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NAB 2007

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By D. W. Leitner and Dan Ochiva

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Change Gathers Force
Storage Goes High-speed

Change Gathers Force

By D. W. Leitner

In my millimeter coverage of last year's NAB 2006, “Cameras and Other Driving Forces,” I divided the massive show into four vectors of interest: cameras, displays, desktop editing, and post. The last included systems found in commercial facilities: telecines, scanners, film recorders, color correction systems, CGI, finishing, and big storage.

I made a point, not terribly original, that bank-loan categories of high-end post gear are unilaterally impacted these days by developments in lower-cost categories such as cameras and desktop editing — much as the cheap, sophisticated computer-based home audio recording systems reshaped the landscape of the audio recording industry starting in the late 1980s.

You can see this dynamic trickling down to pricey VTRs. Shooting with a Sony HDW-F900 in HDCAM might lead to DVCAM dubs for offline capture and a later conventional tape-based HD online, but shooting instead to P2 cards with a Panasonic AG-HVX200 favors a tapeless path, at least up to the point of final deliverables. Then there's HDV, which invites tapelessness from NLE capture onward and requires a quarter the drive capacity of DVCPRO HD. While both are economical HD solutions not generally suited to network series or Hollywood studio production, they're clearly harbingers.

This NAB will be remembered chiefly for turning the hot spotlight of disruptive IT-based technology on cameras themselves, and also for significant developments in reference-grade flatpanel display and projection. Perhaps emblematic of this disjointed show was the debut of Sony's fine new digital cinema camera, the F23. The “23” stands for 2/3in., which is the size of the dual-microlens IT sensors and aberration-free prism featured in the F23's new 3CCD imaging block.

The compact body of the F23 takes design cues from film cameras like the Panaflex and accommodates on its top or back a Sony SRW-1 portable HDCAM SR deck for 4:4:4 RGB capture to tape. (This approach was successfully introduced in the single-CCD Panavision Genesis, with its PL mount for film lenses, rugged body by Panavision, and electronics by Sony. Only don't call the F23 a mini-Genesis if you fear the wrath of a Sony camera rep.)

Looking back someday, we will perhaps decide that the marriage of Carl Zeiss's DigiPrimes and Sony's F23 was the high-water mark of progressive-scan, 2/3in. B4-mount imaging. It's hard to see how the F23's extended dynamic range (11 to 13 stops, depending upon whom you ask); S-shaped, film-like gamma curve; enlarged color space; variable 1fps to 60fps (4:2:2-only above 30fps, for now); and camera-assistant-friendly layout will be topped.

It's also hard to see how its price — as yet, unannounced, but possibly north of $200,000 with viewfinder and recorder, and that's before the requisite set of Zeiss glass — will be topped. For this was the year that single-sensor CMOS digital cinematography cameras that capture compressed RAW images came into their own. Red Digital Cinema, Silicon Imaging, and Vision Research International (VRI) all demonstrated working models.

Red Digital Cinema's Red One, the yardstick by which every other digital cinema camera will likely be measured, comes in at less than $22,000 with viewfinder and onboard hard disk recorder (a commodity 7200rpm 320GB SATA drive in a hardened black Red case). That's what you call an order of magnitude less. Now, factor in that the F23 produces a 1920×1080 image, while the Red One produces a whopping 4K image.

Everyone who walked out of the screening of the 12-minute short film Crossing the Line (shown in Red's tented projection room) knew they'd just witnessed industry history in the making. Industry luminaries with whom I chatted afterwards included several from HD camera or optics manufacturers. Two-and-a-half weeks before NAB, director Peter Jackson greeted the Red team as it deplaned in New Zealand with its two working prototypes, then proceeded to shoot this WWI drama (which he wrote) against a full-blown backdrop of trench and aerial warfare.

