alindsay

A Sober Look at the Past, Present, and Future of Final Cut Pro

2011-07-06T19:50:50Z

So it’s been about a week and many are calling Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X a failure. Is this premature? Let’s take a look.

To begin, it seems like everyone covering this needs to qualify how they use Final Cut Pro to explain their angle. Here’s mine…

Where I’m Coming From

I edited my first project with 2 VCRs in 1987. I actually taught people Premiere 4.0. I worked with Media100 for a while and I later used Premiere 4.2 for pre-vis quick edits and dropping footage to tape at Lucasfilm. I also hacked around on Avid at the Ranch—just enough to grab clips I needed.

I started with Final Cut Pro 1.0 when it was released in 1999. I have used it for a decade now. My company trains people to create media, we also do a fair amount of it ourselves. I would not call myself a “hotshot” editor, but I’ve pushed the boundaries of the app fairly regularly ... which wasn’t hard.

I AM affected by the FCP update. We use probably half the features Apple cut. To add insult to injury, they added a great keyer that killed off one of my company’s most lucrative revenue streams. So ... I have some skin in the game, or in this case, some skin left on the field.

Let’s Be Honest For a Minute

So why did Apple do this? Why are editors so upset? Who is actually going to use this app? Who will win in the editing world?

Before we go into that, I need to pop some your bubbles: there were some parts of Final Cut that were above average, many parts of Final Cut Pro that were OK, and a few that just plain sucked. We took it because of the range of resolutions and relative ease of editing. Oh, and for a while it was much cheaper than Avid, and Premiere wasn’t even on the Mac.

I need to vent, just for a minute ...

Scopes: Really? They were ugly, inaccurate, and only worked in playback—when you really NEEDED them in capture. In general, they were almost useless. And sometimes less than useless—harmful.

Capturing: Sure you could capture, but the window was modal. If you were capturing really hi-res footage it would drop frames when YOUR MOUSE rolled over the window. Live camera capture didn’t include timecode ... not that I’m bitter.

Audio: Slow draw, low resolution cursor, Previewing was unintuitive. Compressor was HORRIBLE. You had to move the audio in whole frame chunks. Round trips to Soundtrack worked ... sometimes. Other times, it mangled the return. And Soundtrack, no matter how hard I tried to love it, was a dog. A pretty dog, but too sluggish to work in day to day.

Garbage matte plugin: THE WORST implementation of garbage mattes ever created. I’m pretty sure Rain Man wrote it because I found myself muttering unintelligibly within minutes of trying to use it.

The Keyer: OK, I love the keyer. Not because it was great, but because it was soooo bad that my company made a good living building a replacement, dvMatte.

Color Correction and Management: Nearly Nonexistent. Color was impressive, but slow and buggy. Thank the editing gods for Colorista.

Exporting: I always just exported, no re-compression. I would explain to all of our editors, “Just try to get the edit out of FCP in one piece, we’ll worry about compression later.”

Rendering: Sneeze in the wrong direction and you will need to render every 15 minutes.

Object handing: Start building up a sizeable library and watch Final Cut start grinding to a halt. Mix and match the resolutions and you’re screwed.

Playback: Sometimes it worked ... unless you were at an odd reduced size (like 26%) or part of the PGM was cut off.

I did mention is was 32-bit, right?

OK. There’s more, alot more, but I’m done for now.

Why Did Apple Do This?

So, back to our regularly scheduled program ... Why did Apple do this? Why did they overhaul the most popular editing application of all time (well, second most popular behind iMovie)?

Um ... you did starting reading this from the top, right? Fixing the issues above was not trivial. These issues were systematic limitations. Fixing many of these would be pulling at the digital bailing the Final Cut Pro was held together with. To be fair, all apps have some of this. You design them with the best intentions, but they are based on what you know now, not what will be available in 10 years. Final Cut Pro was on a road to nowhere for a while. There was no clean way to upgrade it. I think Apple had no choice but to rewrite from scratch.

When you have to do a rewrite, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is dealing with all the morass of trying to figure out what you are going to keep. The opportunity is to step back and decide how you would do it differently. Evidently, Apple decided it would do A LOT differently. In fact, it decided to rethink the editing process completely and focus on the process of editing rather than the specific tools that we are comfortable with. At the core of the process appears to be speed and ease of use. Everything is designed to work in real time or the background. Very fluid, but today it looks like if it didn’t fit cleanly into these two areas, it was shelved.

It appears that Apple took a very long view and chose let go of the present fortune for a possible fortune in the future. And they can afford to. The revenue from FCPS was a rounding error compared to iPhone and iPad sales. I’m actually fairly surprised they kept it going it all. Apple’s ability to make this radical change is unique. A mass exodus of core users would be devastating for Adobe or Avid.

So Why Are Editors So Upset?

It’s clear that many editors feel betrayed, discarded, and generally unloved. And they are pretty upset. To understand this, you need to understand the process of high-end editing. In some sense, editing is just editing. You are making creative designs and telling a story. This can be done on any application, BUT, when you are a high-end pro (top 200,000 or so editors), you can do this very fast. This means that you understand the tricks, know the keystrokes and can do a ripple edit in your sleep (because sometimes you have to). You built a workflow that often incorporates SANs and protocols and involves many people beyond your workstation. If you are a company, you are adding new workstations all the time and assimilating new recruits into the system.

