Category: Assisted Editing

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Apple Pro Apps Assisted Editing Item of Interest Metadata Video Technology

Apple Keynote – Back to the Mac: Implications for Final Cut Pro

There were a lot of features I saw in OS X Lion and particularly in iMovie 11, that I would love to see inside Final Cut Pro. Things like QuickView I already mentioned in my “What should Apple do with Final Cut Pro” article from September.

But today I saw some things I really want in the next version of Final Cut Pro. Like scalable waveforms that change color according to their level! Scalable waveforms (as Media Composer already has and I think PPro CS5) has been a feature request for Final Cut Pro as far back as I can remember. And now the technology is there in the Apple technology basket. We’ll take that, thanks.

Trailers – semi-automatic completion of a trailer – and Themes, fit comfortably with my concept of Templatorization: the use of templates to speed up production. I first mentioned the concept in a blog post of April 2005 titled “Can a computer replace an editor?“. It’s still a good read and remember, that was long before we started actually building that future with our First Cuts/Finisher products. Templatorization is already in the Final Cut Studio with Master Templates from Motion used and adapted (with custom images and text) inside Final Cut Pro.

The concept here is similar. We’ll see more Templatorization over time, even if they are custom templates for a project, like custom Master Templates.

Plus, as my friend Rob Birnholz tweeted during the presentation when some were complaining that Templatorization would drive hourly rates down even further:

I can now sell CUSTOM Professional video design! (vs. template based ‘insta-video’)

But the one piece of technology I most want to see in the next version of Final Cut Pro is People Finder because it automates the generation of so much metadata, that combined with Source metadata is going to really open up Assisted Editing to take away a lot of the dull work of finding footage and a story. (And Shane you can hate me now, but more efficient production is always going to be the driver, but we can automate the drudgery, not the creativity.)

By analyzing your video for faces, People Finder identifies the parts with people in them and tells you how many are in each scene. It also finds the close-ups, medium shots, or wide angles so it’s easy to grab video clips as you need them.

We get shot type metadata – CU, M, Wide and we get identification of the number of people in the shot. That’s powerful metadata. I suspect we won’t get it in the next version of Final Cut Pro because they’ve got enough to do and can’t do everything at once, but I’d love to see this level of automated metadata generation. Remember too, that as well as the facial recognition technology already shipping in iPhoto and now iMovie, it was announced back in September that they had purchased another facial recognition company to improve the accuracy.

The holy grail, from my perspective, of facial recognition would be if the software (Final Cut Pro please) recognized all faces in the footage, and grouped the same face together (like Faces in iPhoto). You’d still have to identify the person once, but from there on basic Lower Thirds (person and location) could be automatically generated (location eventually coming from GPS in the camera – we’re not there yet).

It’s a pity Apple don’t have or license speech recognition technology. Licensing Nexidia’s speech search would be ok (it’s what powers Get and ScriptSync) but it doesn’t derive metadata like speech analysis does. Once you have speech as metadata is makes things like prEdit possible; and ultimately the automatic derivation of keywords.

And it seems like my five year old ruminations might have been on to something.

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest

Sync-N-Link 1.6 Faster syncing

Sync-N-Link 1.6 Faster syncing – 245 clips processed in 2.7 seconds compared to 43.2 seconds in version 1.5 http://tinyurl.com/3y3d984

No new features! – just significantly faster syncing thanks to a complete rewrite of the code.

Free update to all – Check for Updates in Sync-N-Link’s application menu.

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest

Designing an icon for a new Utility for Final Cut Pro

Designing an icon for a new Utility App for #fcp users. @comebackshane is going to like it. #assistedediting

Once again our genius programmer Greg Clarke has created a great utility that incorporates some ideas we created for a custom software project and some that have been requested by Shane Ross.

But when the software is done, there’s the icon, website copy, help guide… There’s a lot to do that’s nothing directly to do with the software.

We’re going to release another little utility we created months ago but never got around to putting up for sale. These will be our sixth and seventh utility – Sequence Clip Reporter, Transcriptize, Matchback Magic, miniME and Sync-N-Link being the others.

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest

YouTube video – Cutting Transcripts to Subclips

I uploaded a YouTube video — Cutting Transcripts to Sublips UL.mov http://youtu.be/Gldh1uCTsVI?a

This video also shows how easy it is to enter log notes (aka metadata) – so easy you might even enter them!

The video is too wide for the blog layout so watch it at YouTube.

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Assisted Editing

Breaking up clips to subclips using prEdit

Breaking up clups to subclips and adding log notes in prEdit for the first time on a real job. http://bit.ly/9nQv07

This week I started (belatedly after feeling off-color late last week) breaking up my interviews into subclips and adding log notes. One thing about working with a piece of software in production compared with in development, is that you usually find bugs or irritations that didn’t come up in development. Such it has been with prEdit. I’ve found, and Greg has fixed a number of bugs. He’s also made some changes to make the auto-complete items a little more logical. Of course, I have “privileged access” to the developer, but I think we’re as responsive to any of our customers who find issues.

prEdit, in case you don’t know, is designed to speed up the process of paper cuts in documentaries. We use the Adobe suite to get time-stamped text (more in a moment) locked to the media file. Adobe places that metadata in the file using their XMP metadata structures and we read the transcript directly from that file.

