Actual cost of using SI2K

Z

zeke

Well-known member
I would like to engage in a non inflamatory discussion about the real costs associated with using the SI2K.
I'm aware of the suggested price with PL mount and the cost of 1 copy of Cineform with Premier 2.0, plus Speedgrade...
But if you need 10 seats in a production pipeline, will the codec only pricing be enough?
This is assuming only 1 ingest PC.

To David Newman, if you have the time, could you register for the free learning edtion of Fusion 5.1 and see if it will load and maintain cineform enhanced clips?
I don't know if Fusion will work with Iradas 3dLut, but it does support 32bpc fp.

Could any of you post an update to the still image output files you support? I remember dpx, cineon and Adobe DNG, but can't remember the rest.

Joe C.
 
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zeke said:
To David Newman, if you have the time, could you register for the free learning edtion of Fusion 5.1 and see if it will load and maintain cineform enhanced clips?
Click to expand...

The Fusion guys dropped the ball on this, I had some technical questions for them regarding their Quicktime engine supporting more than 8-bit I/O, they said they would get back to me, but they never did. If Fusion is only 8-bit to compressed media is not of much use for RAW workflows, and so far that is what my testing shows. 32bpc is nice, but if you can't decode to it functionality is limited.
 
Joe,

You can have up to 3 simultaneous resigstered ingest systems under a single CineFormRAW encoder license.

When you SAVE IMAGE we generate all four files: BMP, JPG, DNG and DPX. The DPX does not have a look applied, to allow for color grading in Speedgrade.
 
David Newman said:
The Fusion guys dropped the ball on this, I had some technical questions for them regarding their Quicktime engine supporting more than 8-bit I/O, they said they would get back to me, but they never did. If Fusion is only 8-bit to compressed media is not of much use for RAW workflows, and so far that is what my testing shows. 32bpc is nice, but if you can't decode to it functionality is limited.
Click to expand...

David, Fusion 5.1 supports higher than 8bpc both in and out, and they really do load OpenExr properly, unlike other apps that claim to support it.
Their forte is sequential images. So it's probably a good idea to keep AE arround for finishing.
Since Speedgrade exports LUT to different formats, I'm hoping there will be a way to maintain the 'look' (pardon the pun) across machines.

Sorry if this is redundant, but here is a link to it's tech specs
http://eyeonline.com/Web/EyeonWeb/Products/fusion5/fusion5_specs.aspx


So, after you folks do your roll out, it would be great if you could add support for OpenExr export.

Thanks for responding.

Joe C.
 
The problem is Fusion doesn't seem to offer more than 8-bit through Quicktime compressed, or it least they haven't told us how. If we have to develop to OpenEXR you lose much of the flexiblity of CineForm RAW.
 
I went and reread the help file, they output to avi via any available codec for preview and/or final.
 
However, any available codec is likely code for Video for Windows which is 8-bit only in its standard form. For After Effects and Premiere we create our own importers for AVI so that they can be upgraded beyond 8-bit. Quicktime does have 16-bit and deeper modes, yet it is poorly implemented, so with some scripting we modify config files for AE and Combustion to enable Quicktime support deeper than 8-bit. Fusion likely needs the same, yet it will be up to Eyeon to tell us how to do it.
 
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So, would DPX 10bit log do in the interim? My real concern is getting it into Cineform, more than getting it out. After doing all I need and rendering out, lets say in DPX format. What would be the best way to convert it into Cineform Raw?
I'm refering to more than just Fusion, but LightWave, XSI...non adobe apps that have the option to render out to HDR images. From a pratical point of view, OpenExr is lossless.
 
Hi Joe,

Cineform RAW is a RAW bayer format . . . once you have a demosaiced RGB image such as a DPX file, you can't go back to RAW. Now the way you see an RGB image with CineForm RAW is that it's doing a demosaic on-the-fly during the decode. But if you export from CineForm RAW to something else, you've lost that RAW data, and it can't be recovered.

Of course technically speaking, if you render out to a floating point format, from say AE to OpenEXR, while you will loose the ability to re-apply a demosaic algorithm because it is now a RGB image, the actual color data should be in a floating point format that allows you quite a bit of flexibility in manipulating the data . . . i.e., correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe OpenEXR stores it's data in a scene referred manner, so you should be capable of removing or undoing any color-transformation that was applied to the RGB data by the .look 3D LUT. It may not be very easy or straight-forward without knowing what the original transformations were, but since no information is lost, you should be capable of returning to the original un-transformed RGB dataset.

Alternately turn off all the color-processing metadata at the codec level and export 10-bit log DPX . . . then you have the exact same data (but in RGB, not bayer) that's coming off the camera head in the first place . . . it will be sort of like a Viper image, that is it will not be very saturated, it will look flat, and there will be no white-balance. But as mentioned, it will be the "RAW" data in a RGB format, not bayer, so you can't re-demosaic it, but you can re-apply any color-transform you want.
 
You can use the BM 10 bit 444 avi codec (r210) for previews and savers in fusion so it is able to understand higher bit avis
But in the process it is rendering a file, so you would have to have encode with CineForm
 
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