MPEG Streamclip Review

Here's a gushing review of the free MPEG Streamclip. I haven't used MPEG Streamclip in a while. This article recommends it for converting DVD's to DV but I never got that to work with interlaced footage. Maybe I should try again with the newest version. Mentions that it does a good job transcoding Flash videos and also includes some iPod presets for h.264 encoding. The article talks about how to edit with MPEG Streamclip. I also wrote about this a while back in this post.

UPDATE: A second post goes into a lot of basic how-to's for all kind of copying and trans-codings for DVD's and Flash movies. Includes a "Mac All-Star Video Software Links".

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.

Sony V1U and 24fps

"Editing the V1's 24p in Final Cut Pro: A Workaround"

The Sony V1U is the first HDV camera to shoot real 24 frames per second with 1080 lines of resolution. There's no native 24fps editing of this format in FCP (yet.) In the mean time, this article describes a workaround to edit in true 24fps mode your 24fps HDV 1080 footage. Basic description of the issues with pulldown and removing pulldown is in the article too
[via FresHDV]

UPDATE: HD for Indies has this post "Working with 24p for Canon HV20". Apparently, Compresor cannot reverse telecine fromt the HDV codec. Its reverse telecine won't work with interframe compression schemes. Thus you have to transcode the HDV footage to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) or ProRes 422 to get get Compressor to reverse telecine.

HD Discs and Macs

Steve Jobs' keynote at WWDC was a bit of a downer. No new great hidden features were revealed, just some Finder improvements. Some of the new iChat stuff was interesting. I could see using the iChat Theater to review an edit. The iChat Screen Sharing could help me show my parents how to do stuff on their Macs. The ability to easily set up access to a remote computer with .Mac could be handy if I can get it to work with the company firewall and get into my office network.

I was hoping there would be an annoucement about Mac's supporting either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, so we could get a little high-def movie action on Mac's. Vista can handle playback of these formats, and PC makers are already selling desktops and laptops that will playback both formats, but nothing for Mac's. Is Apple hoping to make a splash of their own with a high-def movie rental service? I hope they don't treat HD-DVD and Blu-Ray as threats and ignore support. For us video professionals, we can't afford to lose support for any type of major distribution format because Jobs is trying to capture the market on digital movies, like he did with digital music.

"Leopard to support HD DVD and Blu-ray?"
"Apple shooting for autumn launch of film rental service - report"

After Effecst CS3--Runs Faster

"Adobe After Effects CS3: Cranking it up to 11" from Studio Daily
"ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS CS3: A justification for buying an 8-core Mac Pro" from Bare Feats

Reviews and tests of CS3 are rolling in. To me, the big news is that CS3 is running much faster on both G5's and Intels. The last version After Effects 7 was not a Universal Binary and wasn't designed to run on Intel chips. But looking at Bare Feats tests, there are big performance gains to be had for G5 owners too by upgrading to CS3.

The other big feature that I would use is 3-D text animation. Good thing Adobe added this, otherwise Motion would really begin to push past After Effects on the features for the type of quick-n-dirty motion graphics that I do.

Digitial TV Conversion

"Converters Signal a New Era for TVs" (registartion required)

This is a good article about the upcoming switch-off of analog over-the-air TV, which I actually still use. The article discusses the government program to help subsidize the purchase of digital TV converter boxes, so that folks like me can still use our analog TV's and get free TV after the switch-off.

I tried out digital over-the-air TV, which runs on the ATSC system, a couple of years ago when I bought one of these digital receivers. The reception was poor, much worse than with analog TV, and the receiver was expensive--over $150. So I returned it to the store and have been happily watching "Lost" in analog since then. This NYT article says that manufacturers are aiming to start selling these next year for $50-$75. Hopefully either the reception of the tuners or tranmission by the broadcasters is better then than what I saw 2 years ago--or I may have to start paying for TV.

UPDATE: There's an in-depth article over at Consumer Reports on getting over-the-air digital TV.

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.

Motion Tracking Tutorial

"Warp Speed Workflow #5: First Look: Motion Tracker in Motion 3"

This is a helpful tutorial movie over at dvcreators.net. Shows you how to do motion tracking in the new vesion of Motion. Unlike Apple's demos where the motion tracking just magically works perfectly, this shows you what to do when there are problems. Basically, Motion is analyzing the video trying to follow a particular object around the screen, and it is only so smart. So when it gets distracted and loses track of the object you define, you have to set it back on the correct path.

At an Apple demo, they showed where Motion will suggest tracking points. I think maybe you hold down the Option key to see recommended tracking points, but I can't remember for sure.

Real video helps with saving videos

Real video seems to have fallen fatally behind in the video streaming arena, now that Flash has emerged as the dominant streaming video format and the powerhouses of Apple and Windows stay strong with their online media presence. But it sounds like Real is putting some interesting features into a new version of their player. They are making it very easy for users to download and save videos in a variety of formats (Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime, and, of course, Real.) They are also offering some features to burn video to discs for playback in DVD players. Read about this over at hardmac.com.

How much is that old Mac worth?

This is a cool site. mac2sell.net estimates the resell value of your old Mac. You enter in your specs and it guesses the value. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it's a place to start when thinking about how much you might get if you want to sell (or how much is reasonable to pay if you want to buy.) My iBook G4 933 MHz is worth $440 according to them.

"Final Cut Pro 6 - A First Look"

Check out this article at kenstone.net. Goes into the new features in FCP 6 from an expert who's actually used the new stuff. Gives you a more hands-on feel for how things actually work, like Open Format Timeline, SmoothCam, round tripping, and more. When you're ready to start using FCP 6, I recommend this to get an overview of how to actually use some of the new features. [via camcorderinfo.com]

Photoshop CS3 Extended

"Photoshop CS3 Extended Review"

MacWorld UK gives an overview of the new features of Photoshop CS3 Extended, which is a new version of Photoshop with some specialized features. In particular, there are some new video and 3D features. You can paint frame-by-frame. Good for taking out dropouts, it seems to me. Also FX's work or rotoscoping.

Final Cut and SmoothCam

"Final Cut Studio 2 SmoothCam Tested: Fix Those Shaky Shots"

An overview with examples of using SmoothCam in FCP. SmoothCam uses "Optical Flow", which is technology imported from Shake, to the new Final Cut Suite. Gives some good advice on working with HDV--transcode to ProRes422 to dramatically reduce processing time. Very impressive what it does with shots from a car. Seems like Apple's SmoothCam is providing a great tool for removing unwanted motion in a shot. However, I think its value for interlaced standard-definition video is low because you lose so much resolution from the de-interlacing and the scaling that SmoothCam does. But I guess I should try it out before I make any judgments.

UPDATE: There are some more in-depth tests at The Edit Blog. Apparently, when you execute SmoothCam, FCP analyzes the entire source clip and not just what is cut into the timeline. The Edit Blog notes some improvement from using ProRes422 over HDV (36 min. vs. 53 min. on a 12.5 sec clip). But it looks like the big improvements in analysis time cited above are probably confounded by the creation of a smaller source clip when the video was transcoded to ProRes 422. [via FreshDV]

Bottom line: The results are good but the analysis time on SmoothCam is slow. Dual 2.7 G5 estimated 5 hours to process one and half minutes of HDV. Did I mention that the analysis takes place in the background, so you can keep working while FCP analyzes the clip?

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.