Lots of Adobe Stuff Going On

"Adobe offers Premiere Pro, After Effects betas"
Betas of Premiere Pro for Mac and After Effects Pro 8 available. Premiere Pro is only for Intel Macs, not G5's or G4's. After Effects Beta is only available for folks with a serial number for After Effects 7, but the article doesn't mention any similar restrictions on Adobe Premiere Pro for Macs. Article reminded me that Adobe is working on Blu-Ray authoring for Encore, which will be on Macs later this year. What's up Apple? Where's your next-gen authoring for DVD Studio Pro?

"Adobe to show off media player"
Adobe is working on a stand-alone flash player. Looks like it has sort of an iTunes interface.

"Adobe ships Creative Suite 3"
Days after I order a copy of Creative Suite CS2, Adobe ships a new version. (OK, there are good reasons why I ordered the old version after I knew CS3 was on its way.)

New Product: Final Cut Server

This seems interesting. An asset management product from Apple. Available "this summer." 10-user license is $1K, unlimited users is $2K. Not too many details yet. Here's some features.

-Searchable database for media--"100 formats supported".
-Windows client. But the database backend must run on a Mac?
-Client can be used to make cuts that will then import into FCP.
-FCP Project can be an asset. Users "check-out" a project.
-Integrated with Compressor. Will watch folders and automatically start encoding when someting is dropped. Then automatic notification when something is ready.

Watch the video on Apple's product page. I'm guessing that this is a good way to sell some Xserves and Xserve RAID's. This could be a really great productivity tool.

Final Cut Studio 2 Announced

Apple announced Final Cut Studio 2 at NAB. Here's my wrapup of the features that impress me.

Final Cut Pro 6
-"Open Format Timeline" easier to mix different codecs, frame rates, resolutions in the same timeline. Apple says "Freely edit a combination of HD and SD, including NTSC and PAL, all in real time." Now there must be some rendering, especially on older systems. But this is great, I'm very happy to see this feature.

-Motion templates. Create a Motion template with text fields that can be edited directly in FCP. So I could design a lower-third and an editor who doesn't know Motion can update the lower-third without ever leaving FCP. Also you can drop in video into a Motion template in FCP.

-Monitor 5.1. channels of audio.

-I love things that make it easier to mix audio qiuckly (I consider audio a chore.) This sounds good: "New Soft Normalize and Gain controls can be applied to single or multiple clips to automatically raise the level of any clip to its maximum without distortion. "

-Smooth cam. Smoothes out shaky video. In the past with other tools, this has never looked good on standard-definition stuff, especially if its interlaced. The video ends up soft. But for high-def sourced stuff this could be good. Apparently this came from Shake, which Apple discontinued.

-Apple ProRes 422. I don't know all the specifics on this, but they basically wanted to squeeze HD signal through firewire. Like what Avid did with DNxHD. Mainly seems to work with the AJA IO HD which will hook up to Macs through firewire 800 to capture and output from just about any kind signal

[swiped from Final Cut Pro 6: What's New"]

Color
-"Color grading" this means color correction. But I guess grading sounds more creative, and this application looks like it packs a punch. As long as it isn't as buggy as Motion 1 (and 2) were, it could be big. AFAIK, this is Apple's Version of an application they bought called Final Touch HD. This is aimed at a very high-end market. This is a separate app, and I personally wish that they had put some of these features in Final Cut Pro. You have to "round-trip" this stuff, which I'm not too thrilled about doing.

-Very sophisticated tools for tweaking color. Secondary color correction includes masks and vignettes. Great, but I'd love to see this in FCP too.

-Optical image flow--very fancy slow-mo/fast-mo. Also in Motion. Why can't we have this in FCP? (Maybe in FCP, HD4ND's mentions optical image flow in FCP, but is that part of Smoothcam or for Motion FX's?)

-Pre-built looks to make your stuff look like some sexy commercial or a music-video.

-This is a new app and Apple didn't raise the price for Studio (still $1299). On the other hand, they haven't upgraded DVD Studio Pro.

DVD Studio Pro 4 (Again)
-Huh? No updates to DVD Studio Pro. No real HD-DVD. No Blu-Ray authoring? Is Apple dropping the ball or maybe waiting for the new OS X? I don't really care because I don't do any HD stuff yet, but it does make me worry about Final Cut if it is not staying competitive on this point.

Motion 3
-Nice upgrade here.

-3D space. Cool-el. Check out the videos here. Cameras, lights. Pre-built camera moves, so no more awkward keyframing in x-y-z axis, as in After Effects. Throw is 3-D.

