Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

For the fourth iteration of Lightroom, Adobe has enhanced the processing capabilities and added features to aid photographers with handling modern photographic challenges, such as the integration of video. Although Lightroom is primarily a photographer’s tool, it is also indispensable for video producers and editors who have to deal with a large volume of photographs, such as when producing documentaries that are based on archival images. Lightroom is the ideal application to store, organize, adjust, crop and prepare stills for video editing. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom competes directly with Apple Aperture and each has its loyal proponents among photographers. Both are powerful tools and each new version tends to leapfrog that of the competitor. For now, Lightroom offers the more advanced video features and, of course, is a cross-platform application.

Photo features

Let’s first look at the improvements for photography. Image processing and color science have been changed in Lightroom 4. If you open existing photos that have been processed and catalogued in previous versions of Lightroom, you have the option of sticking with the old correction or update the file. Naturally, all changes are non-destructive, so your original photo is always unaltered. The biggest changes have been made in highlight/shadow recovery and noise reduction.

Highlight/shadow recovery is critical in digging out detail in bright skies and dark areas in an image. If you work with camera raw images, Lightroom uses the same raw processing engine as Photoshop. There’s also advanced black-and-white conversion. This lets you use eight color channels to control the tonal qualities of the black-and-white image. In other words, you have more control than merely desaturating the image. Finally, there are new selective brushes to control such options as white balance within areas of the picture.

With the increased use of smart phone cameras and online social media and photo services, like Flickr and Facebook, Lightroom 4 now lets you organize images based on location information embedded in the image metadata. This is aided by a new Map module accessible at the top of the interface. There is also enhanced sharing integration with some social media sites.

The big new selling point for photographers is photo book creation. This was a feature that previously had some Lightroom users jumping over to Aperture just to use, but no longer. Photo book creation lets photographers design coffee table book layouts, complete with proofing and ready to send to the printer. To enter the Book module, click the title button at the top (like Slideshow or Web) to access the book layout controls.

Plug-in integration

As a video editor, plug-ins are something I use a lot. A video plug-in is typically applied as a filter within the editing application, but photo plug-ins work differently. Lightroom sends your image to an external application launched from the Develop module’s Photo/Edit In pulldown menu command. This architecture has been available since version 1.0 and developers have steadily been creating photo-compatible versions of their tools. Adobe Photoshop, Magic Bullet Looks, Tiffen Dfx, DFT Film Stocks and DFT Photo Copy are all available as external “plug-ins”.

When you send a photo to an application like Magic Bullet Looks, Lightroom gives you the option to send a copy with or without the Lightroom correction “baked in” for further processing. When you are done, the external application returns you to Lightroom, where you then have two versions of the photo – the “before image” and the “after image” with the look added.

I like using Lightroom for processing photos, but I also find these plug-in options quite enticing. For example, adding selective focus filters, stylized effects, textures or painterly effects can be best achieved using an application like Photoshop or Tiffen Dfx. By starting and ending in Lightroom, you maintain the ability to organize these images in a central environment.

Video

Photographers have increasingly had to deal with video as part of their workflows, so photo organizing/processing applications have added video features. This includes Adobe Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom. First, in version 3 and now more so in Lightroom 4. Videos are accessed in the Library module, but you only have limited processing control. You can’t open video files in the Develop module for full color correction. Individual videos can be opened in a viewer by double-clicking the file in the browser. You can trim the in and out points of the clip and set a reference frame for the browser thumbnail.

The Library module does allow limited adjustments, as well as the application of custom and built-in presets. With video clips you can adjust white balance, exposure, contrast, black and white points and vibrance. A variety of video formats are supported, which on my Mac Pro included ProRes HQ and 4444 files from an ARRI ALEXA and RED files from both RED One M-X and EPIC cameras. Although the RED images are a raw format, Lightroom still only sees these as video, even when using an EPIC to shoot stills. If you do nothing to the RED files, then Lightroom applies the in-camera metadata settings created by the videographer. If you adjust the color metadata settings of the .R3D files using RED’s free REDCINE-X PRO application, then these updated settings will be recognized by Lightroom.

To test the custom presets, I exported a TIFF from an EPIC file out of REDCINE-X PRO using the flatter RedLogFilm gamma curve. This was imported into Lightroom as a photo, so I was able to bring it into the Develop module and make detailed image corrections. These parameters were then saved as a custom preset. Doing this enabled me to open my RED files in their native .R3D raw format (using the same RedLogFilm metadata setting) and apply the custom preset as a batch to all of the files. Although it’s possible to work with RED files inside Lightroom 4, frankly it’s a slow process. REDCINE-X PRO is the better tool if you are a RED photographer/videographer; however, there’s no reason you can’t use the two applications in conjunction with each other. This is especially true if you are using an EPIC camera for still photography, such as fashion shoots, since Lightroom 4 is far better as a tool for adjusting and organizing still images.

Another new video feature is the ability to export color corrected and trimmed video clips. Lightroom 4 offers three options: original, H.264 and DPX.  If you export as “original” then no color adjustments are applied and the existing clip is merely copied in its original size and length. DPX image sequences and H.264 files accept the color changes and are exported between the trimmed in and out point (if set). The maximum video output size is 1920×1080 for H.264 and DPX, but I was unsuccessful in exporting RED files as anything other than the original format. The ProRes files from the ALEXA, however, exported in all three variations and included the baked-in settings I’d used to offset the camera’s Log-C gamma profile.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 continues to improve as the best, cross-platform photography application. It sports a new, lower price ($149), plus will be available through the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service. The new processing features bump its power up a notch, but if you need to create photo books, then this upgrade is essential. If you are a video professional, then it’s not the most ideal tool for dealing with video, but obviously that’s merely a secondary feature, rather than the primary intent of the software. Nevertheless, photographers who want a limited ability to make color adjustments and to organize their video clips in a familiar environment will welcome the new video features.

Originally written for DV magazine / Creative Planet / NewBay Media, LLC

© 2012 Oliver Peters

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

Editors looking for an alternative to Apple Final Cut Pro view Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 as the logical choice, but there’s more to this release than a hypothetical FCP 8. I’ve reviewed and used each version of the Creative Suite for many years and Premiere Pro is one of the few NLEs where each new version exhibits tangible performance improvements. Creative Suite 6 is no different, with performance tweaks and expanded GPU usage in Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Adobe’s video bundle, CS6 Production Premium, is a complete end-to-end workflow solution covering ingest to distribution. Adobe Prelude (ingest, transcode and logging) becomes the substitute for OnLocation, which was geared towards the tape-based world. SpeedGrade adds film-style color grading to the package. Production Premium is a 6GB file download, plus there’s an additional 21GB of optional sound effects and music loops that Adobe customers may also download for free.

A focus on performance

With Premiere Pro CS6, Adobe focused on performance improvements and an overhaul of the user interface. There’s better use of screen real estate for functional tasks, less blank space and you now have the ability to turn off buttons and displays. As folks say, “There’s less chrome.”  The idea was to make Premiere Pro look and feel closer to the experience of NLEs like Apple FCP “legacy” and Avid Media Composer. Premiere Pro offers the most direct translation and shortest learning curve for editors moving over from Final Cut, but it is still different – mostly in good ways.

The changes in Premiere Pro are designed to get you editing faster and make the experience more direct. There’s “hover scrubbing”, which is Adobe’s answer to Apple’s “skimming” found in iMovie and Final Cut Pro X. Source clips in the Project panel, in the Media Browser and in the Adobe Prelude ingest dialogue box can be quickly reviewed when in the icon view by moving the mouse over the image. Thumbnail icons can be expanded to be quite large, functioning almost like a separate viewer. Once you click the icon, use the standard JKL transport controls, mark a selection and edit it to the timeline. Trimming gains special attention in Premiere Pro CS6 with better contextual timeline control. This includes asymmetrical trimming akin to working in Media Composer’s trim mode and smart timeline trimming tools.

