Digital Foundry: First Again with Stereo 3D HDMI 1.4 Support

June 30th, 2010

Digital Foundry is extremely proud and excited to announce that its TrueHD product has now been upgraded to support the new HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D protocols for gameplay. We were first with direct capture support for the 1080p60 HDMI standard, and the experience that made this possible made the support for stereo 3D relatively painless to add.
This means that TrueHD is the first - and currently only - system available right now capable of acquiring the PS3’s bespoke stereo 3D output at the full frame-rate, when attached to a debug or “TEST” development console. Not only does TrueHD acquire the full stereoscopic output, but the card itself registers as a 3DTV: the significance of this is that you can capture 3D footage without even owning a 3DTV. Useful if you don’t have such a display, or if units are limited around your studio.
So, what form does the stereo 3D output take? Basically two 720p frames (one per eye) are incorporated into one 1280×1470 image, with 30 lines of black separating the two views. Here’s a couple of direct shots taken from a TrueHD capture session.

Click through for the full images. They’re actually derived from CineForm-encoded footage, though the customary lossless 24-bit RGB codecs are supported for those who simply must have a pixel-perfect dump of the HDMI port. The top image is for the left eye, the bottom for the right.

Obviously this is video capture quite a step apart from anything we’ve done before, and while we support 1280×1470 as a direct capture option, this frame setup is completely divorced from current editing workflows. So just how do you integrate this into your existing editing set-up?
Thankfully, the world leaders in high definition compression, CineForm, have been working on 3D video editing tools for a long time now and the HDMI 1.4 standard has now been integrated directly into both their world-beating encoder and workflow products: CineForm NEO-4K has all the 3D tools required to make full stereo 3D editing a reality, while NEO-3D offers the additional function of keyframing for convergence dissolves. Both packages also include CineForm FirstLight, allowing you to manipulate and colour-grade your captures on the fly using active metadata - staggeringly useful features.
The addition of the HDMI 1.4 stereo 3D support should also mean that TrueHD now becomes a viable platform for NVIDIA 3D Vision capture thanks to the firm’s release of the 3DTV Play package - something we’ll be testing out once the support is complete.
The final icing on the cake? Existing TrueHD users will be able to upgrade the hardware side of the equation for free, though users with CineForm NEO-HD licenses will need to arrange an upgrade to the NEO-4K or NEO-3D packages. CineForm itself tends to offer full “trade-in” value on the existing license, so the upgrade should be cheap and painless.

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ExpressCard-HD Update

June 30th, 2010

Ongoing development of ExpressCard-HD is currently on hold, and has been for a couple of months now. While the card itself is proven and works beautifully, the problem we are finding right now comes down to laptop graphics chips and the massively variable performance level between different models.
Digital Foundry’s capture tool relies on having strong 2D performance for the real-time scalable preview window. We are finding that laptop GPUs occasionally short-change the user in terms of 2D performance, often within the same family of silicon. Consider the Dell XPS M1330. It’s a great little laptop from a couple of years ago with an onboard NVIDIA 8400GS. Regardless of OS, its 2D performance is absymal, dropping frames randomly and killing capture performance.
Now consider the ASUS Z37S. Practically the same machine, but with a different sound chip and a slightly downscaled NVIDIA 8400G. Same driver as the Dell, and it works fine, despite being an inferior version of the exact same GPU! Bearing in mind the amount of GPUs out there and our inability to test them all, we’re not confident in releasing the product as an upgrade when it may not work on your particular system.
Real-time preview window is an essential element of the package here as Expresscard-HD itself has no video passthrough. Therefore, Digital Foundry has taken the decision to sell Expresscard-HD as a complete, validated system as opposed to an upgrade. Alternatively, we will validate the card on a specific platform, so you can buy in confidence. On all other systems, mileage will vary.
Right now, we are looking to target the new range of Core i3 and i7 laptops with the integrated Intel GPU - which is an enormous step-up from the firm’s previously poor integrated offerings. The GPU in this case is a standard part that’s included on the die of the CPU itself, so we can validate both CPU and GPU performance and ensure that the product works well for you.
Hopefully the wait will be worth it: pro-level HD capture from an ExpressCard really is as cool as it sounds - we really want to get this product out.

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New Hardware Announcement: ExpressCard-HD 480p/720p Capture for Laptops

December 1st, 2009

Digital Foundry is pleased to reveal its latest hardware, allowing for full HD capture on the go. ExpressCard-HD is an upgrade designed for video games capture in any environment, featuring support for analogue component at 480p and 720p resolutions, with 1080i to follow.
Simply plug in the ExpressCard34 upgrade into your notebook, attach the analogue component break-out box, and you’re instantly capturing superb quality video. No external boxes required are required to house the capture card: your laptop is instantly turned into a battery-powered pro-quality HD recorder.
While an HDMI capture solution may have been initially the more obvious choice, the selection of analogue component allows for the widest possible compatibility with all mainstream gaming devices. ExpressCard-HD supports 720×480 and 1280×720 resolutions, allowing for hassle-free connection to Nintendo Wii and Sony PSP in addition to all makes and model of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
To give an indication of quality at HD resolutions, here are two shots taken from Assassin’s Creed 2 running on the Xbox 360. Click on each thumbnail for the full-size shot.