Apple has upset all of this and put many of these editors and companies in a bind. Final Cut Pro X is not an upgrade from their current version. It’s a completely different application. It would probably be easier to port your FCP projects to Avid or Premiere than into FCPX. To make matters worse, it lacks many of the features these high-end editors need. This leaves them in a quandary.

The app their whole world is based on is dead. Do they continue to work on it or move to something else?
All the projects they have worked on for 10 years are borked in the future. No matter what they do, they will eventually need to keep some old Mac around to service clients who come in a year from now for a re-edit.
They can’t grow until they jump to something new. You can’t buy Final Cut Pro 7 now—meaning that if you want to just stay put, you can’t add more workstations to handle new editors. You can’t put the decision off. You need to act now!

You can see why making a bad choice (all of these are bad) in a short period of time would make anyone crazy mad. A week ago, they were waiting for Apple, the company that constantly surprises us with wonderfully shiny new toys, to bestow upon them their new ninja sword. What they got, in their eyes, was a plastic sword with rounded edges.

Who Were They Thinking Of?

So if not for the high-end editors that Apple has spent a decade courting, who were they thinking of when they wrote this mess?

I’ve talked to a lot of folks over the last week. Some where upset editors but many were not. Here are some examples:

Marketing staff: Video is no longer a bonus on a website—it’s a requirement. Many of these folks have been building marketing videos for their company in iMovie. They never got Final Cut Express, but they are bursting at the iMovie seams. They hire people to do some of this (we produce 20-60 videos for corporate clients a month) but smaller companies and smaller products don’t have the budget to go out of house. Many times, the folks working on these videos understand the product but just barely understand video production.

Photographers: They are NOT videographers—they grew up on stills. But it’s a brave new world and everywhere they turn, people are expecting video. For many of these artists, Final Cut Pro is daunting. The new version gives them many of the tools they need but in a much simpler package.

Educators: The education system in the US and around the world is changing very rapidly and video is a large part of this revolution. Folks building this content are not trying to cut the next Star Wars, they need to pull all the elements together—but with more control than iMovie.

Beginning Filmmakers: They have a vision, but not the skills to get crazy with the edit.

Who Wins; Who Loses?

Sooo ... IF Apple loses 10% of the 200,000 high-end editors (and I think this is generous … the real number is probably near 50,000) but gains these markets, will it be an even trade? No, not at all—each of these markets is 10 times the size of the current high-end editing market. If only a small percentage buy FCPX, Apple’s installed base will double, and quickly. Almost every person I’ve talked to in these areas are excited about the new release. They don’t want or need EDLs or multicam edits, they just want to cut their story together quickly.

This sounds like trouble for Avid and Adobe, but in the short term, it’s not. Both Avid and Adobe stand to sell more editing software than at any other time in their history as high-end pros begin to look around. Apple handled both of these companies a huge gift, wrapped in a bow. As editors begin to jump, these two companies will catch most of them. The folks who need tight integration with After Effects, Photoshop, etc., will pick Adobe. The folks who need scale and heavy guns will pick Avid.

In the long term, the future is more fuzzy. Apple stands to gain and hold the bottom 90% of the pyramid—if they are able to develop the application effectively. This 90% will begin to put pressure on the top 10%. We’ll just have to see how committed Apple is to the future. For the many that will be entering the market with Final Cut Pro X… getting in now means that they can learn a simple application and grow with it… like many of us did with Photoshop over 20 years. It was simple when in started, really.

As someone who has had to give up every important application in my pipeline at one time or another: It will be painful but no matter what you do…it will work out.

NAB Live From Pixel Corps

2011-04-11T09:18:25Z

If we programed this right….and things could go wrong…check in here for live from the show floor, press announcements and more…

Let’s just say that if this doesn’t work as planned…“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”.

“Will Apple Release a New Final Cut Pro Studio and What Will Be New?”

2011-02-28T18:27:45Z

Here’s my uneducated guess (meaning, I’ve been careful NOT to ask Apple about it). All is based on what Apple has done the near past and what I think makes sense for them to do. It is NOT my opinion of what would be good for the industry, the user or even myself… Just what I think might happen. In order of likeliness…

Apple will release a new Final Cut Pro by the end May (95% chance). Steve reported told someone that it would be “Kick Ass” and in the Spring so… I’m thinking they will get whatever they can into something they can solidly release before Memorial Day. It will mostly likely take more advantage of graphics acceleration and Thunderbolt. There will be more Red support and probably some refinements to the interaction between apps. I don’t expect 3D Stereo or anything groundbreaking. Apple will aim squarely at the Education and Corporate markets with a nod to TV and Film. .. and DVD Studio will remain unchanged. Apple doesn’t care about plastic.
FCPS will be in the App Store (80% chance). Apple is undoubtedly committed to positioning the App Store as THE place to buy software on the their platform. Nothing would speak this more clearly than the professional tools in the App Store. They have already put Aperture into App Store and split iWork and iLife collections into the store… which leads us to the most controversial prediction…
Apple will split up Final Cut Studio and dramatically reduce the prices (50% chance). If Aperture is any guide, Apple break the FCPS apps into their individual parts and sell them from $79 to $99 each. Apple is moving away from complex bundles and integrated solutions (iWork and iLife have already been decoupled). At the same time, they are lowering the prices across the board. The reality is, Apple is playing a different game… one that Sony, Avid and Adobe can’t play. They are building a platform. Making these tools more available and cheaper make it hard to argue that a PC is cheaper (in a Corporate or Education department) when the software is so cheap and still does what you need. The impact of this decision, which I predict is only 50/50… would be profound. There will be little more than stubble left in the Mac market. Companies like Avid and Adobe will need to decide whether they really want to go head to head or give up a market that is growing quickly in corporate and education markets. Plug-in developers would need to re-think their pricing… which bring us to…
Apple adds in-app purchasing for plug-ins (5% chance). I don’t think Apple will add this on this rev. I do think this is the future. Making the apps less expensive would probably multiply user numbers by a factor of 5-10. Apple could increase application related revenue (offsetting the price drop) by selling plug-ins directly in the application. I’m kind of surprised Adobe hasn’t done this with Photoshop.

