[Chris Kenny]

[MichaelMaier] “From talking to several other people who also experience the same problem, it seems to be a Prores problem. On top of that, Prores on windows can have gamma shift problems etc. I think it’s a great codec, but only if you are on a Mac. Just my personal opinion. For that reason my whole workflow is DNxHD based, at least till it hits Resolve.”

Hmm. We grade Alexa-originated ProRes 4444 (on Windows) on a fairly regular basis, without apparent issue. In terms of outputs, we’ll just move finished projects to a Mac if we need to render to ProRes — and we’ve found smaller gamma shifts (no visible difference, very slight change on scopes) with ProRes than with essentially any other QuickTime codec, including QuickTime-wrapped DNxHD and Blackmagic’s 444 Uncompressed QT codec.

Although QT is infamous for gamma shifts in general; I certainly understand the temptation to avoid it. It just opens up the ability to use so many additional tools. For instance, if you want to encode a DVD, you severely restrict your options for doing that if you require an app that can do it directly from a DPX sequence.

[MichaelMaier] “I would still grade in Resolve though. But instead of going back to the NLE, After Effects would maybe make more sense?”

If you need its toolset After Effects may be a sensible option, but I think to some extent it leaves you with some of the same sort of limitations Resolve has in terms of configuring audio, etc. In fact, last time I checked I couldn’t figure out how to even have After Effects play audio except with a RAM preview, which might make it a little hard to watch through your finished piece prior to export.

[MichaelMaier] “There’s also Blender 3D, which is the closest thing we have to Smoke and even closer than AE since it has a proper timeline and video editing function, along with 3D CGI, powerful node based compositing, matchmoving, tracking, rotoscoping, color grading etc.”

As far as I know Blender doesn’t support video I/O hardware, so the question again is, how are you going to be able to watch the piece with ‘real’ monitoring as you’re working on it?

[MichaelMaier] “I think this workflow you are talking may be very viable. The question is if it would be viable for long form, such as a feature film. But sounds interesting nonetheless. Good idea. “

We generally fully conform features in Resolve, even when we’re outputting to ProRes and/or generating final deliverables in another app. Why? Because we never know when clients are done making changes. Sometimes they’ll want to come back months after a ‘final’ output, with a slightly tweaked edit, or a desire to take the grade in a particular scene in a different direction. If your workflow involves rendering out of Resolve and then doing a bunch of additional conform work in another app, and then you later need to make changes in Resolve, you may have to painstakingly transfer over or redo that additional conform work with the new set of Resolve outputs. So we’ve found that while it might seem like more work up front to get every title, every VFX shot, etc. dropped into place in Resolve, it saves time in the end.

It also means the client can just watch the whole movie through like a movie (well, except for reel breaks; see below) while it’s still easy to change everything.

[MichaelMaier] “Could you elaborate a bit on that? I’m not sure I get it.”

A QuickTime file doesn’t just contain a particular number of audio tracks; those tracks can be configured in specific ways. So, for instance, having six mono tracks in a QuickTime movie is not the same as having a 5.1 mix in it, or three stereo pairs, or whatever, despite the fact that all of those are six tracks. As far as I’m aware, while Resolve can export pretty much any number of audio tracks, there’s no way to specify what they are like this.

Honestly I’m not sure e.g. Smoke actually addresses this either, though. By far the easiest way we’ve found to handle it is via roles in FCP X. Of course you might not actually need to care about this when delivering many projects.

[MichaelMaier] “Does anybody break shows into reels anymore these days? I thought that was only important if you were going to transfer it to 35mm.”

Long-form projects tend to bog down a bit in Resolve if they’re not split into reels, particularly with respect to the time it takes to save. We generally break features up into reels of 300-400 shots each.

[MichaelMaier] “Really? I wonder why since at the time of projection there’s no need to change reels and it will be a straight through shot.”

DCP itself actually has a concept of reels. That is to say, within the DCP package there are usually multiple reels. The media server strings them together seamlessly during playback. I don’t believe this is actually a technical requirement of DCP (that is, I think you could deliver a single reel feature if you wanted to), but it’s a widespread practice.

Breaking things down into more manageable chunks tends to make it easier to troubleshoot, and may mean having to redo less rendering/encoding if things go wrong somewhere.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[MichaelMaier] “I was not sure if I should post this in the basics forum or here. Something tells me this is not really a basic question.

Once you are done with your grade, what do you do? You export the files out to be re-imported in the NLE and finished/final exported to DCP, Blu-ray etc? Or do you finish it from Resolve? If so, how do you do with the soundtrack/audio mix?

