Telecine to hard drive?

[Kei Sugimoto]

With so many new cheap uncompressed cards coming out, I was wondering if uncompressed 4:2:2 editing is possible at home. Since buying a Digibeta deck is out of mind, my question is this. Why can't I just take a few firewire drives to a place like Duart and ask them to telecine directly onto my hard drive? After editing at home, I would just take the hard drive with the edited project to the facility again and ask them to transfer it to a Digibeta tape. My friend says,

"although it is technically possible, no post houses would ever allow it because it would put them out of business. If it was possible, everybody would be doing that."

Is this really so? If post houses won't transfer to hard drives, then whats the point of all the "prosumer" uncompressed editing systems?

[David Mullen ASC]

I was over at Ascent Media doing the HD transfer for "Northfork" and I asked if they ever transferred directly to hard drives and they said they had for some effects companies.

[Michael Nash]

Panasonic's DVCPRO50 tape format is also 4:2:2. A deck is still pricey for the private buyer, but it's an alternative to Digital Betacam.

 

Last year Panasonic got together with Apple to support 50MB DV over firewire into FCP4, in conjunction with their release of the SDX-900 camera.

[GeorgeSelinsky]

My friend says,

"although it is technically possible, no post houses would ever allow it because it would put them out of business. If it was possible, everybody would be doing that."

Is this really so?

I don't think that's a consideration. Bono Labs does direct to hard drive transfers in HDTV for FCP editing. They supply the drive and you have to return it, place a deposit on it.

 

If facilities tried to do that, alll it would take is one facility to offer direct to hard drive transfer and then everyone would run to them with their business. It's the beauty of a market economy, competition benefits you directly.

 

One of the problems I think is that it takes a lot of work to get a good compatible system going. I'm sure they'd have to have a method of co ntrolling the hard drive system and that would require writing software. There is already an established interface between their tape decks and the telecine. Furthermore, then we have the big issue of "what format you want it in"? Windows, Mac? What compression? That's a lot of variables. How do you do an instant playback? Gotta have software that integrates all of this and as of now it seems only Bono labs has developed something that works.

 

Most people are just used to taking their tape and going to a post house wheve everything is sitting there for them. It's few of us indie stragglers that can't afford the stuff, and we're not exactly the most dynamic force in the marketplace.

 

- G.

[Kei Sugimoto]

Thanks for all the replies.

I guess its just the money strapped independent people that think about such short cuts. I was just thinking, in terms of compatibility, if we could just ask the post house to give us files in uncompressed AVI or MOV format. Then we could just convert it into any format that our editing systems wants. It would be a lot of render time, but we could save hundreds of dollars renting an off line/ online suite and paying for each dubb. This would especially be a good option to have for HD as editing systems become more affordable.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I was speaking to someone who was considering setting up such a system a few weeks ago. There are issues but they're solvable; I haven't heard from him in a while.

 

Phil

[Tenolian Bell]

It's only a matter of time as Sony and Panasonic are already making their way to tapeless media. But I wouldn't necissarily look to that route as being a great deal cheaper. Seeing as 4GB flash card in Panasonic's P2 system is $2000, and 4GB in video is nothing.

 

But I do wonder are $200 serial ATA drives with Firewire or USB 2 connections really satisfactory for uncompressed 10 bit video? But anyway it appears wide use of tapeless media is coming soon.

 

I don't think your friend was totally correct in that post houses will go out of business just because tapeless media being used in the telecine session. High end post houses provide services, expertise, quality and speed that still can't be had quite the same with a G5 in your home office.

[Kei Sugimoto]

Even if the HDDs are not satisfactory for editing, it would be a great way to transport the data. You could just copy the files to your RAID array once you get home. In doing so you would be able to save the cost of tape media and expensive dubb. (But its also notable that there are new Firewire800 raid array enclosures that could be considered portable. http://www.cooldrives.com/so13ideexras.html )

 

But my real curiosity is, what are all these "prosumer" HD editing cards for if the average indie editor cant afford to have a deck at home? How is he/she gonna get the video in and out of his/her computer? Is HD just a term bounced around as a marketing ploy? (Kind of like "realtime"?)

[GeorgeSelinsky]

The way I feel it, the telecine houses are going to probably find some charge to throw into the direct to HD transfer so it won't be as cheap as we want it to be. In other words, it's not like you're going just pay for time and goodbye. I'm sure there will be a nice "set up fee" or a higher cost transfer time, or both.

 

- G.

