The present and future of post production business and technology

Occasionally I do some work for my day job at Intelligent Assistance!, where we’re actively adding to our metadata-based workflow tools. This time taking the speech transcription metadata from the adobe suite and making it accessible to producers who want text or Excel versions, or even into FCP with the transcription placed into colored markers (one color per speaker). With Transcriptize you can also name the speakers, something not possible in the Adobe tools.

Here’s my interview with Larry Jordan where we announced it and the press release is below.

“Announcing Transcriptize on the Digital Production BuZZ”

Transcriptize expands the usefulness of Adobe Speech Transcription

Take transcriptions from Adobe Production Bundle to Media Composer, Excel and Final Cut Pro.

Burbank, CA (February 12, 2010) – Intelligent Assistance, Inc has introduced a new software tool that takes Transcription XML from Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 or Soundbooth CS4 and converts it text, Excel Spreadsheet or Final Cut Pro clip markers.

“Late last year, Larry Jordan asked if we could create something to make the Adobe Speech Transcription more available”, says Intelligent Assistance’ CEO Philip Hodgetts. “We thought that was a great idea and Transcriptize is the result, less than two months later.”

Transcriptize imports the transcription XML from the Adobe Production Bundle and allows editors and producers to name the speakers – something not possible in the Production Bundle. From there users have the option to:

Export a plain text file, suitable for the needs of a producer or to import into Media Composer’s Script Sync engine.

Export an Excel spreadsheet with a variable number of words per row – Perfect for a producer.

Open the XML from a Final Cut Pro clip and add the transcription to Markers where:

There are a variable number of words per Marker (including one Marker per speaker)

The speaker name is placed in the Marker name

Transcription appears in the clip Marker comment

Marker colors are used to identify each speaker (FCP 7 onward).

The transcription can be searched within Final Cut Pro.

Markers can be easily subclipped based on transcription content.

Transcriptize is available now from www.assistedediting.com/Transcriptize/. MSRP is US$149 with an introductory offer of $99 until the end of February 2010. NFR versions for review are available, contact Philip Hodgetts, details below.

Over recent months Larry and I have spoken regularly on a variety of topics, so I thought I’d post some of the interviews here.

RED Digital Cinema’s latest announcements and more on how we’re going to fund entertainment

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/BuZZ_Audio/Hodgetts_BuZZ_091105.mp3

More of my thoughts on the Democratization of production

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/BuZZ_Audio/Hodgetts_BuZZ_091126.mp3

My Look Back on 2009

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/BuZZ_Audio/Hodgetts_091224.mp3

My thoughts on what to expect in 2010

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/BuZZ_Audio/Hodgetts_091231.mp3

NAB 2009 is now finished, gone and done. The annual meet-up in the desert is over for another year, and this year, I’m over it. Well, Las Vegas for sure. Driving out I was not in a happy place and, for the first time, I was a little jaded by NAB. But I think that’s just me.

For the first time since I moved to the US in 2001, I wasn’t speaking in any part of the official conferences. That was a change for me. In fact, I was heading to Las Vegas and NAB 2009 with no official role(s) at all, apart from an offer to “help” Larry Jordan, Cerina and Debbie, and their amazing crew, with the NAB Show BuZZ. This year the Digital Production BuZZ was the official podcast of NAB and I couldn’t have been more proud. How the show has grown under Larry’s guidance!

Greg, my long term partner, had a much more clearly defined role as streaming engineer – basically fixing anything podcasting, internet or web page that needed fixing. He was pretty busy all week. Ultimately I did some special reports and contributed to the regular news feed while everyone’s attention was focused on putting out 37 shows in six days.

My first impression of NAB was that it was quieter. That was on Saturday before the show opened, but the show floor was cleverly hiding a distinct drop in floor space – more aisles, three carpet aisles and lots of comfortable seating areas each one representing a no-show to the show.

Attendance was officially down – about 17-18% in pre-registrations for a start. Tuesday turned out to be the busiest day of the show floor as many people planned their trip to avoid the Monday crush! So many that Monday felt like a regular Thursday it was so quiet.

As well as registrations being down, I got the feeling that people came for fewer days. I heard of a number of people who caught early flights into the show and a late flight out that same day, and people staying two days, instead of three or four. But the quality of attendee was very good.

It seems that the economic conditions weeded out students and tire kickers. Exhibitors report good sales leads and quality attendees, which is good.

Socially (well, that’s the main reason I go to NAB now) the week went well. The highlight had to be the AJA party at JET in the Mirage. They booked out the nightclub and invited a couple of hundred of their dearest friends. A great night was had by all and the AJA guys should be very proud of the Ki Pro, Io Express and Kona LHi announcements. I hear they had a good year last year and this year’s shaping up to be even better.

