The Cutting Room Floor
dedicated to the art of film & all things post production
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Compositing…NLE or Third Party?
Compositing can be a very deep and complex subject, especially when dealing with animation, but here we’ll try and keep it fairly simple and straightforward. There is always talk amongst those in the industry when it comes to blue/green screen and working on an edit as to whether or not one should do their composite in whatever NLE software their working with or export to a third party software to handle the task. Unless your working with animation, the answer, like so many in post production questions is a not a simple one. Take for instance Avid, who has excellent composite tools available in their 3.0 versions ( and up ) that can do the job relatively pain free providing the ‘screen’ is a talking head or has minimal movement. Final Cut does a decent job too, providing your using the newly acquired Ultimatte software that was made available earlier this year. Both are good and most editor’s may prefer to use their NLE system to avoid the hassle of exporting and re-importing footage for what may be no difference other than minor ones no one notices.
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Apple’s ProRes Captures Nascar
It seems like Apple is weaving it’s way into the fast these days. As announced last year, NASCAR Media Group is preparing for a transition to HD, which will include a move into a new 40,000-square-foot facility in Charlotte North Carolina. The transition will also mark NASCAR Media Group’s move to an all Apple ProRes workflow. NMG is the primary television production company for the sport of NASCAR, is using Macs and 16 AJA Kona 3 cards for ingesting the 150 hours of multi-camera footage shot at each race. An additional 18 Kona 3 cards are used for editing playback in NMG’s 10 edit bays, as well as to handle duplication and new media, and to support field operations for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and NASCAR Nationwide Series. This polishes their existing DIVArchive System by adding this new Apple Interface.
“Bringing DIVArchive and Apple together in a unified environment will make it easy for producers and editors working in Final Cut Pro to restore content from anywhere within the system including the datatape library,” said Jeff Lowe, managing director for media and broadcast technology at NASCAR Media Group. “The flexibility of DIVArchive and our close partnership with Front Porch Digital are key to simplifying our production process and helping to secure our valuable media assets while at the same time supporting higher quality new programming by giving our staff even easier access to thousands of hours of historic clips in our archive.”
Motion 4 signifies the end of Shake
With the release of Motion 4, packaged with Final Cut Studio 3, it seems like Apple has officially dropped it’s high end software program, Shake. First off, I wish to say that Shake is an excellent program, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. High end films such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Dark Knight have all used Shake in their post production workflow. The real perplexing issue here is why has Apple abandoned such a well used and respected program. It seems like Apple is in the business of telling people what they want rather than listening to what they want. Meaning that rather than take an already solid and well-groomed program and expand with it, they bury it and try to force people to use their new Motion 4 instead. Now Motion has had some upgrades, the most notable and obvious being the ability to work in 3D textures and shadowing, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why that means dumping another popular and successful program. It’s almost as if they think that we’ll just start using Motion instead, when really Motion hasn’t had, nor has it earned, the respect of serious professionals. With other programs available, such as the very popular After Effects for example, my guess is that people will simply use programs like that more rather than start learning a new program that’s clearly at the beginning stages of it’s professional wannabe surge. And with these other programs having solidified their reputation on the market, Motion has a long way to go to get any real attention from the serious players.
Having said all that, I certainly don’t want to take away from the abilities of Motion or Apple’s attempt at pushing it up toward the next level. The new Motion 4 is a step in the right direction, and Apple has begun the stage of trying to make it a viable choice for those consummate professionals. However, the way Apple seems to be conducting it’s business tactics to achieve this, is just plain arrogant and foolish. For a company who waged the excellent marketing behind the iPhone and has since taken 28% of the cell phone market with this ingenious ploy, this is a rather disappointing setback and will not bold well for their PR.
Final Cut Pro 7…finally
Well, it seems that on the heels of Avid’s recent award by the Amercian Editor’s Association Apple has released it’s new NLE system with a proposed large addition of codec’s and workflow upgrades. FCP has generally faired well on the market grabbing an apparent 50% of the share of systems used, but it has always been regarded as a second tier editing platform to the majority of big wig editors and studio’s, who seemingly prefer Avid. Apple isn’t giving up, and really why should they with the split on the market share what it is, so here come Final Cut 7.
One of the biggest upgrades will be to Apple’s ProRez codec, which was much needed in my opinion. Apparently Apple added a ProRes 444 format at the high-end for compositing, effects, and digital cinema work. Among other additions there is also improved XML metadata support for footage that is round-tripped through third-party software, which I’ll believe when I see it, as well as proper 4k support. FCP7 will be packaged with Studio3 so of course Motion has it’s upgrades as well, the most drastic being the ability to support three-dimensional effects, including 3D shadows and reflections, depth-of-field control, and individual glyph adjustments. Color & Soundtrack were given upgrades but nothing dramatic other than “isn’t this neat…” type fuctions, although Color now supports 4K cameras which is a plus. And for the love of God, I won’t even bother discussing Compressor which has to be Apple’s worst attempt at conversion software. The only possible upgrade to that program would be to ride the DeLorean back in time to when Apple was in pre-conception for it and eliminate all the headshrinkers involved.
Although all of this hasn’t hit the stores yet, when it does i’ll be eager to get my hands on the full FCPS3 to see what it can do. I don’t expect much from Motion, never have, After Effects still holds the consumer roost when it comes to most anything involving motion graphics. Motion has always been used for simple, yet effective, CG’s that don’t need a lot of twindling or specific assets, but FC7 could finally be what Apple’s been looking for to put them over that professional hump.
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