Adobe Pipelines: Redux
Posted: May 29, 2006 at 12:39 am, by Isaac
My last post on building production pipelines has generated a bit of mail. Some of it is from Macfans who refuse to believe that any film work can be accomplished outside of the magical, all-powerful Final Cut Pro, but most of it contains more-reasonably posed questions. For example, since I laid out Adobe’s production suite as a backbone for three different studios models, is it really the best? For most projects, yes, the myriad of professional applications that Abode sells, working together will be more powerful and more cost-efficient than any alternatives.
For other projects with special requirements, this might not be the case. And the different studio setups that I mentioned aren’t rough guesses; they’re designed around specific projects that I have in mind. Mostly they exist at as treatments and have simple budgets and production structures attached, so it’s easy for me to choose what would best tools for those project requirements. For the most part, those tools are made by Adobe. However, I did get one query as to why my low-budget film would be edited on Premiere, and my medium budget on an Avid.
 Well, basically for the same reason that if I were to go from driving to work once a day to a job that involved driving all day, I’d exchange my Toyota for a BMW or an Audi. Premiere and Final Cut are like Toyota and Honda cars. They’re basically the same quality of construction, and they use similar parts, and they do the same job. Toyota and Honda’s mid-range cars are great for most uses, but every now and again you need something specialized. If you need to move tons of material from one place to another you need a large truck. If you need to beat serious deadlines, you need an F1 racer.
And sometimes, for comfort and reliability, you want a BMW. Yes, top-line Avids are actually more limited in some ways, which makes them a bad choice if you’re working on small video projects that mix and match formats, but an excellent choice if you want a more streamlined solution for a single, carefully planned purpose. And people who complain about Avid only accepting certain filetypes or hardware are like people who complain that BMW and Mercedes engines don’t accept cheaper, third-party Japanese components.
And that’s not really the point of high-end cars or high-end NLEs. The other reason is that 95% of all pro film editors use Avid. If I was hiring a professional driver for full-time, high-precision driving, I’d want to make sure that he’s using his own gear; what he’s most comfortable with. Even though you can easily load several hours of footage into Premiere or Final Cut, it just ends up feeling more unwieldy than in Avid.
For my low-budget film(s), I’d handle the final edit, and I’d probably use Premiere because we’d be sticking with HD, working directly on top of an animatic that I would also be cut on Premiere, and we’d be trying to cut corners. For my more expensive film(s), I would almost certainly hire a dedicated editor, no matter how involved in the edit I might be. I would probably have shot more footage, it would definitely be stored at a higher quality, and Avid’s upper-range models are better designed for long-form feature film editing, period.
Practical Pipelines and Adobe
Posted: May 29, 2006 at 12:39 am, by Isaac
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of building production pipelines around the workload of the studio. I then wrote in my article about Adobe’s Production Studio that it was powerful and flexible enough to be ideally suited to a number of different production environments and workflows. This prompted a few emails asking for examples of what I meant. Let’s take a moment to reflect on some recent projects and daydream about some potentially upcoming ones…
Video Production
Earlier this year I completed a promotional video using the tools in the Adobe bundle. Because it was a relatively simple and short project, I whacked out the whole thing myself on two computers. I began with video shot on the Canon XL2, and edited this together with stock footage in Premiere. Some of the materials needed only minimal color tweaking to get agood match, but the majority required considerable adjusting. For example, I was combining interlaced video, 24p DV, and telecine’d 35mm into what was meant to be a 30p master.
Premiere enabled me to edit these divergent framerates in one timeline, which I could then import into After Effects for fixing on a shot-by-shot basis. After considerable deinterlacing, color adjustments, glow passes, sky replacements, and gradient overlays, it was time to change the mostly fullscreen shots into widescreen. Because the final was meant for exhibition on 16:9 widescreen displays, I used InstantHD to stretch the video into 16:9 rather than a letterboxed 4:3. At this point I also created a number of technical animations in After Effects as well, using Photoshop and Illustrator for some of the elements.
The music, sound effects, and narration were edited and mixed in Audition, and mastered to a full 5.1 surround track. The audio and video files were combined in Encore, and I was able to create a seemingly random set of loops that was controllable by DVD remote without using the menu. This is non-standard approach but it was something I specifically needed for the job spec, and so I was impressed that Encore gave me enough control over the authoring process to do this. All in all, the project was a great success, and the close integration between the apps sped the process up considerably.
