- This topic has 10 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 13 years, 9 months ago by .
-
Posts
-
Hi,
We are going to produce our second feature film, the first one was HD, but the post-producers want me to get infos about 4K post to see if it could work nicely.
We actually run an eQ HD, and some AE/combustion/fusion stations.
Of course we’ll need something like an iQ 4k, to get some real time, for conformation and color grading. That’s a workstation i have seen running, and it seems pretty fast, but are any other solutions existing ? For color grading/conform/composite ? I don’t know if something like an Inferno 4k exist ?
But i’m more concerned about the stations.
Do you guys ever work at 4k ? Which software will be the most responsive, if the choice is between Fusion/Shake/Combustion ?
And what kind of hardware, quad cpu ? 4gb of ram ? more ? of course it’ll be hard to have real time from hard drives for all compositing stations.Does working at 2k proxy, then render at 4k is an usual workflow in 4k film post production ?
I’m also concerned about monitoring, are they any DLP projector working at 4k ? for a reasonnable price (i mean not projectors designed for theaters), and does monitoring at 4k is useful, or 2k is enough ?
I also have seen that Apple Cinema display can handle 2k anyone tryed them with 4k footage downsized to 2 k?
If you also have special thoughts about 4k workflow, errors to avoid etc don’t hesitate to share them.
Thanks for your answers, and appologies for my poor english
Julien
I never worked with 4k images, but I guess that your main concern will be your data storage system. A single 4k image weights around 50MB and at 24 fps so you get a data rate of 1200MB/sec.
You’ll have to find a very good storage system with a lot of TB if you want to make a good DI pipeline.For single workstation, this product looks interesting :
http://www.hugesystems.com/Products/pdf/MV-4440.pdfPS : Where are you located in france?
we’re located in paris.
indeed i dunno if realtime play his worthy for compositing, maybe fast drives but not realtime, because using software compositing i’ll always need ram preview, i’m more concerned about processing power than data storage, because we’ll have a central machine that’ll do all the storage, for conform and color grading, compositing workstations won’t have access to the full lenght feature.
And having a data storage that can do 4K, for 2/3 workstations would be damn expensive, maybe more than powerful stations with fast drive (like 4/5 drives in raid5) don’t you think ?
julien
4K needs lots of bandwidth, approx 1.2Gbyte/sec!! Even for doing a ram preview, you will need 1.2Gig of system ram for each sec. This will physically mean 6sec. of max length of ram preview for 8GB systems.
I can only tell my limited experience with flame/inferno systems, 4K doesn’t work well in 32bit versions up to inferno6.2/flame9.2. So if you will ever use inferno for your comps, I would try v6.5 (64bit) and 12gig of ram on linux system. I hope you can comp 4K w/o any memory problems in batch on that version.
2K proxies?!!! We work here with 720 pixel proxies on inferno for 2K! 2K is damn slow for interaction, if you have more than 2-3 layers!
Regarding combustion, does it have 64bit version? If not, 2GB will be your limit with that application, and I don’t think it might be possible to do complex 4K comps, with that amount of memory. Don’t know about DF has 64bit code…
The 64bit apps I know: shake/inferno6.5…
About 4K projector, Sony has one. We bought sn0001 and went into some problems, Sony tries to solve it now. And it is not true 4K! It has 4 x HD1080 inputs. It should be priced around $80k, if I don’t remember wrong. But even if you buy that projector, to drive it at so called 4K, you will need filmlight system for playback. That was the only system supporting such a config.
kuban wrote:4K needs lots of bandwidth, approx 1.2Gbyte/sec!! Even for doing a ram preview, you will need 1.2Gig of system ram for each sec. This will physically mean 6sec. of max length of ram preview for 8GB systems.I can only tell my limited experience with flame/inferno systems, 4K doesn’t work well in 32bit versions up to inferno6.2/flame9.2. So if you will ever use inferno for your comps, I would try v6.5 (64bit) and 12gig of ram on linux system. I hope you can comp 4K w/o any memory problems in batch on that version.
