By Oliver Peters, February 6, 2007
The Hollywood Post Alliance's Technology Retreat in Rancho Mirage, Calif., has become an annual "must" for many key players in the video and film post community. Originally organized by a consortium of Los Angeles-area postproduction facilities and moderated by Videography's own Mark Schubin, the technology retreat offers a mix of papers, presentations and demos intended as a glimpse into future technologies that are both challenges and opportunities specific to the leading post facilities in the world. It's four days of learning and fun highlighted by presentations that range from in-depth engineering papers to less formal company presentations and panel discussions.
The intent is to foster a dialogue between manufacturers and end users of advanced technology, aided by such events as roundtable breakfasts. The several hundred attendees break up into approximately 30 tables-each hosted by a table leader who facilitates discussion about specific technologies. These table leaders are typically manufacturer product managers or industry consultants who try to gauge emerging technologies that customers might have an interest in. Some of this year's 60 topics included color management in post, previsualization and 24p workflow, to name just a few. Schubin presides over all this like a ring master with an eye on the clock, much to the great delight and appreciation of the attendees.
Adjoining the presentation hall is a demo room, where you can get an up-close and personal look at some of these advanced technologies. Some are future technologies, while others are new products that will be formally announced at the NAB convention in April, giving attendees a sneak peek at products that affect film and video postproduction workflows. Although I couldn't even begin to adequately cover everything that was presented in these four days, here are some highlights of interesting new technologies presented at the HPA Technology Retreat.
Security, Storage and Archiving
Quite a few presentations tried to tackle new ways of securing and archiving assets. Piracy is a big concern in Hollywood, and IT methods in current use can come to the rescue. Security concerns were addressed by Thomson, among others, with its NexGuard product, which offers assigned user permissions tied to a USB key, as well as traceable watermarks. The intent is to make rights management as easy as possible when screening copies go out, using real-time encryption hardware and forensic tracking in the case of theft.
Both Sun Microsystems and InPhase Technologies introduced new storage products. InPhase demystified holographic storage for the crowd with new optical storage technology originally developed at Bell Labs. InPhase's products will roll out over 2007 and 2008, first as write-once discs and then later as rewritables. Disc capacities will start at 300GB and eventually grow to 1.6TB per disc by late 2008.
Sun, on the other hand, is a proponent of using data tape archives as the most cost-effective solution. They offer large-scale turnkey solutions, but they also outlined an archiving strategy for customers at the retreat. Sun recommends that assets should be held in the form of two complete redundant libraries at each of two geographically separate locations, with a total of four duplicate sets of your assets for maximum catastrophic protection.
Compression
If you thought you'd seen enough codecs, you are mistaken. Several presentations were given involving JPEG 2000, the codec many folks are betting on for storage and workflow with high-resolution files, like 4K film data. JPEG 2000 is being developed by the Fraunhofer research institutes in Germany (the folks that gave us MP3 and co-developed the ARRI D-20). It is designed as a scalable, royalty-free codec that can be either lossy or mathematically lossless. It employs Layered Scheme Compression (LSC), which is a fancy way of saying that your medium is being encoded as simultaneous 1K, 2K and 4K versions. This codec also offers some rights management, giving authorized users access to either all or only selected resolutions.
Along the same lines, the BBC is developing its own codec called Dirac, a wavelet-based I-frame compression scheme. Dirac will be made available for commercial licensing with the first application to be shown at NAB. Dirac provides mezzanine-level compression to allow users to move 1080p content from 50p and 60p original sources through existing 1080i or even SD infrastructures. The BBC is seeking SMPTE standardization as VC-2, while Avid is seeking a SMPTE VC-3 designation for its own mezzanine codec, Avid DNxHD.
New Camera Technologies
The digital cinema camera space is becoming quite crowded and typified by much marketing hype. It was refreshing to see Silicon Imaging at the technology retreat. SI is a low-key company with an actual working, low cost 2K digital cinema camera that has already been used on real films. In partnership with CineForm, both companies have developed a viable workflow using camera RAW images and a CineForm codec. The secret sauce is that RAW images from the Silicon Imaging sensor are compressed with the codec, but no processing information is applied at the time of compression. Instead, demosaicing of the Bayer RAW pattern, color balance and color LUTs (lookup tables) are applied only as metadata to the compressed file. The CineForm codec is a 10/12-bit, visually lossless, variable bit rate wavelet codec that compresses 2K data at 24fps down to 10 to 14MB/s and 4K data down to between 25 and 35MB/s. This process enables even 4K editing on desktop systems, as the files are wrapped as AVI or MOV media instead of DPX files common in other methods. CineForm estimates its codec is five to six times less compute-intensive than JPEG 2000. Once the editing and color correction are final, all adjustments, which have been traveling with the media clips as nondestructive metadata, are "baked" into the final version once that timeline is rendered for output to tape or exported as a "flattened" file. The key point to this workflow is that you are always working with the final quality media, not proxy files.
Although it's not a new technology, Stargate Digital gave a rather interesting explanation of its "digital backlot" and "virtual locations" concepts. Stargate has been filming locations all over the world in order to build up a library of stock locations to be used as background plates. These various high-resolution elements recorded for any given location on film and HD video, as well as high-res digital still photos, are seamlessly stitched together into a 360-degree view that becomes a background scene with about 20 megapixels of resolution. Actors are composited onto such a plate using tracking and greenscreen methods plus on-set matching to get the right angles, lighting and perspective. Stargate has regularly supplied shots to such notable shows as Heroes and Ugly Betty. In fact, the signature 360-degree panning shot from Heroes of Hiro Nakamura (actor Masi Oka) in Times Square was a Stargate composite. It is the belief of Stargate's founders that advanced digital techniques must be used in new and unique ways to bring down skyrocketing production budgets.
Other interesting technologies shown at the HPA Technology Retreat included Panasonic's upcoming data adapter for any Panasonic AJ-HD3700 (H, A and B model) VTR. This is a $35K adapter that is added to an existing D5-HD VTR (plus a firmware update), turning the VTR into a real-time 2K data recorder that will capture and play back 2K media as a video stream. The adapter uses the JPEG 2000 codec at a maximum bit rate of 188Mb/s to record 12-bit 4:4:4 information in either HD (1920x1080) or 2K (2048x1080) frame sizes at 23.98p or 24p frame rates. This capability enables post houses to deal with 2K data in a familiar videotape workflow.
Of course, not everyone has that type of budget, so at the other end of the spectrum was JVC with samples from its GY-HD200U camera. The 200 (as well as the GY-HD250U) offers 24p recording in the HDV-1 (1280x720) format, but recent additions include the JVC-engineered HZ-CA13U adapter for PL-mount 16mm film lenses and the DR-HD100, a dockable hard drive recorder from JVC. The latter is similar to the Focus Enhancements FireStore products available for other cameras.
JVC presented footage recently shot in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival. Despite the fact that the format was HDV, the images from the 200 camera using film lenses were competitive with the look of 16mm film, even on a large screen. The camera's 24fps files can be recorded to the hard drive recorder as QuickTime files and are ready to be dropped directly into Apple Final Cut Pro for native editing. The JVC cameras have piqued the interest of indie filmmakers, not to mention integration for background plates and show elements in a number of television programs, including Fox's 24. Now the ability to use film lenses might just make it the best all-around low-cost digital cinema solution.
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