Category: Video Technology

Cameras, recorders and other video devices

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Business & Marketing Video Technology

Why would we want one type of NLE design?

Here’s a question.  If you enter a new business into a crowded market, would you design it to be as similar to the existing competition, or would you design something different that differentiates itself in the marketplace?

Growing up in Australia in the 1960’s thru to 90’s on Saturday afternoon the average Sydneysider – the biggest city in Australia – could choose from five networks: 3 commercial (7, 9 and 10) and two Government – ABC (think PBS but Govt funded) and SBS (for multicultural entertainment). Typically two of the commercial networks and both ABC and SBS would have some sort of sport. (Soccer on SBS was very “multicultural” at the time!)

The ratings winner was the 10 network because they programmed something that wasn’t sport! Although sports were, and are, very popular, the aggregate non-sport market was bigger!

Although Media Composer wasn’t the first non-linear editing software, it was the first to capture the popular imagination of the industry. It’s interface was very comfortable for editors familiar with both Moviola and tape-based offline editing. That was probably exactly the right thing to do at the time.

At the time.

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Item of Interest The Technology of Production Video Technology

Doesn’t anyone shoot video on video cameras any more?

The project is not mine, but that of a client where I was called in to see if the “crew” (mostly just one guy) was going to be able to shoot content that will integrate with the existing project.

The thing is that  the rest of the project is HDV, XDCAM, DVCPRO HD, AVC-I, AVCCAM, some SD – so today we add DSLR!

This is not an art project so there’s no big advantage of a “shallow depth of field”. Most of the b-roll is coming from achieve SD video of varying quality, but because it was shot over a long period, without anyone keeping track of formats we end up with this sort of mess. A young and reasonably competent “editor” was on the job but totally unaware of the complications of having every known frame rate and format in the project (except DSLR until today).

Every different format complicates the project and adds additional processing time to bring everything to a common format before starting the edit, including mixing 23.98 and 29.97 frame rates.

And while Premiere Pro and Media Composer (and probably Final Cut Pro X) can deal with all these formats natively, I hope no-one would recommend that as a workflow for a large documentary project. Certainly AMA for Media Composer is a great way to choose selects from the native format and then transcode to DNxHD for the edit.

This is simply madness. Every one of us needs to educate producers and directors that mixing frame rates and formats is going to cost them a lot of money in post production. And then make sure the message communicates by charging what it costs.

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Assisted Editing Item of Interest Metadata The Business of Production Video Technology

Join MediaSilo, Oasis (and me) for Free Metadata Event in LA

RT @zbutcher: Join MediaSilo & Oasis for FREE event in LA http://eepurl.com/cdZ4T

Metadata is crucial in today’s ever-changing, competitive post production environment. New, exciting tools continue to emerge. Trying to sort through it all? Join us for a special event in LA onJanuary 27 @ 6:30.

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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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Item of Interest Video Technology

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 9

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 9: The “un-eye-witness” IBC report! http://bit.ly/9B0nfs

With crazy guy Howard Brock! Avid’s DS software release and what it means for the Avid product line; KiPro mini; which leads to a side trip talking about the restored Cinerama Windjammer playing off the KiPro at the Cinerama Dome; Blackmagic Design’s IBC announcements: Resolve shipping; control on iPad, bigger and smaller VideoHubs.  Discussion reaches to the Kona 3G and market forces. Howard points out some of the anomalies of charging over time. More on the Blackmagic Design’s IBC announcements. 3D at IBC and why we don’t like it. Trimming R3D files and the problems of naming. Avid sponsors the IBC Supermeet. Cinedeck version 2.

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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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HTML5 Item of Interest Video Technology

Ogg: The “Intelligent Design” of digital media

Ogg: The “Intelligent Design” of digital media http://bit.ly/bUYo7B

The only thing Ogg is good for, is being open source, which isn’t relevant to professional media producers.

People who actually work in media don’t mind paying for stuff, and don’t mind not owning/sharing the IP. Video production professionals are so accustomed to standardizing on commercial products, many of them become generic nouns in industry jargon: “chyron” for character generators, “grass valley” for switchers, “teleprompters”, “betacam” tape, etc. Non-free is not a problem here. And if your argument for open-source is “you’re free to fix it if it doesn’t do what you want it to,” the person who has 48 shows a day to produce is going to rightly ask “why would I use something that doesn’t work right on day one?”

The open source community doesn’t get media. Moreover, it doesn’t get that it doesn’t get media. The Ogg codecs placate the true believers, and that’s the extent of their value.

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Apple Pro Apps Video Technology

Introducing AV Foundation and the future of QuickTime [Updated]

Introduction to AV Foundation http://slidesha.re/aYEJfR To be honest I don’t know why this isn’t hidden behind an NDA, but it’s not and until someone has it taken down, and asks me to do the same, I’ll consider it public knowledge.

Now, AV Foundation is the iOS media system, so we’re not talking about QuickTime per se but I have to wonder.

QuickTime – the real OS-centric media framework, not the little sub applications that function as players – is transitioning from C APIs (Carbon) to Cocoa via QTKit. Trouble is, QTKit got a lot of work around QuickTime 7’s release, but not so much in recent years. And yet Final Cut Pro needs a lot of what’s not written, before it can release a Cocoa version of Final Cut Pro.

