HD For Indies

Spent yesterday with Nick Smith from Matchframe finally getting into, and starting to understand, how Final Touch HD works. I'm going to hold off on my detailed commentary until I talk to the company some more, but a few thoughts:

Wow, this is NOT a typical Mac application. The intended user base is colorists that may be used to, or may be expecting, an interface like this that looks like a Unix operating environment. As a Mac user, I find it confusing, awkward, frustrating, and glitchy - simple things like entering file names to save don't work the way you'd expect until you click off the name then click save. Just clicking save will save it as Untitled, not what you have in the dialog. This is the same in 1.07 and in 2.0b2. It's not as real time as I thought - it's easy to do stuff that brings it below realtime.

Today, I've been doodling with codecs - recreating what Marco Solario has done on his site but with the new codecs from Apple. Based on what I'm seeing so far, I'm not thrilled that BlackMagic is moving to Apple's codecs for 10 bit workflows. AIC, DVCPRO HD, and HDV all predictably don't fare anywhere near as well as the uncompressed codecs. There are substantial differences, even between the uncompressed codecs. All interesting stuff. I'll post some stills in the near future. I've also found some glitches displaying codecs in After Effects 6.5 under 10.4.1 (don't know if it does elsewhere) - the Apple Uncompressed 8 bit codec does not display if your After Effects 6.5 project is set to 16 bits, and Sheer's 10 bit 444 codec gets some crazy prismatic aberations if you look at it in a 16 bit project. Both are fine if you change project settings back to 8 bits/channel.

More thorough reporting by Monday...

-mike