Avid Nitris wha?

Edward wrote on 1/24/2006, 8:37 PM
I felt bad... well, sorta. had to call one of our contracted editors because she borrowed our panasonic dvcpro deck. had to ask her a technical question about it. during our conversation, she complimented me on my work, that she loves the 'quality'. I told her i use vegas and i'm only rendering out dv. she's like, "wow. i look at my stuff compared to what you do, and now i'm wondering why i spent 250G."

i was humbled by her compliment.

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 1/24/2006, 9:34 PM
250g??
What an idiot...

sorry.. but $250g??? whats she using?? Gold plated hard drives??

I know some studios up to the million dollar mark, but most of their stuff is all cameras and a $80k avid system... 250g... bloody hell.. lol

im in a freakish mood,
Edward wrote on 1/24/2006, 9:42 PM
dunno what was that much (software, hardware setup, furniture...). here in hawaii, i know that it's the only system of it's kind. she has one below the 'motherload' of avid systems. that is alot tho. sheesh, i wouldn't make that in 5 years.... waitaminute... i do.
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/24/2006, 9:50 PM
That's a good bit for a nitris - I didn't know they went that high - (but then again - what do I know) :(
p@mast3rs wrote on 1/24/2006, 9:59 PM
Figure in network attached storage for uncompressed and it could get pretty high. Avid definitely aint cheap by any means.
rmack350 wrote on 1/24/2006, 10:01 PM
Of course there's all sorts of stuff to spend money on. You can't buy the building for that but you could remodel. And then there's decks and arrays and fiberchanel and routers and mixers and mics and HD monitors, and seat licenses...

It's a lot for one edit system, though. Not so much for two or three seats of HD because of the infrastructure to connect them together, I'd think. Expecially if you want the facility to look like "money".

Maybe it's the Koa panelling throughout?

Rob Mack
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/24/2006, 10:21 PM
Koa wood - there's a pricey wood there - good grief - it's like some of the highest priced wood in the world (if not the most) I think.

Dave
apit34356 wrote on 1/25/2006, 12:53 AM
Don't forget, if you're running an highend Nitris, then, as an example, you are probably have a pro color correction app, +10k, plus another +60k in support programs and libraries.
apit34356 wrote on 1/25/2006, 12:56 AM
Koa wood is that expense? No more bonfires for the kids.
Edward wrote on 1/25/2006, 6:14 AM
she invited me to come over and learn her avid system. she worries that she's the only one on the island who can use it. cool, i just don't know if that's a step up or down for me... heh. what can be so hard? avid, fcp, vegas... same smell... different price.

her partner uses touch screens and tablets, no mice. that must be pricey.
Coursedesign wrote on 1/25/2006, 8:21 AM
her partner uses touch screens and tablets, no mice. that must be pricey.

You can do that for $50 with a 4x5 Wacom Graphire for Vegas.

Some people really prefer using a tablet in stead of a mouse, and there is nothing in Vegas to prevent this.
rmack350 wrote on 1/25/2006, 8:35 AM
It's expensive because it was mostly cut down to make furniture and panel people's houses. It's really rare now and protected. As far as I know, all Koa available for craft is either old horded stock or recycled.

Rob Mack
rmack350 wrote on 1/25/2006, 8:41 AM
Obviously, you should take her up on the offer if you've got the time. If she's got the only system like it she'll be hard pressed for editors and if you can stand in in a pinch it'll be good for you both.

Working with a system that's radically different will make you more flexible too.

Rob Mack
GlennChan wrote on 1/25/2006, 2:18 PM
If you add up the cost of everything in high-end edit suites (i.e. for high-end commercial work), it'll run around $300-$400k.

Decks cost a lot. betaSP, digibeta ($40k+ now I think) may also want VHS, 3/4", DVCAM, DVCPRO25/50, etc.
Broadcast monitor, Waveform/Vectorscope
Editing system of course.
Storage - uncompressed storage gets pricey. Traditional SCSI hard drives are pretty expensive.
Furnishings - You do want to spend a lot on this if you need to impress clients. What clients think can make or break your business!
etc.

Setting up a SD edit suite costs a lot less now (you won't need as much for a high-end setup), although some people may want to consider moving to HD. In which case, the deck (up to $120k+) and broadcast monitor ($5k-$60k) cost significantly more!

2- On the other hand, the cost of high-quality equipment has dropped significantly in price. i.e. color correction on a Da Vinci hardware color correction (the telecine suite runs about $2,000,000) used in many high-end commercials isn't leaps and bounds ahead of what you can do with cheaper tools.

i.e. see the folks who made "Broken"
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=45234

shot on a DVX100 instead of 35mm film
special effects in Shake (about $5k) versus Inferno or whatever (hundreds of thousands of dollars).
color in Magic Bullet Editor's versus a Da Vinci 2K (hundreds of thousands of dollars); in my opinion MBE isn't even the best quality for <$2000 tools, but thats a moot point.

The really expensive equipment does have more client appeal and is a lot faster, so it does have a high-end market.
Coursedesign wrote on 1/25/2006, 2:33 PM
Glenn,

Shake is $3K on Mac, $5K on Linux.

It has become much more of a real possibility today to run a tapeless suite, and deliver footage on hard drives. This saves the totally asinine cost of professional video tape decks, and the high cost of maintaining them.

What do you think is better than MBE for color for less than $2K? FinalTouch SD, or are you thinking of another filmlook-specific product? DVFilm, Ultimate S?

In what way is it better? Inquiring mind wants to know. :O)
farss wrote on 1/25/2006, 2:38 PM
I think the critcal point is "faster". When you've got the director, producer and the DOP plus the client and a few hangers on watching / supervising everything has to be real time. Add to that you need audio and video monitoring so they can all see / listen and it all adds up very quickly.
I've stuck my nose into edit suites where just the Genelec 5.1 monitors would have cost $50K.
Harpo Production bought a 5 seat Xpri system that set them back $1.5M, a lot of that would have gone into fibrechannel arrays and connections. But it means they can edit minutes ahead of what's on air.
Bob.
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/25/2006, 4:09 PM
Nightline is using Vegas for their minutes before what's on air stuff :) - The times they are a changin :)

Dave
GlennChan wrote on 1/26/2006, 9:18 AM
What do you think is better than MBE for color for less than $2K? FinalTouch SD, or are you thinking of another filmlook-specific product? DVFilm, Ultimate S?

I've never played with DV Film.

Final Touch is good. If you have lots of time to color for your project, it's a good choice. It has some problems though (conforming doesn't work well all the time, the vignette looks wrong, the equivalent of color curves interface is extremely weak).

On the Vegas side:
Magic Bullet Editor's has some technical flaws like not paying attention to 16-235 color space. This totally goes against its use of 32-bit floating point precision. One step forwards, one/two steps back.

Reelpacks (which I haven't played much with, because I just create my own looks) is probably just as good. It also doesn't pay attention to 16-235 color space.

Or if you just make your own looks, you can use color curve presets that take into account 16-235.
http://www.glennchan.info/Proofs/dvinfo/color-curves.veg

Gradient filter to add tints. *sometimes causes banding... not cool.

In Vegas you can do detailed corrections like using secondary color correction or masks to affect specific areas or colors. You can combine the compositing modes and filters in various ways to create custom looks, much like Final Touch (except the interface is clunkier).
Vegas and Final Touch are sort of equal in their color correction abilities. This is mainly because FT is not as good as it could be. FT is a dedicated CC app, which Vegas is not... so this comparison should be unfair.
Coursedesign wrote on 1/26/2006, 10:09 AM
Glenn,

Thanks for this.

Is your concern about 16-235 caused by working only on material for analog NTSC broadcast?

I would humbly argue that it's the quaint 1950's 16-235 rule that goes against the use of 32-bit color, although they are not really related, as the additional bits are not usually used to go farther into superwhite (1.0f) and superblack (0.0f), but to get more tonal resolution.

The exception of course is HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging, which can go beyond 1.0f to what we might call ultrawhite.

It looks like 2006 will be the year of HDR, simply because it is so useful for professional work. In addition to all the specialist tools that have been available for many years, it has now gone mainstream in After Effects 7 where it is used to substantially improve the quality of many common effects. You don't need special HDR images to use this, just regular video footage.

Even motion blurs, and rack focus moves created in post, can look vastly better with HDR, even if the end result is seen on an 8-bit screen. The difference is very, very substantial.

Gradient banding is caused by running out of bits. Time for 10-bit...

