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MillimeterNAB 2004
Jun 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva, D. W. Leitner, Bob Turner, S. D. Katz, and Michael Goldman
HD, Codec Wars, and a CEO
DI — Film's Best Friend?
During a presentation at the Digital Cinema Summit 2004 at NAB on the application of the digital intermediate process to the recent Universal feature Van Helsing, colorist Steve Scott of EFilm, Hollywood, referred to the DI process as “film's best friend.” By that, Scott suggested that the evolution of all-digital post workflows, techniques, and tools — many of which were on display during NAB 2004 — will serve not to help digital replace film. Instead, these developments will increase filmmakers' options in processing their imagery, no matter how it was captured, thus helping to preserve and improve film's usefulness as a capture medium.
This theme, revolving around the blending of old and new media and techniques and the attendant improvements, along with serious, thus-far unsolved challenges resulting from this evolution, was omnipresent during both the Digital Cinema Summit and NAB in general. During his keynote address for the afternoon session of the Digital Cinema Summit, for instance, Phil Feiner, president of Pacific Title, Hollywood (a company that invested heavily in the DI process during NAB with a Discreet Lustre color correction system purchase), emphasized that a host of issues still need to be resolved in the “non-sequential world of a digital workflow” if the DI process is to truly become a standardized process for feature films.
“There are no standards yet for workflow when it comes to the editorial conform process,” he explained. “No standards to describe color correction, no metadata standards, a need for better support for higher bit depths and higher resolutions, a variety of lingering hardware incompatibilities,” and so on. All this is leading our industry, Feiner argued, into a world of “massive data wrangling,” and therefore, he suggested, manufacturers focused on solutions to data management issues will find themselves popular with all people seeking ways into the DI space.
Many manufacturers, of course, are already addressing these issues, with SGI and Apple (among others at NAB) focused on data-workflow networking solutions that do not require specialized hardware. In particular, SGI has aggressively pursued this strategy with its InfiniteStorage SAN solution, while Apple is now addressing the issue with its Xsan approach.
SGI markets InfiniteStorage as a data-management solution for both broadcast and feature film postproduction applications, but in particular, the company was promoting the data-sharing technology at NAB as a useful DI backbone. The key feature is the notion of transparent data-sharing at high resolution (2K) in realtime across networks, interfacing with all components of the DI pipeline — scanning, color correction, film recording, video mastering, and output.
To emphasize the point, on the day following NAB, SGI co-hosted a tour of EFilm in Hollywood to show a small group of journalists how the technology has been implemented at that facility for use on major projects. EFilm builds its infrastructure around three 16-processer Onyx 3000 visualization systems, 30TB of SGI Total Performance 9400 storage, and four SGI Origin 300 servers, all incorporating SGI's CXFS shared-file system technology.
FilmLight, meanwhile, demonstrated realtime, interactive, color grading at 4K resolutions with its new Baselight Speed FX technology at NAB. The company is pushing the Speed FX approach as a way to do affordable, realtime, color correction on standard PC hardware, using open architecture. FilmLight expects Speed FX to be available with its Baselight finishing system later this year.
FilmLight also debuted version 2 of Baselight, which includes new features such as an advanced tracker, a new gestural interface capability, improved pan-and-scan, integrated HD support, and other new options.
Da Vinci debuted new versions of several tools at NAB, including the fourth version of its Revival restoration product and its new Resolve resolution-independent, software-based color-enhancement system. The company demonstrated Resolve as configurable three different ways, depending on its application — as a visual effects tool (Resolve FX), a realtime 2K processing tool (Resolve RT), or as a DI color-correction tool (Resolve DI). Resolve DI includes the da Vinci Powerhouse render farm connected via Ethernet for realtime processing of video-resolution images. For mastering work at 2K and higher resolution, Resolve RT integrates da Vinci wide-bandwidth technology to achieve realtime 2K data at 24fps in and out.
The company also demonstrated updates to its Nucleas DI production suite, first introduced at IBC 2003 and recently shipping, and it also offered improvements to its da Vinci 2K Plus HD suite. 2K Plus now includes components of the Nucleas system to permit realtime data for video color grading and conform using conventional HD picture and waveform monitoring of material previously scanned at 2K.
— Michael Goldman
Compositing, Animation, & HD Boards
Last year saw the launch of two new compositing applications, Curious gfx from Curious Software and Mirage from Bauhaus Software. Both are mature applications largely because they are derived from older products. NAB also saw the addition of Nuke to the field, a Linux-based compositing system from Digital Domain, with software based on the visual effects giant's battle-tested internal pipeline.
