Daniel Smith

Digibetas are generally used for capture and intermediate storage in the broadcasters I've worked for, for standard definition applications. HDCAM-SR for most HD, or DNxHD, as many more people are using EVS for studio capture/insert playback.

Hi,

 

A while ago, I posited the idea that one of those little pocket oscilloscopes could be used as a waveform monitor. So, I bought one, since they're not too expensive and I wanted one for other reasons (truly, I am a geek).

 

 

 

Cute, eh?

 

Anyway, as a WFM, the short answer is: sort of, not really.

 

Below is an image captured using the scope's inbuilt screen grab feature. At this point, it's reading the Y output of a Blackmagic card that's displaying a 1080p25 signal with some picture on it.

 

 

 

As we can see, the sync pulse and one line's worth of luminance information is clearly visible, and it does work to some extent as a single-line waveform monitor. What it doesn't do is to integrate all the lines of the image together, in the way an old-style CRT scope (and old style waveform monitors) do. The rate at which it displays each line's worth of information is limited by the refresh rate on its little LCD and you therefore don't get the integration effect that's intrinsic to CRT scopes.

 

So, you can't really use it as a waveform monitor. There's an outside chance I may be able to modify the software to make that possible, but I'll have to look into it.

 

P

To be honest though at least it gives you a rough approximation of exposure, which is better than trusting a monitor with a 100x10^200 contrast ratio where even the sun looks correctly exposed.

Hi,

I'm not involved with this personally (I was the engineering manager for Ravensbourne 2011) but I thought I'd help out share the stream for the end of year degree show from Ravensbourne. Run mostly by second year students.

http://www.ravensbourne2012.com/live

Apologies wasn't really thinking about portability..

Check out the 'Test Chest' or try Phabrix.

Could possibly find an SD-SDI Tektronix second hand for a reasonable price. Failing that, there's some Tektronix rasterizers around for an even more reasonable price that have VGA outs.

It's just that BT.601/709 difference in down conversion I'd be wary of.

Ya, it sounds warmer and many artist prefer it. Especially me. What would you like to prove that we like it better? Are you trying to be a smarty pants? Why don't you do your own research with some head phones. If I said rock and roll is better than country would you have asked me the same question? I'm not sure if your a jackass yet. Can you provide some info or test' that prove that your not please.

Nothing wrong with liking it at all, I can completely understand the artistic use of analogue mediums. It's just it sounded like you were totally obscuring your own argument beyond any logical sense to prove analogue formats were factually better, something I wouldn't have a problem with if you could back it up.

2" tape is better

Could you explain this a little more or provide any objective test results?

These are to a degree waterproof. Yellow indicates 110V (really only seen on construction sites where it's achieved with 50-0-50 tapped transformers down from 240, for safety).

On that note, if anybody's interested it's definitely worth looking up ingress protection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code

Most 16a cee-forms are IP44, but you sometimes see IP67. Was quite a challenge during the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race trying to keep everything safe.

Fortunately the yellow cee-forms are designed with a slightly different 'key' shape and won't connect with blue cee-forms, even though they look the same (the notch that normally indicates up or down is rotated around 180 degrees.)

Sorry, this was too good not to share

It's often the small but key things that get overlooked. A beautifully shot film - graded by the director on a £150 TFT. An amazing drama - no sound-post, let alone ADR. Or better yet, ADR with no-alignment.

I'm hardly one to talk but generally the better productions I've worked on have normally been where the guys in charge have had both technical and creative competence. I think my biggest grief is still the way people think it's acceptable to grade 4th generation dubs and expect to pull HDR results out of it.

I don't know of any official details from SMPTE surrounding 6G-SDI but please let it not accept any form of interlacing, at all, whatsoever. (Please excuse the tangent.)

As long as you're sure whatever's coming down the 4-pin XLR is rated respectively it shouldn't be an issue. Buzz the cores out and test for positive polarity with a multimeter before plugging it in, better safe than sorry with power.

That is the remarkable thing about film, it has no Quantization by itself. Which is why when a film with a damaged negative is "restored" to digital, most filmmakers would be sure to save both the damaged original, as well as a new 3 strip separation. SO that when the next cycle of technical obsolescence comes around they can decide if the best material is the pre or post digitaly processed version.

I can understand keeping the original negative, when scanning methods improve there may be value in re-scanning the original negatives and restoring them, as in the case of the 'Jaws' video posted in this thread.

However to scan the film, re-edit/touch and then burn back to film, and then re-scan, it's the difference information I'd be interested to see before and after this process. Is any quality lost during the transfer to film and back/is the film format able to retain picture detail with the same strict quantisation levels found in digital.

