Chris Conlee
Forum Replies Created
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[Scott Witthaus] “that in itself does not make it the best choice or the best platform for every visual storyteller”
Absolutely agree. Like computers, I’m largely agnostic, believe it or not. I used Amigas for years, then D/Vision and Razor and Incite on a PC. Have dabbled with Premiere thru the years. Moved to Mac so I could use FCP 7 when I needed too. I’m currently playing with Lightworks in Bootcamp, and looking forward to the imminent Mac release, although now that I don’t find myself using FCP much, I may move back to PC on my next upgrade. The right tool for the job is my mantra.
Chris
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[Scott Witthaus] “Last time I had a gig on MC it seemed just old and slow. Shame, really.”
Interesting. What one person sees as “old and slow,” another sees as mature and stable. I can’t imagine doing what I do, ie: episodic television with sometimes 1,000 VFX per week in a shared environment, on anything BUT Media Composer. There’s a reason why it’s still used on probably 95% of all top Hollywood shows and features.
Chris
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Okay, I guess it’s just a case of differences in perception. I don’t necessarily see those situations as “conundrums,” but as “editing.” The nice thing about Media Composer is that it has wonderful asynchronous trimming, so you can decide in advance which side of abutted clips you want to trim and how to deal with music beds under video clips, etc. There will, of course, be times when you have to clean up the results of an edit, but because every edit is unique, I don’t know how a software package could know what I want to do in all instances. I’d rather be the one in control, I guess.
Chris
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Yes, I think we’re probably setting a record of some sort. The show uses virtual sets quite a lot, so in many scenes EVERY shot is a VFX shot. Then we have the usual CG specialty shots, wire removals, 3d creatures, you name it. Our vendor is definitely cranking ’em out, with as few as 15 days to get an episode’s FX delivered!
We work for a couple months before the season’s shows starts airing, getting the FX in the pipeline. But it definitely gets hairy once in a while. Lots of 80 and 90 hour weeks at the beginning and the end of the season.
Chris
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Yes, we use Media Composer, in a shared environment with 3 editors and 3 assistant editors. We have anywhere from 250 to 1000 VFX shots per episode. They get pulled and counts are delivered to our VFX vendor as EDLs, one per layer for multi-layered effects. They are then returned to us with 12 frame handles. The show is fluid and often-times changes are made to the cut between the time the counts are delivered to the vendors and when they return, so we can’t count on always having the same amount of handle on each shot (ie, sometimes a shot has been trimmed, meaning we now have more handle, and sometimes they’ve been rolled out a bit, meaning we have less handle).
Because of this, we find an easily identifiable piece of action within the shot: perhaps somebody’s hand crossing a particular object, etc. Then we find the same frame in the delivered VFX shot and simply press “Replace Edit” to replace the shot on the timeline with the shot in our source window (the matching frame serves as the anchor point). If we didn’t have a “replace edit” function we would be forced to always match to the first frame in the shot, which isn’t always a good candidate for eye-matching.
Also, we don’t actually replace the existing shot, we place it on a video layer above the original dailies take, so we can always compare. Each successive version gets stacked one track higher, because sometimes the producers want to go to an earlier version.
Media Composer makes this easy too, by simply putting your locator bar over the shot in question and pressing “t” it will set an in and an out for the shot, then you can simply arm the track above and use the same “replace edit” key. Because Media Composer treats empty track like media (ie: slug or leader) it will happily “replace” the empty track with the new VFX shot.
I’ve also written a small app to automatically name locators on the MC timeline and create a SubCap file so we can also get visual identifiers for each VFX on the timeline. If anybody is interested in that app for Media Composer, you can get it for free here:
https://www.chrisconlee.com/Loc2VFX.htmChris
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[Simon Ubsdell] “If you’re also faced with jobs where you have to eye match footage, the absence of this feature is ridiculously painful.”
Working on Once Upon A Time at ABC, I have to eye-match sometimes as many as 800 or more VFX shots per episode, so this lack of functionality would be a deal-breaker right there. I didn’t know this, but if true, it simply doesn’t meet the needs of people doing VFX heavy shows on a tight deadline.
Chris
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[Brett Sherman] “Every once in awhile I run into a conundrum with the connected clips, but not very often. There are different conundrums you run into with a track-style editor. I’m not sure you could say one is better than another in that regard.”
I honestly can’t think of a time when I had a “conundrum” with a track-based editor. Can you elaborate? Not trying to be obnoxious; truly curious.
Chris
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No, it’s not part of my 5 year plan.
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Hello everybody. I’ve rewritten the app from the ground up to be more efficient and hopefully more stable. I’ve just posted the new build to my site. Someday I’ll figure out how to properly version identify the various builds, etc. but in the meantime I’ll just post these updates when a new build gets posted.
BTW, I think this requires 10.7 or greater to run. I’ve gotten several reports that it won’t launch in 10.6, but I don’t have access to a machine running less than 10.7 to confirm. If anybody else can, that would be great. Once I know for sure, I’ll update my documentation page to indicate this.
Thanks.
Chris Conlee
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Sure thing, Lee. Glad it was useful.
Chris