Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “I don’t know if I agree. Sometimes documentary and reality TV (or similar styles of production) are harder, because there’s less control of the image in production and a wider range of [often mismatched] cameras are used. For these types of jobs, especially non-broadcast, it’s pretty hard to beat what Adobe has done with the Lumetri Color panel. “
Each project has its own set of hurdles, but I think doc/unscripted benefits from not having the expectation to look as slick as scripted. Shaky cam, jump cuts, blown out skies, even horrible camera moves are typically accepted by audiences because ‘hey, it’s real life’ and the roughness adds to the authenticity. Scripted is supposed to look more polished in part because you are supposed to have more control over variables, but as well all know that’s not always true (especially if you are working on lower-end projects). And many times scripted is also expected to have a ‘look’ where as doc/unscripted is just expected to look natural (or be an enhancement of the beauty already in the scene).
I don’t know how many times I’ve got a scene that someone wanted to be ‘moody’ so they just turned off all the lights but one and left me with an under-lit face swimming in a sea detail-less black noise. WTF am I supposed to do with that? Here, let me Neat Video this scene within an inch of its life and hopefully it won’t look totally offensive. Or someone’s wanted the ‘teal & orange’ look but they didn’t think to dress their set or cast to facilitate that look. No, we can’t get that ‘blockbuster’ look because a bunch of people are wearing red, green, yellow, etc., and the room is orange. Or the shoot was done outside over the course of the day and it’s very obvious that the different angles were shot several hours apart.
Ugh.
/rant
Years ago I cut a doc called “Looking for Lenny” (about Lenny Bruce’s impact on standup and Free Speech) and it was all shot in SD over the course of six years (mainly Canon GL1, some random handy cam and later an HVX200). In 2012 we got distribution (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, cable/Sat VOD, etc.,) and I always joke that it was the last SD project picked up by Netflix. If we’d been an indie drama or indie action movie I think getting distro like that wouldn’t have been possible because the production value wouldn’t have been good enough. But for a doc people are much more forgiving.
[Oliver Peters] “I’m working on a team right now producing a fair amount of branded entertainment content and absolutely everything gets color corrected and all with the Lumetri tools. The editors are definitely expected to know how to do this, even if their work is only for approval of rough cuts by the client.
When you look at the work being done, the Color Board doesn’t cut it. If we went third party plug-ins, then that would mean purchasing at least 7 or 8 licenses. Turnarounds don’t permit enough time to use Resolve. So, having better color tools integrated into X would help push X into this arena.”
I’ve been very impressed with Lumetri. For years I used Colorista for my in-NLE grading needs (both in PPro and FCP Legend), but I haven’t thought about it since the second round of Lumetri updates. 6 or 7 years ago I worked briefly as a Junior Colorist for a company that did a lot of shows for HGTV and they did all their coloring inside of FCP 7 using an assortment of plugins (and sometimes just using the 3-way). If you were up to speed on the plugins they used it was certainly faster than doing the round trip to Color (prep, send the timeline, grade, render, back to FCP, hope their aren’t any changes, etc.,), and easier to make last minute changes too. FWIW a few years ago they switched to Avid and Resolve.
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What codec does the GH5 record to and which Mac are you using? If you are using H.264 on an iMac or Mac laptop then QT 10 (and FCP X) use the built in H.264 encoder/decoder chip that’s part of the intel CPU on those models. Adobe doesn’t utilize that chip for whatever reason so manipulating h.264 footage is always going to be slower in comparison.
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My quick 2 cents:
I think Apple’s happy with how 1st party color grading is inside FCP X sp they aren’t going to drastically improve it. They’ll leave it up to third parties. Also, AFAIK the use of the Color Board prevents any control panels from working with FCP X’s native tools so that obviously creates a workflow ceiling. Even if Apple dumps the power of Color into X, the usability will be drastically hindered by not being able to use panels.
[Bill Davis] “Not by removing the need to grade at the top end of the market – that will remain forever. As will the desire to employ educated colorists who can put an artistic imprint on a work. “
I think the need for a colorist depends more on the project than on the budget. For example, creating the look the director wants on a scripted film is generally going to be more work than making footage look natural on a documentary even if the film is micro-budget and the doc is big budget. Like with most changes, the lower hanging fruit will disappear first.
With regards to AI taking over grading duties for the majority of projects five years from now… I think we’ll see AI taking over many aspects of editing before we see it taking over many aspects of grading because so grading is so subjective where as a lot of editing can be very objective. For example, say we are doing a local car commercial for Bob’s Auto Barn. The low hanging fruit is for AI + metadata to enable an NLE to find the broll of the Fords, Chevy’s and Hondas and cut them in when Bob talks about the Fords, Chevy’s and Hondas he has on the lot. When we get to the last shot, which is a wide exterior of the lot including the “Bob’s Auto Barn” sign Bob says the sign is the wrong shade of red. I think that subjective subtly will be much harder for computers to effectively do autonomously. If it was in a documentary the exact shade of red of the sign probably wouldn’t make a difference, but for a commercial (even a low budget one) the color is important because it’s part of the branding.