I'm not referring to quantisation in the sense that film has binary values, but in the sense of, is the format able to retain picture detail to a finer accuracy than say for instance, a 14-bit scanning system, how much does it drift, how linear in nature is the loss (if any.)

Like I said, I'm not saying film does drift or isn't accurate enough, but I'd still be interested in seeing test results before and after.

There are numerous examples of what is historically very important film which has survived for over 100 years. Examples are first world war footage and, at this particular time, film of the Titanic. I doubt very much whether that footage was archived in any sophisticated way for many of the years it has survived, indeed much of the German wartime film survived the destruction of Berlin and much of Germany in the run-up to the end of the second world war.

 

A comparison is how well video imagery has survived since it was developed. Even now, there is a huge question mark over its longevity and that follows a number of stages (if the process can be regarded as a single line of development, which it is possible to argue it is not) which still require a very considerable degree of "anticipation" or hope. Trying to view early video is almost impossible, and even where early imagery has survived, the quality is quite poor.

 

It is possible that tape will help with the longevity issue of video imagery, but we "know" that film works. It would be pretty disasterous to rely on a "possibility" and then find that the "possibility" did not deliver. That is not to say that it should not be tried out, but a sensible approach would be to continue with archiving on film whilst allowing tape or some other form of archiving to prove itself.

 

"Better the devil you know, than one whom you do not", comes to mind.

I'd still be interested in viewing difference mattes between film before archival and after re-scan.

No one stores high value content on one LTO tape, nor one hard disk, so making comparisons between one LTO tape or one hard disk VS a roll of film isn't a practical comparison. Data redundancy by today's standards makes digital archival achievable theoretically for as long as we want it to.

What attracts me at least to digital archival over film is having the confidence that I'll get back exactly what I put in. Which is why I'd be interested in seeing PQA results between pre-archived material stored on film and then after archival and re-scan. You could probably argue that if quality was lost it was due to the re-scan not the negative, an optical to digital process I would assume will improve in years to come (a process improving faster than the deterioration of the negative.)

Admittedly I have very little experience with film, but I remain unsure about its ability to retain picture detail within such discrete quantisation levels found in digital systems, for instance 14-bit scanners - from archival through till re-scan.

I doubt this will be worth it because of the postage costs but I always shop bryant-unlimited.co.uk. I've always got a good deal there.

There is so much valuable media stored in film archives and in terms on long term storage, it's a much safer option than digital file formats which seem to have an extremely short life span. The best bet seems to be B & W colour separation. Storage is simpler than digital, because it doesn't need an active process of archiving compared to the digital media. The parts used on film equipment are mechanical, so easily manufactured by machine shops. Decoding obsolete computer files could be more difficult in 50 years.

 

It probably becomes more worthwhile on projects that have a high investment and a long economic life, such as feature films.

 

Unfortunately, long term archiving is the elephant in the room with the digital media. There have been a number of reports on the issue in recent years.

I can see the value in that film is able to retain the quality of its pictures for many years, in comparison to hard drives for instance in which from my experience last around 5 years (normally because of mechanical failure - but not that SSD's are much better.) I think you're right in that it's more worthwhile for material with high economic life, I think the process of transferring to film and back isn't as flexible as accessing data held on a RAID array, although in the context of archival I don't think flexibility is necessarily an important factor, and when you're Twentieth Century Fox dealing with the original prints from 'Star Wars', I don't think the cost of doing so is an issue.

I think what would put most people off archiving onto film nowadays is having or paying for the facilities to transfer the content to film and back again, along with physical storage space, demanding storage conditions, along with the time it takes and any loss of quality over time and/or through transferring content to the optical domain and back. Let alone the fear that manufacturers may not support the technology in 20 years time (ie. Try getting spare parts.)

The Sennheiser ME66 isn't bad for its money, I've had many good experiences with it.

many of the 'respected' universities don't as unfortunately film and television are seen as 'soft' subjects.

I'm studying a BSc in broadcast engineering and when I posed interest in a telecommunications position in the Navy I was told all broadcast engineers did was change light bulbs on a stage. I think it's fair to say subjects surrounding television and film are not always as academic as pure STEM courses, but they have their own unique challenges, of which anyone without any experience in either industry are often ignorant towards.

Everything in the image seems to have a soft appearance to it, especially around the edges of the wind blades. I read somewhere that pro colorists use some sort of color chart or something and get color fixed perfectly. I could never figure out exactly how to color correct properly. I do study footage from documentaries like this to attempt to help myself color correct better but it never seems to work. I mean how do they know what saturation levels certain things are and stuff? Would calibrating my monitor with something like Spyder 3 color calibrator help because it could also be my monitor, Im sure the pros use much better color correction stuff than I have at home.

