Great Story. Check.

Solid Production Values. Check.

Performances………whoops.

Time and time again I see this problem with low budget filmmaking.

And it’s a problem, that as an actor and a filmmaker, really annoys the shit out of me when it comes to indie film.

It is quite often that when watching a student short, or a low budget short or any type of film project made by an amateur filmmaker, that they forget one integral piece of the puzzle when it comes to telling their story.

And that my friends, is the actors.

Now I’m not saying this happens all the time, and I’m not going to spend the next little while ranting but I’d just like to point  out a few reasons (with some very good examples) as to why casting is so important when making a film.  ESPECIALLY if you don’t have the money to really have all the bells and whistles of a multi-million dollar, government backed film.  And guess what??  It’s bloody easy!

For starters, films are made by memorable performances.  When people walked away from Avatar they were blown away by the visuals, but disappointed by the story and performances (well…except for Chris, but he’s a Jim Cameron fan-boy).  A similar case can be made for the always criticised Michael Bay.  Sure he shoots action better than most, but you always walk away from his movies unfulfilled cause all you can think about is how cringe worthy the actors were (apologies Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, but you really are just awful).

New directors are often scared by actors.

I can totally understand why too as there is a minority of actors that gives us all a bad name.  You know the ones I mean.  They constantly name drop who they’ve worked with, what shows they’ve been on, that time that they were in that TV commercial for VB and were fourth in from the back next to the bar.  Oh yeah and how they like to prepare on set by being “in character” the entire time the cameras arn’t rolling which means yelling abuse at crew, running off set and also throwing themselves into wardrobe vans because “their character” has ADD (true story).

Then when push comes to shove these so called professionals get on set and are about as interesting to watch as a piece of dried toast.

I think we’re all smart enough to be able to know a good performance from a bad one so I urge you,  next time you are casting your short or looking for actors, take that little bit longer to look past the one that was on home and away or was in a toothpaste commercial or perhaps was in a “feature film” that you’ve never heard of but IMDB said it’s real so you just assumed you missed it.

Australia is CHOCK A BLOCK full of talented actors who are great to work with and all about the work rather than the fame.  And guess what??  They are also quite lovely people whom you can talk to and work with rather than against to get the best for your film.

So where do you start to look???

There are plenty of wonderful institutions for actors in Melbourne including Melbourne Actors Lab, Tafta and The Rehearsal Room.  You can even look online by signing up for an account with Showcast and potentially going through agents.

Our personal favourite, and number one recommendation though are our friends and sometimes collaborators at 16^th Street Actors Studio.

The work that goes on in that place is truly sublime and the teachers are some of the best in the business including people like Pamela Rabe, Kerry Armstrong, Noni Hazlehurst (just to name a few).  They have a view on acting that works along a similar path as it does in the states which is that actors, regardless of who they are, never stop training.  And it’s about finding the truth in the performance.  Not playing for laughs or squeezing out a tear cause the script asks you too, but investing time in finding the truth of each character.  It’s the very thing that makes some performances so damn affecting.

They have even managed to bring out some of THE WORLDS BEST acting coaches in recent years like Ivana Chubbuck (Halle Berry, Charlize Theron) and Larry Moss (Leonardo DiCaprio, Hilary Swank) to take master classes here in Melbourne.  Their tireless efforts to get the best out of actors is nothing short of inspiring.

So long story short (kinda) I urge you, next time you are looking to cast your short or your low budget feature or your TV pilot, take that little bit longer and a bit more care in casting your project.  Don’t just settle for credits, or because people are willing to work for nothing or “just have the right look” for what you want.

Take the time to find the real actors.  The ones that will give you truth and will give you their all and will fight for their character.  Because that my friends, will be the difference between your film being Great or just kinda ok.

Think of films that have blown you away in recent times, and why you loved them.  I can almost guarantee you that what you will remember is the performances – especially, if like me, you like walking away from a movie having been affected in some way shape or form.

Here is a bunch for me that really shook me to the core, made me laugh, made me cry or just plain fascinated me in the last little while:

• Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
• Kristen Wiig – Bridesmaids
• Christian Bale – The Fighter
• Ryan Gosling / Michelle Williams – Blue Valentine
• Daniel Henshall / Lucas Pittaway – Snowtown
• Ryan Gosling – Drive

Back in October last year, I was invited to speak to the 3rd and 4th year students at Swinburne University about Post Production Workflows (if you haven’t already, you can read about everything I discussed last time here). A couple of weeks ago I was invited back again to cover the same sort of thing with a whole new bunch of 3rd year students.

Not surprisingly, a fair bit has changed in the months between the lectures, so I thought it might be useful to document some of the new things I discussed on this blog. I’m obviously not going to go into as much detail as I did in the lecture, and in a lot of cases I will just provide links to other articles, rather than going through things step-by-step, but if you do have any questions, or if anything is unclear, just let me know!

One question that lots of students had was, when you’re shooting with cameras such as the RED or ARRI Alexa that shoot such big files (and generally speaking people end up shooting a lot more footage with digital formats than if they were shooting with film – just because they can) – what’s the best way to store all this media when you’re a poor student filmmaker?

Backing up and later ARCHIVING your media is incredibly important – as I’m sure everyone can appreciate. I know at least a handful of filmmakers who have COMPLETELY lost their films, simply because they didn’t have their files adequately backed up. One poor girl had two copies of the media stored in two completely separate locations – but purely due to bad luck (a house fire at her Mum’s house and a electrical storm at her Dad’s house), even that wasn’t enough. Gone are the days of having a tape backup of everything (so at least you can re-capture all your media if a drive dies) – now days almost everything is stored digitally on really cheap hard drives.

Recently, Sony in the UK had a massive fire due to the recent riots, and their whole warehouse got burnt down, with thousands of DVD all going up in smoke (have a read of Chris Jones blog if you haven’t already). If you had your master stored at this facility – you’d be pretty worried right about now!

Given these sorts of horror stories, we always recommend that you have THREE copies of your media, in TWO different locations (although, three would be better!), on at least TWO different formats. For example, in the professional world we normally have one or two LTO copies of all the camera originals for archiving purposes, and then also have it on three hard drives for easy access.

However, if you’re a poor film student, then archiving to LTO might not be a viable option.

An blank LTO5 tape will cost you around AUD$115.00, which has a native data capacity of 1.5 TB. If you’re shooting a short film to RED, then you may be able to get all your R3D files onto the one LTO – which isn’t that much compared to a hard drive. So if you can hunt down a production house that has an LTO deck you can use for a few hours, then that might be a really viable option. LTO’s a great, because as they are tape based, you can store them on a shelf and not worry about having to check them every few months (like you have to do with a hard drive – which are designed to be “spun up” every now and again).

If you were to buy an LTO deck for use on a MacPro it will cost you around:

ExpressSAS Card = $594.00
HP Ultrium 3000 SAS External Tape Drive LTO5 = $2,594.90
BRU PE Producers Edition for Mac OS X = $649.00
TOTAL: AUD$3837.00

Although not cheap – long term, it makes a lot of sense to archive to LTO as opposed to hard drives, so if you produce a lot of media, then it’s really worth the investment.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you download and have a good read through Silverado’s white paper on Archiving for Indies, as it covers this whole topic of LTO arching in great detail.

But assuming you don’t have any friends that have an LTO deck you can use – what’s the next best thing that’s affordable for students?

My suggestion would be to store all your CAMERA & AUDIO ORIGINALS (i.e. the R3D files or ProRes 4444 files) on THREE separate drives, stored at THREE separate locations. In terms of a student film, I would give one drive to the editor, one to the director, and one to the producer (assuming they’re not all the same people). You might even be able to store a drive at your University, just for good measure – or maybe you just leave a drive at your grandparents house in a top cupboard for the duration of the post production process.

To keep things as cheap as possible, my suggestion would be to just use bare drives (i.e. drives without an enclosure). You can pick up a Seagate 500 GB drive for as little as $42.00, or a 1 TB drive for $59.00 – which is pretty incredibly cheap if you think back to how much drives costed only a few years ago. You can buy these drives from any computer reseller, however if you’re near the city – then somewhere like Computer & Parts Land (CPL) in West Melbourne is a great option – as they’re cheap, open long hours and they normally have heaps of drives in stock. There are also plenty of online resellers that sell these kinds of drives really cheaply.

So how do you actually connect these drives to your computer? Luckily, there are heaps of different hard drive docking stations out there, so you have plenty of options – some that are really cheap, others that are built incredibly well, and cost a bit more money. For example, the product pictured above cost $29.00 from online reseller MacFixIt. There are plenty of options out there, including enclosures that have two bays (such as this one – $65 from CPL) – so it’s worth just doing a bit of Googling to see which enclosure is right for you.

On this topic though – one very important thing to keep in mind BEFORE you purchase an enclosure is what kind of connection are you going to use? Given that you will be moving around very large chunks of data – the fastest connection you can get the better. If you’re lucky enough to have a new Apple laptop – then maybe a Thunderbolt drive is your best option. Thunderbolt I/O technology gives you two channels on the same connector with 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions meaning you can move data to and from peripherals up to 20 times faster than with USB 2.0 and up to 12 times faster than with FireWire 800. The only downside is that as the technology is new, only a few products exist on the market currently, and their expensive. The next best option is eSATA. If you have a MacPro, then you’ll either need to purchase a eSATA card ($65 from MacFixIt), or you can get a cable that actually connects to the motherboard of the Mac ($25 from MacFixIt) – or if you’re on a 17″ MacBook Pro, you can buy a ExpressCard with eSATA connections ($29 from CPL or MacFixIt). If you can’t afford to upgrade to eSATA – then you’re best bet is FireWire 800. FireWire 400 and USB are generally a bit too slow for throwing around lots of data – but if that’s all you’ve got then that’s all you’ve got. Basically – just go with the fastest option you can afford, and remember you’re only as fast as the weakest link (for example if you’re copying from a USB card reader to a Thunderbolt drive – the bottleneck will be the USB card reader).

So now you should have all your camera originals stored on three separate drives in three separate locations. But that’s really just the start. You now have to make media files which you’ll actually use for the offline process. If you’re shooting on RED, you might use REDCINE-X to transcode all the R3D files to ProRes or DNxHD – or if you’re shooting Alexa, you may just be working with the native ProRes files directly off the camera. I would recommend having two copies of all the offline material – one kept with the director and one with the editor (again, assuming they’re not the same person) – that way if you accidentally drop your drive the day before you need to export EDLs or OMFs – you can just jump straight back onto the backup drive. In a perfect world, it would be great to work off a RAID-protected (meaning, a Redundant Array of Independent or Inexpensive Disks) drive, as opposed to a standard drive for added protection. You can pick up two bay enclosures from as little as $149.00 from MacFixIt that allow you to run what’s called a RAID 1 – which basically mirrors the content from one drive to another. If you’re working with a huge amount of footage, then maybe a four-bay enclosure that supports RAID 5 (which means that if one of the four drives fails, then you can still re-build the information using the three other drives) would be a better option. If you want to learn more about how RAID protection works, there are plenty of resources out there on the Internet, such as this video.

Backing up the offline media to hard drives is really the only viable option. However, backing up project files from Final Cut Pro or Avid is a completely different story, as the files sizes are so small. As an added precaution, I would always keep multiple backups of your actual edit – just in case. How you do this is really up to you – maybe you can just store all your backups on a fairly large USB Stick (4 GB for $14.95 at MacFixIt - although sometimes you can buy even cheaper and bigger flash storage from places like Office Works), or you can backup your files to “the cloud” using services such as Dropbox, or any of the other cheap/free online storage services out there (of which there are many). Most universities offer some kind of storage on their servers as well – so that’s another good option for student filmmakers.

As usual – which workflow and backup procedure you use will come down to your budget. At the very least though, you should have three backups of your raw media ($59 x 3 = $177), and two copies of your offline material ($59 x 2 = $118) plus at least a couple of SATA docking stations ($65) – so you can really get everything working for under $400, which is a pretty good deal. Obviously storing your camera originals to LTO would be a much SAFER option – but when you’re a student, you have to work with what you can afford.

