HD For Indies

So after putting this down for several months, I'm coming back to Final Touch HD to really dig into it now that I'm working with someone.

Here's some raw notes from sitting down with the book and diving back in. Apologies for the roughness. When I editorialize, I'll put it in bold.

Overall, this program is (still) quite rough around the edges - but the promise it shows is huge. It is lumpy getting there, but the journey is worth it if you need fast, high quality color correction with realtime feedback. I say this comparing it to much more mass market, mature products like After Effects of Final Cut Pro - products with large teams and years of development effort. But even by small developer standards, this feels lumpy. The "2.0" designation feels a bit rushed - it's really more of a v1.5, fulfilling the promise of 1.0 but not delivering everything you'd hope quite yet.

I've forgotten how to do a lot of stuff - three months ago, I knew how to do tracking to apply a soft edged correction to an area - now I've forgotten and need to back up a bit.

The difference is that now I understand the room metaphor much better - each task in Final Touch HD is separated into "rooms" - which are basically just tabbed sections of the interface to tackle just one aspect of the process, such as primary or secondary color correction, geometry (rotation/cropping/pan/scan), etc.

So I fire it up - Silicon Color has shipped version 2.01 since I last messed with Final Touch, when only 1.x was shipping.

I"m going to start with the basics, and gradually build up to more complex things.

Firing it up it asks if I want to activate a Tangent control surface. Since these are about $25,000, regretfully I decline.

It asks me whether I want to create a new or open an existing project.

I start a new project.

I'm noticing differences already - version 1.x (way back in January through spring) required manually editing a text file to set preferences. Now they have "real" preferences to establish preferred directories for renders, projects, etc. I felt the former situation was inexcusable, and they have rectified it (and it surely wasn't just me complaining about that).

-when importing individual shots, you can either drag and drop from the shots list (their version of an Open dialog for an Import type function), or click the "Import" button to add it to the list on the right side of the screen. But you cannot drag from the list on disk (the left side of screen) to the list of imported media (the list on right). If you can drag & drop to timeline, you should be able to drag and drop to the list I would think.

I dig around in the prefs and try to activate the video out function so that my broadcast monitor can display the output. The program crashes. I try it again - crashes again. Not encouraging.

I've installed a version of the ATI drivers more recent than they recommend - perhaps I've gone A Version Too Far...

Nope - if I turn on the "Disable Vid-Out During Playback" it doesn't crash. I save it then turn off the disable function.

The good news is that it WILL run to both computer display and broadcast monitor at the same time - the bad news is that the frame rate drops all to hell - in the ballpark of 10fps or so just eyeballing it (that's a verrrrrry vague guestimate).

This is expected - I had a long talk with Roland and he explained that it is an architectural limitation (he even told me this back at MacWorld I think) - sending the corrected image from the graphics card back over AGP to PCI-X bus is too slow for realtime, and that's the hindrance. He's hoping that if/when PCI Express Macs ship (personally I think they'll be announced in within 60 days, shipping by Christmas maybe?) it will vastly improve the situation.

The video out situation is much tidier than I thought it would be - there's a switch in the UI to enable video output, and it can be disabled altogether or jsut during playback.

This is GOOD.

Vid-Out disabled is what we'd been doing - strictly on computer screen.

Vid-Out enabled means what we'd heard - crappy performance. It drops frames - playing back something in the vague, vague ballpark of 10fps (could be 6, could be 12, just a guess).

The winning solution, it would seem, is to use Vid-Out, but disable during playback - every time you hit stop, it updates the playhead to the current frame and sends it out the video out. So hit play and computer screen moves, but broadcast screen doesn't. Hit stop, broadcast display updates.

When color correcting, dragging the UI around live updates the broadcast monitor. This is an entirely decent solution - the only thing missing is live broadcast monitor feedback. As you discovered earlier, you can't make changes during playback. So the loss of live output isn't such a big deal.

Dragging around in the UI - whether on the timeline or adjusting a control - does update all screens in realtime. There is a little bit of latency - not much though. It updates the UI several times a second, even on the broadcast monitor. I could see this causing minor slowdowns when in a hurry. With the Vid-Out disabled, (and Disabling Vid-Out in general doesn't crash the app), the UI's response is MUCH more fluid - feels like something well north of 20 updates a second, more than you'd need - plenty for hurried, realtime feedback.

Just DO NOT change your Vid-Out settings (the frame size, frame rate, and bit depth settings of the AJA or BMD card) WITHOUT having the "Disable During Playback" turned OFF. To change the Vid-Out, have "Disable Vid-Out During Playback" turned ON for safety. Wha? I'll need to play more to lock down that behavior, but basically save first less you lose data in a crash.

Hmm - maybe that's just because I'm trying to change from the 1080p23.976 to 1080p23.976==>29.97 setting - essentially 23.976 with built-in 3:2 pulldown. Maybe FTHD doesn't like that and THAT'S why it's crashing. More testing to follow.

And if you do hose it, click "Close" NOT "Reopen", otherwise it'll say something about "Welcome to FTHD for the first time, you'll have to configure blah blah". Close it and relaunch MANUALLY.

with the "Disable" turned on, I change from 23.976 to 23.976==>29.97 and it crashes.

I try it with "Disable" turned OFF, and it crashes. Maybe it doesn't like that 29.97 setting? Reboot.

there are annoying white blocks that make it very very difficult to read the names of the "rooms" (aka tabs) at the top of the screen and on various UI stuff.

This is a problem with 10.4.x, and hopefully 10.4.3 will fix it. ATI's 4.5.5 drivers do NOT fix it.

It's annoying that the UI does not update - the playhead/timeline does not move forward as the video plays. So you don't know where the playhead is. There is a button to live update, but it hinders performance of the video playback, causing dropped frames. This is on a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with ATI 800 card, OS X 10.4.2 and ATI drivers 4.5.5 - all the latest stuff (although 4.5.5 may be TOO much the latest - no info on website about it yet).

I need to refamiliarize myself with it's toolset and get back into it. There are some funky behaviors with XML import that I don't understand - is it that I don't understand the behavior, or is something going wrong, or what? More reading to be done.

Oddly, there is NO undo here - I'm kind of amazed/appalled at that. Maybe their reasoning is that high end CC stations don't have it. But as a Mac app, it should. I'm sure some would argue it's not really a Mac app, but then we're getting into semantic wars.

Overall, this program is quite rough around the edges - but the promise it shows is huge. It is lumpy getting there, but the journey is worth it if you need fast, high quality color correction with realtime feedback.

But the big stuff is working - I can do primary color correction on a 10 bit, 1920x1080 24fps clip, crop and rotate it, and it'll play out full res, in real time on my computer monitor - think that isn't a big deal? Try that with FCP. Then time how long the render is to let you see it play in real time at all. Then you'll start to appreciate how much faster this makes the workflow.

OK, that's enough for tonight.

Tomorrow I hope to make it do cooler stuff and I'll have nicer things to say. Most of my complaints center around glitchiness and underperformance from a "I wish it would" perspective. What it does is still pretty amazing, and it's amazing enough we are dedicating some serious time, effort, and cash to building a business around this technology.

-mike