[Ryan Holmes]

[Walter Soyka] “And in breaking compatibility with Flame, Autodesk has alienated a lot of their existing Smoke artists. I am curious to see if they’ve got a big idea coming for editorial that justifies the decision to separate Smoke from Flame.”

Coming to this thread a bit late, but as a Smoke user I also fear that AD doesn’t actually have a clear direction for Smoke. I’m guessing someone at AD had a “great idea” around 2008/2009 to decouple the Smoke hardware and put Smoke on an off-the-shelf Mac and drop take the bottom out of the cost. So in 2010 we get the first version of SMAC costing a mere $20K. Installation is chore, interface is clunky compared to other editing/finishing apps, and there’s hardly any training material around so the transition is quite literally an uphill battle for any new user. The unintended consequence though of the price drop being that current high-end users exploited the cost savings and used it as an inexpensive Flame prep station with the potential to finish if needed (depending on the post house) losing AD sales on additional Flame seats (or previously expensive Smoke seats). Then Apple bungled the FCPX release to such a degree that AD thought they could capitalize on the turmoil like how Adobe was doing with CS5.5, hence the “Smoke is changing everything” slogan at NAB 2012 (about 10 months after the FCP7–>FCPX transition). And Adobe was shipping a polished up version of Premiere in CS6 by May 7th of 2012. So I think AD was trying to channel that turmoil in their favor. It was a very tumultuous time with seemingly entrenched editors really willing to switch tools.
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However, as [Oliver Peters] notes “The problem I see is that for someone to make the most out of Smoke, you really have to go very deep and that’s a pretty steep learning curve. Plus the architecture is not very logical compared to other apps. But if that’s all you’re going to use, then there are easier, cheaper NLE that will give you results that are just as good.” I think SMAC 2016 is making strides in all these directions, but I don’t see why a professional editor would choose to spend the time/effort learning Smoke over using more intuitive programs like Media Composer, FCP7 or X, Premiere, or even Resolve or Vegas. I guess the struggle is that Smoke’s greatest strength and biggest weakness is its depth. The idea that you can do nearly everything in one app is the dream. Smoke comes close to that, but at a heavy cost both financially and user learning curve wise (I should also note that Adobe’s CC 2015 is also getting closer to that holy grail with the enhancements in Dynamic Link between apps, Lumetri color fx in PPro, and all the other add ons they’ve stuffed in there).

Compounding the learning curve problem is the price! If Resolve 12 actually turns out to be a competent NLE (which we’ll have to wait and see, and I don’t think version 11 is very good as even a basic editor) how do any of these companies compete with FREE? Resolve Lite, completely free and runs on either Windows or Mac. Additionally it may well solve a vast portion of the editing markets needs….did I mention it’s for free? If so, AD’s SMAC at $1500/year is way too rich then, and even Adobe CC at $600/year starts to sound steep. FCPX at $300 could compete since you only pay that once, but even then that’s $300 more than Resolve Lite.

It seems like AD is now heavily focused on Flame as their main tool. It’s what they promoted heavily at NAB and for good reason. Flame has a great niche in the TV/FIlm market. Those artists are typically highly sought after, and the profit margin for AD is likely still good on that product. All those things cannot be said about Smoke any loner. I know many Smoke users, myself included, were confused that AD didn’t even have the Smoke logo floating around the NAB booth this year. It was as if the product didn’t even exist. As Walter noted, they have uncoupled development releases from Flame. Even their 2016 announcement for Smoke was so small and quiet that if you sneezed you would’ve missed it. Which leads many to wonder if Smoke already has 1 foot in the grave. Will it go the way of Flint, Combustion, and Softimage? Which is to say, I’m not sure if AD knows what to do with Smoke at this point, especially when considering the shifting landscape both technologically and financially. Smoke has never catered to a broad market like an Apple or Adobe does, and the changes they’ve made to Smoke for 2016 won’t really do much to change the mass appeal either, in my opinion.

So SMAC is a niche product for a dying breed of editor/fx artist that’s likely moving over to Adobe/PPro/AE due to cost and functionality or moving up to Flare/Flame/Nuke. So where does that leave Smoke? And as we know…if there’s no fire then there’s certainly no Smoke! 🙂

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Timeline – 1080p24 (23.98)
Regular motion shot at 1080p24.
Slo-mo shot 720p60. When ingesting footage you’ll have to do 2 things to this footage: (1) Interpret your 60p footage as 23.98 (provides you about a 2.5x slow down), and (2) once you drop the footage on your timeline you’ll need to scale it up 150% like Warren notes.

It’s pretty straight forward. I would not shoot 1080p24 and try to slow that down. It’ll look bad as you noted already. Shoot 60, interpret that inside Premiere Pro, then lay it on your timeline and scale it, then sit back and enjoy your masterpiece!

