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Filed under: Business •Cameras •Distribution •Hardware •Post Production •Production •Visual Effects •

HPA Technology Retreat 2009

The EBU’s Hans Hoffman discusses codec concatenation testing.

A decade ago, the European Broadcasting Union tested multigeneration performance of various SD codecs. At the Tech Retreat, Hans Hoffman presented an updated study, looking at the performance of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p acquisition, editing, and distribution codecs, including concatenation effects. The EBU again ran a careful and comprehensive test, ensuring that both spatial and temporal offsets occurred between the four to seven generations tested, and having a panel of “golden eyes” evaluate the results on a 36” Sony BVM CRT, a 1080-line LCD, and two 50” 1080-line plasma displays. The full test report is available only to EBU members, but anyone can read the summary, EBU Recommendation R 124.

Panasonic’s Varicam 3700 web-server with glowing blue antenna.

Panasonic demoed putting a web server directly into a camera: in this case, a P2 Varicam AJ-HPX3700. A wireless link lets members of the camera department mess about with the rich metadata available in the P2 workflow without having to be physically connected to the camera.

Script Supervisor’s view of the 3700’s clips and metadata.

One client is this nifty Toughbook handheld PC, not seen much in the US outside the medical community. The interface here tracks those available through the camera’s own metadata pages, or Panasonic’s P2 Viewer application, with some live-production tweaks: the UI is customizable with one-button macros to update or edit various metadata fields, mark circle takes, or add timecode-tagged notes to points of interest in a clip. Another client is an iPhone app, with single-touch icons for marking circle takes, points of interest, and the like.

Sorry, no ship dates: it’s a tech demo, not a product… yet…

Arri’s Hans Kiening shows a prototype dynamic-range test target.

How do you measure the dynamic range of a camera? You can shoot a series of exposure tests, opening and closing the aperture a stop at a time, but then you’re assuming that each stop marked in the lens really gives you a doubling or halving of the light, and you run into issues where the camera’s firmware may modify the tonal scale from shot to shot. Alternatively, you can shoot a transmissive test target like a Stouffer wedge or a DSC Labs Combi OSG, but you’re at risk from illumination leakage and from densitometer inaccuracy when measuring wide ranges of transparency.

Arri, in their characteristic German manner, have come up with a transmissive test target that overcomes many of these problems. An Arrilaser film recorder generates transmission wedges within a narrow and well-calibrated density range; to get higher densities, multiple wedges are stacked. Each target area is surrounded by a bore or tunnel to reduce cross-contamination and ambient light spill. The ring of test targets is calibrated while mounted on an integrating chamber that looks like a cross between a diving bell, a comsat, and a stainless-steel pressure vessel. The final test target, shown by Hans Kiening, is a typical Arri product: precise enough for standards-body usage, rugged enough to survive the tender ministrations of a feature-film crew, and probably expensive enough to bankrupt a small country (or, in this day and age, even a medium-sized country). Arri says they’ll donate one to AMPAS, and one to USC, so that those organizations won’t be able to complain that they can’t afford them!

Cinnafilm’s frame-synthesis debug screen, showing motion vectors and red areas where motion blur makes motion estimation difficult.

Cinnafilm showed their HD1 frame-rate-converter, interlace-to-progressive, 60i-to-24p, synthesize-super-slo-mo, you-name-it-and-the-HD1-can-probably-do-it workstation. I saw this thing do a 10x slo-mo on a clip that was hard to believe; there was none of that frame-blending nonsense, just a smooth, crisp, very clean synthesis of all the in-between frames. The debug display (above) shows sample motion vectors during a frame-rate conversion, as well as areas of the image where motion blur made motion estimation impossible with the current settings. Of course the whole processing pipeline is interactively tweakable, so you can optimize the process on a shot-by-shot basis. Frame rate conversion on 1080-line clips runs at about 1.5x real time (e.g., 16 fps or so).

All this stuff runs on a single nVidia GPU, like one you could buy at Frys or Best Buy.

S.two’s current TAKE2 uncompressed recorder, and its FlashMag-based replacement, the OB-1.

Ted White from S.two Digital Filmmaking had the current TAKE2 uncompressed recorder in the demo room, showing off the automated slating capability that reportedly saved David Fincher’s crew 40 minutes per day on “Zodiac”. Sitting beside it was a mockup of the diminutive OB-1 solid-state uncompressed recorder, one that “does everything the TAKE2 does, only twice”—the OB-1 is a dual-stream recorder. The OB-1 will be on the market in the next couple of months; the recorder will be about US$30K and the 500 GB FlashMags will be around $10K each, so they’ll rent for about $300/day and $100/day respectively.

Sarnoff’s Norm Hurst describes “A Test Pattern for the Digital Age”

Bars & tone are so 20th Century. More importantly, the list of things that bars & tone don’t help you to line up in the digital era is embarrassingly long. Sarnoff Labs has come up with the Visualizer Digital Video Test Pattern to fill the needs of this Brave New World. If I got the numbers right, it can be yours for $5000 for a single-site, three-seat license, and for $500 more, Sarnoff will put your name and logo in it in place of their own. Expensive? Sure. Worth it? If you’ve got a digital broadcast plant with any possibility for color space, resolution, resampling, resizing, repositioning, lip-sync, field-reversal, and/or transcoding errors, you’d be silly not to get it.

There was more, so much more… again, this is just as sampling of the ideas, products, experiments, and case studies presented. My apologies to the presenters and demos not mentioned; omissions are due solely to the time I have available to write up the Retreat, not to any lack of interest or importance in the presos and demos themselves. Readers, trust me: if you’re into this sort of thing, you gotta be there.

Other reports (with a tip of the hat to Mark Schubin for the links):

http://www.fxguide.com/article526.html

http://sportsvideo.org/blogs/hpa/

http://www.televisionbroadcast.com/article/74800

http://www.televisionbroadcast.com/article/74816

http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/tools/tech/10540.html

Why does New York’s Metropolitan Opera put ten minutes of solid white at the tail end of each live HD cinemacast? They don’t know exactly when the live performance will end, and they know that in all the theaters around the world (including those on ships at sea) that are showing the opera, the popcorn boy—erm, the projectionist—is unlikely to be waiting in the booth for the end of the show. So when the show ends, the Met broadcasts full-field white, so the audience has light enough to leave the theater by while the projectionist is off selling popcorn!

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