NAB 2013: Pure Hi Res Poker (Pt 2)

Avid to take more aggressive approach
Announcing the concept of ‘Avid Everywhere’ and stating that the company would be, “More aggressive in our approach to adopting new technologies,” new president and CEO Louis Hernandez approved the biggest gamble of the show – Media Composer 7 at $999 and Pro Tools 11 at $699 (see Interplay next month).
Avid’s big game is end-to-end workflows and leveraging cloud technology, but Matt Feury from the marketing team took the lid off Media Composer. The AMA media management toolset has been boosted with Dynamic Media Folders.
“These are basically user-customisable watch folders where I can design profiles to do copy consolidated transcode functions in the background, in multiples of one,” said Feury. “It dramatically accelerates the ingest process and cleans up how you manage media.”
Users will get new functionality for background processing, and the next big new feature is FrameFlex – a toolset for re-framing a 4K image to HD or other resolutions. There is extra LUT support (colour decision lists that are not baked into media files), and Symphony is no longer a stand-alone product. It is a relational colour correction and VFX option for Media Composer ($1499). Asked about the amazing price gambit, the poker equivalent of going all in, Feury said: “It will make it more accessible and enable producers to deploy more seats of editorial.”
Avid has re-engineered the audio and video engines in Pro Tools, and it is now a 64-bit architecture. “Just going to the Pro Tools 11 software will give you twice the processing power,” said Dana Ruzicka, VP segment and production marketing. “And you can have orders of magnitude more virtual instruments. The new feature Offline Bounce, plus the new audio engine, means you can now do a two-hour clip in 49 seconds.”
The entire metering section has been re-tooled (17 different views), and Pro Tools has a Media Composer video engine. “For video editors and anybody doing audio or video to audio post, this is important because before you would have to flatten your video files and go through a lot of steps to prep video media to move over to Pro Tools for the editing and mix,” said Ruzicka. “Now it is the same video engine, projects just move right over.”

Arri states that 4K is way over hyped
Arri had product news on most of its product fronts, but the most dramatic element was Mark Shipman-Mueller’s suggestion that 4K is “over hyped”.
On the booth it had a small room with a Sony 4K monitor showing Arri Raw clips upgraded to 4K.
J D Vandenberghe, workflow project manager, fronted this and he said: “4K is just a resolution. For me it is 4096 and for a lot of other manufacturers it is Quad HD, so already this is not clearly defined.”
The factors to consider beyond resolution were bit depth, gamut, and dynamic range. “We wanted to show that if you shoot Arri Raw today and up res – we tried a bunch of different up res algorithms and software – it looks really great. Yes, it is lower on pixel count but we deliver Raw.”
Asked if this was a tactic to buy time while Red, Sony and Canon advance, Vandenberghe said: “It is about doing it at the right time. The problem with 4K today is you have to make a lot of compromises. Other manufacturers are compressing their raw information, and we do not.”
The hot new lighting product was the M-90 HMI, a new power class for fixtures at 9K. HMI will outgun LED for a few years yet. There is a new version of the L7 LED lamp, which is lighter, shorter, and 20% brighter (L7-T 2600-3600 Kelvin.
The scanning and recording side of Arri has switched its focus to archiving options, and offers a new 16mm pin-registered gate and new Arriscan stabilisation.
Arri launched some attractive accessories for the Sony F5 and F55 (base plate, tope plate, viewfinder adapter, shoulder pad), and three of the Arri/Zeiss anamorphic lenses. There will be seven lenses covering 35-135mm, all T1.9, and they have low distortion, large area of interest, and good skin tone rendition. There is an Arri CMOS sensor in the Ikegami HDK-97 camera, which is aimed at dramas and soaps and things like the MTV Awards (which bought 8).
JVC enables live breaking news
The GY-HM650 has been upgraded to give its users the ability to stream live HD transmissions. This is enabled by a Verizon 4G LTE modem that connects to the camera via USB. All this happens while the camera simultaneously records an HD file to its sold-state cards (SDHC and SDXC).
The other wonders behind this V.2.0 are a dual codec, the inherent FTP and Wi-Fi connectivity. The user pushes the live stream button and engages the decoder. He can send the content in 1080i, 720p and various other Web-friendly resolutions. When it comes to the metadata, this can be added locally or remotely.
The camera will record to multiple file formats - native XDCAM EXTM (.MP4), Final Cut ProTM (.MOV), and AVCHD, as well as .MXF files that support rich descriptive metadata optimised for asset management. And V 2.0 adds a useful 540p low bit-recording mode at 3 Mbps. Other upgrades are a communication package, with improved FTP for video files and metadata transfer, support for secure file transfer (FTPS and SFTP) and Web-based remote control. This takes the camera into remote control from station desk by a producer, who could meddle with focus, zoom and image set up. He or she could also insert metadata. All this conforms to AS-10.
Better-looking pictures could be seen on the JVC 84-inch 4K 60p LED back-lit monitor, a snap at $14,000, and further evidence that the CES continued into NAB. Look for the PS-840UD ProVérité 4K (3840x2160). It has an IPS LCD panel with 120Hz refresh rate and 10-bit colour depth.
Read the article in the online edition of regional Film & Video here.