Archive for the ‘Avid Wish List & Bugs’ category

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Fixing the Title Tool

June 24, 2007

Avid needs to start building a suite to compete with Apple and Adobe. It’s got the best video ap, and it’s got the best audio ap (except that it won’t work software-only). That’s a pretty good start. Avid certainly needs a DVD tool and a compression utility. But, for my money, the first order of business is a title animation tool to compete with Motion.

Titling is now part of the responsibility of most editors on all kinds of shows. These days, I help create the main title on every show I work on. And I’d do more if the tools were better. But the Avid tools are antiquated. You can’t create a modern, nuanced title with the Title Tool and it takes way, way too much work to do it with Marquee.

Avid can look at this as a problem or as an opportunity. The opportunity is to start with a clean slate and create something better than what the other guy is offering.

Here what I’d like to see:

  1. Don’t make a separate title application — build this functionality into the MC. I have no interest in creating a separate title project to go along with my MC project. I don’t want to manage both, archive both and move back and forth between them. I want the whole thing integrated into one environment.
  2. It should be as live as possible. The editor should design based on moving video.
  3. It should work with organic actions, like Motion does — or with keyframes. The editor should be able to move back and forth between these approaches as needed.
  4. It should support the use of a tablet or touch pad to create complex movements by showing the system what you want.
  5. It should be vector-based. No rendering. Simple scaling. Easy changes.
  6. It should offer title styles. Create your style, then create titles based on it. Want to make a change to all of them, say a different font or font size? Just change the style and all titles update automatically.
  7. It should export digital mattes at any resolution you want. That’s how you get your work out of the MC and into the finishing system of your choice. And it should do intelligent aspect ratio conversions, so you can work at letter-boxed standard def and still create useful mattes for HD or film.

Now wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t you do a lot more slick title work if you had a tool like that?

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Comments: 4 Comments

More Home Movie Woes

June 19, 2007

I did some more work cutting together home movies on Media Composer software over the weekend. And I discovered that the “stop delay” is even worse than I thought. With standard def 14:1 media (PAL) the problem is relatively subtle (picture stops precisely, audio continues to play for two frames). But with Firewire-acquired DV the delay is much longer — four or five frames, picture and sound. It’s just downright impossible to cut accurately this way. You have to noodle every cut and there’s no such thing as working reflexively and feeling a cut point. Simple trims take twice as long as they should (the delay seems to be worse in trim mode).

Maybe this is because my master clips are an hour long. I don’t know. But I do know that this ought to be fixed pronto.

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Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Comments: 4 Comments

Upresing Without Tears

June 15, 2007

I’m thinking about the process of upresing a sequence. If we’re all going to be working in some form of HD in the future, is there going to much need for this?

For larger-budget feature films, if we cut at DNxHD 36, are we going to screen and preview that way? My guess is that we will. Video won’t look as good as it would at a higher bitrate but the hassle factor will outweigh the quality improvement and we’ll go with what we’ve got. We’ll leave the final upres to 2K or 4K to a DI house.

But for television and for lower-budget features, we’ll see some productions upresing in their “offline” cutting rooms and producing a conformed master for color correction.

So, given that many of us are still going to be working in multiple resolutions, my question is whether the tools we have for this are adequate. I recently came across this post that describes the two main procedures. I’ve never done it myself, so this is partly a question for the assistants in the audience, but I wonder whether these methods are really adequate. Aren’t they pretty darn geeky? The second procedure is certainly an improvement, and there’s nothing here that can’t be learned, but shouldn’t the machine do more of the work?

It seems to me that what you want is to be able to select a sequence and then simply tell the system that you want to upres it. You select your resolution and the rest is handled automatically. All the media management, all the clip management.

You shouldn’t have to make multiple sequences — you should be able to view the one sequence at whatever resolution you prefer. And if you make changes to your sequence, the system should figure out what media is available and what isn’t — at each resolution. You should be able to view the sequence (or any other sequence, for that matter) at low res with all media present, at high res with “media offline” showing as needed, or at “best res” where you get the best quality available for each clip.

Am I missing something? Does upresing really need to be so complicated? And does FCP do any better in this regard?

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Categories: Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 13 Comments

More Things Pro Tools Does Right

May 30, 2007

Harry Miller’s column in the latest ACE Magazine covers the many things he likes about the Pro Tools timeline. I couldn’t agree more, and I’ve mentioned many of these things in a previous post. Harry also talks about the ability to create a group of effects and save them as a single object, and the ability to reshape a fade by clicking and dragging.

