I’ve been excited about the possibilities of Thunderbolt on the MacBook Pro since it was announced almost a year ago. The problem has been the wait to get these new small portable but fast peripherals. In a recent fxguide rc podcast, Jason and Mike commented about the delays in seeing products actually shipping. Due to various factors, including a lack of controller chips, Thunderbolt devices have taken a while to materialize. But we’re starting to see some cool products come to market that are especially suited to production and post production.

A few of our favorites include the Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter and the LaCie Little Big Disk. These fit in nicely with our needs of nimble production travel for fxguide and fxphd, where we shoot with the RED EPIC, SCARLET, and the 5D.

Why do they fit in nicely? Basically it’s the size/weight and the vast increase in speed.

Our requirements for the job at hand are probably quite different from others’ needs. For our production, we’re already lugging quite a bit of gear around the world, so we don’t want to be bogged down with weighty RAID systems or even desktop-sized external drive enclosures. We have several Promise Thunderbolt RAID enclosures and love them. But the thought of lugging one around in a backpack? Ain’t gonna happen.

So on the road, we prefer smaller and more portable notebook-based external drives such as the OWC Mercury Pro Elite Mini, which has FW800 and ESATA ports. We even steer towards larger capacity drives that spin at 5400RPM vs. smaller capacity at 7200RPM. This is because we’re shooting a lot of content on the EPIC and so we can quickly fill up drives during a week of production. We also stick with the 15″ MacBook Pro, as the 17″ is frankly too large to lug around (Mike and I have both owned 17″ systems in the past). But the 15″ MBP doesn’t have an Express Card slot, so until now we’ve been out of luck using ESATA drives on the road.

The Sonnet Tempo SATA Express Card plugs into the Echo Express Card Adapter

This is why it makes sense that we love the Little Big Disk and the Echo Express Card Adapter. The Little Big Disk gives us 2TB of RAID0 speediness in an enclosure that fits in the palm of your hand. As far as the Echo Express Adapter, it allows us to plug in the Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 and then use the ESATA connection on the RED STATION. This allows us to take advantage of the vastly faster Thunderbolt pipeline as compared to FW800.

How fast? An almost 2.5x speed up from what we were using before. We did some tests trying to mimic a real world situation, so we used:

• OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini 1.5TB drive. This drive already had about 750GB of material on it
• LaCie Little Big Disk 2TB drive, formatted as RAID0. It had about 900GB of material on it
• Sonnet Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter
• Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 Adapter

First, we tested the basic drives utilizing the AJA System Test. Here are the results:

Next, we moved on to transferring footage, testing various combinations of things, including:

• Using the OWC drive as an ESATA drive and as a FW800 drive
• Using R3D Data Manager with MD5 verification
• Is a unix command-line copy faster than the Finder?

The test involved transferring 40.5GB of R3D footage from a REDMAG SSD 128GB. Each test was run twice and both runs were incredibly close to each other (within 5 seconds). See the end of the article for a visual representation as to how the drives were hooked up for the various tests.

Here are the results:

The obvious takeaway was that using the ESATA adapter and the LaCie Thunderbolt drive gave us performance that was close to 2.5 times faster than the FW800 setup we were using at the end of last year. That’s a huge difference when you’re transferring footage overnight after an all day shoot.

Interestingly, using the OWC drive as an ESATA drive in the same setup was also considerably faster. So if you need to use the single drive in a pinch, it’s worth it to use the ESATA connection.

If you use R3D Data Manager to ensure the integrity of your transferred data, the results using the full on Thunderbolt system were fairly close to our “original” FW800 to FW800 Finder copy setup. It’s also more than twice as fast than if you were using R3D Data Manager with the FW800 to FW800 connection.

A couple of hopefully helpful tips in operation:

• We did find that occasionally we’d unmount the Thunderbolt attached drives (both the LaCie and the RED STATION) and couldn’t get them to mount again without rebooting. Unmounting and detaching and then re-attaching the Thunderbolt cables seemed to cause the swaps to be more stable.
• The Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 doesn’t solidly click into the Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter. Be careful as you don’t want to disconnect the drives during a copy. If you do, you’ll most likely need to reboot to get all the drives to be recognized again.
• The ReTrack Esata Adapter is a nice, compact ESATA adapter that winds and unwinds the cables. We find this to be a better solution than the incredibly rigid (and short) ESATA cables you find that are common.

All in all we’re really excited about this first batch of portable Thunderbolt products to hit the market.

Faster drives on the road equals more sleep (instead of staying up babysitting EPIC transfers), – or time for a few more pints of amber ale after the shoot.

Visual summary of the test setups:

Test setup and connections (click for full size image)

- John Montgomery fxphd.

