So Red camera systems launched two new cameras: the Scarlet, which had been much talked about prior to the show, and the Epic, which was new to most people. The Epic is a 5K camera, which sparked the inevitable question, “what’s the point exactly?” Scarlet, on the other hand, sits at 3K resolution and, if Red is on target, it will be shipping by NAB next year. The big news, of course, is that the planned price – $2995 or thereabouts – is half the price of current top-spec handhelds.
So why so cheap? Surely they’re leaving money on the table? You could argue that they could sell it for twice that and still take as big a bite out of the low-end pro market. Well, the answer has to lie in their plans to attack the high-end consumer market. Remember, the pro/broadcast division of companies such as Sony and Panasonic make a tiny proportion of the money made by their consumer divisions. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a filing cabinet somewhere full of designs for tiny Red cameras, Red TVs and RedRay VCRs.
Problem is, of course, that consumers don’t sit on broadcast and filmmaking forums. To sell Scarlet to the public at large is going to take some serious consumer marketing – bearing in mind that the company doesn’t even have a marketing department at the moment, just a man who smokes fat cigars and sits monitoring forums ready to jump on any comment or question about his camera. But Jim Jannard was smart enough to bring together some of the brightest technical minds in the business to build his camera, so maybe he’ll do the same with marketing. Marketing professionals should apply in the first instance to:
jim@red.com, enclosing their CV and relevant examples of their work.
Sony F35
No 4K camera from Sony yet, but it’s on the cards. Instead, the company, along with BandPro, was showing its F35 camera (think of it as a Sony F23 with a single Panavision Genesis chip instead of three 2/3in CCDs). In A new phrase entered the industry lexicon at NAB: ‘Red Fatigue’. The trade show was divided between those suffering from it and those who still couldn’t talk about anything else. So let’s get them out the way first, and if you’re a Red Fatigue sufferer yourself, just jump to the next section.
So Red camera systems launched two new cameras: the Scarlet, which had been much talked about prior to the show, and the Epic, which was new to most people. The Epic is a 5K camera, which sparked the inevitable question, “what’s the point exactly?” Scarlet, on the other hand, sits at 3K resolution and, if Red is on target, it will be shipping by NAB next year. The big news, of course, is that the planned price – $2995 or thereabouts – is half the price of current top-spec handhelds.
So why so cheap? Surely they’re leaving money on the table? You could argue that they could sell it for twice that and still take as big a bite out of the low-end pro market. Well, the answer has to lie in their plans to attack the high-end consumer market. Remember, the pro/broadcast division of companies such as Sony and Panasonic make a tiny proportion of the money made by their consumer divisions. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a filing cabinet somewhere full of designs for tiny Red cameras, Red TVs and RedRay VCRs.
Problem is, of course, that consumers don’t sit on broadcast and filmmaking forums. To sell Scarlet to the public at large is going to take some serious consumer marketing – bearing in mind that the company doesn’t even have a marketing department at the moment, just a man who smokes fat cigars and sits monitoring forums ready to jump on any comment or question about his camera. But Jim Jannard was smart enough to bring together some of the brightest technical minds in the business to build his camera, so maybe he’ll do the same with marketing. Marketing professionals should apply in the first instance to:
jim@red.com, enclosing their CV and relevant examples of their work.
Sony F35
No 4K camera from Sony yet, but it’s on the cards. Instead, the company, along with BandPro, was showing its F35 camera (think of it as a Sony F23 with a single Panavision Genesis chip instead of three 2/3in CCDs). In Europe, where there’s a tradition of shooting TV drama on Super 16, DPs are used to the depth of field characteristics of 2/3in chips, which are pretty similar to S16, and the F23 would seem to be the perfect tool for the highest end digital productions. However, despite its initial success in the US, there has been resistance in some quarters to a high-end camera that doesn’t take film lenses, no matter how clean the signal and wide the dynamic range.
The F35 answers that objection. But it may never have happened were it not for a minor spat between Sony and Panavision, who co-developed the Panavision Genesis. The F35 was created to fulfill an order by Sony Japan to production company Omnibus Japan for a bunch of Panavision Genesis cameras when Sony and Panavision were best buddies, but later, being unable to provide the cameras, Sony Japan put the F23 and the Genesis chip into a barrel, shook it up, and the F35 was born.
