SI + Cineform " Just 2K to anything ? Future ?

[REDHKSC]

The "K" steam is up before NAB2007 !!!,
Check it at : http://www.cineform.com/CineForm-SI_seminars.htm

I prefer to wait to see more from RED + AAA @NAB2007.

Stewart

[IAN SUN]

I am attending the SI workshop in Toronto on Valentiens day

[REDHKSC]

somebody will send the message to CHINA via HKG from Big CHINESE communities for the 2 or 4K to anything.

Remember 2008 world sports event in Beijing and 2010 world expo in Shanghai ?

Stewart
A Gardener in HKG for Greater China

[Paris Remillard]

I just got back from the SI-2K seminar in NYC. They certainly don't have the marketing engine that RED has. I came home from seeing the 4K projected RED footage at NAB NYC and immediatly reserved a camera. But, they seem like good guys putting out a decent product. I was most impressed by the Cineform workflow, though. Namely, being able to edit with unprocessed RAW files, applying LUTs or metadata for white balance, demosaic, and IRIDAS .look files, thus saving huge amounts of render time by leaving the actual demosaic for the edited footage. It seems kinda like the way that Apple's Aperture works. The guy from Cineform(sorry I'm bad with names) mentioned the DALSA demosaic being something like 25 times realtime. I'm not sure where Redcine will end up, but that's a big consideration. Also, I know that what we were looking at was only 2K footage, so the same workflow may not be possible at 4K, however, I do think that I remember another thread where the Cineform folks said that they had 4K RAW working the same way in Premier. It'd be great if Apple could put native RAW workflow into Final Cut the same way they've done with Aperture and even iPhoto. Anyway, I know that most of these topics have been touched on elsewhere on the forum, but I just saw the presentation and thought I'd give my thoughts.

[IAN SUN]

I just got back from the SI-2K seminar in NYC. They certainly don't have the marketing engine that RED has. I came home from seeing the 4K projected RED footage at NAB NYC and immediatly reserved a camera. But, they seem like good guys putting out a decent product. I was most impressed by the Cineform workflow, though. Namely, being able to edit with unprocessed RAW files, applying LUTs or metadata for white balance, demosaic, and IRIDAS .look files, thus saving huge amounts of render time by leaving the actual demosaic for the edited footage. It seems kinda like the way that Apple's Aperture works. The guy from Cineform(sorry I'm bad with names) mentioned the DALSA demosaic being something like 25 times realtime. I'm not sure where Redcine will end up, but that's a big consideration. Also, I know that what we were looking at was only 2K footage, so the same workflow may not be possible at 4K, however, I do think that I remember another thread where the Cineform folks said that they had 4K RAW working the same way in Premier. It'd be great if Apple could put native RAW workflow into Final Cut the same way they've done with Aperture and even iPhoto. Anyway, I know that most of these topics have been touched on elsewhere on the forum, but I just saw the presentation and thought I'd give my thoughts.

Hopefully the this snowstorm doesn't cause a cancellation of the demo in Toronto. The SI guys are scheduled to fly in tonight. I'll post my impressions of the SI-2K footage. I haven't seen any RED footage projected LARGE yet, so I'm salivating every time I think about flying to Vegas.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Glad you guys could make it out to the Seminar :)

Steve Nordhauser, Silicon Imaging's head of marketing and sales is conduction the seminars together with David Taylor who is CEO of CineForm.

And yes, the same workflow you saw at 2K is available at 4K . . . in fact CineForm has been showing dual-stream effects such as real-time dissolves using 4K footage from the Dalsa, and they were using available machinery, i.e., a dual woodcrest workstation (so something like a higher-end MacPro should suffice). So if you're thinking you need to spend $20K for an editing system for real-time 4K performance, you don't. At least if you decide on using CineForm RAW instead of going uncompressed.

CineForm is coming to Mac very soon, so you will have the same capabilities to edit RAW footage at 10-bit resolution inside of Final Cut Pro.

And yes, thinking of the workflow like Aperture for motion imaging (but doing so at the codec level so you're not locked to one application for control of the RAW data) is a very good way to put it. With the QT codec coming very soon, the amount of applications available that you will be capable of working with native RAW in is going to increase quite a bit.

[Jason Rodriguez]

BTW, Just talked with Steve, he made it into Toronto okay, so the show will be happening as scheduled tomorrow.

[Tom Lowe]

Chips are getting so fast and powerful now, 4K online is already a reality, and will be a breeze within a year. I mean, Intel is fooling around with 80-core chips now. 4K may seem daunting to some, but my guess is that soon enough 4K wavelet-compressed post will be the same as 720p HVX/MXF post.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Very true Tom, although not all wavlet codecs are created equal . . . for instance try to decode a single HD stream of JPEG2000 in real-time on even the fastest dual-woodcrest machines out there right now . . . it's not going to happen. CineForm on the other hand, while being loosely based on the same wavelet transform type function as J2K can decode 5+ HD streams simultaneously and do dual-stream 4K on the same box. Then to top it off, CineForm is higher quality than J2K as well.

To place all "wavelet" based compression engines on the same level playing field is like saying all DCT-based codecs are created equal, but as we all know, they're not. They all may start on the same premise, but the methods and outcomes vary wildly. For a given bit-rate, a wavelet-based compression codec will (or at least should) be higher quality, especially visually, than a DCT-based compression codec, making wavelet more efficient at compression in a general sense, but that does not mean that either wavelet codecs themselves will all look the same, or that they will be the same speed in encoding and decoding. So while faster chips will make 4K "wavelet" compression editing in real-time a possibility, it will not do that for the gamut of codecs out there . . . some will be much faster than others.

[Clayton Harper]

I also attended the NYC event at NYU.

The idea of working with preview LUTs on top of the RAW files within the NLE really started to make sense to me when they mentioned that the pilot feature for the SI camera shot 270 hours of footage. I think they said this was like 10TB of data in the Cineform RAW format.

Imagine having to then transcode even half of that after making your selects to a proxy format for editing. Even at DVCPROHD 720p res you'd still need another couple of TB to work with the files. I realize on a big show people are going to be sending their REDRAW offsite to be cloned and transcoded as a dailies process but for something in between film production and ENG type work there is a need to turn footage files a little faster. There is an interesting advantage being able to immediately transfer and edit files in the field on your laptop NLE without transcoding. I have loved doing this with the HVX and would be sad to not have a similar capability like this with the RED. On the otherhand, in FCP you have to do the P2 to QT copy to make things work but this doesn't really take so long. Here's to faster than RT performance in REDCINE.

On a big down note, I learned that the SI sensor chip is still only 2/3" so none of the lowlight and oversampling advantages like the RED.

These things considered, I am still keeping my titanium R close to me at all times.