Linux Media Arts Advances Video in Linux 103
GigsVT writes "Linux Media Arts has introduced a line of video capture and hardware MPEG encoding cards with full Linux support. The sd601 is a full featured hardware video solution including hardware dissolve, key, wipe, and split screen.
At pricetags around $3000 US, they aren't cheap, but this could break Linux into the video editing market. This isn't vaporware, they are selling these right now."
starwipes (Score:1)
Re:starwipes (Score:1)
What the hell is a starwipe?
You obviously never watched a lot of old Abba videos...
Re:starwipes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:starwipes (Score:1)
homer makes great use of the star wipe.
Re:Funny thing I noticed cheking out their homepag (Score:1)
Still I think it's great.
Re:This would work ...... (Score:1)
What is the quality? (Score:1)
Re:What is the quality? (Score:5, Informative)
The card is a professional solution for the professional broadcast market, for what it does $3000 is actually pretty resonable.
This product takes SDI (Serial Digial Interface) for video input which is the standard to broadcast video, it runs at 270Mbs and is not found on anything but professional (or at best "prosumer") gear.
This is not the first pro card that does SDI under Linux either, IIRC Optibase have a Mediapump card that does SDI under *nix.
Re:What is the quality? (Score:2)
--
Evan
Video Toaster (Score:3, Informative)
An Amiga with a Video Toaster 2.0 and a time base corrector can be had for around $1200, and with any of the seven mainstream Linux desktop video packages, it can be slaved as a second system, so you control it from a cheap, fast PC running Linux, with the Amiga doing the majority of the hard work.
Video Toaster users are the few sane remaining Amiga fanatics. Most television shows and minor Hollywood production companies still use Video Toaster for the few things you still can't do in Adobe Premier and After Effects.
Re:Video Toaster (YHBT) (Score:2, Informative)
NewTek is still producing the Video Toaster, and it's very much in use. I work for Fox, and we've purchased over eighty units this year alone. There's nothing like it for the price, and even high end motion paintboxes lack some of its more basic features.
Do you really think there would be so many desktop video packages with Video Toaster slave support if it were that dated? Hell, half of Maya's rendering target options have to do with extra key modes and depth buffer information for Video Toaster use.
And yes, the 68030 blows Athlons and Xeons out of the water when it comes to SIMD bandwidth, because it can deal with different cache modulos. The straight set-associative cache of the Intel and Athlon architectures kills them when it comes to dealing with full-frame video effect processing, and half the vector opcodes aren't even there, except in the newer, upcoming AMD Hammer architecture.
Re:Video Toaster (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, Video Toaster and Lightwave.
Lexx, the new Firestarter series, and all of the "I am Sci-Fi" spots are also done with Video Toaster and Lightwave. Strangeworld is done with Video Toaster and KDE kVideo. (AFAIK, Strangeworld is the only active production using Debian right now. You'll find the Debian swirl hidden in at least one scene per show, so presumably they've got at least one Debian fanatic on board. Pretty damned cool!)
For what it's worth, Babylonian productions and J. Michael Straczynski have renewed their contract, and now have 5 NewTek engineers working in-house for ongoing software improvements in anticipation of the upcoming Video Toaster 3 board, up from the 3 engineers in the previous contract. There was a big press release from NewTek about that recently.
The upcoming Video Toaster 3 is for PPC-enabled Amigas only, is about the only reason I see for AmigaOS 4.0.
Re:Video Toaster (Score:2)
You are completely mistaken. While the long version [scifi.com] can be found on the scifi.com web site, the short version is that Strange World was produced, finished, and shelved in 1999. Only ten episodes were even made, and only three of those were aired before SciFi picked up the property. Nobody has touched Strange World in three years.
Whether Video Toaster or Debian Linux were used in the production of the series is open for discussion. But the question belongs entirely in the past tense.
Re:Video Toaster (Score:1)
except for enterprise, cg finally caught up.
Re:Video Toaster (Score:1)
Re:Video Toaster (Score:2)
Actually, most television shows (in my experience) are still cut in linear*. Those that are cut in nonlinear are done with Avids; the crappy stuff comes out of a Media Composer or a Symphony, while the relatively big-budget shows are sometimes cut on a DS. The really big-ticket shows are finished on a Smoke. Most of the HD stuff, to my knowledge, is done in Smoke.
