Online Post-Production Management with ShotRunner

The days of cobbling together a database to track shots, assets and progress are numbered. Although nowadays it has become common for many post-production projects to be managed with Basecamp, it’s an application hardly specialized to our industry.

Two web based tools currently in late beta anticipate the needs of post production more directly. Shotgun has been adopted at large facilities around the world and will be profiled separately; this article focuses on ShotRunner, and my own experiences using it as a visual effects supervisor on a pair of feature films.

The Foundry releases Rolling Shutter for After Effects & Nuke

The Foundry today released Rolling Shutter, a new plug-in available for After Effects and Nuke.

This plug-in cleverly reuses one of The Foundry’s strongest bits of intellectual property - optical flow as utilized in effects in the Furnace plug-in set including Kronos, as well as licensed by Adobe for use in the Timewarp effect for After Effects - in order to solve a problem particular to video cameras containing CMOS chips, which require an interval of time to scan an entire frame, line by line, and generally top to bottom.

In cameras with a speedy frame refresh rate, such as RED One, the effect is rarely noticeable other than under extreme conditions, but it is more commonplace when shooting with the Canon 5D Mark II and completely ubiquitous with consumer level cameras such as the latest iPhone.

Because a given shot typically contains multiple planes of action, correcting rolling shutter artifacts involves more than simply un-skewing the image. The problem is similar to that faced when compositing a 3D shot, and The Foundry has added similar technology to Nuke to make it a leader in 3D compositing.

Rolling Shutter will help not only to make an image look better but also to make it possible to matchmove the shot in 3D, which would otherwise be a nightmare with an unevenly scanned shot. As long as the movement of the camera is unidirectional - whether sideways, forward or backward, this plug-in will correct for it; more chaotic handheld shots with circular or otherwise inconsistent motion might be beyond its abilities.

Rolling Shutter $500 for Nuke or After Effects,  direct from The Foundry website. A demo version is also available for download.

AEScripts.com revamped as a comprehensive script destination site

Lloyd Alvarez, creator of aescripts.com as well as some of the most useful After Effects scripts available, released a new version of the site that may finally put an end to the need to google for the best available After Effects scripts. All of the scripts listed from the half dozen top current developers are freeware except for one - Immigration, which also appeared in its final version today as the first script shareware product.

Scripts have moved from a marginal, obscure and difficult-to-create feature introduced in After Effects 6.0 to an outlet for After Effects artists who are also coding nerds to add what might otherwise be considered new features to After Effects. One key to this change has been that many of the most useful scripts, among them Immigration and BG Renderer, appear in the After Effects UI as regular panels.

Immigration transforms what was a major After Effects deficit - difficulty importing and replacing image sequences via an import dialog that does not recognize them as such - and created one of the best sequence-handling interfaces available in any software in its place. Not only can Immigration tell how multiple sequences in a folder are grouped, it can automatically scan existing sequences already present in an After Effects project and intelligently replace updated versions all at once.

The cost for an Immigration license is $20, marking the first time a script has been offered other than as freeware. Is this an ominous trend or a fair way to compensate innovation, coding effort and time savings? Immigration is an excellent test case, as it offers clear added efficiency for those who want it and want to pay for it. It also helps compensate Lloyd for releasing the most valuable script of all time, BGRenderer, which literally can replace a Nucleo Pro license (not available for CS4 until Tuesday, August 4) or even obviate the need for an extra rendering workstation on a big project.

Why, I have a BGRenderer terminal session running even as I type this.

Training: Visual Effects for Directors

The past decade has seen visual effects pervade film and television production to the extent that it is rare to see a television commercial with no visual effects, even documentary-style dramatic programs are sweetened and cleaned up via compositing, and films outside the big-budget action movie genre often have vfx shot counts in the dozens or even hundred.

This changing of the guard has not been without its difficulties; principle among these are the veteran directors and art directors who learned how to craft compelling images and stories before the computer became a routine part of the process. Good visual effects shooting is all about planning, but effective planning requires experience.

Visual Effects for Directors, a 7 DVD set released by Hollywood Camera Work, is inspiring for how thoroughly and patiently it visually explains how to shoot ordinary, bread-and-butter visual effects shots. Far from the mystifyingly complex techniques used to push the entire medium forward in, say, the latest recipient of the Visual Effects Oscar, the approaches shown on these seven videos are in the realm of what should be common knowledge among effects professionals.

VLC Goes 1.0

VLC, possibly the most versatile desktop video player in the world, was announced as version 1.0.0 (aka “GoldenEye” if you prefer Ian Fleming style nicknames). Its features are widespread, but among the most significant is that it is the only major alternative to QuickTime Player that allows you to step frame by frame through a video file, a limitation which has frankly stymied professional use of Windows Media, Real and other closed-source players.

But that’s not all. With VLC 1.0.0 you can also:

• record live video
• play dozens of file formats on Mac, Windows or Linux, many of them otherwise unsupported (including QuickTime on Linux, apparently)
• play DVDs from any region
• play damaged or partially downloaded files otherwise considered “unplayable”
• view full screen (and even pipe audio out to AirTunes)
• since some readers are already using VLC 1.0.0, I encourage you to add other favorites in the comments!

The feature list is quite long and - due to the intense rush to download VLC - the forum and wiki, major sources of information, are disabled today and perhaps for some time.

If there were one feature I would hope they would add for version 1.5, it would be playback of image sequences. A nerd can dream.

Is Nuke the new Shake?

A series of press releases from The Foundry since NAB have marked major steps forward for Nuke as the emerging software leader for visual effects compositing. The latest of these is this morning’s news that Weta Digital has invested in a Nuke site license, less than a month after ILM announced the same. During that time the Nuke founder/developers managed to reacquire ownership of the software in what may have appeared from the outside like a confusing flip-flop of assets between Digital Domain and Foundry. The bottom line seems to be that the people who make Nuke have secured control of its destiny for the forseeable future, and major studios have responded by investing in that future.

GridIron Flow Ships with Surprise Additions

GridIron Software this morning announced on a conference call that Flow, the one-of-a-kind visual file management, workflow and time tracking tool that has been in development for three years, is now available for purchase or 30 day demo from the GridIron site.

In addition to a demonstration of how the software can be used to recover otherwise lost versions of graphics files, to discover the use of an element – including even a font – in a given file, or to track time spent on a project, Steve Forde, CEO of GridIron, brought on John Nack, Product Manager at Adobe, to show how Flow has been integrated directly into CS4 via Flash Panels.

A Flow icon was shown right in the tool bar of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign – and reportedly is available for all CS4 apps – that opens a Flash panel showing a miniature version of Flow and allowing capabilities such as coordinating fonts with a file from a different CS4 application that have never been possible.

Steve also announced a new feature added to Flow that did not appear in the public beta: the ability to see the same Flow map regardless of user or system. To support this, GridIron offers a multi-machine license, three systems for $100 more than the single system license.

Tip: Force an After Effects Render to Fail (and Save!) on a Mac

No doubt you already make liberal use of the After Effects Auto-Save feature, which incrementally stores sub-versions of your current saved project in set increments of time. By default, the last 5 20 minute increments are saved, with the oldest replaced by the newest, but you can freely change the interval and number of saves. Still, what happens when your session hangs up and you have valuable unsaved information?

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