Admittedly, this was a one-man show, but larger projects requiring more staff could get the same benefits. In a previous, much larger project, we used Premiere and After Effects together across several workstations seamlessly, sharing assets even in the previous, non-Dynamic-Linked versions of the software. Starting with a naming convention that allowed the interchange of DV video files, highly compressed MP3s, and transcribed text files, we created a simple proxy system to maximize productivity. With a semi-automated backup and renaming tasks, untreated video files were replaced by the final versions within the edit as they were completed.
With the metadata of Adobe’s bridge, this could be even more streamlined. My ideal setup for a video studio working on television programs and documentaries would consist of several Adobe seats, and possibly a video server; at the very least, distributed video storage shared over fiber. For this studio, the camera of choice would be the Canon XL H1, and post-production would either stick with HDV or a somewhat-less compressed intermediate codec for editing and effects. The backbone of the workflow would a be content management system that would allow editing and graphics stations to share assets simultaneously.
Low-Budget Film
This would be even more important for film work. My ideal low-budget, post-production film studio would be slightly different. For starters, production would likely use the Silicon Imaging SI-1920HDVR camera, which looks like a fantastic machine. While it may not be as ambitious as the RED camera, it does have several advantages, one of which is that it exists today. Post production would be based on an uncompressed or lossless codec, which would change the editing process slightly. Rather than editing full HD video, DV proxy files with identical timecode and metadata would be used. While Premiere can, with the right hardware, easily edit uncompressed HD, full quality on-line editing is not required for feature work.
The content management system would pass the large, uncompressed files to the colorists and compositors for sky replacements, effects and matte paintings, and give lower-res, lower-bandwidth files to the editor and sound engineers. Weta Digital uses a similar system, but it’s a hugely complex system of virtual files and real-time processing. For my low budget films, auto-managed directories and file tracking would probably be sufficient. For final output, the Premiere edit project would be repopulated with the final full-rez video files and import the final audio mix.
Medium-Budget Film
A step up to the next level would require more computing hardware, because HD just doesn’t cut it. If I were to start shooting a feature next month, it would be on 35mm. Next year, I’m not so sure about. The film would be scanned in at 2k (some effects plates at 4k), and occupy a massive amount of storage. My proxy servers would need to be seriously upgraded and I would probably need a few more quality levels for all the post staff. At this point I would upgrade from Premiere to an Avid editing solution, and add a few Nuke seats to my compositing department.
I would likely also delegate my final color pass to a real daVinci system, but the pipeline itself would probably be similar, if larger and more faceted, to the workflow of the video studio. Logistical concerns would be different, and the size of the project would mean more redundancy in every area. The final output would probably involve a master print on film, and the output from the Avid would require a different compilation method. However, After Effects, Photoshop, and Audition would be used very heavily in pre and post production, and I’m sure Premiere would see plenty of action in rough on-set edits, animatics, and miscellaneous areas.
With careful planning and good research you’ll be able to build your pipeline ahead of time rather than spend your post production budget trying to pound a round peg into a round hole. The film projects are just a couple of examples that I dreamed up to fit projects that I already have roughed out on paper. I’m sure I’d make a lot of changes if I were actually building these studios, but they are good starting points. Feel free to keep the questions coming for more specifics. And to all the people who commented on how cluttered and busy my screenshots were, I know. I have a big screen, and I like them that way.
How to Calibrate an NTSC Studio Monitor
Posted: May 22, 2006 at 12:34 am, by Isaac
Earlier today I helped a friend of mine set up an NTSC studio monitor by using color bars to set the brightness, hue, and saturation properly. It’s been a long time since I did this, so it took me a while to remember how, and I figured that I might as will write it down while I’m at it. The first step is to get color bars displaying on your monitor, and they should be color bars played out of your computer or edit deck.
 So, first we set the brightness, or luminance. On the lower right, just under the red bar, you’ll see three grey stripes, each lighter than the other. On a computer monitor, the far left is black, and the center one is dark grey. However, that black is actually darker than video black on an NTSC monitor, so we should adjust the brightness to where those two tones just match. Then adjust the contrast so that the white square on the left is at its brightest without “blooming” into adjacent squares.