We found the Premiere Pro/Soundbooth speech analysis to be very variable – more so than Adobe would expect so we’re providing them some examples. What has worked exceptionally well is a “Transcription > Adobe Story > OnLocation > PPro for analysis. This keeps most punctuation (paragraph returns are ignored) and names and provides a great result. A half hour interview takes about 5 minutes to tag in Adobe Story, and less than a minute in OnLocation to associate the script and the media file to embed it.

Once we determined that was the most optimized workflow retained speaker names, I asked Greg for prEdit to automatically subclip those speaker paragraphs, since it seems obvious that we’d eliminate the Interviewer sections and having a long interview already subclipped makes life easier and results faster. That led to a feature request (now in prEdit) to be able to add metadata (log notes) to multiple subclips together.

Having used it on a real job for a full day, I have to say, it is everything I hoped and more. It’s so easy to enter log notes: probably 5x or more faster than entering them in Final Cut Pro.

I’m working on creating subclips: the real action happens when I get to building the story, but even making subclips based on text (and optional video playback in prEdit) from the blocks of text is so much easier than any other method I’ve used.

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Assisted Editing Interesting Technology Metadata Video Technology

prEdit reaches 1.1 after first month

I probably have mentioned that we’re working on a documentary about Bob Muravez/Floyd Lippencotte Jnr in part because we wanted demo footage we “owned” (so we could make tutorials available down the line) but also because I wanted to try it in action on a practical job.

I start work in prEdit shortly – nearly started today, so it looks like Friday now – but already we discovered some ideas that have now been implemented in the 1.1. release.

Along the way I’ve learnt a lot about how well (or not) Adobe’s Speech Analysis works. (Short answer: it can be very, very good, or it can be pretty disappointing.) As prEdit is really designed to be used with transcriptions I also tested the Adobe Story > OnLocation > Premiere method, which always worked.

Well, from that workflow it became obvious that speakers (Interviewer, Subject) were correctly identified so wouldn’t it be nice if prEdit automatically subclipped on speaker changes. And now it does.

If multiple speakers have been identified in a text transcript, prEdit will create a new subclip on import at each change of speaker

It also became obvious as I was planning my workflow that we needed a way to add new material to an existing prEdit project, and to be able to access the work from historic projects to add to a new one.

New Copy Clips… button so you can copy clips from one prEdit project to another open project

Now that I’m dealing with longer interviews than when we tested, I needed search in the Transcript view.

Search popup menu added to Transcript View.

That led to one problem: adding metadata to multiple subclips at a time. Previously I’d advocated adding common metadata to the clip before subclipping in prEdit (by simply adding returns to the transcript) but if it comes in already split into speakers, that wasn’t going to work!

Logging Information and Comments can be added for multiple selected subclips if the field doesn’t already have an entry for any of the selected subclips

Because you never, ever want to run the risk of over-writing work ready done.

And some nice enhancements:

Faster creation of thumbnails

Bugfix for Good checkbox in Story View

prEdit 1.1 is now available. Check for updates from within the App itself. And if you work in documentary, you should have checked it out already.

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest Presentations

DV Magazine: Hodgetts Leads Web Video Tech Sessions

From DVMagazine via Twitter: Hodgetts Leads Web Video Tech Sessions at Digital Video Expo http://ow.ly/18NUMZ

I’ve got a reasonably full DV Expo Schedule this year with three sessions on compression and web video on Thursday September 30th: Video Compression Options, Web & Mobile Video: Web Video Production Workshop, and Web & Mobile Video: Web Video Production Workshop | Part 2. That’s in the paid conference track, which has 11 days left for discounted registration.  Fun fact: in the audience will be a friend from my high school days I haven’t seen in more than 35 years.

The day before, Wednesday 29th, I’ll be on the main stage off the Exhibition floor with a free presentation “The New Now: Surviving the Changing Biz of Production The New Now — Surviving the Changing Business of Production”.

All the details are at DV.com

Plus, that Wednesday night’s LAFCPUG meeting will include the first public demonstration of our newest piece of software prEdit. I’ll be writing more about prEdit coming up as tomorrow will be the first day I use it on a real project: a documentary we’re producing to find out how better to improve prEdit, but also to have demonstration media we own the rights to.

By the way, you can check my schedule for upcoming events on the Upcoming Presentations link at the top right of the blog. Next presentation will be at OCMA, Orange County on September 21: Part 2 of the New Now presentation. Marketing, sales, working more efficiently and owning an income.

