Cut!...It's my wife calling.

OK...just when you thought you'd seen it all with hand cage/matte box rigs for DSLRs (Red Rock's really elaborate rig is pictured), you realize you ain't seen nothin' yet.

We seem to be moving in the same opposing directions that the HD television-buying, yet YouTube obsessed consumer is... We like video to be of great quality...or really convenient. And we're willing to completely compromise one for the other.

The people at Zacuto in Chicago have seen an opportunity and seized it. Zacuto has been known for very solid camera accessory rigs for some time now. They are a rental company that also does their own hardware development.

The new iPhone has video capability-what it doesn't have...is a handle. So, here it is. This is the ZGrip iPhone Pro. Zacuto has made a fairly informative video that shows the capability of the grip system in use here.

You can mount the iPhone on a tripod, on a long accesory rod to gain elevation... it looks as if you can create a 30 pound accessory kit for your 135 gram smart phone in no time.

I'll be holding out for the teensy swing away matte box and french flag myself.

Once an iCinematographer has his or her rods, tripod, jib, audio recorder and other accessories assembled, the iPhone may be the only cel phone that is actually too bulky to carry on a commercial flight with all its accessories...

Don't forget to set the ringer to 'silent' before you call "Action!"

TimK

More on DisplayPort...Part 2 of 2

Part 1 of this topic is here.

While the case for moving forward from VGA and DVI is a fairly obvious one for many of us, the logic on why we need DisplayPort in a world where HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) has taken hold, may be more subtle.

HDMI has become the standard for high definition television displays and, by extension, the devices that connect to them.Its ability to support multiple audio channels, nearly any video or computer display format and as of version 1.4, an option for 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connectivity would seem to make HDMI a clear contender as the omnipotent display connection choice for all entertainment and data display applications.
So what is gained from adding DisplayPort to the landscape?

In the list of advantages over DVI, both HDMI and DisplayPort can carry audio and each has the ability to use RGB or Y’CbCr colorspace (VGA and DVI are RGB only).

There are several reasons why DisplayPort may be better in certain circumstances…and in cases where there are several reasons for anything, one of them is often ‘money.’

In our scenario, the cost factor referenced most by manufacturers is HDMI’s licensing fees. The cost of licensing HDMI in the PC display space is apparently not as practical as it is for the consumer television market. DisplayPort is a royalty-free, VESA (Visual Electronics Standards Association)-defined standard.

Another application that makes DisplayPort technology attractive is “chip-to-chip” interface for use inside a device that has an integrated display (think laptops and smartphones, currently using low voltage differential signaling or LVDS), as well as a “box-to-box” for connecting external displays. This creates interesting opportunities down the road for external displays to become lighter and thinner (and less expensive) by jettisoning the considerable electronics dedicated to scaling and other “receive signal and deploy pixels” sort of duties inside the display and making the display “direct drive.” Manufacturers can also cut costs by standardizing on one method of driving integrated and external displays. HDMI is designed as a “box-to-box” connection only.

As our requirements for computer display performance continue to expand, ideally our next connectivity standard would be able to grow as well. HDMI has a lot of advantages over DVI, but one limitation the two share is having an external clock. This limits the ultimate speed and bandwidth of the pipeline to the predetermined maximum rates already set in the architecture. In a case like this, the standard needs to be revised to extend the capabilities of the protocol as in the case of HDMI 1.3 increasing the clock speed to 340 MHz over the 165 MHz in HDMI 1.2 to enable support of WQXGA displays (the 2560x1600 of 30” LCDs most typically) . DisplayPort embeds its clock in the data signal itself, making it scalable, along with data payloads, to the physical limits of the pipeline.

So…we know some of the advantages of DisplayPort…what are the limitations?

First, HDMI is backwards compatible with DVI and you can drive an HDMI display with a DVI output. DisplayPort can be adapted and converted to HDMI or DVI, but of course the signal would have to be compatible with the destination. In other words a Y’CbCr signal could be sent through an adapter from DisplayPort to HDMI, but DVI can only handle RGB.

Second, HDMI supports xvYCC or “extended-gamut YCC” whereas DisplayPort does not. xvYCC is a color space that utilizes the full gamut of RGB grayscale, which would use all values 0-255 in an 8 bit grayscale versus a typical television gamut which would confine legal values to 16-235 under BT.601 and BT.709.

