Archive for April, 2006

I suppose it shouldn’t be jarring when The World is Flat (that’s the title of Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman‘s most recent book) was used within the first five minutes of the Panasonic NAB press conference.

But it was there, as part of a plan to boost the argument for P2 Flash RAM technology by noting how it upsets traditional, slower changing non-IT type technologies. After all, this is an NAB that seems to be reacting more speedily than ever to the dynamic changes occurring in today’s technology, political, and economic marketplaces.

Friedman’s book talks about how various enabling technologies, such as computers and the Internet, are leveling the playing field worldwide. Whether you‘re in Cupertino or Calcutta (okay, Kolkata), you can use such powerful, commoditized technology to minimize if not dissolve the differences between first world and third world, high-end and low-end.

This is just a long way around to say that for Panasonic, solid-state, P2 technology will be heralded over the next year as not only better technically than the ‘old fashioned‘ spinning medias of optical discs and hard drives, but that its very use enabled the production and post processes to move to a new level of IT-awareness set to inexorably level the competitive playing field. more

The Digital Cinema Summit kicked off on Saturday to the biggest turnout in the event’s history. Last year’s poor box office performance and the launch of Movielink and other potential threats to the theater-going experience have helped accelerate digital cinema in a way the promise of substantial print savings never have. In past years, the summit was dominated by technical issue with DPs and SMPTE members weighing in on the relative merits of various compression schemes and the continuing 2K vs. 4K debate. Business and security issues have always been a topic of concern, but there was a distinct shift this year towards galvanizing cinematographers, studios, and exhibitors into implementing digital cinema.

John Fithian (pictured), president of the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), spoke on Saturday making an appeal to end the technical debate and instead unite in selling the message that “digital is better than film.” More than once, Fithian spoke about the survival of the theater-going experience. This was echoed by director James Cameron during his presentation and heavy lobbying for the adoption of 3D technology as part of the transition to digital distribution and projection. In fact, the dominant theme of this year’s Digital Cinema Summit was the importance of 3D technology as a way to revive interest in the cineplex.

Cameron was even more direct than Fithian in invoking the end of the theatrical movie experience as a reason to get behind 3D cinema. His reasoning was that finally here was something that could not be duplicated on a mobile device or the home entertainment center. A few audience questions probing the limits of the 3D experience were brushed aside and there was definitely a sense that this was a time to lock arms and to quickly move ahead with digital cinema and to present a united front. more

For those of you who missed the Digital Cinema Summit this morning, you missed an unusually animated director James Cameron aggressively preaching the gospel of 3D HD for the big screen. Cameron was in a particularly jocular mood, both in his keynote address, and on panels discussing specifics of making 3D stereoscopic imagery and putting it on the big screen, and discussing the future of digital cinema with NATO president John Fithian.

In fact, Cameron was positively Lucasesque in his digital fervor—not suprising, considering he and Lucas are, in his words, “in violent agreement about all this. In fact, George has the curse of being prematurely right most of the time.”

Cameron has obviously taken up the cause this NAB, big-time. Following are some of his more definitive musings:

*”Anaglyphs are bad. Very bad. Let’s stamp out this unholy practice,” he said, promoting the stereoscopic HD camera approach to big-screen HD that he has been pioneering with camera rig guru, Vince Pace. (Look for Vince shortly coming to our podcast section of this NAB blog …)

*”It should be a rule that all CG movies should be released in 3D.” more

The 8 a.m. Sunday Chyron press breakfast traditionally starts off the week of NAB press conferences. Now British-owned, the company originated in Melville, Long Island, decades ago. The name became a standard term in the broadcast industry—something like Band-Aid or Kleenex—to define a character generator, as the company built some of the very first commercially available ones.

For the first time, Chyron announced that its entire line of character generators, graphics play-out systems, and channel branding gear would be SD/HD switchable. That’s good news for those starting out with the new entry-level HX200 CG; users can begin at a lower tab, then add the HD boardset when the need arises.

The new Channel Box, a “channel branding solution in a box,” reflects the dynamics and increasingly tight economic factors now in play in the broadcast industry. While an artist or talented CG type can create the original graphical layouts, the device sports a newly designed, simple, clean, drag-and-drop GUI. Now, regardless of staff change-over, any operator—even that pimply kid intern, can run the system—changing the graphics via the simple-to-use Windows-style drag-and-drop interface. There’s more: The same GUI will show a neat mini-version of how the image will appear married to the final broadcast video, and even allows control over the final play-out to air. more

The National Association of Broadcasters, organizer of NAB 2006, will also be producing downloadable podcasts from the Las Vegas Convention Center. Show partner Future Media Concepts (the training group behind Post Production World) will produce five-minute video recaps of daily events in conjunction with the trade organization. Read the full press release here.

