Products almost never exist in a vacuum. There are always competing versions of essentially the same things, because a good idea is, well, a good idea. But products are developed to serve needs, and needs exist because of trends. It’s easy to look at this year’s NAB and conclude that “4K” is a goal of many manufacturers. But that would be a rather literal interpretation, because 4K is specific, and the movement towards resolutions beyond HD and delivery systems yet to be determined is not specific. It is, rather, a trend, influenced by an industry now confronted with a future that consists of various delivery systems, fewer specific standards in some market segments, mobility of viewing platforms, and a competitive playing field. One cannot really say that “4K” is a singular format to which all market segments and delivery systems will gravitate any more than one can say that HD is “dead.” Neither view is true because both are really indicative of trends. Those trends are what determine where companies invest their time and effort in the hope that the public or the industry will embrace what they have to offer. In evaluating this year’s NAB, I try to relate the new products that were shown to what I perceive as the trend that is influencing their development. So in no particular order, here are some of my observations.

Trend 1: Interaction between Production and Editorial Growing Tighter

Many products were shown that facilitate creation of dailies. Many are based on single workstation approaches, some are based on existing color grading products, some are based on editing products, and still others are based on unified approaches. Products from companies such as Blackmagic (an updated DaVinci Resolve), Assimilate (Scratch Lab), MTI (Cortex/Convey), Colorfront (On Set Dailies and a “lite” version), YoYo, and numerous other vendors attest to the growing number of entries in this market segment. Almost all have been heavily influenced by Blackmagic’s pricing policy on the DaVinci line (the Lite product in its next version will essentially be a feature complete dailies system for free). Some are targeted to individuals or budget limited productions, while others have features that allow for multiple deliverables, more flexibility in color correction, tighter integration with larger storage, integrated backup, extensible databases, and in general, more robustness in the toolset for higher end productions. Most of them can ingest many different native file formats, and all can generate dailies in various formats as well. At the same time, nonlinear editors have become even more portable, as evidenced by programs such as Avid Media Composer, Premiere Pro, Autodesk Smoke, and Lightworks – all of which were shown running quite well on laptop computers. The emergence of Thunderbolt based storage peripherals allows for a portable system that rivals or exceeds the desktop systems we’ve used for quite some time, in terms of storage capacity, speed, and overall power. Laptop editing is certainly not for every editor and every project, but it has now become a lot more practical in situations that can benefit from it. And the growing use of metadata, with products to support both its creation and its maintenance through the post production chain, represents another piece of the puzzle. Finally, the use of portable devices for viewing daily material, both via file delivery and cloud based distribution, allows for production to see the material very, very quickly and without the need for a specific viewing environment.

While it’s important to look at these products directly, it’s more useful to look at the trend they represent. Traditionally, production and editorial have been very separate environments. The handoff from one to the other was never direct, as a dailies process was necessary before editorial could have their materials. In film days, both a film lab and, in later years, a video transfer facility were necessary to create those materials. With modern digital workflows, and portable dailies systems, that is no longer the case. Editorial dailies can be created on or near the set in some cases, in the editorial department in others, and in a third party facility in still others. Production can see what’s been shot almost immediately, or with a very short delay if color correction and double system sync is included. All of this is allowing for a much more direct and immediate link between the production unit and the editorial department in a way that has never previously been the case. Over time, this has the potential to allow for a lot more efficiency as well as better communication between the director and the editor. It also allows for better and more direct maintenance of the original creative intent of both the director and the cinematographer, which in turn can facilitate later steps such as the digital intermediate stage. The products may center around things like dailies creation, but the trend is much larger and more far reaching than that.

Trend 2: Decentralization of Post Production

The introduction of smaller and more portable editing systems certainly represents one product segment that is contributing to a larger trend. We are now also seeing products that facilitate remote collaboration, both over short and long distances. Products such as CineSync have led to a lot of changes in the visual effects industry over the last few years, allowing direct collaboration between artists around the world and supervisors in other locations. It is very common today to be creating visual effects for large projects in places like Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, New Zealand, India, Singapore, and San Francisco simultaneously, sometimes even working on the same shots in multiple locations. Connectivity has made that possible, but clever software has led to very wide adoption of those techniques. For production, the ability to either directly upload camera files to a central data dropoff point, or to have fully capable remote labs with the production unit has transformed the logistics of location shooting. It’s no longer necessary to be in a large production center to have post services directly accessible to the director, the cinematographer, the producers, and in many cases the editorial team – all while on location. Some of the larger post vendors have the capability of creating full digital intermediate viewing environments on location, allowing for dailies screenings and preliminary color work, all with or without a direct tie to a central facility. For smaller productions, files can be created on location and uploaded to editorial at “home base,” regardless of where in the world the production happens to be.

Post production, of course, also means finishing. Traditionally, finishing has been done in purpose built facilities, both large and small, for both features and television work. These facilities not only have the infrastructure, but also the talent and connectivity to facilitate a very efficient finish of very high quality. For that reason, I believe finishing facilities will certainly continue to exist and succeed for quite some time, although they will ultimately be smaller and leaner. But the same technical changes and economic advantages that have come to bear on the front end of post production are influencing many in the industry to explore alternative models for finishing as well. The existence of far more economical finishing tools, such as DaVinci Resolve and a lower priced Avid Symphony and Autodesk Smoke, allow the creation of “in-house finishing” as an adjunct to basic editorial. On the sound side of things, this movement has been going on for a few years, with a number of television productions opting to have a sound editor/mixer employed directly by the production, working in a ProTools equipped room within the editorial department. This has the advantage of eliminating a lot of uncontrollable costs that are often incurred by using outside vendors for sound services, particularly on shows that have a lot of late changes or a lot of “busy” scenes, such as action shows. By allowing the sound editing to be in lock step with picture editing, the time allowed for sound editorial is increased significantly, permitting a “deeper” mix with more tracks to be created within the limited time frame for each episode. There is certainly still a place for the traditional dub stage mixing environment, but the time it’s needed for is greatly reduced. On the picture side, this type of arrangement hasn’t really taken hold yet. That’s due in part to economics, but it’s also due to the talent pool and how they’ve traditionally been employed. But the commonality of tools between basic editorial and finishing has grown, to the point where many shows are finished on the same platform they’re cut on (Avid Media Composer/Avid Symphony). Color grading remains a specialty step, but the availability of low cost/free grading software like Resolve has already created a much wider talent pool than has previously existed, and one that is not tied to the traditional post house employment model. There is, of course, a need for storage and backup systems, as well as some other infrastructure pieces in any location finishing environment, but it is now all achievable when packaged correctly. For shows that go through a lot of changes, or involve a lot of visual effects, there is a lot to be gained by eliminating the need for facility scheduling and the exposure to hourly rates.

Taken together, it is obvious that there is a clear trend towards a mixed model, in which location based front and back end post production is a reality on many productions, while others will stay in a streamlined facility model. For features, a proper environment for digital intermediate work is still a necessity, but preliminary work can conceivably be done in a temporary environment set up specifically for the production, wherever it’s needed. But the movement towards a general decentralization of the post process is obvious, with many steps in the process being done in many physical places depending on the production’s particular logistics and the needs of the creative talent involved.

Trend 3: Platform Independence and Immersive Presentation

The entertainment industry loves buzzwords. One buzzword for the last few years has been “3D,” or more specifically, stereoscopic presentations. Another buzzword, particularly during the last year, has been “4K,” especially since the Sony F65 announcement during last year’s NAB. In fact, this year some were saying that “4K is the new 3D,” actually combining buzzwords to create a new one. It’s true that the 3D craze has abated somewhat, due largely to the public’s seemingly growing indifference to the format for all but some specific productions (animation in particular). And it’s also true that interest in 4K is growing due to the entrance of a number of manufacturers into creating actual products to support it, both in terms of production and display. And having observed some new 4K displays (courtesy of Canon), I can say that I do see some of the things that the 4K proponents have been claiming for some time now, particularly in terms of perceived depth when viewing a display of sufficient size at a viewing distance that allows for somewhat immersive display (i.e., the screen largely fills your field of view). I would say that when the image is composed to illustrate depth, as it is with shots that include some noticeable parallax (helicopter aerials of large cities are particularly effective), the sense of depth is much more natural than it generally is with a stereoscopic 3D approach. In many ways, you get the sense of real depth without the artificiality.

