Proxied

As I’ve been working on my new feature doc “Unheralded” (web site coming soon). I’ve been struggling with edit technology. 90% of this film is going to be cut on my MacBook Pro at home. Since I’m using Cineform master files, they don’t play back nicely enough on my MBP in Premiere to edit (Adobe’s fault)- they’re fine on my octomac at the studio though. I needed a proxy.

I decided to use this opportunity to learn myself Avid. I picked up a copy of Media Composer for the Non-Profit price of $295 and started importing my Cineform masters (about 25 or so hours of HD). A side benefit to editing with DNxHD 36 proxies is that the files are small enough I can fit my entire project on one set of 500GB drives at RAID 0 on my CalDigit VR Mini. So now my entire editing setup includes one 17″ MBP, power supply and my VR Mini via FW400 (also doubles as the VR Mini’s power supply). Pretty sweet.

Now, Cineform is coming out with a Mac importer for CS4 that will greatly enhance the Premiere/Cineform editing experience. You FCP guys already have decent goods on that (see here and here).

Now boys, play nice!

As far as playing nicely together, Premiere to Avid via EDL works great. Just make sure you don’t use subclips from your Pr sequence. And I spent the rest of my allotted 2 week demo playing around with importing my Avid AAF’s and EDLs into Premiere and relinking to my Cineform masters which I’ll be doing for final color and mastering- I hopefully have an American in Bangkok to work on my VFX and titling using Cinema 4D and Motion. More on that later.

So don’t overlook Premiere as a solid go-between for Avid and After Effects or FCP and After Effects. Adobe’s Dynamic Link makes even the smaller stuff that much easier to work with sans rendering or outputting of more files. You can find out more about that here. Incidentally, my workflow is somewhat backed up by what the guys did on Avatar. (Watch the second vid clip under “making of” here).

New Year’s Workflow

2010 for the blog will have me talking a lot more about the production of Unheralded and continued discussion of non-profit media. I’m looking forward to it!

I’ve got another large teaching resource, a series of promotional web videos (hopefully shot with a VDSLR), and other random work for the non-profit this year, I’m heading to the middle east in May-ish for a pre-production trip on the next documentary and look out for some more workflow goodness with the Cinedeck, Cineform and Avid and Premiere.

Tags: after effects, avid, cineform, dnxhd, documentary, final cut pro, mac, premiere, Production, unheralded, workflow

Introduction

I have a lot to say or a lot to rant about or…I don’t know. As you know, I spent some time in Cancun right after I got back from shooting the last bit of the new doc, Unheralded. Cancun was awesome. Then it was full-tilt once I got back in to the studio. Not sure how that happened, but I ended up with too much to do and not enough time. Then, I got completely frustrated not having RT playback in Premiere CS4- it hasn’t bothered me with short form stuff, but this long form is not fun.

Video

AVID – So I download the Avid Media Composer demo and give it a whirl. I love it. But it’s a demo so I start poking around to see if they offer a non-profit discount. I see that they do via one of their authorized resellers but I email to clarify and he says “yes,” 501(c)3 organizations get the discount. I place my order, submit my verification and it gets cancelled because I didn’t submit anything. I email the guy who said I’m good to go and I haven’t heard back. I call Avid, leave a message and I haven’t been called back.

ADOBE – Right, I’m going to presume that they lied and I don’t get that discount. So back to Adobe. I email the Sr. Adobe Evangelist (we’ve been Twitterers for a while now) and ask him about the preferred codec for Adobe if you’re using footage that doesn’t come with a preset (in this case Cineform). He’s like, “I do everything DVCProHD- you’re almost guaranteed RT playback without issue every time.” That’s the straightest answer I’ve gotten in two years with Adobe. So I transcode a couple clips and cut up this vid:  I like it. It’s not without metadata and proxy-relink issues, but RT playback is the bomb and I don’t have to change much plus the DVCProHD files are half the size of my Cineform masters so I can put the whole project on my VR Mini set. Unless Avid tells me I qualify at which point, I’ll be editing DNxHD.

Design

WEB – On that note, I have to create websites as well. We use a CMS backend called Kintera (or Blackbaud Sphere). These guy are awesome and massively on top of things. Too bad their built-in website templates and formatting suck. So I’m working on integrating Dreamweaver CSS/XHTML with Kintera .KDF/.KTF template structure. Needless to say I’m pulling my beard out more than I’m actually solving any problems.

LAYOUT – I have a host of design work coming up the biggest of which is the NP’s new product catalogue. We don’t have much but it needs to look nice, present well and make people happy. One of those projects where (as indicated in above paragraphs) I have no say in, yet I’m designing it. I design, they mark it all up and debate it and I design again and the process continues until it’s finished.

Conclusion

The ski area is open, we have good snow, my little sister had her baby, the beer is near and my dogs are happy.

Tags: cineform, design, dnxhd, non-profit, Production, web

Here I mentioned the upgrade of my system to one of the new octomacs that came out last month. The thing is blazingly fast. Lightning. It’s incredible. But, to sum up the issue, it wouldn’t read any of DNxHD footage, this was a result of the lastest QT updates (the only thing I could figure out) so I re-transcoded.

I compared 3 different codecs: Blackmagic 8-bit uncompressed, Photo-JPEG, and Apple 8-bit uncompressed. Each codec looked amazing…for transocded HDV. Every one of them naturally, looked better than the DNxHD footage. So after comparing the same frame on each codec, I settled on Photo-JPEG. Pretty old school I know. But, the uncompressed codecs just left huge file sizes and Blackmagic’s codec pixelated the hell out of the highlights and the Apple codec had mushy shadows. If anyone has a better codec than Photo-JPEG, let me know (that’s free).

So my current HDV/Sony HVR-Z7U workflow is thus:

Shoot 1080i at 59.94

Transcode via MPEG Streamclip to 1440×1080i Photo-JPEG (you have to specify 59.94 otherwise it will default to 29.97)

Edit in Premier as normal.

Then I can go back and forth between Premiere and AE without having to render until final output. Pretty sweet…for HDV. I think however, I’ll be losing the Blackmagic card in lieux of the Matrox MXO. I discovered I can’t use to it to color correct as I wanted…only after researching for a monitor today :/ Ugh. It’s brand new though so it’ll resell well I think.

Tags: dnxhd, hdv, Photo-JPEG, print, tech, tools, video, workflow