Teranex

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Ian Liuzzi-Fedun

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Teranex

PostSat Nov 24, 2012 2:43 am

I am seeing what a lot of people are talking about with the lack of motion compensation - stutter in pans and tilts. Any way at all to fix that or any word from Blackmagic about possibly adding motion compensation?
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Bernhard

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Re: Teranex

PostSat Nov 24, 2012 11:37 am

Hello,

I thought, Teranex is using Motion Compensation for De-Interlacing and Framerate-Conversions?
At least according to this:
http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/59352-1283865204-teranex-motion-compensated-frame-rate-conversion-unveiled-at-ibc-2010.html

Elsewhere, I read Teranex (was) using the SiliconOptics's 'Realta' chipset for doing so.

Confusion...confusion.

Please, could anyone from BMD bring light into this?

Thank You and Best Regards,
Bernhard

P.S.: I would really like to see a Teranex that processes files!
Whether it is internally on a PCI-E board or externally via PCI-E or Thunderbolt adapter.
Doesn't matter if in realtime or simply 'fast enough' - Quality matters!
!!! F I L E - B A S E D___P R O C E S S I N G !!!
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Baz

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Re: Teranex

PostSat Nov 24, 2012 11:09 pm

Bernhard wrote:.....

P.S.: I would really like to see a Teranex that processes files!
Whether it is internally on a PCI-E board or externally via PCI-E or Thunderbolt adapter.
Doesn't matter if in realtime or simply 'fast enough' - Quality matters!
!!! F I L E - B A S E D___P R O C E S S I N G !!!


I do it using 2 Hyperdecks - in REAL TIME TOO!!!

MISC
U/S Express, SmartviewDuo, SmartScopeDuo, Teranex 2D, Web Pres, 5/7 Vid Assists
VIDEOHUB
Smart 12x12
12x24
72x144
HYPERDECK
Studio, Shuttle, Studio Mini
ATEM
2me4K, 2me, TVS, TVS HD, CamConvs, StudioConvs, Studio Cams, Micro Studio Cam
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Paul Provost

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Re: Teranex

PostSun Nov 25, 2012 3:32 am

Yeah, or send the file from one computer/Nle/sdi > teranex > computer/nle/sdi or thunderbolt
Paul Provost - colorist
Twitter: @4kfinish
www.4kfinish.com
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Bernhard

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Re: Teranex

PostSun Nov 25, 2012 12:46 pm

Paul Provost wrote:Yeah, or send the file from one computer/Nle/sdi > teranex > computer/nle/sdi or thunderbolt


Hello,

actually I do such a WORKAROUND:
I put my ProResHQ HD masters onto a KiPro;
playback and scale them down to capture via SDI board.

I HATE THIS WORKAROUND!

I am living in the 21st century!
I am operating with video FILES!
Therefore I need FILE BASED PROCESSING!



Before BMD hat acquired Teranex, they planned a
server-like device (VC400) for file-based conversions.
Just another workaround and for most users a fail in concept.

There needs to be an easy and ergonomic way to process video-files.
I vote for a PCI-E board/external adapter.

Best regards,
Bernhard


P.S.: I'm NOT arguing against Hyperdeck or other File-recorders!
Excellent devices. Videorecorders for the 21st century.
But unnecessary in the context of video-file conversion.
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Perry

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Re: Teranex

PostWed Nov 28, 2012 5:35 pm

I am living in the 21st century!
I am operating with video FILES!
Therefore I need FILE BASED PROCESSING!


Then you need to be doing this work in a file-based realm, such as a computer. The Teranex is a video processor, not a file processor. That is, it's designed to take a video input signal in and output a video signal. It's pretty cool that BMD has made it so you can output to Thunderbolt to output files, which takes care of half your problem.

If you want a purely file-based system, After Effects does a great job on most of the conversions the Teranex can do.
Perry Paolantonio
Gamma Ray Digital - 288 Walnut St Suite 105, Newton MA 02460
14k Film Scanning -- Color Grading -- Film Restoration
www.gammaraydigital.com
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Paul Provost

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Re: Teranex

PostWed Nov 28, 2012 6:46 pm

here, here!
Paul Provost - colorist
Twitter: @4kfinish
www.4kfinish.com
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Bernhard

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Re: Teranex

PostThu Nov 29, 2012 5:46 pm

Perry wrote:
I am living in the 21st century!
I am operating with video FILES!
Therefore I need FILE BASED PROCESSING!


Then you need to be doing this work in a file-based realm, such as a computer. The Teranex is a video processor, not a file processor. That is, it's designed to take a video input signal in and output a video signal. It's pretty cool that BMD has made it so you can output to Thunderbolt to output files, which takes care of half your problem.