Third, HDMI supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, which is one reason why HDMI is very entrenched in consumer products. For computer displays used in post production environments, support of these formats is far less an issue.

In the real world of motion visual post production (much of it which can no longer be described as “film” and some it even awkward to designate as “video”…) , both standards have some foothold.

The HP DreamColor display has been causing many of us in the image-handling world to reconsider the configuration of our systems to be able to monitor Deep Color…in this case, 30 bit color precision (10 bits per channel, effectively a palette of 1 billion colors). The DreamColor will connect to DisplayPort or HDMI 1.3 outputs…along with DVI-Integrated. Of course, DVI will only work with 24 bit RGB signals, but it’s a clear sign that DVI’s epitaph isn’t quite written yet. (The DreamColor also has S-video and composite video inputs…a bit of a trailer hitch on a Ferrari in my mind.)

Several manufacturers have released HDMI in/out cards for use as ingest/output devices for video editors taking in material from an HDMI-enabled camcorder, and several manufacturers have added HDMI capability to their computer display cards.

AJA Video Systems recently came out with their “LHi” line of video cards, which not only features all the traditional video industry standard interfaces such as HDSDI and analog component video, but now includes HDMI in/out.

DisplayPort has been adopted in varying degrees by many other manufacturers, and has seen a commitment as the next-generation display solution in NVIDIA’s line of professional display cards and Apple Computer’s laptops, as well as a fair number of their consumer desktops.

As for myself, I do color correction work and I also do conventional post production and editing work and I see Deep Color devices and workflows as a way to gain precision in my work. HDMI will likely be a very neat and clean way to drive a television display to view output in that environment, but I look forward to the sort of technical and economic advancements that DisplayPort will enable for those of us who need a standard that will stabilize yet remain extensible.

…and who among us wouldn’t love to add just one more cable type to the rack in the closet?

www.displayport.org
www.hdmi.org

TimK

Why Display Port? Part 1 of 2

If you have been involved with computers for any amount of time, you may very well be reaching your point of maximum tolerance for sheer number of connection and slot types available. As the pace of advancement has accelerated in computers themselves, advancement and evolution of the methods of interface with these systems continues to accelerate in kind.

Display interface may not have been changing with quite the speed of hard drives and other peripherals, but for those of us who use computers in video post production, it’s become a chore to determine how to construct a signal path and monitor combination that can be considered “evaluation” quality as CRTs fade into the sunset.

When VGA (Video Graphics Array) was introduced in 1987, it was certainly a step up from its predecessor, EGA, which could choose 16 colors, and added the ability to choose those from a palette of 64 possible shades over its predecessor, CGA.

Of course, then we moved to Super VGA, XGA, WQVGA, WXGA, WSXGA, WUXGA, WQXGA…and on and on…ever increasing pixel count and color precision.

Of course, as displays changed, requirements changed in the way we fed them a signal as well. Flat panel displays had pixels instead of a CRT’s analog scanlines. Enter the Digital Visual Interface, or DVI connector in 1999.

Of course, the great thing about the standard DVI connector is that there are 5 different models. They are each just different enough to make many technicians misidentify them about 50% of the time, but to make them incompatible about 75% of the time.

A DVI-I connector (“I” for “Integrated”) can carry analog as well as digital information to be backwards compatible with analog displays. A DVI-D connector is “Digital” only. The fact that there even IS a DVI-A (“Analog only”) connector defies logic as the reason for DVI’s development was to overcome previous analog display cabling limitations. There is an M1-DA connector that integrates USB with digital and/or analog signals, and of course, the DVI-DL (“Dual-Link”) is what is necessary to run those spiffy 30” LCD displays at full native resolution because of its additional payload capacity.

All this has been expanding the capabilities of our computer displays quite rapidly over the last decade, but for video production professionals, 24 bits per pixel has started to become a bit limiting (DVI Dual-Link does have the capability to convey 48 bits/pixel in specific applications).

As displays have shown up with 30 bit color precision, (see more about HP's DreamColor here) in a new pipeline was needed. HDMI can handle the color, but as a data display driver, it didn’t quite have the necessary flexibility.

Enter Display Port.

Continue to Part 2 of this topic...

TimK

One of my favorite explanations of color balance...

The fine folks at Cambridge in Color have a very helpful explanation of color balance. (among other things)

The concepts behind light and color are key to the work we do with images both in the field and in post. Check out the article which includes several solid visuals...

