Categories
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.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps

What would a new editing interface be like?

At the most recent meeting of the Editor’s Lounge (held at Keycode Media) Steve Cohen – blogger and author of Avid Agility – expanded on some of his blogged thinking on the possibilities of a new, more fluid editing interface. An interface that didn’t stop every time you did something!

And that got me thinking about how Apple might change up the interface, riffing on some of what has been rumored.

Categories
The Business of Production The Technology of Production

Pre-NAB thoughts on the Digital Production BuZZ

On Thursday night I did one of my regular sessions for the Digital Production BuZZ, where Larry wanted to me to predict what was going to be “hot” at NAB 2011. But before we got to that, he played back my predictions for NAB 2010 – the equivalent show of a year ago.

You can listen to my segment on the BuZZ with this year’s predictions and last year’s roundup here.

I thought I did OK and the live chat audience during the show gave me 100% accurate. Check it out and tell me whether you think I’ll be as good with 2011!

Categories
Assisted Editing Interesting Technology Item of Interest Metadata

Semantic Text Startup for Textual Analysis

Semantic Text Startup for: Cliff notes, keywords, key points and important facts derived from raw text. http://tinyurl.com/5sr5myk

One of the technologies I’ve been following, because I think it’s relevant to my goals with Assisted Editing (to take the boring out of postproduction). One piece of the “boring” is deriving keywords and concepts from spoken word (transcribed, of course).

Technologies like this, and others developed for the Library and Archivist industries, are becoming very sophisticated.

In an Assisted Editing context, the extraction of keywords (particularly) from a “chunk” of transcribed spoken word (let’s say an interview for a documentary), removes the need for a human to enter the keywords.

Having keywords is valuable because you can search for all instances of the keyword (to find common themes), which is something prEdit really does well, whether you’re going to build the initial outline manually in a tool like prEdit or Final Cut Pro, or use an Assisted Editing tool to get to a rough first assemble.

Categories
Interesting Technology Item of Interest

The Next 9 Jobs That Will Be Replaced by Robots

The Next 9 Jobs That Will Be Replaced By Robots http://tinyurl.com/4c66w5b

I thought this article was interesting because I’m always looking at the cutting edge of what can be automated. For me the interest is in thinking about how the cutting edge of technology will move into even more “creative” roles.

The jobs supposedly “on the line” (and they don’t mean tomorrow, but rather a little ‘down the line’):

  • Pharmacists – robots in two hospitals have filled 350,000 prescriptions without mistake. (Could human pharmacists boast that level of accuracy?)
  • Legal Discovery (Lawyers) because computer can analyze documents faster and for less than humans, and find information and connections that humans miss.
  • Drivers – as Google’s self driving car experiments (and those DARPA have sponsored) then commercial drivers may not be needed any more.
  • Astronauts (where I’m in favor of replacing human risk as much as possible)
  • Retail clerks – self checkout is growing.
  • Soldiers because in a smart war, it’s the machines that count and frankly if machines are killing machines, that’s a war I can almost salute!
  • Nannies and baby sitters.
  • Online sports stories from the basic scores.  This can probably applied to most other types of factual-based writing.

Categories
Interesting Technology The Technology of Production

Why do we need lighting anymore? [Updated]

Last week I was a the official Storm launch at RED Studios. While Storm – the RED Digital Cinema Camera Production Hub – is undoubtedly going to be the “go to” app for  anyone working with RED footage, it wasn’t what set my mind thinking about lighting.

Before I get to that though, I was very impressed with Storm in every way (without having actually used it myself). Well thought out and priced appropriately, if you have to work with RED, you will end up buying Storm.

What set me thinking was the demonstration of RED Epic where the incredible low light performance and high dynamic range combined to kind of answer a question I’ve have had in my mind for a while.

Categories
Interesting Technology Item of Interest The Technology of Production

Ditch the Satellite Truck

Ditch the Satellite Truck: Livestream

http://tinyurl.com/6c26ey3 More disruption of traditional approaches.

Whereas a live remote feed in even recent times was a chore involving a large vehicle and loads of gear – and more than a little smarts to set it up – now Livestream have a dedicated box for less than $2000 that takes video and audio input and live streams it from anywhere via Verizon’s 4G LTE network, with upload speeds of up to 8 Mbits/sec.

That’s a little low for really high quality HD at about 1/3 the rate of AVCCAM at 24 Mbits/sec but it is possible to push a good quality 720P signal through that bandwidth.

 

Categories
Interesting Technology Item of Interest

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software http://tinyurl.com/4aplu9h

This is a fascinating article on how software can detect patterns of behavior from thousands and thousands of pages of documents. This technology goes way beyond searching for keywords:

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 21

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 21: Talking about the “new” Final Cut Pro http://tinyurl.com/69c9mqw

This is the show where we talk for twenty eight and a half minutes about a version of Final Cut Pro that neither of us have seen, nor have any real information about. We make some intelligent guesses on what to expect.

It’ll be fun to revisit this after the new Final Cut Pro is released.

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest

HTML5 Adoption for Web Video Continues to Grow

HTML5 Adoption for Web Video Continues to Grow http://tinyurl.com/4cwhnaz

In the time that MeFeedia has been tracking H.264 for HTML5 video on the web, the numbers have grown from 10% in Jan 2010, to 63% in Feb 2011.  That’s a huge boost for H.264 as the message gets out. It’s not good news for WebM, which frankly is only going to take off if Google does something incredibly stupid like making YouTube WebM only. (I doubt it since they have a contract for H.264 versions with Apple, it would appear.)