The present and future of post production business and technology

Logging

More logging is good up to a point. I learned that you don’t overload story keywords as the same clips keep coming up in many edits, often not so successfully. So my advice now would be to keep the story keywords for each clip to the minimum that really describe the clip’s value to the story.  Initially I tended to load on any possible story keyword I could think of but as we got First Cuts closer to finished, and with the ability to selectively add as many story keywords as you want, I can really make the decisions of what I want to include on a much more fine-grained basis that way.

That multiple select also means I don’t have to be overly anal about always using the same keyword. It’s obvious when I’m building an edit that “Austria” and “Austrian” will probably both be included together or excluded together. Ditto “McDonald School” and “McDonald College” both refer to the same place – where my subject was “discovered”. In my examples there are many inconsistencies among story keywords.

Names and locations do have to match. Variations will be considered to be different people. We use the name to fill in lower third titles and to avoid jump cuts. Likewise location needs to match. Again it’s used to avoid jump cuts. Fortunately, FCP makes it easy to be consistent with these fields. After entering a name, for example, you can right-click (control click) into any other name field and pick the existing entries from the list. For Name and Location this makes entering the metadata very fast, and very accurate. It’s not like you have to type them twice.

The same trick works with entering Event and Theme log notes but I’ll come back to that.

How many clips are necessary?

The challenge is that First Cuts doesn’t do so well with small numbers of clips. You’d probably want to give it at least 20 A-roll or A+ and a similar number of b-roll options to start seeing how it can generate multiple different editions quickly and interactively. With small numbers of clips the results tend to all end up very similar – pushing duration can force variation though.

With small numbers of clips, you might get the optimal results by doing a quick A-roll (aka ‘radio’) cut and using Finisher to complete the job.

What should I do with the clips from which I made thought sized subclips for A-roll? Should they be deleted or can they be left without description?

My recommendation would be to move source or master clips to their own Bin or Bins within a single “masters” bin. Then when you export the XML file select all Bins *except* that master bin of masters. That will leave them out of consideration by First Cuts, because First Cuts doesn’t ever get them.

Tip: If you’re cutting a master clip down to though-sized subclips, enter as much metadata as you can – name, location, maybe event or theme – to the master clip first. Then the subclips will all inherit the common log notes and only need their individual variations entered.

Same for B-roll. If I leave the master clips in the bins will First Cuts use them?

If clips are included in the XML export then First Cuts will attempt to use them.  Excluding Bin or Bins from the export to XML would be my current recommended practice. It’s a fairly simple matter to select all in the Browser, then Command click (that’s the Apple key) on the Bins you want to exclude. Then Export XML. FCP will only export what was selected.

Is there a minimum length of A-roll needed?

As a consequence of this question being asked, First Cuts was changed. There is no minimum duration required for any story keyword. However, if there is insufficient A-roll First Cuts will do what it can with it, but it won’t necessarily be useful. Experiment.

Is there a minimum proportion required of B-roll to A-roll?

No there is no minimal proportion of B-roll to A-roll. You can send no b-roll and it will still do the best possible job on an A-roll edit.

In fact one of the benefits I’ve noticed with First Cuts is that it makes it really clear where there’s no b-roll coverage on a subject, because First Cuts will place as much b-roll as possible (within certain guidelines so people get face time) That’s another benefit that’s hard to put into a user guide or marketing pitch, but it’s really useful.

Events or Themes confuse me. In the manual you refer to story arc which implies that they are in part about position in time within the development of plot. But I am unclear if changing the numbering of the events has an impact on the sequences generated by FC. It seems that order is affected by the choices made in the Story Keywords Selected panel.

There are many things that affect the way the story evolves in First Cuts. Story keywords are important in determining what will be included in the edit, but the actual sequencing within the story arc is affected by a Events or Themes and some other minor factors. Truth is, the Serendipity algorithm at the heart of First Cuts is now so complex that neither Greg nor I totally understand exactly how results evolve. Greg can trace a particular example and determine the decision making process behind why a particular clip is included, but to trace out how a particular edit evolved would probably take days. Both Story Keywords and Events and Themes interact to determine the story arc of a particular edit.

