• Blogs
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Events

DI at NAB 2006

Aug 26, 2006 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva

End to End is the Name of the Game

As a concept, DI has moved from the cutting edge to accepted methodology. But with few standards and specifications beyond file formats and output types, implementing a digital intermediate workflow can be haphazard. That's part of what fuels the growth in all-inclusive system offerings at NAB 2006, which will be held April 22-27 in Las Vegas.

For a number of years, FilmLight has touted its approach of creating an end-to-end scanning and grading workflow — with more control over each stage of the process, reliability, and throughput increase, according to the company. Truelight, designed to handle facilitywide color management, receives an update. With new types of LCD technology and a wider range of LUTs (look-up tables) now on the market from companies including Arri and Kodak, users gain flexibility and finer control. Booth visitors will also see demos of the now-shipping Baselight Blackboard hardware control surface.

At the show, the London-based company will launch the Northlight 2 scanner, part of a realtime 4K grading system built around its Baselight Eight computing cluster. New features include infrared scanning, support for third-party dustbust applications, and archive and restoration. Employing new sensor technology, optics, and electronics, Northlight 2 is said to provide a fourfold increase in scanning speed — or more than 2fps at 2K and 1fps at 4K.

Autodesk builds out its DI offering, the Discreet Lustre digital color grading system, by highlighting efficiency via interactivity with the addition of Incinerator 1.0, which debuts at the show. The Incinerator system uses one of the latest hot computing solutions — computer cluster technology — to provide realtime capabilities for complex primary and secondary color correction, as well as realtime visual effects processing at HD and 2K resolutions and accelerated 4K processing. The modular Incinerator system can be shared by multiple Discreet Lustre systems in a networked workgroup environment.

Instead of offering its own DI system with scanning and color correction, Cine-tal opts to handle the precise monitoring and image control required in top-end facilities. The company has been working closely with third parties such as Iridas to provide the rest of a DI system. The LCD monitor isn't a passive element in Cine-tal's system, but acts as a touchstone along with the Cinemage Intelligent Display Server (IDS) to optimize collaboration between the on-set production team and the postproduction crew.

This approach enables the on-set crew to share image data, load and manipulate any color previsualization setups, grab or store still frames, and view and insert ancillary data. IDS provides signal routing and display for up to four HD inputs, which helps in camera setup and monitoring.

Accurate test and measurement is key to this, of course, so IDS integrates an OmniTek waveform monitor and vectorscope. The OmniTek T&M device is also part of Cine-tal's Philo product family of HD broadcasting and video production monitors. The combo allows waveforms and vectors to be saved and recalled to aid in matching cameras. Since the system creates a client-server environment, control and access can be handled from any network or web-enabled device.

Dave Stump, ASC, recently used a Cinemage IDS system on production of the indie feature What Love Is. Using the Cinemage monitor on set enabled him to color correct the 10-bit log images coming from the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera. Stump says of the setup, “This is the future of on-set HD viewing.”

Iridas has worked closely with Cine-tal over the past year to devise a color pipeline toolset, key to creating, reviewing, and sharing looks, whether on set or with the colorist. At NAB 2006, the company will demo the integration of Cine-tal's Cinemage display with SpeedGrade OnSet and SpeedGrade DI as part of the Iridas' “color pipeline” approach: Users can grab frames from a camera's datastream, sending these to SpeedGrade OnSet for grading. SpeedGrade .look files can, in turn, be loaded in the Cinemage display for graded playback, or even live graded previews during acquisition.

Finally, once the shot or scene's look has been determined, other Iridas gear can be used in post, including FrameCycler and SpeedGrade DI, its realtime color grading and film finishing app.

FrameCycler, which provides tools for conform, review, and remote collaboration, comes in a new version at the show: FrameCycler DI. This higher-end version handles realtime playback of uncompressed file formats, adds in various analysis tools, and allows colorists the ability to apply looks for color-graded daily sessions. Also new: SpeedGrade Video, which offers color grading, conform, and other tools for QuickTime and AVI video formats at HD resolution.

Assimilate Scratch draws kudos for its open, standards-based platform, enabling third parties to supply add-on solutions. At facilities such as Digital Domain, for example, staff coders employed XML programming and a custom-built web browser to enable artists to send their work in progress (as 2K, native DPX, or Cineon files) to the facility's Scratch systems. On complex effects jobs, this allows CG, compositing, and effects supervisors to review results in daily sessions, or send it out to the preview theater, where a Scratch system feeds footage to a Christie 2K projector.

At NAB, be sure to check out some of the data storage options, including Globalstor's ExtremeStor-DI with up to 9.6TB via its hot-swappable SATA drives, and Ciprico's MediaVault 4210 RAID storage array with its 4Gb Fibre Channel interface.

While Quantel has presented its iQ system as a digital hub, similar in some ways to Assimilate's approach, with the debut of its Pablo color correction system, the company is making a play toward providing a one-stop solution.

New Eiger Media Engine hardware enables realtime 4K preview, while a second Media Engine handles background rendering of shots with complex, compute intensive effects.

Da Vinci has been working with third parties to expand its offerings. Earlier this year, the company announced that it had completed qualification testing of a SAN based on SGI's InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem with Da Vinci's Resolve digital mastering suite. The basis of the technology, SGI's CXFS file system, excels in moving huge files around a SAN. Da Vinci says that recently completed benchmarks include the simultaneous running of two streams of 2K material.

A Bit of Software and Hardware

D2 Software debuts the just-shipping version of Nuke 4.5, its compositing and effects app. The company, a subsidiary of acclaimed post house Digital Domain, has built in the latest must-haves, including an advanced 3D compositing workspace, 32-bit floating point rendering, Open EXR support (which includes 64 channels of image data), and an image-based keyer.

GridIron Software debuts Nucleo, a unique optimizing technology that speeds rendering in single workstations running After Effects — as long as the hardware includes at least one dual-core processor. Nucleo rejiggers the standard serial processing setup AE uses, speeding throughput by turning it into a parallel processing system. Nucleo is a sibling to GridIron's X-Factor for After Effects, which creates grid-computing networks to speed preview and rendering. (In this application of grid computing, X-Factor allows users to create an on-the-fly renderfarm by networking together any mix of computers you might have lying around the shop — whether Mac, Windows, or both.)

While no information was available at press time, HP may debut workstations employing the latest Intel Core Duo dual-core CPUs, as well as offering the recently announced next-gen graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia. However, while the initial Core Duo CPUs powered the first Intel-based Mac laptops, expect to hear whisper suites talk about workstations built around the (code named) Conroe processor, due out in the second half of 2006. It should deliver a considerable bump in performance. According to company announcements at Intel's March developers' conference, Conroe will boost performance 40 percent and decrease power consumption 40 percent compared with the top-of-the-line dual-core Pentium D 95.

The debut of the Boxx Apexx 8 workstation — with eight dual-core processors and up to 128GB of memory — might look to some like a throwback to the pricey custom workstations and servers of yore. The company positions it as a “super-workstation” capable of handling 2K and 4K film, while “blowing through video encoding chores.”

Other features include single or dual Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 cards (up to four cards can be installed), or ATI as the buyer desires.

“We designed a system able to handle so much memory because we've had such requests from facilities doing feature animation and effects work,” says Francoise Wolf, Boxx's director of marketing. “These are 64-bit capable CPUs, but earlier systems using 32-bit processors quickly ran into the memory limit of 2GB to 3GB per CPU, which complicated post work.” Large scenes and effects objects, says Wolf, had to be cut into smaller sections for manipulation, with differences in looks and timing often only showing up when all of the sequences were stitched together into the complete scene.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.