Below are some useful links to various sites around the Internet that are worth checking out on the topic of backing things up. I’m sure there’s plenty of other great sites out there, so if you have any favourites please share them in the comments!

Useful Articles:

• Anything worth backing up…
• My Personal Backup Routine
• How disaster proof are you?
• Archiving Dilemma
• Inexpensive Archiving for Tapeless Media
• How secure is your data? Do film makers create more data than most others…?
• Are you ready for a crash?
• DIGITAL DISASTER!
• Backup Overview
• Backup Tips – Prevent data loss with a good backup strategy

The other area that students wanted to learn more about what workflows for different digital formats.

Unlike previous years, a lot of students this year are shooting on the ARRI Alexa (mainly because Swinburne now owns one). The Alexa is great, as the camera generates direct-to-edit ProRes media with embedded timecode and reel IDs, allowing you to basically instantly have access to the footage on Final Cut Pro or Avid (using AMA). These are self-contained files without a folder hierarchy to mess you up, like with P2 or XDCAM – you simply drag the ProRes files into the Final Cut Pro browser and away you go! In theory anyway. There are really only two things you need to keep in mind with the Alexa. If you shoot ProRes 4444, the file sizes are quite massive, and depending on your hard drive, what connection you’re using (i.e. Firewire 400, Firewire 800 or eSATA), and also how complex your edit is – you might find you get stuttered playback, or require a lot of renders. The solution – simply transcode all your footage to another variety of ProRes (i.e. ProRes LT or Proxy) and away you go! If you use Final Cut Pro or Compressor, the timecode and tape name will come across, so you’re good to go!

The other little gotcha is that you may be files are recorded using the ALEXA Log C profile (for more information on what Log C actually is check out this post). This yields a low-contrast, “flat” image designed to preserve dynamic range and offer optimum grading latitude. It’s a wonderful alternative to true camera raw recording, but adds a few considerations for post. A lot of editors won’t want to work with the low-contrast image, and although you could just apply a 3-way colour corrector to everything in the timeline in FCP – this is probably not the most fluid way of working (especially if you’re on a lower spec Mac). However – this is what we do in Avid – we just apply a colour corrector to the whole sequence, so that everything in the sequence has a “look” applied. But a much better (although more time consuming) option, is to “bake” the look in, so you don’t have to worry about long render times, as you add more effects to your edit. The easiest way to do this is documented here. Keep in mind though, that Nick Shaw’s plugin is no longer free – so you can either purchase it (it’s only USD$30), purchase the much more expensive Glue Tools ($799 – which is what we use at The Butchery, as it can handle ARRI RAW as well) or just use the 3-way Colour Corrector or a third party tool such as Colorista.

The RED One and EPIC have come along way in regards to post production workflows over the last few years. Although I personally never found the workflow too difficult, now-days you can basically just use the one application to transcode all your media for different NLEs. With the recent release of RCX-Pro, things are now even simpler, as the interface of REDCINE-X has basically just been “tweaked” to be much more user friendly and easy to manage. Basically, for Final Cut Pro, we recommend just converting everything to ProRes for the purposes of the offline edit. Later down the line, when you’re ready to grade – you can always go back to the original R3D files. Below is a really easy to follow video on how to convert all your RED rushes to ProRes using REDCINE-X:

And of course, Canon DLSR’s have taken over film schools like the plague!

The Canon is great for low-budget filmmakers and students, because the gear is cheap enough that you can actually own it, the cameras are small so that you can put them in all kinds of wonderful places that a RED or Alexa could never reach, the image quality is incredible (considering the price and the compression used), plus you can make use of all the incredible stills lenses out there. But of course, there are gotchas – the camera records to H264, it doesn’t record timecode, amongst many other things (i.e. when recording for long periods, especially in warmer climates, increased video noise may occur due to CMOS overheating – but let’s just focus on post for now). If you’re just planning to edit and FINISH in Final Cut Pro, then you don’t need to worry too much – just transcode all your footage to ProRes and way you go. However, if you plan to do an offline/online workflow – then you are going to need reel names and timecode. Although there are a few different ways you can do this, the method we recommend is as follows:

1. Duplicate all your camera originals as a safety (although you should already have three backups anyway!)
2. Use something like Name Mangler (US$10 on the App Store) to batch rename all your rushes to something a bit easier to keep track of (i.e. MVI_0021 becomes AD1R1S01 – A camera, day one, reel one, shot 1). This become really important if you’re shooting with multiple cameras over many days (i.e. documentaries), as you don’t really want duplicate file names, as it will just complicate things later down the line.
3. Once everything is named correctly, you can apply timecode to the clips. We use a program called QTChange (US$24.95) to add new timecode and a reel name to each clip. Although there are a few different ways to tackle timecode (i.e. you could just use Time of Day – based off the date information from the camera) – but we just normally set the hour mark, to the shoot day (i.e. day one begins at 01:00:00:00, day two begins at 02:00:00:00, etc.).
4. Now that you have nicely named, timecoded masters, you can now create ProRes files! There are many different tools out there that allow you to do this, but just make sure you use a tool (i.e. Apple’s Compressor) that RETAINS all the timecode and reel information. However, if you do accidentally use a tool that doesn’t bring the timecode and reel information across, you can always use QTChange again.

It’s also worth checking out 3rd party tools like Magic Bullet Grinder - although with Grinder, although it’s great for jobs where you are just finishing everything in Final Cut Pro, as it doesn’t add reel-names automatically to clips – so if you think you’ll need to export EDLs, then you would have to manually enter all the reel names within FCP, which can be a bit of a nightmare – or use QTChange. As with everything – make sure you do some workflow tests before you commit to a piece of software, as Grinder is constantly being updated and revised.

Hope this helps! As always, if you have any further questions, or if any of the above is incorrect or unclear – just let me know!

Onwards & Upwards!

Chris!

The tool I recommended was Excel Time Code Extension by Matthias Bürcher. It hasn’t been updated since 1997, however it still works great, even on the later versions of Excel. Although there is some great documentation floating around on the Internet (this blog is probably the best resource – especially the comments), when I first downloaded it all I really wanted was a Installation Guide and an Example.

Here’s a crash course for Mac users out there – although the workflow is very similar for PC users. I tested this on MacOS 10.6.8 and Excel 2008.

1. Download the XLA script from here (I hope you don’t mind Matthias, but I’ve also mirrored it here - just in case your site ever goes down).

2. Unzip the download, and then drag the XLA file into Excel.

3. You will be presented with a Macro Warning – just click Open.

4. You will now be left with a blank Excel workbook. To activate the plugin, press Command+Option+T (Windows users can just press Control + T I’m told, although I haven’t tested it personally yet). In the bottom status bar you should see a message like the below to confirm that everything is working properly:

5. You can now start getting to work! Select the fields you want to use as timecode fields, then click Format > Style from the top menu bar.

6. Then select Time Code from the Style Name and click OK.

7. You can now enter timecode into the fields you selected previously. Enter it as a full number, without any spaces (for example 01013000). Excel will automatically format it nicely (i.e. 01:01:30:00).

8. With that complete, you can now start doing some calculations. For the purposes of this demonstration, let’s just add A1 and A2 together. There’s probably a much quicker way to do this, but the most reliable method I’ve found is to convert the timecode values to frames, do the calculations as frames, then convert the frames back to timecode at the end. So, in B1 let’s display the value of A1 as frames (at 25fps). To do this type:

=TCtoframes(A1,25)

9. And do the same for B2:

=TCtoframes(A2,25)

10. Now add B1 and B2 together:

=B1+B2

11. Now let’s use the cell A4 to show our final calculation. The first thing you need to do is change it to a timecode style (as per step five and six above), then you can enter the following calculation:

=framestoTC(B3,25)

12. And assuming everything was typed in correctly – you should now have your finished calculation!

There is a list of all the different functions you can use here, although there’s a more detailed explanation on the French page (which you can use Google Translator or similar to translate).

However, most functions don’t really need much explanation, so here’s a summary of what’s available:

• TCtoframes(TC,fps)
• framestoTC(frames,fps)
• TCplus(TC1,TC2,fps)
• TCminus(TC1,TC2,fps)
• TCmult(TC1,facteur,fps)
• TCdiv(TC1,facteur,fps)
• TCsum(TCref,fps)
• TCtrans(TC,fromfps,tofps)
• TCtofeet(TC,gauge,fps)
• feettoTC(feet,gauge,fps)
• TCtometer(TC,gauge,fps)
• metertoTC(meter,gauge,fps)
• timetoTC(intime)
• TCtotime(inTC)
• texttoTC(intext)
• TCtotext(inTC,fps)
• isTC(TC,fps)

At 3:30 in the morning today, I received an e-mail from EditShare announcing that the first public beta release of Lightworks 10.0 was released into the wild. Unfortunately I’ve had quite a bit on today – however I have managed to do a couple of tests, and do a bit of mucking around. Over the next few months we will do a lot more detailed testing, and also cut together some actual projects on the system. However in the meantime, the amount of misinformation out there already is mind-blowing, so I thought I’d quickly run through some of the basic’s. Please be aware however, that I’m no expert – and this is really the first time I’ve ever had a good play with the Lightworks platform. I have known about them for years, and have read a lot about them – but never actually used one.

If you haven’t done it already, you can download a copy of the free public beta here. When the release was first announced the servers were hit pretty hard, and there were lots of reports of registration emails not getting through, however those issues have since been fixed so you should have no problem downloading a copy.

To give you some background – Lightworks is not a new system. It’s been around since 1989, as was one of the very first and most advanced non-linear editing systems on the market, however it’s had a pretty rocky history despite the fact that it’s won Scientific and Technical Academy Awards and Emmy Awards! Founded by Paul Bamborough, Nick Pollock and Neil Harris in 1994 it was sold to Tektronix (a North American company best known for their test and measurement equipment such as logic analysers, oscilloscopes, and video/mobile test protocol equipment), who were never able to turn the technology into a highly profitable product. In the end they sold it on to Fairlight in Japan, who set up a new company called Lightworks Inc in 1999. Gee Broadcast (who were initially set-up to provide a design and installation service for Broadcast Television Systems but expanded to equipment sales and distribution, including videographics and “engineering” products), then purchased Fairlight and the Lightworks technology in May 2004, and under new ownership, they released the Lightworks Touch range, the Alacrity range (an offline editing tool that incorporated the Lightworks job/shuttle console with analogue audio scrubbing, offered realtime effects with no rendering, SD and HD and was used to cut features like Evan Almighty), and the Softworks ranges (offering the Lightworks User Interface and toolset in a software only package for laptops or office workstations – keeping in mind at the time a Lightworks system was a complete package, not just sofware) for Standard Definition & High Definition editing. Then in August 2009, the UK/US based EditShare acquired the Lightworks software and video server system Geevs (think big league TV video servers!).

Step forward to April this year, at the National Association of Broadcasters (i.e. the NAB show), EditShare announced that they were going to transform Lightworks into Lightworks Open Source and run a public beta program. Then then announced and showed off some of there work at IBC in Amsterdam in September 2010 – but the software only has become publicly available TODAY.

One of the big selling points of the system was (and still is) the console, which gives you all the controls you need at your fingertips (similar to the industry standard Steenbeck controller):

It also had a number of (for its time) unique features, such as “sync slip”, synchronised varispeed playback with audio scrubbing, synchronised multi-channel playback, and an object-oriented user interface.

There are lots of people around the world who have a soft spot for Lightworks including editors such as Chris Gill (who cut films such as 28 Days Later – but more recently used Lightworks on the highly-anticipated Neil Marshall thriller, Centurion) and multi Oscar-winning Thelma Schoonmaker (who cut films such as The Departed – but more recently used Lightworks on the acclaimed Martin Scorsese thriller, Shutter Island).

