Who Watches the Middle Men?

I have been doing a lot of travelling lately. This means I've been spending a lot of time in hotel rooms.

As an avid consumer of movies and music, I've been surprised to discover that I have been spending an equal amount of time thinking about the process to consume media, as I have had time to actually watch a movie. Beyond this I have had to purchase a pile of cabling and micro adapters just to make use the the "standard" HDMI port found on my hotel room television. Surprisingly, the most inconvenient part is deciding who to give my credit card number to and how I am going to buy the stuff I want to watch. Too many services are not compatible with each other and each other's hardware.

Why does it feel like 1994? Your best friend comes over and he's brought Donkey Kong Country but, since you have a Sega Genesis you can't pop in that cartridge and start playing.

See this? My phone is charging right now in a great little dock. Too bad the dock doesn't work with any other  phone.

In 2012 - Why do we need a middle man?

I am currently on the road with a company issued MacBookPro, a Blackberry Bold 9700, a Blackberry Playbook, and a Palm Pixie Plus. We have an iPad at home, as well as Windows workstations and a huge DVD, CD, and vinyl collection. In short - I already own everything I should need. I have bought the content, and I have the hardware. Piles of hardware. So much hardware, my closet is overfilling with proprietary adaptors and packaging. I have bought 6 cellphones in 9 years. And yet last night when my phone couldn't open a PDF file I think "well I guess I need to buy xxxxxxxxxxxx".


Locked to EcoSystems:
Historically consumers have been punished with inconvenient upgrade paths that forced them to buy the same thing over and over. Vinyl to CD, VHS to DVD, NES to Wii. We have all purchased something we love more than once. This came blanketed under the guise of product improvement. DVD was better than VHS so there was a discernible reason to upgrade and we all fell for it.

A quick peek at a few digital distribution services:

iTunes - great pay to play model. Huge library. Most content is not available on non-Apple devices (ie books, apps, & movies. Only music is cross-platform to an extent)

Netflix - great pay to subscribe model. Huge library. Not compatible with the Blackberry Playbook or Linux.

Amazon Prime - great pay to subscribe or purchase model. Not available when I return to Canada.

MOG - great pay to subscribe or purchase model. Great quality for streaming music. Not available when I return to Canada.

Broadcast streaming services - useless unless you have a good internet connection, ie: not hotel wifi.

Google Play - an "open" store on an "open OS". Not compatible with non-Android tablets & phones.

Zune - amazing music service, great subscription or purchase model, nice looking client. Only available for Windows.

Steam - PC & Mac game store. If you buy a game and both PC & Mac versions are available - you get both. Pretty good but it would be great if this was extended to Xbox and Playstation.


Direct from publisher.
As listed above, all current distribution models are hampered by hardware, software, and international law. Why can't I give Bioware $15 for the ability to license the videogame Bioshock? I bought the game for PC, but why would I buy it again if I wanted to get a Playstation?

As I made mention in my RIAA rant a few months back, when you "purchase" content you don't "own" anything except the physical packaging it ships with. You are simply licensed permission to playback the content on that closed system. If you are a computer programmer you are not allowed to alter the game as it ships. If you are a DJ you can't play an album at a club. If you are a video editor you can't recut a scene of your favourite movie and post it on YouTube. Think no one is keeping score? It's ok because "everyone does it anyways"? Take a look at the classic Downfall memes being pulled from YouTube, and hair-dressers putting on their favourite CD only to get fined by SOCAN.

The Blackberry Playbook has standard ports like Micro-USB and Micro-HDMI - no need for proprietary dongles & breakout adaptors. No Netflix and no Skype applications cripple functionality.

Light at the end of the tunnel: HTML 5
An up-and-coming web standardization of HTML 5 could potentially solve a number of problems, most notably the "app" debacle. Eventually browsers will be powerful enough to run applications - so there will no longer be need for the App Store. You could in theory get the same Angry Birds experience on your iPad, Kindle Fire, and PC - all without having to purchase the same game 3 times for 3 different platforms.

