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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

ISO an NLE - Part 3

One of the reasons I am looking to leave FCP 7:

Well, while I love FCP 7 and can work in it with my eyes closed, this is the exact reason that I am looking to move on. Today, I received 200 GB of Canon 5D Mark II footage with dual-system audio, This show I am on was already started in FCP 7 but when it was started, it was on some weird HDV (ugh, don't get me started on THAT mess) format that FCP 7 sorta worked with. Now that the entire show delivers hundreds of GB of compressed H.264s from these DSLRs and Zoom recorder audio, I spend days just on ingest and syncing, multiclipping, and binning.

No more should we have to work this way and unfortunately Apple's answer was a little bitter and hard to swallow. I am still playing around with FCP X but even with a "Pluraleyes"-type thing built in, if my footage is not shot and captured in a way that makes sense in FCP X, syncing still isn't super fast. I haven't had to deal with dual-system audio in Premiere or Media Composer yet but this step is just a pain in the ass -- even with Pluraleyes. I don't want all my stuff laid out in a timeline for me to grab unless it's a string. I take pride in my bin organization. Perhaps it's a workflow I need to get used to. How do you implement Pluraleyes? Do you leave it in the synced sequence and pull from there as opposed to your bins?

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

ISO an NLE - Part 2

Adobe Premiere CS5.5

I do own CS6 as well but for some reason cannot get audio to play form the .mts files so my workaround to A) avoid re-wrapping / transcoding and B) play around with something other than FCP7.

So as 5.5 on my system does play the audio from these .mts files back, I am using it for this project. What I have come to love about Premiere that is more innovative than any other NLE is the Media Browser. I know nothing about Premiere's history so I am not sure when this was implemented but being able to browse my media on the drives directly from the UI is a game changer for me.

It can natively read tons of tapeless formats in CS5.5 and even more in CS6. Next project I start in CS6, I'll show you how Media Browser has come leaps and bounds taking, what looks like, some cues from FCPx (don't worry -- they're the good ones) and stepped up the coding so much so that I am just salivating to work in the system and bummed that I can't for this particular show.

So this alone, to me, garnered it's own post. The first time I used premiere, I didn't even use the bins -- I cut everything straight from the Media Browser. My bins were atrocious at the end of the project and I shudder to even think of opening it back up but it was a quick turn-around show and it was cutting raw T2I footage. It worked like a dream.

I'll update you with more as I come across things I love and hate.

Where to go from here - Part 1

I am an editor by day and by hobby. I love telling stories and I love computers -- so it was a win-win for me when I realized in high school what it was that I wanted to do. I learned on Media 100 on a computer at school. I knew nothing about asset management, i/o, the Mac platform or anything like that. I was shown what to do to get video onto the computer and I figured out how to cut from one angle to the next.

Years went by and that was what I knew. Then came college and FCP. It was super similar and I slipped right into it. 8 years later, I consider myself an FCP master and I loved the program. But I have had enough. I needed a 64-bit program to handle all the new tapeless workflows and FCP7 wasn't cutting it anymore.

8 years and I had grown comfortable. I now have 4 NLEs on my system and go back and forth between them all trying to find the "right" one. I will chronicle my findings here as well as talk a little about what I like, dislike etc.

The Catalyst:

I got a clean install of Compressor 4 this morning and put it through the ringer today. I like it a lot so far. Pretty much the same UI but a couple changes:

I noticed "This Computer Plus" as opposed to the old "Include unmanaged services on other computers"

I am one of the few people I knew that used this function. Compressor was (and still is) a 32-bit program so it doesn't natively take advantage of the internal power of the system's core. This was their 32-bit workaround and it worked great. Basically you could tell all 4, 8, 12 cores to split the job up and they'd all work on it together -- quickening up your workflow. I even went a step further and installed qMaster on all the computers in the office and took over EVERYONE'S cores -- 32 cores after all was said and done, I think. It was fairly reliable but there were times where one core would not behave and the whole render would be bad. But 7/10 times, I got the speed I needed for deliverables, etc.

Now compressor has made it EVEN EASIER to do. No more going to System Preferences to set up qMaster. It seems to be built right into compressor.

This will basically make your computer utilize all cores you tell it to while rendering from compressor and, what looks like, FCP and Motion although I have not used that function. In the Compressor options in the window, that's where you tell it how many cores to utilize for renders and voila!

Here's how it will look when you render and select "This Computer Plus":

I also highlighted some cool things I found in the "Share Monitor" preferences. This is what used to be "Batch Monitor" but has since been renamed.

I am not sold on any NLE yet, but after using Adobe's Media Encoder and having not-great-luck with client deliverables (hinted-streaming quicktime files, mainly - which I use exclusively), I find that Compressor 4 has made me a fan!