Little Frog in High Def

OK mates, time to get out of your flat and out meeting people.  People in your industry.  Talk shop, see great demos, have a chance to win fabulous prizes!  You can sit around your flat any old time…but a FCPUG Supermeet is a once-a-year event.  This is the perfect way to network, get to know other editors.  Talk shop without your significant other staring at you blankly.  Learn something new…TEACH someone else something new. I mean, for pete’s sake, Alexis Van Hurkman is going to be there!

Where? – THE GREAT HALL, KENSINGTON CONFERENCE & EVENT CENTRE

When? – Thursday, 23 June, 2011 Doors open 16:30 for SuperMeet Digital
Showcase featuring 15 vendors and PLENTY OF NETWORKING – SuperMeet 19:00 -
23:00
How Much? £15.00 per person plus ticket fee.
£10.00 for Students and Teachers with valid ID plus ticket fee.
£20.00 per person at the door
Ticket will include 2 raffle tickets.
Any raffle prizes? Of course.

And World Famous Raffle valued now at over £24,000.00

Try Artbeats’ 3D footage FREE!

Artbeats, a great source for royalty-free stock footage, is offering everyone a free HD clip from their new Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) library. If you’ve been wanting to play around with 3D footage and see if you can figure out the workflows, but have lacked 3D footage to play with, this free download is the perfect opportunity to test it out.

For those of you who are not producing or editing for 3D, you can download the same clip in 2D for use in your everyday high def projects.  You can download the free clip now thru July 5th.  Just use the link below and the clip is yours:

http://www.artbeats.com/littlefrogHD0611

OK, so I am playing a bit more with Adobe Premiere CS5.5, and this time seeing what it can do with still images…pictures.  Typically I will do my moves on stills in After Effects, or Motion, because the way FCP does them is wrong on many levels.  The “ease in, ease out” is iffy, at best in FCP (never worked for me), and zooming from really far out to really close in isn’t a constant speed.  It starts out fast, and slows down.  I forget the term for this…the speed is constant, but the perception of it is that it starts out fast, then slows down.  Well, After Effects, and Motion, compensate for this and make it look more consistent.  So I wanted to see what Premiere could do.

I brought in some photos I shot of my kids, with my Canon T2i.  The pictures are 5184×3456 pixels.  Now, FCP would choke on these, because they are over the 4000 pixel limit. Not at first, but when you try to render…BAM! “General Error.”  Which tells the editor nothing, unless they know from experience that you can get that if you have pictures that are either CMYK color space, or over 4000 pixels.  Adobe Premiere doesn’t have that limit.  It took in the pictures no problem, and allowed me to work with them, and render them, no problem.

I put a still on the timeline, and out of habit, double clicked on it to open it in the Viewer (preview monitor).  I was glad to note that my FCP muscle memory in how to do that also works in Premiere.  And I was happily surprised to see that all the controls I am used in After Effects were available in Premiere:

If you want to manually move the still about the frame with the mouse, you click on the word MOTION and that gets you cross-hairs, telling you that you can move the pic with your mouse.  Or you can adjust the horizontal and vertical position by clicking on the numbers and moving the mouse to the left or right, increasing or decreasing the numbers.  Either way you want to work.

But the cool thing is that you set your keyframes, adjust it where you want to start and end…and then you can right-click on the keyframes and choose TEMPORAL INTERPOLATION>EASE IN or EASE OUT.  This will start the move on the still gradually, and end on it gradually, rather than the jerky sudden start and stop you normally get…and typically get with FCP (even if you use EASE in and out…because it rarely works right).

So I do my move on my still, I put the playhead just before the still, press play and… it stutters.  Hmmm.  Might be because I am on an older (two generations older) MacBook Pro…2.4Ghz model.  Or because the still is very large.  Or because I am on a DSLR 1080p24 timeline, which already has a yellow bar…meaning that Premiere needs to process the footage as it plays.  Might be a combination of all those factors.  So I made a DVCPRO HD sequence, 720p24.  Brought in some footage in that format, made a new sequence with settings to match…and the footage in the sequence had no color, meaning that Premiere could deal with it natively, without any processing needed on the fly.  I added a still, and moves (the spot with the still had a RED render bar, and it did on the DSLR sequence as well) and pressed play.  It played through without any problems.  So I assume it is because the system already had to deal with processing the DSLR footage.  Things might be smoother on the MacPro.  I’ll have to test that and tack my findings on the end of this post.