An end to hardware, a beginning to services
Now that virtually everyone owns good enough hardware - be it a computer, cellphone, tablet or game console - hopefully we'll see more standardization. I can use my Netflix account on my computer, or on a Wii at a friend's house, and the same settings, preferences, and user information carries over. This situation unfortunately happens very rarely. If you moved from an iPhone to Android and wanted all the same Apps you use, you would have to buy them again - even if it is the exact same product. Hopefully we will see a not too distant future where we have universal logins with settings and services that follow you, where ever you go. Cloud services could do this, but we are too rooted in closed system design. I don't want my Apple phone talking to my Apple computer. I want my work computer talking to my home computer talking to the computer at the library talking to my phone or whatever. Punch in one log-in and everything is there.

One service, that does everything. So I can keep buying new music, new movies, and new applications. I don't have to think about it - it just works.

That would be cool.

Auto Create Titles!

Manually entering titles such as lower thirds is not very much fun. Marquee, a suite of title tools included with Avid Media Composer and Avid DS, has a unique "AutoTitler" tool. 

Simply assign your titles "Title 1" and "Title 2" names within the layers menu (see video for a better explanation)

Then format your titles in a list within a text editor

Title 1

Title 2

Title 1

Title 2

Or

James

Director

Alfred

Editor

etc. etc. etc. Marquee can now chomp through your list and while referring to your layout, automatically create corresponding title media!

Chances are that a Producer will be handing you a document of titles anyways, so simply create the layout once, and never manually enter a title again!

Dark Roast Post - now on Facebook

Dark Roast Post is now on Facebook! "Like this" @ facebook.com/darkroastpost

My Favourite Chroma Key Plug - BCC Chroma Key

My favourite of all the Boris Continuum plug-ins for Avid Media Composer is the BCC Chroma Keyer. It somehow just "automagically" works.

However in all truth, I would probably use the Avid keyer in a real world situation, because it is a real time plug. Then composite during the online. All depends on the scale of project.

3:2 pulldown properly

This is a fairly specific tutorial for a not unheard-of situation. Say you have material that is 23.98 and 59.94 and you need to finish in one format or another. By default Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro will import your mixed frame rate material and playback with 4:1 pulldown.

4:1 pulldown holds a frame to compensate for the difference in play speed. It's bad, you don't want this in your offline. Sadly, from reading on forums, some broadcasters will not accept material processed this way and some editors have a terrible time conforming their edit.

Final Cut Pro cannot properly convert material with 3:2 pulldown - all though the user manual suggests otherwise.

Avid can do it, but it's tricky. Take a look at my most recent video.

Tip: Use an enclosure for DVDs

DVDs can be pretty great. However, they are disappearing. You may find yourself in a situation where you need to load something from DVD, but you don't have a drive. Maybe your new laptop doesn't have one, or the one in your desktop is burned out. Or you want to do a disc-to-disc transfer.

You might have one of these kicking around:

A Firewire 400/USB 2 external hard drive enclosure. 

I pulled out the interface card from the enclosure, since it will not fit a DVD ROM.

Why I Bought a Powermac G5 in 2011

Power PC might be dead as far as a developer is concerned. But some of these machines have substantial productive usage. This is one of those "if it isn't broken..." moments where dropping an old piece of tech to the curb might be a little hasty.

see also:

For a mere $200 I recently purchased a Powermac G5. Despite the fact that the platform was abandoned by Apple exactly 5 years ago, I am surprised at how useful this machine is. 

I made the purchase because I tried to give up on Apple hardware cold turkey. I am not satisfied with Apple and the computers it currently sells. I built a modest PC for a mere $700. I am generally happy with Windows 7, it  does everything I need to do, and almost all the software I use is cross platform. The only exception was Logic Pro 8, which I legitimately purchased. Logic 8 is Universal Binary, meaning it can run on both Power PC and Intel Macintoshes. 

I tried the Hackintosh thing. I was successful at installing OS X on a number of PCs. However that is another post.

My Powermac G5's score

Geekbench is a method of benchmarking a system. It is not an entirely accurate method of measurement, because it bases its results on theoretical performance of your processor and hard disks, not real life usage. It does however put a quick number on things to visualize a computers abilities. 

The current entry level Mac is the $599 Mac Mini i5. It runs a respectful score of 5839. We should add $80 to this cost for the now optional optical drive, because would need it to install software. 5839 divided by $680 equals a cost per performance of 8.5

The G5 runs at a rate of 8.7 cost per performance. So both computers are basically the same overall value. The Mini is faster, the G5 is cheaper. The Mini can run more modern software, but the G5 allows me to upgrade easily, things like ESATA, multiple internal hard drives, all very cheaply.

Actual uses:

Logic Pro 8: You can get a Universal Binary license for cheap considering Logic 9 is $500. Logic 9 didn't add too many new features, and offers a discounted price for upgrade licenses. 

Pro Tools 8: Pro Tools is well known for having a compatible architecture. You can easily move sessions around from different versions to different editions. LE to HD to M-Powered, all your edits are right where you left them. Just watch out for the plug-ins you use. The same version of the plug-ins must be installed on whatever system you are moving your sessions to.

Final Cut 6: Still a perfectly good offline system. The method in which Final Cut lets you setup your sequence has always been a benefit and a hassle at the same time. You can edit in whatever codec you have installed be it Pro Res, DVCProHD, or even DNxHD. 

DNxHD plz

Compressor: Treat your Final Cut Pro projects the way that Avid does (and FCPX for that matter): You should transcode all of your material into one format.  You need to pick a codec that is appropriate for the quality of source media you have. This is usually Pro Res (not necessarily HQ) in the Final Cut world, and DNxHD 145 (only use 220 when you need too) in Avid. Rendering Quicktimes of either final quality picture or something as simple as a screener tends to render quicker in Compressor using a Quicktime reference, or the send to Compressor button.

Most of CS3: Photoshop and After Effects work. Premiere not so much. Just pray you don't have to roto anything.

iLife '04: Sometimes you just need or want something quick. You don't want to think about it or wait for it to load. iPhoto lets me navigate my projects quickly, without rendering the faces of everyone I know into separate albums. Garageband v1 is amazingly fast, stable, and useful for a quick practice. Even iMovie can be useful for slamming a few clips together, without constantly being in hover scrub mode.

 

We live in an offline/online world. Even with advances in hard drive technology, simply dumping everything full resolution on a timeline is foolish. Cut in a lower resolution codec that is versatile. When it is time for your colour correct, relink the media you need to a higher resolution. Not doing this will cost you equally with logistics of managing that much data effectively, let alone render time. So why spend let's say... $6000 on a top of the line offline edit suite? I'm not suggesting that going around and buying up obsolete machines is a good idea, but would a $3000 setup deliver 1/2 of the performance? How many times faster or slower would you edit? Maybe buying mulitple budget machines would give you more real life usage. Let something compress on one machine, then focus solely on another. Also, if you don't need the features of the latest software release, why not buy up old licenses for cheap?

What I am most happy about: the piece of mind of being able to crack open my own system. Little known fact: current iMacs run proprietary hard drive connectors that only Apple manufactures of course. All hard drives fail. I wouldn't want some salesperson at the genius bar say something like "Oh well it costs so much to repair your old drive, you may as well buy a new computer". A hard drive costs less than $50 and shouldn't be a big mystery in life to upgrade and swap out.

It's all about the GPU, why "Mac Pro" is an Oxymoron

If there is one company that has seen a little too much of the spotlight, it's Apple. But, let's face it, the post-modern cheese grater design of the G5 and subsequent Mac Pro has become "a" (not "the") gold standard in the field of media production. However it's CPU vs GPU pairing is by nature, unusual.

The Processor: Intel Xeon. The Xeon is a special flavour of CPU in that it is only used in "Workstation" computing and Servers. They traditionally have multiple-cores, and large caches. The Mac Pro utilizes a Xeon processor making it a "Workstation"

The Xeon in a Mac Pro is just too much power for too little application, and by application I mean applications. In real world media production, Xeon sales are attributed to Avid turnkey systems running on HP or Dell hardware. They are also used on Autodesk turnkey systems running Suse or Red Hat Linux. On the Mac Pro... well, Final Cut Pro drives the sales, which is only a 32-bit application and takes very little advantage of that extra CPU power. Annoyingly, Apple has gone all ATI for it's GPU lineup which by nature is incompatible with Avid and Autodesk, and offers less performance from Adobe. 

Standards are not Features: eSata, PCI, USB 3.0, Blu Ray, VGA, DVI. HDMI, FireWire 400... These are all things you'll find on most mid to high end PCs. My brother has a 2 year old mid level HP laptop that has most of these things, why not a high-end Mac?

The Graphics: standard fare. The Mac Pro has never come in a baseline configuration with a professional GPU. The NVidia GT120, or recently the ATI 5770 are very middle-of-the-road gaming cards (at time of release). Multiply the fact that the Mac Pro only sees an annual revision, no other $2000+ computer on the market will ship with an outdated $100-$200 GPU. It is generally accepted that the Quadro and the FirePro are both considered to be the definition of "professional graphics", with marketing favour leaning towards NVidia Quadro.

The GPU issue is more of a deal than you might think. Graphics today, are powerful. There has been an explosion of cheap, high performance cards being put onto market. It seems like putting a date on a piece of technology today is pointless, but a $100 graphics card today can out perform a $1,000,000 supercomputer from 10 years ago. The GPU has become an essential component of media production at all levels. Just as important as your CPU and RAM.

So this is where the Mac Pro gets weird. The only tower design in Apple's product line starts at $2500. So Apple doesn't sell too many of them and rightfully so. However this creates an unhealthy third-party eco-system. It doesn't make sense for ATI and NVidia to develop new drivers and hardware for Apple, because they can only potentially sell a few thousand units to a niche market. Majority of the already small number of users will stick with the base configuration, and not purchase new cards as they are released. So when big breakthroughs happen in the graphics world, Apple users are left in the cold.

The ATI Radeon 5770 card that currently ships in the $2500 Mac Pro is priced at newegg.com for a mere $144. A similar workstation the HP Z400 comes equiped with a Quadro 1800, a "workstation" graphics card.

I think Apple should create just a "Mac". A desktop class CPU and a desktop class GPU. I would buy a Core i5 or i7 desktop with an NVidia GTX immediately, and many students and media professionals would too.

Q: FCP or Avid? A: It Doesn't Matter

Final Cut Pro or Avid is one question I hear all too often from film students and friends. People get really passionate about it too: 

"Final Cut is like $100,000 cheaper than Avid."

"Avid is more professional."

"Avid is too hard."

"Final Cut is too easy."

"You can't do *insert needless technical information here* in *insert edit software here.*

"Final Cut comes with all these great programs, like Motion."

"Final Cut comes with prosumer software... like Motion."

Some people think that Apple is a mystical Jedi Knight out to destroy the evil empire that is Avid Technology. This drives me nuts, they are 2 companies that are fighting for market-share, and at the end of the day, this brings the overall cost of software lower.

For most major projects, and by major I mean something that will air on television, be released on DVD, or even played theatrically, you'll be living in the offline/online world. You, the editor, will use whatever software you want to create an offline edit. Your assistant editor will load the source material into the NLE (non-linear edit system) of your choice, and will keep track of paperwork like lined scripts and shot lists. You, the editor, will use the NLE to create an edit based on one thing: story. 

Once you have picture lock, things move into another stage of post-production. Someone else (ie. not you) will go and create titles and do colour grading. Someone else (ie. not you) will edit your sound and music. What I am saying is, as an editor, you edit. You are not a 3D effects wizard, a professional colourist, an online editor, a post sound designer, a surround sound mixer, or a VTR operator stamping out the final broadcast tapes. 

So as an offline editor, you can use whatever software you want so long as it can spit out an EDL. It could be Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Media 100, Lightworks, Adobe Premiere... Just not Final Cut Express (it can't log timecode). I know a very successful documentary editor/producer who uses an 8 year old Avid running on a Powermac G4. You can't even give away a G4 tower but this guy makes award winning docs, because it's just the offline.

Even if you play multiple roles, or produce your own shorts that no one will ever see, you should still somewhat follow the offline/online method. Don't create your titles in Final Cut Pro, use Adobe Photoshop and/or After Effects. Once you have locked picture, you import your newly created elements such as sound, graphics, and colour grading into a new session. 

On the technical forefront there is a difference between these 2 platforms, things that I will go into further detail later. But for now, put your mouse where your mouth is and actually cut something worth watching, no one will know what system you cut it on.

housekeeping

 

3 months, 52 episodes, 8TB of media, 12096 render files.

SGI Case Designs

One thing you don't see often in computer design is colour. Silicon Graphics had some amazing industrial designs, many of which still look good today. Counting down the top 5 SGI case designs.


5) Crimson (150mhz server, Its hot red, and it was in Jurassic Park.

4) Octane

3) Fuel (a 700mhz Fuel processor is equivalent to a 3Ghz Pentium 4)

2) Tezro (really weird design, and its HUGE)

1) O2+ (its small, has video capture abilities, and runs Maya)

VHS as an aesthetic

The actual visual qualities of a technical format bring about artistic decisions. Any given format has a certain "look". But for a filmmaker, these technicalities bring about presumptions: different formats say different things. Grainy Hi-8 video would be unusable for a serious drama production, but would be suitable for recreating a home video.

From an artistic and technical perspective, VHS is something of a black sheep. It has a low pixel ratio, grainy, prone to problems & drop outs, redubbing is a mess, and the audio quality is less-than-great. But just enough time has passed since VHS sailed off into the sunset that a certain nostalgic appreciation is now attached to the format. 

This music video was produced last year.

"video was recorded onto vhs. We wanted it to look like an 80s movie youve just found at the back of the cupboard. Doing it analogue gave it a real unique look that you cant create on a shiney computer. Keep it real. dugdale and the prodigy"

The footage certainly looks the part. However, I don't think this video was actually shot on VHS. The hallway scene 30 seconds in is suspect. The band members are cast in red, whilst the backdrop in green. But the shadows are a bit unrealistic. The group looks "on top" of the background, as if a composited layer. 

The VHS aesthetic is enough to make this uneventful video above average. 

Perhaps this is looking into this too much, but a low quality dubbed tape goes hand in hand with the culture of electronic music of the early 1990's, which is where The Prodigy originated. Aspiring DJs, or just hardcore fans would dub their favourite tracks onto cassette. Veterans would mix an MC overtop of the live dub to create their own versions. As a result of dubbing something so many times on cassette, the quality would degrade. 

This clip is from James Rolfe's blog Cinemassacre.com He's using 2 VCRs continuously dubbing the same video clip again and again to demonstrate generation loss. I'm a big fan of his blog and his Angry Video Game Nerd personna so check out his site.

where did tape go?

Nearly a year ago I went into a Best Buy looking for a Mini DV camcorder. I was quite surprised, they don't sell them anymore. Consumer camcorders have gone tapeless. Even smaller "boutique" electronics stores don't carry tape-based camcorders.

arguments against tapeless camcorders for you or your family:

• H264, AVCHD, etc. are not fun codecs to deal with
• Consumer edit software is not fun to deal with (especially the stuff that comes with the camera, ugh!)
• File management. Its difficult enough keeping track of digital photos. HD videos are huge. DVD-R has proven itself as an unreliable archiving format, same with portable drives.
• Having to offload all of your footage to keep shooting. Imagine a birthday party interrupted by an angry father "I'm trying to get the camera! jeez I have to download the MOVIES!" 
• How many people do you know who own an HDTV who have the aspect ratio set incorrectly? Imagine that with your home movies...

And the biggest benefit to having a tape-based camcorder: after a day of shooting you eject the tape and put it on a shelf. You can just keep taping material and pile up the tapes. Mini DV is a digital format, which can easily be transferred to a computer without notable loss in quality. Also, it is a really safe storage format. 

Lightworks (OpenSource)

Lightworks, a major NLE that was popular through out the 1990's, is going open source. In other words, free. I've never used Lightworks so I can't add much to this subject.

• available on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms
• support for QuickTime, MXF, DPX, R3D, DV, DVCPRO, XDCAM, P2, DNxHD, and Pro Res codecs
• up to 2k resolution

I can't wait to get my hands on this. Watch out Avid & Final Cut, its awful hard to compete with free.

further reading: 

http://library.creativecow.net/battistella_david/lightworks/1 

a great article by David Battistella, director & editor from Toronto.

http://www.editshare.com/?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=203 

Lightworks homepage, features technical information and press release style info.

Autodesk Smoke for Mac

Historically, all of Autodesk's high end product line (ie. Smoke, Flint, Flame, Inferno etc.) has only been available on "turn-key" systems. 

A turn-key system is a special combination of parts & software, that only in this conjunction, can run said program. For example Autodesk Flint, Flame, or Inferno can only run on an HP Z800 workstation, with an NVidia Quadro FX 5800, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The idea is that this computer's sole purpose in life is to run high end graphics software in a specialized post facility. 

This serves a purpose, I don't think anyone would invent a product-line like this without motive. The idea is that the absolute best drivers are written since the manufacturer knows exactly what combination of components the end-user is running. The result is a software/hardware relationship that brings huge gains in performance. 

I saw this teaser this morning and got quite excited.

Sadly, after noodling about, I discovered that the Macintosh requirements are nearly as steep as the Linux requirements. The price for the software alone is $15,000. Add that to the hardware priced at $8000 and you have a very high end on-line suite. But with a price that high, I don't really see the value in porting Smoke to the Mac. I mean the Mac Pro is a great piece of gear, but for that much money and exclusivity, why not stick with the Linux turn-key? The Mac might be better at crunching codecs like Pro Res or DNxHD. I guess it can't hurt the Mac and offers an alternative if Red Hat goes belly-up.

I downloaded the trial version and managed to get through the installer without too much hassle. I'm running the baseline iMac with integrated graphics so I wasn't expecting much. Somehow, after failing all hardware requirements, the program started! It looks a little funky seeing as I don't meet the 1920x1200 display resolution requirement.

8 Core FAIL

So there you have it: Smoke on an iMac. I'm busy writing a new mash-up right now, hopefully I'll get some compositing done before the trial expires.

An open letter to the RIAA: be less evil

Piracy, file-sharing, torrents, "I didn't know it was stealing", whatever.

A lot has been written about the current state of media consumption post-Napster. One thing I'd like to bring up today is ownership.

When you buy a CD (for example) you own the physical product that is the plastic disc. You in no way own the music contained on the disc. The RIAA simply allows you to listen to it. The fact that CDs can be ripped onto a computer is more or less a happy accident. The digital signal is being converted into another form of digital signal (a closed audio source to a computer file). Record companies by the way don't want you to do this.

Now, I own a big ol' shoe box of cassette tapes. I can't "rip" them to my computer, it is an analog medium. To enjoy the music I have on cassette on a computer would entail me buying the music again, on another format. I own 3 copies of Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream. 1 on CD, 1 on cassette, and 1 on vinyl. And I paid full price for all of them.

Record companies were initially against adopting MP3 as a means of delivery. They wanted to hang onto the CD and whatever format they wanted to succeed it. Since MP3 was not of their inception, they wouldn't back it.

The industry totally dropped the ball on the switch to digital. When I look at the iTunes store I think "This is great, but we should have had this 10 years ago... And not owned by Apple". Sony tried with Mini Disc but couldn't get enough adopters.

To create a happy digital domain, an easy upgrade path should exist. Imagine walking into HMV with your box of cassettes. You get the barcodes scanned as a "proof of purchase" and get discounted MP3 versions in return. This could go for vinyl, 8-track, or whatever... Laserdisc and Beta. The point is, the consumer shouldn't be punished, ever. Instead of filling lawsuits against individuals, the industry should be embracing their business past and present.

The digital domain is still a mess. Piracy has never been more rampant. There is no standard, and Apple (of all companies) has a stranglehold on the music industry. It didn't have to come to this.

Through this process music has been devaluated. Ever notice that very few new musicians break into the scene? It seems like the only promoted artists made their money in the 1990's or earlier.

I guess what is clear, is that the industry no longer has control of its own product. People can find, listen, buy, pirate and share whatever they want. Broadcasted music videos are a thing of the past, the radio has never been more predictable. People will just have to navigate themselves, guided by their own interests. How it makes its way onto your iPod is entirely up to you.


*UPDATE 24/09/2010

I was looking up info on Scott Pilgrim vs the World on Amazon. It will be released on Blu Ray, DVD, and a digital copy all in the same package. Looking a little more I saw that Kick Ass has also been released this way. Great news, buying these combo packs will eventually give me an excuse to buy a Blu Ray player. I guess that's being a little less evil.