[Tenolian Bell]

Many editors I know rent Digibeta or HD decks, they include the price f the rental in their budget for the job

[Mitch Gross]

Getting a computer and hard drives integrated into a telecine suite is no small task. You're asking to turn a computer into a "virtual VTR" and have it fully controlled by the edit controller of the system. And it has to be field accurate, hit correct "A" frames, NEVER drop a frame, accept timecode in control track and VITC, deal with KeyKode and run in real time. It can be done and people are working on it, but it's certainly not as simple as plugging in your hard drive. Currently the easiest way to do it is to go to a tape format and then encode to the hard drive seperately.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> Getting a computer and hard drives integrated into a telecine suite is no small

> task. You're asking to turn a computer into a "virtual VTR" and have it fully

> controlled by the edit controller of the system.

 

I'm not sure that people who'd want TK to hard drives would be all that worried about it, but that isn't actually that hard to do.

 

> And it has to be field accurate

> hit correct "A" frames,

 

Bah, all this NTSC drivel!

 

> NEVER drop a frame

 

Never happens unless the drives are getting full, and rarely even then. Today I put my 128th gigabyte onto a 130Gb drive, and it was fine (two forty minute sequences, zero drops) This is now a reliable part of desktop computing.

 

> accept timecode in control track and VITC

 

Well, it doesn't. Assuming you're talking DV, there are component to 1394 convertors which handle timecode. VITC is a rather meaningless concept to a DV stream of whatever format.

 

> deal with KeyKode

 

What? Why? How? It would be NICE to have some kind of keykode encoding but that would be an extension to almost any existing file-based video format. Ordinarily you'd supply the same .flx file for each DV chunk as you would with a tape, which would connect the timecode embedded in the file with the keykode.

 

I guess you could put the keykode information in the user bit space for each frame, but I know of no NLE software which would read it. Yet.

 

> but it's certainly not as simple as plugging in your hard drive.

 

Well it sort of is unless you want to get very picky about device control as opposed to resolving to hit two buttons at once to make the transfer. This is the big issue; most DV recording computers won't act as a firewire device control slave, although according to spec they should.

 

I'd also always advocate making a tape backup of any material expensively transferred to hard disk as well. Hard drives crash. Tape doesn't.

 

Phil

[DanStewart]

Not just DV though Phil, needs to handle uncompressed 601.

Did you get my email?

Cheers

Dan

[Kei Sugimoto]

I guess I was thinking in much more simple terms. For more ghetto style editing I thought it would be nice to just hook up the component output of the telecine to a computers NLE and just press "Capture" and "Play" at the same time. For short music videos or student projects, timecode isnt such a big deal anyway. Especially if everything is going to be edited online, there will be no need to move between different systems.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> Not just DV though Phil, needs to handle uncompressed 601.

 

So switch the component-to-DV convertor to a component-to-SDI convertor and you're more or less there. There's many more file formats you could come across now, but if you're working with the kind of people who want it on a hard drive, then a Huffman AVI is liable to be the most applicable. This may imply a conversion stage.

 

> email

 

Yes, sorry, will get on it.

 

Phil

[Tenolian Bell]

For more ghetto style editing

Interesting how the term ghetto has come of use in the lexicon to symbolize almost anything of a lower stature, especially when considering the people who primarily live in the ghetto's of where this term come's from.

[Jason Maeda]

"especially when considering the people who primarily live in the ghetto's of where this term come's from."

 

huh?

[Alex Ellerman]

This is an interesting topic, and certainly a prescient matter in light of FCP HD... i think the limiting factor at this point is the price of a terabyte storage system... My reading frequently quotes 1-2 terabytes as the storage capacity for a feature film... if you had a 10:1 shooting ratio, you'd be in for an expensive solution...

 

is it 9MB per second for 2k data? Is the math close to 10TB for a 90min. feature with a 7:1 shooting ratio? Am i close? (9MBX24fpsx60x90x7)=8.1TB?

 

How much space do you save by going D5 instead? HDcam? Digibeta?

 

My latest macmall quotes 3.5TB Apple Xserve RAID series for $10,994.00

 

technology keeps advancing... storage will catch up... looks like it could make sense for a short, but maybe not a feature right now. Please correct my math if it's wrong - it's also predicated on the assumption i pulled good data from somewhere. ;)

best,

t.t.

[Kei Sugimoto]

In terms of storage, I think its not that expensive if you also consider "ghetto" drive arrays. You can get a 200gig hard drive for around $150 now

(http://www.essencompu.com/nupplysingar.asp?ID=5709)

and a 6 drive ATA raid enclosure for $450

(http://shop.store.yahoo.com/extremepcgear/prosx6000pro.html).

