[Tig] [Fwd: Re: NAB, tig server status]
Rob Lingelbach
rob at colorist.org
Tue Apr 24 12:08:31 PDT 2007
------------------------------ Original Message ------------------------------
Subject: Re: [Tig] NAB, tig server status
From: "Christopher Noellert" <chris at frithiof.se>
Date: Tue, April 24, 2007 1:35 pm
To: "Rob Lingelbach" <rob at colorist.org>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Rob,
This is a mail I posted to the Diforum regarding my thought on
products at nab. Part of it is a discussion with Steve Shaw
regarding his experiences but you're welcome to pass it on to the TIG
if you think it would be beneficial. I don't work, of course, for
any of the companies I listed here in my round-up (or even work
through them as some people do), although I have bought equipment
from several of them and the rest are just cool people who make cool
stuff.
Best,
Chris
Hi Big Guy,
Saw you waiting there in the 20 mile line for checkin at United.
What a pain. Comments inserted.
On Apr 21, 2007, at 12:48 AM, Steve Shaw wrote:
> I also sat through a number of other demos, including the ones on
> the Apple stand. It must be because I'm a Brit, but I really don't
> get the way they hype their demos up so much.
This comment about hype is so ironic Steve... you must see it too huh?
> The basic tools are ok, including the re-launch of Final Touch as
> Color, but what a painful workflow and poor business model. I guess
> the view is that the real low pricepoint overcomes other
> limitations and issues
I don't know if offering a free, powerful color corrector is a bad
business model for anyone except for Apple and the xml workflow
between FCP and Color is hardly what I would call painful. What was
it that you didn't like/thought was painful? To put it another way
- at least you have a multilayer timeline both in grading and editing
and the possibility of seeing your pictures move while you're
grading. A *WORKING* process tree, *WORKING* curves and shapes,
*WORKING* segment aware pan and scan. In all fairness, no, Color
will not play out a 4k DI to vhs in realtime though. Perhaps that's
the painful part.
To be honest, I think where Apple is heading with this little setup,
FCP Color and Motion, is for people doing compressed episodical work
in a workgroup type situation once you add some form of SAN topology
and FCP server when and if it is available. I think it's more of a
threat to what Avid is up to than your Pablo's Steve, although it's
quite possible in the not so distant future that photographer's are
going to be sitting in Pablo sessions and asking why they have to
render (even if it's in the background) before they can see the shots
rolling.
Quantel was at least showing a drawing of a new panel. But we've
been waiting for working curves for a few years now.
> Am I being an equipment snob?
.. that's nothing new. Just part of your flair ;)
> I wasn't able to sit through all of the demo on the FilmLight or
> Nucoda stands, but I did hear a number of good things from those
> that had. Can anyone else add their views on what they saw of these
> products?
Now I'll let my bias show. 3.2 and 3.3 of Baselight looks
fantastic. All of the video IO code has been reworked for some
extremely interesting and cool workflows specifically for video
deliverable in traditional telecine/hardware color corrector
environments. In 3.3 the Baselight has full control over all of the
Spirit's internal fuctions, and transport controls on the Strip
level, essentially backing all settings into the Baselight timeline.
You grade along until you need Baselight secondaries, then mark a
range hit the ingest key on the blackboard, the area marked is
ingested and then you can use the Baselight cc layers above the
Spirit's, when you're done, it's render and lay to tape. For all of
the stuff where you haven't used baselight cc layers, the baselight
will pass the Sprit's input through the DVS's input directly to the
output. When it comes to a section that has used Baselight CC then
it automatically switches to playing out that section of the timeline
from the Baselight to the DVS board and switches back to the Spirit
output when complete. Very fucking cool. This of course will mean
direct conforming with full metadata from the Spirit to the Baselight
for short or long format work and the ability to dynamically work in
edit order in a standard film to tape environment.
Think dailies workflows here - especially since the cube can be baked
in on the output to everything.
Otherwise Filmlight was still the only company showing a real 4k DCI
compliant workflow from scanning through color correction and
calibration and the Northlight2 was amazing. Rumor was that a
pinless gate and 24fps data scanning at full density (not just a
single flash) are just around the corner. Loved the projector probe
as well.
DV's latest revision of the DVNR is by far "best of class" as usual.
There was a little bit of strange optical flow artifacting on slower
16 mil but it looked fantastic all the same - I want to get an
update for ours as soon as possible - then I can do 15fps DVRN in 2k
looping through the Sledgehammer. Looking forward to that I can tell
you.
