Category: Post-Production
I first heard the name “Final Cut Pro” in November of 2001. This was when a producer asked me to get up to speed on it for a corporate gig the following January. It was probably the very next day that I read online that Final Cut Pro was going to be sold.
It’s a rumor that won’t die.
Ever.
This years’ rumors have a slightly different tenor. Apple pulled out of NAB. For whatever reason they state, with $18 billion cash in the bank – money isn’t the issue. Or – at least, potential access to money isn’t the issue. This non-MBA imagines that Jobs forces each division to stand on its own and if ProApps has money problems such that they didn’t think a booth was worth the expense… perhaps they’re having trouble meeting their margins. At least Avid has an excuse for its NAB disappearing act that Apple doesn’t, Avid is undergoing a major re-organiztion. They’ll be back at NAB once their new strategy is ready to roll.
If you want to read what I consider the most interesting analysis on Apple selling ProApps, then check out this article by Robert X. Cringley.
Cringley’s analysis helped me gather my thoughts on something else that is bothering me about Apple’s handling of its ProApps division. And its has me starting to wonder if Apple is the best company to manage the Final Cut Studio array of products. Specifically, it’s Apple’s handling of BluRay that’s the heart of my misgivings.
None of Apple’s ProApps support BluRay DVD creation. Final Cut won’t export to BluRay. Compressor won’t encode to BluRay. DVD Studio Pro won’t author BluRay. Not a single Mac ships with BluRay playback or burning. And my wife’s business is getting weekly calls for BluRay duplication and authoring.
For the first time in my memory, Apple has fallen behind my customers!
Why? Why? Why is Apple forcing me to consider buying Adobe Encore or (hissssss) a PC-based authoring tool for a need my clients want today?
It drives me nuts that a company so forward-thinking is dropping the ball on next-generation content creation. As Cringley points out in an earlier article on Apple’s (lack of) BluRay strategy, the answer is probably summed up in one concept: High-Def Downloads.
In other words: Apple’s consumer strategy is now at odds with its development of its ProApps product line.
Is it possible that Apple no longer deserves to handle the ProApps division? Has Apple finally reached its inflection point where it will sacrifice its traditionally strong and loyal ProApps customers for its newfound success in content delivery?
I don’t know.
I know this: For the first time in 7 years I’m not discounting the Cringley analysis. For once, the rumors may be true.
If Apple does sell the Pro Apps division at a time when it’s still holding back on delivering BluRay creation tools… I’ll say, good riddance – it was a great ride but it will have been time for both businesses to move on.
UPDATE 1: Not everyone buys Cringley’s analysis.
- pi
I’m just bubbling up to the surface after 2.5 weeks of non-stop Color’ing. 10 hour days. 600 shots / day. Fair amount of secondary isolations with vignettes. Exhausting. More exhausting than I expected.
I usually have a few intense days of color correction that are followed by a day or two of finishing. I switch gears fairly regularly. 10 hour days are common and not too stressful.
On this past job I was downtown at Outpost Digital working as a freelancer on a Discovery series (all other details of the job are embargoed). I had the luxury of an Assistant Editor prepping timelines for the Color roundtrip and a Finisher to handle the graphics, formatting, & outputs. For me, it was all color correction all the time.
I was able to turn around 50+ minutes of footage, about 600-700 shots, in 13-16 hours across two 10-hour days. Essentially, an episode every 1.5 days (including client revisions). By each Friday I was completely wiped out. Far more so than if I put in a 50-hour week doing finishing. I contacted a friend who’s a long-time colorist about his stamina on the job. I was wondering if his eyes were used to the routine.
Apparently not.
While he’s no stranger to much longer days – he also finds diminishing returns after the 10-hour day. His words:
“I hear you 10 hours and I’m done. I start to loose my peripheral vision and I know it’s time to rest. Longer than 10 hours the slower I go to the point when I realize how long this is taking and stop. I’ve worked in a few places and when I was at the CBC they had a nice monitor surround to take some of the stress off your eyes. In my new place I have some strips of white LEDs behind the monitor and until they finish the room this will have to do. I had a killer week last week and I wish I had the Herman Miller chair that I had from my last company. This makes a big difference as well.”