The Premiere Pro approach

The differences between Premiere Pro CS6 and other NLEs come in three areas: native codecs, rendering and plug-in support. Premiere Pro is not based on a QuickTime or MXF media architecture, so timelines can mix various native codecs and maintain real-time playback. There is no need to first transcode to a common format on import/ingest, so you can get to the task of editing more quickly. Many codecs and file wrappers are supported natively, including AVC-Intra, ProRes, HDV, H.264, RED, etc. Premiere Pro generally maintains real-time playback without rendering, but processing-intensive filters can cause performance to drop. To mitigate this and to keep from dropping frames, there’s a playback resolution setting, which is adjustable from full to one-half or to one-quarter resolution (plus 1/8 and 1/16 with RED and other large formats). If the effects are still too taxing for the GPU/CPU of a given system, the timline may be rendered for real-time playback.

Premiere Pro’s render files are intended for previewing and are ignored during export to maintain maximum quality. (You do have the option to use them as part of the export, to speed things up.) Every export from a Premiere Pro timeline uses the Adobe Media Encoder engine. Certain native media formats, like XDCAM HD or DVCPRO will not be re-encoded in this process if exported back to the same format. Timelines that do require re-encoding or the rendering of effects will have somewhat longer output times when writing a master file to disk; however, AME also lets you queue up simultaneous encodes in various formats.

There is no free lunch and you can pay the “render tax” on any system either at the beginning, middle or end of the process. Adobe has picked the end. If you decided to edit with native files like RED, long-GOP H.264 or HDV, then your export can take some time. For RED files specifically, this can mean that a sequence of several minutes will take quite a few hours to export, if your target format is a 1920×1080 ProRes file. If you are editing native P2 media using the AVC-Intra codec and export to this same format, the export time will be significantly less.

It’s a different story for videotape users. If you output to tape through a capture card, anything that plays at full resolution without dropping frames, regardless of whether it’s rendered, will be mastered at full broadcast quality. The exception is RED editing. Premiere Pro easily supports real-time editing at a reduced resolution setting with 4K RED media on a native 4K timeline; but, this image will not be output at converted SD and HD sizes using a hardware i/o card, like a KONA or Decklink. It can’t be monitored through such a card either.

A number of Final Cut users have lamented over the lack of an equivalent to FxScript filters. This was a tool in FCP that allowed users without extensive programming knowledge to create their own custom effect filters and transitions and distribute them for free or at a low cost. Premiere Pro doesn’t have anything like that (nor does Avid for that matter), although obviously there’s an SDK for both Premiere Pro and After Effects that’s available to professional developers. Many of the third-party filters purchased for After Effects will work natively in Premiere Pro. This list is expanding and due to the changes in CS6, it’s important to update the filters you own. Red Giant Software, Noise Industries, Boris FX, GenArts, Digital Film Tools, Tiffen and others have recently all released updates for CS6 compatibility. Thanks to the playback resolution throttle, many that would require rendering in another NLE to even play will run in real-time in Premiere Pro CS6.

CUDA, Mercury Transmit and OpenCL

One aspect of the Mercury Playback Engine was hardware acceleration for some effects when using certain CUDA-enabled NVIDIA cards. This has been expanded with CS6 to include two of the OpenCL cards used in the newest MacBook Pros. Unfortunately, if you are running a Mac Pro with an ATI 5870, as I am, Mercury Playback acceleration still only runs in a software mode. Honestly though, I didn’t find it to be much of an issue. I tested my Mac Pro with an NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and received numerous crashes when I applied taxing filters. To compare, a filter like Magic Bullet Looks (not CUDA-accelerated) ran in real-time at half-resolution using the ATI card.  Better yet – no crashes!

New to CS6 is Mercury Transmit – a hardware abstraction layer for third-party i/o cards – to enable video output. This is a change from CS5.5 and all of the vendors, like AJA, Matrox and Blackmagic Design, are in the process of updating their drivers to be compatible with CS6. I tested Premiere Pro with a Decklink HD Extreme 3D card and everything worked well. The few minor issues I had were resolved when the Premiere Pro 6.0.1 update was released. (Older cards may not work in some cases.)

Adobe SpeedGrade

The engineers have only had since September to integrate SpeedGrade, so it’s not fully “Adobe-ized” just yet. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful tool that can easily fit into any editor’s workflow, once they learn the application. The design of the interface is focused on working quickly with a lot of real-time performance. It’s the only desktop grading application that enables multiple, real-time timeline viewers for easy shot comparison and color correction matching.

The SpeedGrade design fits in well with other Adobe software – using a layer model for primaries and secondaries instead of Apple Color’s tabbed rooms or DaVinci Resolve’s nodes. Grading layers can be applied to individual clips or to the timeline track and can be used for full-screen, keyed or masked grading (with tracking). The number of layers is unlimited and each has visibility and opacity values, just like in Photoshop or After Effects. The grading parameters can be adjusted using color wheels, sliders or numerical entries. For primaries, offset/gamma/gain settings are applied in four ranges: overall, shadows, midtones and highlights. In addition, each of these four ranges has sliders for input and output saturation, contrast and pivot, plus temperature and tint (magenta). SpeedGrade also includes a healthy set of Look presets and display LUTs for cinematic styles and camera profiles, such as correction for ARRI ALEXA Log-C.

You can “send to” SpeedGrade from a Premiere Pro timeline, but there’s no roundtrip, i.e. no Dynamic Link, back into Premiere Pro. Right now, SpeedGrade is ideally positioned to be the last step in the post workflow, although that will likely change in the future. Export your timeline to SpeedGrade and intermediate, uncompressed DPX files are rendered. These are approximately 8MB/frame (1920×1080). That’s because a number of broadcast codecs, like AVC-Intra, are not yet natively supported by SpeedGrade. The alternative is to export an EDL and relink the media in SpeedGrade. This works well and is faster for ProRes or RED media than the DPX route.

SpeedGrade does not use Mercury Transmit to connect to third-party broadcast video cards. Instead, it only uses NVIDIA cards with SDI connections for that purpose, but you can display a full-screen image on a second computer monitor. There’s no user guide yet, so rely on the introductory web videos to get up and running. These are all minor, short term issues. Don’t let that stop you from diving into a very powerful grading tool that’s right at your fingertips.

Conclusion

Premiere Pro CS6 has undergone significant improvements, but it’s still optimized for the single user instead of a team of editors working collaboratively. In order to truly make inroads into the space dominated by Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe must make sure that it plays well with the outside world. XML support for FCP 7 files is quite good. It was relatively painless to move timelines and projects into Premiere Pro. I ran into some issues importing 23.976fps EDLs, related to a calculation difference when timecode was externally added to media files, rather than generated in-camera. Fortunately Adobe had been working on this and the problem appears to have been corrected in the Premiere Pro 6.0.1 update.

Many team projects involve one or more editors working on duplicate copies of the same project, each with the same media and master clips. To share versions of their edits with each other, sequence files are exchanged, which seamlessly connect to the media. Media Composer, FCP 7 and FCP X editors simply save a bin or project file that only contains a sequence and pass that along to their colleague.

This same workflow needs improvement in Premiere Pro. Importing a sequence from one project into another also imports some associated master clips, even though they already exist in the project. This results in duplicate master clips in the project browser. If you delete the duplicates, the imported sequence is negatively affected. Going back and forth a few times like this would result in a lot of unnecessary extra clips and potentially some real problems.

The good news is that they are listening. After all, Adobe’s stated goal is to make Premiere Pro the Photoshop of video. More than most other companies, Adobe is passionately and proactively soliciting input from professional customers to make its video products better. That’s a refreshing approach, which goes a long way to overcome any differences that users might encounter as they make the transition. For now, Adobe is making a lot of folks happy with an update in Premiere Pro CS6 that lets them edit exactly how they want to.

