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

Kicking the tires on The Foundry’s Storm beta

Final Cut Pro integration

Currently Storm only has Final Cut Pro integration built-in with a Send to Final Cut Pro menu command:

That integration is via XML both into and out of Storm. I tried several different export options but was never able to get Storm to successfully send an XML to FCP. It looked from the error messages as if it wasn’t writing the file paths to the generated media correctly. When I had Storm generate new QuickTime files (with included looks and effects) I could import them directly into FCP and the files came in fine, reel numbers intact. It’s important to remember this is a beta and the Storm splash screen even says it’s not intended for production. That is a good warning as I had the first test project that I began to crash every time I tried to move from the Editing workspace back to the Preview workspace via the keyboard. And then the same thing happened on every Storm project after that as well. It also won’t move back when using the menu command. I’ve heard reports that Storm doesn’t want to save custom workspaces either. But I guess that’s the intent of a long, public beta cycle - work out the bugs before it’s put into real world use. It would be nice if there was a big “report bug” button but according to the Foundry’s Storm support page they want you to report bugs over in their forum on the REDUSER.net website. That’s an interesting way to do it.

What did work was the importing and conform of an FCP XML. I took the ProRes LT clips that I had Storm create and made a simple edit in FCP. Exporting an XML back into Storm conformed that little edit just fine.

Tags and those big buttons in the interface

One thing that’s particulaly nice about the interface overall as it’s simple to use and simple to understand. Buttons are big, elements are well named and there’s pop-ups on most items when you hover the mouse over them. Storm has an FCP-like pop-up in the viewer when you drag pretty much any element into the viewer window that details exactly what you might want to do.

Dragging a tag into the viewer yields a pop-up for different operations.

Tagging is an important part of Storm and there’s tons of prebuilt tags that are easy to use. You can even create your own tags and assign an image. And tags aren’t limited just to a clips as you can tag individual frames within a clip and these tags show up in the viewer timeline so you can get a quick visual reference of what tags are applied to a clip. That’s a nice touch.

Tags that have been applied to individual frames.

Once clips are tagged it’s easy to sort by a tag just by dragging a tag into the search box at the top of the Production tab. Storm searches for the tag by either filtering the results and only displaying the finds or flags the results by displaying an X Tag icon over the clips that aren’t included in a search. Want to filter and search for more than one tag at a time? Just drag another tag into the search field. If Storm is going to be a primo organizational tool then it has to be easy to add metadata, sort and search. It feels like they’ve got that pretty well covered.

Search results that were flagged as opposed to filtered.

And no mention of Storm is complete without noting that it comes with quite a few Look presets:

As well as a number of Effects that can be applied:

Thinking about what could be - Storm’s future

Now as any good editor will do when working with new software I’ll now layout a road map of where I’d LOVE to see Storm go. It’s been stated by folks from The Foundry that additional application support will be added beyond FCP. That’s a no-brainer and hopefully Avid Media Composer will be next. It’s also expected to add more format support besides RED R3Ds as is mentioned in John Montgomery’s article over at FX Guide. That will move the tool up a notch too.

But I’m going to dream for a moment about Storm morphing into the ultimate transcoding and media management application that I’ve always wanted for post-production. Imagine if Storm could do for most all commonly used camera formats and NLEs what it does (or really will do once the bugs are worked out) for R3Ds and FCP. Imagine an application that could look at and catalog multiple days of shooting on multiple formats and be able to provide one set of offline editorial files from all those formats. Imagine then being able to import the offline edit and conform that back at full resolution to the original camera acquired media and send the edit back to your NLE (or whatever finishing system you choose) for finishing.

I immediately think about a recent show where we had 9 days of XDCAM-EX and 5D. I transcoded all the media to DNxHD and edited at full rez. While it was relatively simple my preference would have been to work at an offline resolution of DNxHD 36 to facilitate better timeline performance once the edit became complex as well as making the shuttling of media files much faster as DNxHD 36 is much smaller in file size. If there existed a tool where I could have loaded the raw XDCAM and 5D materials and transcoded right from the raw media to offline editorial files only to then come back and re-render only the locked picture (with handles of course) I believe that would be the holy grail of file management / transcoding applications. I would not want that tool to do things like make various web formats or DVDs or do anything other than the singular task described above. Editors and assistant editors have to do this all the time and I think that type of tool would find a prominent place in many an editor’s toolbox. The closest thing I’ve seen thus far is Proxymill and mainly because it supports so many different camera acquisition formats but it’s clunky when compared to Storm and can’t do any looks or reconforming. I guess it’s not really close to this dream application at all as it’s only made for transcoding.

Maybe that mythical tool I’ve described above is a pipedream but The Foundry’s Storm looks like it could, possibly, evolve into that someday. Maybe I’m the only editor out there who would like such a tool. But if anyone out there could make that tool and make it work it’s probably The Foundry. They seem to know their tools well and they seem to design some good ones. Storm will come out of beta early next year and be available for $375. That’s a fair price for what it should be doing when it launches. I can’t wait to see where it goes in the future.

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