AJA Announces Ki Pro Quad

AJA Ki Pro Quad and Canon Cinema EOS C500

AJA announced today Ki Pro Quad that accepts RAW 4K over SDI, simultaneously (or subsequently) outputting that data via Thunderbolt, and recording compressed signal to SSDs.  "A scaled or cropped output is also simultaneously available for 2K or HD monitoring via dedicated SDI and HDMI connections", says AJA.

The product will be available "later in 2012" for an MSRP of $3,995 US.

Some details are rather sketchy, probably on purpose:

• What are the compression options?  If the Ki Pro Quad is anything like Ki Pro, it will be ProRes and DNxHD.  Yes, the same ProRes that is on its deathbed following a spectacular demise of Final Cut Pro 7 last year and mass exodus of editors to Avid, Adobe and even Sony.  DNxHD could not have been timelier.  No CinemaDNG?
• Thunderbolt (TB) support is coming to Windows this month, although not on the just-released HP's flagship workstations Z820 and Z1.  For now, TB is confined to Macs (iMac, Mac Mini) and Macbooks - which is fine for KPQ, a portable device by design.  Still, with no TB yet on Mac Pros, does KPQ's inclusion of it means there will be a new Mac Pro this year with TB built-in?
• Uncompressed 4K recording?  Thunderbolt can be used to connect to a storage array.  Will KPQ be able to pipe raw uncompressed 4K video straight to a Thunderbolt (TB) array bypassing a computer?  Probably not, although you can connect a KPQ and a TB storage array to the same TB port on an MacBook simultaneously, which may make this uncompressed 4K recording possible.

(I hope you forgive my calling an already laconic "Ki Pro Quad", a "KPQ".  It just sounds good.)

Enjoy the video: spectacular cinematography, fantastic low lighting shallow DOF, giant close ups of Japanese designers and execs.  I wonder what camera it was shot on? Wow, really?

AJA Ki Pro Quad: Efficient 4K workflows. from AJA Marketing on Vimeo.

Premiere Pro CS6: what’s new and changed

See Todd Kopriva's blog for an extensive list of "what's new and changed".  Here are just a few points:

• a trimmed, lithe user interface; less waste, more customization including customizable buttons
• OpenCL support (one some systems) for GPU acceleration
• expanded multi-camera editing
• native support for new formats (such as ARRI Alexa)
• basic color grading built-in; integration with SpeedGrade
• improved dynamic-linking
• full-screen playback on primary monitor - yay!
• uninterrupted playback (while you fiddle with timeline, settings, etc.) - yay!
• new way for hardware manufacturers (AJA, Blackmagic Design, Matrox, etc.) to write drivers and interface with Premiere Pro; drivers for popular hardware are supposed to be ready by NAB (April 15)

There will be more; stay tuned.

Intel's 720-series SSDs

Intel's new 720-series SSDs are extremely fast, equally expensive, not yet available, and you can't stick one in a laptop. Stop reading now before it gets worse.

A prototype PCIe SSD Intel demoed in 2009

(The product will only slightly resemble the photo on the right that depicts a prototype Intel demoed in 2009.)

Speed.  Intel 720 Series "Ramsdale" SSDs are rumored to have 2.2GB/s read and 1.8GB/s write speeds. That's Gigabytes, not Gigabits - and represents about a 500% to 1000% speed improvement over current SSDs, not to mention being about 15 times faster than regular spinning disks. The device will easily play or record several uncompressed 4K video streams simultaneously and do many other things that previously required a humongous and energy hungry storage array.

Why do I need one.  The kicker isn't the raw speed or extremely low latencies - it's the compactness of it, and the relatively low buy-in.  Before this and similar devices became available, the only way to achieve such performance was a storage box with at least 24 mechanical hard drives or 8+ SSDs with a RAID controller, connected to the host computer via super-fast multi-link SAS or Fibre Channel connections.  The buy-in is usually north of $10K, often $20K for an enterprise-class solution.  Granted, you get a lot more Terabytes with those - however if it's portability and speed you are after vs. raw capacity - this device will likely be calling your name.

