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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Angelina and Lindsay battle over their favorite RED scopes!

standalone scopes vs. software scopes vs. built in scopes - What you need to know!

I’ve also used several “rasterizer” or “hybrid” scopes, including those by Tektronics and the above-mentioned VideoTek model. These scopes tend to have identical abilities and accuracy to the standalone scopes. Basically the difference boils down to one advantage and one disadvantage. The disadvantage is that the display of the “trace” – the part of the image that responds to the video signal – does not seem to be as finely detailed on the rasterizers as with standalone scopes. It seems much more “grainy” or “pixelated.” The advantage of the rasterizers is that they can be displayed on a nice big CRT or LCD monitor, which is great when you’ve been editing for 25 years and your eyes are a little less sharp than they used to be. However, in defense of my trusty WFM 7120, in addition to the built-in display, which measures about 4.25 inches high (about 6” on the diagonal), is that it has a XGA output on the back of it to deliver the data to a bigger screen if I wanted to.

Some people I respect have been proposing the use of the new software-based scopes that take advantage of the relatively meager computing power of a “spare” computer that you may have lying around in combination with a video card for accepting the incoming video signal. These scopes can also display video data on “file-based” video, like QuickTimes and AVIs. I was really hopeful about these solutions because I hoped that their low price point would allow more people to use “external” scopes. My problem with “internal” scopes has never really been that they were “computer-based” but that the scopes that are a part of the software that you’re editing or color correcting or compositing with have two significant drawbacks: lack of CPU cycles and they aren’t downstream of the videocard.

Let’s address those two issues separately. It has long been known as a dirty little secret that the scopes that are a part of your editing application are giving you a basic idea of the incoming video signal. It’s fairly accurate, but all of the manufacturers know that their customers want the main power of their computer to be devoted to running the main application, and not powering the scopes, so instead of sampling and displaying all of the pixels and lines of video that are present, they only sample half or a quarter or even a sixteenth. This is not speculation on my part. It’s the truth as confirmed by several product managers who wished not to go on record about their software. But it’s industry-wide, and not limited to one editing application or another. Some editing applications actually experience a fair amount of “buginess” when realtime scopes are turned on. This is a primary reason why I advocate using standalone scopes. Why tax your system with this unnecessary drain on its power? Use real scopes to give you real information. Scopes like ScopeBox, VidScope and OnLocation can devote the full measure of the computer’s power to displaying the data.

The other issue is that if you’re looking at the scopes in Final Cut, Color, Premiere or Avid, you are NOT seeing anything that the video card or any outside elements may be having on your signal. Let’s say you don’t have your deck terminated properly. If you were looking at that deck through an external scope, you’d know that you had a problem. If your videocard or software output has been tweaked – intentionally or not – to deliver a revised signal, like increased gain or lowered chroma, you’ll never know it from the internal scopes. That’s simply a recipe for disaster.

Since this article is getting a little long, I’ll conclude with the shoot-out in the next article.

Production •

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Yes and no. If DMTs are utilized properly on set and there are proper workflows established then it becomes really hard to go back to tape. The immediacy of digital files, ready for editing without hours and hours of logging and digitizing is very attractive. Where I think the real bottleneck exists is in archiving. It’s expensive if you do it right (hard drive, video tape, and data tape for triple redundancy). So in a sense, some people are playing with fire because they are electing to store only on hard drives, which could fail somewhere down the line. The solution?

A robust medium needs to emerge that is truly archive quality which means it can resist temperature and moisture adversity, will have no moving parts, does not scratch, and won’t be obsolete years down the line. It will need to be driven by intelligent, bug-free software engines that can assure accurate, verifiable data transfers. And this data will need to be retrievable many OS versions down the line. In other words, you need a technology that is not only forward thinking but always respectful of the past, i.e. backwards compatible.

Some may argue that LTO and DLT fit many of these requirements but I think we can do better. Speed is one area that can be improved. Holographic solutions are beginning to emerge, but it’s still new and unproven. Blueray seems viable but the capacities are too small. What we need has yet to be developed in my opinion. It’s the bulletproof system that would put everyone’s minds at ease, at a price point that is in line with the way the rest of the media industry is going, which is what I would describe as “relatively affordable”. Once this is in place, tape can be a thing of the past and we don’t have to get caught up in the “things were better in the past conversations”.

Posted by  on  06/02  at  06:13 PM

Sorry guys, wrong field. This is a response to another article. Not sure how to delete it.

Posted by  on  06/02  at  06:15 PM

Yeah, but its more interesting than ‘Scopes wink

XD Cam with its $30, 20Gb, MXF file based (plus low res proxy) optical disks seem ideal to me, but isn’t having much take up in UK.  M

D

Posted by  on  10/21  at  02:27 AM

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