Step forward to the present, and the new Lightworks software looks amazing on paper! Features like advanced real time effects, 2K native support with DPX and RED, multi-camera editing features (advanced multi-cam editing with unlimited sources and dual-SDI outputs, so you can simultaneously view your source angles in sync with your edit), a wide support of codecs (including AVI, QuickTime, MXF, DPX and RED R3D, DV, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD, XDCAM EX, P2, AVC Intra, DNxHD, ProRes as well as EditShare’s Universal Media Files), plenty of 3rd party support (including support for Adobe After Effects, Boris, Combustion, Sapphire, etc.), real-time up and down-scaling from SD to 2K, and a really killer workflow in terms of collaboration - ignoring the fact that this current release is FREE – this is something to take notice of, and indeed everyone has!

Already on the official forums, there are 6231 members and 571 posts (and rising)! However, despite the buzz, there are a lot of people that are already unhappy with the system.

Some of the complaints include:

• Couldn’t get it installed
• After I installed it, it wouldn’t load
• The interface is too confusing
• Where’s the source code?
• Why can’t I drag in DPX sequences?
• When’s the UNIX and MacOS versions being released?
• Nothing will import…
• Bla, bla, bla.

First off – I have to say – GIVE THEM A BREAK! The software has only been out a few hours! It’s very publicly stated that it’s in beta, and that some of the functionality is still in the works. In fact, unlike some companies, they have actually given you a Road Map!

Q1 & Q2 2011

• Blackmagic support
• AJA support
• DVS support
• Stereoscopic adjustment toolset
• Export options for DVD and BluRay
• Titling tool
• Interoperability improvements with AAF and XML

Q3 2011

• New effects such as image stabilisation
• Audio plugins
• File delivery
• Remote editing

2011-Q4

• Full 64 bit version
• Linux & OSX support

Support for Blackmagic Design, AJA and DVS hardware devices is scheduled for early 2011, and they have also said that they will start selling addons which will allow you to edit the following formats in January:

• Avid DNxHD
• Apple ProRes
• AVC-Intra
• RED R3D
• DPX 10 bit and 16 bit
• Sony IMX
• Sony XDCAM HD
• Sony XDCAM EX
• Sony XDCAM HD422

Regardless of all this, currently the system is definitely workable – assuming that your workflow isn’t based around any of the above formats (although you can always convert the files to something else prior to import anyway!). We have been testing it on a 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, with 3GB of 1066 MHz DD3 RAM running Mac OS 10.6.2 and Parallels Desktop 6.o.11828 with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (allocated 1GB of RAM).

First up, make sure you read through the system requirements (which are pretty vague – so you should be fine!), are running the latest version of Quicktime, have all the latest updates for your operating system and have installed Matrox VFW codecs. When we first ran the program, it crashed after the loading screen. However, we soon realised (and this has since been very well documented on the forums), that you can get around the crash by running the “ntcardvt.exe” file first, exiting, then clicking the desktop icon again. The developers are aware of this installation issue, and will fix it in the next release.

When you first load the program, you are presented with the option to load Final Cut Pro or Avid keyboard shortcuts – really cool! Naturally, we elected for an Avid keyboard layout! You are then presented with a “Projects Browser” screen. This is were you can easily open old projects, or create new ones.

Once you create a new project, you are then presented with the really sexy and very clean interface. However, rather than bore you with all this “introduction” stuff that you can easily learn from the manual, or just from playing, here is what we have found so far!

The program seems to work fine on a Mac with Parallels. We haven’t tried it with Bootcamp yet – but I imagine the performance results will be even better!

We have tried dragging in a number of different formats and have gotten mixed results.

• DV-PAL (Quicktime Wrapper) = Works
• DVCPRO50 (Quicktime Wrapper) = Works
• HDV 1080i (Quicktime Wrapper) = Works
• RED R3D = Content Unknown (which is to be expected!)
• JPEG Image Sequence = Works
• DPX Image Sequence = Format Unlicensed (which is to be expected!)
• Phantom Cine File = Doesn’t Even Detect (which is to be expected!)
• Sony HDR-SR1 File = Doesn’t Even Detect (which is to be expected!)

When we drag in a Canon 5D clip for example, we are given the option to “Create a Link” (i.e. link to the original file), “Copy Local” or “Transcode”.

The transcoding options are as follows:

• DVCPRO100 (Quicktime Wrapper)
• AVCIntra100 (Quicktime Wrapper)
• DVCPRO 100 (MXF Wrapper)
• DVCPRO100 (AVI Wrapper)
• Lightworks RLE (AVI Wrapper)
• Uncompressed (AVI Wrapper)
• RGB32 (AVI Wrapper)
• MPEG I-Frame HD (AVI Wrapper – with custom Bit Rate Options)

So far, all of these options seem to work fine. I haven’t got any scientific figures on transcoding times yet, but it seems to be pretty quick. I was getting some “low on memory” errors some of the time – but not once did the system crash or halt. A 1 minute 20 seconds 1920×1080 30fps 5D clip took six and a half minutes to convert to a 1080i Lightworks RLE AVI if that’s of any interest.

I have also done a lot of “playing” with the timeline – but I really need to put a complete project into the system before I make any actual judgements. There are lots of cool things (the colour correction tool seems to work really well – the adjustments work really fast, especially considering I’m running the program on an emulated operating system!) – but there’s some basic’s I haven’t worked out yet (like how to resize an image).

One cool trick I did notice is that if you move the shark, he comes back! Drag him by holding down the right mouse button, and as soon as you let go, he comes back! Useless – but a good time waster!

I have done some tests exporting media out of the application, and it seems to work fine. Here is an example of the Lightworks Export:

You can export:

• AAF
• EDL
• OMF
• 3G
• Apple TV
• AVI
• DV Stream
• Geevs
• iPhone
• iPhone (Cellular)
• iPod
• MPEG-4
• MXF
• Quicktime Movie
• Image Sequence
• AIFF
• AU
• WAVE

One really cool thing I noticed though, is that you have stereo 3D options on all exports – so you can easily export a iPhone Anaglyph with a click of a button!

Really though… the only way to really test out the system is to cut an actual project on it! I don’t think we’ll risk cutting the 48 hour film festival entry on it, nor the Hannah & the Hasbian feature – however, we might cut our next short film on it just to see how it goes.

I’m also going to print off the 308 page manual and have a proper read tonight!

So basically, I just wanted to give you all a heads up that this new piece of software is out there, and despite all the winging and crying for everyone, it does actually open, and you can start playing with it straight away. Keep in mind though that it’s VERY different to the interface of Avid and Final Cut Pro. The timeline and the way things work is COMPLETELY different. Not worse or better – just a different way of thinking. Avid and Final Cut Pro are very similar in the way they work – this software brings similar concepts to the table, but with new names (i.e. you store bins in racks).

It’s obviously not perfect yet – and there is still lots of exciting things to come – but it’s worth checking out, even if you are a Mac user! It’s free after all! Just make sure you download the manual and have a flick through before you begin.

Hopefully the forums will settle down and become more sane once the hype dies down, and the serious editors and post gurus start having a play over the Christmas break!

Happy Cutting!

Chris!

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited to Swinburne University to speak to 3rd and 4th year students studying towards their Bachelor of Film & Television in Prahran. I’ve had a couple of requests already to share some of the slides from the presentation, so I thought I might as well put together some useful resources to sum up what I discussed, and share them with world via this blog! So instead of just sitting in front of your computer or mobile device reading this – imagine that you’re a student in a university class room. The only difference is that instead of being able to just yell out questions (of which we had some really great questions when I did the talk!), you’ll have to just submit a comment at the bottom of this page and I will get back to you. Please keep in mind that this was only a short introduction to the world of post production, so I won’t be going into so much detail in regards to all the technical things – consider it a quick overview. I have however included a stack of really useful links at the end of the post, so you can continue your learning… Enjoy!

Hello, my name is Chris Hocking and I am here to talk to you today about Post Production workflows, and the role of the Assistant Editor in a professional postproduction facility. Before I get stuck into it, I thought I’d better give you some background into how I got started in the industry.

I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for 11 years now – starting off in the animatronics department for a BBC Kids show, Tweenies Live. After touring around Australia and the UK with the Tweenies, after I finished high school I started work in concert lighting and production management, based in Melbourne, but spending most of my time in Sydney with the occasional trips overseas and lots of trips around Australia. After two years of working essentially 24/7, I decided I needed a break from the crazy hours of live productions, and submitted my application for Swinburne Film & TV (little did I know at the time, that I would be working basically the same hours in Film & TV!). Like you guys (or at least like the people I originally designed this presentation for), I studied towards a Batchelor of Film & Television, and finished up in 2008 – still doing lots of freelance lighting and film jobs whilst studying. Last year, I got a job as the Assistant Editor at The Butchery, and this year after travelling overseas for the first half of the year; I’m now back at The Butchery as the Post Production Supervisor. What does that mean exactly? I am responsible for implementing effective workflows across the whole facility, training up new staff, maintaining the phones and servers, developing relationships with other post houses, testing new software and hardware, etc.

For those that don’t know, The Butchery is a boutique offline editorial company that mainly focuses their attention to commercials and film work. Created as an antidote to the “all in one package” of many modern day post production houses, The Butchery instead focuses it’s attention solely to the art and practicalities of film editing.

The company is based in West Melbourne, spanning across two beautiful terrace houses. There are four full time editors at the facility (three of them cutting on Avid, and one on Final Cut Pro), a facilities manager (who also studied at Swinburne with me), an office manager, one full time assistant, two part time assistants and myself.

If we have a look at The Butchery website you can see that we mainly do some of the more creative, and higher-end commercials, such as some of the big beer ads, some of the big car companies, major softdrink companies such as Coke and Schweppes, government companies such as Worksafe, yummy companies like Cadbury, just to name a few. Jack has also cut two feature films, Last Ride and Bastardy – and Peter is currently working on a feature film called Hail. All of the editors also do short films and video clips whenever they can fit them in – and we’ve cut several award winning short films such as Cracker Bag, Nature’s Way and Jerrycan.

For the next little while, I am going walk you through a typical commercial job from beginning to end. The reason I’m going to focus on commercials, as opposed to feature films, is that in reality, if you’re going to be an editor or assistant editor, most of your income is going to come from commercials. Feature films are great – and you really get to flex your creative muscles, however they take a year or more of your life, plus they don’t draw as much cash as a year’s worth of commercials would in comparison. The technology is basically all the same for both types of jobs – it’s really just the deadlines are longer for longer form projects, and instead of having agencies like you would in commercials, you have studios and investors to keep happy.

There are several different parties involved with every commercial. Essentially, a client decides they want an advertisement for their company or product. For example, Coke might be releasing a new energy drink. They will employ an agency to come up with a cool concept for an advertising campaign – for example, they might decide to do a commercial where there are a whole lot of skateboarders on fire. The agency will then hire a director they really like. Most commercial directors in Australia work for a particular production company, such as a directors collective like Exit Films, although there are some freelance directors out there that employ producers on a job-by-job basis. Production companies will normally pitch for the project, and the agency will decide which director/company is best suited for the project. Once the director is on board, he or she will then get in touch with their preferred editor for the project. Assuming all the dates work out, if all parties are happy, the job will then go ahead.

Before I get into the specifics – I just want to give you a quick overview of what is involved on your average commercial. Generally speaking, the production company normally spends three days shooting the commercial – although this obviously depends on the complexity and nature of the spot. Some shoots go for 2 weeks for a 30sec spot; others only take a few hours to shoot. Once we receive rushes, the editor normally has about a week to start going through all the footage, making selects and putting together an assembly cut. Once they are in a good position, the director will come in and work with them. Normally the director and the editor have a couple of days to come up with something to present to the agency. The agency will then make suggestions, and everything will go back and forth until everyone is happy (or in some cases, until they run out of time!). The agency will then present the cuts to the client. If the client is happy, then that’s a job well done – if not, they will keep going back and forth until they are. Once the client approves the cut, the editors job is now over, and the assistant much prepare EDLs and OMFs for the online/grade and sound design. I will explain EDLs and OMFs in more detail shortly…

For anyone here who really wants to get into the world of postproduction, whether you want to work in visual effects, editing or post producing, one of the best ways to start out is an assistant editor. Although it’s an entry-level job – it’s certainly one of the most important roles in the postproduction process, and is a great stepping-stone to bigger and better things. That said, I know plenty of people who have made a whole career out of being an assistant editor, so it’s not necessarily a job that you have to grow out of.

