HD For Indies

UPDATE - Scott Simmons has a nice bit on some of the new features here:

The Editblog � FCP updated. Now more Avid-like

Nice breakdown of the new features in Final Cut Pro 6.0.2.


Oddly, it isn't showing up in my Software Updates (probably because I need to update to 10.4.11 first, also new UPDATE YES THAT'S WHY), I had to go dig it out after hearing about it elsewhere. So here's one place to get it:

Apple - Support - Downloads - Final Cut Pro 6.0.2

NOTABLE IMPROVEMENTS (found here: Final Cut Pro 6 Release Notes)

-6.0.2 compatible with 10.4.11 and 10.5, ONLY
-Sony XDCAM EX support, but requires the Sony XDCAM extra here
-supported formats under XDCAM EX:
-1080p24/25/30 VBR, 1080i50/60 VBR, 720p24/25/30/50/60 VBR
-can either connect camera directly, or put the SxS card in a MacBook Pro's ExpressCard/34 slot
-the format suports 25mbit CBR (constant bitrate) or 35mbit VBR (variable bitrate)
-when capturing from the HVR-V1, can capture to native codec, or Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), or ProRes422
-has some nice notes about optimal workflows for working with 24p on 60i and 3:2 pulldown removal, etc.Hell, I'll just quote it:

24p/60i on tape: Capture to the 24p Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple ProRes 422 codec, then output to the HVR-V1 camcorder in 24p/60i mode.
25p/50i on tape: Capture to the 25p Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple ProRes 422 codec, then output to the HVR-V1 camcorder in 25p/50i mode.
30p/60i on tape: Capture to the 30p Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple ProRes 422 codec, then output to the HVR-V1 camcorder in 30p/60i mode.

-support for had drive based HDV cameras via Log & Transfer, such as Sony HVR-DR60
-AVCHD o Intel Macs (1920x1080 interlaced) such as Panasonic HDC-SD3 and HDC-SD5, spanned clips NOW recognized since 6.0.1 didn't properly recognize them
-AVC-Intra support - Log and Transfer window, BUT: must transcode to ProRes, Intel Mac only, no audio playback when limited playback capability (due to too slow of a Mac???), full video preview requires Mac Pro, Panasonic's AVC Intra codec must be installed. So - LOTTA caveats there
-720p50 DVCPRO HD native support now works right
-Canon HDV 1080F24/25/30 setups!
-more setups, such as HDV-Apple ProRes 1080p24 ProRes 422 for Sony HVR-V1, and HDV-Apple ProRes422 and the same with ProRes HQ - EXCELLENT
-60fps Drop Frame Timecode support
-50 fps timecode in ALL timecode fields and project properties, including 50@25 timecode format for decks and EDL compatibility
-720p50/60 support for JVC's GY-HD200 and GY-HD250 cameras
-improved BWF (Broadcast Wave Format) support concerning iXML support
-Skipping Directories in the Reconnect Files Dialog - I'll use this a LOT, as I'm constantly relinking files
-Hiding Clip Names in the Timeline
-New Playhead-Centered Zooming Commands in the Timeline:

Zoom In on Playhead in Timeline: Keeps the Timeline playhead centered while zooming in (regardless of the selection in the Timeline).
Zoom Out on Playhead in Timeline: Keeps the Timeline playhead centered while zooming out (regardless of the selection in the Timeline).
Scroll to Playhead: Horizontally scrolls the Timeline so that the playhead is centered in the window.

-Opening a Nested Sequence Displays the Playhead in the Expected Position
-Holding Down the Shift Key Forces Final Cut Pro to Open with an Empty Project
-Gamma Import Option Has Been Renamed
-“Show as Sq. Pixels” Option is Now Called “Correct for Aspect Ratio”
-Log and Transfer Window Improvements
-FxPlug Plug-in Improvements
In Final Cut Pro 6.0.2, FxPlug plug-ins display collapsible parameter groups in the Filters tab of the Viewer.

New Apple Events Support
Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 responds to three new Apple Events that allow you to:

Query which effects are currently installed
Query which projects are currently open
Select specific clips based on UUIDs.
For details, go to http://developer.apple.com/appleapplications.

-Lost Render Files for Duplicated Sequences Issue Resolved
-Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 projects are not backward compatible with Final Cut Pro 6.0.1. - SO UPDATE ALL AT ONCE!
-for latest 3rd party stuff:

For P2 driver software from Panasonic: Go to https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/support/desk/e/download.htm.
For Sony XDCAM Transfer software and XDCAM EX plug-in: Go to http://www.sony.com/xdcam.

WHEW! Lots of good stuff and new goodies.

I wonder if retimed (especially ramped retimed) shots work after being Media Managed? One of my biggest online editor gripes.

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2

Reader Robert Ashe sent this in:



- The AJA IO HD is NOT an accelerator of any kind nor will they ever claim to be (cough cough Avid)
- Can be used as a converter as long as it is hooked up to a computer (a future version will allow it to be flashed into a setting, and then disconnected, keeping the setting intact)
- You cannot (as it stands now) have both a AJA IO HD and a kona card running simultaneously on the same system. They suggest doing a dual boot partition (Leopard may change this)
- If you add Virtual VTR to the mix you "probably" could use your system as a slave (they haven't tested it)
- It is designed for pro res PERIOD.
- If your machine is fast enough however it will support play out of anything from dvcpro hd to uncompressed
- There is a solid one frame video delay for digitizing (not surprising)
- Just like the adrenaline the IO HD dominates the firewire box, you MUST install a pci-e or pci-x firewire card for other devices.
- AC Power supply (this is nice, in case you lose the supply)
- Supports video output in the usual applications, however in color, it CURRENTLY only supports SD...for now.
- No Look up table support. Kona 3 will remain the "film" card
- Purely designed for broadcast television
- Has same chip set for the FS-1 as far as up-conversions and cross conversions which look really great.
- Does NOT convert frame rates, it works in hertz so that will be very tricky for 720p 60 (wasn't clear about this part) Seems like it may have the same problems with 59.94 and 60p shows that the adrenaline has
- Will not overheat, they've done all the testing, the thing is gold
- Does have LTC input but some changes will have to be made in quicktime to accommodate
- Ready to ship, just waiting for green light from apple
- 1/2 Rack size, same size as HVR-1500. They WILL sell a rack for it later, other wise the sony rack for half rack decks "should" work
- Any speculation with redcode compatibility is currently only speculation

So I pretty much think that this one is almost completely on par with the adrenaline (only missing a 35mbit pro res) and it's about 1/6.5 the price. Pretty much a no brainer for any small shop or film.



Thanks Robert!

Mike's Comments: For field usage and broadcast work, this is a very useful and capable box, FOR CERTAIN APPLICATIONS. For those looking to have a portable converter, a field capture device, a field ingest device to work with a laptop, etc, this thing is GOLDEN.

For those looking to work with Color as well as possible, or get maximum performance, or do LUTs, or 4:4:4 work, or uncompressed HD, this is not the ideal tool.

But it is a GREAT tool to have in the arsenal from what I've heard so far.

As Robert alluded, Apple (with the ProRes codec) and AJA (with the IO HD) have taken solid aim at Avid's DNxHD codec and Adrenaline hardware - and come up with a winner in terms of bang for the buck.

Avid still has some well liked options in terms of software features, but in terms of high quality ingest and export and realtime mixing of formats and codecs, the price performance winner is looking strongly like Apple on this one.

Further emails - Rob suggested that Apple needs an equivalent to DNxHD 36 - a low bandwidth, full raster codec for offline HD editing. I agree! But that's a relatively easy addition that can be done at pretty much anytime they want. They COULD include it in a .0x update, or wait for marketing reasons to roll it into next NAB's version, whatever that may be.

On my wishlist: GPU acceleration for format mixing, better frame rate conversion done in GPU (3:2 pulldown not repeating 4th frame please!), cleaner Compressor functionality, bug fixes, better EDL/XML interaction & integration with Color, DVD SP Blu-ray support (and the drives to go with it!), etc. Personally, I don't care as much whether they support HD DVD or Blu-ray or both, as long as it is soon. Well yeah, I do care - Blu-ray seems to be taking the lead, although slowed by the recent Paramount buy-out/buy-off. Hate to see Apple back the wrong horse exclusively. Although they seem well set to handle both. The hat trick would be to offer a combo burner - burns CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray. Pricey, but would RAWK.

-mike

Labels: AJA, FCP, Final Cut, hardware, Mac, NLE, software

Got an email over the weekend from some folks about to deploy into the field that were having some workflow issues with their gear. Emailed back, didn't hear back, but got a call yesterday from them once they had arrived at their remote destination shooting location on another continent.