I do have concerns about this trajectory. Apple will gain massive market share not from technological advances but from business model adjustments. I’m not clear Apple is really committed pushing the envelope with Final Cut Pro Studio. They could relegate OS X as a vast land of mediocre tools (or tool) as Adobe and others continue to develop but focus on the PC because… 99% of the Mac market will own Final Cut Pro. It could make developing new editing tools very difficult because… if you want to sell on the Mac, you will have to sell it for $99.

On the other side, as someone who is accountable for about 20 licenses in our company… lower cost software and the pressure for others to follow suit does make an impact for us. I would not only buy more licenses… I would buy more computers if it was cheaper to load them with software. Setting an example for the industry _could_ be good if it’s followed by robust sales from eager App Store users (like me).

Datavideo HS-2000 Review

2010-09-03T08:31:51Z

The Datavideo HS-2000 is an all-in-one HD-SDI mixer that includes audio, video, intercom for 6, and monitor… all in a simple briefcase like form factor. It’s designed for remote mixing of HD (720p or 1080i) venues. It should be noted, that this is not a review of a loaner product. We purchased an HS-2000 a few months ago and use it nearly every week and have used it now on 3 continents, indoors… and outdoors.

Features

HS-2000 sports four SDI inputs (one doubles as a DVI input) as well as a dedicated DVI input. For our purposes, this is been completely sufficient for on-location and remote switching. The system has many of the attributes that you would normally expect with a video mixer. There is a fader bar, lots of buttons for wipes (that you should never use), Picture-in-Picture, Take and Cut, and 4 channel audio mixer. You can use the DVI signal to feed graphics in and use a luminance keyer to overlay with the video (we’ve actually found Apple’s “Keynote” to be very effective for this process).

There is also an intercom and tally system built right into the box, seamlessly. Having an intercom system built-in and not an extra piece of equipment can be very, very useful… especially combined with the tally relays to all the cameras (that switch automatically as you edit… yellow tallys for Preview and Red for Live). If you haven’t done a lot of mixing, it should be pointed out that having a solid tally and intercom system is an absolute necessity for mixing a tight live event. You will need this system included, it’s great to have it built in without tons of extra wires connecting the relays to the mixer (just wires to the tally/headsets). The HS-2000 comes with 6 headsets and tallies.

The monitor is actually built into the case too. This provides the standard display of preview and program as well as all the independent feeds connected to the mixer. You can also go full screen on the Preview or Program for confidence checks. Of course, you could buy a mixer and simply connect it to any old monitor that you have but if you’re trying to shoot at a remote location and set up quickly… having all of these pieces put together turns out to be very useful.

Outputs are exactly what you’d expect - HD-SDI (2), component HD and DVI for Preview. The system runs another 720p or 1080i. It is not capable of working in standard definition or scaling to standard definition. While this is not a large concern of ours if you’re trying to integrate with older cameras this may become an issue.

The strongest feature of this mixer is its portability. You can set this mixer down at a location and have it connected all the cameras and other inputs in less than 15 minutes. Everything you need for a basic mix is all built-in and you are not carrying around a lot of cables and do not have worry about a lot of extraneous connections. The mixer is well-built and feels solid. This is very important when you’re working with larger clients but on a smaller budget. Our experience of this mixer is that it is a solid and reliable appliance that delivers exactly what it promises.

Cons

There are, of course, a few things that we would love to see improved in the next iteration of the HS-2000. First, the audio is not embedded into the SDI output. This could be considered a subjective complaint. There are good reasons not to embed the audio into the SDI feed. Oftentimes, the audio will get ahead of the video as the video passes through hardware appliances. This requires a variable audio delay to re-sync the audio with the video. This is often done downstream of the video mixer. Many mixers in this class don’t even deal with audio at all. That said, it generally requires another piece of hardware in the workflow and makes the mixer slightly less portable. Second, we would really like to see a key/fill option for graphic overlays. A key/fill uses two SDI input streams- one carrying the color information and the second carrying the alpha channel. This combination allows for much cleaner transparencies and soft edges than a straight Lumakey. The workaround is generally to key video downstream. The problem with this is that you are putting a computer and software between the mixer and the final output. This is a less stable approach than feeding the graphics into the mixer. In defense of the Lumakey option, many times you won’t want to give up precious inputs for a key and fill (2 inputs just for graphics), you also need a more beefy system to send the graphics to the mixer (Dual SDI outputs) which makes remotes more cumbersome. That said, it would be a great choice to have.

