Firewire vs. USB Performance in New Laptops

So Apple has dropped Firewire from the MacBook and don't expect to ever see it againon the consumer-level laptop from Apple. This is too bad, especially since Apple really boosted the performance of the new MacBook--it would have made a decent computer for editors if it had had Firewire.

The lack of Firewire raises two big issues for video folks. First, the performance of hard drives over USB has traditionally been really poor on Mac's--usually half the speed of Firewire 400. Second, there are all kinds of other gear that uses Firewire--decks, cameras, Firestore, video monitoring/digitizing equipment. We layoff to DVCam at Link and get most of our footage from DV and HDV tapes.

One good bit of news about peripherals with the new laptops is that Apple has finally raised the performance of USB. Check out this article at Bare Feats to see the results of a comparison of hard drive performance of USB, FW400, FW800, and Sata drives on the new laptops. USB is almost as fast as Firewire 400 on the new MacBook Pro.

I still wouldn't recommend doing any serious editing with USB drives on these new laptops. I guess it could work, but Firewire was supposed to be a better standard. My guess is that you would run into problems with capturing and laying off if your media was on USB drives. But these are educated guesses at this point. This may change if Apple does a better job of implementing USB on their Mac's.

October Blogwad

"3D Objects from Photoshop in After Effects CS4"
Adobe CS4 is shipping. The thing that most interested me is you can have 3D objects in After Effects. There are a number of limitations on this. This little video shows you the basic of working with 3D objects and discusses the limitations in After Effects (the biggest for me is objects don't respond to lighting in After Effects.) More new features described here.

"Top 10 things you didn't know about the new MacBook"
New MacBook and MacBook Pro's were announced. Each model lost a Firewire 400 port. That leaves the MBP with one FW800 port, but the MacBook with no Firewire port and no way to add it. Some good things about the new laptops too (besides looking really slick.)

"Final Cut Pro: Free plugins to make all fonts available"
Why by version of 6, Apple still hasn't fixed this I don't know. But here's a text plug-in that is supposed to let you use all of your fonts in FCP.

"Final Cut Pro: My free Closing Credits plugin"
From the same guy who made the type plug-in above. The cool thing about this is that it lets you control the lines per second speed of your scroll. I basically almost always use one speed for credit rolls--120 lines pers second. (To know why read from Adam Wilt here). I do keyframe animation of Title 3D to do this, but it's a pain. This plug-in is an easier way to get the speed right, but you lose all the nice type editing features of Boris 3D.

"Build your own affordable SAN -- that works!"
Remember my crazy idea to use Jonathan's computer to build a SAN. This is where I got the idea. I'd still like to do it, but nobody wanted to give me $3K to play around with this, instead of letting editors use the computer.

"What to do if you lose your Pro App serial number"
Title says it all.

"Final Cut Pro Audio Filter Guide Part 1"
"Final Cut Pro Audio Filter Guide Part 2"
Bone up on FCP's audio filters with these helpful articles. Basically they describe what the various sliders do for the filters. However, if you're like me and not an audio person and you don't know what you are doing, then you will probably make your audio sound worse by playing around with filters. On the other hand, I learned the little I know about audio mainly by playing around with filters.

My current favorite filter is Soundtrack Pro's limiter. It works much better than the limiter in FCP. But it's a pain to export to Soundtrack Pro and reimport. It really makes sure that your peaks aren't out of control and cuts off all sounds at a consistent level without distorting it. I usually set it to -10 limit with a +10 boost.

"Another electronic slate for the iPhone"
"Finally a few timecode calculators for the iPhone"
Rejoice iPhone owners (and iPod Touch owners.) Video-centric apps for your iPhone.

"Anything Worth Backing Up…"
Good thoughts on backup strategies and technologies.

"All About Video Fields"
For extra credit, read this long, tech-y article on fields. Written from the perspective of a software engineer, but all the issues come up for video editors too.

SD Cards in the Sony EX-1

This seems like some exciting bit of news. Apparently, folks have figured out how to shoot onto SanDisk SD cards with the Sony EX-1 and EX-3 cameras, instead of Sony's expensive SxS media.

