Indie Film Live

Technical_05: Post-production near end.

2008-06-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

"SPOON the Movie" Server is operational.

It comes down to 6.8TB of total available storage which will hold all source footage and lower resolution off-line CineForm versions of the same source. On the server that we are using 16 x 500GB HDD's in RAID5 configuration on Promise EX16350 16 SATAII unit (only available card on our side of the world). To keep 16 drives together we used custom build (from one8six) aluminum cage (can hold up to 32 drives) with 8 CM 4into3 HDD converters (box that converts 3 x 5.25" space into 4 x 3.5" with 12mm fan front of it).

Choice of the Operating System happens to be Linux Ubuntu 6.10 64bit.

File system is meant to be XFS, but its performance was substandard for a number of reasons. The main reason being that XFS’s read speed is slower than its write speed. In our pipeline read speed is more important than write speed, which is why we have decided to use JFS - IBM Journaling File System. Our tests show that JFS, compared to any other file system, gives outstanding performance and is stable all round. Its reading speed varies from 540MB/s (under 1GB) to 200MB/s (for larger files +/- 10GB). Its write speed is slightly less.

Network - Four “Link Aggregation” enabled CAT5e cables (from four port server adapter) run from the Linux box into a 1000BT switch from where two link aggregated cables run into Edit Suites.

Work Flow :
Initially we planned to work in on-line mode only, but we realized that it is more efficient to work with lower resolution proxies and have every artist share the media. Adobe Premiere needs a bit of a work around to account for scaling but Discreet Combustion uses “target size” to scale to High Definition no matter what the input is.

DV versions :
If you are working with CineForm you would know that it comes with a tool named "HDlink" that can be very beneficial to you. One of the features it has is down conversion of high resolution footage into DV version (for example PAL 16:9). The new down converted file is 1/6th the size (in MB) of the original and it gives you an opportunity to work with it on a much lower level PC with less intensity on the network. Now your medium range Pentium 4 computer can be your Edit Suite.

Given we have more or less 260 hours of footage, converting it to lower resolution files will take a very long time. Render farm capabilities here would be cool, but, some sort of auto proxy in the read process that does not render a new file would be much better. Alternatively have a mirror update folder which monitors the source folder and auto converts any new files in the directory tree and saves them to another identical folder tree but containing lower resolution proxies.

Current state :
Footage Server 6.7TB out of 6.8TB is full. Audio Server/Workstation 1.56 out of 1.6TB is full.
And "Spoon Tenth Assembly" is completed... :)

Target :
Shoot the missing scenes and Lock the Edit.

Technical_04: Production Phase Complete.

2006-11-10T19:10:00.000-08:00

"SPOON"' The Movie.

EVE - SI1920

Imagine a recording device the size of any prosumer camera like the Sony HVR-Z1 or the JVC GY-HD100. Small enough to be comfortably mounted on a steady-cam, yet all the power of a professional HD camera with 1920x1080 resolution image acquisition. EVE is the fist camera to revolutionize the “indie film” world in both size and performance. The ability to record in HD 1920x1080 depth as film stock and all of the benefits of a digital environment.
No more having to waste money on digitizing film stock or having to shoot less footage due to budget constraints. Now you can shoot clean "True Eye" footage on set with immediate access for editing, animation or grade. Imagine the amount of time saved, shooting a film with the same depth as film stock and all of the benefits of a digital environment.
What does one gain from a digital environment. More control on what you shoot, changing the color matrix and comparing footage before you even shoot the scene! Exposure meter, color meter, digital zoom, element zoom, element spotter, focus assist... All of these tools are available to make for a less painful shoot, spending less time having to calculate things which can be done in the comfort of your VT workstation. All this while the footage shot is still RAW!
EVE is really easy to setup. A PC attached to the CMOS camera head with a PL mount for the prime lenses, 16mm or 35mm. Think of having a bigger monitor to watch your footage and compare sharpness, contrast, etc?.. It can be done. Want to edit your footage immediately while on set? It can be done.

MINI EVE
Lets assume EVE is the chicken then MINI EVE is the egg. What do I mean by this? Allow me to explain...
Tight spaces to shoot in... Front of a car POV (Point Of View), while driving at high speeds. Shooting interior of a mini cooper while driving and looking around like a first person POV. How about shooting live action first person shooter? Now you can without having to lug around a heavy camera. The only down side to this configuration is that you are limited by a network cable used to record the footage and a VT workstation fast and powerful enough to capture full frame master footage and not reference image. This chip is easily mountable to a car or even a hard hat without the heavy weight attached to it, in other words the body of the camera...

WAFIAN HR-1
The Wafian HR-1 is a direct-to-disk recorder with HD-SDI & HD component video. It has been our front line VT Station - footage recorder on location for the movie. It is now our edit suite. Recording to the Wafian HR-1 improves the visual quality of footage by avoiding on camera compression and limited bandwidth of HD tape formats. Unlike fixed bit rate codecs such as DVCPRO HD and HDCAM, camera sensor data is recorded directly to a CineForm RAW format preserving the original pixel data.
With the HR-1 footage is immediately available for instant preview and on site editing via Adobe Premier Pro software. Saving you time and money from recording to film stock, developing the negatives as well as transportation costs, etc... The HR-1 is capable of recording approximately 18 hours of footage at 1920x1080 progressive capture, edit ready.
Other than being a direct-to-disk-recorder it can be used for many applications such as computer animation, compositing, rotoscoping, post production, green screen, etc... The all in one solution for on-site editing.

MOTU TRAVELER
The MOTU was used for recording approximately 4 to 6 channels of audio to a laptop at 24-bit, 96KHz sample rate recording ability, it can record 192KHz as well. Reason for using the MOTU Traveler over other hard disk recorders is that you have the ability to edit on-site with the Traveler acting as your sound card. So it basically becomes an on-site sound editing suite, with the ability to record at high sample rates and have instant playback as well as better file management. For the movie we recorded using 2 condenser microphones, 2 wireless lapel microphones plus the addition of a background microphones. It is compatible with most programs, but the software of choice happened to be Adobe Audition which has an easy to use interface and pristine sound quality up to 192KHz, 32-bit.
It has 4 XLR balanced inputs with an addition of 4 extra balanced/unbalanced quarter inch jacks, analog inputs. ADAT optical digital I/O, SPDIF and AES/EBU digital I/O provide a total of 20 inputs and 22 outputs. The unit is also bus powered from the computer's FireWire port or standard battery pack for complete portability.

CINEFORM RAW
CineForm has developed new patent-pending technology called CineForm RAW. CineForm has extended acclaimed wavelet codec algorithms to lightly compress the raw data from the camera into 10-bit CineForm RAW files. Directly compressing the sensor data eliminates the multiple stages of transform processing traditionally performed inside the camera, ensuring the highest dynamic range and visual quality for the images. The data which is lightly compressed into CineForm RAW at a ratio of about 5:1 for 1920x1080 10-bit data, substantially less than any other in-camera format. For more information on CineForm RAW codec check out their site at: http://cineform.com/technology/cineform_RAW.htm

FINAL
The production phase of the movie has come to an end... Total figures are 6TB of total storage, of which 230 hours of RAW 1080P footage for the feature "Spoon", 20 hours of 720P "Spoon" coverage and 70 hours of behind-the-scenes coverage in DV format... 230 hours edited to approx 100 minutes... Good Luck with the edit “Inspired Minority”.
A very big thank you to everyone involved in the pre-production and the production of our feature film, THANK YOU for all your support, dedication and patience during this process.

Special thanks to: CineForm, Silicon Imaging, Wafian, One8Six, CineGate.

This is Phase 2 – COMPLETE.

PREMIERE PRO 2

2006-10-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

We were using premiere 1.5 for some time even when Cineform insisted we upgrade to V2 for best performance with Cineform RAW. We began testing Pro 2 with a demo version and have just upgraded. The test results were varied and there are definately issues with the entire work flow. But nothing that will actually get in our way and as we settle in I think most should dissapear or we'll find a work around.

The biggest problems overall seem to be caused by large projects which produce a memory bottleneck. Also there appear to be some issues with Premiere and other apps on the PC. For example. If mid way through an edit you browse your folders in explorer and and play source files in media player (we use media player classic but all players produce the same result) after a while premiere will slow down. A lot. I waited 12 minutes once for it to resolve whatever it was doing. It seems to be a page file swap but there is no indication in the tasks that memory is used up or low. My project could be consuming between 150MB and 700MB and the same could happen. This may be caused by XP but I don't think so. Memmory is being swapped somewhere but no ones telling. In task manager everything is just fine!!