Another approach that is being both talked about and employed on some specific projects is the use of higher frame rates for both capture and presentation. 48 frames per second is being used on the new Hobbit series being done by Peter Jackson, and James Cameron has been talking about using either 48 or 60 frames per second on his planned Avatar sequels. The idea of higher frame rates has been around for a long time, and for systems such as stereoscopic 3D it does present an opportunity to alleviate some of the characteristics that many viewers find particularly uncomfortable about that format. Both of the filmmakers also feel that the higher frame rate provides a more “real” quality, although it is also true that many others in and out of the industry feel that the similarity in “feel” to live television actually detracts from the fictional storytelling, providing less opportunity for a “suspension of disbelief” in the average viewer. Only time will tell how higher frame rates for cinema presentation are received by the general public.

Both of these things, however, are symptoms of a more general trend, which is an industry moving towards both platform and resolution independence and a more immersive experience, particularly in theatrical presentation. I for one don’t really feel that “4K” as a specific format is either an ideal or an inevitable aim. We now live in a world in which visual entertainment is viewed on many different devices, at many different resolutions, in many different form factors, and in many different situations. The same movie that you see on a large screen in a theater might be viewed by some on a smart phone, an iPad, a small screen, a large screen, or a computer screen. Some of these devices will benefit from larger images, some won’t. But not everything is made for the large screen, in fact, most entertainment material is never viewed that way. As the industry makes its final moves towards purely digital capture and distribution on all platforms, it is clear that “standards” as we have known them in both the television and cinema worlds, are the last vestiges of a world in which all devices were the same. It is no longer necessary to have a specific aspect ratio, or a specific frame rate, or a specific resolution in order to have the display system work. At the same time, the theatrical experience is in need of a differentiator, something to make it unique in a marketplace in which home viewing quality and screen size has increased dramatically. Hence the need for “immersiveness,” which becomes far more possible as the size of the screen increases. Since theaters have much larger screens than most homes, techniques that add to that immersive quality create a different feel when they’re viewed in a cinema. Higher resolutions (and experiments are already being done with systems considerably higher than 4K) provide a lot of that immersive quality. And, at least potentially, so do higher frame rates. Stereoscopic 3D remains, for the moment, a bit of a special case, because while some are willing to accept its current limitations (glasses are required, the ticket price is higher, the image is less bright, and for some the whole system is physically uncomfortable), many are not, so until those limitations are minimized or eliminated, it will continue to have limited, non-universal appeal.

So that’s about it for now. Instead of looking at specifics, look for trends. That’s where the real signposts to the future lie.

Cameras

Red is hinting at new products to be revealed in about a month at the NAB Convention, but my feeling is that those new products will not be new cameras. I think that with the two Epic models and the Scarlet, Red is positioned well in the market it competes in. Along those lines, they will likely continue to be a major player in stereoscopic feature production, as well as 2D features and the indie market. They will also continue to be a popular choice for commercial work. But my prediction is that they won’t likely make more of a splash in television, with one major exception: the Epic will often be brought in as a specialty camera for high speed work. The Epic can easily shoot at frame rates often relegated to the Phantom in the past, but compared to the Phantom, the Epic is smaller, more familiar, higher resolution, and cheaper. The use of Epics as specialty cameras on shows shot primarily on other cameras has accelerated, and my feeling is that this will continue. But at the same time, I do think that the choice for the “A” camera in television series work will usually be either the Alexa (as it has been almost exclusively for the last year or so) or the Sony F65. The Alexa has a proven track record, and has won over a lot of fans based on the images it produces and the simplicity its workflow represents. The F65, while it can record RAW and is in part designed to produce 4K images, can also record directly to HD resolution using Sony’s SR Master codec. This puts it in a unique position of being capable of delivering high resolution RAW imagery for feature use, but directly competing with the Alexa in the television market, delivering HD images natively. The fact that Sony also happens to own a major motion picture and television studio practically ensures that the F65 will see use in both. But wide deployment of the F65, especially in television, will require that Sony deliver feature complete and reliable cameras in numbers that will satisfy that kind of demand. At this point, their ability to do that in a way that can service the television pilot season that’s just now beginning is a bit doubtful, but that won’t prevent the F65 from becoming a major player in the industry as the year progresses. So my prediction is that what we’ll ultimately see this year is a digital feature market that is split between Red and Sony (with Red being the most common choice for both independent productions and stereoscopic work), and a television market that continues to be largely dominated by the Arri Alexa, with Sony making some inroads, but perhaps having to wait until later in the year for a real share of the television market. There will, of course, be some crossover. Red will be used on some television series, and the Alexa will see some feature use. Which brings me to my final camera prediction: Arri will at least announce, if not deliver, a higher resolution version of the Alexa to better compete in a market that already has the 5K Epic and the 8K F65. The announcement might happen at NAB, or it might happen later in the year, perhaps at IBC in September. But it will very likely happen. There are, as always, some wildcards in play. Aaton, with its Penelope design, could be a factor, particularly in Europe. And there have been various rumors related to Panavision designing a new digital camera. But my feeling is still that the dominant players will likely be Red, Arri, and Sony. Not necessarily in that order.

Software

The post production industry, like every part of the film and television industry, is changing before our eyes. The dominance of large post facilities is being seriously challenged. The ability of the editorial team to do more than basic picture and sound cutting has been enabled by enhanced software and cheap storage. And the inevitable approaching of file based deliveries in the television world will alter the landscape in terms of the skill sets required and the equipment needed to do final finishing.

I doubt that we’re going to see anything quite as bold as Blackmagic’s introduction of DaVinci Resolve at $1000 this year, although I wouldn’t completely rule it out. But among the industry’s most dominant software vendors, I think we will see a continuing movement towards more power to do final finishing in what have previously been regarded as offline tools. Along those lines, I think Avid will finally make a decision regarding its Avid DS product, and will likely either discontinue or sell it and fold features such as image sequence support into the Media Composer code base, although possibly restricting it to the Symphony product. I don’t see Adobe’s Premiere Pro gaining much ground in the “high end” editing market, but Adobe has done a lot of things right and will likely continue to gain users that are either coming from Final Cut or are new to the market. And one aspect of Adobe’s software to keep an eye on will likely be the Speedgrade product, acquired from Iridas, which will likely make its appearance at NAB as either a standalone program or part of the Adobe CS suite (much as Apple did when they acquired Final Touch and turned it into Apple Color). For those willing to use separate (but linked) programs for things like editorial, visual effects compositing, and color grading, the Adobe suite could be a desktop competitor to very high end systems such as Quantel Pablo/iQ and Autodesk’s Flame Premium suite. And it is one of the few companies that is actually positioned to compete with Blackmagic in the specific area of color grading, both in terms of capabilities and price. Adobe at the very least will be an interesting company to watch.

