The ACE tech blog has posted some useful information about the use of DNxHD-36 on the show “Iron Man,” edited by Dan Lebental. I’m eager to shift to this workflow, but it sounds like there have been some pretty significant growing pains.
Archive for the ‘Workflow’ category
HD Notes on Iron Man
November 9, 2007New Site for Assistants
November 9, 2007Justin Bourret, Scott Janush, Carrie Puchkoff and Dan Ward have started a new site dedicated to issues of interest to professional digital assistants, with an emphasis on turnover between different editorial departments. It’s only been up for about a week and already has several useful and well written tips.
Check it out here: Editing Standards
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Pack and Go
November 3, 2007Anybody try to grab a scene from your desktop Avid, put it on a laptop, and cut it somewhere else? It ain’t all that easy.
Consolidate helps — you find the source bin, select your master clips and consolidate them without relinking. But even though you are moving media to an external drive, consolidate insists on creating new clips that will link to the new media, clips which are placed into your source bin, and which you’re going to immediately delete. What you want is a copy of the media that will link to the original clips. There’s no way to do that except via the Finder. (And despite 20 years of confusion, media filenames still don’t contain clipnames, so that’s going to take some hunting, as well.)
Even if consolidate didn’t create those extra master clips, the task would still be too complicated because there are many non-master clips in a typical scene bin, namely groups and resynched subclips. For these, you have to find the relevant master clips and consolidate them individually.
Then you copy the relevant bins and put them into the project on the laptop. And finally, because the old clips aren’t linked to the new media, you’ve got to relink — which means setting options and often relinking more than once. (Why does every relink produce error messages even when the relink works?)
In general, this is not a task for the faint of heart. Too many steps, too many gotchas. All I want is to select a bunch of clips and sequences, and copy all the source media involved to a drive, along with the bin involved. It would be even easier to select a bin from the project window and have all relevant sources for everything in it copied.
Simplifying the process would make it a lot easier to take work on the road — and it’d also help sell Media Composer software. If this were easy enough and MC-software was reasonably priced, every editor and assistant would have a copy.
Turnover Blues
October 19, 2007Much as I want to love Adrenaline, we’ve had our share of problems in the last couple of weeks, all related to turnover — problems with OMFs, EDLs and cut lists, as follows:
OMFs — If you want to deliver OMF media to sound and any of your media is MXF, you won’t be able to export. MC offers no help — you just bomb — and you’ll have to suss the problem out for yourself, cutting your sequences down and redoing the export until you finally find the errant clip or clips. This is a double gotcha since MC really wants to create MXF media now, and you have to turn off MXF file creation in several hidden places to make sure you don’t get any (see this post for details). In our case, it was a sound effect clip. Check your media drives and look for an “Avid MediaFiles” folder (as opposed to an “OMF MediaFiles” folder). Your MXF files are going to be in there.
EDLs — In MC version 2.7.2 and 2.7.3 you simply can’t make audio EDLs. Yes, you read that right. You’ll crash or see an error message. The solution is to upgrade to version 2.7.5 or 2.7.6. Loading a newer version of EDL Manager won’t work. In our case, after an upgrade to EDL Manager 23.7.5 we were unable to run MC at all and had to revert both MC and EDLM. For your system to work properly MC and EDLM versions must match (that is, the digits after the dot must be identical — MC 2.7.6 goes with EDLM 23.7.6). If you don’t want to upgrade MC (we’re in a critical period and can’t risk it), the workaround is to load a later version of EDLM on a standalone system and make your lists from there.
Film Lists — Unless you’re satisfied with Avid’s Web template you’ll crash when you try to make a list in FilmScribe 23.7.2. The solution is to replace your FilmScribe template folder with a new one from Avid. The problem is that most vendors don’t know about the fix, but I’m told that MC 2.7.6 / FS 23.7.6 includes it.
All in all, this is not much of a testament to Avid’s ability to test their software in a real-world, Hollywood-style environment. Turnover to sound and online/DI is mission-critical for us and when we need to do it, we need to do it now. And it’s not much of a testament to the now-forgotten decision to split off FilmScribe as a separate application. One key rationale was that as a standalone ap, it could be updated more quickly. But if we can only use the version that matches the installed version of MC that rational doesn’t hold up.