-Text behavior animation is 3-D. Again, check out the videos here.

-Particle generators are 3-D. Replicators are 3-D. This stuff is all really cool. Again, check out the videos here to see this in action.

-Vector drawing. I'm going to be adding drawn-on squiggly lines to everything I do now--that will never get old.

-Point tracking and match moving. Pretty high-end feature. I think this came from Shake.

-Image stabilization and Smoothcam. Smoothcam is also in FCP. Fix the shaky camera shots.

-Optical image flow with retiming animation. Apple says this was adapted from Shake. Fancy looking slow-mos and fast-mos. I wish this was in FCP.

-Motion 3 Master Templates. Allows editing text in FCP. Also video drop zone, where shots can be dropped into a Motion animation within FCP. Nice.

-More free stock footage and graphics.

Compressor 3
-Closed captioing. Says that it will insert closed-captioning information into movies. Need to do more research on this.

-Upscaling. Does it do anything special that FCP won't do? I don't know.

-Optical image flow. Is this new? Wasn't this in Compressor 2?

-Support for iPod. Wow, the video iPod has only been out for 18 months, and Apple has already delivered professional encoding for it! (Yeah I'm bitter about the long period where neither Apple or Cleaner support encoding for iPod video.)

-Chapter support for iPod. That's handy for podcasts.

-5.1 audio encoding.

-MPEG-2 Broadcast Streams encoding, e.g., for playout servers. Will it work with our station's? Need to research this too.

-Integration with Telestream's Episode Pro for all kind of formats "Output files in VC-1, WMV, GXF, High Profile H.264, and FLV formats. Or output proprietary broadcast server formats such as Omneon, Quantel, Avid, Grass Valley, and Leitch"

-Time code overlays. Nice way to make a window-dub of a show or raw footage.

-HD4ND's says that the H.264 encoding is much faster.

Soundtrack Pro 2
-Mosf of the new features are way too high-end for what I do with sound.

-e.g., 5.1 mix. I'm not going to do a 5.1 mix.

-Automatic audio conform. This seems cool. If you are round-tripping from FCP, it can keep track of changes to the FCP timeline and then change the Soundtrack Pro timeline.

-More free sound effects.

Final Cut Studio 2 is available "next month". Same price $1299. $499 upgrade from Final Cut Studio 1. $699 upgrade if you don't have FCS 1.

I think this is a very good package of updates. Hopefully, the Media Manager is improved--they didn't say anything about improvements to it. And I'm hoping that Motion is stable as it has always been buggy for me. Keeping my fingers crossed that the other apps aren't buggy, especially the new Color.

MacWorld: "Convert video for Apple TV"

This is a good tutorial on MediaFork aka HandBrake and VisualHub. Use the free MediaFork/Handbrake for ripping DVD's to AppleTV/iPod. VisualHub costs $23 but will handle just about any type of file for transcoding for AppleTV/iPod.

[via AppleTV Hacker]

Reivew of a Card for Fast & Safe Storage

"AMUG Review: RAID 5 SATA Port Multiplier Host Adapter"

AMUG has another thorough review of a SATA product. This time it is a feature-packed RocketRAID host card. It is the first SATA card to add good data redundancy with RAID 5 and 1/0 support and support for port multiplier cases that hold up to 5 drives each--so a potential total of 20 drives connected to this card (read review for a caveat.) Their test showed average RAID 5 writes over 300MB/sec. and reads over 500MB/sec. Very fast for RAID 5, but that is a 12 drive RAID set.

Here's the AMUG summary:
The HighPoint Technologies RocketRAID 2314 PCIe SATA host adapter provides Mac Pro users with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 1/0 support for both direct connect and SATA PM enclosures. While SATA PM enclosures may be a little slower than a direct connect enclosure, they can support 5x more hard drives. The draw back to RAID 1/0 has always been the fact that I never had enough ports to produce high performance. With the new found ability to connect 16 hard drives to the RocketRAID 2314, RAID 1/0 not only provides the highest crash protection but also extremely high performance. The RocketRAID 2314 opens up the very cool feature of adding redundancy to our SATA PM setups. With a price under $200, the RocketRAID 2314 provides a compelling feature rich SATA host adapter for Mac Pro users interested in expanding their external storage options.

If it's not for an iPod, is it still a Podcast?

"Podcasting (and encoding) tips from Apple"
This article says that Apple is pushing videos podcasters to up their video resolution to 640x480. Previously Apple recommended 320x240, which is the resolution of the video iPod's screen. Apple is clearly trying to generate content (free at that for both Apple and users) for the Apple TV. The problem is that at 4 times the resolution, it costs producers more to host these videos; the videos are slower to download; and they take up more space on the users' hard drives and/or iPods.

I was thinking that maybe we should offer a "high quality" video podcast alongside our current offerings with the 320x240 resolution. But Apple discourages this. They argue that this will lower your ratings because the same show will have 2 feeds that are measured independently. I think they want to simplify the experience for users who may be confused about which podcast to subscribe to. With a choice between one simple option and multiple options to cover every user, Apple always seems to go with simple. For people like me with a full hard-drive who don't want big video podcasts clogging up their system, then I would be out-of-luck.

I'm all for better quality but I'm not sure about dropping 320x240 videos for 640x480. As I have written before (here, here, and here), I think the Apple TV could be a great, new platform for Link TV to deliver content. And the 320x240 video doesn't look good on a TV, especially a high-def one. On the other hand, I think just having one high-res podcast could alienate some users. I disagree with Apple on commiting to only a higher-resolution video podcast. Maybe once it is clearer that the Apple TV is going to be a significant product that rivals the iPod for video distribution, this would make more sense. But I think right now, Apple is just really trying to help Apple TV by pushing for more good-looking content for it.

Here's some good technical info from Apple on video encoding for podcasts with more of Apple's thinking about Apple TV vs. iPod encoding [via AppleTV Hacker]:
Podcaster Tech Specs

FCP 4.5 Drops Frames with OS X 10.4.9

"Final Cut Pro 4.5 and Final Cut Express 3.0 may drop frames with Mac OS X 10.4.9"

This is a support document from Apple. Apple says the problem is dropped frames when capturing to firewire drives. Apple recommends capturing to an internal ATA drive. Or you folks running FCP 4.5 can stick with an older version of 10.4.

Blackmagic Design Intensity Review

Digit Magazine Review of Blackmagic Design Intensity

This card costs $250 and has one port for HDMI in and another for HDMI out. I can think of two good uses for it. One is using a consumer-oriented LCD screen for HD monitoring.

The other is for posting an HDV-shot piece in high definition. You can always dig HDV through firewire, but the format is MPEG-2 based with interframe compression. MPEG-2 is a rough codec to edit with. If you dig your HDV footage with the Intensity, then while capturing you can encode the video into the DVCPro HD codec or Apple's Uncompressed 8-bit or 10-bit codecs. The DVCPro HD codec doesn't require a lot of bandwith--it's around 100mb/s vs DV's 25mb/s. So a G-RAID would be adequate to playback DVCPro HD material. Once you go up to Apple's Uncompressed setting for HD you are talking a serious RAID setup, such as described in the DV article Build Your Own HD Workstation that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

There are some limitations to this product. It's doesn't support 24 fps because AFAIK the HDMI standard doesn't. It supports 1080i, 720p, and 480i (not 480p) video sources. It doesn't work on G5's--the only Mac supported is the Mac Pros. No other types of inputs or outputs besides the 2 HDMI ports, but it is only $250. Blackmagic Design does have more expesnive products with HDMI like the Decklink HD Studio.

DVD/CD Disc Stuck in Optical Drive

"Ask Apple Matters: DVD Stuck in Drive!"

The old paper clip trick doesn't work with slot-loaded drives. Here are some tips when a disc gets stuck in a laptop, iMac, or Mac mini.

Speech Recognition

So the day hasn't arrived when the computer will transcribe all of your footage for you, but some new tools are coming out that use speech recognition to help line up text with video.

Caption Sync uses speech recognition to turn a transcript and audio into a caption data and/or subtitle data. You upload the text and an audio file to their website, and they turn it around in minutes. It's up to you insert the caption file onto tape or add it as subtitles to a DVD. They also support lots of web formats, like Flash, streaming, MPEG4.

Avid's Media Composer, which can be bought software-only for $5K, has a new tool with speech recognition. It's called Script Sync. You feed in a script or a transcript. For scripts, if marks out which takes cover which parts of the script. With a transcript, you can click on a line and Avid will open the clip at that line in the viewer. Pretty nifty for doc folks with long interviews. Here's a good description on Script Sync in action on The Editblog.

Free Apple Motion Templates

"Free Apple Motion Templates"

Check out these Motion projects. I think the countdown clock with a slate is cool. Looks like the countdown that we get for the BBC shows.

