The present and future of post production business and technology

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m very happy to announce that all of our Assisted Editing software is now Snow Leopard (a.k.a. Mac OSX 10.6) compatible.

Even better, along with the speed improvements from running on Snow Leopard, Greg also improved the XML parsing speed so all the apps should be very noticeably faster.

These updates are free and can be downloaded from within each piece of software, using the built-in updating framework, or you can simply download the current version from Assisted Editing and overwrite the current version.

We’ve been all about logging and metadata over the last few weeks!

First Cuts has just had a substantial update: we’ve added a new module to it that makes it easy to use Microsoft Excel to do your log notes. The new module is called exceLogger and it came about because of a suggestion from a First Cuts user. The advantage is that, even if you’ve already captured your clips, exceLogger will read your log notes out of the Excel spreadsheet and add them to the logging fields in your Final Cut Pro project.

The update is free for First Cuts owners.

We liked the idea of exceLogger so much that we created a stand-alone application called exceLogger for FCP – you can read more about it here.

The second new piece of software is something completely different. Final Cut Pro back at version 5.1.2 introduced support for QuickTime metadata, and more cameras and formats have been adding metadata to their media files. (Philip wrote about this metadata at his blog.) The problem is that you can’t see this QuickTime metadata in Final Cut Pro’s browser view – it’s hidden.

That’s why we created mini Metadata Explorer (miniME for short): export your clips from Final Cut Pro as an XML file, and open it in miniME. The spreadsheet view fills in with your clip names and columns of QuickTime metadata.

The free version of miniME allows you to save this metadata out to an Excel spreadsheet. But if you buy a serial number you also get the option to add this hidden metadata into the Final Cut Pro logging fields of your choice. There’s more information here.

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.

At the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group this evening we announced the availability of two products: First Cuts for FCP and Finisher for FCP.

The Assistant Editor product demonstrated at NAB 2008 was renamed “First Cuts for FCP” to better reflect its main function. “Finisher for FCP” was shown publicly for the first time tonight, and came about from conversations with users in the beta program for The Assistant Editor. It’s a tool that does the same finishing work that was done by The Assistant Editor: finding b-roll, lowering the b-roll volume, building and placing lower third titles, fade-in and fade-out of lower thirds… There’s more details about Finisher for FCP at its product page: http://www.theassistanteditor.com/Finisher/.

Since Finisher would be incredibly useful for editors doing many changes to a sequence produced by First Cuts, we’ve included the Finisher product in First Cuts. And, for the first three weeks after launch, we’re offering discounted pricing on both these new products!