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• NAB 2010 wrapup

  15 avril 2010

  Another year of NAB has come and gone. Making it out of Vegas with some remaining faith in humanity seems like a successful outcome. So, anything worth talking about at the show ?

  First off, there’s 3d. 3D is The Next Big Thing, and that was obvious to anyone who spent half a second on the show floor. Everything from camera rigs, to post production apps, to display technology was all 3d, all the time. I’m not a huge fan of 3d in most cases, but the industry is at least feigning interest.

  Luckily, at a show as big as NAB, there’s plenty of other cool stuff to see. So, what struck my fancy ?

  First off, Avid and Adobe were showing new versions of Media Composer and Premiere. Both sounded pretty amazing on paper, but I must say I was somewhat underwhelmed by both in reality. Premiere felt a little rough around the edges - the Mercurial Engine wasn’t the sort of next generation tech that I expected. Media Composer 5 has some nice new tweaks, but it’s still rather Avid-y - which is good for Avid people, less interesting for the rest of us.

  In other software news, Blackmagic Design was showing off some of what they’re doing with the DaVinci technology that they acquired. Software-only Da Vinci Resolve for $999 is a pretty amazing deal, and the demos were quite nice. That said, color correction is an art, so just making the technology cheaper isn’t necessarily going to dramatically change the number of folks who do it well - see Color.

  Blackmagic also has a pile of new USB 3.0 hardware devices, including the absolutely gorgeous UltraStudio Pro. Makes me pine for USB 3.0 on the mac.

  On the production side, we saw new cameras from just about everyone. To start at the high end, the Arri Alexa was absolutely stunning. Perhaps the nicest digital cinema footage I’ve seen. Not only that, but they’ve worked out a usable workflow, recording to ProRes plus RAW. At the price point they’re promising, the world is going to get a lot more difficult for RED.

  Sony’s new XDCam EX gear is another good step forward for that format. Nothing groundbreaking, but another nice progression. I was kind of hoping we’d see 4:2:2 EX gear from them, but I suppose they need to justify the disc based formats for a while longer.

  The Panasonic AG-AF100 is another interesting camera, bringing micro 4/3rds into video. The only strange thing is the recording side - AVCHD to SD cards. While I’m thrilled to see them using SD instead of P2, it sure would have been nice to have an AVCIntra option.

  Finally, Canon’s 4:2:2 XF cams are a nice option for the ENG/EFP market. Nothing groundbreaking, aside from the extra color sampling, but it’s a nice step up from what they’ve been doing.

  Speaking of Canon, it’s interesting to see the ways that the 5d and 7d have made their way into mainstream filmmaking. At one point, I thought they’d be relegated to the indie community - folks looking for nice DoF on a budget. Instead, they seem to have been adopted by a huge range of productions, from episodic TV to features. While they’re not right for everyone, the price and quality make them an easy choice in many cases.

  One of the stars of the show for me was the GoPro, a small waterproof HD camera that ships with a variety of mounts, designed to be used in places where you couldn’t or wouldn’t use a more full featured camera. No LCD, just a record button and a wide angle lens. I bought two.

  Those are the things that stand out for me. While there was plenty of interesting stuff to be seen, given the current economic conditions at the University, I wasn’t exactly in a shopping mindset. The show definitely felt more optimistic than it did last year, and companies are again pushing out new products. However, attendances was about 20% lower than 2008, and that was definitely noticeable on the show floor.

• FATE Under New Management

  2 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  At any given time, I have between 20-30 blog posts in some phase of development. Half of them seem to be contemplations regarding the design and future of my original FATE system and are thus ready for the recycle bin at this point. Mans is a man of considerably fewer words, so I thought I would use a few words to describe the new FATE system that he put together.

  Overview
  Here are the distinguishing features that Mans mentioned in his announcement message :

  • Test specs are part of the ffmpeg repo. They are thus properly versioned, and any developer can update them as needed.
  • Support for inexact tests.
  • Parallel testing on multi-core systems.
  • Anyone registered with FATE can add systems.
  • Client side entirely in POSIX shell script and GNU make.
  • Open source backend and web interface.
  • Client and backend entirely decoupled.
  • Anyone can contribute patches.