Finally, the unit is slightly larger than the regulation size for carry-on luggage. This may seem like a small detail but this is a portable mixing unit and we take it all over the world. We have thus far been able to talk her way onto the plane with the mixer but if a few inches for shaved off to the width we wouldn’t have to worry about it.

Conclusion

While there are many mixers that have lots of little features that we wish we had in this mixer, we simply haven’t found another all-in-one mixer, at this price point, that matches the feature set or stability of the HS-2000. We have found it to be a solid mixer that we can trust to get the job done while also being very portable and very convenient in the field. If you are looking for a system that allows you to set up extremely quickly and feel confident in the final result, HS-2000 is definitely worth checking out.

Tablet Madness

2009-10-06T02:09:00Z

Whether or not the mythical Apple “iPad” will ever grace our presence, the idea of tablet device seems to be cresting the point of critical mass. While many have tried and failed in this area, the environment for tablets is dramatically different than only a year or two ago. Here’s why…

1) Connectivity - One of the key issues with a tablet device is being connected to the internet. It makes way more sense to have a full screen device when you can connect anywhere. Wifi is now nearly everywhere and 3G/EVDO is everywhere else. 4G, just around the corner, promises to deliver 60 megabits/second… this is faster than most of our home, or office, connections.

2) Netbook success - After years of ever-growing laptop sizes, the trend towards “less is more” has definitely taken over. Netbooks are more than computing, they are high-portable computing. Their only real impediment is making room for the keyboard.

3) The Cloud - As we move more and more to the cloud (Google docs, Zoho, Salesforce.com, etc)... We become less and less connected to a single computer for everything we do. We don’t need to have our music, our calendar, or our documents local to the CPU. While this may not work for graphics professionals… it’s a contributing factor to popular demand for a tablet.

4) The iPhone - More than anything else, the iPhone is the bellwether of the rising storm of tablets. As the applications available approach 100,000, the way people use their iPhone has changed dramatically. It has gone from a phone with some applications to a portable internet device that happens to answer calls.

5) Web Video - With everything from Netflix to Hulu to iTunes to You Tube serving up high-quality web video, a portable way to watch this becomes more and more appealing. While the iPhone has proven to be a force in this area, it’s viewing range is painfully limited (hardly “arms reach”). The video available is also ready for a bigger screen. This is why, of course, this article is in PVC and not Engadget…

Greenscreen Primer Part 2

2009-10-02T20:15:00Z

In the first installment, we looked at the basic set up for shooting Greenscreen. Most of what I covered is exactly what we see people skip everyday. What I’m going to talk about next is what everyone else ignores at their peril. We’re talking about capture systems and codecs.

As with color correction, capturing greenscreen plates is more than just resolution. Color depth and, more importantly, color scaling make a big difference. How you capture your precious cargo can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead.

Most people capture to their camera’s internal storage - Generally - P2, SxS, HDV Tape, or SD tape. Getting video onto these tiny cards (or tapes0 requires some compromise. Here’s why…

When a camera’s HD chip captures the world in front of it, the data pipe can be roughly 180 megabytes to over 400 megabytes per second. At this rate, most memory cards, if they could write that fast, would fill up in less than a minute. To get more data onto the card, and to allow it to keep up at all, color scaling and compression is applied. For many video projects, these manipulations are not apparent. Most of what we focus on in an image is the luma detail (black and white information) and the primary subject of the video. Much of this is left intact. BUT as compositors, we need more. When a camera throws away color data, it is throwing away exactly what we need to do our work.

Here’s the filesize differences between popular capture formats. While size isn’t everything… it’s something to consider.

Color Scaling

We’ve all heard the terms… “4:1:1”, “4:2:2”, “4:4:4”, “4:2:0”. For many, this is some course measure of quality. For greenscreen compositors, this is the terrain: From the smooth slopes of 4:4:4 to the rocky coasts of 4:1:1. Color Scaling will set the tone of your composite and ultimately define how far you will go, and is the first “handle” that you will have to get ahold of when determining the quality and file size of what you capture.

In a 4:1:1 frame, you have luma information for every pixel across the image, but color information for only one quarter of the pixels (above). This may work okay for normal footage when it is not as obvious (our eyes are more sensitve to luma than to chroma), but produces a terrible color key (below).

Color Scaling is simple enough. We start with YUV, Y is the Luma, U and V represent the color information. The magic numbers represent the ratio of YUV. So, if every 4 pixels of luma are matched with 2 in the UV… we have 4:2:2.

We generally keep all of the luma information (because it will look soft if we don’t); we then throw away color information. If you’re lucky, the process only throws away half the information but it’s usually more. HDV is 4:2:0, as is XDCAM. This is an overview. Adam Wilt has covered this in great detail in the past in his various camera reviews; you should read his articles on the subject if you want to dig deeper.

Half the color information in 4:2:2 means you are keying an image half the size of the full frame and then mapping that back to your selection. When you see the stair steps down the side of your next key, this is why.

There are 4:4:4 options. Sony F-950s, F-23s, and F-35s along with a few others all shoot 4:4:4. But you pay a dear price this color scale. Most of these camera bodies start at $100k or more. The Red is one exception but it reaches 4:4:4 at the cost of definition… we’ll talk about that later.