So what exactly does an assistant editor actually do on your average commercial production? Well, if we start at the beginnings of a new job, the assistant will liaise with the post producer and the producer at the production company and make sure that everyone is on the same page. They will discuss formats and workflows. If the job is to be shot on film, they will normally get in touch with whoever is doing the telecine and the online, to make sure that everyone is on the same page. If the spot relies heavily on visual effects, then all the specifics need to be worked out now, so that there are no surprises later down the line. The assistant may also have to contact sound recordists and camera assistants just to double check settings. Basically – it’s the assistant’s job to make sure that when the editor eventually sits down in front of his computer, everything is in the right format, and everything just works. One of the most important documents at this stage is the specs sheet. This is a list of all the requirements that the offline facility needs in terms of tape formats, Quicktime settings, sound recording settings, etc.

Between the post producer and the assistant, all the scheduling details need to be worked out, such as when rushes will be received, and work out how long it will take to ingest and log all the footage, so that the editors knows when to come in.

Once all this has been confirmed, not much else needs to be done until the rushes arrive. Depending on the format, the rushes will arrive in a variety of different ways.

Most film jobs (whether they be 16mm or 35mm) that are being shot in Australia will be telecined to DVCAM, and then delivered to us. If the job is being shot overseas, the tapes will either be couriered or the telecine facility will send us the files via an FTP server. Although technically, most facilities have the ability to telecine the footage straight to ProRes or DNxHD files, this rarely happens.

All jobs shot on the RED ONE are normally delivered on an external hard drive containing all the R3D files. We then use the free RedCineX software to convert the files to ProRes (for Final Cut Pro) or DNxHD (for Avid).

All jobs shot on cameras like the F900 or Panavision Genesis, which shoot to HDCAM are transferred to DVCAM for the offline. Some of the bigger offline editing companies have HDCAM decks – however, given the huge costs of these decks, a lot of the newer offline facilities have chosen to go with more file-based workflows.

All jobs shot on high-speed cameras, such as the Phantom and Photron are supplied to us on hard drive as images sequences (normally TIFFs or DPX’s). We then wrap these files in Quicktime Movies for ingestion into Final Cut Pro or Avid.

Almost every single job that has synced sound is recorded separately to the vision. That means that it needs to be synced manually using a slate. Sometime’s you’re lucky and they use a smart slate (which has timecode), so you can easily sync things quite quickly. Other times the clapper loader forgets to slate shots, or they use an iPhone app, which fails, etc. Although there are easy ways to sync cameras to audio recorders using timecode – in the real world, most of the time, they don’t do it.

One of the most important things to get your head around as an assistant editor is timecode. In theory, each frame of video on a project should have its own unique timecode reference. This is the one bit of metadata that allows you to easily track individual frames. Timecode is the glue that helps us get from offline to online via EDLs and XMLs.

With film workflows – keeping track of timecode is relatively easy. When the footage is telecined to tape, the tape is striped with a timecode track. Generally speaking, roll one starts at the one-hour mark, roll two at the two-hour mark, etc. This timecode reference allows you to easily scan the required film frames in future, just with an EDL reference.

However, new cameras like the Canon 5D and 7D don’t record timecode, which makes traditional workflows a bit more tricky. Generally speaking, we normally add a timecode track to the individual H.264 files so that we can easily track each frame of footage.

TIP! You can use Qtchange to add timecode metadata to Quicktime files.

One you have received the rushes, the first job is to get them into your NLE – whether it be Avid or Final Cut Pro. Although each editor has their own way of working, we generally set up projects exactly the same way.

In Final Cut Pro we create bins that following the syntax you see on the screen, and in Avid we create folders, which do exactly the same thing.

• The Cuts Folder contains all the actual edits and selects.
• The Takes Folder contains all the actual takes, in the form of subclips
• The Audio Assets contains any music or sound effects used
• The Stills & Graphics folder contains any stills or graphics!
• The Assistants Folder contains the raw rushes, EDL exports, DVD exports, OMF exports, etc.

Once you’ve set up this structure it’s then just a matter of importing or capturing the footage, then syncing and sub-clipping as required.

One of the biggest issues with FCP is media management. One of its biggest attributes (being able to throw anything into it from anywhere) is also one of its biggest floors. It’s so easy to just drag in an MP3 from your iPod – but life gets a lot more difficult if you’re moving around to different suites a lot, especially when you’re studying here. The solution? You need a rock solid folder structure. This is what I recommend.

It’s also very important that you don’t just drag anything into Final Cut Pro. Never drag in MP3s – always convert them to 48kHz 16-bit AIFFs. Loader is a great 3rd party app that helps with this.

Generally speaking, apart from DV tapes, we convert everything to ProRes 422 for offline editing in Final Cut Pro (and DNxHD 36).

Naming conventions vary from project to project, but generally speaking, we normally use the following format:

01/01/01 – Description, description (WS)

Once everything is into Final Cut Pro or Avid, all synced and sub-clipped. The editor can begin cutting. Whilst the editor is doing his or her thing, the assistant may be required to source sound effects and stock footage, do selects, create temporary visual effects, record temporary voice over’s, export DVDs and Quicktimes for Client Review, manage graphics, and even occasionally complete rough cuts of the edits to speed up the process for the editor.

Once the offline edit is complete, it is time to get everything ready for the online. The way we do this is export out an EDL (edit decision list). An EDL is a way of representing a film or video edit. It contains an ordered list of reel and timecode data representing where each video clip can be obtained in order to conform the final cut.

At the end of the offline edit process, we provide post production houses (such as Digital Pictures and Complete Post) EDLs so that they can work out which shots need to be scanned, graded and conformed. We basically use them as a tool to communicate with other posts houses systems to explain exact what frames of footage we are talking about (using timecode as our common “language”).

Types of EDLs:

Scan EDL
This EDL contains all the shots that are used in a job. If there are multiple versions of a commercial (i.e. a 60sec cut, 30sec cut, 15sec cut and 10sec billboards), then this EDL should contain EVERY clip that is included in all of the cuts, but should not include duplicates. Any visual effects background plates, extra passes, green screen shots, etc. should also be included in this EDL. They don’t have to be in any particular order. The online house will use this EDL as a reference of what shots need to be rescanned at high resolution for the final colour grade and conform. The EDLs timecode should start at 01:01:30:00 and there should not be any black gaps between clips. This EDL should not contain any effects, graphics or transitions. This EDL should be sorted by C-Mode (also referred to as “Source” in Final Cut Pro).

Grade EDL
This EDL contains all the shots that are used in a job, in order of the various edits, and can include duplicates. For example, if you have a big impressive dolly shot that opens at the start of the 60sec cut and then again in the 90sec cut, it will appear twice in the EDL. The EDL should start 01:01:30:00. Each new cut should also start on a 30sec mark (i.e. 01:02:30:00). At the end of the EDL, also on a 30sec mark should be any visual effects elements that were included in the Scan EDL. This EDL should not contain any effects, graphics or transitions. This EDL should be sorted by A-Mode (also referred to as “Master” in Final Cut Pro). This EDL is used to grade all of the footage. It is laid out in this particular way so that the colour grade can be viewed in context to the edit.

Conform EDL
For each cut you do (i.e. 60sec, 90sec, 30sec), you will need to export an individual EDL for each track/layer. For example, if you have three different edits – you will need three different “sets” of EDLs. If each EDL has two layers/tracks, then you will end up with nine EDLs in total. The conform EDL should contain all effects, graphics, speed changes and transitions. Each EDL should start at the same timecode point as per the grade EDL (i.e. the first cut will start on 01:01:30:00, the second might start on 01:02:30:00, etc.). This EDL should be sorted by A-Mode (also referred to as “Master” in Final Cut Pro). This EDL will be used by the online artist to essentially “recreate” the edits as they appeared in the offline edit, however they will now link to the newly graded footage and any updated effects shots. Any speed effects and transitions will also be reapplied at full resolution.

Useful Documents:

• How to export an EDL from Avid Media Composer (PDF)
• How to export an EDL from Final Cut Pro (PDF)
• How to export an OMF from Avid Media Composer
• How to export an OMF from Final Cut Pro

In addition to all the technical editing jobs, as an assistant editor you may also be expected to do:

• Data Management (backing up office computers, etc.)
• System Administration (making sure all the computers work!)
• Basic Office Duties (photocopying, answering phones, printing, organising couriers, etc.)
• Client Services (i.e. making coffees!)
• Basically, anything you can to make the editors life easier!

At the end of the day the assistant editors job is to ASSIST the editor. They must do whatever it takes to make the editors life fun, enjoyable and as easy as possible. The editors job is to edit a series of images into something that tells a story – you need to make sure the editor can do their job and are not distracted by anything else.

Useful Articles:

• A Look at Careers in Editing
• Starting out in Post Production
• Getting a job as an assistant editor (make sure you read the comments as well!)
• What is the Real Relationship of Editors and Their Assistants?
• What does a Brand Manager actually do?

As Swinburne students you are very lucky to get free access to Screen Hub. Make sure you make the most of this! Currently, there are lots of really interesting post production jobs out there, so it’s well worth having a look!

This concludes my little talk about the world of post production. Unfortunately, if you didn’t catch the lecture in person, you have missed all the stuff I showed off on Final Cut Pro and Avid, however, there are plenty of websites around that will help you continue your learning. Also, remember to download a free trial of Avid Media Composer so that you can have a play!

Where can I get help & support for Final Cut Studio?

Luckily for you there are heaps of fantastic resources out there to help you with Final Cut Studio!

First off, there’s always Apple.
http://www.apple.com/support/finalcutpro/

Secondly, one of the very best places to get support for anything technical is The Digital Video Information Network. It’s an incredibly professional forum, full of industry professionals and young up-and-coming gurus. In most cases, a quick search of the site and you’ll found your answer. However, if a search returns nothing, you can always post your question and within no-time you’ll receive a quick and helpful response. We can’t recommend this site enough!
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/login.php

But, if you’re not a fan of forums, here are some other great alternatives:

Ken Stone’s Final Cut Pro Tutorials website is one of the best sites out there for Final Cut Studio information. It really contains a wealth of information from a range of fantastic authors on all kinds of things!
http://kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_homepage_index.html

Moviola Digital Education Center is committed to providing useful information, both in the classroom and out. Here you’ll find a lot of useful information related to Final Cut Pro, and other Final Cut Studio applications. In addition to custom tips and tutorials, you’ll find downloads relevant to Final Cut Studio, troubleshooting resources, and we’ve also scoured the Internet for other helpful information.
http://edu.moviola.com/rc_final_cut_studio_main

DMN Final Cut Pro Channel has some really useful tutorials.
http://finalcutpro.digitalmedianet.com/

FCP Hot Tips Podcast: Every month, Apple certified trainer Martin Baker shows a hot tip for Final Cut Pro to save time and make your editing life easier.
http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/podcast/

LAFCPUG: Offers extensive resources, articles and information for Final Cut Pro.
http://www.lafcpug.org/

LarryJordan.biz: Final Cut Pro articles and info.
http://www.larryjordan.biz/

Proapptips.com: Pro App Tips are short tips about for the Apple PRO series of video production programs.
http://www.proapptips.com/

SFCutters.org: The world’s first FCP User Group in San Francisco.
http://www.sfcutters.org/pages/articles.htm

Yahoo! Groups: Final Cut Pro discussion groups.
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/1603568771

Final Cut Studio Planet: Tips and News Blog.
http://dvcreators.net/finalcutstudioplanet/

Creative COW: Final Cut Pro discussion, articles and tutorials.
http://forums.creativecow.net/index.html

Avid Resources:

• Avid Media Composer 5 Getting Started Training
• Freddy’s Big List of Relevant Avid Links (links to everything you can ever imagine!)
• Avid Tech Tips (a collection of very useful tips, tricks and workflows!)
• The Changeover Challenge: From Avid to Final Cut Pro
• Comparing the Log and Capture tools in Avid and Final Cut Pro
• Avid Screencast (lots of useful free Avid tutorials!)
• Avid Tips

Great Videos:

• MakingOf talks with a range of award-winning Editors

Useful Articles:

• Canon 5D/7D Workflow Papers
• Organising Tips for Final Cut Pro
• Handy Scripts for Final Cut Pro
• Keeping Your Final Cut Pro Project Organised
• 10 Things Every Final Cut Pro User Should Know
• Everything you ever wanted to know about 24p and NTSC

Helpful Blogs:

• Alex 4D
• ProVideo Coalition
• GeniusDV
• FCP Daily
• Little Frog in HD
• Chris Jones Blog
• Avid 2 FCP
• Thrillcat Editorial
• Finalcutters
• Editing Standards
• Splice Here
• View from the Cutting Room Floor
• ACE Members Tech Web Discussion
• Film Industry Bloggers

Recommended Podcasts:

• RED Centre
• This Week in Media
• This Week in Photography
• Stories from The Edit Bay
• The Terence & Philip Show
• This Week in Tech
• The Production Office
• fxguide & fxguide tv

…and finally, if you’re a Twitter user, make sure you follow us, and also all of these fantastic people and companies. We hope you have found this blog post interesting and helpful! If you have any questions or if you require any further information or assistance, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Onwards & Upwards!