The EX cameras are supposed to be great (see latest EX-3 review from Adam Wilt.). Excellent performance in terms of resolution and low-light sensitivity. Their 1/2" sensors work much better than the smaller 1/3" sensors in the Z1, Z5, Z7, HVX200, HPX170, and Canon cameras. The big problem for me with the EX cameras was shooting on the expensive SxS media. Like the Panasonic's P2 cards, these are much more expensive per GB than run-of-the-mill flash memory--e.g., $850 for 16GB of SxS Pro storage. It just wouldn't make sense when you are shooting a lot of stuff because the hassle of making sure all your footage was safe on hard drives all the time.

Well, this guy says you can use a 16GB SanDisk SD card for $60 that will do just about everything that Sony's $850 card will (the notable exception being over-cranking, used for slo-mo shots.) You just need a particular Kensington Expresscard adapter for $40 that you put in the camera.

It still doesn't make the the EX-1 ($6450 at B&H) a no-brainer for Link. That's still $60 to record about an hour at 35 Mb/s or 90 minutes at 25 Mb/s. The camera's more difficult to handle than the Z1 or Z5, or even Z7. Plus the Z5 has a 20x lens versus 14x lens for the EX cameras. And we are hardly ever delivering HD--so we usually downconvert in the deck, which is both a good and easy way to get SD footage from HD source material. If quality is what really counts, than the EX cameras are a real winner in the sub $10K range, but I think, but there are some significant drawbacks to the camera when compared to more practical, tape-based cameras like the Z5.

If you are seriously interested in this, then read the fine print here:
Overcoming the cost of SxS media: Introducing KxS.
Also, I don't know of anyone personally doing this. I would probably wait for some trustworthy sources to vouch for this before I committed to buying an EX camera.

UPDATE: Adam Wilt (a very trustworthy source) says that he's heard good things from Sony about working with off-the-shelf memory cards on the EX cameras in the comments section of this post on ProVideo Coalition.

I tried looking for the Kensington card reader, and it seems to be out-of-stock everywhere. Also read on a forum that it may have been discontinued. Not good news for this concept.

Farewell Messages to Kathryn

Hi all Link staffers,

We are doing something new for Kathryn Binovi's going away party, and I need everyone's help. I want to make the video equivalent of a card that we would give to Kathryn. So I want to get nice thoughts and reflections from the staff about Katherine. I plan to make a video that will play on a TV screen during the party. On the screen will be text with messages from Kathryn's co-workers (that's you!).

Please try your best to think of something unique to say to Kathryn--it would be nice not to have 10 messages that just said "We'll miss you" and "Good luck." Also try to keep it shortish, as the type will have to be pretty big to be legible. Feel free to recycle these messages in any actual physical card.

To make it easier for people not to duplicate each other's messages, I'm encouraging people to write out their thoughts as comments on this blog post. Please make sure to write your name at the end of your comments. To make a comment, click on the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of this post. You don't have to log in to post a comment--just select anonymous option on the page where you write your post. But again, remember to write your name in the message.

If you are receiving this message in an email, follow the link to go to my blog where you can post your messages to Kathryn.

Thanks!
Matt

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.

Sony Announces Successor to Z1

Sony has announced a new camera in their HDV professional lineup: the HVR-Z5. It's body is very similar to the Z1. The V1 is a smaller size with the LCD located on the left size of the body, while the Z7 has a removable lens.

There's lots of nice upgrades over the Z1. The 3-CMOS imaging system is supposed to handle low-light much better. The lens is wider and has a 20x zoom and an iris ring right on the lens. Traditionally, Sony has relegated the iris control to a small wheel control on the camera's body for their low-end pro cams. There are a lot of similarities to the new Z7, like recording to CompactFlash (with optional HVR-MRC1K), an high-resolution LCD display and viewfinder, and native 24P recording onto the HDV format. The MRSP of the Z5 is $5000.

