September Blogwad

Hard Disk Warning!
Larry Jordan says don't leave a hard drive sitting on your shelf for more than a year with data that you want to keep. Explains why and gives some suggestions on how to keep old hard drives from losing data.

The Freesound Project
Sound effects here. They are available under Creative Commons licenses. Not sure if that would include any of Link's work. As I understand it, Creative Commons means that you aren't doing the project for money and your work will also be available to others under the Creative Commons agreement. But I'm not an expert.

DA Font
Some fonts here some are in the public domain, others are available under Creative Commons licenses. Again, I'm not an expert in Creative Commons licensing. But public domain is obviously cool.

Ripple Training
Some good tutorials in the Ripple Training section of the ProVideo Coaltion website.
Remove the Jitters - Covers the SmoothCam feature in Final Cut Pro 6.
Photoshop & Motion - Simple way to do a quick animation on a multi-layered Photoshop document in Motion 3 by using its 3D features.
Color Workflows With Different Video Formats - Covers how to use different codecs with Color. Warning here about working with Long-GOP formats, like HDV.

HDV video to SD DVD Using Compressor 3 and DVD SP
Exporting HDV Video from the Timeline to Standard Definition DVD
Man, working with HDV can be slow. Hopefully these tutorials will save you some time if you need to make a DVD from some HDV footage. They are over at kenstone.net
Also at kenstone.net, a tutorial on making a Blu-ray high-def video disc on a Mac. Takes you from FCP through Compressor to Adobe's Encore:
Blu-ray with Final Cut Pro, Compressor and Encore

ProRes 422 was one of the big features of Final Cut Pro 6. It was essentially a QuickTime codec, but Apple wasn't going to give it away. Too bad, because it's an efficient codec and very useful, especially for high-def footage. Well, Apple is finally letting people playback ProRes 422 footage on systems without FCP 6 installed (but you still can't create ProRes files without FCP 6.) Here are the links to playback ProRes on Mac's and PC's.

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk
I didn't know you could do this:
You can make a "universally bootable" external hard disk that will work with both Mac OS X 10.5-compatible PowerPC-based Macs and Intel-based Macs.

Bluetooth Earpiece--2-way radio
Do production? Need to buy a bluetooth head set? Then consider the Dragon. It will work as a 2-way radio with another Dragon headset. They even sell a device that will allow you to link up to 5 Dragon headsets together. Probaby not the cheapest way to communicate with a crew, but it's nice that it will do double-duty as the wireless headset for you cellphone.


Making Compressor Multiprocessor Aware
This one of Larry Jordan's Tips of the Day. Uses QMaster to make virtual clusters on multi-processor systems.

Drobo: Your Data Robot

Drobo has been around for about a year and when it first came out I judged it as "cool but not ready for primetime." Drobo is a unique RAID setup for hard drive storage. The biggest drawback was the Drobo only had a USB interface, which is not cool for video editing. Well, this summer Drobo 2 came out with Firewire 800. Data Robotics, the manufacturer, is touting read speeds of 52MB/s and writes of 34MB/s--not too shabby. They say it's good for uncompressed SD, DV, and compressed HD. They cite DVCProHD as OK, but at those data rates I'm thinking that Apple's ProRes 422 is supported too. ProRes maxes out at about 26MB/s--generally I think if the drive's speed is double the needed data rate, then you are OK.

So what makes Drobo unique? It's got a great combination of redundant data storage and the easy-to-use factor. The Drobo case holds up to 4 hard drives, and you only need 2 drives to get started. Your data is spread across the drives in such a way that if one drive failed then you wouldn't lose any data. Need more storage? This is the great part. Just slide in another hard drive of any size. Drobo incorporates you new drive into the existing RAID. If you have four drives in the case and run out of space, then no problem. Simply replace the smallest drive with a bigger drive to get more storage.

My experience with RAID has never gone beyond buying a G-Raid. Whenever I looked into setting up a RAID on my own, there were always enough drawbacks to keep me from making the plunge. It just seemed too difficult to manage all the drives. We are in drive overload anyway. Plus the added expense of more drives and SATA gear was always an issue. Granted Drobo is not cheap. At $500 without any drives, that's a hefty expense to swallow. But I think over it's life it will make up for that in the cost saved by not buying drives with cases, plus the peace-of-mind that you get with redundant storage.

There could be some drawbacks to Drobo. One is that you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. Yes, you are protecting yourself against the failure of a hard drive, but what if Drobo fails. Then you could be in real trouble and pray that Data Robotics will come to your rescue (and do so promptly). Also all of the management seems automatic. That's good if you don't want to deal with the hassle of repairing a RAID with a bad drive, but bad if the maintenance takes place in the middle of a big deadline. If a drive dies, then you don't lose any data. But then Drobo has to start shuffling around all of your data between the existing drives that are still working, and this will take a lot of time. While you are supposed to still be able to access Drobo while it does this automatic maintenance who knows what kind of performance you will get as Drobo and the drives are very busy. Will the Drobo still be able to playback and record video while it rebuilds? So while losing a drive could mean no lost data, it doesn't necessarily mean no downtime for us video editors. But overall, I'd prefer losing no data but have a slower system for a day or so, then totally losing the data.

You are also giving up some of the transportability of a G-RAID. While the Drobo can be moved, it will probably end up having all of your storage on it. If you like to put individual project on a drive, which gets moved around, then Drobo is probably too expensive for that. So it's both good and bad that Drobo can be the only drive case that you will need.

Here's an example of a Drobo system once you get the drives.
Drobo...$500
(3) 500GB Hard Drives...$325
Total Cost...$825
Total storage...930GB
That compares to my favorite type of storage a G-Raid, which gives you the same amount of storage for $355. So that's $500 up front is a lot to ask for. But I'll be thinking about his seriously in the future.

Here are some links on Drobo:
Drobo in Action
A video from Data Robotics on how Drobo works.

Drobolator
See how much storage Drobo will give you when you put different drives inside.

Drobo Firewire 800 Review
A short review of the new Drobo that gives more info on the benefits and setup of Drobo.

Capture HDV as ProRes 422

"Really? Capture HDV to ProRes in FCP? Over FireWire?! Yes!"
This is a short tutorial over at the Creative Cow about converting HDV to ProRes 422 during capture. Will give you an idea about how to do this and how it works.

Note that in the comments section, the author advises against reimporting the clips from the finder in order to rename them (something that is recommended in the article itself). The reason he changed his mind is that FCP 6 lets you rename clips and then changes the name of the media files to match--pretty cool.

More notes on this process here at Little Frog in High Def:
CAPTURING HDV AS PRORES...VIA FIREWIRE

Utility Offers Import of AVCHD on G5's, G4's

I read about a nifty looking utility in a Final Cut Express review at macworld.com. Voltaic is the missing link for PowerPC users who want to cut AVCHD footage.

The need for this utility arises from Apple's refusal to support AVCHD on PowerPC Macs--only newer Intel Mac's can convert AVCHD footage to something that you can edit. This applies to both iMovie '08, Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Pro. Voltaic lets PowerPC users convert their AVCHD footage to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec.) AIC is supposed to be similar to ProRes 422 with the main difference being that AIC is 8-bit and ProRes 422 is 10-bit. Also, Voltaic offers a workflow for cutting AVCHD footage recorded onto DVD's, which Apple isn't supporting now.

So what's AVCHD? If you don't know, you can check out these older posts:
AVCHD Support in FCP
AVC: More Format Wackiness
AVCHD Is a Pro Format

While we're on the topic of AVCHD, Canon has announced a couple of new camcorders, which record in AVCHD using flash memory, as well as a replacement for the popular HV20. Here's the news on that:
"Canon Debuts First High Definition Solid State Camcorders: HF10 and HF100"
"Move Over HV20, Here Comes the Canon HV30"
These flash memory camcorders are really small, and I have hopes that Canon's new camcorders will produced some good looking high-def video. I got to play around with Sony's AVCHD flash memory camcorder the HDR-CX7 recently--could be a decent B-Cam and its size makes it inconspicuous and good for travel.

Camcorderinfo.com's annual list of the best consumer cameras CamInfo Selects 2007 saw Canon take home the top honors. The HV20 was the best camcorder, and the HG10, which records AVCHD to a hard drive, was also honored. Apparently Canon's cameras do a better job of encoding video into AVCHD than either Sony's or Panasonic's camera. This isn't good news for Panasonic because unlike Sony and Canon, Panasonic is trying to use AVCHD in cameras marketed to Pros.

My Most-Used Freeware--Bitrate Pro

I don't know why Apple doesn't include something like this in Compressor and/or Final Cut Pro. The free Bitrate Pro will do a lot for you. How much space will 2 hours of DV footage take up? 20.95 GB. If I want to fit 1 hour and 45 minutes of video on a single-layer DVD what is the highest bitrate that I should use? 5.98 Mb/s. These are the kinds of calculations you can do with bitrate pro. Includes all kinds of handy info about how much data is on a DVD single-layer vs. dual-layer and what data rates different codecs use like ProRes, DV, DV50, and DVCPro HD.

AJA has a similar piece of freeware AJA Data Rate Calculator that is more geared toward figuring out storage for editing. They have presets for most of the editing codecs that their hardware has native support for.

I couldn't remember the name of Bitrate Pro, but I was able to track it down on this cool page that Apple has for video software downloads. You can always use versiontracker or macupdate, but I get overwhelmed by all the software on those sites. I think Apple helps make it manageable to explore freeware and shareware (although there's a lot of demo stuff thrown in there too.)

Codecs and Editing

"When to stay in the native codec of the source, and when to convert to something else."
by Philip Hodgetts

Good article by Philip Hodgetts over at kenstone.net. A pretty thorough run-thru of recommendations of what codec to edit in based on what codec you shoot on. Also talks about how to convert to other codecs using the batch export command.

I wonder about his recommendation to convert HDV to ProRes 422 though. The article says to convert HDV to ProRes 422 either during capture if you'd got the hardware or by converting in FCP after capture. I would probably edit in the native codec, but render to ProRes 422. I've never been through the lengthy conforming that he describes HDV requires when you master back to HDV. Then again, I've never even posted in HD. But my thinking is that I'd rather save the storage by keeping footage in the more compressed HDV codec. (HDV is 25 mb/s while ProRes 422 for 1080 footage goes from 140 mb/s up to 220 mb/s.)

The article doesn't mention a workflow that we use at Link TV. Shoot on HDV, but use the deck to down-convert to DV. I think Sony's gear does a really good job on the down-conversion. I think it's better than what FCP does. I've captured some footage at HDV and then scaled it down in FCP to standard-def, and I don't think it looks as good as HDV down-converted in the deck. The article also covers the problems with DV in respect to color space.

[via StudioDaily Blog]

More Creative Cow on ProRes

"Part 2: ProRes for HDV, with a splash of Color"

More nitty gritty fromt the Creative Cow on using ProRes 422. Here's my big takeaway:

PPPS. Just so there's no question here: most (but not all) of you are certain that native HDV capture is the way to go. Skip AIC. Skip DVCPRO HD. Just render to ProRes.

PPPPS. Of course, some of this changes once we add a little Color.

So basically if you have HDV footage you can capture it as HDV over firewire, and don't need to think about how you would transcode it to ProRes or rig your system to capture it to ProRess, which you can't do while capturing over firewire. Capture to HDV, but render in the timeline to ProRes 422.

Apparently sending HDV to Color and then rendering back to ProRes is totally screwed up. All your clips get out of sync. Seems like Apple didn't put the kind of quality control into Color as they do FCP before releasing.

Also an interesting note about removing pulldown on 24p footage, as an update to my previous post. Compressor 3 has a smart pulldown remover where you don't have to worry about the cadence of the pulldown. The downside is that you lose timecode.

And the article says that capturing to standard-def ProRes 422 is OK on a Quad G5. But for HD ProRes you need at least a quad-core Intel.

Creative Cow on Apple ProRes 422

"The Wisdom of the Cow: Apple's ProRes 422 Codec"

This is a good article that summarizes insights on the ProRes 422 codec gleamed from posts on Creative Cow's boards. Nice to get some real user feedback on this new feature of FCP 6.

One thing that has come out is that if you want to transcode HD to ProRes 422, you need an Intel MacPro or an AJA I/O HD. It's too processor intensive to be done while capturing, even by a Quad G5. The AJA IO HD handles the transcoding itself, but with other hardware from AJA and Blackmagic the CPU has to handle the transcoding. However, slower computers can still render HD video to ProRes 422. Nothing definitive on transcoding to SD while capturing, but this should be much less processor-intensive than HD footage.

Rendering 10-bit in After Effects

With ProRes 422, I think I might start working in 10-bit video. Below is some info on working with 10-bit and ProRes 422 in After Effects. Pretty deep stuff, but apparently it can take some work to get After Effects to work with 10-bit well. Info from HD for Indies and Studio Daily.

After Effects Stuff: Workflow tips and QT NOT always 10bit when you render"

"The great codec bake-off"

What's New in FCP 6

Final Cut Studio 2 is now shipping. I don't know when I'll get my hands on it, but Apple has posted many of the manuals online. I took a look at the manual What's New in FCP 6. I've written before about my thoughts on FCS2 and FCP6, and here's some new things that jumped out at me after reading that manual.

SmoothCam Filter
This borrows Shake technology to steady shaky footage. This seems to be the only implementation of Shake in FCP according to the "What's New" manual. If so, then no great slo-mo's in FCP. Looks like you'll have to go to Motion for those.

Bloom FX
More FX's from Motion are coming to FCP. I like the Bloom filter and there are a few more.

Rendering Native HDV and XDCAM HD Sequences to the Apple ProRes 422 Codec
This is a new sequence preset. So as I discussed before here, it makes less and less sense to transcode HDV to another codec, like uncompressed, when capturing. With the Open Format Timeline you can load and cut your native HDV footage and then render in whatever codec you like (uncompressed, ProRes 422) when you want to filter or composite.

External Video Monitoring
This is very cool. I don't remember hearing about this capability when the new version was announced. Here's something I pulled from the manual:

You can now output to external video interfaces whose settings don’t match those of your sequence. Here are some examples of some of the possibilities:
-A DV or HDV sequence output to an SDI signal on a third-party interface
-An uncompressed NTSC or PAL sequence output to a DV FireWire output
-An HDV sequence output to a DV FireWire output

Before you had to rely on hardware from AJA or Kona to do stuff like this. Now FCP and your Mac's CPU will handle this. Of course, if you are throwing an Open Format Timeline and down-conversion at the CPU that's a fair amount of work. The better the chips you have, the more luck you'll have with this type of stuff. But I pretty much got a DeckLink card because I wanted the option of seeing HDV downconverted to SD (the Kona LS wouldn't do that.) Now Kona LS users will get this capability with FCP 6 if their computer is fast enough.

For more on the new manuals for Final Cut Studio, check out this post at HDforIndies.com.

Mike Curtis Reviews DeckLink HD Studio

DV Magazine Review of DeckLink HD Studio (requires registration)

Mike Curtis from HD for Indies reviews the DeckLink HD Studio. This card has analong in and outs for standard and hi-def video, but it also has HDMI in and out. Sort of like the a regular DeckLink plus the Intensity card that I have discussed before. Mike mentions on his blog that the new Intensity Pro from Blackmagic will more or less match the featurs of the DeckLink HD Studio at a lower price.

Here's Mike's summary of why you would use this card:
"...if you want to transcode HDV or AVCHD to uncompressed (for finishing and online work) or to DVCPRO HD (for faster renders and greater real-time performance than HDV), or if you want to monitor on an inexpensive HDTV, then the Blackmagic DeckLink HD Studio is the right card for you."

As I mentioned before, I think the new features in FCP 6 make transcoding HDV or AVCHD (or DV, IMX, DV50, any format that can be captured in its native codec) an unnecessary step. With FCP 6, you should be able to mix the native codec with uncompressed renders or the new ProRes 422 codec in the same timeline without rendering. So that leaves monitoring video through the consumer-standard HDMI output as the only really strong reason to work with HDMI, unless you can't wait for FCP 6.

ProRes 422: Apple New's High-Quality Codec for Post

I think that I downplayed the significance of ProRes 422 in my write-up of Final Cut Studio 2. After doing some more research, it seems like a real great codec. I just read an Apple white paper on ProRes 422 (PDF file) for lots of good detail on what I think is a big addition to FCS.

Here's Apple's summary of what's so great about ProRes 422:
Enter Apple ProRes 422, a new format designed for pristine HD quality, economical hardware confi gurations, yet high-performance, multistream Final Cut Pro real-time editing—for both high-defi nition (HD) and standard-defi nition (SD) formats. Apple ProRes 422 features:
• The quality of uncompressed HD at data and storage rates lower than uncompressed SD.
• Performance comparable to or better than the existing HD codecs in Final Cut Pro.
• The ability to work with HD on slower drives, and with more users on shared storage.

In my FCS2 write-up, I thought that ProRes 422 was all about the the $3500 AJA IO HD. But Apple says in the white paper, "Capture ProRes 422 in real time from any HD-SDI source." OK. I'm used to having Blackmagic or AJA point out support for specific codecs with their hardware, and I haven't heard any mention from them about supporting ProRes 422 (except for the IO HD.) But for the time being, I'm going to take Apple at its word.

But ProRes 422 isn't just for folks with those super-expensive decks with HD-SDI outputs. Apple mentions that you can mix ProRes 422 in a timeline with native HDV footage:
"Through a new user preference in Final Cut Pro 6.0, the editor can choose to render projects in HDV and XDCAM HD using ProRes 422. This will result in faster rendering time and a higher-quality 4:2:2 composite. For projects that are mastering to HD-SDI, ProRes 422 is the perfect rendering choice. "

So capture your HDV in its native codec, low-bit rate codec (lower bit-rate than ProRes 422). But then don't render effects in highly-compressed MPEG-2 codec. FCP 6 doesn't mind having HDV and ProRes 422 in the same timeline. Well, this changes a lot of my thinking about editing HDV in other codecs as the best way to post it The new ability to mix codecs in the same timeline, really means capture in the native codec if you can (no conversion/transcoding and you don't have to use more bit-rate or storage on a higher bit-rate codec until you render something.) And you don't need some 5-drive RAID to play back those high-quality renders--my guess is that a G-RAID will play back the highest bit-rate ProRes 422 fine.

ProRes 422 also support 720x486 standard-definition resolution. This is a 4:2:2, 10-bit codec at rates comparable to DVCPro50 and IMX 50, which are only 8-bit codecs. So Apple doesn't mention how you can capture SD into ProRes 422. It seems like again it is a good option for rendering at the least.

So again:
-For all intensive purposes, visually lossless
-HD quality at SD files sizes
-Do more with your video--your drives can feed you more streams and the processors can handle the footage faster than uncompressed

Apple also alludes to support from Sony, Panasonic, and RED. It would be interesting to have some of these tapeless cameras capture directly to ProRes 422 if it really is such a great codec, but it's not clear what other manufacturers might do with the new codec.

More on ProRes 422:
Studio Daily: "EXCLUSIVE VIDEO DEMO: ProRes 4:2:2"
Apple Insider: "A closer look at Apple's new ProRes 422 video format"