If you want a purely file-based system, After Effects does a great job on most of the conversions the Teranex can do.



Sorry, but due to several reasons this is simply FALSE.
Almost ALL video applications out there are extraordinary weak when it comes to image processing; especially when handling interlaced frames. And if the algorithms are fine, then they operate at 8bit only, or do handle only 4:1:1 and so on... simply not suitable for professional usage.

These apps are making very bad compromises in favor of speed over quality.
I've tested a lot, and e.g. After Effects is one of the weakest when it comes to image processing:
- it throws away the half of the frame at de-interlacing.
- it uses bilinear scaling.
- it has no noise reduction filter (and NO, applying a gauss filter is not an appropriate solution).
- (and NO, applying a ton of plugins on a very basic task isn't sophisticated; years ago there was a plugin worth using: Algolith Algosuite - discontinued)

It's very funny that You mentioned AfterFX: customizable scaling filters like Lanczos or other SinC filters are under the top ten feature requests for AfterFX...
And those apps out there using Lanczos are using it the 'stupid' way: The whole image is scaled with the same filter settings. Good HW-scalers like Teranex operate image adaptive: they are detecting edges and determine which filter is suited best for every pixel of the resulting image; or in case of Teranex' diagonal filtering they choose which pixels in the search region are appropriate to be processed...

The only app I've discovered that could at least compete with hw-scalers/processors is Smoke2013.
But specialities like SuperResolution upscaling You won't find even there.

Teranex' biggest competitor, S, founded a spin-off company to bring the quality of their
hw-conversion to a file-based workflow in conjunction with transcoding.
Their solution starts at € XX,000!

Under this circumstances it is simply annoying that we have the best algorithms available in our facilities, but can't use them on our files. Even the video processing in our cheap TV-sets are
much better than what we get in our video apps.

Best regards,
Bernhard
Last edited by Bernhard on Sat Dec 15, 2012 4:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Perry

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Re: Teranex

PostThu Nov 29, 2012 6:23 pm

If you want to use the teranex for files, you have a solution - play the file out of one system, SDI into the teranex, Thunderbolt or SDI into the target machine.

The only thing lacking with this workflow is that you need to do it "wild" without deck control. But this is easy enough to work around. I've done it 4 times already this morning on downconverts done with this method. It's a hell of a lot faster than software processing, because it's real time. You're unlikely to find any software based noise reduction that's quick, even one that uses the GPU.
Perry Paolantonio
Gamma Ray Digital - 288 Walnut St Suite 105, Newton MA 02460
14k Film Scanning -- Color Grading -- Film Restoration
www.gammaraydigital.com
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Paul Provost

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Re: Teranex

PostThu Nov 29, 2012 6:28 pm

I'll second that. works great - now if only the ultrascope was usable...
Paul Provost - colorist
Twitter: @4kfinish
www.4kfinish.com
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Peter McCabe

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Re: Teranex

PostSat Dec 01, 2012 12:10 pm

I for one would love to have Teranex file based version. Seems like you could round trip it through the thunderbolt connection. It would be great to be able to sort out mixed frame rates/sizing issues as the edit is progressing while keeping the tc/metadata intact.

Please get the ultrascopes updated! how long can it take to get retina display support together?

Trananex request. How about over and unders/out of gamut with time coded flags?
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Bernhard

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Re: Teranex

PostSun Dec 02, 2012 9:06 am

One thing to add:

I don't know how the current Teranex architecture looks like,
but I was told that the old Teranex indeed where Windows-PCs (?!?),
utilizing the Teranex' processor boards.

Would fit, because the old VC Teranex boxes were marketed as 'Video Computers';
thus VC.

It also explains the concept of VC-400 (File-processing!!!) being a server.


Even if the new architecture is less Windows-PC and more proprietary,
technically it should not be a problem to let the new Teranex process files.
The only thing required, as Peter has already mentioned, is a loop back and an
expansion to MediaExpress controlling it. Thunderbolt has 2 channels,
so it can handle data transfer with ease.

Best regards,
Bernhard
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xeberdee

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Re: Teranex

PostTue Dec 04, 2012 10:26 am

I have got to agree with Bernhard, this is a long awaited feature for hardware processing.

With the SDI workflow you guys are describing, there is still the problem with capturing unnecessary material (black) and the removal of it to create the new converted files at the same duration. This poses a problem in many workflows that involve many people working on mixed format files. Each format and file has to have exactly the same duration in this scenario. Having to re-stream and truncate the output from Teranex to remove black is an unnecessary step into the workflow, that file based hardware processing would remove.

Running a file through the SDI and capturing it on a recorder as described - Is it possible to do this frame accurately with sync between units by timecode and capture only the file?

Sync between two PC systems or video recorders - which ones will allow this and what applications would be used for the playback and capture?