Earlier this year, I was touting the Z7 as Link's "next camera". I have to eat my words. I should have seen this camera coming--all the features of the Z7 without the removable lens. I think this camera makes more sense for Link. The built-in lens I think will make the Z5 easier to handle and lighter. The Z7 has a 12x lens versus the 20x on the Z5. And I'm guessing the Z5 will be cheaper than the Z7. Although the Z7 price recently dropped on the B&H site for $6300 to $5400.

B&H wrote an article about the prosumer version of this camera the FX-1000. It's covers some of the new features also included on the Z5 in detail.

While I am now predicting this as Link's next camera, I have no idea when we would buy one. Don't hold your breath. But the camera will be available in December.

OT: Sharing files via YouSendIt

OT means "off-topic." So this isn't something that I would normally put on my blog. But I was going to send this info to a few people, and I thought folks on the blog might have some interest in it.

I'm going to give a basic tutorial on sharing files with the free version YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a service that's available in a free version and paid version with more bells & whistles. Link has the Pro account that we pay for, but I'm going to give the example of a free account. (For using the Pro account you don't need to do all the extra steps that takes up the bulk of this article.)

First register with YouSendIt. You know you are going to have to give up an actual email address to use this service. But it's worth it. They mostly use your address to send you useful info, like a confirmation that your upload is complete. Give them your email, then wait for their email confirmation to arrive. Once you get their email follow their instructions so that they will activate an account for you.

Once you have a free account, you can send one file upto 100MB in size. The way YouSendIt works is that you are using YouSendIt to send the file to someone else via their email. Really you are just sending them a notification that they can download the file from YouSendIt. You use their website to upload the file along with the email address of the person or persons that you want to send the file to. The person then gets an email with a link to YouSendIt. When he or she gets the email, they can follow a link to start downloading your file.

Now YouSendIt likes to work with one upload--so what happens when you want to send multiple files? As an example, I'll use sending an album from iTunes. With 10 or so music files in an album, it might seems like you have to send each song individually--that would be a pain and not worth the hassle. But there's an easy workaround that I know of on the Mac to easily send multiple files.

The workaround involves using the Zip technology built into the Mac OS. Zip is essentially a way to compress files. You can zip a single file or multiple files. Because most types of media, like MP3 or video, are already compressed, zipping the files doesn't actually make them significantly smaller. However you can use Zip to take several files and bundle them together into what Apple calls an Archive. So by taking an album and zipping the songs, we create a copy of the album that exists as one file. This single file (containing multiple songs) can then be uploaded to YouSendIt in one go.

So here's an example of how to do this with an album. First find the files that you want to send. It's easy enough to do with iTunes. By right-clickng on a song, use can use the "Show in Finder" command (the third item from the top in the contextual menu.) If your mouse only has one button, then you can hold down the Ctrl button while clicking to get the same contextual menu up.

The "Show in Finder" command will open up a window in the Finder showing where the file of the song is located. So now you see your song along with all the other songs in the album. Now we want to bundle all the files in this album into one single file. To do this, select all the files in the folder, then right-click again. This time you use the "Compress x items" (where x is the number of files that you've selected), the fith command from the top of the contextual menu.

After you've compressed your files, you'll see a new file in the same folder called "Archive.zip." This is a copy of your files collapsed into a single file.


This file called "Archive.zip" is the file that you want to send with YouSendIt. You can also compress or zip a folder. If you did this, then the compressed file would be named after the folder and not the generic "Arhive" that is used when you zip or compress multiple files. You can't send a folder via the free YouSendIt, but you can send a compressed version of that folder. Again, the free version of YouSendIt just wants a single file to send.

In this example, the file is 65MB, below the 100MB limit of our free service. Most compressed music is encoded at a bit rate of 128Kbps. At 128Kbps, 100MB equals about 1 hour and 50 minutes of audio. That's enough for a single album. However I've started buying music from Amazon, and Amazon encodes their music at a hefty 256Kbps. That means a 100MB is only about 55 minutes of music. So you may not be able to fit everything in one file. So if you want to send a group of files (like an album) and the total was over 100MB, then you wold need to split up your files into more than one archive, and each archive would need to be under the 100MB limit of YouSendIt and sent separately.