Best Regards, Chris!

One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
4GB RAM (4 x 1GB)
640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Card

And so, once it arrived, I open up the box, took out the tower, and hooked it up to some monitors we already had. It booted fine, and loaded Snow Leopard. “Ah, no” I thought to myself, and added a mental note that the first thing I will need to do it get rid of Snow Leopard. But, while it’s up and running, I might as well check out some of the new Snow Leopard features. Then I noticed it. Something was not right. For about half a second every five seconds the computer seemed to “stall”. It would just stop for half a second. It was almost as if it had a faulty heart and was missing a beat every now and again. I’ve never seen this before, so I was a little bit scared that maybe this brand new machine might had serious hardware problems. Either that – or Snow Leopard was causing the poor machine some major, major grief. So first thing I did after a diagnostics test (in which the machine passed all tests), was try and dump Snow Leopard and put on Leopard 10.5. I put in the Retail DVD of Leopard we have, clicked install, and waited for the machine to reboot. Then nothing happened. Ummm… Strange! Why wasn’t it booting? I tried another Retail DVD of Leopard we have. Same problem. Ummm… very strange! Time for Google. I hit my first major stumbling block – you can only install Leopard 10.5.6 or later on these new MacPro’s and all our Retail DVDs are 10.5. With no copy of Leopard 10.5.6 on DVD, and no dealers stocking 10.5.6 on the shelves, it was time to sent it back to the retailer so that they can install 10.5.6 and work out what’s going on with the strange freezing issue. We can always grab another copy of 10.5.6 on DVD from Apple’s discontinued software division later (as we’ll need to install the OS again on other partitions anyway).

And so, the Mac went back to the shop. The weird thing however was that the machine worked perfectly once they received it. No lagging, no freezing – it worked perfectly. So they installed 10.5.6, ran the diagnostics tool, swapped out the RAM as a precaution, and sent it back to us. They did say however that they have come across this issue once before, and put it down to electromagnetic interference in the room it was being used in – putting the machine in another room seemed to fix the problem. Very strange!

I got it back, plugged it in, and the same issue occurred. It would freeze for about half a second every five or so seconds. And so, as a test, I tried it in a different room. It worked fine. Very strange! So I tried it in another room. Same freezing issue. In another room. Same freezing issue. In another room. It worked fine! So it seemed that this silly machine would only work in specific locations, and I had no idea why!

Not convinced that electromagnetic interference would do this, I tried swapping out cables, the keyboard, the mouse, and then finally, I tried different combinations of monitors.

And then I found the solution. For some reason certain monitors connected via the DVI port cause the system to lag (i.e. literally freeze for half a second every five or so seconds) if connected via the DVI or Mini DisplayPort. However, all monitors seem to work fine over VGA using adapters.

I’ve tried every single possible combination of screen resolutions and refresh rates – so that’s not the issue.

I’ve tried Googling similar issues, but apart from finding a whole heap of issues with the 4870 graphics card, I couldn’t seem to find anything like this.

Here is a list of monitors I tried:

Works over DVI, Mini DisplayPort & VGA:

Samsung 205BW 16:9 LCD
Benq G2420 HD (Model: ET-0027-B) 16:9 LCD

Works over VGA:
Kogan X19WB 16:9 LCD
Sony LMD-2030W 16:9 LCD
Sony KLV-325200A 16:9 LCD
Sony KDL-2054000 16:9 LCD

Doesn’t Work over DVI or Mini DisplayPort:
Samsung 940B 4:3 LCD
Benq T2200HD (Model: W2108) 16:9 LCD
Benq G2200W (Model: ET-0016-N) 16:9 LCD

When I get the time, I’ll also try a few other monitors we’ve got lying around including some big old CRTs!

So, to cut a long story short, if you get a new MacPro and it looks like it’s lagging – try a different screen! If anyone has a reason as to why this happens, I’d also love to hear it!

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris !

However, I tend to do a lot more things that fall outside of the offline banner. Sometime there might be some visual effects elements I’ll throw together in After Effects or Shake, other times I might want to do some hardcore grading in Color, or maybe I just want to export out a really high quality DVD.

Unlike in Final Cut Pro, getting consistent images into and out of Avid seems to be kind of a black art. The RGB vs 601 terminology is at times confusing, and despite the wealth of information out there on the World Wide Web – there still seems to be a lot of misinformation and head scratching. Even creating a dead simple DVD via DVD Studio Pro using Avid footage seems to be a real challenge (the solution on forums normally tends to be use one of Avid’s Sonic products).

Well, rather than spend even more time trying to find answers on the various Avid forums, I thought I’d do some tests and see how things actually work in the real world. This isn’t a formal experiment, nor is it anything like a technical white paper – all I’m really doing is having a bit of a muck-around and documenting what I do for future reference. It’s more for myself than anything else, to try and help get my head around everything. So apologies in advance if this blog entry is a bit of a mess!

To start things off, here are my system specifications. Now, before you all drill me, yes I know I’m running an older version of Avid, and yes I know that technically speaking I’m running a newer version of Quicktime than I should be (as you can see by reviewing the Avid Version Matrix). But as more and more people tend to run Avid and Final Cut Pro on the same system, the more I see Avid running alongside newer versions of Quicktime that what the developers originally intended. As Avid is completely backwards compatible (which is both amazing and EXTREMELY handy!), the less often people tend to upgrade the Avid software. If it ain’t broke – why fix it?

Here are the system specifications of the machine I will be using for these tests:

System Specs:
Processor: 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Mac OS X: 10.5.7
Quicktime: 7.6.2 (1327)
Avid: 3.0.5
Final Cut Pro: 7.0
Photoshop: 11.0

For the purposes of these tests I will be using a 720 x 576 PAL test chart from Belle Nuit.

Once I had a test chart the next step was to convert it to a Quicktime file. To do this I opened up Final Cut Pro, and set up a new Sequence with the following settings:

I also set the Motion Filtering Quality to Best for good measure (in the Video Processing tab).

I then imported the test chart TIFF into the timeline and exported it as a Quicktime Movie.

To make sure something weird wasn’t going on, I then opened up the original TIFF file and the Quicktime File in Photoshop. Using the eye dropper tool I then double checked that all of the value were correct. They were…!

OK… So now I had a Quicktime file that identically matched the TIFF test chart.

The next step was to do some experiments with Avid. First up I created a new 25p PAL project. I then imported the Quicktime Test Chart, as well as the straight TIFF Test Chart a few different ways:

Method 1
Format: OMF
Video Resolution: 1:1 OMF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (0-255)

Method 2
Format: OMF
Video Resolution: 1:1 OMF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (Dither Image Colours)

Method 3
Format: OMF
Video Resolution: 1:1 OMF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: 601 SD or 709 HD (16-235)

Method 4
Format: MXF
Video Resolution: 1:1 MXF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (0-255)

Method 5
Format: MXF
Video Resolution: 1:1 MXF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: Computer RGB (Dither Image Colours)

Method 6
Format: MXF
Video Resolution: 1:1 MXF
File Pixel to Video Mapping: 601 SD or 709 HD (16-235)

Now that the test charts were successfully in the Avid, it was already time to try and get them back out again!

To export out of Avid I used these settings:

For each method, I exported out a Quicktime movie using both the 601 and RGB Colour Levels.

Here are the results in regards to bringing in the Quicktime Files (with the Compression type set to None) and exporting them out of Avid.

Please be aware that to generate the images shown below I opened the exported Quicktimes in Photoshop, resized them to fit in with the blog design, and then saved them as a JPEG. They are only displayed here as a general guide.

Method 1

601:

RGB:

Method 2

601:

RGB:

Method 3

601:

RGB:

Method 4

601:

RGB:

Method 5

601:

RGB:

Method 6

601:

RGB:

Here are the results in regards to bringing in the original TIFF file and exporting it out of Avid:

Method 1

601:

RGB:

Method 2

601:

RGB:

Method 3

601:

RGB:

Method 4

601:

RGB:

Method 5

601:

RGB:

Method 6

601:

RGB:

OK… So now what? What’s the result of all of these tables and charts?

Hint #1: If you brought in your footage into Avid as RGB – then export as RGB. If you brought in your footage into Avid as 601, then export as 601.

If you look at all the different methods – this certainly seems to be the case. When using the same file pixel to video mapping setting for both import and export the file coming in is very SIMILAR to the file coming out – not EXACTLY – but very similar.

Hint #2: I hate to state the obvious, but Computer RGB (Dither Image Colours) only applies when you import still images. If you import a Quicktime movie using this option, it will just export as regular Computer RGB.

According to the Media Composer ReadMe file:

RGB (Computer RGB (0–255)): Select this option if the imported graphics file uses RGB graphics levels. Most computer-generated graphics use RGB graphics levels. The RGB color values are remapped to ITU-R 601 (formerly CCIR 601) or ITU-R709 video color values appropriate for the Avid system.

RGB, dithered (Computer RGB, dither image colors): Select this option if the imported graphics file uses complex color effects, such as a gradation, and you are importing at a high resolution (2:1). Do not use this option to reimport an image that has already been imported with dithering.

601/709 (601 SD or 709 HD (16–235)): Select this option if the imported graphics file uses video levels based on the ITU-R 601 (formerly CCIR 601) or ITU-R709 (HD) standard. These graphics include Avid color bars or images that include superblack (zero black) for keying purposes.

Now with this new found knowledge, it was time to do some further, more detailed tests. First up let have a closer look at what happens to an image if we import it in as 601, and export it as 601.

Original Test Chart:

601 to 601:

Apart from a few very minor differences where the values are off by one (highlighted in bold), the import is basically exactly the same as the output.

Interestingly however, if you use the DigitalColor Meter to measure the values directly from the preview monitors in Avid, the white (255) section reads exactly 255, despite the fact that the output file reads 254. Apart from that using the meter everything else matches the above table.

The only different is the resolution.

Original Test Chart:

601 to 601:

As the test chart was originally 8bit in RGB space,

So now we know that if you import footage as 601 and export as 601 the colours pretty much stay the same. But it’s one thing to do these kind of tests – it’s another thing to try it with real footage. So that’s what we’ll try next…

In Final Cut Pro I created a new sequence with the following settings:

…and everything set to best quality:

I then dragged in a FCP Bars & Tone generator for a second, then the test chart we’ve been using for another second, and then some 4K RED footage. I threw a quick 3-way Colour Correction filter on top of the footage to tweak it a bit and then exported out a Quicktime Movie. This Quicktime will become our test footage.