Aside from that we have had a fairly solid test phase with an average of around 3 crashes a day in premiere. The file recovery has worked very well and we have only really lost data due to network issues and other areas of our worlkflow that we are tweaking. It would be nice if the edit software was less memory intensive. Right now we plan only to edit groups of scenes (2-3) at a time and then assemble those seperately. There seems little chance of assembling an entire film on one timeline and while that seems silly, with hundreds of hours of source footage we might be thankful of that fact.

Once we get into the thick of editing I am sure there will be more to comment on but right now we are only just getting going and we have many other workflow issues which are giving us bigger headaches - like network media sharing and serving.

LENSES

2006-10-31T07:38:00.000-08:00

The lenses used on Spoon were 16mm Zeiss prime Ultra II and some canon zooms. Primes are highly recommended as there is clearly a difference. Our zooms were also soft a lot of the time when we shot wide shots but we managed to resolve this with settings and stop and also Silicon Imaging has updated the software which has made other changes which have improved the sharpness and clarity of the image a lot. We have also used 35mm lenses and they are fine.

ASK QUESTIONS HERE!

2006-10-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

Finally we are getting post under control. I know there have been many questions in the past few months on many forums. It has been difficult to keep all the wheels turning when there is so much work to be done but finally the systems are comming together and we can begin manage our time better. I would like our team to be able to manage the process the best way possible and to this end I have created this thread for questions.

The Idea is to Post questions about anything on Spoon in this thread as a comment. We will place responses in the content we upload and make sure we inlcude answers (should we have them) elswhere or in the body of content. This way we can ensure that we know about what people are interested in. Also feel free to let those on other forums know that we would like to centralise this process for efficiency. All questions welcome. Please try not to use this thread for discussion. This "questions list" does not preclude creation of and discussion in any other discussion threads.

Thank you all for your continuing support and interest.

Simon

See what can be done

2006-07-15T07:28:00.001-07:00

I have gotten some requests for more and more behind the scenes clips. Silicon Imaging have posted some of the greenscreen shots we've done on their site, so check it out. For today I have a selection of awesome clips...

Grant with Glyde Cam

Our Director of Photography using a glyde cam. The camera being just the head and the LCD and the monitor actually was so light we had to add a little weight to the arm. We have used this for quite a few shots and I'm sure you can see why. The system is perfect, his got great movement and the head is small and versatile.

ACTION

Allright here we have some FX. Start off with one of our bad guys breaking a car window, it looks super. The art department had to actually then make a hole in the middle of that already broken window which was fragile and could actually fall out any second. Buit they did it so well done. After that he have Jason Cope firing off an AK-47, looks pretty real.

Sunel on trolley

You've seen photo's of this but now take a look at it in action.

Underwater 1

Underwater 2

Here the latest starts. We wanted to do an underwater shot and we got it in the end. The biggest problem was that we we working with non-standard camera's and wires. Having worked with them before we approached One8Six, suppliers of camera, grip and video equipment. These guys are amazing. They modified a Hydroflex for us so we could get the cables in to the heads without obviously letting the water in. The make was perfect first time round. We tested it right after they finished making the modifications and not a single drop was let in. Also the shoot at the pool was great and the footage we got was awesome. We shot some in 30p just to get that little slo-motion feeling together with the strange ambiance of being under water and it worked great. Hope you enjoy the clips...

Behind the scenes II

2006-07-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

Here are some more clips from behind the scenes.

Shoulder and Handle

This clip will give you a good look at what the camera looks like. This is NOT the full body version, which is a bit bigger with the drives attached. Still, we are using this head on wire for almost all our filming. You can see in the second part of the clip with Grant just how nice and light the camera is. He is easily holding it up and able to move it around smooth and effortlessly.

Bungee rigs and Slide

We posted a picture of these bungee rigs previously, now take a look at them. The rigs, built by Alfie gave a nice handheld feel to the shots. The last part of the clip is a rig we built for a slow high angle 'track' to close-up on the car window, it worked great.

Two camera's on one dolly

This is one of our out-door shooting days, luckily we had nice weather. Here you can see why it's so nice to have just the head of the camera's: it's light-weight, and it's a lot smaller. Thus enabling us to put both heads on this one dolly and covering a wide and close shot in one take.

Cable Stunt

A little stunt we did at the power station. Can't give away WHY he is moving through the air. In the second part of the clip we strapped Shaheen into the same harness and pulled him back to get a POV shot of the action.

BEHIND THE SCENES

2006-06-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

The moment we all have been waiting for...behind the scenes footage of SPOON and the SI-1920. These first few clips I have put together to try and show you a bit about what's going on and so you can take a look at some ways we are using the camera's and software.

Simon with software interface

In this clip you can see Simon, one of our directors, after just installing some new software we got from Silicon Imaging. The picture you see on screen is the interface we use to control camera operations, all with the click of a button. Here we just recieved software upgrades that enabled us to change shutter speed through the program. You will also notice, from around 35 second in the clip, how Simon is selecting the project archive he wants to record to. Each time the record button is pressed and then stopped again a seperate file is created for each take. This is a huge help in post-production as all your clips are already seperated and ordered.

Camera LCD screen

The camera head sends the GigE signal to our wafian boxes, and then the screen image from the computer screen is sent baack to the LCD mounted on the heads, as you can clearly see here. Thus what you see at VT is what the camera operator sees, and the other way round of course. This was filmed on our set that we built in the school hall.

Shaheen on the SI-1920

Our camera operator for Camera Head 1, Shaheen. The camera heads are quite light so actions like standing on a high ladder is no problem. The light heads have made various such shots possible that would have, though possible, been more dificult.

Camera on Jib Arm

Couple of shots where we are using the camera on a Jib Arm. Very easy to control and it gives a very nice smooth motion to the shot.

Right, I hope you like our first behind the scenes footage, there are more clips, but I'll post them tomorrow. If there is anything specific you want to see, feel free to ask for it in the comments. Just as a teaser I will say that future clips include: outside shots, camera's on bungee rigs, close-ups of the camera, some stunts and Grant, our DOP, showing off the glyde-cam.

VT station flexibility

2006-06-24T04:39:00.000-07:00

We have just finished with our shoot at our latest location, a week and a half of night shooting, working from 5pm till 5am. This was our biggest set-up for the film that we have so it was pretty exciting. We got to shoot some scenes in slow-motion, at 48fps, we can't get it up to 72fps yet as Silicon Imaging is still working out the software for us.

We have shot various scenes at a couple of locations and it got me to thinking about the setup at each location, and how each situation is different. Let's take a look.

On our first day with the SI-1920 we were shooting in Cape Town High School in their hall where we built an entire set. The setup was pretty nice, as we had built the set in the open floor area and the VT was set up on the stage, on two big tables. The cables were just run straight down to the camera's in the room.

This setup worked perfectly as there was enough space for everything. We had no problems apart from the small grounding issue as previously mentioned.

We shot there for a couple of days and then we moved to the Athlone Power Station, where we had to change the setup a little bit. Our first scenes in the power station was shot in a very small room, we barely had space for both camera's and the actors. Luckily, as we still prefer to shoot with the head only, the VT station was not a problem. All we did was set up in a completely different room, about 15 meters away and simply ran the cables from the heads down the hall.

Still at the power station, but just at a different spot we shot our scene with the car bonnet exploding open with smoke and water pouring out. The setup here was very nice as we shot in a sort of work room, so we had a bit more space.

We simply set up a portable fold-up steel table and put the VT on there. We had the camera on a track car and as you can see in the photo our VT was behind all this, so we could look at the camera movement and see the shot on the screens, which made co-ordinating the scene a lot easier as there was a lot of little actions that all had to be qued one after the other.

After the scene with our car popping open we had two days where we shot away from the power station before returning for a couple of days of night shooting.

First we had a day at the campus of the University of Cape Town where we had two setups. Our first for the day was an outside scene, and of course it was cold and wet, but the camera's didn't give any problems. The VT was set up in a tent about 10 meters from the action, and since it was raining we had to keep the door closed so no rain would blow in and soak the PC's. For the scene we were only running one camera, so the little space wasn't a problem at all.

Our second scene that day was in one of the classrooms in the University, where we once again had a lot of space. By this time the team was already quick to dismantle and re-assemble the VT station so setups were going smoothly. The scene was shot in the little room you can see through the door in the back of the picture.

The next day was a lovely shoot, it had stopped raining and we were shooting outside in clear weather. Our shoot was on an open field, so we just put up the VT in a small open-sided building just to the side of the field. The shot was a nice long track scene, we posted a clip from that in one of our previous blog updates.

After that it was back to the power station for a session of night shoots. Once again we were in a different spot (the place is huge and looks amazing). Tried and tested we once again set up our
VT on the fold-up steel table and was up and running in no time. Just like with at the school we had enough space to sit comfortably around the monitors, just a small way away from the action.