Another gotcha with music is that some music has DRM protection, meaning it can probably be only played on specific computers and other devices (like iPods) that are linked to a particular person. This isn't conducive to sharing music. iTunes is the last big player that is still selling lots of music with DRM. (This isn't about Apple but about the entertainment corporations--but that's the subject of another post.) iTunes has something called iTunes Plus, which is DRM-free music that you can buy (look for the plus icon next to the price of the music). All music bought from Amazon's download store is free of DRM--so they can be shared with anyone. Amazon has a pretty good store--it's nearly as easy to use as buying music from iTunes, and it's usually cheaper. Anything you rip from a CD is obviously DRM-free.

OK back to YouSendIt. Go to their website and log in using your account. Follow the link to send a file. Enter the email address or address of the person or persons that you want to get this file. Then click on the "choose file" button and select the Archive.zip file that you just created. Then click the "Send It" button. This actually starts the process of uploding the file to the YouSendIt website. This will take some time, and it's important not to disrupt the process. So you want to leave that webpage open and your web browser running until the file finishes uploading. Upload times are generally slower than download times. On my DSL it takes about 10 minutes to upload 50MB of data, but I can download that much in a fraction of the time.

Once the file is uploaded, an email will be sent to your buddy or buddies. Then it's up to them to follow the link to download the file. With the free verison, your file will be available for 7 days. So hopefully your friends will download soon instead of procrastinating.

Oh, you will probably want to delete the Archive.zip file now that it's uploaded. It's just a copy of your existing music that's taking up space on the hard drive.

If you are like me and you've been burning files onto disc to share with people, this method offers some advantages. One, there's no physical media to move around, either by hand or by mail. Two, you are helping the environment by not using up plastic to make a copy of your files, and in the case of mail, you aren't using fossil fuels to move a physical copy of the file around. So give it a shot, and let me know what you think of my method for sharing files.

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.

Some Bay Area Events

A couple of interesting events I thought I'd share with others.

SFCutters is doing an event on Thursday the 28th with a some focus on compression. The author of 'Real World Video Compression' Andy Beach is speaking. I was recently checking out a blog post from him that compares Compressor with some other competing encoding apps that was worth a read. Article points out some weakensses in Compressor, like the poor default deinterlacing and its slowness. Also there will be some training on the oft-neglected LiveType, and there will a presentation by Adobe on Flash CS3, which we have a couple of licenses for at Link. $10 to go and you have to pay online before you go at the link.

There's also a conference October 17 & 18 at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley called The Conversation. It's subtitled "The Future of Cinema, Games & Online Video: New Tools/New Distribution/New Rules". Looks like a lot of interesting panels. Only problem is I think it's a bit pricey--$150. How about some non-profit discounts? I guess I could call them and ask.

How I Download Flash Videos

Here's how I download Flash video. I'll use YouTube as an example, but I've found that the method works on other flash video, but not by any means all online video.

1. Start playing the movie in Safari.
2. Open the Activity Window in Safari. It's under the Window menu.
3. Find the movie in the Activity window. The Activity window lists a lot of things, like all the graphics on the webpage (and for all open pages.) But I usually find movies because they are the largest--in the MB's not KB's. Also the movies size is usually changing--as long as the movie is downloading.

In the image below, the movie is the file 3rd item from the bottom whose name starts with v6.cache.googlevideo.


4. Select the movie file in the activity window and copy it. This will copy the location of the video.

5. Open a new browser window and paste the movie's location in the address field.

6. Safari starts downloading the video. Download window should automatically open.

7. Wait for the video to finish downloading. Then find the video file. The magnifying glass next to the file in the Download window will take you to it. In OS.10.4 it's probably on the desktop. In OS 10.5, it's probably in the Downloads folder.

8. Rename the file to add the .flv suffix if it doesn't already have the .flv suffix, e.g., get_video.flv. You might as well add a descriptive title too while you are at it.

