HD For Indies

I spent some time this weekend on a non-HD4NDs related work project - getting my own home studio in order, so that I can actually, you know...DO STUFF rather than merely sacrifice my house to the tidal ebb and flow of gear coming in and out.

I'd long ago run heavy duty coax underneath my house* by the bucket load (I don't know how many hundreds of feet of it), but I'd never really gotten it all going and hooked up.

(* I have a rarity in Austin, a pseudo-basement, since I live on a hill - my pier and beam house has what would be a crawlspace under any other home, but since I'm on the hill it is 18" on the uphill side and about 6 feet tall on the other....thankfully the living room surround channel speakers were the only thing that had to be run to the 18" side)

I made a push back when I pondered and then got my first HDTV to get it all hooked up to/from the studio - I bought a 50 foot HDMI to DVI cable and a 50 foot toslink in addition to the 8 heavy coax cables (RG-6 I think it was) that ran from the living room into the wiring closet.

So while I'd finally got studio to living room wired and working, I'd never gotten the living room to studio setup working - and after having put it down a couple of months ago, identifying which cable was which that dissapear into the floor in one room and pop up in another can be a bit daunting. So through trial and error I got it all working by spending half my Sunday on it.

Just for kicks to show what's involved to get this kind of stuff going, here's a few photos walking through my setup. Click for a larger view, but command-click (Safari w/tabs enabled) to open in a new tab, or possibly open in a new window if you'd prefer. I'm too lazy to provide proper links, so deal. ;p

Also, please realize this is a work in progress - yesterday I spent many hours running cables over the floor etc. testing, and this ain't purty - it is just where I have it at the moment figuring it all out and getting it working. This is my house/mad scientist lab, not set up at the moment as a client presentable space! This is just me sharing my geekery with you folks, not trying to show this off as a final result.

Here's the back end of the home theater setup:

Hooked into that I've got
-the big HDTV (Sony SXRD rear projection)
-an Xbox (original, aka Halo Injection Device)
-an Apple TV
-an HD cable box
-a Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player
-an S-VHS deck whose apparent fate is to gather dust
-and a 5-8 year old Onkyo 5.1 receiver, that doesn't have enough ports on it.

Therefore, with the new toyz, I got a 4-in-1-out HDMI/toslink/digital coax switch with a remote. I literally ran out of remote commands available on my Onkyo's universal remote! I need to deprogram all the CD changer's commands to free up some buttons and squeeze the AppleTV's and HDMI switch's commands in there (yes Logitech universal remotes are nice, but I don't want to spend that much). Figuring out who has toslink vs. digital coax vs both and how to allocate my limited digital audio ports was quite an undertaking - DON'T be one port shy, else MAJOR hassles ensue.

The HDMI/toslink/digital coax audio switch flips between the HD-DVD player, the AppleTV, the HDMI feed from the studio, and a 15 foot DVI cable if for some reason I want to connect a laptop or computer into the living room to the HDTV (makes a helluva desktop, and Macs can underscan to avoid the "I can't see my menus!" dilemma). The switch was was also necessary because I only have two HDMI ports into the HDTV. A bit irksome considering this was Sony's top or near top of line last summer.

All that routes into the HDMI switch and/or receiver and/or directly into the TV. The wiring does get a bit dense...

...and you can't even see 2 or 3 devices & their wires in that pic. One nice tidbit - the HD digital cable box has both digital coax and toslink audio outputs, and they're both hot at the same time - so I have a 50 foot toslink running under the house to get the living room's audio into the studio - that way I can hear the same TV channel while working (good for CNN). For all other digital audio, that's an M-Audio CO2 sitting on the corner - I pass the HDMI/toslink/digital coax switch's audio output through the CO2, and send a digital coax audio signal (the CO2 is configured as a signal repeater/converter) to the studio - since the two rooms are on separate audio legs, if I send analog stereo pair from one to the other I get an annoying hum. By going digital, I skip the hum and get pure digibitty goodness. As is wise in any endeavor like this, label all your cables! At both ends! Makes life MUCH easier when you find a stray later or are trying to troubleshoot.

The stray grey cables with barrel adaptors are from the HD-DVD player - I can route the analog component outputs simultaneously with the HDMI output to get HD picture/sound into the studio for when I'm back&forthing living room to studio. (Incidentally, I've tested & verified I can use the "analog hole" approach to capture video this route if I want to put my HD-DVD content on my AppleTV...but it doesn't look nearly as good, that's another post).

If you look at that first picture closely, you'll see what looks like a white rag on the floor (it is) - that is actually a rag wrapped around and stuffed into the little hinged hatch I oh-so-carefully drilled and hand cut in the floor (about 2x4 inches) carefully and exactly into a single board of my original hardwood floors. (A side benefit of old house - ZERO insulation underneath - drill through 3/4" of wood and you're seeing the basement.) That runs a few feet under the house (carefully crossing electrical lines under the house at a 90 degree angle and a wide looping berth) and comes up through an even bigger hole in the wiring closet (the closet is immediately behind the TV through a wall, closet opens into the studio). The Master Hole has about 32 RG-6 cables, all the Ethernet drops for the house (about 15 or 20, this done before ubiquitous cheap/fast WiFi), all the phone lines, etc. You can just see part of it at the bottom right of this picture (the blue/grey/black cables lower right):


What you see here is (bottom to top) GigE & 100Base-T Ethernet switches, cable modem, router, S-video/RCA stereo pair duplication amplifier I picked up on eBay and not got quite working/installed right, and my recently simplified patch panel.

Below is a detail shot of the patch panel:



You'll note in the high res that a bunch of these cables are properly/professionally labelled underneath clear plastic - these cables were scavenged from a facility that went out of business (Big Old Heavy Iron Avid for lower end work, ahem), so their labels were a HUGE time saver when configuring and connecting all 32 of them into the studio head end.

While technically I "shoulda" run all the labelled Studio In & Out lines into the back of the patch panel and then patched to the Living Room Ins & Outs, I realized the way I've got it set up now is how I'll probably use it 99.9% of the time (I've got 4 BNCs running to breakfast room aka meeting room and also to the bedroom, but I'll probably rarely use'em that way...haven't yet, unless I get that DA properly set up). Since it is an analog signal path, I didn't want to go through several more signal degrading physical connections, so I just connected them as directly as possible.I can always redo it with studio ins/outs into the back of the patch bay if I want/need to. This is ugly but cleaner signal path.

So that is the bridge between living room and studio, with the option to route it elsewhere in the house, with the option to duplicate an s-video video source with stereo analog audio and send that to the 4 zones of the house all at the same time (my Whole House Audio/Video Dream).

Also coming out of the floor in the closet are a big gob of cables that lead under the house to the back corner of the studio with another little hatch:


You can see the hatch flipped up, can't see the cute little brass hinges and knob I suffered to install so if I. The other hatches just like this. The purple is an old t-shirt I wrapped tightly around the cable gob and tucked up tightly into the hole to tighly block it - I learned the hard way that wasps like to set up camp in cool dry underhouse environs....and then crawl up. I also heard black widows and other Ickies do this, so I'm glad I've got it sealed off pretty well (I sit barefoot sometimes with my toesies right down by that...bad bad scene). it is loose at the moment until I'm sure my wire pulling is done and then I'll secure it again.

All that gob leads up to some cable guides I made out of some Home Depot J-hooks I bent to mount under the desk to keep all the cables tidy, out of sight, and away from any electrical interference. All of those then leads to...


...what I call my half-rack. Bottom to top:
-Apex DVD player (which can disable Macrovision for quickie DVD rips of client stuff or for creative rip-o-matics)
-Kenwood stereo amp/receiver I've had for a loooong time
-Toshiba S-VHS deck...it sits here or gets thrown away...
-Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme - which can be used either as primary HD I/O for my Quad G5, or as a standalone converter (which will soon be its primary task)
-home configged BNC patchbay - here's where three Macs worth of HD I/O, two component monitors, and the living room feed can all get routed to each other. I spent hours figuring out the layout of those 32 ports, as I had about 50+ possible connections I could have made to it
-AJA Kona3 breakout box
-AJA Kona2 breakout box

I have more HD-SDI I/O cards than I have Macs (have BMD & AJA gear), so I config as needed to the project at hand - the AJA stuff has convenient breakout boxes, I've remoted the cables from three Macs so when set up with BMD gear the panel acts as a breakout box - HD-SDI, audio & component I/O can be routed/patched through there. When I'm done wiring it all, I'll be able to slide this in under the desk out of the way.

If you thought the front was a big messy cable gob, the back is even busier:


I am still not finished setting all this up - note the receiver's audio I/O is looking a little lonely down there. I also hard-mounted a power strip on the shelf that the A/V gear sits on, to simplify wiring and have "one switch for off" simplicity. The one thing I have to be careful of - if the Multibridge is hooked up to computer, it essentially is a PCIe card, so I have to be careful about my power up/down order with that.

