These days technology moves fast and there are large advances announced and featured during the two largest television industry shows, NAB in Las Vegas in April and IBC in Amsterdam in September. So, I thought I'd write a few pages about what's new at IBC and have a brief look at other interesting products I've found.
I'm actually working for Thomson Grass Valley whilst I'm here, demonstrating their newsroom editing products. The benefit of this is that half of my time is allocated to standing in the Apple display showing the integration of Final Cut Pro HD within Grass Valley's newsroom. The downside is I cannot walk round all day, so I've decided to split the review in half. This also allows me to tell you all the latest Apple news quickly, including some announced features on the Final Cut roadmap and lets me visit the other stands and pick up the buzz when and where I can.
Apple
There are two new items on the Apple stand that are immediately visible. The new iMac is proudly rotating on a stand on one corner and a 30 inch Apple Cinema Display is rotating on another corner of the Apple booth. The Cinema Displays are truly gorgeous. The 30 inch does tend to dwarf the 23 and 20, but never the less there is a constant stream of people walking up and lovingly touching every new display. They get very hot though, the top of the 30 inch being almost too hot to touch by show closing time at six. The font size in the bins in FCP is also very small using the 30, and this should become a user preference in the next update.
Nvidia's powerful new 6800 Ultra:
What was more interesting for me was not immediately visible. To drive the 30 inch screens you need an Nvidia 6800 Ultra card installed. Now, it just so happened that the G5 next to me not only had that card installed, but Motion as well. So, I didn't hesitate to put the combination through its paces!
Apple's Nils Makaro is well impressed by two thirty inch cinema displays. This was the machine I tested Motion with the Nvidia card.
It's already been reported that the Nvidia will allow a larger project size than 2048x2048. The new maximum is 4096x4096, but any project I tried creating in this size really dragged, so I settled on a resolution of 3000x3000. Looking through the file browser in Motion I found some widescreen DVCPRO clips 720 lines high and started to drop these onto the already playing timeline. After two clips were quite happily playing simultaneously, I paid a bit more attention to the FPS counter in the top left hand corner. When a clip is dropped in, there is a noticeable FPS hit, but the timeline soon bounces back to 25 FPS. Drop another clip on, and it's still 25 FPS. Add the fourth and then the fifth and the timeline still returned back to 25 -- amazing. It was only when I added the sixth that the project played back at a lower frame rate.
Let's just get this into perspective, that's five high def pictures at full resolution, no overlapping, playing at 25 FPS. Now to do this you need fast drives -- and the G5 I used was being fed by an Xserve Raid, it was also stuffed with 4 Gigs of RAM.
Dion Scoppettuolo (left), the product manager of Motion had a steady stream of people wanting to take a closer look at Motion -- the screen wasn't black for long though!
So much for a large project, how about a smaller SD output? Let's try a new project, this time 720x576 at 25 FPS. Trying to find SD source clips on an Apple demo machine can be quite difficult, but I did manage to find some 1920x1080 high def widescreen clips. These are huge when you hold them over the project window! – so a bit of resizing later to accommodate and the result was 6, yes 6 clips playing at 25 FPS. Try adding the seventh and the frame rate drops to 20 FPS.
This was nothing short of incredible, but when I tell you that the card was driving two 30 inch displays, the timeline was open and the inspector with the GPU hungry widgets was on the second screen, it shows the awesome power of the 6800. Having a bit of a reputation for stretching any kit to its limit, I decided to add a few filters. Poke worked like it was one image, not a patchwork of six 1080i clips. Then after removing that I managed to roll the composite of the six up into a ball with the spherical filter and then apply a throw, and yes -- you've guessed it! -- it was still playing at 25 FPS!
The Nvidia is nothing short of stunning and is way, way faster than any of the other cards recommended for Motion. It was hard to judge the RAM preview times that I tested but they were on screen for seconds. I've also a hunch that the card will process at 10-bit, but I've a bit more research to find out.
Still on the stand, but on the other side, Greg Niles was demonstrating Motion. I think I know the programme well, but watching him working using gestures leaves me trying to catch up. No delays on windows or layers opening and no SBOD!
Apple's presentation at the Okura Hotel
Apple traditionally hosts a demonstration evening on the show's Saturday night at a local hotel, and this year was no exception. What was very “un-Apple-like” was that early in the presentation, it was said that some of the new features in the next release of FCP would be announced. Apple revealing a future road map? Well, the reason for doing so was to give the prospective large purchaser an insight into what formats will be supported. I'll run through the salient points of the presentation.
There are now over 300,000 users worldwide. This includes TVM, a large station that uses 50 G5’s in a Mac-only broadcast environment.
We quickly moved onto new formats for the next release.
- 1080i DVCPRO HD50 - well we are in Europe.
- HDV – A bit of an unknown at the moment, but who thought DV would take off when it was released?
- P2 - Panasonic’s PC card flash memory. This solid state format looks promising until you realize that a single 4 Gig card costs $750 dollars and a P2 rack takes up to 6! A big downside too is the fact that these will fit into any PC card slot and will make a very attractive target for any person who wants to back up their laptop for free.
- IMX up to 50 mps, though strangely no mention of XDCAM
The biggest disappointment was the omission of the 12-bit 4:4:4 HD codec.
We majored on XML to interchange sequences and media in between applications, not just on a Mac, but through third-party vendors as well. This is where I have to give Thomson Grass Valley a plug as Final Cut Pro HD will quite happily access media from shared storage in a newsroom system – that's what I'm demonstrating while here in the Thomson booth. I believe the BBC also have a similar system, but they didn't buy me dinner so I'll quickly move on!
There were a couple of demos of Motion and a mention of DVD SP, but nothing new -- still, DVD Studio Pro and Motion are fantastic products though.
Xsan:
For the broadcast market, Xsan will become an important weapon in trying to move into the multi-seat editing systems that Avid’s Unity seems to dominate at the moment. Apple have 100 beta test sites running Xsan and they expect to shipit sometime in Q3. The maximum amount of storage for one system can be up to 64TB and the maximum single file size (hope you are sitting down) can be anywhere up to a whopping 16TB! This is a limit of Panther at the moment.
Xsan will be priced at €1069 (Euros, figure that in dollars it's pretty close) for each node. This means that a 4 node system with 3.5TB will work out at €35,000. More importantly; that's a third of its nearest competitor.
Two Other Notable Things Found at IBC:
Well, that's about it for the Apple news, but before I end this installment of my report, two things that have stood out from other manufacturers. There is a 3D plasma screen on a stand that stops people in their tracks. No glasses, just 3D objects sticking up to a foot out of a screen. I've no idea how it's done and maybe I don't want to ruin the magic! Have you ever wanted to use an archive tape in a show only to find out that there is music all over an interview or presenter piece to camera? Fuji Television has developed a piece of software that can remove ‘unwanted’ music from a fully mixed source. It's only a service at the moment, the tape has to be sent to them, but there could be potential for regional licensing.
The second half of my look at IBC will feature the smaller companies like Blackmagic, other card manufacturers, third party software packages and anything else that stands out!
See you in the next round...
-- Peter Wiggins 11th September, 2004
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