Ron Shook
Forum Replies Created
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Harry,
[Harry] “Does anyone have any further news about availability/release/pricing?”
Oops, sorry, I forgot to say something about this. When I talked to Jan about this, she said that Panasonic hasn’t heard word one from this company about their doing a companion product to the P2 camcorders, so it looks like Paul or his source jumped the gun and we shouldn’t expect anything very soon if at all. She did mention another similar company who is in contact with Panasonic but the name escapes me.
Ron Shook
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Jan,
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “Hope that helps clarify what I was saying.”
It certainly does and I thank you!
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “That info traveled with it into the edit and out again.”
That “out again” part is pretty significant in my estimation when you’re looking for an IT workflow and asset management that preserves all the info.
Nicely done!
Ron Shook
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Eric,
[Eric Jurgenson] “Apple will make ipods that fit in your navel, and we will be pledging allegiance to Microsoft, Adobe, and Ma Bell.”
Or…, maybe most folks will get sick of it all and go back to baking pies, playing checkers and softball, and making love, and we can pledge allegiance to something of real value.
While I’m probably closer to the opinion of Mr. Hewitt, I’m enjoying your interplay.
Ron Shook
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Richard,
[Richard Milner] “Will Adobe wait for the big meeting, or is the announcemnt of PP2.0 big enough news all by itself.”
In my never too humble opinion, the optimum is to release something big prior to the big show to develop significant buzz on the run up to the show and drive traffic. And don’t forget, it ain’t just PPro that gets updated but the whole video collection and that oughta be a big enough bang to get lotsa press without it being diluted by the all the press surround the show.
Ron Shook
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Tim,
[Tim Kolb] “I can see making each function *available* to be assigned a shortcut key…that would seem like that should be easy I guess…I was thinking about the shortcuts in the default map that would have to be displaced and thinking that it could end up being a nightmare to make exactly the choice you describe…what is important enough to need a key shorcut?”
Now we’re getting somewhere. (g)
You’ve said many times, and rightfully so, that no one NLE will ever meet everyone’s needs, but no one NLE has to be constructed to force the editor to work one way or another, and they can be constructed with maximum user preferences, so that the user can customize to something appropriate to their preferred style or the type of project they are working on. The common Adobe graphical structure of tool bars, drop down menues and such that make the products relatively easy to learn and use by the ocassional user are also the elements that often stand in the way of efficient use by the full time editor, for example, accessing a function through layers of drop down menus with a mouse as apposed to hitting a key. For one editor accessing that function may only be necessary once or twice a project if at all, so having it buried in menus is no big deal, but the next editor may be cutting something that involves accessing that function or macro series of functions over and over and it becomes a big deal, accompanied by knashing of teeth and cursing. If the macro functionality and keyboard assignability of all functions is available, including being able to shift focus by keystroke to any part of the interface, the sophistated user can make this available to his/her project on a case by case basis, and…, even more importantly to the broader base of the more casual user, a cottage industry can develop to deliver noodly editing tools that take the pressure off of the development team to deliver these same tools.
Case in point, Sony Vegas: Perhaps the one thing that has driven the software as much as all the efforts of the Vegas development team was the inclusion of a scripting tool, a somewhat more complicated thing but with the same design goals as what I’m suggesting here. It gave Vegas low cost, sophisticated multicam and other automated editing tools long before any development team could have delivered them, and…gave the user base very good expectations for rapid help in frustrating areas of the interface without all the pressure coming down on the development team. It builds loyalty as well as functionality.
BTW, I hate multiple keystrokes to access functions or anything that takes my right hand off the mouse, but there are ways around that. (g) I’ll give you a call next week.
Ron Shook
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Hey Jan,
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “So would you please forward this pdf or at least the link to me,”
Here’s the link:
https://www.avid.com/products/productivitytools/integration_briefs/panasonicdib.pdf
The appropriate paragraph is the 3rd under “Typical Workflows” on the second page.
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “it seems somewhat counter to what our experience has been and maybe it is a fraction of what we have there as far as the amount of data that is available vs what they store.”
The statement from the PDF is pretty generalized, so what you suggest is probably the case, but if you have anything to add, I’d like to know.
Thanks,
Ron Shook
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Tim,
[Tim Kolb] “But as I look at the keymap for PPro…there aren’t any keys left on the keyboard and many of the keyboard shortcuts are three key combinations…it seems to me there are even some four key combos…not that I bother learning those as I find them less productive than a one-click mouse action…”
Today’s NLEs have so many features that having a keystroke or keystroke combination assigned to every one is nearly impossible, but…, not every function necessarily needs to have a keystroke assigned, but it must be assignable, so that it can be assigned if needed. Edius, which has quite comprehensive keyboard shortcuts, I seem to remember has a number of functions that haven’t had keystrokes assigned to them, but are assignable if need be, but then you’d know that better than I would.
[Tim Kolb] “So I guess what sort of science it is and what else it potentially messes up might still be unknown. Not that I think anyone should stop asking for things…but I’m an editor, not a coder and I can tell Adobe what is *important* to me…but I think for me to tell them what is *easy* would be pretty presumptuous…”
I’m no more a coder than you are, but I made that possibly presumptuous statement based on what an expert NLE coder told me several years ago. That sort of thing often doesn’t get done because it’s not a glamorous new feature unlikely to find its way into a “what’s new and exciting” list and because it’s no fun, coding grunt work.
Regards,
Ron Shook
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Jan,
[liv2snoride] “I really enjoyed your demo today- thanks for your willingness to share your knowledge.”
I second that!
Oh, and Jiri, the camcorder uses a block-head. Sorry, but I just couldn’t resist.
Jan, you told me one thing that seems to be possibly in error, unless I misunderstood. You said that the Canopus Edius NLE is the only current NLE to be able to use the XML metadata when editing natively from P2 cards and that FCP and Avid both can’t access this data. An Avid guy called me on the carpet about that and pointed me to a PDF from Avid that seems to indicate that the XML metadata from P2 is encorporated into the Avid Media Manager. Did I get some distinction wrong?
Some non rigorous perceptions based of course on a fairly complete late prototype. (Jan said the camcorder goes into production in about a week. I was happy enough with the lens. It seemed quite sharp throughout and the zoom rocker was good and capable of some subtlety. The pictures were very nice subject to the limited dynamic range of 1/3rd inch chips. The viewfinder could have been a sharper all B&W model rather than switchable between lower res. color and B&W. I suppose that’s quite a bit cheaper. The zoom in focus assist did work nicely. It’s probably a prototype thing, but the autofocus was unusably slow, taking about 2 or 3 seconds to lock in.
One thing I forgot to ask about, although I wouldn’t expect an affirmative answer is whether when you are shooting DVCPro50 or HD on P2 or Firestore, you can simultaneously record DV25 to tape for backup. A feature like that would make this device a lot easier to sell, I’d think.
Thanks again, Jan,
Ron Shook
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Greg,
[Beckt Media] “My point is that time remapping is fairly significant when compared to many of the keyboard or tool requests people are moaning about…:-)”
[david cherniack] “I guess you guys have never used an NLE as timeline efficient as edit* Otherwise you wouldn’t think so. And this is from someone who uses time warping ( an edit* name ) extensively. Believe me when I tell you that the most frustrating thing about PPro from my perspective is the inefficient, and sometimes very clumsy, way I’m forced to do things in the timeline. Maybe I’ll eventually get over it but I sure hope that the design team leaders can sit down with an experienced edit* user and get enlightenment :)”
I’ve enjoyed this thread immensely and thought I could stay out of it until today. (g) While I certainly agree that time remapping is a very necessary editorial tool, I cannot stand by while “the keyboard or tool requests people are moaning about,” are belittled. As Tim says, time remapping on the PPro timeline may not be a priority because it’s available in AE, and from what I hear the integration advances may make AE almost a part of the PPro timeline anyway.
I agree with Mr. Cherniack. Nothing beats an efficient/responsive workflow when you are slicing and dicing your source material into a flowing story and part of that efficiency and rsponsiveness rests in the lap of comprehensive keyboard shortcuts. By comprehensive I mean that virtually everything that an NLE can do should be reachable from the keyboard.
Now this doesn’t mean that I think that the keyboard is the most efficient tool for everything that we do in editorial. For some operations the mouse or similar pointing tool is more efficient, but even when it is, the NLE needs to be able to do the same operation with the keyboard, for this reason. The sorts of projects that we work on are legion and we often run up against a need to do something multiple times that involve multiple operations. With a keyboard Macro Utility (which I think should be built into any NLE) we can automate those multiple functions to a single keystroke, but not if the NLE doesn’t have access to some part or parts of the sequence from the keyboard.
