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.

Posted in Corporate, Technology | Comments Off

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.

Posted in Corporate, Technology | Comments Off

Cross-Platform HD Video Files

January 5th, 2008

It’s difficult to write any blog entry about Digital Foundry HD without evangelising the CineForm compression technology we have used since day one. I recognised the sheer quality of the codec right from the very beginning of our project way back in August 2005, but its incompatibility with Final Cut Pro on Apple Mac has always been a concern, being as it is - rightly or wrongly - the industry standard for video editing.
CineForm has been working on the Mac implementation of its technology for some time, but just before Christmas I finally took the plunge and invested in a Mac Mini. Partly to see what all the fuss was about (my last Mac was a monochrome powerbook that died sometime in 1994!), partly to investigate just how good the CineForm implementation was, and finally because I like to dismantle electronics and the Mini looked like a lovely design (that PCI Express Mini Card socket is very interesting…)
As it happens, CineForm have been good to their word. Our captures open in Quicktime and Final Cut Pro with no issues whatsoever, and no conversion required. The decoder required for running captures on the Mac is free too, meaning that distribution of those captures is no problem at all.
Going into 2008, we have some pretty exciting new stuff lined up that’s been in gestation for quite some time. We’re expanding the Digital Foundry HD hardware options, and introducing some revolutionary new capture options - stuff that’s literally never been seen before - but practicality, flexibility and sheer quality are our bywords and as such, CineForm remains at the heart of everything we do.

Digital Foundry HD .avi files playing in Quicktime Pro on OSX 10.5, and imported into Final Cut Pro. Thanks to the CineForm HD codec, Digital Foundry HD captures are not only small and compact with industry-leading quality, they’ll work on all major editing systems on both PC and Mac.

Posted in Corporate, Technology | No Comments »

Why CineForm Rules Supreme

September 12th, 2007

When I first started to approach other companies in the games industry with a view to licensing the Digital Foundry hardware, typically the only negative responses tended to be…

1. Why do you CineForm HD compression? Nobody else does and we want to use Final Cut Pro.
2. Why use compression at all? We want precision quality (this is a common attitude with games developers, who would fall in love with CineForm if they put it to the test!).

Well let’s tackle point two first, with a very simply exercise. Take a look at the image below from an Xbox 360 Gears of War cut-scene. One image was captured completely uncompressed. The other was taken with CineForm HD. We’ve zoomed in on a specific part of the image and blown it up to 200%. This proves conclusively that while not mathematically lossless, you lose virtually nothing by using CineForm and you gain so much - easy integration with multiple editing systems, relatively tiny file sizes (anything up to 15:1 compression), plus you can capture onto a single 7,200rpm SATA drive. No more need for stupidly expensive SCSI RAID arrays.
Want some more quality tests? Download this ZIP package of shots. Open an uncompressed HDMI image in Photoshop. Zoom in to 300%, 400% - whatever you like. Import the CineForm version of the same image, CTRL-A, CTRL-C and CTRL-V into your uncompressed window. Use CTRL-Z to undo the paste, then again to re-do it - rinse and repeat. Now you’re switching between the two images at a stupendously magnified rate. Impressive eh?
It’s all the more impressive considering the chosen subject matter. Video games have little in the way of natural blurring (eg camera focused on the foreground, background out of focus) so it’s notoriously hard to compress. Secondly, there’s the sheer level of detail in games these days - another compression nightmare. And thirdly, two of the three games in the test package run at 1280×720 at 60 frames per second. Every frame is different, making compression even harder. But CineForm copes easily with any eventuality. No other codec I’ve tested can.
Point one now. Nowadays, CineForm HD is now pretty much the only cross-platform HD codec on the market. Digital Foundry HD AVI captures can be losslessly rewrapped into the Quicktime MOV format (the bitstream is literally identical) and now both PC and Intel Mac owners can use our captures. Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro - now pretty much all editors can make use of superior HD assets, with Avid the only hold-outs.

Gears of War on Xbox 360, cropped and zoomed in to 200% - uncompressed on the left, CineForm on the right - not that the human eye can really tell the difference. And the really scary thing? This was taken at CineForm quality level ‘High’… there are two more settings offering an even better quality match. We simply don’t need to use them.

Posted in Corporate, Report, Technology | No Comments »