[Erik Lindahl]

Right, digging around a bit I found this page:

https://blogs.adobe.com/keyframes/2010/04/faster.htm

In the comment section you see the following:

Question
Does this mean that in a Core i7, instead of needing 2GB per core (quad-core: 4 x 2GB = 8GB + overhead for OS & AE), After Effects can now use 2GB per thread (eight threads: 8 x 2GB = 16GB + overhead). If so, my 12GB rig looks meager.

Reply
Instead of ‘threads, think ‘processes’. It’s more accurate for this discussion. So, with native 64-bit After Effects CS5, each core can use more ram, up to the available RAM on the system… In addition, you’re no longer limited to 2-4GB per process. If you were rendering big things and only had 8 gb, you could give all 8 GB to one process, (i.e. turn off the “render multiple frames simultaneous” checkbox in the preferences).

Given these are very nice movies, I’d almost go as far as saying the info in the video is incorrect if what’s posted on the Adobe blog is true. AE is NOT limited to the amount of processors you have to address RAM, it’s only limited by available RAM in your hardware.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

I’m very confused about your comment in the video… I presume AE can address more RAM than 3GB per core? That’s something you could do in CS4 already given it’s split up in X amounts of processes (in general 1 process per 2 cores was quite optimal) which in the end was a huge limitation. I’d presume with true 64-bit, AE can address the same amount of RAM the OS allows it to allocate which should be AT LEAST 32GB on OSX per instance of the application (i.e. on a wintel system with 96GB of RAM in theory you should be able to have at least 6 instances with 16GB each if needed).

Have I gotten this wrong?

I do reckon your notion of having ≈3-4GB of RAM per core is a reasonable figure to go for but I would think (and hope) AE can adress more than 3GB of RAM per core. Otherwise I’ve missed something vital in the 64-bit transition.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Steve Jobs comment (if true) gives some hope.

Regarding AVID vs FCP I don’t see any difference really. We’ve had odd bugs hit us in our Protools setup and I had numerous crashes in our AVID setup at my old jobb when FCP was still gaining ground. From my experiances every system has it’s good and bad days. FCP 6 / FCP 7 / AE CS4 have been stable enough in my book. AE CS3 was pretty horrible compared to AE7 though, but that might just be our particular setup / OS at the time.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Steve said what what? I thought he stated they layed-off external consultants and that the pro-suite of apps where going no-where.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Premier Pro CS5 or rather the CS5 production bundle holds a few very interesting features compared to FCS.

Modern foundation of 64-bit. How much this affects an editor I can’t say, After Effects will be a joy giving all that RAM too and I could imagine certain areas an editor really can enjoy this as well. No more limitations!

Modern play-back with the Mercury Engine. This is something Apple should have “cooked together” with the advent of MacOSX 10.6 in my opinion but Adobe was way a head of them on the ball here.

Format-support is something FCP has been king in to some degree but at some point Apple decided “no native formats, all should be re-wrapped to Quicktime” (more or less). This and the native route has it’s ups and downs but seeing some tech-videos of the performance Premier as with for instance RED-footage. Yes, it does make me look to that.

Integration between apps. We edit in FCP, Grade in Color and do most of our FX / Compositing in After Effects. With this in mind CS5 could be our choice of online.

I tested Premier CS4 and for me by no means was it for me a viable replacement for FCP but CS5 does sound intriguing IF they’ve sorted all the oddness out of the previous app (ridiculous slow time-line refreshing and what not). What is clear is that Premier is the underdog of main-stream editors. They are backed up by a giant (Adobe) but are competing with more or less two standards out there: AVID and FINAL CUT PRO. It’s impressive to see the technical “highs” each sub-sequent version gets and it’s quite clear that Apple in some areas need to get their thumb of of somewhere and get up to date.

My future workflow? If PPCS5 holds the water I’d either be going:

FCP > Color > Premier / AE > Output

or keep

FCP > Color > FCP / AE > Output

But use Premier as a bridge into AE for more complex scenes.

What CS5 is lacking is a Color-class grading solution. You do get something similar for AE as a plugin but that’s not really the same thing as a stand-alone gradeing suite. On the flipside, DaVinci is now offering a VERY cheap software / GPU solution that should give Color a serious run for their buck. This renders this part of FCS less of a must-have.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Perhaps I was hoping for a bit to much. Got the EDL today and the TC in my RED and ProRes files were totally off compared to what showed in the EDL.. Sigh.. I thought if anything the TC would be consistant?

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

HOW TO EDIT IN AVID AND GRADE IN COLOR
A super easy workflow from Media Composer to Apple Color via an EDL.
Tested with Color 1.5. (This is an EDL workflow so obviously it’s for cuts and dissolves only).

1. Preparation.
– Use your favorite metadata rich workflow for dailies.
– MetaFuze (MXF), RocketCine-X (MXF), Redcine (ALE), MetaCheater (ALE), RedRushes (ALE)
– As long as you track the R3D filename and the TOD timecode it works.