The Filmmaster hooked up and grading from the Unity in version 3.5
was damn damn damn nice for anyone looking into a grading solution
other than DS or Symphony for Episodical workgroup workflow
scenarios, and I'm told that at release 3.5 should contain even more
nice hooks into the Avid workflow (perhaps bins and sequences) past
the aaf support that was demoed. It was actually really nice to see
Avid cooperating so openly with what could be viewed as a competitor
in the finishing market. DV has also qualified the Avid platform as
well as the DVS clipster platform meaning that you can just install
Filmmaster or DVO on the same hardware that you might normally run
some other hardware/software instead of double investing.
The toolset of the Filmmaster just seems to be growing as well. The
paint package was best of class as well, supporting some really nice
motion estimation tech combined with grain managment for dustbust.
It really makes their little DVO package a very interesting addition
to any DI house.
> The da Vinci Resolve looks to be progressing very well, but I
> didn't get a chance to see Pandora, who had impressed me a lot
> with their new DI systems at IBC. Again, any other comments from
> those at NAB?
We've bought three Revolutions for Pandora now, and I can't tell you
how happy we are to see the final shipping version. The CDL stuff
was indeed there and working (however strange it felt to drive -
subtle differences between lift, gamma, gain...) and all of the
secondaries (like all 50 channels) running in 3D cubes had without a
doubt the nicest, cleanest color isolation that I have ever seen
(even better than the old 888 which for me always seemed cleaner than
the 2k). 3d luts on the input and output, very nices improvments to
the shapes package particulary the blur. The custom shapes package
still felt a little weak, but will mature with time, and all of the
list management that Pandora seems to always clobber DaVinci with has
improved greatly when using the machine with Pandora's YoYo data
box. For those running the Pixie based systems, the Revolution is
such a step up, it's amazing.
Pandora's little DI machine with CDL support , primaries, secondaries
and panel for $125K was a pretty nice little setup for running
dailies as well. Compact and a concise toolset for getting the
grading done and out as soon as possible. I think they sold 3 or 4
on the stand.
I didn't have time to catch DaVinci, although admittedly I really
wish I had found the time.
> On the VFX side Fusion looks amazing, and Motor from Imagineer was
> very, very cool.
Nuke, Nuke, Nuke, Nuke, Nuke.... and Flame.
Nuke 4.7 looks great, so nice that there's Truelight baked in now for
colour consistency across whole pipelines from dailies, editing,
scanning, cc, and film out. I met briefly with the folk from the
Foundry and they seem to have a very clear and concise vision of
where to take the product. personally I think it's really cool that
the company that is consistently delivering some of the most
interesting developments in image science has take on the product.
Can only be great things.
At the users group Discreet showed up and coming versions of Smoke
and Flame which were just amazing - multilayer timelines in batch for
Flame and Smoke with Batch and Action. Can only hope that it comes
sooner rather than later. They also showed EXR support if 16 float.
Finally. I think I was the only one clapping. I remarked later to
Philipe that Flame should support the CDL...
> On the scanner and film recorder side there have been a lot of
> developments in the past months, and Cintel, LaserGraphics,
> Imagica, Arri, etc were all showing some very serious developments.
I like the Arri very much, but so much of the discussion falls apart
on big canvas. As far as the digital dailies aspect is concerned
shouldn't we be heading for scan once in full quality 2K and then
store on tape libraries instead? Then the 8.6 fps thing kind of goes
back down to the 4.5 thing again due to the second flash. But like I
said I really like the machine.
> However, 8 frames per second for dailies from Arri is pushing the
> idea a bit, I think?
No. Not really. 25 is possible on the Spirit. 60 would be pushing
the idea. Why strive for realtime?
> One device that did catch my eye in this area was the telecine/
> scanner control system on the Film + Data Technology stand.
Wasn't that cool??!! The Corona (Korona?) editor I believe it was
called and the first thing I checked out at the show. Guy hooked us
with all kind of info. Nice people and cool stuff.
Ok, flight being called...
> Can anyone else add their thoughts of NAB?