“So if you are a really keen young Camera operator and you see EXTENDED range – you’re going to pick it – I mean who wouldn’t? Normal and Extended – you’re 26 – you’re going to pick Extended,” joked Charles Poynton as part of his lecture at fxphd last week.

What Charles was talking about was the Extended range on the ARRI Alexa, but the same discussion could be had about the Marvels Cine Profile for the 5D vs the Technicolor Cine profile.

The theory is that in many cameras there is a set of levels. Let’s say for the purposes of this article ONLY – that they are between 0 to 100. Now imagine that you discovered that your camera had values mapped for black to white that only went from 5 to 95. In other words, you film with the lens cap on and it would internally store that number at 5. And if you way way overexposed, the best you could do is an internal number of 95. Of course, on your screen or in the cinema it would be black and white respectively – but in effect you have mapped all the range of light levels from black to white just between 5 and 95 – and in theory there is no way to get below 5 and or above 95. It would seem like a waste perhaps? You might even look for the button that says EXTENDED – that did not do that. Why not map between 0 and 100 if that is black and white?

Marvels Cine Picture Style is an option for the 5D. I am sure it works for some people, but I was alarmed when I read their web page. Here is a quote from the Marvel Cine Profile web page, which highlights the problem and reads as if the Technicolor Cinestyle would be inferior. This is frankly at best odd, and at worst, simply inaccurate:

Warning to all users of the Technicolor Cinema-style flat-profile! Using the Technicolor style will severely limit your dynamic range! Blacks are lifted and whites are crushed! With only 255 values between black and white for each color, snooping 10% off at both sides is simple “DR theft”! You remove another 10% of DR when using the Technicolor LUT (via LutBuddy); that’s probably two stops total!

There are many things wrong with this statement.

First it reads like a warning, which is inflammatory. I mean, we are all on the side of getting the best out of our next shoot aren’t we? No need for the drama. But, perhaps, that is just me.

Second, it says the whites are crushed and the blacks lifted. Yes, the blacks are lifted, but the whites are not crushed. Crushed implies that data is clipped off. It is not the whites that are clipped – or even crushed – as long as they are adjusted along with everything to fit into a more restricted range.

Then there is that “theft” remark. Well now, you really need to start discounting the marketing hype ! Why is it not theft? Why is EXTENDED range or using the full range not such a great idea?

For a start, ARRI — one of the most respected camera companies in the world — does not make this ‘theft’ mode normal. It is not the default. Technicolor represents some of the best technical minds in the industry, they have no incentive other than image quality to get this right. Note that Technicolor gave away Cinestyle for free. I will leave that for you to interrupt motives.

But again – why isn’t it theft? The answer is simply noise.

Imagine we only focus on noise in the blacks. That is a sensible thing to do…after all if you have 10 units of noise over a very small dark signal of say 20 units, the noise is half the signal. Man, will I notice that. And yet if I have the same 10 units of noise over a signal up at 70 units (say 70% up the light scale) then 10 over 70 is not half, it is 14% (10/70). That is why we record signal to noise ratios (normally in dB). The same amount of noise in the blacks as in the whites looks worse as there is a higher signal to noise ratio.

One more point before I prove my noise ‘anti-theft’ theory. Not withstanding my point above, you might argue there is actually more noise in the blacks due to heat. Good point. In a sensor, photons come in and they get collected in little conceptual ‘wells’ and the photons cause electrons. Every frame, we read out the number of electrons and bingo we have the light level for that pixel for that frame. But heat also causes electrons, this is the dark body noise; the noise the actual silicon makes given it is hot (and yes it does rise as the camera is on filming longer).

But the clever guys at your camera company know how much we hate noise so they make some sensor ‘pixel’ on the CMOS chip – some normal ‘wells’ or ‘pixels” and then cover them with aluminum, they block them off completely to light. This gives a great idea as to the noise the other active ‘wells’ are getting that have nothing to do with light. Imagine your camera only had 2 pixels – the real one and this dummy one (the one covered over). The main ‘pixel’ well reads 92 photons and the covered over one reads 7 photons. But, of course, the covered one is locked shut so it is really reading 7 photons of noise. By subtracting the dummy reading from the active reading (92 minus 7), we effectively take out the noise in our one and only pixel image. This makes it reasonable to assume that the other active pixel is really only reading 85.

However, noise is not constant. So that one active pixel might have actually had 6 or 8 fake photons of noise. We don’t know. But we all agree if we take out most of the noise it is a lot better off. Even if a small amount of noise remains, most of it is gone.

So how does this relate to our extended range or ‘theft’ remark?

