Media 100 and OMF and Long form

[Floh Peters]

[Warren Eig] “Does M100 support OMF export?”

Currently not, as far as I know. There was an OMF option earlier (sold separately), but as far as I can tell it has been discontinued. You can export FCP-compatible XMLs, though. And as far as I know, AAF export is somewhere on the roadmap.

[Warren Eig] “Does it still only have one preview monitor?”

You can work either with a single viewer monitor, or with Source/Record monitor.

[Warren Eig] “No color wheels?”
You have RGB curves and levels in realtime, and you have a great 3way Colorcorrector via Boris Red (you have one-click access to Red from within the Media 100 timeline).

[Warren Eig] “Can you cut a feature film on it and export necessary deliverables?”
Yes. In my experience it is much more reliable and much quicker for long-form editing that FCP.

There is a free 14-day trial version available for download, so if you know V8 you could give it a try. You should feel at home pretty quickly.

[Fermin Branger]

Hi Warren, our main activity is the film production. We have two M100 systems.

Depending on the project we’ve worked with M100 or Final Cut, it depends on the codec support (the 1rst projects) or if we works at distance from the Director and it has a FCP in his home.

We’ve been making long feature films and some short films with Media100 Suite since 10 years ago, and all that projects have been released without any problems. Pure peace of mind is M100 for us and our clients. M100 works natively with our AVC-INTRA 10 bit codec of our Varicam 3700 camera. We have done projects shooted on HDCAM-SR, XDCAM, DVCPRO HD, HDV and so on. And now that M100 supports Red cameras natively, I know that a lot of projects will come to us from that way.

To export OMF files to the dolby studio, we export XML to FCP 7, and then export the OMF from there.

Our color correction is made, depending on the client, in AE using Colorista II, or in Color, for our co-productions. The final tuning of some escenes is made using the curves and levels corrector over our uncompressed 10 bit media in M100. (but I’ve heard very good comments about the new 3 way corrector of Boris for some things). Then, we export a “Self contained” movie of each roll and then export each one as AJA 10 bit RGB Codec, to convert it into DPX files for lab. (I know this “Export” part sounds a bit tedious, but worth it). At last, we make a final “one-light” color adjust into the Scratch or Film-light before transfer it to 35mm.

Media 100 have been so much reliable for us, compared to FCP. You can edit without re-rendering video and audio. It works like the finest machines.

But remember, to prevent gamma issues from quicktime you MUST export without use the internal Qtm conversion, and then export from Qtm application using your AJA codecs.

Fermin Branger
ALFARERIA CINEMATOGRAFICA
Caracas, Venezuela.
http://www.alfareriacine.com