Now to work with flash video on the Mac, I use the free Perian plug-in. It lets QuickTime recognize the file, so that you can use it in Final Cut Pro or any app that uses QuickTime.

YouTube now has better quality video available on some videos. Check to see if the video you want is in better quality before downloading. If there is higher quality video, then you'll see the link below the movie "watch in high quality."


Click on that link and then follow the instructions above to get a much better looking video from YouTube.

Earlier this summer I posted a link to a post from Final Cut User that recommends transcoding the flash to something that FCP is used to working with, like the DV codec. I haven't had any problems working with Flash video, but it could speed up your workflow if you don't have to render the movies in the timeline.

Blu-ray Burning 101

Not sure if everyone really knows about the Blu-ray burner that we have. We bought the OWC Mercury Pro 2x Blu-ray Panasonic SW-5582. It's an external burner that burns 25GB and 50GB over firewire. Right now it's hooked up to the G4 that interns have been working with.

We got it to back up data mostly. Blu-ray is more reliable than a hard-drive and 25GB is decent capacity for backing up video files. We are hoping to use it to free up some of our hard drives that are sitting around not getting used because of old projects that no one wants to delete.

The discs aren't cheap, around $10, but it's reasonable, especialy when you consider that it's a robust, easy-to-use archiving solution.

So how do you use it? I'm not going to into all of the setup here (if you are interested ask me), but there's a video that covers burning discs in the Mac's Finder and with Toast. This video shows Toast 9, but we use Toast 8, and it works pretty much the same (I think the main difference is that they tweaked the interface.)

MacVideo: Step into Blu-ray - for less than £200

I looked for that drive mentioned in the video and couldn't find it. This guy is British, and I couldn't find anything as comparably cheap or anything with the same model number in the States. Remember folks, the dollar is a currency on the wane, eventually our greenbacks aren't going to go as far when buying all those imported, electronics.

Now, you can't watch any blu-ray movies on Macs. Apple needs to add support for that both in hardware and the operating system, and as I've written before Apple has made no announcement indicating that they will support Blu-ray movie playback at all. However, you can author Blu-ray movies using Adobe's Encore software on an Intel Mac. Right now we have that up and running on the new Octo-core Intel Mac Pro that Hiawatha uses. But until Link gets a Blu-ray player or a Playstation 3, then we don't have any way to playback those Blu-ray movies. (I'm all for getting a PS3--how about some Rock Band jamming at the office?)

Here's an article from Adobe discussing workflow for encoding high-def video using Compressor to burn onto Blu-ray using Encore:
Apple's Compressor & Encore Blu-Ray

Compressor and Conversions

Compressor 2 and 3 have very powerful tools for converting and upscaling video, as well as doing slo-mo. The optical flow technology, which Apple acquired when they bought the powerful compositing application Shake (only later to kill it), is the key to the results that you can get from Compressor. The key to getting the best results is the Frame Controls settings in Compressor.

Compressor is very good at standards conversion or converting video to a different frame rate. People often call this PAL and NTSC conversion although this isn't really accurate, but it will handle the same tasks that systems that do this do--namely the scaling and frame rate conversions. Frame rate conversions in particular are difficult to do really well. There are some standalone products from Teranex that just do this for around $2500 Well Compressor does this really well, but Teranex does it in real-time and Compressor is really slow.

Optical flow can also help in up-conversion of interlaced footage. Interlacing makes it really hard to do upconversion because your vertical resolution is basically split in two. For an example of how to scale things up badly look at what Final Cut Pro does in the timeline. FCP basically throws away half of your vertical resolution as soon as you scale a video clip. So the difference between 100% scale and 99% or 101% scale is crisp video and a blurry messy. When scaled up like this over 200%, not unusual when putting in standard-def footage into a high-def project, fine detail like type also starts shaking up and down from the interlacing--it looks ugly.

Compressor is an improvement on how FCP works in a number of ways. First, it can analyze the image and decide to selectively keep detail from both fields when the video isn't moving--if visuals in a part of a frame is moving, then only that part of the frame will lose resolution. With the optical flow technology, Compressor guesses how a part of the frame is moving and intelligently creates an image with more resolution than other results. These two approaches are handled in the deinterlacing settings in Compressor--the first approach is described as Better while Best uses optical flow.

