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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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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New Hardware Announcement: Mobile Capture with Digital Foundry HDScope

March 22nd, 2009

Digital Foundry is pleased to announce its new entry-level unit, designed for ultra-mobile, quality-focused high definition capture. Primarily aimed at video games media outlets, HDScope is a portable computer with an integrated 7″ widescreen touchscreen display, measuring just 30.5 x 20 x 18.5cm and weighing around 5kg. Simply plug into the mains, connect to any component or unencrypted HDMI source and you’re instantly recording superb quality video.
HDScope works best with 720p, but also supports 480i/576i and 1080i. Video and audio passthrough allows you to use HDScope as an intermediate ‘bridge’. Connect your source to the unit, and the unit to your HD display and you have full realtime gameplay on the main screen while HDScope’s touchscreen is used for preview and recording functionality.
Digital Foundry’s customary support for CineForm HD is included, along with two lossless codecs - the freeware UT Codec Pack and the shareware AMV Codec.  AMV also includes multiple lossy options; not quite in CineForm’s league for ultra-precision capture, but still remarkable. All recorded clips can be played back in realtime on HDScope’s integrated touchscreen.

Digital Foundry HDScope, capturing Dead or Alive 4 on Xbox 360. All recording functionality can be carried out via 7″ LCD touchscreen, with AV passthrough options allowing you to retain gameplay on the big screen. Keyboard, mouse and monitor can also be attached, transforming HDScope into a powerful small form factor PC.

HDScope’s performance on 720p video is akin to TrueHD in its YPrPb 4:2:2 mode. The new hardware lacks signature Digital Foundry 24-bit RGB support, as this is an entry level product with a corresponding feature set, but the quality level is still exemplary. Here’s a quartet of Dead of Alive 4 shots. DOA’s lack of anti-aliasing, it’s mind-melting strobing colour schemes and ultra-fast v-locked 60fps gameplay make it a nightmare to compress - ideal testing material. Click on the thumbnails for full 720p screenshots taken directly from the captured video.

The top shots show CineForm compression at work, revealing that even in this ultra-stress test, it’s still the best quality vs filesize codec in town. The shots at the bottom are extracted from lossless captures acquired by the HDScope in the same session.

Some random HDScope facts: universal power supply means it’ll work anywhere worldwide… CineForm compression means optimum quality and at least 20 hours of 720p60 video at ultra-precision quality on HDScope’s 1TB hard disk… includes typical Digital Foundry variable frame rate selection - why capture a 30fps game at 60fps and waste valuable hard disk space?… use HD Fury 2 to capture from any HDCP encrypted source…  inexpensive adaptor available to capture Wii 480p… carry case also available!

Should HDScope prove to be popular, expect a TrueHD 1080p capable unit to be introduced.

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New Hardware Announcement: 1080p Notebook Capture with TrueHD Mobile

December 17th, 2008

Take a custom-built notebook, an ExpressCard to PCI Express interface and the Digital Foundry TrueHD Express capture card and this is what you have - 1080p video acquisition in a complete package that weighs just 3.2kg. They say that a picture’s better than a thousand words, so let’s up the ante a touch with a hastily put-together, but quite illuminating video.

A welcome return to our old friend Ridge Racer 7, capturing directly into the CineForm codec at 1080p via TrueHD Mobile. To give some sense of scale, that’s a 13.3″ sub-notebook.

No hardware has been altered here. You can remove the TrueHD Express card from the enclosure, and run it in your PC for all the benefits outlined here. But card performance on the notebook is reduced from PCIe x4 bandwidth down to PCIe x1. In real terms, that’s 720p60 and 1080p30 at 8-bit YUY2 (courtesy of CineForm compression) and 720p30 and 1080p15 at 24-bit RGB, via the lossless codec. Bearing in mind speed limitations on notebook hard disks, you can’t really ask for much more. While the notebook can run from batteries, the enclosure itself requires mains power, that’s pretty much the only major limitation.
Otherwise, as it’s the same hardware, there’s support for component, VGA, DVI and HDMI and crucially, the quality of the assets between desktop TrueHD and the mobile iteration remains identical.

A selection of Ridge Racer 7 1080p screenshots taken directly from the TrueHD Mobile captures encoded in the CineForm codec. Quality level is identical to the standard-setting desktop version. Click on the thumbnails for the full-size shots.

So… obvious question out of the way first. Why custom-build the laptop? The short answer is that my Dell XPS M1330, using the same core parts, didn’t work properly. I’d expect the same to be true of many different notebooks, depending on the BIOS. Right now I’d also rule out using Vista for the OS too. It drains too much power, particularly on the graphics card. Our realtime scalable preview window needs all the juice it can get there.
Things might (probably) change with the new Centrino 2 based notebooks - higher FSB, faster CPUs, more memory bandwidth. You’re looking at a Core 2 system of 2.6GHz or better, integrated GPU, and a nice, fast SATA notebook drive to allow the hardware to truly flourish.

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