FlipFactory

I just got back from a presentation by a representative of Telestream. Now probably best know for their Flip4Mac, which is how to watch Windows Media on a Mac, Telestream has a long history of transcoding video. We are looking at FlipFactory to deliver video to our playout server at Link TV. Around $20K for the software to transcode from QuickTime to an MPEG-2 file that makes the playout server happy. There's a 15-day trial version, which I need to check out at the TeleStream website. The cheaper Episode line of products from Telestream support transcoding to the Grass Valley playout server, but no other playout servers.

FlipFactory also has some new features for generating RSS feeds for podcasts (as well as all the codec settings for video podcasts.) I was also reminded at the presentation of libsyn.com, which is the cheap way to go for podcast hosting.

Skype 2.5 Adds Videoconferencing on Macs

As great as iChat is, wouldn't it be nice if you could videoconference with Windows folks? OK, someone who uses a Windows computer probably isn't worth the effort, but the new Skype for Mac at least opens the door. Version 2.5 is now "gold" and includes support for audio, video, text, and SMS messaging. Download Skype 2.5 for Mac here.

Understanding Scopes in Final Cut Pro

Understanding Scopes in Final Cut Pro is a good video tutorial by Larry Jordan. Covers all the important basics of using the waveform and vectorscope in FCP. These same principles apply to using a real waveform and vectorscope--essential tools for getting reliable information about your picture. I found this link over at FresHDV.com.

Blow Up Video Stills or Fun with Fractals

So you have to make a DVD case and you have no production stills or artwork to use. You can use stills from video but they can only be so big on paper before they look like junk because they are too lo-res for print (especially if you only have standard-def video.) Well fractals have come to the rescue, according to this tutorial at DV.com Repurposing Video for Print. You need to register to see the article. It is basically a tutorial on using Genuine Fractals. There's a free demo version of Genuine Fractals which allows you to scale 20 images over a trial period of 30 days. It works as a plug-in for Photoshp or Photoshop Elements. It boasts that you can scale an image up to 800%. I just did some printing with something that I blew up 300% and it looked good.

Download YouTube Videos

I wanted to send someone a QuickTime version of a video on YouTube the other day. What to do? Here's what I figured out--I'm sure there's other ways to do it, but I know this one worked for me. I copied the link for the video from the movie's page (YouTube posts it prominently on the page to encourage people to embed videos on other webpages.) There's a website keepvid.com that will take that link and give you a new link to download the YouTube video. So now you have a video in the flash format on your desktop. But I wanted a QuickTime. I used a free program called iSquint to convert the flash video to an MPEG-4 QuickTime. It only took a couple of minutes to transcode a 30-minute video on a MacPro 2.66 GHz. iSquint is meant to transcode for iPod, but the MPEG-4 settings seemed to cause no degradation to the YouTube video.

In a simiilar vein, there's a post on DVGuru about ffmpeg, a free app that will let you encode into Flash. If you do want to post to YouTube, it seems to make sense to encode it yourself since their built-in encoding seems to do a poor job to me.

Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 Features

I'm just starting to fiddle around with Final Cut 5.1.2. Two nice new additions are "live" video scopes and FX Plug support. The "live" video scopes means that the waveform monitor, vectorscope, RGB parade, etc. will give you a continuously updating display while you play video. Almost like having real scopes. However, the "live" display doesn't come close to capturing the full detail of the image--not as good as having a real waveform monitor but still a big improvement.

FX Plug support allows you to bring over some filters, transitions, and generators from Motion into Final Cut Pro. I was just using the Light Rays filter yesterday in a project. Pretty nifty. There's a setting you have to change to activate the new filters, which is described in this good article on 5.1.2 at kenstone.net by Andrew Balis. There's also a list of all the new filters there and some nice demonstrations of what you can do with them.

Free Sound Project

Free Sound Project has a collection of recorded sounds, including effects, for download. I'm not sure of all the licensing issues but the next time I want a swish or a whoosh I'll be visiting them. I heard about them at DVGuru because one of their effects ('Loud Male Screaming') was used in the Alfonso Cuarón film "Chilrdren of Men". It's fun to just browse too and listen to some random sounds--tibetan chanting, dog growling, birds in the forest, ringing glass.

Watch out HDV, Here Comes AVCHD

This is an interesting poll on formats. The poll is from camcorderinfo.com where people reported what format they were most likely to buy into. HDV came out on top with 35%, but AVCHD, the tapeless format, raked in about 29% interest. And as I wrote earlier, there is no official way to edit AVCHD yet. Does that mean many shooters don't carry about editing or a lot of people can't wait to throw away their tape? The AVCHD format is split between people who were interested in the hard drive camcorders (14%), the SD card camcorders (11%), and the DVD camcorders (3%). But when you add that up, it represents a challenge to HDV. Granted, this is really a site geared towards consumers, but not totally (they do a lot of good covereage on the sub-$10k camera market with some kick-ass reviews now and then.) I've already bought two HDV decks, so I hope it'll be around for a while.

