Stopping on a Dime?

Posted June 13, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut

A friend of mine, a longtime Media Composer editor, is cutting his first feature with Final Cut Pro 5, and yesterday I spent an hour with him. He’s having a good time and has become a strong advocate of the program, but when we got into the nitty gritty, he admitted to having some problems. He hates trim mode, finds it buggy and unpredictable and, as a result, is inclined to use it less than he did on the Avid. He finds cutting one sequence into another awkward. He doesn’t like the fact that he has to create many different projects — having everything in one project slows the system down too much.

There were some bugs visible, even in a brief demo — we often saw progress bars when making trivial trims and, at one point, video flickered horribly until the sequence was reloaded into the canvas.

He does like some of the effects capabilities. And he’s working at 1080p (via a BlackMagic card) and loved that a lot. He also likes the fact that you can load many sequences into the timeline and instantly switch between them.

I played with the system briefly and was struck by how responsive timeline scrolling is. Drag your cursor off the screen to the left or right and the timeline instantly scrolls with you.

But I also noticed that, at least in trim mode, the machine doesn’t stop instantly. When you hit pause there’s a palpable, several frame delay before it stops.

Media Composer version 2.7 has a similar, but less severe, problem. When you hit pause it stops instantly, but you hear a couple of frames of audio beyond the stop point. You have to set up a careful test to catch this, but it’s definitely there.

Once upon a time such problems were considered totally unacceptable. You can’t cut precisely if the machine won’t stop precisely. But maybe things are different now. Have we gotten to a point where responsive play control is no longer important — or are the manufacturers just getting sloppy? A 1950s-era Moviola stopped a lot more precisely than Final Cut Pro did yesterday.

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The Bill & Steve Show

Posted June 11, 2007 by Steve
Categories: User Interface

If you’re interested in the history of the personal computer revolution you owe it to yourself to check out the Steve and Bill show from the D5 conference two weeks ago. Gates and Jobs were on stage for a 90-minute interview moderated by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. You can listen to it or watch it from the iTunes store, see a highlight reel here, or check out a transcript. I listened to the audio yesterday, and though it doesn’t reveal anything radically new, it offers a unique perspective on the way these two leaders think and provides a few tantalizing hints about the future.

Gates referred at least three times to what he calls the “natural interface,” presumably a more general description of multi-touch. He clearly thinks it’s the wave of the future, and given that it’s the basis of the iPhone, so does Jobs.

Here’s a relevant quote:

I think natural user interface is particularly applicable here because the keyboard, you know, we’re sort of warped in that we grew up using the keyboard and so it’s extremely natural to us, but things like–and that’s partly why when we showed the Surface computer, I showed it privately to a bunch of CEOs a couple weeks ago, I was kind of stunned by how blown away they were. But their ease of navigation is just not the same. And when they saw that, the idea that they could organize their photo album, it meant more to them than it did to me.

Bill even talked briefly about editing a movie, a surefire sign that what we do is now totally mainstream.

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The Editing Room and the Waistline

Posted June 8, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Quality of Life

15% of kids 6 to 11 are now obese. Yes, you read that right. And a new study says that 60% of overweight incidents in children can be traced to too much time in front of the tube. If that’s true for kids, what about for us? Don’t we log more screen time than an average school kid?

When I taught editing a few years ago I sometimes saw the bodies of students change. Their minds and skill sets expanded — but their bodies did, too. And it isn’t just happening to students. Too often, the job just isn’t good for you.

What are the causes? Too many hours indoors is one problem. Not only does lack of sunlight make you tired and sick-looking, but it influences your mood as well. If you don’t see a half hour of daylight every day you can get what’s called “SAD,” or seasonal affective disorder, which manifests mainly as depression. The cure is sunlight, or artificial light that matches its spectral characteristics.

Posture and repetitive motion disorders are omnipresent, too. I’ll wager that every one of us knows somebody who’s had carpal tunnel symdrome, or something like it.

Not enough sleep is another hazard. So is stress. Here in the US we all make jokes about the French, but a 35 hour work week and 6 weeks of vacation a year go a long way toward making life livable.

And that waistline? A lot of it has to do with the lunches we eat. Take out — the fat and carb express. When you’re under stress you’re genetically programmed to want that stuff and it’s always hard to go for the salad when somebody else is having a cheeseburger and fries.

And, of course, we don’t get enough exercise. You’re supposed to do something physical every day — just a 20 or 30 minute brisk walk does wonders. But when we’re working the hours we do, that isn’t so easy.

Last summer I was able to do something unusual for me — I commuted to work on a bicycle. And the effects of doing that for three months were clearly visible on my body and in my mind. I got to work feeling refreshed, and I looked forward to the trip home every night.

It’s too bad that we can’t find a way to do that kind of thing more regularly. I love the work I do, but I love it even more when it’s part of a balanced life.

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Home Movie Gotchas

Posted June 5, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips, Avid vs. Final Cut

Now that I’ve got a software Media Composer running at home, I’ve been trying to use it to edit some home videos. And therein lies a tale. The material in question was shot with a Panasonic PV-GS120, a nice little consumer three-chip DV camera, and I used the camera as a deck, as well. I’ll try to summarize what happened below. Relevant error messages and screen shots are included.

First problem: disk space.
There’s a serious bug (in the capture tool?) that can cause the MC’s temporary “creating” files to balloon and fill up your disk. One minute I had 20+ gigs available on the drive, the next minute it was completely full. I don’t know exactly what caused this to happen but it occurred several times.

