Monitoring 3500 x 1080 timeline

[Bob Zelin]

What the hell are you working with –

2k files are 2048 x 1556

What are you editing, how did you shoot this, what are you delivering on ?

I personally don’t know video products working at higher resolutions than this (but I don’t know the Quantel produt line).

Bob Zelin

[Rich Rubasch]

WE just finished a 2880 x 1080 project and we took our AE comps and squeezed them into a 1920 x 1080 comp for final output…it became like a big anamorphic file. We viewed them that way, but they were anamorphic.

Bob, live shows are getting pretty ambitious with the super wide screens, especially with HD projectors. A lot of the footage is shot green screen and we create the worlds behind them in AE in the superwide comp. Then our workflow was to squeeze that into a standard 1920 x 1080 final movie which the show guys would stretch back out for the projection.

Looks good but adds a lot of time rendering and working with the odd format…especially fields and frame rate issues. We also mixed HD and SD footage in the wide comps…it was a field interpretation and frame rate conversion mess.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Dave Martin]

I’m sorry Bob…should’ve explained a little more….

I’m working on a screen blended video for a corporate show which will be projected from three projectors on a 100 foot wide screen.

Eventually The 3500 pixels will be sliced in after effects to an HD or media server format but to actually build the project I need to work in 3500 x 1080.

I was hoping to monitor on something besides the computer screen…

Thanks…

Dave Martin

– MacPro – MacBook Pro –

[Dave Martin]

Thanks Rich

You nailed it. Were you able to monitor your large comp anywhere other than in AE on a computer screen? I was hoping I could use Kona somehow.

How did your anamorphic squeeze turn out. That was a suggestion for this project but I thought there would be a lot of pixel loss.

Thanks for the reply…

Dave Martin

– MacPro – MacBook Pro –

[Rich Rubasch]

I actually built a lot of the comps and string outs in FCP on a system that has the Aurora Pipe card. Coolest thing about this card that the Kona doesn’t have is a feature called Interceptor. Basically any clip that plays on the computer, regardless of application, will output thru the card and be displayed on my NTSC monitor. Very cool feature I wish Kona would develop.

I can be on the Cow Demo reel site, click on a reel and the clip that is playing in the browser is playing on my NTSC in its native size. It scales down HD material. Not perfect, but not bad either.

The stretch out worked great. Just like anamorphic video, stretching back out horizontally can take quite a bit of abuse…stretching vertically is another thing.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Dave Martin]

I’m looking for the Aurora Pipe online and I guess it’s discontinued, which means they won’t have anything for an Intel MacPro.

I’m sure the Kona 3 could do the same thing with a little tweak somewhere…no?

I’m interested in hearing more about your experience, perhaps this isn’t the forum for it, have you written about it anywhere?

Dave Martin

– MacPro – MacBook Pro –

[Ramona Howard]

Rich,

We are doing something similar for the upcoming CES show (one of the keynotes). The graphics are that large and they wanted monitoring to be the best it could be. They wanted uncompressed, so they turned to us.

Essentially we are splitting the image up as two 1920×1080 and running the stereo RaveHD (originally designed for stereoscopic, but will also operate as two independent systems) and feeding them to one very large display (I think it’s 100′ x 30′). Think of this just like running 2 SR’s in sync, just much cheaper and uncompressed.

Works like a charm and we are writing in some tools to tie into our DiceHD (keyer/still-storer) that makes for a very cool little set-up for this kind of work.

Now I know you can’t go with a 100′ x 30′ screen for daily monitoring but this can be scaled down considerably, using all of the same tools 🙂 The size of the screen is not the factor here (although 100′ x 30′ is rather cool), it’s the projector displaying the content and the systems pushing the content that are doing all the work.

If you need to go to a monitor, your going to be stuck with a scaling product if you want it to come out of the AJA, or any other Video I/O board as a single file/image. Which essentially means it will take your extremely large image and scale it down to 1920×1080.

Usually with the customers we deal with, they don’t want anything scaled, compressed or converted. Uncompressed and untouched as much as possible is how they want to see it. Creates some interesting work for us 🙂

Hope that info helps you along.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

I forgot to add. These are standard DPX frame sequences being pushed thru all of this 🙂

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Dave,

Can you work with a proxie and then conform it?

Cheers,
Ramona

[Jeremy Garchow]

We just finished a deal that was about 3450×1080. It’s basically 4 HD comps blended together (they edge blend is calculated to blend the projectors together to make one seamless image). I simply made a comp in AE that big, then made a white solid. I took a 1920×1080 comp and scaled the still in it on V1 to give me an idea of where the screen will land. This ended up as a very skinny image in 1080 comp, but you could easily see it. Using ProRes (footage captured ProResHQ @ 1080i) I was able to edit very very easily (some of it on a laptop even). Once the content cut was pretty much complete, I autoducked to AE, expanded everything back to the final size and an AE artist took it over from there for the final graphics treatment. Once that was done, it was laid off to a four sync roll HDCam situation.

Ramona, your Rave HD solution sounds delightful. Keeping this whole thing tapeless would have saved a ton of time. I know some staging companies that might be interested in this sort of thing. DO you have a write up of it in action somewhere, or perhaps a tech doc explaining exactly how it’d work? What about audio? Can you play that along with it, or is that something that needs to played separate (at these big shows, it’s not too hard to do, but somehow we have to get it all in sync. Can the RaveHD take an external sync cue? Sorry don’t know the technical term for it. It’d basically be some sort of serial protocol that told the Rave HD and whatever audio playback system to play at the same time.

Jeremy