Don’t Write Off Avid

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Over the past couple months I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to check out two cutting-edge tapeless workflows, both of which seemed at first glance to be difficult to work with in Avid. First was the Arri D-21 with an S.two digital magazine. Before I had a chance to look at it I was actually told that it would not work with Avid. I was pretty sure there’s always a way to make anything work, so I went in and looked at it firsthand.

S.two’s system records to a heavy-duty hard drive array that can then be plugged into a fancy dock that processes the video and allows you to ingest into your computer via HD-SDI in real time. Essentially it turns a tapeless workflow into a tape workflow. You get deck control and everything. The one advantage FCP has over Avid in this workflow is that the mag automatically generates a FCP XML file that allows easy batch digitizing. What you get with Avid is more work for the Assistant Editor because you have to enter the start and stop times and names and whatnot manually. Why they didn’t use the cross-platform ALE format, I don’t know, but it’s really not a big issue. It’s just like working with tapes.

With the RED workflow there’s absolutely nothing anywhere close to “realtime” processing. What you get with RED is a lot of waiting. It’s like processing 35mm film. It takes time. For some projects this isn’t really a big deal, for others it is. RED and FCP have been like two peas in a pod from the beginning, but Avid is getting things worked out nicely. The disadvantage Avid has at the moment is that it doesn’t read metadata from QuickTime files. If you were to import any QT file into Avid, its timecode would always start at 01:00:00:00. But the new REDRushes, which comes with REDAlert can create an ALE for easy batch importing.

The situation as I see it right now with all these crazy workflows being introduced, is that all you’re still doing as an offline editor is generating a list of numbers for the conform. In most cases, Avid and FCP are equally good at doing that. And if you feel more free and comfortable to create and actually edit in Avid, you should be working in Avid, no matter what anyone says about how well FCP handles newer tapeless workflows. Of course, that’s assuming you have someone in the production—such as myself—who actually understands what’s going on under the hood.

Converting edited 29.97 Video to 23.98 in FCP

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For the past couple weeks I’ve been working for Revel in New York, a very cool new online video series. I started after they had already shot several pieces, and some of them had already been captured and assembled. Almost all the video was shot 24p on a DVX-100 and captured at 29.97. I figured I wouldn’t try to get too fancy, and just kept editing that way since some work had already been done at 29.97. Then I exported an edited video for upload and I took a look at it. As I should have realized, it was full of interlacing! There are a lot of moves on still photos, and it was just unacceptable. So I decided to try something I’d never done before. I took a piece that was edited as regular old 29.97 and converted it to 23.98.

First I media managed everything, so I could always go back if I screwed it up. I made a new project copying only the linked media, with 3 second handles. The handles were very important, because without them I couldn’t properly remove the pulldown on some clips. There needs to be a little bit of leeway at the beginning and end of the clip, since there will be some frames removed.

Once I had my newly created project, I selected all the DV NTSC master clips in the bin and clicked on “Tools/Cinema Tools Reverse Telecine.” Cinema Tools went to work on all the clips, and automatically removed the 2:3 pulldown.

Now I had 23.98 media in a 29.97 sequence, all of which was informing me of a newfound desire to be rendered. So I hit ⌘ + A to select all the clips in the sequence, copied to the clipboard, created a new 23.98 sequence, and pasted into the new sequence. Now I had 24p clips in a 24p sequence, with no need to be rendered. The trouble of course, was thanks to the removal of 6 available frames per second, some of the clips were now off by a frame. Some were even out of sync, but they were nice enough to tell me that. I had to go through manually and make sure everything fit together properly. Since the pieces were only about 3 min long it wasn’t too odious. Every once in a while I had to slide a clip 1 frame forward or back.

Once I was satisfied that I had a sequence that matched my original cut, I exported a fully progressive QT. The moves on the artwork are significantly better now, and there is no interlacing to be found.

Famous!

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I did an interview with Rob Feld for Editors Guild Magazine a couple months ago, and had my picture taken by John Clifford on my lovely Brooklyn roof about a month ago. Today I got a copy of the July/August issue and there’s a big picture of me on the cover looking squinty yet casual.