2K proxies?!!! We work here with 720 pixel proxies on inferno for 2K! 2K is damn slow for interaction, if you have more than 2-3 layers!
Regarding combustion, does it have 64bit version? If not, 2GB will be your limit with that application, and I don’t think it might be possible to do complex 4K comps, with that amount of memory. Don’t know about DF has 64bit code…
The 64bit apps I know: shake/inferno6.5…
About 4K projector, Sony has one. We bought sn0001 and went into some problems, Sony tries to solve it now. And it is not true 4K! It has 4 x HD1080 inputs. It should be priced around $80k, if I don’t remember wrong. But even if you buy that projector, to drive it at so called 4K, you will need filmlight system for playback. That was the only system supporting such a config.
Shake is a 32bits app as fusion, I believe that only Flame is 64 bits . But Fusion is used in 4k production, example- in Digital Dimension (Zathura, Mr/Mrs Smith…). But Shake and Fusion have features can be useful in this type of work like background render, render limited areas of an image and auto proxy options
Shake is not truely 64 bit. It will only acess 3gb in the gui and then allow you to access 3 gb for each instance of flip book that you run. There is NO WAY I would run comps through my system at full 4k. I have been working on a Dual g5 2.5 with an XRAID and I still have been using 2k and 1k proxies to get things done !
Quad 2.5s with 8 gig here, got a couple of 4k shots to do in the next two months… will see how it goes with Shake 🙂
ok thanks for your answer.
It seems that 4k is not supported as a thought
Because of the iQ 4k, i thought flame/inferno would be more responsive to 4k, and maybe like iQ4 to do 4k in realtime with the right stone option.Now for the desktop compositing it seems hard :/
Working with proxies isn’t dangerous ? I mean when rotoscoping etc, does the “interpolation” of what you did on the proxies goes well with the full 4k. I’m afraid to have a lot of bad surprise when rendering at full 4k
julien
osmose wrote:Working with proxies isn’t dangerous ? I mean when rotoscoping etc, does the “interpolation” of what you did on the proxies goes well with the full 4k. I’m afraid to have a lot of bad surprise when rendering at full 4kjulien
Quantel tells you that proxies are always bad. That’s not true, they are sometimes good, sometimes bad. For masking, tracking, keying, etc… we work in fullres. But since tracking is done in one layer, even an onyx2 is fine for 2K tracking, and also the same with masks. But when you want a quarter res preview for your 40 layer comp, to control timing, etc… a proxy render might suffice. At those positions, proxy workflow is great. But for controlling your key, tracks, you always have to check them in fullres, if you want to be precise.
About Quantel systems, we have been demoed just today for their Pablo system. It is fast, I mean very fast. Works great in 4K! A primary color correction, with 300-400 pixel blur renders 5-6fps!!! But if you ask my idea, it is very fast for color correction and conforming, and for very simple compositing tasks, but it is not good at complex compositing jobs. It doesn’t have a true process tree, and it lacks the tools for highend compositing.
I have never seen an inferno on linux yet. It should be a hell faster than the onyx systems. But it might not be as fast as Quantel dedicated hardware…
osmose wrote:ok thanks for your answer.It seems that 4k is not supported as a thought
Because of the iQ 4k, i thought flame/inferno would be more responsive to 4k, and maybe like iQ4 to do 4k in realtime with the right stone option.Now for the desktop compositing it seems hard :/
Working with proxies isn’t dangerous ? I mean when rotoscoping etc, does the “interpolation” of what you did on the proxies goes well with the full 4k. I’m afraid to have a lot of bad surprise when rendering at full 4k
julien
Although not mature for production yet. I have tested toxik and it works really nicely with big images. It feels quite responsive due to some clever progamming. I think in a few more revisions Toxik will be “the shit”! 😀
Comments inserted:
> Of course we’ll need something like an iQ 4k, to get some real time, for
> conformation and color grading. That’s a workstation i have seen running, and
> it seems pretty fast, but are any other solutions existing ? For color
> grading/conform/composite ? I don’t know if something like an Inferno 4k existWhen you say 4k I assume that you’re talking about shooting 35mm, and scanning on for example a Northlight or Arriscan? Be thinking about using ir channel data from the scanner and say Pixel Farm’s PF Clean or MTI’s Correct for handling the cleaning of the scans.
