NAB 2011 - Some Thoughts on the Show Themes

My entry into this media world was through the DSLR.  The DSLR revolution we called it for a while.  As a DSLR enthusiast, it was clear that its not a revolution anymore - its absolutely mainstream.  Both its strengths and weaknesses continue to inspire hardware and software designers to find new ways of using it.  The old revolutionary council has not lost its enthusiasm and even its most vociferous opponents are more likely than not to be making their pitch down the lens of a Canon EOS.

Duelling Gurus - Bloom v Laforet - Different approaches but both still evangelising DSLRs

That said the show was a bit dull from a DSLR gear point of view for me.  I think there are a few reasons for the lack of progress.  Firstly, most of the major photo shows have been and gone and thats robbed NAB of any scoops.  Secondly, the Japanese Tsunami has had a major impact on the supply side.  Even if the manufacturers have a new story to tell, they will be wary of doing it when the shipping date may be a long way out. Whilst there have been worthy additions to the video capable DSLR market over the last year nothing has really extended the envelope and NAB has done nothing to change that.  About the only area where there was a buzz was EVFs.

Zacuto EVF

Zacuto saw a lot of interest in their new EVF and sitting right behind them on the show floor was Cineroid who beat everyone to shipping last year and now are preparing a metal bodied version with a choice of outputs.  I believe there was a new entrant from LCDVF but I didn’t get to see that.  I did get to see a prototype from SmallHD using a larger 4” screen.  This is more overtly a dual purpose device but it is going to sacrifice a little pixel density compared to the Zacuto.  Redrock Micro seem to have fallen by the wayside a little with their design which wasn’t one show.  I was told, but not by RRM, that they were reviewing the design or price point due to the coming influx off dual purpose flip designs.

If there was a vibe about this year then it was not DSLR or 3D it was 4K.  RED has been banging the drum about HD (roughly 2K) not being enough.  However, with 4K cameras on the way from Sony and JVC and 4K lenses from Canon, I just get the feeling that the electronics industry is looking for what comes next. 

Canon's PL mount 4K compatible zoom lenses

With Full HD already pinned on 1080p they need a new moniker to rally round.  4K has the advantage that it breaks the cycle of getting into ever more desperate superlatives.  There are alternative names floating round like Quad HD or perhaps even Cinema HD.  Remember, obsolescence is part of their business model - so change is inevitable.  Of course from a content creation view 4K is not just Quad HD its Quad Hassle.  Top movie productions and post houses may be used to a 4K pipeline but not the rest of us.  With Thunderbolt, CUDA, 64bit and all that I think the post and hardware vendors are just about ready but the display and distribution side for anything except movie theatres is nowhere near ready.  To see the difference from 1080p you are going to need a very large display device.  I must admit I struggled to see the difference in the RED Theatre at the show which was using a Sony 4K projector.  I liked the short they made but there was no shock and awe for me on the image quality. 

Sony F65

Sony’s own theatre showing footage from their new F65 was more impressive if partly because the screen was huge and the room was not.  The demo material was more overtly “demoish” than REDs but what impressed me was the latitude and the lack of noise.  But would I expect to see a difference on a 50" or smaller panel on a wall 3m away like most people have - I just don't think so.  How is that 4K image going to reach me.  My rural internet connection struggles to deliver me AppleTV 720p in a reasonable time.  Broadcasters are not going to sacrifice 4 HD or 16 SD channels to show one 4K channel and current blu-ray players would are going to struggle with the format or the capacity - probably both.  The market is still trying to digest 3D and I guess it will be a while before the marketing machine gets into its stride.

Canon - what are they up to?

We are on the verge of NAB and Canon have surprised us by announcing two PL mount cine lenses.

Now the odd thing about that is that Canon don't really have a suitable camera to utilise these lenses.  They could have just wanted to take the opportunity to tap into the market being opened up by the likes of RED, Arri, Sony and Panasonic.  Nothing wrong with that, but it just doesn't feel like Canon's style.

What interests me is the prominence of the word 4K in the press release.  Lenses don't really have a K as such, they are fundamentally analogue devices.  Its phrased in a way that they mean good enough for 4K (4096x2160).  Currently thats a pretty rare beast in digital capture - only RED springs to mind.  Its importance in the film world comes more from being a resolution coming out of high-end film scanners.  Given past technology demonstrations by Canon, could they be looking to enter the arena with a 4K camera?  Are they trying to push the 4K concept in a way which would make it seem the natural successor to 1080p or Full HD as it known (slightly embarrassingly).

Now 4K may be 4 times the resolution of 2K/1080p but its still, at 8MP, a bit pants in the photography world.  To use PL lenses and have a 4K sensor would suggest a dedicated video sensor and a mirrorless design.  Think in terms of a higher resolution F3.  Canon have experimented with form factors too so an EPIC/FS100 shape is a possibility - maybe even a touch of my old friend Thunderbolt.  This is all unashamed speculation on my part but then Canon has given us plenty of time to dream.

