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?

alt.edit.final.final.final

It’s the last 10 yards of an edit. Well actually, today it’s two edits symultaneously.

Unlike, I imagine, big beefy long-form edits, corporate edits spend the first 80% of their edit being chopped together with major things happening, large scale grading and audio finessing, and then spend the next 80% of the time being tweaked to death. A caption update here (oopsie – re-render), a shuffle of sections there (necessitating a complete reshuffle of the music edit), make this slower, make that faster. It’s what we do for a living, and quite frankly it’s the shift from the ‘Director’s cut’ to the ‘Release Print’. Not all Director Cuts are, if the truth be told, ‘better’.

So I’m doing major version controllage on filenames, i.e. I export my FCP movie as ‘Main edit – final’, then there’s a slight change, so it becomes ‘Main edit – final final’ and so on. Yes you do, don’t get all coy, we all do it. So we start being all professional about it and using numbers for version control, and the real ‘greybeards’ start their versions with a leading zero, knowing that all final edits end in double figures.

All this is fine. What gives me the time to vent frustration on this blog whilst YET ANOTHER version of my edit(s) ooze out of FCP is that rendering as you go can lead to problems. Rick – we’ve both been here, and the mystery is in rogue render files shared between sequences within a project.

When making tweaks to a sequence, requiring outputs two, three or four times a day, it feels good to render everything out and allow only the bits you tweak to change. Saves lots of time.

But I’ve found something horrible: what you see in the Canvas window does NOT necessarily equate to what you’ll get in the exported sequence. I had an imported movie from Google Earth Pro, which had a glitch in it, and an overlaid graphic sequence from Motion. Everything played fine within FCP. When I exported it, haunting flashbacks from non-working versions over-wrote what I saw in the Canvas. As soon as a transition started, the background (google earth pro movie) snapped from the latest version to an earlier lame version. So tweak the transition by a frame, force a re-render, but the export was the SAME. Ditto other glitches.

Bottom line: I’ve tried to flush out ALL renders for the whole project in order to get the Export to Quicktime (make self contained) work. Nope. Perhaps I should have checked the ‘re-render’ box instead, but Nope. Glitches still existed from phantom renders – and I think it was to do with other sequences in the same project using the same renders, therefore they DON’T get deleted even if you ask them to.

I finally got what I wanted by exporting to a different codec, making it self contained and re-rendering the whole thing. Took six times longer to do the final export of course, so only do it if you have to, or as your final stage. I wouldn’t want to do that for every output, but if what you see in FCP and what you get in export don’t match, do this.

So that’s my lesson today: all ‘final final final final’ movies should be rendered out from scratch in a lossless codec otherwise the ghost of renders past will be hanging around like a fart in a space suit.

Graphic artists borrow, artists steal

Sorry to inaccurately paraphrase Mr Picasso, but I’m trying to excuse the fact that I’m watching Top Gear. With a notebook. I’m pretending to be a petrol head, but I’m watching the editing like a hawk. Or a hungry chicken. Whatever.

I’m watching it through the BBC iPlayer. I can’t stand broadcast TV any more – I don’t just want to pause live TV, I want to be able to stop it, walk away, mow the lawn, make wife some tea, watch something else, then pick up where I left off. Frame by frame if I feel like it. iPlayer rocks even if it’s a fraction of the technical quality of broadcast TV. Broadcast TV and schedules and adverts and ‘did you see last night’ are so dead… But I digress.

It’s automotive pornography, it’s without any useful educational content, it’s rather divisive (ho ho! In the extreme dear friend), but the pictures are pretty and the editing is exciting. And there’s lots of bits of metal that go ‘brum’ loudly.

I don’t edit long segments about cars, but why am I occasionally pausing the video and going through it frame by frame, working out what’s done in-camera and what’s in post? Why am I making mental notes about ‘the sound of transitions’? I’m analysing the number of frames in sequences and in beard stroking moments, watching how edits contain more and more sub-15-frame content and ‘glitch’ edits. Pixelation is no longer a ‘whoah’ thing, it represents DV drop-out to the audience, a moment when tape and drum did not connect. So camera shake and rolling frame is out. A ‘blik!’ sound effect and a few random pixellated areas and perhaps a flash frame or two.

