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A Little Rant About Language

May 28, 2008

As someone who edited a magazine for four years, allow me to digress with a brief rant about language. I have two pet peeves.

First, “digital” is an adjective. As in “digital video” or “digital audio” or “digital acquisition” or even “digital divide.” It is not a noun — it modifies a noun. So, for example, it would be incorrect to say something like, “we’re going to shoot it on digital,” (how many times have you heard that?) or, “that was before I started editing on digital.” On digital WHAT? There’s a word missing — the noun.

Second, and more important for us, “editor” is a human being, not a machine. I am getting very tired of the recent trend of calling an editing system, a piece of software, an editor. We don’t call Microsoft Word a “writer,” even though it would be quicker and easier to use that word, and we don’t call Quark Xpress a “desktop publisher.” We never called our Moviolas and KEMS editors, either.

There is simply no logic for this usage — no good reason to confuse two totally different things by giving them the same name. It’s totally disrespectful and frankly, it’s just plain wrong. The machine does not edit — it allows a human being to edit. The hammer doesn’t build the house — and we don’t call it a carpenter, either.

We need to find another word for the device that allows people to edit. And for want of something better, maybe we should stick with the term that worked just fine for the first decade and a half of the digital revolution — “editing application.”

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Categories: Quality of Life, Workflow

Comments: 8 Comments

Time for the EDL Change List

April 19, 2008

There are some features that have been on the wish list for so long that we no longer remember that there could be a better way. The EDL change list is one such feature. When you online a show and need to make further changes, you want to use the first online as a source. The only way to do that is to digitize the online, load it into a new video track and cut it along with your normal material. That is an unnecessary burden, which slows down the editorial process and makes simple changes much too complicated.

The whole process is especially frustrating because the Media Composer could easily create the list you need, comparing your old sequence with your new one and creating a list that references the first as a source. This isn’t totally trivial, but in 2008 it’s not rocket science.

Avid mentions this in a recently posted FAQ about the new systems:

Avid FilmScribe will export XML for all sequences with all source and record side metadata. All standard Avid columns as well as user custom metadata will be output as a single XML file. Transforms can applied to the master XML to create EDLs, Change List EDLs, Scan lists, etc. Transforms can be created by users and manufacturers and easily shared as needed.

Indeed, XML export is an important new feature and it will pave the way for many new capabilities. But the problem here is in the words “created by users and manufacturers.” We shouldn’t have to wait for a third party application to implement this important feature. We’ve been asking for it since the mid-’90s. It’s time for Avid to put it into every Media Composer.

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Categories: Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 6 Comments

Avid DX Sneak Preview

April 10, 2008

Avid offered a sneak preview of their new hardware offerings at Universal Tuesday night. To my everlasting frustration, I was unable to go, but the details are emerging. CEO Gary Greenfield and new head of the video division Kirk Arnold were there, along with Matt Feury and Michael Phillips and a host of engineers and others. The message seemed to be: “We understand you (better than the other guys). And we want your input (unlike the old Avid).” And from what I heard, the audience thought they made both points effectively.

The big announcement was new hardware across the product line. Adrenaline is gone, to be replaced by something called “Mojo DX,” a high-def, rack-mounted box that does away with the old and slow Firewire connection and replaces it with an extension to the much-faster PCI-e bus. Symphony DX will likewise get powerful new hardware. Media Composer will move to version 3 and offer some new features, including a real-time timecode burn in effect, and improved multi-stream effects capabilities. It’ll be able to intelligently address multiple CPU cores and also use the DSP power of your graphics processor and should be a lot more responsive as a result. And it will run under Leopard and Vista.

Michael Phillips demonstrated Avid’s new XML export functionality, with an architecture that allows other manufacturers to write small conversion programs (“droplets”), so that they’ll be able to import sequence and bin information (but apparently not effects descriptions).

Pricing has come down dramatically, and there will be several upgrade alternatives for current owners.

More specifics will emerge at Avid’s events at the Hard Rock in Vegas this Sunday and Monday. For more about Wednesday’s event, see these articles: Digital Production Buzz and HD Head.

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Categories: Avid, Workflow

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Making Titles with Motion

March 30, 2008

This week, I finally gave up on using the Avid title tool. Nothing’s changed, of course. It still does what it always did, all the way back to the early ’90s. But back then, a main title meant a series of cards fading in and out. Today, title animation is so common that I felt compelled to try and find another way. And yes, I’ve made a good faith attempt with Avid Marquee, making all my titles with it on at least one show, but it’s way too techie and so badly integrated with the MC that sometimes it’s laughable (for more, check out these posts “Fixing the Title Tool” and “More on the Title Tool.”)

I know that some of you use After Effects, and I realize that it’s very powerful, but for me, it seems to require an awful lot of meticulous attention to keyframes.

Enter Apple’s Motion. Motion offers “behaviors” — canned combinations of keyframed parameters that can be stretched and shrunk to make your animations do all kinds of things that would take hours with other applications. And Apple helpfully allows you to preview these behaviors, and to mix and match them if you don’t see what you want. It is also completely real-time. You never render anything, and that makes it feel very responsive. You can also let it play your animation as a loop and change parameters while it’s running, which makes it seem even more spontaneous.

So I just completed a first draft of a main title with Motion. Though the learning curve was much steeper than I had initially expected, I was able to do things that I couldn’t even contemplate with the MC. Specific impressions follow.

Pros:

  • All real-time. No rendering. Lots of canned effects.
  • Easy to do impressive things quickly, but fine-tuning takes longer.
  • Integrates with the MC fairly well, as long as you’re willing to export and import and you know a few tricks.
  • Good on-line manual. There’s plenty of conceptual explanation, so you can get a high-level look at what you’re trying to accomplish and then dive into the details. Contrast this with MC’s online help, which gets to the nitty gritty, but often skips the big picture.

Cons:

  • Maximum resolution is HD, so it’s not appropriate in a film/DI environment. I’m working on a show that will deliver HD, so it’s not a problem, but I want to use this on film shows, too.
  • Not particularly stable. Crashed regularly and with no warning, making me value Adrenaline’s comparatively bullet-proof performance.
  • Not good with two monitors — I didn’t see a way to split the timeline from the viewer, for example.
  • Despite Apple’s heroic attempt to shield you from keyframes, you’re eventually going to need the program’s keyframe editor. And because it graphs keyframe values in 2D space, it needs lots of screen real estate and isn’t particularly intuitive for AE or MC users.

Tips:

  • If you’re working in a traditional offline/online environment, be sure to set up your project at the screen resolution that you’ll deliver at. Talk to the people who will online your project and work out the specifics before you start.
  • You’ll have to experiment with export choices a bit. I exported at the Motion project resolution, using the default settings, and imported the resulting Quicktime into the MC with “invert alpha” at 1:1 resolution. That created cleaner keys. It helped that my standard-def Avid project is 16×9 squeezed. Thus the aspect ratio in the Avid and in Motion matched. (See this post for more.)
  • I chose to “export selection,” which meant that each title came over as a separate item. If you want to move your entire Motion project into the MC, you can just drag the little icon at the top of the Motion project window directly into an Avid bin.
  • I was able to install MC software and Motion on my laptop and didn’t see any conflicts. But our rental company insisted on creating a dual-boot setup for our Adrenaline systems. That isolates the MC for safety, but it’s awkward.

Bottom line — Avid needs a new title tool. Though I like Motion, I didn’t much enjoy going back and forth between the two programs, and rendering all the mattes in the MC is a pain. Making a small change means going back to Motion and then doing the export/import thing again. The integration is better in the Final Cut environment, but you still have to leave FCP to do your titles. Avid has an opportunity to build a better title tool, and to put it where it belongs — in the editing application.

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

Comments: 8 Comments

MultiRez — How Not to Add a New Feature

December 22, 2007

I recently stumbled on a whole new set of features in Adrenaline, and now, having spent a couple of hours with the help files, I’m confused. Avid has obviously spent a lot of effort on this, but the new capabilities are explained so awkwardly that I’m not surprised nobody I know is aware of them. It seems that the features could work in a typical feature or TV environment, but not until more functionality is added.

MultiRez and Dynamic Relink allow you to create two sets of media files, one, say at 14:1 and the other at 1:1 — that apply to the same master clips. You can edit with the 14:1 media and just use the 1:1 material for output. The system will automatically switch from one to the other depending on what you’re trying to do. Sounds pretty good huh? Why didn’t anybody tell us about this?

The answer begs the question of how existing editors learn (or don’t learn) about new features in Media Composer. This applies to all kinds of new capabilities, many of which are underutilized in Hollywood. Examples include sophisticated effects like SpectraMatte (way better than the old Avid Chroma Key Effect) or the new motion tracker, or timewarp motion effects, as well as much more mundane stuff like volume graphing or clip colorizing (described here).

Avid’s help files are broken up into little chunks of information, with the result that you often have to wade through a lot of pages before you get an overview of a new feature and how you might actually use it. MultiRez is no exception.

MultiRez allows you to associate multiple media files with the same master clip, and, even better, allows you to have sections of a master clip available at various resolutions. That’s revolutionary and could be the foundation for a slick DI conforming engine. But one key feature appears to be missing — the ability to re-digitize a sequence without decomposing.

The docs imply that MultiRez is aimed at news environments and “is available only on Avid editing systems that have the Avid Interplay Media Indexer installed.” I guess that means that it requires Interplay, and that’s probably why nobody I know has heard of it.

I’m hoping that Avid makes this facility available to the rest of us. It sure would make the conforming process simpler. Meanwhile, the help files need some redesign. Most important, it’s time that we take a thorough look at how existing editors learn about Media Composer improvements. New features don’t help if nobody knows they’re there.

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Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 4 Comments

Totally Portable – Not!

December 9, 2007

I’m about to start a mix and I thought that it would be nice to have my whole show available on a laptop while we worked. This can be helpful in a pinch, and I figured it would be easy to arrange. Four hours of frustration later, I’m not so sure.

We have about 7,000 OMF media files taking up about 200 gigs of space and living on six Unity partitions. Each partition has a separate media folder, and each one contains two “msm” files, which constitute an index of what’s on the drive. The MC needs those files, and if they’re not there, it will create them.

My task was to move all that of our media into a single folder on a firewire drive and open that up with the laptop system. The folder would be re-indexed and all would be well.

Trouble is, MC-software won’t index that media folder. Roughly half way through the initial scan it consistently crashes. That seemed awfully strange to me, so I tried using our main Adrenaline machine to create the index (taking Unity offline, connecting the firewire drive and starting up the MC). That worked fine. So I figured I had a good index and could now open the firewire drive on the laptop. Nope — even with a good index, the laptop wants to scan the drive — and crashes halfway through.

There are differences between the desktop and laptop systems: one is a quad-G5 tower with four gigs of RAM, the other, and core duo Mac Pro with 2 gigs. I’ve never known one to be allergic to drives indexed with the other, but you never know.

So I created a much smaller media files folder with just a couple of hundred clips — the laptop was able to index that just fine. And I was able to add media files to that folder successfully — but only until I got to around 3,000 files, at which point the laptop would crash halfway through the scan — leaving behind a corrupted index.

After four hours trying all of the above and everything else I and our rental house could think of, I gave up.

Maybe a system with 2 gigs of RAM can’t read a big index. Maybe an Intel system can’t read a big index. Maybe an Intel system can’t read an index created on a G5. But one way or the other, I can’t take my show on the road.

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Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips, Laptop Editing, Workflow

Comments: 6 Comments

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