In last month's column, I discussed the possibility of a paradigm shift occurring in postproduction. I suggested that change could take the form of a powerful, low-cost (maybe Linux-based) finishing platform. Today I want to discuss one such platform, the HDBoxx from Boxx Technologies.
With a new version due out at the same time as this column, HDBoxx will feature dual 2.2GHz Pentium 4 processors and an important new capability that no other product offers — the ability to edit nonlinearly with the variable-rate 720p HD video from Panasonic's new AJ-HDC27V camera.
The HDBoxx is the first uncompressed HD NLE system to take advantage of the off-speed acquisition capabilities of the Panasonic AJ-HDC27V variable frame rate HD cinema camera. According to Jeff Merritt, HD/cinema marketing manager for Panasonic Broadcast, the HDBoxx maintains the high-resolution quality of the original undercranked or overcranked video with no generation loss.
“Undercranked” and “overcranked” are terms that are probably unfamiliar to Video Systems readers, but they are processes that are widely used in the film industry.
Undercranked film is shot at 18fps or 16fps (or any other frame rate that is slower than the standard 24fps). For example, in a fight scene, the carefully choreographed fight may go slightly slower than a viewer would find acceptable, but shot at the slower frame rate, the fight appears fast and exciting when played at the standard 24fps. The same is true for car chases.
Overcranked film, shot at faster than 24fps, produces the sharp, slow-motion effect frequently used for explosions, car crashes, and other high-speed scenes. Starting with the Panasonic camera and the companion HDBoxx, video camera operators and video editors will come to understand the benefits of this process. Even the desirable cinema-like blur found in undercranked film images comes through with this new video process.
The HDBoxx can handle all of the HD and SD formats in both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, and also 2K (2048×1556) pixel resolution for output to digital cinema and film. More importantly, it works in both 8-bit and 10-bit YUV, or with a switch you can work in 8-bit per channel RGB (in other words, 24-bit color space).
Todd Bryant, Boxx chief technical officer, explains, “Obviously, the film industry is adopting HD much quicker than broadcasters. What we have discovered is that all the cinematic special effects are now done by computers in RGB color space. These workstations do not understand YUV. Customers like to bring their YUV data and do one transfer to RGB color space (based upon a look-up table) that allows them to work without having to worry about a color conversion every time that they open up YUV data. We do this today. Furthermore, in the future, we are hoping to have this feature fully programmable so that customers can actually control the look and feel of what the film-originated or HD-originated material will look like in an RGB space and vice versa when it goes back out.”
Another important feature of this system is the ability to work with sequential TGA files and sequential YUV files. “Anything that can write out 24-bit TGA files is completely compatible, as long as there are the standard 8-bit header files,” Bryant says. This includes Discreet Combustion, Eyeon Digital Fusion, and Nothing Real Shake. HDBoxx also supports the new Dual Link HD SDI standard for RGB data support, which is used today primarily for telecine transfers.
The software applications with full hardware support for HDBoxx are In-Sync Speed Razor 2000 X and Adobe After Effects. The system also offers plug-in support for NewTek LightWave.
“Our ultimate goal is to be fully software agnostic,” Bryant says. “If something else would come along and there was an open SDK, we are more than happy to get our stuff hooked over. The way our API works now, we haven't found anything that we haven't been able to get up and running in three weeks.”
It is not your father's Speed Razor
Though some may question the wisdom of betting on Speed Razor, Bryant considers it up to the task. “Even though some people have some perceived problems with Speed Razor, when you see how powerful the tool really is, and get past what your perception was from the Mach 3.5 days, it is a much, much cleaner, much better editing solution,” Bryant says. “Our customers seem to be very happy with the toolset. We said to In-Sync that if we are going to continue to use your Speed Razor for our HDBoxx, there are things that are going to have to change. We have an HDBoxx in their lab and we talk to each other at least once a week. I know In-Sync's R&D roadmap. Hopefully, In-Sync will have a brand new version of their NL editing package or a brand new package coming in Q1 2002.”
One of the improvements made to this software was to audio capabilities. The HDBoxx can have up to 16 audio channels with realtime DSP processing. “You are able to mix 5.1 channel sound surround content,” Bryant says. “You can set up your pans and get ready to dump the mix back out to HD tape and then send it out for Dolby encoding. There are also audio sweetening tools. For example, each audio channel has a three-band graphic equalizer. Also, Speed Razor has the ability (through the MIDI) to hook it up to an outside mixer console, and have that mixer control the audio card. It is pretty nice. And we have HDBoxx working with analog or digital audio, or both. We are building solutions for customers that have eight channels of analog and eight channels of digital I/O, and they can mix and match.”
At the moment, the biggest recognized weakness may be the metadata capabilities and sharing edit decisions with other software products — especially 24-frame edit decisions.
“There are a few issues like EDL metadata support that we are trying to work out,” Bryant admits. “Right now we are limited to 30-frame EDLs, but that is not what is going to happen in the future. We have plenty of overhead in our system to handle a rich metadata architecture. We are waiting on the SMPTE DC28 metadata specification to be released.” At the moment, no efforts are being made to offer AAF compatibility.
The Boxx
Today, HDBoxx is a multiprocessor equipped, Windows-based platform with a 64-bit/66MHz bus architecture. The $50,000 price includes 730GB of RAID storage.
“We are moving to a PCIX architecture,” Bryant says. “Our ultimate goal is to pump two streams of uncompressed HD through our system at any one time. This will allow us to go ahead and move toward realtime transitions and effects on either a Windows XP-based solution or on a Linux-based solution in the future. We have actually gotten over all the speed hurdles on Linux, and now we can run Linux or XP at the same speed.”
Linux will offer Boxx Technologies' platform access to other compositing/effects and animation software solutions. “Our ultimate goal is to have the software set or API software development kit for Linux available in the first quarter of 2002,” Bryant says. “And that will allow us to start working with other software packages that were traditionally SGI-based but may be porting over to a Linux-based solution where the manufacturer doesn't necessarily want to port over to the Windows world.”
The platform is designed for workgroup networking and for scalability. Bryant explains, “I am talking of scalability as being able to put large amounts of storage online for very cost-effective pricing — meaning 12 terabytes or larger online at any one time — all fully uncompressed, all RAID protected for full-length feature films and episodic work.”
The bottom line
Designing a platform for uncompressed, standard-definition video postproduction is a challenge today. High-definition uncompressed video has six times the data per second that SD video has. Achieving performance for that data rate is truly impressive.
The performance of the HDBoxx competes with Irix boxes starting at four to six times the cost of HDBoxx. The low-end accelerator board competitive solutions may be 8-bit YUV instead of 10-bit YUV, and may not offer 24-bit RGB color space solutions. They may be limited to the host bus architecture's 33MHz performance. They may not offer film-resolution capabilities or an analog HD output.
The secret of success for a nonlinear platform is a balanced system without bottlenecks. Processing power is important, but that power needs to be balanced by fast RAM, fast storage, fast video displays, high-bandwidth input/output, and a fast wide bus architecture.