Many professionals use grade 1 monitoring, which is far too expensive for most people to afford independently. The environment you are grading in is also important to consider, if the room is painted sky blue, it may affect your eyes overall perception of colour thus affecting the outcome of your grade. Lighting is also important, try and work in a dimly lit room where your perception won't vary as a result of surrounding light.

Normally grades consist of a technical grade followed by more of an artistic grade. The technical grade often entails exposure, black level and colour matching alterations, whereas the artistic grade is more about making things look pretty (ie. lowering the detail to create a silky effect, like the one you referred to.)

The real problem with grading is that our eyes are constantly grading themselves, thus altering our perception and ability to grade images impartially.

Check out effects like bilateral blur in After Effects.

Here is an image from a Limp Bizkit documentary, it seems the colors are smoothed out or something. I cant seem to figure out how they got it to look so good. I have Color Finesse in adobe after effects cs5. Im pretty sure the footage was shot on Hi8 or something but it still looks amazing.

 

Looks like the hues of the blues in the sky could change to produce more of a purplish/magenta tone, adding reds only to the blue component. The relatively low contrast helps. I'd try lowering the detail/clarity levels to give the image a pearly effect.

But she said in her original posting that she thought super 8 was cheap but then realized it wasn't. She should've done the research.

 

And beside that, there are SO many options. Budget shouldn't be a barrier, but an opportunity. And there have been many great suggestions on how to fulfill the assignment and shoot on film. She hasn't asked for help on that. I had poor students in my class who couldn't afford things and I helped them by loaning my own gear. But they came to ME for help. But she is unwilling to consider our advice, or seek help to resolve her problem. Instead she has leaped straight to, "How can I cheat and shoot on digital and fool the professor into thinking it's film." Worse, she has asked us to help, because she can't even cheat on her own.

 

It is not because she can't afford film that I am upset. It is because her first impulse to solve her problem is to cheat on a class assignment, and for that alone she deserves to flunk.

Then hopefully Aubrey will take into account what is being said and will see sense not to cheat but to be honest and open with her tutor and seek the appropriate advice on what steps to take next. Leaving things any longer is the worst thing she can do right now.

Every time I took a class in college that had a lab or some other requirement that needed outside materials the school didn't cover, it was made note of in the class description or at the very least, the first day of class, so you could still drop if needed.

Shame on the school if this wasn't mentioned, but I highly doubt that.

 

And I'm guessing the project goal is to learn how to work with film, and not just do a project and they just randomly chose film as the medium. So, cheating at the assignment is really just cheating yourself.

I'm not aware of Aubrey's entire situation, so I won't judge. But I find it hard to believe her school has not encountered students with financial difficulties in the past, and if they have any regard for their students they should have support in place for her, not penalise or fail her.

But unless I've missed something, shooting on film was a class requirement. That should be laid out when you sign up for the course in terms of financial responsibility outside of costs of tuition for the course, and certainly in the syllabus. If she wasn't going to be financially able to fulfill the requirements of the class, she shouldn't have signed up. Instead, she put off doing the research and when she realized she was in trouble, she comes to us for advice on how to cheat.

 

Frankly I hope she flunks. It'll be a valuable lesson.

But what if someone's financial circumstances changed throughout the duration of the course? It may be that the institution did not fully inform her of the financial requirements of the course to begin with. It would be unfair to fail someone on either basis. The only lesson I think she would be taught if the school were to fail her is that film is for rich people, which I'm sure neither of us would believe.

I think you could probably achieve the prolonged shutter speeds in the time-lapse automation software I mentioned. You can set all of the parameters up in the software and let it roll. The real question is will the software communicate with your camera, or can you get hold of a camera that will.

I wouldn't attempt forging it though, it's not worth the risk. I think any tutor would or at least should understand if you don't have the money for the film, nor should you be obliged to sell what you have. I think it would be elitist of the school to only accept work shot on film but not provide the materials or equipment to do so. I can't emphasise the importance of talking to your tutor, they are there to help with problems like these, not to penalise you because you're not financially in a position to purchase the required materials.

Andy made a good point about looking for some kind of sponsorship, it's amazing how much companies are willing to help at times, it's worth looking into.

I'm not very familiar with that model of camera, but there is software available allowing you to connect a laptop to an SLR (at least) and set it up to take pictures at predetermined intervals. A lot of people use it to produce time-lapse videos, which looks a bit like what is going in the video you posted.

As a fellow student, I'd suggest talking to your tutor so they are aware of the difficulties you are having, and if you do shoot digital, grade it and add effects to make it look more like film but be ready to justify every alteration you have made either in your presentation or report (or whatever is required at the end of the project - if anything) Turn the negatives into positives.