They were having trouble with their P2 import from their HVX200 - they could play back their clips on camera (verifying the clips were good, thank goodness), but when they tried to import, they got white frames and no audio. As I started through my litany of questions to verify the back story on what they had (they said they were running Final Cut on a just-purchased MacBook Pro), my Spidey Sense starts tingling - turns out they're running FCP 5.1.1 on OS X 10.4.10 (with an unknown version of QT as well, he couldn't check at the time). So right there that was a clue - he was running a version that wasn't as up-to-date as he could make it. FCP 5.1.x can be updated to 5.1.4 via Software Update for free, so I suggested he start there. I couldn't recall exactly what was supported when, so I did a little digging and found this bon mot -


Bring HVX200 P2 Clips into FCP via the FireStore FS-100 | Studio Monthly: "As of this writing, the P2 formats DVCPRO HD 1080/24P and 1080/30P are not yet natively supported in FCP 5.1.1."

A-ha - I'd also not thought to ask him what res/frame rate he was capturing, but I DID know that 5.1.4 would fully support any mode he could shoot on that camera.

Lesson to Learn

This client was in a hurry and had to travel on short notice, which made it difficult to do the right thing - ALWAYS research to make sure what version of the OS & your NLE (or QuickTime if on Mac) are appropriate to match together. With older NLE software, there can be a target range - not too old, not too new - that will be the correct, properly functioning match for your system. For instance, BlackMagic used to recommend a particular version of OS, QuickTime, FCP, and their drivers if you were using FCP 4.5 - not to update beyond what was it? I think 10.3.8 or somesuch (DON'T quote or depend on me for that number, just for example here!).

For latest NLE software, check to make sure you have the minimum recommended version (FCP 6.0 required at LEAST 10.4.9 and QT 7.1.6), but don't assume the latest is the best - some percentage of the time there may be a bug that requires a .0.x type of an upgrade to fix. So not too old, not too new - like Goldilock's porridge, you want Just Right.

Most editors know this, but field production folks having to deal with FCP on a laptop in the field for review purposes may not.

Other lesson to learn - ALWAYS have your post workflow figured out days in advance before travel - so if there is an issue, you have time to resolve it - requiring analysis, implementation, and verification testing that the fix does in fact work. Your production may depend on it - so it is worth the time to take.

Remember - as an indie, you have more time than money. But time is your least controllable asset when deadlines are looming - so as an indie, you need to spend MORE time prepping and verifying stuff like this, since you can't throw money at the problem to solve it.

These folks leaped before they looked - or put another way, pulled trigger, then aimed by going to the remote location without a solution.

I'm picking on them a bit here to make a point - in truth, they WERE trying to solve it before they left, but didn't manage to until they were on location - meaning they had fewer resources to try to solve their problems in the field than if they were at home. There was a point in the conversation when I was saying as a fallback they could reinstall the OS if all else failed - but they couldn't since all that stuff was back at home.

Which is why when I travel, I make a point of having a Commando Kit with me - enough stuff to rebuild a hard drive etc. from the ground up, including OS, NLE, compositing apps and all the standalone updates, all COPIES of original installers, not the original discs themselves - my old joke was air drop me into Somalia with a Commando Kit and some new Macs in boxes and I'll have a studio up and running by the end of the day - hopefully I'll never have to actually do that.

Which is also why my durn backpack is so heavy when you see me at tradeshows - I carry lots of junk, but I ALWAYS have That Cable Just In Case.

UPDATE - they were also having trouble with the record times on their 16GB P2 cards (and don't forget, as earlier reported, that you need to update the firmware in your camera to work with the newer bigger P2 cards!). At first I thought it was a firmware issue, then digging deeper, turns out they were recording to 720p mode, not 720pN. 720p mode records 720p24 as 720p60 with 2:3:3:2 cadence (or similar, don't recall whether that or 2:3:2:3, but the point is that it takes up more space recording 60fps not 24fps).

As always, research and test everything before arriving on set!

It's called prep, people.

Short for "preparation."

Don't forget that "pre" means "in front of" or "before."

Time on set is your most valuable asset, especially if you're in a remote location. Where do you want to be figuring out technical problems - while that perfect sunset is ending at your exotic and pricey location, or two weeks before at home while idling watching a DVD and having a tasty beverage?

A few extra days gear rental can be invaluable to be ready to roll perfectly. Think of it like combat - when the enemy comes over the hill, do you want to be reading the manual on your rifle, saying to your seargeant "Hang on, I'll be ready in 5 minutes." *

-mike

* OK in our current climate I'm reluctant to use a war analogy as I'm against that sort of thing, but this does make the point.

Labels: FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2, original, P2, workflow

Apple put some birdseed type up on their website changing the FCP specs not too long ago, and at present, appears that while AVCHD is supported, some gotchas:

-no native support - only transcoding
-no DVD based
-Sony/Panasonic hard drive based supported ONLY
-transcoding to Pro Res is Mac Pro only
-AIC only option on others, and even then some minimum hardware requirements

...so if you are thinking you want to take advantage of the latest/greatest tech by transcoding to ProRes....you'll have to have a Mac Pro. And your AVCHD camera better say Sony or Panasonic on the side, AND better be hard drive not DVD based.

As always, research your solutions carefully.

-mike

Labels: FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE, software, workflow

Hey all - two articles I wrote for DV are now online:

Upgrade Your Images with Audio

I'd written a bit on audio acquisition in this article, where I stated that I basically don't know beans about audio field acquisition, just enough to know that it is important and you should get somebody good to do it.

However, I learned quite a bit researching for the DV article about the plugs, formats, budget considerations and whatnot for audio monitoring in stereo, and now with Final Cut Pro 6, surround (5.1 channel) audio monitoring. This article is really a follow up to my previous DV article a few months ago on building an uncompressed HD workstation. Read all about the various audio outputs that you have or can get, the same 3 tiers of Starving Indie, Moderately Equipped Individual, and Well Equipped Invididual/Small Facility Room. For each, I discuss stereo and surround monitoring options, what the interfaces and options and prices are, etc. I'm really proud of this one.

Similarly, for Windows specific info, I wrote a second article (exclusively available online, won't be in the print edition) here:

Upgrade Your Images with Audio: PC Edition

I discuss the more popular options on the Windows side (see? I DO try to cover The Other Side! :D ) - Avid, Adobe, and Sony's Vegas. I talk about the audio I/O hardware/software options available/appropriate to each, and run down some the Windows specific issues that weren't mentioned in the other article.

One mistake that was made in my own editorial process in that Windows specific article - in Group 3, I didn't come back and mention/recommend Avid Media Composer with Adrenaline, which is an entirely valid and appropriate choice for high end editorial individual/small facility setups as discussed in the article. Tomorrow I'll look into getting that fixed (it is well after midnight after an especially taxing few days).

Another area I don't know as much as I'd like to about is proper room setup for serious audio work - I was pleased to see as a companion piece to the articles I wrote there is a nice long article by Dan Daley (or the MUCH more experienced Dan could very fairly call my articles companions to his!) on how to set up a serious, "for real" audio monitoring environment to get accurate, unbiased sound reproduction. He discusses room dimensions, proper speaker setup, proper acoustic treatment of the room, etc. In my brief skim (I'll read the whole thing just haven't yet) I saw a lot of promising stuff, and already learned some good info on minimal room size to get good, accurate acoustic reproduction, etc.

The Sound of Science: Acoustical considerations for the DIY HD studio"

These three articles should give you plenty to work from to set up your own studio. Good luck, and as always, Comments welcome using the link below.

UPDATE/NOTE: One thing I glossed over and was eventually edited out along the way - YES, an SDI or HD-SDI CAN carry enough discrete audio channels to do stereo or surround - so when mastering, the audio flows with video for multi-channel work (want a multi-channel mix on HDCAM? Dolby E is your answer, but you more than likely can't prep that inhouse and will have to send out to have it done, but it "fits" on two channels of uncompressed audio while mastering). Anyway, point being, while audio DOES flow over SDI or HD-SDI, it isn't likely/viable that you have an SDI or HD-SDI deck, sitting around, all the time, such that you can do your audio monitoring through it/on it. If you've got an HDCAM SR deck permanently attached in the same room, GREAT, the HD-SDI can flow through that and (I believe but would need to verify) has enough audio monitor passthroughs that you could do it that way. While it is technically possible to de-embed the audio from an SDI or HD-SDI stream to discrete analog outputs, other than the Blackmagic HDLink Pro (mentioned in the article), I couldn't find a viably affordable means of doing that. So I skipped it.

