Blu-ray and Macs

As I've said before on this blog, Apple isn't giving Blu-ray any love. No drives, no playback, no authoring software. Apple is supposed to offer some support for burning Blu-ray data discs now, but Apple has been slow to jump on the next-gen for optical media (remember how Apple was out in front with DVD players in their computers back in the day?).

Right now, 3rd party software is providing support for burning. Toast 8 and 9 let you burn data Blu-ray. Toast 9 is supposed to let you burn high-def video to Blu-ray that will playback on Blu-ray players. But Adobe's Encore, part of Production Premium CS3, is now the best solution for putting high-def video onto Blu-ray. With a Blu-ray burner on the way to Link TV, and a copy of CS3 Production Premium available, we are on our way to burning our first Blu-ray discs. (Now if I can only convince my boss to buy a high-def TV and a PS3, so we could play the darn things.)

Adobe can encode your video for you, but there's a recent blog post Apple's Compressor & Encore Blu-Ray from Adobe that helps you figure out how to encode your high-def in Compressor. Adobe gets kudos for playing well with others. They don't pretend like they are the end-all and be-all of post-production software and that anything you would ever want to do can be done on their software. And I like the concept of an Adobe blog as a personable way to distribute info about software. The closest thing Apple gets to providing updated info on their software is their antiseptic support documents.

Adobe can't find a way to get h.264 encoding from Compressor working with Blu-ray, so they are using MPEG-2 encoding. Adobe will encode your high-def to h.264 for you, but it's nice not to have to do an export of your entire high-def show before you even start to encode.

I found this blog post over at Final Cut User who is also bemoaning Apple's lame response to Blu-ray.

NAB 2008

Well, 2 weeks after it started, I'm finally coming out with a NAB post. It wasn't a huge post-production year at NAB--Apple and Avid didn't have booths. And no new products from Adobe. All the major camera manufacturers had some new models. But I've been blogging too much about cameras that I'll probably never work with, and none of the new cameras introduced any real post ramifications. I found the best coverage of NAB at two sites: Pro Video Coaltion and FreshDV. They have good coverage of new stuff from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, JVC, and RED.

There were a couple of post-production things that were interesting, but not earth shattering. Blackmagic Design added HDMI in and out to their $1000 Decklink HD Extreme card. They keep cramming more and more features into their cards. At this point AJA only matches Decklink's in and out on the aprrox. $3000 Io HD (which stole the show last year). I like AJA's gear but they aren't staying competitive feature-wise with Blackmagic. Heck, the analog-only and standard-def only IOLA is still selling for $1K.

Blackmagic also announced a little USB thingy called simply Video Recorder that captures standard-def video straight to h.264. So there's digitizing hardware and h.264 compression in a tiny piece of plastic that plugs right into a USB port. For $120 you get analog capture with the Blackmagic Video Recorder. For $300, you get SDI-only input and RS-422 deck control. Sort of like Elgato's Turbo.264 with video capture too. Not sure how we would use this. It's basically like a quick-and-dirty way to capture really compressed video. Hopefully it will do a good job with the compression. Seems like they should have it work with some PVR software like Elgato's EyeTV.

Matrox came out with a something like a competitor to the Io HD. The MXO2 is portable I/O hardware for about $1600. Unlike the Io HD, you can do uncompressed HD if you want. But unlike the Io HD there's no built-in codec support. A great thing about the Io HD is that it will transcode to ProRes in the box. ProRes is pretty processor-intensive to transcode in real-time--for HD you need 4 Intel Xeon cores at a minimum. So I don't see how you could capture HD on a laptop with the MXO2. It hooks up to a tower through a PCI-E card and to MacBook Pro through Expresscard slot (so no support on iMac's or Macbooks.) It also is supposed to do up/down/cross-conversion and claims support for Adobe Premiere Pro and of course FCP.

Last year, Telestream announced Pipeline, a network encoder/capture-device. It basically has an SDI input, SDI output, rs-422, port, and an ethernet port. Because it's on an ethernet network and any computer can use it--it doesn't need a host computer to run. It could be a good way to share a deck with SDI in/out between different computers. It also can layback to tape, but I'd like to see it as the capture and lay off are done through Telestream's software. A cool thing they were showing at NAB was the ability to start working on video while it was being captured. They demo'd an encode in Telestream Episode Pro of video that was being captured. HD support is supposed to be on the way for Pipeline. They also announced Pipeline support for Final Cut Server.

