NAB 2004: Graphics, Effects, and Animation

Epochal Change at NAB '04
Graphics, Effects, and Animation
Editing
Storage and Networking
Sidebar: In Japan with Sony

Graphics, Effects, and
Animation
HD Goes Public

Discreet's Lustre 2 introduces the GMask vector shape system for more realistic light effects.

If you want a real preview of NAB 2004 go to Circuit City or the
electronics department in Wal-Mart. Americans are buying large screen
TVs, micro-projection displays, picture phones, digital cameras, hard
disk-based recorders like TiVo, and of course DVDs in large numbers.
This past fiscal year, Kodak's revenues from digital products surpassed
their traditional film-based revenues.

Two years ago the average consumer thought HD was a herniated disk,
but this past Christmas they were asking about progressive scan. HD is
reaching the general public motivated largely by the increased
availability of HD programming and lower prices on HD televisions the
size of a Mini Cooper. Consumer desire drives the decisions of everyone
on the show floor at NAB, including you.

Last year I claimed that 2003 was the year of HD. That was true: HD
production gear was all over the show floor. But that was anticipatory
spending by content creators. This year, enthusiasm for HD cameras,
editing systems, and display technology will be backed by consumer
dollars that helped drive the sales of HD televisions and LCD
projection TVs to record numbers. Intel is pushing LCoS (Liquid
Crystal on Silicon) technology that could bring large screen HD systems
below $1,200 by the end of the year.

This gas station scene, created with the new hardware-accelerated Nvidia Gelato film renderer, demonstrates ambient occlusion, a technique that uses ray tracing to shade objects based on how much light is visible at any point in a scene. Gelato 1.0 debuts at NAB as part of Nvidia's new Digital Film Group initiative.

Content for all these new video appliances has to come from
somewhere and hopefully that will be you — unless some recently
graduated film student with a G5 and knowledge of Maya underbids you.
The digital revolution cuts both ways, and if you are interested in the
future of your business, NAB is as close to a crystal ball as you'll
find.

For several years now, the creators of high-end animation software
concerned themselves with getting the job done rather than scooping
competitors with features unique to their product. This situation came
about because of the relentless jumps in hardware speed and the rate of
software implementation, both of which outpaced core research in
computer graphics.

Two examples of important breakthroughs: renderosity, a relatively
new addition to 3D animation apps, first appeared in Siggraph papers in
the 1980s; sub-division surfaces, a newly popular modeling solution,
bases on work that Pixar president Ed Catmull did some 30 years
ago.

In other words, the mother lode of legacy ideas has been mined.
There are still breakthroughs to come, but just at a slower pace.

That's not a complaint; the early years of 3D animation development
were brutal for artists who served as guinea pigs for software
developers. The worst of those tribulations are behind us. While some
of the old competitive excitement will be missed, the big four —
Alias, Discreet, Softimage, and NewTek — now
deliver tools that cover the majority of what we need to do in
animation and visual effects. It's a risk-adverse industry now; the
contest between the big players is as much about marketing and
education as it is about breakthrough software development.

Most of the top 3D animation developers have limited their
participation at conferences, so NAB is one of the last places to ask
informed questions and enjoy high level demos. Several of the big 3D
applications launched new versions in the past six months, so for many
show attendees this will be the first time they get to audition the
software.

Maya 5 was brand new at NAB ‘03 so we can't expect a full
version upgrade this year. For most of 2003, Alias has concentrated on
making the existing product more accessible with a DVD training series
— StudioTools Techniques — as well as the specially priced
Maya Productivity Pack and Explorer Bundle. While special pricing
offers have already expired, we can only hope that NAB will see the
announcement of more special deals.

This is the second year that Alias does not have a booth at NAB.
However, they will be hosting their first NAB press conference on April
18th. Might the press conference be related to the February
announcement by Alias that they are in discussions with a private
equity investment firm for the acquisition of Alias from SGI? Alias
president Doug Walker has indicated that should the deal go through,
Alias will develop consumer products based on the core 3D technology.
Given the saturation of the professional 3D market, a consumer brand
could help underwrite the kind of innovation that has been subdued in
3D animation software for the past several years.

It's only been a few months since Discreet's 3ds Max version
6 debuted with a well-planned feature set, which basically means they
listened to their customers. This latest version continues the
housecleaning effort to enhance existing features, particularly
workflow and project management. This does not make for earthshaking ad
copy, but it makes a world of difference in the stability department.
Having said that, Max 6 does have a fair share of new features; these
include Particle Studio, a node-based scriptable particle system. The
product ships with a license of the now fully integrated Mental
Ray.

