Interview DMN : Avid au NAB 2004, à lire Interview DMN : Avid au NAB 2004, à lire Avid unveiled its newest products at NAB 2004, with a large number of impressive updates to its varied software and hardware lines. The company announced a bundled set of hardware and software it calls Xpress Pro Studio, an update of Media Composer Adrenaline, and a beefed-up version of its high-end editor and compositor, DS Nitris. The biggest news for the company was the introduction of a brand new group of extremely efficient high definition codecs called DNxHD, which the company said will appear first in its high-end DS Nitris line this summer and later this year in Media Composer Adrenaline. « The major theme for NAB for Avid is going to be a real time high definition workflow, » said Charlie Russell, Avid’s Senior Marketing Manager for Post & Editing Products. Russell explained how Avid engineers and designers were looking for a way to deal with the fact that uncompressed HD files are too unwieldy, and put a huge strain on disk drive storage. At the same time, this large amount of data requires tremendous bandwidth to move the footage off those drives and around production facilities where large numbers of workstations are working together. In the digital video editing marketplace, where many facilities have multiple users connected to each other via systems like Avid’s Unity, editors and compositors have become accustomed to quickly and efficiently exchanging files and projects across the entire organization. But there’s only one problem with that: Until now, all that convenience was geared toward working with standard definition video files. According to Russell, Avid’s customers and many others were crying out for the kind of high performance and interactivity they’re accustomed to with standard definition, only now they want that with high definition files. That’s why Avid created DNxHD, a new codec whose name is an acronym for « Digital Nonlinear Extensible, High Definition ». The goal here was to create a finish-quality codec able to move and edit HD files in spaces and hardware normally associated with standard definition. Avid says this new DNxHD encoding system was designed specifically for postproduction and real time collaboration. The new codecs will be offered in three variants. The least-compressed version runs at 220 megabits per second (mbit/sec) and works in the 10-bit color space. The 10-bit flavor will be important for users who are interested in functions like color correction and multi-layer composites, where 10-bit processing maintains a high degree of accuracy. A second version is also a 220 mbit/sec codec but is 8-bit, and the third – which still looks very good to this reporter – runs at 145 mbit/sec, and is also an 8-bit codec. After looking at these three codecs up close, I have to say that they are remarkable. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that all this data can be squeezed down into file sizes that are this small. According to Avid, by the end of this year the three DNxHD codecs will be available on the company’s DS Nitris, Media Composer Adrenaline, Avid Unity Media Network, and Media Manager systems. But will users balk at such compression? Not according to Doug Hansel, Avid’s Product Manager for Media Composer Adrenaline. « There will be many people saying ‘uncompressed HD is the way to go.’ And you know, for certain things, absolutely it’s the way to go. But there are a lot of people who aren’t going to benefit from uncompressed video. All it’s going to do is hurt their wallets, hurt their whole concept of workflow. And that’s what we’re trying to keep from doing. It should be painless. » The DNxHD hardware encoding will be offered first in Avid’s high-end DS Nitris system, where the encoding systems will ship with the first DS Nitris version 7.5 systems this summer, according to Avid. Then later this year, the DNxHD encoding hardware will be offered with the mid-range Media Composer Adrenaline systems as a $9995 add-on hardware card. Avid also revealed that these new codecs are based on MXF : The new Media Exchange Format that many industry observers think will be a big buzzword in the coming months. If adopted by numerous nonlinear editing manufacturers, it’s expected to offer a surprisingly high amount of interoperability between various editing systems, allowing one system to edit files created on another, carrying forward an unprecedented amount of metadata between applications. Said Avid’s Charlie Russell, « Sony’s behind it, a lot of companies are behind MXF. We’re on the MXF Board and one of the leading proponents of MXF. We’re very strict in our MXF compliance – we’re not playing a lot of games. We’re hoping that other people are as crisp in their MXF implementations as we are. MXF really will be very good across the board – not just Avid but with other companies. That’s the basic philosophy that we’re going after. » A surprising aspect of the roll-out of these new codecs was Avid’s promise to make the new software’s source code available to everyone. « On Avid’s DNxHD, we are going to provide open source code, and it will be publicly available, » Russell said. He added that the software code would be available on Avid’s Web site for all interested parties. « It’s royalty-free, » Russell said. « It’s going to let people create media that is compatible across the industry. We want it to become an open standard throughout the industry. Also from a customer’s standpoint, this should add a lot of reassurance, because they’ll never have to worry that if they commit to this media format — is it going to be around? It’s going to be available from many, many companies, » Russell predicted. « It’s going to be open-source, available forever. » Avid also announced its plans to include HDV support in all its product lines : HDV, the highly compressed high definition format that uses a workflow that’s nearly identical to that of the well-established DV format, is said to be the next step for the lower-end producers who are looking to move to HD without spending a fortune. Using an extremely efficient type of MPEG 2 compression, HD footage is crunched down to a relatively tiny 19mbit/sec, requiring even less bandwidth than garden-variety DV25. Avid announced plans to support native editing of the new HDV format, without any transcoding necessary. The company said its users will be able to bring the media into a workstation via FireWire, store it on disk in its native 19mbit/sec MPEG format, and then edit that material natively. Avid revealed that its HDV support will be available in Avid Xpress Pro and Media Composer Adrenaline, both coming « later this year. » When pressed for a release date by Digital Media Net, Avid officials admitted that the HDV support would arrive « late in the year, at the end of the 4th quarter. » But will users balk at such compression? Not according to Doug Hansel, Avid’s Product Manager for Media Composer Adrenaline. « There will be many people saying ‘uncompressed HD is the way to go.’ And you know, for certain things, absolutely it’s the way to go. But there are a lot of people who aren’t going to benefit from uncompressed video. All it’s going to do is hurt their wallets, hurt their whole concept of workflow. And that’s what we’re trying to keep from doing. It should be painless. » . Media Composer Adrenaline : Avid also announced it will be supporting uncompressed HD in Media Composer Adrenaline. Last year the company mentioned an HD expansion card for its Media Composer Adrenaline, and this year, the company showed two cards it will be offering for sale later in 2004. One, which will be the engine that drives the real-time compressed DNxHD codecs, will sell for $9995. For uncompressed HD via HD SDI, another card will be offered by Avid for $4995. For HDV and DVCPRO HD support, Avid will offer a software upgrade that will be free for its customers who subscribe to the company’s Assurance Program. « We just want to let our Adrenaline customers have it all, said Avid’s Senior Marketing Manager Charlie Russell. « If they want uncompressed, they can have it. If they want HDV, they can have it. We’re even offering it in DVCPRO HD native FireWire — we’ve licensed that technology from Panasonic. » Russell explained that this enables users to transfer footage to disk via FireWire and then edit, using the DVCPRO HD codec natively. « So, bring over the native HD material, write it to disk. If it’s HDV, bring it to disk. Edit natively on either of those formats, » Russell said. On a dual 3.06GHz Xeon machine, Avid’s Product Manager Doug Hansel showed a whopping 11 streams of SD video playing back in real time, with nary a dropped frame to be seen. The test consisted of 11 boxes grouped on the screen with four on the top, four on the bottom and two in the middle, with a background behind them, equaling 11 layers. Looking at Avid’s « gas gauge » in the user interface, the indicator showed a yellow color, indicating that nearly all the CPU power was being used for this remarkable deed. Even so, the composite didn’t even come close to straining the disk array, a 12-disk configuration that Hansel characterized as « overkill » for this demonstration. Next, when Hansel stressed the system to its limits, adding a move to some of the stacked-up boxes, frames started dropping. But it was an impressive trick, nonetheless, showing off the scalability of Avid’s underlying DNA architecture that was the darling of last year’s NAB. Hansel emphasized that the point of all these flying boxes was to continue last year’s  « scalable message that we came out with – it really dies scale. We optimized it, the PCs get faster, the Macs get faster, and off it goes. So it’s a proof of concept, » Hansel said. Avid also announced it is bundling Boris Continuum Complete AVX, an extensive effects package including a sophisticated keyer, numerous effects and motion tracking. The company also announced that the Mac and PC versions of Media Composer Adrenaline will come one step closer to feature parity this year, with the addition of Marquee for Macintosh, as well as the already-announced Film Tools for the PAL format. Also adding to the new feature set is direct support for Windows Media 9 from the Avid timeline. « Windows Media 9 is great for a lot of things, » said Avid’s Russell. « One of the things with a lot of potential is Windows Media 9 for HD when that comes along. » But for now, Media Composer’s Windows Media 9 output is in standard definition, but what’s new is it’s done directly from the timeline, where in previous versions it needed to go through Sorenson Squeeze. « What that basically means is, you’ll be able to play with the real HD media. So you write the DNxHD material to disk, or the uncompressed HD, or the HDV, or the DVCPRO HD, so you’re writing the full resolution material to disk, » said Russell. « It’s not like you have to do an offline and then a re-batch capture. » However, when Adrenaline pulls the footage from disk, Avid’s codec will rapidly extract a lower-resolution proxy out of the full-rez material that lets editors process this vast amount of data much faster. « You wind up with a very good-looking real-time preview in Adrenaline, » Russell said. « And then, if you wanted to master and finish out of Adrenaline, you would just need to render. So, that’s something that I feel like is important for customers who are making buying decisions to understand. » This turns out to be the difference between paying around $35K for an HD Media Composer Adrenaline system and paying $148K for Avid’s full-blown high-end finishing system DS Nitris. In addition to more-sophisticated compositing tools and many other enhancements, with DS Nitris you’re paying for the ability to edit HD in full resolution and output it in real time, without any rendering. Also coming to Media Composer is a capability that was available before with Avid’s Meridien board for Media Composer – real time multicam. Though there is non-real-time multicam offered now, Avid plans to release not only standard definition multicam in real time through its DNA hardware, but also will release an HD multicam capability in the release planned for late this year. Avid engineers said it’s too early to be promising numbers, but in their back-room labs they showed us a four-way split of SD video playing back in real time, at 4:1 in a specialized multicam resolution. Then demo artist and Avid Product Manager Doug Hansel played back a 9-way multicam sequence in real time, albeit in draft resolution. « By the end of the year, I’d like to see that playing back in quarter rez, » Hansel. « Basically, we’re getting back to where we were, but of course, it’s a whole different architecture — it’s a whole another way of doing this — there’s not hard, dedicated hardware to do that any more. But the cool thing is, the DNA is responsible for scaling, so when people say, ‘What’s the DNA doing?,’ one of the things it does is scales back to that rez, even though it’s quarter-rez, to give you that kind of quality. » Avid’s Russell also talked about real time multicam coming for HD as well. « More and more production is happening in high def now, and people would love the capability to just bring it in at DNxHD, mastering-quality high def, doing real time multicam right on there. » This is a capability that Avid says is « top of the list » right now for HD program producers, particularly those who are using multicam for HD sitcom production. . DS Nitris 7.5 : DS Nitris, Avid’s high-end editing and compositing offering, gets a revision as well, now at version 7.5 which the company says will ship this summer. Top of its what’s new list – it’s the first Avid product to include the new DNxHD hardware encoding, allowing users to edit HD in either DS Nitris’s real time uncompressed mode or with the new compressed DNxHD codec. Said Russell, « When you want to print back out, just hit Play and DS Nitris will deliver real time color correction on HD, real time picture-in-picture, dissolves, and real time DVDs and titles, on HD material, and it’s either uncompressed or DNxHD. » We saw these capabilities demonstrated, and the system proved to be quite impressive. Another significant addition to the DS Nitris feature set is its MXF compatibility, offering enhanced file sharing and metadata exchange between all systems —  Avid or not — that have this compatibility. DS Nitris 7.5 is capable of more than real time HD performance, too. Said Matt Allard, Avid’s Product Manager for DS Nitris, « We’re seeing HD becoming a lot more affordable on the market, especially at this NAB. So our customers at the high end are thinking about how else they can define themselves — it’s not just HD. Historically, the guys at the top end of the market have always distinguished themselves with workflows that were concentrated around film. And so, 2K is the next natural increment. And it’s a difficult workflow because of the huge file sizes. » Even though DS Nitris already has a 2K and 4K implementation, according to Avid, the number one request from customers has been for more real time functionality. « The main thing our customers have been telling us is that they want more real time. Because today, in DS Nitris, if you bring in that 2K media, you can look at it but you can’t actually play it, » said Allard. With this new update, Nitris will let those users play back and even edit that footage directly, using single-stream real time playback of the actual 2K files. A second method will allow users to edit the footage using HD-quality proxies of the files, and then convert that data back into the original files when editing and compositing are complete. « The thing that’s cool about the way we’re doing 2K in this summer release is the real time proxy resolution, » said Allard. « So when I set real time proxy resolution, I get real time through the Nitris engine. I can work in real time, with HD proxies which look great. It’s hard to think of that as offline, or a proxy — but for 2K guys, it is a proxy — but it gives them real time color correction, real time DVEs, and everything else. And then, once they’re done, they can switch that sequence back to full resolution, and it applies all the metadata to the 2K RGB, and protects the colors and renders it out properly. So from a working standpoint, you link to DPX files in our system – full resolution, 10bit log RGB files. You can pull the time code out of those DPX files – a frame equals a file- each frame can have time code information inserted in its header. We can actually pull that information out, and we can send it back now, too. » Allard appears to be proud of the progress Avid has made in the few short months since DS Nitris’s ship date. « We shipped Nitris in October [2003], and probably by this June, we’ll actually have this release knitted up with a whole bunch of new stuff, » he said.  Allard went on to explain the progress Avid’s made with DS Nitris’s ability to handle metadata information in the conform sequence. « In version 7, we had lookup table support, so I can do linear-to-log conversion, or just straight linear, or I can bring lookup tables in from an external file, so it’s kind of a basic functionality that was there in 7. » So what’s new in this upcoming release? « What we changed in 7.5 is time code export, so that I can send it out to an Arri, or another device that wants time code. That’s a nice little feature there. » Will it be ready by summer? « Oh yeah. It’s close. The software’s in pretty good shape. We’re still working on stuff on the DNx encoding hardware, but it’s coming. » To me, this particular software looked pretty shaky the week before NAB, but then, Avid has a large development team that’s highly motivated, so it remains to be seen whether the team will actually hit that June ship date. There are numerous other new features in 7.5, including improved compositing, enhancements to the way the tree-based compositor works, and increased interoperability between the timeline-based compositing and tree-based compositing. Version 7.5 also includes improvements to its Media Composer-like capture panel, adding the ability to save comments, and designate locators on the fly. There are even more improvements in the system’s antialiasing, blurring and blending. So with the summer release, the DNxHD capabilities will be released first in DS Nitris, and incidentally, when we saw this working at Avid’s Tewksbury facility shortly before NAB 2004, the results were remarkable. The three DNxHD codecs were of extremely high quality, and in ordinary viewing of various types of footage on a high-quality HD monitor, the three were almost indistinguishable from the full-resolution original frames. Source : DMN