Our children are watching this too. My four year old son thinks that fire engines go ‘nee nahh nee nahh’, but of course they don’t – they never have in his lifetime. They go – well, you know what they do. It’s like green screen text in The Matrix – does anyone under forty who is NOT a geek know what a command line is? More to the point, what will my 4yo son make of film scratches, film jumping the gate in projectors? He sees glitches and freezes, he hears the ’stut-stut-stut-stut-stuttering’ of internet movies starting up in iPlayer. The buddy-blocks of blown bandwidth.

It doesn’t stop there. He associates the ‘washing machine from hell’ flash-loading icon with a busy day for the internet. Ye gods, forget the Oracle of Delphi and the ides of March, we have the spinning beachball of death and the washing machine from hell to tell us it’s a bad IP day for mortals.

Top Gear has been educating an audience with a visual style that’s abrasive (like rinsing your eyes in mouthwash), fresh, dynamic (and very IP unfriendly) – and I’m finding my edit style adapting to match. It’s all very ‘now’, very ‘cold shower’, very ‘mouthwash’ and ‘9 volt battery on your tongue’.

So when I had the chance to show my 70+ aunt my current show reel (it was that kind of afternoon), she got it totally.

Which leads me to a giddy pontification: when octogenarians are totally into blipvert editing, where do we go next?

Death of a hard disk

I had a hard disk failure the other day. MacBook Pro. Happened without warning when on the phone to client. No warning. Just like a stroke. Sudden, devastating, terminal.

The next day, I’m due to fly out for an EX1 shoot, requiring the transfer of its SxS cards into a compatible device – the MacBook Pro being perfect for this. I do have a backup Mac – a MacBook, but it has no PCI Express slot. And as backup machines go, it can’t really do Colorista, Motion, DVmatte Pro (all require GPU). And so although I have software backups, the hardware isn’t really a backup. So within three hours of the Spinning Beachball of Death, I owned a brand new MacBook Pro 17″.

Lesson 1:
If your income is dependent on a certain type of computer rather than a computer per se, have two of them. Not a posh one and a skivvy one. My backup was a helper, an ‘it’ll do, it can help out’. But if I need to load up a project full of colour correction, esoteric codecs, and (since my main machine is dead and gone) my current copy of Final Cut Pro, a skivvy computer will say ‘no’.

I call AppleCare – I purchased the full-on AppleCare package for my Mac. Sure, they will take it away, replace the hard disk and send it back – without transferring data, so it will be basically factory fresh. This may take up to three weeks. Three WEEKS? Three days would be a disaster. Apple’s response will be ‘just use your backup’. I pay for rescue: if my car breaks down, I call a number, and somebody arrives within an hour or two and gets me going. I thought I paid for this service for my Mac, but no. AppleCare is not the AA. I wanted to turn up at a shop, for some kind person to rip out the old drive, put a new one in, and hand my Mac back with a hard disk I could have in a USB enclosure if it should ever work again. What I got was 30 minutes of phone support reiterating everything I’d spent two hours doing, and a courier firm who always phones when I’m out and doesn’t want to call mobile numbers.

I’ll have the old MacBook Pro repaired, and it will be backup hardware for when my main machine calls in sick.

So, I now have a brand new MacBook with a nearly empty hard disk. I also had loads of backups spread across 30+ hard drives – but I didn’t know which one because in order to use the disk cataloging software, I’d have to install it in the new machine. So I did, and I found a recent one. Great. I attached the hard disk and used Migration Assistant. Oh.

When you set up a brand new Mac, you’re asked to set up a user account, which I duly did. This is me, this is my password. Okay, so it was the same as the previous one, otherwise the new software would be frumpy being on a new Mac and all… But I can’t restore my old self, as I can’t restore my old ‘Me’ over my new ‘Me’. I don’t want to make a new me (Me1 rather than Me) as it sounds so lame to be a secondary also ran on one’s own computer.

So that leads me to Lesson 2:

When in possession of a new Mac, make TWO accounts. The first one is a disposable admin account. Nothing to see, nothing to do. Most importantly: It is NOT personal. Just make it as plain as you can. From that, THEN restore your personal account – your avatar of Macness – into the virgin machine. The funny thing is that this is Computer Administration 101 stuff. Of course that’s how corporate machines are set up. I should know that – I used to do it myself. But somehow, when you’re a one-man-band, the lessons of Big Corporate IT don’t seem to apply. But they do if you don’t want to… Spend the next X hours reducing your brand new Mac with patiently set up software back to its virgin state so you can try again…

Right, so the new Mac is virgin again and as it boots, it swirls the Apple Welcome message. I set up an Admin account. I can now migrate my old entity to the new machine.

