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Apple’s Announcement – First Impressions

April 15, 2007

Today’s Apple event at NAB was heavily anticipated and turned out to be a real blockbuster. Updated versions of most of the major applications in FCP Studio were demoed and many represent breakthroughs either in capability or price or both. The company showed off a new media asset manager and collaboration tool called Final Cut Server, and it revealed a new color correction application, Color, included in FCP Studio.

Final Cut:

Multiple resolutions in same timeline
Multiple frame rates in same timeline
Support for a new compressed HD codec, called “ProRes 422,” via a $3,500 hardware encoder and breakout box from Aja called the “I/O HD”
Much better integration with Motion

Final Cut Server

Media management solution for $1,000 (10 users) or $2,000 (unlimited)

Motion

New 3D tools
New tracking tools
Paint tools

Soundtrack

Tracks changes in a sequence imported from FCP
Full support for surround (5.1 treated as a single clip, complete pan controls)
Spectral editing (look at a spectrum graph and remove pieces of it).

Compressor

More presets.
Much faster encoding using 8-core Mac Pro

Color

Sophisticated and easy-to-use color correction via technology that was presumably picked up when Apple acquired Final Touch.
Included in Final Cut Studio

What we didn’t see:

Final Cut Extreme — many rumors predicted a 4K hardware/software finishing solution for $10,000. The demo talked about 4K support on a laptop, but I see nothing about this at Apple’s FCP site.
Changes or additions to the basic editing model (translate — better trim controls). I’m really bummed about this one.

Of course, it’s early days on all of this. We’ll have to see how it shakes out in the real world of editing rooms, which no NAB demo will ever reveal. And the announcement covered so much ground that all kinds of details were missing. But Apple is taking direct aim at Avid in several ways.

Final Cut Server is positioned against Avid Interplay at a fraction of the price. I/O HD takes on Adrenaline HD, again for much less money. ProRes 422 competes with DNxHD. Motion integration into Final Cut aces all of Avid’s antiquated title generation tools.

Soundtrack offers 5.1 mixing, something you have to buy a Pro Tools to get on the Avid side of things, and change tracking between FCP and Soundtrack is something Avid should have offered long ago. The new Color application gives Apple the lead in low-cost desktop color correction.

It’s been almost two years since Final Cut Pro 5 was released and a year since 5.1 added Intel support. In that time Avid should have been innovating aggressively. We’ve seen some valuable improvements, certainly, but the changes have been relatively conservative, presenting Cupertino with what amounts to a near stationary target in some areas — and Apple has responded very aggressively.

Engadget has good early coverage with a lot of pictures. Apple’s site gives additional details.

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

Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Workflow

Comments: 4 Comments

Waiting for NAB

April 11, 2007

At this point, I expect that all eyes are on NAB — the calm before the storm, as it were. Apple’s announcement this coming Sunday has been the subject of a lot of speculation, namely that we’ll see a 4K version of Final Cut and a revamped Logic. The company has made it clear that it plans to focus on host-based processing and with the quiet introduction of the 8-core Mac Pro last week it has an opportunity to really push the envelope. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to guess that they’ll use those machines to do things that haven’t been possible before. That should provide excitement enough, but we haven’t seen a significant feature upgrade to Final Cut for some time and the company may have some other improvements up it’s sleeve, too.

As you all probably know by now, I tend to be more interested in bread and butter usability features than finishing or visual effects. Not to say that those things aren’t important. But my focus is on shaping story and performance and I tend to get excited about things that help me do that. An extreme example: one friend, a prominent editor, prefers Adrenaline over Meridien for exactly three reasons: real time audio dissolves, 16 playable audio tracks and faster bin saves. The ability to play layer upon layer of visual effects in real time, Adrenaline’s headline advantage, doesn’t figure in his calculation. If Avid offered invisible, background saves, or a live timeline that could be scrolled or scaled while the machine played, I’d wager it would create a lot of Hollywood converts. I doesn’t seem that things like that get high priority in Tewksbury and that’s slowing adoption here.

Avid doesn’t keep secrets the way Apple does and it looks like they haven’t held much back for NAB. That doesn’t diminish the importance of version 2.7. If it’s as bug free as we’ve been led to expect it will finally allow us to get some serious work done on portable systems and that has the potential to fundamentally change our work environments. Avid wasn’t the first to this party — Apple was — but if they’ve got it right it will change the way we in features and episodic TV work. DNxHD 36 is also important and will help a lot of us start looking at HD images — no small thing, either.

All in all, it feels like a watershed NAB for both companies, but in different ways, and that can only be good for editors. The changing technical landscape continues to alter our lives. But at the end of the day, storytelling has to remain paramount. I love the technology — but if I’m not using it to move people it doesn’t mean a whole lot to me.

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

Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut, Quality of Life, Workflow

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The Work vs. The Quicktime

April 9, 2007

I recently had to take care of a few small picture changes. The work itself took just a couple of hours and I was soon ready to present the results. But my producer and director couldn’t make it to the cutting room. To get their feedback I just had to make Quicktimes and upload them to an ftp site for viewing.

Easy, right? Wrong. I always worry about doing something when the task is preceeded by the word “just.” “Just bump that up to HD and blast it over to us, okay?” “Just recut all the music and make a new DVD, okay?” Just create cold fusion or a perpetual motion machine — it’ll just take a few minutes! In fact, making and uploading those files took exactly twice the time needed to make the changes themselves.