This provides a great stop-gap for those who want a 35mm-sized sensor but can’t wait for the Sony 4K camera. But spare a thought for the poor rental houses who thought they were getting a minimum of two years to make their RoI with the F23 before a new high-end Sony camera emerged. Can’t imagine Panavision are too fussed. Bets are on for a Panavision 4K (Exodus?) camera announcement later this year.
But the Sony camera output machine is unstoppable, particularly at the lower end. Following the release of the cameras shown at IBC – including the S270 and Z7 HDV cameras, and of course the EX1 SxS card XD camera – there is already an EX3, which adds interchangeable lenses to the EX1 spec, among other things. The interesting one to watch, though, is the PDW-700.
Despite the widely acknowledged exceptional quality of the EX1 for its price point, the toughest people to please, the HD police at the BBC’s HD channel in the UK, rejected the camera, claiming that they could see the shadow of a compression artifact when freezeframed under an atomic microscope, or some such. And although they love other aspects of it, the BBC is just not impressed with its 35Mbit/s output. The PDW-700, with its 50Mbit/s output, might just pass the BBC HD police interrogation. If that happens, it’ll have a passport to anywhere…
Panasonic Varicam
Panasonic hasn’t been idle either. There’s a new companion at the low-end for the HVX200 mass market P2 camera – the HVX170 – as well as two new P2 Varicam cameras, the HPX3700 and HPX2700. On top of the popular variable frame rate options of the original Varicams, the 3700 offers full 1920x1080 chips, 10-bit output and the option of 4:4:4 color space via dual-link HD-SDI. In fact, just about everything the VFX cinematographer could ask for.
The HVX170 (HVX171 in Europe) is kin to the HVX200. Offering both 1080i and 720p and HD-SDI out, in 720p mode the camera features a 20-step variable frame rate between 12 and 60fps. Using 32Gb P2 cards in both slots will give you an hour of recording, which will double when 64Gb cards are released in the fall.
With both Panasonic and now Sony going the card route, the need for a decent archive system is becoming more and more apparent. So who’s going to be the first to bring out a mega-cheap LTO drive and clean up? Staying with the HVX area of the market, Canon has announced two new HDV cameras, the XLH1a and the XLH1s. We have reviews of these elsewhere, so there’s no need to go into detail here. JVC, meanwhile, announced that later in the year it will be joining the card camera brigade, releasing the MR-HD200U – a memory card-based recording unit for its 200 range of HDV cameras. A 16GB SDHC card will be able to store up to 1.6 hours of 720p HDV footage.
Arri D-21
Arri’s D-20 was one of the original big chip cameras along with the Genesis and Dalsa Origin. Back in 2003 when the D-20 was first shown, Arri was pretty muted about it; presumably fearful of film camera clients’ reactions to them entering the digital marketplace. Not so with the newly released D-21.
The company is pushing the improved spec hard. The camera not only offers increased sensitivity, but also anamorphic shooting (the center 2880x2160 pixels are processed, giving a 1.33:1 aspect ratio to match 35mm film – with anamorphic lenses you get 2.66:1, which can be edge-cropped in post to 1.39:1). Arri is offering an uncompressed RAW signal off the chip, and is running a certification program for hard disk recorders that can handle the signal. Currently, only S.Two and Codex have been certified (more about these later).
Iconix
Iconix, makers of the ultra-portable, HD POV camera, the HD-RH1F, introduced a new 2K version of the camera, called the Studio2K. Using the same camera head and 1/3in chip as its predecessor, the company is positioning the Studio2K as an ideal tool for shooting stereoscopic 3D. Well, you can’t throw a stone at NAB without braining someone who’s big into 3D, so it makes sense. However, the 2K stereoscopic systems will probably not be ready until IBC.
The Studio2K also features dual-link HD-SDI, which enables the camera to capture 4:4:4 images as opposed to the 4:2:2 of the original HD-RH1F. The company was demonstrating a 4:2:2 1080p stereo production pipeline using Digital Ordinance’s new Frame Thrower 3D review and approval system for real time on-set monitoring, and a 3ality stereoscopic camera rig.