Originally written for DV magazine / Creative Planet / NewBay Media, LLC

©2012 Oliver Peters

Three choices

We now know where the four “A”s are headed. With the dust settling just a little, picking your favored approach to post is shaping up into three choices: the software suite, the all-in-one and the toolkit. That’s not to say you can’t mix these options up a bit, but let me outline each approach.  Before I start, let me clarify that these choices are designed for the needs of small shops that post the average types of projects, including corporate videos, commercials, reality TV shows and low budget indie films. If you only cut studio films or are a high-end VFX specialist, then your world view is likely to be quite a bit different. So, let’s start.

A. The Software Suite

If you wanted to build your facility around a complementary suite of applications as I outlined in this previous post, then Apple Final Cut Studio had been the dominant option. With Apple’s changes, Adobe becomes the logical successor. The new Creative Suite 6 offerings provide many of the advances that Final Cut users had expected in a hypothetical Final Cut Pro 8 or Final Cut Studio 4. If you are looking for a package that can cover all the bases – including logging/ingest, editing, audio mixing, color grading and encoding/authoring – then Adobe CS6 Production Premium is the place to go.

Most Adobe applications may be purchased as standalone applications, as part of a suite or through a Creative Cloud subscription. If you are buying a site license as a multi-seat user, then you’ll likely go with perpetual licenses (the software has no time limit) rather than the Creative Cloud. (Adobe does plan to offer “Team” subscriptions later in the year.) Understand that if you are purchasing Adobe software with the intent of running different applications on different workstations, you will still have to purchase the appropriate suite (or a Cloud subscription) for each workstation. You cannot buy one software bundle license and then pick and choose specific applications to install and authorize on numerous computers for simultaneous operation. For that, you’d need a volume, or multi-seat license. It allows you to deploy bundles like Production Premium onto multiple workstations, using a common license number.

Granted, any FCP/Color editor moving to Premiere Pro or SpeedGrade is probably going to miss a few of their favorite features, but once comfortable with the differences, will find a very comprehensive package. One that lets you do everything you need for creative cutting and finishing – all within the Adobe family. There are links between Premiere Pro and Audition or After Effects or SpeedGrade, so it’s pretty easy to start in Premiere Pro (or even Prelude for ingest/transcode/logging) and then move to After Effects for vfx/motion graphics, Audition for the mix and SpeedGrade for the final grading pass.

Right now, the least-integrated application is SpeedGrade, which was acquired by Adobe only last September. Only the “send to” half of the roundtrip with Premiere Pro is in place. You can’t monitor broadcast output on any card except an NVIDIA with SDI, which most video editors don’t own and which doesn’t work on the Mac. You can, however, view a full screen signal on a second display that’s connected via DVI or DisplayPort. This is likely to change pretty quickly under Adobe control, but if you can work within the current constraints, SpeedGrade is a powerful color correction tool on par with Color or Resolve.

The intent of this post is not to go into depth about the pros and cons of any individual software application, so I’ll leave a discussion of Premiere Pro’s strengths or weaknesses as an editor for another time. Suffice it to say that if you want a powerful and comprehensive set of tools from a single vendor, who has made interoperability a priority, then Adobe is the best option today.

B. The All-In-One Editor

The editor who prefers to have everything at his or her fingertips inside of a single application is going to have to stick with Avid. The best bang-for-the-buck until mid-June is the Avid Symphony cross-grade promotion for FCP “legacy” owners. For $999 you get Symphony, AvidFX (Boris RED integrated into Symphony), the Boris Continuum Complete filter set, Sorenson Squeeze and Avid DVD (PC only). The advantage of Symphony over Media Composer includes advanced color correction tools and the bundling of the BCC filters. Both are cross-platform and work with the full range of third-party i/o hardware.

Naturally Autodesk Smoke and Avid DS editors might consider their favored NLE as more deserving of the all-in-one label, but I see the strengths of these systems in finishing and not offline or creative editing tasks. DS does offer many of those tools (though is typically not considered the first choice for such tasks), but Smoke doesn’t. In other words, if you want a system that can tackle any task from film editing to finishing, Symphony and Media Composer definitely fit the bill. The weaknesses are that you are limited to a maximum of HD-sized frames, the effects modules need a lot of improvement and the color correction tools are also long-in-the-tooth. Nevertheless, in the hands of an experienced editor, 80-90% of all editing and finishing challenges can be tackled inside of Symphony. This includes creative cutting, mixing, finishing and color grading – all accomplished without ever leaving the Avid editing interface.

For folks interested in understanding the differences between Media Composer and Symphony, check out this video at Avid. Furthermore, you can search for “avid fx tutorial” at Google or YouTube to find numerous tutorials on how to use Avid FX within the Media Composer or Symphony interface.

C. The Toolkit

This is where I see Apple Final Cut X fitting. FCP X by itself is not a complete NLE for advanced work and needs to be augmented with many other tools. When I say this, I’m focusing on the small shop, multi-suite user, not the individual videographer or editor who needs to bang out spots and corporate videos on his home or portable system. The work that many editors do requires collaboration with other editors, mixers and colorists. FCP X lacks those tools internally and instead leans on third-party utilities. The mix that seems to work best is some combination of FCP X (creative editing), DaVinci Resolve (advanced color grading) and Autodesk Smoke (visual effects and finishing).

As I watch the rapid expansion of the FCP X-based ecosystem, it’s becoming clear that what appears to be a lack of features is, in fact, spawning innovation to complement FCP X. As a result, the application is becoming more of a platform than the previous version or other editing software. Final Cut Pro X becomes the editing hub that is augmented by other applications and utilities based on your individual workflow needs.

Naturally any purchase of FCP X would be incomplete without Motion 5 and Compressor 4, not to mention that essential media management and interchange tools include Event Manager X, Xto7 for Final Cut Pro, 7toX for Final Cut Pro and X2Pro Audio Convert. I also find that it’s very hard to get through most complex productions without some fallback to the “legacy” Final Cut Studio suite. For example, if you need to generate EDLs or OMF files or prefer Color to other grading tools, then FC Studio (assuming you already own a copy anyway) is the best choice. In fact, you can still buy a Final Cut Pro Studio license from Apple’s 800-number business sales operation. Adobe CS6 Production Premium can also fulfill many of these same functions and there’s no reason not to own both CS6 and FCP X. For the sake of this post, I’m presenting Choice C as a non-Avid, non-Adobe alternative.

Advanced post functions in the toolkit include grading, audio mixing and advanced finishing. There are plenty of options for audio, including Apple’s own Logic and Soundtrack Pro. There’s no clear path from FCP X to either of these, yet. You can export audio streams as Roles, but those are “flattened” tracks without handles. Best to bounce over to FCP 7 and then to STP or Logic. Other solutions include ProTools, Audition and Nuendo. Marquis Broadcast’s X2Pro is designed to send FCP X audio tracks to Pro Tools in the AAF format, but not OMF, so it’s not compatible with some of the other DAW software options, like Logic.

Blackmagic Design has done a good job of integrating FCP X’s XML into DaVinci Resolve, so even the free LITE version works well as a grading companion to FCP X. Resolve can easily be installed on any workstation in the facility and if you want a dedicated grading room, then it’s worth the investment in a proper monitor, scopes and a control surface. Likewise, if you invest in Autodesk Smoke, it is probably with the intent to make this a client-supervised “hero” room. Yes, all of these applications can reside on a single workstation, but that doesn’t make the best business sense.

Another thing to consider is i/o hardware. Final Cut Pro X works with most of the PCIe and Thunderbolt capture/output cards and devices, but Resolve only works with Blackmagic Design’s own hardware. Conversely, Smoke requires an AJA KONA 3G or IoXT. For a facility owner, having dedicated Smoke and Resolve suites makes sense and, therefore, it’s OK to have different cards in different workstations. This does mean you will have to do a bit of planning to best manage your configuration.

