[Simon Ubsdell]

[Walter Soyka] “Maybe they don’t know it’s a problem (i.e., the QC team doesn’t know what to look for, or the beta program is too small and not doing the kind of work that would show this flaw).

Maybe they do know it’s a problem, but don’t care (i.e., it doesn’t affect a large enough portion of the user base to be worth the effort to fix).

Is it ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care! “

I know it’s going to look like I’m labouring this point excessively but I do care 😉

And I care because of what it might say about the culture at Apple – which in turn might affect one’s opinion of their entire pro video enterprise.

Let’s look at the scenario here.

Your name is Joe and you’re the developer who’s been tasked with building the light wrap component, and If you know anything at all about light wrap (and even if you don’t) this is probably no more than the work of a few hours if you’re being slow.

To recap, you take the matte output of the keyer (already calculated) and you blur it.

You then subtract the un-blurred matte from the blurred version.

You use the resulting edge matte to composite a blurred version of the background back over the keyed foreground.

You add a couple of sliders to adjust the blend amount and the blur depth for the matte, and you add a couple of compositing options for the blend.

Because this isn’t your first time doing this kind of compositing job (please tell me this isn’t your first time!!), you’ll have made yourself a note to check that you’ve handled the edge pixels correctly in your blurring operations – because it’s an easy enough mistake to make, but you don’t make it twice!

(Let’s just remind ourselves that there’s almost nothing to building a light wrap beyond the blurring operations.)

Then, if you know anything about developing a compositing application, you test what you’ve done across your ample collection of test footage – which you will make absolutely certain contains the commonest green/blue screen scenario, namely a talking head where the lower half of the body is cropped at the bottom edge of the frame.

Because there’s almost nothing to this operation, you’ll at least remember to check that you’ve set the blurs correctly at this point. If nothing else you’ll want to verify that you’ve set the range for the blur depth to your satisfaction.

At this point your supervisor will come over and ask you how it’s looking – and remember to ask you if you’ve set your edge pixels to blur correctly. Hey Joe, let’s see how it looks at an extreme setting, he’ll say, because he’s also familiar with scenarios where this has been overlooked. (I mean I take it that supervisor guy knows a little bit about compositing even if Joe is not that hot on it. There is someone at Apple who knows about compositing, right?)

But this didn’t happen. It got signed off just like that with the most obvious error in place – in fact, the only error that you really needed to look out for.

Now if Joe is like any other developer out in the real world, he will go home and in the wee small hours of the night he’ll be awake wondering if there’s a way he could have made his light wrap better. And he’ll probably think, you know what, I bet I forgot to check my edge pixels and he’ll come in early the next morning to fix it – if he hasn’t rushed across to town to fix it in the middle of the night.

But he didn’t.

Then the product gets released, and still if he was a typical developer Joe would be worrying away at whether he could have done a better job and he’ll spend his downtime worrying away at the keyer looking for possible improvements.

Or at the very least he’ll have enough pride and/or interest in his own work to keep playing with the keyer to see whether it works as well as he and the rest of the team had hoped. Because the sad fact of the matter is that most developers can never let anything go – even long after it’s released. And because most developers expect that their products will continue to grow beyond the moment of their first release – updates and upgrades which will make their creation even better than the original conception.

But in Joe’s case this didn’t happen. Ever.

And here’s the really depressing thing for me. Not only did Joe not care enough to look at his own work after it was finished. No-one else working on the keyer ever bothered to check if it all worked perfectly.

Not in the period before its release – and not once in the years after. Not to this very day.

No-one at Apple pro Apps was interested enough in their own keying product to spend their own time playing with it and discover this elementary mistake.

Really??

No-one at Apple actually uses this stuff?

Yes.

That scenario I can believe.

I can believe that pro video is simply not in their lifeblood the way it is for the majority of people who use their pro video products. “Just about good enough but only barely” is as far as they take it and no further.

Whereas the evidence suggests that in the real world of pro video product development, the best you can do can always be made better. Making the best even better is what gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you up at night.

At Apple there is clearly a culture that says make it flash, don’t spend too long on it and once it’s done don’t waste any more time thinking about it.

Just to come back round to your point about beta-testing – beta-testing is pretty useless for picking up stuff like this unless you’re very lucky. You simply have to have systems in place to pick up basic technical flaws – even if it’s just your co-workers taking sufficient interest in what you’re doing.

