Grouping, Courtesy of Gaming

As you may know, I work a lot in reality TV and specifically with shows that use “Multicam Groups.” Hence,I’ve been doing a lot of grouping lately.  For those whose eyes glaze over at the mention of techie lingo, I’ll put it in layman’s terms.  I’ve been taking multiple shots of the same subject and welding them together so they can be used as a single piece of footage, like a live television director cutting from one camera to another on the fly.

I’ve begun using a method referred to by a lot of my peers as the 1-2-3-4-5-6 technique.  Here’s a piece on the basics of grouping: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/setting-up-for-multi-camera-editing-in-avid-media-composer-part-1-of-2/

The 1-2-3-4-5-6 method is as follows: you create your stack sequence (each layer of video is a camera and you synchronize them in a single sequence- I use the waveform a lot for this) then you put a splice through all layers every time a clip begins or ends.  Now you’re set up.

You then map your keyboard to 1 (mark clip) 2 (go to in) 3 (match frame) 4 (go to out) 5 (mark out) and 6 (make subclip) and create a new bin for groups.

Next, you go to the first scrap of footage in your stack (let’s say you have two shots of exactly the same length, ready to be grouped, just for simplicity’s sake) and you select all layers (in this case, V1, V2)  You play the clips so you’re timeline is focused on the shots you want grouped, and you hit the above numbers in order.  This subclips your mutlicam-to-be-footage into your groups bin.  You deselect the top layer of video and go through the 1-2-3-4-5-6 order again and it will subclip the next level down.  Once you have all your elements of the group in your bin, you can select the subclips and shift-control-G and have a group (select “group by in-point!”)

I color my finished clips red (sometimes you get a shot that’s longer than another and you need to keep subclips of those bits to have all the footage handy, since those bits won’t group), organize the finished bin by color and alt-drag the red clips into a new bin.  Now you have all the work you did on the groups backed up, and you have the clips for the stringout ready to go in their own bin without the extra stuff you used to make them.  Drag those reds (the ones you put into the new bin) into a new sequence and assuming you made them in chronological order in the first place, you’ll have a perfect string out of your footage, grouped or otherwise, that plays like one continuous clip reel.  Great, right?

Well, hitting 1-2-3-4-5-6 can be easy if you have ten or fifteen groups but what if you have sixty?    People make mistakes.  A lot.  Even when you have something so simple a trained dog could do it.  Well, for this, I brought in… a rat.

The R.A.T. 5, specifically.  It’s a gaming mouse.

This device was designed for video gamers who like using a PC.  The extra buttons are intended for special moves (haduken, etc.) or commands that allow careful aiming or firing special weapons.  Great, right?  But useless in the real world.  Well, no.  I used the same driver to program one button to type 1-2-3-4-5-6 and another Shift-control-G.  Now, once I have things synchronized, grouping is a snap.  Because it even has an option for multiple modes, I have one for grouping, one for multicam editing, one for color correction, etc.

There are newer R.A.T. models, but this one is fine.  If you get the bluetooth one, get a white mousepad though.  It’ll help preserve the device’s battery life.

Windows 8 Makes a Break For It

What does this have to do with film?  Everything.

A while back, Microsoft introduced the interface for Windows 8 with its new smartphones and let’s face it, most people think an OS is the interface.  More recently Microsoft showed us what “proper” Win 8 will look like as a teaser for the next batch of PCs.  The truth is I don’t think most computers will upgrade to 8 since it relies on using a touch screen interface on a PC and most people don’t have touch screens on their existing workstations or laptops.  So 8 will exist mostly on future PCs.

And tablets, apparently: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx

For a long time I’ve said that the power technology has to influence media production is in increasing the reach of humans across distances.  If you have an AE on set loading media into a drive and transmitting it to the editor in a post house in another location, you’re using tech to save time and money.  Such an arrangement means your editor can spot problems while you’re still in the field, saving time planning reshoots.

So what exactly does this tablet mean?

Tablets have enormous potential as media production tools.  On one hand they can store media for review and some light editing (with the right software) so you can work on a plane or something.  Sony has recently demonstrated its new tablet http://discover.store.sony.com/tablet/ can control other Sony devices.  I think the ultimate use of a Microsoft tablet is not just as a stand alone device, but as a control device for a workstation.

Some iterations of Avid software (like Curator) allow the PC to work like a terminal, letting the big server do the heavy lifting computations when pushing to a playout server or rendering a big movie.  Likewise, a tablet could be used as a terminal, like gotomypc.com thereby allowing the editor to work on something from thousands of miles away, with no equipment.  Also, it could work like a fancy keyboard, with total customization to the keyboard allowed, enabling specialist configurations for editing, gaming etc.  The only thing that this arrangement leaves out is tactile feedback, which is handy when you’re touchtyping.  Sometimes you don’t want to cover the image with your hand because you won’t be able to see the image you’re adjusting.