Here's a detail shot of the half rack:


Note once again all cables labelled - HUGE time saver down the road! I can't stress how important it is to label all the cables in what is to be a permanent install - label both ends of EVERYTHING. I used to quibble about labelling power cords as they are interchangeable, but if you've got 10 of them hanging down the back end of a desk and one is loose, or you need to unplug something non-vital to plug in yet another FireWire drive or whatever...you need to KNOW, and not accidentally unplug the computer. And once labelled, PUT 'EM IN THE RIGHT PLACE! Only thing worse than an unlabelled cable is a mislabelled one. Anyone, back to cable central - and all that feeds into my monitoring options:


-the 23" Apple is connected to the Multibridge Extreme for pixel-for-pixel accurate monitoring of 1080p/i signals
-the "Mon1" is a 19" JVC HD broadcast CRT, LOVE this thing - does EVERY SD/HD standard, including PAL & 23.976 frame rates. I have a component HD analog board in it
-the silver one is a 20" consumer SD CRT - lets me see what signals will look like on a "normal" TV (and I have cable hooked up to it as well for watching bad SciFi Channel stuff to half-ignore when working late)
-I can also connect the Multibridge to the 50 foot DVI-HDMI cable that runs under the house to the living room - one nice thing about using the Multibridge as a standalone converter is that ANY of the 3 HD stations can feed it either HD-SDI (single/dual link) or component analog and I can monitor SD/HD as well as HDMI in the living room...all at the same time! Nerdly schweetness...but also truly convenient for clienty stuff as well if they want to know how it'll look in a variety of viewing environments and types of viewing tech.

Next up, I need to get this guy all set up:


...so I can more readily monitor audio from any of the three HD stations in the room, as well as listen in on living room's AppleTV feed (got 50 days of non-repeating Shuffle Luv all queued up). So this is as clean/tidy/lonely as it'll ever get.

So maybe that'll be next weekend's task, getting all the analog/digital audio in/outs figured out in the studio. Then get a passel of color coded not-too-short and not-too-long patch cables so I can route everything quickly/easily. I got these patch panels from that defunct production company and from a friend, if I were starting from scratch BNCs on the front aren't the quickest/easiest way to go as they are slow to get on/off.

All of this has probably totalled into the hundreds of hours of cutting holes, mounting racks, pulling cable, planning, testing, etc...I wouldn't go to all this trouble if I didn't own the house (been here 8 years), and actually got secret geeky joy out of getting it all working. Sometimes, it isn't playing with the toy, it's just BUILDING it that is a ton of the fun. Because I LIKE being able to say, whenever anyone says uncompressed HD editing & routing is a huge undertaking, "Well, HELL - I've got THREE of'em set up in my house, all talkin' to each other and with a triple monitoring setup...its no big deal."

...and get my metaphorical propeller beanie all spun up to 7200rpms.

:D

Your geeky friend,

-mike

PS - and a note for anybody else embarking on such a setup - as I figured out when running the BNC cables (RG-6 & RG-59)originally, the distance above floors has little to do with how long cables need to be under floors. While the HDTV and the Multibridge are perhaps 15 linear feet apart, by the time I factor in going from the Multibridge to under the desk with slack, across the room under the desk, down to where the hole is in the floor, through the floor, under the house following the cable guides I'd already built, dodging around electrical lines to prevent interference, up through the floor, slack, and connecting to the HDTV...a 50 footer was exactly long enough - I have maybe 6 feet of excess slack in the whole thing, and I wanted that anyway to reach the furthest possible computer I might want to directly drive the HDTV with. And if you do want to set up a similar studio or home studio setup...I am available for consulting on such things. This was done somewhat on the cheap as I'm pretty comfortable patching things around by myself, and didn't want to pour a ton of cash into this endeavor. If I really wanted this all to be completely simple and slick, I coulda/woulda spent a bunch more on things like matrix routers, different patchbays & racks, newer/better equipped receivers, proper professional amps, etc. This was scaled to my comfort level and budget - I went out to Fry's to buy a rack and rack shelf and hacksawed it down to fit under my desk, etc. It sits on a cheap blanket to slide it around my wood floors until I come up with something better for it to roll/slide on, etc. I'd previously spec'd out a professional studio for the color correction business I was in, and much of the gear to achieve the same functionality was going to cost thousands and thousands more.

So yes this is an UNGODLY MESS as is, a work in progress- first Thou Shalt Make It Work, and then later Shalt Thee Make It Tidy. Someday, hopefully soon. And then maybe I'll have tidy, client presentable pics to show. As I said at the beginning, this is must me sharing my geekery with you folks.

Another reason to label all cables - after you've got it all working, going to have to unplug/replug/re-route a ton of those cables to tidy it up - and you don't want to be holding a toslink in each hand wondering which one went where...

-mike

Labels: hardware, post equipment, workflow

Apple acknowledges MacBook battery problems

Got a MacBook or MacBook Pro? Been having battery problems? Read this article, download the firmware update (is Software Update accessible), and if that doesn't help, you can take it in to get it swapped out. This also extends the warranty on batteries - excellent.

I write 90% of the content on my BlackBook, so this certainly caught my eye. Thanks to reader Richard Scobie for pointing this one out.

-mike

So yesterday, among other things, I spent some time on the phone with clients doing consulting. Interestingly enough, I ended up having two conversations with DIY filmmakers - one before production started, another at the very tail end of production.

Filmmaker One: Before

First guy was getting ready to embark on his production - he was trying to figure out whether to shoot on F900 or Varicam or HVX200, so I went over the pros and cons of that in terms of color, resolution, ease of working with cameras, which one's easiest to get good looking results quickly without a DIT, free downloadable settings files to improve results, etc., starting out with "If you can afford to do better than the HVX, do so." I then brought up the post ramifications, which was an area he hadn't thought of - one route he could do FireWire ingest and potentially just capture once for offline/online, and the other route would require HD-SDI cards, RAIDs, etc. EDIT - but with Apple's new ProRes, maybe he won't need a RAID...

He was in a hurry because he was on a limited budget (perfectly understandable), didn't want to spend a lot of time on the phone/on the clock, so we zipped through the broad strokes of post production - after acquisition, ingest, editorial, picture lock, audio handoff, conform to high quality, color correct, QC, mastering, etc. He wants to edit his own film, and hasn't edited before.

My spidey sense starts to tingle.

I say that while it is possible for him to figure it out, most self-edited films (that come my way) done by first time editors have problems that cause major problems down the line, often requiring recapturing ALL the footage to sort things out. It'd take him a while to get up to speed, things would be slow and frustrating at first, etc.

I said my biggest concern would be what I've seen happen too many times - that the process would seem daunting and complex and wearying, and if the generic self-editor did learn "the right way" to do it, they'd find it complicated and time consuming, and "Why can't I just do it THIS way, is SO much easier?" Let me make a point about "this" way - while "this" may vary from case to case, it can all too often be similar to the beginning auto mechanic who finds putting all those teeny bolts & screws back in exactly the right place just so much tedious work. You can step back and it will hold together, it might start, but sooner or later, stuff's going to start falling off or the engine's gonna blow, or the pieces are laid out to do quiet, deadly damage that won't be discovered until Too Late. While creativity should be a significant part of the indie filmmakers process, and new tools and techniques are coming out all the time, and I encourage folks to stray from SOME "tried and true" old school methods of post workflows (usually to get better quality at lower cost), straying from the path of Good Workflow Process is a potentially dangerous, dangerous game. Here there be lions, and tigers, & bears...oh my.

I encouraged him to do lots of research, buy books, hit the usual forums up for free (sometimes questionable) advice, or feel free to call me back and I could walk him through the steps on the clock if that were within his budget.

So while it is technically possible to learn the stuff and do it yourself, I really, strongly do not recommend it for most commercial endeavors...is that really where you want your finite, limited mental time and energy going? Or into the creative end of the film? If at all possible, get an experienced editor on the project. Not just the technical skills, but the storytelling ability, and the objective, disinterested viewpoint are actually bigger assets in trying to get a good project made. That said, get your project done any way you can. If ya gotta edit it yourself, and that's the only way it'll happen, more power to you.

But he was doing the smart thing by doing research well before the production started. In my opinion, that's the only way you're going to have any chance at a smooth and hopefully successful project. If you want to focus on the creative side, then surround yourself with the smartest, most informed, most flexible people you can, however you can.

So that's the Before on an indie DIY effort, starting to do the right thing by researching in advance. Here's another route and way it can turn out, call it the After...

Filmmaker Two: After the Edit, Before the Apocalypse

So later that night, after the Tim League outdoor inflatable screen coolness, I got an email from someone I'd never spoken too saying call them, its urgent. So I call (its after midnight), and I get the guy on the phone. Turns out he's basically the above guy, just (metaphorically) some months later. They'd shot their footage on HVX. He'd edited it himself, in Sony's Vegas ("...it seemed the Universe wanted me to use Vegas for this"), using a third party codec/solution to get DVCPRO HD MXF files into Vegas. Now Vegas is a fine little editor, especially with its codec agnostic approach and EXCELLENT audio manipulation capabilities, but not something I'd recommend for feature work usually. Viable for a low cost solution to do audio heavy work for short form - think music videos. His Vegas didn't support MXF ingest, so he bought a third party tool to get his footage in..and the tool wasn't exactly designed for what he was trying to do - a bit of a workaround/hack to use it in this particular way from what I could tell. Now he needed to screen it in high def, in a theater, this weekend, and was trying to figure out how to get the files from Vegas to some playable form to show. He's short on time, tools, and budget.

He said something to the effect of "I'm not a very technical guy, I didn't want to get dragged into all the technical arcana...I just want to make my movie, ya know?" I totally get it and don't blame him - he wants to focus on the creative, fair enough, and somebody's got to keep the eye on the far horizon - the end goal. However, think of it a bit like going to the moon, or at least taking a road trip through the hinterlands of the desert...it'd be a really, really good idea to have somebody technical along for the ride to make sure you get where you wanted to go, and that if something does come up (or break) along the way, it can be dealt with without unreasonable delays or expense, and hopefully without chaos, blood, or tears.

