John Heagy
Forum Replies Created
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[Bill Davis] “Not quite sure how exactly it’s being “stuck” on a thing one is actively arguing against the need for”
You keep associating it with a container or folder and rejecting it because you don’t care what container it originally was imported from. I don’t really care about the container either but do value it for grouping a camera-days worth of clips, enabling accurate communication, and for content ID along with TC. You can’t see past the physical container thing.
[Bill Davis] “I’m just asking that Apple not spend a world of effort building in an inflexible way to track a particular term that’s becoming less relevant over time.”
Again… Apple’s FCPX has the field, Apple’s QT format contains the data. I can’t imagine anything that would take less effort than to read the data and populate the field considering Apple created both.
John
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[Bill Davis] “You feel you MUST have a field that says REEL. Ok. If you’re in a shop that demands you put a REEL ID on every card, folder, and download, that’s perfectly fine too – whether or not those things have any “reel nature” whatsoever.”
You’re really stuck on the whole media container idea with reel. I’m not… I need a way to identify content within files, and I need it embedded in the file and have it survive encodes in QT.
As far a feeling I must have… I already do have… and just don’t want to lose it. If you don’t want to use it… don’t.
John
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[Oliver Peters] “he ARRI Alexa embeds a REEL ID”
So does the the Red Epic/Scarlet and recorders from Aja and Sound Devices.
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[Oliver Peters] “This back-and-forth is premature as it pertains to X. I believe we are talking about is Apple’s (current) incomplete implementation”
Premature after the first two releases… yes, but not after five. FCPX has been out for over a year and they haven’t “finished” the Reel implementation? I can’t think of an easier “feature” then reading a metadata field created by Apple in a file created by Apple.
This back and forth is useful to understand how people use reel and why some dismiss it as “old fashioned”. Apple hates old fashioned and we all know Apple loves to drop legacy tech. Given how they redefined the language of editing in FCPX, I fear Reel is on the chomping block.
I hope my posts about how we use reel will convince others of it’s usefulness and help Apple make the right decision.
John
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[Jeremy Garchow] “There are plenty of other human readable fields to assign alpha numerics, and this is what I was getting to earlier, there’s probably no way to “unite” the differing NLEs and get them to agree on some sort of standardization.”
Correct, so we use a metadata field currently included in all NLEs, is embedded in a great production format (ProRes QT), is immunue to filename/path changes, and passes thru the transcode process.
It’s called “Reel” !!!
Sorry Jeremy, that was a slow ball right over the plate and I couldn’t resist 😉
John
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[Bill Davis] “If someone in a shop I was visiting told me to go find “REEL 105” – I’d immediately start looking for a physical something. So would you. If “REEL 105″ is now a file on the server, a thumb drive, a space on an HD or a node on the network – perhaps it would be useful for me to think about changing a bit of my more traditional thinking?”
Yes it would… Your associating “Reel” with something physical and therefore rejecting it is akin to rejecting the use of “Bin” and “Clip” as valid terminology because they physically don’t exist . We have moved past that and use “Reel” as simply another useful metadata field, very useful as others mentioned i.e. EDL, audio, grading.. etc, that works for both old and new media.
The old and new is really key. Our productions don’t allow for “old media” to wither away. Old media must be included, this includes tape and film. We also don’t have a single digital acquisition format so we can’t rely on any one camera’s media ID, this includes GoPro and the like.
We also transcode everything to ProRes and “Reel” is the only metadata that can be passed to a QT file. Avid still uses “Reel” or as they call it “Tape ID” that is still embedded in their mxf files and Avid’s media management is highly regarded.
“[John Heagy] “It can be boiled down to UUID vs Reel. UUID is what a computer needs “Reel” is what people need. ”
[Bill Davis]I absolutely agree with the first part of this. And disagree with the second.”
You prefer to remember and type in an email to point someone to a shot:
0x060A2B34401010105010D431300000003A2AFAA938520FS0080458230D5C007 @ 1:01:12:00 whew!!
as opposed to 264320 @ 1:01:12:00
Note Jeremy wasn’t willing to type that long ID in his post and chose to include a screen shot link. Certainly not very human friendly by all accounts.
[Bill Davis] “Applying something like REEL A, Card 10504, BUCKET A-18, or whatever to your functional clips in X is beyond trivial.”
Yes crap metadata is not useful, we enter meaningful metadata. Don’t trash a metadata field based on what’s entered.
“Reel” is current and time honored metadata that is far from trivial or silly!
John
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[Walter Soyka] “the reason to do it is interchange with other apps which require reel/TC information moreso than because “camera-day” is a useful construct.
“We would still use reel even if interchange was moved to other metadata. We maintain unique reel IDs from the first tape we created starting at 1000 and continuing today past 270000. It’s really part of our production lexicon. Any shot whether it’s from camera footage, graphic elements or edited maters, can be found from two numbers, reel and TC.
[Walter Soyka] “With all this fancy metadata, you should be able to track your cameras and your days separately, by serial number and by date -“
Everything starts with reel, and things like you list are added on top. Reel can be applied to any media whereas camera specific information like location, serial, cannot be applied to edit masters or elements. For us it’s one size fits all.
Somebody at Apple thinks Reel is important because it’s in FCPX’s basic metadata view. Just finnish the job and read your own embedded metadata for Pete’s sake!
Going one step farther, I’d like to see FCPX have the ability to embed a user defined reel when exporting movies.
John
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Panasonic’s GlobalClipID is better than the typical UUID only approach, but it’s not very human friendly if one needs a way to refer to groups of clips. We apply our in house “reel” to the “Program” mxf field and then map that to QT Reel via CatDV.
We could use the GlobalClipID and/or an in house number as a per clip “reel” but our organization communicates very effectively using our in house reel numbers to refer to groups of clips. In the end we may use both as long as the per clip ID is preserved and not reset.
Right now we don’t see any down side with our camera-day reel assignments.
John
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[Walter Soyka] “We still need to uniquely identify frames from pools of files, and we still need to conform, but the tape metaphor is no longer relevant for many, and now there’s no physical piece “
The lack of a physical reel frees us to assign reel how we want. For us a reel is essentially a camera-day that may span many cards. It’s a way to group shots from a specific camera with a single ID. We are generating less reel numbers this way than we did with tape where we’d have multiple reels for a camera-day.
[Walter Soyka] “Basically, we used to think in units of reels, and now with file-based recording, we can think in units of shots. Whether there’s a practical distinction between shot ID and reel ID is debatable”
I agree as long as shot ID is passed to a file extracted from a master file. If it’s a UUID it typically is not.
John
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[Jeremy Garchow] “When you have something like P2 which records op-atom MXF files (video and audio separately) a reel number is extremely important in keeping those files together in the case of mistake or disaster.”
You should join me in asking Panasonic to include “reel” as part of the MXF metadata then. 😉
It’s a shocking omission IMHO.
John