Which bring’s the next issue. You’re going to need to be looking at things like SANs or rather intense NAS (think 10gE or infiniband) head for moving the data from the scan repository to the grading/conforming machine, and as the workspace for your retoration/retouch software – even if you’re going to generating 2k proxies for do most of the bump and grind work. It would be worth looking into say Bright Systems or DVS SAN on the SAN side and say Max-T’s Sledgehammer for the NAS end with inifiband cards.
Also before jumping immediately onto the 4k Pablo bandwagon it might be wise to investigate other alternatives that are a little more open and a little more modern. We own and operate 2 iQs and despite that I’m an extreme fan of our Filmlight Baselight8 system, which isn’t just rendering in 6 fps but doing primary and secondary grading on Full-AP 4k in real time. You also don’t pay the same premium as with Q with regards to storage and nothing – NOTHING – will outperform it. It can do the full conform from the DPX files, the grade in full 4k, either against Sony’s projector or by using a 2k proxy and Barco, Christie or other projector.
Most importantly Baselight has the truelight calibration system built in. A DI product is worthless with out being able to gaurantee that what you see on your projector or monitor is what you’re going to get on film.
What might be smart is instead of upgrading your eQ to 4k Pablo just go up to iQ4 and truelight hardware box on SAN with a Baselight4 or 8 instead. This would give you all of the mastering tools such as real-time 4k pan and scan to 2k, HD or SD that you really want to have when mastering a DI show.
Regardless, Quantel will tell you that the best approach is “the jack of all trades” angle. From experience I can tell you, more machines means a greater flexibility as well as reaping immense benefits from picking “the best tool for the job”.
> But i’m more concerned about the stations.
That’s the easy part.
> Do you guys ever work at 4k ? Which software will be the most responsive, if
> the choice is between Fusion/Shake/Combustion ?
> And what kind of hardware, quad cpu ? 4gb of ram ? more ? of course it’ll be
> hard to have real time from hard drives for all compositing stations.Quite often. Almost all the sofwares you’re going to come across wil allow you to work with a proxy. It’s pretty much how you’ll get through the whole ordeal. It pretty much comes down to the toolset you like and want to abuse. Personally I like Nuke nad the 4.6 version has Truelight built in.
> Does working at 2k proxy, then render at 4k is an usual workflow in 4k film
> post production ?No not so strange. Although the bulk of VFX is still completed in 2k.
> I’m also concerned about monitoring, are they any DLP projector working at 4k
> ? for a reasonnable price (i mean not projectors designed for theaters), and
> does monitoring at 4k is useful, or 2k is enough ?Sony. Bear in mind here something quite important though. After the 4k material is recorded out on the Arri laser to intermediate then you’re going to strike a print. The kicker is that you’re going to lose an immense amount of resolution once you strike the print (positive). In all actuality your 4k source will yield a closer to 2k result on pos. Something you’ll notice directly in comparing a 4k digital projection to a first gen (0/A-copy) print from the lab.
We can also argue the benefits of the different projection technologies, but I would stick it out with the Barco and Christies of the projection world for large format projection with a lot of light to play with a minimum of 16ft Lambert is really required for matching the film projector and potentially 20-2 ft if the projector has a native white point that’s not 5400K.
Smaller format projectors like the Cinevation CGP35 are good choices for the 2 – 4 meter screen size as they will easily put out the 16ft lamber needed.
> I also have seen that Apple Cinema display can handle 2k anyone tryed them
> with 4k footage downsized to 2 k?For colour fidelity you’re better off with CRTs.
> If you also have special thoughts about 4k workflow, errors to avoid etc don’t
> hesitate to share them.I’ll put you on the road but I’m not going to walk it for you 😉 Don’t cheap out on storage. By SAS or FC and a significant amount of it.
> Thanks for your answers, and appologies for my poor english
>
> JulienDid fine I think.
Chris
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.