Monday night’s MediaMotion Cafe was a less formal version of the regular MediaMotion Ball, set in what felt like deep suburban Las Vegas, even though it was really only a couple of blocks past The Palms. A lot of great friends, although the night was a little dampened by the loss of Mik Vitti but brightened by Blackmagic Design’s sponsorship. A good time was had by all because by the end of the night the sponsors had more free drink tickets than takers!.

Monday was also both the formal and informal Avid Events, which I had planned to attend as well as the MediaMotion Cafe but logistics – the Cafe was further from the Strip than I expected) made that a little difficult. I hear it was a good night as well.

Tuesday night’s Supermeet was the other highlight of the week for me, since I’ve been part of that community since it’s inception and worked with Mike Horton on the BuZZ and count Dan Berube among my friends. (Real friends, not just Facebook.) 

It was also the formal, if that could be said, launch of my new book The New Now: how to grow your production or post-production business in changed and changing circumstances. A little bit of a departure for me, this being more a business than technical book, but I think the content is great. More of that in a subsequent post but the digital download is live now, with paperback coming shortly.

The only presentation I did all week was on the subject of Growing your business in a recession at the ProMax Digital Lounge. It seems to have been well received – both the talk and the new format from the new ProMax. Over three nights, instead of the one big event, they packed the program with informative talks and presentations, great food (best of the show from our experience) and good quality surroundings.

Then it was off to the RED User party to get the only mind boggling information of the week. Graham Nattress has managed to develop a distribution codec for RED that puts full 4K of pixels down a 10 Mbit/sec pipe. That’s pretty amazing, well incredible.  I could see no difference in quality between this year’s show reel, played out uncompressed, and last year’s show reel at 10 Mbits/sec. That’s within the bandwidth I get from my cable service here in Burbank, so they could be streaming me 4K! 

Well, not soon as it needs hardware assisted playback afaik, but I think it’s an amazing piece of technology.

Our own technology face-off caught me off guard. First, the dates got all confused and they were busy reshuffling the Superbooth schedule to get us back into it. I had a nasty piece of bad health all morning (Unfortunately NOT caused by over-indulgence) and was delighted when Jim Mathers from the Digital Cinema Society had already selected two booth pieces and had them on the show floor. Saved the day because I was running very late thanks to the health problem. 

Then it turns out my editor didn’t turn up. Again due to the confusion and that he was setting up over at the Supermeet, so I had to step in and used a borrowed laptop and play the editor role, and try and MC. I can’t do both, so I fear the presentation was a little dull for the audience, for which I apologize. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

As it turns out Finisher had a useful result faster. More on that later.

We also had some nice business leads. Not from anything planned, which pretty much takes me full circle to my post on why I was still going to NAB. The serendipity. The person who introduces you to someone else; the casual meeting in a line; or visiting a booth you didn’t know about. That’s NAB and that’s why I’ll probably be back for the 13th year in 2010.

More on the Finisher/Editor Faceoff shortly.

It’s always preferable to prove the accuracy of your video levels using external scopes as long as they’re downstream of your output hardware.

One common problem, as discussed in the BuZZ show of Jan 25, is the levels coming from Adobe After Effects. Video levels could be full range 0-255 in each channel (or 16 bit equivalent) instead of the 601/video range of 16 -235.
May be some useful information at
http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.php?articleId=196601411 (might have to set up a free log-in)
and for super technical background
http://www.poynton.com/notes/colour_and_gamma/ColorFAQ.html

This is the URL for the CNN article Does this HDTV make me look fat? mentioned during the BuZZ in Depth segment on the January 4th edition of Creative Planet’s Digital Production BuZZ.

I just heard that Dave McCandless, a UK media pundit, has featured my weekly broadcast/podcast Creative Planet’s Digital Production BuZZ. The Radio Times has a circulation of just over 1 million. The brief article is available online if you’re interested.

This post is from the BuZZ show of September 21 where links were mentioned in the Pick our Brains segment. These are the links.

720 50P Capturing and Editing in Final Cut Pro

720 25 or 50P, workflow with Final Cut Pro

The latest bit of insanity in legislation (part 654 in an ongoing series) has Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) brining up a Bill to “ban Myspace.com from schools” in order to “protect the children”. Leaving aside the facts that parents are where the responsibility lies, and that, given the 80 million members, MySpace is safer than the school itself because more teachers have been convicted of molesting children than has ever come via MySpace or equivalent, this piece of extreme stupidity once again proves that Legislators don’t seem to have any idea of anything regarding the Internet.

Fortunately this piece of lunacy is unlikely to go beyond grandstanding by Rep. Fitzpatrick, but if it did the “Deleting Online Predators Act” would be devestating for the Internet because it’s badly drafted and way too broad. If Wikipedia were commercial it would not be available in schools or libraries. And, just btw, MySpace and equivalent social networking sites now cover half the Internet’s users.

I say every legislator in every assembly should show a working knowledge or the subject before they’re allowed to vote on, let alone draft, legislation.