Qube Cinema has an entire suite of products required for a practical, commercially viable, end-to-end implementation of Digital Cinema. Qube Cinema is a company that has proven expertise in managing complex technology transformations in traditional workflows; a company with a passion for cinema and a thorough understanding of film, video, audio and computer technology as well as the production, post-production and exhibition industries.
QubeMaster Pro is a uniquely flexible and powerful Digital Cinema encoding and packaging solution designed to integrate fully into the modern post environment. It is a database-driven software solution for the Microsoft Windows™ platform with an intuitive and familiar user interface that is simple to understand. For power users, the software provides fast keyboard-based control over virtually all operations.
QubeMaster Pro's DCI Object Model
The architecture of QubeMaster Pro closely mirrors the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) Object Model with a hierarchy of Shows, Compositions, Reels and Track Files. It is this design that makes QubeMaster unarguably the best choice for every digital cinema mastering application.
While QubeMaster Pro has been designed from the ground up to conform to the DCI Specification product and is the ideal to go from a Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) to a Digital Cinema Package (DCP), it has also been designed to operate in the real world where workflows don't always represent the ideal.
The Virtual DCDM
QubeMaster Pro has powerful pre-processing capabilities that allow it to crop, scale and add borders to the image, and to combine multiple audio files with flexible channel assignments. QubeMaster Pro can perform Log to Linear conversions, handle 1-D and 3-D Lookup Tables as well as convert between XYZ, RGB and YCbCr color spaces with user defined R, G, B and White Point colour coordinates. For more advanced pre-processing, QubeMaster Pro includes Color Transform Language (CTL) Script Processing. The software handles all pre-processing calculations with the highest internal precision to preserve every bit of image quality.
Together, these pre-processing capabilities allow QubeMaster Pro to work directly on the Digital Intermediate data where there is insufficient time or budget to create a DCDM – a concept that we refer to as the Virtual DCDM! And since the DCDM is the ideal archival format for a film, QubeMaster Pro can also generate a standards-compliant DCDM even as it encodes, thus saving considerable time and money.
Flexible Source File Formats
The software supports multiple methods of bringing in picture and sound elements including digitizing from tape-based sources, file import and image sequence import. Numerous picture formats are supported including TIFF, DPX, Cineon, TGA and BMP image sequences apart from MXF, Quicktime, QT Reference and AVI based sources. Since QubeMaster Pro works with any existing local or shared storage, its flexible support of multiple file formats will quickly become a boon in a post facility without the need to copy or convert.
Simple, Intuitive Workflow
QubeMaster Pro provides a very powerful mastering interface which allows picture, sound and subtitle Track Files to be added to the database by a simple drag-and-drop operation. These files are then synced accurately using a Sync Point such as the 2-Pop to form Reels. Sync Points are marked for each Track File using the Clip Editor as are In and Out Points representing the First Frame of Action (FFOA) and the Last Frame of Action (LFOA) of each Reel.
Subtitles are xml files in the CineCanvas™ format and can be created by the QubeMaster Pro application from plain text files in multiple popular formats or the system can directly use xml files created in other applications.
Multiple Reels are ordered and chained together to form a Composition along with additional metadata that is entered by the user. The Composition is the basic unit of distribution in the digital cinema world and QubeMaster Pro produces standards compliant Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) and Key Delivery Messages (KDMs) for distribution to digital screens.
Encoding, Encryption and MXF Wrapping
In order to retain maximum flexibility, QubeMaster Pro allows MXF wrapping and encryption at the Track File level while one-step encoding, encryption and MXF wrapping is performed at the Composition level. Encoding of Compositions into JPEG2000, MPEG-2 and VC-1 can be performed in software and, where speed is of the essence, optional distributed processing capability is available to achieve performance limited only by source file throughput. QubeMaster Pro fully utilizes every CPU in a multi-core system and processing throughput increases linearly with the number and speed of the processors.
While QubeMaster Pro has the capability to encode into all supported image compression formats, it fully supports MXF wrapping and/or 128-bit AES encryption of already encoded material to the DCI specification. This allows post-houses to take advantage of their custom encoding solutions for JPEG2000 or to continue to utilize their fast and dependable hardware MPEG-2 encoders, whether these output Elementary Streams or MXF files with unencrypted essence.
Control Over Every Asset in the DCP
One of QubeMaster Pro's most powerful features is its versioning capability. Not only can multiple Reels refer to the same Track File and multiple compositions refer to the same Reel, but making copies of Reels and Compositions is also quick and easy. The software also has very powerful Packaging features including the ability to merge multiple items into a single DCP and to include or exclude every element of one or more Compositions in a DCP.
The Clip Editor
Another powerful tool in the application is the Clip Editor. This is used throughout the QubeMaster Pro application to mark Sync Points and In & Out Points, and to check Reels and Compositions for Sync and Transitions. The Clip Editor uses familiar icons and keyboard commands that will make the user instantly comfortable with the system.
Powerful Localization Capability
QubeMaster Pro also allows for Compositions to be edited for censorship or localization requirements of different territories. Existing Compositions may be loaded into the system along with a valid KDM using the Qube Ingestion Controller and then modified with total control of all parameters.
Whatever your digital cinema mastering application, QubeMaster Pro is one system that has the power and flexibility to support it!
System Requirements : Microsoft Windows XPTM Professional or Windows Vista™ Business based Workstation, Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GHz or faster CPU (8-core Workstation with 2 x Intel quad-core Xeon 3.2 GHz preferred), 1 GB RAM minimum (4 GB preferred), 100 MB available Storage, separate Media Storage and a high-performance Graphics Adapter capable of a screen-resolution of 1280x1024 or higher (1920x1080 or 2048x1536 preferred).