That brings us to our location where we just finished. We blocked off a huge part of a street in the middle of Cape Town. We had A LOT of extras, police cars (supplied by Renault), gun-fire, protesting, fighting...

Our VT setup here was very interesting. We actually got all the equipment into the back of a television type van, including our sound recorder. Not only that, but the van was part of the background for some of our shots, so the whole VT team had to crouch down behind the van out of sight, but we still pulled it off, with a little room to spare.

Oh, we also recently got our wafians into nice boxes, you can see them in the two photo's above.

Heads and Grips

2006-06-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Another turn around day and I have a spare 10 seconds. Spoke to Silicon imaging this week and I saw some posts on DVINFO about Steadycam. We are using a glydecam. More acurrately Grant Appleton is using his Glidecam. Thanks Grant. Grant is the DOP on spoon and has been a real trooper on the project. Here is a picture of him on set doing one of many glidecam shots. Some people expressed concern about the use of the head and wire on a rig like this but so far it's been working pretty well. It's light enough and still get you great shots without the more expensive rigs. When he has a moent (like in 10 years) he might give us an update. He's been threatening to do so for a while but there is just so little time at the moment.

Here's a shot of Alfie, our key grip, pushing Sunel on a trolley we found on hanging behind her but nothing more cumbersome than the usual video take off cable used on film sets - and our small location. Worked out beatifully. There is a 16 core network cable batteries last 4 hours on the head and monitor. The big ones last almost a day.

Here is a pic of Alfie's bungy rigs. These worked well for alot of hand held feeling shots where operators had to roll a lot.

We did this stunt where Michael Dooley is thrown against the wall "can't say how". Here he is in the stunt rig set up by Anton Moon. And then we mounted Shaheen in the rig to get another POV style shot from the rig.

Another advantage to lighter smaller heads. Both Heads on one dolly here. And the ride is still smooth as ever.

Hand held or should I say Palm held. Grant on the head only.

Here is the head only on the Jib Arm. This was quite a good solutions for tricky moves. The arm gives you range and control made easier by the lighter head and good gripping.

That's all for now. Mpeg's of on set to follow soon.

Batteries and Stars

2006-05-31T09:42:00.000-07:00

Our shoot at the power station is still going on and the cameras keep performing excellent. Apart from the cameras I also need to thank Anton Bauer for the batteries they are supplying us. We are using Hytronic 140, 140W batteries or Dionic 90, 90W batteries on the heads. We are getting around eight hours of filming from our Hytronic 140 and over four hours on the Dionic 90. These are the best batteries we could hope for so go take a look at their website at www.antonbauer.com for more information on them.

Also for those who have not heard we have an appearance in the film by Rutger Hauer, who plays the lead of Daniel's father. Rutger Hauer has made over 100 television and film appearances since his debut in 1969 in the TV series "Floris". He later appeared in more well-known films and series such "Blade Runner", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Alias", "Smallville", "Sin City", "Batman Begins", and many more. In 2001 he also directed a film by the name of "The Room". So if you are a fan, look out for him in our movie. For more information on Rutger Hauer, visit his official website at www.rutgerhauer.org

As you can see Simon did a big technical update with his previous post. For you other techies: I have asked our photographer to get some shots of the wired rigs and will be posting them hi-res for you to get a closer look. Ari on your question in my previous post: that is a normal GigE UTP RJ45 connection. Also for those who are wondering about our sound recording. The sound is recorded separately, not together with the footage, but with the video we record a reference clip so that we at least have some sound in playback on set and editing

What do you all think of the footage so far?

AND SOME MORE?

2006-05-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

Here are 5 more:

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_005.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_006.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_007.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_008.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_009.wmv

FINALLY SOME FOOTAGE

2006-05-29T16:32:00.001-07:00

Note this is raw ungraded footage converted to windows media 9. Some takes are "outakes" so there may be focus errors or operation errors. I will try post more this week. We have better stuff to see than just these.

Here the clips:

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_001.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_002.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_003.wmv

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/SI1920HDVR/web_004.wmv

Enjoy. Any questions please adress Francois. He is active on the blog and in touch with me regularily. Watch this space...closely.

Simon

Shooting in Progress!

2006-05-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone.

I tried putting a bunch of footage on the blog last week on my day off only to run out of time. This time I will go one clip at a time so that you can at least see something if I run out again.

The shoot is going extremely well. Thanks to everyone who has made it so. This format is turning out to be ideal for our comic strip style film. The look is unique falling between film and video. It is soft yet clear - video without the video edging we all hate. The beauty shots are great - the make-up reads better than other hd formats (it's more like film).

We had some issues shooting flashes (camera flashes). The rolling shutter is a bit complicated with rapid change like that- some times you get a great flash other times it's more of a half frame flash.

We've shot varying conditions. The darker areas are holding up but there is nothing to beat this camera in good light. I will try and give two clips today at least - one with school yard bench scene in strong light and a darker industrial shot.

Despite the fact that these camera heads are prototypes they are working really well. We had some static build up issues (at least i think that's what they were) first when I booted up the second camera head after transportation and again when shooting Daniel's soaked apartment. These sort themselves out when ground is properly done and when the head "settles down".

We've shot close on 40 hours of footage (probably too much but to have the coverage is great). Both close personal performance stuff and a fair bit of action. Both are great. The action stuff has a really unique real feeling while remaing very filmic (not videolike).

We've shot a lot with zooms for efficiency but the fast 16mm primes are the way to go if you have time. Much more light and hence data gets through.

Andrew, in response to your qestion we have been using the head on cable mostly. They are light and fast to work with. Also we follow the action on the big monitors at the "film recorder/video take off station". When we need a roaming shot we will go for the full self sufficient camera but it's rarely needed and the extra weight is a detractor. Even though it weighs much the same a s a film cam there are advantages to the head only system. We can more easily mount two cameras to a dolly and cover wide and tight angles on the same action in one go for example. Recording on wire also gives you the choice to go filmscan 2 on the recorder as we are using wafian hadware. the wafian hardware gives us redundancy of our data and faster processors for higher data rates should you need them. Mostly we record filmscan 1 because there is little difference in quality but quite a bit in size. Jeff at wafian can advise on what hardware he supplied us. Otherwise Pavel can tell you. Note that Jason says there are laptops that should habdle the recording too. The coolest thing about working this way is the choice. You can use whater arrangment of gear that suites your shot. I expect a lot of innovation around this flexibility in the comming year because I for one will never give up that choice if I can help it.

Clips will follow now....

Stills from the set

2006-05-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

Almost a week has gone by since the last post and a lot has happened.

We finished our filming at our first location with no major problems. We did have a small grounding issue: All the equipment was runing off the house power, so the computers were trying to find earth through the cameras. This issue was easily resolved by simply running the computers off the generator from outside.

Next we moved our shoot to a power station just outside of town, and even though it was cold and raining the whole time, the weather was getting no-one down.

We were shooting in small offices, so the directors were sitting in one room in front of the VT station, and if you were looking for where the scene was being shot all you had to do was follow the wires down the hall.

We shot a scene in which a cars bonnet had to burst open with smoke, flames, and water spouting out. The shot looks awesome, so great job to the FX team.

Our shoot on the 20'th May was done at the University of Cape Town. The second scene of the day was of our lead character entering a building, and as it's supposed to be raining we had the rain machine set up and working. The irony was that, while we were setting up and some time during a walk-through, it actually started pouring rain. However, as soon as we wanted to start filming the rain had stopped, so we had to use the rain machine. We had no problems using the cameras in the wet weather. Also a special thanks to all the extras in the scene who had to spend their morning getting cold water poured all over them.

We are going back to our location at the power station, this time however we are doing a night shoot. The location is perfect as the whole place has such a great atmosphere on the screens that you would think it was built to be a film set.

Well, hope everyone enjoys the photos from our first few days of shooting, don’t you think the cameras look great in action?

Spoon ready and rolling...

2006-05-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

Right, it's been more than a week since the blog was last updated and a lot has been happening. First, let me introduce myself: my name is Francois and I will be updating the site from today. So let me tell you what has been going on.

We started shooting the feature film “Spoon” on the 10'th of May and the first few days were hectic. Initially we had a small problem getting our second camera to link with the system, but soon got that fixed. The shoot was at an outside location while the VT station was set up inside, which initially led to a small delay in work flow because of communication between the on-set crew and the VT guys, but after a while the whole process was streamlined and by the time we got to set and rolling on day two everything was going smoothly.

