NAB reflections and surprises

[Joel Kaye]

I went to NAB in time for the Apple event on Sunday and stayed to close the show down Thursday afternoon... and I'm still detoxifying. :-)

I'm curious what you guys saw that you had reactions to across the board.

Some of my thoughts:

RED was bigger than I expected, but it's smaller than similar cameras. I'm still very excited about the camera and am basically willing to beg, borrow or steal more money to get everything I need to support it right. It'll be great being among the first wave of RED "experts" along with you all.

I was blown away by Peter's movie - mostly because it was shot in 2 days. I mean - get real. I happened to meet the DP on the escalator out of my hotel and we talked for half an hour about the shoot and his thoughts. He was very positive about the camera as a shooter's tool - felt like a real camera. He also said they had a number of suggestions and the entire RED team was there when they offered them. He said no other company acts like that and it really impressed him. He also told me Peter owns a WWI replica company... his company built most of the stuff in the movie. So it's really a demo reel for his company. ;-)

What else... hmmm... a grip gear is too expensive. Zacuto stuff looks cool but ... $117 for this little thing? Oh, that the SALE price? They must have had $2k of little gadgets on their demo camera.

Reelstream for the DVX100 looks pretty cool, but you can still see all the noise from the chip. You're uncompressed as I understand it so you've still got hard drive space issues. Personally - I wasn't sold at all on their whole workflow. The HVX version is supposed to deliver higher quality results but I'm skeptical. The DVX100 greenscreen key they showed went by so fast it took me a couple of views before I picked apart how mediocre the key really was.

I bumped into several HVX users who have never used an HDV camera that SWORE the HDV codecs were the work of the devil and only Panasonic's (10 year old highly compressed) codec would work for them. Whatever... they'll figure out the truth when they start pulling their first key or trying to save something a little underexposed.

GRIP gear is expensive. REALLY expensive. I knew that already... I think the microdolly stuff took the "overpriced" cake for me. I did like their car mount stuff though.

The Losmandy Spider Dolly was really well designed and worked great. I hopped on for a test ride and really liked it. The Porta-Jib was really impressive too.

The new top of the line Bogen tripod (can't recall the number) was actually pretty good. It was much better than their other heads and still only $1200ish for the head. Good job Bogen. The Miller Arrow 40 was my favorite head of the show, but there were a lot of good heads in the $5k range. Did I mention this stuff was expensive?

The MovieTube 35mm adapter looked great. They showed a $5k smaller version that's very nice. No light loss, static but no grain and it flipped the image. The filmscreen they use is sealed in a clean room so you don't have to worry about dust. If they sold it for $2k they'd own that market. $5k is just getting a little spendy for that idea IMHO. An HV20 and a movie tube would be an awesome combo.

RED ROCK follow focus's were just about as good as they rest for my money. I played with them all and they weren't so different I felt compelled to spend and extra $1k to get a slightly better one.

Sony demos 64bit Vegas. Very interesting. Supposedly they hired a bunch of new programmers and are about to get very serious with that app. With all that power there may be a RED connection. Too bad it has a different GUI than all the other editors.

Apple's 6 months away on Leopard? Ouch. Color IS Final Touch, but with curves and some bug fixes that plagued Final Touch. Scene matching tools suck. Everything else looks pretty strong to me. You can buy hardware to control it like a DaVinci. I hope someone like Logicman develops a $300-$500 option. They could do it easy IMHO.

Adobe is stronger that you think and they could steal some Final Cutters on the Mac if they play the game well. Impressive stuff on display at their booth. Photoshop 3D? Kewl. Now we need less expensive 3D clipart that's high quality.

Well - that's a FEW off the top of my head. I've got a stack a foot high of brochures etc. sitting here to sift through.

What were your hits and misses?

[GlennChan]

LCD broadcast monitors - the Ecinemasys FX line looks interesting... 1920x1080 pixels, decent black level, for sub $5k. They look way, way better than LCDs from a few-several years ago (none of them doing 1920x1080, screen burns, wacky colors, etc. etc.). LCD monitors have gone a long way.

64-bit Vegas- only looked a little faster?? Extrapolating from other apps, jumping to 64-bit is only an incremental improvement in performance. Anyways, I don't know for sure.

Many high-end apps run off GPU acceleration and are a magnitude faster. GPU acceleration possibly won't happen for Vegas though, since it's tricky with the incompatibilities.

With Red + Vegas, it looks like you might need to do grading work in Redcine to make the most out of your 8 bits.

I was demo'ing VASST tools for Vegas. But I don't think I can comment too much about them because that would likely be advertising.

Red Rock- coming out with a prism that flips the image right side up. I didn't play with the prism though. I wonder what P+S Technik will do.

Color / Final Touch - I didn't really see it. I wonder if the conform process is still a pain and what formats are supported in Color. There are some limitations to Final Touch and some of the algorithms don't quite look right (i.e. the masking), but for the price there isn't all that much else that's comparable.

Da Vinci Resolve - It looks very nice... a lot of real-time performance. It seems like the classic Da Vinci 2K but with the benefits of software too. Non-linear grading, unlimited layers (performance drops in this case, but it's still amazing), background rendering, integration with Revival / dust busting, can accept alpha mattes (which lets you really isolate corrections).

No telecine control, but the digital pan and scan looks VERY good.

It looks like they're on the ball with conform and versioning tools... i.e. support for multiple grades + it can output them all to tape for online. Resolve is expensive though.

Red of course had an amazing 4k demo. The footage is very very clean, very little noise. Dynamic range looks very good... in the plane shots:
You can see detail in the clouds, and some sun shining through the clouds. In the flying plane, you can see the markings and detail on the shadow side of the plane. And I'm guessing they weren't able to add fill light to the other plane they were shooting.


Misses:
Prores HD 4:2:2 - The problem with 4:2:2 is that when you resample the chroma, you can get generation loss. If you use nearest neighbour re-sample, you won't get generation loss. But first generation quality will be terrible... the chroma is blocky, and is shifted 0.5 pixels to the right. If you do it the right way (i.e. co-sited chroma, using bilinear or better resampling), you get much better 1st generation quality and generation loss.

Had Apple gone with a 4:4:4 codec, they'd avoid the generation loss inherent in 4:2:2. And you get this generation loss whenever you render, even if your delivery is 4:2:2 (or limited to 4:2:0).

This is probably why Redcode won't do 4:2:2... it's better to start with 4:4:4 and convert to 4:2:2 when you need to. i.e. you only want to convert to 4:2:2 once, anything else introduces degradation. Multiple generations of 4:2:2 degrades image quality (though not significantly).

As a point of reference, you can take a look at the images at codecs.onerivermedia.com

So yeah, 4:2:2 chroma subsampling degrades image quality. Ok I'll get off my soapbox now. :D