[Tim Wilson]

Yeah, we’re all wrapping our heads around it.

That’s why I was hoping you’d have a clue to offer the class. 🙂

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[reel2reel] “what would be the workflow for archiving or mastering if you wanted to use a higher quality? Would you capture everything again, then transcode it to the higher ProRes quality (unless you have a machine fast enough to do transcode it on the fly)?”

I think you have it exactly right. I know that Apple prefers not to talk about ProRes as an intermediate codec — in fact, goes pretty far out of their way to NOT talk about it as such. But this is an example where it really can work quite well for it.

Out of curiosity, what do you want your workflow to be? I haven’t tried this workflow yet — just reporting so far 😉 — but it seems to me that the primary benefit would be for uncompressed HD, right? Although now that I think about it, quarter-res would be smaller than DVCPRO HD or uncompressed SD, so maybe it could work there….

Anyway, just curious what you’d like to do with it in this context.

Or were you just asking? In which case the answer was always within you, Grasshoppah. 😉

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[adampglover] “I want to start taking things to the next level”

Rather than a beginning class, I recommend getting Aharon’s disk, “After Effects: The Next Level.” Perfect name for you, eh? 🙂 It’s all 50 of his podcasts in 800×600 resolution in one place, sequenced for maximum impact. I believe that even people who think they’ve seen most of these tutorials will realize they haven’t. And seriouly, look at the table of contents, and I think you’ll agree that very, very few AE classes will attempt to cover more than a fraction of this.

Even in the classes that Aharon teaches at the Pratt Institute in New York. 🙂

It’s over 6 hours of training for only $29,95 if you order in the next couple of days. (Ignore that June 1 date in the store — the special price goes until the 8th.) Otherwise it’s $39.95, still a bargain for 6 hours+ of training.

Along with the 20 minutes or so of audio to further lay out the best ways to work with After Effects, you’ll be well ahead of what most classes will teach you.

I’m not just saying this to help sell DVDs. I’ve been using After Effects for 12+ years, and I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned from watching all of these tutorials.

Best,

Tim
Even if you decide to spend the boss’s money on some classroom stuff after watching these dvds, you can at least skip ahead to advanced classes. Where you’ll still be catching up with what Aharon covers. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

I’ve read interviews with a whole lot of actors who regret agreeing to a part without a final script. Changes are inevitable, but you don’t know what you have until you have it.

[Jaymags] “The script is very much in the rough stage – new interviewees have been added, and some of the existing ones are not as lucid as would be hoped…”

Eek, eek and more eek. First, note that I’m not ranting at you. I’m ranting at the producers who’ve put you in impossible situation.

There’s no way on earth to even begin to estimate this. Other than time, you don’t have any other targets! Even for the interviewees, the question is approach.

We’ve had this argument here before, but I’m a HUGE fan of having a script, or at least an outline, of the whole project. You don’t want to script all of the interview — and you CAN’T script the interview answers or it’s not really an interview. But you have to get the producers to pin down targets: where is each interview going? What do you need each interviewee to cover? Without that in hand, you can’t even guess how long an interview session should take. You can’t know how much footage you’ll need so you can’t estimate hard costs either.

There’s also shooting style. I’ve been reading about Errol Morris, who’s made Academy Award nominated and winning documentaries (Fog of War won most recently). With that one, what started as a single one hour interview turned into 2 two-hour interviews in two days….and then into 7 months of interviews off and on. He’s done single interviews upwards of 12 hours.

Even doing nature docs, I rarely shot more than 10 or 15:1…for a single subject. If you’re doing that for 25 interviewees, and the final length for each interview is 5 minutes, you’ll have an hour of footage in the can for EACH. Add set-up (lights, camera), getting them comfortable, repacking the gear, you’re easily looking at 3-4 hours.

Each.

Or a fraction of that. You just can’t know.

So I recommend pushing back on the producers. Say that you’re ready to outline your strategy, costs and time as soon as the project targets are locked. If the target moves, so will your numbers. If they can’t buy into that, eek eek and more eek.

Others will surely weigh in, but there’s me.

Good luck!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Sean ONeil] “I specifically asked two people at the Apple booth if a G5 was good enough for ProRes and mixed formats. The answer I got was “I’m sure it will be fine”.”