Full 720p capture at 60 frames per second is possible with Digital Foundry ExpressCard-HD, though our customary support for multiple frame-rates is also included. If the game runs at 30, why capture at 60?

ExpressCard-HD is equally at home with 480p component sources, capturing at 720×480 at up to 60 frames per second. In these shots, our Xbox 360 is running in normal 4:3 mode. It’s important to note that analogue component always runs at 4:3. When playing a widescreen game, the screen simply stretches the image outwards. ExpressCard-HD does not do this - you’ll need to resize the image itself elsewhere in your workflow.

As you can see, ExpressCard-HD’s 480p support works just fine, meaning no issues capturing Wii or PSP. Set the HD consoles to run at 480p, and you can also capture using very weak CPUs. Indeed, even an ExpressCard-equipped netbook should be viable here. Again, click on the thumbnails for full-size shots.

ExpressCard-HD produces phenomenal results based on the same kind of tools as used in our TrueHD and HDScope products. There’s full support for the CineForm codec, AMV Codec and UT Codec Suite. We would recommend CineForm as the most space-efficient compressor - something that’s crucial when recording onto a bandwidth-limited device such as a laptop hard disk drive.
System specs? For 720p60 capture, we recommend a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo equipped laptop running 32-bit Windows XP, with at least 2GB of RAM. A discrete graphics card is also recommended; even something as lowly as an NVIDIA 8400GS will do the trick. Support for Intel integrated graphics is being tested. However, this will require a stronger CPU as the processor needs to emulate the hardware overlay provided for “free” by a dedicated graphics chip. Support for 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 may follow.
The on-screen preview window supplied by ExpressCard-HD is of crucial importance as the hardware itself offers no video passthrough option. There is simply no room on the board. However, there is a full-screen option on the capture tool itself. This, combined with the video output typically found on all laptops, serves to give you much the same effect as a dedicated passthrough. Notebooks equipped with HDMI video outputs are particularly well set-up for this task, as audio is integrated into the output.
For a wider selection of sample shots, please click here. ExpressCard-HD is expected to be ready very early in 2010. Please contact info@digitalfoundry.org for more details.

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Modern Warfare 2 Trailer Created with TrueHD Hardware

August 10th, 2009

Earlier in the year, we were contacted by Infinity Ward - the creators of the Call of Duty franchise - with a view to outfitting their new media suite with TrueHD hardware. As you might expect, the team had a number of technical requirements that involved some tweaks to our tools, not least of which was beta support for capture of AC3 and DTS surround sound audio.
Now, with the marketing campaign for the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in full effect, it’s great to see our hardware being deployed in creating promotional material for what many believe will be this year’s top-selling video game. Here is the first of the trailers engineered by Infinity Ward in-house using TrueHD hardware.

Infinity Ward is looking to create the most pristine assets available, and that being the case, they opted to use the unique lossless 24-bit RGB capture modes used by TrueHD, which captures and encodes gameplay footage at up to 1080p at 60fps. In this case, their game outputs 720p, so there was no need to use the top-end.
After this, the footage was taken into Adobe Premiere Pro where it was edited into the presentation above. Editing can be carried out in real-time, and again, using the lossless codecs supported by TrueHD, absolutely ZERO video quality is lost no matter how many times the footage is processed and exported.
While the asset has so far only been deployed in streaming web applications at 30fps, having the pristine lossless video available allows it to be used for presentation and event scenarios where the quality is literally idential to the game running the action itself.
In short, from start to finish, it’s a video that could only have been completed to this most highest of standards by using Digital Foundry hardware.

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New: V-Sync Screen Tear Clean-Up Tool

April 23rd, 2009

We talked about this in the Uncharted ‘Coming Soon’ piece, but it’s here, it’s working and it looks excellent. The Digital Foundry frame analyser allows us to pinpoint every frame in a 60Hz output that is not v-locked, and now that same tool has been expanded to take that analysis and use it to weed out and clean-up all the torn frames.
So here’s an example of the tool in action - an original capture from Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, followed up by the cleaned-up, enforced v-lock version.

Slowed down to 1/6th speed, this video shows a classic ‘before and after’. The result is pretty dramatic - Uncharted looks better than it does running on your PS3. Go here to see this in streaming HD, or download this VC-1 WMV file for a higher quality analysis.

So over and above showing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in the very best possible light, what else is this tool good for? Well, Microsoft’s conditions for Xbox Live Marketplace video include a stringent guideline that all footage must be v-locked. Up until now, the only way to do this was by hand, manually copying and pasting frames, or elements of frames. But now, publishers, developers and video studios can simply supply us with their clips and we can do the work for them - quickly and easily.

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