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Filed under: compression •Editing •Post Production •Software •

Kicking the tires on The Foundry’s Storm beta

It was a busy week this past week as November changed to December and The Foundry released their long discussed Storm product as a public beta free download. Storm is a “RED Digital Cinema Camera Production Hub” and has been described by RED’s Ted Schilowitz as REDCine-X on steroids. After kicking the tires on Storm for a few hours over the weekend I’d say it’s not just REDCine-X on steroids but rather what will be a much more well thought out version of REDCine-X that will hopefully be more robust, less quirky, easier to use and an overall better application. And that’s as it should be as Storm will cost $375 when it finally ships its paid version around March 2011.

The Foundry is probably best known for their compositing application Nuke. There’s a lot of users out there in the world who swear by Nuke the application as well as The Foundry company as a whole being that they are dedicated to bringing great post-production tools to market. I haven’t ever really used any of The Foundry’s products so I wasn’t sure what to expect with Storm.

But after downloading the beta and kicking the tires on it for a few hours all I can say is ... wow. These guys know how to design a tool.

The nice, clean Storm interface

The Reviewing workspace preset is where you’ll do a lot of organizing, reviewing and tagging.

To me Storm interface feels like a cross between Adobe After Effects and Lightroom. It may be entirely based off the Nuke UI I don’t know but anyone who’s an AE user will easily understand Storm’s method of floating, dockable and resizable window panes and tabs. Storm begins as one large, resizable window but each of the panes and tabs within a pane can be undocked and floated in its own window or redocked into other panes.

It also reminded me of Lightroom in that as you tag and organized clips they get little icons to remind you of what you’ve done. All your working R3D clips are kept in the “In Tray” in the project window and can be viewed by a thumbnail (as well as list and a more compact thumbnail view) and once any type of metadata is applied to the clip, such as tags or effects, you get a little icon above the thumbnail that lets you know something has been applied. Hovering over a clip brings up a little play button and slider for auditioning the clip right in the thumbnail. Double click a clip and it opens in its own tab in the viewer window for further review. When you load a clip you’ll see a brown bar load in the timeline at the bottom of the viewer as the clip caches (it’s not a GPU dependent application according to this article over at FX Guide) and once it’s cached it’s very smooth and responsive for playback.

That brown bar is the current clip caching. Once a clip or timeline has fully loaded performance is very responsive.

Obviously the playback performance is dependent on the decode quality setting in the pop-up at the top of the viewer:

I left my decode pop-up on auto and performance was very, very good. RED Rocket support is available as well.

And they’ve seen fit to operate playback via JKL scrubbing - well done.

Storm’s performance

The performance of Storm is quite nice too. By setting the decode quality setting to Auto I was able to easily get full frame rate, realtime playback on my 2.66 ghz Quad Core Mac Pro with the R3Ds residing on an internal RAID. The interface is snappy and responsive. It’s still in beta so there are some quirks here and there and my install only seemed to want to save looks about half the time via the S keyboard shortcut. But I could always drag a look I had set in the RED Look controls into the Looks User Preset bin.

I was especially impressed with the quality of the included scopes. Storm includes a full range of scopes, thankfully, above and beyond the histogram. There’s also a waveform, vectorscope and RGB parade with viewing of individual red, green and blue channels in their own window. And the scope playback has equally good performance. Besides being able to toggle between the different scope windows without stopping playback I was able to undock the scope windows and get full playback of them all at once! Video scope displays are pretty processor intensive so this was quite impressive.

There’s also current support for the Euphonix MC Color control surface. Let’s hope the Tangent Wave is supported in the future as well.

Storm’s well thought out RED Look Effect

Another thing that Storm has gotten right that I’ve always thought RedCine-X barely bothered to address was letting the user know exactly what kind of metadata you were looking at on a clip. They’ve solved this by implementing red, green and yellow toggle buttons that appear next to all controls of the RED Look tab, the place for adjusting the look if your R3Ds by standard RED controls.

The buttons in the RED Look effect is an easy way to know exactly what you are looking at on a given shot.

A red button means you’re looking at what came off of the camera, either the camera defaults or an RSX or look file; green is the camera defaults and yellow are User defined changes. These three buttons exist to change the controls in totality by clicking the button at the top or according to each parameter by lighting up to the right of each control. For example, you can be on all red with a look out of the camera and as soon as you adjust the FLUT Control that control’s display light changes to yellow for User to let you know that control has been changed in Storm.

Here’s how the Storm user manual lists these three different options:

• RED Look—this mode contains all the input decisions made by the on set cameraman. Click the red buttons to apply the RED Look.
• Default—this mode applies the RED camera factory settings, that is, none of the on set decisions are included. Click the green buttons to apply the camera default settings.
• User—this mode records any changes that you make to the RED Look effect. Click the yellow buttons to apply your changes.

Compare this with the REDCine-X controls and it’s little M and D metadata and default reset buttons and it’s much easier for me to understand what I’ve done to a clip with Storm’s implementation.

The REDCine-X Look controls.

Storm can do some basic editing as well.

The Storm editing workspace. Yes, I turned the R8 green.

Besides the Reviewing workspace that comes loaded as a default (of course workspaces can be changed, rearranged and saved) there’s an Editing workspace and a full timeline. While it’s no Final Cut Pro basic editing can be achieved by loading clips into the viewer, marking IN and OUT points and dragging them to the timeline. You can also drag a group of clips right into a timeline as well. There are basic editing tools like razor, slip and roll trim all available though there doesn’t seem to be slide or ripple trim. You can ripple edit an entire clip in the timeline by using the ALT key modifier once a clip is in the timeline but I wasn’t able to ripple a new clip right from the viewer or a bin.

You do get a few basic editing tools for working in the timeline.

Storm isn’t traditional 3-point editing in the way that FCP or Avid is and there isn’t a two window editing interface (Source/Record in Avid terms, Viewer/Canvas in FCP terms) but it is simple and well laid out so any editor or DIT will be able to pick it up in no time. You can make a pseudo Viewer / Canvas setup by undocking and floating the timeline window so it’s always visible. Once you have an operational timeline there will be a tab for it in the viewer.

Once a timeline is up and operational it will be its own tab in the viewer. Also, notice the RED Rocket indicator above.

One Editing bug I saw was that if you open a new clip when you have an active timeline the viewer won’t jump back to view the timeline when you actually click back to the timeline to work. I say it was a bug but an interesting thing would sometime happen when I had a clip in the viewer that was in my edit timeline. When the playhead of the timeline would play over that clip it would then play in the view so maybe this bug of the viewer not jumping back to reflect the timeline is a feature ... though it felt more like a bug.

You also can’t seem to add effects and looks to clips once they are in a timeline. In fact there doesn’t seem to be a way to match frame a clip from the timeline to be able to easily get back to editing a look and have that update in the timeline. Maybe that is coming but I have to remember that this isn’t an editing application but rather a DIT, organizational application.

Next Up:

FCP integration, tagging and what I think could be an amazing future for Storm.

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