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HPA Tech Retreat 2011 Day 4

Bend Radius - Steve Lampen, Belden

“Don’t bend tighter than 10x the diameter.” But is it 10x? 4x?  Tried the experiment, wrapping cable around a cone:

Wrapping cables; also pinching with pliers!

It is claimed that the damage can’t be undone; unbending only hides the damage.

Stranded cables are better at bending, also smaller cables, flexible cables.

Cables designed for a typical -30dB return loss, e.g., 99% signal transmitted, 1% reflected.

Critical distances: quarter wavelength at 3 GHz = 0.984”.

Solid cables: time-domain reflectometry of 1694A (Belden’s RG-6 type coax, pretty much the standard solid-conductor cable for HD-SDI studio wiring):

A 6-inch bend on 1694a is less than 4x the diameter, but the cable was pretty much OK unlil the bend radius was comparable to the cable diameter. Even after folding in half with pliers and unbending, the cable recovered considerable.

Stress whitening shows up on PVC jacket when cable is crunched; if you see a white patch on the cable, you might want to check it.

1505A OK to 1.18x bend, folded with pliers -20 dB RL, unfolded -33 dB RL.

1694F (flexible) OK to 1.16x, even to 0.58x still OK. Pliers make it bad, but straightened out is still pretty much OK.

1505F: OK to 1.18, pliers bad, unfolded, not too bad; 24 hrs later back to -33 dB RL.

So, cable can withstand severe bending, and much performance returns when unbent.

What about Ethernet on twisted-pair? The lower the frequency, the less the effect. A data cable only goes to 500, 625 MHz per pair, which is nothing! What about tie-wraps? The sloppier you are, the better! On multipair data cables, what about changing the geometry from bending? Yes; what degrades on data cables is more crosstalk between pairs, not so much return loss. Have you tried more wraps? Wrapping around a nail? Clove hitch? Bowline? Yes, we tried tying cables in knots, stomping on it, it still worked.

When did we come from - Mark Schubin

(Mark does a “post-Retreat treat” in which he feeds historical info to us at firehose rates, to our general bemusement and delight.)

Headlines: “3D TV Thrives outside US”, “3D could begin in the US within a year”: April 22, 1980! Also, Business Week 1953: Jim Butterfields’s 3D broadcast; Modern Mechanix 1931, Baird in 1928, and Baird probably was the first. Active shutter glasses 1922. Live-action 3D movies in 1879?

Electronic TV proposals in 1908, picture tube in 1907. In 1927, intertitles (title cards for dialog). Talkies in 1905, 1900; sync sound in 1894, even (William Dixon playing the violin)! The first edit: 1895, “The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots” (view it on the Library of Congress site).

Edison tone tests, 1910: blindfold tests comparing an opera singer and an Edison phonograph; people couldn’t tell the difference. It didn’t hurt that one of Edison’s chosen opera singer later admitted that she practiced sounding like an Edison phonograph (!).

Headphones date back to 1890 (patented then), but used in Lisbon in 1888. The Gilliland harness for telephone operators dates back to 1881 (but weighed 8-11 pounds. Stereo 1881. Pay cable 1885 (audio feeds of operas).

“Television” coined in 1900 to replace earlier words: telephote 1889, Nipkow patent 1885, Sutton’s Telephane 1885 (oil-lamp TV), Robida’s “The 20th Century”, 1882, showed large screens; “an electric telescope” 1879. Punch’s Almanac in 1879 showing “Edison’s Telephonoscope” (but also showed Edison’s antigravity underwear!). Letter to the NY Sun, 1877: “electroscope” for transmission of opera performances (which, Mark notes, is his day job, more than 100 years later).

Electrical telegraphy proposed in 1753.  Fax-scanning patent 1843; pneumatic tube 1854; telephone 1876; commercial fax service in 1861 France.

First photo 1825. First transatlantic cable 1858. Photosensitivity of selenium written up in 1972… whereupon a rush to invent TV!

Final thoughts…

The end of the post facility as we know it? The general gist of the first day’s presentations was that a lot of what had been safely ensconced in the post facility is moving on-set or near-set, and that the days of the traditional, bricks-and-mortar post house / facility / lab may be coming to an end.

The irony of this concept being advanced at a conference organized by the Hollywood Post Alliance was not lost on your correspondent…

...but let’s not panic just yet. A quarter of a century ago, Stefan Sargent, founder of Molinare, one of the first heavy-iron post houses in the UK, wrote the article “Buying Obsolescence” for the Journal of the Royal Television Society. In it, he describes walking into the machine room of any contemporary post house (this is the era of 1” Type C VTRs, Grass Valley 300 switchers, and Ampex ADOs): millions of dollars of equipment, and it’ll all be obsolete in six or nine months!

