Splice Now

The last item described at Avid’s Tuesday night seminar was a new Digidesign product called “Avid Satellite.” It’s a stripped-down Media Composer designed as a video player to be used in conjunction with Pro Tools.

Digi has been encouraging sound editors to buy Mojo boxes in order to play picture. Not only is this expensive, but it restricts your track count to 48, which, for many editors, is a non-starter.

This new system puts the picture on its own machine, which is a software-based Media Composer with most editing functions disabled. So sound editors will have to buy the Satellite software along with a computer and monitor to run it on. The system can play anything a Media Composer can play. And track level editing is possible, so a sound editor can create a mix and attach it to picture and send it back to the picture editing room.

The advantage for the picture department is time — you don’t have to make Quicktimes. With a simple menu pick, you create an aaf file and consolidated media to match. You then send it to the sound department any way you like. If you make changes and need to send the sequence again, the system is smart enough to only send the extra media needed for the changes — it knows what you’ve already sent, though I wasn’t quite sure how this works.

For sound, this approach is a mixed bag. The good news is that since video is running on its own machine, the sound system can devote all its resources to audio — no slowdowns or track limitations due to video overhead. Quality is very good, of course. Sound editors see the same image that the picture editors do and can play it full screen, if desired. They can also see all picture cuts and jump to them as needed. The bad news is that editors will have to buy new computers just to play picture, along with the Satellite software. And they’ll have to make sure they have space for the new hardware. Satellite software pricing isn’t set, but it will probably be somewhere around $3500.

Interlock between the two systems runs over an Ethernet connection and seemed very tight in the demo, with near instantaneous back and forth play via JKL — much better than a typical Media Composer alone. Scrubbing wasn’t demonstrated.

I’ll have some thoughts about what all this means in the next post.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Though most of Avid’s Tuesday night Insider Seminar was devoted to Interplay, several other technologies were demonstrated that in the short term might mean more to feature and TV editors.

The first is DNxHD-36 compression. This is a highly compressed HD codec that’s looking more and more like an upcoming standard for our editing rooms. At 1080p, it takes up roughly triple the space on disk that our trusty 1:14 media did (100,000 feet of film would use 300 GB), but in exchange, you get images that look dramatically better and can be projected and used for previews. Real-time visual effects are said to work well with this codec and Michael Phillips, who did the demo, indicated that you could play six multi-cam images simultaneously with it.

We saw some comparisons on a projector but the system was downrezing everything to 720P and that, more than anything, limited our ability to see differences. Nevertheless, DNx36 is a huge improvement over our old standard-def editing materials and I, for one, am eager to start using it. The catch, for those of you still hanging on to your Meridien systems, is that you can’t do this with your old machines.

Phillips also demonstrated automatic voice recognition for Avid’s venerable script-integration tools. You load your script from a word processing file and attach a shot to the script. Then, you tell the software to listen to the audio and, in just a couple of seconds, it automatically “lines” the take, indicating the place where every line of dialog begins. Once your dailies are loaded this way, you can instantly and easily listen to all the coverage for a particular line or group of lines, back to back. The software is amazingly effective and very fast.

Avid’s script-integration has never caught on here, partially because the extra time and effort required to line the film. That issue has now been eliminated and we may see more people using these tools. Again, Adrenaline or MC-software is required for this feature.

Both of these things will be available shortly. Another Media Composer technology, and perhaps the most important one, wasn’t actually demonstrated. That’s Media Composer for the Mac-Intel platform. The company has been working on this for a long time and many of us are eager to get our hands on it. It’s now slated for release in mid-March, just a week or two from now.

Another long-awaited feature, Avid’s real-time footage and timecode burn-in tool, is slated for release in the next couple of months. The current version works pretty well but is awkward to use, and the fact that it has to be rendered makes it useful only to the most patient. A real-time version would do a lot to streamline the turnover process for many cutting rooms.

Tomorrow — a new Avid-centric video player for Pro Tools.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Avid presented the latest in their “Insider” seminar series last night, this time at the Skirball Center at the top of the Sepulveda pass. The session was presented by Michael Phillips and Matt Feury from Tewksbury, along with Scott Wood of Digidesign and Michael Krulik and others from Avid Burbank.

Though it might seem like an odd place for a post-production seminar, the Skirball turned out to be a great venue. It’s a beautiful facility with a modern, spacious screening room, and a big, inviting lobby area where good food and drink was served. It’s equidistant from the valley and the west side, very close to the freeway and has plenty of parking. The rush hour drive wasn’t great but it was considerably easier than I expected.

Four technologies were demonstrated:

• Avid’s Interplay “asset manager”
• DNxHD 36 for offline high definition editorial
• automatic voice recognition for script integration
• and a new video player for Pro Tools

The presenters worked together to show off the way the different systems interacted and, in general, did a very good job. There was a lot of equipment involved, all routed into a central projector, and I suspect that it took plenty of time and elbow grease to set everything up and make it work seamlessly. There was enough material presented to cover several seminars, so there’s much to talk about, and it will take me several posts to cover it all.

I’ll start with Interplay. It’s an entirely new suite of products designed to make it easy for a group of people to work with almost any kind of digital media. Physically, it’s a server that sits on top of Unity, along with a software-only player and an extension to the Media Composer. The server costs $18,000. Mike Cavanagh, from Keycode Media, thought it might rent for about $600-700 a week.

The idea is that a modern production is dealing with an avalanche of files: stills, video, audio, visual effects. They live in different places and lots of people need access to them. Each file is typically a modification of something else, and you need a way to organize all those versions. The Interplay server manages all this stuff and makes it available to various people, either in your facility or over the Internet. Each person gets a specific amount of access, and the Interplay engine creates and handles a history for each file. Producers, directors and others can view files, and log them or annotate them with comments via a software-only player. Editors interface with the system using their Media Composers, which will include a set of tools to deal with the Interplay server.

This is a whole new idea for feature film folks and it’s going to take a while for people, me included, to digest it all. It allows you to do an unprecedented amount of media sharing, and that means it will change the way we relate to producers and directors and others. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view. Editors will have to make use of a new tools that seem quite powerful, but they have a techie, Windows-centric feel that isn’t particularly familiar. (For the moment, all the software is Windows-only.)

The versioning tools allow you to work on a sequence and periodically check it in to the server, which will register your latest creation as a version, complete with a set of comments that you add. You can then use the server to step through the versions or “roll back” to a previous one. I like the idea — I think we all spend way too much timing dealing with versions — but whether this approach simplifies things remains to be seen.

In general, the system seems to make the most sense for a large workgroup, say a crew working on a reality show. Eric Rigney from Sony suggested that it might also be valuable for a big feature with lots of visual effects. It’s harder to see how all that horsepower would work for an independent feature film. And the fact that right now there are no Mac versions is going to slow adoption in Los Angeles.

The other technologies shown last night seemed more immediately interesting on a typical feature film or TV show. More on that tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video