No disrespect to Apple intended — quite the contrary. And no disrespect to you for doing what you SHOULD do, which is to NOT make assumptions, but ASK. Way to go.

But my experience from booths as a developer is that not everybody is qualified to answer every question. I don’t want to make it sound like folks from tech support or even engineers (there’s often a TON of them in booths — but they’re usually there to ASK questions of customers, more than answer them) don’t know what they’re talking about…but there can be a pretty big gap between a well-intended, heartfelt educated guess and what happens when the product ships.

[Sean ONeil] “I can’t help but wonder if ProRes could have been optimized to work well on a PowerPC chip.”

I’m going to guess that the answer is “no.” Or maybe some combination of “not without pulling lots of people from other critical projects” and “not and ship this year” and similar concerns.

But I suspect probably “no.” If Apple could have done everything they wanted to on PowerPC chips, they’d likely still be there.

Here’s the thing. Every development effort aims to bring as many people as possible into the tent. More potential customers means more potential money.

Anybody here think Apple’s into leaving money on the table?

But they have to be realistic about what’s possible. They have to in fact be willing to leave money on the table to do the right thing for the product’s long term growth.

BTW, we’ve seen Apple do this again and again, including killing off the MUCH higher-selling Apple II, to enrich Mac’s future. Killing off clones to ensure quality development. Cutting qual on OS support for older but otherwise capable hardware. So on. In the scheme of things, this one’s pretty minor.

Still sux though.

[Tim Wilson]

Developers are always trying to push subsystems to the absolute limit. As processors, drives, graphics cards etc all get beefier, so do the things you can do with them.

FWIW, Avid created a $10,000 daughtercard 3 years ago, because that was the only way you could capture DNxHD in real time. Now you can capture ProRes in RT….awesome. But you have to have a computer that can count fast enough.

[walter biscardi] “ProRes is just another option. But it’s not the only reason to purchase FCS 2.”

We’re going to have muuuuuuch more on all this in this week’s COW newsletter. (I hope you saw Part 1 of our ProRes coverage this past week.) As a sneak preview, I’ll point you to one of the best system specs pages I’ve ever seen.

I LOVE that it gives the basic spec to run the Studio, which actually goes down to a G4.

MacBook, no problem. Don’t even need a Pro.

But for ProRes? No way. Gotta have an Intel Xeon, which means a multiprocessor. Period.

So yeah, it’s easy to say Apple just wants to sell computers, but I think having to buy a new computer is just a side effect. It comes from scientists who always want to do more today than they could yesterday.

Which is exactly what we WANT them do. 🙂

The hottest features are always going to need the heaviest iron.

[Tim Wilson]

A couple of things to note.

The first is a pet peeve of mine, called The Hollywood OS. Set desingers use the computer that looks good in the design of the room, then VFX teams use animation apps to actually put stuff on the screens. Most of it is just plain made up out of thin air.

The stupidity of this is that they think we’ve never seen a computer before. Or that we don’t know the features of an OS and how they work. Maybe true for some of the suits in Hwood who leave computer stuff for their secretaries and their kids, but c’mon! It’s really getting ridiculous.

At least some stories are starting to acknowledge that there are such things as cellphones. A few even acknowledge that you can’t get a signal.

Anyhoo…..

There ARE image enhancement apps, but indeed, most of the stuff you see in the movies is exaggerated….but it exists. Avid has a whole forensics development effort, complemented by a law enforcemenmt-oriented sales and training effort headed up by a former policeman. Some of the demos will blow your mind.

My favorite was using an outrageous new image stabilization tool in Avid (all flavors, not just a special edition or anything) that was applied to some consumer shaky-cam of a social gathering dispersed by gunshots. They centered the stabilization on the shooter-s SHOES, and comparing to another shot of the same guy taken at a different time, were able to zoom in enough on SD video to make a positive ID and get a jury to agree. Wild.

There are also some tools that are only in the law-enforcement world that do super-intelligent guessing to fill in the blanks — but it’s kinda like GPS. The differences between military grade and what you can get on your phone aren’t really worth talking about any more.

So yes, it exists. Sort of. But mostly it’s for effect.

