Yeah, you certainly can't build a good component analog HD capture system for a reasonable price. While there are lots of analog SD capture cards, since analog was around in SD for so long, professional HD has pretty much always been digital.
I have a game company client who needed to be able to do real-time screen caps of game play at HD. What we did was have them do a VGA output at 1280x720 60 fps. We then ran that through a converter box to take the RGB VGA to a component digital HD-SDI signal. That went into a BOXX HD capture system, using the Cineform Prospect HD real-time wavelet codec.
Works like a champ, but expect to pay at least $25K for that setup today. Probably half that next year. But there simply isn't a lot of demand for component analog HD capture, which means that's going to be a specialist, and expensive, part for a while. Moore's law doesn't quite apply to analog to digital conversion circuitry.
Pretty cool to watch recorded game play at 2.5x the detail of a high-end DVD.
This sounds exactly the same as D-Data's apparently defunct Digital Multilayer Disc format, which also was a multilayer red laser. The CTO is even a Russan/Israeli, although not Eugene Levich.
The default install of Word 2004 for Mac always shows the word count, in the lower right hand corner. It shows it as XXX/YYY, where XXX is how many words are before the cursor, and YYY is for the entire document.
As a professional writer, I can't imagine what wc would offer me that would be better than that! I often work on very specific total word targets for articles, so I can track if I'm under or (much more likely) over, and tweak accordingly.
Personally, I haven't been able to use Word on Windows since they started putting the icons in the wrong place in the menus. The PowerBook 17" is the ideal writing machine today, in my opinion.
Eh? DVD-ROM took a long time because the installed base took a long time to develop. You could buy DVD-ROM discs ages ago - stuff like ZIP code directories that would have taken up 6 CD-ROMs. The computer spec was done at the same time as the video spec. But as long as there are still computers shipping with CD-ROM drives only, software will still ship that way.
Remember how long CD-ROM was out before software completely stopped coming on floppies?
Both formats have announced mandatory player support for:
MPEG-2 MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 VC-1 (aka Windows Media Video Advanced Profile)
So, a content creator can make a disc in either, and all players will support all three. Not a win for either format here.
As for encoder speed, one implementation, especially one in alpha, doesn't mean much. Since an encoder simply needs to make a legal bitstream, different encoders can vary hugely in speed. I certainly have MPEG-2 encoders that are more than 20x faster than other ones, or 10x faster than themselves when comparing slow, high quality mode and fast draft mode.
The really important thing is how fast it can decode the worst-case legal bitstream, since that determines how fast a computer or DSP is required for reliable playback.
Well, if you were using MPEG-2, it'd be a bit of a stretch to get a long movie on a single-layer HD-DVD. But with the VC-1 and H.264 codecs available, you'll be able to get at least as much HD content on a HD-DVD as SD content on today's DVD.
Heck, 3 Mbps sustained is enough to make HD worth it. At 10 Mbps, you can pretty much do a 1920x1080 24p that'll look pretty well perfect on any consumer display under $20,000.
The HD-DVD format uses a thicker substrate than Blu-Ray, and hence needs less precise focusing, and thus probably would do better from a vibration perspective.
Adobe and Apple have both said they'll have "native" HDV editing before too long. Today, there is a Main Concept plugin for Premiere Pro that allows GOP-based editing of HDV, although it can't do real-time effects on modern computers. There's also CIneForm's Aspect HD, which transcodes the HDV to a high quality wavelet codec, which does provide real-time effects.
For the most part, a transcode isn't that big a deal - HDV is an acquisition format, not a mastering format. It'd be unusual to want to put video BACK onto a HDV tape.
Yes, MPEG-2 in Main Profile @ High Level 1440, which HDV uses, uses 4:2:0 color sampling. So, for each 2x2 block of luma samples, there is one chroma sample. So with the 1440x1080 frame size, color is really recorded at 720x540.
This is fine for acquisition - the real world doesn't have that much color detail. This can cause aliasing and stair-stepping when converting synthetic graphics, like colored text, to 4:2:0.
Except that Hollywood really wants 24p, not 60p, so it'll be LOWER bandwidth than 60i. Plus you get better compression efficiency with progressive content.
