Final Cut Server--Extra Credit

I did a big post on Final Cut Server last month. If you have not read it, please do. It covers what FC Server is and also lays out how we could use it at Link. This article is extra credit for folks who are really interested in the software.

I went to a presentation on Final Cut Server. It was hosted by Advanced Systems Group. They had a guy from Apple there to talk about the software. Then another guy gave a spiel about how you really want an expert to set up and customize FC Server. They gave some examples where you'll want an expert--setting up a web interface to videos, interacting with automation/playout servers.

One thing I realized at the presentation is that our metadata situation with our Final Cut projects is poor to useless. I know I rarely label clips with helpful info. I try to name projects accurately with the title of a project, but sometimes I don't get it right or the project name changes. Even tape numbers are not always entered or done so accurately. What's the point of having a giant database if you can't search with confidence that you'll actually find what you are looking for? Not to mention an ideal functionality like having files indexed with useful metadata so you could do keyword searches, say "insurgent attacks" and get some dramatic footage from Mosaic.

At our office editors usually haven't collaborated. I usually took an attitude of "if I can find it/figure it out, that's all that matters." But that kind of attitude is the opposite of what's needed for asset management. Extra work needs to go into getting good metadata with your media. Since we don't have the option of hiring a librarian to organize things, that means more work for the editors probably who have to have bought into the process. If they haven't then things will slack off and the metadata won't get entered.

While Final Cut Server does everything that I wrote about in my last post on it, the Apple guy and the ASG folks were really pushing that you have to have an expert to set it up. I think I could get it to do everything that I discussed in my last post with the caveat about searching through poor metadata.

We've talked about hosting media from Mosaic on the web. Again, FC Server won't do this on its own. But it seems like it would be a good spot to organize that media. Then with automation scripting in FC Server, you could hand off the media to a website that handles the front-end, movie hosting, etc. FC Server would be where staff would import media and attach metadata to make it useful for users. FC Server could automatically hand it off to a system to handle the web part with scripting done by somebody knowledgeable.

Below are the notes that I took at the session:

Once a project is imported into FC Server you need to check in and check out. If you keep a copy locally and work with it again after import, then FC Server will think it's a new file when you try to put it back into FC Server. So basically it adds an extra step to opening a project--you have to check it out of FC Server first. Then you have to check it back in to get it to FC Server to update the media for it. Looks like more work for the editor, who has to have bought into the process--otherwise, he or she will just keep everything locally.

Showed a cool video about Radical Media
Translation done in China and FC Server handled ftp for cutting in New York. Complex workflow with steps and notification automated. Required scripting to make FC Server work with ftp server. Process also described in this white paper called "Final Cut Server in Depth" (PDF download.) Translation was added as subtitles using the title tool in Final Cut Pro. BTW, that's extra work for the translator. For Latin Pulse we do subtitles and it takes a lot of time. Translation is done first by someone with good Spanish and English, then spotting and creation of titles is done afterwards by someone who doesn't need language skills that are that strong. (Another step is me reviewing all of the subtitles, suggesting rewrites, adjusting the layout of the titles, and editing if the translation is too long to get read in real time.)

Check out Final Cut Pro projects from Server
Options to handle media when you check out a project
-Edit in place (doesn't do anything really)
-Edit proxies (good for taking a project home for the weekend or on the road)
-Disconnected use (makes a copy of the project and its media, like media manager)
Can't use project until it is checked back in. That is folks can't work on the same FCP project at the same time.

Media manager only recommended if you are creating a whole new version of a project. Again you have to play by FC Server's rule if you want it to track your stuff well.

Demo'd a web interface to log and annotate clips. But this was only a demo version and is not part of the softare. This was a "what you could do" if you are web developer or could afford to hire one. Hmm, well I'm not and we can't for what I do.

FC Server Strategy Meeting--topics for discussion
-Storage plan (for proxy files)
-Type of proxies
-Workflow strategy (what do you do with your media, where does it go, how does it get there, who does what with the media, aka Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How)
-Users
-Advanced automation
-email notifications
-Compression & distribution
-Web review (again not part of the product)
-"Customer" access to FCS

Automated backup can be done--setup rules for when to backup
For example: if file hasn't been touched in a certain amount of time, move to backup storage

Don't have to do an initial scan that sucks in all of your media, it may be better to add project by project. That way, you can be more thorough with metadata.

Annotate is where you can tag in and out markers and comments on clips. Apple guy said that this is supposed to be for transfer of this info back to FCP, but he didn't know how to do it/if it could be done now. Originally, there was going to be similar functionality to make simple edited sequences--I think those would have been transfered back through XML files. But Apple guy said no editing functionality but he "hoped" that they would add that feature because they touted it last year. Annotate is where producers could check out clips for editing and mark ins and outs for editors. It would be great if that could get into FCP. It would still be great for the producers to mark ins and outs on media directly on the clips as opposed to making notes on paper based on time code from a Beta or DV or timer from DVD. But without sending that info back to FCP, editor has to manually transfer in and out points.

Does it work with stills? Sure. FC Server is based on the Artbox software, which was originally written for still images. Also useful for getting producers to sign off on graphics. No need to drag Wendy into the editing room for her to look at something, which (I hope) she will just say OK to anyway. Yeah, for real collaboration you have to be in the same room but for quick and dirty this would be really nice to speed things up.

Suggestions from presenters that FC Serve can read After Effects files to get the links to the media that the project uses. That would be cool.

Apple Rumors (and a little news)

I try not to pass along rumors, but there's a scary one that's been floating around enough that I thought I'd mention it. I think it started around the time that Apple said that it was going to skip NAB. The word from the grapevine is that Apple is going to sell its Pro Apps, which includes Final Cut Pro.

The rumor has been pretty persistent, enough for Apple to officially deny it. In Robert Cringely's latest article he says that Apple spent the NAB conference looking for buyers for their Pro Apps. He's been saying for a while that Apple will buy Adobe in order to get Flash. If that's the case, then Cringely thinks that Apple can't keep both their Pro Apps and Adobe's competing products, like Premiere, After Effects, and their other audio-video apps because of anti-trust concerns. He's more convincing than any of the other sources that I've heard with this rumor or similar ones, so I'm a little more concerned about it. Although, Cringely goes on to to suggest that if Apple really did buy Adobe, then it would sell the Adobe apps that compete with Apple's.

I still think it's unlikely that Apple would sell Final Cut Pro, and for that viewpoint there's a short blog at Final Cut User.

For a bit of official news, there was a statement from an Apple employee on why Final Cut Server took so long to appear on the market--nearly a year after it was announced. According to this interview at TVBEurope, Apple went back to the drawing board to make Final Cut Server easy to administer. Apple's marketing director for professional video apps said that they were reworking Final Cut Server so that it could run "without an IT department to support it." Final Cut Server seems to have been based on asset management software that Apple acquired late in 2006 from a company called Proximity. If they were simplifying the software, I can appreciate that. I'm not interested in becoming an IT professional, but I'm the most likely person to set up and run Final Cut Server at Link TV.

In the same article, Apple's marketing guy says that they have sold a million licenses of FCP. He also said that FCP had 49% market share in 2007 versus Avid's 22% share.

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.

iFlop

Just to prove I'm not a shill for Apple, here are a couple of their recent disappointments.

Back at NAB, Apple announced that Final Cut Server would be available by the summer of 2007. I gave it a positive plug at the time. Well summer came and went with nary another peep from Apple about Final Cut Server. Recently, Apple added to the FCS webpage a release date of "early 2008". I'm guessing we won't see it again until NAB 2008. Apple isn't known for vaporware, but this is a prime example.

"iFlop"
While I don't agree with everything in this article from Forbes, the Apple TV has had a disappointing run. While expecting it to become the iPod of the television might have been pushing it, even Steve Jobs went on to call the Apple TV a mere "hobby". Here is one of my old plugs for Apple TV where I hoped it would become a great platform the video podcasts like our Mosaic.

For me one of the big problems is that the product is basically designed only for high-def TV's, but Apple doesn't really have any high-def content. My guess is that this isn't mainly Apple's fault. I blame the entertainment companies who I think are afraid that Apple will corner the video market like they have cornered the music download market. Universal in particular has been playing hardball with Apple on its NBC TV Shows and and is trying to organize some other record labels for a competing music service. Another big feature missing on Apple TV is movie rentals. Steve Jobs has said that people want to "own" their music (I agree), so is that his view on movies or the entertainment companies'?

Just look at the HD-DVD and Blu-ray fiasco to see an example that the entertainment companies, not to mention the consumer electronics manufacturers, just don't get it. Most of the movies studios are only supporting either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, not both formats. So if you want to watch Universal or Paramont pictures, then buy a HD-DVD player, but if you want Sony, 20th Century Fox, or Disney movies, then get a Blu-ray player. Average consumers would never buy into this crazy scheme. Each company is trying to maximize their own company's advantage to the detriment of the consumer and thus the overall market for high-def movies. For music, it took an explosion of illegal downloads, to scare the record labels into all buying into Apple's music store. Here's one advocate for doing the same thing for video ("Apple TV Fails to Tap the Net's Limitless Library").

Not that Apple is blameless in the content world. Apple will not let other hardware manufacturers make products that will work with iTunes or play content with Apple's DRM for music or video. And Apple won't add support for content from other DRM schemes on their hardware. When it comes down to it, Apple is probably just as evil as Microsoft or the entertainment companies would be. But at least Apple's products are nearly all universally strong in interface, ease-of-use, quality, and reliability.