Can Avid Still Lead?

Posted April 26, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Final Cut

I’ve spent the last couple of days browsing through some of the post-NAB dialog on Avid-L2, the venerable Avid mail list and discussion group (now located in Yahoo Groups). Many of the people on the list have been active in the Avid community since the beginning, and their responses to this year’s NAB were pretty discouraging. Comments included:

  • “Avid hasn’t really upgraded the toolset in years.”
  • “While the basic edit functions are stable and reliable, the user experience remains lacking.”
  • “Avid is about Interplay and Unity and enterprise level solutions and not about editing systems.”
  • “Apple hasn’t told themselves that there’s no room to grow in the NLE market, and that’s why they steal customers from Avid every day.”
  • “If Avid is serious about staying in the NLE business for the long haul and taking a leadership position, it’s time for it to show editors something — anything — new and innovative.”
  • “I remember when the crowds at NAB around Avid’s booth were so large that security would have to try to clear the aisles. That’s sort of what the Apple booth was like.”
  • “It’s time for Avid to learn to innovate and lead again.”

Personally, I’m not quite so negative. Avid did introduce some new things — ScriptSync comes to mind, along with DNxHD 36. And the importance of a fast, portable Media Composer should not be underestimated. But I am also frustrated by how old and creaky some parts of the application feel.

Some people think that editing tools are now a commodity. I don’t agree. There’s plenty left to do. Here are just a few examples:

  • A Live Interface. I’m tired of being able to do absolutely nothing while video plays, or while exporting a Quicktime, or rendering an effect. A live interface will make everything else seem antiquated.
  • Background Saves. Heck, we had this in the Montage, and Pro Tools has it now.
  • Automatic Version Control. All I do all day is manage versions. The machine should help.
  • Better Mixing Capabilities. We need to be able to cut and paste keyframes and move them in groups. We need to be able to mix with sparse keyframes. We need waveforms that don’t extract a performance penalty. We need 5.1 capabilities and track nesting.
  • A New Titler. The Title Tool is almost 15 years old. It’s been showing it’s age for a decade.
  • Search Across Bins. How long have we been asking for this?
  • Improvements to Segment Mode. FCP is in segment mode all the time. I prefer Avid’s approach most of the time, but with a few improvements it would be possible to have the best of both worlds.

Give us just a few things like this and I wager we’d all get pretty excited again.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Comments: 4 Comments

Eliminating Regulation at OSHA

Posted April 25, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Quality of Life

Will it come to a surprise to anyone that under the Bush administration the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the organization that is supposed to protect people from workplace injuries, has mainly eliminated regulations and made life easier for business? Stephen Labaton lays this out in a revealing New York Times article today (also available here). The piece quotes Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University: “The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency. If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

And, big surprise, the article goes on to say, “Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA — transportation, agribusiness and construction — have given more than $630 million in political campaign contributions since 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans.”

I bring this up here because repetitive motion disorders — carpal tunnel and the like — have gotten little attention from the agency. Nor has monitor radiation, or other issues that impact so many of us who are staring at screens for 10 or 12 hours a day. Quoting the article again, “In one of his first acts in office, Bush signed legislation repealing one of OSHA’s most-debated accomplishments during the Clinton administration, an ergonomics standard intended to reduce injuries to factory, construction and office workers from repetitive motions and lifting.”

OSHA is headed by Edwin Foulke, who used to work for a law firm that advised companies on how to avoid unionization.

House and Senate committees are holding OSHA oversight hearings this week.

Comments: Be the first to comment

Clarifying Avid Project Types

Posted April 24, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut, Workflow

It seems like a lot of people are confused about the new “23.976p” Avid project type. This is an alternative to the traditional Avid film project (“24p”) and you can only work with such a project on a modern machine (Meridien 10.8 or later). People have been using it for roughly a year now and over time, it’s probably going to be widely adopted.