I really am flummoxed as why they didn't do 24p. Well, this is Sony, so I'm sure it's some self-destructive, PCjr style attempt to preserve market segmentation.
Yeah, Final Cut was able to do uncompressed HD with the Pinnacle CineWave years ago, at least back to FCP 2. And there are a lot of HD-SDI cards for uncompressed HD editing today. The big thing about FC HD was native support for the DVCPRO-HD codec, which gives a MASSIVE savings in storage requirements (both capacity and performance).
A single D5 HD film project right now is filling up nearly 2 TB of my 14-drive Xserve RAID. And I also need all of those drives run over dual-channel 2 Gbps FibreChannel to support reliable capture, due to the massive bandwidth. I have it formatted as RAID 5+0 - one 7-drive RAID 5 volume per FC controller, combined into RAID 0.
Yeah, best way to think of HDV is that it's the HD version of DV. It's NOT a pro broadcast format, but it is "good enough" for a wide variety of tasks, and likely will wind up going more upmarket than its creators considered.
Also, since HDV uses interframe MPEG-2, it gets a lot more bang for its bit than the other intraframe only formats get. But that makes it a pain to edit.
Beyond the broadcast/network side, Hollywood DV is mainly D5, which is the main thing I've worked with.
The ATSC (broadcast digital HD MPEG-2) standard in includes 1080 24p (perfect for film source) and 30p (perfect for not much) formats.
If I was the ruler of the digital video world (and I'm working on it), the HD broadcast formats would be 720 60p for stuff that's shot on 60i video today (news, reality), and 1080 24p for entertainment content (movies, dramatic series).
I really, really wish this camera supported 1080 24p - if it did it'd take over every film school in the nation in a matter of months!
The 720 v. 1080 argument compares 720 60p v. 1080 60i. 60p is better for sports because it is progressive scan. The JVC cameras are actually 30p, and so actually have less temporal information than 60i.
These new cameras are really better in almost every way than the JVC. Presumably JVC is working on an upgrade, now that they no longer have the market to themselves.
There are already real-time editing systems for HDV. Check out CineForm's "Aspect HD" package for Adobe Premiere Pro.
I imagine Final Cut users would transcode to DVCPRO-HD to use this, which already supports some real-time effects on that dual G5.
The worse case of HD v. SD is only 6.5x as many pixels is SD, which Moore's law eats up pretty fast. The hard thing in HD today is uncompressed real-time effects , since each stream of real-time effects can require over a gigabit a second of sustained bandwidth for 1080 60i 10-bit 4:2:2. Serious RAID.
And most of the Pro tape formats for HD use horizontal compression as well, including DVCPRO-HD and DVCAM. The hyper-expensive D5 ($50,000 for a low-end deck, let alone a camera) is the only shipping format that is square pixel HD. HDCAM-SR will be as well.
HD for distribution, like on the WMV DVD-ROM titles, also typically use 1440 wide anamorphic as well, to reduce decode CPU load. Although this will be less of an issue with Windows Media Player 10 out, which can offload a fair amount of decode onto a high-end video card.
1440x1080 is just fine for this market. Think of HDV as the HD version of DV.
But at this point, it looks reasonably likely that both will support MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264. Content creators will get to pick the format they want to use for a particular title.
Whatever your feelings about Microsoft, it really is a very good codec.
Both have VC-1 as one of the required codecs. But a content creator could use MPEG-2 instead for either one.
Also, they'll be using a format specified by Microsoft. There's no reason to think that they'll be porting from Microsoft's reference source code in any particular case. AFAIK, Microsoft isn't doing ANY DSP ports of the codec - everyone who is doing it is either building from the spec, or porting the x86 reference code.
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Yeah, you certainly can't build a good component analog HD capture system for a reasonable price. While there are lots of analog SD capture cards, since analog was around in SD for so long, professional HD has pretty much always been digital.
I have a game company client who needed to be able to do real-time screen caps of game play at HD. What we did was have them do a VGA output at 1280x720 60 fps. We then ran that through a converter box to take the RGB VGA to a component digital HD-SDI signal. That went into a BOXX HD capture system, using the Cineform Prospect HD real-time wavelet codec.