Well, of course our cameras have a lot more than one pixel, but the principle is the same. We sample a set of blocked off dummy pixels, work out the average (this is important), and subtract the average from the active pixels. This gets most but not all of the noise out. Sometimes the average we subtract was not enough; some times too much. And don’t forget there are SO many pixels or sensor points on a CMOS chip that the math is really valid.

To illustrate, I am going to imagine that there are only 10 active pixels and, as above, keep the math simple and use some dummy numbers to illustrate the point. Here are our 10 pixels and the numbers on those pixels when the sensor thinks it is seeing black:

6, 7, 6 ,3, 9, 15, 6, 5, 10, 3

The covered over dummy sensor ‘pixels/wells’ read an average of 7. So lets subtract out the 7 to get:

-1, 0, -1, -4, 2, 8, -1, -2, 3, -4

Note the average of these numbers is zero. Add them up yourself. The average is zero. We took out the noise…and sure, some pixels are up some are down, but on average there is NO average noise.

Now imagine you stored these numbers without any offset. In other words, we store these numbers as per Marvels Cine profile. We set zero to zero and only store positive numbers… we get

0,0,0,0,2,8,0,0,3,0

The average noise is now … 1.3 – it went up, the image is, on average, now noisier !

If we had some room at the bottom and did not cut off zero at zero and saved the file with zero lifted up, yes, the BLACK LEVEL lifted… we would have less noise. If we just saved some of those negative numbers then as we moved into post, we’d have less noise. No signal processing – no tricks – just simple maths.

but this goes to 11

Personally I will stay with Technicolor, for two reasons:

1. I like it and I hate noise.
2. Technicolor worked directly with Canon and got access to the chip further up stream in the image processing pipeline that ever before, Canon worked with Technicolor.

But that’s just me.

Re the ARRI Alexa: Let me just quote from Nick Shaw, Workflow Consultant London, UK, who’s opinion I trust.

I have seen a lot of problems caused by people not understanding the difference between “legal” and “full/extended range” signals. If in doubt, stick to “legal”. You may have slightly fewer code values to play with, but you do not risk your image data getting clipped at some
point in your workflow.

As for Charles Poynton – I thank him for his work with us last week. The great news is that he is teaching all of this at fxphd this term in his advanced level course, DCT301 – Camera Tech and Colour Science.

By Mike Seymour

Maia Kayser is a Lead Character Animator at ILM. In this, our first video studio profile, we travel to the Presidio in San Francisco to Industrial Light & Magic to see what it is like to be a woman doing digital character animation in films such as Rango.

Download Video

fxphd: Studio Profile – ILM Character Animation

Note, this was originally posted on fxguide but these style tips will be now posted here on fxphd.

Snehal Patel, Sales Associate (Pro Camera Accessories) at ARRI, has been working with Bill Bennett, ASC to test out a workflow for VFX to extract Lens Data and Tilt/Roll information from the Log-C Quicktime files coming out of an Alexa Plus. He posted this information which allows one to extract dynamic per frame Alexa metadata from Alexa files.

It was known that all metadata information was being saved in the Quicktime video file including “per frame” info for things like F-Stop, Focal Length and Zoom data.

Link to the ARRI web page on metadata

The problem was that there were not any metadata readers available for Quicktime that spit out frame-by-frame info. Luckily, ARRI has just released “Meta Extract” for both Mac and PC which is software that runs in a terminal window (command line) and allows you to spit out a semi-colon delimited CSV database file which you can open in Excel. The database is organized by timecode and contains info for every frame in your shot. Some info is static (exposure index, look file, etc.) and other info changes line by line (f-stop, tilt, roll).

Here is the download page for both the instructions (release notes) and software for “Meta Extract”

If you read the PDF it gives precise instructions on how to extract the data.

For example, to extract the metadata for a video file named “A002C016_110719_R33F.mov” on the desktop and make a CSV file called “A002C016_110719_R33F.csv” you would type:

./ARRIMetaExtract /Users/MyUser/Desktop/A002C016_110719_R33F.mov /Users/heugel/Desktop/
A002C016_110719_R33F.csv

This will also extract a look file, in .xml format, that was used for that shot (if one had a Look assigned in the camera) which you can run through the LUT generator to get an LUT without having to go back and find the original Look file.

Snehal Patel explains in his post that when someone wants to look at the CSV file in Excel or another database viewer, make sure they open Excel and do an “import” of the CSV file as opening directly will give you an incorrect display. “During import, be sure to specify that the file is ‘semi-colon delimited’ and don’t reformat the columns. The database opens up and you can see your shot frame-by-frame along with all the metadata that is recorded. To get a list of extracted fields that will show up in the database, see the Meta Extract release notes PDF”.

