Michael Phillips
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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The settings are correct, but there are multiple flavors of MXF file. Adobe only creates MXF OP1a as can be seen in your screenshot. Native Avid MC files are MXF OPAtom only. the “1” means that video and audio are combined into a single file (where there is actual audio or not).
What you have will work. You need to AMA link to the MXF file(s) using the MXF AMA plug-in. Select it directly, do not use Autodetect. The link is instantaneous. Once linked, consolidate. This also avoids the gamma issues that QuickTime wrappers like to inject into the process from time to time.
Michael
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What version are you running? I only use the waveform button on a per track basis that can be turned off or on and is defaulted to off when loading new sequence. If you uses the old waveform from the hamburger menu it stays active (I think, it’s been a while). I would set the setting to only show between marks then you can clear marks. Any operation is supposed to interrupt the waveform display process.
Michael
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I forgot to add that UI commands for certain functions are also more accurate as it comes from a list of predictive and expected library – record, play, change, etc. It also works well for show names, actors, directors as those proper names are also in the library.
I’ll have to give the Nuance another run of tests with its AIFF file based speech to text with my test media.
Speech to text is getting better, just different expectations for different applications.
Michael
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If you’re in LA and looking to get into any type of television of television or film production, I would start with Avid, then Premiere. Start going to user groups and Avid and Adobe presentations when in the area to start the networking part of the job. You’ll start your way into the business via different level of assisting in postproduction.
Good luck!
Michael
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And then again, breakthroughs are being made with a new company Voxil:
https://www.theonion.com/article/new-speech-recognition-software-factors-in-users-m-38257
😉
Michael
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As Oliver points out, speech to text relies on some amount of training (although that’s getting better) but quality and speed of speech being dictated. If there is a lot of accents, environment noise and such, accuracy goes down quite a bit. There are two ways to go about this that have been mentioned:
1. Nuance (Dragon, Siri, Cortana, etc.) These are dictionary based systems in order to provide the text. They can only be as good as the dictionary that powers them and typically dictionaries are not that up to date with people names and places. Combine that with training for voice, accent, microphone type, and the effect of the environment, not to mention any emotion or volume changes you might find in your footage. Your mileage may vary. The BBC and other services use Dragon type applications once trained to the voice to listen to the playback via headphones while dictating back into Nuance. This removes a lot of the issues stated and lets humans interact with the output.
2. Phonetic based solutions like Nexidia. This is not a dictionary based system. It is based on phonemes. Every language has some number of phonemes that make up the entire language. On average it is like 30 to 36 depending on language. Unsure of Asian languages that also rely on tonality. The phonemes can be indexed at up to dozen times faster than real time per core processor and creates an index file that is slightly under 5MB for ever hour of audio indexed. That file also includes other metadata such as timing offset into file, file name, etc. This also allows the search to be lightening fast. I have done searches on libraries containing tens of thousands of hours with results in less than 2 seconds. The search is done by entering a text string which in turn gets transformed to its phoneme representation and then compared against all the indexed files for the results. But there is no correlation of phonemes to dictionary based solutions which is why Nexidia has not developed a speech to text solution. Phoneme based solutions provide a whole other and different benefit than speech to text.
3. Sync to text. This is an extension of the Nexidia technology when combined with a text file containing the dialogue. In this case, not only is the audio essence indexed into PAT files, but the text string is also “phomeme’d” as per previous and the results stored with the text file for later offset index into the media file. This same concept is what allows Nexidia to offer a close captioning and subtitle sync check for QC as it also does language identification, sync, completeness, etc.
Adobe’s technology was licensed from Autonomy. Overall the results were not that great because of the above issues, and it probably came down to the cost of the license to the actual success of the feature. In later versions it was recommended that a transcript be provided to help with the “sync” process, but that sort of defeated the whole purpose of speech to text to begin with.
As far as patents go, there are plenty – Nexidia has several surround their technology, Autonomy has theirs, Avid has some surrounding the use of speech technology as it relates to script and transcripts as part of an editorial process (of which one of them is one I created and now wish I owned…). The original Script Based Editing patent which was the manual process of syncing media to scripts was owned by Ediflex, traded to Avid for systems when they went out of business. That patent has since expired meaning any NLE could offer a script based editing interface. The ScriptSync side of the patents will expire in about 25 months.
I believe there is a whole lot more that can be done with script interfaces and that ScriptSync only scratched the surface of how content creators and editors can engage with their footage throughout the production process. As with all businesses, is it worth the ROI ad will users pay for it.
Michael
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Thanks for the feedback – I will add to it based on your feedback. 14:1 is basically 1/3rd the storage needs/data rare of DNxHD 36.
Michael
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Does this happen when linking to new clips, or to all existing clips that were connected in 8.0? As a test, I might try rolling back to Panasonic AMA 4.4 to see of that still has the problem.
Michael
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Imagine the water cooler talk in 1974 when this was released:
🙂
Michael
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The offline/online choice in workflow is usually due to several reasons that force that decision and not because people want to:
1. Codec is not native to MC – XDCAM, DNxHD, ProRes and a few others are native, meaning they are part of Avid’s coded library and can be Avid managed in the Avid MediaFile structure. Also, because they are native, the decode playback performance is also optimized. Non-native codecs can be used directly, but when they no longer perform in real time to expectations is unknown.
2. Performance – related to #1. How complex is the timeline? Multicam? etc. As you expect more streams in real time, non-native codecs will have less performance.
3. Storage – Is the storage fast enough and big enough to hold everything? For example, it is one thing to have one 4TB drive and four 1TB drives in a RAID config as the more spindles give you more speed. How the drive or drives are connected is a factor – USB2, 3, etc. If the data rate is low enough, then the requirements go down. Also some productions like to bring dailies on to set and lower data rates allow a single drive to hold more media without the speed issue.
Understanding when and where the bottlenecks occur is key to getting a good start in post. Many can get away with native AMA linking – many others can’t.
Michael