OH! And big, BIG Special Thanks and Luv to Craig Negoescu, Stu Maschwitz, and SEVERAL folks EACH from Blackmagic, AJA, Avid, and Apple. I wasn't able to contact anybody specific at Adobe but would have loved to talk to somebody over there, simply because I don't have a good direct connection with them (yet).

If you are, or know somebody who should be my connection at Adobe's video group, I'd love to be in direct contact with someone at Adobe's video group to ping for feedback/answers/etc. to make sure I can get accurate, timely, detailed info out into the wild. And with CS3 purportedly coming out within a couple of weeks....

And OK, I am guiltly of headline pimping on this one, and there is no way to learn "everything you need to know" from three articles, but boy, (I maybe-not-so-humbly think) there is a LOT of useful info in there!

-mike

Labels: audio, FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2, hardware, NLE, studio

Macworld: Review: Final Cut Pro 6

My review of Final Cut Pro 6 for MacWorld Magazine is up right now on their site (top article at the moment, ahem. Pride.).

I discuss Open Format Timelines, the advantages of the ProRes codec, touch on some issues with SmoothCam (which is otherwise way cool), surround sound audio, the (optionally) huge 55GB install (make room on that boot drive, buddy!) and some of the other refinements to the application.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE

How many gigabytes of space does 3 1/2 hours of 1080p23.98 ProRes HQ take up? Now you can quickly answer that - Digital Heaven's VideoSpace has been updated, and now includes settings for Apple's new ProRes codecs and DVCPROHD 720p50 codecs. It also now offers automatic selection of fps for PAL & NTSC codecs. The big deal with this OS X Widget is that it can calculate time or storage space requirements (based on the other).

I use this thing DAILY, and other than Safari, Final Cut, TextWrangler, etc. is probably one of my most used pieces of software. Simple but perfect for the task of figuring out how much space and/or how much time is a given codec, frame size, and frame rate. I emailed to whine about lack of ProRes inclusion a few weeks ago and they said they were working on it - excellent answer.

If you're an editor (or producer) trying to figure out how much space you'll need, this is PERFECT. You can even specify how many tracks of what type of audio for perfectly accurate datarate calculations. Also useful to figure out how fast your storage needs to be. Can I say any more nice things about it? I don't know, I just Luvs It - and it is Free As In Beer.

Other handy info as long as we're talking datarates -

MB/sec * 3.6 = GB/hr

What's that mean? If you multiply the megabytes per second of a given datarate by 3.6, you get gigabytes per hour. MB/sec is handy for figuring out how fast your storage needs to be (add 25-35% for healthy QuickTime overhead room), and GB/hr is handy to know how MUCH storage you need. (Yes, I figured that out by myself, and am thusly proud of it - see the screen grab above for an example of MB/sec as compared to GB/hr) : )

Other Digital Heaven news:

DH_Grid and DH_Guides are two other bits of FCP related freeware you can download when getting VideoSpace.

-----

Digital Heaven's Final Print:

"Final Print is a standalone application which prints a list of clips in a bin or markers contained in a clip or sequence. This provides a very useful workflow enhancement when handing off a project to someone else for further work.

NEW! Version 1.5 now available
Adds printing of bins and markers on source clips"

Not free, but still darn handy.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, OS X, software

In a previous article, I'd linked to a useful article that discussed how to substantially increase your Compressor 3 encoding times. They made brief mention of how to make the necessary adjustments "in System Prefs" but I went and looked and at first blush (10 seconds spent) didn't see how to do it. Then I was encoding some 720p24 footage on the Mac Pro to high def H.264, and realized, after seeing it still had a couple of hours to go "Ya know, I really should figure that out...right about NOW." So I went and figured it out, and for your edification, here's a walkthrough of exactly how to do it, click by click, as a screen grab walkthrough.

Click here to go to the picture page, and Start Slideshow will walk you through the Step By Step.

Wave the mouse over the picture to see the pause/forward/back controls - da usual iWeb stuff.

How many instances to launch? Depends on your machine, but if you're a dual or quad core box, 2 is almost CERTAINLY going to be an improvement over the default single instance. The BareFeats article's chart showed an 8 core Mac Pro doing best with 8 instances, so as many as you have cores is one possible answer - but It Could Depend, I don't know yet, and I don't know exactly WHAT it depends on as well - bus speeds? Source clip datarate & disk transfer rate? How compute intensive or light the encoding is per frame? Long GOP vs. I-frame only - does it substantially affect optimal # of cores? I'll have the interns do some benchmarking next week hopefully to learn some more, but I'm certain whatever answers are learned, carefully qualifying those answers with details on testing methodology will be key.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE, software

Steve Mullen on How to Edit the V1's 24p in Final Cut Pro | A Workaround for Final Cut Pro users by Steve Mullen | Workaround for editing with Avid Media Composer or Xpress Pro | Steve Mullen and video editing

Steve digs into the limitations of the V1U and comes up with a suggested workaround - Cinema Tools to the rescue!

I haven't tried it myself, but if he's putting it out there with screenshots I'll betcha it works. Thanks to Jon for pointing this one out.

Another useful tidbit I discovered on my own earlier today - Cinema Tools 4 (part of Final Cut Studio 2) includes, FINALLY, a 2:2:2:4 pulldown preset - bodes well for properly processing (finally!) the live HD-SDI captured footage from the JVC GY-HD100U we used - could only record as 720p60 at the time with 2:2:2:4 cadence. I'll see if the new once can properly reduce it to 24p....

mike

Labels: FCP, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE, Sony V1U

Apple's ProRes 422

Big long article I wish I'd had the time to do on the ins, out, details, and caveats of Apple's ProRes codecs. I'm not saying much here, but this is a long, detailed article going into the pros and cons of this new codec that you'll likely be using in the future if you're on a Mac.

Footnote: I have detailed, extensive, further thoughts on Final Cut Studio 2, ProRes, Color, etc., but I have to wait for certain articles to be released in other publications before I can say more. All my info and knowledge is, of course, available to my paying consulting clients at any time.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE

The Editblog � Online Avid to Final Cut Pro course: "In the wake of the recent FCP to Avid, Avid to FCP websites and debates, here’s a link to Avid’s Alex online learning site that I have mentioned before. As of today they have a free online course available called Avid for Final Cut Pro users"

Labels: Avid, FCP, Final Cut, NLE, post

Doodling about making some test footage to take with me out of town, I'm getting ready to cook the DCI StEM footage down to ProRes.

Suddenly I notice an option on the export dialog in After Effects 7.0 - a checkbox for "Enable 4:4:4 chroma filtering" - now, is this a smoother cleaner way to get 4:2:2 results, or is this enabling 4:4:4 sampling? I notice it says filtering not sampling, so that gives me pause. Anybody got any more details on it than that?

I'm about to leave town, can't look into it now.

Wizdom of the Interweb Tubez, Inform Me!

-mike

Further note 1/2 hour later - you have to edit your After Effects setup text file (I've blogged on it in the past, don't recall off teh top of my head) to get ProRes to write out to ACTUALLY 10 bits - so that "Trillions" will be available instead of just "Millions" - my test files are going to be 8 bits worth of data, even if in a 10 bit codec. All part of the due dilligence thing, doncha know...

-mike

Tuesday night update - "Enable 4" does not appear in the FCP user manual, nor in the Compressor manual.

Consensus is that it is to help with chroma aliasing, so it truly is chroma FILTERING, not chroma SAMPLING. I emailed Adam Wilt on the issue and he sent me a test file to verify, I'll get to it when I can to have specifics.

I'm pretty much incommunicado this week, so if elsewhere on the web somebody has details, please email or add a Comment (link below) to fill me (and the rest of us) in.

-mike

Labels: FCP, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio 2, NL

I updated my original article from the other day, scroll to the end to see my new notes there.

Another handy tidbit - on the tutorial DVD, there's a ROM folder with all of that content as H.264 files, compatible with AppleTV as well - handy! They are just little QuickTime movies, so you can copy them onto your local drive if you want as well. They are lower resolution (640x360 or so) than the DVD (720x480), so the DVD is a little sharper for seeing the UI details demostrated. No biggie - it is handy to have the option, and you wouldn't know it was there if you didn't look.

It would have been nice if Apple had treated it as a TV series or something so it would self-organize a little better - they just fall into place in alphabetical order, which isn't necessarily the order you'd want them to play in. And there's no playlist organizing them, either. Points for putting AppleTV QT's on the DVD, but it would have been nice if they were organized a little better.

As a related question, how tough would it be to make a QT movie that has embedded navigation that works in AppleTV? It is totally doable (and it'd also be nice if a DVD Studio Pro project could be exported this way as well - Adobe's CS3 can one button export a DVD to Flash...response Apple?)