In terms of recording stereoscopic footage, Wafian introduced its HR-2-DS Stereoscopic HD Direct-to-Disk video recorder and was demonstrating its stereoscopic workflow with two Iconix HD-RH1Fs mounted on a Polecam rig. The HR-2-DS records in the CineForm format, which enables it to capture 3D 1920x1080 24p at 140GB per hour (which would require 955GB/hr if uncompressed). In fact, there have been huge strides in terms of compressed workflows for 2K, 4K and 3D, spearheaded largely by CineForm with its RAW codec – a wavelet-based compression system that achieves anywhere from 5x-10x compression and has unique metadata abilities, such as the ability to carry non-destructive .look metadata with the untouched RAW data. The codec is beginning to permeate data workflows, where bandwidth and storage costs are expensive.
Dalsa recently added CineForm support for its 4K Origin and Evolution, and Vision Research added CineForm support for its Phantom HD/65. In addition, the company has been working with Thomson Grass Valley to develop a new CineForm tool for the company’s long anticipated Infinity camera (called the JPEG2000 Play Module for Infinity). The software will allow re-wrapping of Infinity MXF files to AVI or QuickTime files for preview playback on both Windows and Mac. When combined with CineForm’s Neo HD or Prospect HD software, Infinity files can be converted in real-time to 10-bit CineForm Intermediate files, which are cross-platform compatible with many post tools including Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro.
CineForm is also in beta testing a system to enable users to export RedCine to CineForm MOV files. Plus, the company has had a long-standing collaboration with Iridas and Silicon Imaging, sharing a booth together at major trade shows to demonstrate how their systems fit together. This year, Wafian was the newcomer to the Silicon Imaging/Iridas/CineForm workflow demo.
Back to the flavor of the day: stereo 3D, and Silicon Imaging was showing a dual-camera version of SiliconDVR that displays live analgyph (as well as other, non-anaglyph) 3D visualization features while you shoot. CineForm has extended the decoding capabilities of the CineForm RAW codec to support dual-channel stereo 3D capture, storage and playback. Just as CineForm RAW allows applications to natively ingest and treat camera RAW footage as full 4:4:4 RGB source footage from industry-standard file wrappers such as QuickTime and AVI, the 3D stereoscopic extensions will allow applications to natively ingest, edit and manipulate dual-stream files in a single file wrapper.
Silicon Imaging also announced that it has incorporated support for Cooke Optics’ /i Technology into its SI-2K (generating yet more metadata). The oddly named /i Technology enables film and digital cameras to automatically record key lens and camera data for every film frame shot and provide it to post-production teams digitally, which is particularly useful for visual effects artists trying match shots in post.
Iridas
For its part, Iridas released SpeedGrade XR at the show, designed as a companion product for RAW camera workflows. SpeedGrade XR features Iridas’s new RealTime RAW 2.0 technology for review, grading and finishing of unrendered RAW formats at any resolution. In addition, Iridas DualStream technology for realtime stereo playback and grading is now offered as standard.
The ability to stay in RAW for post-production enables filmmakers to use just one third of the storage and bandwidth of RGB, while maintaining more image data. Iridas offers live de-Bayering of just about every RAW format currently on the market including Arri D-20 RAW, CineForm RAW, Dalsa 4K RAW, Phantom RAW, and Weisscam RAW. And although the company is not allowed to ‘announce’ it, Iridas has also figured out how to de-Bayer RedCode RAW in its FrameCycler and SpeedGrade Systems. For now though, the company is calling those ‘internal versions’.
Red Fatigue pt2
Red has been teasing other manufacturers with the promise that it will open up its RedCode workflow, and offer an optical RAW port from the camera, but for some reason, the company always changes its mind at the last minute, reluctant to share the limelight with anyone other than Assimilate.
Perhaps one reason is that the RedCode format is not actually finalized yet, and while conventional wisdom might dictate the madness of changing a camera’s basic format after it has shipped, there’s really no telling what one particularly eccentric, cigar-smoking Mormon billionaire might be planning next, or what his motives for holding back other manufacturers might be. Either way, r3d files wrapped in QuickTime reference files are supported on Mac OS X versions of the new SpeedGrade XR.