Hardware

Display technology is an area in which we’re still seeing quite a bit of innovation, and I predict this will continue. The past year saw the introduction of 4K DLP projectors for theatrical use. This year could see the introduction of laser technology into the projection arena. Red in particular has been making quite a bit of noise regarding such a product, and interestingly they are claiming to be aiming it at both commercial and consumer markets. This is not the first time Red has expressed a belief that 4K display technology is something that will be a part of consumer electronics, but I happen to disagree with those who make such a claim. Displays that are appropriate for large screens have always been introduced in theatrical venues, and I have no reason to believe that this will be any different. The subject of high resolution displays is wide enough to warrant its own article, and I plan to write about that in the near future. But suffice it to say that just as 3D in the home has basically gone nowhere, I really don’t see 4K going anywhere in the home, either. We’re still in a serious economic downturn, for one thing. And for another, most people in this country and around the world don’t live in large houses with empty rooms that are just waiting to be turned into personal home theaters with 10 foot screens. Many of us live in condos, apartments, or smaller homes in which even a 50 inch flat screen monitor is too large. And this is not to even mention the fact that there is not only no broadcast standard for anything like 4K images, there is no real financial incentive for coming up with one. Many of those advocating 4K in the home are either too young to remember, or simply unaware of the real reasons for the establishment of digital broadcast in the first place. It was done primarily to allow for a recovery of bandwidth spectrum and a subsequent auctioning off of that spectrum by the federal government that controls it. In other words, it was done for financial reasons, not some kind of need for better quality television pictures. That was just the side benefit. Without the financial justification, it would likely not have happened, just as 4K will not likely happen without a financial motivation. And at this point, I don’t see one.

But that aside, I do see a growth in new display technology that may very well filter down to consumers, and that would be OLED technology. I predict that we’ll see wider acceptance and more products using this technology on the professional side this year, following up on Sony’s introduction of professional OLED displays. I also predict that displays such as the rumored Apple iPad display that will likely be introduced this week will play a very significant role in how consumers and professionals alike view the content we all create. With essentially 2K resolution, the new iPad has the ability to really alter the landscape in terms of high quality viewing in a portable environment. For all of the talk about large screens, much of the public has really taken to small screens for a lot of their viewing time, and I think that trend will also continue.

Industry Trends

Since the world economy is still stuck in a serious downturn (although, fortunately, we seem to be at a point where we might be coming out of it a bit), many industry trends, like other businesses, are being driven by the need to reduce cost. And by reducing cost, we often mean cutting staff. The deployment of much of the technology we now use has made it possible to do a lot of post work “in house,” and this would mean everything from dailies creation to final finishing. This is often done today on independent features (certainly the dailies part), but I predict that we’re going to see more of that in the television world, where the time factors to some degree tend to favor development of these kind of new models. High end television has for years relied on an infrastructure of large post facilities for both front end work and back end finishing. But the need for those facilities has to some degree been driven by the cost of equipment such as videotape decks, online editing systems, video routers, telecines, and expensive color correction systems. With the advent of file based deliveries, all of those items become unnecessary. I don’t see the large facilities closing any time soon, but I do think we’re going to see some serious contraction of those that remain, and that might start as soon as this year.

The feature world, to some degree, represents a different story. As long as theatrical venues are the premier destination for feature releases (even if they’re not the largest revenue producers over the long term), the only real way to simulate the theatrical projection experience in post production is to create a small theater, and that’s exactly what digital intermediate facilities are. I think that model will remain for the foreseeable future, simply because it represents the best way to experience the images and sound in a way that the first audiences will.

That’s it for this year. I realize this is a bit less extensive than I’ve done in the past, but I also think we seem to be settling into a time when the changes we’re seeing are a bit more evolutionary and a bit less revolutionary. The pace of innovation continues, but the transition to digital technology in both television and features has already taken place, and so the debates about those changes are largely over. We’ll see what the next year brings.

Starting with cameras, a year ago I said that Red would likely ship both Epic and Scarlet models by the end of the year. As usual with Red, they were late, but they did in fact ship both products, barely making the year end deadline. I didn’t foresee their elimination of the 2/3″ Scarlet model – nobody did – but they did ship both the Epic and Epic X models, as well as the redesigned 35mm Scarlet. I said that the Epic would likely find its audience primarily in features, and not have a particularly significant impact in television, and that proved to be pretty much on the money. I predicted that Scarlet would become a companion camera on Epic shows, somewhat replacing things like Canon DSLR’s for that purpose. I haven’t seen any real evidence of that happening, although that doesn’t mean it’s not. I believed them when they said they would ship RedRay by the end of the year, and that did not happen (it still hasn’t). And finally, I “suggested” that Red try to find a way to use commodity GPU’s for wavelet decompression rather than continue to rely on their own Red Rocket card, and that “suggestion” hasn’t been implemented to this point (in fairness, I’m certainly not the only one who has made that “suggestion”). I predicted that Arri would announce and possibly ship a higher resolution version of the Alexa, and that did not happen either. That’s not to say that it won’t eventually happen, but it did not happen in 2011. Or to this point in 2012. But perhaps the worst prediction I made was that Sony would scale back its digital cinema efforts in favor of consumer/prosumer products. On that one I really blew it, as Sony introduced the F65 with great fanfare. So much for that one. I did, however, somewhat correctly predict the growing dominance of file based recording and the continuing decline of videotape for that purpose, and Sony’s participation in that evolution. Along with the F65, Sony introduced their SR Memory modules and SR Master codec, as well as recording of the RAW data from the F65′s sensor. I also somewhat correctly predicted that Canon would introduce a motion camera that would not be a DSLR, but would also not be a true digital cinema entry in the mold of Red. And that they did, with the introduction of the C300, a product which largely met my description. So at least I got THAT right…

In software, I predicted that Blackmagic’s positioning of Resolve as a very low cost product would not really change the landscape at existing facilities, especially the large ones (and it didn’t), but would probably inspire other players to do similar adjustments in terms of their pricing policies and platform offerings. I incorrectly predicted that the major player that would follow that lead would be Autodesk, which of course did not turn out to be the case. There were no additional program ports to either the Mac or Windows platforms of the Autodesk systems products, as I predicted. However, one other player did attempt to do some market repositioning, and that company was Assimilate. They lowered the price of their primary product (Scratch) by almost half, and they introduced a “Scratch Lab” version at under $5000. As I’m not privy to their sales figures, I’m not aware of the results of those moves, but Scratch Lab is a nice competitor to Colorfront’s On Set Dailies product at the high end, and it adds value as a dailies creation program that is not currently present in DaVinci Resolve, which is often adapted to be used for a similar purpose. So I think I was “sort of” correct on the general prediction.

In hardware, I predicted that 4K DLP projectors would make their appearance, and they did. I also said that the major studios would scale back their commitment to live action 3D production, and I was largely correct on that. I implied that consumers would not readily adopt 3D in the home, and that has thus far proven to be the case. I correctly stated that 3D was not going to go away, but was not going to become the “norm” either, and I was pretty much on the money with that one.

In talking about industry trends, I was a lot more accurate, although what I said was largely predictable. I said that season orders of series episodes would get smaller, and that has absolutely happened, with many series restricted to 13 -16 episodes, regardless of whether they started in the fall or in midseason. I said that this season would basically see the end of film production on new broadcast network series, and that was exactly what happened. I stated that videotape recording would largely be replaced with file based recording, and at least on single camera production, that has also been borne out. I correctly predicted that file based deliveries of network shows, while pretty much inevitable, would not happen in 2011, and except for a few cable networks, that was also proven to be true.

So while I didn’t do quite as well as last year, I did get a few things right. In part 2, we’ll look at predictions for this year.

The easiest way to explain what’s going on is to do it graphically. If we take a “standard” image, one that looks proper to the eye, and plot the input values along an “x” axis and the output values along the “y” axis, the input values would equal the output values, creating a straight line on the graph. Here is that plot as a starting point.

As you can see, there is no manipulation of the input values. The input and the output are the same. The image is simply passed through with no changes. Now, let’s take a look at a log curve.