Like Cherniak and Friendly, I’m an edit*or. As an example of the above, 2 years before edit* had a multicam function, and because edit* had comprehensive keyboard shortcuts, I was able to use a keyboard macro utility to program a multicam function on top of edit* that worked surprisingly well, well enough to impress one of the top edit* coders (who at the time was working on multicam in the back room). You’ve gotta realize that this was something like 6 or 7 years ago, before we had the computing horsepower to display multiple tracks at once, so my multicam feature needed an overnite render to create the multicam DVE that would allow me to see all the cameras at once, but once that render was accomplished, I could hit one key to switch on the fly to another camera and the camera that I was previously on would in a little over a second be copied from its track to the assembly track, a process that would have taken at least 30 seconds manually, and I’d be ready to go on to my next decision on the fly. You can’t do that sort of thing unless all of the operations to make it happen are available from the keyboard, whether they are normally used that way or not, and making them available is not coding rocket science, and is not going to screw something else up. It’s a matter of will and understanding the potential facility and necessity.
For those of you reading this who aren’t former or current Discreet edit*ors, let me explain a few things about the application that have made us such sticklers about some basic editing functions and so adimant about improving the applications that we consider moving to. Edit* came out of a completely pro heritage, made by the same folks who delivered the D-Vision off-line editor that was industry standard for a number of years. Thus EDL I/O was as good as it gets and media management was second only to Avid. It always captured over TC breaks better than anything in existence and had comprehensive keyboard shortcuts. Off-line/on-line works with edit* and recaptures only what you need with handles, something we sort of ignored for a few years in other apps when low data DV and cheap drives came to the fore, but is coming back to bite us with HD.
As David C. indicated the workflow was always a pleasure to use with edit*, with features like multiple bins and timelines, sub-timelines (nesting), setting I/O directly on the picons in the bins with picons that could be all the way from tiny to nearly source viewer size, source and record TC displayed in each clip along with in and out Picons and a text display of any FX applied to the clip, and an updated sorce and record TC in the status line for any point where the cursor rested, and one of my personal favorites, a timeline that could be set to update when playing at any percentage including 50% which would leave the timeline scrolling past a stationary cursor so that you can always see what’s coming and what has just past when doing fine tuning on the cut.
Edit* also has speed editing tools that I’ve never seen elsewhere. For example, you can hit the H or T keys (for heads or tails) on the fly as you watch a cut which brings up a dialog that lets you enter any number of frames + or – to the head or tail of the cut and when you hit enter the cursor moves back prior to the cut a user selectable amount and plays through the cut to automatically show you the revised cut.
Add this to the most responsive NLE on the planet for long form work. Edit* just doesn’t bog down overly much with huge timelines, and this with processors that are puny by today’s standards. On my dual 450 PIII system, I once cut a moderately edited 5.5 hour timeline because I wasn’t sure how I would break it up to lay back to tape. No one on any currently deliverable system would even consider such a work flow, yet on an edit* timeline that huge with hundreds of cuts, latency increased from for all intents and purposes instantaneous to less than 1 second. I doubt that any NLE will ever come close to that kind of long form performance in the future because we keep asking so much more of our NLE’s each year and the code gets bloated. More likely than not, with current offerings, we will have to edit shorter segments of long programs to keep responsiveness and latency reasonable, then cut and paste or import them together later.
These are some of the things that we love about Discreet edit*, and obviously, most of them have the greatest application more to long form docos than short form heavily effected stuff like spots and MTV and the majority of edit*ors had that primary focus. So, sure, as Tim says, one NLE app will be better than another in certain situations, but as David C. says, you’ve still gotta cut efficiently, what ever you are cutting. I’d like to see PPro do some heavy focus on long form work, and the tools necessary for that. Everybody else is focused on RT and kool effects, so someone should go for efficent, responsive cutting.
Gawd, I got to jabbering and forgot where I was going, so It’s time to quit.
Regards,
Ron Shook
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Brian,
[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “if the CCDs are 1080/60p native, then why can’t we record 1080/60p to the P2 cards?”
I’d guess that there’s no codec for it, …yet. DVCPro100 just doesn’t have the space for that many pixels at that temporal density. It’d have to be closer to 200 Mbps to do that with quality. Of course, now we can see another good reason why the P2 cards are raided memory chips. They’ve got the speed to handle DVCPro200 if there were such a thing, and I’d bet there will be or something similar eventually.
Ron Shook