The silver lining to all of this is that MC 2.7.6 is supposed to be stable and fast and include a host of bug fixes — including everything mentioned here. I’m hopeful, but only time will tell.
Switching Between MC and iTunes
October 15, 2007Why does it take so long to switch between MC and other programs? I’m cutting temp music and using iTunes as the music browser. This is because it’s next to impossible to quickly position and audition music against picture in the MC. That, in itself, is a fundamental problem, but with iTunes, I have an adequate workaround. The problem is that I have to repeatedly switch back and forth from MC to iTunes and unfortunately, every time I do, MC goes through some kind of update. The result is a roughly four-second wait while the system seems frozen. Repeated all day long, that turns out to be maddening, especially when you’re trying to hit play in iTunes and then go to MC and hit play there so that music and picture will be in rough sync. Really hard to do it with that long wait.
You can see the same problem when bins are opened — or closed. There’s a several second wait after the bin appears or disappears, while all clipframes in all other open bins are laboriously reacquired from disk — and the system is frozen. Why? This wasn’t true in Meridien or ABVB.
I just tested this at home and discovered to my surprise that it doesn’t happen on a software-only system with local storage. I can switch between iTunes and MC in a quick keystroke — no waiting. And I can open a bin or close it without seeing any other clipframes update.
What gives? Is this a function of Unity? Or of sharing a project? And if so, is it really necessary, or is it an artifact, a programming mistake that added some kind of “refresh all” command where it isn’t necessary?
How Many Editing Markets Are There?
September 20, 2007In the early ’90s, Avid triumphed against all competitors and democratized the editing world in the first non-linear revolution. But it didn’t do nearly as well in the second revolution that began around 2000. Apple saw that software-only systems were going to become increasingly powerful, so they cut prices and offered a swiss-army-knife product that undercut Avid’s business model. And they sold systems to people Avid didn’t even know were potential customers.
Meanwhile, Avid focused on the high end, aiming its new products at large installations with hundreds of systems. Today, Final Cut easily beats MC on market share, and looks like the rebel’s choice. But it just hasn’t caught on in Hollywood, and nearly everybody who has tried it has either come back to Media Composer or has made their peace with a product that they acknowledge as at least partially inferior. Yes, you can get the job done, and yes it’s cheaper (especially for HD) but no, for longform work, it ain’t better. And Avid’s technical support and training apparatus, warts and all, is head and shoulders above Apple’s.
The question now, is where Avid goes next. They can and should build on their deep connections with high-end editors. They’ve done way too little for creative editing over the last decade and by presenting Apple with a static target they’ve given them a huge opening. That has to be fixed.
They’ve also got to cement their strategy for their high-end corporate customers. I haven’t used Interplay but I’ve seen it demonstrated several times, and it seems awfully “version 1” to me.
But what about the rest of the editing world, the folks Apple has been cultivating? If you like, you can divide that world into two parts: consumers and, for want of a better word, independents. Avid has not been able to articulate a compelling vision for either of these groups. For consumers, Avid chose to buy their way to market share with Pinnacle Studio. For independents, they’ve been promoting Xpress Pro with only partial success.
Does Avid need these customers? Or should they just let them go and focus on the high end? My view is that the editing world is becoming more and more unitary and interdependent. I don’t think Avid will succeed selling Interplay to facilities doing offline with Final Cut, and independents won’t want to learn a new interface if they come to Hollywood. Consumers who want to graduate to something more capable will want to stay with the same brand and interface conventions they started with.
Avid needs to articulate a vision that speaks to all these markets. The product line that wins scales naturally with different buying segments, keeps prices low, and, critically important, inspires all customers to be as creative as possible. With its many acquisitions, Avid now has the pieces in place to envision that product line, but it has to actually build it — reinventing many of the applications, making the interface consistent and ensuring that projects and media can easily be moved up the price ladder. It has to start working as one company, focused on one vision for the future of editing — for everybody.
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