In this demonstration, we use a Pro Res timeline in Final Cut Pro, send it to Avid without creating any new media, and have the sequence not only open, but also utilize the same media – all using Automatic Duck & Avid’s AMA feature in 5.0 – via a hidden (undocumented) trick!
Special Thanks to Avid (Casey Richards), Automatic Duck (Wes Plate), Telestream, Apple, and Key Code Media.
JVC, Hyundai, Sony, Panasonic, and the like – are all coming out with 3D monitors. And they’re all flat. And they’re all shiny and sleek. Other subjective features aside, many of the ones you’ve been eyeballing don’t quite cut the mustard when used in the edit bay. Here’s why:
Frame Rate. Sure, if you’re in the 29.97 / 59.94 world, you’re most likely OK. But if you’re in the 23.98 realm – Be careful! Consumer and pro-sumer 3D monitors often have HDMI input. HDMI is traditionally a consumer and pro-sumer video transport mechanism, so it only stands to reason they would be found on the monitor. Some oddball frame rates – such as 23.98PsF – are not a consumer frame rate. In fact, the HDMI 1.3 spec doesn’t even allow for it. Thus, if you are working in Avid or Final Cut Pro (for example) – and you’re trying to achieve that film look with 3D – that deal you got on your cheap(er) 3D monitor may have served to bite you later. I’ve recent run into this situation with the JVC 463D10U.
Word to the wise: check the spec of the monitor you are buying to ensure it handles any of the frame rates and resolutions you could possibly use.
Solutions / Triage: Cross or down-convert on the output. Avid, for example, can cross convert 1080p 23.98 to 1080i 59.94 or 720p. These are more standard resolutions which a larger variety of monitors can handle. Outboard devices can also handle this, such as the AJA HI5 3G. This unit takes your HD-SDI output (Mojo DX, Nitris DX, Kona3) and does the conversion from 23.98PsF to 23.98p AND converts to HDMI. $690.00 solution.
Type of 3D playback: Passive / Active. I’m not about to launch into the pros and cons of each format but I will tell you what is downwind: Glasses Price. Passive glasses are cheap (in some cases, less than $10, I’ve seen decent paper framed ones – for $1 a piece) Active glasses are over $100 each. So, be aware of the added cost if going active and you have a large viewing audience.
Solutions / Triage: Glasses are probably the least of your concerns – as Active vs Passive is a very old argument – with no clear-cut winner. Decide on what format looks best to you (and the people paying your rate) and find a monitor that handles that.
Flavor of 3D compression. Avid, for example, uses a product called Metafuze to marry left eye and right eye into 1 HD frame size – to constrain to the limits of the Avid software. This yields 2 full frames squashed into 1 full frame, yielding a side by side, over/under, or interlaced image. Aside from losing half the resolution from the get go, this also presents the dilemma “which format should I choose?” Your 3D monitor will tell you. Some monitors only understand, for example, side by side. Thus, if you’ve used Metafuze and encoded into over/under, you now have media that your monitor cannot display properly. That was a waste of time, eh?
Word to the wise: Always verify what you shoot – how you edit – how you view – and how you output – are all the same, or, at least can play together nicely.
Solutions / Triage: Cine-Tal’s Davio, is a hardware based solution utilizing software libraries. One of the libraries handles 3D and can convert inbound baseband 3D video signals into other flavors: side by side can become over/under, for example. You can also split single link to dual link for legacy 3D projection gear. Expect to spend $2500 for the box, and $2500 for the 3D library. DoReMi also has the Dimension-3D box, which reportedly has similar abilities.
2D vs. 3D Media. Some 3D monitors easily display a separate 2D image, or a separate 3D image. Taking a 3D image and “muting” one of the eyes – therein lies the challenge. Many monitors cannot eliminate the “combined” 3D image in order to view strictly one eye – 2D. Having this ability is useful in the edit bay, when A) wearing the glasses gives you a headache while you edit B) glasses cut down on light getting to your eye, yielding a darker than usual edit bay and C) you look like damn fool.
Solutions / Triage: Currently, to accomplish this in Avid you would need to keep 2 versions of media – 2D and 3D – and relink to each set of media when wanting to view the appropriate output, or buy extra hardware (see Cine-tal’s Davio, above). Avid’s hardware cannot alter the output of the 3D signal in terms of swapping single frame arrangement or muting eyes (those setting you see in Avid, those are for the Composer Window – Sorry!). I understand Hyundai’s latest 3D monitor has the ability to mute an eye during 3D playback.