Color Depth

But it’s worse than all of this… 4:2:2 is the least of your problems. In fact, a large amount of our keying is done on 4:2:2 footage. The difference in our case is that the footage is uncompressed. Uncompressed?? You thought 4:2:2 was compression… no, that’s just scaling the color channels. You actually have four handles that control the quality and file size. These handles are Color Scaling, Color Depth, Temporal Compression, and Spatial Compression. We just covered Color Scaling, where the camera or system actually scales the color information (throwing away up to 75% of it) to save space. This is generally not something you can choose to do after you choose what type of camera or capture system that you are using.

Color Depth is the number of bits used to describe each pixel. Typically this is 8 bit or 10 bit in capture formats. 8 bits provide 256 levels in each channel. 10 bits provides 1024 levels in each channel. Why does this matter? If the footage is well shot (see Part 1 of this series), it doesn’t really matter. BUT, if the footage has a large variance of lighting across the screen, more bit depth gives you more data to work with.

Compression

The last two handles are temporal and spatial compression. Temporal compression looks at successive frames and tries to intelligently throws away data used in all the frames. This can create relatively small file sizes but it also can create files that are difficult to edit because of the lack of keyframes in important areas. Spatial compression looks at the colors within a single frame and tries to clump similar colors together as discretely as possibly. Unfortunately, this can often leads to square edges on subjects as the macro blocks (the clumped areas) are designed not to noticeable in uncorrected images. When we change the color levels, these perceptual cheats show up. We change the levels a lot in keying.

Whew… why do we need to know all of this? Because it factors into all of our shooting calculations. As we all know… life, and production, is imperfect. We really get to operate in a pristine environment. We need to make compromises. Understanding all of the factors allows us to compromise effectively. For instance…

next page: our setups

It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

2009-06-22T06:20:00Z

I posted a fun little video about creating a shoulder mount rig for the iPhone 3G S on Friday. You can see it here.

While done in a tongue and cheek way, the most important thing for Pros watching the video is actually the first minute. I was dead serious there. The new iPhone is a game changer… make no mistake about it.

The iPhone Video camera is clunky and not particularly high quality. There are many small video cameras and even other phones (think Nokia) with superior quality. But what it lacks in quality, it makes up for in ubiquity and ease of use. Having this phone is far easier than carrying a camera around. And being able to seamlessly upload videos to YouTube will take event coverage, from news to weddings, into an entirely new realm.

What many thought would be the tyranny of an all knowing shark, Big Brother, has been replaced with the piranha attack of Little Brother (or more accurately, Little Brothers, Sisters, and their cousins). Soon, you will not be able to buy a phone without a video camera… and because of iPhone’s ease of use, uploading will become second nature for many.

News will feel this first. In fact, they are already grappling with the impact. With correspondents in Tehran relegated to cell phones, reporters are only a step ahead of the hordes of cell phone users on the streets – who can speak Farsi and actually know what’s going on, in realtime, without a translator. There will be calls for “Journalistic Integrity” but what does that mean when the you have an outsider attempting to make sense of an internal conflict? Maybe we’re better off seeing two (or many) different skewed views than one “correct view”. After all, in the US, we have MSNBC vs. Fox News… who are arguably skewed equally to the Left and Right.

In any case, the immediacy of a thousand video capable phones at every news event… even when that news event is a sudden water landing in New York or violent crackdown in Iran… has captured the attention of CNN and others. Within months, I fully expect to see a CNN “iReport” iPhone app that will upload directly to CNN’s servers complete with GPS location, Time Stamp, and shooter release included.

I’m sure many videographers stand aghast. “How can the unwashed masses replace our years of experience and training?” The answer is, of course: By being there and being willing to share their videos with the world for a mere mention and maybe a T-shirt. As news organizations are continually pressed to make cuts and, at the same time, the demand for real-time news increases – this opportunity will be impossible to ignore.

The hard reality is that this has been coming for a long time. We saw this in print nearly 20 years ago. Highly trained pre-press artisans were replaced by whippersnappers with Photoshop (I was one of these interns). We saw this 10 years ago with the Web - where the lack of HTML coders accelerated the collapse of the “Dot Com” Bubble but soon they were $15/hour for basic work and often replaced overseas. Video is just the next step in this process. Never has the ability to shoot video, and broadcast quality video, been in the hands so many.

Before we all start looking for the door and lament the end of “our time” and video professionals… be of good cheer. While many video offerings will become difficult to create a business around, the demand for professional video is spiking. 10 years ago, you were “behind the times” if you didn’t have a website – today, you are behind if you don’t have videos on that website. Fortune 500 companies are scarfing up more video than the Cookie Monster at a Mrs. Fields outlet store. In hard times, video reduces the pressure on sales and support staff. When the economy expands, raw competition will take over. The revolution for video is not nearing the end but just at the beginning. Independent producers with a solid digital production background are in the pole position if they are willing to zig and zag with the chaotic expansion of this new market.