[Bill Davis] “I also think that most people who do content generation will welcome systems that eliminate time consuming visual issues as early in the production chain as possible.
“You mean like properly white balancing and exposing an image during production (or even *gasp* shooting a chip chart)? Nah, they’re way too busy for that… ????
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[Steve Connor] “Apparently the Ripple will be supported by “Chromatic” in FCPX soon as well”
FWIW Color Finale Pro can be used with all of Tangents panels.
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[Oliver Peters] “But, when Adobe acquired SG, I don’t believe BMD was yet offering Resolve for free. At that point, SG within the Adobe family made sense”
Yeah, I keep forgetting that SG was added so long ago. I really didn’t start paying attention to it until they implemented Direct Link.
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[Michael Gissing] “The article is notable for not mentioning the real reason. Resolve has totally dominated the grade market over the past six years. I got CS6 and looked at Speedgrade. It was not well implemented and the pace of developments at BM shot Resolve into a handy lead. Given the Resolve free or not much pricing, I think Adobe gave up long ago and did the sensible thing of improving Pr by importing the IP from Speedgrade with Lumetri grading.
As grading only needs to be good enough for many, it is a wise move to bury Speedgrade now that parts of it have migrated. Send to round tripping is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.”
Agreed. Speedgrade quickly turned into a strip it for parts project because there’s no point in trying to compete w/a app like Resolve when it’s free.
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[Bill Davis] “If people type in “God” and the only top results returned are those promoted exclusively by – say – Scientology – is that a problem? Would anyone feel it’s a situation that needs to be addressed?”
I don’t quite follow. Are you saying the COW doesn’t always return FCP X results when you search for FCP X?
[Bill Davis] “Lets say we were all to go to the Premiere Pro forum here – and working together – make every single topic thread on the landing page there – exclusively about how DeVinci Resolve functions – to the extent the words Adobe nor Premiere get pushed off the front page.
“I can’t believe were are going on 6yrs and you still think this forum is only about FCP X. If you want a forum dedicated to X at the COW, good news, it already exists (and has for a long time). This forum, though, is dedicated to a debate about how Apple’s ‘re-imagined’ NLE experience compares/contrasts to the ‘traditional’ NLE approach used by MC, PPro, Resolve, Vegas, FCP Legend, Lightworks, etc.,.
Some others think that this place is a just general round-robin, NLE beat’em up forum, and want to given it a generic name that doesn’t involve FCP X, but I think that ignores the unique philosophical underpinnings of X which are at the heart of the debate. Tim doesn’t keep FCP X in the forum title as cheap way to swindle clicks from passersby, he keeps it in the forum title because this place is about how X’s new philosophy compares to the pre-existing philosophy that almost all other NLEs use some variation of.
In another thread you talked about the tendency for many/most people to create cognitive bias supporting information silos around themselves these days, and with that in mind I think it should be encouraged, not discouraged, to post new and relevant info about all NLEs, not just X, in a forum that’s geared toward debating about NLEs.
For example,
[Bill Davis] “As an X editor – I see TONS of X content from all over the world.In order to see stuff on Premiere or AVID – I have to actively seek it out via effort.”
[Bill Davis] “I’d love to be educated about how the Premiere or AVID editing operations are improving and evolving.”
By people posting about what’s new in other NLEs you no longer have to actively seek out that info via effort. It is brought to a place you already frequent and it gives you the opportunity to better educate yourself about applications that you don’t personally use but often talk about. I know nothing beats hands on time, but that’s not always feasible, and even reading about something you don’t currently use can sometimes give you new ideas about what you do currently use.
For example, in the article you posted years ago about the night/day Honda ad cut on X, one thing the editor did is put the poxy media in a Compound clip and edit with that until he was given the full rez media. Once he got the full rez media he just dropped that into the Compound clip and *boom* the whole edit was now full rez. Even though I don’t use X, the article was beneficially because I realized the same approach could be used in PPro via nested sequences.
Ever since then I’ve stopped thinking just in terms of clips and media, but also in terms of containers and that has changed how I approach various editing problems. For example, whenever I do foreign language interviews in PPro I always create a multicam clip (basically a nested sequence) and use that as my source because it allows me to keep interviewee’s audio, the translators audio (aligned with the interviewees audio), and the subtitles all in the same container. This keeps the timeline cleaner, and makes it simple to apply changes globally.