One of the first things he expressed concern about was that he was seeing what he thought was judder. When I asked him to explain exactly what he meant, he started talking about how the motion looked funny in some scenes, how confusing all this tech was, that his 1920x1080 HD shows up as 1280x1080, that the 24p shows up as 29.97 even though the project settings are for 23.976 and he didn't quite get what that was all about...

Bag the spidey sense, alarm klaxons are going off in my head - it sounded like he broke Rule 4 - he said he saw this ghostly fringe behind the actors when they moved - was this interlace lines scaled down on his screen and blended together? Sounds like he shot at least some of it 24p with 3:2 pulldown perhaps? He also mentioned odd motion - perhaps at least some of it was shot 24pA? Either way, their intended footage was ingested at 30fps not 24fps and had either 24pA cadence or 24p's 3:2 pulldown pattern added. He'd not used the "Remove 3:2 Pulldown" option that he'd seen, or if the software/codec import stuff was clever enough to have a 24pA import mode, he didn't use it. And if it is just getting dropped on the 24p timeline...I could see how that would create all kinds of stuttery motion. Perhaps he should just kick it out at 60i? At this point...PUNT. It would take FAR too long to re-import and correct this issue - gotta go with what he's got. If he had an extra week, a different story. But for now, if he gets a workable playback copy secured, I've got another pass we can take to try to minimize the artifacting caused by this. But this is a classic case of a mistake made early on that messes with you later - like forgetting to put the radiator cap back on securely...

When he called me, he was halfway done exporting massive files via a dozens-of-hours process in a format that was...probably not going to work. He'd previously talked to some folks that gave him a path to work with:

Choice 1: make a Blu-ray disc was recommended that he kick out a high def MPEG-2, buy a Blu-ray player, upgrade the firmware, use software so-and-so that could read that file and burn to a Blu-ray disc with a brand new burner that would play back on the set-top box once the firmware was updated. This may work just fine. But for me, it sounded like a bad, Bad BAD idea for a number of reasons:
-the client didn't have a lot of technology experience and more importantly, troubleshooting resources on hand
-there's lots of "ifs" and "maybes" and "it should work"'s implied in the workflow he was describing
-minimal time to test and troubleshoot any problems
-a 90 minute feature to compress - so would take quite a while to convert
-Would the MPEG-2 be in the right format & settings? Would the software work to make a self playing disc? Would the firmware update let it work right? Would it be easy to get the firmware updated? Would the new Blu-ray burner work right? Far too many variables for me to safely recommend, mostly boiling down to - Neither I nor anyone I knew/trusted had gone through this exact process successfully before. And with the limited time and troubleshooting resources available, that sounded all too fraught with peril. I wanted something that I KNEW could work, in the limited time available, that he could safely do himself. Therefore I recommended:

Choice 2: Macbook Pro playback He has a new Macbook Pro, and the projector he's using has a DVI input, and he can do a dry run on this thing the day before the actual screening. So the plan was to have him play a QuickTime movie from the laptop directly. I chose this route because with time this short and resources this slim for him, I wanted something that I KNEW, 100%, would work.

I was going to have him export to a codec that I knew would cook out pretty quickly from Vegas on his PC but also play back on his Mac, look good, be low enough bandwidth to play back from a FireWire drive, and be low enough CPU load that his laptop could play it back without the CPU choking.

Turns out he couldn't change ANY QuickTime settings - perhaps due to the third party codec he'd used to get MXF in, or perhaps due to something else entirely, if he clicked Custom under QuickTime settings, his machine would crash. UGH. This isn't Vegas' fault as far as I can tell, normally this works fine. So we had to go with the default export, which was the None codec. The good news was that it is a lossless codec, the bad news is that it makes HUUUUUUUUUGE files - his 90ish minute piece was going to be over a terabyte big.

Fortunately, he has a new 1.25TB LaCie drive. The catch - if he wants to use that drive cross platform, he will either run into a maximum file size problem if the drive is formatted so Mac/PC can both read it, or he needs a piece of third party software to mount his Mac formatted volume on the PC so that he can write out a 1TB+ file (we touched on kicking it out in smaller pieces, but the technical challenge of putting the pieces back together for him led me to the One Big File approach).

THAT hurdle cleared, he'd already kicked out some short (5 second) test clips, so I quickly built him three customized Compressor setttings (he fortunately was on latest version on his Macbook Pro, FCP 5.1.4 same as me), emailed them to him (they are tiny), told him where to drop them, and he cooked out his test file. Codec 1 had a gamma shift and looked washed out - scratch that. Codec 2 at quality settings medium and high both looked fine. Higher quality (higher datarate) played back fine full screen in loop mode - so let's try that.

Before we hung up, I gave him a roadmap to try:
1.) Cook out a one minute test sequence from PC
2.) Bring to Mac, via either Mac formatted LaCie Drive using 3rd party tool, or just write across the network to the LaCie.
3.) Test codec presets again, running full screen (he had a DVI to HDMI adaptor running to his HDTV as a practice setup for the DVI connection to projector this weekend)
4.) Pick the one that looks best but still plays smoothly
5.) Then convert your whole movie to that.

At dry run, make sure all is going smoothly, hopefully will have finished file by then. If all goes smoothly, bank that one, and try to address the 24p/30p motion issues with a post filter. If there's a problem, he'll still have 24 hours to try to fix it, and the codec I'm recommending will let him make multiple attempts in that timeframe.

In the end, he'll have something that he can show. I haven't seen a frame of the film and know nothing of its content, but I'm confident he'll be able to show SOMETHING on the big screen at full res. It may have some motion artifacts, but his story will be told (OK shown). I have no idea what kind of color correction or anything else has been done with the project, we just focused on these issues in the wee hours of the night.

But if it were my film, I'd want that 24p to all be done right.

Point of all this being....do your homework, or get someone else to do it for you to draw you a detailed map. Get the help you need to navigate the treacherous waters of all the possible choices in this new world of post. It used to be pretty easy - didja shoot DV or Digibeta? Didja shoot drop frame or non-drop frame? You could get fancy and maybe shoot PAL instead of NTSC. Go back far enough, ya cut on Avid, because That Was It for NLEs. Nowadays, there are two sizes of HD to contend with, half a dozen possible frame rates that might be used all with their own twists for ingest depending on format, many different HD acquisition formats, tapes vs. solid state vs. optical discs, lots of different NLEs with different versions & feature sets & support for the different formats that varies yes/no even depending on the frame rate...it is complicated. WAY complicated. Even though there are lots of low cost tools out there that CAN be used to make good to great looking results at low cost with the right post workflow and folks driving the process, it is also ENTIRELY possible to go with inexpensive tools and bury yourself in time and costs later by making the wrong decisions at various points along the way. I keep encountering folks coming to me AFTER mistakes have been made, and they inevitably spend more of their own time fixing it, and spend more of their budget talking to me, than if they'd come to me (or somebody else like me) and gotten a good roadmap before driving off the cliff (or at least into the ditch and needing a tow, causing expense & delay...and maybe scratching up their Pretty Thing in the process).

No names have been used, and certain details fuzzed over to protect the privacy of the individuals & some of the companies involved.

I'm sure there are DIY efforts out there that go flawlessly, and the Gods of Post smile benificiently down upon them, and all goes well.

I rarely get urgent emails from those folks after midnight.

-mike

PS - if you haven't read my 10 things NOT to do list, and you're planning on DIY, perhaps you should.

EDIT - other little story - got on the phone with a client recently and talked about their potential project, they had a particular tool they wanted to use, I didn't think that was a wise choice given their intended deliverables and creative goals...but that is what the client wanted to use. They had a very decent sized budget, but were reticent to spend $10K+ on a workstation and software setup that would comfortably do what they needed it to. Just because advice is given, doesn't mean that it will be taken. It's hard to hear someone say "I'm buying steel wool underwear" and you say "I really don't think that's a good idea." and they smile and nod and still pick it up off the shelf - what do you do then? How hard do you press the point?

Talking to my editor friend Rita today another analogy came up talking about tools and the above situation - "Just because I like my little Honda doesn't mean I should enter it in the Baja 1000." Just because a tool is similar to that which is used for more demanding tasks, and you are familiar and used to using it for those lesser tasks, doesn't make it the best or even a good or even valid choice for that task.

-m

Labels: original, techie, tutorial, workflow

AppleInsider | Apple courts indies with DRM break: "The iTunes Store is lending an ear to smaller labels, hoping to muster support for its anti-DRM movement by cutting indies treatment similar to that given to EMI."

Schweet.

Progress.

Now, if indies can just get content onto the video side of the store...

-mike

Labels: DRM, iTunes, online content service, online distribution

Over the last few days, I've spent some time writing some stuff that I'm awaiting clearance to release - some of it is case studies on client stuff that I feel is of benefit to the community, and some of it is NAB coverage I want to be sure I'm not mixing my on and off the record recollections/notes of NAB stuff to be fair and respectful to the vendors and folks who were kind enough to take the time to talk to me, plus some other commentary that I only have in rough draft form.

I'm most looking forward to releasing info on the case study stuff - it seems particularly relevant for DIY indies and the mistakes they make that can be avoided. No names will be used, some details fuzzed in the story to protect identities and companies, etc.