At the moment we are running both camera's directly into the wafian boxes and PC, thus enabling us to shoot two angles of a scene at a time. It's incredible sitting at the VT station and looking at the feeds from both camera's, especially when with the click of a button you can review the scenes that have been shot a second ago through Widows Media Player. The shots are looking great and it's not uncommon to hear people from the crew saying things like “this is the way of the future” or seeing the directors smiling broadly and talking excitedly about how incredible the footage from the camera is looking.

Both the camera's at the moment are equipped with a Canon wide-angle 16mm zoom lens. The lenses offer us a broad view, fast aperture, and a closer focusing, down to 0.28m. The lens remains compact while still providing superior image quality. It is also highly resistant to dust and moisture, which is great, seeing as on our last day on set (today), we will be shooting in a room with and inch of water on the floor and a smoke-machine (courtesy of MXFX Special Effects) blowing smoke over the entire room.

As far as the technical side from the camera's are going there have been no major problems. The only small glitch is that every now and then one of the cameras disconnects from the system and have to be reset quickly, but this takes less than a minute and everything is up and running again. Little things like this are to be expected since the camera and system are still in the Beta phase, but Silicon Imaging is aware of it and are busy fixing the problem. On the computer we are getting a data rate of about 11Mb/s, less than the 18Mb/s we were expecting.

Yesterday we shot a small semi-action scene, where the main character gets hit in the face, drops to the floor and comes up with blood running out of his nose. For this shot there has to go a big 'well done' to the art department, it looks very real. Altogether during the first week we have shot over 600 gig of raw footage.

As far as todays shoot is going, the set looks amazing, it actually looks like “a real film set”, as someone commented earlier. The images from the scenes have an incredible atmosphere, even without any actors in the space, and something beautiful that I have come to notice of the picture is the texture. Because of the camera we are getting an image that has a unique sort of texture: it's not quite digital, but it's not quite film either...it's something crisp, clear and soft that has an amazing feeling to it.

As a sign-off for todays update I would just like to mention two interesting thoughts. First, on our first day of shooting we also filmed with a film camera and we got about 1 hour 20 minutes of footage, which ran to cost about $8500. Compare this to the SI-1920 camera and system which will cost under $20 000 to buy and can shoot up to four hours on one drive. And then if you want to shoot more all you need is more drive space, which is becoming cheaper by the day. The second thing is that, let's say, hypothetically, you are using a 10:1 shooting ratio. All of the footage would have to be captured, taking quite a while, even a two minute scene would then take up to half an hour, and in the end you are only using 10% of the footage. That's 90% of the time spent capturing, and paying for it, wasted. Just let these last two thoughts sink in and you will see why this system is “the way of the future” for independent film-making.

Be sure to watch the blog as I will be posting photos from the shoot at our first set soon, it looks amazing...

Head on wire camera

2006-05-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Here is the first rugged set ready head on wire si1920. It's a nice size and weight. We will be recording and controling on wire so the operator only shoots for composition the rest is controled at the wafian VT station. All is looking good. Steve, Jason and Ari we had some of those blooms again after we sheared the edge off the block frame plate that fit's over the OPLF. Again we resolved this by rotating the glass as Shown in our previous email diagram. Also we mave have cut a little too much off which did't help but we've made a make shift fill until richard can machine a super acurate plate.Do the filters have to have the pink stripes down the edges. They are what seem to cause the porblem. If we had glass that was totally clear to the edge (as clear as the centre) it would eliminate this issue without having to move thing around and find a happy home for all the parts. I assume there is a reason why those stripes are there. At least we are in control.

All Is going well. Both heads are making excellent inages. Everyone here is crowded around the monitors in disbelief. Very very excited. We shoot tommorow. I will try and post something - maybe even a shot or two. It's not a big shoot day but it will show the image off any way. We should decide how to post the data because WMV won't do it justice. This image is sooooo clear.

Adapter back focus Lock

2006-05-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

Just got our new PL mount clamp form richard. Works like a dream. Simply screw the adapter in until the set point you wish and then lock it off with the locking bolt. It clamps around the broader part of the adapter as we discussed in Las Vegas but Richard wanted to try the rest a little differently. I think he did a good job too. It's a very snug fit and the tests we did were great. What do you think Dave?

All Steam Ahead

2006-05-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

After a 30 hour flight into Las Vegas Grant Appleton and I decended on NAB to collect the first PROTOTYPE model of the Silicon Imaging Si1920HDVR. A rush around NAB to collect all the accessories, Anton Bauer Batteries and chargers and 60 hours later we were flying back to South Africa. Another 30 hour flight. Was it worth it?

The fact that the camera is a prototype sort of made me nervous but once we looked under the hood and chatted to the guys at silicon imaging about the known issues that are in the prototype I relaxed. Like any prototype their are bound to be issues but nothing big enough to get in our way. The team has such a strong handle on everything that we caouldn't really find anything they hadn't already told us about. The image is great, but we already knew that. The camera boasts the prototyope model of the altisense 3570 with Gige on board. It was all exciting and then it got more exciting. We began playing with the cineform raw footage in premiere. This is the BEST latitute I have ever seen on any video format. The 10Bit file has very wide dynamic range and the files are relatively tiny. Our data rates are around 11MB per second. David newman did you say that was because it's single sensor using Bayer Raw cineform compression?

I think that's what he said.

I was expecting 18MB/sec. Aside form a few practical technical issues we are on track. The production model scheduled for release later this year will be awsome and free from any of the teething we must go through in the beta phase. Teething is the currency you use to pry the camera out of the developers hands before it is in production. "Hey let us Beta test that for you on our movie - we'll take care of the teething".

Our biggest issue is the fact that we shoot on Wednesday (10th May). We have had less than 10 Days to prepare everything. And then without warning the motherboard blew. No big deal except that in South Africa cutting edge MB's are'nt sitting on a shelf ready to go. They need to be shipped. It takes 5 days without issues in SA customs. So that was a bit of freak out but again once we came to grips with it it was a blessing because we acceleraed our "head on wire" GripCams and we made provisions for any furhter hiccups while ACTUALLY SHOOTING. We're getting into the film cam mode. If it breaks you open and fix it. It's not like regular video cameras. It's all solid 1+1 stuff. The case is rugged aluminium and the parts inside all familar. The only thing we can't do anything about is the camera head. That's new. But the computer stuff is really practical and it's liberating to know that we can control and service the unit without opeing up complex circuitry. It feels like a computerised Film Cam without moving parts!

We will shoot the first scenes on cable attached to 2 wafian boxes. These make the head light and small and allow for those impossible shots, rapid setups and easy hand helds.

This is the big thing for us. We strongly believe in a future where flexible head removal, mounting and integration will change much of the way shooting happens. Note: the head on the unit is totally removable. You can leave the recorder behind and run gige to the head and shoot from wherever you can think of to place the head. This combined with the use of computers and their processing power on the film set, and integrated with the camera are revolutionary forces. The Si1920HDVR has all this flexibility. The cineform raw bayer data backing up flexible interchangeable hardware. For the first time a digital film camera feels like a a film camera. It's robust and the components accessable and interchangeable with very basic functionality. Just like with film you expose everything, keep everything and decide in post what direction you want to go in. And there is latitude to do it. At NAB our minds were spinning at the possibilities for modular expansion and development, accesssories and tools. There is so much scope in this area for innovation and it's not only around the sensor. Watch this Space!

We will try and post footage as we shoot. Please be patient we are entering production phase. Ken cyr at Anton Bauer, David Taylor, David Newman at cineform Jeff Yeoul at wafian, Steve Nordhauser, Ari Presler adn not forgetting Jason Rodrigues on the Silicon imaging team - thank you. Hopefully we will soon have some great footage that does all your effort justice.

SI-1920HDVR - UNVEILED & UNLEASHED

2006-04-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Well it’s been a while since we posted anything. The reason is we had to keep what we were doing under wraps until Silicon Imaging, Cineform and Adobe announced the SI-1920HDVR and their collaboration in getting the workflow worked out. Well If you haven’t heard about it yet, best read this: http://www.siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/

Making a low budget film is not easy. Especially when you are ambitious about what you want to do. For the past year we have been cutting corners off the production process wherever and whenever we could to streamline a very ambitious attempt at a low budget film. We were planning to shoot directly to the Wafian from the JVC HD100 giving us a great 1/3” chip image. We could key, color correct and everything but the problem was we were using 35mm adapters which lost light and added grain. This combined with the 1/3” chip produced a satisfactory result - comparable to 16mm and aesthetically beautiful.

As often happens with shooting schedules we had some setbacks which forced us to reschedule our shoot four months later and this gave us a moment to think and ask the question:

Was our work flow the best it could be or had things moved on allowing for an even better format?

