Eye to Eye: Video Post-production

Bob Pank#

Author: Bob Pank#

Published 1st January 2015


Video post-production has long been one of the fastest developing subsets of the broadcast business. It was among the first to lead the shift from hardware into software, bringing huge advantages in terms of affordability and ease of use. I can still remember the high cost, heavy weight and low quality of the early analogue tape to tape video editing systems. The expression 'colour comes later' returns to mind. IBC will see the introduction of quite a lot of new video-post kit including a respectable amount designed to handle 3D content which I will start off with.

3D post
Binocle's DisparityKiller software is claimed to allow automatic correction of all geometrical disparities inherent in a 3D shoot. These include camera slewing, lens magnification and keystone. DisparityKiller can correct and produce images in bmp, dpx, fit, gif, jpg, pbm, pcx, pgm, png, ppm, psd, tga, tiff or xcf.bz2 format. Rendering speed at 1920x1080 pixels is 36 pairs corrected per minute on Mac OS X with a 3.06Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 gigabytes of memory.
Dashwood Cinema Solutions' Stereo3D Toolbox v2 is a set of nine new 3D post-production plug-ins for Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro on the Apple Mac OSX platform. A Geometry filter allows adjustment of convergence with horizontal image translation. It also eliminates vertical, rotational, keystone and focal length disparity using either pixel-based or scalable percentage sliders. All adjustments can be keyframed. An 'autoscale' function eliminates cropped edges. Stereoscopic scale, rotation and reframe tools are also provided.
EditShare's new Lightworks Open Source is claimed to be the industry's first large-scale open source development initiative for a non-linear editing (NLE) platform. Features include support for 3D.
For-A's new CEQ-100HS colour equaliser includes tools to help calibrate and monitor live 3D video. Occupying 1 U, it includes HD/SD-SDI I/O and auto-detects 1080i or 720p HD sources as well as NTSC or PAL SD. It is equipped with two frame synchronisers, allowing 3D sourcing from cameras that have no external synchronous input. The CEQ-100HS can adjust horizontal parallax, which determines the depth of 3D images, for automatic optimal axis correction. Monitoring options include side-by-side, field-sequential and anaglyph output.
Miranda Technologies' Densite 3DX-3901 video processor is claimed to offer high quality conversion of multiple 3D formats, including dual 1.5 Gbit/s, normal side by side, and Sensio side-by-side. The 3D processing functions include horizontal and vertical flip and alignment and 2D to 3D conversion for landscape shots. The processor has dual HD outputs to allow previewing of 3D conversion effects, as well as 3D/2D simulcasting. Monitoring functions include Anaglyph, Difference-Disparity, and Left or Right eye display.
2D post
Blackmagic Design's UltraStudio Pro is claimed to be the world's first broadcast quality SD/HD capture and playback solution for 4.8 Gbit/s USB 3.0. The UltraStudio Pro chassis allows connection to 3 Gbit/s SDI, HDMI, analogue component, composite, S-video, 4 channel analogue audio, 2 channel AES/ EBU audio, genlock/tri-sync and RS422. It includes an independent SDI output down-converted for simultaneous HD and SD monitoring. An integral hardware up/down/cross-converter allows an operator to edit in one format and deploy in either SD, 720HD or 1080HD while leaving all CPU time dedicated to real time effects. Selection is possible between letterbox, anamorphic 16:9 and pillarbox 4:3. Audio level indicators and four XLR I/O are provided.
Deltacast's Delta-HD-E 40 is a new four-channel video card which doubles the per-slot capability of PCI Express cards to ingest SD or HD-SDI channels to a PC server. Its feature set includes audio and timecode de-embedding, ANC and VBI extraction, uncompressed 8-bit/10-bit/12-bit digital video capture, and system development tools for Microsoft Windows and Linux
Digital Vision's Phoenix Finish is a restoration, re-mastering and repackaging system for digital intermediates, restoration and archiving. Its capabilities include SD/HD video ingest, batch digitise and layoff direct from timeline/list as well as automatic conforming of digitised video and film scans onto timeline. Effects software includes OFX plug-in support, plus Blur, Convert, Invert, Blend, RGBA over, Composite, Shapes, Log To Linear conversion, and Linear To Log conversion.
Eyeheight's legalEyesFC video legaliser plug-in is designed to handle any combination of file formats and source colour-space available in Apple Final Cut editing and post-production software. Supporting SD, HD and beyond, PAL and NTSC, it provided composite, RGB, RGB-plus-Y and simultaneous composite-plus-RGB legalisation, all with user-adjustable soft clipping on high and low thresholds. High-precision colour-space conversion in legalEyesFC allows accurate limiting to ensure gamut compliance while keeping the full gamut available to the user. The companion safeEyesFC module broadcast safe-area markers and pixel-accurate text height measurement for commercials compliance.
Matrox Video Products Group has announced the availability of support for Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium software with Matrox MXO2 I/O devices for Microsoft Windows. Features of this new release include: full-resolution, full-frame-rate, multi-layer, real-time video editing via Matrox RT technology; fast H.264 hardware encoding for Blu-ray, the Web and mobile devices via Matrox MAX? technology; and professional audio and video input and output with 10-bit hardware up/down/cross conversion.
Panasonic's new AG-MSU10 P2 media storage unit simplifies the process of backing-up or aggregating P2 content to a larger removable solid-state drive. It has two slots: one for a P2 card, and the second for the AG-MBX10 removable housing designed to house a standard 2.5 inch SATA solid state memory module. The P2 Media Storage Unit incorporates a 3.2 inch LCD screen and permits one-touch operation. It provides a P2 thumbnail display and supports master-quality 10-bit AVC-Intra (100/50) and DVCPRO HD, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO and DV recording formats. Content is transferred from a P2 card to the SATA memory at four times real-time when recording in AVC-Intra 100 or DVCPRO HD. The MSU10 is battery-powered.
iPostscript
Video editing on an iPhone? VeriCorder Technology's '1st Video Net' software allows reporters to record and edit news stories for TV, radio and the web from an Apple iPhone or similar device. It allows 640 x 480 resolution video to be captured, edited and forwarded via wifi or cellular link. Features include automatic ingest into a newsroom system.

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