OK, so back to the DSLR sequence and the jerky still.  It was only jerky the first time, for when I played through the second and third times, it was fine.  Having a bit of knowledge of Adobe products, I assume it built up a buffer…a RAM PREVIEW of the move.  And I assume the more RAM you have, the more buffer it can build with footage that needs to be processed.  OK, well if I want this to be smooth the first time, and all additional times because I am on a laptop with limited resources, I rendered the still.

And I found out something too…a little bit about how Premiere handles rendering.

I started rendering the picture, but then decided that I wanted to change something, so I cancelled the render. When I did, nothing was rendered.  This might be normal for Premiere people, but you see, coming from Avid and FCP…when we render, if the render is stopped, everything that was rendered up the point you cancel stays rendered.  Even halfway through clips.  Well, I found out that if you render only one clip in Premiere, if you stop the render, the render is lost…all of it.  Premiere only retains renders of full clips before you cancelled.  Meaning, if you have 5 clips to render, and you cancel the render partway through clip #4, clips 1-3 will retain the renders, but clip 4 wil not.  There are no partial renders of clips in Premiere.  All or nothing.

That was fine in this case, I was going to make a change.  But what about LARGE renders?  I guess I am used to FCP and Avid MC where at times rendering everything can be too much to ask the computer, and we need to render in chunks.  You can still do that in Premiere.  But what about large files…with layers of video.  And you start the render…and an hour into it you realize that you want to change something on the last clip.  So you stop the render, and all the progress you made up to that point is lost.  That can be a bummer.  Someone on Twitter (@Salah_Baker) said that “that is when the razor blade becomes your friend.”

There is a logic in keeping one render file per clip…so I won’t fault them for that.  Because when I make a change in FCP to a clip, I have to re-render the whole darn thing anyway.  Avid is a bit better about that, but then again, it manages media and renders better than anything, so…

Still, I’m very happy with how Premiere deals with pictures that I am satisfied.  Better ease in and out, ability to handle large stills..and they are much higher quality than I am used to in FCP.

OK, if you have been following me for a while, you know that I use both Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro…and I am pretty proficient with both. If you haven’t been following me for a while… I use both Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro, and am pretty proficient with both. I am a fan of both. I might lean more towards FCP, because it better fits the way I like to edit. But I know that Avid had strengths in many areas that far surpass what FCP is capable of. Plus I started out on Avid MC. So I am comfortable with both.

But, I like to be a well rounded person.  Mainly because I dish out post advice, and I like to be sure to give people the proper advice based on many factors in their post/production workflow.  For this reason I have owned and used capture cards from all three major FCP capture card makers…AJA, Matrox and Blackmagic Design (As well as Aurora…I had a Pipe Pro Studio).  So, now I am digging into Adobe Premiere Pro, to see what all the hoopla is about.  I hear a lot of people raving about how much better this is than FCP or Avid.  It’s about time I looked for myself.

INTERFACE.

Took a little looking around to see what was where.  I couldn’t find the INSERT and OVERWRITE buttons for a while.  Always used to them being in the PROGRAM (Canvas) monitor.  In Premiere, they are in the PREVIEW (Viewer) monitor.  But, they are there.  You can drag clips onto the timeline, or use the period or comma buttons (insert and overwrite), or drag into the Canvas.  Many ways to get things there.  Standard J-K-L keys for keyboard operation, and I and O for marking IN and OUT.  So that is comfortable enough.  And you can customize the keyboard…which helps those of us with pretty set in “muscle memory.”

I like the media browser.  Allows me to find the media I want to import from my various tapeless sources.  I can OPEN files in the Preview monitor before I decide to add them to the project…so I can see what I have. And then I hit upon the thing that people RAVE about Premiere.  The ability to import all sorts of tapeless media, without converting/transcoding.

WORKING NATIVE

OK…I will have to admit…this is frickin’ COOL.  I could get used to this.  I have a small external drive with DEMO files on it.  AVCIntra, DVCPRO HD (both from P2 cards), AVCHD, Canon DSLR, XDCAM EX, RED. Stuff I use to demo things, and to test things.  Well, I was able to bring in all the footage into the project with ZERO transcoding.  Just a few seconds to make the clips and there they were, ready to go.  Now, when you choose a new sequence, you have to choose the settings of that sequence.

For this test, I choose AVCINTRA 1080p24.  I imported clips from my AVCIntra card, then some DVCPRO HD, AVCHD, XDCAM EX.  All instantly…all natively.  Man, I can get used to this.  I mean, sure, first I’d have to copy the cards to my media drive, but still…instant import into the application is slick. I was able to mix the footage fine.  I got a yellow render bar…even with the AVCIntra footage, that the sequence was designed for.  Maybe that isn’t a render bar…a QUALITY bar?  I’ll have to do more reading up on that.

When I added the DVCPRO HD footage, it was smaller on the screen, and the render bar turned red.  Well, it was 720p, so it did appear smaller.  Didn’t automatically scale like I am used to with Avid MC and FCP…but I right-clicked and there was an option to scale to sequence, and I did, and it went to the yellow render bar, to match everything else.  And I was able to play all this footage back, no problem.  LOW resolution…it started at 25%, but I made it 50% at least.  And it was fine on my tower.  My laptop slowed a little, so I made it 25% for that, and things were fine (running off a FW800 G-Drive mini).

AUDIO MAPPING ISSUE

OK, at first I was really annoyed by the following behavior, until I noticed it only happened when I mixed media types.  Now it still annoys me, but a little less.  So in this AVCIntra sequence, I have 4 channels of audio from the footage…4 mono tracks.  They show up on the first four channels, and I can move them up or down…anywhere I want (after I unlink them from the video).  But when I added an AVCINTRA clip…and DVCPRO HD clip…the audio clips from them ONLY appeared if I dragged the footage from the Viewer to the timeline.  OVERWRITE wouldn’t bring over audio…only video.  I could drag audio down LATER, after video.  Or DRAG the clip and get both, but not with the mappable keys, or the Overwrite option.  AND…to top it off, they appeared on different tracks than the other 4 clips.  It appeared on track 5…and I can’t move it…up or down.

After talking with a couple people it seems that the AVCHD audio is showing up as a STEREO track, while the AVCIntra audio is all MONO.  And because of that, they cannot be on the same audio track. Premiere will bring in a stereo track as a single track, to save space.  The same thing happened with the DVCPRO HD clip…one track only.  But that is odd, because when I made a DVCPRO HD sequence…I see THREE channels of audio.

I was pointed to Premiere CS5 articles on how to set up audio preferences and deal with this, and I did set my default Audio track format to MONO.  That DID allow me to bring in all 3 channels of DVCPRO HD p2.  BUT, again, when I tried to drag onto the timeline, it relegated the audio to lower tracks.  5-8.  And I cannot move them up to 1-4 to be with the AVCIntra footage.  None of this is an issue with media of the same type…this is all about mixing media types as far as I can tell.  Even though all the media is 48khz and 16bit, and told to come in as Mono…they won’t mix.

This puts a SERIOUS hamper on my editing workflow.  Because I assign audio to specific tracks.  1-2 is narration or VO, 3-6 is Sound on Tape (SOT), 7-10 is Sound Effects, and 11-14 is music.  I keep this uniform for most of my projects.  FCP does this…Avid does this.  Premiere seems to be very resistant to doing this.  And I have spoken to a few people who have said, “Yeah, that’s an OLD issue…been that way forever.”

OK…how do you all deal with this…Premiere editing peoples?  I’m used to delivering for broadcast, and with working with multiple editors so we need a uniform way to organized audio track assignments.  This behavior puts a serious hamper on my workflow…and is throwing me for a loop.  I love the ability to instantly add media, with zero transcode time.  I love the ability to mix media on the timeline and edit.  But this audio thing is really tripping me up.  Small thing, I know.  But still big enough to put me off to the application.  Small things matter.  Demo the Avid MC ability to add footage and preserve the transition and we all go NUTS!  It’s small, but at the same time huge.  Just like this…small audio thing, yet huge.

OH, and another thing.  Avid has DNxHD as it’s main codec.  FCP has ProRes.  Adobe Premiere has…??  What?  There doesn’t appear to be an Adobe format used for mastering.  I posed this on Twitter, and got a variety of responses. From “Adobe likes to work natively, and then you render out to what you are delivering…DVD, BluRay.  Output to tape.” Other said they use ProRes, or DNxHD as final masters.  Well, with ProRes, you need FCP installed.  No encoder for that without FCP on the system.  And DNxHD…that codec and encoder is provided free of charge from Avid.com  And that is cool.  So now I can encode to a finishing format.  But why doesn’t Adobe have one?  Just curious.

So…I like the interface, love the  ability to instantly import and access my footage, edit mixed formats.  But audio mapping issues have me stymied.  But, I’m still learning…still playing around and figuring things out.  If anyone has solutions, feel free to post them in the comments.  OK, back to digging into Premiere.

EDIT: (With mixed media and using my MBP 2.4Ghz laptop, I am dropping frames like crazy.  Something that my Octo 3.0 MacPro does not do. So the computer does mater quite a bit.)

YET ANOTHER EDIT: Kevin Monahan, who is a professional editor who used FCP extensively but now works for Adobe, pointed out this great video to me. It explains all about the audio tracks and how to get the audio into them. Explained from the point of view of an editor switching from FCP to Premiere. Which I am doing. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/switching-to-adobe-premiere-pro-cs5/audio-/

This last NAB (NAB 2011), I had a mission. Well, other than working as a demo artist for Matrox that is. My mission was to search for a reasonably priced archiving solution of tapeless media that all of us not-so-big production and post production people could afford. There are plenty of options for the places that can afford to drop $10,000 – $20,000…and need to back up footage for a dozen or more projects each month. The majority of places I am hired at are small shops…five to twenty or so people. Or I myself am hired with my system to work on a project. IN those cases, $10,000 is a bit out of reach. Which is why I use a cheaper method of archiving tapeless masters…hard drives.

I know my current archiving solution is flawed. I know that hard drives will fail…it’s just a matter of WHEN they will fail. I cover my bases a little better by archiving to TWO hard drives…a manual RAID 1 if you will (material mirrored on each drive)…so if one drive goes, I have the backup. And I make a practice to spin them up at least once a month. And this is a VERY inexpensive way to archive. I have a $110 eSATA four drive enclosure…then a $60 Sonnet eSATA card…and use 1TB bare SATA drives (bare meaning “not inside an enclosure”) that run about $55 each.  Or you can use a drive dock that costs about $30.  Now that’s cheap!  By both meanings of the word.  Inexpensive, and not THOROUGHLY reliable.  Although I will state for the record that I have only had ONE drive fail in the past two years.

What lead to this search?  Well…in brief, I am working on a show that archived their P2 masters to LTO4 tape, using the setup that existed at the large post facility that they were editing in.  They needed to recover one P2 card that had an interview they wanted to use in their current project…but, there was a problem.  The post facility folded, and while gave the production the tapes, the issue was that they were archived using proprietary software and the ONLY place in Los Angeles…the WHOLE of L.A….that also used this software, was backed up for 8 weeks.  And to even LOOK at the footage you needed to purchase the software and get a 1 year service contract…and buy the drive.  Oh, and a PC to run it.  Over $15,000 just to unarchive one P2 card.

OK, enough back story, now to what I found at NAB 2011.

The one place that EVERYONE pointed me to was CACHE-A.  And they were telling me that they really were reasonably priced, and were standardized…not proprietary.  Standardized…I like the sound of that.  So I went to the booth, got the presentation…and liked what I heard.  CACHE-A is a software solution that also involves a consortium of LTO manufacturers: Quantum, IBM, HP to name a few.  So if one manufacturer leaves and no longer supports CACHE-A…you have alternates. And there is no proprietary software involved…the interface is WEB based.  You use a browser.  Now, there is a LOT of information about these guys, so I suggest you visit the website and dig in.  But one thing I wanted to point out were the products.  They have a couple devices…Prime CACHE-A and Pro CACHE-A... that archives from MULTIPLE tapeless sources…both to tape and to internal hard drives.  Perfect for field backup, or backup at the hotel at the end of a shoot…because they archive to hard drives.  THEN you can archive to the tapes. They work with multiple software types, including HD Log, CatDV, R3D Data Manager, Marquis…MANY options.

Wow…that sounds great!  Amazing.  Non-proprietary, works with many sources, many different LTO manufacturers.  But then comes the price point.  $10,000 for the Pro CACHE-A and $8000 for the Prime CACHE-A.  That was out of the price range I was looking for.  But seriously, for all that it does, I’d expect it to cost that much.  And again, if I was a larger facility, I would have no hesitation in buying it.  It is literally the GOLD STANDARD of archiving. But, the price point is out of the range I was looking for…out of range for the smaller shops. So I needed to look somewhere else.

A couple people recommended something called BRU, by the Tolis Group.  ”They are more in your price range.”  And they were right. As you can see from the link provided, they have several packages, starting from $800 and ending at $7200.  With many great options in between.  Check them out for yourself.

The one that I liked best was the Edit Bay Production Desktop (see the picture above).  It comes with the drive, a tape, a cleaner tape, the software, the ATTO SAS card to connect to the drive (so a Desktop machine is required), a software license and one year of support.  NOTE…support isn’t needed to use the software.  Just needed for you to call and say “HELP ME!  I’m stuck!”  All of this for between $3000 (LTO4) and $4000 (LTO-5).  Very much within the price range of the small companies.  And 1TB tapes run about $120.  Perfect.