Now the values have changed. As you might recall, in a logarithmic sequence, each value is the next power of the base value. For this illustration, the “x” axis represents the original values in an arithmetic progression, that is, 0 through 255. The “y” axis represents the base 2 log value of those original values, i.e., the power of 2 that equals the value on the x axis. What that means is that while there are 255 values along the x axis, there are only 8 values along the Y axis.The curve therefore becomes much steeper at the beginning, flattens out somewhat, then becomes very shallow at the higher values as more fractional values of the log number are used to illustrate a larger range of original values (the illustration is a bit exaggerated to make this more obvious). Since this isn’t really about mathematics – and certainly I’m no mathematician – all this really means is that the values of the image have been altered. In image terms, this gives you an image in which the lowest values have been raised, the middle values are higher but somewhat consistent, and the highest values have been “shallowed” somewhat. This means that the image will look light and flat, which is typical of the way log images appear. What’s important here is that while the lowest values have been raised, it has been done in a non-linear way, and while the highest values have been “squeezed together,” it has also been done non-linearly. Since ultimately you want an image that has the original greyscale as a starting point, these changes must be un-done to get back to the straight line version.

This is how that’s done. Using an “s-curve” essentially reverses the effect of the log transform. The lower values are re-interpreted to start off much less steeply and gradually enter the “linear” part of the curve. At the upper range, proper contrast is restored by retaining the “steeper” part of the curve past the nominal white point. The middle of the curve is kept relatively linear, just as it was in the original, but with a steeper slope to counter what the log curve did. Many people dealing with log for the first time don’t really understand the need for this kind of approach in order to restore the proper greyscale, and adopt other methods based on visual cues that give a similar visual effect, but cause other image degredations in the process. I’m going to illustrate two of those approaches here.

This is an illustration of what happens when you “crush the gammas.” Gamma is a power function as well, but it is based on the original straight line, linear curve. By moving the center point of that curve up or down, the midrange contrast is affected. Some colorists will take the log image and crush the gammas to restore proper contrast. As you can see here, that does to some degree emulate what the proper S-curve does, but only for the lowest values. The midrange is still lower than it should be, and the highest values will be very flat because the contrast is being restored in the wrong direction. Typically with this approach, the blacks and lower midrange can look good, but the brighter areas will have very little contrast. That usually affects faces that are properly lit, because typically lit fleshtones are at the upper midrange of the scale. So while this is a decent visual “cheat,” it doesn’t properly restore the greyscale of the entire image.

The other typical approach is to crush the blacks and clip the whites. As you can see, this does tend to produce a midrange curve that is similar to that of the S-curve. The problem is that in the process, all of the black and white detail is being removed, and the transition from dark to midrange to bright is being exaggerated. While this is an accepted approach in “look creation” scenarios, in which detail and graceful falloff is less important than pure visual impact, it is not a proper way to get the most out of the original cinematography, in part because you’re basically removing more than half of the information in the original image.

It should be clear from these illustrations that the “proper” way to interpret a log image is to use an S-curve to “de-log” it when grading. That way, all of the original contrast is restored. There are basically 3 ways to do this, depending on the software you’re using. One way is to use a curve correction, available in most of the modern grading systems. This works well, and allows for changes, but it is a bit dangerous in that unless you know where those curve points should be, you can and likely will alter parts of the grey scale in an incorrect way. So that isn’t the approach I’d recommend for the less experienced colorist. A second way is to use an S-curve control, available on Assimilate Scratch and some other systems. This gives you a variable S-curve that allows some of the same flexibility as a user defined curve, but bases it on a properly shaped curve that can be varied in terms of its contrast. The third way is to use a lookup table, or LUT. A properly designed LUT gives you a predefined S-curve that is mathematically calculated to be correct. This makes it a bit more “foolproof,” but also inherently less flexible because you can’t change it. However, it is the method I would recommend for inexperienced colorists because it does what it’s supposed to do without possibility of error.

The LUT approach is often misunderstood by those who feel, for some reason, that what a LUT is supposed to do is yield a “perfect” starting point for every image. That is not the case. What a LUT does is transform the log curve back to a proper gamma corrected curve based on the particular display device being used, most often a monitor. In the case of an image that is a bit underexposed, this will likely cause the blacks to be crushed by the LUT, and in the case of an overexposed image, it will cause the whites to be clipped. This is where the misunderstanding comes into play. The LUT is not meant to be used as the first correction in a grading pipeline. If you place the LUT after an initial correction, you can then raise the blacks or lower the whites on the original log image prior to it being transformed by the LUT. The LUT will still do what it’s supposed to do, and you then have the option of grading prior to the LUT or after it as needed. This is the “secret” that many professional colorists (especially those who work in the digital intermediate world) know, and few inexperienced ones seem to understand. A LUT is not a color correction, just as a log image is not an image. It is a transform, and the log image is a container. The image needs to be “processed” by the LUT in order to appear properly to the eye.

In the context of this post, I’m leaving out some important points about LUTs, such as the application of a color matrix, print emulation, and device specific transforms. That will be discussed in another post. But for now, hopefully this allows for a better understanding of how log grading should work, and some of the pitfalls involved in “roll your own” solutions.

In a mathematical sense, a logarithm is a “power function.” In a logarithmic progression, each value is the previous value raised by a power of the logarithmic base. This is a rather convoluted way of saying that if you have, for instance, a base 2 logarithm, each value is followed by a value that is the next power of 2. So if your first value is 0, the second value is 2. The next value is 2*2, or 4. The next value is 2*2*2, or 8. The next value is 2*2*2*2, or 16. You get the idea. In logarithmic notation, this is expressed in terms of the power, not the value. So 16 in a log base 2 progression would be 4 (2 to the 4th power). This comes in handy when doing math, since instead of having to do all kinds of multiplication, you can do simple addition, because in a logarithmic series, adding the log values is the same as taking the log value of the result. So if you wanted to multiply 2 times 4, you could take the log values, which would be 1 and 2, and add them. That would give you 3. Conveniently, 2 to the third power is 8, which is also the value of 2 times 4. Where all of this is going is that by using a logarithmic progression, you can express a very large range of values with fewer numbers. It also happens to be how both the world of light and human vision interact, which roughly relates to the concept of stops in photography, in which each stop represents twice the light of the previous stop – essentially, a base 2 logarithmic progression. But this really comes into play when we consider how images are captured and stored.

For practical reasons, the size of image files cannot be unlimited. It needs to be of a size and complexity that can be handled by software and hardware at a reasonable rate. In the case of moving images, it needs to be playable in real time by common hardware. This is where bit depth comes into play. The larger the bit depth, the more accurately the information is represented. With infinite bit depth, the information is essentially identical to the original analog equivalent, in other words, a perfectly smooth curve. But that is currently unachievable, so instead, we use bit depths that are an acceptable compromise between the practical needs of file size, and the characteristics of displays and human perception. The most common bit depth in professional image file formats today is 10 bits. That is increasing due to faster hardware and software, but it is still the most common format, and the one that was chosen by Kodak for its Cineon file format based on film imagery. Most modern digital cameras, however, have sensors that produce information that is at least 12 bits wide, and is usually used to create images that are 16 bits wide, even if only as an intermediate format. So the issue becomes how best to represent a 16 bit linear image (all digital cameras produce linear light images internally, regardless of their output format) in a 10 bit container. This is where log coding comes into play.

In a 10 bit format, you have 1023 possible values (2 to the 10th power). How you use those 1023 values is up to you. If you have a 16 bit image, and you want to express it in 10 bits, you have some choices to make. Since a 16 bit image has 65,535 possible values (2 to the 16th power), you can simply interpolate and make each of those 1023 values represent a larger range of input values, but doing that will likely cause banding or artifacting when a 16 bit value falls between 2 of those levels and the interpolator must choose one of the other. However, another way of looking at the problem is to consider that you’re dealing with images, not values. Assigning the 1023 values in a linear way means that all of the ranges contained in the image, from the darkest to the brightest, will be assigned the same number of levels with the same differences between them. Since our perception of visual imagery is basically logarithmic, this is a very wasteful use of some of those values, because humans don’t perceive detail in very bright areas or very dark areas. If we “weight” the 1023 levels, and assign fewer values to the very bright areas, and more values to the areas that are most critical to perception of the image – i.e., from the lower midrange to the upper midrange – we’ll get a very good representation of the image, but use more values where they’re needed. This is the essence of log coding. It allows us to use both mathematics and the science of human perception to essentially allow a 14 to 16 bit linear image to be effectively represented using 10 bits.

