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Dutch Treats: IBC 2006
By Staff
Dec 21, 2006, 16:27
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The International Broadcasting Convention's exhibition and conference-held annually in September at Amsterdam's RAI Convention Centre-gives many European, African and Asian broadcasters and post professionals their first glance at products announced months before at the NAB Convention in Las Vegas. IBC is not solely a mid-year industry update, however. Products are often announced at IBC first because of PAL-specific features, or because they simply weren't ready in time for April's NAB.
IBC is a more "human-scaled" event than NAB, with smaller booths and about half the number of attendees. It is scheduled a day longer than NAB and bridges a weekend. This combination of schedule and exhibition structure makes it easy for many worldwide attendees to drop in on Amsterdam for a long weekend without the cost and time impact that a trip to NAB would demand.
Quantel used the show to introduce Marco, its first software-based nonlinear editor. Marco is a laptop editing application targeted at journalists in the field. Adopting Marco makes sense for shops that already use Quantel news editing solutions. The system uses FireWire camera capture and features the same interface as Quantel's sQ editing product. Enhancements include a One Shot effects package for white balance, lift, gain, gamma and blur/mosaic tracking.
Quantel also showcased version 3.6 software for eQ, iQ and Pablo post and DI systems. Big news included Pablo HD, an entry-level nonlinear color-correction system for SD and HD with all the features of the Pablo 2K and 4K systems. The transition to high-definition television is also occurring in European Union countries, so HDTV is an important topic for EU broadcasters. IBC served as the European launch for Newsbox HD, a preconfigured HD news editing package based on Quantel's sQ server, ingest, playout and news editing solutions.
Autodesk has formally dropped all use of the Discreet name from Autodesk Media & Entertainment offerings. Fire, Flame, Flint, Inferno, Lustre and Smoke will henceforth be branded as Autodesk products. In the future, Autodesk Media & Entertainment will announce new product releases (identified by a year) at IBC and then introduce incremental version updates each year at NAB.
Autodesk's products had already completed their transition from SGI to PC workstations at NAB, but new shipping configurations of the compositing and editing products will feature an I/O card supplied by AJA Video as OEM hardware.
One emphasis at IBC was on Autodesk Lustre 2007, the newest version of the color-grading solution. Lustre is a family of products ranging from an assistant station to the full-blown Lustre Master Station for DI. A new member of this family is Lustre HD, which permits the input of up to 2K resolution files but restricts the output to HD frame sizes. Autodesk Lustre HD is designed for television work and facilities working with high-quality video mastering formats, such as Sony's HDCAM SR.
Avid chose to place its marketing budget in regional road shows and skip IBC entirely, but Avid products were present in a few booths, such as FilmLight's. Avid and FilmLight are working toward various levels of integration of their DI applications. In the future, this integration will include connectivity to Avid Unity and Interplay, so that an Avid DS and a FilmLight Baselight system might both access the same media files.
Digital intermediate solutions were plentiful at IBC, including da Vinci Resolve, DVS Clipster, Assimilate Scratch, Digital Vision Nucoda and even Silicon Color Final Touch. The latter, a desktop DI/grading solution, leans heavily on integration with AJA Video's Kona 3 card and Apple Final Cut Pro. Grass Valley has dominated the film market with its Spirit family of telecines, datacines and scanners. As an outgrowth of Spirit and the Viper cameras, Grass Valley has developed Bones, a modular software platform for transport control, assembly and color grading. Version 2.6 software, which is available now, includes improved color grading tools and support for the SGI CXFS file system, allowing Bones to connect to SGI SAN infrastructures.
In other film-related news, Teranex (a division of Silicon Optix) announced that it has licensed proprietary film restoration and enhancement algorithms from Kodak. The first technologies to be integrated into Teranex products will be Kodak's Motion-Compensated Grain Management and Adaptive Sharpening. Teranex also introduced ClearVue, a CRT replacement system first shown as a prototype at NAB. ClearVue is a matched and calibrated LCD display system packed with Teranex HQV technology to handle deinterlacing, filtering and scaling.
Apple's booth was nicely subdued by NAB standards but still packed with things to see. Key demonstrations focused on Final Cut Pro 5.1.2, which is now available for download. It is a free maintenance update to customers who have purchased the Universal Final Cut Studio cross-grade/upgrade, which is available until the end of the year. Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 delivers improvements announced earlier and rounds out format compatibility to include Sony XDCAM HD at 18 and 35Mb/s rates, as well as support for the Canon 1080p 24/25 and JVC 720p 24/25 progressive HDV frame rates. Additional features include improved Panasonic P2 import dialog, real-time updating of the video scopes in playback and FxPlug filter compatibility.
