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ScriptSync Demo

May 11, 2007

I just returned from a two-hour introduction to ScriptSync, put together by Keycode Media and presented by Avid’s Michael Krulik. The demo was quite well thought out, with laptops available to everybody present and a good projector so we could follow along. Krulik did an excellent job and, as a bonus, went over several other new or recently added features. I’ll go over some of that in an upcoming post.

I came away impressed with the scripting features, but not totally convinced. The technology is slick, simple and intuitive. You export your script from Final Draft and import the resulting text file into the Media Composer. You then select a portion of your script and drag clips to it, and the script gets “lined” with those clips. Then you simply turn on ScriptSync, and it automatically listens to the sound, reads the script and marks everything up.

The process is quite quick — over 20x real-time in a very informal test I did. Once the script is lined you can use it to select takes or readings and, if you’re game, cut from it. Once you’ve got a rough cut you can navigate to any point in the sequence and, with a keypress, jump to that portion of the script and compare takes. All in all, it’s quite functional, and I imagine that for certain shows it’ll be a lifesaver.

There were a few caveats. ScriptSync can’t deal with dialog that isn’t in the script. If an actor goes back and repeats a line or section ScriptSync won’t figure that out. You have to create a subclip for the repeat, or you’ve got to mark (or “mimic”) that section by hand. And it can’t deal with adlibs. The solution is to enter the adlib a word processor, cut and paste it to into your script and then do your mimic — you can’t actually edit the script itself. In addition, ScriptSync puts several marks in each hunk of dialog, one for every line of text. So, if a speech is five lines long, you get five marks and you have to delete them by hand. Finally, ScriptSync works best with a very well formatted script, where all the dialog is indented properly. If there are mistakes in the indentation there will be mistakes in the mimic.

These aren’t fatal problems, but they mean that script entry is still going to require some hand work. Nevertheless, the people in the class who had used Avid’s old manual script features thought the new version was miraculous and would save a lot of time.

Bottom line: if you like the idea of working directly from the script, it just got a lot easier to do. I’m eager to try it. Line-by-line editing feels pretty rigid to me, but having the script organized this way might get interesting for recutting, especially when you want to quickly compare alternate readings.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, User Interface, Workflow

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Dual Res All the Time

April 27, 2007

Adding to yesterday’s post about things Avid could do to improve it’s editing applications, let’s take a look at how we up-res a show.

It seems to me that the duplicate/decompose/redigitize workflow that we use now is very much “Version 1.” It’s flexible, sure, but all that flexibility adds up to a lot of complexity, too. And in the world of feature films, where we inevitably continue to make picture changes after a first conform, the decompose process gets even more complicated.

I want the system to take all the bookkeeping out of this and transparently keep track of two parallel sets of media, allowing me to use whichever resolution is appropriate. The key is that you work with one and only one version of your sequence. The system connects it, as needed, to the low-res media or the high-res media. You can make picture changes either way. If you’re looking at the high-res media and want to extend a shot, the system knows that the extension doesn’t exist at high res and uses low-res media as needed. When you’re ready to conform, it automatically asks for the needed tapes and loads whatever extensions are needed.

Now wouldn’t that be a whole lot easier than what we do now?

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 3 Comments

Clarifying Avid Project Types

April 24, 2007

It seems like a lot of people are confused about the new “23.976p” Avid project type. This is an alternative to the traditional Avid film project (“24p”) and you can only work with such a project on a modern machine (Meridien 10.8 or later). People have been using it for roughly a year now and over time, it’s probably going to be widely adopted.

The difference between the two types is pretty subtle. In both, the machine digitizes from video running at 29.97 fps and removes pulldown (aka “reverse telecine”). You end up with the original 24 film frames. What makes the project types different is the audio sample rate that’s synchronized with picture.

In a traditional 24 fps project, pulled down audio is synched with pulled down video. That is, video running at 23.976 fps (or 29.97 fps) is synched with audio running at 47952. All the speeds are a tenth of a percent slower than their “normal” rates.

That has worked very well for the film industry for a decade and a half. But when this scheme was originally developed there was no such thing as digital videotape — and therein lies the rub. Digital videotape works differently, synchronizing pulled down video to full rate audio. Video running at 29.97 (or 23.976) syncs with audio running at 48K, not 47952.

A 23.976 project works like digital videotape, synchronizing pulled down video with full rate audio. That makes it appropriate for video-originated material shot at 23.976. It can be useful for film originated material, as well, because it can give you better sound in the Avid.