The Sledgehammer. I bought one of these just prior to the show, so
I'm obviously biased, but I can't understand why not every one who
has a hardware color corrector or works in hybrid data/video
enviroments doesn't have one of these things. The machine from the
ground up is a pretty hardcore NAS box with gigE standard and
Infiniband and 10gigE as options. It has a timeline mode that acts
as a 24 hour pre-striped tape so you can edit down selects from the
tk in 444 RGB. You can then apply an edl to that material and grade
through the Sledge in Amode to say the Pandora. When you're done
grading you blow your list back out to C mode and since the sledge
can play and record all HD formats at the same time as playing, you
can record back your graded selects to the same machine you're
playing from. Then automatically remove gaps in the record timeline
that have no source and play it out to tape from the sledge to tape
with extern regen and jam the tape with tc via the ltc outputs of the
sledge which are being fed tc from the embedded tc in the dpx
headers. I have ours currently doing this kind of stuff both with a
Spirit as well as our Ditto (damn the DS/CO stuff rules), and now
that Max-T has announced that you can cluster the FS with multiple
video io heads it's bye bye Clipster - I can now have a setup with
one Revo doing ingest into the NAS from the TK and two other Revo
grading rooms playing off and recording at the same time to the same
server namespace on 3 different io heads. Once Max-T finishes
implementing the DaVinci and Pandora scans protocol then you'll also
have control over the realtime resizing available on all video heads
as well.
Hook up a tape library from Adic and inifiniband to your Flame and
you've got one amazing workflow, via all of the publishing stuff.
Given that Filmlight is also supporting direct from san/nas grading
now there are some extremely interesting hybrid workflows for HDCAM
SR 444 work which I'll post more about later. Smart guys, really
fucking smart product, to little exposure. I highly recommend
checking the machine out.
For SAN workflows I'll pump Bright systems as well. Tony and those
guys have really managed to fine tune their stuff into doing what it
says on the tin - a theme which few seemed to have embraced this year
at the show. The key comes down to designing a SAN for your
particular workflow and they've managed to get ours together very
nicely. I also really liked their new answer to the firewire drive -
these removable high bandwidth disk packs which you can run BDO on.
It's like bringing a nuclear weapon to a knife fight.
Otherwise the Glue tools workflow was emerging - but I guess since
it's a smart and cheap workflow it didn't make it on Steve's
list ;). Personally I though it was a fantastic start at opening FCP
to a complete DATA centric workflow model that makes a lot of sense
to those who don't have money for buying larger systems, or in fact,
used to compliment existing larger systems. Regardless it's happy
days for rebel mac units every where. the GlueTools, FCP and Color
integration means for a very powerful but commodity based DPX data
workflow. Good work and kudos to Bob.
And lastly I loved two technology demos from Technicolor Labs/Thomson
(other than the printer lights box). The first was the active
scheduler for SAN which organized all incoming requests for reads and
right to the SAN/NAS. With the scheduler on the number of realtime
streams of 444 rgb HD video went from 2 to 5. The other thing that
really caught my attention was the WAN protocol for moving large
images through a 10gigE pipe. Very nice work to both of those teams.
Fantastic show this year,
--
Chris Noellert
Senior Flame / Digital Post Technical Director / Prima donna
Nordiskfilm Post Production Stockholm
(Formerly Filmteknik/Frithiof Film to Video. AB)
Tulvaktsvagen 2
115 40 Stockholm
Tel: +46 8 450 450 00
Fax: +46 8 450 450 01
Dir: +46 8 450 450 17
Mob: +46 7 024 616 31
AIM: cmnoellert
Reel: http://se.nordiskfilm-postproduction.com/movieviewer.aspx?
movie=Video_250018.mov
Web: http://www.nordiskfilm-postproduction.com
On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:41 AM, Rob Lingelbach wrote:
> Thanks to Eric Maurer for support in 2007. see the TIG NAB Focus
> Sheet at
> http://tig.colorist.org/wiki3/index.php/TIGNABFS07
> ====
>
>
>
> Hi everyone, thanks for all your emails asking about the status of
> the tig,
> which went down on April
> 12th. It was cracked (I watched it happen, via a feed to another
> machine) but
> it would be best not to
> publish any more details than that. Contact me personally if you
> want to know
> more, though it's a busy
> week and there could be a bit of a delay answering mails, besides
> having a few
> hundred stacked up to
> answer during the downtime. Being 7,312 miles away from the
> machine caused a
> small delay in bringing it back up as well.
>
> So, with NAB wrapped, for those of us who couldn't make it, are
> there stories
> to tell, equipment specs
> to brandish, anything that we need to know? This is in the first
> or second
> prime directive of the TIG,
> a review of What was Good and What was Not Good.
>
> regards
> Rob
>
> --
> Rob Lingelbach
> http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html
>
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--
Rob Lingelbach
http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html
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