I guess this is more of a workflow question. I wonder for example how big feature films do. If they export the final output straight from Resolve or not. It seems to me that it would be preferable to do it from Resolve to avoid re-compression. I know big budget features use uncompressed but at least to avoid another step?”

[MichaelMaier] “This is what I’m talking about. I think rendering out of Resolve as DPX 16bit (at least) would be best. Maybe EXR is even better. But then there’s the question of where to finish it. Not all NLE work well with DPX let alone EXR.”

The budget DIY solution is to export ProRes 4444 and take it into FCP 7, FCP X (which actually has some pretty cool abilities with respect to routing multichannel audio and batch-generating multiple deliverables formats) or perhaps Premiere Pro.

Technically, yes, you are losing something with ProRes 4444 vs. DPX. As a practical matter, you will likely never be able to tell the difference. ProRes 4444 is widely used as a mastering codec in the indie film world. It’s similar in quality to HDCAM SR, which has generally been considered an acceptable master format. In fact, the last time we delivered a product to have a DCP made, we had prepped a DPX sequence, and our contact at the other facility basically told us that yeah, they can handle DPX, but the vast majority of projects are delivering ProRes these days.

As for generational quality loss from compressing twice, that’s not really a big deal. First, ProRes is specifically designed to minimize generational quality loss, for just these sorts of scenarios. Secondly, while I’m not sure how Premiere handles things, in FCP 7 and X, if you export a sequence containing ProRes footage to a ProRes file, re-compression only occurs where necessary — for instance, if you’ve layered titles on top of the video. If a segment of video is untouched, the ProRes data is simply copied from the input file to the output file, rather than being decoded and then re-encoded.

If you do want to master to DPX, though, Premiere Pro does support it, although I haven’t tested this workflow. The next step up in terms of price would probably be Smoke.

Depending on the types of projects you work on, however, mastering in Resolve may indeed be viable. Note that Resolve supports alpha channels in ProRes 4444 files, which gives you a pretty easy way to get title over image, etc. You can bring in audio, sync it up, and embed it in your outputs. The main limitations with this approach are a) you’re going to be rendering out a bunch of elements in other apps and bringing them into Resolve, where in a fully-fledged finishing tool you could do everything in one app, b) if you need fancy audio channel configurations, etc. in QuickTime outputs there’s no way to set that up, and c) if your program is long enough to have been broken up into reels, you might need to splice them together in an external app. Although the last limitation goes away if you’re rendering to an image sequence format; then if you setup your timecode correctly you can just render all your reels to one folder and get a continuous sequence. (Though note that for e.g. mastering a DCP the facility you deliver to may prefer reels.)

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Gissing] “So it works like Google Docs and Calender have been working for years. Many users share the one file with real time updating possible. It also sounds like Adobe Anywhere as described to date. It makes sense for Apple to have such a thing for certain collaborative workflows.”

It’s hard to tell exactly how ‘live’ Adobe Anywhere is in this sense. Adobe’s demo video seems to show changes being sort of ‘published’ back to the server, and possibly someone manually hitting a sync button to see them.

But yeah, Google Docs does demonstrate this kind of live collaboration. You can also see this sort of syncing with existing iCloud apps — open a contact on your iPhone, update that same contact on your Mac, and see the change happen back on the phone.

Apple could launch something like this with just project and event metadata syncing, leaving users to sort out shared media access. But they might also want add some sort of streaming tech to address the media access problem — Adobe Anywhere has something like this.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “I understand that as a possibility, but the problem for me is that separate audio stems are often–in fact, more often than not–coming from a different source, late in the process. With TC, I can easily match and replace long into the edit. Even if the TC is wrong, I can work out the difference and make adjustments. “

You can add/replace attached audio on a clip in the timeline at any time via ‘Open in Timeline’, although I’m not aware of a way, at that stage, to automatically sync based on TC. That seems like it might be useful, though, and I can’t think of why it couldn’t be added.

[Chris Harlan] “Question: Can I disconnect one channel, and not others? Let’s say I have a clip that has dialog on ch.1, a car backfire on ch. 2, and some OS laughter on ch. 3–How easy is it for me to slide ch. 1 three frames to the left, ch. 2 two frames to the right, and keep Dia. in sync on ch. 2? In traditional NLE’s all I do is slide each along their tracks. How do I do this easily in X?”

Via ‘Open in Timeline’ you can change the relative sync of any attached channel group. You get a timeline with your video clip as the ‘primary storyline’ and your audio channel groups as connected clips, and you can slide them around relative to each other in the ways that implies.

[Chris Harlan] “I’m not quite sure what you mean by this. You can change sync relationship, but do you retain any reference to the original relationship?”

