More Things Pro Tools Does Right

Posted May 30, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, User Interface

Harry Miller’s column in the latest ACE Magazine covers the many things he likes about the Pro Tools timeline. I couldn’t agree more, and I’ve mentioned many of these things in a previous post. Harry also talks about the ability to create a group of effects and save them as a single object, and the ability to reshape a fade by clicking and dragging.

Avid ought to incorporate this stuff into the MC. They certainly have the expertise to do it, if not from the Pro Tools or Media Composer engineering teams, then from the Fast/Avid Liquid group.

Liquid offers a live timeline, background rendering, simple project backups, the ability to work with a stereo pair as a single object, 5.1 capabilities and direct DVD authoring from within the program. Some of its appealing features are described in this post on AE Portal News.

When Apple buys a company it rapidly incorporates the purchased technology into its flagship products. When Avid buys a company it too often puts it on autopilot. That might be good for existing customers over the short term, but long term it’s wasteful and self-destructive.

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Nine to Five

Posted May 29, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Quality of Life

Does anybody remember working nine to five? The last time I did that on a regular basis was in the late ’70s. I recall that it was a near-blissful experience: a regular work schedule and a genuine life after work every day. That’s never been the rule in post-production but it was once the rule for most of corporate America and, guess what, it profoundly changes your life — and your family’s life.

In France, the standard work week is now 35 hours. Americans can’t believe that. It’s so foreign to us that we just can’t process it.

I remember a meeting of union activists I attended many years ago. We went around the room and talked about things we’d wish for. I said that my main wish was to go home while the sun was still shining. That got a big laugh from everybody. Ha ha! Never happen!

Does what we do really require 14- or 16-hour days? Or is it simply a habit we’ve collectively adopted? The culture is so frenetic and competitive that we can no longer go home at a reasonable hour without feeling that we’re somehow cheating. The only way you can get your life back, it seems, is by working at home — and then you can’t go home at all.

Generations of editors have lived with this work ethic and some have died at their Moviolas, valiantly pushing on. The non-linear revolution hasn’t changed this at all. We bemoan the crisis of values in our culture, the lack of family connections, the alienation. And we keep on working.

Haskel Wexler’s film “Who Needs Sleep” covers this subject in compelling detail. You can buy the DVD here. He’s also started a group called “12 On / 12 Off,” which focuses on creating reasonable work schedules in the film business.

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Shared Project vs. Shared Media

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

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.

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Avid’s Road Show

Posted May 23, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut, Workflow

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.

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Avid’s NAB Road Show Tonight

Posted May 22, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid

Avid will show off its new offerings tonight at the “Pure Passion” event in Hollywood.

6:30 – 9:00 p.m.
Production Group Studios – Stage 20
1330 Vine Street
Hollywood 90028

Validated parking at the Arclight Theater (use the DeLongpre entrance).

Details are here. Be sure to RSVP.

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NAB in Hindsight

Posted May 18, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut

Looking back at Apple’s DGA event and Keycode’s ScriptSync demo (described here and here), I’m starting to get a feeling for what those of you who went to NAB this year must have felt. Avid’s announcements for editors were just eclipsed by Apple’s. Our friends in Tewksbury seem much more focused on asset management and on pleasing big corporate customers than they are on inspiring their original customer base — editors like me.

The non-linear editing revolution has been all about democratizing our technology. Avid was at the forefront of this revolution for years. But at every turn now, it seems, Apple trumps Avid by bringing down the price point for yet another supposedly high-end product and integrating it into the Final Cut environment. Even though many editors will never use Color, they are drawn to what it represents: the destruction of another barrier to entry, the possibility that you can do it all from your spare bedroom.

Apple also continues to innovate in terms of the editing UI. Soundtrack, Motion and Color are chock full of interface improvements, new ways to visualize and manipulate our increasingly complex sequences. From Color’s 3D spectrum display, to Soundtrack’s intuitive panner and contextual toolbar, to Motion’s 3D controls and semi-automatic tracker, the message was that these tools feel responsive and expressive and are fun to use.

Media Composer is a whole lot better right now than it was even a year ago. Without a lot of flash, Avid has been slowly and steadily improving it, and it remains, despite everything we’ve seen from Apple, the best tool for the kind of work I do. ScriptSync and DNX36, though not particularly flashy, are probably going to change my life. Many of the new features in Final Cut Studio, exciting as they are, won’t.

Avid’s new ad, on the back of Post Magazine this month, uses the tagline “Pure Belief.” That’s better than anything I’ve heard from them in a long time. But I sure hope they’re busy working on new features, too. They face the real challenge of re-inventing the Media Composer from the inside out — without damaging the hundreds of subtle enhancements that have been built up over nearly two decades of editor feedback. That won’t be easy.

More than ever, they need to inspire editors with a clear vision of the future.

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