Finally in the "Shape of the Things to Come?" category, there's Maximum Throughput and their MAXedit systems. It's network and web-based editing. No beefy computer needed to edit your footage. Maximum Throughput hosts all of the heavy-lifting on the a server and then the editor is accessing all of the footage and the heavy-lifting through the network using any-old PC as a simple client. There's also a web version too for remote editing. Sounds cool. If you read my last post on Final Cut Server, I was bemoaning a crucial missing feature--editing. Last year Apple said that Final Cut Server clients could do some editing of footage on the server. But this year, not a mention of editing for Final Cut Server. I'm hoping that we'll see the feature in a year, but I'm worried that Apple is protecting sales of Final Cut Pro and Mac's. Network-based editing not only undercuts sales of licenses for expensive editing software, but also hardware-sales. With network-based editing, you don't have to worry about each editor having the latest and greatest Mac. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never heard about of Maximum Throughput. But I think they are really on to something.

Final Cut Server

After existing as vaporware for a year, Apple sprang Final Cut Server on us right before NAB. It's now shipping. There are two versions. Feature-wise they are identical. At $1,000, you get a version that will host up to 10 concurrent clients using the server. At $2,000, unlimited folks can log into the server at once.

Seems like since it was first announced a year ago a few important features have been stripped from it. But I'm still pretty excited about this program. It seems like it adds a whole new powerful set of organizational tools for editors and producers. It could help in complex workflows or complex projects where multiple personnel are working with media. Apple is describing Final Cut Server as both an asset management application and an automation workflow program.

The asset management part of FC Server basically sets up a giant database that's a library for any and all media that you have on your Mac's--the library is in one spot (a Mac) but accessible to just about anyone on your network (including Windows users).

For editors, it's easy enough to get started with asset management. Tell it where you keep your Final Cut Pro projects are and FC Server will go through all of the clips in the projects. Any metadata associated with that clip in Final Cut Project will be copied over into FC Server. FC Server will also keep track when a clip is in more than one project--nice if you are ever wondering if you borrowed a clip from one project to put in another when it's time to clear old media off of drives. FC Server creates proxies versions of all this media--basically smaller versions of the original media. These proxies are easy to playback over a network and can even remain on the server when the original media has been deleted. So even if you can't keep all of the original media, you can still see a proxy on the server. Examples of formats for proxies are h.264 and Apple ProRes.

All of the data is fully searchable. Movies, graphics, most any file can be added in FC Server. You can also sort assets under productions. So once you do this, FC Server lets any client access any of this info. Up to 10 concurrent users for the $1K version and unlimited users for the $2K version. The server part of FC Server runs on Mac Pro's, MacBook Pro's, most iMac's, and Power Macs made within the last 3 years or so. But it looks like the client will run on just about any decent Mac and on Windows XP and Vista. That means a producer on a PC can browse through assets through the proxies. Also, FC Server requires Final Cut Studio 2.

In the pre-release info from last year, Apple said that some basic cutting could be done on the client. I can't seem to find anything about that on Apple's website now. I really hope they didn't pull that feature permanently. Editing on the FC Server client would be a great way for producers to be able to do simple assemblies of things. I hope a great feature didn't get cut because somebody at Apple complained that an editing feature would cut too much into sales of Final Cut Studio.

FC Server also tracks movies for approval and notes. Put a movie on the server, and FC Server can host it to any client. That way, a producer can quickly check something out on their PC without leaving their office and then post notes through the FC Server interface. Notes can be attached to a movie and attached at specific time codes. FC Server can also keep track of multiple versions of a project. So editors can make notes on a project, so other folks can know quickly what work has been done.

The automation workflow seems most helpful for encoding tasks. FC Server can watch a folder for any files that pop up. Once a file appears (e.g., after it's been exported from FCP), FC Server can begin encoding it through Compressor or run a script to send to, for example, send it to another app. If you are lucky to have enough to have access to a broadcast server, FC Server can send files there with some extra help available with Telestream's Episode. It's nice that all of these deliverables can be tracked in one place too. For example, I'd use it to track MPEG-2 files encoded for DVD's, which now are stored all over my hard drives.

