Although most editing application manufacturers like to tout how you can just go from camera to edit with native media, most editors know that’s a pretty frustrating way to work. The norm these days is for the production team to use a whole potpourri of professional and prosumer cameras, so it’s really up to the editor to straighten this out before the edit begins. Granted a DIT could do all of this, but in my experience, the person being called a DIT is generally just someone who copies/backs-up the camera cards onto hard drives to bring back from the shoot. As an editor you are most likely to receive a drive with organized copies of the camera media cards, but still with the media in its native form.
Native media is fine when you are talking about ARRI ALEXA, Canon C300 or even RED files. It is not fine when coming from a Canon 5D, DJI, iPhone, Sony A7S, etc. The reason is that these systems record long-GOP media without valid timecode. Most do not generate unique file names. In some cases, there is no proper timebase within the files, so time itself is “rubbery” – meaning, a frame of time varies slightly in true duration from one frame to the next.
If you remove the A7S .mp4 files from within the clutter of media card folders and take these files straight into an NLE, you will get varying results. There is a signal interpreted as timecode by some tools, but not by others. Final Cut Pro X starts all of these clips at 00:00:00:00, while Premiere Pro and Resolve read something that is interpreted as timecode, which ascends sequentially on successive clips. Finally, these cameras have no way to deal with off-speed recordings. For example, if a higher frame rate is recorded with the intent to play it back in slow motion. You can do that with a high-end camera, but not these prosumer products. So I’ve come to rely on several software products heavily in these types of productions.
Step 1 : Hedge for Mac
The first step in any editing is to get the media from the field drives onto the edit system drives. Hopefully your company’s SOP is to archive this media from the field in addition to any that comes out of the edit. However, you don’t want to edit directly from these drives. When you do a Finder copy from one drive to the next there is no checksum verification. In other words, the software doesn’t actually check to make sure the copy is exact without errors. This is the biggest plus for an application like Hedge – copy AND verification.
Hedge comes in a free and a paid version. The free version is useful, but copy and verify is slower than the paid version. The premium (paid) version uses a software component that they call Fast Lane to speed up the verification process so that it takes roughly the same amount of time as a Finder copy, which has no verification. To give you an idea, I copied a 62GB folder from a USB2.0 thumb drive to an external media drive connected to my Mac via eSATA (through an internal card). The process took under 30 minutes for a copy through Hedge (paid version) – about the same as it took for a Finder copy. Using the free version takes about twice as long, so there’s a real advantage to buying the premium version of the application. In addition, the premium version works with NAS and RAID systems.
The interface is super simple. Sources and targets are drag-and-drop. You can specify folders within the drives, so it’s not just a root-level, drive-to-drive copy. Multiple targets and even multiple sources can be specified within the same batch. This is great for creating a master as well as several back-up copies. Finally, Hedge generates a transfer log for written evidence of the copies and verification performed.
Step 2 : EditReady
Now that you have your media copies, it’s time to process the prosumer camera media into something more edit-friendly. Since the camera-original files are being archived, I don’t generally save both the original and converted files on my edit system. For all intents and purposes, the new, processed files become my camera media. I’ve used tools like MPEG Streamclip in the past. That still works well, but EditReady from Divergent Media is better. It reads many media formats that other players don’t and it does a great job writing ProRes media. It will do other formats, too, but ProRes is usually the best format for projects that I work with.
One nice benefit of EditReady is that it offers additional processing functions. For example, if you want to bake in a LUT to the transcoded files, there’s a function for that. If you shot at 29.97, but want the files to play at 23.976 inside you NLE, EditReady enables you to retime the files accordingly. Since Divergent Media also makes ScopeBox, you can get a bundle with both EditReady and ScopeBox. Through a software conduit called ScopeLink, clips from the EditReady player show up in the ScopeBox viewer and its scopes, so you can make technical evaluations right within the EditReady environment.
EditReady uses a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to set up a batch for processing. If you have more that one target location or process chain, simply open up additional windows for each batch that you’d like to set up. Once these are fired off, all process will run simultaneously. The best part is that these conversions are fast, resulting in reliable transcoded media in an edit-friendly format.
Step 3: Better Rename
The last step for me is usually to rename the file names. I won’t do this with formats like ALEXA ProRes or RED, but it’s essential for 5D, DJI and other similar cameras. That’s because these camera normally don’t generate unique file names. After all, you don’t want a bunch of clips that are named C0001 with a starting timecode of 00:00:00:00 – do you?
While there are a number of batch renaming applications and even Automator scripts that you can create, my preferred application is Better Rename, which is available in the Mac App Store. It has a host of functions to change names, add numbered sequences and append a text prefix or suffix to a name. The latter option is usually the best choice. Typically I’ll drag my camera files from each group into the interface and append a prefix that adds a camera card identifier and a date to the clip name. So C0001 becomes A01_102916_C0001. A clip from the second card would change from C0001 to A02_102916_C0001. It’s doubtful that the A camera would shoot more than 99 cards in a day, but if so, you can adjust your naming scheme accordingly.
There you go. Three simple steps to bulletproof how you work with media.
©2016 Oliver Peters
I thought this year was going to be quiet and laid back. Boy, was I wrong! Once again 
Along with that news was 
And if you think free (or close to it) stifles R&D, 
That’s right – a 4K version of the Mini already designed with 
Nevertheless, to guarantee some buzz, 
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
EyeOn is using
Quantel, who often gets lost in these desktop NLE discussions showed the 
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!
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ever since the launch of 
The 4K discussion starts at sensor size. Camera manufacturers have adopted larger sensors to emulate the look of film for characteristics such as resolution, optics and dynamic range. Although different sensors may be of a similar physical dimension, they don’t all use the same number of pixels. A RED EPIC and a Canon 7D use similarly sized sensors, but the resulting pixels are quite different. Three measurements come into play: the actual dimensions, the maximum area of light-receiving pixels (photosites) and the actual output size of recorded frames. One manufacturer might use fewer, but larger photosites, while another might use more pixels of a smaller size that are more densely packed. There is a very loose correlation between actual pixel size, resolution and sensitivity. Larger pixels yield more stops and smaller pixels give you more resolution, but that’s not an absolute. RED has shown with EPIC that it is possible to have both.
The biggest visual attraction to large-sensor cameras appears to be the optical characteristics they offer – namely a shallower depth of field (DoF). Depth of field is a function of aperture and focal length. Larger sensors don’t inherently create shallow depth of field and out-of-focus backgrounds. Because larger sensors require a different selection of lenses for equivalent focal lengths compared with standard 2/3-inch video cameras, a shallower depth of field is easier to achieve and thus makes these cameras the preferred creative tool. Even if you work with a camera today that doesn’t provide a 4K output, you are still gaining the benefits of this engineering. If your target format is HD, you will get similar results – as it relates to these optical characteristics – regardless of whether you use a RED, an ARRI ALEXA or an HDSLR.
Quite a few large-sensor cameras have entered the market in the past few years. Typically these use a so-called Super 35MM-sized sensor. This means it’s of a dimension comparable to a frame of 3-perf 35MM motion picture film. Some examples are the 
This year was the first time that the industry at large has started to take 4K seriously, with new 4K cameras and post solutions. Sony introduced the F65, which incorporates a 20-megapixel 8K sensor. Like other CMOS sensors, the F65 uses a Bayer light filtering pattern, but unlike the other cameras, Sony has deployed more green photosites – one for each pixel in the 4K image. Today, this 8K sensor can yield 4K, 2K and HD images. The F65 will be Sony’s successor to the F35 and become a sought-after tool for TV series and feature film work, challenging RED and ARRI.
The Canon EOS C300 and EOS C300 PL use an 8.3MP CMOS Super 35MM-sized sensor (3840 x 2160 pixels). For now, these only record at 1920 x 1080 (or 1280 x 720 overcranked) using the Canon XF codec. So, while the sensor is a 4K sensor, the resulting images are standard HD. The difference between this and the way Canon’s HDSLRs record is a more advanced downsampling technology, which delivers the full pixel information from the sensor to the recorded frame without line-skipping and excessive aliasing.
RED launched SCARLET-X to a fan base that has been chomping at the bit for years waiting for some version of this product. It’s far from the original concept of SCARLET as a high-end “soccer mom” camera (fixed lens, 2/3” sensor, 3K resolution with a $3,000 price tag). In fact, SCARLET-X is, for all intents and purposes, an “EPIC Lite”. It has a higher price than the original SCARLET concept, but also vastly superior specs and capabilities. Unlike the Canon release, it delivers 4K recorded motion images (plus 5K stills) and features some of the developing EPIC features, like HDRx (high dynamic range imagery).
Software is easy, but what about hardware? Both AJA and Blackmagic Design have announced 4K solutions using the 
digitalfilms 