For many, Final Cut Pro is closely associated with AJA Video and Blackmagic Design. AJA demonstrated 2K playback on its flagship Kona 3 card. This card or its siblings can now be found in connection with products including Apple Final Cut Pro, Silicon Color Final Touch, Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid DS and solutions from Autodesk and Media 100 (owned by Boris FX). Ironically, Apple doesn't yet support 720p at 50fps in Final Cut Pro 5.1.2, but there is a workaround solution (not devised by Apple). AJA was able to demonstrate this workaround on the stand using their cards, showing that you can indeed work with 720p50 and not just 720p25 if you have to.
Blackmagic Design arrived with a wealth of new products, including DeckLink HD Studio, the first capture card to support HDMI for broadcast-quality I/O. Some low-cost HD cameras now support HDMI output prior to onboard compression. The use of DeckLink HD Studio would permit you to capture uncompressed HD from one of these cameras using HDMI instead of HD-SDI.
Blackmagic Design also announced Intensity, the first capture card that works exclusively with HDMI. At $249, it is the lowest-cost uncompressed HD capture solution. Intensity works well with On-Air 2.0, a production application from Blackmagic that turns your computer into a live production switcher. Install two Intensity cards and use the feed from two low-cost, HDMI-equipped HD cameras to create a complete uncompressed 1920x1080 live event workstation without breaking the bank. Lastly, there's DeckLink 5.7 for Windows. This free software update (compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects) introduces a mastering-quality Online JPEG codec that maintains a full size (1920 pixels wide) video raster.
Matrox demonstrated version 2.5 software for Matrox Axio real-time SD and HD editing systems. New features include 720p HDV support (including 50 and 59.94fps rates), native MXF file support for Panasonic P2, Sony XDCAM and XDCAM HD, VariCam support and eight new effects (crystallize, cube, impressionist, lens flare, move-and-scale, old movie, ripple, twirl). Similar features were part of the announcement for version 2.0 of Matrox's RT.X2. Designed for real-time native HDV and DV editing with Adobe Premiere Pro, Matrox RT.X2 provides a high-quality MPEG-2 I-frame codec that allows users to capture other HD and SD formats using RT.X2's analog inputs and mix all types of footage on the timeline in real time.
Matrox also announced the sale of 1,000 MXO units in the DVI-to-audio/video output adapter's first 60 days on the market. Matrox MXO takes the DVI output from a Mac computer or laptop and converts it to broadcast-quality video. Video can be SD or HD; MXO also supports HD-to-SD downconversion.
Omneon's broadcast server business is built on a QuickTime foundation. At IBC, the company announced it has extended the multiformat capabilities of its Spectrum media server system to accommodate Avid's DNxHD compression algorithm and Sony's XDCAM HD acquisition format. Additionally, QuickTime version 7 wrapper support is being added to the Omneon Spectrum system. Support for QuickTime 7 allows media to be recorded in MPEG-2 IMX format and made immediately available to QuickTime 7-based applications like Final Cut Pro without the need for any rewrapping or other conversion process. In its booth, Omneon demonstrated 20 seats of Final Cut Pro accessing the same media files located on an Omneon server.
Most of the standard NAB edit system vendors were present at IBC, including Sony (Vegas and Xpri NS for news), Grass Valley (Edius) and Boris (Media 100). Also present was Lightworks, now under the wing of Gee Broadcast Systems. A favorite of many film editors, Lightworks includes a family of editing products that will soon be joined by a software-only package. Lightworks Softworks comes in a regular version and a "light" version (Softworks LE) that does not include effects. The Lightworks console-one of the best tactile controls available on any NLE-is optional.
RED Digital Cinema showed up at IBC with 4K video samples captured by its prototype 12-megapixel Mysterium sensor. This footage presentation demonstrates that the company is following the product roadmap outlined earlier in the year. More important for post, the video samples were shown both uncompressed and compressed via REDCODE, a proprietary VBR wavelet codec at 27.5Mb/s (24fps 10-bit log).
New for IBC was the announcement of REDCINE, an application described as telecine software. REDCINE takes in the RED images as Bayer camera RAW files in either uncompressed or REDCODE formats. REDCINE then goes through several processing modules: "demosaic" the Bayer RAW files, add a color profile and balance correction, color correct, scale/crop for output size and export to an industry-standard file codec and format for editing. Expect to see a working product, or at least a functional prototype, by NAB 2007.
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