So I don’t blame Apple’s scanty beta testing program – I blame the lack of pride in their job of the people doing the work, sorry to say.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Walter Soyka] “Have you tried the PHYX Keyer? Lots of sizzle there, too, but I haven’t sampled the steak. Maybe it has both.”

I haven’t tried it, but I’ve certainly heard good things.

[Walter Soyka] “do you feel the low pricing of FCPX/M5 has sucked the oxygen out of the room, or has it created a larger user base that can make up lost margin in volume to fill holes like this poor keyer?”

I’d say that the user base for FCP X is simply vast – I’d guess it’s on a scale that’s never been seen before for a professional level NLE.

I’ve had users that include dentists and fire departments and hosts of others that you wouldn’t immediately have thought of as the target market.

Conversely, I’d have said that there is almost no market worth looking at for building something at the higher end like an advanced keyer. I have no doubt that Jeremy is right and the Apple keyer is all most users want if they are staying inside the app – and for those that are going outside there are all the usual suspects that will deliver great results.

Certainly there has not been a keyer released specifically for FCP X and I doubt there will be.

I’m not sure if that answers your question which seems like a very good one.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Walter Soyka] “They did 98% of what they needed to do, but not the last 2% to really make it work. If that last 2% never comes, it almost makes the 98% effort a waste.”

Thanks for the kind words, Walter.

I think you’re being way too generous to Apple. As I pointed out below, the single objective measure of whether a keyer is fit for purpose is not whether it can cut a hole in your backing but whether it can resolve edge detail. On that score it’s essentially a 100% fail.

It also worth remembering, as I think you are doing here, our discussion about the defective lightwrap – which at the very least represents exceedingly poor quality control.

More than the details of what’s gone wrong, which are in themselves intriguing, I’m interested in what it says about Apple’s approach to pro video.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Walter Soyka] “In short, my question right now is not so much why is the keyer so bad — it’s why does everyone else think it’s so good?”

I admit to being just as guilty on this score.

I looked at it when it first came out and I thought it seemed pretty cool … and then I’m sure I’m not wrong in thinking I read loads of comments about how amazing it was – and ended up repeating that opinion to others.

All without really giving the tires a proper kicking. Now I find that if you kick the tires too hard, the wheels start to wobble!

I’m sure Apple knew exactly what they were doing with this – selling the sizzle first as always and not worrying too much about the quality of the steak. I think a lot of us, me included, took too much for granted.

Ron Brinkmann again: “See, here’s the thing with how features happen at Apple to a great extent – product development is often driven by how well things can be demoed. Maybe not explicitly – nobody ever told me to only design features that demoed well – but the nature of the organization effectively makes it work out that way.”

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Alan Okey] “I couldn’t help but feel that the project felt cumbersome to put together in Motion. I kept thinking how much faster it would have gone in Conduit or in any other node-based compositor. It’s difficult (for me, at least) to really see in detail what’s happening in a layer-based system like Motion compared to seeing a node tree.”

Thanks, Alan. I completely agree that this stuff is more easily achieved in a node-based environment.

Like you I graduated from Conduit to Shake (and then to Nuke) – and Conduit is a great place to start learning about compositing and I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially now that the entry level package is completely free.

There were a few reasons I wanted to show how to do this in Motion.

First, I suspect a lot of users have opened Motion and never go beyond doing some basic titling work, and I’m keen to show that there’s potentially a lot more to it than that – which is why I started my Motion tutorials on YouTube back last summer with the aim of pushing the envelope beyond the kind of thing you usually see.

https://www.youtube.com/my_videos?o=U

Secondly, I suspect most editors would be much more intimidated by a node-based demonstration in an application they had never opened.

There are some concepts here that it’s extremely useful to know about if all you’ve even done is push around the sliders on your favourite third party keyer and I think that knowing them, even in only the theory, can really help get better results in the long term.

Thirdly, I was interested to see how Motion would compare to After Effects at this kind of job and in my view it’s every bit as flexible, if not more so in this particular case. Again you often hear that Motion is unsuitable for compositing whereas After Effects is held up as an industry standard.

(As an aside, I don’t find doing this sort of thing at all cumbersome in Motion – but that’s probably just familiarity. I do think that Clones are a very powerful tool in Motion that actually help to confer some of the benefits associated with nodes.)

Personally, I would avoid Ae for compositing and go straight to Nuke or Shake as I don’t find it gives me enough flexibility and it can get pretty cumbersome for this sort of work. But just as I’ve wrangled Motion into doing the job here, there are legions of Ae users who will bend the tools to do pretty much anything.

All in all, though, it makes sense to use the application you’re most comfortable using – whether it’s objectively the best tool for the job is very often less relevant.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[David Mathis] “I will be using an HD format of 1920 by 1080 to create the lower third in Photoshop then use the same preset inside of Motion so everything is fine. I will want to use this as a template for use inside of FCP X and was wondering if it safe to go this way. I might be working with everything between HD and 4K hoping that saving it out as a template hoping it will be not be an issue. What should I take into consideration going this way? Any help is greatly appreciated.”

There is no reason why the first part shouldn’t work just fine.

Of course as regards the second part, you will be losing resolution if you use a 1080 Photoshop image in a 4K project.

But then, I’m sure you realise that.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Well, I think that the keyer is remarkably fast. It is quite fun to scrub the keyer icon and see a near real time ‘key’ of the footage, and I think that’s Apple’s focus for the moment. Speed.

Quality will come later, or someone will bring one to market. For better or worse.”

Because I’m a mean-spirited curmudgeon, I’d say that Apple’s focus is always “flash” rather than speed.

(Not that “Flash” obviously!!)

What looks good in a demo, that’s what really drives the development process.

As always, see the incredibly perceptive analysis by Ron Brinkmann who knows the inside story better than either you or me- and whose high-end credentials are something to weep over:

https://digitalcomposting.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/x-vs-pro/

“See, here’s the thing with how features happen at Apple to a great extent – product development is often driven by how well things can be demoed. Maybe not explicitly – nobody ever told me to only design features that demoed well – but the nature of the organization effectively makes it work out that way.”

I know I keep coming across as mean – but I really, really want Apple to step up and do better. They’re just not putting on a quality act right now.

But they could if they tried. Surely?

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “thinking about it, its the fact that motion has kept the layers and timeline separate that allows for that lovely layer view you get.”

It’s really nice to be able to have both options – as well as the dedicated keyframe editor.

All three have enough overlap that you can do some of the same things in different ways, e.g. slip keyframes in either the timeline editor or the keyframe editor, composite in either the layer editor or the timeline editor. (And despite what some will tell you, the Keyframe editor is very fully featured.)

And yes, Ae precomps can be insanely powerful – but they can also be insanely annoying.

(Did I mention that I quite like working in Motion?)

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

Right, got you.

The interface looks like one of those Apple patent things one sees so many of – it’s all about the design of the user experience. And often about making it as unique as possible.

I think the problem is that the “developer” side is just that – Apple developers.

Developers who understand image processing to the extent that they can make you tools to do cool visual stuff on your phone and tablet.

But who don’t have visual effects as their day job and who may well never speak to anyone whose job it is.

Or worse still, might not understand the need to speak to such people.

Another case in point, is Quartz Composer.

They could make it sooooooo much better. It is an absolutely brilliant concept that has enabled some really talented people, a lot of the time really talented at achieving results against the grain of the app, to do some breathtakingly good stuff.

And yet Apple have apparently no interest in supporting it any longer and could well kill it off any day now.

Or let’s take Motion – my personal favourite.

There are some fundamentally great concepts there, but it’s stuck at a very specific level – and shows no sign of ever getting any further.

I think there’s a reason that ties all this together …

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Jeremy Garchow] “The keyer is simultaneously great and terrible.

Great idea, terrible execution.”

The question that intrigues me is why is the execution so bad?

They could have hired any one of a number of talented people who could have helped them make something great …

Hell, this is Apple, they could have bought The Foundry!

But they so clearly didn’t – this very much looks like the work of a team that got pulled off the phone side for a couple of weeks. Image processing for the Instagram market.

They used to employ the team that made Shake and they let them all go.

They managed to retain a lot of the halo effect that came from having distributed Shake as an Apple product (which it wasn’t), but I seriously doubt that they kept any of the skillset on board that could deliver at that kind of level or anything close.

Such a shame.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com