Video Toaster is just an also-ran.
Right now, Final Cut Pro is also an also-ran, but lots of houses seem to be replacing Media Composers with FCP for off-lining.
*Linear editing, in with video tape machines. Opposed to nonlinear editing, like with computers.
Think vertical markets... (Score:2, Interesting)
Bttv Driver (Score:2, Informative)
With the right insmod args you can get pretty much any bt8x8 based card working under linux.
Broadcast 2000 (Score:1)
I thought it already was into video editing market (Score:2)
I thought they already did? Some Linux Journal article about Broadcast 2000 [linuxjournal.com] and aA list of supported video capture cards for Linux [metzlerbros.org]
Sure the hardware isn't quite Linux supported yet, but at least there are some lower-end cards out there that are supported. So it looks like for the home user the hardware and software is somewhat there. And what about for high-end? Well supposedly Linux is already being used for editing movies [computer.org] (including LOTR). I'm not sure how they get their video onto the computers though, but there must be some way to do it I guess.
So I guess this hardware is special because it is specifically targetted at Linux, but as far as breaking Linux into the video editing market...I think that already happened a little bit so far. And it's not going to get any better with a $3000 USD card.
Re:I thought it already was into video editing mar (Score:2)
Is it open source or not? (Score:2)
So why can't I find the source or binaries on their website?
--LP, who just wanted to check what parts were truly free
Re:Is it open source or not? (Score:5, Interesting)
After a long period of deliberation on the matter, Broadcast 2000 has been removed from public access due to excessive liability.
We've already seen several organizations win lawsuits against GPL/warranty free software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite meaningless in today's economy.
While not related to either of these cases the distribution of Broadcast 2000 enhanced to unacceptable levels the risk of an individual experiencing significant financial damage due to the extremely expensive nature of high end video production and the high risk inherent in professional video business marketing.
This has forced us to reconsider our liability protection at this time. We still plan to continue offering minor works for download and in the coming years, as the liability issues surrounding open source software are resolved, we expect to issue newer major works.
Hmm.
--LP
You can get the source, poke around here: (Score:3, Informative)
--LP
Re:Is it open source or not? (Score:2)
Seriously, have the disclaimers you read in practically every EULA in existence ever been overturned in court? Are they saying that they plan to wait until someone does sue over such a disclaimer before they decide whether or not to release their code? Sounds kinda like a cop-out to me since I've never heard of such disclaimers being overturned. In fact, all I've seen is moves towards strengthening such EULAs.
Re:Is it open source or not? (Score:1)
Ok, then let's consider that instead. Has such a third-party case ever been won in court?
Download it here... (Score:1)
Re:Is it open source or not? (Score:2)
After a long period of deliberation on the matter, Broadcast 2000 has been removed from public access due to excessive liability. In recent months the line between warranty exemption and liability has become increasingly blurred as more companies have liquidated and more individuals have begun to seek compensation. We've already seen several organizations win lawsuits against GPL/warranty free software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite meaningless in today's economy. While not related to either of these cases the distribution of Broadcast 2000 enhanced to unacceptable levels the risk of an individual experiencing significant financial damage due to the extremely expensive nature of high end video production and the high risk inherent in professional video business marketing. This has forced us to reconsider our liability protection at this time. We still plan to continue offering minor works for download and in the coming years, as the liability issues surrounding open source software are resolved, we expect to issue newer major works.
from Broadcast 2000 message [heroinewarrior.com]
Where's my heroine warrior when I need him? sob. :-(
Have there really been lawsuits agains GPL/warranty free software beacuse of damage that software caused to such and such corporation? This sounds like a farce to me. And what does this mean, "While not related to either of these cases the distribution of Broadcast 2000 enhanced to unacceptable levels the risk of an individual experiencing significant financial damage due to the extremely expensive nature of high end video production and the high risk inherent in professional video business marketing"
I think someone like Richard Stallman or one of those hardcore open source/freesoftware guys should talk to these guys and knock some sense into them. Hey, I just thought of something...if they made their software GPL at one time in the past, then their source code must be floating around somewhere...unless they didn't distribute the source, which would mean they never were GPL, or were just violating GPL.
