[Mark Hollis]

No matter what container you use, if the video is to be projected, you want a codec that is not long-GOP and not lossy. Or, at least not so lossy that the viewer is going to see, right away, that they’re looking at mud swimming in mud.

Again, go to your customer/end user. There is a real reason why “film” (or digital film) projection is using a lossless JPEG image for each frame. They are looking to create the 24-frame-per-second perfect quality of a 70mm film projector. So, for projected display, that is what you are “”competing” against—the viewing audience is going to expect that for something cinematic.

Now, if you are smaller than that, there are lots of alternatives but the delivery specification should always be given you by your client.

[Mark Hollis]

If you are editing on a Mac, ProRes is the way to go for your editing codec but then you need to it into something that your customer wants.

Apple has never made ProRes writeable (recordable) on Windows, though it will play easily. As long as you aren’t interested in supporting some form of HDR, you can compress the video using the H.264 codec, the audio as AAC, and store them both in an MPEG-4 container. Those formats will play on just about everything. But this is not designed for projection.

With deliverables, I have always asked my client, “What format do you want this in and what kind of a container?”

For a theatrical release, the following is important: DCDM (Digital Cinema Distribution Master), DCP (Digital Cinema Package) and KDM (Key Delivery Message) — the cinema ‘non-standard.’

For DCP, the video track is encoded frame-by-frame in JPEG-2000. This is a lossless compression codec mastered at 24 frames-per-second (FPS), with high-resolution picture quality. The audio file is a 24-bit linear PCM uncompressed multichannel WAV file.

Most DCPs have a bitrate of around 250 Mbps. The majority of digital projectors at theatres can’t handle anything higher. Digital cinema servers run on Linux operating systems, which means DCP hard drives are formatted in Linux EXT3.

A digital cinema package can be around 200 GBs in size or larger. The DCP for Spider Man: No Way Home was around 500 GB and included the 3D and 4K versions of the 2h 28m-long film).

[Mark Hollis]

Well, you have the answer below. But I have found Apple computers to be less expensive than the Windows systems and I built a facility specifying Apple systems (which my editors preferred). Windows systems are harder to manage while Apple systems just work. We did have a couple of Windows computers running Avid’s DS bought the same year as the Apple systems. And the Apple systems lasted, using the latest software and operating systems for over twice as long as the Windows systems. They had lower amounts of downtime. They had fewer issues with application corruption and corruption in the project files.

This may be the reason why the answer included what the client base wanted: Your clients don’t like downtime while you have to fix issues.

If you buy an Apple system at the top end, you will find it will outlast any Windows system. That cost-savings will increase profits. And not at the expense of your clients.

[Mark Hollis]

I did some pretty difficult transcoding on my wife’s M1 MacBook Pro (the first one released with the M1 chip). I had been using a 2009 Intel-based Mac Pro “flashed” to be a 2010. It had a Sapphire Pulse RX-580 and a lot more RAM than you can stuff into an Apple MacBook Pro.

My wife’s computer did every transcode in one quarter the amount of time or less. The fan never, ever started up. It did not get hot (and her previous Intel MacBook Pro got too hot to reasonably sit on her lap just doing office applications.

Apple Silicon outpaces Intel. in power usage and in heat.

Then I contacted some friends at a Nameless Broadcasting Company where I used to work. I brought Final Cut Pro into their shop, calling Apple and telling them to get their fannies into the plant so that it could be evaluated. They were looking to take the entire plant into Nonlinear editing. For the plant, they went with Avid NewsCutter and Symphony. Avid makes servers that are designed for the kind of large installation required. But, in the field, they saw the value of an Apple laptop running Final Cut Pro, so a lot of their overseas stuff is cut down on that.

They say that the M1 and M2 laptops are brilliant, that there is no noise when they are recording voiceovers into Final Cut Pro and that these laptops will edit an entire news package down to something reasonable to send over the Internet without needing to be plugged in.

Your purchase option should include the max amount of RAM and at least a 1TB boot drive.

[Mark Hollis]

Here is what I have noticed, editing with Apple’s silicon chips:

If you are using Apple’s native ProRes codec, Apple’s SoCs really speed up your workflow. This is because they have, on the chip, the Afterburner card. Back with the Intel Macs, you could stack up a bunch of them to deal with the Apple codecs and speed up your workflow significantly. This is now on-chip.

So, the slowdown in your workflows will occur when you are transcoding from other codecs to Apple’s native codec, supported in the hardware of the CPU. This is where you start. looking at Apple’s GPU cores. They will be doing most of the heavy lifting in transcoding.

So, if your acquisition formats have difficult codecs to change into ProRes, that will slow down your work, no matter where you are, in the field, in your facility, wherever.

Your purchase decisions need to take that into consideration.

Apple sells M1, M2 and M3 systems that are “binned,” this is to say that they have fewer than the maximum number of GPU cores. These are cheaper, but they do not help your workflows if you are transcoding. Also, you will have to transcode for deliverables and that will also be a GPU process (slightly speeded up by Apple’s on-chip encoder-decoder for ProRes. This needs to be an important consideration.

All of that said, Adobe lags the field when it comes to optimizing their applications for Apple’s operating systems and hardware. The most-optimized editing application today is DaVinci Resolve (the purchased version), followed by Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Adobe also lagged well behind other companies when Apple moved to 64-bit only applications.