So, is it all over for DSLRs?  Have they had the brief time in the 1080p sunshine? I am not so sure.  Say you were designing a new full frame sensor for the 5D MkIII.  More megapixels is probably a given and I have heard lots of numbers bandied about but 28MP often comes up.  Now full frame isnt ideal for cine work unless you are mad for shallow depth of field because cine lenses vignette.  So what if you to ignore the pixels outside a S35 frame and those you don't need for cine aspect ratios.  When you do the math, it turns out thats what's left is 4K.  Now this cropping technology is nothing that new.  A similar approach is already being used in the 600D and Panasonic GH2.  Just saying ...

First Trip to NAB

So I am finally going to NAB.  The National Association of Broadcasters annual show in Las Vegas is a mecca for movie, tv and camera geekery.  I first became aware of it a few years back when the whole HDDSLR thing started to take off.  Last year, I teetered on the brink of going but didn't.  After spending hours absorbing video and podcasts from the show and feeling very left out, I decided that next year I would definitely go.  Despite a few challenges its all booked and I am having a final inner turmoil over what gear to take.

I think the highlight for me is less the tech than the chance to meet people who have to date only existed on t'interweb but who I feel I know quite well.  NAB has such a strong draw that its not just the US folks that will be there but many of the other international contacts I have made.  Did I mention it was Vegas?  Viva NAB!

I am not going to attempt to cover the show.  There will be plenty of (properly authorised) crews doing that.  I will write about anything that particular takes my fancy though.  After NAB I am taking some time to travel in the South West of the US of A.  Apart from stop-overs in LA and San Francisco, it will be the first time I have explored this area.  My only hope now is that the US Government settles its budget crisis and the National Parks I have lined up to visit will actually be open.

Olympus XZ-1

I have been looking for a high quality compact camera for a while.  The only modern one I own is a Lumix FT1 which is designed as a tough camera.  It's actually not bad sharing a lot of features with the TZ7 which was it's contemporary.  However, it does not have much in the way of manual controls for when things get complicated.  One of the things I wanted the camera to be able to do was be discreet enough to take into concerts.  Many venues ban Pro cameras and looking at the gear in the sin bin it included anything with interchangeable lens or a long looking lens.  This pretty much rules out DSLRs, EVILs and bridge cameras.  I also ruled out the far too serious looking Canon Gs and the Nikon P7000.  This basically left 2 prime candidates the Canon S95 and the Lumix LX5.  These are two very nice cameras with a lot of admirers.  I read the reviews and I wasted a few hours of retailers  time.  The S95 has the edge on portability and zoom range, the Lumix on ultimate quality and lens speed.   I failed to make a decision.

Then along comes the XZ1, borrowing a lot of Pen tech, it's a re-entry into this Market segment by Olympus.  Now despite spending my formative years wielding SLRs from arch rival Pentax, my first real photographic experiences were with my Dads Olympus 35RC rangefinder.  This little gem was capable of some really nice results fed with Kodachrome.  Olympus had continued to serve up decent compact cameras to my family over the years.  I myself had shunned them in the digital era because I needed to support another memory card format like I needed a hole in the head.  So there was still some residual goodwill which made this new compact a contender.  What really attracted me though was the lens -  a Zuiko branded piece of glass boasting a f1.8 aperture.  More importantly it was still an f2.5 even at maximum zoom of it's 28-112mm equivalent range.  By comparison the S95 is a 28-105mm f2-4.9 and the LX5 is a 24-90mm f2-3.3.  It seemed to me that the extra reach and speed of the Olympus would make it ideal for concerts.  I have taken a few test shots which I have posted up here

Generally speaking I have been pleased with it and it's a nice camera to use with its bright, hi-res OLED screen.  There are a couple of issues which I have taken a bit of a gamble on.  The first is the RAW format which just isn’t that well supported yet.  My number 1 wish would be for Aperture to gain support as this is my tool of choice although I do own DXO too for more tricky conversions.  No news on either of these adding support.  I don’t like the Olympus tool so at the moment I am using a beta version of Adobe Camera Raw.  The second issue is video where both the frame rate and codec yield results below its rivals.  MJPEG 720p30 is well supported, which helps on the road but I am already set-up to ingest H264 from DSLRs so I would prefer the better efficiency and higher quality of the Canon Quicktime or Lumix AVCHD.  Low light sensitivity may not be quite on a par but at anything more than full wide that pales into insignificance because of that big Zuiko.  There is no way around it, thats a killer feature which I just can’t resist.

If it really impresses it I might treat it to the EVF (which it shares with the PENs) which is fine thing, if eye-wateringly expensive.  It does make it a damn side more discreet than holding it mid-air whilst illuminating your face for 10 minutes.  "Me, Mr Steward, videoing?  What makes you think that?"

Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt - cheesy name but a really fascinating bit of tech.  As I headed down to Converge, two pieces of news had just broken.  The first was that Apple had just added Thunderbolt to it's new MacBook Pro range and the second was a rumour the Nikon D4 would get it too.  Putting the two together gave me own Thunderbolt moment.  I started to imagine what the still mythical Canon 5D MkIII could achieve with Thunderbolt.  Now I am no more an electronics engineer than I am a cinematographer.  I can build a PC from the components but that's about as far as it goes.  Given that only that MacBook Pro has been announced with Thunderbolt so far, what follows is pure speculation on my part.

There are two digital ports on the MkII - USB2 and HDMI.  USB has two purposes for the 5D.  The first is data transfer for which the maximum speed is 480Mbps.  USB rarely gets anywhere near that.  When I connect to my Mac Pro with a Sandisk 480Mbps card I get 90Mbps whereas the same card in a FireWire 800 reader gets 460Mbps.  The second use is as a bus for control instructions.  The Canon tethering software and the Okii follow focus use this method to control the camera remotely.  The second port is HDMI which is used to output to display devices.  When Canon designed this they were thinking of playback to domestic tellies.  HDMI is designed for domestic use and Canon only had room to squeeze the mini version of the plug on the body.  HDMI is great in it's domestic environment but has issues in the camera implementation.  Canon does not have the ability to give a clean, uncompressed output at 1080p while recording - the 5D is only 480p with camera indicators.  The built-in LCD also becomes inoperable when HDMI is plugged in. HDMI has a lengthy handshake protocol which interrupts things when the signal changes.  Finally, all HDMI connectors are hateful and mini is the worst.  Not the end of the world in a fixed installation but frustrating in equipment that is constantly on the move.  HDMI can shift a lot of data - HDMI1.4 tops out at around 10Gbps and can handle 4K resolution.

So where does Thunderbolt make a difference.  Well the first difference is that it can do both jobs that USB and HDMI do at once.  Like HDMI it has a 10Gbps capability but this is bidirectional.  It's close relationship to PCIe, the internal bus used in PCs and Apples, should make it possible to produce a breakout cable that supports HDMI and USB for legacy use.  It's so fast that transferring files is really going to going to be limited by the devices either end not the cable.  For tethered shooting this will make a huge difference.  No more jerky live view or long waits between shots or takes.  Apple's implementation of Thunderbolt uses the display port connector.  This is a small plug and the wire is relatively thin and flexible.  Its not as secure as a locked in cable like a BNC type SDI connector but it is a better fit than mini HDMI.

Intel has a fibre optic version of Thunderbolt which is capable of being sent long distances.  This could avoid the need to convert to SDI to get an image back to video village.

When the data comes off a sensor then a DSLR has to deal with it.  First it has to process it, then it has to store it.  With video, the Canon DIGIC4 chip has to first chuck loads of pixels away to get down to 2MP, then it has to encode into H264.  That’s not an easy task, even modern PCs struggle to encode 1080p in realtime.  Working that hard makes chips hot and there are not many places for that heat to go.  Some of that heat makes its way into the sensor which it does not enjoy.  Overheating and a rising noise floor are the things the DSLR shooter has to contend with.  The ideal situation would be to have the option to get the data off the sensor and out of the camera altogether and process and record it in a separate box.  When companies like RED and SI talk about “brains” this is what they mean.  To shift RAW data like that you need a fast bus and it seems to me that is a role Thunderbolt could play.  Whether the camera divisions that make these cameras ever want to go that far into the more esoteric end of the video market is debatable.  However, at least it would mean stills photographers wouldn’t be coughing up for high-end video features the majority of them will never use.  If the manufacturers decided to make the specs open then we could have 3rd parties like AJA or Codex provide the brain/recorders.  Even if the processing is still done in camera, then Thunderbolt offers a more flexible way of getting data out than HDMI.  Its bidirectional nature means that features like timecode, genlock and device control should be possible along with whatever video format the camera produces.  So if Canon do switch to 1080p 4:2:2 to use their MPEG2 based codec from their video line, piping that out uncompressed to an external recorder is well within Thunderbolt’s bandwidth as it has more capacity than HDSDI.  Thunderbolt based modularity seems to me like an elegant solution.  

A fully rigged RED One looks like Borg technology - cool but complicated.  With Thunderbolt, it looks like you may be just be able to plug into a hub like a USB without having to worry about the connection type.  I know in reality things don’t tend to be that easy with plug and play but we can always dream.  At the moment dreaming is all we can do till some devices appear and maybe the whole D4 thing was someone else's dream.  One of my missions at NAB is to see how much of musings are feasible, likely or commercially viable.