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Assisted Editing Interesting Technology Item of Interest Metadata Video Technology

Powerful new transcript workflow tool

Powerful new transcript workflow tool – paper cuts without the pain – from Intelligent Assistance (my day job). http://bit.ly/9nQv07

We just launched prEdit, our pre-editing tool for developing paper cuts (a.k.a. radio cut) from transcripts. prEdit:

  • Lets producers or editors cut transcripts into selects in seconds
  • Adds and updates log notes with auto-complete logging fields
  • Previews the video for any clip, subclip, paper cut or section of paper cut
  • Exports to Excel spreadsheets and Final Cut Pro, or Premiere Pro Sequences

“prEdit marks a new generation of postproduction tools,”  say I. “Video editing by text is a whole new way of working that will take weeks out of developing a paper cut.”

prEdit is available now from AssistedEditing.com and carries an MSRP of $395, discounted for an introductory special to $295 until August 31st. The prEdit workflow is described at http://assistedediting.com/prEdit/workflow.html and a video overview is available at http://assistedediting.com/prEdit. The first 80 seconds provide an overview.

The video is now available at YouTube  http://youtu.be/3fV388QsVVA?a

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest

Letting the Machines Decide

Letting the Machines Decide http://bit.ly/aQwrUW (If you get stymied by the WSJ pay wall, simply go to news.google.com and enter “Letting the Machines Decide” and follow the link to the WSJ around the paywall.)

I know, not my usual stuff, but I have an abiding interest in all forms of artificial intelligence because, ultimately, I believe we’ll be able to apply a lot of the techniques and technologies developed for AI to automating Postproduction. Heresy, I know, but bear with me.

Anything that can be analyzed and systematized can be automated. When we were developing First Cuts – our tool for taking long-form documentary log notes and converting them to very fast First Cuts – the most challenging part of the exercise wasn’t teaching the computer to do something, it was analyzing what I did as an editor to make a “good” edit. Just imaging how complex are the rules for placing b-roll!

So, with that background and a belief that a lot of editing is not overtly creative (not you of course dear reader, your work is supremely creative, but those other folk, not so much!). It can be somewhat repetitive with a lot of similarities.

Just like the complexities of stock trading: knowing when to buy, when to hold and when to sell.

The programs are effective, advocates say, because they can crunch huge amounts of data in short periods, “learn” what works, and adjust their strategies on the fly. In contrast, the typical quantitative approach may employ a single strategy or even a combination of strategies at once, but may not move between them or modify them based on what the program determines works best.

What I think is really interesting is that the software tools started to act contrary to what an experienced trader would do, but:

In early 2009, Star started to buy beaten-down stocks such as banks and insurers, which would benefit from a recovery. “He just loaded up on value stocks,” said Mr. Fleiss, referring to the AI program. The fund gained 41% in 2009, more than doubling the Dow’s 19% gain.

The firm’s current portfolio is largely defensive. One of its biggest positions is in gold stocks, according to people familiar with the fund.

The defensive move at first worried Mr. Fleiss, who had grown bullish. But it has proven a smart move so far. “I’ve learned not to question the AI,” he said.

And that’s what we discovered. One night – after a couple of glasses of red wine – we decided to throw a “stupid” combination of story keywords at First Cuts to see what it would do. Well, would you believe in the six minute edit that eventuated, I only wanted to move one clip, and its associated b-roll, one shot early (swapping it) and as far as I was concerned the edit was done.

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest Metadata The Technology of Production

I’ve just uploaded some computer edited videos to YouTube

As well as showing the software in action, this series of videos show the results from the software. Each “edit” is based on a set of story keywords (logged with the clips) and a duration. Lower Thirds are automatic; story arc is automatic; b-roll is automatic; audio from b-roll is faded in and out and dropped in volume. All automatically and in seconds.

The project is about a young triple threat – singer, dancer, actor – Tim Draxl, discovered in Sydney when he was just short of his 18th birthday.

He played Rolf in a professional touring production in Australia in 2000 and his career has blossomed from there, and the three CD deal he has with Sony Universal: the first when he was 18!

Remember, these edits were done in seconds, from selects using Assisted Editing’s First Cuts software. And yes, this is my baby (along with Dr Greg Clarke).

The Sound of Music Edit

Without limits – about 13 minutes of material.

Four minute limit set. Edit is tighter and only the best material makes it to the edit.

 

Growing Up

Tim grew up partly in Australia and partly in Austria as his father worked as a ski instructor. This is the unlimited version of the “Growing Up” edit.

[Update: I forgot the 10 minute limit so one of the movies was too long and YouTube can’t distinguish between a 6 minute cut and a 4 minute cut, thinking they’re the same. Fortunately the videos are also available on our site. The Growing up unlimited  and six minute versions are available at http://assistedediting.com/FirstCuts/results.html]

And finally with a 4 minute limit.