I also did a video podcast interview this morning for about 40 minutes, I'll post a link when that's up probably next week sometime.

In the meantime, between client work and the unpublished stuff, working on NAB coverage/analysis...

-mike

Coupla thing have happened last coupla days worth mentioning. Except for the Tim League stuff (2nd story), none of this is filmmaking related whatsoever, so skip it if not into it.

ITEM 1 - an idea so bad, it's good...or is it?

So...last night I'd signed up weeks before to go to an event - the Town Lake Trail Foundation was sponsoring a Cruise 'N Schmooze around Town Lake. Town Lake is actually a dammed river that runs through the heart of Austin, and the Trail runs around it, and I run around the Trail - I jog (used to RUN, sniff, sob, 10 pounds ago, old f*rt that I'm becoming) on it several times a week, lately just the 4 mile loop. Gubmint being gubmint, they don't take very good care of this civic treasure to there's a private entity that helps to maintain it. My Mom was on the committee that set the thing up decades ago, and she's still on the Advisory Committee for it now (she's great that way). So I chipped in for a membership and signed up for and paid for this fundraising shindig. On the Day Of (last night), I decided to walk down to the boat dock as I hadn't run that day - get a little exercise in. I was hungry and in a hurry, and decided to pop into Home Slice to grab a quick slice on the way. No slices at that hour, but ordered a Calzone instead. So much for my low cholesterol food plan. Might as well have a Peroni beer with it. Saw the manager, whose name I can never recall (the most strikingly attractive woman I see about town on a semi-regular basis , brief sigh), said howdy, and was on my way.

Got down the to the docks scant moments too late - I could see the paddlewheeler, lit nicely under the night sky and by the lights under the bridge...already backed out, turned, and heading downriver. Drat.

Well, I'd been debating how good of an idea this might be - 2 hours on a boat with a bunch of earnest, well intentioned....who? If it were all my parents generation, the Greatest Generation...I'd have to dive overboard and swim for shore before too long. They're great and all, but the moment they find out you might know how to fix their email...I'm sure you know how that goes. What if they (organizers) were going to lecture AT us about trail preservation? Or pitch us to help them do stuff? Probably not, but the mere thought gave me the shivers.

So there I am, standing on shore 1 beer later and 2 minutes too late...drat it. Kinda. I felt a little relieved about not being trapped on a boat if it wasn't going to be fun. It was an entirely pleasant night, that perfect Austin spring weather with cool evenings, not too humid, and the mosquitoes aren't out in Diving Squadron of Death mode yet (maybe they are all still in flight school training....{R. Lee Ermey]:"Listen up you maggots!" [Cracking puberty laden voice]:"Uh, sir, we're larvae..." [R. Lee again]: "SHUT UP or I'll smack you so hard you'll never fly..." ....but I digress).

Anyway, cut to perfect evening, I'm suddenly rudderless, so to speak. And boatless, and planless.

So I start walking home, thinking about what to do with myself for the evening. I'd had a very productive day and had given myself permission to doof off for the evening, and now my plans were blown. Walking back out from under the 1st street bridge, past RunTex (THE running shoe store in Austin), I see an alternative....and I literally bust out laughing just thinking about it.

So instead of cruising around the quiet night on a paddleboat on beautiful Town Lake at night with a bunch of fellow earnest liberal runner types and/or classic Austin hippies (I feel entitled to say that as I had a ponytail for 15 years, see here), I pondered something else, something entirely different:

I wonder what it would be like to walk in to that Hooters across the street and order beer and Fried Things and just be a total Dood (Dewd? Dayyuuud?) for an hour or two?

The perverse joy of this thought made me literally laugh out loud. Could I do that? Could I pull a sociological 180, bailing on the Nice Folks and walking into the Pit of Despair, aka Hooters? Could I pull that off and not be entirely self concious? Hooters is SO not my scene, is antithetical to All I Stand For, and yet....the wretchedness of the idea, the complete ideological flip flop just struck me as the right kind of horridly bad but incredibly funny idea that Just....Might....Work.

So what did I do? I called Melissa (girlfriend from a year+ ago) and told her my idea, because I knew she'd get why it was so funny, and she burst out laughing too at the thought - so I knew I was on the right track. We talked on the phone as I walked home, me giving her an audio tour of all the new things on trendy/spendy South Congress since last she'd spent much time down there.

Thus I was saved from Hooters by an ex girlfriend.

ITEM 2 - Why Austin rocks, Reason 1138:

So I got back from a long meeting today, and had an email from Lyrae - I typically don't see Lyrae for big chunks of time and then see her and her beau Neil tons for brief periods of time at the Austin film festivals - SXSW, Austin Film Festival, and now Fantastic Fest. Anyway, Lyrae forwarded me an email from Tim League, who started and runs the Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Austin - the by-god-damn-coolest movie watching experience I know of (read up on it, Google, etc. - got picked as one of the best moviegoing experiences in America, and deservedly so). Tim had just received a new 17 foot inflatable screen, and was going to test it - in a backyard. So after a run around Town Lake (see? I try to be healthy...), I headed over there after dark..and wow, what a perfect deal:
-big house with big back yard
-huge, overarching live oaks creating a canopy overhead
-perfect, bug free weather
-pleasant, cool evening
-and oh yeah - A SEVENTEEN FOOT MOVIE SCREEN MOUNTED ABOUT 7 FEET HIGH!
-and big speakers too

This reminded me of what my friends BJ & Carrie did in San Francisco when they lived there - they lived up on Potrero Hill and lived next to a rarity - the lot uphill from them (the corner lot) was empty - no building at all. So he bought a business prentation projector for cheap from some failed dotcom (as you do), got an amp and a single speaker, set up on the sloped hill by his house, and projected movies onto the side of his house at night when the mood struck him. Neighbors would walk up and were welcome to sit down and join them, and in time they got a schedule going with themes and everything. Even a popcorn maker. A perfect neighborhood activity.

They eventually dubbed this Walk In Movies, and did it for 5 or 6 years, then turned it over to friends when they moved back to Austin. If you live in the area, check it out.

Anyway, back to Tim in Austin - he was doing this really as just a test to see how his new toy worked (they have Rolling Roadshows, Google that + Alamo Drafthouse), and were looking at screener DVDs for this fall's Fantastic Fest (I [heart] Stabby). We'd watch a movie for a while, then Tim would stop it and poll the audience whether to finish it or move on to another. I watched most of a pretty cool flying Ninjas movie, but then that got shelved to move on - next up was a hilariously just-good-enough-to-be-good-bad short set in the world of...G.I. Joe. With live actors. Howlingly funny, as they took themselves pretty seriously doing it. After that, an oddball German (Russian?) movie about a couple about to get into trouble, but I had to jet, I was starving. After a beer and some Cheetos there (oops again on the health factor), I couldn't resist the magnetic draw of Dirty's for a bacon cheeseburger and shake (feh - bag the diet - this stuff tastes guuuuuuuuud). You just KNOW you're getting all your sinful goodness in it when they hand over the paper bag and the grease is ALREADY soaking through the wax paper and darkening the brown paper bag.

Aww, Yeeeeeah.

Sometimes, it is just REALLY nice to live in Austin and know some cool folks (or folks who know cool folks).

Hallelujah.

-mike

And yes, Comments are disabled for a reason. :D

UPDATE - this morning Tim sent me this pic he took last night. Click for larger view.


You can rent that sucker (why it was bought) - see details here:

Alamo Drafthouse Austin Venue Rental - Backyard Parties

I'm thinkin' Almost Forty birthday party Movie Madness.

Lyrae then emailed after reading the post to say:

Mike-

Nice blog today.

It was cool that you showed up last night. There was something that you missed at the beginning that was the best show of the night, but it is already booked for the festival so you can see it there. It was a Korean (maybe Japanese) anime piece about a future society that has overpopulated and basically got buried in its own excrement. However, scientists find a way to turn the poop into fuel and now the most valued citizens in the society are the once that produce the most shit. Very satirical, creative and the action scene animation is kick ass!

Don't feel bad that you didn't stay for the last film though. Bad. Way too over the top just for the sake of being over the top. Also, did not care about the boyfriend as he just turns into more and more of an ass as things go on. And they should have edited. Went on WAY to long.

Kind of missed the best part at the end of the night (about 11:20) when we all stood around talking about what we had seen. That is always one of my favorite parts with that group.

-Lyrae

Labels: OT

Indie Films Going Online

About online distro of indie movies. Points out that low budget can suck - big surprise. Points out not a lot of money in it so far - big surprise.

But interesting to see what folks are trying and how well it is or isn't working.

And since I've completely fallen behind on keeping up, go read CinemaTech to catch up on the last couple of weeks of what he's been up to.

-mike

UPDATE:

Commenter Bill Cunningham made such good points I want to put'em up here in the article where you can see'em:

I read this article and posted about it on my blog, but I wanted to let you know this husband and wife team have done everything wrong here. No wonder they feel like they have to "punt" through downloading in order to get their film some attention.

- They didn't do any research on how licensing to international territories usually works.

- They degraded the quality of their film in the press.

- They signed a SAG agreement when they could have acquired bigger names that are SAG core (or at least more marketable names).

- They didn't try to tie in the fact they had a "name" from the BLADE TV series in their film.