4K recorders
Meanwhile, recorders are catching up with uncompressed 4K acquisition, with tools such as S.two’s new i.DOCK4 and A.DOCK4 which complement the DFR 4K. i.DOCK4 features real-time de-Bayering of any single sensor Bayer data camera such as the Dalsa Evolution and Arri D-21. It also supports user loaded Look-up Tables (LUTs). The A.DOCK4 automatically provides fully data-based, verified, secure archive and safety copies to dual uncompressed LTO tapes and network access to the D.MAG data. (Not surprisingly, Dalsa Digital Cinema, was the first to order the complete toolset.)
And of course, Codex, which pioneered the uncompressed 4K field recorder along with Dalsa, introduced the Codex Portable at the a show – a lightweight disk recorder that can record from HD to 4K, relying on a JPEG2000-based codec. The Codex Portable can record from two 4:4:4 cameras simultaneously – either independently for A and B camera shoots, or locked together for 3D stereo projects. The company also reports that it will also be able to record from Red Digital Cinema’s Red One camera in 4K data-mode, when Red gets around to opening up its port.
Second coming
Throughout the production and post pipeline, manufacturers are making way for the second (or is that ‘third’?) coming of stereoscopic 3D. Quantel, which introduced its stereoscopic 3D upgrades for Pablo at IBC, has already shipped 17 new Pablo systems to post and DI houses all over the world, including the newest system, recently shipped to Toronto-based creativePost. With the worldwide surge in production and post capacity for stereoscopic 3D, expect to see lots of new 3D films being made.
Da Vinci was also talking about releasing a 3D machine at IBC. The company has re-engined its Resolve mastering suite with what is calling its C.O.R.E. CUDA Optimized Resolve Engine. Basically, the company worked with nVIDIA to run many of its applications and algorithms off the nVIDIA GPU, which delivers dramatic performance enhancements. Resolve R200, with a single C.O.R.E, works faster than any previous da Vinci system, whereas the R300, with two C.O.R.E., is twice as fast as the R200. Expect to see an IBC release of a 4K/3D system that’s twice as fast again.
Apple and Avid
No Final Cut 7 this NAB – in fact no Apple stand and no Ramones blasting out Wonderful World. But Apple has been roadshowing its Final Cut Server, announced last year, as well as touting its sales figures for Final Cut (just gone over one million if you count in Express). Eighty per cent of these are in the indie sector, but there are high profile projects being cut on Final Cut too, including the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Soderbergh’s The Argentine – the latter no surprise, as it was shot on the Red.
Of course, what the company is most pleased about is that they’re now selling more (units) than Avid. Apple is claiming 49 per cent of US NLE sales last year (in terms of volume, not value) against Avid’s 22 per cent – pretty much a reversal of the situation six years ago. Time for Avid to make some changes?
Well, funny you should say that. Also not exhibiting at NAB, Avid still had a big presence. And recently, they’ve been toting major changes within the organization, including a new management team from outside the industry. The team immediately set about unveiling some New Thinking. For those who have difficulty wading through pages of opaque marketese, most significant among the New Thinking announcements were the axing of Xpress Pro, which was not surprisingly struggling against Final Cut; halving of the price of Media Composer (which is now being released in version 3), and the introduction of competitive student pricing. There’s also a commitment to boost the information flow between Avid and its customers, and to improve its online customer resources. As a major commitment to its customers, Avid has even introduced a new high-level position to ensure satisfaction with its products. Beth Martinko becomes Avid’s new Vice-President of Customer Success, which sounds remarkably like a job title Douglas Adams might have invented for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Legal news
In non-product news, Filmlight announced that it had settled a long-standing patent infringement lawsuit with Kodak over the use of infrared dust-busting technologies in film scanners. The basic idea of infrared dirt and scratch concealment systems is that a separate infrared light source can automatically detect dirt and scratches on the surface of film during the scanning process, generating a defect matte. Those defect mattes can be automatically corrected on-the-fly by software which analyses the frame before and the frame after to fill in the missing pixels.
It’s a technique that has been in use since the ’80s when the BBC’s Ian Childs developed infrared dust and scratch detection systems for telecine equipment. Filmlight contended that Northlight’s infrared system drew a direct lineage from that technology, and that ‘prior art’, invalidated Kodak’s patent claim.