That’s my story until the guys in dark suits correct me. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

Adobe and Apple have never stopped playing nice. The problem has more to do with crossing platforms. And, as far as I can tell, with FCP, which doesn’t play especially nicely with anyone on any platform. That is, Apple the company and Apple the company that develops FCP aren’t all that closely related.

The only way I’ve seen this done successfully is with Automatic Duck’s PPro Importer. Send the XML files for a sequence out of FCP, then recapture in PPro. The good news is that a significant part of your project — most layers/effects/speed changes/keyframes. In that sense, miles and miles ahead of an EDL. But you will have to recapture in PPro.

Worth noting: the workflow that PPro Importer is designed to support is OFFLINE in FCP, FINISH in PPro. I think this is about right, don’t you? 🙂

tw

[Tim Wilson]

See if you can track down a copy of Elastic Reality Transjammer. I’m a little hazy on this, but I think it came out in 1994 or so, and Avid bought it in 1995. You might be able to find it under either company’s name — the product was otherwise exactly the same.

There are many, many Toaster wipes in there, including the falling cows (hooray!) and the dancing girl silhouette wipe, aka the Kiki wipe.

Among the reasons for the similarities: the developers had previously worked at Amiga, which was the Toaster’s original home.

Now having said all this, you have to have a floppy drive to even try and load Transjammer. 🙂 And of course I have no idea if it’ll actually still work.

If not, I believe that there would be a market for any of you creative types to rebuild these…although dwindling as more of us who recall Toaster are dying off….

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Slowe] “why is Avid’s media management so much better – I can’t imagine anything better than Media 100 in this respect”

A bit of disclosure I forgot to mention: I built the NLE part of my business on Media 100, starting in 1995. Avid was the bomb then too, but was strictly an offline tool, with the expectation that you’d conform your cut to film. Hey, great idea, well-enough implemented to win a technical Oscar in 1998….but not what I was doing.

And a bit of historical context: The COW’s earliest incarnation had its roots in peer-to-peer support for Media 100.

Now, having said that, Avid’s media management offers some unique advantages. It uses an external database to track things like timecode, source footage, and all kinds of other information. That means much more flexibility and reliability for collaboration, for moving media from one computer to another — say, on a FW or USB2 drive (I’m partial to USB myself). There are also a ton of film-related media management tools that, again, have kept Avid solidly in the heart of the feature-production world.

That said, I’d put Media 100 at a strong #2. 🙂 If you’re a solo editor, you have everything you need, much, much more easily and visibly than FCP.

One of the side effects of FCP keeping in its crosshairs is that they inevitably fall short, making things especially messy. FCP fans will of course disagree, but you asked for my opinion and there it is. 🙂

[Michael Slowe] “Now we have got rid of Optibase things seem to be moving forward with great support.”

Boris has always — justifiably — prided himself on his support, something I was proud to raise the bar on when I worked there. Now that he can actually get paid for support with Media 100 🙂 the bar raises yet again. (Not being a wise-ass. Support costs money.)

[Denali] “Avid is the program to use for cutting features – if nothing else because it is the industry “standard”. Which does make a difference is when you reach the finishing stages or just when dealing with assistants and support staff.”

That’s a HUGE deal. No question about it. Even if you’re a solo editor or close to it — say, Robert Rodriguez or James Cameron, who are very, very hands on — there are still sound mixes, color grading, VFX, maybe file-based digital intermediates before film prints, and so on. All of these involve other people. Tracking and integrating all those changes across all those people is another benefit of media management.

Even if it’s “only” TV, all of that besides film out still applies.

[Denali] “So to echo what someone wrote on this thread further, if you can do it on your own then m100 is my personal favorite. If others are involved it can get tricky.”

There you go.

BTW, I’m very, very fond of Media Composer for solo editing as well. But I imagine that by posting here, boofer, you’re mostly looking for affirmation that you’re not making a mistake by leaning toward Media 100. If this looks like the right choice for you, then you can see from the enthusiasm of folks like Michael and Denali that it is.

[Michael Slowe] ” Thanks fellows for the expert opinions, this is what makes The Cow what it is, the best!”

Yes indeed. 🙂