The Retiming controls are where Compressor handles different frame rates. For example going from 25 fps video from Europe to 30fps video over in North America, usually handled as 60i (interlaced) especially in standard-def. The Better and Best settings in Compressor use optical flow. Like with deinterlacing, optical flow analyzes your video and recognizes object and how they are moving--the optical flow then intelligently creates new frames that move objects smoothly without losing detail. By the way, going from 24fps, which is a progressive format, is not a problem for us folks working in 60i. You can do this right in FCP without any fancy conversion (assuming you want to keep the 24fps filmic look.)

As an example, here's what I recommended to someone doing PAL to NTSC conversion:
Resizing: Better
Deinterlacing: Better (motion adaptive)
Retiming: Better
In this case, the scaling is going down (PAL has more resolution than NTSC, so you should get good results without jumping through a lot of hoops.) I reserved the optical flow use to only retiming at the Better setting. I didn't recommend optical flow on deinterlacing to save time. But if time isn't an issue then using Best for deinterlacing should improve results.

Unfortunately, all this intelligent analysis by optical flow is very processor and time-intensive. So for example using optical flow for retiming and and deinterlacing makes my quad-core G5 slow to a crawl--I'd give a ballpark estimate of 1 minute to process 1 second of video. But if quality is important, then the results can be excellent.

There are some plug-ins that specialize in upconversion, namely InstantHD. Check here for my post on upconversion.

Here are two good articles on using Compressor. Macworld discusses standards conversions here that walks you through the whole process:
Send video abroad
This post at Digital Rebellion gives detailed info on all the settings in Frame Controls.
Using Frame Controls in Compressor

The Macworld article also recommends an interesting workflow using Cinema Tools to convert PAL to NTSC by conforming the PAL to 24fps, scaling and deinterlacing in Compressor, then adding pulldown in FCP. Interesting workflow that I've never seen used.

The Retiming controls in Compressor can also give you some very good slo-mo results. Here are some cool tests done that compares Final Cut Pro versus Compressor at various speeds on two shots.
"Final Cut Studio slow motion demo"
"Final Cut slow motion at various speeds"
The author brings up a good point--if you are shooting a shot to be slo-mo, then shoot at as high a frame rate as you can--60p, 60i, 50p, 50i are good, where 24 fps is bad for slo-mo. The more samples per second of the image you can acquire, the better the slo-mo will work.

$500 Shopping Spree

So what would you spend $500 on? I'm soliciting opinions. In another interesting variation, on budgetary outlays, I've been offered $500 to spend on anything I want. The reasoning is that we are charging someone around $500 to make some dubs, and the money can go towards equipment.

Well, after figuring that I couldn't slip a receipt for a Playstation or a 32GB iPod Touch past accounting, I've turned my mind towards more practical purchases.

My number one idea is to replace the tube of the Sony monitor on the A system in Edit 2. Am I the only one noticing that the image is looking greenish? $500 should cover the cost of replacing the tube in that monitor. I'd rather do it now when we have the money--otherwise I'll have to wait around until it is so obvious that the folks holding the purse strings can perceive the bad color on the monitor. That could take a while.

However, I've been thinking about other things too. A few months ago, I was making a big fuss about better production equipment. In particular, I was recommending a new tripod, an LCD field montior and a telephoto lens adapter for the Z1. An LCD field monitor is not out of the question for $500. I wanted to get a high-def one for closer to $1K, but there's a kit for a widescreen one with a resolution of 1440x234 for about $500. Check out the Varizoon kit at B&H. I don't know if this is much better resolution than the Z1's LCD viewfinder, but at 7" it is much larger--ergo easier to see. I've been griping about out of focus shots on the Z1. This should help.

Another idea for production gear is a wireless mic. Anyone recommend a wireless mic for about $500? I doubt $500 is enough for a good tripod but I'd be glad to be proved wrong.

