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Where is editing going
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” I would love to hear some other editor comments on this multiple editor workflow, perhaps in a separate thread), so Everywhere and Anywhere don’t carry much weight.”
I’ve worked in two shared environments – one Avid Unity-based and the other using FCP7 with FC Server and a SAN. These were small situations with 4 suites in each case. I also routinely work at a TV affiliate where all rooms are connected to a SAN and they all use PPro now. The Avid set-up was for true collaboration on a TV series while the other two were/are simply to make it easy to move from one room to another based on scheduling. I’ve done some other one-off jobs in shared suites – again, those were more for centralized storage than project sharing.
In the Avid situation, this was true project sharing where different editors were working on various stages of 20+ episodes in a TV season. Since segments of the shows were being shifted from one episode to another and since one editor would often be called upon to recut a segment started by another editor, there was every combination of sharing imaginable. This is a pretty common “reality TV” approach. So two important factors – one, not to get too wrapped up with who cut something because it would likely get revised a few times by others before air – and two, be careful that everyone was using the same conventions within the project to avoid confusion. In this type of set-up, NOTHING YET has equaled the Avid project sharing solution. So I’m very curious to see how Adobe Anywhere progresses.
I do think that easy collaboration over the net is a big future for editing – even for one man bands.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Shawn Miller] “Then again, there are a lot of really talented folks south of the border who don’t have high living expenses either. 🙂
“I remember doing a job for the Post Office about 15 years or so ago in my state, and they had these cameras set up on the lines zoomed in on the mail so that some people in a southern state that worked cheaper (as they tend to do down there) could read the zip codes and type in the info.
They didn’t leave the country, and I don’t know how much they saved by doing it. Totally different industry, but it just kind of reminds me of that.
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Direct TV post guy Mark Bach in his presentation in the FCP X Suite at NAB surprised a lot of us when he talked about how they do their audio post by cutting all day – then every night sending the fresh files to Madrid, Spain where the sound editor starts work when the LA video team is going to bed. The next morning, the files with audio are returned. 24 hours of productivity – and nobody loses any sleep. Sign of the future?
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Bill Davis] ” the innovative energy on the Premiere Pro side has been largely in the new Cloud initiatives – moving what the program already does into virtual space rather than re-thinking any traditional timeline functions. Is that fair?”
Partially. The other half of their innovation is in creating specific new tools for editors to use – tools like Morph Cut, and in the about to be released newest version of Audition a tool that will take a piece of music that runs, let’s say 1:30, and automatically re-cut it to a length you specify without using re-timing but rather by analyzing the beats and chord changes. As well they have a new tool that will take a text file and turn it into an audio file using synthesized speech – perfect for quick scratch vo for those of us lacking your golden pipes. My contention is that the Cloud is creating a context for them to be creating these tools at an extraordinary rate, and it is this new rate of change itself that is a “new direction” for video editing.
You see the innovations in X, the timeline, the skimmer, keywords – all of which appeal to your workflow – and then see “the future” in terms of those type of functions. I think you need to broaden your view and see that innovation can be in team approaches, in remote handling, in speed of new tool introduction, in increased UI options. Then you’ll see that while X is very innovative in some areas, those areas do not constrain the concept of “where editing is going.” It’s going many different places all at once; there is no such thing as going to where the puck will be when the ice is littered with so many pucks.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Oliver Peters] “”Out of interest does PP not care at all what codec you put in the Timeline or does it perform better if stuff is transcoded to Pro Res?”
The PPro timeline codec selection only affects the render file format for previews. In general, I’ve found that PPro likes media that is ProRes, MPEG2, AVC-Intra and Avid DNxHD.”
How is Cineform on the Mac side? I’ve found that it performs about the same as ProRes or DNxHD on my Windows machines.
EDIT: On the Premiere Pro timeline, of course.
Shawn
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[Tony West] “I remember doing a job for the Post Office about 15 years or so ago in my state, and they had these cameras set up on the lines zoomed in on the mail so that some people in a southern state that worked cheaper (as they tend to do down there) could read the zip codes and type in the info.