Media 100 Back from the Dead

"Media 100 Producer: Media 100's New Software-Only Editor"

Frankly, I don't miss Media 100, but I know someone who does. The folks behind BorisFX have bought Media 100, and I think they could be the reliable developers that Media 100 has been missing for a long time now. This new software runs on Macs and will also run bundled with the AJA hardware cards Kona LH, Kona LHe, and Kona 3. Apparently you can mix different codecs and resolution in the timeline without rendering--that's one thing that FCP can't do (yet.) Sounds like this could live on the same system with FCP, but you have to screw around with drivers when you switch between apps to get AJA hardware to work. In addition to the Creative Cow article with the link above, the Creative Cow magazine also has a short article on Media 100 Producer with some more info (sign-up for future issues here.)

Generally, this would only interest me if I had some old Media 100 projects that I really needed to get to. It's supposed to open old project and old media. It costs $795 for the new Media 100 Producer software.

Eight Cores in New Mac Pro

Apple has put eight-cores in a Mac Pro, starting at $4,000. There are 2 Intel Xeon chips with 4-cores each running at 3.0 GHz. The Mac Pro line still includes the 2 chips with 2-cores each running at either 2.0, 2.66, or 3.0 GHz. In fact, the price on those quad-core models hasn't changed with the 2.66 GHz model starting at $2,500. So that's $1,500 upgrade cost to get the extra 4 cores. No other changes made to the guts of any of the Mac Pro's--neither motherboard, graphics, design, nor optical drives.

It is not clear yet what those extra 4 cores would get me. Apple posted some benchmarks, but Maya 3D was the only application I recognized that had stats for the new machine. No Final Cut benchmarks yet, which seems curious. Does FCP 5.1 not take advantage of those extra cores? Maybe FCP 6, which should be announced at NAB, is need to really take advantage of those extra cores? Hopefully, on 4-16, all will be revealed at Apple's NAB event.

My initial response is that that's too expensive for me, and I'm disappointed that they didn't drop the prices on the other models. On the other hand, this is clearly not a new line of Mac Pro's, which leave the door for completely new machines later this year.

I'd recommend reading HD for Indies response to the new machine and analysis about what it means for FCP.

Update: Anamorphicizer

Do you find DVD Studio Pro too hard to use and would rather do a quick-and-dirty DVD in iDVD? Well if your video is 16x9 be careful. Apparently iDVD doesn't properly handle anamorphic 16x9 movies. This free app Anamorphicizer is supposed to fix it.

I got this info from the Digital Production Buzz Tip of the Day.

UPDATE: Apple describes the problem here and gives there more labor-intensive solution in this support document "iDVD: DV widescreen 16:9 workflow from Final Cut Pro". Apple says this problem only affects 16x9 movies that are exported from FCP in the DV format.

Premiere Pro and After Effects CS3 Public Beta on 4-16

"Adobe CS3 First Look & New Public Betas @ NAB"

FXguide says that this includes the public betas for Mac of Premiere Pro and After Effects CS3. Premiere Pro will only run on Intel Macs (not your G5's or G4's.) Suggested retail for the Adobe CS3 Production Premium bundle is $1699 (not bad when you consider that After Effects Pro is $1K.) Here are all the apps you will get with the bundle that will come out officially before October:
After Effects CS3 Professional
Premiere Pro CS3 (Intel Macs Windows Only)
Encore CS3
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Flash CS3 Professional
Illustrator CS3
Soundbooth CS3
Device Central
Ultra CS3 (Windows Only)
OnLocation CS3 (Windows or Bootcamp)
Us Mac folks will miss out on Ultra which is a green/bluescreen software with virtual sets. Also no Mac OnLocation, which is software for capturing and monitoring video direct from cameras over firewire to a computer. Encore is their DVD authoring app, and Soundbooth is a new audio processing app. I don't know what Device Central is.

This is close to the same combined price of After Effects Pro and Photoshop. So a lot of folks who would get those apps are going to end up getting this bundle with a copy of Premiere Pro and all of its associated apps too. This will definitely give Apple some stiff competition if Premiere Pro runs well on Macs.

So the public beta should be a download on 4-16. I didn't check out the public beta for Photoshop CS3, but I understood it was only for registered owners of Photoshop. So I'm guessing that the same would apply for After Effects CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3. However, that doesn't really make sense for Premiere Pro since us Mac folks haven't had a chance to buy a new copy of Premiere in like 5 years.

I haven't edited on Avid in ages, but thought I'd mention the new version of Media Composer and Xpress are finally Universal (means they will run on Mac Intel chips.) Read about the new Aivd software at HD for Indies.

I also found this article on Adobe via HD for Indies.