Put 6 drives together in a raid0 comfiguration and that comes to 1.2 terabytes at $1350. This configuration should easily be able to sustain 20MB/sec.

(http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040426/index.html)

There's no technical support on home made options like these but theres nothing that hard about a raid array, and it would be great for people who want to shoot film on really low budget.

 

Add in a decklink uncompressed card for $900

(http://www.blackmagic-design.com/site/decklinkx.htm)

And you'd have a full uncompressed component editing system.

 

Thats only if we could telecine to hard drive.

[Alex Ellerman]

I thought you could telecine to a hard drive? I also thought there was something about external RAID being 8 bit and internal being 10 bit when dealing with uncompressed data...

 

But I do believe you could telecine 2k data to a hard drive...

tt

 

 

I copied this from another board as an fyi...

Also keep in mind that working in 6K resolution will result in files,

storage needs, CPU time required ... of NINE times that of 2K;  4K

requires FOUR times that of 2K. Even the fastest computer hardware

becomes less than adequate on these higher resolutions.

and found this at digitalpraxis:

Equally important from a business perspective, a 2K image requires about 12Mb of data per 10 bit log RGB frame. A 4K image requires about 48Mb of data, a 1K image 3Mb and a video SD image 1Mb. This shows the level of technology investment required to manipulate 4K vs. 2K vs. 1K, which has a direct impact on the cost of film production and therefore the profitability of any given film project based on the number of bums paying to sit on seats to see the film... Joe Public is unlikely to be willing to pay more to see a 4K processed film vs. a HD film, except for an occasional IMAX style outing!

Source: white paper on D.I. at digitalpraxis.net  Steve Shaw

 

I'm researching the data/storage needs of the lesser formats if anyone has any numbers they can throw at me (D1, D2, HDCAM, D5)...

[Mitch Gross]

You can certainly telecine 2k data files to hard drives. We're talking data files here, so why couldn't you? This is generally how this material is stored, and yes, it is not a low budget option. The processors and storage devices need to be fairly fast to handle that material at anything approaching real time, otherwise even simple editing would become impracticable if not impossible. And once you moved into effects or color correction the whole operation would slow to a standstill. There are facilities now with rooms full of terrabytes of memory, and set up in drive arrarys that work very fast with great reliability and are interconnected through a large server system. It's a far cry from a laptop running FCP.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> once you moved into effects or color correction the whole operation would slow

> to a standstill

 

This has been common dogma for as long as there's been desktop computer systems, but frankly - it simply isn't true any longer. Even Adobe Premiere degrades quite cleanly when you put 2K data through it from quite standard hard drives, and processing colour correction is far from the behemoth that people believe it to be. Doing it in realtime is very tricky indeed, but try this: create a 2048x1536 still frame in Photoshop, and watch how long it takes to "render" a colour correction using, say, the Levels filter (which is more capable and computationally intensive than the primary corrector on a Da Vinci). What rendering, you say? Exactly. It probably takes about a quarter of a second.

 

Okay, so you're up to four frames a second - that's a horrifying 6:1 rendering time for your feature film - oh, the pain! Sorry, but that's only a day's rendering, and you can buy the kit to do it for much, much less than it would cost for the job in Soho.

 

Much as I would prefer to distance myself from the rabid hi-def prosletysation that's been going on of late, I believe that we will see desktop computing push the current high end out of colour correction, and I believe that this may well happen before the long-prophesied marginalisation of 35mm as an acquisition format. Spending many thousands of pounds on realtime correction to save yourself one day in rendering time is simply not an equation that makes sense to me.

 

Phil

[radar71]

This is an interesting thread. obviously it would be great to get the tape out of the equation. i shot a music video recently on S16, telecined with spirit/davinci to digi beta and then had to find someone to digitize it all for me. it was quite a pain to get it correctly into a decent codec to edit and composite with. we ended up using the cinewave codec and digitizing with an FCP system with capture card (pinnacle?). still it would have been allot cooler if i could have had my hard drive in the telecine room accepting simple uncompressed 8 or 10 bit video.

 

Phil did you say that it's possible to edit with 2k files on fcp HD running a raid0?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> Phil did you say that it's possible to edit with 2k files on fcp HD running a raid0?

 

Not in realtime. Realtime 10bit 2K requires around 300Mbyte/sec, which is achievable with a few thousands' worth of SCSI arrays. What you can do is do proxies and render, which has no serious drive requirements at all, or watch it at a few frames a second for timing.

 

Phil

[Bryan Jacobson]

Data is a great thing, I can't say though giving the cost of some transferrs I would rely soley on a hardrive, there is always a margin for drive faliure. My personal opinion; I would always keep a back up on tape.