To Gloss or Not to Gloss?

Posted June 26, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Laptop Editing

I’m about to replace my G4 laptop with a 15″ Macbook Pro. And I’m torn about the screen. This will be a general purpose computer — email & web, word processing, some editing and still photography (using a second monitor when possible).

I’ve looked at the glossy and matte screens pretty carefully. Glossy seems sharper and I tend to like it better — but if you have a light source behind your head, you see reflections clearly. For editing, glossy makes video look more like a TV, and thus more appealing, but for stills it seems almost too sharp and edgy.

Does anybody here have experience with the new glossy screens on the Macbook Pros? What do you think? Better or worse?

Comments: 12 Comments

More on the Title Tool

Posted June 26, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Grant has posted some great suggestions for a new title tool on his blog “Avid Tips.” He’s hoping you all will weigh in with your ideas, either here or on his site, and then he hopes to collect all the material from both blogs (see my previous post) and present it to his friends at Avid. I think that’s a great idea, so I hope you will add your comments here or on Avid Tips and let us know what you’d like to see.

Meanwhile, I’ll add a few additional suggestions. Though I think the title tool needs to be scraped and replaced, there are some things that Avid could do short-term that would help, too.

For example:

  1. Improve the way a title’s bounding box resizes. No matter what you do, the size of the box that contains a title adjusts every time you change the font or font size — but, like an old Detroit seatbelt, the box can get tighter, but it can never get loser. When you switch to a font with narrower letters, the box gets smaller. If you then switch back to the original font, it doesn’t get bigger again, the line breaks change. Even undo doesn’t get around this bug.
  2. Put render files for changed titles where I want them. Every time I change a title, a new master clip is created — and it automatically goes into the same bin as the sequence that contained the original title. That’s not where I want them. Please let me specify a bin for these things.
  3. Work on the typography. I have a lot of fonts installed. They look fine in every application — except in the MC, where kerning is so uneven that it’s almost comical. No matter what font I pick I can’t make a good-looking title.

And finally, make it easier to create a series of similar titles. Let’s say I’ve made a title card I like. I now want to make 10 or 12 more with the same font, size, drop shadow, alignment, length and fade length. The easiest way to do that is to copy the title, put it into the source monitor, cut it in again, and modify the text. Sounds easy, right? Well, here are the steps:

  • Mark in and out on the existing title. Select the appropriate track. Hit command-option-c (copy to source monitor).
  • Mark in on the record monitor and edit the old title to a new position.
  • Park over the title, go into effects mode, then select the little “modify” button on the effects palette.
  • The title tool opens, change your text, resize the bounding box, as needed (#1, above).
  • Close the title tool. The precompute is saved (in the wrong place — #2, above).
  • So much for the first title of 10.
  • Now make another. Woops — the title I carefully placed in the source monitor is now gone, replaced by the full master clip of the modified title. So — start over at the top of the list.

All this to copy one title and change its text.

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Comments: 4 Comments

Fixing the Title Tool

Posted June 24, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Avid needs to start building a suite to compete with Apple and Adobe. It’s got the best video ap, and it’s got the best audio ap (except that it won’t work software-only). That’s a pretty good start. Avid certainly needs a DVD tool and a compression utility. But, for my money, the first order of business is a title animation tool to compete with Motion.

Titling is now part of the responsibility of most editors on all kinds of shows. These days, I help create the main title on every show I work on. And I’d do more if the tools were better. But the Avid tools are antiquated. You can’t create a modern, nuanced title with the Title Tool and it takes way, way too much work to do it with Marquee.

Avid can look at this as a problem or as an opportunity. The opportunity is to start with a clean slate and create something better than what the other guy is offering.

Here what I’d like to see:

  1. Don’t make a separate title application — build this functionality into the MC. I have no interest in creating a separate title project to go along with my MC project. I don’t want to manage both, archive both and move back and forth between them. I want the whole thing integrated into one environment.
  2. It should be as live as possible. The editor should design based on moving video.
  3. It should work with organic actions, like Motion does — or with keyframes. The editor should be able to move back and forth between these approaches as needed.
  4. It should support the use of a tablet or touch pad to create complex movements by showing the system what you want.
  5. It should be vector-based. No rendering. Simple scaling. Easy changes.
  6. It should offer title styles. Create your style, then create titles based on it. Want to make a change to all of them, say a different font or font size? Just change the style and all titles update automatically.
  7. It should export digital mattes at any resolution you want. That’s how you get your work out of the MC and into the finishing system of your choice. And it should do intelligent aspect ratio conversions, so you can work at letter-boxed standard def and still create useful mattes for HD or film.

Now wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t you do a lot more slick title work if you had a tool like that?

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Comments: 4 Comments

More Home Movie Woes

Posted June 19, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

I did some more work cutting together home movies on Media Composer software over the weekend. And I discovered that the “stop delay” is even worse than I thought. With standard def 14:1 media (PAL) the problem is relatively subtle (picture stops precisely, audio continues to play for two frames). But with Firewire-acquired DV the delay is much longer — four or five frames, picture and sound. It’s just downright impossible to cut accurately this way. You have to noodle every cut and there’s no such thing as working reflexively and feeling a cut point. Simple trims take twice as long as they should (the delay seems to be worse in trim mode).

Maybe this is because my master clips are an hour long. I don’t know. But I do know that this ought to be fixed pronto.

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Comments: 4 Comments

In LA, It’s All About Traffic

Posted June 18, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Quality of Life, Workflow

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?

Comments: 4 Comments

Upresing Without Tears

Posted June 15, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

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?

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Comments: 13 Comments

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