Yes, soldiers, explosions, gas masks, machine guns, a trapezoidal tank clambering over scorched earth, a biplane-triplane dogfight (filmed from a chase helicopter) — the likes of which movie-going audiences haven't seen in a generation or two. The results — detailed by Weta Digital touches like tracer bullets, muzzle flashes, and earthshaking explosions — were projected from a 4K Sony SXRD projector at a 2.35 (cropped) aspect ratio. And they were glorious. (You can read more about this and other NAB adventures at blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/nab/category/david-leitner.)

Red is a flashy company without a proven record, and its landmark technology demo cast a disproportionately long shadow at NAB this year. Nevertheless there were other camera standouts beyond Sony's F23. On the digital cinema front, industry pioneer Dalsa introduced a sophomore model. At NAB 2003 Dalsa debuted the granddaddy of single-CCD, PL-mount, 4K digital cinematography cameras: the Dalsa Origin. A prototype of a new, more compact (by Dalsa standards) Evolution was unveiled along with a new T 1.4, 50mm anamorphic prime lens especially designed for Dalsa's unconventional 2:1 wide sensor. It's the first of what new Dalsa president and industry vet Rob Hummel says will be a full set of anamorphic lenses for Dalsa cameras.

Impressive 4K camera results were also demonstrated at Abel Cine Tech's booth, where two truly compact high-speed camera models from Vision Research were reintroduced (“en-Abeled” since their NAB 2006 debut) as the Phantom HD high-speed digital camera (1000fps) and Phantom 65 4K high-speed digital camera (125fps). The former contains a single CMOS sensor the size of Super 35 film; the latter, the size of 65mm. Both sport a new Sony color viewfinder and a thin dock under the handle for Abel's forthcoming CineMag flash memory pack. On a huge plasma screen nearby, Abel showed a stylized Phantom HD demo reel featuring a latter-day Isadora Duncan in a long, billowing white tunic loping in slow motion against silhouetted trees and dramatic dark skies, and also a dog lapping water with a what seemed like a foot-long tongue. Both stopped traffic.

Silicon Imaging introduced two versions of a PL-mount 2K digital cinema camera system based on a new 1920×1080 single-CMOS sensor from AltaSens. The SI-2K digital cinema camera looks like a classic CP-16 film camera with a brick battery instead of a 16mm magazine. And no wonder, it was designed by Munich, Germany-based P+S Technik (which also made the optical viewfinder for Dalsa's Evolution). The SI-2K Mini, which fits in the palm of the hand, is distilled down to the sensor, which is housed in a cigarette-pack-size body attached to a PL-mount via P+S Technik's universal lens mount adapter. Capture for both cameras is direct-to-disk RAW using CineForm compression (rather than Redcode RAW) with Iridas SpeedGrade for on-location color grading of images by the director of photography.

(Speaking of look management, there was notable progress at NAB toward realization of the American Society of Cinematographers' open-standard Color Decision List [CDL] metadata project. This is fruit borne of an effort begun in 2004 to carry forward from production to post a cinematographer's color, contrast, and brightness choices, in order both to protect artistic intent and to streamline workflow. [Think edit decision list for image quality written in standard XML.] With interoperability as a chief goal, NAB saw demos of CDL in on-set image control systems by Gamma & Density and Thomson, monitoring displays by CineTal, and color correction platforms by FilmLight, Avid, Technicolor, Pandora, Grass Valley, and Chrome Imaging of Switzerland.)

Aaton flirted with high-res single-sensor capture, introducing its groundbreaking 3-perf/2-perf Penelope 35mm camera at NAB and announcing future quick-change Digi-Mags which will house 6K sensors along with file storage. Aaton says they'll take “less than one minute” to swap with a Penelope film magazine. Sounds terrific (if you're willing to wait two more years for the Digi-Mags), but 35mm 2-perf alone elevates this camera to a class of its own. Using modern DI methods, 35mm 2-perf halves the costs of camera negative, processing, and transfer and enables a 2.35 widescreen aspect ratio without slow, heavy anamorphic lenses. What's not to enthuse about?