 Now for color. All good studio monitors will have a number of extra display options, like underscan, pulse-cross, and blue gun. Selecting the blue gun will turn of the red and green electron guns, showing us only the blue signal. This will result in four blue bars separated by three black ones. First, use the chroma or saturation knob to match the outside two bars with each other and the short bars in the middle row. Then use the hue knob to match the middle bars together.
You should now have four blue bars that match each other, with no change in brightness between the top stripes and middle stripes visible. The color is now set. You can switch off blue mode and see the full color bars displayed correctly. Now luminance, chroma, and hue are correctly displayed according to the NTSC standard. Note, you’ll be calibrating the monitor to your video signal, so if it the signal is faulty, your monitor’s color will be faulty as well. To test the video signal, you need scopes.
Adobe Production Studio Review
Posted: May 9, 2006 at 12:34 am, by Isaac
A couple of months ago I upgraded all of my Adobe software in one shot by ordering the Adobe Production Studio. This comes in two versions; the regular (Premiere, After Effects Standard and Photoshop for $1200), and the premium (upgrades After Effects to pro version, and adds Encore, Audition, Illustrator, and several third-party plugins for $1700). I went for the premium version because almost all of these additions would be worth the extra $500 on their own, so getting them together is quite economical.
I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while, because this bundle is quite a step forward, both in terms of the individual upgrades, and in the added integration between the applications. Adobe has built a suite of software that builds on itself and makes a number of production task faster due to the enhanced connectivity. As a result, the individual applications get a boost in power and flexibility. It’s a solution that can be the foundation for many different production pipelines and accommodate many project types.
For example, the first thing I did with it was a reasonably complex commercial animatic. I used the Adobe Bridge (a file manager that connects the programs, stores metadata, and more) to get some stock photos from internet libraries, sent them to Photoshop so I could cut them into layered PSDs, which After Effects imported as layered compositions. I arranged the layers in 3D so I could simulate camera moves, and then imported that animation into Audition for the final music and sound effects edit. A seamless process taking only a few hours, using four different programs.
Premiere Pro 2.0 
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Premiere has several new features now, including the spiffy-looking multi-camera switching, and it’s all new fully docked interface, but there are some serious changes under the hood as well. For example, it now handles virtually all SD and HD file formats, mixing different frame rates, in resolutions up to to 4096×4096, and has native support for the Xena HS encoding card for real-time uncompressed HD work. Premiere is also piggybacking on After Effect’s 32-bit colorspace render engine, and there are a lot of new color correction tools to take special advantage of that.
All this extra power is sped up by GPU acceleration, and the editing process is faster with the new simplified and prettified interface, and some new labor-saving features. For example, Clip Notes. Now Premiere can export a PDF file containing an embedded video file of the project and text field for entering comments. This would be only slightly more helpful than sending a regular video attachment for feedback, but the PDF can then be loaded back into Premiere, and the individual comments appear as markers in the edit timeline exactly where the comments were entered. Neat, eh?
And Premiere is good at sharing other things as well. There are export and input setting for EDLs and other project types, making integration with film labs and other studios easy. And for DVD projects, there is a very capable encoder and options to burn DVDs with chapters and interactive menus straight from the timeline, or Premiere projects can be opened as Encore DVD authoring projects. There are also many ways to seamlessly share project files and assets between Premiere and After Effects.
After Effects 7.0 
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Like Premiere, After Effects Professional Version also sports a new customizable interface, adoption of OpenHD standards, and a much revamped 32-bit HDR render engine with OpenGL acceleration. Compositors and colorists will appreciate the many export and preview color modes available, the ability to match any film stock or HDR display, and the new color correction filters. If the built-in tools aren’t enough, Adobe includes Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse, The Foundry’s KeyLight, and plug-ins from CyCore.
There is also a new and very powerful multi-layer graph editor, “behavioral animation” presets, support for (and many of examples of) a new template system for animating graphical elements, new scripting and expression support, and new options for per-character animation of text. For even more control over time, there is a new optical-flow time remapper, that uses motion vectors to warp and interpolate frames. I find the quality comparable to RealViz’s Retimer, which happens to cost more than the entire Adobe package.