Which brings us back to the title of this post. What log is, is an image container. A bucket that contains image information. What it is not, is a practical, viewable image in and of itself. This is a very important distinction to make in order to understand how best to deal with log images in a typical color grading pipeline. Many people, both colorists and non-colorists, look at log images and think gee, this is a nice flat image that I can do anything with. And while there’s a bit of truth to that, what you do and how you do it determine whether you’re going to recreate the actual photography as originally intended, or wind up with something that is less than optimal. Since as we’ve already noted log coding is a mathematical way of fitting more information into fewer bits, it does things to the image that must be undone if the original image is to be properly recreated with the most fidelity. What needs to be done to accomplish that will be the subject of the next post.

Although the networks have talked about changing the concept of how pilots are done for years, little has changed in the almost 30 years that I have been working in the television business. Each year, between the beginning of March and the beginning of May, each network produces many pilots, which because of the compressed time frame, means that there is a constant battle for the available talent, the available resources, and the available crews. And all of this is happening while regular series are still in production, and also while the industry’s largest convention (the NAB Convention, held each year in mid-April in Las Vegas) takes place. The nature of a pilot is unique. It’s a show that isn’t yet a show, because no episodes of it have yet been made. The creative control is usually in the hands of a writer and a director, but the creative decisions are closely scrutinized and controlled by both studio and network executives, who are constantly second guessing all decisions being made, be they story points, casting, selection of locations, or just about anything else. All are nervous because there is a lot at stake and no blueprint to use, as there is once the show becomes a series. Only a very few directors, usually the ones with very well proven track records, are given the true creative control they should get in order to bring their creative vision to the screen. For this reason, pilots are often staffed by creative talents who usually work in the feature world, and make themselves available to television only for pilots. This year, that was the case in at least two of the pilots I was involved with. The pilot for “Pan Am” (since picked up by ABC) was directed by Thomas Schlamme, a proven television director with a great series and pilot track record and an old friend. But it was shot by a feature based director of photography, John Lindley. Another pilot, “Rookies” (probable pickup by CBS) was directed by a feature director, James Mangold. This is fairly common practice, as the studios and networks want to put their best foot forward to make their pilot investments – which are considerable – pay off.

Pilot production is also unlike series production in the sense that the nervousness that permeates the production often results in voluminous amounts of footage, as well as some reshoots (usually done after the show is picked up) and, just as often, recasting of sometimes major roles. Since there are a lot of nervous executives waiting to see great footage each day, the sheer volume of what’s shot leads to very, very long hours on the part of the post facilities that have to put that footage together each night, make it look its best, make sure it’s in sync with the recorded sound, and get it to different places in different formats, all as early as possible. This year, the company I work for (Deluxe) committed to deploying mobile lab units in 5 different cities to handle pilots in those locations. We put two units into Deluxe New York that handled 4 different shows. We also deployed individual units in Dallas, Miami, San Juan (Puerto Rico), and a more permanent version in Deluxe Vancouver. The nature of pilots, as well as series, is that they are often shot in distant locations, but nearly all of them are post produced (finished) in Los Angeles. With rare exceptions, this means that all daily material must be delivered each morning to the editorial team, the studio executives, and the network programming executives, all of whom are in Los Angeles. Final finishing also takes place (for the most part) in L.A., with show conforms, color grading, sound editing, sound mixing, and creation of delivery elements all happening there. Needless to say, this also creates a burden for the facilities that are still working on regular season shows, but must still be available to perform the same tasks on pilots. For most of us who work in post production, pilot season basically amounts to about 6 weeks of giving up your life, working crazy hours, working weekends, and just about everything else that goes along with a compressed schedule in which everyone is expected to put in their very best effort.

An interesting wrinkle for me this year was that I was asked to do final color grading on a rather high profile pilot being directed by David Nutter, whom I’ve known for a number of years. David has a remarkable record as a pilot director in that going into this pilot season, he has directed 16 pilots – all of which were ordered to series. So he is one of those few that I mentioned who’s given a lot of creative control. He is also one of the most terrific people you’ll ever meet, so those of us who work with him put in our best effort and are happy to do it. The pilot he did this year also happened to be the only one shot on Red Epic cameras, so that made it especially interesting for me. So far it has not been picked up to series, but a final decision has not yet been made. This was also the first year in memory that not a single pilot (at least not to my knowledge) was shot on film, which itself is something of a defining moment. Although various cameras were used on pilots, one camera emerged as being very dominant, and that was the Arri Alexa. This was something of a surprise to me, in that I did expect Red to have a bit more of a presence, and I also expected to still see the last vestige of tape based systems such as the Sony F35. That was not the case. Red was a bit less of a player than it was a year ago, probably due in part to its concentration on features – particularly 3D features – with its new Epic line. But it was undoubtedly also due to the emergence of the Alexa as a television camera of choice, and this was due to many reasons. Clearly the Arri name plays into the minds of experienced shooters who trust Arri as a company, but it is also due to the product itself, and the images it produces. In television, dynamic range is greatly valued as production is always severely limited in time and must often shoot under less than ideal conditions. The Alexa’s dynamic range is its calling card, and that has very wide appeal. In addition, the Alexa records Quicktime ProRes files on solid state cards (it also can record RAW frames on a separate recorder, but that is not common or necessary for television series production), making for a simple workflow that does not require debayering or, in some cases, transcoding. The perceived simpler workflow when compared with Red is something that seems to appeal to some productions, especially when time is of the essence, as it is with pilots. All of this, combined with a hand held friendly form factor, led to a very wide acceptance of the Alexa for pilots this year.

Of course, it should also be mentioned that we seem to be living in a fast moving technical age in which each pilot season seems to herald the arrival of a new “camera of the year.” Two years ago, it was the Sony F35. Last year, it was Red (albeit to a smaller extent). This year, it was Alexa. Next year, who knows? Perhaps the Sony F65 will arrive and be friendly enough for television use as to be the practical choice. Perhaps a successor to the Alexa will make inroads. Perhaps Red will re-emerge as a consensus choice, with lower priced Epic X’s on the market. I’m not making any predictions, because if there’s anything to be learned from the last 3 years, it’s that things are, well, unpredictable. The only thing that is predictable is that next year we’ll go through another painful pilot season, in which a lot of money will be spent on shows that will not succeed, some great pilots will get made, a lot of mediocre ones will get made, and most of us who work in television will get very little sleep.

Welcome to my world…

The IIF/ACES system has been developed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences technology committee, and is basically intended to provide a way to achieve more accurate color (and much more range to manipulate that color) from all cameras (both electronic and film)  in a simpler way, along with being able to exchange that information among many vendors during the post production process while retaining consistency and accuracy. IIF stands for “Image Interchange Format,” which refers primarily to the file format proposed to carry ACES information, which is itself based on ILM’s Open EXR format. ACES stands for “Academy Color Encoding Specification,” which refers to the color space used by the process. It is that color space that is the key to the proposed system.

When dealing with images through post production today, most processes rely on the camera manufacturer to provide a representative image of what was shot as a starting point for further manipulation via color grading, visual effects, or other post processes. In almost every case, that image is what we might call “display referred,” which means that is created with reference to the display it’s going to be viewed on. This is particularly obvious with HDTV images, which are usually targeted to a standard display specification known as Rec709. Regardless of the capture method, color is usually manipulated in this color space, which means that the colors and values that are possible are limited to those that are allowed by the display. This makes sense, but more often than not, the camera is capable of capturing far more information than a Rec709 display can show, and that is lost in the process. There have been various attempts at retaining more of that information. Some of these would include Panavision, Sony, and Arri’s use of logarithmic encoding curves to allow for more information to be available within a Rec709 limitation by “compressing” the values into a lower contrast container. Cameras that can deliver sensor RAW data, such as Red, Phantom, and Alexa present a slightly better situation in that all of the sensor’s captured range is supplied to post production for manipulation, although it is also necessary to process these values in order to see a coherent RGB image. In all of these cases, however, the color grading process is usually working in a specific display targeted color environment. ACES attempts to change this in various ways, but its basic intent is to provide a much larger container to represent real world color values, allowing more accuracy to the original scene. It then takes the result, renders an image using a “standard” renderer (we’ll talk about that later), and uses transforms to yield a version of that image for whatever display device is being used. How it does this is the key to the system.