Attend Adam Wilt University

There are sessions from the DV Expo conference available here. As I've written earlier, I'm a big fan of Adam Wilt, and you can get a full 3 hours of him here. I watched about an hour of this, and there are many golden nuggets of info about sub-$10K camcorder market (Z1, DVX100, PD-150, HVX200, etc.). I know I'm not a shooter, but there are many things in here that would have solved issues that I've had to deal with in post. Here's a couple of things that I picked out that have troubled me in the past. In countries with 50 Hz electrical systems, you can get bad flicker with fluorescent lights--so turn your shutter to 1/50 or 1/100 setting to get rid of the flicker. The PD-150 always has auto-shutter on, unless you manually punch in a shutter setting. The skin detail control actually removes skin detail. He does a good demo of how it works at the session. Skin detail's purpose: to make people with wrinkles, pores, and other imperfections look better.

I found this over at DV Guru. You need to register to watch, but I recommend it. Adam Wilt explains complex technical stuff very sucinctly. He makes you understand how these cameras work, and lets you know how to use that knowledge to make better pictures. There's also adamwilt.com, which is worth taking a look it.

AVC: More Format Wackiness

OK, so we are just figuring out how to edit with the HDV format when Sony, Panasonic, and JVC spring the AVC format on us. This high-definition format comes in two flavors AVCHD and AVC-Intra: the first is consumer-oriented and the second Panasonic is putting into its professional line. The AVCHD format is not being used on tape but on hard drive, flash memory, and DVD camcorders. Its supposed to be more efficient than HDV, but in the consumer mode works at lower data rates. Panasonic announced a new camcorder AJ-JPX2000 in December that records AVC-Intra onto P2 cards (like the HVX200). AVC-Intra records 10-bit video and is supposed to be better and more efficent than the DVCProHD format.

What got me going is this tutorial on how to edit AVCHD, which I found via DVGuru. Sounds laborious and its Windows-only. It will be interesting to see what Final Cut does to support AVC. I do like the idea of shooting onto off-the-shelf SD memory cards, as opposed to the pricey P2 cards, but who knows when it will be practical.

OT: Your Rights to Videotape in Public

Via ProLost, a link to a guide to the legal rights of photographers. An interesting read for anyone who has (or might) be told to turn off a camera when they don't want to. I found this link over at the website ProLost by the guy who wrote "The DV Rebels Guide"--a new book for aspring movie makers.

Link

Video Levels in FCP by Graeme Nattress

"Video Levels in Final Cut Pro" is a good, very detailed article on how Final Cut Pro deals with video levels. It just happens that at my facility we have been using a non-standard "wrong" way of handling video levels since we started editing. We now have to make a transition to the standard way of representing luminance, which is going to be a bit painful.

Essentially we have not been using the appropriate level for black in Final Cut Pro because of how our equipment handles the conversion of analog video to digital video (and vice versa, converting digital to analog.) In analog video, the luminance value of an image is represented on the IRE scale. Black should equal 7.5 IRE while white is 100 IRE. Grays are in between with higher numbers being lighter than lower numbers.

However, North America is the only place in the world where black is 7.5--the rest of the world defines black as 0 IRE. The use of 7.5 IRE is also called "setup". This can create a problem when you are digitizing an analog signal. Does the analog-to-digital converter know which standard of black you are using (i.e. 7.5 IRE or 0 IRE.) In our case, the converter we used to digitize did not know what the appropriate black level was for us. It assumed our black level was 0 IRE when in fact our tapes, like all analog tapes in North America, were calibrated to have black at 7.5 IRE. This scenario is described in the article under the heading "Not Adding or Removing 7.5 IRE Setup." I made a diagram (fig. 1) to represent this.

Final Cut Pro, like digital tape formats (e.g. DVCam, HDV, DigiBeeta), does not have any use for "setup". For example, in the waveform monitor display in FCP, black levels read 0 on the scale. The waveform display is a representation of the luminance of a picture. The graphic at the top of this post shows a waveform display of a gradient from black to white. Technically, this isn't an IRE scale because IRE is an analog-only scale. The waveform display is meant give you an approximation of what the luminance values of your video should look like in the analog world. On all of our old footage, our black levels coming from our Beta tapes read 7.5 on FCP's luminance scale. Really the appropriate level for black in FCP would have been down to 0 on the FCP waveform. Unfortunately when I started at Link TV, we didn't have any way of adjusting our black levels while digitizing--we did not have a processor amplifier that could have adjusted the setup/black levels nor did we have an analog-digital converter that we could tell to "remove the setup". The Sony DVMC-DA2, which we used to digitize our Beta tapes, assumed that our blacks were 0 IRE and couldn't remove the setup from our 7.5 IRE black analog video.