Works like a champ, but expect to pay at least $25K for that setup today. Probably half that next year. But there simply isn't a lot of demand for component analog HD capture, which means that's going to be a specialist, and expensive, part for a while. Moore's law doesn't quite apply to analog to digital conversion circuitry.
Pretty cool to watch recorded game play at 2.5x the detail of a high-end DVD.
This sounds exactly the same as D-Data's apparently defunct Digital Multilayer Disc format, which also was a multilayer red laser. The CTO is even a Russan/Israeli, although not Eugene Levich.
Guys,
The default install of Word 2004 for Mac always shows the word count, in the lower right hand corner. It shows it as XXX/YYY, where XXX is how many words are before the cursor, and YYY is for the entire document.
As a professional writer, I can't imagine what wc would offer me that would be better than that! I often work on very specific total word targets for articles, so I can track if I'm under or (much more likely) over, and tweak accordingly.
Personally, I haven't been able to use Word on Windows since they started putting the icons in the wrong place in the menus. The PowerBook 17" is the ideal writing machine today, in my opinion.
Eh? DVD-ROM took a long time because the installed base took a long time to develop. You could buy DVD-ROM discs ages ago - stuff like ZIP code directories that would have taken up 6 CD-ROMs. The computer spec was done at the same time as the video spec. But as long as there are still computers shipping with CD-ROM drives only, software will still ship that way.
Remember how long CD-ROM was out before software completely stopped coming on floppies?
That'd be like a full employment act for rotoscopers. Have any idea how labor intensive it is to airbrush at 24 frames a second :).
Seriously, nobody looks perfect at 1920x1080 in closeup.
Both formats have announced mandatory player support for:
MPEG-2
MPEG-4 AVC/H.264
VC-1 (aka Windows Media Video Advanced Profile)
So, a content creator can make a disc in either, and all players will support all three. Not a win for either format here.
As for encoder speed, one implementation, especially one in alpha, doesn't mean much. Since an encoder simply needs to make a legal bitstream, different encoders can vary hugely in speed. I certainly have MPEG-2 encoders that are more than 20x faster than other ones, or 10x faster than themselves when comparing slow, high quality mode and fast draft mode.
The really important thing is how fast it can decode the worst-case legal bitstream, since that determines how fast a computer or DSP is required for reliable playback.
Well, if you were using MPEG-2, it'd be a bit of a stretch to get a long movie on a single-layer HD-DVD. But with the VC-1 and H.264 codecs available, you'll be able to get at least as much HD content on a HD-DVD as SD content on today's DVD.
Heck, 3 Mbps sustained is enough to make HD worth it. At 10 Mbps, you can pretty much do a 1920x1080 24p that'll look pretty well perfect on any consumer display under $20,000.
The HD-DVD format uses a thicker substrate than Blu-Ray, and hence needs less precise focusing, and thus probably would do better from a vibration perspective.
Adobe and Apple have both said they'll have "native" HDV editing before too long. Today, there is a Main Concept plugin for Premiere Pro that allows GOP-based editing of HDV, although it can't do real-time effects on modern computers. There's also CIneForm's Aspect HD, which transcodes the HDV to a high quality wavelet codec, which does provide real-time effects.
For the most part, a transcode isn't that big a deal - HDV is an acquisition format, not a mastering format. It'd be unusual to want to put video BACK onto a HDV tape.
Yes, MPEG-2 in Main Profile @ High Level 1440, which HDV uses, uses 4:2:0 color sampling. So, for each 2x2 block of luma samples, there is one chroma sample. So with the 1440x1080 frame size, color is really recorded at 720x540.
This is fine for acquisition - the real world doesn't have that much color detail. This can cause aliasing and stair-stepping when converting synthetic graphics, like colored text, to 4:2:0.
Oh, D5 definitely does 1080. Most of my HD work is with D5 24p 1920x1080.
It rocks.
If only the decks didn't cost $50,000 and up...
Except that Hollywood really wants 24p, not 60p, so it'll be LOWER bandwidth than 60i. Plus you get better compression efficiency with progressive content.
I really am flummoxed as why they didn't do 24p. Well, this is Sony, so I'm sure it's some self-destructive, PCjr style attempt to preserve market segmentation.