If your film was telecined to digital video, with dailies synchronized in telecine, and you’re loading from tape, then you want to load digitally, if possible. You won’t have to set audio or video levels and everything will be pristine. The problem is that in a traditional 24p film project your Avid expects to see video at 29.97 and audio at 47952. Unfortunately, your tape has audio running at 48K. In Meridien, this was handled with “poor man’s sample rate conversion” — the system simply dropped audio samples to convert 48K to 47952. That worked okay for dialog but it’s not ideal.

In Adrenaline that trick won’t work — sync will drift. So you’ll have to load your audio analog. (Your audio will also have to be analog when you play out to digital videotape.) The alternative is to use the 23.976p project type. That will allow you to load everything digitally.

There are a couple of issues that you should be aware of. First, your sound editors will have to work differently, and set their Pro Tools systems to work 48K “not pulled down” — the way they would for a 29.97 project or a show that shoots on video. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it will be a surprise, and they should be warned — before you make a final decision about your project type.

The second issue has to do with production audio and how it’s recorded. On a film shoot, audio is normally recorded at 48K with 30 fps timecode. When that audio lands in telecine it gets pulled down for transfer — to 47952. But the tape wants to see 48K, so, even though the 23.976 project has allowed you to create a digital audio path in your cutting room, you’re facing at a sample rate conversion in telecine. The answer is for production to shoot audio at 48048. When that audio is pulled down in telecine it’ll end up at 48K and will go to your digital videotape without conversion. If your final delivery format is HD video, then shooting at 48048 means that dialog can run through your whole workflow without sample rate conversion.

Here are a few rules of thumb:

1. If you are shooting on film and transferring to tape and your workflow is well established, there’s no need to change it. You still want to use a traditional 24p project type.

2. If you are shooting on HD video at 23.976, then you want the 23.976 project type.

3. If you are shooting on film and telecineing to digital video and you want the purest audio you can get in the Avid, you may want to consider a 23.976 project. For even better audio in the Avid, production should shoot at 48048. (This is especially true if you’re making a TV show where your final delivery will be on HD tape.) But before you try this, check with your post supervisor, production mixer and sound effects supervisor. Make sure everybody is on board.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a table that lays out the rates:

Shoot	Project	Production	Telecined to	In Avid & PT
Film-24 fps	24p	48K/30 fps TC	29.97 or 23.976/48K	23.976/47952
Film-24 fps	23.976p	48K or 48048/30 TC	29.97 or 23.976/48K	23.976/48K
Video-23.976	23.976p	48K/29.97 TC	23.976/48K	23.976/48K

Final Cut, for what it’s worth, only works one way — like digital videotape. That’s simpler, but less flexible. It works in a video-dominated world, but can present problems in certain circumstances with film production.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut, Workflow

Comments: 8 Comments

Color

April 22, 2007

Apple’s Color application certainly looks impressive, and it offers lots of power for low bucks. But I wonder how often I would actually use it in a typical “offline” situation. Moreover, it turns out that it’s not realtime at all, according to this very interesting post from Stu Maschwitz, one of the founders of the Orphanage and author of The DV Rebels Guide.

Maybe it’s a weakness of mine but I find it damn near impossible to color correct effectively if I can’t go back and play through a scene or a few cuts and look at what I did while video plays. I tend to go back and forth repeatedly — play, adjust, play, adjust and the faster that cycle is, the better the work. Apparently, you can’t do that in Color. You have to render the whole sequence and then play it in Final Cut. You also can’t run Color on a 15″ MacBook Pro, which is going to frustrate a lot of people. And I’m not clear about how it deals with picture changes.

Avid’s color corrector isn’t perfect — it’s worst feature, by far, is that you have to jump out of the color correction mode to play from one cut to another — but you have a lot of control and the corrections are all realtime.

Apple’s game plan is to give you all the tools you need to completely finish your film in the Final Cut environment. For folks who never plan to enter an online bay or DI suite that’s pretty exciting. But I don’t work that way. For me, it’s much more important that color correction be simple, effective and instantly available.

Nevertheless, Apple has once again shaken up our workflows and job descriptions. As Maschwitz points out, Apple is doing what it has done many times before — making high end tools available to everybody. We’re going to see a lot of bad color now, just as we saw bad graphic design at the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution. And we’re probably going to see more competition for colorist positions and, long term, an erosion of rates. Colorists, welcome to the revolution.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

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

Comments: 6 Comments

Soundtrack Pro Workflow

April 20, 2007

The more I look at the specs for Soundtrack Pro the more I like it. This application is really slick and does all kinds of things that I can’t do in my Avid. It offers non-destructive editing, a very nice looking tool for dealing with picture changes, simple speed adjustments, 5.1 panning and track nesting, easily applied and customizable audio dissolves, elaborate tools for repairing dialog, and nice analog-style scrubbing. It runs without extra hardware and integrates well with Final Cut.