Many DVD players smooth the 8-bit MPEG-2 video to a higher bit depth, so banding may not be as visible in regular DVD->TV viewing.

GlennChan wrote on 1/26/2006, 7:40 PM
The 16-235 versus 0-255 color space issue matters if going to:
DVD (via Vegas / DVD Architect / Main concept encoder)
DV master... or DV passthrough
broadcast

For web, make sure you work in 0-255. i.e. use the studio RGB to computer RGB preset in Color corrector.

To deal with gradient banding, there are ways to add dithering. Which is kind of like noise that masks banding.
Coursedesign wrote on 1/26/2006, 10:11 PM
This is what Joe Kane says about DVD video levels:

The majority of DVD's are mastered using 0 Volts DC for black. In reality all DVD's should be mastered using 0 Volts DC for black, but there are exceptions. The dynamic range of the component video picture is enhanced relative to the standard composite NTSC color system. The DVD player will reduce that dynamic range, moving it from 0 IRE to + 7.5 IRE, in providing an NTSC output which is necessary for compatibility with standard home display devices. Which position should you use? That depends on the display device itself or the video processor driving the display and/or how the DVD player is being used in the entire home entertainment system. Ideally you would want to use the 0 Volts black position to preserve the dynamic range available from the disc itself.

Why use 16-235 for a DV master? (unless you know you will use mostly this range)
You just give away a good chunk of your dynamic range.

Yeah, dithering helps (similar to what it does in newspaper photos), but it isn't quite the same for tonal quality (although I agree there are scenes where you absolutely can't tell the difference).

farss wrote on 1/26/2006, 11:11 PM
Well from my own tests Joe has got it wrong. The DVD player doesn't move the levels (would be nice if it did), instead it clips it at 16 and 235 which is not a good thing at all.
What I don't know however is what the players do on the component outputs. I don't have any waveform monitors that'll take component inputs to check but I guess I could make up a test DVD and have a look see as I have a Sony DVD player that's connected RGB component via SCART to my TV.
If they're doing different things on the component and composite outputs then we're really screwed as there's no way to make a DVD that's going to look 100% correct on every system.
Come to think of it I don't even know what the permitted voltage range is on component?
Bob.
GlennChan wrote on 1/28/2006, 12:01 AM
I think what's written on the Joe Kane site is pretty confusing. From what I understand of it, it only makes sense when you consider the context they are talking about.

They are talking about something completely different. A DVD player can either put proper digital black level (Y' = 16) at 0 IRE or 7.5 IRE over the component outputs.

Some TVs can be set to see/anticipate/assume 0 or 7.5IRE as black level (over component connections). The 0 IRE setting is the "enhanced" mode. Of those that have the 0 IRE option, not all TVs actually get better performance.

2- farss: re: the permitted voltage range on component:
As far as I know, there are a bunch of different standards for component voltage!! Ain't that fun?

tektronix article on this
Be sure you pay attention to whether they are talking about composite or component.

3- The proper levels for a DV master is luma values from 16-235.
They designed things this way so that the format could handle under/overshoot. I'm not too sure on the details of this, but that's the way it is.

Yes they do sacrifice some dynamic range by doing this (versus 0-255).

4- Vegas doesn't actually work with luma values... it works with RGB. So it's at the mercy of the DV codec you're using. With the default Sony/Sofo DV codec (introed in Vegas 5??? ro was it before?), 16 16 16 RGB goes to 16 Y' (luma).
With the other codecs, 0-255 RGB goes to 16-235 luma.
busterkeaton wrote on 1/28/2006, 12:12 AM
I would love to see you guys take this whole discussion to a post of its own and really get into deep on this. I'm finding it very useful.

I think this is most concise way of explaining color banding I have heard.
Gradient banding is caused by running out of bits. Time for 10-bit...

A couple of things I would like to know more about

adding dithering to reduce banding
The implication of "the other codecs, 0-255 RGB goes to 16-235 luma"
Is there any difference between color correction for broadcast and color correction for DVD?
Edward wrote on 1/28/2006, 4:00 AM
it's so funny how we're on the edge of our seats to prove each other wrong politacally (or just prove me wrong) in one thread, and be so informative and helpful in another.

i luv you guys.
i luv this place.
farss, coursedesign, glennchan, busterkeaton, frigidNDEditing... u guys rock.