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Want
more technical information?
Q:
What are the major differences between Prospect HD and
Aspect HD?
A:
At the end of the day, the reason to
upgrade to Prospect HD is about improving visual fidelity
through your post workflow.
This manifests itself
in a number of additional features supported with Prospect HD.
As you consider an upgrade to Prospect HD please consider the
following:
- 10-bit I/O and render
precision improves visual fidelity by eliminating
banding (see diagram below). This is important even for
8-bit camera sources and 8-bit exports (HDV, WMV, etc).
With Prospect HD, 8-bit sources - including HDV and
DVCPRO HD - are extended to 10-bit precision during
acquisition from the camera.
- Support for all ATSC
HD resolutions up to full-raster 1920 horizontal
resolution (including all HD-SDI and HD-telecine
sources) improves the quality and simplifies the process
of combining HDV material with existing full-raster,
square pixel material.
-
Timeline monitoring
through HD-SDI
while editing offers the best presentation of the
ITU.709 colorspace, improving the accuracy of color
correction.
-
10-bit HD-SDI ingest
directly into CineForm Intermediate eliminates expensive
RAID storage subsystems for media acquisition (Prospect
HD-Ingest/Edit).
-
Floating-point arithmetic
support in Premiere Pro
-
16-bit and floating-point
arithmetic
support in After Effects
Q: How does a 10-bit
workflow benefit post-production if my source is only 8 bits?
A:
Great question. Think of it this way….If you need to
perform operations like color correction,
compositing, effects, titling, etc, and
especially if you have material with smooth
gradients (i.e., blue sky) you will be
manipulating your 8-bit source data – adding,
multiplying, etc. Each time you render the
source data precision is truncated back to 8
bits. The 8-bit truncation operations
after rendering introduce “banding”
commonly visible in smooth gradients. Instead,
when you manipulate 8-bit source data in post
but allow precision to grow to 10 bits,
your arithmetic precision increases and your gradients
will remain smooth. This is very clear in the
image sequence below. Notice the obvious
banding in the 8-bit uncompressed YUV image
after gamma correction.
Click
on the image to see a full-resolution (1920 x 1080) version.
Q: Does full-raster
1920 horizontal resolution benefit my workflow?
A:
For many – absolutely,
for a few reasons:
-
1440 x 1080 is not
a square pixel aspect ratio, but 1920 x 1080 is. Many post
tools prefer square pixel data, so Prospect HD allows
high-quality frame-interpolation from 1440 to 1920
horizontal resolution (at 10 bits of course).
-
If you are mixing
material from other cameras (from HD-SDI sources or DPX
files for instance) the frame sizes are often 1920 x 1080.
It is preferable to use a project setting compatible with
your highest resolution source material.
-
If you are
outputting 1080 material over HD-SDI, 1440 horizontal
resolution is not a supported HD-SDI format, but 1920 is.
This also answers one of the questions about why we didn’t
include HD-SDI support within Aspect HD. It could be done,
but it would require real-time interpolation of the data at
the time it is routed over HD-SDI. It makes more sense to
offer this support as part of a true 1920 x 1080 10-bit
workflow within Prospect HD.
Q: Why is professional
color grading enhanced by using HD-SDI?
A:
HD uses the ITU.709
color space. HD-SDI cards, and the monitors they are attached
to, are tuned to properly present the 709 color space, taking
the guess work out of color grading introduced by unpredictable
color processing in computer graphics cards. Adding to this is
that computer graphics cards present RBG data, yet most
compressed video data is YUV, adding multiple color space
conversions between your source data and its display on a
monitor. Eliminating this guess-work adds to the visual quality
of your final production.
Q: What About Xena-LHe
versus Xena-HS?
A: The
Xena-LHe
is a PCIe card compatible with a wide-variety of desktop PCs
that have a PCIe slot. It has both component HD and HD-SDI
I/O.
The Xena-HS
requires a 64-bit PCI-X slot that is present in many
workstations. For the most part PCIe is supplanting PCI-X
for HD-SDI I/O. The Xena-HS card only has HD-SDI I/O (no
component HD I/O).
Ready to purchase?
To upgrade from Aspect HD to Prospect HD, and to confirm your
$499 upgrade credit, please have your Aspect HD serial number
available during the order process.
Visit our online
store....
Haven’t evaluated Prospect HD before?
Then download a 15-day Trial
of Prospect HD-Edit.
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