By Mike McCarthy

At the IBC show in Amsterdam, there were a number of new product announcements that are relevant to editors and other post pros.

First off, AJA announced its newest PCIe I/O card, the Kona X. This card is a straightforward option, sitting below the existing Kona 5 but far above the T-Tap Pro, with 12G-SDI and HDMI 2.0 inputs and outputs and compatibility with any of the tools that already support the long-standing Kona line of products. What makes the card unique is its DMA support for lowering input-to-output latency for faster turnaround of AR graphics and AI-driven video overlays — or virtual production backgrounds — that the game engine generates on the fly.

The rest of the potential legacy I/O interfaces are included on a separate card, the Kona Xpand, which adds support for REF, AES and LTC plus RS232 and stereo analog audio. I like this idea, as many users don’t need these options (which add cost to the card), while others require them. And I would hope that the Xpand will work with other cards in the future, lowering its overall cost over time and allowing it to be retained when the main card is updated. It’s priced at over $3,500. I would still love to see a PCIe version of the T-Tap Pro, a single 12G-SDI and HDMI output, on a low-profile PCIe card. I figure there must be a decent market for a card like that.

Blackmagic
Blackmagic announced a new camera to its Pocket Cinema Camera 6K line. The new camera has a full-frame 6K sensor and an L-mount lens, which is much larger than the Super 35 sensor and EF mount of the previous camera in the line. It still records 12-bit Blackmagic RAW files, but now to CFexpress cards or to USB storage, with live H.264 proxies as well, if desired. It seems like a pretty solid option for entry-level professional work for $2,600 plus lenses. Blackmagic also released “Blackmagic Camera,” which is a free iPhone app for fully utilizing the phone’s camera features with maximum user control. It has an impressive number of features, from false color and zebra display modes to metadata controls. It can record 10-bit ProRes directly to Blackmagic Cloud so media files will be ready to edit in Resolve. I am an Android user, otherwise I would have already downloaded and tried it.

Sony
Sony has also announced a new camera, the Burano, which is a smaller sibling to the Venice. New cameras are important to post production since that’s who has to the deal with the media that these cameras record. But in this case, it looks like the various supported formats (X-OCN and XAVC) are pretty similar to the existing options that have been coming from the Venice for a few years now.

Adobe
Adobe announced a variety of new video-related features coming to its Creative Cloud applications. Adobe is extending Premiere Pro’s well-received text-based editing so editors can easily remove pauses and filler words in recordings to quickly clean up audio and tighten up edits. The length of what will be considered a pause is user-definable, and it can, uh, find and, uh, automatically, uh, remove extra, uh, filler words in audio recordings, either leaving silence or ripple-deleting the time out entirely.

Premiere Pro can also clean up audio with a new AI-enhanced speech tool that has been a popular cloud tool on Adobe Podcast but will now be available directly in the application. It resynthesizes voices to remove background noise and increase clarity, with all processing now down on the local system. Adobe also claims to have a solution to the long-standing QuickTime gamma problem, which has resulted in inconsistent MOV output for years. And you can now batch-select multiple markers to move or delete them, which is a small but extremely useful change in certain situations, especially with Frame.IO’s implementation of them for notes.

Speaking of Frame.io, it has new side-by-side comparison tools for not just stills but videos as well, and the sources no longer have to be in the same versions stack. The tools appear to have a clean and simple UI approach to making that functionality easy and intuitive to use. They will support third-party cloud storage for enterprise users, which will probably alleviate certain security concerns for potential customers. Frame.io also has new camera-to-cloud hardware options, including Accsoon Seemo, which I had never heard of before. It appears to be a fairly revolutionary camera attachment for output compression and streaming.

Lastly, After Effects is getting a number of new features. The application’s AI-powered rotoscoping tool, Roto Brush, is getting a big upgrade to allow it to better handle intersecting objects and other complex problems. But the thing I am most excited about is After Effects’ new support for importing 3D objects directly into the composition. This change is probably motivated in part by the development of apps like Adobe Dimension and by Adobe’s acquisition of the Substance 3D tools. It initially supports OBJ and GLB files, but more formats are said to be coming.

I am not much of a 3D guy because I just don’t have the patience that has historically been required. My brother has been modeling stuff for animation since high school and modeling real objects for manufacture since college, but I would prefer to skip that step. With the development of generative AI-created 3D models, I have been looking for a way to bridge the gap between that functionality and my work in Premiere and After Effects. This appears to be what I have needed. I no longer have to set up scenes in Maxon Cinema4D to use my 3D assets in After Effects. I do a fair bit of VFX previsualization, like the postviz mockups of shots I did in editorial on my last couple big films.

The tools are all there for keying together existing content, but when I have to add an object that will be fully synthetic, I either have to send the shot to an artist to create an overlay for me or pull from a prerendered spinning video of the model. The ability to import 3D objects directly into the composition will allow me to get a model from the VFX team and overlay it onto the shot however the director wants.

The new support for 3D objects in After Effects is thanks to a new GPU-accelerated Advanced 3D engine, and it can do all sorts of advanced rendering on 3D objects. But I am primarily interested in the basics. It will allow me to import and manipulate a 3D asset in an environment that I am very familiar with and easily composite it into a shot to preview how it will look once a real VFX artist takes the time to do it properly. This functionality is already available in the current public beta builds, and I would anticipate the full release to be at Adobe Max next month. I have tested it on my system, and it works with the OBJ models from my last film. It would have saved me a lot of time on that project, so I am looking forward to putting it into use on my next movie.

Maxon
Also related to 3D, Maxon has deepened its existing partnership with Adobe (After Effects plus Cinema4D) by packaging a one-year license of Adobe’s Substance 3D tools with new subscriptions of Maxon One for a limited time. Maxon One is Maxon’s subscription service that gives users access to all of Maxon’s tools, many of which have been updated for IBC as Maxon releases its 2024 versions.

Maxon also released Cinebench24 last week, which is the newest version of its free rendering benchmark utility. The new version has added support for GPU benchmarking now that Redshift is GPU-accelerated, and I have been using it for other upcoming reviews with great success.

Mike McCarthy is a technology consultant with extensive experience in the film post production. He started posting technology info and analysis at HD4PC in 2007. He broadened his focus with TechWithMikeFirst 10 years later.