Lastly, do consider RAM. I have found that the more RAM you have in your system, the faster your workflow, no matter what chip you are using. And do not purchase a system. with an internal SSD that is smaller than 1TB. On other forums, I have seen people suddenly finding that their emails do not fit on the boot drive, after having ordered an entry-level Mac. Obviously, your workflows will involve external drive(s), but the internal one needs to be large enough to suit your needs and. last long enough so that you don’t have to get another computer within a year.

[Mark Hollis]

I am assuming that you are looking at the “base model.”

I am of an age where I remember the “gas crisis” in the United States in the 1970s. In order to get a certain EPA mileage score and also in order to compete in price with the Japanese car makers, GM introduced the Chevy Vega with a novel concept: The optional back seat.

You see, the back seat adds weight, reducing gas mileage and it also increased the price of the car. So, to match price points for the Toyota Corolla and the Datsun B2-10, the Vega was tested for mileage by the EPA with no back seat and it was sold at a low, low price.

Then, GM advertised the car and every single print and television ad for the car had a person sitting in the back seat, which was optional, reduced mileage and increased the price.

The $599 Mac Mini (base model) features the 8-core M2 CPU, a 10-core GPU, 8GB of Unified Memory and 256 GB of SSD storage. It is not upgradable.

The base model has one NAND chip for its SSD. As tested, the single chip SSD provides for a slower performance, compared to the 512GB version. This means read and write speeds will be a little more than half that of the base M1 (which uses two NAND chips for all sizes of SSDs). While this is still three times as fast as any USB-C external drive you may use, I, personally, see this as the “optional back seat” on the Vega.

And, frankly, I would not buy a non-upgradable computer with less than 1GB of storage on its boot drive and I definitely would not expect to put any kind of a large 4K project on anything less than a 2GB SSD. Apple wants $600 for the 2GB system and, for a decent amount of RAM, either $200 or $400. Remember, this computer is not upgradable.

So, add about $1,000 or $1200 for a computer that will last more than a year or two.

That said, I should tell you what I am typing this on:

A 2009 Mac Pro with two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon CPUs and 32GB RAM. It has an AMD Radeon RX 570 (overclocked to 580 speed) 8GB graphics card. I will replace it this year as it’s pretty much out of gas. I am running Mojave, which will support 64-bit applications.

So, a fourteen-year-old computer is still viable and still able to do work today. If I am editing, I must use proxies for 4K. It does not support Thunderbolt 4. But, I did not need to replace it with new technology in two to three years, which is what you will have to do if you buy the low-end model.

You need to assume that you will want to run more than one application at a time, so you will need more Unified memory than the base model. You need to assume that tomorrow’s applications will need more RAM and that tomorrow’s operating system will also need more RAM. And you need to have a boot drive that will suit your needs for more than one or two years.

That is, unless all you are doing is buying the Mac Mini for one project and, at the end of that project you will not need the Mac Mini.

[Mark Hollis]

The way I always handled this issue is to do a slow push or pull on the image. I always make the movement linear so that it does not appear to stop or start at the beginning or the end of the movement. That, combined with noise or grain will give the viewer the sense of movement that you are looking to achieve.

[Mark Hollis]

All due respect, but Public Access “stations” never had digital effects. That was cheap local TV production where the producer wanted everything to page peel — or bounce around — or rotate in a cube — or [insert the popular effect-of-the-week here]. I swear, I saw some awfully horrid commercials back then.

I think you would have to use some kind of compositing system (like Avid’s DS or After Effects or Motion) to get the lag or the trails from hot spots from the old tube cameras from that era. Generally, Public Access was characterized by people who could not or simply did not understand lighting. Thus, if a guest wore anything that glittered, even a metallic pen in their shirt pocket, the tube cameras would burn on that spot as the reflection of the lights entered the camera.

I think one would get extra points for having almost zero depth-of-field, with people and objects that moved in any way falling out of focus with any movement at all.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

OK, since there is something called Time Of Day timecode, Adobe Premiere can give you the time. The date is something you are going to need to manually place on the video. Cameras can record everything from F-Stop to geotagging metadata in a video stream but that is not something that an application such as Premiere Pro can recover and re-insert.

To do time of day timecode, make sure you have no camera pauses for each clip (Scene Detection while capturing can be your friend here). Open up each clip in a Windows Media viewer and determine the metadata for the time of day at the very beginning of the clip. TOD should conform to a 24-hour clock.

Next open the clip up in Premiere Pro. From the File Menu choose Timecode…

This should give you a dialog where you can enter your time-of-day visible in your Windows Media Player for the first frame of the video. Click OK. The clip will now have Time-Of-Day timecode and this may be displayed.

Next, you need to do a timecode display and I don’t know how to do that — but others will.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

As for cs5, i currently own production premium cs2, im not sure if there will be a respectable upsell to cs5 when it comes out, maybe better to upgrade now to cs4 then to cs5 later?

Adobe has gone so far as to admit that they blew it with the CS4 upgrade in some circles. Here’s what I would do if I had CS2:

Wait until Adobe starts packing the channel with CS5.
Go on froogle.google.com and look for CS4 upgrade or an application that will ameliorate the cost of going to CS5. There will be inexpensive opportunities, there always are when retailers are trying to dump inventory in the channel.
Do the inexpensive upgrade.

This has always worked for me.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?