Michael Cioni on X and modern workflows for NAB 2016

[Charlie Austin]

[Walter Soyka] “Metadata driving workflow is so smart. This is stuff that humans should never have to manage manually.”

Agreed, and in X, I hardly ever have to do the stuff manually. Maybe add a note to a submitted version or something, but it the app pretty much does it all for me.

Other thing about X is that I can concentrate on the edit, no tabbing through windows, moving to other apps to do VFX etc etc. Set up X the right way, and bolt on the additions you require, and you can pretty much just do everything from the timeline. You can of course do many things in other NLE timelines too, but it’s not the same at all.

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[Michael Gissing]

[Tony West] “I have been shooting with that camera myself Michael and some of it’s missing features make it a challenge to shoot with (at least for me). It’s a good price point for the image you can get out of it, but I’d like a few more basic features.”

Curious what features you are missing Tony. At the moment I am dealing with the BM4k brick which is impossible to hand hold. I am using the Ursa viewfinder with it so that is a vast improvement. I have ordered the Ursa Mini with the shoulder plate & Vlock battery adaptor so apart from the better sensor I am getting a whole lot of improvements including compressed raw.

[Tony West]

[Michael Gissing] ” what features you are missing Tony.”

I would like built in ND filters. I can use a matte box but I’m use to just rolling the ND when I go from bright sunlight on the field to maybe someone in the tunnel or dugout. I just want to control light faster.

I like having A and B WB on the side of the camera. I want the option to cheat the color temperature
and click back and forth to the producer. A B A B A B

There’s no WB on the camera. You just dial it in (5600k) I don’t really want to do that. Sometimes there are multiple sources of light coming in and I want to see what the camera thinks that looks like on a WB

I like the option to dial but I also want the WB.

You also have to go into the menu to dial up a WB and you lose the picture in the flip out while the menu is up. I want to see the color temp as I change it.

You also can’t step through thumbnails of your clips. You can’t just delete one clip to make room on the card or playback a certain clip.

I’m sure some one will correct me if they have a different experience with the camera.

No HDMI out.

I get it, they want to make it affordable, but dang. It’s like it’s a sensor in a shoebox.

[Michael Gissing]

I get the ND and the WB for your needs. With the sort of shooting I am doing that isn’t a problem. If I shoot raw I can change temp and iso later so I have some post control over those lacking features. I have a matte box and lots of ND with IR filtering. It is certainly a production camera compared to a run & gun but for me it has enough doco features and the things it has compared to the 4k brick are a big improvement.

HDMI out doesn’t worry me. I live in an SDI world and even external monitors I have are SDI. I don’t need external recorders so it is just monitoring and SDI is fine for me.

I guess the big thing is the camera is for my projects. I am not a cinematographer for hire.

[Tony West]

I guess I’m old school. I want my shots as close to pro in the filed as I can get them. I’m looking to just tweak in post, but different strokes.

The matte box just gets in my way as I’m changing primes. It just slows things down.

[Michael Gissing] “I live in an SDI world and even external monitors I have are SDI. “

Me too mostly, but I have the Paralinx system that’s HDMI so when I want to fly this thing I can’t give the client a monitor. I’m sure I could find a convertor but wouldn’t need to if they put it on the camera.

I’m sure you are going to get some really good stuff out of this camera. I was happy with the footage. I didn’t see any noise in the blacks that I heard folks talking about. It was very clean.

[Mark Smith]

I’m not hating on anyone or anything. If Cioni were female he would be taken to task for his appearance, so I’m just trying to apply the rules in a fair way…. that’s all.

Cioni is a vastly talented guy and I recognise that, I also use and like FCPX….

[Andrew Kimery]

Adobe is still being skimpy on the search parameters which is unfortunate (and is a feature request I have put in). PPro supports a lot of different types of metadata and it would be much more useful if the search feature wasn’t so constrained.

[Robin S. kurz]

[Jeff Markgraf] “Great contribution, really on point.”

“In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion,[3] often for their own amusement.”

Yup.

[Dom Silverio]

Mr Cioni overstates a lot of things in there. Original with non baked LUTs? Background transcode? Advance searches? Not “very very unique”.

Even an old Meridien Avid, make a custom column (aka metadata) and write any word (tag) if you like.

Working with high-res media (be it camera original or some sort of transcode) is nothing new. Often its not a question can the NLE handle it, but do we have the money (storage, powerful CPUs, infrastructure) to utilize it.

And that workflow still involves the same amount of equipment and staffing. And editors for major feature rarely have to deal with the tedious tasks of transcode, VFX pull, etc. Those are the job of the AEs. So those are not really taking any “creative time.” Does not matter if it took 15 secs in FCPX or 5 min in x NLE. All AE time.

[Bill Davis]

[Dom Silverio] “And that workflow still involves the same amount of equipment and staffing. And editors for major feature rarely have to deal with the tedious tasks of transcode, VFX pull, etc. Those are the job of the AEs. So those are not really taking any “creative time.” Does not matter if it took 15 secs in FCPX or 5 min in x NLE. All AE time.
“

Except that it doesn’t. This is your view from the outside. The directors have argued forcefully just the opposite in recent weeks. Their opinion seems to be that the X workflow they have adopted is saving them SIGNIFICANT time and money on set and in post. And a even a BUNCH of hours of AE vs Editor time just doesn’t drive the kind of efficiency they are speaking of. Which means you are missing a lot of the story.

In the AFI videos, both the directors, Mr Kovac the editor, the first AE AND the assistant editor ALL spoke of VERY significant increased efficiency – and the furthest above the line Producer on stage was equally clear that the new workflow was a large element in their coming in “well under budget.” I’ve spoken directly with the Editor, Jan Kovac, and I can assure you that he sees X and the new workflow as a significant improvement over how the editorial team used to operate. So sorry, but I think it’s fair to assign more weight to the opinions of people who actually have experience with how a system really works, over the opinions of those who don’t.

Not a slam at all, just a analysis of the facts.

I get that you and a lot of others can’t see how X can be more efficient – and therefore an easier and perhaps more satisfying way to work for many editors, but that’s exactly how a lot of us see it. Guys like me in corporate – and men and women editing lots of big dollar projects like the films we’re discussing here.

The “but it can’t ‘ do…” straw men are largely ashes now. What’s left is each editors decision of whether to give it another look, or feel that even tho it’s capable, fast and almost rediculously inexpensive it OWN – it’s not worth studying. That’s fine. Not everyone will enjoy it.

But you’ve got to marvel (just a little) that these teams have successfully (even happily!) have cut multiple major motion pictures now on the same hardware and $399 App Store software that anyone can buy. And they did it with little to no “special handholding” from Apple – no special software builds nor teams of engineers hovering around them. Just buy the gear, install the same siftware as everybody gets – and make a movie that’s in the local multiplex in the same timeframe as everyone else’s film. Seems pretty cool to me.

YMMV.

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