Workflow | Splice Now

Archive for the ‘Workflow’ category

Business Models 101

July 11, 2007

I just listened to a smart speech by Herbert Allison, CEO of TIAA-CREF, the big financial services firm for higher education, talking about how he turned that company around. And boy did it sound like a story about Avid. Same exact problem — the market expands because it’s being democratized, the company doesn’t see the new market because current customers are happy. The company’s business model was designed around their old definition of the customer — and it’s just too disruptive to change the business model to fit the new definition. Everything would have to change.

Old customer — facilities, broadcasters, rental houses. Able to write relatively large checks. Need excellent support. Willing to buy a variety of products to get the job done, as long as they all work well and fit into existing workflows.

New customer — individual film and video makers. Can’t write large checks. Don’t expect one-on-one support. Want an all-in-one product. Have no existing workflows. Workflows can be invented for them.

There are way more of those new customers than old customers. But Avid didn’t recognize them because its business was built on making the old customers happy.

Avid democratized post production in the early ’90s. Apple democratized it further in the early years of the new century. The question now is whether Avid can come back. They still hold the top of the professional world. They have to build from there, and they have to win on points, creating something that does more and works better than FCP. Tall order — but not impossible. And, make no mistake about it, the better they compete the better it is for all of us. Competition brings out the best in everybody.

Allison’s talk, delivered in December at Yale University, makes some interesting recommendations. It’s available as a podcast — item 98 on this page at the iTunes music store.

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

Categories: Avid vs. Final Cut, Workflow

Comments: Be the first to comment

HD Storage Requirements

July 3, 2007

Talking to friends about their future plans, I’m learning that the one thing that seems to galvanize Avid folks this year is the possibility that they could soon be cutting HD images in an “offline” environment. In my circle of friends DNX36 is the most interesting thing Avid has introduced in a while.

But that inevitably leads to an obvious question. “How much storage am I going to need and how much is it going to cost?” The question is usually framed in relative terms, namely, “How much MORE storage am I going to need than I use now?”

I can do a rough estimate, of course, but it would be nice to have a calculator that compares 14:1 storage requirements with DNX36 requirements — on 24-fps material. Does such a thing exist? Several searches on Avid’s web site didn’t turn up much of anything. The charts the company offers for DNX storage leave out DNX36 and never compare it to Avid’s SD codecs.

In general, Avid’s web site is impossibly hard to navigate. There’s too much stuff, organized poorly, searches are often ineffective, I rarely find what I’m looking for.

Avid-ites are behind their FCP brethren in the switch to HD, but I think we’re going to be moving there in droves in the next year or two. Avid ought to make the switch easier and more comprehensible. What do you need? How much can you do software only? What’s the simplest and least expensive workflow? If that information were widely disseminated we’d see a lot more people upgrading their aging Meridien systems.

And it would also help if Adrenaline HD wasn’t so much more expensive than FCP with a Blackmagic card.

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

Categories: Avid vs. Final Cut, Workflow

Comments: 11 Comments

In LA, It’s All About Traffic

June 18, 2007

I got out of a screening at Fotokem on Friday at 4:30. Time to get to the West Side: 90 minutes. Time without traffic — 30 minutes. Traffic on the 405 South was stopped halfway up the hill on the valley side. That’s the worst I’ve ever seen it. There was a ten minute backup on Sepulveda at Moraga because of a mistimed light.

It’s come down to this: the whole job revolves around traffic. How do I get to work? How do the dailies get to me?

I’d much rather work at home these days and have material delivered. It’s just too much trouble getting to the cutting room.

Verizon is supposed to be aggressively rolling out their “FIOS” broadband service — fiber to the home. For me, it can’t come fast enough. Get me my dailies over a wire. Where do I sign up?

Categories: Quality of Life, Workflow

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?

Technorati Tags: avid, final cut pro

Categories: Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 13 Comments

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.

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

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

Comments: 7 Comments

Avid’s Road Show

May 23, 2007

Avid’s NAB road show event last night, co-hosted by Creative Media Partners at a small sound stage in Hollywood, was well produced and informative but also offered several stark contrasts to Apple’s event last week.

Three technologies were featured: DNxHD 36, Interplay and ScriptSync. All have been discussed on this site before (here and here) so I won’t focus on the technical details. The seminar was only about an hour long and there wasn’t too much time for specifics. The presentation, ably handled by Michael Krulik and Steve Holyhead from Avid Burbank with an assist from Mina Savet of CMP, attempted to show how these technologies might interact in a real-world workflow on the show “Lost.”

The audience was small — less than 60 people. Avid has chosen to partner with its resellers for this demo and the seminar that Keycode gave recently (covered here), but somehow they don’t have the ability to bring out big crowds anymore. Apple got 400 people to the DGA and spent five hours covering new features.

There was lots of equipment on stage: Media Composer Adrenaline on PC, Unity with Interplay, Symphony Nitris. Macintosh systems got scant attention — a Mac Pro setup was available only for people to play with after the demo was completed. Contrast this with Apple’s event that featured nothing but a Quad-core Mac Pro and you begin to see how the companies are differentiating themselves.

Apple is serving independents, editors who would like to do everything in one cutting room at the lowest possible cost. Avid doesn’t want to lose this market but seems mostly focused on big installations: TV stations, newsrooms, reality shows and effects-heavy TV series, where lots of people need to share lots of media. Interplay piggybacks on Unity or Isis and offers them the ability to hand files and sequences back and forth, keep track of versions and tame some of the chaos that such environments inevitably create.

But Interplay doesn’t offer much to an independent feature or even a smaller studio film where a few people work on a single show. It also doesn’t do much in a work environment where sound, visual effects and editing are located miles apart. For that, you’re looking at something like DigiDelivery, Digidesign’s easy-to-use encrypted ftp appliance. And Interplay feels pretty darn geeky to me. You spend most of your time with a Windows-style file browser where the options and choices (and the look and feel) would only appeal to a true nerd. I’ve seen it demoed three times now and I still find the choices intimidating.

Apple is focused on empowering creative individuals. Avid is focused on empowering the workgroup. Avid’s innovations have to do with plumbing, Apple is building tools. DNx36 doesn’t change anything except storage and bandwidth. Don’t get me wrong — we’re going to use it and we’re going to like it. But it doesn’t help you expand creatively. Avid’s script-based editing tools haven’t changed for a decade. What’s new is that your script now gets lined automatically. Again, it’s a plumbing improvement.

The Avid presenters did a good job trying to inspire the crowd, but it’s not easy to get people fired up over plumbing. We saw much the same thing when Meridien was rolled out. The main improvement was better video quality. Over and over again I saw Avid folks gamely trying to convince editors that they should turn in all their current equipment for a small bump in video quality — but four years later people here were still using their old ABVB machines. Adrenaline has seen much the same fate.

DNx36 will probably get a better reception because HD really is better than SD. And that should motivate people to move to Adrenaline. ScriptSync will probably get more people to try out script-based editing. And Interplay will be adopted at many facilities. But Avid has got to start inspiring editors. Final Cut may not work as well for editors and assistants on long-form TV and features, but the 400 people at the DGA represent a tide that is rapidly becoming unstoppable.

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

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

Comments: 1 Comment