2. Edit
– Cut the show in Media Composer.
– Impress the client.
– Lock the cut.

3. Prepare for EDL Export (This is the key step in the workflow)
– Make a copy of the sequence and put it in a new bin.
– Set Bin Display > Show Reference Clips
– Duplicate the R3D filename from column Tape to column Name.
– If you used MetaFuze v2 for step 1 then duplicate column Camroll to column Name

4. Export EDL
– Make sure that you have installed EDL Manager.
– In Media Composer choose Output>EDL or launch EDL Manager
– In EDL Manager choose the regular CMX 3600 as the EDL template.
– In the Comments tab select Clip Name. (Color ignores if Reel is wrong and uses Comment instead)
– Update.
– Save the EDL.

5. Import EDL and RED Media in Color
– In Color choose File > Import > EDL…
– Navigate to the EDL and open it.
– In the dialog box choose the proper framerates and frame size for your project.
– For Source Directory navigate to the root folder of your R3D files.
– Click Import.

Done.

When you have finished colorgrading use File > Send to > Final Cut Pro and take it from there

MORE INFO
– One thing i’ve been doing is adding _F.mov/_M.mov etc to the clip names in the edl with a text editor, importing the edl into FCP and reconnecting to the QT proxys.

– In Media Composer I had used Scene/Take and other useful information (like CU, MS, Steadi and so on) in the Name column. While I was experimenting I actually copied Name to a backup column as you suggested above, just to be on the safe side.

– https://avidscreencast.com/2010/02/15-red-workflow-iv-conform-from-avid-to-apples-color/

—

I personally haven’t tested the above though so can’t say if it works, any quirks or issue. But sounds fairly straight-forward even when doing the above you do lose some meta-data (i.e clip names).

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Was going to add that the iPhone screen is 480-by-320-pixel, not 320×240.

25 / 30 fps, 480×320 pixles at below 1.5Mbit/s will run on the iPhone with ease.

As mentioned above, the iPhone-screen as a 1.5:1 aspect ratio, so either 1.78:1 (i.e. 16×9) nor 1.33:1 (i.e. 4×3). To accommodate this you will have to crop some of your base material.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

I haven’t seen your issue first hand since the YouTube clip is gone but a few things about FCP, Video and Graphics:

– FCP can handle scaling and esp. rotation of graphics really really poor
– Certain colors in graphics will look like garbage due to the 4:2:2, 4:2:0 och 4:1:1 color-sample of most codecs. This will primarily affect really colorful logos (coca-cola red is the classic “bad” color to work with).

How do you deal with the above?

– Avoid setting your graphics in FCP if possible
– If you can’t avoid this, use Photoshop to prep your work as much as possible.
– Avoid using highly saturated colors if possible
– If you can’t avoid this, color correct them a bit – remove saturation and make them slightly darker to compensate them looking washed out.
– Avoid using really really sharp graphics with fine details. This can introduce jitter, flicker or as you say here, rastery looking graphics. To avoid this, After Effects has a million tools for subtile blurs, outlines and such to clean things up a bit (again, FCP is poor at this).
– Move to a higher format / codec. DV och HDV at 4:1:1 / 4:2:0 color sampling will look far worse than ProRes or Uncompressed 4:2:2 material (4:4:4 is of course the best but 98% of the time you can’t deliver this). The higher bitrate can improve things also depending on what you’re doing.

My normal workflow is to always set titles and graphics in After Effects. This is time-consuming but the end-result is far far far better than using FCP. But as stated I can’t see what your exact issue is.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

I’m not 100% sure what Smoke on OSX will offer compared to Smoke on Linux but the demos I saw at IBC this year where pretty impressive. Think of Smoke as having the FCP editor inside of Shake or something like that. You have a full, flexible, editor and you have a full, flexible FX / compositing architecture with a lot of hardware accelerated things happening. It’s not “realtime all the time” but instead of as in the FCP world you:

1. Edit in FCP
2. Export your Edit to Color
3. Grade in Color
4. Export your Grade to the Finder
5. Reconform the Graded Edit in FCP
6. Do effects / compositings / clean-ups on select scenes in AE / Shake / Nuke
7. Reconfrom the scenes in FCP
8. Finalize your Online

The Smoke world, for a lot of things would be:

1. Edit in FCP
2. Export your Edit to Smoke
3. Finnish your Grade / FX / Compositing / Online in Smoke
4. Finalize your Online

Sadly I can’t test the Smoke trial at work as we’ve yet to go over to Snow Leopard but the idéa of it is very nice. The UI I presume is efficient when you learn it, given it looks hideous at first glance I’ll just have to take peoples word for it. Now, if the OSX-version of Smoke is limited in the compositing / FX scene we have an issue cause that limits the function and value of the package tremendously. What FCP lacks to be a “full online suite” are things like:

– Solid keying
– Solid compositing
– Solid tracking
– A larger array of effects
– A far more stable and predictable rendering engine
– A far more stable and functional key-frame system

But FCP is an editor with certain online / finishing “tricks”, its not really a “finishing system”. Smoke is and I hope it hasn’t been crippled too much on the OSX scene. The FCP / Color / AE / Mocha combo makes an “FCP system” a “finishing system” but you’re jumping between 4-5 applications then and it’s not very integrated.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se