Avid ought to incorporate this stuff into the MC. They certainly have the expertise to do it, if not from the Pro Tools or Media Composer engineering teams, then from the Fast/Avid Liquid group.

Liquid offers a live timeline, background rendering, simple project backups, the ability to work with a stereo pair as a single object, 5.1 capabilities and direct DVD authoring from within the program. Some of its appealing features are described in this post on AE Portal News.

When Apple buys a company it rapidly incorporates the purchased technology into its flagship products. When Avid buys a company it too often puts it on autopilot. That might be good for existing customers over the short term, but long term it’s wasteful and self-destructive.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, User Interface

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Shared Project vs. Shared Media

May 24, 2007

Shared media was a very big thing when it became available in the mid-90s. Back then 67 gigs cost $20,000 and fit into a case the size of a suitcase. Sharing your media could save a lot of money.

But today, with 500 gig drives becoming common, storage costs peanuts. And that makes me wonder whether shared storage is such a big deal anymore. 300 gigs can hold a typical feature film at Avid’s 14:1 compression. With DNxHD 36, the same material would take up roughly a terabyte.

So we’re not sharing storage to save money anymore. We’re doing it for convenience, to avoid the time and trouble involved in duplicating media every day during production, and in duplicating render files as they’re created. I’m starting to wonder whether it’s worth it. The Media Composer seems to be more responsive with local storage, and local storage is smaller, lighter and quieter. You don’t have to run cables, you don’t have to buy or rent Unity, you don’t have to manage Unity.

The big loss, if you go with duplicated media, is the ability to share a project. You need Unity to do that. And that just doesn’t make sense anymore. With today’s CPUs, I can’t believe that we need a big, expensive server to share a li’l ole project. I suspect that you could easily support two users with the project hosted on one of their editing machines. But even if you had to go with a separate CPU, you ought to be able to do it for a couple of thousand bucks.

In other words, the sweet spot for a small film is shared project and duplicated media. In fact, it ought to be possible to do your media duplication automatically, with a utility that would compare media folders across a network and synchronize them.

This just isn’t rocket science anymore. Lighter is better. And Avid ought to make it possible. For a small editing environment with an editor and an assistant or two, Unity feels more and more like a sledge hammer banging in a carpet tack. Final Cut is going to add shared projects one of these days and when they do, you can be sure they’ll do it inexpensively. Avid could do it now and show independents that it understands what they need.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 7 Comments

Who is the Customer?

April 30, 2007

I don’t know about you but I’m starting to wonder if I’m Avid’s customer anymore. It’s not that I don’t use their products. I do. A lot. But the more I look at Avid’s corporate communications, and what they introduced at NAB, the more I wonder whether they see me that way. If this sounds awfully basic, it is.

Most of the action at Avid in recent years has been on big iron: Unity, Isis, Interplay. On the Media Composer side the only new feature shown this year was ScriptSync. Otherwise, what we got were plumbing improvements — the ability to run DNX 36, for example — and platform changes — porting the Media Composer to Mac Intel. Those things are important, all right, and they’ve helped keep the Media Composer competitive. But they don’t inspire editors. We saw no changes to our aging mixing or title tools, no improvements to the timeline, no changes to the editing feature set at all.

Avid’s tagline used to be “Tools for Storytellers.” Then, as Oliver Peters points out on Avid-L2, it went to “Make, Manage, Move Media.” That says it all.

Avid is playing to their base — to the people who write the big checks. But as I see it, Avid cannot succeed as a general purpose media company if it doesn’t have a best-of-breed editing application at the core of its business, an application that inspires editors and empowers them to do their most creative work.

Do we really think that big producers will force their editors to use Media Composers when the editors tell them they can be more creative and productive with Final Cut or Premiere? Do we really think, long term, that those big customers are going to continue to buy Avid networking and asset management systems when all their workstations are running the other guy’s programs? It just doesn’t make sense.

Avid has a tremendous amount of engineering talent under its collective roof, but it has had a lot of trouble bringing that talent together. DS has some great features (many of which ended up in FCP), Pro Tools has some great features, Media Composer has some great features. Avid just doesn’t seem able to bring all that functionality together in one product.

But they’re going to have to do something. For the moment, they still have the lead: trim mode, matchframe, track patching, syncing dailies, media management — all work far better in Media Composer. And the incremental improvements they’ve made lately have been helpful. But FCP has Sound Track, DVD Studio, Compressor and now, Color. It has a very nice segment mode and the ability to search across bins, and it costs less.

It’s time for Avid to show us what it can do. The company used to be in the business of inspiring editors. It needs to start doing that again.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Final Cut

Comments: 6 Comments

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