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NAB 2007

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM

HD harbingers and post workflow solutions.

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production Systems

By Dan Ochiva

In the film and video industry, we're now at a pretty good point on the road to digital nirvana. There's a feeling that production and post technology — for lack of a better word — rocks. After all those years of dropped frames, too-pricey gear, and other technical traumas, we've reached a plateau where huge technological breakthroughs aren't necessary.

More important to postproduction right now are the less tangible qualities of new applications and systems. The challenge is selecting among best-of-breed apps and figuring out how to tie them all together to create an ideal workflow for a particular production.

A great example of the growing importance of better integration between production and post will have its debut at the show. The Advanced Media Workflow (AMW) Association (formerly the AAF Association) is hosting an engineering conference, which will include the first public demonstration of the MXF Mastering Format Project. Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) has taken a lead role in the project, described as a long-term initiative to bring a “fresh approach” to MXF by providing real-world solutions for post workflows.

(The AMW Association promotes the development and adoption of open, accessible standards and specifications relating to file-based workflows. Visit www.amwassociation.org for more info.)

Let's look what the manufacturers of postproduction hardware and software have planned for NAB 2007. With the recent announcement of Creative Suite 3 (CS3), complete with Macromedia's products folded in, Adobe looks like it's got a winning model for integration. With CS3, Adobe cannily plays off the huge popularity of its Photoshop and After Effects apps.

Apple Final Cut Pro finally has a worthy competitor on the Mac. For the first time, Photoshop is available as a Universal Binary, allowing it to run natively on Intel-based Mac hardware and delivering a big boost in performance. The Mac gets attention, too, with the release of Premiere Pro for OS X. The NLE software might be irresistible to Mac users running After Effects; a bidirectional connection between the two programs means that files automatically update as you move back and forth, cutting out any need to re-render.

Tighter integration among the suite's applications will highlight many of the new features that are spread throughout CS3. Soundbooth, for example, represents a useful subset of Adobe's Audition audio program, which itself is no longer included in the bundle. Now Premiere Pro users can call up a sophisticated toolset such as an audio spectrum analyzer and editor, but the audio software has been trimmed and tweaked to remove the confusion of choices found in the standard Audition app. After Effects, meanwhile, gains an easy-to-implement character animation tool as well as a fast method to build 3D models from photographs. There's integrated output for cell phone video and animation, so users of Premiere Pro and Flash can design within the familiar Adobe interfaces.

An improved production pipeline — this time in 3D — topped the news in a Softimage announcement earlier this year. In collaboration with Electronic Arts' Chicago studio, Softimage is in the midst of developing a Softimage|XSI pipeline to turn out HD-resolution games. EA has a huge game-development studio operation — claimed as the largest one around — so shaving time off a production by tweaking workflow makes sense. Softimage says its ace in the hole is its Gigapolygon core, developed to manage the 64-bit, high-polygon-count 3D characters and environments needed in HD games.

Softimage|XSI 6, which debuted last fall, also has a new collaborative framework. The software supports Microsoft's .NET framework, among other moves to allow 3D artists to work together even when running other companies' 3D and compositing apps.

Autodesk didn't go into much detail before the show — the company likes to save any specifics for the ritual Sunday press conference — but you can expect to see the latest at its extensive demo sessions of Flame, Smoke, Lustre, Toxik, Maya, and 3ds Max.

Similar to the story we'll be hearing from other vendors this year, Autodesk will give its own take on how to best manage data as it's networked within and across facilities. Each effects system will offer more than standalone content creation, as collaboration and sharing of assets across the entire production pipeline becomes de rigeur. Expect to hear a lot about parallel workflows. If you arrive at the show by Sunday, check out one of Autodesk's master classes for Flame and Smoke.

Quantel continues to carve out a route for its products in mainstream HD post. Last IBC, the British company introduced Pablo HD, a “highly affordable” HD color-correction system. Based on the feature set of its established Pablo 2K and 4K systems — with a bit of eQ and iQ tossed in — the new box handles HD, SD, and mixed-resolution jobs on one timeline, a real-world need that Quantel has aimed to solve over the past few years. Want to move up a notch but still not go to full 2K? There is also an HD-RGB model for 4:4:4 HD/digital film applications.

Whatever you think of the name, the new Bluefish444 2K|Lust card delivers top features, with its I/O support for 2K-res images via HSDL (high-speed data link) so that it can be integrated with telecine and film-scanning devices. Features include realtime hardware scaling, cropping, and color processing, and realtime SDI monitoring of HSDL output. Bluefish Technologies' Symmetry app is bundled, and includes acquisition, review, and playout control for working in 2K DI post. If you bought a 4:4:4-capable HD|Lust card, 2K|Lust is just a free software upgrade away.