Well the truth with technology is it’s always moved on and at some point you need to commit to where it is at that moment and go with it. We had done that with the HD100 but now we had this extra time. We decided that not to take advantage of the time would be a decision made out of fear and as a result of having made a nice comfort zone for ourselves that we didn’t want to move out of. We had to aim higher with the time we had. I immediately began researching 2/3” chips and solutions and it was encouraging though none of the systems out there were anywhere near ready to go. After a long search I reverted to my trusted friends at Cineform with my finding and a question (thinking I was ahead of the game):

- Are there any 2/3” cameras that might suit our needs?

I got a response beginning something like - “...it just so happens that we’re already working with the guys at Silicon Imaging… Want an introduction?...”.

A week or two later we ordered an SI1920 boxed camera for testing and began the process of re-organizing our workflow. Changing your mind is never easy but when we saw the chip with a 35mm lens stuck directly onto it the chip housing we were very excited.

It’s natural to be apprehensive about new things. But once you get to know how they work it gets easier to accept them. The principle of having a chip with a lens attached to a small form factor PC is easy to accept when you know how it works. This is what our testing gave us. Once we had shots flowing we could see the results and they were ground breaking. Because it is a single CMOS sensor we can attach regular film lenses to the chip which essentially means cutting everything from the film plane of the film camera to the Telecine transfer. Everything else is pretty much the same, so most film gear will work well!

We tested 16mm and 35mm lenses from CineGate who have been just amazing throughout or technical meandering. No snooty remarks about film and digital just a solid interest and excitement around something new. Without this kind of support testing and committing to new things is impossible – Thanks Brad and Anton. I will follow you wherever you may go.

We used the Wafian box and the software developed by Silicon Imaging to ingest our test files and after only a little playing we were on our way. Jason referred us to Les Boscher who made up the C-mount to 2/3” adapter. When everything was there we were getting some petty cool looking images.

As we progress and get the first unit here we will post more information and some footage. We begin shooting in May so it may go quite but that means there will be a lot to talk about when we are done with the shoot.

Our commercial independent film market just got an adrenalin shot. We are very excited about the next few weeks and we hope to bring more good news.

Technical_03: Performance

2006-03-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

3 March 2006: On this day we shot two day’s work in one day. We started at 5am and finished at midnight – and this to capture a grand total of 7 minutes of the final movie.

The technical setup that we used for this shoot consisted of two film cameras, both with composite output to two Wafian boxes and from there to two broadcast monitors for the directors to preview the live feed. The sound also feeds from the tape deck to the Wafian boxes as a reference.
The film camera has a reference output of 720x576 that we record to the Wafians. We ended up with 80GB of Cineform footage, which represents 90 minutes of actual shooting. Besides that we had 4.6GB of still behind-the-scenes images and 5 full DV behind-the-scenes tapes. All the departments, from make up, hair, behind-the-scenes, camera and continuity made use of the Wafian like central data server on set. When all was done, we went back and digitized the film to high definition video (Telecine, just using Wafian) with resolution of 1920x1080 23,976 psf – this gave us another 100GB of data to store and backup.
After a very stressful day, with many problems along the way, I can testify to the fact that the Wafian boxes performed superbly and the hiccups that did occur were quickly taken care of. It seems that Cineform and Wafian together form a winning combination and is the one part of the whole setup that I am most satisfied with as far as performance and quality is concerned.
As it turns out, the dual Wafian box setup made life much simpler for controlling continuity. It became possible to watch a recording of the scene before lunch on one box while monitoring the live feed on the other box. Apart from the broadcast monitors, we also had two 23” flat panel screens sitting next to the Wafian boxes. Eventually I had both Continuity and Directors standing around my VT setup so that they could see the action better on the big monitors.
We are learning all the time. We now have to discover all the weird and wonderful things that will emerge from using the new high definition technology.

Just to let you know.

2006-03-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since this blog was updated – so let’s just catch up with some developments:

Spoon, the Movie experienced some setbacks when it turned out that we could not have all our actors in the same place at the same time. This meant that we had to shoot three scenes of the movie on the 3rd of March 2006 and delay the rest of the shoot until May and shoot through to July 2006.

Postponing the shoot gave us an opportunity to investigate (on the camera side) a better digital solution with better high definition specs, which we will now use for the main shoot. Unfortunately it takes time to set everything up for this new camera. To be safe, we decided to shoot the first three scenes using a normal film camera.

Monitoring cineform HD for Filmout

2006-01-20T00:56:00.000-08:00

This is a tricky one.

We have already spent a great deal of time with issues relating to filmout. Every time we think we are close to understanding it we get shot down. Sometiimme by reality, other time the smoke and mirrors that seems to engulf this topic.

We want to monitor our HD signal for two key purposes.

1. Live Capture on set to our wafian (if we don't calibrate our monitor here we stand to loose data we may not htink we need when monitoring the Video feed but which for filmout is essential - am I right in understanding this?)
2. For post and final filmout files.

We have hadexperience with the second option but all of that was with 10bit log film images within combustion whoch has look up table options.

A we understand it we need to get the entire production line conformed to a standard set of calibrations which - when printed to film are consistant. Then where LUT's are an available toolset, (like in combustion) we need to create our own LUT that allows us to monitor an output that emulates as close as possible what is on screen.

If anyone can assist us with ghetting the stup proces sright it would be greatly appreciated.

Simon

Technical_02: Mobility

2006-01-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Spoon” will have some scenes shot on two cameras simultaneously. Now we need to make a box (something like VT rack) to keep inside two 1000VA UPS’s and two “Wafian” boxes together. Must have mobility on the fly, be weather proof and be in separate parts in case unit A and unit B have to be in different locations on set. Long story short – does anybody know of a “Meccano” set for industrial use? It would be nice to be able to try out different possibilities. Each UPS is about 25kg and the whole system could add up to over 70kg. The two systems must be able to work as one mechanical unit or as two separate units as the need arises. There should be a patch board of some sort mounted on the rack so that somebody tripping over a cable only results in the cable pulling out of the patch board and not all the equipment landing on the floor. The UPS’s should be “direct” and not “in-line” so that we don’t have to worry about generator voltage jumps unless it is over 380V. We will keep you posted.

What we were really wondering is where we can get a military size helicopter to drop the VT operator with the equipment to the ocean for testing purposes and leave him there for a few hours to see if “Wafian” will survive any unsuspected situations on set.

By the way I have not introduced myself – My name is Pavel Orlov, I am the Technical Supervisor for project “Spoon” and System Administrator for “Atomic VFX” company.

SPOON TEST FILES

2006-01-07T07:17:00.000-08:00

Hi Everybody

Okay, okay... sorry for the delayed response. We've really had our heads down. You can see some of the questions I was going through with other users of the jvc HD 100camera at a blog here www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=56502

David I'm not 100% sure of the best way for us to make our shots available so I'm just going to post a test here and we can see if this works for everybody.

These are night/ rain/ ext. tests that we captured directly to the wafian box and captured at cineform. They're very rough but give an idea of what we're doing. Some details:

We shot loose comparative tests with a sony 750 hd camera with its standard lens and then on the jvc HD 100 with the ps teknik mini-35 adaptor so that we had some kind of standard, HD video reference point.

The jvc cam footage was captured directly to cineform using the wafain box. We weren't able to capture the the sony 750 directly to the box because of time constraints (we did get it working afterwards, so we can confirm that the box does work with a sony 750). As a result the sony 750 versions of the scenes went to HD tape first, and were then captured with cineform.

All the footage was then compressed to windows media 9. As you'll see, all the jvc cam stuff is soft - that is because we were ideally hoping to be able to sharpen it afterwards and shot with detail off on the camera. However we couldn't sharpen it nicely with any of the post tools that we have. Our subsequent testing with the detail setting to normal has given a sharp image that we're happy with. We have however noticed that when we shoot with detail setting on normal, we get some strange compression artifacts when we capture direct to cineform - i understand that andre has notified you of this and you guys are trying to work out what it could be.

Basically we either need to be able to shoot with detail on and capture okay, or come up with a way to sharpen the image either in post or while it is being compressed. I seem to recall that the box crashed 2 or 3 times while we were working, but never during an actual capture, and the crashes didn't require a hardware restart, only a software one so they didn't cause us any real problems.

Sitting on set capturing the box was great. One really gets the sense that this is the future of filmmaking. Can't wait for the touch screen and other features on the wafian box to get up and running.

ftp://www.atomic-vfx.com/spoon_test_clips/

Let me know if there are any problems accessing the files.

ciao
sharlto

Technical_01: Cables and Storage

2006-01-07T02:40:00.000-08:00

Here it comes, Ladies and Gentlemen…

Finally the Atomic VFX guys have started posting something.
If it is useful – great, if it is not useful or
something in your opinion not true – post a comment please.

