Digital cameras come of age

It seems like only yesterday that any "film" shot on a digital camera had to work extra hard to be taken seriously. At first it was a battle for a digitally produced movie to get the same respect as a celluloid film (DV or HD compared to 16mm or 35mm film). Enter George Lucas and changes to the post production industry triggered by an insatiable appetite for visual effects and an affinity for the new color correction/grading tools offered by digital.

The past 7 years have seen a gradual embrace and acceptance of high-definition video formats - even for studio films. Lucas' Star Wars 2 & 3, Michael Mann's Collateral, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, Mel Gibson's Apocolypto, and most recently David Fincher's Zodiac were major benchmark "films" all utilizing high-definition video to create complete movies that were viewed in theaters across the country. Digital acquisition and production has come of age for Hollywood studios and become a viable option for everyone.

More change is now on the horizon. Inexpensive camera options have evolved from the introduction of the extremely low-cost Panasonic DVX-100 miniDV camcorder which offered the first true 24-frame progressive image. The DVX-100 first shipped in the fall of 2002 and it enabled filmmakers all over the world to work with film-like 24 frames-per-second image capture. There were other 24p cameras, like Sony's high-definition CineAlta HDW-F900, but Panasonic changed the landscape by making 24p affordable for everyone.

We shot Rebecca's first feature, "Coming Up Easy" in the spring of '03 on the DVX-100. It enabled us to acquire 24p images which looked great, but the post-process to keep the whole movie in a native 24p timeline was a nightmare. Most NLE (Non-Linear-Editor) applications only supported 30i (30-frames-per-second interlace) footage, and that made our beautiful 24p footage lose some of its film-rate feel. Several years and NLE application revisions later, and editing 24p is a breeze.

While the introduction of 24p workflows to the masses was groundbreaking, few miniDV produced features ever made it to the big screen. There are many reasons for this, but one factor is the limited resolution offered by miniDV compared to 35mm film or even high-definition video. Even though "digital" has been widely embraced - especially for film festival submissions - there remains a gigantic divide between what makes into theaters (and gets seen) and what independent filmmakers are producing.

The next change in low-cost cameras happened last year with the shipment of Panasonic's next-generation HVX-200. The high-definition HVX-200 has many of the innovative features of Panasonic's much more expensive Varicam, but with this camera they abandoned videotape in favor of solid-state memory recording known as P2. Recording directly to computer memory was a fairly controversial move. Many people have questioned the reliability, longevity, and quality of this kind of acquisition. With the new format, there were some additional hurdles to overcome in the workflow with the camera.

Again, the NLE applications adapted, and now most directly support P2 media. Cinema quality resolution was finally almost in reach of the average filmmaker.

The 2007 National Association of Broadcasters convention held in Las Vegas in April became witness to the crossing of that resolution/capability threshold with the realization of a couple of different camera system approaches from Red and Silicon Imaging.

Each of these systems builds on the idea of solid-state or very small hard-drive based recording from high-resolution cameras. They will enable filmmakers to make use of standard 16mm and 35mm lenses. Using these kinds of lenses lends a whole new toolset to the low-cost/high-quality digital acquisition that had been lacking for most independent filmmakers. Cinematic shallow depth of field which is very difficult to achieve with video lenses will be available to just about anyone working on ultra low-budget films.

Next up the pros and cons of Red One and the SI-2K cameras.

Where'd all the (Apple) hype go?

Apple's much anticipated "event" at the Venetian Hotel on the Sunday just prior to NAB gathered the usual Apple/Mac devotees in record numbers. I was told by one Apple employee that they had a waiting list of over 400 people who weren't even able to get in.

Their list of announcements were wrapped up in this summation: a new version of Final Cut Studio with a new color grading application simply named, "Color". FC Studio 2 will include a version step-up for every application in the suite as well as inclusion of the new "Color". The features of note (that I noticed anyway) of each app were:

Final Cut Pro 6: Can support multiple resolutions and frame rates on the same timeline and play out in realtime with no tedious rendering required. ProRes 4:2:2 - Apple's answer to Avid's DNxHD video codec. This codec allows high-definition video to be captured and compressed at standard definition data rates while maintaining a full raster image (1920 x 1080) within 4:2:2 color sampling and still keeping an impressive claimed visually lossless picture. Apple's own information shows that an hour of uncompressed HD video will consume a whopping 1TB of disk space, while the same hour of HD compressed in ProRes will eat a meager 160GB. This also opens up the door to no longer needing full-blown high-transfer-speed RAID arrays to edit in high quality HD on a desktop system. FCP is still lacking full-blown (or even decent) media management, and several Apple employees acknowledged to me that they are aware of this, and are working on it.

Motion 3: True 3D workspace. Previous versions of Motion worked in pseudo-2D/3D which meant that particles and other effects could not be manipulated in true X, Y, Z dimensions. A very powerful new feature within Motion also allows for templates to be created that can then be dropped into Final Cut and the individual elements edited directly within Final Cut. This would allow for example, an animated lower-third title to be created once and then dropped whenever needed onto the Final Cut Pro timeline. The actual text of that fully-animated text could then be edited simply by re-typing. Very powerful - now if there were just a good list of freelance Motion artists out there.