- And yes, if you look at the opening credits on Amazon, they made a lousy film (or at least a terrible opening credit sequence).

The fact is that no one guarantees you that your film will get distribution when it is produced. It's up to you to make a marketable product to sell.

In other words - No one is going to buy a Yugo when there are so many BMWs out there avaialable for a Yugo price.


I never read the full article, just skimmed, posted, and moved on, but Bill seems to nail it pretty well there. And I agree - a title sequence makes for a crappy trailer. That's just LAZY filmmaking. The job isn't done when the film is mastered out - the job is done when the theatrical run is over, ALL the rights have been sold, carefully, maximizing return, then the sequel pre-sold and funded, the DVD income tallied, etc.

Put it in terms of any other product out there - shipping product is just the first step...then you gotta sell it and support it to actually make the money.

See his article here:

DISContent: Indie Doesn't Have to Mean Stupid! (and he self promotes at the end of it...like a good filmmaker should!)

Labels: distribution, online distribution

DV - Reviews - DeckLink HD Studio

Hey all - my second article for DV Magazine is online, checking out the DeckLink HD Studio. Nice little card, but much of what you'd want to use it for has been obviated by the announcement of the upcoming (NOT shipping yet) Intensity Pro card from BMD. But need something before July? Read this review, it is a good fit for non HD-SDI based HD work. This card has HDMI in/out at 10 bits/channel, and analog in/out, and...read the article for the rest of the details.

-mike

Labels: hardware, post equipment, review

Native Final Cut Pro support of 4K Redcode RAW

Yep, as I originally reported here, here, and here Final Cut Pro WILL natively support 4K Redcode RAW footage, on the timeline, with full support (RT engine for realtime effects, etc.). That's the good news. The bad news - it'll support it....at some point in the future. While Peter Jackson's short was cut with a pre-release version of FCP, hinting that it must be pretty far along, it ain't done cookin' yet. Consider it akin to what we saw last year at NAB - 24p HDV was shown in the booth, but didn't ship until later in the year. So it'll happen, but not quite yet, and I've no idea what the timeline might be.

The good news is that it'll be fully supported on the timeline - it CAN be as simple as shoot some footage onto your Red Drive (or Red Flash or Red RAM), disconnect from Red One, sit down in the field with your MacBook Pro or back at studio on any Intel Mac, plug in via FireWire, and the drive will mount. Drag files over to FCP and drop'em on a timeline and away you go - you're editing 4K.

Huh/how/whaaaaaaaa?

Here's the deal - Red has built a QuickTime codec that understands Redcode RAW (or perhaps calling it a wrapper might be more technically accurate). If you're on an Intel Mac, a FUTURE version of Final Cut Pro, presumably 6.x, will natively read the Redcode RAW files from a Red Drive or any other media/drive fast enough for realtime performance (count on needing circa 30 MB/sec to leave headroom/safety margin - so FW400 JUST fast enough for single stream 4K@24p).

You just drop it on the timeline and go, don't think about it.

If you DO want to think about it, here's what's happening - Redcode RAW uses wavelet based compression. With wavelets, it is easy to extract fractional resolution versions of the whole frame quickly - so extracting a 1/2 or 1/4 res version is (relatively) cake to do. If you're on a MacBook Pro, you get a 1K version. If you're on a sufficiently pimped Mac Pro, you get up to a 2K version of the 4K source. (Final Cut is limited to 2K max res, can't handle 4K. Don't sweat it - only time you ever need 4K is for theatrical distribution). You'll be able to, with that future FCP version, cut, edit, cross dissolve, add effects, titles, color correct, whatever - just like any other codec. What is happening behind the scenes - the RAW Bayer pattern is being demosaiced - converted from a checkerboard of individual R/G/B pixels into a "normal" RGB image, at the fractional resolution desired. Any nondestructive look metadata that was assigned while shooting with the camera is applied - so any while balance, curves, tint, etc. as set on camera are applied to that footage as a default look. From there it is delivered to timeline and away you go.

"What if I want to have all that coolio color control that I had in Redcine in Final Cut Pro?" - no problem, they are making a special Red FX plug that will allow you to adjust exactly the same color paramters (not scale/repo though) in FCP that you could in Redcine. Only difference is that those controls are presented as the FX plugin architecture allows. Same controls, different looking UI. So that would still access the 12 bit RAW data, manipulate it in a 32 bit floating point color space, and then deliver it back to the timeline in whatever the timeline settings were.

One thing that is a little fuzzy is what happens when you need to bring in other files, or render a cross dissolve, etc. - what should new material be brought in as? What format are renders being done to? As for the first question the new Open Format Timeline feature makes that easy, since you can mix frame sizes, frame rates, and codecs on the same timeline (finally!). The answer for what does stuff get rendered to is a fuzzier - I'm guessing Redcode RGB? But I don't know. That may make sense, but I don't have a definitive answer for that yet. Perhaps it would depend on the timeline settings? Not entirely clear how that'll work in FCP 6.

You can still use FCP's 3 way color corrector and other coloring tools in FCP if you want to, even in conjunction with Red's FX plugin for coloring (note I'm not saying Red FX plug for Color, the new standalone app - more on that later). There's always nine ways to skin any cat - if you have questions on best workflow, I'm available for consulting on that (use link top of page).

If that doesn't sit well with you, or a 10 bit 4:2:2 deliverable is as good as you need, there's another option:

Transcoding Redcode RAW to ProRes with a Red Import Module

For those who want something even more straightforward, or want a little more rendering horsepower available (not being taken up by the de-Bayering etc. of processing 4K Redcode RAW), there will be a Red Import Module. Apple was demonstrating taking 4K Redcode RAW and transcoding on import to their new ProRes422 codec. Redcode RAW gets read into FCP, but what gets written to scratch disks is ProRes422. (Kinda like the HDV==>AIC transcode on capture option if you've ever used that). ProRes422 looks pretty damn good, I'll have more to say on it after I can research it some more, but if all you want is a 10 bit, 4:2:2 or lesser deliverable, ProRes looks like a really good choice - transcode to that and just edit that for your offline and your online if you have the space. With 750 GB drives around $400 online, and 1TB drive hitting the market, 1080p24 ProRes422 (which is full raster, FYI - 1920x1080 is actually that size, not 1440x1080 or 1280x1080 like some OTHER codecs) is about 22 MB/sec. That's a 10 bit, full raster, 4:2:2 codec. That adds up to about 80 GB/hr. So that 750GB drive for $400 would hold over 8 1/2 hours of footage - about $45/hr for storage. For shorter form or tight shooting ratios, offline/online with one codec starts getting viable. You may say "Well, I only have 500GB of storage on my current machine." but start looking around at what it really costs to triple or quadruple that...and what it'll cost in 6 months from now.

When importing, you can also pick what size you want - 2K, 1080p, 720p, 576p, 480p, etc.

It may also be possible to transcode to other codecs, don't know at this time. It may not be possible to transcode to another codec for online later, so check workflows carefully - I'm looking into all of this myself still.

So that gives you three ways to get footage into FCP, depending on release schedules:

1.) The first option to be available will likely be just using Redcine to convert to whatever codec you need for offline or online work as laid out above. For this example, let's say ProRes422.

2.) Next likely option will be to use the Red Import Module to transcode to ProRes422 (or possibly other codecs) at the size you need right into Final Cut Pro (future version), no other apps required - if you don't need 2K/4K, why deal with the overhead? Convert to something high quality that lets you work fast - and ProRes422 will do that.

3.) Or, for big work, just cut 4K Redcode RAW natively in a future FCP 6.x on an Intel Mac.

Note ALL of the above choices require an Intel Mac, and choice one you can use any Windows box (but may not be able to render to ProRes on Windows, dunno yet)

If you don't have an Intel Mac for your FCP work, isn't the end of the world, there are workarounds (I'm in that boat - three G5s in this room where I'm typing)

So you can edit 4K natively.

You can transcode 4K to 2K/1080/720/576/480 res as needed to edit.

You can transcode, via Redcine, to any codec, for any Mac/Windows NLE that has a "normal" codec (see previously posted Redcine article for more on that).

A few downer tech notes:

-From what I've been told and understand, FCP STILL does not properly manipulate RGB on the timeline at better than 8 bits RGB. That means for RGB content, cross dissolves, text overlays, etc. are still delivered to timeline as 8 bit RGB at best. You can do 10 bits/channel, but only with 4:2:2 content. While internally 32 bit float is used for the FX plug architecture, there is still a bottleneck for what gets delivered to the timeline. There may be workarounds, I'm researching them (in my copious spare time...yeah right - but if anybody wants to hire me to figure it out...).

-Apple's New Color Application- as cool as it is, as powerful as it is...it doesn't support Redcode RAW yet. It also is limited to 2K at this point in time. Talked to some Apple folks for whom the Redcode RAW support announcement was new to them just the other week too. Apple compartmentalizes very effectively for security, but that does introduce some bottlenecks when folks don't know what's happening down the hall and aren't able to support new features/formats right off the bat. In any case, Color CAN do RGB. Color CAN do 10 bit log...but only from DPX files (there's ways to there, I can help). Color can't, at this time, nor with the first shipping version of Final Cut Studio 2, read Redcode RAW in natively. After having rendered 10 bit RGB files (using AJA or BMD codecs) out of Color...FCP still can't render a proper 10 bit RGB cross dissolve. So there are issues. But what CAN be done is to work with Uncompressed or ProRes422 10 bit 4:2:2 codecs, and THAT will work properly. I'm mentally already designing workflows to start with 4K and switch over at the proper stage in the workflow...mental gears churning...