Dittos on the Herman Miller chair (the one with lumbar support and tilt forward control).
In the future I need to dial back client expectations so my eyes are as fresh on Friday as they are on Monday.
- pi
In a previous post I lamented the high costs of BluRay replication for short runs (less than 5,000 pieces).
These costs can be attributed directly to the mandatory copy protection scheme (DRM) for the BluRay specification. Not only will a company like my wife’s (Dubs by Pam) have to pay a one-time fee to place orders on behalf of her customers. Her customers will have to pay a per-title fee. And these fees are non-trivial for these types of short runs, $5500 for the duplication house, $1900 for each title (according to Larry Jordan on Digital Production Buzz).
Why, I ask myself, must they (the AACS) keep ringing us up for copy protection when almost none of our clients want to pay for it now or for the foreseeable future?
Ars Technica has the rather in-my-face-now-that-I’m-looking-for-it answer: The AACS needs to keep paying for continual development of new DRM schemes because they know they’ll be cracked every few months. I betch’a if my accountant took a look at their books, that line item on their Income Statement is probably the budget for creating new “uncrackable” codes.
What a joke.
The only way the large motion picture distributors will ever be able to keep their content from being illegally distributed is to implement DRM directly in the human optical system. Otherwise, if they want us to buy their DVDs to watch a movie at home – at some point the signal must be decrypted for the digital-to-analog conversion and that will always be the point of attack. You can’t have mass distribution while having a lock-solid distribution method – then it’s not mass distribution.
So. The AACS maintains the fiction of DRM for the movie studios and the rest of us have to pay. Literally.
I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining too loudly – it makes services such as those offered by Dubs by Pam that much more economically feasible…
Still – the short-sightedness of the whole DRM racket is stunning.
- pi
UPDATE 2: It’s been commented to me that my opening line, “Color is broken” is a bit extreme. I’d agree – if you work in a purely progressive frame workflow or a purely interlaced workflow that involves no resizing, distorts, or anamorphic flags – Color is fine. For the rest of us… I think it’s broken. (In fact, I had a meeting this afternoon where I made clear my preference for progressive with no mixed formats in a single timeline)
But absolutely – decide for yourself if this bug breaks Color for you.
—————
UPDATE 1: More on the Geometry Room issue I mention in the original posting – A posting on the Apple message board mentioned that he uses the Geometry Room to zoom in on skin tones to check them in the scopes to see that they properly lay on the skin tone line (something I first saw suggested in the Ripple Training Color tutorials ). He’d then click the reset button in the Geometry and move on to his next task. In my own testing I’ve confirmed that this is enough to force Color into flame blending mode of interlaced footage. Pressing reset doesn’t help. Once a shot is flagged as having touched the Geometry Room – that shot is toast.
If you have an external CRT hooked up to your system (you do, don’t you?) it’s easy to confirm that this is happening. Just park on a frame that exhibits the typical jitter of interlaced footage (most evident when there’s lots of motion on the screen). Go into the Geometry Room and change a setting. The jitter disappears. Color has suddenly decided to frame-blend this shot. Click Reset. The jitter doesn’t re-appear (like it would in previous versions of Color). The shot is still flagged for flame-blending. Switch to a new grade. Still no jitter. Whatever else is happening, switching grades doesn’t fix the problem.
I haven’t found a workaround to this particular problem.
————————–
Color is broken.
But before I get to the specifics, some quick background.
There’s an old problem that dates back to Color’s Final Touch days, before the Apple purchase. In those days (and to a certain extent, these days as well) you had to be very very careful how you handled interlaced footage. Color was originally designed for high-end Digital Intermediate work – which means it was optimized to for a film-based progressive RGB workflow.
It wasn’t until after development was well under way before the original management team decided to open up the software to High Def and Standard Def formats. In doing so, they never really solved how to get Color to handle interlaced footage if that footage had to be blown up, shrunk down, or repositioned. If you “repo’ed” a shot and that shot was recorded on an interlaced codec, all you got back was mush. That “mush” ranged from slightly softening the image to horribly destroying the image, depending on the nature of the content.