At NAB 2007, Bluefish444 will also announce that its Rage N|Code “faster-than-realtime” HD encoding system will now support the H.264 codec in addition to MPEG-2. The card's versatile: Suggested uses include HD archiving, accelerated export from Adobe Premiere Pro, live streaming applications, and HD DVD/Blu-ray authoring.

On the storage side, Archion has built a pretty substantial Fibre Channel RAID array in order to sell its storage into Avid houses. The Synergy HD for Unity is a 3RU SATA II-to-FC RAID array. Features include a 256MB video-optimized cache of RAM on the card itself, support for up to 15 SATA II hard drives, dual-channel 2Gbps FC ports (they employ optical SFP transceivers), and three 350W hot-swappable power supplies (one is redundant). Certified for Avid Unity MediaNetwork v3.3 and higher, the storage is compatible with Windows, Macintosh OS 9 and OS X, Linux, and most flavors of Unix. Archion says the product's hardware RAID protection eliminates the need for “wasteful mirroring” of storage for protection.

Atto will show its line of SAS/SATA RAID adapters, which the company says can deliver performance up to 3Gbps per port. (SAS is the next-generation serial-attached SCSI interface, a spec that offers a more scalable and reliable interconnection scheme over today's parallel SCSI.)

Because the adapters offer a low-profile form factor that fits standard-length PCI Express slots, they are useful when you're building renderfarms or blade servers where real estate is at a premium. The company claims it has the only SAS RAID adapters with hardware RAID 6 and RAID 60 support. (RAID 6 guards against rare but nasty dual-drive failures.)

The ExpressSAS products offer user-selectable port-configuration options, so you can select the optimal mix of internal and external SAS connections. The cards work with Windows (including Vista) and Linux platforms. Atto claims the ExpressSAS adapters are the only SAS RAID controllers that support Mac OS X, including Intel-based Macs.

Ciprico designed its latest RAID storage array as a scalable piece of gear that can travel for location shooting, remote editing, or postproduction. MediaVault 4440 builds around four removable vPods (Video Pods); each vPod offers a considerable amount of RAID chops alone, because each contains a 4Gbps Fibre Channel controller and 10 2.5in. SATA disk drives. Put those all together, and you get four channels and up to 40 drives. This allows you to deliver a combined data transfer rate of more than 1GBps, with a total capacity of up to 6.4TB.

Specified for realtime 2K and 4K film playback and conforming, uncompressed HD capture to disk, and DI, the 4400 deploys RAID 6 capability within each vPod, which ensures both data integrity and read/write performance in the aforementioned event of any two disk drives failing.

Look for upgrades to Facilis Technology's TerraBlock storage array, which was upgraded last year with parity (RAID 5) data protection as part of the Dyna-RAID feature. (RAID 5 combines the speed-up of data striping with the data protection of distributed parity.)

Last year, Facilis also introduced its Tandem volume-spanning technology, which is said to deliver more than 2GBps bandwidth when multiple drive groups are combined into a single volume. The company specs it for collaborative 2K DPX film work, multi-stream 1080i 4:4:4 video, or color correction workflows with 24fps film playback of 4K material.

As we noted earlier, a campaign to promote MXF as a practical universal interface standard looks to get a boost at the show via the AMW Association's MXF project. While there may be new MXF-compliant gear coming out at the show, right now Quantum is the leader.

The company adds an autoloader to its tape-based, MXF-aware ProVideo A-Series backup drives. The networkable SuperLoader 3A autoloader joins the pioneering SDLT 600A drive, which debuted last year. The SuperLoader holds up to 16 tape cartridges, which provide up to 4.8TB of removable networked storage in a 2RU chassis. Each 300GB cartridge can hold more than six hours of 100Mbps HD content. Even though it's a tape backup, users can easily navigate the file directories from any browser. Because it's MXF-aware, you get videotape-like access to subclips by timecode.

While the original RaveHD uncompressed array was introduced in 2004, SpectSoft had some work to do, and so the company slipped in an upgrade at the next couple NAB shows. Finally, by mid-2006, RaveHD reached “the friendly usability stage that most were waiting for,” according to company president Ramona Howard.

With the introduction of RaveHD, SpectSoft became a pioneer by offering a networkable, Linux-based storage system to the post industry, which has long embraced the open-source operating system. The array works with uncompressed 4:4:4 RGB sequential, frame-based (DPX) media in realtime. There is also full VTR emulation, with the capability to bring in 2K images via HSDL from a telecine. New features include audio meters, Axial editor support, and assemble mode.

If you do a lot of audio in a mixed Mac and Windows environment, you might want to check out Studio Network Solutions' (SNS) Postmap search and management software. Designed for postproduction workgroups, the software speedily locates a variety of media files stored locally, remotely, offline, or online, says the company. Users improve post workflow by creating enhanced metadata to describe and classify specific files and folders, with the goals of reducing search times, sharing production notes, and organizing customized files.

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