In short, if there's some gear or software that you think would really help our work at Link for $500, please let me know. Please leave your suggestions in the comments sections--that'll let other see your suggestions and allow them to rag on them. Oh, and it's got to be near $500 or under $500--no $500 towards a new computer or something. No saving for a rainy day here--when you've got it, you spend it.

Summer Blogwad

I'm just dumping some interesting links here to check out.

Digital Rebellion: Recommended QuickTime and Mac OS configurations for Final Cut Pro
A list of recommended combos of FCP, Quicktime, and OS versions. Let's just call this why not to update your systems unless you absolutely need to. On the other hand, it sucks being caught in FCP 5.1.4 world while everyone else has moved on. That's more of a money issue than a technology issue though.

Digital Rebellion: List of QuickTime downloads
A continuation of the theme of don't upgrade if you don't have to. If you have to upgrade but it's not to the latest and (ahem) greatest, then this page will help you find the appropriate upgarde for QuickTime. Similarly, the LAFCUP has a wiki page on Quicktime updates.

Little Frog in High Def: APPLE PRO APPS UPDATE 2008-02
Good advice on downloading all updates to Final Cut Pro even if you don't intend to upgrade. The reason is that Apple doesn't make old updates available for FCP (unlike QuickTime). There are situations where you might want to upgrade but not to the latest version--if you don't have the update then Apple isn't going to help you. You can download updates through Apple's Final Cut Pro page--you don't have to upgrade through the Software Update control panel.

Final Cut User: Using FLVs in Final Cut Pro
Some good tips on using video downloaded from the web from sites like YouTube. I didn't know about using the QuickTime wrapper to help the editing of FLV's--sound like a helpful tip.

"Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience"
This is a good read. An experienced editor wrote down 10 good tips. Good write-up on media management. Also some interesting tips on multicam, amongst a number of other good ideas.

kenstone.net: Color Workflows With Different Types of Sources
By Andrew Balis
Want to work in Color? This seems like a good guide for getting footage in and out for your next go as a colourist.

Overview Video on Sony EX3
I don't think I've talked about the Sony EX3 because I think the MSRP was over $10K and that's my cut-off point for talking about cameras. But it lists for under $10K, and it looks like a good upgrade to the Sony EX1. I've been hearing about and seeing folks use the EX1. Seems like the XDCAM format on SxS memory cards could take off.

ProLost: On Clipping, Part 1
Very tech-y. But interesting to get a theoretical understanding of how video works. Folks interested in Red should read. It helped me understand why there is more grain in dark areas of video than in light areas. Also discusses important differences in how film and video represent light.

ProLost: Go Naked pt. 2
A good example of the guerrilla filmmaking model as described in Stu Maschwitz's "The DV's Rebel Guide." More interesting to me is that Vimeo not only streams HD, but allows downloads too of Quicktime movies (the film shown is downloadable at 1280x720). You can upload up to 500MB per week to Vimeo. An interesting way to share footage encoded in h.264--nice that it allows both streaming and downloading.

stockfootageforfree.com
Not awesome but could help in a pinch. I did about 10 searches on foreign countries, and the only video I got was touristy stuff from Cancun. Some OK shots of D.C., SF, and NYC. [via freshdv.com]

Streaming Video: Quality Comparison and Trends

There's a pair of interesting articles about streaming video at Digital Content Producer:
Encoding Best Practices, Part 1
Encoding Best Practices, Part 2

Part 1 is a report based on samples of what kind of streaming video is out there on the web. It's not a huge sample, but he does look at about 20 sites from broadcast video. So that's a good comparison for Link. Flash and Windows Media far outpace any competitors, like Quicktime and Real. One trend in streaming is growing bandwith and image resolution. Most broadcasters were streaming at a frame size of 460x325 and at a data rate of 500 kbps. Lots of good charts showing trends on this as well as frame rate and audio bit rate.

Part 2 is a quality comparison of h.264, on2 vp6, and VC-1 (Windows codec.) VC-1 gets the lowest marks. Both articles are interesting reads. I found them over at FreshDV.