QuickTime has all the hooks to do this - referring to other movies in the same directory, etc. And since AppleTV seems to be a fairly full featured QT client, shouldn't this be possible? Somebody test! The chapter markers in a movie work in iTunes - can we get a little screen with navigable links to do the same in a self-contained QT file? That works on AppleTV? Chapter nav is awkward on iTunes movies on AppleTV as is.

Anyway, moving on - I don't leave until Tuesday instead of this Saturday, so more time to test & doodle, and try to get some other stuff done in the meantime.

Other tidbits - MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR INSTALLERS - last year at one point I dropped an installer disc I was carrying and stepped on it, scratching the media side - uh oh - it didn't install any more. I had to borrow a friend's and make a copy. I've heard you can send in a damaged installer and get it replaced, but I'll bet that takes weeks - if you're on deadline, that=bad Bad BAD.

I also put the installer serial # in the notes field of an Address Book entry named Serial Numbers - that way it is on my iPod, my .Mac, my phone (anybody else starting to get that junkie arm-itch to get an iPhone? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?), all my computers, etc. - I'll always have a copy somewhere. I also print'em out (and the SN from the prior version needed to install it) and tuck it in my one big CD wallet thingy I use. And that's where the copies of the installer goes, the originals stay in a place that NEVER LEAVES THE HOUSE. I have friends wanting to borrow old OS installers, for instance, all the time, and it is always hell getting them back. It is just human nature, like loaning out DVDs - they tend to get sticky at the destination and not leave. Anyway, never let an original installer out of the house - otherwise odds are better than 50/50 you won't get it back without having to ask for it.

This may seem like overkill, but with all the installers I have - Adobe stuff, Avid stuff, Final Cut, Shake, iLife, iWork, and the 8 bazillion plugins I've bought, been given, or am reviewing, it is necessary to keep up with the library. Nothing worse than setting up (or reconfiguring or reinstalling) a box, and you can't find the right installer for what you need. And since I'm constantly tearing up and down box and reconfiguring, I need all that stuff on tap consistently.

-mike

PS - On a related note, B-Scene Films has a nice report from last night's LA Final Cut Pro User Group meeting where Soundtrack Pro 2.0 was demonstrated.

I've been so busy I missed reporting that this was coming up - sorry LA folks, sorry Michael for not plugging this event.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE

I'm continuing to get the studio set up for some serious Final Cut Studio 2 analysis - but it is taking time. I now have 10.4.8 or 10.4.9 on two internal drives on each of two machines - My dual 2.5 GHz G5 has 10.4.9 on two different drives, one has Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 and the rest of Final Cut Studio (1), on it, the other has Final Cut Studio 2 full install on it.

My main box, a Quad 2.5 GHz G5, has 10.4.8 with FCP 5.1.4 and Media Composer 2.6 on it (they SEEM to coexist so far OK), and 10.4.9 with FCS 2 on the other internal drive. I've got the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme card in it at the moment, but I plan to test it and my Kona3 to see how they compare with FCS 2.

Some preliminary tidbits: Media Manager SEEMS to be improved in its handling of some issues - Recompress To does NOT clip IRE values over 100 IRE at the moment. Sending clips with >100 IRE to Color works (no clipping) presuming you turn off the default Broadcast Safe filter (I need to study its behavior a bit - I'm guessing that with the filter on, you can dial back and the highlights are still there, just being clipped by the app @ 100 IRE - but I need to verify that myself).

The included DVD (16:9, natch) gives a nice overview of how to get your feet wet in Color. It is DEFINITELY a non-typical Mac app, and has MUCH more in common with the feel & vibe of Shake and other traditional "heavy iron" looking apps that have migrated downmarket. Which this one certainly qualifies as - keep in mind that Color 1.0 that comes with Final Cut Studio 2 @ $1300 includes ALL the functionality they used to include in the $25,000 Final Touch 2K - yes you CAN do 2K 10 bit log DPX film scans in this thing - WOWZA.

Yeah, I gotta start figuring out a way to get a Octo Mac, gonna need it...the Nvidia 7800GT card I have in the Quad G5 is not the optimal for this kind of stuff...

The timing is also unfortunate - I'm leaving town for several days on Tuesday as well (family vacation, the neice/nephew are only going to be 5 & 9 on a beach trip once...)

THURSDAY UPDATE - As I get Final Cut Studio 2 installed on various boxes around the office, I'm realizing...55 GB is an awfully large install! If you install everything from Final Cut Studio 2, with all of the LiveType, DVD Studio, and Soundtrack Pro extras, it takes up a HUGE amount of space - about as much space as laptop boot drives were just a couple of years ago. You can custom install to cut it down for stuff you don't plan on using (for instance, there are THREE discs of audio content), but if you want to comfortably have everything at your disposal, a bigger hard drive may well be needed - I found on a couple of machines I was having to push data off the boot drives to data drives...if there was space there. This update coincided with me "getting pretty full" in the studio in terms of stuff on drives, prompting to think about what I need to do for storage and backup - do I get more SATA RAID 0's? Do I buy an LTO-3 or LTO-4 drive for data backup for the inevitable RAID failure? Is it time to plunk down some serious change for a big fibre channel RAID? Man, it'd be nice to have consolidated storage so I could work with media from any box - a SAN would be great, but that'd be a, let's see:

-4 seats of xSan - $4000
-fibre channel switch - dunno, $4K?
-fully populated Xserve RAID, 10.5TB - about $14K, it'd format to 8.3TB in RAID 50, and only just under 7TB in RAID 50 with hot spare. Eww. I already have about 9TB of RAID 0 in the house...that's not so great. If I'm needing more space, I'd really need two of them, so $28K
-4 fibre channel cards - $500 a pop minimum, so $2K there

Total cost of SAN upgrade (list price): approximately $26K to have less space than I already do, or $40K to increase the space I've got. Considering the fact that I've recently vetoed the $9K Mac Pro that I want based on current financial situation, not gonna happen.

What are my other choices? I could stick with my RAID 0's, but I'd need a solid backup plan. Tape backup? New formats offer 800 GB @ over 400GB/hr backup speeds around $4K+.

Hmm...in the meantime, installation of Final Cut Studio 2 on the Dual 2.0 G5 is taking much longer than on the Quad G5 - slower optical drive to blame I would imagine - checking now, read speeds are about 8 MB/sec on that box as it installs off the DVD. So keep in mind, your install times can vary wildly, depending on:

1.) whether you do a full or custom cut-down install, as well as

2.) how fast your optical drive is (hard drive speed probably won't make a meaningful difference, optical drive speed will be the gating/limiting factor)

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut Studio 2, original

my local apple store has 2 copies of FCS2 upgrade in stock, and they won't hold one, even for me.

(edit - no, I didn't really try to play the "But-but-but....I'm SPECIAL...[sniff]" card)

Insert driving video game.

3, 2, 1....GO!!!!!!!

and I'm off....

-m

UPDATE

The Fun Part:

Music To Exceed The Posted Speed Limit By, By More Than A Little Bit, from the playlist labelled doitdoitgogogo (aka Finish Da Race for the last few miles of a footrace):

Track 15: Underworld - Cowgirl ("Everything everything everything....I'm invisible...")

Track 16: Snatch Soundtrack - Hernando's Hideaway - good castanet action - I can't believe iTunes doesn't have this!

Track 17: Moulin Rouge Soundtrack - Lady Marmalade - it's nice when life times out such that the engine is hitting the high note at the same time as Christina Aguillera. My baby hit a high note around 8000 rpm's, I dunno what the Khz was for Christina. I did like the symmetry of those two pure, high, clean notes in perfect, crisp synchronicity.

....aaaaaaand shift. :D

Track 18: Fight Club Soundtrack - Stealing Fat This one lives on another playlist, truly and literally entitled "Music to Conspire To Take Over The World By"

....and that was enough to get me to the mall in rush hour traffic.

Result?

....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand denied.

Drat.

The Not So Fun Part

YES they have Final Cut Studio 2.

YES they have an upgrade box.

YES I called ahead and specifically asked if it was the one for Final Cut Studio, NOT Final Cut Pro.

YES they said they had that.

Upon arrival and inspection, GEE, it is the $699 one that upgrades BOTH Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio.

NO, I do NOT want to pay an extra $200 more than I need to.

They called the one other store (WAaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy on the other side of town in Friday rush hour traffic) and they had the same thing, so no need to spend 2 hours driving.

Lesson to Learn - nice enough people, but they do not know what the frickazoid razzle frazzle mumfaluff they are talking about. Remember, they are making Mall Wages.

NOW I remember that this is exactly what I went through a year or two ago with a prior upgrade, a false start run up to the mall for...the wrong version.