This can be done from a Time Machine drive, or from all sorts of third party solutions like SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper), but then there’s version control. If your backups are spread across many drives to ensure no single point of failure, which one do you use? Well, from personal experience, not the one with the most recent modification date.

I restored from a backup that appeared to be from a week ago, but actually was six weeks earlier than that. Okay, no problem, I thought. I can restore other stuff to make up for the time difference. Email, documents, etc – they’re all done separately, so no problem there.

But here’s the crunch: I’d inadvertently restored from a backup BEFORE a major system change. Thusly, I had re-inherited all the little issues my updates had cured. Due to the time pressure of getting things done now, getting up and running as soon as possible, I had got from hard disk failure and attempts to rescue, to fully operational machine fresh out of shrink wrap in a day. No data loss, no info loss, but…

That leads me to Lesson 3:

Look after your tools like you look after your data. We all back up our work. It’s critical. Redundant backups everywhere. We lose no data. Tools? Heck, I’ve got the DVD install disks. I’ve got the URLs and the serial numbers. My hard disk’s tool kit is backed up every so often – bleah. Whatever. A fresh install cures all.

Fresh installs take time – lots and lots of time. And pain. And frustration. It’s a chance to make the previous installation BETTER by applying learned lessons.

So I restored my data from fresh backups and it’s all good. I restored my tools from a six week old backup, and it’s pants. I inherit a whole lot of dross that I solved ages ago. Back up your tools like you back up your data.

Lesson 4:

I love SuperDuper so much, it’s got me out of nasty situations and helped me no end. I don’t trust Time Machine as I need to know that there’s no silly gotchas in the restore process. But here’s the kicker, folks: If I had Time Machine running on a cheap USB drive when I was working at home (SuperDuper does the abroad stuff), I’d have saved the four hours it’s going to take me to reinstall FCS, Leopard and the rest to make my tools work as they should ‘out of the box’.

Summary:

• If you earn money from your Mac, own two of the same (or thereabouts)
• Always have two accounts on your Mac: You and Admin
• Don’t get obsessive about backups – get regular about everything
• Time Machine is better than it looks

 

But on the other hand, my new machine was budgeted for, has twice the RAM, twice the Hard Disk, twice the GPU. Sorry I didn’t get a maxed out iMac or a base line Octo-Core Mac Pro – but that’s how the Education By Fate works: great lessons, tuition bills are kinda high.

The Old Army Colonel And His Son On Holiday

Another edit is in the can. In approximately 9 hours, I’m off to do a Z1 shoot and really wishing it could have been an EX1 job. Okay, so I could shoot HDV – but the shots would stand out like trout in a fishbowl.

Whatever. No. Tonight, whilst I compress FLVs and upload them, I’ve been going through Ripple Training’s Deep Dive course – all about Motion’s 3D. Lots of Alphabet street and ‘which way is up’ moments. Ages ago, I did a fair bit of early After Effects and even Specular’s Infini-D, but often got lost. I had to get some ‘Doe, a deer’ rules.

So I thought I’d share these silly mnemonics for those who only sporadically dip their toe into the 3D universe:

“X is a cross” (as in across, left and right, geddit?), so therefore Y is uppY downY. And “Z is like Zoom” in and out. Not strictly accurate, but when it’s late and you’re reaching for the right (wrong) slider…

And for Motion,

“Red-X” or “Red Cross”, “Green trees grow up”, “Blue oceans into distance”.

Of course this is all second nature to Motion Graphics designers, and sure – I can reel off pixel aspect ratios and Composite modes in a flash, but if you’re not doing it every day or even every month, we all have those ‘The Old Army Colonel And His Son On Holiday” moments.

If you still remember your Cosines from your Tangents, that is.

Food for thought

It may be a little post-modern to blog about a blog, but you may be interested in Alex Gollner’s recent post over at Editing Organised.

He’s teased apart a little innocuous patent approval from Apple, and from there comes a dizzying view of a potential future of media funding opportunities.