More importantly for this iPhone revolution, however, is the human impact. Where the pen is mightier than the sword, and a picture is worth a thousand words… a video camera is a WMD - Weapon of Mass Distribution. There is nothing more powerful…but like really… nothing. Gandhi didn’t take on the British Empire by himself, he did it with the press… as did Martin Luther King Jr.. Conversely, Vietnam was largely lost on the TV, not the battlefield. And losing one pilot in Somalia didn’t stop the US in its tracks, video of that pilot being callously dragged through the streets did. The bright light that video sheds on the world makes many of our darkest nightmares intolerable to ignore with a scone and latte. The ubiquity of these new tools and the distribution of their content will make it nearly impossible to hide… no matter how powerful the individual or country. This won’t always be “for the best” but in the end, it is most powerful defense against totalitarianism and violence.

This revolution is just beginning and on the other side lies not just freer self-expression, but a freer and more connected existence. It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine.

NAB 2009 Impressions

2009-05-01T10:02:00Z

2009 was almost the first NAB’s I’ve missed in a decade. In the fall, I looked at my schedule and declining conventions and wasn’t sure if I was even going to go. Interestingly enough, this year’s show actually turned out to be one of the most useful and interesting years in recent memory. For me, it was not about big news items but, rather, many small revolutions that, as an aggregate, were very exciting. In this article, I will cover the trends that seemed to emerge and the products that caught my eye.

Trends - Here are some of the trends that seemed to permeate the floor…

Still and Video Convergence - When you see Canon and others putting still cameras front and center at a largely video show… you get the idea that something is afoot. Still imaging has been slowly building in consumer cameras but more and more Pros are getting exciting about still cameras shooting video. Why?

Two reasons primarily:

1) Sensor size - Normally resigned to tiny imaging chips, many filmmakers are excited about the beautiful short depth of field afforded them through large sensor sizes. Coupled with cheap, high- quality lenses - the result are images that we normally only see in the film world. The output is, as many point out, marred by limited camera control and warping due to the rolling shutter…that said, it looks fantastic in many situations.

2) Two for one - For news reporters (especially those charged with B-roll acquisiton) – the idea of a great still camera coupled with even reasonably good video shrinks budging camera bags already stretched to fit “new media”. A surprising number still photographers roamed the halls uncomfortably trying to figure out where they fit into this new food change while others excitedly outfitted their new toys to look more like a classic 16mm film camera than an SLR.

In the end, it is apparent that within a year, maybe two…it will be very hard to buy a new SLR camera that doesn’t shoot video. As still photographers flood into the video market…the “look” of web and tv production is most likely going to take on a much more classic look. Exciting times for many…in the Chinese curse sort of way for some.

3D - If you’ve missed the memo…3D is a big deal and apparently getting bigger by the minute. Whether it’s colored glasses, polarized glasses or no glasses at all…everyone seems to be jumping into the mix. While tried and true methods (color and polarization) are being to mature into something beyond the experimental, many are trying to eliminate the need for any apparatus. Early attempts look more like early LCD screens (like early 90s versions) rather than something really watching. But…5 years from now…some of these may be usable in limited situations.

Viewing is, of course, only half the challenge. Getting two cameras close enough together to achieve the proper separation is also something many are tackling. From Mirrors to matching Red scarlets to custom cameras from Panasonic, many are trying to make 3D acquisition as smooth as standard shooting…though we’re probably still years from that goal.

High Resolution - While resolution has begun to give way to sensor sensitivity in the still camera world, image size still matters in the film world. Red’s 3k, 6k and even 28k sensors are breathing down everyone’s neck as projector companies show more and more 4k options…and above (there was a booth showing 8k projected images which, in reality…hurt my eyes).

We can be fairly clear that SD is all-but-dead at this point…which is too bad since we’ve just finally figured out the proper resolution to use (see Chris Meyer’s excellent notes on this). For TV, we seem to be moving quickly to a 1920x1080 square pixel world (and slowly towards progressive scan). Film is moving towards the larger 4k standard. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s not a case of diminishing returns. 4K is overkill for all but Imax, in my opinion.

Phantom Companies - While many of the excitement followed the companies that came…attention was also drawn by the companies that didn’t. Notably, Apple and Red did not field booths this year but through meetings, partnerships and promotions…they were definitely well represented. This is a testament to good marketing strategy and unconventional approaches these shows.

LED - Whether production is looking to be cooler, greener, or just efficient… the move to LED lighting became more apparent than ever. It wasn’t just new products but also the basic use of LEDs at many goods as simply a matter of course. The prices are still very high per lumen but they are beginning to drop and the ability to control color…and lower infrastructure requirements are tempting.

SD Card Storage - OK, SD isn’t new. What is new is shooting directly to SD cards in prosumer cameras. JVC HM-100 and 700 began to present the question “why are paying premium dollars for proprietary storage when we can get SD cards that are fast enough for 1/8 the price. As adapter cards for SxS cards roll out and JVCs direct attack continue…it looks like we may get to enjoy the efficiencies of mass production, for once.

Podcasting Design

2009-04-01T10:04:00Z

Podcasting has become an over-used term for “Video and Audio Production for Online Sources” (VAPOS) but…until the masses adopt VAPOS as a replacement (something I very much doubt), we’ll be calling this new fangled market Podcasting. Whatever it’s called, I will venture to say…this is the future of television, radio and much of what we think of as “entertainment.” Maybe not today, or in it’s current form, but video and audio online is where cars were in 1904, radio was in 1922, television was in 1952, print publishing was in 1988 and the world wide web was in 1994. If you are in the business of video production, you simply have to pay attention to this market or you will not survive long term and you will give up valuable opportunities.