The export process is so convoluted, with so many different dialog boxes (four?) that anybody would be intimidated, but assistants are familiar with it and tend not to complain. Editors, on the other hand, are rarely confronted with this task and that probably reduces it’s priority level in Tewksbury. A lot of the code was apparently taken from Quicktime itself and some of the complexity comes from there. In their defense, the folks at Avid have made a valiant attempt at simplifying the task by offering us a bunch of canned presets. The problem is that the language used to describe them is often unclear (see above), and the process, whatever you do, seems to take forever.

If you’re making a Quicktime for a unique purpose, you should always try your settings on a short sequence first, see how long the conversion takes, how small the resulting file is, and whether you’ve inadvertently squeezed or cropped the image. If you don’t, be prepared to wait and to do it again when you don’t like the result.

Many people give up on all this and simply make DVDs with a standalone DVD burner. That works fine as long as you don’t have to use the Internet for viewing. Others make a basic Quicktime and then use Sorenson Squeeze, to shrink the file. Sometimes that can help, but it doesn’t make the task much simpler.

For the rest of us, particularly those who don’t do this every day, the complexity is pretty daunting. It sure would be nice if those Quicktime options were explained better. I’d love to see an estimate of how long your conversion will take and how big the resulting file might be — so you could make some intelligent choices before pressing the save button.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 5 Comments

Unintended Consequences

April 2, 2007

The law of unintended consequences has been the one constant in the whole digital revolution. We thought digital tools would give us our lives back and make the job easier. They made it harder. We thought it would take away the drudgery. It made assistant’s lives much more tedious. We thought it would make post production cheaper. It made it better, but more expensive. We thought new tools wouldn’t change the artistic qualities of our work. They did.

We weren’t so bad at predicting the technical future — it isn’t that hard to see what the effects of faster processors and bigger hard drives will be. But we really haven’t had much luck at predicting the social effects of this transition.

Today, the $64,000 question is how the democratization of our tools is going to affect us.

The argument goes like this: Now that you can edit on a laptop, it’s easier to gain access to the tools, easier to learn the job, and more people are going to do it. Editing is now widely understood to be critical to the filmmaking process, and partly because of Apple’s fantastic marketing, editing has become cool. That too is bringing people into the field. All of this means more competition.

The counter-argument is that quality always wins. Yes, anybody can learn to be a button pusher, but that doesn’t make him or her an editor. If you’ve looked at even a few student films you know this very well. And even if the size of the workforce is growing, the number of jobs is expanding, too — there’s more content out there everyday, and all of it needs to be edited.

Another concern is that editing work will move to foreign countries where wages are lower. You ship or or ftp the dailies overseas, you get cut material back. The counter-argument is that editing is a private, collaborative task and can only be done when director, producer and editor are near each other. Furthermore, piracy is a big issue. No serious filmmaker is going to trust a long distance editing arrangement.

So are our jobs safe these days? And if they’re not, what can we do about it? Most important, how do we improve the accuracy of our predictions? If we can’t see the future, we can’t prepare for it.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, media, video

Categories: Editors Guild, Quality of Life, Workflow

Comments: 3 Comments

Avid on Intel-Mac Arrives

March 30, 2007

Well, it’s finally happened. Avid released Media Composer 2.7 and Xpress 5.7 today, complete with Mac/Intel compatibility. Other features include phonetic script integration, which Avid is calling “ScriptSync,” and compatibility with the DNxHD 36 codec. New features in these releases were shown at Avid’s Insider Seminar, which I described in several recent posts.

The press release quotes Matt Feury with the following: “We’ve run these systems through a more rigorous testing process than ever before, and we’re confident that our customers will be pleased with the stability and performance they’ll receive after installing the new software.” Let’s hope so. I’ve heard that Avid on Mac/Intel is the fastest Avid you’ve ever seen. I’m eager to get my hands on one of these things.

The complete press release, including upgrade pricing, is here.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Categories: Avid, Workflow

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Final Cut Penetration in Hollywood

March 28, 2007

Every year the American Cinema Editors compiles the results of a member “equipment survey.” It offers a pretty reasonable estimate of the number of feature film and television editors currently working with various kinds of equipment. The 2006 survey results were released yesterday.

Key results:

About 90% of survey respondents are working in features, movies of the week, miniseries or episodic television. That gives you a sense of what ACE members do.

Over 80% of respondents are using Avid systems (Meridien, Adrenaline or Xpress). 13% are using Final Cut. More interesting is that Final Cut penetration has remained constant now for three years running. In 2004 it was also about 13%. That can’t be happy news for Apple.

DI penetration is increasing. In 2004 it was 18%. In 2006 it was 33%. (Keep in mind that TV shows don’t do DIs and they’re included in these numbers.)

On over half the shows, the editor chose the equipment. From an editor’s perspective, that’s a bit distressing — it would be nice if we chose the equipment on every show. But from a manufacturer’s perspective it means that the editor is still the primary customer. And making us happy still has to be job #1.

Full results of the survey are here. Special thanks go to Harry Miller for his hard work on this project.

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

Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Workflow

Comments: 15 Comments