To get semi-technical: The problem exhibits itself as really bad frame blending.
When Color was released, Apple decided to avoid the whole “mushy image” problem by having Color ignore all Motion Tab effects and let FCP handle that portion of the job. It was a smart way to address the issue. And it worked. With emphasis on the past tense.
Interlace footage is broken again in Color 1.0.2.
In my testing last week I found that when it comes to handling Standard def footage there was only one way to avoid the “mushy image syndrome”. That’s by being sure both these are true for any project I send to Color:
1. No repo’s, distorts, or anamorphic flags on the footage.
2. The FCP timeline frame size must be a preset that exists in Color. For instance, 960×720 always renders with frame blending – no matter what and regardless of the previous Condition #1.
(Note: A recent posting on the Apple Discussion Board suggests that even doing a “repo” in the Geometry Room and then canceling it out is enough for Color to frame blend its renders)
What does this mean to those of us still working in the SD world?
It means we now have to go through our timelines and strip all motion effects from our timelines before color correcting. And then add them back one-by-one after color correcting.
This is NOT progress. It’s been a year since I’ve had to do this and I had hoped we had put this behind us.
For all the nifty improvements in Color 1.0.2 – for me and my clients – this workflow is not worth the pain. But there’s a question that, after a weekend of pondering, I haven’t found an answer:
Is it safe to reinstall just Color and upgrade it only to Color 1.0.1?
The Color 1.0.2 upgrade happened in conjunction with the entire Final Cut Studio 6.0.2 upgrade. And that upgrade contain some very important bug fixes within Final Cut Pro.
So do I add a half day to every job to handle the new bugs in Color 1.0.2? Or do I add a half day to every job because Final Cut Pro 6.0.1 loses my renders and I have spend 4 hours re-rendering?
My head’s spinning here. And my favorite people in the world who’ve I’ve never met (the entire FCP and Color teams) are responsible for it.
Is this the perfect Monday morning blog post, or what?
HD-DVD is dead!
Long live Blu•ray??
Not so fast. In the current issue of Digital Production Buzz’s newsletter (I’d link to the actual piece but the content is refreshed every week) Larry Jordan lays out the costs of replicating on Blu•ray. I knew the costs were high since the Blu•ray spec requires copyright protection – and not just for Hollywood movies but also for your HDV baby pictures.
Or your demo reel.
How much? Here’s Larry’s breakdown:
- $2,500 : License Fee to author and distribute Blu•ray
- $3,000 : One-time fee to AACS. (I think this is billed per production company / individual)
- $1,585 : Per complete Blu•ray project
- $.04 : Four cents per disc. Fee paid to AACS
- $.01 : One penny per disc paid to Sony to handle all these payments on your behalf
So, for your first project licensing alone will cost $7,085. That’s in addition to the actual costs of replication/duplication and packaging that we’re already used to paying.
Idiotic.
If you were wondering why Sony spread their dollars around so liberally to pay off movie studios, you’ve got your answer.
It looks like Blu•ray is going to be the exclusive domain of the Studios. I guess the rest of us will have to settle for HD-DVD on standard DVD 5′s (except that the players won’t be made anymore).
Oh, and who is AACS? Just a couple of guys named IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros…
Huh. Suddenly this is starting to make sense…
UPDATE: The Avid-L list was on this discussion a week or so ago. It seems there is some compatibility issues with duplicated (not replicated) Bluray discs depending on the authoring software and the playback machines (which, of course, also bypasses all the fees detailed above). Apparently some Bluray players want to see a copy protection folder, even if it is empty and some authoring apps don’t put those folders on their burns.
Don’t ask me to confirm this… calls have only now just started to trickle in to our sister company Dubs by Pam asking about Bluray duplication. But this blog is named the Finishing Line and for many clients, delivery will soon become straight-to-DVDBluray.
- pi
Join Us
listen
Meet Your Colorist: Patrick talks Color Grading, Finishing, Workflows, Final Cut Color
via Digital Production Buzz