Re:Is it open source or not? (Score:1)
Re:Is it open source or not? (Score:1)
Broadcast 2000.. (Score:1)
I guess they changed their mind about that...
Re:Broadcast 2000.. (Score:1)
It's not clear whether it's still open source or not, and I don't have the background to tell you whether Bcast2000 was unencumbered enough to take out of GPL. Basically if the previous owners got assignment of all contributers copyrights, then it's posible they have taken future versions closed. The GPL fork will of course always exist to be built from in any case.
Re:Broadcast 2000.. (Score:1)
BSD, a G4, iMovie, iDVD, Final Cut Pro, ... (Score:1, Informative)
Movies already made on Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to shout out to my Windows XP box: as of now it has an uptime of 2 days 6 hrs 39 min and 55 seconds. A new record for Windows!! Yay!
Re:Movies already made on Linux (Score:1)
Re:Movies already made on Linux (Score:2)
At least animation studios are using linux for render farms. And why wouldn't they? Free of charge OS that is used for boxes crunching numbers days in and out. I don't know about Shrek and whether or not it was modelled under Linux. Quick Google didn't help me either, so some willing karma-hungry person can fill in the blank space.
But, that's not the point. This actually brings linux to the world of professional video editing. This is a big step, and definetely one I welcome with joy. Now, if we only had truly good sound studio software to beat the living crap out of SoundForge... I know people who would change this instant to non-windows applications if they offered the same or better functionality and range of capabilities.
Re:Movies already made on Linux (Score:1)
But anyway, according to SGI's site [sgi.com], Shrek was produced using '168 SGI 1200 2U dual-processor Linux OS-based machines'... and some SGI Origin 200 servers... though the characters were designed using Silicon Graphics® O2® desktop workstations. Excuse the trademarks.
I haven't got the faintest idea why they used Linux, though they say it was 'to bring more horsepower to the making of great films', which of course ought to explain everything(?).
Re:Movies already made on Linux (Score:2)
Films are a sequence of files (one per frame) on disk, right up until they're cut onto negative. Video is not.
Simon
Maya, Linux, SGI (Score:2)
This is really bad news for SGI. I'd heard that DreamWorks was disatisfied with SGI, but they must be totally disillusioned to abandon SGI's famous massively parallel systems [ku.edu] in favor of a Linux cluster! Makes you wonder who will buy the Itanium supercomputers [com.com] SGI is betting its future on.
Finally (Score:1)
while we're on the subject of audio.... (Score:1)
Linux is not reliable, and here's why... (Score:1, Funny)
last 15 months collecting data and stuff, when I needed to install
a plug and play LAN card.
I rip off the top of the box and look for a slot, but the IDE cables are in the way,
so I unplug them - just for a few seconds, to plug in my LAN card, and would
you believe it - the fucking PC crashed. Bloody Linux - what a piece of shit.
At least Windows has 'Plug and Play' which works. I mean, Windows upgrades
have never failed us - we just schedule our hardware upgrades for the time of the
day that the boxes decide to BSOD. This is quite a good feature if you really think
about it - sort of a reminder to 'check to see if any hardware needs upgrading'
Well I'm off to Walmart tomorrow to get lots of shiney new copies of
Windows XP to put onto all our computers here. I have to do this, after all..
regards,
Mr 'X'
Chief Information Officer
Some Major Government Department
mJPEG hardware and Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Google.
Re:$3000? Just buy a faster CPU (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$3000? Just buy a faster CPU (Score:2)
IIRC DBeta is DCT based but not MPEG2. ATSC transmission is MPEG2, as is BetacamSX and IMX.
Calum
Re:$3000? Just buy a faster CPU (Score:2)
Yes... but you hit the nail on the head when you said "final format." Although some outlets choose to encode manually before broadcasting, most outlets encode right before the signal go to the transmitter as part of an unattended real-time process. For all intents and purposes, the transmitter or uplink or distribution-system-you-like takes uncompressed SDI or HD-SDI as its input.
Digital Betacam and DVD both use MPEG-2
Bzzt. Digital Betacam (HDCAM too, for that matter) uses a proprietary DCT-based compression algorithm that usually results in around 2:1 compression for SD, 10:1 for HD. D-5 is purely uncompressed, and a lot of post houses use D-5 instead of D-Beta. In the HD world, the D-6 is purely uncompressed. It's a monster VTR, though.
With HDTV coming up in the future, how are editors/equipment suppose to deal with uncompressed data streams of frames larger than current NTSC/PAL frame sizes? Even with fast enough computers, achieving those disk writing speeds to capture the video realtime to a system uncompressed would literally flood almost any physical storage bus solution.
Oh, you'd be surprised. First of all, we've been doing HD nonlinear for over three years now, using Fire on an Onyx2. It's getting to the point where you can do some HD work on a PC or Mac, although no editor who's ever worked on a Fire will ever go back to the desktop. You get spoiled by all the real-time stuff.
Handling the basic data I/O isn't hard. Say you work in 8-bit YUV, 4:2:2. You can pack an entire pixel into two bytes (eight bits for luminance, and four bits each for the two color samples). That's 4,147,200 bytes per frame at 1920x1080 (make it simple; don't count the vertical interval). At thirty frames per second, that's about 120 MB per second. Two fibre channel loops (or one 2 Gb loop) with about eight disks can accomplish that. HDTV at 1080 lines isn't delivered as frames, of course, but as fields. This has no relevance on the storage of data on the disk, because the math works out the same either way.
RGB is more complex, though. Discreet uses RGB internally because all the SGI media libraries deal with it best. So you need three bytes for each pixel, making your data rate one-third more. That's a bit over 180 MB/s, which is still easily doable with commodity hardware.
(The software is tricker. I leave constructing a filesystem that is capable of real-time random-access playback and recording of multi-resolution data to be an exercise for the reader. It's much, much harder than you think. You can get around it, though, by buffering like crazy and using lots of disks.)
But, of course, if you're editing you have to be able to play back two streams of video at the same time. (Think real-time dissolve.) Double that. For RGB, that's about 360 MB/s of raw disk bandwidth required. Even with overhead, that's still within what one 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI bus can do.
Of course, once you get that data onto your disks, you still have to be able to read it and pump it to the video card in real time. If you wanna do anything to it on the way-- like apply a color correction, for instance-- you have to pass it through the CPU. It's easier to do that sort of thing on an SGI than on a PC, because the graphics hardware on an SGI can do lots of stuff in real time without having to bog down the CPUs.
Long story short, you can do HD on a PC or a Mac. If you've never done any high-end work, it's pretty amazing. On the other hand, if you have worked on a Fire or such, HDTV on the desktop sucks.
Re:$3000? Just buy a faster CPU (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, I've tried FFMpeg [sf.net] too.
Do you think this even compares to a $3k hardware encoder? A real-time software encoder is cutting corners everywhere: integer math (probably in the form of MMX), fixed "one size fits all" lookup tables, and little if any motion detection. You know, it's easy to make a real-time MPEG encoder if you only use I frames, but then you basically have motion-JPEG. The real compression payoff in MPEG comes from motion detection with P (predicted) and B (bi-directional predicted) frames. Simply put, the real-time software encoders will produce crap output. That may be acceptable for your PVR-knockoff (I know, I've been using VCR [sf.net] with DiVX under Linux for abouta year now), but it isn't for DVD production. And that's what this card is for.
Re:$3000? Just buy a faster CPU (Score:1)
http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/
Can do remarkable quality in realtime. ffmpeg was a neat idea [same quantizing backend for many formats], but it's quality sucked. If you like vcr, you would be much better off with NVrec, which supports the native opensource xvid codec, as well as divx4linux, without need to mess with win32 dlls, and with much better sound sync, multiple deinterlacing filters, etc.
On my system, I can run the non-optimized [no mmx, etc] original version of mpeg2enc, whose goal is accuracy and quality, faster than realtime. Of course, I have a really fast system.