There are always crowds at NAB, but at Softimage the crowds
become virtual. Softimage/Behavior v.1.5, the crowd effects software
launched in December, will be on display at NAB so this may be your
first chance to see it marching to its own beat. There's a new
batch-processing module with particularly telling feature: an SDK
(software development kit) that allows you integrate Behavior into
competing software's pipelines. Soft, like so many other companies,
recognizes that in the current competitive environment they have to
play nice with rivals. This from the folks who created Digital Studio,
the all-in-one content creation solution.

A preliminary version of LightWave 8.0 was shown last year. While it
should release by NAB, NewTek hasn't yet given exact dates. However,
the long list of new features available at the NewTek website is
typical of modern 3D animation software development: refine the
existing feature set. The enhancements include improved workflow in
Layout and Modeler, improved Soft Body Dynamics, faster IK and FK,
improved Lscript scripting language, and improved character setup
workflow. As you can see, improved rather than new is the current
mantra. This is an industry-wide trend.

In the 1980s we used to whittle away the hours watching the
“render channel” speculating about when the problem of
rendering would just go away. That time is closer than expected if
you've looked at the latest photoreal gaming engines in Half
Life and Doom. This is an industry-wide change —
everyone has access to faster hardware, and realtime virtual worlds are
approaching visual effects standards. You can check this out at NAB by
visiting hardware manufacturers Nvidia, ATI, and
3Dlabs.

GenArts brings its popular Sapphire plug-ins to Adobe After Effects.

Nvidia in particular has their Cg language for shader writers, but
the big announcement at the show comes from the Exluna/Entropy
dev team they acquired last year. Exluna, you may remember, is the
group founded by ex-Pixar scientists who ran into a lawsuit by
Pixar when they brought out Entropy, a competing rendering
product to Pixar's industry standard RenderMan.

Well, they're back. The official debut of Nvidia's Digital Film
Group comes at the show, along with version 1.0 of its Gelato renderer
product. According to Nvidia, Gelato will support both scanline
rendering and raytracing; support for a wide range of geometric
primitives (Nurbs, subdivision surfaces, points, curves); antialiasing
without artifacts; and a customizable API that allows Gelato to fit
into existing production pipelines.

The interactive, hardware-accelerated Gelato product takes advantage
of the programmability of the Quadro FX graphics cards, including the
new Quadro FX 4000, which debuts at the show. The company makes great
claims for the card, including improvements of up to 2X in geometry and
fill-rate performance over existing cards; improved vertex and pixel
level programmability for greatly improved realtime graphics systems;
accelerated pixel read-back performance that improves graphics
throughput to more than 5X the performance of previous generation
graphics systems; and the industry's “only true 128-bit
floating-point graphics pipeline” for millions of more colors in
a broader dynamic range.

Digital Anarchy's Texture Anarchy plug-in creates ani-mated backgrounds and organic textures in After Effects.

Like 3D animation, 2D desktop compositing software has also seen a
winnowing of the competition with Adobe After Effects taking by
far the biggest chunk of the market with Discreet's Combustion 3,
Commotion, and Digital Fusion holding on to what's left. That's
why it's surprising to see that there are two new compositing apps to
check out. Mirage and Curious gFx are integrated effects and paint
software that launched in 2003; both have surprisingly sophisticated
tool sets for 1.0 software. Actually, Mirage is a buffed up Aura,
Newtek's video paint system that has been around for a few years and is
available for Mac and Windows. Now owned by Bauhaus Software,
Mirage is differentiating itself from the competition as an
artist-friendly environment for painters and animators rather than a
visual effects comping tool. This claim is based on their realtime
video, bit-mapped brush technology and Digitally Organic workflow;
however, it has more in common with other 2D compositing software then
a true artist's centric product such as Synthetik Software's
Studio Artist. Reasonably priced, this is a product to watch.

The other compositing newbie is UK-based Curious Software's
gFx 1.5, a Mac OS X only product clearly aimed at visual effects
artists. Curious gFx has the usual complement of expected tools:
tracker, paint, wire and rig removal tools, over 20 pressure sensitive
brushes, keying tools and sophisticated rotosplines. The product also
supports After Effects filters. GFx is available in a standard and Pro
version the difference being the bit depth. Standard is 8-bit and Pro
is 16-bit. The product is expensive for a desktop tool and it will be
interesting to see how they fare against After Effects and
Combustion.