  Client
  The FATE build/test client source code is contained in tests/fate.sh in the FFmpeg source tree. The script — as the extension implies — is a shell script. It takes a text file full of shell variables, updates source code, configures, builds, and tests. It’s a considerably minor amount of code, especially compared to my original Python code. Part of this is because most of the testing logic has shifted into FFmpeg itself. The build system knows about all the FATE tests and all of the specs are now maintained in the codebase (thanks to all who spearheaded that effort— I think it was Vitor and Mans).

  The client creates a report file which contains a series of lines to be transported to the server. The first line has some information about the configuration and compiler, plus the overall status of the build/test iteration. The second line contains ’./configure’ information. Each of the remaining lines contain information about an individual FATE test, mostly in Base64 format.

  Server
  The server source code lives at http://git.mansr.com/?p=fateweb. It is written in Perl and plugs into a CGI-capable HTTP server. Authentication between the client and the server operates via SSH/SSL. In stark contrast to the original FATE server, there is no database component on the backend. The new system maintains information in a series of flat files.

• Why iFrame is a good idea

  15 octobre 2009

  I’ve seen some hilariously uninformed posts about the new Apple iFrame specification. Let me take a minute to explain what it actually is.

  First off, as opposed to what the fellow in the Washington Post writes, it’s not really a new format. iFrame is just a way of using formats that we’ve already know and love. As the name suggests, iFrame is just an i-frame only H.264 specification, using AAC audio. An intraframe version of H.264 eh ? Sounds a lot like AVC-Intra, right ? Exactly. And for exactly the same reasons - edit-ability. Whereas AVC-Intra targets the high end, iFrame targets the low end.

  Even when used in intraframe mode, H.264 has some huge advantage over the older intraframe codecs like DV or DVCProHD. For example, significantly better entropy coding, adaptive quantization, and potentially variable bitrates. There are many others. Essentially, it’s what happens when you take DV and spend another 10 years working on making it better. That’s why Panasonic’s AVC-Intra cameras can do DVCProHD quality video at half (or less) the bitrate.

  Why does iFrame matter for editing ? Anyone who’s tried to edit video from one of the modern H.264 cameras without first transcoding to an intraframe format has experienced the huge CPU demands and sluggish performance. Behind the scenes it’s even worse. Because interframe H.264 can have very long GOPs, displaying any single frame can rely on dozens or even hundreds of other frames. Because of the complexity of H.264, building these frames is very high-cost. And it’s a variable cost. Decoding the first frame in a GOP is relatively trivial, while decoding the middle B-frame can be hugely expensive.

  Programs like iMovie mask that from the user in some cases, but at the expensive of high overhead. But, anyone who’s imported AVC-HD video into Final Cut Pro or iMovie knows that there’s a long "importing" step - behind the scenes, the applications are transcoding your video into an intraframe format, like Apple Intermediate or ProRes. It sort of defeats one of the main purposes of a file-based workflow.

  You’ve also probably noticed the amount of time it takes to export a video in an interframe format. Anyone who’s edited HDV in Final Cut Pro has experienced this. With DV, doing an "export to quicktime" is simply a matter of Final Cut Pro rewriting all of the data to disk - it’s essentially a file copy. With HDV, Final Cut Pro has to do a complete reencode of the whole timeline, to fit everything into the new GOP structure. Not only is this time consuming, but it’s essentially a generation loss.

  iFrame solves these issues by giving you an intraframe codec, with modern efficiency, which can be decoded by any of the H.264 decoders that we already know and love.

  Having this as an optional setting on cameras is a huge step forward for folks interested in editing video. Hopefully some of the manufacturers of AVC-HD cameras will adopt this format as well. I’ll gladly trade a little resolution for instant edit-ability.