If I might toot my own Third Law:
Democratizing media technologies raise the total number of worthwhile pieces, but reduces the percentage of worthwhile pieces.
Yeah, Final Cut was able to do uncompressed HD with the Pinnacle CineWave years ago, at least back to FCP 2. And there are a lot of HD-SDI cards for uncompressed HD editing today. The big thing about FC HD was native support for the DVCPRO-HD codec, which gives a MASSIVE savings in storage requirements (both capacity and performance).
A single D5 HD film project right now is filling up nearly 2 TB of my 14-drive Xserve RAID. And I also need all of those drives run over dual-channel 2 Gbps FibreChannel to support reliable capture, due to the massive bandwidth. I have it formatted as RAID 5+0 - one 7-drive RAID 5 volume per FC controller, combined into RAID 0.
Yeah, best way to think of HDV is that it's the HD version of DV. It's NOT a pro broadcast format, but it is "good enough" for a wide variety of tasks, and likely will wind up going more upmarket than its creators considered.
Also, since HDV uses interframe MPEG-2, it gets a lot more bang for its bit than the other intraframe only formats get. But that makes it a pain to edit.
Beyond the broadcast/network side, Hollywood DV is mainly D5, which is the main thing I've worked with.
The ATSC (broadcast digital HD MPEG-2) standard in includes 1080 24p (perfect for film source) and 30p (perfect for not much) formats.
If I was the ruler of the digital video world (and I'm working on it), the HD broadcast formats would be 720 60p for stuff that's shot on 60i video today (news, reality), and 1080 24p for entertainment content (movies, dramatic series).
I really, really wish this camera supported 1080 24p - if it did it'd take over every film school in the nation in a matter of months!
The 720 v. 1080 argument compares 720 60p v. 1080 60i. 60p is better for sports because it is progressive scan. The JVC cameras are actually 30p, and so actually have less temporal information than 60i.
These new cameras are really better in almost every way than the JVC. Presumably JVC is working on an upgrade, now that they no longer have the market to themselves.
There are already real-time editing systems for HDV. Check out CineForm's "Aspect HD" package for Adobe Premiere Pro.
I imagine Final Cut users would transcode to DVCPRO-HD to use this, which already supports some real-time effects on that dual G5.
The worse case of HD v. SD is only 6.5x as many pixels is SD, which Moore's law eats up pretty fast. The hard thing in HD today is uncompressed real-time effects , since each stream of real-time effects can require over a gigabit a second of sustained bandwidth for 1080 60i 10-bit 4:2:2. Serious RAID.
And most of the Pro tape formats for HD use horizontal compression as well, including DVCPRO-HD and DVCAM. The hyper-expensive D5 ($50,000 for a low-end deck, let alone a camera) is the only shipping format that is square pixel HD. HDCAM-SR will be as well.
HD for distribution, like on the WMV DVD-ROM titles, also typically use 1440 wide anamorphic as well, to reduce decode CPU load. Although this will be less of an issue with Windows Media Player 10 out, which can offload a fair amount of decode onto a high-end video card.
1440x1080 is just fine for this market. Think of HDV as the HD version of DV.
Your license for the patent is for using the software to make a master. It doesn't cover mass production of encoded content.
The company that stamps your disc takes care of that aspect. I think it's around $0.04 per disc these days.
There are two camps on the physical media side.
But at this point, it looks reasonably likely that both will support MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264. Content creators will get to pick the format they want to use for a particular title.
Whatever your feelings about Microsoft, it really is a very good codec.
Both have VC-1 as one of the required codecs. But a content creator could use MPEG-2 instead for either one.
Also, they'll be using a format specified by Microsoft. There's no reason to think that they'll be porting from Microsoft's reference source code in any particular case. AFAIK, Microsoft isn't doing ANY DSP ports of the codec - everyone who is doing it is either building from the spec, or porting the x86 reference code.
Sony is going to use their own physical media format for the discs. No reason why they would need to use the codec (or not use it, for that matter).
Obviously Sony, as a big proponent of Blu-ray, is going to want to have the PS3 be able to play back the video discs as well.