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Filed under: Business •Cameras •Distribution •Post Production •Production •

HPA Tech Retreat - Day 3, etc.

Fox Network’s Yves Montane showing one of many display performance plots.

Day 2 Revisited

Larry Thorpe and John Galt argued for a more nuanced view of camera resolution, such as MTF (contrast) readings at 200, 400, 600, and 800 TVl/ph, as well as a subjective description, in addition to the standard measurement of the limiting resolution and report on aliasing (see Day 2 pictures). I will be modifying my review methodology accordingly.

Bruce Jacobs and his crew at Twin Cities Public Television (Minneapolis/St. Paul) tested several means of upconverting SD to HD, including FCP and Compressor, hardware boxes from Leitch and Teranex, and upconverters built into Sony and Panasonic HD decks. While there were differences in the quality of results, they all looked more alike than different—and all looked far better than the upconverted SD field reports seen in HD newscasts in my home market of San Francisco / San Jose.

DCS founder and DP James Mathers said the RED ONE camera was usable for features and made a fine image—but he’d still rather be shooting film.

Anil Kokaram of eMotion Engines described motion estimation techniques for improving compression efficacy, and Gary Demos described a wavelet-based codec he’s written with layered motion estimation techniques (remember 1984’s “The Last Starfighter”, animated on a Cray X-MP? Yes, that Gary Demos).

A panel discussed tapeless workflows. Panavision’s Marker Karahadian argued that filmstyle workflows shouldn’t be abandoned: don’t put more people on-set, just send the disks or cards back to the lab for cloning and archiving. Codex Digital‘s Paul Bamborough argued the opposite: there’s no need to stick with workflows designed for the limitations of film technology. PlasterCITY Post folks talked us through their P2 workflow, using “exposed” stickers on P2 cards to avoid inadvertent erasure, and S.two‘s Steve Roach described Fincher’s use of disk recording on “Zodiac”, and how aspects of the workflow—like having automatic slating built into the recorder—was a great time-saver.

A crew from Discovery Networks tested the effects of compression concatenation, starting with uncompressed, AVC-Intra (Panasonic) , and JPEG2000 (GVG Infinity) source clips, and working through 60 Mbps MPEG2 compression on Omneon servers all the way through further long-GOP MPEG-2 compression and DTV delivery. AVC-Intra and JPEG2000, both at 100 Mbps, held up nearly as well as uncompressed, while the 50 Mbps variants of both formats fared less well.

Peter Wilson from HDDC talked about Dirac, an open-source video codec designed by the BBC. The BBC has been charged with the task of providing content on the ‘Net, and the licensing fees for common ‘Net codecs are exorbitant and difficult to administer, so they decided to roll their own. The production-level codec has been submitted to SMPTE as VC-2 and is being used for shipping HD over SD connections within the BBC; we saw a demo of the distribution version, showing 1920x1080 25p video with an 8 Mbps data rate. Dirac has been in development for some time, and many people doubted that it would ever see the light of day, but it looked pretty darned good.

Peter Symes gave a status report from the SMPTE Task Force on Synchronization & Timing. Blackburst dates from 1953 and runs at a really annoying set of frequencies; SMPTE timecode hasn’t (until this year) been able to support frame rates above 30fps. Neither timing reference addresses mixed frame rates in production. The Task Force is looking for participants to help devise forward-looking sync and timing standards.

(next: Day 3)

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