The Editblog

While 2009 isn’t that far away I’m happy to report that I have recently gotten my hands on the Magic Bullet Suite 2008 from Red Giant Software. It’s a comprehensive suite of software that would go well in most any editors toolbox, especially if he/she does finishing out of the edit suite. There’s really a lot of things that this package can do and you might not use everything on one job. But then if you put them all together and use them to complement each other you just might find Magic Bullet Suite 2008 cab help put a polish on your edit that isn’t possible with the stock Final Cut Pro tools alone.

The biggie in the suite would probably be Magic Bullet Looks. There’s been a lot written about Looks and its innovative approach of simulating different parts of the filmmaking process in order to achieve a desired look. It shows that someone was thinking outside the box when they designed the interface and the results can be stunning. Presets or custom looks, you can do things in Magic Bullet Looks you can’t do anywhere else.

Magic Bullet Colorista is color correction tool similar to the Final Cut Pro three way color corrector but only in the color-wheels they both share. While you can do nice work with the stock FCP 3-way corrector Colorista comes much closer to what a higher end color grading suite could achieve. Use it once and you won’t want to color correct with the FCP’s built-in tool again.

Magic Bullet Frames is for giving interlaced video the 24P look of film. And everyone who has interlaced video these days wants the film-look right?

Magic Bullet Steady is an image stabilization tool. Wobbly, shaky, jittery … Steady will attempt to smooth it out and give you a few options for the smoothness level, all the way to a lock down. It’s goes head-to-head with Smoothcam and claims much faster time when analyzing footage.

Finally there is Magic Bullet Instant HD. Designed to convert standard definition DV to high definition Instant HD uses sharpening and anti-aliasing to up-rez to any number of HD formats.

I’ve begun kicking the tires on the Suite and so far it’s a nice package. Stay tuned for an upcoming review of the different parts and pieces.

Hot on the heels of the Rian Johnson RED debate, Avid had launched a new part of their website devoted to … wait for it … the RED camera and RED post production. There’s an overview tab, Avid resources as well as links to third part resources. Best of all there is a pdf (direct pdf link here) that goes into great detail about the steps needed to properly post your RED projects in Avid and track the metadata so you have as many options as possible for finishing.

The first thing you’ll notice about Avid Media Composer 3.0 is the … icons. That’s right, for all of the longtime Avid users out there the iconic icon of the little weightlifter there on the z key known as “lift” … is gone.

He and many others have been replaced by more generic icons across the board. This was reported on the web before the release hit the streets so it wasn’t entirely a shock. I kind of miss the little guy though as the weightlifter always meant Avid. But I can see why they changed the z key as well as a number of other icons. They have decided to color-code a number of basic editing functions across the application.

The red arrow now means to lift or overwrite an edit across the application. That means when you perform an edit with any one of the “red-arrowed” edit functions you won’t be causing yourself any real sync issues as the new media overwrites what is there.

When using a “yellow-arrowed” edit function like extract or splice-in, you will close that hole upon an extraction or insert new media thus moving all other elements down in the track, possibly causing sync issues. Of course that depends on how you have your sync-lock function working but that’s the idea. Lift/overwrite functions in red and extract/splice-in in yellow. It may be scandalous that the weightlifter is gone but the color-coding of those basic edit commands, with icons that more represent the actual function, was probably done to make it easier for new users to understand. And that it should.

With that out of the way the next thing you’ll notice about this new release is the speed. One generally thinks about having to buy a new computer with a faster processor to get more speed but with this Avid update you get it included in the software. It’s speed where it counts too. Faster moving around the timeline, both with audio scrubbing on and off. Faster reactions when moving things to and from bins as well as better responsiveness when navigating menus and settings. But most importantly is more speed with all things related to that timeline. Entering and then playing in trim mode is near instantaneous. Un-dos and re-dos happen about as quick as you can push the buttons. And the four-frame display while in segment mode is thankfully usable again. Avid has said that for this release they were concentrating on performance and stability. That means maybe we shouldn’t have expected a ton of new flashy features. It’s always interesting when software updates are more of an upgrade that is based on performance rather than new tools or features as it might not make for as an exciting a demo at a trade show … but the change will be obvious for users of previous versions of Media Composer once you start editing.