First, ACES defines a theoretically unlimited color space, one in which any value possible in the visible spectrum can be described. Second, ACES is not based on “display referred” color, it is based on what we would call “scene referred” or in some cases, “image referred” values. This means that when encoding to the ACES color space, the values are “reverse engineered” to represent what was actually shot, regardless of the camera used to shoot it. This requires the use of linear light values to represent the way real world physics works rather than the way our eyes work. By doing an extensive series of characterizations of the cameras that are used, along with their optical systems, a very accurate picture of the real world light values in the original captured scene can be obtained. This is what is used to create what is known as the Input Device Transform, or IDT, for the particular camera being characterized, and that in turn is used to create the ACES representation. That representation can then be manipulated within the ACES color space without loss, as that space is basically unlimited. An image is created from that information by using what is called the Reference Rendering Transform, or RRT. The RRT is designed to represent an “idealized” image from the ACES data that can be viewed on any device by passing it through an Output Device Transform, or ODT. The combination of the RRT and the ODT are the heart of the ACES output system, and are roughly analogous to the use of an rendered image followed by a display LUT in a typical film targeted digital intermediate system. The RRT has been developed over a number of years, and though originally based on film colorimetry as it seemed to represent the most pleasing image,it has been modified numerous times based on a lot of thought and testing as to what best represents real world photography in a way that is pleasing to human perception. The result of the RRT is then passed through the ODT for display on either a projection or electronic display, depending on the particular situation. For most colorists who have been involved in testing the ACES implemention, it provides a much more idealized “starting point” than has been previously possible, with better greyscale representation, better saturation, and more accurate color. With ACES, true “one light” dailies become reasonably accurate and sensible, and final grading becomes easier and more creative.

Because this is one of the more technically involved topics I’ve posted on here, I’m going to cut this introduction a bit short and continue with some observations in another post. Suffice it to say that having been involved in ACES testing, I’m a believer in the system and its intent, and will continue to be involved in helping to test and improve it in the future.

In 2010, the appearance of Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve on the Mac at an unheard of price point was probably the single most significant event in a year that also saw Autodesk release a Mac based version of their Smoke finishing software at a very attractive price point. In some ways, both releases were attempts by their manufacturers to determine exactly where the market sweet spot was going to be for the customer base they were attempting to create and attract. In Blackmagic’s case, they clearly felt that the growing popularity of Red, and perhaps to a lesser degree the Canon DSLR’s as video cameras, was potentially opening up something of a mass market for a category of software that had previously only appealed to the professional end of the post production market. By almost giving the software away (in the professional world, $1000 for a program that formerly cost 100 times that is essentially giving it away), they were attempting to corner a market that they had no proof actually existed. To date, I think the results of that gamble have been mixed. I’m not aware of their actual sales numbers, but it is clear that at least in the mainstream Los Angeles market, they have not really heightened their profile significantly. Facilities that already had commitments to Filmlight, Autodesk, Quantel, Digital Vision, and others have not abandoned those investments in favor of Mac based Resolves (or Linux based Resolves, for that matter). And in the “indie” world, especially that segment of it dominated by Red, the presence and continuous updating of programs that are even cheaper than Resolve – in particular, Red’s own Redcine X (which is distributed, legally, for free), and more recently, The Foundry’s Storm (which will sell for about $400, but is currently being distributed for free as well) – have likely undermined Blackmagic’s original plan to some degree. So the jury, it seems, is still out on exactly how effective Blackmagic’s moves will eventually prove to be. However, I don’t think that will prevent some other companies from trying similar, albeit not as drastic, approaches to widen the market for their flagship products. The NAB convention in April will be an interesting one for some of these companies, Autodesk in particular. Their release of Smoke on the Mac has been reasonably successful, and at a price point that makes it a sensible investment for small facilities and some individuals, but still generates some significant revenue for Autodesk. I believe that policy will be expanded, and Autodesk will likely unveil versions of at least one and possibly two of their other systems products on the Mac platform, with pricing that will place it in the same market as Smoke. The most likely candidate is Lustre, which has a natural affinity with the same market that embraced the Mac based Smoke version, and which can be paired with it using the same hardware, including the Euphonix trackball controller. It is likely that a Mac based Lustre would have some limitations, much as the Mac based Smoke is missing some major features of the Smoke Advanced product on Linux (Batch FX being the primary missing feature, but a major one). It would likely also be placed under the Subscription support program rather than the Systems Product support, in the same manner as the Smoke on Mac product. But a combined Smoke/Lustre product, under one license, would make for an extremely attractive package, and certainly a reason for many to look at Autodesk rather than DaVinci for a professional grading solution that is affordable enough for individual artists as well as small facilities. Although some might say that Flame is the next logical candidate for a Mac port, I think Lustre would be a better marketing move, and one that I believe Autodesk will make, although I could see Flame being a possibility. What would be even more surprising – although possible – is an attempt by Autodesk to move all of the systems products from Linux to Mac OS X by embracing PCI expansion as a way of opening up the current Mac platform, and ultimately de-emphasizing Linux as their primary platform. Unlikely, but possible.

2011 will also be the year that Sony gets some competition in the high resolution projection arena. The manufacturers of DLP based digital cinema projection equipment – currently Barco, NEC, and Christie – will all release 4K DLP units this year, and JVC and Epson will likely release 4K projection products for markets other than digital cinema. The DLP technology has a potentially significant advantage over Sony’s design specifically in the area of stereoscopic 3D projection. The Sony unit basically splits the 4K imaging chip into two 2K chips when doing stereo, reducing the horizontal resolution but allowing simultaneous projection of the left and right eyes. The DLP system uses a mulitple flash technique to allow the two images to be projected sequentially, but with a very fast refresh rate (usually 3 times the “normal” 24 frames per second, per eye – essentially, 144 frames per second) that “tricks” the viewer into seeing the images without any noticeable flicker. Since the 4K DLP technology uses essentially the same approach as the 2K version, it is possible for 4K DLP units to project “true” 4K stereoscopic images rather than dual 2K images, as with the Sony system. Of course, for this to happen, there needs to be a delivery system that supports that, and right now, that is not the case. The Digital Cinema Package – the current standard for digital cinema delivery – does not have a 48 frames per second, 4K format. This year, however, a number of factors could change that. The DCP format could be updated, as it has been more than once already. Or another technology could emerge that might be an alternative solution, provided the studios and distributors – as well as the theater owners – would support it. Red’s Red Ray format could be such a solution. It has technical specs that, at least on paper, would meet the specific need of delivering 4K stereoscopic images in a small enough file with acceptable quality for theatrical projection. But there are many things involved in studio level distribution that the Digital Cinema Package was designed to provide, including a very high level of security, and use of open source software for all of its components, so as to ensure that one company would not control the standard via a proprietary format that would not be guaranteed to stand the test of time and would not be publicly documented. As long as Red keeps the Red Ray format proprietary, it is a hindrance to its acceptance for studio level distribution and mainstream industry acceptance. It is, of course, possible that Red would open up the format in order to obtain such acceptance, but I’m certainly not going to predict that here.

