HD Expo Report #3: Cool Stuff « Making the Movie

8Nov/050

HD Expo Report #3: Cool Stuff

The fun of going to an industry convention is partly to see the new, new ideas that people are pushing. Sometimes the product is devinely ridiculous. Sometimes it's so simple you curse yourself for not having thought of it. Here are a few things I saw at the HD Expo in Los Angeles' Peterson Automotive Museum that stood out...

Read on... Blue Ocean acrylic HD screen Displays

One booth that was stopping people in their tracks had a giant clear acrylic screen with a clean HD image projected onto it from only a few feet behind. Tradmarked as a Blue Ocean, it is billed as 'The World's First 300" Acrylic Screen System.' I think they are better at making it than writing about it. Verbatim from the brochure:

BLUE OCEAN is created in the center of Cast Optical Acrylic, creating an indescribable amazingly deep and bodied viewing experience like no other display technology. ... No other lens screen or coated diffuser comes even close to this level of optical presentation.

Cameras

Pre-record is a new feature that Panasonic seems to be adding to all their cameras, even the ones that record to tape. The AJ-HDX400 DVCPro-HD camera will record 10 seconds to disk continuously, so that you can actually go back and record 10 seconds previous to when you pushed the button. Of course, you still had to have been pointing the camera at the action.

Digital Intermediates

One panel I attended (at only the beginning and end, because it got quite dull and repetitive) was for Kodak's new inDI process, one that aims to bring the Digital Intermediate to indie filmmakers at an affordable price. They certainly didn't convince me of affordability, although it may be cheaper than a true DI. What sounded like the great advantage with it was the ability to view dailies that look very close to what the final image (on film) will look like. Basically, your dailies get data-scanned in super-high resolution and color-range, giving you a digital master as you go along that would usually come at the end of the process. No more telecine. A sophisticated program that has lots of Kodak film data can then make this scanned image look like what it will look like when its back on film. That's what they're selling, anyway.

A FinalTouchHD rep explains the interface Silicon Color has a different approach. Their software FinalTouchHD looked to me like a lot more affordable indie color-timing solution. Fully-integrated with Final Cut Pro, it is a color mastering program that does all the tweaks that a geek would want. "Over 36 powerful nodes can be linked together into node trees to create that very custom look." (Does that mean 37 nodes can be linked, then?)

Gear

Some of the most talkative reps I met were from Telecast Fiber Systems, Inc. They sell patchbays and multiplexer boxes with all sorts of inputs and outputs, but always containing fiber-optics. Fiber optics can carry several signals at once with zero signal loss, they said. I'm not sure if that's practically true, since they don't claim their cables should go more than a few hundred feet. Aimed mostly at professional level post-production houses, nonetheless a small post-production set-up might be able to make use of the wire-reducing functions.

Lighting

Lite Panels LED Ringlite From across the convention floor, I saw the halo of an angel. Actually, it was a circular LED light by Lite Panels. They had a monitor set up so you could stand in front of the light and see how it lit you. The light was harsher than I expected, and will not substitute for a soft-box on closeups. But it's a cool-looking product and has the added benefit of weighing under 6 lbs and being able to use battery or AC power. The smaller lights they make, which could be disguised as practicals (and are, on such shows as 24), were also intriguing.