After I exported out the Quicktime Movie I then opened it up in Photoshop to have a look at the values on the chart:

Obviously all of these values had some kind of gamma/luma shift applied to them. Just to double check I then exported out the same timeline but with the Compressor set to None to see what would happen:

OK… so obviously Quicktime is doing something funky behind the scenes. This is something we’ll have to look into later, but for now the purpose of this test is to try and get footage into and back out of Avid without any nasty changes. As long as we know what the values are of the chart before the footage gets into Avid, it doesn’t really matter if the values aren’t “correct” (i.e. Grey 71 on the chart doesn’t have to equal 71 using the eye dropper).

I then brought the test footage into the Avid as OMF, 1:1, 601. Using the DigitalColor Meter, I then checked the values of the preview monitor:

Then I noticed that something wasn’t right. Turns out that for whatever reason the DigitalColor Meter tool and the Photoshop Eyedropper don’t match up!

After a slight panic, and a bit of hair pulling, I opened up Color Settings in Photoshop and changed the RGB Working Space from sRGB IEC61966-2.1 to my monitor working space. And with a quick click of the OK button, all of a sudden everything started working as per normal. It seems that I just completely forgot about display profiles for a second there! Thanks also to Cail Young at Inspiration Studios for his almost instant Twitter reply!

Hint #3: Don’t forget about display profiles!

I then compared what was in the Avid to the original file as viewed in the Quicktime Player. When “Enable Final Cut Studio color compatibility” was selected in the Quicktime Preferences, using DigitalColor Meter I obtained the following results:

When you turn off Final Cut Studio colour compatibility you obtain these results:

I then went to a specific frame on both Avid and Quicktime Player. I took a screen shot, and compared the two images side by side in Photoshop. So far so good – the image in Quicktime Player looks visually identical to the video in Avid when Final Cut Studio colour compatibility is turned on. So the media looks good whilst IN the Avid – what about when it comes out again? To test this I exported a “Same as Source” 601 Quicktime file from Avid.

I then opened up the newly exported Quicktime movie in Photoshop for review:

Interestingly, the Avid seems to have “corrected” the bars so that they more closely match where they’re supposed to be. At this stage I have no idea why this is or how it’s being done – but all I can assume for now is that the data out of Final Cut Pro was always correct – it just wasn’t being handled correctly in Photoshop or Quicktime Player.

Visually comparing the original file to the file exported out of Avid, what I can say is that they are identical in terms of colour and tone. You cannot tell the difference between the two:

OK – so it seems that it is possible to get footage into and out of Avid without the image being degraded.

Here’s an interesting bit of information I found on the Avid forum:

I have done some fairly extensive testing (with an oscilloscope and vectorscope….)…. It seems impossible to get certain footage with certain codecs to go through transparently through Compressor (or be imported correctly into FCP). A good test to do is the following: Import a testcard such as the one here:

http://www.belle-nuit.com/testchart.html

into Avid with 601 levels.

Export with your chosen codec then import the QT file into FCP. Observe the results in FCP’s waveform monitor, noting in particular the gray scale ramp which should be linear and have no curve. The patches marked 16 and 235 should be correctly positioned in the waveform.

DV footage with the Avid codec consistently has gamma issues (even though with RGB levels the black and 235 white levels are correct).

DV footage without the Avid codec works as from FCP 6.0 but had problems in 5.1.4 as Avid does not insert the image description extensions that describe the colorimetry (primaries, transfer fn and matrix). FCP 6.0 (and the version of compressor that comes with it) appears to deduce the correct primaries, xfer fn and matrix from the image size and codec (at least in the case of DV pal) if the ‘nclc’ QT extension is absent (which it always is from avid).

I have had little luck with the other codecs (prores, and native avid codecs) which are not transparent with a Avid->Compressor (or FCP) workflow. I think something is up with how Avid presents the image samples to the quicktime compression session. I suspect that given the absence of the ‘nclc’ extension which describes the colorimetry in the output QT file, Media Composer gives the codec no information as to the colorimetry of the samples, so the codec makes a best guess. Of course with the Avid codecs this works (the problem is with decode on FCP and not in the encoding), but with third-party codecs such as Apple ProRes there is a problem. As a result gamma correction is incorrectly applied to the source samples when it should not be. It would be nice if this would be addressed for greater compatibility with other software…..

This is also another interesting bit of information I found on the same forums:

Well the main difference between RGB and 601 color space is the ability to have super white and negative black.

If you were to create a black and white image in say Photoshop with the black being 0 and the white being 255 and then brought it into the Avid using RGB, the black part of the screen would be, in an analog world, 7.5IRE and the white would be 100IRE just what you’d expect. However if you brought it it in as 601, your levels would be about 0IRE and 107IRE.

An image created in Photoshop with “black” being 16 and “white” being 235 and then brought into an Avid in the 601 color space would then have correct black and white levels. Obviously this is very handy if you want to key something.

If you want to export a tiff sequence you can use either color space you want, just make note of which you use and make sure that whoever you give it to knows which you use. If you create it in 601 and bring it back into an Avid as RGB, it will look very washed out.

Here is some other information I found which is really interesting:

When I export your sample to Sheer Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2:[4] with QuickTime Player, QuickTime Player feeds the images to the Sheer Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4] encoder in the RGB 8bf ‘ARGB’ pixel format. I find this odd, since the Avid Meridien Uncompressed (AVUI) codec purportedly stores the data in Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4] format. On inspecting the AvidAVUICodec, I see that ARGB is the only pixel format that the AVUI codec supports for input and output; it lacks the ‘cpix’ resource used to list other supported pixel formats.

For the last few frames in the movie (Silicon Artists presenta El Último Deseo), the “black” ARGB pixels passed to the Sheer Y’CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4] encoder have the value:

ARGB = {0xFF,0×10,0×10,0×10} (hexadecimal)
ARGB = {255,16,16,16} (decimal)

When encoding to the Avid Meridien Uncompressed (AVUI) codec the settings dialog (‘Avid Meridien Uncompressed Codec Configuration – v1.8.0′) lets you specify the input color range as either ITU-R 601 video-range [16..235] or full-range [0..255]. However, QuickTime does not provide any mechanism to specify settings for a decoder. QuickTime unequivocally defines the ARGB pixel format as having full-range components, so the fact that AVID’s AVUI decompressor outputs video-range ARGB is just wrong.

OK… so now what I want to have a quick look at is the difference between the vector scopes in Avid and Final Cut Pro using the same source footage.

Avid 3.0.5:

Final Cut Pro 7:

With this knowledge, it was now time to try and bring the test footage that was exported out of Avid back into Final Cut Pro. Just to re-cap, I originally created the Quicktime Movie in Final Cut Pro, exported as a 10-Bit Uncompressed QT, brought it into Avid as OMF 1:1, 601 and then exported out as 601.

Amazingly, the export from Avid almost perfectly matched the original file that was sent from Final Cut Pro.

Original Footage (10-bit Uncompressed from Final Cut Pro):

Avid Footage (Avid Same as Source imported into FCP):

I then decided to have a look through the Avid documentation once again and found the following information in regards to how Avid handles Field Ordering:

Allows you to select the field ordering (sometimes referred to as field dominance) of the media you are importing. For 23.976p, 24p, or 25p projects, these options do not appear; all fields are automatically exported as progressive (still) frames.

When the field ordering (or spatial field position) of the imported media matches the field ordering of the project format, no special processing is required. For more information, see “Field Ordering in Graphic Imports and Exports” on page 499.

This setting does not apply to OMFI imports when the import resolution matches the OMFI file.

The following options are available:

• Non-interlaced (Properly ordered for current format): Use this option when the file to be imported has been correctly field ordered for the video format being used (ex: Even or lower ordered for NTSC, Odd or upper ordered for 1080i HD). This is the default option.
• Odd (Upper Field First) Odd (Upper Field First) ordered: Choose this option if the file was odd ordered and you are importing it into an even ordered format. For example, importing PAL DV into PAL.
• Even (Lower Field First) Even (Lower Field First) ordered: Choose this option when importing a file with even ordering into a video format with odd ordering. For example, importing NTSC into 1080i HD.

OK, so now that brings us to the final test of the day. For this test I will capture some standard PAL DV footage into Avid and then export it and try to bring it into Final Cut Pro, hopefully without introducing any strange artefacts, field dominance issues or gamma/luma shifts.

The Avid project is 25p PAL.The Media Type is OMF. We will be using a DV 25P 420 video resolution. I used the Software DV 25 Codec (which I later discovered is not so good for PAL footage!).

Here is a screenshot of the footage as it sits in the Avid preview monitor:

Here are the screen shots of exported footage from the Avid brought into Final Cut Pro:

Same as Source (601):

Same as Source (RGB):

Same as Source (Avid DV / 601):

Same as Source (Avid DV / RGB):

Quicktime Animation (601):

Quicktime Animation (RGB):

So it seems that if you want to get footage that looks right from Avid to Final Cut Pro, then Same as Source (Avid DV Codec / 601) or something like the Quicktime Animation Codec (601) seem like viable solutions. Given that, I did a couple more tests:

Avid DV (601):

Instead of exporting as “Same as Source” and selecting “Avid DV”, I exported as a standard Quicktime File, but used the Avid DV codec. It’s important to note that the Avid DV Codec has some additional options:

DV PAL (601):

ProRes HQ (Automatic Gamma Correction / 601):

Just to see what happens, I exported the footage both using and not using gamma correction.

ProRes HQ (No Gamma Correction / 601):

So, although no very scientific, and purely based on visual observation rather than mathematical fact, it seems that as long as you keep 601 checked, getting footage from Avid into Final Cut isn’t that big a deal after all.

As I said at the start of this blog entry – this was always going to be a bit all over the place as I did random tests and tried out new things. Apologies if you got to the end of this an realised that I didn’t answer any real questions or teach you something you didn’t already know. I really hope it was some help! The more time I have to spend with Avid, and the more time I have to work out viable workflows of getting stuff into and out of it, the more things will hopefully become clear in my head. I will certainly post anything I think is useful here. One thing’s for certain… after looking through so many Avid forums, and reading hundreds of articles randomly scattered on the web, it’s clear that I’m not the only one that’s confused. Like a lot of things these days, it takes a lot of patience, hair-pulling and vigorous workflow testing to get things right. Everything is so complex – and it just takes one little glitch to throw everything off balance.

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris!

But today I’m not going to talk about software. I’m going to talk about the other end of the spectrum… hardware.

Even since people started discovering that Apple has been applying for various touch-screen patients the Internet community has been going wild. The funny this is that most people think that they’re working on a Kindle Killer. Alex Lindsay from This Week In Media has been predicting a Kindle-like device that supports video and has a colour screen for months now. Geeks on Twitter, various Mac blogs, and all the Apple rumour sites have been going crazy in recent months predicting Apple Tablets.

Steve Jobs has explicitly said he doesn’t want to make a netbook and that “there are no plans to make a tablet” – so why is everyone so convinced that Apple is working on something that will go head-to-head with the popular, but hardly world changing, Kindle?

Personally, I don’t think Apple is working on a “bigger version of the iPhone”. What’s the point? If you want to read something on the train, you can use your iPhone or iPod Touch. If that’s not big enough, then get a laptop. If neither work for you, then just get a Kindle. That’s what they’re designed for. I don’t think there is a big enough need for Apple to create a tablet just to tackle the “digital book” market. I know it sounds silly – but I think Apple regard traditional books (you know, the paper variety) as dead. Text mixed with video and interactive multimedia is the new black.