If you’re talking about original embedded audio, that will obviously be the same length as the embedded video. This means that if you slide it out of sync via ‘Open in Timeline’, it’s pretty easy to figure out where it originally was.

[Chris Harlan] “So much of my work is with audio, that I can’t imagine having them collapsed most of the time. I use waveforms a lot to navigate.”

Remember, though, that FCP X can show waveforms on video clips. (Although if you don’t expand things it does show a single combined waveform for all the attached audio channels, which might be an issue for your use).

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “Since that has never been the case in any other NLE, ever, you can understand my doubt. If what you are saying is true, then I guess you don’t need sync markers, but I’m having a very hard time believing it.”

I’m not sure it’s quite the case that you’d never want to detach audio in FCP X, but there are certainly many cases where if you’re used to other NLEs you might think you should, but you probably shouldn’t. Sync markers wouldn’t exactly be a bad addition, but if you’re not trying to make FCP X work like a more traditional NLE, they’re not nearly as critical than they might initially seem.

[Chris Harlan] “How do you deal with stems that aren’t initially attached, and only match with time code?”

Make synchronized clips in the event viewer before you start editing?

[Chris Harlan] “Doesn’t having an unnecessary 18 layers of audio attached to every single clip bog things down a bit?”

If you mean performance-wise, I don’t think disabled audio tracks have any negative performance implications. If your concern is timeline clutter, remember that you can visually collapse audio into its associated video if you’re not working with it, and even when you expand it, all tracks show up as one ‘object’ unless you then explicitly expand those as well. So you never really have to see more timeline clutter than you want to, and in fact it’s easy to choose to see less than in other NLEs (no visually separate audio items). Also, note that if you disable some audio tracks for a given video clip from the ‘Channel Configuration’ panel, those disabled tracks don’t show up when you expand audio components in the timeline at all — it’s as if they had been deleted, except you can bring them back by clicking a checkbox.

Furthermore, note that you can change the sync relationship between audio and video for a given clip via ‘Open in Timeline’ — without detaching audio at all. And of course you can make J and L cuts without detaching audio.

[Chris Harlan] “Doesn’t having hidden video for every single clip you are using get cludgy pretty fast?”

Why would it? Again, remember how different FCP X’s timeline is. In a regular NLE, if you have video attached to your audio, that video exists on a video track, and you have to put it somewhere, maybe disabled on V2 or something. That would be ugly. But in FCP X, the video and the audio are collapsed into a single visible ‘item’ — a clip with both video and audio doesn’t take up any ‘space’ that an audio-only clip doesn’t.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “But apparently not the desire, or 2 years in it would be capable of my workflow.”

I don’t know what your workflow is, but I’ve found that a lot of people in this industry — hell a lot of people in general — seem to have a fairly unrealistic idea of how quickly large software projects evolve.

Also, it’s worth noting that commercially released software is generally developed along two ‘branches’ — one for updates to the current major version, and another for bigger stuff slated for the next major version. While this practice is nearly universal, it’s actually not 100% clear that FCP X has been following it (since Apple has been dropping major new features into current-version updates), but if it has been, then it’s possible that Apple has done quite a lot over the last couple of years that we haven’t seen yet because we haven’t seen 10.1 yet.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Kimery] “You are aware that you can drag and drop into Avid yet you choose to come up with the most bizarre method of media ingest into Avid imaginable. Not really an apples to apples comparison. “

It’s not ‘the most bizarre method of media ingest into Avid imaginable’, it’s the standard method for importing pre-existing MXF files without having to copy or transcode anything. It’s precisely what you’d do if you had e.g. rendered a bunch of dailies to MXF out of Redcine or Resolve and wanted to start editing with them. If you do a Google search of ‘Media composer import MXF’ you’ll find lots of people asking how to do this, and this is the standard answer.

[Andrew Kimery] “Doesn’t that put the user in the same position as Avid w/regards to new media generation?”

In some sense. I mean, there’s no way around having to generate offline media if you want to have offline media. But FCP X doesn’t have any of the arbitrary limitations or arbitrary differences between how formats are handled that MC has, doesn’t require the same bizarre workflow to import media that’s already in its ‘preferred’ format, and doesn’t require the user to manually manage and relink to different sets of media.

[Andrew Kimery] “Some aspects, like AMA, need improvement but what software doesn’t?”

Eyeballing this as someone who has some software development experience, I’ve got to say that these distinctions and limitations in how Media Composer handles different media formats look very ‘deep’ — like, replacing this stuff might be like trying to replace a building’s foundation with the building still on top of it. And this stuff is all going to be tied up with Avid’s shared storage solutions as well, making things even more complicated. There’s probably a reason they went and did AMA instead of adding more flexibility to ‘native’ media handling in the first place.