Storage:
Statistically speaking if you want to make a 100 minute movie, you shoot about 700. Not true anymore. Now it is all digital. Our last “Test Shoot – Day 1” showed that we end up shooting a lot more just because we can… We can view footage on set straight away. If a director isn’t happy, no problem: let’s just have another take. And VT roll before camera, say up to 5 seconds - that is 150MB of wasted space, just like that. If this were uncompressed, it would be 1.1GB. Thank goodness for “CineForm” mathematics and support. Without them and with our independent budget, this project would never have kicked off from the start line.
In our case we will have a few shoots with special visual effects and some of them may be so important that we want them to be uncompressed anyway. For this we need at least 4 SATAII 7200rpm drives. However the motherboard must have SATAII support and all four drives must have the “3Gb/s” switch enabled. Stripe them together and “Hitachi” HDS725050KLA360 model will give 224MB/s. This just makes it - for real uncompressed we need 221MB/s. But hold your horses; “Wafian” is planning to release a software update with uncompressed capture ability (to RAM with 24p extraction option). This means that we don’t need unsecured RAID0 configuration and we can stick to the RAID10 that is on the “Wafian” already. If we plan our shoots carefully, we will have the entire movie on each box (930GB is about 9 hours of “CineForm” footage).

Cables:
Yes cables, not satellite transmission. With 221MB/s from component output of “JVC” GY-HD100E camcorder, it is still too expensive to transmit data wirelessly. So we decided to use normal off-the-shelf coaxial cable. When we started there was no component capture card on the market, so we used “AJA’s” HD10A HD-SDI converter and captured the feed from that. “Wafian” now have a “AJA’s” video capture card with component input that saves us having to use the extra conversion. We can now take the feed directly from the camera into the ingest box. What I discovered is that digital data requires very expensive cables to transmit over long distances: with SMPTE292 cable the maximum distance will be under 26 meters. Over that length the capacitance and resistance of the cable starts filtering out the higher harmonics of the digital signal. This results in the digital square wave becoming rounded and ultimately impossible to read accurately. The analog signal from the component output can run much further because it does not contain the high harmonics of the digital signal. But the analog signal can easily pick up external junk like electromagnetic interference from the generator. Such a sensitive cable is better to pull last and take away first and run over 20cm away from any power cables on the floor. However, it is still easier to pull 30 meters of cable to the camera on the middle of the set rather than moving the entire VT system closer to the camera.
The most important factor that we found on set is the quality of the cable itself. Don’t save money on things that are cheap anyway. We used two sets of the cable, flexible and non-flexible… Non-flexible breaks too easily, after 3 hours of heavy usage only.

Discussion on using the P+S Mini-35 with HD100

2005-12-23T08:43:00.000-08:00

While trying to keep up with everything Spoon related I noticed two of the filmmakers discussing the camera setups and using the P+S Mini-35 over on dvinfo.net. As they do refer back to here, I thought I should link back. Here is the thread.

Mobile direct-to-disk captures.

2005-12-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

Come on guys, share the fun. It seems that it will still take some effort to get the Atomic VFW guys to post some of their cool and interesting experiments. I do know they are preparing a lot of material. In the last weeks we have been doing boring stuff related to determining what compression settings work best for chromakeying from the JVC HD100, and doing initial 24p capture tests with the Wafian HR-1. But the last email of these pictures I had to post. This is a Wafian recorder being crushed by a large CRT (where did they find one of those these days) in the back of a small car set up for mobile direct-to-disk recording.

One interesting note is the Wafian HR-1 is A/C powered, so to gain mobility they run this unit of a UPS system, given them 15+ mintues of capture time while moving. I understand there is a wireless device used to start and stop the captures remotely.

New Compression Controls

2005-12-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

This is taking a while to write all this up. :) The last, but not least, is the new Custom compression options. Previous versions of Aspect HD and Prospect HD only had Small, Medium and Large compression options. Large begin the best quality mode of real-time compression of demanding footage at 720p60 or 1080i60 on a Dual Opteron workstation (using up to 90% of the CPU bandwidth.) As we now have the pulldown extraction options to encode 24p vs 60p or 60i, we have saved some compute time that we can apply to even higher quality (note: the faster Opterons like the 254s and 280s have the same effect.) As CineForm is already visually lossless why do we need higher quality? In 99% of cases we are already higher quality than most application needs, yet for difficult keying and effects work we have now added four new higher quality modes (and one lower quality mode.)

From lowest to highest quality:
Off line - This was added for very large documentary style projects which may need to keep more hours of source material that can be inexpensively fit on an average system. For a 24p 1080 project, 30 hours of source (using Large mode) results in around 2 TB, which these days is simple and inexpensive to add to a PC (around a $1500 cost in SATA drives.) So for the average independent narrative feature, everything can fit in $1500 worth of disk -- NO OFFLINE REQUIRED. For 720p24 productions, you get twice the storage time (or need to spend half as much on drives.) Yet a project with 100+ hours of source material gets a bit tricky as the biggest drives are 500GB. Whereas four drives fit easily, 8-16 drives is a big issue within a desktop and pricy (for those that can afford it a SAN is an excellent option.) So for these very large projects an off-line mode still makes sense. Using this format a 1920x1080 image is encoded to around 4MBytes/s (720p24 to around 2MB/s), they will increase the storage capacity around 4 times. The beauty of this mode is it is still a full resolution file with the same 709 colorspace, much better than switching to a format like DV, switch has different size, pixel aspect ratio and a SD 601 colorspace. Your off-line in CineForm Intermediate will be a lot closer to you final result than a traditional off-line.

Optimized Large -The is the same quality tables as the original Large, yet all data-rate caps are turned off. Standard Large capture typically lets the data rate be variable up to around 160Mbit/s, then it is limiting the data rate from get too much higher (peaking at around 200Mbit/s.) However for effects work turning these limiters off will potentially help. This is not to be used or needed for every day shooting.

Chroma Key - This is a new designed modes for chroma key applications. How it works will remain a secret. For creating the best key use this mode for chroma key shooting only. We are still tweaking this one so feedback is welcome.

Optimized FilmScan 1 & Optimized FilmScan 2 - These mode have come from Prospect 2K, and are mainly used for encoding scanned film (not telecine.) There is little point in there usage of real-time HD captures, (so we may remove them), just something to play with.

New Pulldown Extraction Modes Explained

2005-12-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

Both the new JVC HD100 and Canon XL H1 cameras have unique pulldown requirements for generating a true 24p capture ready editing. In these camera's MPEG modes (i.e. HDV tape,) the 24p signal is encoded either within the 60p (JVC) or 60i (Canon) transport stream, with the MPEG data kindly indicating which frames/fields are repeated and which frames/fields contain active image data. Using these MPEG flags, both Prospect HD and Aspect HD are able to cleanly extract and convert to a pure 24p CineForm Intermediate AVI. Editing is very easy from here.

The base-band acquisition from these cameras is a different story. The first downside is there are no MPEG flags indicating active or repeated fields, the upside of course is there is no MPEG, DVCPRO-HD or any other heavy compression interfering with the image. So the extraction of pulldown requires on the fly image analysis to determine the pulldown cadence of the incoming uncompressed HD signal (which I have touched on here.) This feature is controlled by the new capture panel, which tell Prospect HD which pulldown type to look for.

The most common mode will be the "2:3 (extract 24p)" mode. As we are not performing any predictive deinterlacing, the camera must be in the appropriate mode. On the Canon that is the 24F (or F2) setting and on the JVC HD100 it is the 24 frame mode. Note: this 2:3 pulldown extraction should also work on the HVX200 and Sony Z1U (there are some limitations of CineFrame 24) -- not tested yet. Even when you are capturing the a 24p stream, the incoming video format must match that of the camera's output : for the 100U use "1280 x 720 p 59.94" and for Canon use "1920 x 1080 i 29.97" (some call this 60i.)

The next two extraction types only apply to 720p sources. The "2:2 (extract 30p/25p)" is simply to half the frame when 30p is sent over 60p or 25p is sent over 50p. European users of the HD101E in 25p mode will use this pull-down type to capture a pure 25p signal. The final "1:1:1:2 (extract 48p)" is a bonus to JVC HD100 users, this allows for a perfect 48p signal for those who would like a 2X slow motion over 24p.

New Slowmotion Capture explained.

2005-12-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

If you set the capture to a regular 720p60 (1280 x 720 p 59.94 -- the mode for the JVC 100U) the 60 fps file will be flagged to play at normal speed even on a 24p timeline. To make it slow motion you have to an intepret footage as 24p or apply other post processing, otherwise Premiere, AE, or any player, will attempt to play at the full speed. I gather you used some post-processing to achieve this cool slow motion clip (slomo2.wmv) you uploaded to your FTP site.