Ok, lets be harsh for a minute. Kindle’s are geared towards older people. They’ve been developed as a “book replacement”. Older people love them because they are easy to read. You can change the text size. They’re simple to operate, buying digital books is fairly easy, and you can carry the Kindle around in your giant handbag. Lots of people over 40 really love their Kindle. They’re a great mothers and fathers day gift. That said of course, lots of younger people love them (a.k.a the amazingly talented, intelligent and witty Daisy Whitney), but most of them are “books nerds” from way back. I don’t think Apple wants to make a leap into the “book nerd” territory. Apple is all about being cool and innovative. As I said, I think Apple thinks print media is dead. I love books personally – you have no idea how many film books I have lying around in my house, or how much money I spent of film related books of all varieties! However, the though of buying digital books doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Just like I love having a whole pile of physical DVDs – I love having a book shelf full of books. I think that Apple has realised that people who just love books like I do, will never accept a digital equivalent. I think that Apple has realised that most young people who can be bothered reading, will be happy to read on their iPhone or iPod Touch. And I think that Apple has decided that although there is a market for digital books on a nice and simple digital book reader (like the Kindle) – it’s a market that they’re not particularly interested in.

OK… so the tablet idea is out… what about the netbook? Well I think that’s out too. As others have clearly said:

“One of the key selling points of a Mac lies in its usability, and a Netbook will not be able to deliver the full Mac experience with its small screen and slow single-core processor. Moreover, an Apple minilaptop will be unlikely to compete in price cuts and may cost as much as another premium Atom machine, the Sony Vaio P.”

I tend to agree. Apple isn’t going to make a laptop unless it can easily run the power-hungry applications in it’s iLife suite with ease. iPhone as they currently stand are basically just a more compact version of a netbook anyway. As cloud computing becomes more the norm, and as more people jump on board Mobile Me I think more and more people will start their job on their MacBook and automatically sync everything up to their iPhone. They’ll be able to put together their presentation in KeyNote on the MacBook, but then make changes before they step onto the stage on their iPhone. I don’t see the need for a netbook (after all who wants to cart around yet ANOTHER piece of technology), and I don’t think Apple does either.

So where does that leave us? Tablets are out. Netbooks are out. So what is Apple planning to do exactly?

Well… you’re going to call me crazy. You’re going to think that I’m out of my mind. But my prediction is that by the end of next year, every Mac will be touchable. That’s right. I think that every MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Apple Cinema Display and iMac will have a touch screen. I also predict that the MacBook and MacBook Pro will replace the Multi-Touch Trackpad with a fully functional multi-touch tablet.

Why you may ask? Because it will not only be really cool – but also speed things up dramatically. For instance, right now I have two screens sitting in front of me. I’m typing something in a web browser. But say I want to quickly open a document that’s sitting on my desktop which contains a whole lot of notes. To do that I’ll have to lift my hands of the keyboard, grab the mouse, move it over to the icon and click. How much easier would it be if I could just reach for the screen and double tap directly.

This is my crazy prediction… Apple is planning to kill the mouse. I think that when Apple releases it’s new Operating System (which already supports touch and some pretty cool character recognition), it will also update all it’s hardware to include touch screens, remove mice from the inventory list, but include a new “multi-touch keyboard” with each MacPro tower and Mac mini. The keyboard will basically be exactly the same as you’ll find on a 17″ MacBook Pro – touchpad included.

With Windows 7 coming out, which surprisingly actually works, and works quite well, and with PC hardware prices coming down, Apple needs more things to separate Mac hardware from PC hardware. The super slick operating system is not enough any more. Despite what Mac enthusiast may tell you, Microsoft is catching up again (admittedly by stealing most of Apple’s ideas and concepts!). Apple needs to push the boundaries once more, and having “touchable computers” seems like the logical step forward. They have the cool factor, but they also will help speed up everyday tasks. In the pro world of video and stills photography, I think it will be even more ground breaking. Most visual effects artists love their tablet, but imagine if they could combine their traditional Wacom tablet with two nice and big 24″ touchable LED Cinema Displays!

This changeover to touchable screens will bring the whole Apple product line, into, well, line! Everything from a MacPro to a MacBook to an iPhone and iPod Touch will be running MacOS and have a touch screen. It’s an advertising agency’s dream! Imagine the Mac vs PC ads now…

Will it happen? Yes it will. When, well that’s a bit more tricky. It all comes down to money and technology. I have a sneaky suspicion that we’ll see this kind of thing much sooner than anyone could possibly predict. I have a feeling Apple has been working on this for a while. Although I have no facts, or no evidence what-so-ever to base this on, hell, it’s just a good old fashion guess, but I can imagine that Apple might announce something at the same time as it’s Snow Leopard unveiling.

So that’s my prediction as of today. No Kindle Killer. No bigger-version-of-the-iPhone tablet. No less-powerful-than-a-MacBook netbook. I think Apple will just introduce “touch” to the whole product range. However, leaving the best till last, I also predict that on the MacBook Air, you’ll be able to “slide” the screen around, essentially turning it into a tablet. It won’t be called a tablet, it’ll just be a MacBook Air Touch (or something like that).

Will I be right? As always, only time will tell… I think we’ll find out if I’m crazy slightly before we find out if my FCX predictions are on track… Fingers crossed!

Up until the end of February this year, I have been a Final Cut Pro man. But just to give you some background, as a young child, well before NLEs were available cheaply on personal computers, I did editing the old fashion way between two VHS domestic recorders. Sound mixing was done “on the fly” using a cool four channel Realistic microphone mixer.  It was a horrible system – but it worked. Many a Star Wars fan movie was thrown together in my grandparents back yard. As I grew older, and progressed through Primary School, I moved away from film making temporarly becoming more interested in electric guitars, amplifiers and concert lighting. Towards middle years of high school I had another bash at making films – this time I did all the editing on Premiere on a PC. We recorded everything using Panasonic handycams with VHS-C tapes, and then using one of those cool VHS tape adapters, we captured everything using a normal domestic VHS deck. Once again, I drifted away from films, becoming more interested in live productions.

For my brothers final year of high school, he decided to do Studio Arts, and produce two short films. As he’d never really done any film-making before, and I was working full time as a lighting designer (so I had money!), I decided to go on a bit of a spending spree and purchase some things. So one day we had nothing apart from a little Sony MiniDV camera – the next we had a portable green screen, boom pole, ME66 microphone, some basic tungsten lighting, makeshift steadicam, a few Lacie drivers, and a copy of Final Cut Express 2 and DVD Studio Pro (standalone) to put on a new eMac.

So, over the next couple of weeks, as my brother was in preproduction for his two films – I quickly got my head around both the Mac platform (as up until now we’d grown up with PCs) and Final Cut Express. To be perfectly honest, I feel instantly in love, with not only Final Cut, but also with Macs in general. They just… well, worked!

As so, with the help of Final Cut Express, my brother got his two films, God’s Handiwork and Hello Sunshine. With those now finished, and high school completed, my brother then also moved away from film-making heading to univeristy to study Arts/Science. But we now had all this gear, and the inventory was continuing to grow (we purchased a Sony Z1P as soon as it came out). And so, after working for two years as a lighting designer for live events – an amazing job which took me all over the country and many times overseas – I decided to head back to school, studying Film & Television at university.

The film school I went to was a Final Cut Pro facility, and so I upgraded from Final Cut Express to Final Cut Studio – and because I already owned a copy of DVD Studio Pro – the upgrade was incredibly cheap!

And so, for the past five years I’ve been using Final Cut Pro extensively. I’ve thrown all kinds of footage at it from DV to HDV,  XDCAM to DVCProHD, 10-Bit Uncompressed Telecine Transfers to RED. I love Final Cut Pro. It’s powerful, flexible, fast, and cheap. Plus, everyone knows how to use it.

Final Cut Pro has served me extremely well. However, when I took up an editing assistant job earlier this year, I discovered that I’d have to learn Avid. And so, for the past 12 weeks or so, I’ve been using Avid on a daily basis. And guess what… I love it just as much as I love Final Cut Pro.

And so, when my ex-film school peers ask me which is better, I reply… “I love them both, equally”. I hate to be the kind of guy that sits on the fence, but the reality is they’re pretty much exactly the same in my opinion. They both do the same things – just a bit differently.

Just for the record – I’ve used Vegas and Premiere in the past as well – but only for individual projects. I haven’t played with the latest version of either. I also haven’t played with the latest version of Avid – although I’m really looking forward to testing out the new AMA architecture within the next few weeks.

Ok… so, one of the most common things I hear is, “Final Cut crashes all the time… but Avid is bullet proof…”. Well, although I’ve had my fair share of Final Cut Pro crashes over the years, I have to say, from my experiences, Avid is far from perfect! Admittedly I’m using 3.0.5 at work – so it’s not the latest version, but that’s really no excuse.

Generally speaking, I think that Avid crashes just as much as Final Cut Pro – when you’re not doing “normal” stuff. For example, if I’m just doing a rough cut of DV-PAL footage on Final Cut Pro, with just simple cuts and simple dissolves, then everything will just work. No crashes, no stalls, no bizarre error messages. Everything will just work. Same as with Avid. However, as soon as you start pushing the boundaries a bit – things start going wrong. For example, in Final Cut Pro, if you’re working with heaps of different formats on your timeline, with thousands of hours of footage in your project file, and a bunch of image sequences, PSD files, etc. you’re bound to have problems. Things will go wrong. The project will take a long time to open. Obviously there are work arounds (such as splitting up your project into multiple projects, etc.) but they’re not ideal. Avid is the same. I’ve been doing some temporary visual effects compositions  in Avid for an offline for a television commercial. The reason they were done in Avid was so that when we hand the EDL over to the effects company – they know what footage they need to use. Avid is FANTASTIC for this kind of thing. I love the AniMatte effect – it’s far better than anything Final Cut has. However, once you have twelve tracks of video all with a colour correction and a couple of mattes – Avid starts to panic a bit. Strange errors start popping up. Things stop working normally. Having said that though – I’ve never had Avid crash (i.e. the program close) on me before. It’s crashed a couple of times on load due to a dodgy file in the OMFI folder – but it’s never died whilst I’ve been doing something important. It’s given me lots of cryptic error messages – but so has Final Cut.

Having said all that – Avid does seem a lot more stable. The timeline responsiveness is incredible. Final Cut Pro is generally pretty good when you wizz around the timeline, but at times it seems to slow down for no particular reason. Avid is fast. Always fast. I like that. I like that a lot.

Another thing that people generally always say is that the media management in Final Cut Pro sucks. Everyone seems to agree that this is the case – from film school students, to random people on Twitter to professionals. Everyone, except me. Personally, I think that the way Avid and Final Cut Pro handle files is pretty much the same – and yes, I know this is going to cause all kinds of arguments. When I set up a new Final Cut Pro project, I set up a new folder structure on an external hard drive (on an unrelated topic – I name all my external drives after pet dogs I’ve come across in the past):

For every single project I work on, I have a Final Cut workspace folder. This contains everything to do with the project – render files, caches, stills, graphics, audio, etc. The advantage of this is that when I open up the project on another Mac, everything is there, and ready to go. No need to re-render. No need to reconnect. Everything just works. The disadvantage is that I need to change the Capture Scratch and Cache paths every time I open a project. However, this only takes about 7 seconds, so it’s not that much of a pain. I very rarely open two project files at once unless it’s a massive film I’m working on such as a feature (and almost never open two different films at the same time, so I don’t get any nasty problems like render files being saved to the wrong project workspace).

Unless you’re working with a Unity – Avid pretty much works the same way. For each project you had a OMFI Media files folder (if you’re working with OMF files) or an Avid MediaFiles folder (if you’re working in MXF files). Sure you can store content for multiple projects in the same media folder, just like you can in Final Cut Pro – but that just makes life more confusing when the time comes to moving projects around. So, I much prefer to have a new OMFI folder for each project.

So in that sense – for my workflow – both Avid and Final Cut Pro work the same way. I keep the media in one place and never have any reconnection issues. Of course if I just drag a file from the desktop into Final Cut Pro without first moving it into my workplace – then I’m going to have reconnection issues if I move to another Mac. But I’m a fairly organised person, so I always put stuff in the right place. For those people who are too lazy or forgetful, then do yourself a favour an purchase a copy of Loader from Digital Heaven.