Soundtrack Pro 2: Vastly improved sound editing application. They took the familiar context-cursor controls from applications such as ProTools and Sony's Vegas. These allow editors to place the cursor at the end of a piece of audio and depending on where it is in relation to that audio, drag/extend the audio, create fades, or create crossfades. A new spectrum display allows for audio to be looked at in a whole new way and visually manipulated. Apple's demo showed a low-frequency bump (likely caused by someone touching the mic during production) which showed up visually and could be removed without effecting the dialogue happening at the very same time. A seemingly revolutionary new "conform" feature allows for an edited Soundtrack project to be conformed against picture changes made in Final Cut automatically. I haven't been following the feature set of ProTools close enough to know if they have something like this, but it's something many audio/picture editors have been wanting for years. Finally, they implemented full surround panning on all tracks.

Compressor 3: A re-written and completely rebuilt application according to Apple. They didn't really spend that much time demonstrating any specific new features, but it appears to be much more like Sorenson Squeeze or Cleaner in it's support for multiple target codecs/bitrates/etc. Now supports H.264 directly. One interesting feature of note - the ability to "automatically" detect other Compressor render capable/installed machines on the network and batch queue to them to speed up processor intensive renders.

DVD Studio Pro 4: Big disappointment here. Any new features are almost totally unknown to me. Apple spent no time talking about any new features, and I did ask - no BluRay support in this version. They still support creating HD-DVDs - I have no idea whether they support VC-1 or H.264 encoded video for those authored HD-DVDs.

Color: This has to be the biggest news for most users of the Final Cut Pro suite of applications, and really anyone else interested in a decent color correction/grading application at a low cost. Apple acquired a little-known company last October called "Silicon Color" which made a fairly high-end desktop color grading application called "Final Touch". Apple has now renamed that application to "Color" and included it in the FCP Suite. It brings fairly sophisticated color grading tools to the desktop at a price never seen before (essentially free as part of the FCP Studio). This includes primary color correction, 8 inside/outside secondaries, custom geometry for creating selection masks and a basic image tracker used to track the underlying image to apply masks to it. There are some other tools that are fairly unique to this product including a color display that shows color and luminance values in 3D space with the pixels showing up as spots around a 3D "pole".

Where do all of these features lead for Apple? They made a fairly big point in saying they now have 800,000 Final Cut Pro users worldwide. Doing quick math, at an upgrade cost of $499 per user, that's nearly $400M in potential revenue for Apple - just from their current users. Not bad for a software application that would have been considered a small vertical market just a few years ago.

NAB pre-amble

I recently attended the National Assocation of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, Nevada as well as the concurrently running Digital Cinema Summit. An awesome local post-production facility, Mission Control sponsored a good portion of my trip down, and I was on the lookout for a lot gear and things for several different people/agendas (including my own).

Prior to the show there had been a lot of hype surrounding an "unknown" announcement from Apple regarding their product line which everone assumed would include something about Final Cut Pro and perhaps DVD Studio Pro (version 4). They had announced their dual-quad processor machines (yes that's EIGHT CPUs in one box) just a few weeks earlier, so the speculation was that they would have some really kick-ass software that needed that spectacular horsepower.

Highest on my own priority was to check out the current state of digital cinema cameras such as the super-hyped "Red" camera from Oakley (the sunglasses) founder Jim Jannard and the underdog SI-2K from Silicon Imaging which incorporates the Cineform digital codec. Amongst the concerns for any new camera system is to asses the stability and level of maturity of the tools and workflow developed for the camera.

35mm film has been around for a LONG time, and is fairly well understood by most of the folks working with. Digital cameras on the otherhand are so new that even the pros are often confronted with vexxing questions about how they're going to proceed with the acquisition through post-process.

I wanted to find on-set monitoring solutions that included the ability to incorporate what are known as Lookup Tables (LUTs) so that quick color-grading "looks" can be applied while shooting on location. These would need to be non-destructive - meaning they would only effect our set monitoring and not the actual footage recorded to digital disk/ram. This is a fairly new market and so the list of companies providing solutions for this is very small.

Finally, I was interesting in seeing what options might be available from any and all companies for a digital grading or DI process for our movie as well. Currently in the Portland market, the only real "Color/Film Transfer room" is at Downstream which has a Spirit Datacine capable of a maximum of high-def resolution with an older DaVinci color correction system. I'm really looking for a product that can do a total digital data pipeline so that our footage can be shot in a raw digital format, transcoded to another codec for editing and then conformed using a high-end color room for final assembly and mastering. Ideally this would be done at 2K or 4K instead of just high-definition (which I'll elaborate on further when I recap the D-Cinema Summit).

This was my fourth or fifth time attending NAB, and probably my 20-something trip to Las Vegas. I've been to many conventions there over the years (including CES and the now defunct Comdex), so I guess you could say I'm a bit of a veteran there.

In the coming days, I'll be posting my observations about several of the products and companies that caught my eye and also recapping some of the more interesting tidbits from the 2007 Digital Cinema Summit.