Xena 2K Broadcast Legal output??

[Tim Kolb]

In the Premiere playback settings, the Xena card has specs for setting card output to rec 709 or 601…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Bram Tulloch]

Hmmm.

I’ve looked at the settings you’ve mentioned and they are listed under “importer options” and don’t seem to have any affect on the video signal output according to the waveform monitor I have attached to our HD Cam SR deck.

I’ll provide some background on the material and work flow.

It was originally 2k film log DPX frames which were then resized to 1920×1080 and converted to REC709 colour space in Shake (done by our colour geeks)

These new REC709 HD dpx frames were then played out to tape 4:4:4 dual link.
We have then recaptured these frames 4:2:2 using our HD Deck’s frame convert (Which doesn’t scale illegal values) and we have edited some material together and are attempting to play out again 4:2:2.

As this is showreel material, it’s possible that this may end up going out for broadcast so I want to make sure that the values are legal.

Perhaps I need to revisit the generation of the REC709 HD dpx frames and ask that they be made broadcast legal, but I was kinda hoping that the AJA Xena would be able to help me out here.

Any ideas or suggestions would be great!

Thanks
Bram

[Bram Tulloch]

I guess no one has any ideas with regards to this?

We’re really trying to avoid having to go back to the source material and re-edit them back into the showreel.

Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated. Even if it’s a suggestion of an external box which may fit the bill?

thanks
Bram

[Tim Kolb]

So…when you are outputting the images, what do your scopes tell you about the images? Do they seem to over drive for luma or have some hyper-saturated colors?

Keeping in mind that I’d always rather have a colorist dial them in than some device just simply clamp or scale the image property that is out of spec without any appreciation for the aesthetic of the image itself.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Bram Tulloch]

It’s luminance that’s the problem. On both the low end and the high end.

This stuff isn’t going to a colourist unfortunately. It’s directly from a Nuke artist and it was made for a film output. The conversion from FILM LOG to video REC709, I assume, is just substituting like for like values and not really scaling to legal SMPTE values.

I don’t believe that clipping the top and bottom end affects the “aesthetic of the image”, mostly (dangerous comment but I don’t want to get into a debate over that, I just need some kind of answer about my original question! 🙂 ), but I know what you mean. Although there are differences you can see, I don’t believe the image as a whole is compromised. Going from film to video means a compromise has to happen at some point!

If this was a project that was being paid for, then yes, I would have a colourist check it out, but in this case, I simply need to know that the values that make it to tape are legal. Obviously, if we’re not happy with the results of a “quick fix” then we’ll re-address the offending clips, but if we think the result is acceptable using a hardware scale, then that’s what we want to do.

Any ideas? 😉

Thanks
Bram

[Bram Tulloch]

Well, no ideas here so I found a goofy work around myself.

Played the material out to tape with it’s illegal range.

Captured the material back in but in an RGB format (i.e. Not YUV)

Set the Xena output to CGR and since the material is now RGB, it now displayed legally.

Annoying work around but… it works.

Bram

[Ramona Howard]

Hello,

So just to clarify. These issues are application issues not hardware issues. We also use the AJA boards (along with many other manufactures) in our products and allow a feature set to work with all kinds of levels since the hardware is built to handle it.

The hardware allows for everything to operate in a SMPTE range as well as beyond it. How applications clamp beyond to SMPTE will vary and some do a better job than others.

I just wanted to make sure you guys know where the real problems lie, as AJA does make an awesome product.

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Bram Tulloch]

Hey Ramona

There’s no doubt it’s a great product and I’m aware that it’s an application issue, or AJA’s integration with the application.

I guess my question was more workflow based and it certainly wasn’t implying the AJA was no good. A lot of what we do in my company can allow for illegal values and that suits us just fine, but occassionally we have to make sure stuff is legal and so I just wanted to work out the best (read: easiest) way to do that.

Thanks
Bram

[Ramona Howard]

Bram,

I know you were not pointing fingers, didn’t mean to imply you were (it was a general post for those that may think that all items that go wrong is linked to hardware). In this case many of us can speak up that the hardware works as it should because we are using it outside of these applications 🙂

I know the hardware handles non legal to legal just fine, we do it all the time. I would certainly keep pressing the application manufacture/s to fix it 🙂

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!