In this article, I’m going to talk about designing and structuring a podcast along with some of the technical issues that should be considered when producing a podcast. The Pixel Corps produces about 80 episodes of web content a month in 6-8 different structural formats. Much of what I will share is a culmination of many painful lessons we’ve learned over the last 8 years of producing online video.

Why Do a Podcast?

This of course, is really the first and most important question you need to ask yourself. “Why am I thinking about Podcasts, web video, or production at all?” If you are having a hard time coming up with an answer, let me give you a little help. Here’s where most podcasts come from…

1) Experimentation - This is actually a large focus of the Pixel Corps podcasts. We’re playing with ideas, playing with styles and formats, playing with the production pipe. The best way to figure something out… is to noodle with it. This can be a great reason to do a podcast in itself.

2) Self-Expression - I think about 80,000 of the 90,000 podcasts out there are for this purpose…for better or for worse. This is also 99% of YouTube. The masses have been unleashed and they are wrecking havoc on everything we hold dear in video production. Before you bemoan this, remember, people were going crazy with Photoshop in 1992…many (me) ended up taking it somewhere useful. Even if you are a little stodgier than the average Flip user, Self-Expression is important because if you don’t love what you do, it will be hard to get through the lean times…and if you start doing video on the web now…there will be lean years. Of course, if you wait until the market is moving, the train will have already left the station. We only do podcasts (for ourselves) about subject matter that we enjoy. We don’t wait for advertisers or funding. We create content because we want that kind of content to exist.

Self-Promotion - There are soo many avenues for self-promotion with online video. If you want to get known for something…do a great podcast about it. There is a lot of competition in many areas but the cream still rises to the top. And, if you are patient and diligent, you may end up with hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of followers. Just as importantly, you may find clients that are paying a great deal of attention to this. Self-Promotion comes in many forms (this may be the most important part of this article)...here are few ideas…

Getting the word out - This is the most crude and recognizable form of self promotion. You tell people about your product. While sometimes effective, you know how everyone feels about someone who just talks about themselves at parties? Yea, this type promotion often works just as badly. You can do it but the less people feel like you are selling something and the more they feel you are serving them, the more they will be interested in what you’re serving up.

Education - This is generally the most effective form of self-promotion using online video. Make sure people know how to use your product, make sure their questions are answered, make sure they understand the context for why your product exists. These kinds of videos deepen the company’s relationship with their consumers and makes sure those consumers have a good experience and spread the word. Here are a few good examples…

elfa
Elfa, like Ikea, Target, Staples, and a host of others, makes stuff that looks easy to build but turns out to be a weekend of swearing at the instructions and drinking hard liquor when you’re done to sooth the mental, and sometimes physical pain. Elfa recently posted videos on their site to show that it is, indeed, easy! ...Once you know what you’re doing. After 20 minutes of watching the videos, the customer can breeze through the operation rather than guess what the writers mean in the “intelligence test” written instructions that most of us fail. The customer gets their closet up fast, buys again, and tells their friends…success.

Whirlpool
Whirlpool takes frequently asked questions and hires people to make videos of the answers. This creates happy customers and reduces support call time (which saves lots of money). It’s also often more effective to watch the video than try to talk it through with a customer service rep in India.

Boxwrench.net
Holley ships a DVD of how to install and tune their carburetors with each unit. Why would they do this if it’s just mechanics looking at the videos? Because it reduces installation errors and thus reduces returns…saving, you guessed it, lots of money for Holley.

These are examples of the revolution coming…where it’s not “BMW films” but how-to’s and support videos that make sure that consumers know what their buying and know how to use it. Before you turn your nose up at this market, remember, it’s likely 20-30 times larger than film, TV and games combined.

And the last reason people make podcasts is for, you guessed it, Profit. Money makes the world go round and, while it’s not turning very fast yet, it can and does make money. Here’s the primary ways…

Services for people who want to promote themselves. See points above, consider doing them for someone else…enough said.

Advertising - While advertising is still getting started, there is plenty of money flowing into online video. Some of this is going to places like Hulu.com but it is also going to individual podcasters with niche markets that are coveted by advertisers. Much of this is non-fictional content about subjects people are passionate about. What are people passionate about? Go to the book store, walk through the magazine section. Welcome to 1000 passionate niches. You don’t have to do all footwork to get advertisers on your own, by the way. Websites like YouTube, Blip, Wizzard, Vimeo, and Howcast would be happy to sell advertising for you. We actually have an ad sales partner, Podtrac.com, who handles most of our advertising.

3) Clickthrough - While it’s a small market now, this is bound to grow - a lot. The idea is - that you are watching a cooking show and you want Alton Brown’s knife or pan or eggs. You click on them, order them and then go back to the show. Most people think that this won’t work because they are imagining this happening during a viewing of “Ocean’s 11.” Narrative is not the venue for this. How-to content is the perfect venue because starting and stopping is not that disruptive and because you have an audience interested in something specific. As devices like the iPhone mature, expect to see much more of this kind of content. Revenue can be either on the click-through or the purchase (Amazon Affiliate kind of stuff).