As I mentioned I’m happy to report that Trim mode is speedier with this upgrade. The Avid Trim mode is something that it is always worth mentioning when talking about Avid Media Composer. I’ve never met anyone who uses the Avid that doesn’t live in trim mode. It’s one of the most missed features when cutting on Final Cut Pro. I was once asked to provide a quote about Avid trim mode and here is what I said: “The Avid trim tool is by far the greatest non-linear editing tool to be coded by a human being. It is very functional and very intuitive. From the simplest double roller trim to the most complex asynchronous multi-track trim, it delivers. And the ability to play out a slip or slide edit makes it even more useful. Plus there is the great little progress line that plays along in the timeline as you trim. It’s perfect visual feedback. Yea, I know that FCP added jkl (dynamic) trimming but its implementation is still light years behind what Avid has perfected.”

That may sound like hyperbole but IMHO that’s how good trim mode is and with the new speed in version 3 it’s faster … and faster is better.

Roundtripping is a big buzzword in the Final Cut Studio suite as well as Dynamic Relinking in the Adobe Creative Suite. These terms describe a link between the editing application and supporting apps like After Effects or Motion. Create a motion graphics sequence in one of these apps and then without rendering out a piece of self-contained media drop them into the timeline of their sister editing app (Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro) and you can render the motion graphic in the timeline. Update the graphic later in the creating application and it will update in the editor. With this version of MC Soft 3.0 on the Macintosh, Avid has added its own graphics and effects application Avid FX.

Avid FX is based off of Boris RED. Boris RED is a titling, effects and compositing piece of software that has been around for years. While it doesn’t have the penetration of Adobe After Effects (and probably not Apple Motion either) it does have a devoted following. Anyone familiar with After Effects will be able to pick their way around Avid FX and really learn it well with some dedicated time.

Click for larger view of Avid FX interface

Unfortunately there isn’t a printed manual included for Avid FX (no one seems to include them anymore) so you’ll have to rely on the help files to learn more. And those help files aren’t great but they are better than nothing. The best thing about Avid FX is that when installed you get a new category in the effects palette called Avid FX. The Avid FX Filter and Avid FX Transition can be applied just like any effect or transition in the timeline. You can then open the Avid FX application via the effects editor and go to town doing any kind of effects or compositing work you see fit. The full effect build is then updated in the timeline. It’s really useful with the transition effect as you apply it as a transition between the two clips and then build a custom transition from within Avid FX. The Avid FX Title-Matte Effect seems like it would allow you to create a title or something similar and then just key through to the background just like any title. It doesn’t seem to work that way for me and to be quite honest I can’t figure out exactly what it does so if you’ve got that one figured out please comment below. Another nice thing about Avid FX? You don’t have to go to Marquee anymore!

If you are new to Avid from Final Cut Pro one thing that always seems confusing is segment mode.

When you click and drag around in the timeline you are only moving the playhead, not individual clips in the timeline. To move clips via click & drag you have to enter segment mode. It’s a totally different philosophy from how a number of other editing apps work but for many it allows the editor to perform basic edits very fast. For others it is baffling. To this day I can still do a basic cuts/dissolve type edit, say rebuilding from a printed EDL or a paper cut, much faster in Avid than in Final Cut Pro. One thing that would be a great improvement would be for the Avid to stay in the selected segment mode until the editor turns segment mode off. The app will stay in segment mode after you move a clip and then play or move the playhead via the keypad but if you click and drag down in the timecode track to move the playhead you leave segment mode. By staying in the selected mode it would allow for another way of working which would be very welcome. Avid also finally added the ability to select clips on different tracks and move them via segment mode. What they haven’t done is give the editor the ability to select multiple non-adjacent clips and move them together. This kind of makes it feel like they have just missed something with segment mode but the developers are aware that this would be a nice feature to have and it will probably come along in future updates.

A couple of great new features that have been added are the Timecode Burn-In tool and the Subcap tool. Both are under the new Generators heading in the effects pallet.

The Timecode Burn-In tool goes a step beyond simple burn-in and allows customization of different types of displays and it does so in real time.

One fantastic thing that it does is display other types of information like clips names and a custom note.

The new Subcap tool is an easy way to add open captioning from a text file. According to Avid it “Provides quick and easy way to fulfill delivery requirements for foreign markets and integrates easily into existing subtitling workflows by supporting EBU-N19.” I haven’t used it for this particular purpose but I did slap it on an offline the other day and use it to provide on-screen notes on parts of the edit as it went by. As I mentioned these new effects are under a Generator heading so I hope they will provide other new additions to the Generators in the future.