3D Editing Support. As of this writing (early July, 2010), ONLY Avid has a complete end to end 3D editiorial and finishing solution. While there are other solutions that can trick editorial softs into pseudo 3d editing, or to simply finish 3D after editorial Avid is the only complete end to end solution.
Solutions / Triage: How much time do you want to waste attempting to Rube Goldberg a 3D workflow, only to have the kluge be unsupported when it blows up? If you’re doing a complete project – editing and finishing – stick with the most solid solution.
On the heels of the recent uncharacteristically Apple statement about the future of Final Cut Pro, and then a fantastic post by a fellow Hollywood Tech Neighbor Philip Hodgetts, speculation has one again fanned the flames of excitement within the collective Final Cut Pro Kool-Aid drinkers. Thus, I thought I would examine the current gaps I see in the product. A wish list, as it were. And no, not minor keyboard shortcuts and the like, but fundamental features which I believe are needed to kick ass and chew bubblegum. Admittedly, many of these keep the “Pro” in “Pro Apps.”
Unfortunately, this *needs* to be said: None of the views expressed within this entry constitute any advanced product knowledge nor anything more than an educated guess. It’s Apple, you should know this by now. If I knew anything, I’d be shot.
Here are my top 20:
64-bit. Yeah, we all know it’s happening. Good.
Stereoscopic Built in. FCP needs a filter – much like 3D toolbox – which allows for a video track to have a second video track overlayed and locked to it at the same time. This filter needs various flavors of 3D (side by side, over/under, interlaced, anaglyph, etc.) convergence, sync points, and basic color controls – all keyframeable. These “tweaks” and timecode (plus other metadata) needs to be exportable via XML or EDL for use with other systems.Yes, I know 3D Toolbox and Cineform do this, but native support is, of course, welcomed. This is a massive feature that Avid has and FCP doesn’t, and I don’t expect Mr. Jobs to ignore the fact that Hollywood uses Avid for this fact – and not FCP.
blah blah blah send to mobile me which sends to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, grandma’s rotary phone with one click blah blah blahalso send to iTunes cloud for sharing your video and video playlists with friends blah blah blah.
Unlimited RT was cool for a couple years, but now, c’mon – just support more native formats in the timeline. Log & Transfer has still has some good uses when you don’t want to edit in the native camera codec, but realistically, every other NLE supports more and more native camera formats in the timeline. If Apple wants to continue to make their apps more geared towards consumers, then support what consumers are generating. That being said, native DPX and image sequence support would be very, very, very nice.
Add mixing of frame rates, frame sizes, and audio sample rates without needing Unlimited RT.
Shared projects. FCP has always been a single user environment. Aside from XML exchanges, (which – let’s face it – bloat your project quickly) FCP really needs some kind of shared project environment, a la Avid Unity. I concede I can see where this may be rolled into an XSan environment, but collaboration is being stifled by this limitation.
Break the large frame size restriction. Large graphics and frame sizes will bring FCP to it’s knees. I’m sure 64-bit will help to remedy this.
More efficient round tripping without exporting. The Motion roundtrip is great. The Soundtrack Pro is not.
More efficient Compressor CPU utilization (have you seen how bad it is?) and a more reliable QMaster for distributed rendering. QMaster breaks or loses track of nodes way to often and is not nearly as efficient as it could be. I’d love to see a PC verison of QMaster to add PC’s into the mix (Hey, Apple *has* made a few Windows apps)
Distributed Rendering – not just Compressor encode based. Maybe even background rendering whenever the mouse isn’t moving. (i.e. the system is never idling – always rendering)
Better support for uber high powered video cards (NVidia 4800, 5600, 5800, etc) with or without SDI, plus better leveraging of the card’s GPU. I’d love to get a high end video card and have the option of using SDI for output instead of a Kona or Blackmagic card.
Blah blahFCP project blah blah iPad blah blah look at what I’m doing to this video in real time blah blah blah get video from iPhone too blah blah blah roundtrip video from apple mobile devices along with comments blah blah blah
Initial deployment of cloud based editing. C’mon, the writing is on the wall. It may not be ready for primetime, but there has got to be some hooks to edit material already sitting in the cloud.
Email notifications for everything. Renders, exports, media moving, FTPing, etc.
Skinnable and/or color scheme changes, and more control over ALL text and button sizes – not just Browser and Timeline text.
Versioning, not just incremental autosaves.