But in spite of all these great features, many of which I’ve wanted for a long time, I’m almost more excited about the integration between Premiere and After Effects. Any Premiere project can be imported into AE, and vice versa. Any After Effects composition can be dropped into an editing timeline just like a normal video clip, even if it hasn’t been rendered yet. This solves nearly all of the common “If only Program A had Feature B in it” complaints. Oh, and it can also export Flash encoded FLVs or SWFs as raster or vector. That’s something I’m going to experiment with in future…
Encore DVD 2.0
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Encore can also open any Premiere or After Effects files, regardless of whether they have been rendered yet. It’s high time that I point out this feature is called Dynamic Link, and there’s another benefit to it that I haven’t mentioned. If I load a gigantic, RAM-hogging file into AE, I can have that same file open in other Adobe programs without it taking up any more memory. This makes it even easier to work on the same project in four different applications without a performance hit.
And there isn’t aren’t any interface hiccups either, because the all look the same. In fact, I had to change Encore’s layout, because it looked too much like Premiere’s, and as the deadlines get longer and the hours got later, I occasionally got confused when I couldn’t find my Premiere tools in the Encore timeline. It is easy to work in, though. I generally use DVDlab Pro for DVD authoring, and I think it is a more powerful tool for building complex DVDs, but Encore is nice and fast.
It comes with boatloads of background and menu templates, or you can load layered PSDs (or After Effects comps) into it, and they automatically become menus with individual buttons. You can chain video and audio files in a timeline or flowchart hierarchy, easily mix different aspect ratios and build complicated chains of multi-audio, multi-subtitle movies and unlike DVDlab, it has built-in encoding for video and audio.
Audition 2.0
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Speaking of audio, Audition has made great strides. Previously a mid-range waveform editor called Cool Edit, it now supports SMPTE timecode-locked multitrack editing with unlimited tracks and video preview (Dynamic Linked from Premiere or After Effects, of course). There’s a complex mixer supporting 16 effects sends per track, with full automation and preset saving. It’s great for sound effects work, both in design and mixing. And yes, it also has the new Adobe Interface in all its shaded, adjustable glory.
It also comes with 5,000 uncompressed music loops that can be mixed and matched, and pitch-shifted and tempo-changed and matched to other elements. We generally compose, record, and mix music in Cubase, using Gary Garritan’s fantastic Personal Orchestra instruments, but since Audition has low-latency ASIO hardware support, MIDI tracks, and VST plug-in compatibility, I’d like to experiment with it in that areas as well.
Illustrator CS2
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Illustrator isn’t a program that I use much, so I’m not sure how to review it. I usually only use it to extract elements from EPS logos so I can animate them elsewhere, so I’m not particularly familiar with it. There are some fun new functions, though, like Live Trace and Live Paint which are neat ways to create artwork. You’ll also note that it has the CS interface, and not the new video one, which is understandable. Full Adobe Bridge support and great Photoshop connectivity, though.
Photoshop CS2
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Photoshop also has the CS interface. Most of it’s new feature are also under-the-hood additions, like support for 32-bit HDR images, and the Digital Negative and Camera Raw 3.0 standards. However, it is happily obvious that we can finally see in-menu font previews, and the ability to select multiple layers at a time. Matte painters (like me) will enjoy the new Vanishing Point tool, and the Image Warp feature. Most of the features are geared to photographers, such as noise and grain reduction filters, red-eye fixers, and the new Spot Healing brush, but there are several video-specific features, like the Firewire preview, and again, this is an integral part of many of the other programs.
In short, this is a fantastic suite of software, and the price is unbeatable. Almost any two of these applications would cost more than these six, not to mention the third-party plug-ins that are included. However, the main selling point is the synchronicity between the individual applications. The ability to share such divergent file types and have instant previews and feedback across the whole suite is immeasurably valuable.
Unfortunately, it’s not completely perfect yet. Extremely large Premiere projects are unwieldy in After Effects (logically so, however), and Audition still has a few bugs, although these seem to be limited to interface glitches and not real performance issues. In two months of long use, only Photoshop has crashed, and then only once. I’ll be writing more about my experiences in the future, but for now I give Production Studio nine stars out of ten.