What about high end post work? There's been another announcement of note:

Assimilate's Scratch can read in Redcode RAW files and grade them natively, and even access the nondestructive look metadata from camera.

This gives maximum control with the absolute minimum of bandwidth required to read in and play back the Redcode RAW files. This is a biggie - If you wanted to make a 4K feature, shoot 4K Redcode RAW, edit, then take EDL, Redcode RAW clips, and metadata to a Scratch facility - they can conform and color from that. There are other ways to go about this, too, but that's a damn handy option to have!

Of course, if you want to work with any other traditional DI tool, you can work with DPX files, and there's ways to get you get there.

As always, if you have any questions on Red workflow, be it Red gear, editing/VFX hardware or software, codecs, storage, archival, etc., I'm doing my best to the the Go To Guy on all these matters. Buying a Red? Thinking about it? Trying to figure out how it will or might fit into your facility, studio, or workflows? Contact me at the email address at the top of the page (in the header), and I'll get you sorted out, be you a starving indie barely able to afford a Red with still lenses, or a high end shop wondering how to integrate this into your heavy iron and/or realtime-centric facility workflows. I gotcha covered. I charge by the hour, my rates are indie viable/affordable. My overarching theme is to be flexible and accomodating to the budgets, time sensitivity, equipment available, level of technical sophistication/comfort, etc. and find the best match for each individual circumstance.

-mike

PS - I've had a couple of folks voice concern that this is turning into the All Red, All The Time site - hang on, hang on, I'm just going one at a time by vendor through all my copious notes here. I want to get the biggest one that most folks were most interested in done FIRST, and then move on from there. Apple, Dalsa, Sony, Abel Cine, JVC, Panasonic, Canon, Band Pro, Arri, storage, etc. are alllllll coming...I can only type just so fast...

Labels: Red, Redcine, software, workflow

OK, let's talk workflow with Redcode RAW and Redcine.

Some background for those not up to speed:

Redcode RAW is the native compressed recording file format of Red, recorded as data to files in a folder structure on a Red Drive, Red Flash, or Red RAM. Redcode RAW is a 12 bit linear RAW (Bayer pattern, color filter array) wavelet based compression scheme.

All above recording media have about the same performance envelope - based on public statements, all can record the same frame sizes/rates as all the others - so long as you have a properly spec'd CF card, for instance, the only limit as compared to Red Drive is the recording capacity. Recording quality, frame rate/size, etc. all the same. Red gives you LOTS of recording options - single/dual link HD-SDI to deck or DDR/DFR, uncompressed 4.5K out the high speed link, or the more likely/useful Redcode RAW to one of two external recording modules (320GB, $900 Red Drive or 64GB, $4500 Red RAM), or to one of three $500 internal Flash RAM based adaptor modules that fit on side of camera body (CF, ExpressCard 34, or eSATA).

Anyway...after you record all this stuff, how do you use it? Redcode RAW is the native format, but it is also proprietary - nobody else's camera generates it, it is specific to the Red One at this time. How to edit it, do VFX work with it, etc.?

Redcine

If you hadn't heard, Redcine is the tool to convert Redcode RAW to...whatever you want (I'll skim over the basics previously covered and get to the juicy stuff here shortly). Standard image file format sequences or any "normal" codec you have installed on your Intel Mac (no PPC Mac support, drat) or Windows based system.

Click the pic above for a larger view of what Redcine looks like.

As you can see, there are four tabs, and I'l zing through what they are for:

Project

In the project tab, you set up your, well, project. What is a project in Redcine? If you're used to working with film and the telecine process, think of this as your telecine session, saveable to disk, same as you'd save your color grades for a given tape on your daVinci setup. If you're a software jockey, you can think of a project as being akin to an FCP timeline settings or an After Effects composition settings (not exactly for either of those, but that's the general idea).

From here you can load a shot or a full mag - one of the nice features of Red One is that on camera, during the shoot, you can do some digital slating - specifying shots, takes, etc. The files are filed in folders that fall to that order - takes inside shots inside scene folders, etc. Redcine understands this struture, so when you import, shots are stretched out horizontally, and multipe takes are stacked vertically - just like Scratch, which this owes a very obvious debt to. So much so that the UI (user interface) pretty much IS a very cut down version of Scratch's toolset with some modifications.

One of the coolest features of Redcode, which makes it more like anybody else's v3.0 software than a beta release, is the use of gestural controls - if you flick the mouse pointer (no clicking involved) towards a screen edge, controls and UI elements will appear or dissapear (or even build/reduce in terms of how many/how simple things are shown). Sounds a little complicated/scary at first, but once you start using it, is super fast and easy. It's the little touches - things like you can click and drag horizontally to control some things where they make sense, but in other areas you click-hold and twirl mouse clockwise or counter-clockwise to increase/decrease values...just like a knob or wheel. Very clever.

Anyway, in the project, you can set things like your format, your aspect ratio, your frame rate, etc. You can also control display reticles and masking areas (opaque or transparent, your color of choice), show timecode, all kinds of useful stuff and powerful stuff.

It is important to remember that Redcine is a prep/conversion tool, not intended to be an editor or full coloring tool. It is a pre-grading tool for one light type color corrections, and a prep tool to deliver assets in format of choice.

You can flip between Library View which shows all your shots (horizontally) and takes (stacked vertically atop each other) - is a pre-editorial organizer so you can get a sense of your shot coverage - instead of a long vertical text list for your to organize, is thumbnails in a timeline like interface. Fast and efficient.

Next up, you can proceed to the Shot portion of the application. In here you can see and edit the shots metadata, name, position and scale. Want to crop? Want to scootch it around in that cropped area? All doable, and those shot-by-shot decisions get saved in your project for later recall and usage (handy when it comes time to generate your online res copies). You can play back, even on a laptop. That's right - play back 4K footage without pre-rendering - it is extracting a fractional res version on the fly. You have pop-ups for playback quality at full/half/quarter res, in preview through high quality. Higher res, higher quality slower to process. Wanna see realtime playback as you adjust scale or whatever? Quarter res preview is your friend. Wanna zoom in on that blown highlight for subtle tweaks? Crank up the res to see all the detail. The wavelet nature of Redcode makes it cake to extract fractional resolutions on the fly, no problem. So scale and repo as it is playing back - nice! Can't keyframe though - for that kind of subtle work, just take it to Motion, After Effects, or tool of choice at full res and manipulate it there.

In the Color tab, you have control over a bunch of the color attributes of the shot - you've got three point curves (toe/gamma/shoulder), you've got tint, exposure (measured in stops, very nice), white point (measured in Kelvin and properly executed without just chopping channel data), color channels, a special highlight recovery tool that manipulates digital blowout (ever see a magenta highlight in an overexposed area? This tool can fix it!), and several other things I can't recall.

One major feature of this: the color controls on camera, and in Redcine, and in the FCP plug (more on that below), are all the same, on purpose...because you can save in any one of them and move them to the other. It takes a little time for the full meaning of that to soak in, but do so. Hypothetical: imagine shooting a few test frames, throwing on laptop, previewing the shot there. Tweak color until you like it using the convenient mouse/keyboard interface (could do all same stuff on camera UI, just harder, like iPod vs. iTunes playlist organization...in fact VERY much the same metaphor). Save those settings as a file, put on an SD card, and load back into camera. Bang! Your tweaked nondestructive look metadata now rides shotgun with all footage shot with those settings...and gets baked into the HDMI and HD-SDI outputs. Doing a live shoot? Save those settings and put it on all 8 (or however many) cameras used for them to match. Calibration issues in what I just suggested, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, as you tweak the color settings, you're working from the 12 bit RAW source, manipulating in a 32 bit floating point color space - very precise. And of course, GPU accelerated as well. You can adjust colors WHILE the footage is playing back - very handy.

Oh - you can also define the color space you're working in - be it Rec 709 for HD destined work, or Camera RGB for the native color space, Adobe 1998, etc. as desired.

When you're done there, you can go to Output. From the Output settings, you pick what size you want to generate, what file format, what bit depth (auto-governed by what's possible with the format, so you can't try to create something impossible), and what codec. Now, for everyone who's concerned about will their NLE be supported, the answer is pretty much yes. If you can write to the codec you want to edit with on an Intel Mac or a Windows box, you're in luck. If you need a high end image sequence like TIFF, DPX, OpenEXR, JPEG2000, etc., you're also in luck - as all those formats are already working in the build shown at NAB. As for codecs, here's the drill - if you have a codec installed on your box that you could "normally" use, such as with After Effects or similar programs...you can write to it from Redcine. Simple as that. If you're on a Mac running FCP 6, you could convert to the brand new ProRes422 codec. If you're on a Windows box running Avid, you could convert to DNxHD 36 for your offline, and then later DNxHD 220 for your online. Or the same from a Mac with Avid stuff installed. Just bought the Sheer codec from BitJazz.com, or any other third party codec? Install in on your box, and you write to it from Redcine, no new version of Redcine required. It is that simple.