Creating

This is a big problem in itself, but it’s compounded by the fact that the MC can’t cope with a full disk. When your disk fills up you’ll soon be looking at a perpetual spinning beach ball — but you won’t be able force quit. The first force quit doesn’t even make the Media Composer disappear. Repeated attempts eventually dismiss the interface, but something hangs around, because when you go to the Finder and try to delete the “creating” files you discover that they’re in use. The result? You can’t even shut down the computer. The only way out is to hold down the power button to force a restart. I had to do that four times this weekend, and believe me, it got old. This is with a 1.5 Ghz G4 Mac laptop. I can’t remember the last time anything crashed on it.

Force Quit

Second problem: sync.
I discovered that if I digitize without selecting the timecode light, when I play back a long clip, sync will drift. Hitting stop and start again during playback fixes the problem. If I digitize with timecode, things seem to be okay.

But even when I captured with DV timecode, media still came in slightly out of sync. In frustration, I finally grabbed a slate and shot some tests, examining the digitized media frame by frame against an audio waveform. Avid lets you introduce an audio delay during digitizing. If I set it to one frame, audio comes in slightly ahead of where it should be. If I set it to two frames, it comes in late.

Third problem: logging.
This being consumer DV, I naturally tried digitizing without logging the tape. When you hit the red capture button the MC does the right thing — it starts playing the tape and digitizing at the same time. But when video runs out, it acts like there’s been an error, tells you that your media may be no good, and asks if you want to keep it. Of course I do! Every tape runs out — this isn’t an error!

Capture Aborted 2

So I tried logging the tape and batch capturing, instead. But here the MC gets hung up on whether the tape has drop or non-drop code. If I just do a crash digitize it tells me the code is non-drop. But if I log a tape that way and try to digitize, it tells me the tape has drop-frame code.

Drop Vs Nondrop

The solution is to log the tape and then modify the clip to drop frame. But even then the MC has a terrible time finding the start point of a clip. I have to cue the tape by hand and get very close or it won’t cue up.

More Problems
When the MC sees the camera/deck it controls it just fine. The trouble is that it often doesn’t see it. Sometimes you can solve the problem by selecting “auto-configure” from the deck pop-up in the capture tool. But often you have to restart the MC. Not fun. Another glitch: the MC defaults to a maximum clip length of 30 minutes. Until I figured that out and reset it in capture preferences, I couldn’t digitize whole tapes.

There were other problems, too. Here are a couple of other error messages that I saw. I can’t remember the exact circumstances anymore.

Digdverror

Transfersamples

Bottom Line
The procedure I finally settled on was: turn the deck on and wait a bit before starting the MC (to make sure it sees the deck), set the maximum clip length to 90 minutes and the audio delay to one frame, and do a crash digitize with timecode. I ignored the error message that appeared at the end of the reel, and scrupulously checked the size of the “creating” file after every tape was captured. That worked fairly reliably. But it sure took a long time to come up with that formula.

For what it’s worth, lil ol’ iMovie does a whole lot better. It loads complete tapes every time without ever complaining and without any configuration hassles. But, of course, you get non-standard media and your editing controls are very crude.

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Multi-touch Coming Soon

Posted June 2, 2007 by Steve
Categories: User Interface

Microsoft’s “Surface” technology, announced on Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference, is a multi-touch point-of-sale device for stores and casinos — a computerized coffee table that houses a little DLP projector and cameras to sense the positions of your hands. Priced at five to ten thousand bucks, they envision people using it for shopping and photo browsing, but over time, the form factor will evolve and the price will come down. Take a look at these links and tell me that you don’t want something like this for editing.

Popular Mechanics Video
PC World Story
Ars Technica Story
MS Surface Site

Microsoft implies that they invented it, and Apple, using related technology in the iPhone, does, too. But the original ideas came from university labs. I’ve talked about it before, here. Check out this video demo by NYU’s Jeff Han from last year’s TED conference.

Multi-touch offers multiple simultaneous points of interaction with the computer, as opposed to a mouse, which offers only one. And it allows for direct manipulation, where you physically touch the display. You get much more sensory bandwidth to the device, and, as a result, it feels more organic and intuitive. Microsoft’s system can also interact with tagged objects that are placed upon it.

I sure don’t want to edit hunched over a coffee table, but in the right form factor this might really be a slick way to work.

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Final Cut Reality Check

Posted June 1, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut

As people start using Final Cut 6 some of the hype is going to fall away and we’ll see what the program’s strengths and weaknesses really are. In a post on Editblog, Scott Simmons notes the extremely long analysis times that Apple’s SmoothCam requires (especially with HD). He also points out that times speed up considerably if you make a new master clip containing only the material cut into your show — otherwise the software analyzes the whole master clip, regardless of what you actually used. We sure didn’t see this in the demos Apple did.

I’m now very curious about how long Avid’s Stabilize effect would take on the same material. It’s not nearly as intuitive, but those multi-hour wait times on FCP look like a real disadvantage.

I’m also hearing from a friend that Compressor 3 is much slower than Compressor 2 on a quad-core G5. [Correction — it was a dual 2.0 G5.]

For its part, Avid introduced version 2.7 with a bad bug on Mac systems running Unity that can trash all your bins. Buyer beware — back up regularly. I’m sure hoping that one gets fixed real quick.

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