With the new capture interface you have an easier option. Using the Slow-Motion Output Rate field you can set the frame rate the output file will be flagged to play back as. All 60 frames per second will be captured, yet the resulting file will be immediately ready for slow-motion playback. Setting the output rate to "Default" results in the same 60p data you had in the previous release.

Other differences to notice. When you previously captured 60p as 60Hz, the file reported an average data rate of 18+MBytes/s. Now when you record 60p for 24Hz playback the file will a much lower data rate more like 8MBytes/s (data rate will depend greatly on your source.) The low number doesn't mean the quality is lower (it in fact could be higher) instead the data rate is now the new playback rate, during record 18+MBytes/s is sent to disk.

Many new capture tools for Prospect HD (and soon Wafian HR-1)

2005-12-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

We have kept you guys waiting so long for all these enhancements, but as promised, the new Prospect HD is now available (check you email for the beta download.) Originally we planned to roll these features out one at a time, yet the Wafian delivery schedule really helped push these items along. The new capture features include:

24p extraction from JVC HD100 60p analog outputs (normal 24p capture mode.)

24p extraction from 60i HDSDI (from Canon XL H1 -- I know you are working with the HD100, yet we only have one of those between Wafian and CineForm, we just happen to have two Canon XL H1s -- so this used of a lot of testing.)

48p extraction from JVC HD100 (great 2X slowmotion in the 24p shoot mode.)

60p to 24p automatic capture option (for 2.5X slowmotion -- no post processing required.)

Real-time 180 degree image rotation on capture when using a 35mm lens adaptor.

Five new quality modes, including one optimized for Chroma Keying.

In my next post I will explain the key features in more detail, plus where items can be enhanced with your feedback.

Comparing 10-bit to 8-bit

2005-11-20T13:48:00.000-08:00

One of the comments a few posts ago involved comparing the difference between a 10-bit Cineon and an 8-bit TGA files both produced from a CineForm 10-bit master. The problem found is that no difference showed. Of course it will be alarming that no difference shows (where is the value in 10-bit), but it turns out that the test is flawed, not the 10-bit data. This took me a while to determine what is happening and to come up with an alternative test. The flaw is these 16-bit compositing applications are producing 8-bit difference mattes (and only using the top 8-bits to create them.) If you perform the white count test that is proposed over at codecs.onerivermedia.com (an excellent site), however the test doesn't work correctly for deeper than 8-bit data. On the One River Media site the difference is performed in 16-bit After Effects using these few steps :

a) Place your source on the bottom track (in this case your 10-bit data)
b) Place your new clip (in this case the TGA sequence) on the second track.
c) Place a Menu bar > Effects > Keying > Difference Matte on the second track
d) Set your Difference Matte options to the following:
View: Matte Only
Difference Layer: (Your 10-bit source image layer)
Matching Tolerance: 0%
Matching Softness: 0%
Blur Before Difference: 0%

This results in a completely black image, even though we know a 8-bit TGA doesn't have as much information as a 10-bit Cineon or CineForm AVI. Note: I believe Combustion is doing the same 8-bit processing on the difference matte -- as Atomic VFX found in their own testing.

The simpliest way to see the difference and advantage of an 10-bit image over an 8-bit image is to boost the contrast 4-5X on an image with gradients, the 8-bit data will show banding and contouring in the gradients that is very annoying. Yet I wanted a test similar to the white count test to the difference between any 10-bit vs 8-bit images (not just the areas in a gradient.)

The test I come up with using the 16-bit mode of After Effect is as follows:
1) Start with your 10-bit source, either a CineForm AVI file or DPX/Cineon sequence.
2) Export that as a 8-bit Targa (TGA) sequence (really only needs to be a few frames worth.)
3) Import the TGA sequence place it in a composite above the 10-bit source.
4) Place a "Levels" filter on both tracks, set them with these parameters.

Input Black: 0.0
Input White: 32768.0
Gamma: 1.0
Output Black: 0.0
Output White: 1024.0 (to normalize to 10-bit precision)

5) On the TGA track set the Blend Mode to "Difference". The composite will now appear black, however moving the mouse over the image to reveal RGB differences between 0-3.
6) Add an Adjustment Layer.
7) Place a "Levels" filter on the adjustment layer a set it with these parameters.

Input Black: 0.0
Input White: 1.0 (This will make all differences visible)
Gamma: 1.0
Output Black: 0.0
Output White: 32768.0

If you want to perform a white count test, simply nest this composite with a clip of solid black and perform the first test listed above (the One River Media test.) You will discover only approximately 2% on the pixels are unchanged by the 10->8bit truncation, mostly a white image will show.

P.S. I'm planning to create a page to easily explain the advantages of 10-bit for color correction, even using 8-bit sources, as this tests above doesn't explain why the difference between 10-bit and 8-bit matters in post-production.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

Auto pulldown of 60p to 24p now working.

2005-11-09T21:01:00.000-08:00

Over the last week we have been working to add pulldown detection from the analog output from the JVC GY-HD100. As the camera's output is analog (digitized for HD-SDI) the pulldown must function without the guides of user-bits or other flags that indicate a repeat vs an active frame (like you get with VariCam HD-SDI data.) This proved a little tricky as we also need to detect pulldown from frames that aren't moving, like video data that starts from a stationary scene (moving scenes are easy -- we need this to be correct in all cases.) The detection routines basically used the difference between the camera's CCD noise (which all camera's have) and the smaller sampling noise from the A to D converters; the noise characteristic is different on the repeated frames. I was able to detect and remove pulldown with the camera pointed at a blank white surface, Jeff at Wafian successfully repeated this test with the lens cap on -- so we are ready for real world data. I hope this can be implemented in the next Prospect HD software release and in the upcoming Wafian HR-1.

Indie Film Live

2005-11-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

Hi guys,

Here is an update with some questions. Today we shot a replica of an interior car shot from a recent job which utilized 2k dpx files canned from telecine. The shot framed the driver of a car with a green screen behind. Both windows were open (we should have shot one with windows closed as wel). The object of the test was to determine the effectiveness of the keying ability of both the codec and the HD100e.

three files were produced.

1. footage shot to tape using mpeg2 hdv @ 30p.
2. footage shot to disk uncompressed @ 60p
3. footage shot to cineform large format @ 60p.

We then took the footage through after fx into cine (dpx) files which were keyed in combustion. We havn't tested the mpeg2 file yet but the other two keyed with different degrees of success. The uncompressed was perfect while the cineform required more work but although it wasn't AS clean as the uncompressed (8bit? see later on) file the result looked great. The biggest probelm was the jagged edgeing we got which we had to correct for using matte blurring etc. . I expected some artifacts but wanted to know what you thought of the result and to see if there is any way to improve on this.

There was also another interesting result. When we converted to cin files we also exported 8bit tga's for comparisons. Now the uncompressed avi was captured using widows media capture and was fixed at 24bit so that is one thing we want to resolve for proper testing. But the downconverted cineform (from 10bit cineform to 8bit tga) exhibited what appeared to be identical offspring. ie no difference between original 10bit cineform and exported 8bit clone. We difference matted the two and found no difference at all. Perhaps we are missing something but we are very interested in understanding the best process through all of this to make sure we are getting the best possible result. We are using combustion in our work flow for various reasons but mostly because Glen can compare benchmarks against previous work in that software, which is helpful.

The camera, convertor and process was very impressive over all. Everything worked BETTER than expected. We got very excited about it. There was even a litle dancing. We also shot with detail off - which is worth noting after our last discussion on the stretchies. No stretchies noticed yet on this clip. We also converted DPX files used on a feature film we just finished and we got the same jagged lines on the key. Aside from the jagged edge the same key (copied and pasted the key operator) worked - again bluring was used to enhance. Not ideal but definately workable in many cases. I will upload pictures of both dpx and hd100 footage tommorrow for your perusal. Let us know if you have any thoughts on this.

Simon Hansen

Atomic VFX

Atomic - vfx finds it's way to cineform

2005-10-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

Sharlto Copley and I started a film project called “SPOON” a year ago. Once the screenplay was complete the film funding process went surprisingly smoothly and 1 year later we are in pre production on “SPOON”.