I mentioned offline/online - if you aren't converting to your final format (and if you're doing an indie feature, you probably aren't, or shouldn't), then convert the first time to your offline codec, save your Redcine Project, and Red is working on something they'll call a Red Pull List to help with your conform - you kick an EDL or XML out of your NLE, then bring that back to Redcine which parses it for all the shots and selects you used - those selects can then be processed to your online format of choice (frame size/codec/etc.) Software conform (easy with FCP I know, I'd imagine so with Adobe, dunno enough about Avid to say), and you're in bidness. Redcine and Red Pull List don't DO the conform for you, they just HELP in the conform process.

Or, if that all seems to complicated, there's another option...read next article posted.

If you have workflow questions about how Redcode RAW will fold into your existing pipeline, be it editorial, VFX, offline, online, hardware, software, whatever, I do exactly that kind of consulting for a living - contact me at the email address at the top of this page in the header. I charge by the hour, rates are indie viable/affordable.

-mike

UPDATE - I'll keep adding extra bits of info to this post -

Q: What about subclips?

A: you can "dupe" the shot in Redcine (doesn't replicate any data on disc, just makes another instance of it in the timeline...like making a copy of a clip in your NLE - no new media generated). You can set separate ins and outs for that VERSION of that shot...this is a big deal for doc makers that roll for an hour and want to pre-slice into shots, but not have to process that one hour shot for the online if all they need is 5 second subclip.

Q: What about conversion times in Redcine?

A: They haven't released official stats, because it'll depend on a lot of things - what clock speed your CPU/s, how many cores, what GPU, what bus speed, what read/write storage & speed; then on top of that what size frame are you rendering to, what color/cropping/repo are you doing, what quality and scaling settings are you using....lotsa factors. What they want to avoid is posting a "it took my box x.y secs/frame" on some pimped out 8 core box doing draft quality SD to a RAID, and some Moe Ronn getting upset stating "Hey! It took WAY longer than that for me!" ....on his Core Solo Mini cooking 4K Hi-Q DPX files to a USB 1.0 drive or somesuch. So they need to get organized and test in an appropriate fashion, and then publish the results in a detailed, well documented and qualified fashion.

All that said...if they are managing to play back at 1K on a Macbook Pro and 2K on a Mac Pro in REAL TIME...I'm not too worried about how long conversion is going to take in Redcine. Rob's on the job.

-mike

Labels: Final Cut, post, post equipment, Red, Redcine, software

Jim Jannard made an announcement on the Reduser.net boards today:

The Good News - "a significant upgrade to the RED ONE camera coming in the form of an update to one of the major boards in the camera, effectively further increasing dynamic range and reducing noise in the image."

The down side?

"Our original goal was to complete this upgrade later in the year, but we now plan to implement this improvement prior to shipping any cameras. It will cause a minor delay, but we are absolutely certain that every customer will feel the improvement was worth the wait. It also eliminates a future board change down the road.

We will publish a new shipping schedule that reflects this update in a couple of weeks.

-Jim"

On the plus side - improved dynamic range? Excellent! Who doesn't want that? They'd been planning on doing it as a board update later this year - it is simpler to just fix it up front and then everybody has best possible camera...but also it is causing a delay. The fact that it'll be a couple of weeks before they even get a revised schedule to us is a little scary to me - just how much is it going to delay the camera?

Of course I want the best possible camera I can get, but I also would like to have a camera sooner rather than later....choices choices choices...and the decisions belong to Jim & team, not us.

After just finding out that I should be getting my own camera in August (and I actually guessed that date right with no inside info), it does make me a little itchy to know when I'll actually get it now.

My cynical-o-meter notes that this decision was announced post-NAB...but I also recognize that since Sunday before NAB was first 4K screening of Peter's footage to Red team, it is entirely viable that they are just now making this decision based on reviewing data in hand.

I stop and think about what I know about the people involved...and I can entirely see them simply looking at the results, seeing that they could do better, and wanting to get best possible camera out the door, and making the decision to do that. Their vibe all along as been "We will sell no wine before its time." Today they announced that they realized they could make better wine if they just aged that cask a little more...

The good news is that they are not chopping features to make an arbitrary ship date (and it has happened elsewhere, believe me). Instead, they are doing the opposite - taking longer to work harder to make it better. Their early tagline was "Making obsolesence obsolete" - these kinds of decisions back up their earnestness in striving for that goal. We just have to wait a little bit longer to unwrap our presents.

-mike

(enough tangled metaphors there for ya?)

Labels: Red

Next up - Red accessories. Let's start off with the fun stuff and work our way down: the EVF, the LCD, the Super Grip, the Lens Motor, and other widgets.

I've got some pics of accessories here, open them in another window and refer to as we go. Regrettably, I got no closeups of the EVF, but you can find pics/renders at Red.com. EDIT - a-ha - 3rd from last pic shows it pretty well.

THE EVF

In case you hadn't heard, Red hired the sharp guy behind the AccuScene viewfinder. If you don't know what AccuScene is/was, it was the only 720p res viewfinder on the market, and when introduced, cost about $17,500...sound familiar? In a few years time, get the 4K camera for what the viewfinder used to cost. Amazing.

Anyway, down to the details:

-MUCH smaller than AccuScene, but still surprisingly chunky, but nicely textured grip to turn for focusing it (to focus the EVF, not the main lens)
-size understandable considering what it does - is 1280x720 pixel resolution
-color/black and white switchable, bright and sharp
-$2950 - amazing deal for what it does

The buttons on side of EVF - one knob and three buttons. Knob is for EVF controls (rotate to select, push in to "click" - functions like a clickable scroll wheel on a mouse, except can get to all of the "roundness" of the wheel and you push into the middle not down on the edge to click). The three other buttons are all user assignable, and arranged as a pair together over the single other button. You might choose to assign the pair to audio levels up/down, and the 3rd as a temp switch for focus or exposure assist (in that mode either when clicked or only while held down).

Just to cover it somewhere, on the back of the camera itself, set under the UI screen (which is not a video display) there's a multi-function control - is a joystick, but also a button and a twisty - so you can tilt it for up/down/left/right, as well as twist the stick to scroll through menus, as well as push it in to click - hmm - seems to replicate most of the functionality of an iPod clickwheel - an efficient UI control doable with a thumb and maybe one other finger. Sweet.

The much vaunted exposure control - here's my own notes from talking with David Macintosh, the designer:
exposure control through EVF and (eventually through LCD, not yet) - is like a monochrome image with a false color LUT (LookUp Table) - top 20% runs yellow to orange to red to show "hotter" exposures, yellow is about as hot as you'd like to shoot to have some headroom. At the bottom end, used cool colors, light green to dark blue. * Instead of seeing shades of grey, see shades of color to know how "hot" your exposures are. It also works as a night sight - otherwise tough to see if your exposure is focused or not. Graphical focus assistant not shown yet...durn.


Of course, all the menus show up in the LCD and EVF screens as well. Of course - how ELSE should it work? Nice.

The LCD

Not much new to report - it is 1024x600 (lower res than EVF), it is pretty bright, it has its own power button on top and some menu buttons. While the screen is decent sized, the electronics around it are surprisingly small - see the pics (link top of page). It is VERY flat, esp. compared to other high res LCDs that are little bricks - this thing is elegantly compact, just a slight bulge on the back and a single cable going in for power and video signal. While I originally kvetched about LCD and battery prices, the originals were going to be internal battery and foldout LCD - these are soooooo much better, and cost justify like a mofo, and are dirt cheap compared to the competition. $1700.

Super Grip & Lens Motor

OK, another fun/cool one - who doesn't want to say in their best manly voice "Why yes, of COURSE I have the optional Super Grip on mine. And yes, my name is Steve McQueen." (Maybe Jenn White or Jendra wouldn't, but lots of DPs I know would).

Kidding aside, check out the pics (again, link at top of page). The SuperGrip can be configured in one of two ways, with or without the bolt-on handle. Pictured without the handle here. What the SuperGrip is - a handle with a gob of user assignable buttons - 10 in all. Under the thumb looks like it might be a directional (has a squat rubber boot on it), two bigger ones immediately above/adjacent to that (one red colored in the brochure). Four more on the inner part, and three more at the top. ALL are user assignable. ENG/EFP folks are used to a rocker switch (and who's to say they won't have one of those in time), but Ted said cinema shooters accustommed to a Micro Force controller (sp?) will feel right at home with this controller. You can user assign the buttons to different functions, and from what I've heard about the open architecture of the Red, you should be able to assign all KINDS of goodies to that - more on that in the future. But one of the primary intended goals will be to partner it with a pair of Lens Motors. What's a Lens Motor for? Well...

Red Lens Motor is a motor to be controlled by a Super Grip to control either iris or focus. Ideally, get a SuperGrip and two Lens Motors, one on each side of the lens, one for iris, one for focus. Then you can start/stop, adjust iris, adjust focus, and other controls of the camera, without ever taking your hands off the grips. For non-shooters, think of this as the Xbox controller for your Red One (Hey, it already looks like a big black badass BFG 9000, why not control it like one. Yes, I'm having fun writing this.)

Other Widgets - on the brochure/price list that was handed out (and you can see some of the stuf in the online store at red.com), there's tons of little goodies - plates, handles, shoulder pads, rail mounts, 15mm rod adaptors,more handles, side handles, etc. - there are 39 items listed on the big exploded view diagram of Red One and its accessories, NOT including lenses. I'll leave it up to them to post more pics of it all.