Artists now have a choice of seven competing compositing products, and each one of them is very good — a rarity in any category of software. That's why it was no mean feat to garner as much attention as Apple's new motion graphics tool, Motion. Certainly not a visual effects compositing environment like Shake, Motion is a gestural design tool — if you buy into Apple's vision. The product is a great demo tool, leveraging OpenGL to provide a realtime motion graphics canvas.
It's a seductive if a bit naïve of a concept — drag text and vector effects around the screen in SD or HD on an Apple 23in. monitor at full resolution and frame rate. Use canned effects and particle-driven motion with the ease of Tom Cruise manipulating data on a virtual display in Minority Report.
Under the surface there are keyframes and a timeline, but Apple is selling fun, not precision. This is a product aimed at less-experienced motion-graphics artists, but if Motion's toolset and range of realtime prowess grows, we may be seeing the beginning of an approach to design worthy of the MIT Media Lab. This product may be the perfect companion to Wacom's Cintiq 18SX or 15SX, the interactive pen displays that were shown at NAB sporting significant price reductions.
Mirage and After Effects both had significant show announcements beginning with the launch of an OS X version for Mirage.
Adobe After Effects 6.5 was introduced to the public at the show, and a release is due before summer. As mentioned above, integration with Photoshop and Premiere Pro has improved in the new version, although full live interaction with Premiere is still a ways off. The new feature list includes an improved Tracker, an advanced Clone tool, disk caching to speed up interactive work, and 60 — count them — new plug-ins, including Particle World, Light Burst, Light Sweep, and Toner.
One of the most asked-for new features is the addition of a 16-bit color corrector. Experienced users will recognize that Color Finesse from Synthetic Aperture has been integrated into AE 6.5 as a plug-in. This is an excellent CC solution that helps keep AE at the forefront of the compositing pack.
But the biggest news for AE 6.5 is GridIron, a grid computing application that ships with After Effects. This is nothing short of a paradigm-smasher because GridIron lifts AE into the realtime realm of Flame and Inferno. Install GridIron on additional processors connected by Gigabyte Ethernet, and the acceleration is nearly linear. What makes GridIron unique is that the acceleration works for RAM previews. In other words, you don't have to render a movie to see the results, although you can save RAM previews as movies. AE can now be used with clients in a suite full of 10 dual-processor Apple, Intel, or AMD workstations, reducing that 100-second-per-frame render to less than 10 seconds per frame.
Our March NAB preview got it wrong on two counts: we predicted no new versions of Maya, Softimage XSI, or 3ds Max. Alias launched version 6.0 of Maya, its animation and visual FX software, while Softimage brought out version 4.0 of its nonlinear animation system. The overall contours of development, however, followed our March lead; animation software is in a period of refinement rather than accelerated innovation, with feature catch-up a component of any new release. The object of most new features is character animation, currently the magnetic north of development. More than straight visual effects, storytelling of the Pixar kind defines Hollywood's interest in digital production.
Alias preceded Maya 6 announcements with the news that it is no longer part of SGI. That was a story in process this winter, but now there's a name to replace the speculation. For $57.5 million U.S., Accel-KKR will acquire Toronto-based Alias.
Maya 6 has a long list of features and improvements, but those that really stand out are motion retargeting, enhanced Maya Hair, and greater integration with Mental Ray. Motion retargeting allows mo-cap or keyframe animation from one character to be applied to another character with very different proportions. Existing animation — say a mo-cap animation of walking — is made more flexible with the new ability to change the direction of the motion path while preserving the animation.
Maya Hair is far more advanced with a new dynamic curve-simulation engine. The demo used at the show had a complex braided hairstyle colliding and interacting with both external objects as well as with itself. The hair toolset also allows for the simulation of braided rope, chains, and wires. Along the same lines, Maya Fur can now be rendered in Mental Ray 3.3 to produce renderings using reflections, refractions, global illumination, and caustics — NAB was a big show for makeovers.
Softimage also stepped up the pace of development with the release of version 4.0 of XSI. The list of new features includes a new Character Development Kit that concentrates on rigs for bipeds and quadrupeds, including a Dog Leg rig and spring-based tail-maker. Rigid body dynamics are also enhanced, demonstrated in a complex realtime simulation based on the collapsing house used in Michel Gondry's The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Support for Mental Ray 3.3 seems to be growing in the industry. XSI supports the latest improvements and new features, such as high-speed motion blur, enhanced memory management, bias, bsp and other options for detail shadow maps, a new toon shader, and a fisheye lens shader.