I will say this…it is proprietary.  And yes, that is one thing I was hoping to avoid.  But, as I was told by the representative, they won’t leave you stranded.  Their main objective is RESTORING your footage.  Backing it up is one thing, but the reason you back up is so that you can get to it later.  To recover the footage.  And that is one thing they will never stop you from doing.  They know how important it is to recover the data.  When he heard my story of trying to get the one P2 card from the drive, he said “EXACTLY! Why are they doing that to their customers?”  So if you want to recover your footage, all you need to do is have a drive, and the software.  And they offer a 30 day demo of the software, free of charge.  So you can recover everything you need.  And if the demo expires…the RECOVER option STILL WORKS!  And if it doesn’t, call the company and they’ll extend the demo to ensure it works.  So we won’t get stuck with a bunch of tapes full of archives and no ability to unarchive them. That is priceless. Customer support comes first.  That is a BIG selling point.

I know I’m not going into every detail of both options…for that you need to go to the links provided and dive in.  Now, I’m off to try to convince a couple small companies that BRU is the way to go for them.  And tell the BIG company that I know was looking, about CACHE-A.  And start saving up for a BRU system myself.  If I drop a drive, I’m hosed.  Drop a tape?  No problem.

Unless you live in a cave, you might have heard that Apple announced FCP X (10) at the Supermeet at NAB. And from all the people asking me my thoughts about it, I gather they want to know what professional people think about what we saw.

Me? I put forty more questions than it answers. So much was left out, and I need to see the full app before I can really rant or rave. I simply don’t know what it can do for us broadcast professionals.

But, there are plenty of other initial thoughts to read. Here is are a few:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/ssimmons/story/fcp_x_is_shown_to_the_world._flashy_things_are_seen_questions_are_asked/

http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2011/04/what-are-my-thoughts-on-final-cut-pro-x/

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/?newsid=3274193&olo=rss

http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1452. (Although I disagree with the title. Not all of our jaws dropped)

Does this post seem like a cop out? Well, a little. I mainly don’t want to add to the chorus going on about this release just yet. Still letting things sink in.

More later.

Maximum…Max.  I’m talking the Matrox MAX system…the H.264 encoding engine in their MXO2 with MAX product line, and the CompressHD card.  You might have thought that this only worked on the APPLE stuff…Compressor and FCP.  But no…it works on the Avid Media Composer side too.  Because the Matrox MXO2 Mini is designed to work as a monitoring option for MC5.

OK, here’s the situation.  You are done with your cut and you need to submit it for client/producer approval, and they want you to post a QT movie with timecode for them to watch.  It’s a 30 min piece, the time is 3:30 PM, and the client would like to see it before the end of the day.  What are you to do?  That was the situation I was in last week, and I’ll tell you what I did.  The twist to this story is that I was on my laptop.  So no power from my tower on this one.

First off I must tell you that if I did things the normal way…or one of the two normal ways…this would have taken 3:24:18…that’s three hours, 24 min, 18 seconds.  I know this because I tested it later on…just to see.  Well, that was the timing it took exporting directly from the Avid as H.264, 640×360.  And when I tested exporting a Quicktime Reference and using Sorenson Squeeze, it took 3 hours 12 minutes.  Compressor (because I have Final Cut Studio on the same system)…3 hours 18 minutes.  All of those would have put me past my deadline.  And if I was on my tower, I could have used Compressor and Q-master to utilize all my processor cores to do this.  But, I wasn’t on my tower, and if you don’t have Final Cut Studio, or a tower with multiple processors…what are your options for the fast encode from Avid Media Composer?

MATROX MXO2 Mini with MAX!

Last year Matrox and Avid got together and made the MXO2 Mini work as a monitoring solution for Avid Media Composer 5.  And I thought that the benefits stopped there.  I got the MAX version to help with encodes on the Final Cut side…I didn’t know that it could be used on the Avid side until recently. It might have been included in some press release somewhere, but I think it is the best kept secret about the MXO2 Mini with MAX that should NOT be a secret.

Here’s what I did.

STEP 1:  CHOOSE EXPORT AS… in the export setting, choose Quicktime Movie.

Click on OPTIONS…then you get this window:

Choose VIDEO and AUDIO…click on format options:

Choose the Matrox Max H.264… I kept the default settings:

…and you are done.

When I exported this time, it was just about real time. The 30 min project (OK, 29:45) exported out…with timecode window burn…in 31min 14sec. ON MY LAPTOP.  That’s fast.

I ran tests on my Tower, just to see.  And without the MAX, doing it the Avid way, I didn’t save much time.  It took 3 hours and two minutes.  But with the Mini with MAX, it was FASTER than real time.  29 min and 19 seconds.

If you want to know more about this box, and happen to be going to NAB, I will be manning a station in the Matrox booth showing off this and other capabilities.  The show is from April 11 to April 14 in Las Vegas.

FYI – This was done without rendering the timecode overlay filter before I started exporting.