And speaking of stereoscopic 3D, it seems to be everywhere these days, to the delight of some and the consternation of others. This year we will see many more 3D enabled monitors appearing on the market, with great fanfare. We might see some that use “passive” glasses, which at the moment make the monitor more expensive but the glasses cheaper. We will see the arrival of a number of BluRay 3D titles, and we will also see the arrival of some cable and possibly broadcast delivered 3D programming. ESPN 3D is already available on many cable systems, as is pay per view 3D. So we’ll see a lot of attention paid to 3D in the home. But my prediction is that won’t translate to customer acceptance or significant sales numbers, at least not this year. My further prediction is that the major studios, which have already committed a number of tentpole pictures to 3D production, will ultimately begin to scale back their commitment to live action 3D, concentrating primarily on CG animated 3D releases instead. The backlash against 3D in theaters has already made itself known to some degree, and although I certainly don’t think it’s going to go away, I also don’t think that 3D will become the “norm,” as many others have predicted. Time will tell, but the fact is that technology has moved a bit too fast on this one. Consumers have already spent thousands of dollars on large, flat screen monitors, and I think the notion that they will do so again in such a short time frame for 3D is rather fanciful at best. But, as I said, time will tell.

Which brings me to the world I know best – television. There have been some real changes in the landscape of television over the last two years due to a number of factors. The financial meltdown, the SAG/AFTRA situation of almost two years ago, the rise of alternative platforms based on Internet and wireless delivery, the rise in popularity of downloaded rather than physical media, the growth of Internet based entertainment service providers such as Netflix and Hulu, the rise of cable networks as providers of original scripted series, and the arrival of 3D are all factors that did not really exist as recently as 3 years ago. The television business as we have known it is changing, in some ways rather drastically. There are some unmistakable trends developing that will continue and become more pervasive. The cable networks have pioneered the notion of a shorter season, in which series orders are based on 13-16 episodes (sometimes even fewer) rather than the “traditional” 22 episodes of a broadcast network program. This change has in many cases proven to be both financially and creatively stimulating, and this year will be adopted to some degree by essentially all of the broadcast networks as well. The 2011 fall season will likely be the one in which film is almost completely abandoned in favor of electronic acquisition of all but a select few television series, at least on networks not named HBO or AMC. I also feel that this fall we will likely begin to see a significant erosion in the use of videotape for on camera recording, replaced by file based recording on all new cameras and many existing ones as well. This in turn will lead to a replacement of videotape based deliveries by file based media for broadcast and cable networks, but that will not likely happen this year. Hopefully there will be some standard file formats agreed upon for this purpose, however, and that very well could happen this year.

There are other topics I haven’t touched on in this year’s forecast. I’m going to save them for more specific discussions over the next few weeks, as I think I’ve gone on a bit too long already. As always, I welcome all of your comments and look forward to hearing what you think. If nothing else, 2011 should prove —- interesting. At the very least.

I predicted that Red’s influence would become stronger, and to some degree it did. I said they would ship some but not all of their new products “later in the year”, and I was correct, to a degree. They did deliver a number of pre-production Epics to some significant large productions in November and December, and they did ship the first of the hand built new cameras before the year was out. I predicted that Canon would unveil a competitor to Red’s line, and that did not happen, although ironically enough, some competition for Canon appeared in the form of Panasonic’s AF100 and to a lesser degree, Sony’s F3. I correctly predicted that Sony would talk about 4K but not ship a camera product in that format. I also correctly predicted that Arri would ship a new digital camera line and offer both compressed recording and uncompressed recording, which turned out to mean ProRes compression on SxS cards, with live dual link HD output via SDI. I predicted that software based post production tools would have downward price pressure, that they would be multiplatform and that lower end versions of existing high end tools would appear. I was pretty accurate on all of these things, not that it took genius to see them coming. But by the end of 2010, there were lower cost versions of Autodesk products, Avid DS, Baselight, and DaVinci Resolve, just as I had predicted. I predicted better Apple support for NVidia cards, and in particular support for the SDI daughtercards. I was wrong on that one, although companies like Autodesk and Blackmagic (via DaVinci) have successfully hacked around some of those limitations to allow successful migration of their programs to Apple’s platform.

Probably my most accurate prediction had to do with color correction. I said that one disruptive product would emerge that would force all of the others to take notice and adjust accordingly. I further said that the likely source of that product would be DaVinci, and I was right on the money with that one. I said that they would release a shrinkwrapped version of a software-only Resolve, and I was dead on with that one, too. I also predicted support for commodity control surfaces, in particular, the Tangent Wave, which was correct as well. The only thing I didn’t get quite right was the price point, which I predicted would be around $15K, in the same ballpark as Autodesk Smoke. I was taken by surprise – as was everyone else – when Blackmagic released the Resolve software at a fire sale price of $1000. I still think that’s considerably lower than it needed to be, and I still don’t know how they can make money on it at that price (or justify support), but it doesn’t matter what I think since they’re already gone down that road.

So that being said, let’s move to this years’ edition. As with the Grading the Graders series, I’m going to do this in two parts. First up will be issues and products dealing primarily with production and the front end of post production. In a second part, I’ll discuss industry trends and more specific post production issues. So, as I did last time, let’s start out again with Red.

2010 was in many ways a transitional year for Red, with much of what they were doing going on behind the scenes. Aside from Mysterium X upgrades for the existing Red One model, and many upgrades of their Redcine X software, they didn’t ship any significant new hardware product to the general public. They did show and/or talk about a lot of new things, but none proved production ready by the time the year was out. 2011 will likely be considerably different, with a lot of what was behind the scenes emerging as real product. Epic will appear in production form, followed a few months later by Scarlet. Red has reconfigured their lineup and rebranded what was originally the Scarlet 35mm camera as part of the Epic line with the name Epic S, with the Scarlet name reserved for what will, at first, be a 2/3 inch based unit. To this point, Epic has found its immediate acceptance in stereoscopic 3D production, which is a niche in which there is really nothing quite like it in terms of a combination of high quality imagery, extreme bang for the buck (including some very impressive overcranking capabilities), and perhaps most of all, form factor. Its small size is ideal for 3D rigs that have had to accommodate larger camera bodies, but can now be brought down to a much more manageable size and weight. Those using it on 3D projects will find a lot to like, and that will allow it to migrate to regular 2D projects as well. Its high resolution will make it a preferred digital platform for features, but it will likely find a more mixed audience in the television world, as will the Epic S (the rebranded Scarlet 35mm). Once it ships, Scarlet will likely become the preferred “companion” camera on Epic shows for things like additional coverage, shots that require a lot of mobility, and shots that place the camera body in danger, replacing the Canon 7D in a lot of those cases at only a slightly higher cost.

In the software end, Red will continue to improve its Redcine X program, which has already become the de facto transcoding engine for Red material. To this point, Red’s introduction of the Red Rocket card has served as a real catalyst for more mainstream acceptance of the format by eliminating a great deal of the time involved in creating files for editorial and the like. But like all hardware, the Rocket card is a proprietary and somewhat closed design, limiting its future adaptability. It was a necessary product for Red at the time of its introduction, and still serves it well, but ultimately, I think Red would be better off moving to the use of commodity GPU’s for a lot of the heavy lifting currently being done by the Rocket. This is the approach taken by Blackmagic and many others, and although a great deal of the processing burden for Redcode files is dealing with decompression, it has been shown that GPU acceleration can be applied to wavelet decompression with success. The simple fact is that commodity hardware has economies of scale that a specialty card like the Rocket can never have, and its continued development ensures a constant upgrade path. I would like to see Red embrace this and basically move to a software based, hardware accelerated transcoding engine that could ultimately take advantage of the Moore’s Law improvements that Jim often points out. This might take a new generation of CPU’s as well (which we will also see later this year), but inevitably I think Red needs to go to software so as not to limit their future growth. Red has shown prototypes of other products that will likely ship this year, one of the more interesting is the Red Ray player/server. I’m going to hold of discussion of Red Ray until part 2 of the forecast, however.

