TV Soup is Toast!

It’s taken a while, but I think I’ve now got the blogging ‘habit’.

It’s all very well starting out with lofty intentions, but unless it’s part of your job description or you get some sort of tangible benefit from it, blogging can rapidly become a neglected chore that just ’stops’ one day, and the blog site becomes a clogged site.

But I’m almost a year through it all, and the blog post frequency is climbing up. It’s time to re-evaluate what I want to do now versus what I thought I’d be doing ‘way back then’.

And so I’m going to ‘move house’ so to speak. TV Soup was never about TV and although it was a soup of subjects, it’s pretty clear that the common thread is the world of the videographer.

TV Soup is closing down. Please change your bookmarks to my new blog home:

mattdavis.wordpress.com

It’s all strangely familiar, but with added goodies and much more frequent updates!

Would the last person to leave here kindly switch the lights off?

Timelapse on tape

Following on from my last post about tape in a tapeless workflow, I also had some fun planning some timelapse shooting.

The requirement was to demonstrate the amazing transformation from empty exhibition hall to finished ‘environment’ – ditto for the main presentation theatre. The build would happen over 2-3 days, and I reckon that the timelapse sequences would last around 5-7 seconds each in the final edit.

Weapon of choice would be my EX1 – it has great timelapse, slomo and interval recording modes. Trouble was, client wasn’t going to pay for me to bring one, rent another, and hang around whilst the shoot goes ahead. I know somebody who got to spend a week doing a single timelapse shoot somewhere hot and sunny. And the plants died, so had to be reshot – what a job: filming grass growing…)

Alternatively, a camera like the Nikon D200 has a built-in intervalometer. Providing you have enough power (big power grip or a mains outlet nearby), you can shoot in extra-high definition with a really wide lens, convert the raw images into a QuickTime movie and then pan around the final movie from within FCP or motion. But the client wasn’t going to pay for a photographer to bring his kit and set it all up…

So a couple of PD150s were hired to do it. The Sony PD150 is a venerable little DV camcorder from the tape age and whilst tape isn’t known for its strengths in time lapse, the PD150 does have an ‘interval’ mode.

Tape isn’t good for timelapse because even when the tape isn’t moving, the head is rubbing over the tape all the time it’s laced up. Rubbing the same little bit of tape for minutes at a time could lead to the head clogging up or worse still, scoring through the oxide so it’s one big drop-out and candidate for the point at which the tape will snap. Furthermore, if you disengage the tape from the head after each interval, you’re wearing down the transport mechanism, dramatically reducing its life span. It also means that taking a shot every 1-10 seconds is well nigh impossible because it’s long enough to clog your heads but too quick to unthread and rethread the tape.

So the PD150 timelapse mode records ‘about half a second’ (15-17 frames) of video every XX seconds. It’s not good for shooting things like clouds, and still leaves you with some editing after you’ve sucked in the video. Because you’re only getting half a second of real time video every so often, the footage still looks ‘narcoleptic’ – like a security camera. To get a smooth result, you need to speed up the footage by a factor of x15 or so, so you’re only getting one frame out of each burst of 15.

Aeons ago, there was a bit of software that we got with FireWire PCMCIA cards (so we could grab DV video with Apple’s Wall Street PowerBooks) which enabled you to grab every ‘n’th frame of the incoming DV signal. I hear that Adobe Premiere can still do this, but Final Cut Pro does not. So the clip is sped up in the timeline. Tip: remove the audio, as you’ll have no use for it and FCP will spend processor cycles trying to speed that up too.

So let’s consider a bit of maths:

The camera will record half a second of video every, let’s say, two minutes. This will eventually equate to 1 frame (1/25th of a second) every two minutes.

 A 60 minute tape has 3600 seconds of video, therefore 7200 half second intervals. With me? Those intervals occur every 2 minutes, so each hour tape will last 60 hours (2.5 days) in-camera, and 288 seconds (not quite 5 minutes) in the final edit. But then you can chop out the overnight bits and the periods where not much is happening.

With a little jiggling of the numbers, you can work out if you can get away with doing interval recorded tape. For anything faster (clouds, crowds), then you’re better off recording real time and speeding up in post.

Or get a file based device.

Go with the workflow

15 months after going tapeless, I’ve just returned from a job where I was thoroughly glad we had tape.

I needed to incorporate clips and quotes from the TX of a conference, recorded onto Grass Valley Turbo and onto tape. These clips would be edited together with general footage of the conference and played back in the conference’s main room.

Originally, I had planned to have my FCP edit station within the production area, so I could record directly into Final Cut Pro and hard disk by taking the TX feed into a deck, then taking the deck’s firewire into FCP as a ‘non controlable device’. The same can be done with a FW camera, and it’s very handy – no ingest, no tape changes, immediate edit. But remember that unless you have a deck, there’s no backup, and you need to have a record station per source or vision mix live. But I digress.

My edit station was going to be ‘elsewhere’ in a large venue, so I would have to rely either on the GV Turbo recordings – MPEG2 files at 15 Mbits – or on DV Tape. The file based solution required copying the entire file from the GV Turbo onto a USB2 hard drive, then taking those files and copying them to the edit hard drive, then using Episode Pro to transcode into DV for editing, and then (phew!) locating the clips within the single file and chopping them out.

With tape, the 90 minute recording was handed over, taken to my edit bay, and I did a simple log and capture. Within half an hour of the presentation, we had our sound bites in and ready to roll. We’d still be copying files on a USB device had we gone for a file based workflow.

I’m not advocating a massed move back to tape – if I had been in the production area recording to disk using FCP, I’d be ready to play out my finished edit within half an hour. The time taken to export my edit and transcode to GV Turbo was roughly equivalent to running off to tape, but the way the Turbo works means that the file based efficiencies and benefits were centred around playout, not the whims and caprices of the editor.

It’s all down to workflow.

And there is no single ‘correct and canonical’ workflow. It varies. A planned workflow can change. The main thing is to spot the bottlenecks before they cause a problem and either work around them or (in this case) work with them.

Turbo Power

There’s a particular Broadcast toy that’s been cropping up at more and more events that I film. It’s called the Grass Valley Turbo – basically, a sort of disk based VTR which can also work as a play-out solution.

For those of you of a certain vintage, it’s a virtual betacart-in-a-box. Transfer all your tapes for a show into it, make a virtual running order, and just keep hitting the cue button. You could run a TV station on a couple of them.

So I’ve been supplying either DVCAM tapes or even DVDs. But from EX1, it required encoding to SD DV and laying off to a deck with bars and a clock, or authoring and burning a couple of DVDs, which took up time.

Of course, Grass Valley’s sales literature says you can shove almost any video file into it and it will cross convert into its own internal format. We tried this some time ago. It took a long time and the results weren’t wonderful. And it doesn’t like EX1 footage. Been there, tried that. No cigar.

And I now have a very elegant solution. But it’s costly unless you really really need it.

There’s no real secret here – Episode from Telestream has a pre-set recipe buried deep in its provided templates for ‘Grass Valley Profile_K2, GXF_SD_PAL’ amongst others (better off calling it ‘GV Turbo’?). It creates a file that doesn’t play on Macs, most will never try it. If you do, you’ll find that it’s a demo, ‘enabled’ by upgrading to Episode Pro. But there’s an issue about Episode. There are plenty of cheaper alternatives and in the world of high quality Open Source encoders, you may baulk at paying $500 for Episode. Or even $1000 for the Pro version. Gulp.

I have spent a lot of money on encoders over time. Some are great, like Episode. Others have been a waste of time, like MegaPEG. What you’re getting with the good ones is a different order of speed, flexibility and quality. Convenience has different meanings depending on the situation you’re in. But don’t get me wrong. Episode, for me, is a great FLV and WMV encoder but you should look elsewhere if you’re doing DVD, format conversion or H.264 (start with Compressor).

Then there’s the ‘pro’ version of Episode. Double the cost simply to add some esoteric MXF formats (and GV Turbo). Few users will ever need it. But if you want to play with the big boy’s kit, Telestream’s got you. What you get is a quick encode from your exported edit (be that XDCAM-EX, DVCPro-HD or even plain old DV) straight to GV Turbo. No messing, no conversion. SD or HD, PAL or NTSC. And it’s QUICK.

Definitely NOT the sort of purchase that most will want to make, but if you’re delivering lots of short newsy clips over a week’s worth of exhibition or other event, and look into hooking up a separate encoding machine, file server (when Episode’s Watch Folder is fixed for NAS) and Turbos on a network, it’s one more giant leap beyond a tape based workflow.

Who will test the testers?

What a day. What a horrible, puss filled, cankerous waste of everything.

Yes, folks. Today, I am trying to test a DVD. It’s quite a biggie – ten programmes taking up 2.5 hours, to be delivered on a single sided DVD-R.

DVDs used to be a nightmare. Compression glitches, authoring glitches, media glitches, it would all pile up together to form a single amorphous problem blob that everyone would describe as ‘it doesn’t work’.

We’re not talking Cinema DVD, here. We’re talking the journeyman titles pumped out by our massed hoardes of corporate, videographer and event producers. We’d have a clutch of DVD players at our disposal, testing out on our expensive home set, the nasty cheapo picked up at the supermarket, and the one we had ages ago which was great then but is now in retirement.

As time went on, troublesome DVD players fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, we learned that AIFF audio wasn’t a good idea, that few players could do 8 megabits per second, and only very expensive or very cheap media seemed to be consistently good.

Then a few years ago, the clouds parted, the sun came out, and DVD authoring was straightforward. Problems were bad links as we got more adventurous with our authoring. It’s been a sunny old time recently. DVD authoring was a quick process of assembling suitably encoded material into proven templates. Testing becomes a ritual. A sort of sugar topped process that really doesn’t mean much because a title plays, it works, it all looks lovely, and really feels superfluous.

So. Here’s today with my big 800 lb project, and it’s trickling through my nice big fancy DVD/BluRay player and I’m half ignoring it whilst playing with son. And I spot something. Oh. That’s wrong, thank heavens I spotted that – how did that get through? Right – back to the office. Fix it. Encode it. Burn it. Test on the DVD player in the office. First movie is fine. Second movie – it barfs.

And so I tried it again, reencoded, and it barfed in a different place.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

So try a newly authored disk on a different machine, whilst playing a known good disk on the retired machine. Aha! The retired machine barfs 30-40 mins into the programme, which is interesting. On my disk, I’m playing through a series of 15-30 minute programmes, and the barf happened towards the end of the second or in the beginning of the third programme. You’re getting the picture.

What’s so obvious now is that I am testing on my ‘retired’ home DVD player. It’s really useful because it’s old, it’s connected to a 4:3 CRT domestic TV set of similar vintage. The TV set is good at spotting Title Safe violations, the DVD player has been a reliable old brick for ages.

So I take a breather in search of cats to kick, when wife offers solace and a cuppa. And a reminder why I retired the DVD player – complaints from son that his DVDs kept hanging. Okay, at the time, I used this comment as an excuse to go out and get a nice BluRay player whilst providing the opportunity to get a DVD and TV set in my office for testing. And maybe watching my own TV when son’s Cbeebies or Cars or Nemo or Wall-e DVDs tipped me over the edge. Every man needs a shed to retire to.

But (sharply apply palm of hand to forehead and repeat ad nauseam at this point) I didn’t get round to actually soak testing the retired DVD player. Sure it worked for all the DVDs I’ve produced since then – all under 30 minutes. Groan. So I have had one real problem, and now I look at the disk, it may have been a scratch. But since then I’ve been doing the burn, test, tweak cycle for almost 24 hours on a damaged DVD player.

Madness is definitely doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

So the rest of today’s duties revolve around a little trip to the council recycling centre (aka tip), and my shed where I keep a 48 foot high Yard Arm which – if you stand close enough – the sun is always under, therefore signalling the time for a medicinal and industrial strength G&T.

Today’s lesson: don’t forget to test the test equipment.

Tinkling the ivories

I’ve never thought about driving Final Cut Pro. I remember when I first started, going through the manual, getting all hung up on J-Cuts and doing the hunt-and-peck at the keyboard with a ready reference card at my side, but that was a long time ago. Now, I’m breezing along and the interface never really gets in the way.

But I was cutting the other day with somebody who has recently joined the FCP camp, and he was incredulous.

“You’re using the trackpad?”

“You’re using drag and drop? I thought that was beginner stuff.”

“On my training course, I was told I had to use the keyboard.”

“How come you just dropped it on the window? How come it works?”

“What did you do there?” (when I dropped a filter and a transition back into a bin for future bulk use)

And so on. Yes, unfortunately, I had a Charlie Brooker moment with my audience that day, and continued to edit alone. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no problem with people wanting to learn, only too happy to pass on tricks and stuff, but there was an underlying feeling for a while that this person didn’t agree with my style of driving because it involved a lot of mousing with the track pad and I felt I was having to justify things rather than explain things. And there’s nothing worse than a back seat driver.

But I digress.

I’ve been thinking, as I spend the afternoon rummaging around my rushes picking out choice cutaways and spotting little sequences, that the reason I don’t habitually hit F-9 to insert a clip (for example) is that the button is a little too small and unidentifiable on my MacBook Pro to hit reliably every time with the confidence I need to move on to the next select rather than checking it’s done what I wanted it to do. It just takes an idle swipe of the finger. To be sure, I can hit T-T-T-T to select everything from there on everywere to open up enough working room to add a new sequence, I can hit R-R to roll off a clip earlier, or R and click with the option key to make a straight cut based on audio into a cunning J-cut rather than mess around with all that 3 point stuff I’ve forgotten how to do with a BVE-3000.

But the rest? If I had a big day-glo Chad-Valley Final Cut Pro keyboard, maybe it would be easier to differentiate F9 from F10 (which is kinda important when you’re editing against the clock) and I wouldn’t be quite so happy to ‘fling clips around’.

And is it really saving time? The Germans have a word for it, which I have forgotten, but I remember that it means ‘eye blink time’. The time taken to fling a clip onto the canvas or dump it onto a sequence above the other clips (rather than replug the things correctly at the left hand side and remember to overwrite not insert) may take a little longer than hitting the right button, but if you tot up all those moments and work out that you’ve saved 15 seconds over the course of a day, even a minute… Okay, so if you’re an itinerant editor, even if it means taking your work home and setting up on the kitchen table, does the time saved by deftly using the F9 key rather than dragging from ‘over here’ to ‘over there’ actually add up to the mealy mouthed irritation time on having to lug around yet another bit of kit (your Fisher Price FCP keyboard)? Is it worth a bag of beans?

All good editing systems allow you to wrap your editing environment around you by providing at least a handful of ways of doing the same thing. If you’ll pardon a little metaphorical meandering, some people like Saabs with their dorky controls, others like Mercedes once they’ve worked out where the hand brake is. Use a mouse, a special keyboard, even a special control surface if you like. Your system. Your flow. A friend is seriously working out how an iPhone might assist as an additional FCP control.

All pro edit systems I’ve played with deal with ‘In’, ‘Out’, ‘put it in’ and ‘take it out’ – and if I’m being reductionist I’d hav to say that beyond that, we’re talking tinsel and lipgloss. Whatever works for you… works.

Today’s lesson: real speed in editing is when the interface disappears, not when you learn the keyboard shortcuts.

SDHC Cards – FYI

I am known as an advocate and proponent of shooting to SD cards in the EX1 – I’ve never suffered a problem in all the time I’ve been using them, and I have 16x 16GB cards and 8x MxR adaptors plus my two original Kensington 7:1s. I’ve even managed to capture short bursts of 60fps material on them, but that’s a different story. But…

Today, I want to issue a little missive of warning.

Nothing too dire – it’s got nothing to do with the camera, nor the adaptors. But it is a fairly fundamental issue that’s cost me two cards and some other cash spent on fancy cases.

I found a rather nice box that would store 8x SD cards, and bought several of them. I could have two sets of cards, and once filled, a card would be transferred from one box to the other, or so I thought. Anyway, the SD cards looked very slick and neat in their case and I looked forward to the ‘loading’ ceremony once on the job.

A couple of cards – as luck would have it, the first two I tried – would come up with errors on the camera. They wouldn’t format, they wouldn’t record. They played back fine. Hmmm. Tried changing adaptor, same problem. Cut to the chase: let’s check the write protect tab! SD cards can have a little write protect thingy that protects the card when slid back.

Well, the troublesome cards didn’t have one. Ah. That was the problem.

The snug-fitting SD case and my initial pressure in putting the cards in had snapped or pulled off the write protect sliders on two of the cards. Of course the camera won’t write to them. Nor will they erase them. Nor will the Mac and nor will ShotPut or any other software I could muster. I tried twiddling around with a needle, and that didn’t work.

They’re basically toast. I’ve lost the use of two SD cards. Bother.

Today’s lesson: keep the cards in the adaptors, keep the adaptors in boxes. Yes, they’ll take up room, but they’re safe and sound.

However, the two duff cards have still got stuff on them. So I am going to propose a little test involving a form of controlled torture of SD cards. I’ll try laundering them and see if they’re still readable. After that, I’ll get as creative as I dare before risking the blowing up of my MacBook Pro’s PCIe slot…

Lower Thirds done right

We all need to do tummy tags. Name captions, usually running along the bottom of the screen. It’s part of the plumbing, rather than the showy part of a production. There’s a simple FCP generator if all you want is two lines of left aligned text at the bottom, with perhaps a strap behind it. But what happens when you’re doing a corporate job title? Time to launch Motion or LiveType, and there’s fiddle and faff, and rendering, it’s all a hassle unless you have the time to set up a Motion template and adopt a format for a series.

A lot of us are knocking out stuff for a variety of uses, where all you want is just a neat little name caption – just a little more than the standard generator can provide. Often it ends up as three little chunks of generator, a couple for the text plus another for the background, and it all gets a little messy and needlessly complex as you begin to wonder if you’d be better off in Motion after all…

Well, I’ve simply got to rave about this…

http://alex4d.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/free-final-cut-plugin-lower-third/

Okay, so as well as doing

• three lines of text on a lower third
• justify-right and centre as well as justify left
• control over box behind (so it can bleed off bottom and sit halfway through the top line

It now does the insanely useful:

• graduates off to the left or right for that expensive feathered edge look
• position text anywhere (not just lower third, not just inside text-safe)
• put returns inside the textbox to wrap into multi-line text areas
• provides a 3 layer hierachy of text with as many lines as you’ll need

This one little plug-in covers about 97% of my needs for lower thirds. No rendering required, no trips to Motion, only one channel in your timeline, quick to set up a style and modify it, and it’s free!

Do the write thing

Almost a quarter of a century ago, I got my first chance to bash away at an Amstrad PCW and it was a revelaiton. Having forsaken handwriting for the discipline of the typewriter, and then transcended manual typewriters for daisy-wheel electronic typewriters, the PCW was the final missing link that set words free.

Your document became a flock of thought sheep to round up. Start in the middle, wander towards the end, sort out the beginning, nail the end, rewrite the middle bit again, and make the ending bigger. Then stir the soup at the beginning again.

I wrote copious amounts on the PCW, and then on Word Perfect 5.1 when I was finally blessed with a PC. I even learned enough WP51 to make the display look like LocoScript (the PCW’s built-in word processor). I could sit there for hours until my forearms were on fire and my eye sockets filled with sand, pouring stuff into the world of green words in the void.

And then something happened.

I bought a Mac. I became all WYSIWYG. I collected fonts. I made HyperCard stacks. I’d create buttons that did things. I’d worry about presentation and margins and justification and colour and diffusion dither and 101 things that made a huge difference if you were into bevelled boxes and soft drop shadows.

But it didn’t help my writing. No Sir-ee.

I’d sit down to the Great Unfinished Magnum Opus, and fret about inter paragraph spacing. Or try to format it using my interpretation of an industry standard, or get lost in angst over two column layout or US screenplay. Later on, I’d be trying to yank my manuscript into an outline and try to add meaningful footnotes and comments.

Basically, I got lost in the trees and no longer saw the wood.

And that pattern can repeat in all sorts of ways. How many times are we editing and think ‘just a touch of Magic Bullet Looks, or a SugarFX transition’ rather than sticking to cuts-only editing – with guest appearances from dissolves.

Cut a long story short: if you need to write, are easily distracted, enjoy the first Matrix movie, were born in the 1960s, have a short attention span, do your best writing in email software, or even just want to end up with 1000 words of reasonable quality strung out in a line, check out Scrivener.

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

It’s the Bolex H-16 of word processors. Well, no. Actually it’s not. It’s the Red Scarlet of word processors, because it stops mucking around with picture profiles and deals with RAW, and it presents its self with what appears to be bare bones but which pads out to be high octane stuff. It’s pocket sized and blows the doors off the big shoulder mounted DigiBeta word processors out there.

There’s Final Draft – the standard script formatting software for Hollywood (there are some out there who know what its version of Courier looks like and they’re checking for it). There’s CelTx, which tries so hard to do everything. There’s WriteRoom which tries to do nothing other than replicate your DOS word processor. There’s Omni Outliner which is a superb outliner that can do some spreadsheet tricks. There’s Pages that will do Quark for the Web on a pocket money budget.

But when it comes to putting one word after another, throwing the results around and not being afraid to ‘delete’ stuff, Scrivener’s getting hard to beat for this humble hack.

Writing is like it used to be. It’s fun again.

A Stitch in Timelapse…

Timelapse, the process of apparently speeding up time, is something I seem to do a lot of. It can make the task of filming ‘watching grass grow’ subjects into something quite interesting. The EX1 has been great for this, especially its slow shutter tricks. But timelapse, by its very nature, takes time – and often one will want to be letting something happen in front of the camera whilst you can be covering other things. Getting another EX1 just for that seems a little, well, over the top. Ideally, we’d have another little camera with high quality imagery and long battery life to cover these situations.

I once had such a little camera – a Pentax Optio 720Z – which had a great party trick: it was a compact cam that could do timelapse. Stick it somewhere quiet, set it to take a photo every minute or so, and leave it. A while later, up to 99 high resolution images to import into QuickTime Player (File –> Open Image Sequence), select a good codec, and you have a four second 25fps movie you can import into Final Cut Pro, even pan and zoom around in true Ken Morse style.

Well, it got stolen (from the office, not on a timelapse job!). And there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth as I trawled shops both real and virtual trying to find a good replacement camera with a built in intervalometer (the thing that enables you to do time lapse). Sure you can buy separate boxes, but it all gets complicated and you have to remember to bring it and have enough power in it, and you’ll need the right model for your camera. Plus some way to attach it to your tripod or whatever. The little Pentax was so much simpler.

To cut a long story short, I’ve bought a second-hand Nikon D200 rather than a happy-go-lucky Nikon D40x – Rick will be shaking his head in distain as he’s Canon man. I’ve always liked Nikon, and the D200 came with a useful f2.8 17-55 lens, a separate battery pack and some other bits for about the same price. But imagine my joy of joys when perusing Ken Rockwell’s great site (http://www.KenRockwell.com) – turns out that the D200 has a built-in intervalometer!

Sadly, the interesting Nikon D90, which does 24fps HD albeit with exposure limitations, does NOT have an intervalometer, and neither does the Canon EOS 5D MkII – which would be of great interest to me if it did 25fps HD even though the price tag is somewhat scary. The price of a Canon EOS 5D with a couple of zooms isn’t far off the price of a 35mm adaptor with rails and some secondhand lenses, with the Canon producing a whole new look. I can imagine it being a brilliant talking-head and candid camera. But 30fps to 25fps conversion and audio recording issues are pretty tough to crack outside the indie film world. And lets be frank: the DSLR form factor isn’t really optimised for shooting video.

A stills camera that can shoot HD did seem an odd proposal for me, but I am warming up to the idea. Not as your main camera, not even as B-Roll, but in the same category as lipstick-cams, pole cams and the like: special purpose, ’special sauce’ shots and sequences.

And I’d be sure to bring a decent stills camera to every shoot.