Phantom Cine Toolkit for MacOSX & Demo Features

Vision Research Inc. creates and manufactures professional cameras for digital cinema as well as high speed cameras that can capture imagery at several thousand frames a second. The Phantom Cine Toolkit allows MacOSX and Applications to work with the Cine movie files created by these cameras. With this toolkit, Finder is fully aware of these files, including support for Spotlight, QuickLook and QuickTime Playback. Other applications that are QuickTime aware, will also work with the Phantom Cine movie file format.

Supported Applications
- Final Cut ProX
- Final Cut Studio 3
- Avid Media Composer 6 for Macintosh (or later)
- Adobe After Effects CS5 for Macintosh (or later)
- Compressor 4
- Telestream Episode 6.4
- Many other QuickTime compatible applications

Demo Features

• Supports Phantom Flex, Miro "M" series, Phantom HD/65 and V Series Cameras.
• Reads Phantom Cine files with a Water Mark (A Red Bar through the image.)
• Time Code is Fixed to 24 fps in the demo version.
• Time Code time is Fixed to 09:09:09:00
• Supports 8-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit and 14-bit Phantom Cine files.
• Supports QuickTime 7.6.6 under MacOSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and MacOSX 10.7.x Lion
• The optional Final Cut Pro import panel is limited to importing a single Phantom Cine Clip.

Version 3.1
This updated Phantom Cine Toolkit package now includes support for Vision Research’s new line of Miro M series cameras as well as the latest v1210 and v1610 cameras. Support for Vision Research‘s new PCC 2.0 as well as Glue Tools’ Séance package is included. With the dramatically improved color processing engine, Cinematographer and Artists can now see exactly what the image looked like on the Camera’s HD-SDI out.

The Phantom Cine Toolkit will perform all of the importing, playback, debayer, white balancing and color correction functions to the movie. All applications that use QuickTime can access all aspects of the Phantom Cine files. Applications including Adobe After Effects, Avid Media Composer 6, Final Cut Pro 7, and Compressor can import and play these files without any sort of conversion or preprocessing steps. For the ease of portability with other users, you can quickly and easily convert a Phantom Cine Movie to any other QuickTime movie format that these applications support.

Dramatically Improved Color
New for v3.0 is a re-built color processing engine. This new engine dramatically improves color accuracy over the previous versions. The imagery now closely matches what you see from the HD-SDI output on the camera. As with previous versions of the software, the user can adjust the debayer quality to allow for full playback on a variety of systems. When high quality imagery is required, the artist can also switch to a high precision debayer mode, to render a great looking image. Along with user selectable debayer modes, you can change the color processing. Selectable tone maps, adjustable display gamma values, adjustable white-balance modes can be modified to suit your needs .You can provide your own white balance values, or use your own XYZ color conversion matrix to adjust the color space of the footage.

GPU Acceleration
The Phantom Cine Toolkit is now fully GPU accelerated! By using the GPU, the rendering of the imagery is significantly sped up. Any Mac with MacOSX 10.7.4 or later can take full advantage of your GPU’s power, increasing render performance. Users can expect at least a 2x to 4x speed improvement over previous releases.

Time Code
With these components, productions can import Phantom Cine clips directly into your favorite editing application. No additional processing is required. Time code is now extracted from the embedded timestamps that have been generated by the camera. This now provides editors with a reliable Time Code source for all Phantom footage regardless of the source frame rate.

System Preferences
The Glue Tools PhantomCine preference pane is where you pre-set all of the settings that the components use. These settings include white balance modes, debayer algorithms and color conversions. The panel also handles licensing information, time code support, and more.

User Adjustable Imagery
The Phantom Cine Toolkit provides the editor or artist with a wide array of settings. For editors that need raw speed, low quality debayer modes offer quick, yet efficient display modes, to let any application playback Phantom Cine movies. When high quality imagery is required, the artist can switch to a higher precision debayer mode, to extract great looking footage. Along with user selectable debayer modes, you can choose from different XYZ colorspaces, different display gamma modes, even choosing camera defaults for white-balancing. If that isn't enough, you can provide your own white-balancing values, or your own XYZ color conversion matrix to adjust the colorspace of the footage. Also included is the ability to change the image aspect ratio for Anamorphic footage.

Playback with the AJA Kona 3 Card
On capable systems with high speed storage, the Phantom Cine Toolkit can now playback HD sized footage out though AJA's Kona 3 card. You will be able to preview your footage using Final Cut Pro, and assorted broadcast equipment.

Spotlight Plugins
The Spotlight Plugins enable your system to see inside the Phantom Cine header. The Finder can extract specific information from the Phantom Cine files when it does a "Get Info." You can search for camera models, encoding characteristics, or even "shot notes" from the user modifiable "description field" from the Finder's Spotlight panel. Simple shell scripts can also take advantage of the spotlight services and sift through frames for specific data.

With Glue Tool’s Cineon/DPX Components
Phantom Cine QuickTime Toolkit in conjunction with Glue Tool's Cineon/DPX Pro Components, allows users to export a Phantom Cine movie as high quality dpx frames. The combination provides universal access of Phantom Cine footage to many industry-wide visual effects, editorial and color correction packages. In addition, all of the features of the Cineon/DPX Components will also be available such as adding Time Code, adding custom Metadata into the headers, Adjusting the Frame Rate and Exporting files out to film or have the footage color corrected at a DI faciity and then printed to film.

Important Notes about Phantom Cine File Format
Vision Research has been in business for a number of years, building high speed digital cameras. As time has gone on, the camera capabilities have greatly improved. As a result, each generation of camera has required the Cine file format to expand and change. Vision Research's more modern cameras create Cine movies that have a different image payload from the cameras that the company originally built several years ago. As a result, some legacy cameras create a movie file that is not supported with this software.

The Phantom Cine QuickTime Toolkit currently supports the following cameras: Phantom Flex, All Miro models (including the new Miro "M" series), Phantom HD/65, v10, v9x and v7x cameras. When the Phantom Cine QuickTime Toolkit is installed, you can do a "Get Info" on Cine file, and see which camera model created the Cine file.

The Phantom Cine QuickTime Toolkit will only open files with a ".cine" extension. Files with a ".cin" extension will be confused with the Cineon file format. If you can't open your Phantom Cine files, check to see that the extension is set properly.

Exporting a New Movie from QuickTime Player 7
For the ease of portability with other users, you can quickly and easily convert a Phantom Cine Movie to any other QuickTime Movie format. You can do this by opening a Phantom Cine Movie using QuickTime Player 7, and then selecting the "File->Export...". Select your codec, location and filename as you would with any other movie, and start the export. It is that easy.

Customer Feedback
“Phantom Cine is awesome! Now with one touch playback of the .Cine files from the Vision Research Phantom, I have the ability to see and playback the camera native files directly within AfterEffects and Quicktime. Your tool has mind numbingly simplified the workflow for acquisition with this amazing addition to my Production tool kit.”
Gary Adcock, HD and Film Consultant
Studio 37, Chicago, IL

System Requirements
Minimum Requirements:
- Intel Mac
- Mac OS X 10.7.5
- QuickTime 7.6.6
- 1280 x 1024 display

Recommended System for Playback:
- A High-Speed ATI or NVidia Graphics Card.
- MacOSX 10.7.5 (or later)
- QuickTime 7.6.6
- Dual 1920 x 1200 Displays
- Thunderbolt, SAS, SATA, Fiber-Channel RAID or SAN

Supported Application Suites:
- Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 or later
- Avid Media Composer 6.0.x
- Compressor 4
- Final Cut Studio 3
- Telestream Episode 6.4
- And many others