Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Adobe are recommending this workaround for now:
In the meantime, do one of the following: 1 > Set you cache file location back to the default location. You can do this quickly by trashing your user preferences (hold down Alt (on Win) or Option (on Mac)) and then launch Premiere Pro. Or… 2 > Create a custom folder on whichever drive you want to use and direct your cache files to this location. Keep all files other than the Media Cache file out of this location.
The problem seems to occur when there are loose files (not in folders) at the same file level as you Media Cache.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
What I tend to do here for temp monitoring purposes is to add a stereo submix track and route the 5.1 mix to that.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Great post, thank you.
I think there is a very simple way to look at this, touched on but not made explicit in what you have quoted.
Film is a sequential medium, experienced sequentially.
Sorting/sifting/reviewing/experiencing your source material sequentially helps you to think about how it is going to work sequentially.
Container-focused editing does not promote the same type of thinking.
Sequence-focused editing is an ideas generator.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Tim Wilson] “The most characteristic characteristic of digital content creation in the 21st century’s second decade is exponentially expanding options for finishing, driven by real-world demand.”
You quite rightly emphasise the astonishing growth in the technical means for finishing, but does that give us the complete picture?
Are you perhaps not sidelining an equally important factor, namely the skill, experience and talent to operate them at the highest level?
While software and hardware continue to become exponentially more available, the same is (sadly) unlikely to be true of these human factors which cannot be bought off the shelf or acquired overnight, and sometimes can never be acquired at all. There are people with better eyes and better ears who are better equipped to maximise the potential this gifts them. That’s a playing field I just can’t see ever being levelled.
Of course, it’s an outrageous affront to democracy that this should be so, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
Iñárritu is still going to want to be grading and mixing his next movie with the most talented artists he can find. (I sincerely wish that he would turn to me but I have to accept the fact that he is never likely to in this lifetime.) And the most talented artists are always going to want to work in the best rooms using the best options that technology can currently offer because that allows them to deliver the best that their talent can achieve.
I doubt somehow that cheap software and hardware changes that picture at all.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Oliver Peters] “You can be an expert and use X+tools to do your finishing. Conversely, you can be less than an expert, use X, and get terrible results.”
Of course, it really depends what you mean by “finishing”, what type of programme you are finishing and what your audience expectations are.
Broadly speaking there are these main areas that come under finishing: audio mixing, conforming and color grading, VFX, motion graphics, and mastering.
Let’s take audio. I want to flag up this quote from the Saving Grace project: “I worked probably 6 weeks finishing the edit in my home studio and then handed off the audio files for the mix.”
Having worked in pro audio for over thirty years, I could probably put together a cinema quality sound mix entirely inside FCP X if you put a gun to my head – at least for a certain type of feature film project. Of course, I’d want to have access to all my expensive third party plug-ins to even contemplate doing so, but there’s no doubt it would be possible – for some types of project.
Would I be happy that the mix I created in my small studio would stand up in a large theatre? I could certainly make a reasonable guess based on extensive experience, but I’d really hate to have to rely on that guess. (Edit: I should add that mixing to a large picture means you balance everything very differently compared to mixing to a small picture.)
In other words, if you’re mixing for cinema, you really do need access to a big, fully certified room in a large facility. Your desktop set-up just isn’t going to cut it, even if you know exactly what you are doing.
Would I contemplate mixing Guardians of the Galaxy this way with tracks stacked hundreds of layers deep? Of course not. It would be ridiculous to try.
Let’s look at color grading. Obviously there are projects that you can successfully grade on your desktop using your favourite NLE. Clearly there have been features that have been graded this way.
But would you try to grade The Revenant using Color Finale in your back bedroom? You could try, but there are just so many reasons to choose a high end grading suite for a high end project: the ease, speed and accuracy of dedicated grading hardware; grading software built for the job; a properly calibrated projected image; a fully controlled light environment; not to mention the skills and natural talent of a top flight colorist who has made color grading their life’s work.
How about motion graphics? The feature film Focus made a big deal of having created their title sequence in FCP X, but I’m really not sure why anyone would think there’s anything remarkable about that. You could have done the same in most NLEs ten years ago. But could you have made the title sequence for, say, Man in the High Castle in FCP X? You might be able to do a final composite, but it’s simply not even remotely conceivable you could do any of the rest of it. It’s a complete non-starter.
Moving on to VFX. Obviously there are a number of tasks that could reasonably be considered VFX that you can perform inside your favourite NLE: screen replacement, cloning, sky replacement, etc. But could you create the visual effects for Guardians of the Galaxy? Why do we even have to ask the question – of course you couldn’t, not in a million years. What you can do inside your NLE represents perhaps 5% of what is typically meant by visual effects – it’s absurd to think that that 5% is at all meaningful.
Finally, mastering. Vashi Nedomansky talked recently about using the Wraptor plug-in available free with Adobe Media Encoder for making screening DCPs and that’s a seriously nice bonus. But I’d be pretty certain they didn’t master the feature using this method. We frequently make DCPs this way for your clients for market and other industry screenings, but we would always want them to go to a dedicated facility to create their definitive distribution masters. Not least because it’s a process with complex requirements once you go beyond the most basic options, and most importantly because we don’t want to have to be responsible for potentially very expensive and serious mistakes. One of the reasons you pay experts is so that you don’t have to take the flak when something goes wrong!
In other words, of course you can “finish on your desktop”, as long as you acknowledge the very real limits to what this means.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Joe Marler] “I don’t see that, at least in TV news.”
Indeed, there are many areas where standards have plummeted to a pitiful low. (And despite what one sometimes hears to the contrary, there is quite a lot of truly appalling video and audio on YouTube, not just on TV news.)
But there are also many other areas where quality is even more in demand than it ever was and where the quality benchmark keeps getting higher.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Steve Connor] “Less relevant for who? Broadcasters? Movie Producers? I’m not sure it’s true in those sectors at all”
This is always going to come down to anecdotes, but in my world the standard of finishing expected by our clients keeps going up year on year.
As the tools continue to improve and allow for better and better results, so the expectations become more and more demanding. Our clients are continually discovering that they can ask for more and more “perfection” and thanks to some incredible advances in software we can keep delivering it.
I think it’s great that our clients continue to build on their expectations and demand results that they would never have considered possible only a couple of years ago, let alone ten or twenty years ago.
However although it is possible to keep up with the pace at a cost that keeps getting cheaper, it’s still not possible to deliver what our clients expect without using the tools (both software and hardware) that are specifically designed for the job with the highest specification in mind.
On a more general note, although there are still millions who cannot tell good or bad from a hole in the ground, there are ever-growing legions of extremely knowledgeable and exacting younger audiences with a very keen eye for even the smallest deviation from what we currently think of as “perfection”.
And today’s “perfection” will always be tomorrow’s “I can’t believe they used to live with that!”
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Jiggy Gaton] “What do I have to do, break out a calculator?”
Yes.
And those are RGB values expressed on the scale of 0-1 rather than on the scale of 0-255. Doesn’t make them any less RGB values.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Twirl open the controls next to each color swatch and you can enter your RGB values in the RGB fields.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
“It’s like you’re living in a big apartment building and there’s a cool party going on in the penthouse,” he says. “They’ve got mixologists and craft beers and craft whiskeys. Apple is you showing up four hours into the party and trying to sell cans of Bud Light.”
From this interesting article about a side of Apple’s business that doesn’t directly relate to us here, although maybe it does indirectly:
https://backchannel.com/apple-is-losing-its-shine-in-china-9f12a9626312
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki
