I got a demo yesterday of a software-only Media Composer playing DNXHD-36 media. We hooked up an 8-core Mac Pro to a big Pioneer plasma TV that served as our second monitor. In a word, it was fantastic. Seeing material with that kind of clarity at that size in an offline editing room, and being able to play it and work with it quickly, jogging back and forth and dragging through a clip, was downright breathtaking. And it was not just an aesthetic experience, although it was that, for sure. You’re getting more information — for example, you can clearly see facial expressions in wide shots.
Major caveat — all I did was look at a couple of clips a few minutes long. I didn’t try to play huge complex sequences, I didn’t run a big project, I didn’t even have much audio. All I did was use JKL to move around in the video, made a few cuts, tried making a Quicktime and a cut list. In that limited environment, the system was quite responsive.
Special thanks go to Jeremy Dela Rosa at Global Entertainment Partners (GEP) for putting the demo together for me.
The big revelation was that we could do this with a software-only Avid. You don’t need Adrenaline to do HD, and you don’t need huge amounts of storage. DNX-36 uses about 16 GB per hour at 24 fps — just a bit more than DV, and about triple what you’d need for good ol’ 14:1.
So can you really use a software-only system instead of Adrenaline? That depends on what you are trying to do. The first problem is monitoring. We ran the system with two monitors, one of which was the HD TV (the TV has to have a DVI input). That might be a viable way to work — if you had a 30″ monitor for cutting, you could put everything there, bins, composer and timeline. But if you want three monitors, you’re moving to the bleeding edge. You’d install a second graphics card in your Mac, and run your bin monitor from that. We didn’t have that second card, so we weren’t able to try it. Avid doesn’t officially sanction it, but it ought to work.
The second problem is input and output. The software system has only one way of doing this — Firewire. And that severely limits your choices: DV or DVCPRO HD. If you’re working at DNX36 that doesn’t help much.
So a realistic environment for a small show might mean an Adrenaline-based system for the assistant and a software-only system for the editor.
We tried a few other things:
Making an SD Quicktime — something you might have to do for turnover to sound. On the 8-core Mac, creating a 640×480 QT at Motion JPEG-A was very quick — a bit faster than real time.
Playing SD material in the HD project. The only way to do this is to create a separate SD project, load your video there and then drag the bin into the HD project. In the time we had, all we could do was create some color bars at DV resolution. I was not only able to play that in the HD project, I could intercut it with HD. Unfortunately, the MC insisted on treating the SD clip as though it were 16×9, so it looked anamorphically stretched. But adding a reformat effect solved that problem, and the effect played without rendering.
I also tried making a cut list. And, not surprisingly, I ran into some new bugs. FilmScribe is not nearly as stable as it used to be. Lists out of MC used to handily beat those from FCP. I don’t know if that’s true anymore.
I heard about some other problems, too:
In Adrenaline you can output to SD with a pillar-box in real time. But you can’t do it with deck control. In other words, you can’t use digital cut, you can only crash record. That makes creating an SD tape pretty dicey and not particularly useful.
Worse, I was told about a bug in Adrenaline, that puts a delay into video on the client monitor. The result is that you can be in sync on the client, or on the record monitor, but not on both. The delay is four to six frames — not trivial. I didn’t see this myself, but I sure hope Avid engineering is doing whatever they can to fix it — pronto. The good news from my demo is that the problem only occurs with Adrenaline. Software only was in perfect sync.
All in all, an eye-opening couple of hours, and a lot of food for thought.
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