Sharlto and I have always tried to do innovative things and to make our work look better than the budget would conventionally allow. The idea of making a commercial style popular film on an indie budget is the holy grail of every endeavour we have embarked on in the past 12 years hence the name of our production company “inspired minority”. We have never been more excited than we are right now as we believe the media industry is finally at that turning point so many have been waiting for. The barrier to entry to big screen content has shrunk enough for those with talent and good ideas to blossom. It is our belief that an entire new strain of content is about to emerge that will blur the lines between commercial and indie films – were calling it “commercial independent”. In that spirit we just couldn’t resist the temptation to use low end prosumer gear to produce a truly high end product. So much so that we took a document we found on the web detailing the aspects of a film to avoid when trying to make a low budget indie film (I say “low budget” indie film because Star Wars was essentially funded by one man.) and commitied to include almost every one. Many of these obstacles can be solved with CGI and we have strategically been preparing ourselves for that eventuality for the past 7 years through our company Atomic Visual Effects.

Things like rain, which should be avoided, can be generated in part and pull in Post. Production design, and environment manipulation also. The list is long but the truth is without proper high resolution, high detail, deep pictures visual effects become tricky. We are still not certain how far we will be able to push the effects on our process but we will let you know as we progress what we have achieved. This is where cineform come in.

We needed 10bit High detail pictures which we could grade, key and composite with, but we refused to use film or established high end HD cameras because we wanted the money we had for the film on other aspects of the production. After much research and a long wait the new generation of cameras sporting HDV rolled out. There is always a sense of insecurity about these sorts of decisions. You never know what is around the corner or what unforeseen pitfalls there are but on spec the JVC GYHD100 seemed to fit the bill. The reasons, included the true 24p record, removable lenses, and most of all the uncompressed component output. Not only was it an HD image it was uncompressed and up to 60 frames a second thereby including another film makers power tool – SLO-MO!

The idea was to capture these uncompressed pictures to disk and Cineform threw a huge twist in the tail which made it all viable. They could compress the images to a fraction of their size, retain 10bit image depth and allow for post grading and effects. They’ve shown this with “dust to glory” but where we wanted to go was another ballgame. We wanted to do hectic VFX on the footage and this would certainly put the codec to the test. In the beginning we planned to shoot uncompressed for all the effects but as we got more involved it gradually became clear that Cineform was in another league from any codec we had seen. We could do things to the footage we never thought possible and right now we are tesing the Keying using cineform instead of uncompressed. So far we are very impressed. Now I know most VFX experts will be shaking their head like I was but what I have seen has been enough for me to give it a solid look and we will let you know as things evolve.

So then we got going with a cineform Prospect HD solution on an AMD dual core dual opteron 252 proc pc, an HD100e camcorder (the first in the country) and an AJA HD10A converter. Within minutes we were up and running with Data, 60p, being recorded directly to disk with cineform. Real slo-mo and at 1280x720. The data rate around 15-17 MB/s (60 frames). Of course David Newman had already forgotten what we still had to learn. Thankfully he, David Taylor and Jeff got right behind the project from the word go and they have been indispensable assets to the process. Not only did they invent the product that make our process possible, they have been re-inventing it to make it do even more. And that’s about where this blog comes up. We are at the stage now where we are testing everything and preparing frantically for our Feb Shoot.

Aside from the implementation of the codec in our workflow, the ingest suite had to be ruggedized for a film set. UPS, cabling, cooling, mobility and operation are all major issues. We thought we were in that one on our own but then Jeff and Cineform announced their intention to release their version of an ingest solution for on set possibly in time for the shoot. So we immediately found a synergy in that development similar to the one we already had with the codec development. Cineform would develop all this cool stuff that would be their contribution - and we would get to use it to make our dream film – that was our part. What a great deal! Oh but there was a catch – we had to tell them what we wanted first. Since we started this project the any bad luck we have had has landed us in an even better position. “Leap and the net will appear” is written on our production board. I think it’s working!

So at this stage we are very, very excited about what has been happening and we are very honored to be working with such intelligent and dedicated people. We hope to demonstrate our appreciation for all these efforts in the quality of film we can make as a result of all these initiatives and to share our experience with those who wish to do similar things.

Simon Hansen
Atomic Visual Effects

What been happening up to now.

2005-10-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

So much has already happened on this project so I expect this initial post to be edited hugely.

We just got off our 3rd or 4th monthly Skype conference call with the Atomic-VFX guys, where it was decided we should be documenting all our developments and discoveries as they happen. Resulting in this blog starting half-an-hour later. The goal is to help others considering similar Indie projects. Before I cover some of the points of this recent call, here is a quick overview of the project so far:

Spoon is an indie feature in development in South Africa. The team behind this feature contacted CineForm regarding using Prospect HD to complete the post work on this feature. The intention is to replicate some of the successes of Dust to Glory - an earlier feature onlined using Prospect. It turns out the Atomic-VFX guys are an adventurous bunch and planned to do much more with PHD by integrating into the product work-flow as a capture solution -- thereby bypassing camera compression for a much higher quality image suitable for effects-heavy work. Multiple camera are to be shot this way simultaneously. This is to be an indie project that does not shy away from the tricky stuff -- my understanding is that there are to be many effects shots, greenscreening, nights and rain shoots, all on a truly independent budget. To bring the costs down dramatically this feature will be shot with multiple JVC HD100/101 cameras at 1280x720 at 24p or 25p for the dramatic elements, overcracked to 50/60p for effects and slow-motion shots. They also intend to shoot through a mini-35 style lens adaptor to gain much better control of the depth of field. OK that is a tiny run-down of the project to date.

In more recent times the Atomic-VFX team has been testing a Prospect HD system (based on a dual AMD Opteron 275s) at live capture of 1280x720p60. As the current AJA Xena card only has HD-SDI inputs, the analog feed from the camera is sampled using an AJA HD10A unit to convert the 720p60 to HD-SDI. This was the first time a raw 720p60 feed was ever captured by PHD system -- so an issue did come up. Previously all 720p60 tests at CineForm came from Varicam DVCPRO-HD sources, which are somewhat heavily compressed and filtered (to 100Mb/s at 960x720 by the DVCPRO HD codec) which typical CCD sensor noise can't survive. So this raw signal from the JVC produced a bit-rate that exceeded our bit-rate cap, causing the noise characteristic to change (i.e. as expected there is more information in the raw JVC feed than a compressed DVCPRO-HD source.) Using CineForm compression this is supposed to be visually lossless so we needed to address this. Bit-rate tests indicated the image data demanded around 180-200Mb/s (a lot of data from our 3D wavelet tranform) and the signal was being clamped to rates around 150-160Mb/s. The simple solution is to lift the data-rate cap, which was previously put in place to allow slower workstations to capture without dropping frames -- this will be one of our next steps. Secondly, even with the current PHD release (1.1.0.32?) this issue will not occur for lower frames p50, p30, p25, or p24. 150Mb/s is plenty of data as the frame rate is reduced, as the cap is the same for all frame rates.

Capturing all the lower frame rates would be cool, but....it turns out the AJA HD10A sampler will only operate at 60p (or 59.94p), so 50p is out. Other supported frame rates over HD-SDI are 30p, 25p and 24p are pull-down versions of 50 or 60p, so 25p is out. Currently 24p and 30p works yet the data is captured as 60p, and the pulldown is not removed (so we get duplicate frames encoded.) Clearly the removal of the pull-down is now the highest priority as much of the production will be captured using the 24p mode on the JVC camera.

Other capture related issues revolve around the new Wafian ingest device. Atomic-VFX hopes to use these devices on this project so Wafian is working hard to meet that goal. Jeff, I hope you can expand on this here.

That's it for my first post.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

Prologue - Atomic-VFX and CineForm collaboration

2005-10-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

When Atomic VFX approached CineForm about participating in their film project called "Spoon", it became apparent to all of us that the workflow decisions to be made mirror the decisions other Independent filmmakers will struggle with. Simon Hansen and the rest of the crew at Atomic-VFX aren't afraid to experiment with new technology, but they are methodical in evaluating and analyzing the technology to verify in advance that it matches their needs. For our part, we at CineForm believe there's nothing that helps our technology mature more than getting our hands dirty, so we were excited to work with the Atomic-VFX guys. We decided together that other filmmakers may benefit from following the requirement --> analysis --> decision process as it applies to Spoon. Other posts in this blog will add lots of detail to the analysis and decision process we are all actively going through.

Part of our enthusiasm for this project is that Atomic-VFX wanted to push the envelope in a number of areas. The project is to be shot with the JVC HD100U, and from its component output will be recorded direct-to-disk using CineForm Intermediate. This decision allows lots of creative freedom including capturing at 48p and 60p for various slow motion effects. The project will be edited online using Prospect HD with Adobe Premiere Pro plus After Effects for compositing and effects work. There are many, many decisions still to be made, but we'll save those for later....

By the way, we've never once met one another face-to-face. Atomic-VFX is in South Africa, and CineForm is in Carlsbad, CA. But Skype, email, and ftp sites are great things!

David Taylor
CineForm