The equipment has been getting better/faster/cheaper for the past 25 years, yet Molinare is still around. The post business has never been one where you can rest on your laurels; the tech and the business climate have never been stable and secure (even in the film days, as one presenter noted: 150 different film formats in the past 120 years). What differs nowadays, just as in the camera department, is that the barriers to entry are so much lower, more people can get in the game. Post is hollowing out: you’ll have guys in their basements with FCP on a MacBook Pro, and high-end houses with the film scanners, grading rooms with control surfaces, proper monitoring, and real-time high-bandwidth storage—and not much of anything in the middle. Post has always been a high-risk, high-volatility business; it takes a strong constitution and more than a bit of luck to survive long-term, but the one thing that remain constant is that talent, not gear, is the best indicator of success. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

We used to speak of the end of the format wars, and boy, were we ever wrong!

A few years back, we were talking about seeing the end of the formats wars.  Remember when we shot interlaced 4x3 SDTV with a specified colorimetry and gamma to a handful of tape formats, and delivered interlaced 4x3 SDTV to an audience using interlaced 4x3 CRTs? Ah, those were the days… we didn’t know how simple we had it.

Now, let’s see, for acquisition, we have AVC-Intra, AVCHD, HDCAM, HDCAM-SR (in three different bitrates), ProRes (in more than three different bitrates, depths, and color resolutions), XDCAM HD and EX variants, DVCPROHD (still out there), ArriRAW, R3D, Codex Digital, Cineform, uncompressed (S.two; DPXes on SR 2.0), and whatever your HDSLR du jour shoots, just to name a few. And that’s just HD. There’s still SD being produced, and 2K and 4K, in gamma-corrected “linear” or log (LogC, S-Log, REDlog); 4x3, 16x9, 2:1, 2.4:1; 8-bit, 10-bit, or 12-bit; 4:2:0 to 4:4:4; full-res, subsampled, or oversampled (both well and poorly).

If you add in the number of deliverables the various presenters were talking about, and consider all the permutations of inputs and outputs, it just boggles the mind.

The format wars are over. The formats won, all of them. May their tribes increase.

Deal with it.

“The Tape is dead. Long live the Tape!”

Sony’s demo of solid-state HDCAM-SR, a.k.a. SR 2.0, marks a transition from the last professional videotape format we’re likely to see into—finally—a world of totally tapeless acquisition.

The 1TB SR memory card, in front of an SRW-9000 with the solid-state recorder (and a nanoflash proxy recorder!).

The medium (a bit too big to be a “card” or a “stick”, shall we call it a data-slab?) comes in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities; the big one will record about 4 hours of SR (440Mbps) or twice that of SR-lite (220Mbps) material. Prices were not announced, but the scuttlebutt amongst HPA attendees was around $8000 for the 1TB memory slab.

There’s a solid-state “deck” for the slabs, too; it has four slots, and four IO channels, so it’s really a four-channel video server in the guise of a “VTR”:

One of the demo units was playing out on two channels while recording on the other two.

There’s also a 1 RU box the length and width of an SRW-5800 VTR, a single-slot SR slab player/recorder with 10 Gigabit Ethernet on the back. It was shown atop a 5800, looking uncannily like the HD adapter for a D-5 VTR (an observation which, when offered, brought a slightly pained grimace to the face of the kind Sony fellow showing me the gear); the combo serves as a faster-than-realtime slab-to-tape offload station. The slab reader can also work as a standalone device for network transfers, or as a slab reader for any computer with a fast enough network port.

A portable deck was shown attached to the back of an F35, as well as cabled to a PMW-F3:

Sony says it’ll be in the same pricing order of magnitude as the PMW-F3, making for a very affordable package (comparatively speaking, of course) for shooting dual-link, large-format images to SR. As a camera operator, I appreciate the reductions in size and weight just as much as I like the savings in cost, complexity, and power requirements (theoretically, that is; SR shoots are well above my pay grade).

“Now how much would you pay? But wait, there’s more!” Sony was showing native SR editing (well, decoding, at least) in both Avid Media Composer (via Avid Media Access) and FCP via an updated version of the cinémon plugin. I saw SR-lite (the 220Mbps version) happily playing natively on a MacBook Pro (and yes, I did command+9 on the clip in the bin, and it came up as HDCAM-SR 220Mbps in the Item Properties window). As for writing an SR file natively? Sony says that’s coming, but a timetable hasn’t been announced.

