On March 20th a few of us in the Bay Area, about 300 people, gathered at the San Francisco offices of Adobe to witness the beginning of the local User’s Group. The initiative, started by Matt Silvermann and Marcello and Brandon Grande has been a lot of fun and a chance to meet fellow motion graphics and compositing artists and it was a good occasion to see vitality of the entertainment and media industry in the bay area.
Archive for the ‘News’ Category
The SF After Effects User’s Group is born!
Sunday, March 30th, 2008Avoid creating a look in camera
Saturday, March 29th, 2008This post on ProLost made think about how far that approach on color correction can be stretch. The example given by Stu starts with a daylight balanced shot and turns it blue in post and then recovers the skin tones with additional tweaks. What if you have footage that is already blue and you want to recover the skin tones and leave the rest untouched?
When incompetent pundits strike
Monday, March 17th, 2008Now that the High Definition DVD war is over we could just enjoy buying our favorite version of “Blade Runner” without fear of it being obsolete next year. Instead somebody has to come up with some absurd reasons why BluRay is not relevant anymore, despite the fact that it is a novelty for most people. This ComputerWorld article is the sad demonstration of what happens when incompetent people are given the opportunity to yak about stuff that they don’t know. Let’s review it point by point.
Final Cut vs Premiere Pro – act two
Thursday, March 13th, 2008So, in the first few posts I’ve been nice to Premiere, the new software is generally getting a more positive attitude just because it’s “the new thing” and new things are exciting. It’s time now, after a few days to talk about a few things that could be enhanced, from the point of view of and old FCP user.
- Quicktime paramerters. In the render settings you can select which compressor (codec) you want to use but not all parameters are always accessible. For example, for the Photo JPEG codec you can’t set the quality slider in Premiere.
- Lack of the “E” command. In FCP you can set the position of the CTI (current time indicator), click at the end of a clip and press “E” to trim the length to the clip down to where the CTI is. Very useful, could not find it in Premiere. Maybe somebody can find out if there is such command and post here.
- Lack of blend modes. This kinda surprising given that blend modes are such a huge part of working with Adobe apps like Photoshop or After Effects. Could not find them in Premiere. None. Except for some effects. But they are not available for just video clips. Of course this could be easily done by using Dynamic Link but c’mon, this should be in the NLE as well.
On the other hand I had Premiere running on my MacBookPro for 3 days without quitting it and it’s rock solid. And this is the 3.0.0 Try out version, before the current updates and not updated for Leopard. Quite impressive. More later.
32 bit processing = film look
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008The benefits of using 32 bit processing for compositing are not always apparent to superficial examination. If you create a project in After Effects, drop a few clips in a comp and turn the switch to set the projects processing at 32 bit you will not see anything happening. Of course 32 bit processing takes much more memory and processing time than the standard 8 bit so what’s the point?We know that cameras shoot at 8 bits per channel, that is 8 bits for Red, 8 bits for Green and 8 bits for Blue. The combination of those three values provides enough colors to depict the world as we see it with human eyes. 8 bits is integer processing, 32 bit is floating point. Floating point provides a much finer amount of values than integer calculation. 8 bits means that you have a maximum of 256 values possible for each channel, from 0 to 255 ( 2 to the power of 8 = 256 – 1 = 255 ). While the combination of RGB leads to a high number of colors that can be represented by the screen, the single channels can “overflow” pretty easily. Overflowing means that the software tries to store a number that is higher than the allowed precision and as a result only a portion of it is stored, the portion that didn’t fit is truncated or clipped. Think about your car’s odometer. When you reach the maximum number the odometer “clips” any subsequent number. Say that your odometer has 5 slots. After you drive for 99,999 miles all numbers will roll over and you’ll be back to 00001. Same thing for binary arithmetic. Using floating point allows us to map color and luminance operations in a much more precise way.This becomes useful as we manipulate our images by adding effects like Trapcode shine or by using blend modes like Add and Screen. All these options can cause luminance values to go beyond the 8-bit limit and get clipped. But there is another advantage of 32-bit processing. If you look at the way a movie shot on film handles crossfades and fades to black you will see that the highlights of the fading clip tend to linger on till the end. If you use your typical “Fade to black” effect in your NLE you’ll notice that the effect lowers the luminance of every pixel in the image turning the highlights into greyish mud. Here is an example, click on the image for the unscaled version:
Uncompressed TIFF file originally created by After Effects.
And here is the exact same image at 32-bit precision. Notice how the highlights are much brighter while the rest of the image is exactly the same as before.
Uncompressed TIFF file originally created by After Effects.
It’s important to note that both images have been converted to 8-bit JPEGs, as a demonstration that the storage and acquisition formats do not determine the final quality of the picture, the precision used to process the effects does.Yes, you acquire your footage at 8 bits and you will very likely deliver it at 8 bits. What you do in the middle will affect the final result and having the ability to work at higher numeric precision is fundamental in order to obtain great images or create believable visual effects. Precision is everything in this field. Remember digital, after all, means “based on numbers.” Everything that we do in the digital domain is numbers, if we chop them up with no attention to precision we cannot expect to see good images at the end of the chain. On the other hand when we use higher numeric precision the final result will be virtually indistinguishable from film. That alone is a reason to try 32-bit processing and it’s amazing that we can access that kind of power with a desktop application like After Effects. In the not so distant past this feature was not available to the general public. Another way the digital revolution brings the power of making great movies to the masses.
Rebel Video
Monday, March 10th, 2008If you haven’t read the excellent “The DV Rebel’s guide” by Stu Maschwitz do yourself a favor: open a new tab in your browser, go to Amazon and order it now. And pay for the express shipping because you don’t want to spend a single day without knowing what’s in that book. If you have read Rodriguez’s “Rebel without a crew” and liked it, the Rebel’s guide is the modern, digital-based, version of it. It’s one of the most important books for the aspiring independent moviemaker and a great resource for anybody who wants to gain control over the production process. Stu, who co-founded The Orphanage and co-wrote the famous Magic Bullet plugin, gives a complete map, from the choice of camera to the final “onlining” (mastering) steps of your project. And don’t let the “DV” part confuse you, the same techniques apply verbatim to HD as well.One of the revelations presented in The Guide is that After Effects provides you with everything you need for professional color correction. In fact Stu goes as far as claiming that with it you can have the power of a DaVinci color correction system, a workstation that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and that rents at $1,000/hour, including the colorist 
.How is that possible, you might ask. After Effects has 16 and 32 bit processing. This means that you can achieve the kind of precision in processing color information that makes your digital footage look more like film. The only advantage that a DaVinci has to AE is that it process in real time. In AE you have to render but that is hardly a problem for people like us working independently, often at home. With a little bit of skill an knowledge of AE you can use proxies, precomps and other settings to minimize the time necessary to judge a color correction and then let the system go during a break or overnight to render your composition.The great thing is that After Effects does so much more than color correction. In fact it’s your digital special effects house that you can carry with you inside your laptop. Chromakey, masking, background creation, titling, tracking, etc. It’s all there and with plugins like Trapcode Particular you can create stunning scenes.For this reason I was not incredibly excited about Apple’s Color. A lot has been said and tried since its release at NAB 2007. Color is nice but it’s yet another application that has its own UI (User Interface), that is unfamiliar to people who know Final Cut, and that requires all kind of rendering back and forth. Given that I already have that power in After Effects, with an application that allows me to do so much more, the only issue that I had was to solve how to move back and forth the NLE and the Compositing program. That’s how I started looking at Premiere. Adobe’s Dynamick Link in fact works much better than the “Send to…” command in FCP and allows you to link After Effects to both Premiere and Encore. The amazing part is that once you Dynamic Link your apps you don’t need to render or even save your After Effects project in order to see the changes in Premiere or Encore. So my 2 cents of advice, if you are on Final Cut 5.x is to save your money and consider Adobe Production Premium or Creative Suite Master Series. These tools, coupled with the accessible wizardry of Stu’s book give you much more control over your creations. Speaking of The Guide, be sure to checkout Stu’s blog, Prolost where you can find all kind of deep knowledge about digital image processing.References:After Effects tutorials: Video Copilot, Motion Works
Premiere vs Final Cut : act one
Sunday, March 9th, 2008OK, I spent a few days with Premiere and here are some of the things that favorably impressed me:
- User Interface. If you have experience with AE then Premiere is a plus. The usual layouts established by Adobe are quite pleasant and the consistency among applications makes it easy to feel at home. Plus, the elements of the UI are placed in a very nice way and very easy to access via mouse, tablet or other pointing devices.
- Multi-camera edit. While FCP has this feature too, the way Premiere implements it is nicer and simpler. The ability to use any user-defined marker as synchronization point is a plus.
- Support for image sequences. Every NLE should have this and it’s quite surprising that FCP doesn’t have it. In Premiere you can load an image sequence from TIFF, JPEG, PNG, pretty much anything. Another plus.
- Audio editing. Premiere has a much more sophisticated editing of audio inside the editor, including support for 5.1 surround sound. In comparison FCP’s features seem quite rudimentary
- Clip Notes. This a big one. Premiere’s and AE’s have ability to export a sequence embedded in a PDF that can be edited by the client and sent back to be loaded as a series of markers in the timeline. What can say. Wow. I never saw anything like that.* Smart search in the project. Very nice and available right there in the window.
- Clip storyboard. While this can be achieved in FCP as well, the ease of use of this feature and the way it can be customized, coupled with the simplicity to set the poster frame really makes it a great editing tool. Now you can create your bins with subclips that can be reviewed for easy reference. The “storyboard” exists in parallel to your default project view, it’s just another tab and so you can have the best of both worlds:
- Clip preview and easy setup of the poster frame. This is another neat part of Premiere’s UI. The scrubbing of the clip’s thumbnail is really easy and accessible.
- File format support. Premiere can support MPEG2 and .m2t files directly, no conversion to QuickTime necessary. I can’t verify this one with the try-out version but it’s part of the specs. FCP can edit only QuickTime files + still images like PSD and TIFF files. Again, Premiere’s support for media formats is wider and more flexible.
- XML project file format. OK, this one is a little bit esoteric. File formats are hardly a concern for editors but the fact that the native format for Premiere’s projects is XML has some huge consequences. First of all XML is a text format, this means that it can be read and updated with a text editor or with simple text-processing tools. It also means that you can take two versions of the same project, run it through a programs like diff, which comes standard with all Macs (it’s a Terminal program), and find the differences between the two files. For example, you can see if a clip was added or removed. With an open format there is a whole set of options that can be explored. For example, I am writing a program to take an FCP XML-exported sequence and import it in Premiere. This would be the foundation of a FCP to Premiere translator so that old projects started in FCP could be continued in Premiere and finished by taking advantage of the integration with After Effects.
Well, that’s it for now, I’ll post more as soon as I gather new elements in my research. Remember, this is not a “religios war”, this is just the pursuit of the best tool for the job.
From FCP to Premiere Pro
Saturday, March 8th, 2008I bet you don’t see this often. There is a perception that Final Cut is regarded as a “pro” NLE and Premiere is not quite at the same level. Or so they say. For years I have been a devoted user of FCP and I really don’t have anything against it. It’s just that Premiere is looking more and more inviting by the day and there is a bit thing that it has that Final Cut cannot even touch: amazing integration with After Effects.Let me get a bit of background here. For the past few years Premiere was supported only on the Windows platform. That move, which I bet Adobe regrets, left the Mac OS field solely in the grasp of a few products: Avid and Final Cut. It’s not a secret that FCP has steadily conquered the Mac market and it’s presence today is massive. Well, last year, at NAB, Adobe announced the new Production Premium suite which included, surprise, surprise, Premiere Pro CS3 for the Mac. Thank you. Finally we get some serious competition on the Mac.My first experience with Premiere was not very encouraging. I was assigned to edit and interview on a PC using Premiere. Double whammy. Premiere and on a PC. I wasn’t happy but I agreed on the assignment and kept an open mind. I was actually surprised to see how similar Premiere was to FCP and I managed to finish the assignment on time and as expected. The problems that I noticed where some serious memory leaks that caused some crashes but I had no way of verifying if they were a Premiere or Windows issue. I left it at that and I was happy when I got to go back to my Mac with all the familiar tools. Fast forward to current time. I firmly believe that After Effects is an indispensable tool for any post production work. It’s just too damn useful, flexible and fun to use to think about a project without it. I even edit photos in After Effects just because I’m more comfortable with its non-destructive filters than the ones in Photoshop. I have Motion and Shake as well and they are never used. Shake is just too crazy complex for me and Motion doesn’t even approaches the power and flexibility of After Effects. I’m sorry, this is just the way I see it.After Effects is also the de-facto standard for Motion Graphics and if you haven’t seen what you can do by combining Cinema 4D with After Effects, you are missing out. Big Time.Before I go further I want to make clear that I’m in no way compensated by Adobe. I just happen to like what they make.Anyway, the push to adopt Premiere comes from my need to use After Effects in my projects. In the past few years I used all kind of tricks to move my footage from FCP to AE. I can export a Sheer Video-based QuickTime file and import it in AE but I loose all the clip information. I could buy the “Automatic Duck” plugin but at $500 it’s just $200 short of the cost of upgrading to the full “Creative Suite Master Series” which includes Premiere, AE, Encore and more. Also, the integration between Premiere and AE is much deeper than just opening a Premiere project in AE so the plugin route is not nearly as interesting.There is also another consideration. The Adobe DVD authoring tool, Encore, is capable of turning the whole DVD menus and videos into a Flash application, making it very easy to distribute your work on the Web, a feature that I don’t see in Apple’s DVD Studio. So, all in all there are several compelling reasons to make the switch to the Adobe’s suite. What remains to be determined is if Premiere can replace Final Cut and that’s what I’m going to find out. I’ll post my findings here, it’s going to be interesting.
Better Images
Saturday, March 8th, 2008This site was born out of necessity to publish my findings in calibrating the JVC HD100 camera that I bought in 2005. I love that camera but when it arrived I had a bit of disappointment in the quality of the image. I had so much anticipation for my first HD camera that I expected to be so cool, so brilliant, so .. I don’t know what but the images that I got from it were not very exciting. Not that the images were poor, the quality was very good but the colors were kind of “spent”, not vibrant and with a tendency towards the blue/grey. That struck me as strange since I knew that HD had a much better color precision than SD and still my SD Canon Optura was actually capable of giving more brilliant colors. Fortunately the HD100 has extensive control over the color matrix and so I was able to calibrate the camera with a DSC chart and a lot of patience. The rest is history, TrueColor, not my initial label, was born and a lot of shooters adopted it as tehir configuration of choice and employed on all kind of shows: documentaries,interviews, features, commercials, etc. It’s been really fun to see how much my modest effort has been used all around the world. In keeping with that tradition this site documents my efforts to improve the quality of the images that we can shoot with every-day equipment. From HD to color correction to editing to photography, a great love of mine, I’ll share techniques and maybe just random thoughts on how to make better images.
Paolo