Actually, Apple could do what Adobe have done for Premiere Pro CS5. In rewriting their core media handling engine, Adobe retained QuickTime support by spinning it off into a 32 bit thread, but that’s a complex workaround that does nothing for performance, nothing positive anyway.

When you consider slide 9… Even though it was only introduced in iOS 2.2, extended in iOS 3 and “completed” in iOS 4 (consider the reference framework growth in slides 6, 7 and 8), AV Foundation has 56 Classes and 460 Methods (the more you have of these, the more you can do with it). QTKit has 24 Classes (less than half) and 360 Methods. Compare that with the (very mature) QuickTime for Java with 576 Classes and more than 10,000 Methods. Something tells me that QTKit is not in favor at Apple.

Not that I think QuickTime is going away, at least not as a brand for their media players and the overall technology. I say that because, although the code that’s in iPhone OS shows a simplified player, that was all that was originally released and it shared no “QT Classes or Frameworks”. So, the QuickTime brand is likely to be retained.

If I was extrapolating from this presentation, and I am extrapolating wildly from a small amount of data, I’d guess that the direction within Apple was toward the more modern Classes and Methods of AV Foundation, and that, eventually, AV Foundation, Core Audio, Core Animation and Core Media will replace what we currently have under QuickTime on OS X: Core Audio, Core Video (well, just a subclass of Core Image) and a lot of deprecated (do not use) C APIs.

If you consider slide 14, and the similarity of Classes between QTKit and AV Foundation it makes no sense to build two technologies in the company that were essentially doing the same thing.  Slide 29 shows how similar an AVAsset is to a QTMovie. The other Classes all seem to duplicate functionality that’s in QuickTime now, but in efficient, new, modern code. Capture, editing, playback, media formats… they all seem to be in AV Foundation duplicating work done (or not yet done) in QuickTime’s QTKit.

Importantly Core Media Time is in “n’ths of a second” not “ticks” or “events”. Media based on time will be better for video frame rate uses than one based on ticks or events, which caused the “Long Frames” problems of earlier versions of Final Cut Pro.

In support of my hypothesis I offer slide 42: specific references to AVAssetExportSession.h being available in OS X with 10.7 and likewise CMTime.h has a reference to becoming available in 10.7.

So, I’ll go on a limb and suggest that QuickTime as we’ve known it is somewhat dead; long live a new QuickTime. QuickTime will continue being the branding, but everything “below that” will transition to new architectures essentially ported from iOS to OS X.

This would be a very good thing. A completely new, modern, efficient (you see what it does on the iPhone) underpinning for QuickTime down below that QTKit layer.

Who wouldn’t want to use that in an modern NLE, even if it means waiting for OS X 10.7, which hasn’t been announced yet? It would make it much easier for the Final Cut Pro team to create a much more powerful media engine than it has now; one that really understands time and not events and one that mimics the power of Adobe’s Mercury Engine. Let’s face it, media performance on a 1 GHz A4 chip is in some ways better than the performance on 8 core processors. iMovie for iOS, built on these frameworks (if slide 24 is to be believed) can edit Long GOP H.264, which Final Cut Pro can’t! (And in both cases the H.264 playback is accelerated by hardware: dedicated chips in the iPhone, on the graphics card in OS X.)

As always, conjecture on my part, and this time based solely on what I’ve learnt from the quoted slide show. Chris Adamson does not work for Apple but he does claim expertise in iOS and QuickTime. Other posts on his blog indicate some differences between AV Foundation and QuickTime; and Classes still missing from AV Foundation that are in the current version of QuickTime. That shakes my confidence in the hypothesis a little, but given how little work has been done on QTKit in the last two years, and the need to have the foundations for QuickTime modernized, it still seems like the most likely path Apple will take.

Another data point is that the QuickTime X player was promoted thusly:

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone™, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*

Pioneering the technology under iOS, and then porting it to Mac OS X has happened already.

UPDATE: Chris Adamson, who did the presentation I referred to, clarified many of the points I get wrong or wrongish, including the fact that AV Foundation is not under NDA. His Connecting the Dots post is essential reading if you’ve got this far!

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Item of Interest Video Technology

Japan develops ‘touchable’ 3D TV Images

Japan develops ‘touchable’ 3D TV images http://bit.ly/cCu9kB

Touchable in the sense that the images react to being touched, poked, distorted etc, by using cameras to determine where hands are. They are not claiming (as far as I can see) that the viewer can “feel the image”

 

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Interesting Technology Item of Interest Metadata Studio 2.0 The Technology of Production Video Technology

‘Interoperable Master Format’ for file-based workflow

‘Interoperable Master Format’ Aims to Take Industry Into a File-based World http://bit.ly/bvF6Vk

A group working under the guidance of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC is trying to create specifications for an interoperable set of master files and associated metadata. This will help interchange and automate downstream distribution based on metadata carried in the file. The first draft of the specification is now done based on (no surprises) the MXF wrapper. (Not good for FCP fans, as Apple has no native support for MXF, without third party help).

Main new items: dynamic metadata for hinting pan-scan downstream and “Output Profile List”:

“The IMF is the source if you will, and the OPL would be an XML script that would tell a transcoder or any other downstream device how to set up for what an output is on the other side,” Lukk explained.

The intention is to bring this draft spec to SMPTE, but first, ETC@ USC is urging the industry to get involved. “We need industry feedback and input on the work that the group has done thus far,” said ETC CEO and executive director David Wertheimer. “Anyone who has interest in this topic should download the draft specification and provide feedback to the group.”