Final Cut Server also helps you delete and backup media. For example you can delete media directly through FC Server, and it will tell you all of the projects that a clip is used in. It will help you archive media or move projects around the network. I'm not going to cover all of the features in this article. More good info on how you might use it at Apple's website.

OK, so here are some specific ideas about how Final Cut Server could help at Link.

EDITORS
As an editor, I'm always looking for media. Often, I'll need something on another system. Our current solution is for me to network to that computer. Then I have to figure out which project the media was stored in. I can often play back those files over the network. But if the other computer is older and/or busy with a big encode or render, then I might have some problems. With FC Server, I could search by file name, project name, reel # across anything that we've ever edited. Instead of trying to use another editor's computer as a file server, I can check out clips using FC Server's proxy files. So streamlined searching for media. Plus, the proxies can hang around even after the original media has been deleted. So it really opens up the amount of media that I can scan through without relying on tapes. Yippee!

Plus, FC Server sounds like it's easy to get up and running to catalog your existing media and projects. I just tell it where the Final Cut Pro projects are, and it start cataloging and making proxies. Now it's going to take a long time for the server to make all those proxies files--lots of encoding to h.264 to make proxies that are small enough to store and move quickly over the network. That's not going to happen overnight.

PRODUCERS
Producers will have the same ability to search and watch media as editors. Producers can watch through proxies video that's been captured. No more waiting to use a Beta deck or, even trickier at our facility, a DVCam deck. If the footage has been captured then producers have as much access to the media as editors.

Busy producers no longer have to come by the edit room to review materials. The editor drops an exported movie into FC Server, and FC Server creates a proxy. Then the producer can watch the proxy movie over the network. Notes are added through the FC Server client app and are stored on the server.

NEWS ARCHIVES
We have three large projects of monitoring international news. FC Server allows the option of adding proxy movies to a database of news. The FC Server interface allows for a centralized database that is connected directly to actual media. I could see news reports getting converted to h.264 proxy movies. A producer could quickly search for stories, then organize them into a project. This info can be seen by an editor or assistant who can begin converting the video to DV for editing in Final Cut Pro.

As far as I can tell, FC Server is being billed for in-house use I'm not sure how open it is to the internet. Maybe it's not internet-friendly or maybe Apple is being conservative about those features because of security concerns or the hassles of streaming media over the internet. To put that valuable of a server on the internet must carry some significant security risks (not that I'm a network and/or server expert.)

Like the simple editing feature, last year Apple was touting client access over the internet. Now, Final Cut Server doesn't say anything about the internet. I can only hope that internet access to the FC Server is coming in the future.

CAVEAT
OK, as an Apple fanboy, I'm usually onboard with Apple as soon as a product is announced (or even rumored.) But I've been burned before, and it's good to be wary of 1.0 products. Especially something this complex--a giant database with 1,000's of associated media files. I'll look forward to hearing some reports of folks who are actually using it, and even better see it in action. At this point, everything I know about Final Cut Server I've gleaned from their website. If you are interested in the product, I encourage you to check it out--there are some good video tutorials/demo movies there where you can see Final Cut Server in action.

Will Your Next Project Come from a $150 Camcorder?

Check this out:
"Flip Video Vlog: A Tale of Two Formats"

This guy literally taped a $150 Flip camcorder to a Canon XH-A1 and made the same exact film on both cameras. You can watch them back to back on his website. Basically, there's not too much difference when watching them in web video, and I couldn't hear much difference on my MacBook Pro's speakers (the audio for the Flip footage was recorded on an iPod using a microphone accessory.)

Now on a TV, I'm sure the difference would be readily apparent (not to mention the fact that the XH-A1 is a nice high-def camera and the Flip only records 640x480.) Oh and the Flip doesn't even have an optical zoom not to mention dozens of features that a $3000 camcorder has. But it does make you think about how cheaply and easily someone can make something now that is very watchable.

If you are interested more in reading more about the Flip camcorder, check out this review at the New York Times (registration req'd.) Their tech guy David Pogue shoots his video blog on the Flip phone.