Facial and verbal recognition and tagging of this in FCP, which populates the metadata fields in the browser, with markers. Couple this with a form of Script Sync, and we now have a way to associate searchable media and text for faster usage. Facial recognition has been out for a few years with iPhoto, many applications out there have decent verbal recognition, and Script Sync…well, the other “A” company has had it for many, many years.
Edit while live capturing of the same footage. Several other plug-ins have already been doing it for years.
R3D native support. Wavelets got FCP on the map with RED users, but the hand tieing because of the extractions made it a pain.
Real Time LUT based filters. Apply a filter that reads LUTs and BOOM, instant RT “looks” for the Editor. Maybe even applying a LUT while capturing or during Log & Transfer for permanent bake-in….?
I’ve been getting massive web traffic and emails from people looking to use ProRes within Avid, as well as outputting ProRes from Avid. With Avid Media Composer 5.0 due to be released next month, the two playing nice with one another will be paramount. I drew up this short Q&A for fellow coworkers at Key Code Media, and I thought I’d share it here.
Can Avid 5.0 on Mac or PC play Pro Res?
Yes, provided you have a recent version of Quicktime (free) installed. This is required by Avid for installation.
Can Avid 5.0 EXPORT into ProRes?
Mac: Not Natively, but yes. Apple allows for any machine (Mac or PC) to PLAY ProRes with a current version of Quicktime, or with the free ProRes decode codecs from apple.com. However, ENCODING into ProRes is limited to the OS having certain software(s) installed.
This includes 1 of the following:
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Server
Logic Pro
Compressor
These apps install the proper ProRes component, which is needed for ProRes encoding. There are sneaky ways around this without installing one of the 4 apps, however they all violate Apples EULA and are illegal, and can also be unreliable.…thus, don’t do it.
PC: No. Apple has not made it possible for any software manufacturer to do a software ProRes encode on a PC platform.
If I have ProRes in my timeline (Mac or PC) and create an effect, how does it render?
Good Question. On both Mac and PC – even if you have one of the 4 apps above installed, Avid 5.0 will NOT render into ProRes. If you look in your media creation settings, Avid will default to another codec.
Then, how do I get my Avid project to FCP and vice versa?
Wes Plate at Automatic Duck has you covered. Automatic Duck provides for both of these scenarios.
Keep in mind, these are NOT yet (as of 5/20/10) qualified for Avid 5.0. Usage of Automatic Duck with legacy media (OMF, MXF) may require some transcoding to work within the other editing system. Depending on the workflow, the Automatic Duck software may be able to handle the transcoding for you. See the README for each plugin.
Remember, all of this is based on an Avid 5.0 Beta – at least 30 days from release. Features are of course, subject to change. However, I do not forsee anything changing, due to Apple’s licensing.
On a side note, I am really, really excited about Avid 5.0. NAB 2010 had me geeked, the beta has me jazzed, and I think this is one of the best steps Avid has taken in many years.
My viewing experience is tainted by the “cleansing” of perceived foul language and/or content by network and cable censors.
Issues to consider:
No station is going to simulcast 2 streams of video and/or audio just for language. This will eat up satellite bandwidth and cost millions.
You don’t fuck with the FCC.
Thus, we are left to find a way to selectively filter out content using existing technology and infrastructure.
Here is my spitball concept:
During Editorial – within Avid or Final Cut Pro – a marker could be placed in the timeline at the start of the offensive word / and or phrase. These markers, when exported, could easily become metadata within that exported file. As that file gets transcoded, moved, and subsequently broadcast, this metadata “flag” could trigger a process within the end user cable box to replace the offensive audio with a bleep. This keeps the censorship on a per household and per TV set basis – i.e. the adults make the call on what’s acceptable; not the station. As an added bonus, there could be parameters for types of markers: language, violence, religion, etc…think of a V Chip on steroids.
A modification could also be made to this workflow to have the “flag” be automatic.
How?
Closed Captioning requires transcription of the spoken word. This is the encoded into the video signal and timed intervals. A filter added to the broadcast center gear would allow any closed captioning word or phrase that is equal to a set of parameters, to effectively be censored. Closed Captioning also has other “hidden” metadata, that could also be used to trigger the censor, if the text is not deemed accurate enough. (Remember, closed captioning text is not always in sync with the audio – and closed captioning can always be turned off by the user.)
What problems this does present is:
What if the system ever fails? Broadcast outlets could face steep FCC fines if someone tripped a power cord and Pulp Fiction was broadcast sans bleeps.
What if people are using over-the-air HD sets? No cable box would force the brodcasters to have the security in place – not the end user.