IF you face a similar predicament, THE WAY to fix it - when you call ahead, tell them to tell you the price on the box - the Final Cut STUDIO upgrade is $499, the Final Cut Pro upgrade is $699.

I want it, but not $200 for 4 days want it bad.

Harrumph.

I Am Jack's Impotent Rage.

I bought a book on iLife '06 so my parents maybe won't call me with, shall we say, BASIC questions quite so often just to make the trip not QUITE such a loss. I then realized it was 5:30pm (I left the house around 5) on a Friday and I'd be fighting all the other salmon upstream, so decided to check out what movies they had in the mall. The thought of Shrek 3 ("On Four Screens!) makes my skin peel, so I went to see The Invisible. Ehh - wait to rent it, or even for Cinemax to carry it.

Back in the car, the perfect denouement music was queued up for me - Fight Club Soundtrack - What Is Fight Club?" - truly music to brood and mull and conspire to take over the world by.

And When I Am King, false answers on software in stock shall be dealt with....harshly....where'd I put that lye?

Only kidding when thinking about telling mall employees, in a calm,perfectly perfunctory chipper tone: "This is a chemical burn. This will hurt more than anything in your life."

...aaaaaaaand pour....

....or maybe I just need a hug to deal with my disappointment...





I'm Tyler behind the wheel (or at least _I_ think so), but I Am Jack's Bitter Disappointment sitting at home in front of machine NOT running the new toyz I know are out there...

-Cornelius

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, OT

Software isn't here yet, but we can start getting some questions answered.

Final Cut Studio Manuals

LiveType 2 manual (appears unchanged since FCS 1)

Motion 3 manuals

Qmaster 3 manuals (distributed processing/compressing stuff)

DVD Studio Pro Manuals - includes DVD SP 4.2 new features

Compressor's page doesn't list the latest manuals, but they are listed on the main Apple - Support - Manuals page. Direct links: Compressor 3 New Features and Compressor 3 User Manual - Note some manuals not found elsewhere can be found in the "Recent Manuals" list on the lower portion of this page!

Cinema Tools 4 User Manual

Cinema Tools 4 New Features (manual)

Apple Qmaster 3 and Compressor 3 Distributed Processing Setup

A few goodies: finalcutpronews: More nuggets on FCP 6.

A bunch of new Apple support docs have been posted over at Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 5/17/07, including FCS 2 issues, color issues, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro, etc.

UPDATE - reader Michael Ryden found the Color Manual online, so download and learn...

...and here's the Color 1.0 Release Notes - just read'em, and WOW there are a lot of caveats to be cautious of - when sailing those waters, there are lots of rocks and reefs just below the surface, and the occassional sandbar as well. Consult this map to safely navigate!

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, NLE

Hey all - it would appear that Final Cut Studio 2 is shipping - I got an email from a reader claiming they received a "has shipped" confirmation from Apple, and Apple's online estimates have shifted (see pic). New versions are shipping first - as a business decision that makes SOME sense - serve new clients, with highest profit margin, first.

In the meantime, it would appear that existing loyal upgrading/updating clients are getting served...after that. Maybe it is just that the new/standalone versions were ready or ordered first, and the upgrade versions were ready or ordered second, but it does stick in my craw a little bit - couldn't they have both been ready at the same time?

In any case, update versions are stated to ship in 2-3 weeks, new versions ordered now will ship in 3-5 days according to Apple Online Store as of Wednesday afternoon (May 16, 2007).

If you haven't ordered yours yet, now that it IS shipping it might be a good time to do so. You can order your new copy, or an upgrade from Final Cut Studio, or an upgrade from any prior version of Final Cut Pro from the HD for Indies Online Store. It is an Amazon Affiliate store, so you're dealing with Amazon and paying the same Amazon price, but HD for Indies gets a cut to help support the site.

OH! And kudos to Apple for shipping EXACTLY when they said they would! That is SUCH a rarity for an NAB announced product - they said it'd ship in about a month, and they actually beat that estimate! Congrats, FCS team....go sleep!


-mike

UPDATE - and Michael Horton of the LA FCP UG pointed out the manuals can be downloaded here.

Rockin', thanks Michael!

Time to go scratch 'n sniff around in those....as if I didn't have enough to do already tonight...and for the record, as expected, the word "Redcode" does not appear once in the FCP 6 manual, the Working with High Definition
and Broadcast Formats manual, nor the New Features in Final Cut Pro 6.

A future version is expected to support Redcode RAW 4K, we don't have specifics on that as yet.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut

Final Cut Studio Warp Speed Workflow # 1: Applying a transition to multiple clips at DVcreators.net

A NICE little video tutorial that shows how to apply the same transition to a bunch of clips. Also nicely illustrates some good keyboard shortcuts, so there's a lot of good info in this one short little video tutorial (a couple of minutes or so).

Time well spent.

-mike

Labels: FCP, NLE, software, tips, workflow

What version of Final Cut Pro will open my Final Cut Express project?

This is damn handy to know for the low end folks. Paraphrasing from their little chart:

FCE2 requires FCP 4.0 or later
FCE3.0 requires FCP 5 or later
FCE3.5 requires FCP 5.1 or later

Labels: FCP, NLE, post

MacNN | Apple's iPhone delays Leopard until October:

From Apple: "we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.'

The company said that while it plans to have all Leopard features completed by early June, quality control would add a few more months to the development cycle.

'We cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October,'"


I can understand how that could delay things, but they CLEARLY must have known this for months.

What vision pops to mind? Dana Carvey as the Church Lady saying "Isn't that conveeeEEEeenient?"

I'd been hearing that Leopard had LOTS of bugs as of a month or two ago and was behind schedule, and blaming it on the Popular New Thing About To Ship is a great bit of deferral - we're more willing to accept getting a better iPhone, sooner, than accept that Leopard is a huge complicated undertaking that was just buggy and late Just Because.

Interesting that Apple would choose to pull resources away from a $130 product with virtually zero manufacturing costs (R&D is expensive, but pressing discs is CHEAP!) that would be maximally distributable to their user base (everybody that has bought a capble-of-running-it Mac in the last few years) in order to finish a brand new product - Apple CLEARLY thinks there's more growth, and profit potential, in the consumer electronics space than there is in the software/computer space. And I can't say I can fault their logic.

Some were saying, when iPhone was announced, that it might steal resources (staff or dollars or both) from the Pro Apps group, where you have to hire expensive, specialty programmer teams to develop large, complex software for a relatively small group of potential users. What if you put such resources into building something less complicated but more widely applicable to the consuming public? It only makes sense for them to optimize resource allocation for optimal ROI.

So while my BS detector starts to tingle (think Spidey Sense of technology), using iPhone as a conveninent excuse to cover why it was already running late (regardless of how much staff was reallocated), it is a daunting concept to think of our professional tools (the OS in this case) languishing because Apple reallocated for consumer stuff.

As for Final Cut - two schools of thought on this one:

1.) They were already going to show now/ship later, so this isn't affecting them that much. The announcement of new OctoMacs with no new GPUs or high def optical drives the week before NAB reinforces that supposition, and hints that maybe we are in for a wait as I posited last week If Apple wants to seriously take on Avid for performance, they need to cut free of all that legacy code that has held them back or so long and optimize for the hardware platform of the present and future - the Intel platform. Apple hasn't sold a PowerPC professional Mac in quite some time now, so having software that does an extra bit of performance on the new hardware platform and requires the latest OS to do it is a gutsy move that, uh, would, um, require everybody to upgrade to new hardware/OS. While Apple has gotta love that idea, I just don't think it viable, and I'm pretty sure they don't either.

2.) It won't matter, because the new Final Cut Studio is about ready to roll - they've been working on this for a long time, the last major code effort was the port to Intel that happened last February or so, they've had LOTS of uninterrupted time to work on this. Apple won't be so radical so as to divorce a large segment of the OS and hardware Mac market in order to get a bit more performance out of the software by relying on a brand new OS. They've never done that before, and why change now. It has ALWAYS worked on the current OS, and maybe back a major version (sometimes, depending on OS release cycles), and works on current and one generation back machines. After writing that thing the other week, I don't THINK Apple would go that radical to get performance trophies at the expense of supporting the majority of the user base. While it'll probably run best on Intel Macs with latest OS, I'll betcha I get pretty good performance on my Quad Core G5 running 10.4.9 (I hope Hope HOPE so anyway). I'd get more, but not hugely, crushingly, real-world usefully more RT perfomrance an a 4 core Intel Mac Pro. And I have sneaking feeling that maybe they won't be ready to really make those 8 core Macs sing since the OS isn't truly optimized for it.

I've flipped some emails with Bruce Allen this afternoon, and editor web buddy who originally pointed out the announcement to me.

I'd said:

My bullshit detector is pinging a bit - if you steal folks for
iPhone, that shouldn't bump the release FIVE MONTHS!

Software ALWAYS lags hardware. Until you see benchmarks for shipping software/hardware you can personally lay your mitts on and afford, it can be a dicey proposiiton. Of course, I'm going to need to get into a beefy Intel Mac sooner rather than later with Redcine right around the corner...dammit. My only Intel Mac is my MacBook I'm typing on right now.

And Bruce responded:

Agreed, Mike, agreed!

It makes the 8-cores very scary to buy now - you can buy now, expecting performance to improve with Leopard... but by the time Leopard comes out, Apple might very well have released the NEXT 8-core models. This must be driving you nuts, my friend, since I think you are in the market to buy your next Mac, right?

The problem for everyone is, if you don't get an 8-core and independently benchmark RedCine on it,, who will?


...we'd have to wait on, and trust the results of, Rob & Graeme I'd bet. Fortunately, they are both honorable guys and share my utter loathing for what I consider "specsmanship." It has been said "...there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." The height of such endeavors I dub specsmanship, and with maximum pejorative emphasis.

Anyway, in summary:
-bummer that Leopard is delayed
-but I don't think/I hope that it won't affect next Final Cut's release
-if I haven't said it yet, the rumor of a high end, Avid tackling, 4K capable Final Cut Extreme never quite sat right with me, since Apple isn't in the ultra-niche high end business. Realtime codec/frame size mixing on a timeline? Yeah, LOTS of folks could use that daily. 4K finish? That is an ultra tiny minority of the market and doesn't make sense right now. But if they want to go nuts collaborating with Red (no idea what the working relationship really is between those two), I'm all for it, even it if isn't best use of their resources in the big picture (but GREAT for my needs!). Anyway, to announce a forthcoming package that would include the capabilities that Final Touch had, with the new asset management tools they acquired, and the next Shake, and say it'll ship "later this year" meaning next year, is the most plausible idea I've come across to scratch that Final Cut Extreme itch
-Oh, back on track - I'm kinda hoping new GPU & optical drive options would be announced on Sunday, but I'm not holding my breath - the timing would be so wacky.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, iPhone, Leopard, OS X

Got an email from David Taylor of CineForm with a new product announcement. To boil it down:

Cineform announced a new codec - 12 bit "CineForm 444" codec - 12 bits/channel, 4:4:4 RGB. Note that this is different from their Cineform RAW codec that they've been using with the SI-2K.

So, this new codec details:

-targetted at high end of digital cinema & broadcast acquisition
-pitching as a competitor to HDCAM SR
-tested HDCAM SR vs CineForm 444, CineForm bested SR by 3 to 5 dB in peak s/n ratio testing
-used StEM (Standard Evaluation Material, is scanned film)
-see results here
-same results discussed on David Newman's blog here

More on the codec from their press release:
-12 bit RGB
-member of the CineForm Intermediate codec family, called CineForm 444
-up to 2048x2048 pixel resolution (why not 4Kx4K? -Mike)
-Prospect 2K for Premiere Pro supports real-time, multi-stream editing (oh, that's why! -mike)
-a version of CineForm 444 for Intel Mac QT "will be released in the near future"
-"Intended for professional film, digital cinema, and broadcast applications"
-it now offers realtime direct-to-disk capability over dual link HD-SDI onto Windows now and OS X "soon"
-alternative to tape based recording, much lower price point
-setup allow for picking AVI or QT wrappers
-recorded files IMMEDIATELY editable with no conversion or transcoding required IF using Premiere Pro on Windows (currently). Can also open directly in After Effects on Windows for compositing using native, recorded files
-Final Cut support coming
-tested using a Wafian prototype recorder (hardware computer solution using CineForm recording) recording off a Viper, compared to HDCAM SR deck, as well as StEM footage
-comparing peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), the CineForm solution bested HDCAM SR by 3 to 5 dB

Mike's Comments:

This all sounds very good - the Wafian recorder is simply a customized Windows portable system that has the horsepower and storage to record the CineForm codec format, but you could lug a suitably hoss system onto a stage/set for DIY recording for greenscreen etc. shoots. The Wafian makes it easier and productized, but the CineForm codec is the magic inside.

The point being they now have a very high quality recording option to meet or exceed the bit depth of the high end production being down these days over dual link HD-SDI. The F950, D-20, Genesis, & F23 will all kick out a maximum bit depth of 10 bits/channel over dual link HD-SDI.

I know just enough math to know that PSNR is important but not the only factor that matters when evaluating compression techniques. As someone on CML pointed out, 20 seconds or more of rolling footage viewed in a critical viewing environment is one way to evaluate material, and running compressed footage all the way through post processes to make sure nothing non-visible to human eyes but software visible (think keys and aggressive color correction).

The Davids were kind enough to point out all this material to me in recent weeks, but I've been too busy to sit down and thoroughly evaluate the material in the rigorous methods needed to give a comprehensive and definitive analysis.

But this all sounds very good and promising and it is great to have new options.

The ability to have a 2K master that edits in realtime with a reasonable datarate for high quality work. Wait, what datarates? I emailed David Taylor and he was kind enough to respond quickly:

But as a quick summary, using the StEM material (which is a bit more complex than most material, the average bitrates were:

CineForm 444 Filmscan 1: 350 Mbps (=43.8 MB/sec -mike)
CineForm 444 Filmscan 1-Keying: 410 Mbps (=51.3 MB/sec -mike)
CineForm 444 Filmscan 2: 415 Mbps (=51.8 MB/sec -mike)
CineForm 444 Filmscan 2-Keying: 480 Mbps (=60 MB/sec -mike)

Source in all test cases was 1920 x 1080 24p 10-bit dual-link HD-SDI.

David.


Those datarates are stretching beyond the bounds of what is reliably doable on a single SATA drive. Modern single SATA drives run from about 30-55 MB/sec (full to empty rates) for slower drives to 40-65 MB/sec for faster drives. So really, you need a RAID to run these - if you're using 44 MB/sec footage on a drive that falls below 40 MB/sec when full, you aren't going to get reliable, no frames dropped performance. So a RAID of some sort is a practical necessity, esp. if you want a realtime transition (where two streams must be sustained).

But even a small native SATA RAID 0 could suffice, and they are quite affordable (starting under $1000).

That said, some issues:

1.) At present, the only native editing solution is Premiere Pro on Windows. That's at least 3rd on the list of NLEs high end professionals (target for this product, remember) want to work on. Avid is serious editors #1 pick, Final Cut tends to follow, and then it devolves to "everyone else" of which Premiere Pro tends to be at the front of that line. Final Cut support is coming but not quite here yet (it is in beta). When it does get here, will he have realtime support for things like cross dissolves and color correction? That is a mission critical feature as far as I'm concerned.

So no Avid native support at all at present or on the foreseeable horizon (and they historically Don't Play Well With Others unless others are camera companies). But then again, you can always downrez (software easy but slow, hardware realtime but cumbersome esp. for timecode issues) for an offline edit and conform on PPro/AE. Then, if needed, kick out to uncompressed for online if you want to do so on a different system (DPX sequences, SR tape, whatevah).

2.) As the last bit of the above alludes, data migration. Right now you can get that footage into some desktop type apps on Windows, soon on Macs, but lets face it - most shoots working with HDCAM SR are likely to also be using heavy iron production equipment that is often Linux/Unix based, and expects a DPX sequence. While you CAN convert to that format, you're losing the storage, time, and One Master File convenience offered by CineForm. You could acquire and archive with CineForm, then convert to offline editorial codec and uncompressed full res for VFX - your "digital negative" would remain conveniently small.

3.) I have yet to do my own testing to verify how well this compressed format holds up to heavy post - aggressive color correction and green screen keying the two items of greatest concern.

OK, gotta go run...

UPDATE:

Got an email from David of CineForm and that got me thinking:

1.) You CAN just treat this like a deck, with data copied off as your "tape". Wafian HR-2 (designation of new model) DOES have dual link HD-SDI, so you could shoot on set, bring it back to studio/editorial, ingest over HD-SDI any way you want (DVCPRO HD for offline edit, downconvert to SD for edit, whatever), and have SOME kind of sync system to go back for the high res masters.

2.) OR you could batch process the Wafian files down to whatever you want for offline/online/VFX pipelines as needed using After Effects or possibly other tools. After Effects isn't built for batch conversion, but you can do it.

3.) High quality file based compressed wavelet source captured to hard drive that lets you convert to offline/online formats of choice - that's pretty much what Red is doing, but they're building their own conversion utility as well, with the added benefit that there is a shipping solution to edit it now with realtime effects (on a duly pimped system).