The Importance of the Pipeline
Posted: May 6, 2006 at 12:33 am, by Isaac
How to build a studio is a topic that I’ve seen discussed on a few internet message boards recently, and I’ve also gotten a few emails about it. In the olden days of video, this was extremely expensive, but now you can get comparable gear for almost one tenth the price. Also, dealing with analog video was kind of tricky. Even basic post tasks might involve lots of equipment that we don’t see much in computer post. For example, multiple edit decks, edit controllers, DVEs, video and audio signal amplifiers, cable patchbays, TBCs, blackburst generators, timecode capable audio recorders, multitrack mixers, and lots and lots of exotic cables that you don’t see much anymore.
Yes, things are simpler today, particularly in post-production. But contrary to most indie film ads, a good post studio requires a little more than a single camcorder, a single cable, and a single white plastic laptop. A good post studio is built around a pipeline, not hardware or software. The workflow needs to be designed around what the staff will be doing on a day to day basis. And it should be scalable, as well.
Judging from the feedback I’ve been getting, most of my readers are at varying stages of the transition from video production to feature production. The video work, be it for a local tv station or an individually marketed DVDs, pays the bills while allowing the reader to practice filmic techniques and move towards a career in film production. Regardless of how advanced these individual production companies are, the first step to building a solid studio is the same; outline the upcoming annual workload.
What exactly will this studio be doing? Producing short-form documentaries or long-form documentaries, either independently or under contract? Filming live events and conferences and selling lecture DVD products? Creating TV commercials for broadcast TV? Various video for the web projects? How-to, training, or other industrial videos? Off-line film editing? Color correction and other graphics work? Once you know that, you can begin to plan a pipeline to best serve these projects.
The goal is to create a workflow that is balanced between the utmost efficiency in handling the job at hand, and the ability to expand the studio rapidly for the jobs of the future. It isn’t possible to just pick the components on their individual merits; the studio network needs to be more than the sum of its parts. Every aspect of the production process must be taken in to account to avoid bottlenecks. First look at upgradability, in terms of both gear and of staff, and them move into the hardware and software. This will take a lot of research, since digital video isn’t quite as simple as it initially looks.
Even though digital technology has simplified most of the processes that required dozens of pieces of analog gear, the days when analog video was a single standard had a few advantages over today’s formatting challenges. For example, we now have D1, DV, HDV and HDTV frame sizes (among many others) and dozens of separate frame rates from 23.97p to 60i. Most codecs work with AVIs and Quicktime, but not all of them work together, and some HDV tapes recorded on one camera might not play on another.
So do your homework on what you need, and what your staff will need, and what your software and hardware will need. And don’t forget to factor in some level of redundancy and/or backup options, and some sort of archival solution for your footage library. Any shots or graphics elements that might be usable in the future should be saved if at all possible.
After Effects: Compound Blur
Posted: May 3, 2006 at 12:32 am, by Isaac
Ok, lets take a moment to talk about my current favorite After Effects filter. It’s something that I haven’t used much in the past, but on my last project, I ended up applying it to several layers in each composition. As an example, I’ll use this simple background.
I created these graphic elements to set behind text. They look interesting, kind of like a DNA chart, and they animate well, with individual pieces sliding around and dissolving over each other. Graphically speaking, it fits the technical nature of the project, but it’s too sharp and distracting as it is. I could blur it evenly, but that would just look like shapeless blobs moving back and forth. Time for something a little more subtle.
Compound Blur applies diffusion to an image based on the grayscale values of another image. To control it, I made a simple linear gradient that whited out most of the area where I planned to put text. I then added the Compound Blur filter to my moving blocks, and set my gradient as the blur layer. After tweaking the blur amount and lowering the layer’s opacity, we have what we’re looking for (with some images, heavy Compound Blurring can create blocky artifacts, but these can be blurred again by a masked adjustment layer).
The areas where the gradient is lightest, the blocks are the most blurred, and the upper left corner of the image, sharp detail is still visible. This is simplest use of the filter; just a still linear gradient controlling the blur amounts. However, animated gradients or moving footage can create interesting effects, and if you can make a pseudo-depth map for video footage, it’s a good way to add or enhance depth of field blurring, even though the Lens Blur may be a more precise option.
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