This also brings to mind shared storage. FCP X is still evolving in that regard and currently works with Xsan. You can use it with volume-level SANs, but the “Add SAN Location” feature may or may not work at your site. For instance, it doesn’t work with Command Soft FibreJet. You’ll be fine with shared media, as long as your Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders are on locally-controlled volumes, where the FCP X workstation has write permission to that volume or drive.

Last but not least is Adobe Photoshop, which I find essential for all sessions. Other editors disagree and prefer to avoid Photoshop – either for reasons of need or cost. So, alternatives to Photoshop include Corel Painter, Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator.

In closing, remember this is just a simple way to present the options. There’s nothing that says you can’t mix and match After Effects and/or Pro Tools with EDIUS, Media Composer, Vegas, Media 100 or any other variation. My world is headed primarily to an Apple/Adobe witches brew of applications. I hope my little overview makes some sense out of the confusing NLE landscape. It’s still very fluid and will likely continue to change over the coming year. The key is to pick a direction and stick to it. You don’t have to know everything, but pick the right tools for your clients and workload. Learn to use them well and dive in!

© 2012 Oliver Peters

NAB 2012 – Adobe CS6, Smoke 2013, Thunderbolt and more

Get some coffee, sit back and take your time reading this post. I apologize for its length in advance, but there’s a lot of new hardware and software to talk about. I’m going to cover my impressions of NAB along with some “first looks” at Adobe Creative Suite 6, Smoke 2013 and Thunderbolt i/o devices. There’s even some FCP X news!

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Impressions of NAB 2012

I thought this year was going to be quiet and laid back. Boy, was I wrong! Once again Blackmagic Design stole the spotlight with democratized products. This year the buzz had to be the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. It delivers on the objective of the original RED Scarlet idea. It’s a $3K camera with 2.5K of resolution and 13 stops. I’ll leave the camera discussions to the camera guys, but suffice it to say that this camera was thought up with post in mind. That is – no new, proprietary codec. It uses ProRes, DNxHD or Cinema DNG (the Adobe raw format). It also includes a copy of Resolve and UltraScope with the purchase.

Along with that news was Blackmagic’s re-introduction of the Teranex processors. Prior to that company’s acquisition by Blackmagic Design, the top-of-the-line Teranex image processor loaded with options was around $90K. Now that Grant Petty’s wizards have had a go at it, the newest versions in a nicely re-designed form factor are $2K for 2D and $4K for 3D. Sweet. And if you think free (or close to it) stifles R&D, take a look at the new, cleaned-up DaVinci Resolve 9.0 interface. Great to see that the development continues.

You’ll note that there was a lot of buzz about 4K camera, but did you notice you need to record that image to something? Enter AJA – not with a camera – but, with the KiPro Mini Quad. That’s right – a 4K version of the Mini already designed with Canon’s C500 4K camera in mind. It records 4K ProRes 4444 files. AJA is also building its Thunderbolt portfolio with T-Tap, a monitoring-only Thunderbolt-to-SDI/HDMI output adapter under $250. More on Thunderbolt devices later in this post.

The NLE news was dominated by Adobe’s reveal of Creative Suite 6 (with Premiere Pro CS6) and Autodesk’s re-designed Smoke 2013. Avid’s news was mainly broadcast and storage-related, since Media Composer version 6 had been launched months before. Although that was old news to the post crowd, it was the first showing for the software at NAB. Nevertheless, to guarantee some buzz, Avid announced a short-term Symphony cross-grade deal that lasts into June. FCP (excluding X), Media Composer and Xpress Pro owners can move into Symphony for $999. If you are an Avid fan, this is a great deal and is probably the best bang-for-the-buck NLE available if you take advantage of the cross-grade.

An interesting sidebar is that both FilmLight and EyeOn are developing plug-in products for Avid software. FilmLight builds the Baselight color correction system, which was shown and recently released in plug-in form for FCP 7. Now they are expanding that to other hosts, including Nuke and Media Composer under the product name of Baselight Editions. EyeOn’s Fusion software is probably the best and fastest, feature film-grade compositor available on Windows. EyeOn is using Connection (a software bridge) to send Media Composer/Symphony or DS timeline clips to Fusion, which permits both applications to stay open. In theory, if you bought Symphony and added Baselight and Fusion, the combination becomes one of the most powerful NLEs on the market. All at under $5K with the current cross-grade!

Autodesk has been quite busy redesigning its Smoke NLE for the Mac platform. Smoke 2013 features a complete Mac-centric overhaul to turn it into an all-in-one “super editor” that still feels comfortable for editors coming from an FCP or Media Composer background. See my “first look” section below.

Quantel, who often gets lost in these desktop NLE discussions showed the software-only version of Pablo running on a tweaked PC. It uses four high-end NVIDIA cards for performance and there’s also a new, smaller Neo Nano control surface. Although pricing is lower, at $50K for the software alone, it’s still the premium brand.

There’s been plenty of talk about “editing in the cloud”, but in my opinion, there were three companies at the show with viable cloud solutions for post: Avid, Quantel and Aframe. In 2010 Avid presented a main stage technology preview that this year has started to come to fruition as Interplay Sphere. The user in the field is connected to his or her home base storage and servers over various public networks. The edit software is a version of the NewsCutter/Media Composer interface that can mix local full-res media with proxy media linked to full-res media at the remote site. When the edit is done, the sequence list is “published” to the server and local, full-res media uploaded back to the home base (trimmed clips only). The piece is conformed and rendered by the server at home. Seems like the branding line should be Replace your microwave truck with a Starbucks!

The company with a year of real experience “in the cloud” at the enterprise level is Quantel with Qtube. It’s a similar concept to Avid’s, but has the advantage of tying in multiple locations remotely. Media at the home base can also be searched and retrieved in formats that work for other NLEs, including Media Composer and Final Cut.

An exciting newcomer is Aframe. They are a British company founded by the former owner of Unit, one of Europe’s largest professional post facilities built around FCP and Xsan. Aframe is geared toward the needs of shows and production companies more so than broadcast infrastructures. The concept uses a “private cloud” (i.e. not Amazon servers) with an interface and user controls that feel a lot like a mash-up between Vimeo and Xprove. Full-res media can be uploaded in several ways, including via regional service centers located around the US. There’s full metadata support and the option to use Aframe’s contracted logging vendor if you don’t want to create metadata yourself. Editors cut with proxy media and then the full-res files are conformed via EDLs and downloaded when ready. Pricing plans are an attractive per-seat, monthly structure that start with a free, single seat account.

Apple doesn’t officially do trade shows anymore, but they were at NAB, flying under the radar. In a series of small, private meetings with professional customers and media, Apple was making their case for Final Cut Pro X. Rome wasn’t built in a day and the same can be said for re-building a dominant editing application from the ground up. Rather than simply put in the same features as the competition, Apple opted to take a fresh look, which has created much “Sturm und Drang” in the industry. Nevertheless, Apple was interested in pointing out the adoption by professional users and the fact that it has held an above-50% market share with new NLE seats sold to professional users during 2011. You can parse those numbers anyway you like, but they point to two facts: a) people aren’t changing systems as quickly as many vocal forum posts imply, and b) many users are buying FCP X and seeing if and how it might work in some or all of their operation.

FCP X has already enjoyed several quick updates in less than a year, thanks to the App Store mechanism. There’s a robust third-party developer community building around X. In fact, walking around the NAB floor, I saw at least a dozen or more booths that displayed FCP X in some fashion to demonstrate their own product or use it as an example of interoperability between their product and X. Off the top of my head, I saw or heard about FCP X at Autodesk, Quantel, AJA, Blackmagic Design, Matrox, MOTU, Tools On Air, Dashwood and SONY – not to mention others, like resellers and storage vendors. SONY has announced the new XDCAM plug-ins for X and compatibility of its XDCAM Browser software. Dashwood Cinema Solutions was showing the only stereo3D package that’s ready for Final Cut Pro X. And of course, we can’t live without EDLs, so developer XMiL Workflow Tools (who wasn’t exhibiting at NAB) has also announced EDL-X, an FCP XML-to-EDL translator, expected to be in the App Store by May.

On the Apple front, the biggest news was another peek behind the curtain at some of the features to be included in the next FCP X update, coming later this year. These include multichannel audio editing tools, dual viewers, MXF plug-in support and RED camera support. There are no details beyond these bullet points, but you can expect a lot of other minor enhancements as part of this update.

“Dual viewers” may be thought of as “source/record” monitors – added by Apple, thanks to user feedback. Apple was careful to point out to me that they intended to do a bit more than just that with the concept. “RED support” also wasn’t defined, but my guess would be that it’s based on the current Import From Camera routine. I would imagine something like FCP 7’s native support of RED media through Log and Transfer, except better options for bringing in camera raw color metadata. Of course, that’s purely speculation on my part.

Now, sit back and we’ll run through some “first looks”.

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Adobe Creative Suite 6 – A First Look

Adobe charged into 2012 with a tailwind of two solid years of growth on the Mac platform and heavy customer anticipation for what it plans to offer in Creative Suite 6. The release of CS5 and CS5.5 were each strong in their own right and introduced such technologies as the Mercury Playback Engine for better real-time performance, but in 2011 Adobe clearly ramped up its focus on video professionals. They acquired the IRIDAS SpeedGrade technology and brought the developers of Automatic Duck on board. There have been a few sneak peeks on the web including a popular video posted by Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco editors, but the wait for CS6 ended with this year’s NAB.

Production Premium

Adobe’s video content creation tools may be purchased individually, through a Creative Cloud subscription or as part of the Master Collection and Production Premium bundles. Most editors will be interested in CS6 Production Premium, which includes Prelude, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop Extended, SpeedGrade, Audition, Encore, Adobe Media Encoder, Illustrator, Bridge and Flash Professional. Each of these applications has received an impressive list of new features and it would be impossible to touch on every one here, so look for a more in-depth review at a future date. I’ll quickly cover some of the highlights.

Prelude

As part of CS6, Adobe is introducing Prelude, a brand new product designed for footage acquisition, ingest/transcode, organization, review and metadata tagging. It’s intended to be used by production assistants or producers as an application to prepare the footage for an editor. Both Prelude and Premiere Pro now feature “hover scrubbing”, which is the ability to scan through footage quickly by moving the mouse over the clip thumbnail, which can be expanded as large as a mini-viewer. Clips can be marked, metadata added and rough cuts assembled, which in turn are sent to Premiere Pro. There is a dynamic reading of metadata between Prelude and Premiere Pro. Clip metadata changes made in one application are updated in the other, since the information is embedded into the clip itself. Although Prelude is included with the software collection for single users, it can be separately purchased in volume by enterprise customers, such as broadcasters and news organizations.

Premiere Pro

A lot of effort was put into the redesign of Premiere Pro. The user interface has been streamlined and commands and icons were adjusted to be more consistent with both Apple Final Cut Pro (“legacy” versions) and Avid Media Composer. Adobe took input from users who have come from both backgrounds and wanted to alter the UI in a way that was reasonably familiar. The new CS6 keyboard shortcuts borrow from each, but there are also full FCP and full MC preset options. Workspaces have been redesigned, but an editor can still call up CS5.5 workspace layouts with existing projects to ease the transition. A dockable timecode window has been added and Adobe has integrated a dynamic trimming function similar to that of Media Composer.

The changes are definitely more than cosmetic, though, as Adobe has set out to design a UI that never forces you to stop. This means you can now do live updates to effects and even open other applications without the timeline playback ever stopping. They added Mercury Playback acceleration support for some OpenCL cards and there’s a new Mercury Transmit feature for better third-party hardware i/o support across all of the video applications. Many new tools have been added, including a new multi-camera editor with an unlimited number of camera angles. Some more features have been brought over from After Effects, including adjustment layers and the Warp Stabilizer that was introduced with CS5.5. This year they’ve broken out the rolling shutter repair function as a separate tool. Use it for quick HDSLR camera correction without the need to engage the full Warp Stabilizer.

SpeedGrade

By adding a highly-regarded and established color grading tool, Adobe has strengthened the position of Production Premium as the primary application suite for video professionals. The current level of integration is a starting point, given the short development time that was possible since last September. Expect this to expand in future versions.

SpeedGrade works as both a standalone grading application, as well as a companion to the other applications. There’s a new “Send to SpeedGrade” timeline export operation in Premiere Pro. When you go into SpeedGrade this way, an intermediate set of uncompressed DPX files is first rendered as the source media to be used by SpeedGrade. Both applications support a wide range of native formats, but they aren’t all the same, so this approach offers the fewest issues for now, when working with mixed formats in a Premiere sequence. In addition, SpeedGrade can also import EDLs and relink media, which offers a second path from Premiere Pro into SpeedGrade. Finished, rendered media returns to Premiere as a single, flattened file with baked-in corrections.

As a color correction tool, SpeedGrade presents an easy workflow – enabling you to stack layers of grading onto a single clip, as well as across the entire timeline. There are dozens of included LUTs and looks presets, which may be used for creative grading or to correct various camera profiles. An added bonus is that both After Effects and Photoshop now support SpeedGrade Look files.

Audition

With CS5.5, Adobe traded out Soundbooth for a cross-platform version of Audition, Adobe’s full-featured DAW software. In CS6, that integration has been greatly improved. Audition now sports an interface more consistent with After Effects and Premiere, newly added Mackie and Avid Eucon control surface protocol support and mixing automation. The biggest feature demoed in the sneak peeks has been the new Automatic Speech Alignment tool. You can take overdubbed ADR lines and automatically align them for near-perfect sync to replace the on-camera dialogue. All of this is thanks to the technology behind Audition’s new real-time, high-quality audio stretching engine.

Audition also gains a number of functions specific to audio professionals. Audio CD mastering has been added back into the program and there’s a new pitch control spectral display. This can be used to alter the pitch of a singer, as well as a new way to create custom sound design. Buying Production Premium gives you access to 20GB of downloadable audio media (sound effects and music scores) formerly available only via the online link to Adobe’s Resource Central.

After Effects

Needless to say, After Effects is the Swiss Army knife of video post. From motion graphics to visual effects to simple format conversation, there’s very little that After Effects isn’t called upon to do. Naturally there’s plenty new in CS6. The buzz feature is a new 3D camera tracker, which uses a point cloud to tightly track an object that exhibits size, position, rotation and perspective changes. These are often very hard for traditional 2D point trackers to follow. For example, the hood of a car moving towards the camera at an angle.

Now for the first time in After Effects, you can build extruded 3D text and vector shapes using built-in tools. This includes surface material options and a full 3D ray tracer. In general, performance has been greatly improved through a better hand-off between RAM cache and disk cache. As with Premiere Pro, rolling shutter repair is now also available as a separate tool in After Effects.

Photoshop

Photoshop has probably had the most online sneak peeks of any of the new Adobe apps. It has been available as a public beta since mid-March. Photoshop, too, sports a new interface, but that’s probably the least noteworthy of the new features. These include impressive new content-aware fill functions, 3D LUT support (including SpeedGrade Look files) and better auto-correction. There’s better use of GPU horsepower, which means common tasks like Liquefy are accelerated.

Photoshop has offered the ability to work with video as a single file for several versions. With CS6 it gains expanded video editing capabilities, enabled by a new layer structure akin to that used in After Effects. Although Premiere Pro or After Effects users probably won’t do much with it, Adobe is quite cognizant that many of its photography customers are increasingly asked to deal with video – thanks, of course, to the HD-video-enabled DSLRs, like the Canon EOS series. By integrating video editing and layering tools into Photoshop, it allows these customers to deliver a basic video project while working inside an application environment where they are the most comfortable. Video editors gain the benefit of having it there if they want to use it. Some may, in fact, develop their own innovative techniques once they investigate what it can do for them.