All the SR 2.0 stuff being demonstrated is supposed to ship “this summer”. And when that happens, SR—the mastering and mezzanine format of choice for most high-end productions—will have a smooth migration path away from tape. “The Tape is dead.”

At the same time, LFTS-formatted LTO-5 is taking off like a rocket. One speaker at the Tech Retreat asked for a camera that shoots directly to LTO-5; 1Beyond had a “Wrangler” system capable, via an HD-SDI connection, or recording directly to LTO-5.

1Beyond’s LTO-5 “sidekick” for backup of disks and cards inserted into the adjacent Wrangler DIT station.

LTO-5 drives were all over the demo room, in boxes from HP, Cache-A, and even ProMAX:

ProMAX ProjectSTOR disk/tape combo box.

Using LTFS, LTO becomes a cross-platform, interchangeable, easily searchable format allowing partial restores—in other words, something fast enough, friendly enough, and flexible enough for uses other than disaster recovery. With LTO already being the overwhelmingly predominant archiving / backup mechanism in high-end production (many bonding companies require it), this only means there will be a lot more LTO tape in our future. “Long live the Tape!”

At least, you’d better hope it lives long, if your irreplaceable data resides on it… [grin].

Everything Else…

I apologize for not covering the demo room in any detail. I had my hands full with all the content from the presentations, and insufficient sleep as it was. Ditto with the breakfast roundtables.

3D? Seems to be dead in the water as far as broadcasters are concerned. Microstereopsis seems to offer so many freedoms in production and post: why isn’t anyone using it?

Washington update: the spectrum grab remains contentions. As to domain seizures, have a look at the most recent instance: Unprecedented domain seizure shutters 84,000 sites.

So gather your metadata ‘round (in whatever format you’ve got it) and guard it well; it’ll be even more valuable in the future, because you’ll need to track way too many input formats, an even greater number of output formats, and make mezzanine IMF masters from which every conceivable deliverable, in every possible size, shape, codec, color space and resolution, can be made (IIF ACES will let you preserve enough image data to do so, fortunately). Wrap it all in clever, ever-evolving rights management—in such a way that it won’t infuriate the consumer—and do day-and-date delivery inside of a week to every country on the planet. Don’t forget to back up on LTO-5 and quad-mosaic film protection masters, too (including the 3D subtitled versions), and be ready to do it all faster, cheaper, and better than ever before!

HPA’s master list of press coverage: http://www.hpaonline.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=122850&orgId=hopa

Disclaimer: I attended the HPA Tech Retreat on a press pass, which saved me the registration fee. I paid for my own transport, meals, and hotel. No material connection exists between myself and the Hollywood Post Alliance; aside from the press pass, HPA has not influenced me with any compensation to encourage favorable coverage.

The HPA logo and motto were borrowed from the HPA website. The HPA is not responsible for my graphical additions.

All off-screen graphics and photos are copyrighted by their owners, and used by permission of the HPA.

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It’s already hell on earth for a bunch of these folks!

One of the things that strikes me, as I sit back and reflect, is that last year at HPA we saw some “best practices” presentations. This year, while there were roundtables with that aim, none of the presos were about “best practices” but, seemingly, just about surviving the flood.

The great terror—or the great comfort, depending on your viewpoint—is that nobody knows what “best practices” actually are; everyone is feeling their way into this brave new world (“oh, Brave New World, that has such complications in it!”) just as blindly and as hesitantly as everyone else. When folks like Disney and WB and Starz are making it up as they go along, you either feel comforted that you’re not the only one going though this trauma, or you’re mortified that if these folks haven’t got it all sussed, how the heck are we (and anyone else) supposed to figure it out???

Me, I’m a wee bit comforted that my confusion and consternation are shared by the Big Guys. But I’m weird that way.

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  02/21  at  10:36 PM

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It’s like everybody has its own custom made cookbook and even though those folks at WB and Disney seem a bit confused i’m not worrying about them. I mean they can afford the LTO-5 recorders.
The thing is at the lower end of the spectrum where i usually work, this is going to be total chaos. And trying to convince people of the best course of action is going to be increasingly difficult when i’m not even sure what the best course of action is, for finding that sweet spot between cost, quality and stability.

Posted by Corbor  on  02/22  at  07:05 AM

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