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[Claude Lyneis] “How about calling it FCPX vs PPro? Sure Avid and Resolve drift in and out of the discussion, but X vs Pro seems to get the blood pumping.
“I dunno. This recent roil over the forum name started because Bill thinks there were too many threads about Resolve and Fusion for a finite amount of time, and anytime it’s brought up how popular MC is with the we-have-budgets-big-enough-to-choose-anything-we-want crowd someone always lash out with “well, that’s just actually a really small niche..” or “they only use it because it’s entrenched, and nobody in their right mind would choose it otherwise…” blah, blah, blah. The animosity is certainly still strong there.
I’m not found of “X vs PPro” or “X vs Avid” or really X vs any specific NLE because the scope of this forum has never been that narrow. It’s more of a philosophical debate about how to best build an NLE, and of course it’s always changing because the software is always changing.
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[Bill Davis] “But I’m not at all saying that.
I’m saying a Forum designed and marketed (by title) to focus on a particular topic, is weakened by having nothing on that topic showing in all the discussions on its front page.
When I set my forum view to “by topic” and look back one week I see 9 topics and 6 of them contain discussions about X and/or Apple. If I look back two weeks I see 17 threads and 10 of them contain discussions about X and/or Apple. If I look back 4 weeks I see 40 threads and 26 of them contain discussions about X and/or Apple. The ‘X-less’ front page you saw seems to have been a short lived anomaly.
And with regards to the few threads that only talk about the brand new releases of Resolve and Fusion, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize them as completely OT because one can’t truly discuss the effectiveness of X w/o discussing the effectiveness of other NLEs. Apple is the one that ‘re-imagined’ how an NLE should function so I don’t think it’s unfair to say the onus is on X to prove that that change of direction is the best way forward. For you, and other’s like you, the debate was over the day you got your hands on X. It fit your needs swimmingly right out of the box. For other people it is still on going. And hopefully through the nature of competition it will always be ongoing so that these companies always feel compelled to improve their offerings.
And it’s not just with big re-imagining of how things are done that can propel X forward, it’s also with smaller, relatively mundane things that add up over time. For example, the addition of Lanes and color coded Roles was huge in my opinion because many editors (myself included) are visual organizers and these two new tools give us a way to help visually organize
our timelines. For someone that already adopted X years ago it’s probably not that big of a deal because they’ve learned to get along with it out, but for someone that’s still debating whether or not X is worth it it could be something ‘small’ that finally tips the scales.You things like this are a somewhat regular basis,
[Bill Davis] “I know I find WAY more interesting discussions about FCP X elsewhere on the web. A large chunk of those 2 million folks are active and engaged. Just not here.
which is why I think you’d be happier if this place turned into another homogeneous experience were the dominant theme is to talk about X, not to question X. That’s just antithesis to the DNA of this particular forum though. Plus there’s already a forum on the COW for that type of experience.
Particularly in today’s environment – where people clicking in, often have shortened attend spans and the ability to click away if they don’t find something satisfying that causes them to stay – less “on-topic” content won’t build the brand very efficiently.That’s all.”
I’ll wait for Tim to officially chime in, but I bet the traffic here is still doing well.
EDIT: fixed the formatting.
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From the article:
“There are two things Apple can do here: firstly, they need to improve their products to make them more suited for high-end production. Secondly, they could invest in the education aspects of the post ecosystem.”Normally I’d expect hellfire and brimstone to rain down in here for a statement like that, but since it’s from Alex I doubt it will happen.
Overall I agree with his position that if Apple wants to bring to bear the same talent that works on originals for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.,. then they can’t stipulate what NLE is used. Dollars to donuts it will be Avid, and then someone will give a Nelson-like “Ha-ha” because an Apple show wasn’t cut on Apples NLE, a flame war will ensue and the other 99.99999% of the people that saw the show will only care if they liked it or not.
So far all their original programing has been self serving (Planet of the Apps, Carpool Karaoke and the semi-biographical drama about Dr. Dre) which is I think a bigger issue than what NLE they use. I’m also curious as to how Apple will handle this new level of editorial control they have in terms of their image. Much like Disney, Apple has carefully curated and protected its image so is that going to filter into their programing decisions as well? The Dr Dre show is supposed to be pretty R-rated, but who knows if it actually will be. Also, given Apple’s progressive political leanings will they feel pressure from some parts of their user base to release shows that echo that sentiment? And if they do will they risk alienating other parts of their user base that feel like Apple is preaching?
Unlike Netflix, Amazon, etc., Apple’s customers many times are buying into the lifestyle/cult of the brand as much as they are buying a product.