I never tried it - but surely it is an option.
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Perry

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Re: Teranex

PostThu Dec 06, 2012 2:29 pm

xeberdee wrote:With the SDI workflow you guys are describing, there is still the problem with capturing unnecessary material (black) and the removal of it to create the new converted files at the same duration. This poses a problem in many workflows that involve many people working on mixed format files. Each format and file has to have exactly the same duration in this scenario. Having to re-stream and truncate the output from Teranex to remove black is an unnecessary step into the workflow, that file based hardware processing would remove.


I agree, which is why i've been asking BMD literally for years - going on almost a decade now - to set up their capture software to work like VirtualVTR (which is buggy and way too expensive). Basically, what I'd like to see is MediaExpress have an RS422 Slave mode, so that another edit system or deck could control it just like it was a deck. You'd load up a file into MediaExpress, set it to slave mode, and connect another FCP system or whatever to that machine. then you could insert edit, capture, etc without having to do the current workaround of setting up a 2-pop, capturing wild and then editing and re-exporting the file so that you have something that syncs up with the original frame-by-frame. I really don't understand why they don't do this. It's possible. We have a Rave2K DDR that does this, but because it captures to DPX files, it's not convenient if we need to do something quickly in the Quicktime realm.

-perry
Perry Paolantonio
Gamma Ray Digital - 288 Walnut St Suite 105, Newton MA 02460
14k Film Scanning -- Color Grading -- Film Restoration
www.gammaraydigital.com
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Perry

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Re: Teranex

PostThu Dec 06, 2012 2:39 pm

Bernhard wrote:I don't know how the current Teranex architecture looks like,
but I was told that the old Teranex indeed where Windows-PCs (?!?),
utilizing the Teranex' processor boards.


QNX, actually, not Windows. At least, that's what the VC300 is that we have. It's an OS designed for special purpose embedded systems - it's not a general purpose computer. It was made to do one thing - take video in, manipulate it, spit video out.

On the VC300 you interact with the teranex via a touchscreen interface that does in fact look a little like Windows. But it's not Windows. When it boots, the POST screens look more like Linux, checking common *nix file system paths. There is no storage in the Teranex, the whole OS runs off a small CompactFlash card inside the unit.

It may be that newer versions ran some flavor of embedded Windows, but I'd be surprised if that's the case.
Perry Paolantonio
Gamma Ray Digital - 288 Walnut St Suite 105, Newton MA 02460
14k Film Scanning -- Color Grading -- Film Restoration
www.gammaraydigital.com
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Bernhard

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Re: Teranex

PostSat Dec 08, 2012 8:22 am

Perry wrote:
Bernhard wrote:I don't know how the current Teranex architecture looks like,
but I was told that the old Teranex indeed where Windows-PCs (?!?),
utilizing the Teranex' processor boards.


QNX, actually, not Windows. At least, that's what the VC300 is that we have. It's an OS designed for special purpose embedded systems - it's not a general purpose computer. It was made to do one thing - take video in, manipulate it, spit video out.

On the VC300 you interact with the teranex via a touchscreen interface that does in fact look a little like Windows. But it's not Windows. When it boots, the POST screens look more like Linux, checking common *nix file system paths. There is no storage in the Teranex, the whole OS runs off a small CompactFlash card inside the unit.

It may be that newer versions ran some flavor of embedded Windows, but I'd be surprised if that's the case.


Thank You for the info. Interesting what's going on under the hood.

With the MS:Windows info I referred upon an interview:
http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/blackmagic-design-simplifies-teranex-product-lineup
Can only speculate Teranex changed the OS for the VC400 file processing server.
Would make sense.

Nevertheless, in it's core the Teranex processes (streamed) files.
So it would make sense to provide an app that converts arbitrary image data
(as far as they are TV-standards conform) into a data stream Teranex could process,
and vice versa. In fact this is what MediaExpress already does for DeckLink, etc...

Best regards,
Bernhard
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Perry

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Re: Teranex

PostSat Dec 08, 2012 12:40 pm

Bernhard wrote:With the MS:Windows info I referred upon an interview:
http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/blackmagic-design-simplifies-teranex-product-lineup


Unless I misread that, I don't think he was referring to the operating system of the Teranex, but the fact that BMD could take aspects of Teranex's patented technology and integrate it into, say, Windows-based applications.

In either case, I think you're wasting your time expecting this to be file-based. it might be theoretically possible, but that's not what the teranex was designed to do. More likely you'll see a different product using some of the same algorithms, in the form of a PCIe card or software.
Perry Paolantonio
Gamma Ray Digital - 288 Walnut St Suite 105, Newton MA 02460
14k Film Scanning -- Color Grading -- Film Restoration
www.gammaraydigital.com

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