One cool tidbit - the Red Arm ($175, comes with EVF & LCD) that is used to position the LCD and EVF is WAY cool bit o' engineering. If you think of a human arm, this thing has shoulder, upper arm, elbow, lower arm, and a wrist. That could be really complicated to adust, right? Nope, not at all - there's a single twisting lockdown control at the elbow - loosen it and the whole arm gradually goes from rigid to loosey-goosey - get the EVF or LCD where you want it, then tighten it again with a turn and it locks SOLIDLY and rigidly in place. A very nice little bit of engineering they've accomplished there, and a solid bit of kit. Other companies would point proudly to it, here it is just one of the dozens of cool details. Edit - a commenter just pointed out that these are not a Red invention, have been out for a couple of years. My mistake - as a non-shooter, I'd never seen them before. Anyway, it is still cool and still groovy that they are using them.

One Big Thing to get about the Red One - in all aspects - the codecs, the recording methodology, the sensor approach, the accessories, the controls, the readouts/displays, the user interface - much has been approached the way bright fresh tech companies do - discarding the "well that's just the way its been done" even if that goes back to the days when that was the ONLY way it could be done. In SO MANY ways, down to so many of the smallest details, fresh thinking has been applied. Zebra mode is nice, but the false color exposure thing has a forehead smacking "well of COURSE that's a better way!" sensibility to it once you Get It. I have heard of and seen some other unreleased details that are similarly clever. It's like cutting loose an iPod UI designer on some ancient Russian bit 'o gear - of course there are just TONS of ways to make it better than it has been done before. In terms of readouts, and color controls, and Redcine, and a lot of the image control stuff - it is as if they said, in broad strokes "Well, let's do it the way my brain works - like Photoshop does it, rather than in color matrices, which is only how DIT's brains work." So many things that are so non-intuitive to so many people the old way are now immediately obvious, because we've grown up with computers, more specifically often Macs and iPods and Adobe software, and we have expectations about how to control things and interpret understand things. On TOP of the fact that it shoots up to 4.5K, up to 120 fps, for under $20K, etc. etc. etc. Red just roxors, and HARD.

Other stuff from the pics - the battery charger is shown, with and without batteries on it. Nothing else to say about that. One extremely useful shot - has all the outputs LABELLED on the camera. Those far ones you can't make out? "Viewfinder", "Monitor" and "Aux232"

And What's up with the hat?

Quite a ways back, a prominent poster on CML (Cinematographer's Mailing List) said something along the lines of "If they have working cameras at NAB next year, I'll eat my hat." That isn't an exact quote, but that's the gist of it. Much notice was made of this statement. And since Red did indeed have working cameras, he brought a hat to eat...and it was a cake (much tastier than a bowler, almost as good as a Stetson). Kudos to all for having a good sense of humor and being a good sport about the whole thing. We loved it in the booth, but I don't know what happened to it or where it went - perhaps to the CML party where it was eaten and enjoyed (I hope so). If anybody knows what happened to the cake, please post in the comments, it is a fun story.

Slightly extra wide smile factor on that one as I took some substantial heat from CMLers when I was singing Red's praises early on. It's all good now, I had some great friendly, productive discussions with LOTS of them at Red's booth, around the show in other vendors' booths, etc. All cool now, and excellent to put names to faces and make new friends. Some of my most vociferous (but polite and professional) counter-arguers on the boards were a delight to meet and shake hands with and talk shop with - a great experience.

End accessory rant, moving on, workflow stuff next...

UPDATE:

On a related note, Evin Grant started a thread (including pics!) on Steadicam with Red: Flying a Red One... - Reduser.net

I also overheard that Tiffen is going to make some kind of a Red sled for steadicamming.

For those wanting more info, there's a whole thread on the Magic Focus - Reduser.net - it gets interesting starting on page 2...

Other accessory related tidbit questions answered by Stuart English:

Q: B4 adaptor timeline?

A: Immediate

Q: Canon/Nikon lens adaptor timelines?

A: Formal announcement soon

Q: SuperGrip & Motor timelines? Pricing was TBD as I understood it

A: Both pricing and delivery are TBD

Q: I overheard someone asks about the B4 mount, you said: "B4 mount spreads the image to 2K, [omitted] has a B4 to 35 adaptor, but I'm not sure that's going to be a good move" - more on that?

A: Yes. Spreading B4 to 35 mm is probably not a good move from an image quality point of view, especially when you have affordable 35 mm glass.

Mike addenda to that - why shoot 2K through a quality reducing adaptor when you can shoot 4K (or at least start and scale down from 4K) directly instead?

Stuart response: Shoot 2K RAW with B4 - because for applications that need a long zoom ratio, a high end B4 motorized lenses works very well, and some applications - sports, natural history - have taken to those lenses. And if you own that lens, how do you re-use that?

Q: Hey - isn't there supposed to be an SD card slot for moving Redcine etc. data around on camera? Where is it on prototypes?

A: Under the Record button on the left face of the camera body. You can also use USB for that...

Q: Single/dual link HD-SDI functionality still there, right? Possible to do 1080p60 4:2:2? Possible to do 2048x1080 10 bit like the SMPTE spec?

A: Short term implementation is focussed towards supporting dual link 1080p / 24 at RGB 4:4:4. Other formats to be added in due course.

Thanks Stuart! On that last point - sounds like it is possible to do, may just require firmware updates - that is encouraging - he didn't say it wasn't techically possible. Another cool thing about the camera - it was designed to be as upgradeable, including software/firmware upgradeable, as possible. None of this "Well, in 18 months we'll come out with a /A rev, you can buy that camera then to get that feature." - Red strives to be ever adaptable and upgradeable from the camera you've already GOT.

Along those lines, when I spoke with Grant Petty of Blackmagic Designs at NAB, it struck me he had a very similar attitude when it comes to firmware upgrades - if you sell the original hardware, but keep it upgradeable, you get money from those folks to add future features. You add them as you can develop them and just roll them out as firmware upgrades...which in turn encourages new sales based on the new features, as well as benefitting existing hardware owners. If you DIDN'T make your hardware upgradeable, you might not have the capital to develop new features from you early adopters as they may be waiting to buy until those features ship...once implemented, new features would attract the new customers for further sales...so why NOT make your products upgradeable and keep your clients happy and keep sales more consistent?

EDIT - and Apple sees the benefit of this too - AppleInsider | Apple to build new features into iPhone, Apple TV free of charge

I really like that approach. (AJA does it to, and so do a lot of other companies, Grant just framed it well for me last week.)

More stuff, updated 1am Wednesday (wait, must sleep sometime!):

Red Timelapse - Reduser.net - timelapse options in the menu structure already - that hint at all kinds of future coolness - benefit of tapeless workflow, is cake to implement.

Studio Daily's Coverage:

Studio Daily | First Look at RED (video)


Studio Daily | RED at NAB, Part 2


Studio Daily | RED at NAB

And, as always, if you need some help or recommendations on what Red gear or post gear to buy, or how all this stuff will work once you buy it, or how to make it all work together, that is exactly what I do for a living - I'm trying to position myself as the Go-To guy on all things Red related. Contact me at the link at top of page.

-mike

Labels: cameras, Red

Four areas to cover here:

1.) 18-85mm zoom delayed - off the price list at present

2.) New zoom offered - 18-50

3.) PRIMES!

4.) Whattup with Cooke's /i tech?

First off - the 18-85mm f2.8 zoom has been put "on delay" by Red, to the point that it is off the price list and no set date as to when it will be available. They say it is still coming, though, just don't know when.

2.) New zoom offered in its place - 18-50mm, f2.8, close focus (down to 8 inches I think I heard Jarred say). Instead of end of year availability, available summer with camera orders, so pretty much if you're a reservation holder, you can get one. Hooray for that one! 18-85 zoom reservation holders can switch over, no problem (I'm 95% likely to be doing that myself with my own). Also, lower price than the 18-85 - only $6500 for the 18-50mm, not $9500 like the 18-85. Schweet.

3.) Prime Lenses now being offered - and they are $20K for the KIT:

15mm f2.8
25mm f1.9
35mm f1.9
50mm f1.9
85mm f1.9

This is an AMAZING price point, as there are individual primes that cost about what this entire set does ($19,975 to be precise).

Only downside - not due until end of year.

My own notes from my conversation with Ted:

Prime lenses-end of the year expected delivery date, with usual caveat under dev/etc., will let folks know if sooner/later - as compared to other primes, will let customers decide, personally Ted thinks they'll be all world. Full cine style PL mount, cine grade, prime lenses. Optimized for our sensors for full coverage, 4.5K and down. Solid solutions.


4.) Also an interesting tidbit - the samples at the show have Cooke's /i logo on them. What's that? Read here for more info, but short version is that it is a system to send lens metadata out on a frame by frame basis - a HUGE boon for post and VFX work. There's also a row of four electrical contacts, I don't know what they are for - are they for the /i datastream? I don't know, I'm not a lens guy - they could be something utterly mundane. I'd already known that Red would support /i tech - but I think I'd previously misconstrued that it simply meant Red One camera bodies could read the data and record the metadata. NOPE. From the press release: "Red Digital Cinema recently added /i Technology to the specification for forthcoming releases of its Red One 4k digital camera and Red lumina and prime lenses." - so Red's own lenses will also have this capability. EXCELLENT. EDIT - WHICH lenses exactly when is NOT known nor stated. No official statement from Red at this time - so it is NOT safe to assume that your ordered lenses will definitely have the /i tech features at this time. Maybe some will some won't, or /i variants that cost more, who knows.

Labels: Red