Where do I put it?  As there isn't yet a cable connection fast enough to accommodate such speeds - not even Thunderbolt (aka LighPeak) - the only connection offered is 8-lane PCI Express.  Thus, it won't fit inside a laptop, other than externally via a PCIe expander from Magma or JMR.

Prices.  If current SLC SSD prices of over $10 per gigabyte are any indication, a 200GB version should start at over $2000. It may however boot your PC in a scant few seconds undoubtedly motivating some gamers to spring for their wallets.

Real-world applications: ultra-hi-res (like, uncompressed 4K), multi-stream and ultra high speed field video acquisition and monitoring, enterprise data caching and yes, definitely probably some gamers.

Exciting times we live in.

No desktop drives in RAID?

WD Black Caviar

Some of the fastest and well rated large capacity desktop drives are WD Black Caviars. They also 50%-100% less expensive than their "enterprise class" RE4 series siblings. Can you use them in RAIDs? Western Digital says "no" in their spec sheet:

• "Desktop / Consumer RAID Environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 / RAID-1).

• "Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing."

Also in their KB article:

"Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically as a stand-alone drive, or in a multi-drive RAID environment."

There is more detailed information in that KB article:

"When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

"Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array. While TLER is designed for RAID environments, a drive with TLER enabled will work with no performance decrease when used in non-RAID environments."

In other words, WD is OK with Black Caviars for home and gaming use in RAID0 and 1, and is not OK with using them in external enclosures - even in RAID0.

Compare that to Deskstar 7K3000 desktop hard drives whose maker Hitachi says they are suitable for:

1. "Consumer and commercial computers"
2. "Video editing arrays"

...with no explicit warnings against commercial or enterprise class RAID configurations.

Bottom line, Hitachi supports their desktop drives in high performance arrays while WD doesn't.

What is your experience with using desktop drives in RAIDs?

Quick Disk Benchmark in Windows

If you need to quickly test disk performance of an individual drive in Windows Vista and 7 without downloading any 3rd party tools, use Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) from an administrative command prompt, in the following format:

winsat disk -drive C:

Substitute "C:" with the drive letter you'd like to test. To run command prompt in administrative mode, click "Start", type "cmd" in the search box, wait till "cmd.exe" shows up in the results, right-click on it, click on "run as administrator":

A command prompt box will open:

Type: winsat disk -drive C:

Substitute "C:" with the drive letter you'd like to test; press "Enter".

The command will run a minute or two. Here is what the results will look like:

Highlighted are numbers that are most important: read and write transfer rates.

There might be a million of reasons why you may need to know your individual drives' transfer rates:

• copying from one drive to another takes a long time, and you'd like to know which one is especially slow
• monitoring system health
• finding out if your drives are fast enough for a specific task, e.g. capture and playback uncompressed video.

There are also other tools for testing drive speeds, from benchmark software vendors and hardware manufacturers such as BlackMagic Design and AJA. WinSAT however is already included in a standard Windows installation and may be just the right tool to quickly assess disk transfer rates.

The URL has changed to blog.dv411.com

The company that hosts our web site now allows custom DNS settings - and that means a new and better URL!

blog.dv411.com (the old one was dv411.blogspot.com, just in case you were wondering)

Let's celebrate! Order an HP Z800 workstation at 10% off from now until end of October. Just mention "the blog".

YouTube Goes 4K: Why?

YouTube started hosting 4K clips, and I am stumped: why offer something that very, very few people can use? Here are my tops reasons to not host 4K clips:

1. My monitor is too small. The official YouTube blog post says that "the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet". Yes, 25 feet. That's 6 times your average Joe's 50-inch TV and most apartment walls are 10 to 14 feet unless you feel like finding an empty wall at Ralph's... good luck.
   