They’ve also added improved performance for HD codecs that aren’t full raster like HDV and DVCPRO HD:

New codecs are supported like Sony XDCAM-EX (using the Sony Clip Browser software), Panasonic AVC-I & JVC 23.976p & 25p HDV. Plus, contrary to what you might have read in other reviews (and confusingly on Avid’s own site) Media Composer 3 software will run on PowerPC Macs. I’ve run it on a Mac Pro and a Dual 2.7 G5. Performance on the G5 is pretty good.

I also want to mention ScriptSync. People often wonder what the advantages of Media Composer over Final Cut Pro might be. Here’s one great example. Besides the fact that you can even do script based editing on Avid and can’t on FCP, allowing Script Sync technology to phonetically line the script with actual takes from captured media means you don’t have to do it by hand. One important thing to remember is that it doesn’t have to be a narrative script. If you have transcripts of footage then you can use ScriptSync to associate the transcript with the footage. It’s a great way to stay organized and find specific things at a moments notice. It can work in languages other than English and is surprisingly accurate as well.

What’s not to like? One thing that I hate, hate, hate about Media Composer is that you can’t do any kind of scrolling or zooming around the timeline while it is playing back. Try to zoom out and playback stops. Hell, try to clear an IN point and playback stops!! This seems very antiquated in a modern NLE. I also really wish Avid had some kind of “check for updates” menu (or even a stand alone application) that would look at your currently installed version, and also the OS and QuickTime versions, and be able to download the updates. It has always been difficult to even learn about updates to the Avid software much less download and install them. Even if a new version requires you to uninstall an old version they should build some kind of tool that makes this process easier. In an age where all computers are connected to the Internet, software updating should be a simple affair. I don’t mean it should be automated as you don’t want to update your editor right in the middle of a big project but it should be one click to at least see what the new version is and where to get it. Even better if it can tell you things like the fact that you might need to start at version 3.0.1 for Mac OS 10.4 because of a bug related to the Avid Mojo SDI box and Mac OS 10.5. And it may be just me but the Export dialog box has always been confusing. There is only one Export under the file menu and from there you choose what you want from a pop-up. You can then Save As that setting and it ends up in the Settings tab. I have tons of them there and I wish there was a better way to store them. It also seems like I often make a change to a setting and don’t save it properly so the next time I go to output a Quicktime Movie with a particular export setting it’ll be set to something else. Maybe I’m just not paying enough attention but usually you are exporting near the end of the day so it really should be idiot proof. And don’t even get me started on the Send To menu. Like the Avid FX Title-Matte Effect, maybe i am just dumb but there is something about the Send To operations that has always stumped me. And Media Composer 3 is certified to work with Leopard but damn if it doesn’t make my dock do some crazy disappearing/becoming invisible act sometimes after tabbing through Spaces or hiding and showing. I know that it’s still there as I can show/hide the dock but I see some funky mirror image of the dock which isn’t really there anymore:

Seems like a bug so I guess they aren’t all gone.

This release is much more stable than the last. Crashes were few and far between and I only have seen one instance of the dreaded “bus error” that has plagued some earlier Media Composer releases. While I’m still not sure I like the cryptic error messages you get when Avid crashes there has to be some reasoning behind the long, crazy string of characters that pop-up. It might be less scary if you just got a generic “this application has unexpectedly quit” message but that would not mean as much to someone in the know.

To sum up … Avid Media Composer 3 is a must update for Avid users. The speed alone makes it worth the price of admission. There are a number of upgrade options from early versions of Media Composer as well as Avid Xpress Pro and Avid Xpress DV. If you choose the download option there is also a download-able bundle of the 3rd party applications that come in the boxed version for $195. That’s worth it as you get Sorenson Squeeze and Avid FX, two applications that make the suite much more worthwhile. So if you are an Avid user grab your checkbook and get version 3.

I was reading over Larry Jordan’s monthly newsletter today (and if you use Final Cut Pro and don’t subscribe then you should) and the second item under the contents is this: Hard Disk Warning! That’s always worth a second look so here is part of what Larry says:

Magnetic signals recorded on a hard disk are designed to be refreshed periodically. If your hard disks stay on, this happens automatically. However, if you store your projects to a removable hard drive, then store that hard drive on a shelf, unattached to a computer, those magnetic signals will fade over time… essentially, evaporating.

According to what I’ve been told, the life-span of a magnetic signal on a hard disk is between a year and a year and a half. The issue is complex, as you’ll see, but this is a MUCH shorter shelf-life than I was expecting.

Holy crap me too! I’m sure many of us keep hard drives around for entire projects as it’s much easier to plug in a drive and make changes than it is to recapture and rebuild an edit long after that edit is done. I’ve even found myself storing drives for clients after an edit not knowing it I will ever boot those drives up again. And I don’t always remember to pull them out and power them up as often as I should. This is even more important in the era of tapeless acquisition with XDCAM, P2 and especially RED. I can’t see into the future but I would bet that there are going to be a lot of pissed off RED camera owners out there in a 5 years when they go to boot up old hard drives and they won’t work. The lesson here is always archive your most important media to something other than hard drives and/or take time to check those drives on a regualar basis so they still work years from now. Just goes to show the need for an easy, reliable, cheap and (most importantly) accepted archiving system in the tapeless age. Larry has a lot more to say about this topic so click over and read the whole thing.

I’ve been enjoying the batch processing capabilities of REDrushes and as I was asked recently about the different debayer quality options I had a general answer to what the different quality levels mean but I had not done a side by side comparison. The debayering process converts the raw RED data to an RGB image for use in the video world so the higher the quality the better the image, at least in theory. When you do side by side comparisons with the same footage there are some subtle differences in quality.

The image below is from a 4k clip converted with REDrushes and the Full Res debayer setting to a 1920×1080 ProRes 422HQ file (click on the images for a larger view):

The next image below is the same part of the same frame of a 1920×1080 Prores 422HQ file that was debayered at Quarter resolution:

It’s a bit tough to see here on the web but the quarter rez debayer has noticeably more noise. It’s not extreme but it’s enough that you probably would lose some latitude when doing a color correction, especially if you were pushing the image. It also takes a LOT longer to render the full debayer.

The other place it would be most noticeable is around edges. You really begin to see the difference in the quality levels when you apply a difference matte between the two examples (click on the images to open a larger version):

Again, it’s very tough to see in this low quality web image and it depends a lot on the monitor you are viewing on but if the light isn’t too bright on the screen and you get really close (click on the image above for a larger view) you can really see the outline and edges on the slate. Here’s an exaggerated version:

Is there that much of a loss that it’s worth the extra time and effort to debayer at full rez? It might be more of a mathmateical question for the programmers as to what you really gain from full rez and as I’m an editor and not a colorist I don’t really know the answer (maybe a colorist or two will chime in via the comments) but if you can see that much difference in the matte above then that seems to me like loss enough to debayer at full rez for the final online. For the most dramatic example render you own footage with REDrushes at the two extremes of debayer quality, slap them in the a timeline, apply the difference matte (thanks Jon) and then render the full moving image. When the footage starts moving you can see even more.

There’s been a number of new installs of Avid Media Composer 3.0 around the web so I’ll add my entry to the list as well. I actually installed it a couple of weeks ago but have been on a longer Final Cut Pro job so I have only dipped my toes in … until yesterday. First impressions?

Whoa … this thing is fast. Avid says they spent a lot of time just concentrating on making the application more responsive and they weren’t kidding. Moving around the timeline, audio scrubbing, trimming and dragging things via segment mode is lightning fast. It’s by far more responsive during basic timeline editing than any NLE I’ve used. Oh sure some will say “shouldn’t it have been this way all along?” My experience with software, and especially large and complex software, has been that as the life of the application progresses and it get more complex it often slows until it reaches a point where the developers (and often the users) say enough and they concentrate less on fancy new features and more on refining the basics. It happened with Quark Xpress, it’s happening with Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and it’s now happened with Media Composer. The interface is nearly identical to the MC Soft of old, save for some controversial icon changes, but it feels like a brand new application.

The feel of a software application is something that is hard to define. It’s the way the various buttons, sliders and windows interact with your mouse and your keyboard instructions. It’s the way the various windows fit together and the control the app gives the user over how those windows look and fit together. And of course it’s how quickly overall the app responds to user inputs. When you spends hour after hour after hour in the same application a solid feel is very important. So far Media Composer 3.0 has that feel. It’s a feeing it hasn’t had in a long while. Stay tuned … more in-depth reviews of MC Soft 3.0 to come.

It’s probably not very often that an editor comes across the very first thing he or she ever edited (at least during the modern non-linear era) but the other day while going through a bunch of old Zip discs I came across just that. It was a happy day on Wednesday, August 7 1996 at 12:02 AM when I export a tiny 160×120 Quicktime and thought I had accomplished a major task that few had ever done … of course this You Tube version below is all scaled up, double the frame rate and looks like shit! It was that day that my Power Computing Power Tower with a MiroMotion video card and AV-rated hard drive arrived at my house. I had bought it in frustration a few days before after renting a linear VHS editing suite for the day to cut a short film I was working on to submit for a scholarship to film school. I decided this linear crap is for the birds and NLE is the way to go. The software was Adobe Premiere 4.2.