Audio seems to lag behind other visual features in most animation apps, but XSI 4.0 has improved the precision and flexibility of its nonlinear synchronization tools in the timeline. Realtime speed controls and markers for phonemes and emotions combine with a waveform display to make lip synch chores far simpler and more accurate.
If you wandered to the perimeter of the show floor you might have found the booth for Hash's Animation Master, the character animation tool for Windows and OS X. After nearly a decade of development, this best-kept-secret software continues to launch the careers of animators at Pixar, PDI, and Disney and enjoys a following of loyal users. Remarkably, this software provides high-level character tools that are easy to use and competitive with XSI, Maya, and Houdini at $299.
That's because the team of developers has concentrated on character animation. Although the system has dynamics, a particle system, mo-cap support, and other tools useful for visual effects, these features take a back seat to a world-class patch modeler and IK implementations that demystify character rigs and keyframe animation for character work. Version 11 was shown at NAB with a dynamic-based hair and fur system that is stunning. An innovative product from this group of free-thinkers — located in a converted church in Portland, Ore. — Animation Master turns conventional software wisdom on its head and comes up with a wonderfully targeted artist's environment. If you don't get into Sheridan College's animation program, give this software a try.
In the early 1990s, Millimeter hosted an infamous shootout between the first batch of I/O hardware boards, which mainly came down to Radius Edit and SuperMac's VideoSpigot. Back then the hardware companies tried to convince us that compressed, line-doubled 320×240 was broadcast quality, but what the heck, we had to start somewhere.
NAB 2004 may go down in history as the show that finally answered the majority of hardware I/O requirements at absurdly competitive prices. The AJA Kona 2 card, BlackMagic DeckLinkHD Pro, Aurora PipeHD, and Digital Voodoo HD Fury product lines offer a wide range of solutions that provide facility level video in flexible configurations for a desktop computer. Thank the computer manufacturers for technologies like HyperTransport and PCI-X to host the latest boards, which make uncompressed HD in 10-bit, 4:4:4 a reality.
NAB saw the release of the AJA Systems Kona 2 card, a dual-rate, HD/SD capture card for PCI-X slots that supports uncompressed 10-bit SDI, HD-SDI, and dual-link 4:4:4 HD at both 10 and 12 bits. The card supports eight channels of AES audio, HD/SD component analog video output, and broadcast-quality up- and downconversion. Additional compressed formats for Final Cut Pro are supported as well as RS-422 machine control and automatic genlock for HD and SD. The card is priced at $2,490.
Not to be outdone, BlackMagic Designs continues to push the price/performance standard of the industry with new features and lower prices. New for NAB was DeckLinkHD Pro, a dual-link HD-SDI 4:4:4 I/O card with two channels of HD-SDI inputs and outputs. The single-slot PCI-X card has built-in monitoring, with 14-bit digital/analog conversion in RGB or YUV. DeckLink HD Pro also provides Blackmagic Deck Control, an application that lets editors mark in and out points on source tapes and then automatically capture from a VTR using the serial control port. DeckLinkHD Pro is available now at an MSRP of $2,495.
BlackMagic also introduced HDLink, a $1,295 converter that allows an SDI video signal to drive any supported DVI-D-based LCD computer monitor for HDTV resolution monitoring. That means your 23in. Apple Cinema Display can double as a video monitor for an HDCAM deck or any other SDI source. HDLink supports dual-link 4:4:4 HD-SDI and conventional SD and HD at 4:4:2 and makes the frame-rate conversion with adaptive pulldown processing adjusted automatically when the product senses new LCD hardware.
This product eliminates the next to last link in an HD pipeline because desktop NLE artists moving to HD often choke when they see the sticker price of a traditional CRT-based HD monitor. The last link in the chain of course is the VTR, but don't expect Sony to get into the spirit of price-cutting typical of computer hardware companies.
Still, NAB 2004 has opened the door to affordable HD on the desktop with the predictable consequences for traditional post houses. Since the development of digital video tools has outpaced even the recent brisk adoption of HD in broadcast and cable, it's likely that long before HD programming is the norm, DCC tools will be dirt-cheap.
The claim of a few years ago by traditional video manufacturers that HD's technological challenges would offer a new opportunity to stem the tide of desktop cost-cutting have turned out to be unfounded. Relentless innovation and the murderous reality of silicon economics is good news for artists and tough times for any company looking for high margins. Time to buy gear, make movies.
— S.D. Katz