There are a few obvious omissions: no ability to work in feet and frames, a limited track count (I was told that it maxes out at 32. Is this true?), and a clear dependence on the mouse for trimming and slipping (similar to Final Cut’s slip tool). Those certainly aren’t fatal, though, and putting all that power on the desktop for such a low price is wonderful.

The problem for me is that I don’t want this stuff in a separate application. Soundtrack seems like a worthy alternative for sound editors, but for a picture editor like me, the idea that I’m going to frequently switch back and forth from FCP to STP just isn’t efficient. What I really want are much better mixing and sound editing tools in the primary application.

I’ve mentioned some of this stuff before (Wish List #1 – Audio and Why Are Our Mixing Tools So Bad?) so I won’t go into all the gory detail here. But I badly need the ability to leave waveforms on all the time, to move automation around independent from the sound itself, and to easily make different kinds of crossfades. Final Cut offers several things that the Media Composer doesn’t, namely the ability to lay down sparse keyframes when mixing, and an onscreen mixer that isn’t limited to eight tracks. But neither program lets you move keyframes numerically, neither lets you move a group of keyframes at all, and neither lets you mix a group of tracks as if they were one thing — you can only make level adjustments within a clip.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that I don’t want to be switching back and forth between two applications to do the kind of temp mixing that is now routine for picture editors. I don’t want to be conforming my own changes. I don’t want to wonder which application to use when working with a director. I don’t really need all the power of Soundtrack Pro or Pro Tools, but I do need some of it and I want it in the main application.

As a footnote, what’s with all this “Pro” stuff? Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools — it’s getting downright embarrassing. The word is so overused that it’s become meaningless. If I’m a professional and your program is for me, then putting “pro” in the name just makes me worry that you “protest too much,” as the bard would say. Yes, sir, I sure am professional! Heck it’s in my name! Every time I hear “pro” I think “amateur.”

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

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

Comments: 4 Comments

NAB – 2nd Impressions

April 18, 2007

The smoke has cleared a bit and I’m left just a wee bit underwhelmed by this year’s NAB. Full disclosure — I wasn’t able to go, so I’m commenting from the sidelines.

Apple and Avid both made some big announcements. Apple introduced Color, Final Cut Server, and a new, relatively high bitrate, compressed HD format. And it took the wraps off some significant improvements to Motion and Soundtrack Pro. Final Cut went to version 6 with an “open timeline” where you can mix and match formats and framerates.

Avid introduced an improved Unity product at a significantly lower price point, along with ScriptSync and DNxHD 36. It also offered a new and surprising commitment to open standards.

What strikes me about all this is how similar the two companies’ strategies are now. Both offer compressed HD formats, both have file sharing solutions, both offer a media asset manager, both have timelines that can mix and match different formats, both allow you to do useful work with a stock computer or a laptop, both provide a suite of applications, both profess to be based on open standards (though how that works out in practice remains to be seen). More than ever before, Avid and Apple are leapfrogging and copying each other.

The differences are in the details. Final Cut Studio provides much more breadth in terms of the applications offered, and the programs are tightly integrated. But Final Cut Server, which looks like a nice and inexpensive media asset manager, can’t do the most basic thing I need, which is to share bins. ProRes 422 and DNxHD now compete, but in different ways. Avid offers a 36 Mbps codec, which is about as light as you can get. But at higher bit rates Apple says you can still run an impressive 14 simultaneous streams of 720P/24 material on an 8-core Mac Pro (details).

Most disappointing to me, neither company made major changes to their core applications. Apparently they’ve both decided that their editing UIs are good enough. But that’s where I live all day long and there’s plenty in Media Composer that seems old and antiquated. Final Cut was built more recently and tends to feel a little more modern, but it has many weaknesses, too. It badly needs a better media manager, a better way to resync clips, and an improved trim module. Both companies seem to be influenced by facility people who aren’t close enough to the editing interface to recommend changes of this nature.

All that said, I’m excited by Color and I find the Final Cut ecosystem very appealing. On the Avid side, if Media Composer 2.7 offers good and stable performance on a laptop it might be the release that finally convinces a lot of Meridien users to switch. And many of my friends have been talking about ScriptSync, so I’m starting to think it might catch on.

Either way, it seems like the future of “offline” editing is high definition. I fully expect that I’ll be cutting with DNxHD 36 very soon. In fact, it seems like we’re going to have to come up with some new terms for this. Offline just doesn’t mean what it used to. At the top of the editing world we’re still going to see a distinction between editing from dailies and finishing. But the old idea that offline meant fuzzy and low-res just ain’t true anymore.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

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

Comments: 3 Comments