So I applaud Microsoft for its first taste of the future in a while.  And when Microsoft wants people to test it out, I volunteer!  Gorilla glass is killer.

Pickman’s Model

https://vimeo.com/38204631

I realized I hadn’t posted this here, despite making it live on Facebook and twitter. This film was made for less than $2K and you’d never believe it. It look amazing, due to some great actors and some clever use of cheap lighting, well planned shots (not to mention meticulous storyboards made after visiting the locations) and a soundscape crafted with an old fashioned tape recorder and some simple filters. Enjoy!

Some Handy Thoughts on Data

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000001476356&playerType=embed

The Maxdata Quad – It’s a hard drive – Review

I don’t usually buy external hard drives unless they are very specialized.  I’ve been eyeing the Drobo Pro for a few years now, because it comes with special software that enables you to RAID drives of different speeds and sizes without loss of space.  I like the Maxell iVDR because it is hardened to go in the field and shoot with an HDV camera.  I’ve even started looking at these new hard drives that come in a shell that is supposed to work like an airplane’s black box, protecting the data within from impact, fire and water.  So, what do I make of Maxell’s offering, the Maxdata Quad?  Maxell sent me a free one to review, and I have some thoughts.

The drive in question.

Well, it’s a hard drive.  It plugs in with USB 2, Firewire 400 & 800 and eSATA 3G.  It runs at 7200 RPM and it’s a hefty 2TB.  So, it’s big, it’s fast enough for backing things up (but not really as a media drive, unless you’re using a laptop and not running things in full HD) and it has a lot of handy plugs.  It needs an external AC adapter, but okay, so far, so good.

Look at all the pretty plugs

I used it a couple of different ways.  First, when it arrived, it was formatted in FAT32, which I imagine is so Maxell could slap a “PC and Mac compatible” sticker on the box.  FAT32, for those of you who don’t know, is an archaic format developed by Microsoft in the good old days of XP to be Mac and PC compatible.  It’s fine, unless you need to make files bigger than 2GB.  Then it’s useless.  FAT32 literally can’t handle files over 2GB so if you try putting your video outputs there, it won’t let you.

Maxdata Quad (at right) beside two home made drives. The middle drive is 300GB at 10K RPM and the leftmost drive is 2TB at 7200 RPM

So, as a media drive, this thing is useless.  I needed to copy some media onto it and it just couldn’t handle it.  I had to reformat it, which isn’t a big deal, but if I didn’t know what I was doing, I’d be in a pickle.  I made this thing NTFS, though since I run Macdrive software on my HP Z800, I could have made it a Mac formatted disk just as easily.

As an NTFS disk, I plugged it in first as Firewire, which worked okay although the computer lost sight of it a couple times, then as USB, which hasn’t had any issues.  Honestly, I wish it were USB 3 because I have the card and it’s just as good as Firewire, which is not that useful anymore given the advent of thunderbolt.  Of course, neither of these plugs mean much with an eSATA port on the box.  With a spare eSATA cable from my RAID controller I plugged it in and whoosh!  Nice and fast.  As fast as an internal drive of the same speed.  I’ve been transcoding my work library from Quicktime to MP4 so I loaded the Quicktimes on the Maxell and made the transfers to my internal storage.  So far the only problem with any of this is that quicktime crashes if I tell it to convert too many files at once.

Maxdata looking like a Cylon

Maxdata drive front, no light

So, the drive is good.  Thumbs up.  The only question I ever have about an external drive is this: when the bus in the box dies, and it will one day, can I extract the drive and put it in another enclosure?  Lots of external drives fall down here.  If the bus dies and you can’t get the drive out and into another box, then you have a working hard drive but no workable way to get the data off it.  It’s like a Dalek in one of those Dalek pods with the batteries flat.

A Dalek, inside its Dalek exoskeleton thing. What happens to the Dalek when its exoskeleton runs out of juice? How will it get out?

Sadly, without having to pay Maxell for the privilege of ripping apart its drive with a screwdriver, I can’t tell for sure if this is an issue here.

The drive goes for $326 (retail) according to Maxell.  I’m sure if it’s made as well as the other Maxell products I’ve used it’s fine.  Still, $326 is a little steep unless you’ve got your back up against the wall.  For $129 at Newegg, you could get a comperable 2TB internal drive (I won’t say which one) and put it in a $30 box with all the same plugs as the Maxell (minus the Firewire) and of course, an internal drive in an external box can be unplugged from the box and put into the computer or another box later.  So the choice of buying a drive like this is a personal one.  If you don’t feel comfortable taking things apart, or you just can’t be bothered, it’s probably worth the extra money to buy this drive.  For the advanced user, it’s main strength is the multiple ports on the back.  That being the case, I’d be tempted to put in a 10,000 RPM drive and use it for full HD media.  Of course, I don’t know if I can do that, because I’d have to pay Maxell for the drive they sent me in order to open the box.

As for the Mac and PC compatibility issues, I think it’s a wash.  There is no point to keeping anything FAT32 these days.  Just reformat to NTFS or whatever you want and leave it at that.  A lot of the need to put things on a drive and go between Mac and PC is media and media files are too big to go on this thing if it’s FAT32, despite its overall capacity.

Drive makers need to understand they are competing with cloud storage, so their drives need to work for the kinds of things people send around better than the cloud does.  Cloud storage has some legal issues coming down the pike (see below) it takes more time than loading things onto a drive, good cloud storage is expensive and some cloud storage isn’t that secure.

In light of these issues, portable hard drives can make a case for themselves, provided that they take advantae of what makes them special.  I’ve already mentioned the “black box” hard drives that are damage resistant.  Then there is network operable stuff like Drobo.  If you aren’t either of those ultra-specialized drive makers, you have some challenges, but here’s the solution:

Portable drives need to be

a.) fast – at least 7200 RPM

b.) flexible – you should be able to take the drive out of the box if you want and there should be a lot of ports on it, like this one.

c.) in an ideal world, the drive should come with a software package that adds the value of making it compatible with multiple platforms without needing some special format or software installed on the drive itself.

I know someone who uses Dropbox to send things between two computers in his own house.  Crazy.  Cloud storage runs into some of its unique problems.  If Maxell bundled software that enabled Mac to PC and PC to Mac disk reading, then the drive could be formatted in some sane format and there would be a lot of added value to the product.  I’m talking about a disc with software, not something loaded onto the drive.  Drives should be malleable.  I don’t like being told it has to be formatted one way or another.  They could even keep the PC and Mac compatible sticker on the box and mean it.  As it stands, for my purposes, it’s an expensive backup drive.   If you’re not a tinkerer though and you need a massive bucket of storage (and you don’t have files bigger than 2GB) go for it.

The Vicissitudes Of Media

I had a really unpleasant surprise this week when my computer, while in the midst of prepping media for an editing gig, decided to stop seeing one of two drives in a striped RAID configuration.  To fix this I had to unplug the hard drives in the RAID, plug them in with different cables (just in case) copy off the data to a safe, albeit slow hard drive and reformat the media drives, plug them in again with fresh cables, copy the media back and prep a second RAID just in case the first one decided to off itself again.  This has been going on now for nearly 3 days.

What a nightmare.  I have a new 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black HDD that I just formatted and put into Rosewill RX358 V2 enclosure in case I need the extra space again, only this time I did the smart thing and got a drive with some speed.  This one is 7200rpm whereas the other drive, which is still going after a day and a half (with about 8 hours left it says)  is as slow as slow can be and is infuriating me and making my clients uncomfortable.  I really hate USB 2.0 as well.  It’s too slow for me.  I want a USB 3 card but what’s the point when most devices still don’t use the format?  The nice thing about the Rosewill drives is they come with a PCI slot cover with a SATA cable attached so I could run it to the motherboard (I still have two SATA slots left) instead of running it to USB, but to install that I’d have to pull an existing PCI card because I’m using every slot.  I think there’s one slot left but the video card in my machine is so big that it takes up the slot.  What I feel like I need is another 3 PCI slots!  In the meantime, I am using both my RAID cards so I at least I can feel like I’m getting my money’s worth there.

But let me get back to the inciting incident.  What happened?  I was using Plural Eyes to sync up some media, I was ingesting new video into Avid Media Composer from a firewire Mac Drive and I was doing nothing else.  Suddenly one of the two drives in my striped RAID went down.  It still showed up on the RAID software, but was grayed out.  I suppose the Mac drive might have confused my computer or something in as much as I need to use third party software just to look at it, but in the end I couldn’t take the chance that it was a one time snafoo.  I didn’t have a spare RAID with the space for the media I was working with so I had no choice but to copy it to the slow external drive.  Had I known that freeing up the space on what I now have as a second RAID wouldn’t take more than a few hours, I’d have done that and copied everything over that way.  It would have been a lot faster, but given the amount of time it took to set up those drives and the amount of time it takes to copy nearly 1TB of data, I don’t know if it’d have made a meaningful difference in the time it took to set up.  Anyway, the damn USB drive is transferring data at 6.39 MB/sec and has 174 GB to do.  That’s 178176 MB.  That’s a lot of seconds.

Or about 8 hours.  Take your pick.

Anyway, I have regrouped the drives as a new RAID, reformatted them and checked for errors.  No errors.  So they’re getting copied to.  The data is safe.  I’m just angry that it took so long to fix something on a time sensitive project that was already taking forever because of having to sync up the sound to the picture.  Ugh.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire – What it is, what it should be

As you probably heard, Amazon has its new E-reader, the Kindle Fire and pretty soon you’ll be able to buy it.  It’s a pretty cool idea.  Let me break down what it is:

1.) A new E-reader.  Okay, not necessarily any better than the old kindles, with its iPad like screen with color.  Its hard drive should handle more books though, assuming you haven’t clogged it with apps.

2.) A Honeycomb device.  Yes, with a version of Android and the ability to install certain approved apps, it’s an Android.

3.) An AMAZING deal.  $199 for the most expensive one, pushing down the cost of all the other kindles.  The cheapest kindle is now $79.  No bullshit.

4.) An Amazon Store.  Yes, now you can buy Amazon stuff anywhere you can connect the device to the internet.

There of course limitations on the device.  First and foremost, it’s smaller than an iPad, which may be good or bad depending on how you intend to use it.  It doesn’t have a mobile connection beyond wifi, which some people may find hard to handle (of course, I have a mobile hotspot in my phone, so there’s no need to fret about that with me) but the biggest question shouldn’t be what it is or isn’t but what it should be.

Mobile devices like the iPad and the kindle are in a funny place in the realm of usefulness.  On one hand, they mean not having to carry books or a laptop if all you want do is write an email, read a book or watch a video.  On the other hand, they aren’t great for writing anything long (unless you opt for a keyboard, like with the Transformer) and they have limited capability because of their drive size and in many cases, an inability to attach an SD card.

I like that the Kindle fire pushes the price point down, way down in fact, but what I’d like to see from these devices before I spend any money on one are the following features:

1.) easily make presentations with them.  I want a projector that connects wirelessly with the device, or a laptop.  That makes it much more useful.

2.) Video editing.  I think the larger devices like an iPad are well situated for video editing provided that the app doesn’t try too hard (not too many effects etc.), can connect to a computer after (output your project file and media to say, an Avid workstation) and finally, I’d like to see more of an ability to connect to external storage so you can work more easily.  If I could plug a 64gb sd card into an iPad, edit in low res from that and match my project file to the HD files on my Avid, I’d be a pig in shit.  Adobe, take note.  You too, Final Cut Pro.

3.) network with other devices.  I think it’d be amazing if I could carry say an iPad around in a backpack, snap some shots with a DSLR and wirelessly transmit them to the iPad where I could edit them in photoshop, rather than having to lug around a laptop.  It doesn’t have to be full photoshop, but just a few more of the basic tools from Adobe (more than you get in Photoshop Express) would be magnificent.  Couple that with software that allows you to send the photos home to a printer and you’ve got a great setup.

I think right now we’re at the stage where people marvel at the tech without really knowing what to do with it.  People need to get over the niftiness and get down to the business.  Tools are tools.  What you do with them is entirely up to you and your creativity.

Netsplitz

Apparently Netflix is about to have a major split.  I don’t think this is the best idea.  Unless there is a major problem with the DVD rental model or the streaming model there’s no advantage in creating a new brand.  The Netflix brand may have lost 1 million of its 25 million subscribers when it decided to nearly double its fees, but it’s confusing to constantly rebrand and honestly, the people who really care about this stuff will know it’s really Netflix under a new name, so it won’t confuse the right people anyway.

Netflix, if you want to improve things, here’s what you need to do:

1.) Keep your business as one brand.  Save the money you’d otherwise spend on new marketing and just provide more value for the customers.

2.) Become a theatrical distributor.  Or buy one.  Either way, you’re positioned well to take a few risks on back end deals, buying indie films otherwise in financial and distribution limbo, then flogging them to renters, and finally Netflix subscribers.  Get the jump on the increasingly niche indie market.

3.) Try developing some of your own content.  With Google in the game, developing its own content, Netflix should provide some sort of “free” content on its site (like the BBC iPlayer, which shows recent BBC programming for free) and then the bulk of its available programming on the subscription service.  New model.  No FCC.  Show whatever content you like.

And just in case you don’t think that growth and moving up in the world is that important because hey, you don’t have to worry about much competition, think of RIM (the creators of the Blackberry) and then read this.  Yes, Facebook is moving into your territory.  Be afraid Netflix.  Be very afraid.

And that’s it.  Really.  Netflix, you’re going the wrong way right now.  Think big.  Don’t have a split personality.