If you’re a resolution hound (and these days, who isn’t?), odds are you get a special twinkle in your eye when you look at output from the Dalsa Origin camera, which delivers images at 4K resolution. Shooting pretty pictures is one thing, but figuring out the most efficient way to handle that kind of data flow is something else entirely. To prove that it could be done, Alan Lasky set up a model 4K workflow at the Dalsa Digital Cinema Center in Woodland Hills, CA.
To ensure quality signals, Lasky needed to modernize previous-generation workflows to use DVI in place of analog connectors. “They decided to do it in the digital way, while a lot of people are still doing it in the analog way,” said Hagai Gefen, president of Gefen, which had DVI boosters, splitters and CAT5 extenders ready to go when Dalsa came knocking. “It was a good fit for them, because they were only running in high resolution, and it looks much better when you use digital connectivity. You don’t have to deal with phase adjustments and loss due to cable-related problems. You can do a whole studio set-up and you don’t have to worry about equalization, matching colors and things like that.”
A key piece of gear was Gefen’s 4x4 HDTV Matrix, which allowed video from three sources — PC and Mac workstations and a DVS Clipster — to be patched into Dalsa’s screening room. “It used to be a real chore to get something into high resolution and scale it down and do all those things in a digital way,” Gefen said. “Now, going between formats is basically just going through a menu and picking which way you want to go. Everything’s very simple.”
We asked Lasky to walk us through the pipeline on a typical Origin-originated project. His comments follow each step of the process, below.
1) Send data out from Dalsa Origin camera as DPX files (4096x2048 in RAW Bayer format) via InfiniBand
The analogous way to think is: it’s a digital still camera running at 24 frames per second. We’ve just taken the film scanner off the post line and put it on the set. The InfiniBand cable is really small, but it’s a fat pipe. It’s smaller than a BNC cable — it’s four braided fiber-optic cables together, essentially carrying all of the data from the camera to the recorder.
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