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Yep…the glories of a rolling shutter. So basically you’re struggling with a few things here:
(1) How the 70D records video with a rolling shutter, and
(2) The refresh rate of the monitor itself,
(3) The power grid that you’re plugged into to power the monitor (depending on where you are in the world power runs at different frequencies – 50Hz in Europe, 60Hz in North America)

On your 70D what shutter speed are you shooting at? What frame rate are you recording to? What is the refresh rate of your monitor? I’ll be honest, that it’s very, very difficult to completely eliminate this from your recordings in camera. This is why TV shows and movies will typically do screen replacements for everything. So the image appears clear and without any refresh lines appearing. Many times this is a post vfx problem. Here’s a good down and dirty trick from Philip Bloom that may work in your case:
https://vimeo.com/80187743

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

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[Ryan Holmes]

[Mike Horan] ” so what is the alternative?”

Second source audio, meaning you shoot your camera footage to the recorder and the sound to a different device entirely. Then in post you sync the 2 back together. You can use the 5D3 to record audio, it’s just that the controls are quite limited and the A/D converters inside the camera are not that good (compared to dedicated devices for audio). But it depends on your workflow and budget.

That’s how all audio is handled on my shoots. Camera gets a scratch track of audio sent to it (for syncing purposes), but the actual used audio file during post-production is recorded to a SoundDevices 702.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Those times look about right given your systems specs (4 year old iMac) and that you’ve turned up Motion Estimation to Best Quality. Your options are to turn the motion estimation down to the default setting and/or purchase a beefier computer with more horsepower.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Use the mp4 format and the h.264 codec. If you’re uploading it to YouTube why does your data rate matter? YouTube will choke down just about anything. Typically for a YouTube upload I’ll export out a h.264 piece at 15mbps (or as high as 65mbps depending on video length and content). YouTube will reencode anything you put up anyway, so feed it something high quality for it to make the derivative resolutions from (144p, 240p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, etc).

If you want something that will play smoothly on a person’s laptop that’s a different story. I’ve found that a 1280×720 h.264 mp4 at 5mbps seems to run well on most laptops made within the last 5-6 years.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

[Steven Cohen] “I did all that before I made the original post and like I said I am not able to change anything under the audio setting. “

Just following up here – you’ve made a brand new, from scratch preset setting? You’re not using an existing one in your system or a default one that comes pre-loaded with Media Encoder? If you make a brand new one from scratch is the audio still greyed out? If so, you should probably give Adobe a call.

One other thing to try is it to download the Creative Cloud trial and see if Media Encoder 2014 solves your problem. In my AME (CC 2014) I can choose the MXF OP1a format and chose between 16 bit or 24 bit sample size on the audio and 2 channels up to 32 channels of audio.

I’m wondering if CS5.5 didn’t have these capabilities yet?

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

So you’re gamma is shifting where – when you encode from ProRes4x4 to h.264? Or after you’ve uploaded to YouTube?

If it’s the former the natural questions are: (1) What player are using to view these differences (Quicktime, which is notoriously inaccurate to judge color on or VLC or something else? (2) What monitor are you using to see these differences (broadcast monitor? computer monitor?)

If it’s the latter, there’s not much you can do. YouTube has it’s own encoding system and it does what it does.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

I was just working on this same type of problem last week, with WebEx. The only solution I’ve found useful so far is to playback the WebEx file (.wrf), and run a screen capture software to record the playback. The screen capture software can then be set to capture in h.264 with whatever settings. That file can then be easily shared and passed around.

Not super elegant, but it gets the job done.

I love proprietary formats like .wrf! <–sarcasm

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

[Shawn Miller] “Just out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into with the BMPC 4k? “

Persistent problems – internal electrical grounding issues when running off of an external battery which resulted in static being recorded on the audio track, horrible internal battery, sensor dynamic range was poor in terms of ISO (200, 400, or 800, and 800 being unusable due to fix-pattern noise) and overall usability (about 8 stops, similar to the AJA CION because they share the same sensor), and ergonomics are non-existent (like the Cinema Camera so we knew that going in). And not so much a problem, but an aesthetic choice…the footage from BMD looked a bit too sharp for my taste. And not sharpness as in focus but the look and feel of the footage does appear different when compared side by side to our C300. I tend to enjoy the look of Canon more than BMD (but see above…I’m a homer 🙂

Things that drove us nuts until the firmware was updated – not being able to format a SSD in the camera, not having multiple choices of ProRes (not everything needs ProRes HQ), not being able to delete clips from the SSD from within the camera, not telling the shooter how much space/time was left on the disc, the LCD screen on the back being absolute garbage in any environment beyond a dark room (though this is still a problem as it’s just the hardware they sourced).

6 months into owning the camera we added a C100. Once that happened the BM Production Camera just started to collect dust because nobody took it out. So after using it a couple times this year, I decided we should just cut our losses and move on. One benefit is that I got a full copy of Resolve out of it… 🙂

DISCLAIMER: This is not to say the camera is junk or awful or unusable. Far from it. We shot some great stuff with it (and the built in time lapse feature is totally killer and should be included by more manufacturers). For our workflow and our style it didn’t fit. It needs a lot of light to work well and it needs time to be setup properly. As a corollary it doesn’t do well with quick run ‘n gun style shooting, which can be a part of my corporate work life.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost