So with IBC opening this week in Amsterdam, there are a few new announcements worth noting. Now that 4K is old news, and supported by most products, regardless of who is actually using it, HDR is the new buzzword. That is a little more complicated than just upping the pixel count, so it will be interesting to see how this impacts existing workflows.
Adobe of course has a new iteration of upcoming updates for the Creative Cloud applications. Premiere now supports HDR media and color space, especially with the Lumetri toolset, which is now also available in AE. It supports H.265 files which are the big new thing in 4K, as well as DNxHR and OpenEXR sequences. Media Encoder has a lot of new audio options, especially for broadcast formats, and can now export and publish directly to Youtube and Vimeo among other sites. They also have improved tools in Premiere and Audition for adjusting the length of video and audio assets. On the video end, they have a new optical flow frame interpolation tool, and with audio they have Remix which adjusts the length of musical elements while maintaining the “musicality” of the original asset.
AJA has a few new products on display. The FS3 brings their line of Frame Synchronizers into the world of 4K. It scales HD and SD content to 4K at maximum possible quality. The Corvid HEVC is a hardware encoding card for 4K signals or up to four independent streams of HD. It encodes to HEVC (also known as H265) in realtime, up to 60fps. It also supports file to file encoding, so maybe someday I will be able to use one to encode my PPro 4K timeline export, otherwise it has a very different target market from where I work.
Blackmagic Design released new versions of Resolve and Fusion, that were originally announced at NAB, and a few other minor product revisions. Canon is demonstrating a functioning 8K camera in their EOS Cinema line, but it is a long way from release, and they have a future 8K display that we can look forward to as well. While I am all for 4K, I am not sure how I feel about 8K.
Sony has a couple of new cameras. The PXW-FS5 records XAVC from a Super35 sensor to SD cards in smaller professional camcorder form-factor. The A7sII is an update to their popular full frame DSLR, with a 4K sensor instead of pixel binning from a higher res still sensor. The larger pixels also give better low light sensitivity. I have been a Canon guy since Act of Valor, and I really like my 70D, but I may have to check out the Sony’s when it comes time to upgrade.