In my view, if Avid wants to reverse its long, slow decline, they need to pull an FCP X — except with much better communication with users, no radical new timeline paradigm, no immediate discontinuation of the legacy product, and a more complete feature set in the 1.0 product. I think they really need a clean start. As I mentioned in an earlier post, MC is the only major NLE that hasn’t had one. FCP obviously had one with X, and Premiere had one with Premiere Pro in 2003, which was also a complete rewrite. There is little desktop software that has 24 years of technical continuity, and there’s a reason for that.

I ran across an article a couple of years ago (the link I saved to it sadly now appears to be dead) that quoted an Avid employee saying that Avid actually started down this road once, but backed away precisely because they were worried about a backlash from existing users.

[Andrew Kimery] “The downside to that is that the program would readily give you enough rope to hang yourself and happily watch as you did it. It might sound odd that I like some of the restrictive parts of Avid and at the same time like the lack of restriction in FCP7 but some situations benefit from rigidity and some situations do not. “

Working at a post house (and getting to see lots of projects as they transition from offline to online), I know exactly what you’re talking about. But there are ways to prevent self-hanging that don’t involve restricting options as much, and there are certainly ways to do it that don’t compromise user friendliness. FCP X’s proxy workflow, for instance, is both more friendly and more foolproof than manually managing original AMA and offline MXF versions of clips in MC.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Since when.”

Since the discussion in this sub-tread began with this post.

[Herb Sevush] “If you really think a few hundred dollars is that important you should be pushing Lightworks. It’s free. That’s more than a million times less than FCPX. “

I make a policy of seriously evaluating pretty much everything that might plausibly be useful (and that’s sanely priced), although I’ve held off on Lightworks so far pending Mac/Blackmagic compatibility.

[Herb Sevush] “I would rather Apple spend their programming time working on making X more useful to more people than worrying about the look of the time code clock.”

I suspect they have the resources to do both.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Kimery] “You can also open Avid, create a bin, drag & drop the media files from the desktop into the bin or use the File->import command and your files will import into Avid (it automatically creates the folder structure it needs). Material already in an Avid codec that matches the project settings will be rewarpped into MXF, not transcoded. “

I’m aware of these methods, but they still don’t really match the expected behavior (since they always generate new media and might in some instances cause transcoding). And they still don’t address my points about MC basically having two ways of referencing and managing media, one being the original ‘native’ way, and a second way, that works totally differently, that was grafted on to support file-based workflows better.

[Andrew Kimery] “Though is that really worse than users tossing in every format under the sun, wondering why performance sucks and eventually transcoding into a less CPU/GPU dependent codec?”

FCP X manages these problems in significantly more comprehensible way with its ability to automatically generate optimized and proxy versions of imported clips.

[Andrew Kimery] “From an asset management perspective having everything given a unique alpha numeric file name and kept in a centralized place is great especially in multiuser, shared storage environments. Sure, it forces some aspects of asset management on the user but I don’t really see that as a bad thing in the long run. I’ve worked in places where you could import whatever you wanted from wherever you wanted and it’s an operational nightmare.”

While Apple isn’t presently making use of this to enable multiuser functions, FCP X also has a much more straightforward and flexible way of handling this as well. It can optionally copy imported media to a folder structure it manages (either at import time or at any later time). And that folder is named for the event the footage is imported into, rather than having an arbitrary, non-descriptive number. It can also store footage in any format it supports in this folder. As well as, optionally, optimized and/or proxy transcodes of that footage — and you can switch between editing with original/optimized/proxy media with one click at any time.

Contrast with MC, which basically forces you to let the app centrally manage your native MXF media, doesn’t provide an option to have the app manage your non-native (i.e. AMA) media, and requires you to manually move media around in the Finder and relink sequences to move between original and proxy representations of the same clips.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “As for cheaper and Ap store availability – yes, if your 23 years old, this matters. It mattered when Avid cost $20 – 50K and FCP cost $1K, but the $500 difference between the various NLE’s today don’t make a difference to anyone with a job.”

Since a primary focus of this discussion is adoption by new editors, things that matter “if you’re 23 years old” are actually kind of important here. It’s also worth noting that these price differences add up pretty fast for a facility with multiple seats.

And… $500 difference? If you don’t qualify for cross-grade pricing, etc. Media Composer is still $2500. there’s a fair chance it’s more expensive than most of the computers it’s installed on these days. That’s not nothing.

[Herb Sevush] “Until Apple starts producing actual useful editing tools as opposed to programming niceities the cost difference won’t matter.”

You really can’t use the idea that FCP X isn’t a useful tool as a starting premise in an argument in a forum where many people believe it is.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.