It is simply some stock footage off a Quicktime demo cd, some animation from who know where, a lot of sound effects, cheesy wipes, PIP effects and Adobe Premiere transitions and Stone Temple Pilots as the sound track. It was really just a technical exercise to see that you could do with “non-linear” editing software. This was 1996 so the final format was a one minute 160×120 Quicktime in the Apple Video codec with thousands of colors! I was totally blown away by the control you had with an NLE to get an edit just right. The system served its purpose as I was able to complete the edit for the short (maybe I’ll put that on You Tube!) which was submitted for a scholarship (which I got) and it was off to film school in 1997. I guess as they say the rest is history!

Have you ever been capturing footage from tape and you get an error message that says: “Tape Trouble. Check VTR. Do not attempt to eject tape or use transport without checking VTR first.” There’s nothing wrong with the tape and it apparently has something to do with the way Final Cut Pro communicates with your deck via 422 control. A bit of a search came up with a fix that involves a patch from AJA, makers of the Kona card, but this patch is not on their support site. I also found a long thread on Creative Cow where someone mentions the name of the patch but no link as to where to find it. A Google search for the name of the patch, DisableAltETTPolling.txt , brought up this Apple document where they give you the code to build your own patch. I did as they suggest and upon launching FCP it gives this error message:

And they are right as a blue render bar will pop up in certain timelines:

But this patch did fix the capture errors as I was able to capture from that point forward. I did all my capturing and then removed the patch from the plug-ins folder and all is well. Doesn’t seem like the most elegant solution but it worked. So if you’ve been having the “Tape Trouble. Check VTR. Do not attempt to eject tape or use transport without checking VTR first” error message then maybe this will help.

UPDATE: Check the comments below for a note from Philip Hodgetts. Seems this may only happen when capturing ProRes 422. If you’ve had this error please comment below as to what format you were capturing and how you fixed it.

The other day I had a bit of an Apple Compressor vs. Sorensen Squeeze smackdown and I didn’t even know it! After getting approval on an edit I authored a DVD and encoded my file via Compressor. The encode looked good except for one portion where I did a push-in move on one of the many still images used in the piece. There was a lot of flicker and artifacting on one particular shot. It was most noticable under the eyes of the subject of the picture:

If you look closely you can see a red line under the eye in the above image. Compare that to the original DV source:

This red artifacting produced a noticeable flicker as the picture move occurred. Rather than troubleshoot the encode settings (I used both the 90 minute DVD encode presets in Compressor) I ran the edit through Sorenson Squeeze. Using its default settings for DVD the problem spot looked good, though slightly darker:

Overall the Sorenson encode looked very good and seemed to have less artifacting. If you look closely (and you have to look very closely at this jpeg as it lost quite a bit on the conversion to this web image below) at a difference matte between the Compressor encode and the original video, the red line under the eye is very prominent:

Now we all know that DV resolution material compressed via MPEG for DVD delivery isn’t the best quality that can be had but it’s very common and can produce a good result. As I said I didn’t have a lot of time to troubleshooting and experiment with different bit rates and compression and such so this isn’t the most scientific test but what it did show me was that for that particular problem spot with a client waiting on delivery, Sorenson Squeeze came out on top.

FreshDV noted that RED has released new versions of a number of their tools. The RedAlert release now includes REDrushes, a batch processing application which looks to be a similar workflow to running the Quicktime reference proxies through Compressor. You should get better results in image quality in that REDrushes is working directly with the .R3D files. There are options to create TIFFs, DPXs and Quicktimes. A number of Quicktime codecs are available but as of the build I have there is NO option for Avid DNxHD! I hope this is just an oversite as the codec is available in REDCine so I don’t understand why if wouldn’t be available here as well. As with most RED software releases there isn’t a lot of documentation and you wouldn’t know REDrushes is even there if you didn’t notice it in the release notes on the RED site or just happen to see it in your applications folder after the REDAlert install. It’ll be great when RED one day really buckles down and concentrates on the post software they are supplying but until then REDrushes is a good step forward for batch processing. I’m putting on a batch overnight so here’s to hoping it doesn’t crash!