-mike

Labels: acquisition, Adobe, advanced, Avid, Cineform, disk based recording, FCP, Final Cut, NLE, post

ProLost: New Look

Stu Maschwitz, the brains behind the original Magic Bullet and more recently Colorista, couldn't help himself but to talk a little bit about the next version of Magic Bullet that is due to be demo'd at NAB.

Some tidbits of interest from his blog post with commentary, his in italics, mine in plain

Rather than a regular plug-in with a ton of sliders, Magic Bullet Looks features a standalone application with its own UI.


Hmm....I'm not sure about that, I'll have to see it in action. So much of what needs to be done gets done on THAT shot rather than applying a look. Stu gets workflow, so I'll have to trust him on this one until I can see it.

Interjection: I'd emailed Stu to talk about this, and he replied back:
Stu said:
I totally hear you -- the standalone UI is a double edged sword, but we're working to make it as non-modal as possible, and when you see the UI you'll understand why there was no other way.

Like the previous Look Suite, this tool isn't meant to be a color corrector in and of itself. The classic use would be Colorista followed by Magic Bullet Looks. You'd use MBL as a kind of LUT over your corrections. That way all the shots in a sequence have the consistent look but their own shot-by-shot corrections underneath. So there will be at least one mode of working where MBL will be somewhat fire-and-forget.

-Stu

That is certainly an interesting concept - Colorista for the tweaky tweaky color balancing, then MBL for applying a look. One key detail will be how the architecture in your app works - does it do Colorista in 32 bit floating point, then return results as what? Hopefully at LEAST a 10 bit space, not 8 bit RGB before THAT result gets sent to the next plugin (MBL). I don't know all the details on how exactly that works in each app, but it can make a substantial difference in the final quality results.

Back to quoting his blog entry...

Called Looks Builder, this application is launched when you apply the Look Suite 3 plug-in in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Avid, or Motion.

I like that modularity, and the ability to use same looks in all those apps (don't forget Premiere Pro is coming to Macs this year)

Within Looks Builder, you build and edit looks using Look Tools; modular mini-effects for things like bleach bypass, gradient filters, and film stock simulation. All of these tools work in realtime and can be tweaked and edited in context. All processing is done in floating-point color.

Floating point GOOD, preservation of >100 IRE better - Stu tipped me to this in my own workflow issues, so I'm guessing he'll handle it right, or as rightly as the software & APIs allow him to do so.

With over 30 Look Tools to assemble however you like, you can create an infinite variety of Looks.Or choose a preset. Pop open the Looks Theater to see 100 different preset looks applied to your image (not a canned thumbnail) in realtime.

This bodes well for him "getting it" the way I want it to work.

Magic Bullet Looks was designed to be easy and fun to use, but it's powerful enough for pros too. Filters and exposure adjustments work in real-world units. Color corrections obey industry standards. Cineon film scans and digital cinema images, such as those from the Panavision Genesis camera, are interpreted correctly and can be converted to video or left in their native color spaces. The same look that you develop on an Avid rough cut in video color space can later be applied to a 35mm scan.

BINGO. If he's supporting Panalog, that bodes very, VERY well that he'll be handling a lot of other high end things I want to be able to do (Viper balanced LUT?). And all this with hardware acceleration on an 8 core Mac Pro with a good GPU? Bwahahahahhahaaa.....the POWER! Now, if he could just get secondaries in Colorista...

-mike

Labels: Adobe, After Effects, Apple, Avid, DIY, FCP, Final Cut, Genesis, NAB, NLE, plugin, post, software

SO...we now can buy an 8 core Mac as of today. GOOD.

Let's do some tea leaf reading, starting with the most likely and getting speculative from there:

1.) No other Mac Pro computers to be announced at NAB. This is pretty much a foregone conclusion - why roll out hardware 10 days before a Big Announcement that would change said hardware? They'd either release it now, or WAIT. Since they did roll it out now, it makes sense that they realized this wasn't super impressive, so they wanted the bitter taste of dissapointment out of everyone's mouth that had hoped for more before NAB.

2.) Since the hardware has been announced, it is likely that the software announcements will be BIG. If Apple felt they didn't have anything too special to get folks psyched up about, they would have held onto this "new hardware" card to play that Sunday. Note last year - no new FCP, just a preview of stuff that didn't ship for months (24p HDV support & better P2 import), so they decided to roll out the new Macbook Pros at NAB to give us something to be excited about. Since they've played the hardware card, they're confident the software will rock.

3.) Final Cut Studio 6 *, if it is to include improved HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray authoring, is less likely to ship soon because of these hardware announcements. "Buh-whaaaaaa?" I hear you say? Let me explain - if Apple were going to be ready to ship an HD-DVD or Blu-ray burning version of Final Cut Studio, they'd need to have a hardware option to burn such discs. This announcement includes no mention of such hardware. If Apple WERE going to do so, they'd probably have held the announcement for NAB, as 8 cores and Blu-ray or HD-DVD burning would, in my mind, be "big enough" news.

Therefore, since the next hardware upgrade cycle is likely to be in the August/September timeframe at soonest, perhaps Final Cut Studio 6 will ship around that time if it has that feature? I know that sounds odd, but consider:

Apple has more than once previewed software at NAB that didn't ship until September or October of that year - witness Motion and Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 (that added 24p HDV and better P2 support). The rumors are this is a BIG update, with significant new features and maybe a ground-up rewrite. That kind of effort takes TIME, and even though they've had since last spring (when the Universal Binary PPC/Intel version 5.1 shipped) to work on it, depending on how big a bite they took of New Tech Pie, they could still be busy. The causality is getting a little thin, but one could interpret this hardware announcement to mean that not only will the next Final Cut Studio ship later this year, but it will be bigger/better than the routine update some have expected. That said, if Apple's offerings at NAB are just routine updates (new formats supported, more RT stuff), a LOT of folks will be dissapointed...me included.

* (or whatever it is called, internally I refer to it as "Final Cut xXx")

It IS possible they'll announce optional Blu-ray or HD-DVD burners as a BTO option at NAB, but that would be splitting fine hairs for Apple - to announce new machines 10 days before, then announce new OPTIONS for that machine later, is possible but odd and confusing to customers, and would piss off a lot of folks buying 8 core Macs for the next 10 days. Since you can order and receive one before NAB, that just doesn't quite make sense for Apple to do. Better to hold back the announcement if that were the case to avoid the backlash.

4.) Since there's no new GPU options, that makes the chances of the rumored Final Cut Extreme less likely to be true. Since no new GPU capabilities, nothing to run that big thing on.

Devil's Advocate/Off Chance - the rumors of a Final Cut Extreme that requires additional hardware fits into this model - if it is going to be some badass GPU with additional capabilities, then it makes sense that there's no improved GPU options...YET. Or that it'll replace the existing GPU with something much better, so it didn't make sense to offer something yet. The backlash argument applies here too, though.

5.) IF Final Cut Studio (next) isn't going to ship for some months, that also lends credence to the possibility that it would rely, or certain features only work under the next version of OS X, 10.5 aka Leopard. I had previously thought Apple might require Leopard for the next Final Cut, but it would be unlike Apple to require a new OS for a new version - more likely is that some features would be realtime under Leopard on sufficiently fast machines, but would require non-realtime rendering on non-Leopard machines. Again, just a theory, and inconsistent with Apple's past behavior. Too much splitting of hairs on performance leads to customer confusion, and Apple is averse to that. No version of FCP has ever had features that worked under one OS and not on another. Personally, I expect OS X 10.4.x (probably 10.4.9) or Leopard to be required for the next Final Cut Studio, however.

WRAP-UP:

Apple would get major points for "Surprise!" if they rolled out new, additional hardware at NAB, but then they would suffer from backlash of those that bought this week. Plus, Apple tends to follow a pretty predictable hardware release schedule, and this completely wouldn't fit their past behavior.

All this does tend to cement my belief that we'll SEE Final Cut Studio version xXx at NAB, but it won't SHIP for some time (months) after NAB. And I'm 100% certain it won't be a free download like version 4.5 was on Day Of. At this rate, the only reason for me to upgrade to a Mac Pro is for Redcine....until Apple and/or Adobe and/or Red show me otherwise.

That said, if at all possible...DON'T buy until after the press event two Sundays from now and we know what's coming and can make a fully informed purchasing decision.

-mike

Labels: analysis, Apple, Blu-ray, FCP, Final Cut, Mac Pro, NAB

Cineform has finally released a public beta of their Cineform Intermediate codec for OS X and Final Cut Pro.

The big deal for Cineform was Mac's migration to the Intel platform, so that the software port was easier and they wouldn't have to ditch a ton of code optimization for the Intel platform.

So now they have a QuickTime codec for Macs, albeit only for Intel Macs. It works with Final Cut Pro, and will eventually work with Adobe's Premiere Pro when it comes back to Mac later this year (also Intel only).

Cineform Intermediate is a 10 bit, full raster (full 1920 wide, not like DVCPRO HD's 1280 or HDV's 1440 pixels wide for a 1080i or 1080p signal), and uses wavelet based encoding - much more efficient than the DCT used in DV, JPEG, DVCPRO HD, HDV, etc.

The codec is cross platform (write on PC read on Mac and vice versa), but Intel Mac only, and requires Tiger (OS X 10.4.x). It can read and write files up to 2K (2048x2048) and is 4:2:2 color sampling.

Over time, they plan on adding Cineform RAW (for RAW workflows like SI-2K and Red One), HD-SDI and HDMI interface support, etc. So I take it that with this build, it won't be possible to capture and transcode on the fly with an AJA or BMD card.

This public beta is unrestricted and will work for a couple of months (into May) or more as they work at the bugs and add features to it.

More info at Cineform.com.

This is good news - the existing crop of codec choices is rather limiting. This is a great first step, but only a first step. To really work in a production environment in FCP, they'll need support and help from Blackmagic and AJA so that you can capture directly to this format (otherwise a lengthy transcode is required after acquiring uncompressed, for instance), as well as playout support so that it'll show up through an AJA or BMD card on your video monitor (as oppposed to computer monitor). Ultimately it would be great if Apple would support it in their RT (realtime) architecture, but I could see barriers to that, starting with Apple's "not invented here" penchant when it comes to third party codecs. Cineform knows this and is actively pursuing those relationships to make all this happen.

I haven't downloaded/installed it yet, but I would expect that it would install and work in Final Cut Pro, and hopefully play in realtime on a decently fast machine. I'd expect a still (park on the timeline) to possibly play out through an AJA or BMD card, but I wouldn't expect full speed video to play out, and you definitely won't get real time anything other than playback - no dissolves, color correction, etc. - it'll all have to render. But that is all supposition, I haven't tested it yet myself.

Adobe, however, plays nice with these guys, and they already have deep tie-ins to the code for Premiere Pro, so that is where I expect this codec to blossom on the Mac platform.

Plus, it'll be a good choice for a compressed working or intermediate codec for those lacking the array speed and capacity to handle high res uncompressed source.

-mike

Labels: Apple, Cineform, FCP, post

Apple - Support - Downloads - Final Cut Pro 5.1.3

from the PDF:

Render File Compatibility
Render files created on both PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macintosh computers now work properly on either type of computer.

Keyboard Layout Issues Resolved
Final Cut Pro 5.1.3 adds several commands to the default keyboard layout that were missing in the previous version.

Issues with Cross Dissolves in Nested Sequences Resolved
Final Cut Pro 5.1.3 resolves cases in which cross dissolves did not work as expected in nested sequences containing still images with adjusted motion parameters.


That's all they say...

UPDATE:

Colorista has a UI problem that makes it inoperable, Wes of Automatic Duck says there are problems -Duck Support Blog has details on that.

My advice - hold off a few days in general. If the above listed fixes a mission critical problem, update but be prepared to go back to earlier version (disk image using Super Duper of your boot drive). If you use Colorista or Automatic Duck, DEFINITELY do not upgrade until there are updated, proven to to work versions.

As always, careful jumping on the upgrade train!

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, NLE, post, software

Ampede | Press: "PDFLink 2 is a fully-integrated Final Cut Pro generator plugin that renders vector content from PDF and Adobe Illustrator files frame by frame, so the image is always razor-sharp regardless of scale, movement, or rotation. Vector content can be seamlessly mixed with QuickTime content, and the geometrics are fully keyframeable using the standard Final Cut Pro interface editors already know how to use."

Labels: FCP, plugin, post, software

(read article, then click on picture for larger view)
One of the things I'd been advocating as a workflow was to capture as native media via FireWire (such as for DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD, etc.). Do your offline in the native codec, then you can use Media Manager in Final Cut Pro to simply re-write the file to uncompressed. I felt so smart and smug to have figured this out, you can even Delete Unused Media to reduce the amount of footage converted...but it turns out, it doesn't do it as expected. It does it WRONG.

Retimed shots messed up? Used to do it, purportedly finally fixed with 5.1.2. So what goes wrong?

If you do this, you'll clip your highlights over 100 IRE - I just tested to verify. Dammit. So any so called "Super White" values will get clipped off. Not scaled, clipped. So you're losing highlight values.

...and it is completely invisible to the naked eye when comparing before/after images in FCP. So why does it matter? Because if you want to darken up the shot, you can retrieve some of that highlight info detail. If clipped and you wish to darken, it is gone forever.

There are cumbersome one-shot-at-a-time workarounds, as Stu suggests in his DV Rebel's Guide book, but I wouldn't want to have to go through all that - be faster just to batch recapture...which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place.

It boils down to a color space and QuickTime issue - in YUV space, you can have SuperWhite values. In RGB, you can't reall y (at least as QuickTime typically operates). When exporting via QuickTime, if it touches the QuickTime architecture, it is getting converted to an RGB color space along the way, and the SuperWhites are clipped.

If you never read my original 10 bit QuickTime in After Effects article, it is good reading as well for pertinent issues for high quality workflow issues as well.

More test notes - if you Media Manager Recompress To from one 10 bit 4:2:2 codec to another, Super Whites aren't clipped, they survive. But that's not a very helpful scenario for what I'm describing.

I tested DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD, and HDV, and they all clipped - most likely because of the above mentioned conversion issue - to transcode it bumps it through an RGB space, and you lose your highlight goodies.

As I said..hell, hell, hell...here's to hoping Apple might make a huge change to their QuickTime architecture to fix this for NAB...yeah, doubt it.

This revises a significant chunk of workflow-ery that I'd been banking on for quite some time, and raises further complicating issues as well - without handling shots one at a time the Stu way, in order to ensure you maintain full highlight detail for uncompressed post workflow, you'd need to recapture from tape via HD-SDI whenever possible. This opens further complications, esp. if you shot 24p - unless you shot on a camera that can kick out psF frames from the studio deck (and AFAIK HDV, DVCPRO HD, and XDCAM HD decks do NOT), you're in trouble - you'd have to capture 60 fps (1080i60 or 720p60) then try to remove pulldown...and oops, how are you going to do that? Again, the QT processing would clip it.

OK, here's a challenge for all you folks out there - how DO you optimally post these formats in Final Cut Pro if you can't ingest native 24p over HD-SDI?

The only solution I can think of so far is to make a dupe of the sequence, modify the sequence settings to the desired final format, then you'd have to change some aspect ratio stuff on all the clips, adjust some other timeline settings, then Render All to get a playable version. Every change you'd make would then require a render. Possible, but time consuming and sucky as compared to the convenience of my other approach...but highlights are maintained (yeah I checked). It does seem to follow one of Stu's rules - Respect Thine Pixel.

Anybody got a better way to handle this? Chime away in the Comments (use link below).

Of course, my brain will be churning on this as I watch SuperBowl ads...

-mike

UPDATE 1:
-exporting, clip by clip, from Timeline, Browser, or Viewer windows maintains Super Whites if re-imported directly into FCP
-double triple checking, taking same clip and Recompress To does not - SO - while QT is related, it isn't inherently involved - FCP has a native YUV (OK really Y'CbCr, but that's a pain to type) pipline, but clearly Recompress To in Media Manager does NOT.
-MAKING PROGRESS - I think I've found a way...gotta test some more, and make sure can relink to an Offlined project and have it all work...

UPDATE 2 - there's TONS of useful Comments, go read'em. Also, Stu just posted:

ProLost: Linear Color Workflow in AE7, Part 5

which folds in some related issues

as well as

Stu, writer of Colorista, writes and shows on ProLost one way to address the problem by compressing the video range - but only AFTER you're in a high precision YUV space (fix it in Timeline Settings in the Video tab).

And there's always this crap to worry about when taking files out of Final Cut Pro as well

Labels: advanced, FCP, post, workflow

Macworld: Creative Notes: Exploring Final Print:

"One common complaint about Final Cut Pro is that it is difficult to get notes and comments out of the program. There isn’t a direct way to get timecode-accurate collaboration notes to your sound mixer, for example."

also

"The idea behind Final Print is not particularly earth-shattering%u2014 it lets users add timecode accurate markers with comments to their sequences and then print out the contents of those markers with thumbnail images of the video. "

yeah. good. do that.

Labels: FCP, post, software, tips