In the Trenches
Austin has style. And music. Surrounded by big, corporate cities like Houston and Dallas, Austin is the Greenwich Village of Texas (though they might not like the analogy). Janis Joplin got her start there, and it’s the home of the South by Southwest (SXSW) festivals and conferences, a bastion of “indieism” in Texas. Thinking differently is part of the Austin scene, and Mike Curtis, a digital consultant and founder of the popular online site hdforindies.com, is doing his part by evangelizing for HD production on the desktop.
The second-best information on what software and hardware to buy comes from the cameramen, editors, and directors working in the trenches. First best comes from the techies who put together the gear for those other guys. Mike Curtis has been wrangling bits for more than fifteen years, and two years ago he realized that the second wave in the digital indie revolution (the first being DV) was the advent of affordable high-definition cameras and editing systems. He could have coasted along like everyone else, adopting equipment shortly after it was proven production-worthy. But that’s not Curtis. Instead, he has been testing hardware for next-generation systems and sharing his knowledge with others.
Hdforindies.com is a blog site filtered through Curtis’ point of view. He gives mini reviews and recommendations on everything from hard drives to displays, along with his insight into industry trends. Reading through every item on the site is a crash course in HD production. It helps to have some knowledge beforehand, but hdforindies.com is one of a handful of excellent HD sites that should be bookmarked by anyone looking to make their next project in HD.
Curtis described his own home studio, a good introduction to overall recommendations for a professional HD post production pipeline. “In my studio I have a mix of Macs and Windows machines. I use the Macs for all of my HD capture, editing, and color correction work. The Windows machines [Athlon and P4 boxes] are used less and less these days; I’m finding the dual G5s [a dual 2.0 and dual 2.5] work so well for my needs.
“I’ve really found the Blackmagic product line to be the core of my HD workflow. I use two DeckLink HD Pro Dual Link cards for capture and editing of all my footage. I use the HDLink to monitor my HD signals for focus and detail and use a standard definition studio monitor to judge critical color. This is a huge cost savings over a traditional HD monitoring setup, on top of the fact that it simply works better—I can see all the detail of my HD footage on my Apple 23 inch LCD connected to the HDLink and still judge my most critical color work on the SD monitor connected via the analog outputs of the DeckLink HD Pro card. The more recent drivers for the card allows this mixed SD/HD monitoring, and it’s been great.”
A Flip of a Coin
This is the system that Curtis used on a client’s recent HD short Heads or Tails, a tragicomedy that involves a philandering husband who can’t decide on which women to stay with, his wife or his girlfriend. The title refers to the coin toss that decides the matter and ultimately leads to the husband’s comeuppance. Head or Tails was originally intended for DV, but the producer, Paul Alvarado, found a way to borrow a Panasonic Varicam for the shoot. This was at the beginning of 2004 before Apple announced Final Cut Pro HD™, and so finding an affordable post solution in Austin remained a problem.
HD post meant renting a DVCPRO HD deck, the hardware frame-rate converter, and editing on uncompressed HD on a SCSI array—an expensive system to gain access to. Curtis learned about the project and offered Alvarado his expertise and studio. “The short came at a moment when three of the four costly elements of HD were about to become affordable, namely the I/O card, software, and monitoring [the fourth element, storage, is still expensive],” Curtis says. Apple released FCP HD at the same time Blackmagic lowered prices on their already competitive DeckLink HD cards and introduced the HDLink product that turns an Apple Cinema Display into an HD monitor. Suddenly, desktop HD was a lot less expensive, and Heads or Tails was officially turned into a HD short.
The Workflow
At the start of production Curtis used a pre-FireWire DVCPRO HD field deck and the hardware frame-rate converter. But getting the 24p shots out of deck was not straightforward. “Shots had to be buffered into the frame rate converter, converted, and then output via HD-SDI into uncompressed files,” he says. “But then we realized that we couldn't capture at 720p24 at the time [drivers have fixed that since then], and we had to up-rez via the hardware frame-rate converter to uncompressed 1080p24 at around 95MBs.”
This forced Curtis to rent a Panasonic AJ-1200A deck (introduced at NAB 2004), a decision that ultimately solved many problems. “It was a pleasure to work with,” Curtis says. “720p24 footage was only 5.7MBs and could be captured directly with deck control via FireWire. 60p shots could be processed down to 24p with the software frame-rate converter in FCP to do things like slow motion of a shot of the coin flipping in the air.” Curtis used the DeckLink HD Pro card and an HDLink with the Apple 23 inch LCD Cinema Display allowing him to monitor the HD with pixel for pixel accuracy.
One advantage of the FCP HD and Blackmagic system is that the Media Manager can be used to copy the pertinent clips in a project to a second hard drive in one easy step. This allowed Curtis to hand over the entire Heads or Tails FCP project to Alvarado so that he could tweak edits at home on his laptop. Even with the 1280-pixel display of the smaller screen, Alvarado was able to see a reasonable facsimile of HD with realtime performance in FCP HD.
The last step was to take the final edited movie in DVCPRO HD (including color correction performed in FCP) and prepare for deliverables. “I used the Media Manager's Recompress function to process the camera native codec DVCPRO HD footage to the Blackmagic uncompressed codec,” Curtis says. “The ‘Recompress’ nomenclature can be misleading—the 5.7MBs DVCPRO HD footage was exactly what the tape had recorded, there was nothing better to obtain. You can either rely on the hardware circuitry in the deck to decompress and spit out the uncompressed results on HD-SDI, or rely on the software in the Mac to decompress it to uncompressed data. Tests revealed extremely minor differences between the hardware and software decompression results. Since we didn't want to go to the added expense of renting the AJ-1200A deck from Dallas again—we're in Austin—this was a very cost-effective way to get us to an uncompressed edit of our project so that we could make an uncompressed digital master, so that all of our color correction, compositing, titling, etc. were rendered in highest possible quality.” With a digital master complete, Curtis was able to output DVD, tape, web, HD Windows Media 9, and high-quality, full-size MPEG-4 deliverables.
What’s Next?
Looking into the future, Mike Curtis is developing a low-cost, direct-to-disk, uncompressed, high-definition field recorder. The system will use inexpensive, hotswappable drives, and footage and metadata will be Final Cut Pro™ compatible. One big advantage of this system is that hot-swapped drives can be pulled out of the array on location and delivered directly to the edit bay. There’s no waiting to download footage; you’re instantly ready to go once the drives are plugged into a suitable enclosure. Other features of the new system include compatibility with all broadcast formats, 4:4:4 sampling along with SDI or HDSDI or dual-link SDI camera connections. Curtis expects to have his portable field recorder ready in 2005 at a price far below competing systems.
The above system is now in the final stage of completion, but Mike Curtis is already planning for new features and innovations to make HD production easier and more affordable. Blackmagic’s very aggressive driver updates that add many new capabilities for card owners, along with the continuing Apple development of FCP, provide Curtis with new opportunities to build innovative systems. Since the pace of HD R&D shows no signs of slowing down, frequent visits to hdforindies.com may translate into news that saves indie filmmakers money and helps launch projects like Heads or Tails. As far as Mike Curtis is concerned, betting on HD is a sure thing.
