4th of July Weekend Newsletter Update

A few weeks ago, we published our fifth electronic newsletter: PVC Pipeline | Post, which included an essential article making your videos searchable using Adobe’s automatic transcription feature, a great tutorial on using Mocha for After Effects CS4 on a tricky tracking shot, a deep explanation of where non-square pixel aspect ratios came from and the confusion surrounding the new numbers that appeared in Creative Suite 4, and a very handy primer for those thinking about switching over from Final Cut Pro to Avid Media Composer, taking advantage of Avid’s new free trial version. Subscribers had exclusive access to these articles for the past few weeks. These articles are now available for all PVC visitors to view; a list of them is included below.

We are about to publish our sixth newsletter, which will be the second edition of our PVC Pipeline | Distribution publication, covering a variety of subjects in the areas of web video, mobile media, and more. To receive exclusive access to these articles before everyone else, click here for your free subscription!

Believable Hand-Held Motion Tracking with Mocha & After Effects CS4

Motion Tracking - After Effects CS4 with Mocha from Jeff Foster on Vimeo.

One of the best additions to After Effects CS4 is the inclusion of a stand-alone application called Mocha for AE from Imagineer Systems. This is a powerful planar motion tracker and stabilizer that does an amazing job of tracking all kinds of elements in motion or to stabilize a character or a scene with shaky footage. Many of the example movies you may have seen demonstrating Mocha with After Effects CS4 (including some of my own) have been inserting something into the screen of a portable device or a TV. But what if the object you are tracking goes off the screen? What if you want to track something in motion but want to retain the realism of the hand-held camera shake? Even though Mocha does a remarkable job of stabilizing footage I thought I’d put Mocha to the test with some hand-held footage from a compact DV cam and track the footage, shaking and all!

PAR for the Course

Over the years, I have seen a lot of folklore and bad math employed to determine how to work with non-square pixels, resulting in a plethora of incorrect working practices. Therefore, in this article I’m going to spend a lot of time laying out the historical and mathematical basis for where these numbers came from. Hopefully this will provide you with a solid foundation on which you can build a new set of working practices.

Please label tapes and disks: An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs

Man, there are a lot of high definition formats out in the world today. Just to spell them out would be a dizzying array of letters and numbers. 720p, 1080i, 23.98, 30p ... this list could literally go on and on so I won’t even attempt a partial list other that what I have above. Just take a look at this HD format chart. That’s a lot of different formats and it doesn’t even take into account the different flavors of a particular format that camera manufacturers often come up with on their own.

With that in mind this PVC post is an open letter to all DPs, ACs, camera ops, DITs, anyone and everyone associated with the camera department to please label their tapes and hard drives with the usable, relevant information of shooting format and frame rates, codecs and cameras so post-production will at least have an idea of what is being handed to them.

RED announces REDCINE-X™

RED Leader Jim Jannard today announced a new version of RedCine that they hope to be shipping sometime in August called REDCINE-X. For those of you who have used, or attempted to use, RedCine then you might have watched the video (see the embeded clip after the jump {sorry about the autoplay} or watch the full-rez version here) with quite a bit of shock and awe as it really looks and feels nothing like RedCine. And this is a good thing.

Take the Adobe Non-Linear Editing Software Survey

Adobe has recently posted an online survey about non-linear editing software. The link was floating around Twitter and it’s a great survey to share with the rest of the editing community. There’s a lot of questions focusing on 64-bit support and workflow. It’s great to see Adobe reaching out to the community and hopefully they will take the information to heart as they continue to further improve their video editing offerings. I wish they would have asked about Adobe help and documentation. As I try to learn more about After Effects and actually use Premiere Pro I get so frustrated when you go to the help menu for help and instead of getting a searchable pdf it takes you their website. Rarely do I ever quickly find an answer to a question there without a lot of searching. 

Avid:  Editor or Database?

I’ll admit it, as I have before:  I’m not an Avid guy. Of course, that doesn’t stop my employer from being an Avid house.  We are currently installing an Interplay system, which centralizes all our assets, and allows many different people throughout the plant to preview the video, audio, graphics and such.  As a part of the installation process, all of us who have to edit must get an Interplay tutorial.  I sat through mine this morning, and for four hours I was reminded of a statement I have heard again and again:

“Final Cut and Premiere Pro are great editors with crappy databases.  Avid is a crappy editor in front of a GREAT database.”

Interplay drives that message home - with a sledgehammer.

There are at least three (and maybe more - I’m not sure) ways to tiptoe through the Interplay database.  The one that looks the most useful to me is the Interplay window that lives inside the Media Composer editor.  This window seems to hold the promise of wiping away all of the various bins (except the bin with the sequence in it.) Big step forward, IMHO.  Next is Assist, which is a standalone app that can offer logging on a desktop, which of course requires database access.  And speaking of access, then there is Access (wasn’t Microsoft using that name just a minute ago?), which is the heavy-duty search monster, with Boolean searches that can drill through your pile of video like an Exxon oil rig through the Gulf of Mexico.  Not to mention the several administrator tools, which I will never hold permissions for (and rightfully so.)

And I wonder...three (or more) applications?  Wouldn’t one be enough?

I suppose that an argument can be made for each, but really - how complicated do we have to make our systems?

Of course, I probably wouldn’t mind half as much if I could just graft the Premiere Pro interface onto it.  Is that too much to ask?

Avid has their own pan and zoom tools as well

I recently pointed out three plug-in tools for performing "Ken Burns" style pan and zoom effects on still images in Final Cut Pro. Avid Media Composer has options for doing the same thing. While there aren't as many options (and one of them is the same as Final Cut Pro) there is one that is part of the software package.

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