In terms of actual editing (i.e. the creative stuff) Avid and Final Cut are very different. It took me a while to get out of the habit of being able to quickly drag and drop like you can in Final Cut Pro, but within two or three days, I’ve quickly adapted to the new way of thinking. I really like the way Avid works and can see why editors love it (especially the more old school editors from the days were you had to physically “cut and paste” film). Avid seems hard core and industrial – whereas Final Cut seems more like a sexy new toy. That said though, I personally think a good Final Cut Pro editor can be just as quick as a really good Avid editor. I don’t think one method of working is better than the other – just different.

One thing that Avid wins hand down on is the default keyboard mapping. I’ve grown up with Final Cut Pro, so I’ve never really thought too much about it. Until I started working with Avid. The default Avid layout isn’t perfect – but it’s so much better than Final Cut! Make sure you check out the Keyboard Manifesto on the ProVideo Coalition site. Scott allows you to download a great “Avid-like” keyboard layout to “fix up” Final Cut Pro. However, that said, I can see why Apple have mapped the keyboard the way they have. It’s logical. Sure, it may not be fast. But film students can literally walk up to a Final Cut Pro workstation and have a fair idea of what everything does. When they walk up to an Avid – they have no idea. Avid makes the most sense once you’ve been shown once what everything is – but Final Cut Pro makes sense from the onset.

So what do I like about Avid much more than I do about Final Cut?

The colour corrector in Avid is amazing. It’s so powerful and so easy to use. Apple’s 3-way Colour Corrector is a toy in comparison. However, that said, Final Cut Studio comes with Color – which despite what some people may tell you, is amazing. Sure it has some bugs in it – but they’ll be worked out in time. In the meantime there is always workarounds. Most people hate the interface – but I think it makes sense. Sure it’s not very Apple – but who really cares. As long as it creates amazing looks – which it does.

The effects in Avid are a lot better than Final Cut. I love the AniMatte. It reminds me of After Effects. I wish Final Cut Pro had something like this without having to install some expensive 3rd party plugin.

I love the way Avid handles users and preferences. The fact that when you boot up Avid you’re presented with an option to select a project you wish to open, plus select a user preference is fantastic. It’s so simple, so logical, yet so incredible. Why oh why can’t Final Cut Pro introduce this? The only thing that I don’t like about Avid is the one thing that may people love about it! Whenever I change projects, I need to also change the OMFI folders around. It would be great if when you opened a project you could also select which “media folder” you wanted to use.

By far my FAVOURITE thing about Avid is the way it handles project files. The fact that you can simply copy and paste a bin on the finder level is so much better than the way Final Cut Pro handles things. Sure you can export out an XML file in Final Cut Pro – but it’s so much easier to just be able to copy and paste a bin. From an assistants point of view – this is invaluable! I can just copy and paste bins to the editor and the new bins magically appear in his project. Amazing!

My second favourite thing about Avid is the way it handles settings. You can easily copy and paste settings and rename them. For example, you might have a couple of different configurations for deck setups. Instead of having to change all the settings around each time you change decks, you can just uncheck one configuration and check the other. You can have multiple keyboard configurations in the one user profile. The Avid is amazingly customisable. You can basically change EVERYTHING to suit your needs.

So… if Avid has all these amazing features, why don’t I just change? Well, originally it was just a matter of price. Final Cut Pro is DEAD cheap whereas Avid WAS incredibly expensive. This is changing. But, personally, I think I’m going to be one of those annoying people who is constantly switching between Avid and Final Cut Pro. Why? Because they are both fantastic tools – and they basically do exactly the same thing – it’s just that they are both better at different things.

Final Cut Pro is like a Swiss army knife. You can basically throw anything at it and do things quickly. It can basically tackle any Quicktime file you throw at it, and within minutes you can get from the Final Cut Pro timeline to an exported DVD. It’s quick and sometimes nasty. Everyone knows how to use it (and even if they don’t know, they can learn the basics within hours) – so if you get sick someone else can take over the project with ease. As long as the project is set up correctly from the get-go, and you have some kind of self control in terms of managing files, then you shouldn’t run into too many (if any!) reconnection issues. Final Cut Pro is GREAT for short projects. It’s the perfect short film tool. However for longer projects it dies. It doesn’t handle masses of footage well at all. If you have 40 or so hours of footage in the project, it can take up to 15 minutes to boot up even on the fastest Mac. If you have hundreds of sequences within a project, you can run into all kinds of “Out of Memory” problems. Sure there are workaround – such as using a different project for each scene. But that’s a pain.

Avid on the other hand is a workhorse. It can handle feature films with ease. The boot up time is almost instant in most cases. It’s not bullet proof – but I’ve never lost media, render files, or work because of a random bug or error – in comparison to Final Cut Pro where I’ve lost whole projects temporarily (thank goodness for the Autosave vault!). If I know I’m going to be working with a lot of media, then Avid will always be my first preference.

Although the new AMA changes everything – as of Avid 3.0.5 and Final Cut Pro 6.0.5, both NLEs have the same limitation – although it doesn’t bother me that much. Avid converts everything to MXFs of OMFs whereas Final Cut Pro converts everything to Quicktimes. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People complain about the transcode times. Do it while you’re sleeping. People complain about requiring so much hard drive space. Hard drives are cheap now. I don’t think this is really a limitation at all.

Finally, I still stand by my prediction that the next version of Final Cut Studio will change EVERYTHING. I’m sorry, but there is no way in hell Apple is going to watch Avid dramatically improve their packages, lower the prices dramatically, and just do nothing. I’m extremely confident that Apple has something new and amazing hidden away in some dark and smelly room somewhere. But, that said, Avid is now a completely different company. They’ve changed. For the better. They are actually listening to their customers, and seriously improving their software.

One thing for certain is that I think Avid will eventually get rid of the EDL Manager and DigiTranslator, and put this functionality directly into the Avid application. I think integration between ProTools and Avid will also become almost transparent. But I also think that the integration between Final Cut Pro and ProTools will become better.  I finally think Avid has decided to stop fighting Apple and start working out ways to get their software in front of the eyes of Final Cut Pro fanatics.

So in conclusion… both Avid and Final Cut Pro are great tools that both can help achieve amazing works of art. Both are far from perfect. Both have bugs. Both needs improving. But I think every editor should have both on their system.

If you’re doing a long form project – unless you have an amazing assistant editor who’s extremely technically proficient and patient – I’d stick with Avid. It’s got an unchallenge amazing track record.

If you’re doing a short film – then maybe Final Cut Pro is the go.

If you’re working with lots of different editors, or if it’s a big project, then Avid is the winner, although you can do these kinds of projects with Final Cut Pro. Personally I prefer the ability to easily copy and paste bins than using XML files.

Either way, I know it’s cliche, but as every editor will tell you, it’s not the tools that make a great film – it’s the talented editor who’s TELLING A STORY. It’s easy to get bogged down in technology, and Final Cut vs Avid discussions – but at the end of the day use the tool that works.

Happy Editing! Feel free to leave your comments, suggestions, abuse, ideas, etc. below! I’d love to hear from you!

Best Regards, Chris!

Directed by Sydney-based Shawn Seet – who traditionally has mainly done television directing and editing as well as being awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen’s New Years Honours Lis for his services to Australian society and to Australian film production – this film is sure to be a hit, especially given that At the Movies gave it some a positive review. It will be very interesting to see how this film goes at the box office…

Ignoring the actual film for a minute – the thing that really caught our attention was their online presence. As well as the official movie site, they also had two other promotional sites. One of them teaches you how to throw a punch, and the other features a Cut Your Own Scene competition. It’s the latter that really got us interested.

On the site, you can download five scenes, and some sound effects and temp score and basically do what you want with it (under the condition that you link back to their site if you display it online). The footage is in “rushes” form – meaning the footage has a logo on it, isn’t colour graded and has timecode burnt into it. Although they don’t give you all the footage for each scene (and if they actually do, then they really shot VERY little coverage for each scene), and the “rushes” have been edited together to look like rushes (i.e. slates have been added in for the hell of it, random footage has been added, useful footage has been removed) – you’re still provided with some useful footage, and it’s great to play around with.

Although the competition has now closed – the general idea was that the public can cut together their own scene, and submit it for review.The best five scenes will be posted on Disney’s promotional site for the film (obviously this is a great opportunity for some exposure to high-profile people in the film industry). These five best scene cuts will be selected by Bill Russo head of Editing at the AFTRS and the creative team from the film. Interestingly, Director Shawn Seet, Editor Milena Romanin and Cinematogropher Hugh Miller are all graduates from AFTRS, Australia’s premiere Film and Television school.

If you haven’t already downloaded the rushes and had a play – I highly recommend you do! They’re great for practising your craft, and would also make a terrific training tool.

I downloaded the rushes a few months ago now, and used them to really get to grips with Avid (as I’ve done most of my cutting in Final Cut Pro in the past). Trying to cut together a real scene (as opposed to some dodgy video footage supplied with most books and tutorials), was really handy. Just getting on with the job, and learning as I went, was extremely beneficial.

For your viewing pleasure, here are some of the edits I threw together:

Scene A (Rough Cut 001)

Scene B (Rough Cut 001)

Scene C (Rough Cut 005)

Scene E (Rough Cut 001)

None of these edits are particularly amazing – although I did spend a fair bit of time on Scene C to try and get it flowing a lot nicer. The lack of coverage was a bit tricky – and really added to the challenge. I didn’t have time to really fix up the audio or grade the footage either – so you’re really seeing a first pass of an offline edit.

You can download my Avid Project for the scene here if you like. You’ll need to download all the media yourself though and re-link it. Originally I planned to log all the clips in Final Cut Pro as well – but never got around to it. If you edited the scenes in Final Cut and want to offer your project file on this site, let me know!

Overall – I think this campaign was a really good idea, and I’d love to see some statistics on how many people actually downloaded the rushes and submitted entries for the competition. Looking at YouTube search results, there doesn’t seem to be that many people that got into it which is a real shame. Although the fact that the site moved their rushes over to Amazon Web Services probably means that at least a lot of people were downloading the files. I guess at the end of the day any publicity is good publicity, and the most people that talk about the film the better.

It’s really interesting watching what other people have done. For example, I just watched this version – although it’s cut together OK, it seems a bit all over the place, and doesn’t really have a nice flow to it. Also, you don’t really get an insight into the characters at all. This version of another scene is a lot better – but it seems really fast. I also don’t really like the dissolve at the start. This version of the fight scene however works HEAPS better than mine. At the time of playing with this scene, I was too afraid to use jump cuts, and I really tried to make it flow naturally – but it never really worked. I used far too many instances of the one cutaway (the young worker looking through the window). In retrospect, I think the use of fast jump cuts and really making the action zip past would have worked a lot better. I’ve also been told you should never have characters both enter and exit a sense – you should either have one or the other. This is hard when you’re only cutting one scene, with no overall context – but I think the rule is still a good one, and may have helped me with some of the other scenes.

As we’re in the process of trying to build a similar campaign for the SAKOOZ trailer, this was a really great project to study. The fact that you could download the rushes (as opposed to editing the trailer online) is something that really interests us. However, I think by making people download large files and edit them on their own system (whether they use Mac or PC, Avid or FCP, Premiere or Vegas, Windows Movie Maker or iMovie…) as opposed to just being able to cut something together in the comfort of a web browser, means that the campaign attracts more to geeks and professionals, as opposed to just general movie goers. As a lot of geeks and professionals will probably go see the movie regardless, I’m not sure if this kind of thing will actually attract more audience numbers to the cinemas. What I’m now considering for the SAKOOZ site (and for future “cutting your own version” sites), it having the option – you can either edit online (we are currently working very closely with the team at Kaltura), or download and cut it together using your own tools.

Regardless of all this – we highly recommend you go and see the film at the movies and support Australian films! And when it comes out on DVD – buy that as well! I’m sure there’ll be some great special feature on that one…

Finally – if you edited your own version of the scenes, feel free to let us know via the comments system at the bottom of this page! We’d love to see your interpretation of the scenes!

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris!