We Are Storytellers

Render times have been killing me. Between After Effects, and h.264 files in Final Cut, it seemed I was doing less editing than I was rendering. Now to be fair I am editing on a 24” Imac 3.06ghz Core2duo with 8 gb of ram. My immediate solution was to get on the apple store and see what I could afford. I couldn’t afford anything. My ideal edit machine quickly hit $7,000 minus software. I decided I would have to wait, and just deal with it.

Around this time Adobe released CS5 and along with that release came some curiously great reviews. Professionals in the field who are what I would call Apple “fanboys” started talking about working in CS5 and the difference in speed. This made me curious. My first edit suite was Premiere 5.0LE on a Sony VAIO. I would make it all the way to version 6.5 before I switched to FCP in college. At the time the advantages of Final Cut were clear, and few considered Premiere to be a legitimate competitor. 

A few things happened that have put Premiere back in the running, if not ahead of the competition. The most important of these things is the Mecury Playback Engine which offloads rendering to the GPU. This is not something that Adobe has done that Apple couldn’t do, it is simply that it is available now, and Apple seems to be more worried about iPhones and iPads to update Final Cut. The next release of Final Cut Studio will most likely contain something similar, and will probably be dependant on the use of OSX Lion when it releases as well.

So why switch, why not wait just a little longer for Final Cut to catch up? Well, taking advantage of the new ability to offload to the GPU will most likely mean needing a new GPU, one with the right muscle to be able to pull this off, but unless you recently bought your Mac, this probably means upgrading everything else as well, so back to spending a good chunk of cash. But isn’t that money worth it for the extra stability and other benefits that OSX + Final Cut offer?

Adobe has not only beat Final Cut to the punch with GPU accelerated rendering, they have also made alot of other improvements, mainly in the areas of stability and workflow. After Effects sequences can now be played back directly in Premiere without rendering, much like Motion sequences can be played back in Final Cut. Window’s 7 is the first good OS since XP and simultaneously brings even more stability. Basically, the clear advantage of Final Cut is not so clear anymore… When Final Cut adds GPU support it will become a matter of preference, which makes many other factors come into play. 

So now the question was for me: How much is it going to cost to switch? Initially prices didn’t seem that different, but the markup on pre-built adobe suites was incredible. Quick price checking on Tigerdirect.com revealed that the systems were way over component cost… So I decided to build the computer myself. The last time I had handled PC hardware was 10 years ago, and even then, it wasn’t to build a computer, but I thought I would give it a shot. 

I spent a week researching, and catching up on what was what, reading reviews, diving into forums… I finally felt educated enough to buy my components. Here is the rough breakdown.

Asus p8p67pro motherboard
Intel 2600k 3.4ghz Quad Core i7
16gb Corsair Vengeance Ram
EVGA GTX 580 GPU
CoolerMaster Silent Pro 850w PSU (Never skimp on your power supply… seriously)

Of course, I had to get a case, and dvd drive, CF card reader, but I had some of this already. (addonics makes an amazingly fast CF reader). In the end I spent $1500 dollars on a brand new top of the line system… Without jumping into an entirely different ballpark of Server components, I bought the fastest Intel chip in its class, the fastest NVIDIA card, and 16gb of nice ram.

The computer took a couple of hours to put together (I was being very methodical) and booted the first time. Win 7 and Adobe Suite was up and running a couple hours after that. 

I crossgraded my Adobe suite from my mac (prices vary), and was good to go. I dropped in footage from my 7D directly to the timeline (no transcoding), chroma keyed it, color corrected it, and it never even had to render, it simply played back in realtime.

This was all before overclocking the CPU to 4.5ghz ;) 

In the end a complete switch of edit suites and a brand new computer was cheaper than a new iMac, and It hasn’t crashed… yet… I will let anybody know if I come to regret my choice, but as it stands now, I can focus on being creative, edit to my taste, and not get bogged down waiting for renders.

Don’t get me wrong… I am keeping my iMac and Final Cut around (Premiere can now open FCP files, but I would hate to be caught unable to open something). I will probably even hackintosh my PC when Lion comes out, but despite a few leary glances I have received from telling my “professional” friends that I switched, I have been very happy.

For the curious. I was going to order at Newegg (their website is easier to navigate) but went with Tigerdirect for sales tax reasons. Tigerdirect later called me and told me they have a business portal and you can sometimes get discounts, or bids for large orders… 

Shane Hurlbut discusses why CS5 is important, and how it can no longer be considered unprofessional.

A $400 Follow Focus for Canon DSLR’s that supports presets, and uses the internal motor to drive the lenses. Truly wonderful.

There is still alot of speculation at this point, but here is what we know for sure.

Super35 sensor (very close to APS-C for all you 7D owners)

PL mount standard / or with new lenses from Sony on a new mount type.

35mbs/XDcam 4:2:0 which is a nice long form gop codec (interframe compression)

With a nano flash and HD-SDI out you can get 4:2:2 amazing compression.

Body only PL speculated at $20,000

To me this misses the point. At this price point, this thing better be nicer than the RED, which as far as I can tell, it isn’t. Someone let me know if I am missing the point here.

So I finally got around to using Pluraleyes to sync my second system audio with my HDSLR video. I had been doing this by hand looking at waveforms in Final Cut. My first test I stacked all my interviews in a row. Dropped the corresponding audio file roughly underneath, hit sync… A few minutes later… perfect! 

tip: Sync your audio first. It creates a bunch of separate sequences for all the audio it syncs up. If you tried this with something already edited it could cause headaches. Doing it upfront I just edited each interview by itself and inserted it into my actual edit sequence. Awesome stuff.

Shooting with a 180 degree shutter has been well covered. But what do you do when you are going to artificially slow down your frame rate in post? Simple: Take the target frame rate, double it and thats your shutter speed. So if you are going to try a sweet 1000fps shot with your 7D, then set your shutter to 2000. Keep in mind that this shutter speed will look quite strange during normal playback, but will work great in the end.

DVfilm has a new product that looks interesting, but I’m just not sure. Anyone have any experience with this?

Well I can’t use it to monitor my footage on my ipad, but at least it gets rid of the cables to my HDMI monitor. I think these things will do really well. Throw in a cheap battery pack and you are good to go.

Shane Hurlbut created a checklist for HDSLR’s and posted it in video form on his website. For me I didn’t get around to watching it until today. I would have much rather had a text version. So without further ado, here is a “transcript” of sorts of the check list video. I have added some explanations to some of the items, and re-ordered the items.

1. Set camera to manual

2. Set whutter to 1/50th*

3. Confirm that your ISO is camera native (160, 320, 640, 1250, 1600)**

4. Confirm Picture Style

5. Have camera and compact flash labels ready***

6. Be prepared for overheating or other error with identically configured backup body.

* Set shutter to 1/50th (This is as close as you can get in 1080p24 to a 180 degree shutter. 1/48th is what you want, but you cant get it. Here is a great article as to why 180 degree shutter is important)

** Stay in these ISO’s: 160, 320, 640, 1250, 1600 (according to Canon staying close to multiples of the “native” iso of 160 yields less noise in video. Consider the example of shooting Different film stocks. You would rather shoot a higher ASA stock than push a lower ASA to match. In the same way consider these numbers base ISO’s and anything in between the equivalent of pushing the stock. Check out this post for more info)

*** Shane Labels his Camera (A-Z) with white Gaffers tape, and then keeps three labels (Matching Letter + number) on the side of the camera, when he removes a card he sticks a letter + number label onto he card. Keeping track of which camera shot what is important to identifying problems with a camera (dead pixels, incorrect picture style…) It is also very helpful when logging footage to be able to quickly identify and match clips to shots and to audio when syncing sound.

Some of these things may seem basic, but having a Camera Protocol and keeping it can be the different between smooth sailing in post vs huge headaches. Shoots rarely go perfectly, and even the best forget things under stress. (Shane even mentions bumping his camera to Bulb during a shoot and not noticing.)

For a while now many of us have been making our own portable cine-sliders by order parts for IGUS and drilling and tapping a few holes. Apparently enough of us have ordered that IGUS is selling these sliders prebuilt on Amazon. Great deal!

It may come as a shock that this monitor is 4.8 inches. Many don’t realize that most small devices that say HD aren’t HD, they simply support a HD input signal. Pixel density and the limits of the human eye may come into effect at this size, but I would be happy if my 7” field monitor were even 720p. I guess I should look into the SmallHD DP6.

Philip does a great job reviewing a “75%” pre-production model of Panasonic’s new video camera.

Not the most scientific review, but worth a quick read.

I witnessed a record breaking “dive” at a conference I was shooting this past week. Professor Splash essentially belly flops into 12” of water from about 40ft. I confirmed for myself that no shenanigans were occuring.  Some quick googling reveals  that for about a quarter of a second he endures 4 tons of force. One of the most amazing / terrifying things I have ever seen, just listen to the sound of the splash. 

Check out this Slo-mo version from Discovery Channel’s Time Warp. This makes me really want to get a copy of twixtor.

Philip Bloom is spending three days with the new Panasonic AG-AF100. He has posted a 3200 ISO test on the page already.

Blogging may come naturally for some, but for me I expect it will take quite a bit of effort. I am not entirely convinced that I will have throngs of people visiting my site and wondering what I have posted to my blog most recently. In fact, I am not sure I want the responsibility that would come with such a large audience. I do know that there are thoughts, ideas, facts, and figures all rolling around in my head that I wish I had known when I got started with all this production type work. At the very least I would love to share some basic knowledge, and just maybe help someone else tell a good story. If there is a topic you are interested in understanding, I will either do my best to explain it, or find someone that can. Information you find here in the future will take various forms, but hopefully it will all be useful to someone, somewhere.