   Wait, here is an idea. You go buy a 4K Red One camera ($25-50K with lenses and accessories), shoot an awesome 4K video, upload it to YouTube and... watch it on your iPhone? Oh wait, it's less than 4 inches and you need 25 feet of real estate to view it. Then go to your nearest Imax theater - they should let you fire up your 4K YouTube video after hours, right? Or, rent one of those 4K projectors and a 25' screen for something like $5K a day... There, enjoy your 4K movie. Don't forget the popcorn.
   
   Seriously, most high resolution monitors max out at 1080p and there are very, very few monitors or projection screens out there that can display 4K. None of them are accessible to regular mortals outside of 4K post production houses and Malibu celebrity row. People attempting to view 4K clips on their supposedly high end systems will be disappointed to not being able to see the 4K quality.
   
   Ouch.
   
   
2. My computer is too slow. The vast majority of computers will choke on 4K. My 3-year-old office machine (Intel Core 2 6600 2.4GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, GeForce 8800GTS graphics, Vista 64) sure does choke: choppy playback, severe compression artifacts. The monitor is the 30-inch HP LP3065 with 2560x1600 resolution. In 1080p mode, it's smooth and gorgeous. In 4K mode - horrible. Here is the 4K clip I tried - see if your results are better. I hope they are.
   
   Ouch 2.
   
   (Added 2010-07-10 10:57am) Current computers with high performance multi-core Intel and AMD CPUs will likely play back 4K videos in their "original" mode smoothly. HP Z800 with dual Xeon E5530 CPUs and NVidia Quadro CX card had no issues although the visual quality of the video in the original mode is still noticeably worse than in 1080p mode and even 720p mode: not as sharp, with visible gradients and pixelized lines. According to Pavel P who commented on this post, his 27" iMac with Core i7 CPU had no issues either. I can only guess that the "original" 4K mode is worse than 1080p because of Adobe Flash player processing: it may simply not know what to do with such high quality video.
   
   
3. YouTube says you need a "super-fast broadband" to video 4K videos although my crude calculations show that they stream at about 6Mbs, which means even a home-brew 3Mbs DSL is fast enough if you don't mind a little waiting. It took me about 4 minutes to fully download a 3-minute 4K video over a 6Mbs DSL. So to me, broadband speed isn't that big of an issue. The real issue is that most people can't enjoy the 4K quality.

Bottom line, virtually nobody can enjoy the full 4K quality. Why offer this 4K support then?

For YouTube, it's most likely a test of the potential market, a somewhat cruel tease akin to putting you in an F-22 Raptor and taxiing you around the airstrip but no flying. Lots of tease, no release, excuse my parallel. These 4K videos may be useful to few of us with access to the right display and computer equipment, and to ubergeeks to stress-test their uber-duper gaming or editing systems - but certainly not to the vast majority of YouTube users.
(F-22 Raptor image by Rob Shenk)

Another reason is future-proofing YouTube. Making the 4K option available today rather than sometime in the future, eliminates the inconvenience of re-uploading 4K clips in the future. After all, there aren't too many 4K cameras out there; 4K production (and post-production) is expensive, and the impact on YouTube's servers because of hosting 4K will be minuscule. Letting users upload 4K clips today is a smart move even if few people can enjoy them at full quality.

Have you tried YouTube's 4K videos? How do they look? Can your computer play back YouTube's 4K videos smoothly in their "original mode"? Is that "original" mode better quality than the 1080p mode? Let me know - post a comment, and tell me this:

• which 4K clip(s) you tried, and in what mode (original, 1080p, etc.)?
• the resolution of your monitor
• the CPU, RAM and GPU in your system
• What OS you are running (e.g. Windows Vista Business 64-bit), and Flash player version (right-click on the video, click on "About Adobe Flash Player")
• What was the effective frame rate of the video, and how many frames were dropped during playback? (Right-click on the video during playback and choose "Video Info")
• How is the quality of the video in "original" mode vs. 1080p and 720p?

Enjoy your tests!

Sample 4K video below. Click to open it on YouTube page and select "original" quality.