They didn’t leave the country, and I don’t know how much they saved by doing it. Totally different industry, but it just kind of reminds me of that.”
Wow, I didn’t know about that. I think that’s the new reality for nearly every industry though. Jobs that can be done remotely, will probably be sent to the least expensive workers with the most acceptable output.
Shawn
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[Herb Sevush] “the about to be released newest version of Audition a tool that will take a piece of music that runs, let’s say 1:30, and automatically re-cut it to a length you specify without using re-timing but rather by analyzing the beats and chord changes.”
That sounds very useful! A bit like the functionality of Smart Sounds Sonicfire Pro, but with a standard music track.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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I wonder whether they licensed this technology from Sony, or that it’s just relatively simple to implement. I’ve been using Sony ACID Pro for a few years now, and was amazed at this ability with just a .wav file. I could take a music clip which was, say, 100bpm, and change it to whatever speed I wanted it, without effecting pitch. As a matter of fact, when you start a music project in ACID, the software “learns” what the bpm of the first track is, then can automaticlly adjust non-matching tracks to fit the tempo.
Sony sells what they call “8 packs” of library music – these are essentially 8 track versions of music beds, which, when opened in ACID, allow you to create whatever arrangements you need, right down to the tempo – so you can fit a piece of music to your production perfectly, right down to using a quieter/simpler version of a track when you’ve got a VO, and that sort of thing. It’s not dissimilar to Sonicfire Pro, but to see it in in Audition will put the technology a bit closer to home.
If you want to download a free trial of ACID, it’s at:
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/trials/musicstudio
Sony also gives away a free 8 pack of their music beds once a week:
https://www.acidplanet.com/downloads/8packs/
There are some pretty sophisticated arrangements in their library. And there’s also a free version of the software called ACID Xpress.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[James Ewart] “Out of interest does PP not care at all what codec you put in the Timeline or does it perform better if stuff is transcoded to Pro Res?”
There are a lot of formats it works with natively, but even people at Adobe (Al Mooney, for example) says that any NLE has issues playing back H.264, so it’s best to transcode. AVCHD is an H.264 variant, and GoPro is H.264 in an MP4 container… So while they CLAIM true native editing, there is a point where that isn’t possible.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Scott Witthaus] “Personally, I am a one-man-band and can’t imagine having multiple editors working on a project with me (except for assistants of course. I would love to hear some other editor comments on this multiple editor workflow, perhaps in a separate thread),”
I work on documentaries and reality shows in which 4-6 editors might be working on a single episode. Typically one per Act, or each editor might do two acts, depending on the schedule. We all work in the same project file, but use our own CUTS bins to store media. But we do open and share the same FOOTAGE bins and MUSIC bins and SFX bins. Opening the exact same bins. The first person to open the bin “owns” it, meaning they can make changes. Any one who opens it after this, can open the same bin, but it’s locked, and they can’t make changes. Well, they CAN, but when you close the bin, the changes you made go away.
This is very useful when we all need access to the same footage, same music…and the Assistant Editors only need to update one bin in the project when new footage comes in, instead of in FCP workflows, needing to update every bin on every computer (as with FCP, you copy the project locally and work from that, rather than running it from a server, and two people cannot share a project).
And as Oliver mentioned, we all have to conform to a single style of cutting…we need to cut in a way that’s seamless…so that it looks like every act was cut by the same person. No small task, I tell you. The lead editor sets the style, and the pacing, and you need to mimic that. Often the lead editor will go over your cuts and tweak them so they conform to the show style, and all appear to have the same style and pacing.
Working with multiple editors with FCP Classic, or Premiere, or FCX is possible, for sure. But it’s done very differently. And editors have to be more aware of the technical aspects of their project, where media is stored, and pay more attention to details about getting new footage and saving their cuts and getting those cuts to the other editors. Unlike Avid where you can just cut and not really need to think about it.
And we don’t use ANYWHERE or EVERYWHERE for this…but you do need a specific server type to support shared projects. Like Avid ISIS or Facilis Terrablock.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
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