Archive of the NAB 2006 Category

[Originally posted April 26, 2006]

Yesterday I blogged that my eyes had seen the glory of the coming of 4K (hum that to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, you won’t get it out of your head) at Filmlight’s demonstration of 4K color grading of 4K Dalsa Origin clips over a Sony 4K SXRD projector. But that was yesterday. Today my eyes have a new hero: NHK’s Ultra High Definition Video, which delivers sixteen times the definition of HD. And seeing is believing.

Sitting maybe three screen heights from a large theater-sized screen, I could identify individual faces in stadium shots made with a wide-angle lens. A wide shot of a Knicks game from the nosebleed section of Madison Square Garden showed game details clearly. A 1:1 scale reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper, which filled the screen, was so photorealistic that the full tragedy of da Vinci’s rejection of conventional wet fresco in favor of dry plaster, which faded and flaked within decades, hit me for the first time. And I’ve seen the original.

We’re talking 7680 x 4320 pixels at 60p, not puny 1920 x 1080. And 22.2-channel surround sound. That’s not a typo! Every time the crowd at Madison Square Garden cheered, I thought applause was coming from the packed NHK screening room. But nobody’s hands were moving. It was spooky.

In the discussions Saturday and Sunday at the Digital Cinema Summit about the economical and logistical advantages of replacing heavy, fragile film prints with compact digital media, nobody mentioned (to my knowledge) the film format that would obviously benefit most. If you’ve ever seen a gargantuan IMAX print roar through a huge IMAX projector—a marvel of cine engineering, by the way—you’ll guess where I’m going with this. IMAX prints cost a king’s ransom to print, ship, replace. Isn’t NHK’s UHDV the digital equivalent of IMAX? With better sound?

Naturally I was interested in what beast of a camera created this impressive spectacle. The experimental NHK camera on display at NAB is not much larger than a bulky old-fashioned studio camera—good things here at NAB often come in small packages—but what intrigued me most was the optical block containing four, count ‘em, four 16mmx9mm CMOS sensors made by Micron Imaging. That’s right, 16×9 sensors that happen to be 16mmx9mm. You might call it a 3/4in. chip. Point is, it’s hardly larger than a conventional 2/3in. chip and nowhere near the size of the 35mm-sized sensors in Dalsa’s Origin, Arri’s D-20, or Panavision’s Genesis.

Why four? One CMOS is devoted to the red channel, one to blue, and two to green. Since our visual system registers image detail largely in the green band of the spectrum (about 70 percent; red or blue contribute merely 30 percent), the NHK camera sensibly doubles up on green sensors, then diagonally offsets both green sensors to obtain (I’m educatedly guessing) 50 percent greater spatial resolution. Such “pixel shifting” is common in broadcast cameras and especially recent HDV camcorders.

Why CMOS? Micron marketing manager Caleb Williams told me that CMOS is the only technology that can achieve such results at full 60p. Micron Imaging is world leader in commercial CMOS categories like cell phones and security cameras, and Williams admits he’s biased. Who am I to argue? My eyes say the proof is in the pudding.

Speaking of good things/small packages, here are the other two lust-inducing technologies that stopped me dead in my tracks today:

Litepanels’ new 1×1 LED light totally rocks. One foot by one foot square, blindingly bright, soft as a Chimera, thin as a paperback, no heat, fully dimmable with no shift in color temperature, weighs nothing. Native 5600ºK LEDs (flood or spot models) or 3200ºK LEDs (flood). No bulbs to replace ever. 100 percent safe: no tungsten or high-pressure discharge lamps to explode, no dangerous UV to shield. And low power requirements. Runs off 9V-30V sources such as standard 12V camera brick or car batteries, includes a worldwide 90V-264V AC adapter.

In terms of convenience and economy, Litepanels’ 1×1 is to hot, inefficient incandescent lights or ballasted HMI lights what plasma or LCD displays are to CRTs. Folks, it doesn’t get better than this.

And then there’s Kodak. Kodak? En route somewhere else, I caught in the corner of my eye an Arri 416 Super 16 camera, which debuted here at the show, in a plastic display box at Kodak’s booth. All joking aside about Arri finally having built an Aaton, a total lust object! Moving closer to get a better look, I then noticed a 15in. MacBook Pro, two of them, being used to demo Kodak’s Version 2 of its Look Manager System.