Target environments (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Target environments (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Target environments (Score:2, Informative)
this kind of hardware may be very useful for unattended video work - you know, the box that is sitting there in the rack and encoding, decoding, switching, inserting, etc
My current work environment would definately welcome the chance to ditch the several dozen windows boxen it has doing just this type of work now. We also need some major beefy boxen for desktop video and graphics rendering in real time... in an Irix environment... so folks wouldn't be wholly hostile to linux-based stuff. Although I admit it's a major battle to get the okay to use Linux for anything at my work... including web services.
Re:Target environments (Score:2)
Those apps run on SGI workstations, either Octanes or Onyx 2/Onyx 3000s. The app is full-screen, and highly modal rather than windowed. No windows or menu bars or palettes or anything. It's a very different interface, and not intuitive at all, but once you learn you way around it's incredibly fast. I've watched experienced Smoke editors fly though the app faster than I could follow. Amazing.
If Discreet were to port those apps over to Linux, I don't think any of the artists would notice or care. The underlying OS is invisible-- and irrelevant-- at that point.
Of course, Discreet's next-generation product is going to be based on Windows XP. So it's kind of a moot point.
Re:Target environments (Score:2)
Really? Hmm. I agree to a certain extent that the OS doesn't matter to the artist, insofar as the application takes over the interface, but in my experience, no x86 system has the bandwidth to keep up with Discreet's bigger apps (well, at least flame and inferno).
Background: In 1999 I worked for a major FX house, where I rolled out (as sysadmin, along with the video engineers and facilities people) a bunch of flame seats on dual-R10K octanes. These were, according to the artists, 20% faster in practice than the 8-way R4400 onyx/inferno systems they replaced.
Anyhow, these systems worked so smoothly because of their phenominal internal bandwidth. IIRC we had 8 ultra scsi channels multiplexed with discreet's stone filesystem - for a few minutes of uncompressed video - and 800 Mb/s (with a much higher real throughput than gig-e) serial HIPPI to sling frames around.
I'm not aware of any x86 systems yet with the bandwidth of these (really 4-year-old) systems. The R10K onyx inferno systems they kept still had much life in them.
Now, I could see these apps ending up on linux at some point, but flame or inferno on linux/x86 (or xp/x86) doesn't strike me as a near-term proposition. (If I'm horribly out of date here, let me know - I have been out of that industry since late 1999. What attention I've paid, though, suggests pc's just aren't there yet for high-end applications.)
-Isaac
Re:Target environments (Score:2)
You're not horribly out of date. Flame still runs on Octane, albeit with next-gen graphics now instead of the MXI/MXE that you worked with. We use FC disks instead of SCSI, which means fewer channels. Discreet is finally getting rid of their Stream audio subsystem-- which was left over from the Onyx days, when there was no other digital audio in the computer-- and replacing it with optical audio input and output through a break-out box that has analog and AES spigots. (I don't remember if Flame did audio in '99, but it has now for quite some time.) But besides these things, the hardware and software haven't changed much.
But the PC world has caught up, somewhat. The 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI bus offers something like 500 MB/s of bandwidth, which is plenty fast for standard definition, and acceptable for high definition. PC processors have gotten fast enough to be able to run mediocre, untuned code at acceptable speeds. And Discreet is using some mildly exotic hardware coprocessor stuff for their new product, if my sources are to be believed. Kind of like Avid's hardware DVE component, except inside the computer on a PCI card. Not sure of the details.
The point, though, is that PCs are catching up through brute force. For example, Discreet's apps depend quite a bit on the digital media libraries bundled with IRIX, the SGI OS. These libraries, particularly ImageVision and dmedia, are largely composed of handwritten assembler code. They were tuned to the nines years ago, and have remained mostly untouched since the mid 90s. This allowed those old, slow (relatively) SGI machines to do amazing things in real time.
Microsoft's media libraries have never been very good by comparison. But CPUs are getting to the point where they're sufficiently fast to get the job done at a much lower efficiency.
Plus which, look at it from a business perspective. There's just not that much more work that can be done to Smoke or Fire, Flame or Inferno. The improvements that are happening now are either fairly marginal-- like the color warper-- or kind of half-assed-- like bolting various shared storage technologies atop Stone+Wire. If Discreet builds a sufficiently advanced system, maybe not revolutionary but good enough to convince their customers to buy it, then they're in a really good business position.
Which is easier to develop for, Windows, SGI, or Linux? Which is easier to find programmers for? If you were going to start from scratch on a whole new app, and you didn't require one particular OS or class of hardware for any good reason, which platform would be your first choice?
Yup. We can talk about superiority all day long, but the bottom line is that it's faster and easier to develop and deploy major apps on Windows. Assuming, of course, that your app doesn't do anything Microsoft might be interested in integrating into the OS.
as an enthusiast... (Score:1)
in the future, you will no longer need those mjpeg cards as hardware codecs as well as to generate real time effects.
the new way of doing it is using 1394 to interface with dv devices. the fast cpu nowadays can do more realtime effects simultaneously than the cpu in the hardware cards include.
for the professional world, they will be using sdi to do hdtv uncompressed. so buying expensive specialized hardware is no longer needed.
just a note. avid is the industry standard in video editing software and systems. with their latest release of avid expressdv 3.0, it practically beats all competiting consumer products to the dust.
:)
johnlaw
...wrong wrong wrong... (Score:1)
The card is not MPEG related at all. It doesn't do compression or decompression.
It is a very high speed serial interface for high-end video applications. That is all.
a very short wishlist :) (Score:1)
However, I really would like (would gladly pay $50 extra for a distro that allowed me to *easily*, out-of-the-box, no-foolin', no hassles, do the following 3 things, with free software):
1) import over firewire from a digital video camera (yes, it's possible; is it out-of-box ready from any distribution? Can I plug the cheap floor-model Sony digital camera I bought from Best Buy into a box running any available distribution which will correctly recognize / identify the hardware and let me haul in the video from it?]
2) Set edit points something like iMovie allows on the Mac (I believe Windows now comes with a similar program, but I have not seen it), and then duplicate / rearrange / shorten / delete clips. Doesn't have to be pretty, just has to let me define beginning and ending points, and then assemble the resulting collage.
3) Burn to VCD / SVCD
That's it.
Now, there are a lot of other things it would be nice to have -- color correction, titling, fancy fades and wipes, DVD authoring, complex sound capabilities, animations, bluescreen abilities
I hope interest in video-on-Linux trickles down enough that a real, working, easy integrated package to do at least these three things actually reaches us. (Can be a pretty wrapper adding together separate programs to do each of those things, of course.)
timothy
Hey, I do this for a living! (Score:2)
Sgi is dying- They tried to make systems and their product revision cycles were just too slow for hardware consting tens of thousands of dollars... (not to mention that SGIs stuff is just dog slow for the $$) So... we're moving to the PC, hopefully Linux.
For our stuff, we've found that the DVS card (out of Germany) works best- It does 66 Mhz, 64 bit PCI, simultaneous in and out, has up to a second of delay onboard (user selectable), and it has colorspace conversion on board. We've paired this board with an intel i860 chipset since it is one of only two boards (the other is AMD supplied) that does 4bit/66Mhz PCI and 4X AGP.
The colorspace conversion is really the killer feature for us on teh DVS card (well, that and the fast PCI)- It saves us from having to do it on the CPU (which takes up a lot of processor at 270 or 540 Mbit/second!!).
Our biggest wish right now is for someone to make good GL drivers for linux (glReadPixels has to be fast so that we can rendered video and blit it out of the AGP card at framerate) Currently the only one we've found to work well is NVidia's proprietary drivers..)
We havn't tried the LMA card as my attempt to reach anyone over there was met with 4 consecutive seemingly intentional hangups.
I'd love to use the LMA card, but at $3000 it just doesn't have all the features the the DVS card does for the price- ($600 more in quantity, and DVS hasn't ever hung up on us..).
Re:Hey, I do this for a living! (Score:1)
On the good side, I've just heard from LMA (as a result of my post), and they say that their card does colorspace conversion too, which would be a wonderful thing as far as we're concerned.
Whether or not we as a company use LMA, we wish them the best of luck!
what about audio? (Score:1)