To compensate for black levels on our digitzied video, we essentially redefined what black was in FCP. FCP wanted black down at the bottom of its scale at 0 on its waveform monitor. But all of our analog video that had been digitzed had blacks at 7.5 on the scale. We couldn't just leave a blank space in the timeline for black because this was blacker than the blacks in our analog video. So we had to make our own black clips with a color matte with a lumiance value of 4. (Logically you would think the matte clips would have a luminance value of 7.5 but that was too bright. To know why read farther down in Graeme's article on how FCP adjusts the gamma of still images.)

Well, we are finally moving over most of our editing systems to professional analog-digital converters from AJA and BlackMagic. These converters have software settings that allow you to control whether setup is removed while digitzing an analog signal. So it is possible to capture analog video with 7.5 black levels that gets digitized to FCP's default value of 0 for black. The AJA or BlackMagic hardware will also add the setup to the signal as it goes out the analog outputs back to Beta tapes. So when we lay off, our Beta master tapes will also have the standard 7.5 IRE black for analog videotape. So the FCP settings are right (black at 0), and the black levels on our Beta masters are right for North America analog video (black at 7.5 IRE.)


We haven't made the switch yet. We currently have a hundreds of promos that we have to update every couple of months that we keep on the system. Ideally we will make a clean break in the near future. After that every project that we either start or have to lay off while have blacks at 0 in FCP. That will be a lot of busy work, but we will finally be using the correct standard for our video. To get the old projects using black at 0 in FCP, we will probably use the color corrector to lower the black levels down to 0 in FCP. It would be great to redigitze all of our projects, but I think that is just too much work.

The article goes into more detail by describing the ITU-601 standard as well, which defines luminance values on an 8-bit scale of 0-255 (I skipped that scale in this description to try and make this complex issue simpler.) The article also describes some interesting issues with luminance values when importing graphics (e.g., from Photoshop.) The author Graeme Nattress is a great engineer type. He authored a good plug-in for converting PAL video to NTSC that we use sometimes at the office. Compressor does a better job of doing standards conversion, but his plugin is easier to use and faster.

Good Stuff Over at DV.com

DV.com, which started out as a magazine, is not the same as it was during the DV heyday, but their stable of expert commentators is still around churning out good articles. I'm thinking of Adam Wilt who just put out a review of the new Canon XH-A1,which sounds like an awesome camera. Trish and Chris Meyer who recently wrote a good article "Brighter Whites, Richer Colors" about luminance values when working in After Effects. And Jay Rose, their sound guy, who just gave me this good tidbit in this article on echoes that I need to remember:
"Cut down the reflections. Hang sound blankets on the walls so they don't reflect as efficiently. Or spread movers' pads, fiberglass batts, production assistants, or anything else that'll absorb sound. Bunches of helium balloons can calm the echoes from hard domed ceilings."

We've been shooting some stuff in our office that sounds really boomy. Hopefully we can get a hold of some of the stuff that Jay talks about to cut down on the echo. I keep a copy of the Audio for Post Production book by Jay Rose around the office, which I recommend for both beginners and experienced editors who want to dig deep into sound issues.

You do need to register to use DV.com, but I think its worth it because of the quality of their articles.

More on Apple TV & Video Podcasting

While iPhone has stolen all of the headlines (and probably justifably so), I think Apple TV does shine in liberating the video podcast from the computer and bringing it to the TV set. Apple's demo does a good job of approximating what the user interface is like. Click on the Podcast link down their webpage to see more or less what I saw with an actual unit at Macworld.

Granted podcasting is a distant cousin to the internet craze of the moment--YouTube. It would be a challenge to transfer all of the chaos of shared video from the computer to the TV, and I don't think Apple is going to try and do that. For the time being, I still have some hope for the medium of video podcasting to reach a broader audience, especially with consumer-friendly products like the Apple TV, not to mention the video iPod, and coming soon the iPhone.

Random DVD Encoding Tidbit

I picked this up from a Studio Daily video tutorial that I heard about at DVGuru.com. Larry Jordan gives a couple of pointers on working with Compressor for going to DVD.

For audio, use Dolby/AC3 compression if you have more than 20 minutes but tweak the default setting. Larry says to turn off dialog normalization, which ends up lowering the volume on your sound. To do this set dialog normalization to -31. Also turn off the preprocessing by setting it to none. Larry shows you how to do this in the video and also gives a general overview on choosing your settings for compressing for DVD.

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