But I do understand your confusion on Events or Themes. It was another of those concepts that evolved over development. Originally only Events it was supposed to be a way to bring together clips around a particular events within the documentary. The project I used during development is the story of a young singer (dancer, actor) from Sydney called Tim Draxl. The documentary covers his early career and into his first CD and performance deals, before he got movie roles.  So, my Events and Themes look like this (there are 20 in total, I haven’t included all)

010 Growing Up and Family

020 Master Class

035 Tim the person

040 Beginning Career

055 Tim’s Talent at Cabaret

100 Tim’s Future

060 Recording in LA

075 Performing and Audiences

065 Developing Career

and so on.  The numbers give chronology to the overall story arc and a way to group or associate ideas as material is logged.

The Events and Themes can really be whatever you want. Events was originally intended to group content around the events that occurred during the documentary production. In Tim’s case “Recording in LA” was  a discrete event, as was “Cabaret Convention” “Sound of Music”. But as we went on in development I found I wanted to use the same mechanism to group other than events – what eventually became themes. Often the numbering is fairly arbitrary. Probably 00 to 99 is enough. I start with themes or events on the 10’s so that I have slots between if I decide (as I did) that I wanted to put the theme “Tim the person” between the Master Class and Beginning Career. It seemed to fit there. But I could just as easily renumber it to fit between Recording in LA and Developing Career by changing the number to 063, for example.

Keep the questions coming – they help us improve the documentation and/or the software.

A lot of my friends and associates are getting their passports ready for IBC this year. Every year I think “maybe this year” but there’s always one thing or the other. One thing has been Visa renewals which have happened in August the last three times. Leaving the US without a valid visa would make the European trip a much longer one than the five days or so of IBC – Sep 12 to 16.

So, once again I’m not going, and this year it’s bad. This is the first IBC FCP Supermeet organized in part by my good friend Mike Horton. Imagine putting together a major even a couple of thousand miles from your home base, in a city with a foreign language, expensive currency and way cool coffee shops. (They probably wouldn’t help Mike keep organized though!). The agenda has been set for the September 14 meeting at the Culture Park Westergasfabriek, Gashouder. (I hope that’s an address – for all I know I could be insulting someone’s mother!)

And there’s a good lineup for the meeting – ok, obviously *I* won’t be there to wow the crowd with a demo of Assisted Editing, but we will be giving away a copy of First Cuts as a raffle prize.

Those that make it will get Paul Saccone, Director of Technical Marketing in Apple’s Applications Marketing group, will provide the latest news on Final Cut Studio. If you’re into Digital Cinema Technology QuVIS will debut their offering there. Adobe’s Simon Hayhurst and Jason Levine will show how Adobe Production Premium’s suite of applications can compliment the Final Cut Pro workflow. (BTW, smart marketing by Adobe – people will have the CS3, and before the end of the month it appears CS4, and be tempted by what Adobe adds to the Final Cut Studio) without taking it on directly.) There will also be opportunity to see how the Infinity camera integrates with Final Cut Studio.

If you want to see the work of your peers, Darius Fisher will show clips from “Fields of Fuel” – the documentary that won the Audience award at Sundance 2008. Darius will also show how Final Cut Studio was used to make this complex and important documentary work. “Traitor” has only just been released Aug 27th (same as First Cuts/Finisher) and has an incredible pedigree behind it: written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, edited by award winning film editor, Billy Fox and it stars Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. Once again, the role of Final Cut Studio will be discussed by Billy Fox and (if available) Jeffrey Nacmanoff.

The final show and tell will be Miguel de Olaso – a Director of Photography from Spain – about using the Red camera with Final Cut Pro. Not to forget that the ever-smart Rich Young – editor of Macvideo.tv and founder of the UK FCP User Group – will share his “Top Ten FCP Tips and
Tricks”, which would make the trip worthwhile.

In addition to the above agenda there will be twenty vendors from all around Europe showing off their wares. Many of these companies will not be on the show floor at IBC. The SuperMeet will be the only place you will see them. There will be food and cash bars and rounding out the evening will be a
raffle with prizes totaling into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Doors will open at 5PM (17:00) and the show will begin at 7PM. (19:00) Tickets are on sale online only for Euro 10.00 each and this event is expected to sell out. Historically every SuperMeet for the past seven years has sold out.

Complete details, including daily updates on the agenda as well as a link to where to buy tickets can be found on the lafcpug web site.

Maybe I’ll make IBC 2009

I originally wrote this to a friend over the weekend and I thought that, with a bit of an edit, it might be interesting to some others.

Last week we released two new pieces of software through my long-time company, Intelligent Assistance, Inc: First Cuts and Finisher. Collectively we call the category “Assisted Editing” because they, well, assist the editor and going with Assistant Editor was getting confusing.

What I think makes this so exciting is that it’s the first real innovation in editing since Non-Linear Editing was popularized with the release of Avid’s Media Composer version 1, 19 years ago. 19 years is a long time in the computer business. Non-Linear Editing has certainly developed since that first release of Media Composer. Then 160 x 120 16 gray images were the “state of the art” while now we effortlessly manipulate High Definition (and beyond) images in our systems. But, despite this development, the way NLE systems work today is much the same as they did 20 years ago.

What Media Composer did, was to make the “cost” (time, effort, expense) of an edit much more affordable. With linear editing bays, making small changes to, or alternate versions, of a program was difficult (read expensive). Non-linear dropped the cost of a change, revision or alternate edit dramatically. Assisted Editing achieves similar dramatic cost reductions by allowing the computer (and specifically our software) to do some of the work of the editor.

Back at NAB in April we announced “The Assistant Editor” for long form documentary editing. After three months of beta testing we have now released that application as “First Cuts”. First Cuts (for Final Cut Pro right now but we’re exploring other platforms) take the log notes made by a documentary editor (or their assistant) and turns them into very, very fast first cuts. This allows editors and producers to explore the stories that are available in the material, and to juxtapose different versions while they seek inspiration and direction.

First Cuts take the log notes that long-form documentary editors have traditionally made (and their workflow) and makes them much more useful. The logged clips are exported from FCP as XML and opened in First Cuts, where the editor chooses opening title and lower third template (Motion templates preferred), the duration and story keywords that will be used for this edit. Within seconds it creates an edit with beginning, middle and end to the story arc, with opening title placeholder and fully finished Lower Third titles used appropriately to identify speakers on camera. The edit will also have b-roll used appropriately and the audio on the b-roll is lowered in volume and faded in and out. It’s an edit a producer or finance person can watch without being distracted by jump cuts or lack of visual interest from the absent b-roll. You can see the process in a quick five minute tour at the First Cuts home page.

First Cuts is primarily focused on long form documentary editors because they have the discipline to enter log notes (if they don’t they will have a very hard time of it) and because they need to explore a lot of material. The payback is significant. Fortunately there are a lot of documentary editors working with Final Cut Pro.

We discovered that one way of working with First Cuts would be to find a cut that was close to what was desired, and then the skilled editor would add the polish, trim and emotion that a first cut lacks. In doing that we discovered that blowing away the b-roll and titles was the cleanest workflow. Since that removes a lot of the time saving, we decided to make a product that restores that finishing effort. Hence, Finisher.

Finisher takes a project with an edited a-roll sequence (aka “radio edit”) and adds Lower Third titles and b-roll as above. This is the perfect bookend product to First Cuts.

But we worked out that we could do a lot more with Finisher for those who don’t want/need to enter a lot of log notes. Finisher will work with any of the log notes that are provided for First Cuts, but does not require them. In fact Finisher can randomly choose b-roll to place in a Sequence. Location of b-roll can be forced with Sequence Markers, so obvious jump cuts are covered first. While it can run with random selection it will use b-roll search terms in the comment field of those Sequence Markers and search for matching b-roll if available.

You can see some examples of Finisher’s work, including a guided tour that shows a couple of different ways it can work, at the Finisher home page. Particularly interesting is the final example – ‘Ode to the Beach’ – because that is a simple audio recording, some b-roll pulled out of my stock collection from Final Cut Server, and Finisher adds b-roll to the cut (with Sequence Markers) randomly. The result – for almost zero effort – is quite acceptable and may even be useful in some situations.

Not too shabby for a version 1 product.