Arri introduced the Alexa in 2010, one of the most significant products it’s ever developed. It found almost immediate acceptance and praise, in part because it represented something that Red was not, in part because it displayed some very impressive imagery right out of the gate, in part because of its increased dynamic range compared to existing products (including Red), and perhaps most significantly, because it was, well, Arri. There are many in the industry who sincerely want Arri to succeed, for many reasons, some of which are simply sentimental, but many that are not. Arri has demonstrated a commitment to very solid build quality in its camera products, and many have come to trust that. They have also demonstrated a deep understanding of color science and how best to yield extremely pleasing images for both electronic display and film recording. So expectations were high, and arms were wide open. However, as successful as they’ve been with the Alexa, especially in television, it is clear that there are real limitations in this first version of the camera that put it a quite a bit behind Red’s roadmap, particularly for feature work. The great images coming out of it, along with the convenient ProRes recording capability, have been the primary selling points for television, but that only takes you so far when you’re looking at a market that is producing images to be shown on 40 foot screens. My feeling is that Arri knows this quite well, and will unveil a higher resolution “Alexa 2″ this year. That higher resolution could be 4K, or it could be higher. It could involve a Vista Vision sized imaging device or a 35mm based one. And it will likely involve an on-board recording solution that will involve some kind of data compression. Some might say this would be copying Red’s lead, and to a great degree that’s correct. But just as Kodak and Fuji have always competed in film stocks on the basis of the images they produce and not the scanning resolution they’re capable of, in a digital future the high end competitors will likely not be competing on who has the higher resolution or the better compression. They will compete on the basis of the images they produce, with post paths evolving that will be more generalized and able to handle images in a common way (I’ll talk about that a bit more in Part 2 as well). It might take a year or two to get to this point, but I think the migration will start this year with an Arri product introduction (or at least an announcement..) that will put the industry’s two primary file based, high end camera suppliers on more equal footing. And I think that’s a good thing. Once you let go of the tech, you can concentrate on the art. And that’s what all of these things are ultimately built for.

Sony would appear to be the loser in the area of digital cinema cameras, but most people in our end of the industry seem to overlook the fact that Sony is a giant in other camera markets – consumer, broadcast, and industrial. I feel that in the face of an industry that seems to moving more towards higher resolution capture and file based recording and post production, Sony might actually retreat somewhat from the digital cinema camera market. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the F35 be the last camera of its kind, with the larger chip technology migrating to far less expensive products intended more for the industrial and high end consumer markets. They’ve already done this with the F3, which I feel will ultimately undergo a price adjustment to put it more in line with the current EX3. And they’ve also done it with the replacement for the venerable F900, by announcing a modular upgrade for the new HDCam SR based camera that replaces it. Their expertise and high profile in the broadcast market allows these products to be practical, but my prediction is that in the television market, 2011 will be to videotape as 2009 and 2010 were to film – namely, the beginning of the end. It is clear that file based recording is the future, something Sony already dabbles in with the XDCam and XDCam EX products. They have announced a file based implementation of the HDCam SR codec as well, but I feel this is a bit too little too late, as the SR format just doesn’t fit in a higher resolution world. Sony will also face competition in the 4K exhibition market for the first time this year as well, with the introduction of 4K DLP projectors. So my fearless forecast for Sony in 2011 is a return to its roots in broadcast and consumer, and a retreat from its digital cinema efforts. That may be a pretty bold prediction, or it may be a bit premature, but let’s check back a year from now and see if it pans out. The wild card here would be if Sony were to acquire Imax, a rumor that has recently started making the rounds. If that happens, Sony’s priorities could quickly change.

Last up for this part of the forecast is another wild card, Canon. Nobody really seems to know if they are serious about a digital cinema presence or not. They took a back door into the industry by creating a product for a specific purpose when they put HD video capture on the 5D Mk II for the Associated Press, only to see the device adopted by a much wider audience of indie filmmakers looking for an ultra cheap camera that could deliver decent images using 35mm optics and yielding shallow depth of field. Since Canon, like Sony, is a large company that basically requires large potential volume in order to justify production of a product, it is hard to say whether they feel that kind of volume is possible with a targeted digital cinema product that would evolve from the still camera technology, especially at anywhere near the price points they can hit with their digital SLR’s. My prediction is that they will show something beyond the design prototype they’ve shown already, that will likely be targeted at the potential market for Red’s Scarlet camera – that is, high end consumer, low end digital cinema, and special use on productions using things like Alexa and Epic as their “A” camera. The user base they have with the 5D and 7D will be very open to such a product, particularly as it would allow them to continue use of their current lenses, and even more particularly if it eliminated most of the current compromises on image quality by going to a higher clock speed for the imager and a far less limited recording codec. So I hope they do go down that path, but I’m not definitively predicting that they will. As I said, they’re a wild card. At least as of January 1st, 2011.

That’s it for part 1. Within the next few days, I’ll post part 2, in which we’ll look at general industry trends and where they might take us this year.

First, some of the comments on Part 1:

Gergely Vass pointed out that the tracking in Lustre is not from the systems products (Flint, Flame, Inferno, etc.) but from the Lustre development team. I believe that is true for the area tracker, but not necessarily for the point tracker. But, as Gergely points out, it doesn’t really matter much…

Timofey Goloborodko commented that the Lustre has “advanced gallery, users, and project manager.” Well, I would say that every program has a version of all of those things, it isn’t really an advantage or a disadvantage in the comparative sense. He also mentioned that in secondaries, Lustre cannot desaturate. While it might be true that there is no directly accessible saturation control on the secondary layers, Lustre does have curve based saturation controls, based on either luminance or hue, that let you do everything you can with a singular control and more. So it’s a matter of perspective.

Jeff Charles commented that I left some things out on Lustre, including among other things 3D capabilities and an open plugin architecture, and that is true. 3D capabilities, however, are present on every system I included, so in a comparative sense, it’s not an advantage or a disadvantage except where the support is really exceptional and unique, as is the case on, for instance, Pablo’s depth based color isolations. Plug-in support is also present on most of the evaluated systems, but I agree that I probably should have included that. Jeff also mentions file format support via a gateway, but personally, I look at that as something of a hack to make up for the lack of wide file format support in the primary program, and an attempt to make up for a serious weakness in the program’s previous versions. As a Smoke user, I appreciate what Autodesk is doing with this, but as a Baselight user I see much simpler, much better integrated native file format support in other devices. He also mentions color management flexibility, but once again, except for Baselight (which includes Filmlight’s Truelight color management as an integrated part of the product), all of the evaluated systems have support for LUTs produced by Truelight, Cinespace, and other color management systems. The Linux based Resolves even have Cinespace support built in. So once again, I don’t consider that a competitive advantage or disadvanatage.

Arturo requested that I evaluate Mistika. That won’t happen because a) I have no experience whatsoever with the product, and b) I know very few people in Los Angeles who do. If a system suddenly shows up I’ll take a look at it. But at the moment, those looking for an evaluation of this product will need to look elsewhere.

And some of the comments on Part 2:

Thanks to Lucas Wilson for his positive reaction to the piece. Lucas and I are long time friends, and (insert disclaimer here) I have done some demos for Assimilate in the past, and enjoyed doing it very much. As an independent blogger, I write ‘em as I see ‘em, and Lucas understands and appreciates that. So again, thanks to Lucas for his gracious comments.

Jack Jones talks about his preference for Film Master, and mentions the image processing tools as one of its best features. I agree. Digital Vision was wise enough to leverage its long time expertise in cleanup tools and other image processing into a companion toolset for the finishing system that is a very valuable component of that system. That, to me, is a very good way to create a value added toolset, something also done to some degree by Autodesk, although personally, I wish Autodesk would do a bit more of that.

That’s about it. I might revisit this topic in the future as new developments warrant. For the moment, I’d like to thank all who have responded for their kind comments, it’s greatly appreciated.