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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Pushing Back the Boundaries

July 19th, 2008

An exhausting week with over 800 miles covered across the UK, but plenty to get excited about. First of all, I recently upgraded to CineForm’s Prospect HD editing solution; loaded up Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and imported a few 1080p60 captures into the timeline. Lo and behold, not only is Digital Foundry TrueHD the only high definition capture system on the market capable of the most extreme resolutions and frame rates, it’s also capable of doubling up as a realtime HD workstation.
Yup, 1080p60 streams on the timeline, playing back in realtime…. while conforming the audio at the same time. Bearing in mind that Prospect HD gives you change from $1,000, this is a pretty staggering state of affairs - especially as I believe that an overclocked Q6600 based system running in the region of 3GHz, combined with RAM running at 1066MHz will also do the job. It’s a theory I’ll put to the test sometime next week, but with Intel’s new Nehalem hardware coming along, I’m all but certain that mid-range consumer level kit will soon be outperforming the current top-end server-based technology. And that’s fantastic for HD, while posing interesting questions to those of us  in the HD hardware market.
Secondly, a brilliant meeting yesterday with the engineers behind the TrueHD hardware. I went in with a wishlist of stuff that can make the best HD capture solution bar none better yet, and I was amazed at the response. Plans are afoot to include the analogue component support currently absent from the hardware, improve precision 24-bit RGB performance, introduce hardware scaling, and finally, I’m very confident that an iteration of TrueHD will soon be available for notebook users. Bandwidth and CPU limitations prevent full-on 1080p60, but 720p60… 1080p30… some level of support for precision, lossless RGB capture, all the CineForm bells and whistles. It’ll all be there in a package you can fit in a travel bag.
And lastly, in a sleep-deprieved, non-stop week of action, I spent a fantastic day at Criterion Games this week installing their new TrueHD station, demoing its capabilities and helping out with their video encoding on the Crash TV podcast they regularly produce.
If you don’t know, these are the guys behind the Burnout and Black videogame series, pushing back technical boundaries themselves with each new game they release. Any way, check out that podcast on iTunes if you’re in any way interested in games development (search for Crash TV). In an industry increasingly obsessed with PR spin, it’s refreshing to see a bunch of talented developers letting the customer into their world, withholding very little and having some fun at the same time. Having spent a fair amount of time with these guys, a lot of the content is almost back like being in the room with them.

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TrueHD: The Proof of the Pudding

April 4th, 2008

So it’s been a while since I’ve updated with progress on Digital Foundry TrueHD. While the core of the product has been complete for quite some time, there’s been a fair amount of engineering work going on in the background to make the whole thing stable. I’ve been doing a fair amount of beta testing with a client since my January blog entry and I was surprised at how easy it was for me to work around bugs, but not so easy for someone who’s never laid hands on the hardware before. Thankfully now, the system is very robust and I’ve got some great feedback on how to improve the product still further.
Overall though, TrueHD is now good to go, so it’s time for a screenshot or two, this time with a difference. The left hand side of the shot shows a captured image using our lossless 24-bit RGB codec (which supports 720p60 and 1080p30). The right hand side shows the quality we have using CineForm HD (support for any resolution at 60fps up to 1080p). For a complete comparison download both images here. Yet another testament to the quality of CineForm HD, which makes 1080p60 capture possible.
If you’re wondering why I have an obsession with Ridge Racer 7, it’s because it’s a superb way to stress-test 1080p capture. And pretty much the only way we have right now until more advanced gaming hardware hits the market. First of all, it runs consistently at 60fps - give or take the odd dropped frame. Secondly, it’s full raster 1920×1080 while most PS3 titles that offer 1080p support actually run at 960×1080, 1280×1080 or 1440×1080 - if they support 1080p at all. Thirdly, it’s packed with detail, fast motion, and zero anti-aliasing. All of these details combine to make compression an absolute nightmare - in short, it’s the best way to put TrueHD through its paces.
So, with TrueHD effectively done and dusted, what next for Digital Foundry? News early next week. It’s gonna be big, or rather small.

Our old friend Ridge Racer 7 on PS3 versus Digital Foundry TrueHD, captured at 1080p30 in full 24-bit RGB (left) and YPrPb 4:2:2 CineForm HD (right). Click on the image for the full picture.

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New Hardware Announcement: Full 1080p60 Capture with the ‘Digital Foundry TrueHD’ WorkStation

January 15th, 2008

Earlier in the New Year I mentioned some exciting new equipment being worked on here at the Digital Foundry lair. Now I’m actually in a position to be able to make an announcement of sorts before a full press release goes out in the next week or so.
Digital Foundry TrueHD is the first piece of brand new technology we’ve been working on. The best kit available (soon!) for hardcore professionals and media outlets, but really targeted at games developers, it’s an ultra high-end unit designed to be the last word in video games capture.
It’s also the first HD system available capable of acquiring full raster 1080p high definition video at 60 frames per second, while simultaneously running an on-screen preview window scalable to any resolution at the same refresh rate. In this mode, files are encoded into the CineForm HD codec, which regular readers will know offers the best quality, spectacular compression rates and allows for cross-platform usage of the video files on PC or Apple Mac in all major editing systems.
Other stuff we’re looking to include? How about enhanced support for full mathematically lossless 24-bit RGB? Digital Foundry TrueHD can capture 720p at 60fps with full 24-bit precision, up from 30fps on our previous hardware. Literally every single byte of video information from the HDMI port is captured with zero loss of quality. That 24-bit support extends upwards too, with 1080p support included at up to 30 frames per second.
So is the new TrueHD offering a direct replacement for the current portable DFHD? Not really. There are no plans for a portable version of TrueHD, but more than that there is no planned support for analogue component (VGA/DVI/HDMI only) nor interlaced sources - all handled easily with our existing product. So consider TrueHD a top-end device designed to complement Xbox 360, PC and PS3, while DFHD remains the best games media swiss army knife on the market - able to handle any input (SD or HD), any resolution, anywhere.
Screenshots, videos and everything will be released in the next week or two.

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