Wonder what Kodak, which had a booth at NAB but otherwise was not much in evidence, thinks of Aaton's switch-hitter? Kodak's latest Vision2 color negatives go hand-in-hand with the development of 2-perf technology, as does its latest Digital Ice Technology Version 2.0, embodied at NAB in Arri's latest 4K Arriscan digital film scanner. (Digital Ice uses infrared light during film scanning to create a dirt and scratches matte, which is then used to erase image flaws digitally in realtime.) At NAB, Arri introduced a new 8fps high-speed 2K scanning mode to encourage growth of “data-centric digital dailies.” Another nail in the coffin of telecines?

Last but hardly least where the bread and butter is concerned, cameras capturing HD 4:2:2 video, as opposed to 4:4:4 digital cinema, generated considerable heat on their own at NAB. Panasonic introduced long-awaited 2/3in., 3CCD shoulder-mounted P2 camcorders — two of them.

The AJ-HPX3000 is a five-slot P2 HD camcorder with 2.2-megapixel CCDs that produce full 1920×1080. It's the first camcorder from any company to incorporate twice-as-efficient AVC-Intra MPEG-4 compression, which will double the capacity of Panasonic's P2 cards, which themselves double from 16GB to 32GB later this year. At 50Mbps, AVC-I matches current 100Mbps DVCPRO HD; at 100Mbps, it matches D-5. To put things in perspective, you might want to compare the specs of this $48K camcorder (14-bit A/D) with a Sony F900 series (12-bit A/D, 1440x1080 HDCAM) that costs twice as much. The second new Panasonic P2 camcorder, the AG-HPX500, has four P2 slots and lower-res pixel-shifted CCDs but compensates with a budget-friendly $14,000 price tag.

Despite showing up at NAB with a trimmer, less power-thirsty Grass Valley Infinity camcorder with an all-new 3-CMOS imager (replacing the original 3CCD) featuring 2.4-megapixel Xensium sensors that produce 1920×1080, Thomsonmade little impact compared to last year. Perhaps because Infinity doesn't do 24p? Thomson says mid-summer delivery is still on target.

Sony made a loud splash previewing an innovative XDCAM EX camcorder series to be introduced later this year. Handycam in profile, this little guy has a three-1/2in.-sensor head, interchangeable lenses with real focus and f/stop marks, and records to SanDisk consumer flash memory cards. XDCAM means MPEG-2 compression at 18Mbps, 25Mbps, and 35Mbps. $8,000 was the price floated at NAB.

On the display side, Sony made equally big waves with its 22.5in., 1920×1080, LED-backlit LCD BVM-L230 reference monitor, which handles 2K, 1080p60, and everything on down. Sony set up comparisons in a darkened space between a BVM-L230 and BVM-A series HD CRTs, and while subtle differences appeared upon close scrutiny (CRT yielded better blacks in low-key scenes), the images were strikingly identical in most respects. I particularly applaud Sony's inclusion of waveform and audio level displays in these monitors, as I do Panasonic's in its new 7.9in. 16:9 BT-LH80W LCD display, which with Focus-in-Red and Pixel-to-Pixel Mapping for focus assist doubles as a viewfinder. If only pro monitors had been this versatile all along. (For the record, eCinema Systems introduced LED-backlit reference-grade LCD monitors too, a 24in. and 40in. version. Due to an apparent power supply problem, the 40in. wasn't working when I arrived, nor was I able to inspect the other model, although eCinema Systems is a credible manufacturer with the highest standards.)

Truly jaw-dropping was the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology's demo on Saturday night of 5K projection of 65mm footage shot by DP Bill Bennett, scanned in Munich by the only 65mm Arriscan in existence. Think digital Cinerama on a 40ft.-wide screen. Then there was Thursday's closed-door sneak peak at an 11in. Sony OLED monitor, going on sale in Japan later this year. The first true blacks ever in an electronic display — and I mean it. Utterly spectacular (with apologies to the BVM-L230).

For a further description of the first, click here. For more about the second, tune in next NAB.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.