Adobe Creative Suite 6 offers a wealth of new features, expanded technologies and a set of brand new tools. It’s one of Adobe’s largest releases ever and promises to attract new interest from video professionals.

Click here for updated price and availability information.

Click here for videos that explain CS6 features.

Plus, a nice set of tutorial videos here.

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Autodesk Smoke 2013 – A First Look

Thanks to the common Unix underpinnings of Linux and Mac OS X, Autodesk Media & Entertainment was able to bring its advanced Smoke editor to the Mac platform in December of 2009 as an unbundled software product. The $15K price tag was a huge drop from that of their standard, turnkey Linux Smoke workstations, but still hefty for the casual user. Nevertheless, thanks to an aggressive trial and academic policy, Autodesk was very successful in getting plenty of potential new users to download and test the product. In the time since the launch on the Mac, Autodesk has had a chance to learn what Mac-oriented editors want and adjust to the feedback from these early adopters.

Taking that user input to heart, Autodesk introduced the new Smoke 2013 at NAB. This is an improved version that is much more “Mac-like”. Best of all it’s now available for $3,495 plus an optional annual subscription fee for support and software updates. Although this is an even bigger price reduction, it places Smoke in line with Autodesk’s animation product family (Maya, Softimage, etc.) and in keeping with what most Mac users feel is reasonable for a premium post production tool. Smoke 2013 will ship in fall, but the new price took effect at NAB. Any new and existing customers on subscription will receive the update as part of their support. Tutorials and trial versions of Smoke 2013 are expected to be available over the summer.

More Mac-like

Autodesk was successful in attracting a lot of trial downloads, but realized that the biggest hurdle was the steep learning curve even expert Final Cut and Media Composer editors encountered. Previous Mac versions of Smoke featured a user interface and commands inherited from the Linux versions of Smoke and Flame, which were completely different from any Mac editing application. Just getting media into the system baffled many. With Smoke 2013, Autodesk has specifically targeted editors who come from an Apple Final Cut Pro and/or Avid Media Composer background. The interface uses a standard, track-based editing workflow to maintain the NLE environment that editors are comfortable with. There’s a familiar Mac OS X menu bar at the top and the application has adopted most of the common OS commands. In short, it’s been redesigned – but not “re-imagined” – to act like a Mac application is supposed to.

Smoke now features a tab structure to quickly switch between modes, like media access, editing, etc. The biggest new tool is the Media Hub. This is an intelligent media browser that lets you easily access any compatible media on any of your hard drives. It recognizes native media formats, as opposed to simply browsing all files in the Finder. Media support includes RED, ARRIRAW, ProRes, DNxHD, H.264, XDCAM, image sequences, LUTs and more. Media Hub is the place to locate and import files, including the ability to drag-and-drop media directly into your Smoke library, as well as from the Finder into Smoke. Settings for formats like RED (debayer, color, etc.) are maintained even when you drag from the Finder. Since Smoke is designed as a finishing tool, you can also import AAF, XML (FCP 7, FCP X, Premiere Pro) and EDL lists generated by offline editors.

ConnectFX

Beyond familiar commands and the Media Hub, the editing interface has been redesigned to be more visually appealing and for the easier application of effects. ConnectFX is a method to quickly apply and modify effects right in the timeline. Tabbed buttons let you change between modes, such as resizing, time warps, Sparks filter effects and color correction. When you choose to edit effects parameters, the interface opens a ribbon above the timeline where you can alter numerical settings or enter a more advanced effects editing interface. If you need more sophistication, then move to nodes using ConnectFX. Smoke is the only editor with a node-based compositor that works in 3D space. You get many of the tools that have been the hallmark of the premium Autodesk system products, such as effects process nodes, the Colour Warper, relighting, 3D tracking and more.

Smoke 2013 is positioned as an integrated editing and effects tool. According to Autodesk’s research, editors who use a mixture of several different tools to get the job done – from editing to effects to grading – often use up to seven different software applications. Smoke is intended as a “super editor” that places all of these tools and tasks into a single, comprehensive application with a cohesive interface. The design is intended to maximize the workflow as an editor moves from editing into finishing.

Lighter system requirements

Apple is changing the technology landscape with more powerful personal workstations, like the iMac, which doesn’t fit the traditional tower design. Thunderbolt adds advanced, high-bandwidth connectivity for i/o and storage in a single cable connection.

To take advantage of these changes, Smoke 2013 has been designed to run on this new breed of system. For example, it will work on a newer MacBook Pro or iMac, connected to fast Thunderbolt storage, like a Promise Pegasus RAID array. A key change has been in the render format used by Smoke. Up until now, intermediate renders have been to uncompressed RGB 4:4:4 DPX image sequence files. While this maintains maximum quality, it quickly eats storage space and is taxing on less powerful machines. Rendering to an uncompressed RGB format is generally overkill if your camera originals started as some highly-compressed format like XDCAM or H.264. Now Smoke 2013 offers the option to render to compressed formats, such as one of the Apple ProRes codecs.

Another welcomed change is the ability to use some of the newer Thunderbolt i/o devices. Smoke on a Mac Pro tower has been able to work with AJA KONA 3G cards, but with Smoke 2013, AJA’s new Io XT has been added to the mix. The Io XT is an external unit with most of the features and power of the KONA card. It connects in the Thunderbolt chain with storage and/or a secondary display and is the only current Thunderbolt i/o device with a loop-through connection. Thus it isn’t limited to being at the end of the chain.

While at NAB, I took a few minutes to see how comfortable this new version felt. I’ve been testing Smoke 2012 at home and quite frankly had some of the same issues other FCP and Media Composer editors have had. It has been a very deep program that required a lot of relearning before you could feel comfortable. When I sat down in front of Smoke 2013 in the NAB pod, I was able to quickly work through some effects without any assistance, primarily based on what seemed logical to me in a “standard” NLE approach. I’m not going to kid you, though. To do advanced effects still requires a learning curve, but editors do plenty of in-timeline effects that never require extensive compositing. When I compare doing this type of work in Smoke 2013 versus 2012, I’d say that the learning requirements have been cut by 60% to 75% with this new version. That’s how much the redesign improves things for beginners.

You can start from scratch editing a project strictly on Smoke 2013, but in case you are wondering, this really shouldn’t be viewed as a complete replacement for FCP 7. Instead, it’s the advanced product used to add the polish. As such, it becomes an ideal companion for a fast application used for creative cutting, like Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro or Media Composer.

Apple’s launch of Final Cut Pro X was a disruptive event that challenged conventional thinking. Autodesk Media & Entertainment’s launch of Smoke 2013 might not cause the same sort of uproar, but it brings a world-class finishing application to the Mac at a price that is attractive to many individual users and small boutiques.

Click here for videos and tutorials about Smoke.

Click here for Autodesk’s NAB videos.

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Thunderbolt I/O Devices – A First Look

Over the years media pros have seen data protocols come and go. Some, like Fibre Channel, are still current fixtures, while others, such as SCSI, have bitten the dust. The most exciting new technology is Thunderbolt, which is a merger of PCI Express and DisplayPort technologies co-developed by Intel and Apple. Started under the code name of Light Peak, the current implementation of Thunderbolt is a bi-directional protocol that passes power, video display signals and data transfer at up to 10Gbps of throughput in both directions. According to Apple, that’s up to twelve times faster than FireWire 800. It’s also faster than Fibre Channel, which tends to be the protocol of choice in larger facilities. Peripherals can access ten watts of power through Thunderbolt, too. Like SCSI and FireWire, Thunderbolt devices can be daisy-chained with special cables. Up to six devices can be connected in series, but certain devices have to be at the end of the chain. This is typically true when a PCIe-to-Thunderbolt adapter is used.

A single signal path can connect the computer to external storage, displays and capture devices, which provides editors with a powerful data protocol in a very small footprint. Thunderbolt technology is currently available in Apple iMac, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mini computers and is starting to become available on some Windows systems. It is not currently available as a built-in technology on Mac Pros, but you can bet that if there’s a replacement tower, Thunderbolt will be a key part of the engineering design.

By its nature, Thunderbolt dictates that peripheral devices are external units. All of the processing horsepower of a PCIe card, such as a KONA or Decklink, is built into the circuitry of an external device, which is connected via the Thunderbolt cable to the host computer. I tested three Thunderbolt capture/output devices for this review: AJA Io XT, Blackmagic Design UltraStudio 3D and Matrox MXO2 LE MAX. AJA added the monitoring-only T-Tap at NAB to join the Io XT in AJA’s Thunderbolt line-up. Blackmagic Design has developed four Thunderbolt units at difference price tiers. For smaller installations or mobile environments, the UltraStudio Express, Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt or Intensity Extreme are viable solutions.

Matrox has taken a different approach by using an adapter. Any of its four MXO2 products – the standard MXO2, Mini, LE or Rack – can be used with either Thunderbolt or non-Thunderbolt workstations. Simply purchase the unit with a Thunderbolt adapter, PCIe card and/or Express 34 slot laptop card. The MXO2 product is the same and only the connection method differs for maximum flexibility. The fourth company making Thunderbolt capture devices is MOTU. Their HDX-SDI was not available in time for this review, but I did have a chance to play with one briefly on the NAB show floor.

Differentiating features

All three of the tested units include up/down/cross-conversion between SD and HD formats and perform in the same fashion as their non-Thunderbolt siblings. Each has pros and cons that will appeal to various users with differing needs. For instance, the AJA Io XT is the only device with a Thunderbolt pass-through connector. The other units have to be placed at the end of a Thunderbolt path. They all support SDI and HDMI capture and output, as well as RS-422 VTR control. Both the AJA and Blackmagic units support dual-link SDI for RGB 4:4:4 image capture and output. The Matrox and AJA units use a power supply connected via a four-pin XLR, which makes it possible to operate them in the field on battery power.

The need to work with legacy analog formats or monitoring could determine your choice. This capability represents the biggest practical difference among the three. Both the MXO2 LE and UltraStudio 3D support analog capture and output, while there’s only analog output from the Io XT. The MXO2 LE uses standard BNC and XLR analog connectors (two audio channels on the LE, but more with the MXO2 or Rack), but the other two require a cable harness with a myriad of small connectors. That harness is included with the Blackmagic unit, but with AJA, you need to purchase an optional DB-25 Tascam-style cable snake for up to eight channels of balanced analog audio.

One unique benefit of the Matrox products is the optional MAX chip for accelerated H.264 processing. In my case, I tested the MXO2 LE MAX, which includes the embedded chip. When this unit is connected to a Mac computer, Apple Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder, Avid Media Composer, Telestream Episode and QuickTime perform hardware-accelerated encodes of H.264 files using the Matrox presets.

Fitting into your layout

I ran the Io XT, UltraStudio 3D and MXO2 LE through their paces connected to a friend’s new, top-of-the-line Apple iMac. All three deliver uncompressed SD or HD video over the Thunderbolt cable to the workstation. Processing to convert this signal to an encoded ProRes or DNxHD format will depend on the CPU. In short, recording a codec like ProRes4444 will require a fast machine and drives. I haven’t specifically tested it, but I presume this task would definitely challenge a Mac Mini using only internal drives!

The test-bed iMac workstation was configured with a Promise Pegasus 6-drive RAID array. The iMac includes two Thunderbolt ports and the Pegasus array offers a pass-through, so I was able to test these units both directly connected to the iMac, as well as daisy-chained onto the Promise array. This system would still allow the connection of more Thunderbolt storage and/or a secondary computer monitor, such as Apple’s 27″ Thunderbolt Display. Most peripheral manufacturers do not automatically supply cables, so plan on purchasing extra Thunderbolt cables ($49 for a six-foot cable from Apple).

These units work with most of the current crop of Mac OS X-based NLEs; however, you may need to choose a specific driver or software set to match the NLE you plan to operate. For instance, AJA requires a separate additional driver to be installed for Premiere Pro or Media Composer, which is provided for maximum functionality with those applications. The same is true for Matrox and Media Composer. I ran tests with Final Cut Pro 7, X and Premiere Pro CS 5.5, but not Media Composer 6, although they do work fine with that application. Only the Blackmagic Design products, like the UltraStudio 3D, will work with DaVinci Resolve. In addition to drivers, the software installation includes application presets and utility applications. Each build includes a capture/output application, which lets you ingest and lay off files through the device, independent of any editing application.

Broadcast monitoring and FCP X

The biggest wild card right now is performance with Final Cut Pro X. Broadcast monitoring was a beta feature added in the 10.0.3 update. With the release of 10.0.4 and compatible drivers, most performance issues have stabilized and this is no longer considered beta. Separate FCP X-specific drivers may need to be installed depending on the device.

If you intend to work mainly with Final Cut Pro “legacy” or Premiere Pro, then all of these units work well. On the other hand, if you’ve taken the plunge for FCP X, I would recommend the Io XT. I never got the MXO2 LE MAX to work with FCP X (10.0.3) during the testing period and initially the UltraStudio 3D wouldn’t work either, until the later version 9.2 drivers that Blackmagic posted mid-March. Subsequent re-testing with 10.0.4 and checking these units at NAB, indicate that both the Blackmagic and Matrox units work well enough. There are still some issues when you play at fast-forward speeds, where the viewer and external monitor don’t stay in sync with each other. I also checked the MOTU HDX-SDI device with FCP X in their NAB booth. Performance seemed similar to that of Matrox and Blackmagic Design.

The Io XT was very fluid and tracked FCP X quite well as I skimmed through footage. FCP X does not permit control over playback settings, so you have to set that in the control panel application (AJA) or system preference pane (Blackmagic Design and Matrox) and relaunch FCP X after any change. The broadcast monitoring feature in FCP X does not add any new VTR control or ingest capability and it’s unlikely that it ever will. To ingest videotape footage for FCP X using Io XT or UltraStudio, you will have to use the separate installed capture utility (VTR Xchange or Media Express, respectively) and then import those files from the hard drive into FCP X. Going the other direction requires that you export a self-contained movie file and use the same utility to record that file onto tape. The Matrox FCP X drivers and software currently do not include this feature.

Finally, the image to the Panasonic professional monitor I was using in this bay matched the FCP X viewer image on the iMac screen using either the Io XT or UltraStudio 3D. That attests to Apple’s accuracy claims for its ColorSync technology.

Performance with the mainstream NLEs

Ironically the best overall performance was using the end-of-life Final Cut Pro 7. In fact, all three units were incredibly responsive on this iMac/Promise combo. For example, when you use a Mac Pro with any FireWire or PCIe-connected card or device, energetic scrubbing or playing files at fast-forward speeds will result in the screen display and the external output going quickly out of sync with each other. When I performed the same functions on the iMac, the on-screen and external output stayed in sync with each of these three units. No amount of violent scrubbing caused it to lose sync. The faster data throughput and Thunderbolt technology had enabled a more pleasant editing experience.

I ran these tests using both a direct run from the iMac’s second Thunderbolt port, as well as looped from the back of the Promise array. Neither connection seemed to make much difference in performance with ProRes and AVCHD footage. I believe that you get the most data throughput when you are not daisy-chaining devices, however, I doubt you’ll see much difference under standard editing operation.

The best experience with Premiere Pro was using the Matrox MXO2 LE MAX, although the experience with the AJA and Blackmagic Design devices was fine, too. This stands to reason, as Matrox has historically had a strong track record developing for Adobe systems with custom cards, such as the Axio board set. Matrox also installs a high-quality MPEG-2 I-frame codec for use as an intermediate preview codec. This is an alternative to the QuickTime codecs installed on the system.

Portions of this entry originally written for Digital Video Magazine.

©2012 Oliver Peters

The post FCP world

Just as the computer manufacturers discuss the post-PC world, I believe the film and video industry has entered the post-FCP world. For over a decade Apple has steadily gained NLE market share and set the standard with its Studio software configuration. In addition to the popularity of Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro owned the DVD space for Mac-based authoring shops. The integration of Color launched new opportunities for entrepreneurial colorists. In spite of these gains, Apple tossed it all out and in June the industry changed.

The professional community of full-time film and TV editors and post facilities wanted a new software suite that expanded and enhanced the strengths of FCP 7 and the accompanying Studio bundle – not a completely new application that was Final Cut in name only. Regardless of whether you love or hate Final Cut Pro X, it’s hard to ignore the fact that it simply doesn’t fit into any established workflows. If you’ve structured your business around the Final Cut Studio ecosystem, then FCP X is a square peg in a round hole.

We all know that Apple is quick to abandon legacy technologies, but no one was prepared for a change quite this radical. Apple simply does not compete on features, yet that’s where a hypothetical FCP 8 would have headed. Had Apple actually done that, it no doubt would have kicked serious butt against Avid and Adobe, so the launch of FCP X is all the more puzzling to folks who rely on the “classic” version of FCP. In the name of innovation, Apple decided on a reboot as the way forward. One that included a completely different editing paradigm, which not only changed the way they decided editors should work, but also made it nearly impossible to integrate FCP X with anything else in the rest of the post world.

The Final Cut Pro X update

A few days ago, Apple released its first update to FCP X. In making the PR rounds Apple is trying to stress that they are listening to pro users and this update reinforces that. I’m not so sure. I do think Apple is listening to its pro customers and values them. I just don’t believe they are willing to make many (if any) concessions to users who disagree with the design direction Apple has taken. The FCP X launch was completely botched by an instant removal of FCP, FC Studio, FC Server and FCE from the market. New seats of FCP/Studio “classic” were made available again for a limited time – and FCP X can now be tested with a 30-day free trial – so, both are tacit attempts by Apple to rectify mistakes that the pro community vocalized loud and clear.

I don’t believe, though, that this update is a direct response to user demand. The new features include XML interchange, a public SDK for native camera plug-ins and the expansion of Roles into metadata-driven exports, such as for audio stems. These all seem to be the addition of elements that were unfinished at launch and were likely yanked out at the time. FCP X’s XML is an entirely new version and this feature is simply a hook for third party developers. Because FCP 7 is based on a track model and FCP X is based on a parent-child model, the two forms of XML have no commonality. Many users quickly tested XML interchange between FCP 7 and FCP X and were disappointed, because they don’t understand that Apple isn’t going to add this functionality. That’s there for developers like Assisted Editing, who is working on an FCP X to FCP 7 XML converter for timelines, i.e. Projects to Sequences.

The camera plug-in SDK will leave it up to the camera manufacturers to bring native files into FCP X. This is much the same as FCP 7 Log and Transfer or Avid AMA. Yet, it is my understanding that this doesn’t actually mean complete native support, but rather support if the codec is wrapped in a QuickTime wrapper. So, in the case of RED’s .r3d format, will an FCP X editor actually have access to the camera raw adjustments, like they do in Adobe or Avid applications?

Apple has announced that the next update (available in early 2012) will include multi-cam support and broadcast I/O. I’m sorry if I sound jaded, but I have to believe that these features have always been planned from the beginning. Multi-cam probably required further development and broadcast I/O most likely needed OS elements to be developed for AV Foundations (the under-the-hood media architecture of FCP X). Once developed, then AJA, Blackmagic Design and others can write the appropriate drivers for their hardware. After all, why would Apple design those really nice software scopes in FCP X, if the only visual output was via desktop video?

The last little tidbit to note in this update is that Apple has been touting the XML interchange with DaVinci Resolve and CatDV. I don’t know about others, but this seems rather ironic to me. That’s great as a solution going forward, but does little to appease owners who had their investment in Color or FC Server instantly wiped out. Paraphrasing a friend, “Isn’t that spitting on the grave?!”

Is it a game-change away from Apple?

The bottom line is that Apple clearly feels they are changing the game. Maybe so. All I know is that it has completely splintered the market in a way that the competition never could. However, it has also had a type of “negative halo” effect. Not only are users looking at the options beyond FCP – many are looking at options away from Apple hardware and software entirely. This didn’t just happen because of FCP X. It started with the poor support of Xsan, as well as the string of EOL decisions for Shake, Xserve RAID, Xserve and Final Cut Server. Some of these after only a few short years under the Apple banner. Rightfully so, it has many corporate buyers a bit skittish about long term Apple reliability as an enterprise supplier.

I understand such corporate reasoning, but I think the sort of decisions Apple has been making reflect the computing industry as a whole. There’s probably at last one more solid refresh coming for the Mac Pro towers, though odds are it will have fewer slots in favor of Thunderbolt. After that, who knows? Only iMacs and Mac Minis? Maybe so, but that’s likely to be a few years down the road, yet. If you look over the fence at Windows machines, you’ve got HP seeking to dump that operation, as well. Where will the power users turn for a workstation if both suppliers aren’t making them any longer? Dell, Boxx, 1Beyond or Lenovo? Will the industry return to the SGI model, where a high-end, specialized machine is the way to work with video at the facility level? These are all unknowns that probably won’t affect larger users for a number of years.

Testing the waters

The change caused by FCP X is parallel to other industry changes, which all add up to a big year or two of stirring the pot. Editors and facility owners are actively planning a move away from Final Cut. For many this is Adobe, since quite a few already own Premiere Pro as part of one of the bundles. For others, it’s a return to an old friend, Avid Media Composer. Both are on fast development paths these days, with Adobe on 64-bit before Apple and Avid getting there shortly.

Along with these NLE changes, the color correction landscape has also been radically altered. Apple could have owned the low cost color correction suite business, but they’ve been trumped by Blackmagic Design. DaVinci Resolve or Resolve Lite have became great alternatives if you want to move away from Color. I still love the way Color works, but you’d be nuts to build a new room or service based on it now. No slouch in color science, Adobe opted to purchase Iridas and appears to be ready to integrate a form of the highly-regarded SpeedGrade application into Creative Suite 6. Once this is done, Adobe will have completely overshadowed FCP X and replaced all of Final Cut Studio’s functions with components of Creative Suite.

The exit strategy

It seems like prudent editors and facility owners should be developing an exit strategy from FCP 7 and Final Cut Studio. Sure, these tools will continue to work, but support is gone and sooner or later various portions of the software will inevitably “break”. If you were on the fence about FCP X – waiting to see the direction that the next couple of updates would take the application – then I think Apple has now made that direction quite clear. If that’s not for you, then the next year should be a time of transition.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Pick the new NLE or Suite you want to use, learn it and start using it on projects.

2. Re-evaluate and revise your workflows. For instance, if you were a heavy plug-in user and did your finishing in FCP, but are now moving to Adobe, you may opt to use  After Effects instead, for all the finishing work. That will now become the primary host for your plug-ins.

3. You are going to continue to use Final Cut Studio for a while in tandem with the new solution, but start stripping done the elements you use. Streamline the selection of plug-ins, for example, and reduce FCP’s footprint on your system.

4. Any masters you create today for projects should be saved not only as finished files, but also as split-track, textless versions – probably as QuickTime files. This will make it easier to edit future revisions to legacy projects in your new solution, without the need to completely translate or rebuild old projects.

5. Preserve any edit lists and data in easily-opened formats, such as EDLs, XMLs, batch lists, spreadsheets, FileMaker Pro databases, etc.

6. Consolidate all of your ongoing projects to single folders, drives or other data locations. Avoid having contents spread all over the place. Automatic Duck Media Copy is one of the best tools for doing this with Media Composer or FCP 7.

© 2011 Oliver Peters