I took the bait, they reeled me in. My good fortune.

KLMS previsualization software enables cinematographers and filmmakers to predict the effects of their choices of colornegative, processing (push processing, skip bleach, etc.), glass filters, exposures, and print stocks on the basis of test shots made with a digital still camera. I’m here to tell you that Version 2 of KLMS is a quantum leap over the original KLMS in terms of interface design and utility.

There are many filter and processing combinations I’ve never tried, and I’ve been shooting for decades. KLMS depicts them all. Imagine how useful KLMS would be to a student studying cinematography? Imagine how useful it can be to me in the future! KLMS is a career’s worth of technical insight at your fingertips.

Next I noticed that Scott Stevens of Kodak was demo’ing the Windows version of KLMS, not the equally-featured Mac OSX version, on the MacBook Pro.

Bootcamp? Way cool, Kodak.

The Entertainment Technology Center’s Digital Cinema Summit’s morning session ended moments ago with news from Wade Hannibal, VP of Cinema Technologies at Universal Pictures, that the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium has officially updated the Digital Cinema Spec.

As of this week–the spec is now known as the Digital Cinema Specification, version 1.1. Also, in response to the 3D frenzy, a topic of much discussion at this year’s Summit, the DCI group also announced the Draft Stereoscopic Digital Cinema Addendum, Version 0.9. DCI is also pushing ahead with a new phase of its DCI Compliance Test plan, and has a variety of other new initiatives going on as well as part of the ongoing struggle to standardize the digital cinema formats. You can read papers on the newest DCI announcements at the DCI site–dcimovies.com.

Interestingly Hannibal did not take any questions before the session broke for lunch …

–Michael Goldman

Thursday is a blessedly short day at NAB, when the show floor closes early and everyone unwinds at last. Days of frenzy and hyperactivity give way to widespread relief, bottle openers come out, and competitors become colleagues again.

Consequently, my Thursday blog will be brief. Here are some notable items I encountered today.

Vision Research‘s Phantom 35 (35mm-sized Bayer-filter CMOS) and Phantom 65 (65mm-sized Bayer-filter CMOS) digital cameras. The first, 1920×1080, up to 1000fps; the second, 4K up to 120fps. Both are progressive scan with an exposure index about 600 ISO (no microlens!). Low 40W draw. Pricey (about $100K and $200K, respectively) and lacking a viewfinder, but work great. Company has been in business since 1950. more

A busy week is now nearing its close, as the crowds on the floor finally start to thin out. I’ll be going back shortly for a final presentation by NHK of its Super HD (I think that’s how they spell it), a technology which is said to project at 8K pixels. Not sure where that sort of res is valuable in today’s competitive marketplace, but perhaps NHK is just acting proactively, presenting the R&D that will be productized by its clients, the Japanese electronics manufacturers. A similar pattern came with the development of HDTV, which debuted at NAB and SMPTE shows decades before deployment.

Most recently, I stopped by the booth of the ever inventive folks at 1 Beyond, based in the Boston area. President Terry Cullen presented with pride the company’s latest unique products that should be delivering soon, including the HD Octoflex (an eight-processor workstation running under Windows XP) and IntelliRaid FC-XPR (16 SATA2 drives with dual 4-gigabit fibre channel connections). more

At its booth, Kodak is debuting the system that makes it possible for DP Ron Garcia, ASC, to combine various exposures on Vision2 HD Color Scan Film (7299/5299—35mm and Super 16) on the TV series numb3rs. According to Kodak, you can shoot Vision2 HD at an EI of 100, 320, and/or 500, over or underexpose at those ratings, and even possible emulate one of your beloved (but departed) emulsions of the past.

The new gear—the new stock plus software and a digital image processor—not only lets users combine EIs but also incorporates various popular photochem effects such as bleach bypass, black-and-white, etc. Kodak also says the new platform lets users move among different telecines, monitors, and suites, and integrates better with the Look Manager System.

Read Kodak’s NAB press releases here.

JVC follows up its popular ProHD GY-HD100U camcorder with the GY-HD200U, released at the show.

According to JVC‘s Dave Walton, the new “Compact-Shoulder” form factor camcorder is targeted at independent filmmakers and stringers. Employing the new “Super Encoder”, the 200U delivers HDV720/60P progressive capture—that‘s 60 frames per second, which can deliver slow motion when the final output is 24P.

Besides the new 1/3in. mount HD lenses introduced at the show, JVC has created the HZ-CA13U, an optional lens adapter that fits on the 1/3in. bayonet mount of JVC ProHD camcorders. Why‘s that? So you can access the thousands of great quality 16mm film prime lenses that use a PL (Positive Lock) mount, such as those from Arri. more

NAB, the “National Association of Boys.” I heard that at a ProMax Systems gathering, where the guy on stage was tossing ProMax T-shirts to eager audience members, preferably those blonde and female he announced with self-irony. Of course only a few in the audience fit this description. Perhaps that‘s why he asked if Adam Wilt were in the audience. He was, duly received and donned his free T-shirt, and curtsied. Boys will be boys. Adam will be Adam.

A far cry from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when companies (particularly European) at NAB or the SMPTE Equipment Exhibition featured at their video camera demonstrations tableau vivants of lissome “Indian” babes in buckskin posed in front of a teepee. It‘s gratifying how NAB has evolved away from dimwitted chauvinism and towards inclusiveness. more

Yesterday I met with Marshall Electronics, manufacturer of production monitors. The company was showing off its 23in. V-R231P-AFHD, a 1920×1080 native LCD that sells for only $5,999. Thom Belford, VP of marketing and engineering (when was the last time you saw that combination?), told me that the monitor was able to produce 98 percent of the SMPTE chart, making it close to a reference monitor in quality. Belford said that Marshall was looking at LED backlighting as a way to cover even more of the chart, but at this point hasn’t yet developed the necessary servo system that would respond to saturation feedback and modulate the LEDs. This is a challenge that’s specific to moving pictures, he said—still images already can be displayed just fine in a LED backlighting situation.

Over at the Panasonic booth today, Steve Golub showed off the BT-LH2600W, a 26in. widescreen LCD production monitor with a 1366×768 resolution and a relatively low price tag under $5,000. It’s got a ton of features to make the guys in OB trucks and post facilities happy. Audio level meters can be superimposed across the top of the screen. The BT-LH2600W has two auto-switching SDI/HD-SDI inputs. Its waveform monitor graphically displays luminance levels from -5 to 108 IRE in any of the monitor‘s four corners. There’s a split screen/freeze frame function for scene comparison and critical color matching. A safe-area frame marker is selectable in both 16:9 and 4:3 modes. Check out the press release for more info.

And I couldn’t resist taking a look at Panasonic’s 103in. plasma monitor (pictured), which it’s claiming to be the world’s biggest. It will get its official debut at InfoComm in June. MSRP: If you have to ask.

Sun Microsystems is promoting a variety of video management, data management, and content distribution tools at NAB, as well as several partner initiatives, such is designing a powerful render farm solution for an indie CG film called Barnyard and a storage solution for several HBO shows. But the over-riding theme behind all this, according to Rob Glidden, the company’s marketing manager for broadband and digital media, is the notion that standardized IP/IT infrastructure solutions, built on a Java backbone, can work at a foundational level for a wide range of entertainment industry content creation, management, and distribution requirements in the strange, growing world of “new media.”

Glidden suggests that content creators should be concentrating on building a single, robust IT-based infrastructure to whip out content ranging from high-end feature films to cell-phone video, and everything in between. more

Visited the Inlet Technology booth the other day and talked to Neal Page, Inlet CEO.

Lots of developments at Inlet, which makes hardware cards and systems to encode to VC-1/WMV, and has become recognized as among the leading companies working in this fast growing market. (VC-1 is the SMPTE spec that‘s a variation of Microsoft‘s Windows Media Video.)

The Raleigh, N.C. company has announced that it will now crunch down video to include AVC (H.264 / MPEG-4), the other major spec for DVDs, the ‘net, etc. Demos presented AVC encoding within both the Fathom compression card and Semaphore, a quality control app. Production release follows later this year. more