Combustion 3 is also worth a look at NAB, with the latest version
for OS X just a few months old. Discreet's powerful little compositing
program now has the only integrated editing solution in a compositing
program. That's a huge time saver for certain projects, particularly
short form and commercials. JavaScript based expressions are now
integrated. While this is not the first solution artists take to solve
a problem, I'm surprised how many comp artists have taught themselves
how to write expressions. Not every one of Discreet's desktop gambits
have paid off, but after a long struggle Combustion has become an
excellent 2D animation solution.

Adobe will of course have an immense booth to show their Creative
Suite (for print and the Web) and the Video Collection (for us). The
Video Collection includes the latest versions of Photoshop, After
Effects, and Premiere Pro for motion graphics and Audition for sound
designers and composers and Encore to author your work on DVD. The
Adobe booth is the second best place to find 2D plug-ins because many
of the developers are showing their filter collections at Adobe demo
pods. There will also be a dedicated plug-in booth (the first best
place to find plug-ins) so be sure to check out Digital
Anarchy's latest software as well as the gargantuan 16-bit filter
set from Sapphire. Sapphire's has 175 filters in total and the
buzz is that they are first rate if not definitive.

Another great gathering place at NAB is the Apple booth. With
its Jobs-inspired return to the content creation community, Apple
provides lots of square footage for partners with OS X software. You
can usually save a few hours searching for a particular company's booth
by first finding a satellite demo pod at the Apple booth. But what we
all really want to see at NAB is the next generation of the G5. In
December, Apple rumor sites predicted we would see the new hardware at
MacWorld. It's a measure of Apple's interest in the motion graphics
industry that it now saves some of its biggest announcements for NAB.
Logically, a new G5 should be coming out soon because Apple just
released the new line of Apple Xserve systems using an updated PowerPC
970 chip based on the 90-nanometer fabrication process. An April
PowerMac G5 is certainly possible.

Microsoft is not as industry focused as Apple, but its
Windows Media Video 9 codec and Windows Media Player are killer apps.
Literally, since the technology is aimed at the heart of MPEG-4.
Microsoft also would not mind if QuickTime was wounded in the
crossfire.

Proximity Corporation introduces ArtBox, a content management system that allows artists to manage all of their work from one interface. The ArtBox platform integrates format conversion, storage, workflow management, and search and retrieval of artwork (video, graphics, script, or audio) into a single device. The idea? To enable artists to spend more time creating artwork and less time performing mundane administrative tasks, says the company.

Recently Microsoft has sought to make the Windows Media 9 A/V codec
a standard and submitted the specs to the Society of Motion Picture and
Television Engineers (SMPTE) for review in October. The encoder
produces great results and is supported by Premiere Pro, Avid,
Discreet Cleaner XL, and Canopus ProCoder. The player was even
made available for OS X, however, not with all the codecs, resulting in
the inability to even play some movies made with the MVP. That issue
aside, WMV 9 is the main reason for going to the Microsoft booth at
NAB, since it looks as though this technology will be the encoder of
choice for HD DVDs and digital cinema. As an unfolding story, this
should be of interest to anyone in production.

Image stabilization, match moving, set extraction, and background
removal are all based on the same computer vision technology. There are
several competing software products that let you track live footage;
last year at NAB you could get a really quick tour of several of the
best- known products at Apple's booth. Three computer vision type
products had demo pods right next to each other.

2d3's Boujou has a $99 image stabilization product for Adobe
Premiere that's worth checking out. Used intelligently, indie
filmmakers can make Steadicam shots out of hand-held footage.
Realviz, based in Sophia Antipolis, France, will be showing
Match Mover 3 for OS X.

A new company called Pixel Farm has generated quite a lot of
buzz with its PF Stable and PF Track for stabilization and match
moving. If you are thinking of using any of this technology, then use
NAB to twist the arms of developers to show you something other than
canned demos. Match moving requires a lot of skill and the demos are
all blue-sky situations. NAB is the perfect time to ask the experts
about how to actually use their software.

While NAB may be a little smaller than in past years, it will still
be more than any one person can take in. The areas I've just discussed
are going to take the full four days to visit. Even though NAB
celebrates tossing bits and bytes over the airwaves, nothing quite
beats seeing the people behind the technology face to face.
— S.D.K.