To be honest, my first reaction to the announcement was ‘oh great, Apple are trying to patent something that already exists’ and thought little of it, other than perhaps buying shares in IP law firms. Then when I read Alex’s post, I noticed the ‘Access denied’ route. If you don’t want to watch the ad, you can’t watch the video. You pay for the video by watching the ad. Hence it’s just another form of DRM.

And that’s where it gets interesting. You can pay to not watch ads in your media. Hmmm. That could get very expensive very quickly. As in making the UK BBC License Fee seem quite reasonable. Tot up the BBC, a standard satellite or cable subscription, add your mobile, roaming charges, internet dues, a few online subscriptions, maybe even the occasional tip jar payment, and this is before one starts paying $2 per episode of whatever. I’d like a bit of free, quite frankly.

But that little rant misses the interesting tie-ins between companies with cash and content creators that are possible in this system.

It’s an interesting read.

Spoiled

Last Saturday, shot a very interesting event for a colleague. Lots of action, lots of fun, beautiful day for it. Only caveat – he needed it to be a Z1 shoot. HDV. 1080i50.

Not a problem. So I arrived and shot as usual using a mutually agreed Picture Profile (Black Stretch On, Sharpening at 9, No Cinegamma or other diversions). Audio consisted of camera mounted short shot-gun on channel 1, AKG reporter mic with Sennheiser wireless dongle on channel 2 – I should point out it was a very windy day with vox pops shot outdoors. The AKG 230 is an amazing tool. You can bash nails in with it, play rounders with it and even record very nice sound with it in noisy windy environments. I was recording interviews in a Sea Breeze next to fire engines and diesel generators, and getting really nice sound considering the impossible surroundings.

And herein lies the rub: it sounded great. The Z1’s unburstable audio circuitry coped with everything from quiet teenager interviews with event PA echoing in the background, to enthusiastic organiser almost shouting down the mic in a stiff wind. All shot on HDV, and it’s… well, it’s all very okay.

Shots of a lifetime: BCU of police helicopters, RNLI rescue boats, and it’s all nice. Well exposed, in focus. But I’m seeing HDV compression in areas of blue sky around my helicopter. I’m seeing sharp shots of Lifeboat go fuzzy when I deinterlace. I’m seeing the limits of exposure range in shadow and highlight detail as an interview is conducted with sun going in and out behind clouds. And through all of this, watching it ingest, I’m thinking ‘if only I’d shot all this on my EX1′. The truth is this: the footage is fine. I’ve turned into something I used to hate: an anti-HDV bigot. And that on top of being a Progressive Zealot. There is no hope…

Zmatte is dead, long live DVmatte Pro!

For those with long memories of the UK FCP User Group, you may recall my rants about chromakey and DV. How in theory it should not be done, but in reality it can be done with external plug-ins.

Two offerings lead the field in terms of quality and affordability.

I chose Zmatte over DVmatte Pro a long time ago because, while DVmatte Pro was actually better in the long run, it was too slow and fiddly for the extra 20% of quality you got, and I quickly found out that clients didn’t notice.

So I championed Zmatte. Four clicks and you’d be pretty much there.

Then in September 2007, as a member of the Pixel Corps, I tried version 3 of DVmatte Pro.

The interface has been slimmed and yet it’s more powerful.

The speed is astonishing – due to the fact that rather than burdening your Mac’s main processor with arty stuff, it uses your Graphics Processor to do the work, which is exactly what it was designed for. ‘Hardware Accelerated’ is always an exciting term for graphics geeks.

It does the usual magic of using the ’shredded’ colour information in DV and HDV and supplementing that with extra detail information gleaned from the brightness (luminance) part of the image.

It now does all the graceful things we like in good chromakeys such as edge wrapping. Still not as gracefully as Zmatte, but the quality is superb and the speed…

… DVmatte Pro is bloody quick. You can actually watch a live preview. You can actually watch a live preview of HDV material being keyed on a MacBook Pro. An 8 minute edit of talking heads against green renders ‘better than hardware’ in about 40 minutes on such a machine – from 1080p EX1 footage. That’s fast.
You will need to watch the on-line tutorials as there are some things to understand, but if you’re needing to do chromakey with FCP from DV, HDV or XDCAM-HD, you really should check out DVmatte Pro.

Online: http://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=dvmattep3

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