The video programs will be available through a free subscription to Future Media Concept’s podcast RSS feed that is featured on iTunes, through a clickable link that will be sent via a daily email or on the NAB2006 website: www.nabshow.com.

I attended a few more Post Production World sessions that I didn’t get a chance to mention yesterday. Ben Waggoner’s “Compression for DVD” session was especially interesting, and appealed to me as a guy who finds comfort in the certainty (more or less) of numbers. He didn’t get too deep into the hottest emerging issue for DVD authors—that would be HD-DVD and Blu-ray authoring—but I certainly learned a bunch of great tips for packing the most bits onto a 4.7GB disc while maintaining the highest possible level of quality.

The first basic, elemental issue that Waggoner covered is one that hits home for many do-it-all author/shooter/editor types—encoding DV25-originated content to MPEG-2. It’s simply a bad idea to go straight from one to the other, because of the incompatibility of their respective 4:1:1 and 4:2:0 color sampling schemes. (4×1 horizontal blocks and 2×2 square blocks don’t mesh that well, who knew?) The answer, pretty obvious: Use an intermediate codec of some sort; just don’t render back out to DV25 before moving onto authoring. more

This is my 19th NAB. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of, or if I should have figured this thing out well enough to know better by now.

Whatever the case, April finds me back in the familiar haunts of the Las Vegas Convention Center, eager to see what the major players will bring to the table in these fast developing digital days, while hoping that I’ll come across some unique, inventive souls that are turning out technology that will rock our world, whether that innovation is coming from Australia, China, or Santa Cruz, Calif.

Actually that last stop along the way is a reference to CustomFlix, the innovative on-demand DVD publishing company that’s come up with a sharp method for film and video makers to sell their work via the Web. (CustomFlix clients keep their data files on the company’s servers; DVDs are printed out as orders come in, so there’s no need to sink cash into upfront stock.) more

In a Post Production World session he affectionately referred to as “Spot’s Toybox,” Douglas Spotted Eagle trotted out a table full of useful, often essential, production gear. Much of it was related to audio capture—an oft-overlooked task in video production—and much of it was quite affordable. After a parade of different types of mics, audio recording devices, boom poles, and more, Spot trotted out a fairly large camera rig. If you mentally removed all the accessories, you realized it was actually a small-format HD camcorder - the Sony HVR-Z1, to be precise. (read our review of the HVR-Z1 here)

Spot mentioned that the exact rig, which he dubbed the “Uber Camera,” had been used to shoot the TV series 24. So what all was attached to the small camcorder? Two Hoodman viewfinder accessories. A Bebob Twisty Tap that powers a wireless mic. A Chrosziel Matte box with french flag and side bars. A battery, and a 20W Coco light. more

Dylan Tichenor, editor of Brokeback Mountain, participated in a discussion with Ken McGorry of Post for the keynote of NAB Post Production World 2006. Tichenor began as an apprentice, and then assistant and associate, editor for Robert Altman films in the early ’90s. Back then, as an apprentice editor, he worked on a KEM flatbed. The editor would cut frames off a reel of film, and hand them to Tichenor for him to tag and file. Often these would be requested for retrieval later - with both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.

“Editors today in the nonlinear world, for all its advantages, consciously have to let assistants into their process,” Tichenor says. “Because they’re in another room with their own computers and their telephones.” They wouldn’t come into his suite unless he invited them, which makes it more difficult to pass on the art and craft of editing. Another blessing and curse of the nonlinear process is that editors “can try 100 times as many things” as they could before. Of course, “Sometimes it’s better to have a little more time than the computer requires” in order to reconsider a cut. more

Before Tichenor’s keynote, Chas Smith, general manager of Avid Video, gave a brief presentation on his company’s take on the evolution toward HD. (HD is present in about 12 percent of American homes, he reported.) His points were quite simple: Traditional I-frame-only 1080i video contains about 6X the pixels as NTSC. That means 6X the required storage for 1080i compared to 480i. HDV, which is compressed to allay that challenge (among others), presents problems for postproduction.

The long-GOP structure of HDV means that in the editing processing, a lot of cuts will begin on an incomplete non-I-frame. This requires re-encoding around the edit to create a new legalized GOP around that cut. This essentially introduces a second generation of the media. Also, rendering for output after, say, color correction requires another re-encode. Finally, horizontal sub-sampling (1440 pixels across vs. 1920) that’s common to HDV camcorders requires compression and decompression cycles during monitoring and compositing. more