Where this all comes from is that in 2004, Kodak acquired Texas-based Applied Science Fiction (ASF), which gave the company a portfolio of patents covering things such as the use of an infrared light source in slide scanners, defect mapping, and image concealment and image correction techniques.
Kodak had been seeking a $25,000-a-year license fee from post houses for its Digital ICE automated concealment package, which comes bundled with infrared hardware in IR-enabled film scanners such as the ArriScan. But Filmlight had been offering its Northlight 2 with a more generic infrared alpha channel, without the controversial license fee, and without the whole Digital ICE package.
“We have settled, but it’s not that we agreed that they were right or anything like that,” company director Wolfgang Lempp told me. “It’s just acknowledging that after two years, the landscape has changed. And that because there was so much uncertainty in the industry it made infrared almost disappear as something that people are after. It had lost value for a lot of the customers.”
Plus, in the interim, software-based dust-busting systems from companies such as MTI, Digital Vision, The Foundry and The Pixel Farm have come a long way. “Obviously for us as a small company we didn’t want to carry on with lawyers fees,” adds Lempp. “In spite of the fact that over this time, we have found a lot of evidence for ‘prior art’, and as far as we’re concerned it’s pretty much a clear cut case… But it was reasonable to say, ‘OK, let’s forget about the past. Let’s move forward and come to an agreement that satisfies Kodak’s requirements.’ It’s up to them to see whether they can make some money out of it. If it’s not valuable anymore, then it’s their problem not our problem,” adds Lempp.
Kodak has dropped its $25,000 per year license fee for Digital ICE in favor of a one-off fee of €50,000 (about $75,000). But Lempp explains that, it was important for us to protect our existing customers. We sold quite a few and those customers are the lucky ones, because they will continue to have it without paying for it.” He explains that it was basically legally impossible to go back to existing customers and retroactively alter the terms of sale to include an on-going annual fee.
Separately, Kodak announced that Lasergraphics will now be offering Digital ICE Technology on its DIRECTOR series of film scanners. Arri has been offering Digital ICE for its ArriScan film scanners for almost two years, but Elfi Bernt, product manager, ArriScan Digital Systems, reports that new customers will be able to pay the one-time fee, and existing customers who have been paying the annual fees, “will be contacted by Arri directly, and they will be given a very good offer that makes sure the early adopters receive a special price.” Imagica has been slow to release its Digital ICE-enabled scanner, while other manufacturers such as Thomson and Cintel have shied away from infrared altogether. The former sees software-based dust-busting systems as the answer, while the latter has focused its efforts on its D/SCO ‘optical’ dust and scratch removal.
Exactly what Cintel means by ‘optical’ is a closely guarded secret, but even in its literature the company stresses the fact that: “As D/SCO is optical and not infrared, it works on all stocks including black and white and does not require annual licensing.”
Perc of the trade
Another ‘old-school’ dust-busting technique is poised to make a bit of comeback. Wet-gate telecines, film scanners and printers have relied on perchloroethylene or ‘perc’, for decades. However, in recent years, environmental and health and safety regulations in most Western countries have made wet-gate film scanners extremely cumbersome to own and operate. Perc is a cancer-causing, genotoxic agent that is very strictly regulated in most jurisdictions, both for employee safety and environment impact. At present, it’s almost impossible to get a new license for a wet gate film scanner in California.
But Arri announced that it now has 16 and 35mm wet gates built around a new chemical that is far safer to work with, far less of an environmental hazard and, according to Bernt, at roughly €5,000 for 10 liters of Kodika’s SES, “it’s much cheaper than perc.”
The only ‘bummer’ in all this is that Kodika, the designer of the chemical (which offers roughly the same exposure properties as perc), has signed an exclusive deal with Arri, so there won’t be ‘Kodika SES liquid’ versions of other companies’ wet-gate scanners anytime soon.
Bernt also noted that the chemical can’t replace perc in other applications such as film printers, due to the sheer speed those machines run at. The speed of the ArriScan is exactly the speed that it needs to dry off. eeds to dry off.
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Scott LehaneScott Lehane is a Toronto-based journalist and documentary film producer. He can be reached at scottlehane@sympatico.ca |