Here is a direct link to just the PDF

With the start of the new term, we have redesigned the home page and we have significantly altered this blog. We started this blog to keep you up to speed with the Dean’s activities – but we decided you can do that easily elsewhere – in particular via the fxphDOD podcast. This blog will now be featuring production tips and updates from the projects that we are doing.

You will get videos, audio downloads and much more than ever before. We will be profiling facilities to work at, people in the industry and showing the broader community some of your work that previously one needed to be an fxphd member to see… for example, we will showcase the best of the challenges here, key shots from classes and making of any fxphd films under construction.

We think you guys will enjoy the new content and we welcome your comments. All the content on this blog will be free to all, but we hope those of you who are not members will see the great work being done and try joining fxphd. The plan is that fxguide will continue to have news and interviews but more timely content will be increasingly posted here on the fxphd home page.

Check back regularly for heaps of content we have planned.

John and Mike

From all the team here at fxphd, the Professors, staff and team – have a really wonderful Xmas and best wishes for the New Year.

- Travel safe these Holidays.

This week we have just returned from Siggraph Asia and I wanted to share a really odd side of Siggraph: The Emerging Technology exhibits. This is weird science, actually this is often just weird. I am not sure what the criteria for getting into the Emerging Tech exhibition exactly is, but I suspect it involves non-commercial applicability. Don’t get me wrong – I love these guys, every show – no matter how busy I am – I visit.  I am never disappointment. It is like free speech – I may not agree with your point of view but I will fight for your right to put headphones on me and freak me out. This year there were flocking robots, that herded visitors in a pen, 3D holograms of rabbits in gas, mirrors that superimposed a matching animated horse head over yours, and inappropriate food noises. (As I said, all of them somewhat failing on the “ready for mass marketing” tag). The last of these involved demonstrating that you eat with your ears. And you know they were right!

The team had a plate of various food, and a complex headset that included both headphones and a jaw sensor. As you placed various food samples in your mouth – such as a jelly baby candy- the kit sensed your chewing. As you byte down, you hear the jelly babies sort of screaming. As you eat crackers you hear squelching. It is stunning how this affects your sense of taste.

I said it weird.  But bloody marvelous, I can’t wait to see what they have next year.

After having earlier been accepted to Cannes, our little film BEAR has been accepted into Sundance.

64 short films were selected from 4083 submissions for Sundance.  Like Spider (its sequel) before it, Bear will be in competition.  Congrats to dir. Nash Edgerton and the team – especially the member of fxphd who did such a professional job on the vfx shots. It was great fun and the team did a great job in next to no time. Also just a piece of advice – if you get to work with great people… everything else will follow.

(Above is Jack – played by Dir. Nash Edgerton, recovering from ‘Spider” but not having learnt his lesson !)

I know this is not strictly fxphd production related but it is the same family… I wanted to write about how much joy and success we have been getting from our podcasting lately. We run a series of podcasts

• fxpodcast : a serious technical in depth look at issues from Siggraph papers to Union issues

• fxgtv: A magazine video podcast – covering feature films, tech & a great venue for our trade show coverage

• the rc: a look at digital cinematography, with a more conversational style, but with RED Room interviews with leading DOPs.

• the vfxshow – a review and discussion show where industry professionals discuss what does and doesn’t work, in a film review style show.

• the fxphdod - the fxphd domain of definition podcast that is very conversational and lets you hear whats happening behind the screens at fxphd (this is completely ”casual” -but hopefully informative)

Each of these now has over a 100 episodes some many more. We track these closely and try and make sure that each show has a different profile. If you want the facts – then fxpodcast is the place to start, if you want some relaxed ‘conversation with friends’ then the DOD or the RC is the place to go. But over the last year or so we have been trying to get the shows more regularly scheduled and tighten the guest list of co-hosts to better match the shows themselves. -

And the results are amazing…

some of these podcasts are up double on what they were… and the feedback globally is really humbling. We do it to serve the industry and because we love it, but while some people say podcasting is flat- we are not seeing that at all… our growth is double digital across the board.

I want to quote from one of our community members who said it really well:

“If you compare the conversations on the early shows to the shows now, you can clearly see that the quality of your analysis and well considered opinions on the movies you talk about, is why we are growing at this rate. I was a listener long before I ever worked on the show and the show is much better today.

I appreciate all of you taking the time, sometimes on short notice, to see the films, read the research and then work within worldwide schedules to contribute to our show. All of your experience and honest, constructive feedback on the films is why more people, especially professional VFX artists, are tuning in…”

Of course it is a combination of the guests – generously giving their time, the amazing hosts – all of whom have day jobs yet still make the time, and you the fx-community.  We owe you guys so much – we have the best jobs in the industry and you support us and allow us to have those jobs. From teaching inside fxphd to interviewing VFX artists for fxguide… this is one great gift. Thanks for your support  – from all of us.