Sorry for the bad quality, I don’t have a scanner and it’s not online yet. Also, note that Pineapple Express didn’t get the cover photo. Someone at the magazine has a warped sense of priority.

The article is quite extensive and I’ve definitely been paraphrased and edited for brevity. I just hope I don’t come off like a jerk.

OpenCut Final Cut

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Here’s the final cut of my OpenCut project. Go to Vimeo to see it in 720p HD. This was a very fun experience. I learned a lot about the Red workflow. It turns out at this point it’s about as easy to use as P2 media. I’m still a little unsure about how I would finish it on a large budget project. I’m perfectly content to finish the project in 2K ProRes, but given the option I know it would be better to do a 4K assembly and color correct from the original files.

It was very unusual for me to work on a script I disliked and have the opportunity to change it beyond what any director would let me. Since I had no contact with the writer/director on this project, it didn’t matter that I thought his script was trite and boring. I wasn’t collaborating with him, I was stealing his footage. The downside of the isolation from the production was that I had nobody to yell at when crucial shots were missed or delivered without sound. I only received one take that had blood on the wall after the gunshot and it was MOS. I used it, but I would have liked some better options. There were several shots covering the end of that scene that included the ear and wall without the blood, but I didn’t use them because the blood would have disappeared. And I didn’t get a lined script, which would have been nice.

I tried using Color to do the color correction, but even as I started to get the hang of it I realized that it was way more control than I needed or had the ability to take advantage of. So I stuck with good old 3-Way Color Corrector in FCP. And I mixed in FCP too. What can I say? I stick with what works.

OpenCut First Cut

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This past week I’ve worked a bit on my version of the OpenCut 1.0 project. As I said earlier, I did not care for the script, so I decided to make a few important changes to the tone. I’ve finished up my initial cut, and done a bit of sound work. I’ll probably polish the edit when I’m back from Amsterdam, and do some color correction. I’m hoping to learn how to use Apple’s Color program with this project.

You can see the cut below, or go to Vimeo to watch it in 720p HD.

“Susannah” 06-09-08 from Kyle Gilman on Vimeo.

Red TC Fixer

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Scott Simmons at The Editblog has noticed a serious problem in the Red post workflow. There are two timecode tracks in R3D and their associated QT proxy files. One is known as “edge code” and is generated as rec run. It is continuous from the end of one shot to the beginning of the next. The other track is time of day. If your camera is set up to display edge code during shooting, QT will display edge code. If it’s displaying TOD, QT will display TOD.

I did some peeking under the hood, and it seems that the QT proxy files generated by the camera have two timecode tracks. The first track is whatever was displayed during shooting. If you delete Timecode Track 1, QT will now display the other type of timecode. If edge code was turned on in your clip and you delete Track 1, you’ll see TOD.

Unfortunately, right now it looks like there are a number of applications that are only looking at the TOD, so if you’re going to do an assembly it seems to make sense to work in TOD. If your production wasn’t aware of this problem and had edge code display turned on in camera, and you still want to work with proxies, I’ve made an AppleScript to delete the first TC track for all the QuickTime files in any directory and its subdirectories. Use with extreme caution. The script will permanently delete the first TC track from any QT file in its path. If you want the track back you have to regenerate the proxy files. I’ve done limited testing with this, and I’ve never worked with AppleScript before, so please be careful.

Download “RemoveTCTrack” 0.1

OpenCut Begins

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Right now I’m participating in the first “OpenCut” project, which is a great idea unfortunately saddled with an awful script. Basically some very clever people came up with a great way to give people access to footage shot with the exciting new Red One camera. I’ve been following the development of the camera and went to NAB NY last year to see some 4K Red footage projected. It was very pretty. But I haven’t worked with any producers or directors crazy enough to try it out on a film yet. There are definitely still a lot of limitations and a lot of bugs to be worked out, but the promise of the system is incredible.

So the OpenCut people shot a short film on the Red One and they’re giving the footage to anyone who pays the very reasonable $25 fee. I just got my hard drive in the mail today and I’m currently transcoding everything into ProRes HQ and syncing up the audio.

Here’s why ProRes HQ. You see, Red shoots in a kind of RAW format, like digital still cameras can do. It retains metadata regarding exposure and whatnot, but you can adjust that after it’s shot. It’s all very fancy, but I don’t want to spend my time grading the image before I edit. You end up wasting a lot of time on footage that you won’t use. That’s why you do a quick one-light telecine when you’re working on film. I just want to start working on the footage as soon as possible. You can’t edit straight from the “RAW” (actually .r3d) files, but the camera automatically generates QT reference (proxy) files of various resolutions. You can edit using those proxies, but it requires access to the original r3d files and a lot of processing power. My quad-core 3 gHz processor is around 90% on all cores while playing back one of those files. I can add some real-time effects in there too, but it makes me uneasy. So I’m going with something I know. I know ProRes HQ is great, and my processor barely breaks a sweat once it’s transcoded.

I’m doing the transcoding using the Red Log and Transfer Plugin, which works just like those old-fashioned P2 cards. You open up the original folders and start transcoding the clips you want. FCP creates a master clip and generates the new media on your scratch disk. I noodled around with RedAlert, which seemed nice, but had more controls than I wanted, and I tried RedCine, which was completely baffling, and usually froze up on me. I never even managed to figure out how to export a clip (UPDATE: Hit the big red “Go” button). The Log and Transfer Plugin is definitely the simple way to go.

I’ve looked at some of the footage, and I started syncing the audio. For some reason it was recorded at 44.1 kHz, so I have to be careful to change my sequence settings to match. There are no scene numbers either, which I guess makes sense for such a short film and for a project that will be edited by different people in presumably wildly different ways, but it threw me a bit. Every shot is assigned a number, although luckily it’s not in shooting order like they do in the foreign lands (a confusing system obviously not designed by an editor). It’s in order based on the script / storyboards as far as I can tell.

As for the script, the less said about it the better. I’m going to do my best to turn the movie into something completely different.

Editing La Commedia – Part 2

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I’m back from Amsterdam and we’ve finished editing La Commedia. A few weeks ago I described the basic setup we were working with. The whole thing worked beautifully. We almost never rendered anything. There were times when playing back a freeze frame while 2 other video streams were running would cause dropped frames, but that just required a quick render on the 8-core Mac Pro we were working on. The finale of the show finally uses all 5 screens at once in a seizure-inducing extravaganza that also included some effects, so that needed rendering as well. But for the majority of the show I was able to edit up to 4 streams of resized HD video in realtime.

This is an example of the format we used during editing. Each picture represents one of the 5 screens that will be in various locations throughout the theater. The “C” screen is not in use in this example.

The real difficulty in this project was creative. The opera doesn’t really have a clear narrative like a traditional opera. It’s more fragments of ideas that all relate to a theme. Hal Hartley, the director of the show, came up with a separate story for the film that was inspired by the ideas in the opera. But while there’s a clear relationship between the two, the film is definitely not just an illustration of what the people are singing about on stage. And I usually had no idea what anyone was singing about anyway since we edited to MIDI recordings of the score.

As we started editing there were a lot more decisions to be made than usual. In a movie you can take for granted the fact that you’re going to have an image on screen most of the time. You might have a few seconds of black here and there, but in general movies tend to have something going on all the time. But with a stage production, you might not have any video at all for several minutes while the audience focuses on some activity on the stage. And if we do want to show some video, we have 5 different screens to choose from. And some portions of the audience can’t see some of the screens. Some of the audience sees the back side of some of the screens, so the image is in reverse and we can’t put text on those screens. It was all very tricky. Read more →

Avid Xpress Pro: Good Riddance

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Ever since Media Composer was released as a software-only option (no longer requiring expensive Avid hardware) I’ve had a hard time understanding why it cost so much more than Xpress Pro, considering the complete compatibility between them, and the large overlap in features. I didn’t see much need to upgrade to Media Composer myself. Well, apparently Avid is done with Xpress Pro, and they’re slashing the price of Media Composer. I think this is a great move. It puts Media Composer much closer to the price of Final Cut Studio, and removes the vestigial Xpress Pro line. It’s getting so cheap, I might even buy a Mojo some day.