TimK

A Primer on 3d Modeling...for those of us who don't do it for a living.

(Sorry for the gap in posts. I've been traveling for an extended period.)


Over the years, I've dabbled a bit in 3d animation but I am a neophyte relative to anyone who does it on a regular basis.

That's why Jeff Brown from FireMist Media is in my rolodex. When I have a need for something in the way of complex 3d animation, he gets a call from me.

Jeff has put together a white paper on 3d modeling to give those of us on the outside a bit of insight into the general concepts of 3d animation. For those of us who purchase this sort of work from vendors, this article will certainly help you begin to cut through much of the jargon involved in 3d work.

Download the PDF from the link here.

TimK

4 cores? 8 cores? How about 240 processor cores?

NVIDIA has been making some pretty heavy-duty display cards for professionals for a number of years now. I use 2 NVIDIA Quadro dual head cards to drive my 4 monitor post production workstation. The acceleration provided for visual effects preview is extremely helpful in getting more work done in less time.
With all the focus on bigger and badder CPUs in our workstations, one of the more intriguing advancements in computer muscle is happening somewhat quietly. That would be the advent of parallel processing over a much larger group of processor cores.
While I'm absolutely positive we'll continue to see advancements in CPU power, one CPU core represents the capability to process one operation at a time...at an incredible speed of course. When you add more physical processors, you gain processing power but your limitation becomes how well the math can be sectioned up between two processes and the energy expended to figure out how to divide the operations up-and on the back side, reassemble the results into one unified dataset.
When you have multiple logical cores on one physical wafer, you now have the ability to do multiple operations using each logical core, limited by the pipeline that gets the operations on and off the chip as well as the efficiency of the code to divide and reassemble data. Multiple physical processors would involve multiple "pipes" to get data on and off each processor, gaining some extra torque over an equal configuration utilizing the same number of logical cores on one physical processor.
For operations like 3d animation or complex visual effects where the data that needs to be streamed onto the processor and the math involved is small in relationship to the processing necessary, multiple physical or logical cores are of immediate benefit. In video editing applications, adding processor cores can be helpful where large amounts of decode and encode operations are necessary, say when editing highly compressed HDV or AVCHD footage. In applications where the material is less compressed, or even uncompressed, multiple processor cores become less of an advantage as the dataset that needs to be moved becomes larger, but requires less processing, moving the speed burden to hard drives and buss speed.
NVIDIA has recently started focusing on their CUDA technology. CUDA is what gives software manufacturers a way to tap into the processing architecture of NVIDIA's powerful graphics cards to complete processes that may or may not be display or graphics related. NVIDIA uses parallel processing to get the speed from their configuration. While the cores may be smaller, there are a LOT more of them. The Quadro 5800 card for instance, has 240 processor cores. One example of utilization of this kind of processing is the CUDA-enabled RapiHD™ H.264 encoding plug-in for NVIDIA Quadro cards.
(Wikipedia's take on parallel processing-good general info.)
A way to picture the relative capability of an 8 core CPU and a 240 core GPU might be to picture five decks of cards being dealt out. With eight dealers, each dealer has 32.5 cards to distribute...with 240 dealers, each one distributes 1.083 cards. Even when we take into account that the 240 processor cores are smaller, the share of the load they have to carry is MUCH smaller and the processing is all happening at the same time. The 8 dealers may be very fast but they can't throw 32 cards out at the same time and expect them to fall neatly in front of each player in the proper rotation...they have to go one at a time. They may be dealing cards out of a pitching machine at a velocity that could severe a human limb, but the cards still have to be handled one at a time-serially. In the case of the 240 dealers in parallel, they also handle the cards one at a time with the one caveat that all but 20 of them are only handling one card with one destination. Which way do you think would be faster?
I think that GPU based processing is one of the most interesting areas of computer processing to keep an eye on... With GPUs becoming available to handle instructions along with ever more powerful CPUs, I don't think that the exponential growth in computing speed and power will be leveling off anytime soon. This technology is even being deployed as the primary processor in specialized workstations...learn more about Tesla here.

TimK

Sasquatch...The Loch Ness Monster...and Magenta

I came across this article on biotele.com (a site that calls itself the "neurostimulation portal" which seems appropriate, looking at the home page design) that explains why...spectrally...magenta does not exist.

It's an interesting article for those of you who are interested in color theory and how the human brain perceives color.

TimK