The difference between the two types is pretty subtle. In both, the machine digitizes from video running at 29.97 fps and removes pulldown (aka “reverse telecine”). You end up with the original 24 film frames. What makes the project types different is the audio sample rate that’s synchronized with picture.

In a traditional 24 fps project, pulled down audio is synched with pulled down video. That is, video running at 23.976 fps (or 29.97 fps) is synched with audio running at 47952. All the speeds are a tenth of a percent slower than their “normal” rates.

That has worked very well for the film industry for a decade and a half. But when this scheme was originally developed there was no such thing as digital videotape — and therein lies the rub. Digital videotape works differently, synchronizing pulled down video to full rate audio. Video running at 29.97 (or 23.976) syncs with audio running at 48K, not 47952.

A 23.976 project works like digital videotape, synchronizing pulled down video with full rate audio. That makes it appropriate for video-originated material shot at 23.976. It can be useful for film originated material, as well, because it can give you better sound in the Avid.

If your film was telecined to digital video, with dailies synchronized in telecine, and you’re loading from tape, then you want to load digitally, if possible. You won’t have to set audio or video levels and everything will be pristine. The problem is that in a traditional 24p film project your Avid expects to see video at 29.97 and audio at 47952. Unfortunately, your tape has audio running at 48K. In Meridien, this was handled with “poor man’s sample rate conversion” — the system simply dropped audio samples to convert 48K to 47952. That worked okay for dialog but it’s not ideal.

In Adrenaline that trick won’t work — sync will drift. So you’ll have to load your audio analog. (Your audio will also have to be analog when you play out to digital videotape.) The alternative is to use the 23.976p project type. That will allow you to load everything digitally.

There are a couple of issues that you should be aware of. First, your sound editors will have to work differently, and set their Pro Tools systems to work 48K “not pulled down” — the way they would for a 29.97 project or a show that shoots on video. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it will be a surprise, and they should be warned — before you make a final decision about your project type.

The second issue has to do with production audio and how it’s recorded. On a film shoot, audio is normally recorded at 48K with 30 fps timecode. When that audio lands in telecine it gets pulled down for transfer — to 47952. But the tape wants to see 48K, so, even though the 23.976 project has allowed you to create a digital audio path in your cutting room, you’re facing at a sample rate conversion in telecine. The answer is for production to shoot audio at 48048. When that audio is pulled down in telecine it’ll end up at 48K and will go to your digital videotape without conversion. If your final delivery format is HD video, then shooting at 48048 means that dialog can run through your whole workflow without sample rate conversion.

Here are a few rules of thumb:

1. If you are shooting on film and transferring to tape and your workflow is well established, there’s no need to change it. You still want to use a traditional 24p project type.

2. If you are shooting on HD video at 23.976, then you want the 23.976 project type.

3. If you are shooting on film and telecineing to digital video and you want the purest audio you can get in the Avid, you may want to consider a 23.976 project. For even better audio in the Avid, production should shoot at 48048. (This is especially true if you’re making a TV show where your final delivery will be on HD tape.) But before you try this, check with your post supervisor, production mixer and sound effects supervisor. Make sure everybody is on board.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a table that lays out the rates:

Shoot Project Production Telecined to In Avid & PT
Film-24 fps 24p 48K/30 fps TC 29.97 or 23.976/48K 23.976/47952
Film-24 fps 23.976p 48K or 48048/30 TC 29.97 or 23.976/48K 23.976/48K
Video-23.976 23.976p 48K/29.97 TC 23.976/48K 23.976/48K

Final Cut, for what it’s worth, only works one way — like digital videotape. That’s simpler, but less flexible. It works in a video-dominated world, but can present problems in certain circumstances with film production.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Comments: 8 Comments

Good Articles About Avid vs. FCP

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

If you’re interested in comparing FCP and the Media Composer, or if you’re familiar with one program and want to learn the other, you might want to check out this page on Scott Simon’s Editblog. The articles cover a variety of topics and go pretty deep. Interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Color

Posted April 22, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Final Cut, Workflow

Apple’s Color application certainly looks impressive, and it offers lots of power for low bucks. But I wonder how often I would actually use it in a typical “offline” situation. Moreover, it turns out that it’s not realtime at all, according to this very interesting post from Stu Maschwitz, one of the founders of the Orphanage and author of The DV Rebels Guide.

Maybe it’s a weakness of mine but I find it damn near impossible to color correct effectively if I can’t go back and play through a scene or a few cuts and look at what I did while video plays. I tend to go back and forth repeatedly — play, adjust, play, adjust and the faster that cycle is, the better the work. Apparently, you can’t do that in Color. You have to render the whole sequence and then play it in Final Cut. You also can’t run Color on a 15″ MacBook Pro, which is going to frustrate a lot of people. And I’m not clear about how it deals with picture changes.

Avid’s color corrector isn’t perfect — it’s worst feature, by far, is that you have to jump out of the color correction mode to play from one cut to another — but you have a lot of control and the corrections are all realtime.

Apple’s game plan is to give you all the tools you need to completely finish your film in the Final Cut environment. For folks who never plan to enter an online bay or DI suite that’s pretty exciting. But I don’t work that way. For me, it’s much more important that color correction be simple, effective and instantly available.

Nevertheless, Apple has once again shaken up our workflows and job descriptions. As Maschwitz points out, Apple is doing what it has done many times before — making high end tools available to everybody. We’re going to see a lot of bad color now, just as we saw bad graphic design at the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution. And we’re probably going to see more competition for colorist positions and, long term, an erosion of rates. Colorists, welcome to the revolution.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Comments: 6 Comments

Soundtrack Pro Workflow

Posted April 20, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Audio, Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Final Cut, Workflow

The more I look at the specs for Soundtrack Pro the more I like it. This application is really slick and does all kinds of things that I can’t do in my Avid. It offers non-destructive editing, a very nice looking tool for dealing with picture changes, simple speed adjustments, 5.1 panning and track nesting, easily applied and customizable audio dissolves, elaborate tools for repairing dialog, and nice analog-style scrubbing. It runs without extra hardware and integrates well with Final Cut.

There are a few obvious omissions: no ability to work in feet and frames, a limited track count (I was told that it maxes out at 32. Is this true?), and a clear dependence on the mouse for trimming and slipping (similar to Final Cut’s slip tool). Those certainly aren’t fatal, though, and putting all that power on the desktop for such a low price is wonderful.

The problem for me is that I don’t want this stuff in a separate application. Soundtrack seems like a worthy alternative for sound editors, but for a picture editor like me, the idea that I’m going to frequently switch back and forth from FCP to STP just isn’t efficient. What I really want are much better mixing and sound editing tools in the primary application.

I’ve mentioned some of this stuff before (Wish List #1 – Audio and Why Are Our Mixing Tools So Bad?) so I won’t go into all the gory detail here. But I badly need the ability to leave waveforms on all the time, to move automation around independent from the sound itself, and to easily make different kinds of crossfades. Final Cut offers several things that the Media Composer doesn’t, namely the ability to lay down sparse keyframes when mixing, and an onscreen mixer that isn’t limited to eight tracks. But neither program lets you move keyframes numerically, neither lets you move a group of keyframes at all, and neither lets you mix a group of tracks as if they were one thing — you can only make level adjustments within a clip.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that I don’t want to be switching back and forth between two applications to do the kind of temp mixing that is now routine for picture editors. I don’t want to be conforming my own changes. I don’t want to wonder which application to use when working with a director. I don’t really need all the power of Soundtrack Pro or Pro Tools, but I do need some of it and I want it in the main application.

As a footnote, what’s with all this “Pro” stuff? Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools — it’s getting downright embarrassing. The word is so overused that it’s become meaningless. If I’m a professional and your program is for me, then putting “pro” in the name just makes me worry that you “protest too much,” as the bard would say. Yes, sir, I sure am professional! Heck it’s in my name! Every time I hear “pro” I think “amateur.”

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Comments: 4 Comments

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »