HDTV On Fire*

One of the most significant milestones in digital non-linear post-production during the past year has been the advent of disk-based editing and on-line finishing using true HDTV images. Back in April at the NAB show, Discreet, was the first company to show uncompressed HDTV flowing into and out of a sophisticated NLE system, with no scanning or rendering. This was accomplished by demonstrating real-time input and output on its high-end fire* edit system. Discreet's breakthrough in real-time high definition image manipulation was made possible by incorporating a prototype of the remarkable HD I/O board developed by SGI. Once SGI's HD I/O board went into general release in June for $18,000, more than 20 post-production facilities incorporated it into their fire* systems, giving them the same real-time access to HDTV that they have grown accustomed to with NTSC video.At Hollywood's Complete Post, editor Bob Blanks has been using a fire* system with real time HD input and output to create many of the effects for CBS's ""King Of Queens"" sitcom, including the show's extensive greenscreen composites. In Washington, D.C, Jeff Wiengarten has been editing real-time HD on fire* at the Interface Video Group PBS promos that tout the advantages of high definition television. And in Birmingham, Alabama, John Pope has completed several high-profile HD productions on his fire* system at Atelier Video, including a sales piece for Coastal Living magazine and a corporate video for Malibu Boats, a top manufacturer of ski boats.But since few people have access to HDTV screens it is not likely that many will get a chance to see how great the HD output of these fire* systems looks - unless they can get over to one of the more than 350 Best Buy stores where a Toys for Tots promotional spot called ""Magic Gift"" is running on their HDTV displays this holiday season. Though the piece was originally edited in NTSC by Randy Gackstetter at Pixel Farm in Minneapolis, the whole project was re-created in 1080i HDTV on a Discreet fire* system at Crawford Communications Inc. in Atlanta.""Magic Gift"" director Tom Betting said, ""There is not a lot out there that is available in HD right now, so it just made sense for Best Buy to begin creating their own. I was very impressed that Crawford Communications could take the NTSC master, re-digitize the images from the original 35mm negatives using a Philips Spirit DataCine at 2K resolution, and re-create the project with all its effects on the Discreet fire*.""Tom Fulks, senior effects editor at Crawford, supervised the high def reincarnation of ""Magic Gift."" Fulks obtained the first SGI HD I/O board when it became available last summer. Fulks has been a longtime fan of fire* since the release of software version 1.0 and is enthusiastic about Discreet's approach to HDTV. ""I love it because it makes my life a lot simpler,"" he said. ""Previously we had to laboriously scan all of our HD material into the edit system frame by frame from the Spirit DataCine. To put this in perspective, on a recent HD video presentation for a museum, it required a day and a half just to input 22 minutes of footage at four-and-a-half fps. To get our edited piece out to a DLT 7000 data cartridge for eventual transfer to film, it took an hour and a half to output the final 15-minute HD master. Now, with fire* and its real-time capability, we can output an HDTV project to Panasonic's D-5 tape as quickly as we used to do it with analog or standard definition digital video in NTSC.""Though it is leading the industry in real-time HD I/O, Discreet is continuing to push the envelope of disk-based HDTV post-production. In November, Discreet released its software version 3.6 for fire*, giving the system two major new features. As Sandra Buckingham, senior product manager for editing at Discreet, said, ""The first is an optional software compression algorithm which they call the Sony HDCAM software codec. This feature provides support for Sony's current 30fps HDCAM format. This lets you take the SDTI (serial digital transport interface) output from a Sony HDCAM deck into a standard 601 port on fire*, and decode the HDCAM data stream to provide full resolution images.""As we demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, this means that facilities that choose not to invest in SGI's HD I/O board can still import true HD images through a software codec,"" Buckingham said, ""although the video will be recorded to disk at considerably slower than real-time. For example, using a four-CPU Rack Onyx 2 platform, it might take one second per frame to decode the images and about three seconds per frame to encode them again. However, once the images have been brought into fire* with version 3.6, editing proceeds at the same speed as it would with any other format of video.""The second new feature of software version 3.6 is support for a process Discreet calls ""universal mastering,"" because it enables 24fps editing, including the insertion of 3/2 pulldown and removal on the fly in real-time. Though it will not support the new 24fps version of Sony's HDCAM until Sony releases a standardized codec specification, this new feature will greatly facilitate the direct editing of television shows shot on film, still the preferred capture medium for most primetime programming and commercials. In addition, the universal mastering concept in version 3.6 simplifies the conversion of a final master to NTSC, PAL or any of the ATSC high definition formats the networks are using.""The beauty of our universal mastering capability,"" Buckingham said, ""is that with it fire* will let you edit your project at high resolution and then down-convert it to other formats only during the output process. Since fire* is the only non-linear edit system that lets you edit at 24fps and easily create the final master at 1080i, or any other ATSC recognized format, we feel this gives it a unique advantage for post-production facilities that are facing the challenge of serving a variety of clients with different format needs."" Most impressively, Buckingham said, the upgrade to version 3.6 is free to owners of either the current 3.01 or 3.5 versions of fire* software, though the optional Sony HDCAM software codec will be $7,500.Discreet has already been acclaimed for being the first to present real-time disk-based HDTV input and output at a public NAB demonstration by using SGI's HD I/O board on its fire* system. Now, with the November release of version 3.6, Discreet is providing editors with a free software-based HDTV I/O alternative that trades real-time speed for the cost efficiency of a software codec. At least two other companies will have real-time HDTV input and output NLEs by NAB 2000, and it is becoming apparent that if the voracious appetite of primetime HD broadcasting is going to be satisfied, this will have to become a technology trend of the future. But by being the first to make real-time disk-based high definition editing a reality before an audience of its peers, Discreet's technological leadership has given it the honor of being the first to publicly put HDTV on fire*.

Source: Editing Technology