Greenscreen Primer Part 1

2009-03-01T10:05:00Z

I pulled my first Greenscreen in 1996 working on “Star Wars: Episode 1” pre-viz. The footage was rough (pre-vis handycam footage) and the After Effects Color Difference Key was a complete mystery. Now, the Pixel Corps, we shoot an average of two hours of greenscreen footage a day, mostly 4:4:4 uncompressed. While the tools have progressed significantly, the process itself, and the rules, have changed surprisingly little.

In this article, I’ll cover the major issues you need to solve when shooting greenscreen footage. There will be future installments to discuss theory and keying technique. I will argue about 90% of the professionals out there do not use most of the information I will lay out here… and it makes their process much more difficult. I will say, everything we do in the Pixel Corps is designed to lower costs and accelerate delivery speed while constantly improving quality. We’re not particular to be particular. We do everything because it shaves time or improves quality.

The Set

While some people still use a green cloth and a few shop lights, they are saving money on the front end only to pay for it later, in time and quality, on the back end. This “future” payment can often dwarf the cost of the original shoot. While you can’t always get a great screen, most bad screens that we see are shot as talking heads…where there is absolutely no excuse to shoot a rough backing. In reality, you really don’t need a super expensive set-up, but a few elements make a difference. The thing to realize is… 80% of the quality of your key happens on-set. If you shoot garbage on set, you will spend countless hours just to survive the composite. If you shoot clean, well lit, plates on set– you will key quickly and easily.

Let’s address Greenbacking first (this is the Japanese Term for “Greenscreen” and in some ways, more accurate…as the Japanese often are). I call it “Green” not “Blue” because, well, you should almost never use a bluescreen. Kermit the frog may thought it wasn’t easy being green…he obviously wasn’t a compositor. Blue is the most disrespected, beaten and shortchanged channel in the digital pipeline. When compression hits…it hits the blue record the hardest. It leaves it blocky, grainy and chattering. You can feel bad for the Blue Record but you shouldn’t use it for your keying operations…even out of sympathy. Green, on the other hand, is usually crisp and clean because it actually gets most of the YUV signal in the conversion. Compression will still affect it but not nearly at the level that it affects the Blue.

So, we’ve decided on green, but what kind of green? You can get Rosco, Composite Components, Wescott, or the green paper at the Pharmacy. At the Pixel Corps, we only use Composite Component’s “Digital Green” (and no, we don’t get paid to say that). On paper, it shouldn’t really work as well as Rosco…but it does by a significant margin. I would not suggest Wescott pop-open screens or anything that feels like corduroy or cloth. Both of these will suffer from reflectance issues and patterns. They are cheaper, and there’s a good reason. If you love Roto and lots of extra hours working on the keys…knock yourself out. But I’m lazy and prefer to make the capture process as clean as possible.

Once you’ve chosen the screen flavor, you need to decide the screen type. The best solution, when you can implement it, is a smooth green painted wall. It’s the easiest to light evenly (which is 60% of your challenge). If you can’t muster a green wall, Lycra is the next best choice. Again Composite Components Green stretched tight is your best, though not cheapest, bet. You can go out and buy a fancy frame for it but we often use 1” PVC pipe that’s 1.5 feet longer and wider than the greenscreen. The nice thing about PVC is that you can get in any city…making it easier to travel. If you are going to go with paint, plan on 4-5 coats. You need it to be really green and really consistent. We also don’t “touch-up screens” we repaint the wall every month or two and we really talk care of it. It’s expensive, but not as expensive as “fixing it in post.”

Our lycra screen hitched to PVC

OK, now we need to light our screen…

Red releases Details on “Scarlet”, “Epic” and more

2008-11-13T22:51:00Z

Red has, at least on paper, turned the entire imaging world upside down. While “When and Whether” this comes to fruition is still up in the air, the stats are pretty impressive.

I’m not going to regurgitate the stats. You can see the details on Red’s web site.

Here is the ADD upshot…

Modular - You buy a body and then accessorize. This is the ultimate erector set of cameras. Add lenses, handles, batteries and interface as you like. Set it up as the still camera that shoots Video or a video camera that shoots stills. You can upgrade and interchange as you go. You can often trade accessories from the Scarlet to the Epic. It’s the just the guts that set them apart.

Scarlet at $2500…from 3k to 6k. From fixed to Canon/Nikon to Pro lenses. Get this…there’s a controller on the Scarlet that you can pull off and operate the camera from up to 100ft…wirelessly. I wish I could do that with my F-950. I can see these cameras becoming the core of Industrial, small film, Pro-web video, TV and “hazardous” shooting.

Epic starts more expensive but goes up to…261 Megapixel…at 50 fps…yea, crazy. 65 Megapixel was really enough for me. I’m clear we’re looking at the end of the film…by 2010, digital will simply be passing the resolution and color depth of film. Especially looking at plates from films and videos…at 1080p here…I would never think about shooting film again.

Red Code 225 and 500…we’re talking CRAZY bandwidth (I don’t think Red even knows how to do it).

One of the most exciting things I saw at the Red Presentation was actually Apple’s unveiling of a Red Transfer plug-in (developed by Red) that wraps the Redcode into a Quicktime wrapper (with Metadata). What does that mean? No transcoding, no proxies, AND you can open Color and work with the 4K source footage. This is a big big deal. I changes the whole pipeline (which has been fine but a little cumbersome). Adobe will also be releasing a dot release that supports Redcode directly. The pipeline is starting to form.

Great stuff…more observations in the coming days and weeks.