Thursday, April 17, 2008

NAB -- The Results

I'm now back in Solana Beach, CineForm HQ, returning a day early from the show. The CineForm reception at NAB this years was simply awesome, with more and more high-end companies seeing the value of compression in high resolution workflows. While most of the staff are still in Vegas, I had to get back to working on our 3.3 release, adding great features suggested by customers and fixing the bugs we always find at show time. Trade shows always have the habit of showcasing bugs, so it is good to have engineers doing the demos with pen and paper jotting down the list of things they will need fix back at the office -- we never hold back demoing work in progress features, but showing the cutting-edge of our development has it risks. This year as no different, but fortunately most the bugs showed themselves during Sunday setup and were fixed by Monday morning when the show opened. It turned out we never tried playing 3K on 4K timeline at full res. before (in preview it worked fine on our dinky 24" displays,) but the at the office we don't have the wonderful 30" monitors Intel loaded us, so we cranked up the resolution to make use of the display area. At show start everything looked great and presented smoothly from HD to 4K. We were playing 125 frame per second over cranked 4K Phantom 65 footage, thanks to guys at Vision Research, AbleCine Tech, and the Dual Quad HP xw8600 workstations that power our booth -- the most demanding footage I have worked with to date (clean, but amazingly detailed, and played real-time even while using Iridas's 3D LUTs.) It fun dealing with the extremes like discussing the detail of over cranked 4K footage with one customer, and the next minute discussing pulldown removal from Canon HV20s.

"All sources welcome" could have be a slogan at the CineForm booth, but fortunately I'm not in marketing (anyone seeing our website will know we don't have marketing department.) On the booth we where showing footage and editing Dalsa Origin, Grass Valley Infinity, Vision Research Phantom 65, Red One, Silicon Imaging SI-2K, and Sony EX1 (likely many more.) Grass Valley kindly loaned us an Infinity camera (pretty awesome BTW) to help us showcase the Infinity support we will be offering shortly, and someone loaned us the tripod to put it on (thank to that unknown company.)

In addition to the regular CineForm crew, I would like to thank those friends of the company that helped out at the booth: Isaac Anderson, Jim Hays, Mike McCarthy and Jason Salonen, providing the much valued outside prospective for CineForm and our customers. Thank you to Steve Sherrick who invited me to present at the Red User Workflow panel, and the warm reception from the engaging audience. For the Reduser presentation, thanks to Terry Cullen of 1Beyond who loaned CineForm a QuadCore laptop, and amazing machine that made the demo fly. And finally to all the companies that made up a "end-to-end digital workflow" booth: Wafian, Silicon Imaging, Iridas and Intel, each one helping with a sizable piece of the digital film making puzzle.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi David,

I am glad to see CineForm expanding and then expanding some more. It was predictable !

Any comment on Adobe's open format file announcement, on what Cineform's part will be ?

Any possibility for 50i to 50p conversion on new HDlink version ?


best
Andreas

David said...

CineForm is pleased to have a role in CinemaDNG. That's all I can say at the moment.

Anonymous said...

David,

The more I read about the latest developements the more confident become in my choice to use Cineform technology.

Just watched the Cineform 2K & 4K workflow video on FreshDV.com. That is just amazing... things are looking good for Cineform.

Thanks for having such great products!!

Anonymous said...

I am also amazingly excited about Adobes CinemaDNG since I am a long time regular Premiere user.

How does it affect a workflow like Cineform RAW?

You mention you are involved, this is great at least.

Jesse said...

Hi David,

It was great meeting you at the show - and cool to see my Phantom footage playing in your booth! You'll be hearing from me soon...

-Jesse (from Abel)

Anonymous said...

Great talking with you at NAB David,
Loved the new things you were showing me...
And Yes I went into the RED booth on the last day and didt get into any trouble at all...