Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

Ja Shia, BAVC Media Arts Technician

NAB this year was generally focused on the release of FCP Studio 2, the RED camera, and storage solutions. (There were smaller booths that carried new gadgets; most notably a still camera that took DVD quality video and served as a DVR):

For the most part, the South Hall (Post Production Land) had the majority of people previewing the new Apple products and their affiliates. Apple’s new codec the Prores 422 allows for the compression of DV with the quality of uncompressed 10 HD. They had a booth showcasing a split screen of the same shot: one side had 10 bit UC, and the other side was the 422 codec, and you couldn’t really see the difference. (Although, this really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.) Ideally, this is huge because it brings drive space back to a manageable level if one wanted to edit at online resolutions. When we get the new Studio bundle, we’ll run some tests using the scopes and see if the codec with pass a tech eval (the real test).

Another new option is Color, the incarnation of Apple acquired final touch. It allows for a slightly more advanced color grading and correcting system. The demonstrations showed pretty fast workflow from an FCP sequence directly to the Color application and then back again. This actually touched on the best improvement of the FCP studio in that the bridge between applications got much smaller, leading to improved workflow. No change in DVD Studio Pro and Compressor has the ability to use all 8 processors if you get an 8-core machine. I took a Motion 3 class on the “3d space” and was minimally impressed and would still use After Effects for any real intense 3d spaces. But for the prosumer market, it’s not bad. I think that’s it for apple. If you have more questions, it’s all really online, or stop me in the hall and we’ll chat.

I spent some time at the AVID show room watching them cut a segment of “Lost” and it seems like the AVID initiative is to partner and integrate with more 3^rd party software and hardware providers. They’ve made their DNxHD codec (Apple answered this with the 422) available to other vendors. Some of the tests looked standard, but my biggest discovery is the reason why people still choose AVID over FCP. It’s the industry standard work horse, and most places are so invested in the product, it’s hard to cut out. I mean we’re talking millions of dollars dropped on Nitrus, Adrenalines, and Unity servers per company. I spoke with the former Director of post-production from National Geographic and he said that they crank out 135 hours of TV every year and it’s difficult to get the executives to trust anything else. My opinion is that AVID shops are so invested that they have no choice but to stay invested and can’t go with the cheaper FCP option. It has nothing to do with reliability, because in the end of the day, they’re still not doing any in-house color correction. That’s all being sent out. Same for mixing. All in all, I don’t think it makes any sense to purchase Adrenalines, given our success with exporting offline sequences to AVID, or uprezing with FCP. Even the Nitrus didn’t have that much appeal for finishing. To finish off AVID, I think we need to keep on understanding where AVID is going and what the specs are, but I wouldn’t want to get entrenched in that system. It’s just simply not cost effective.

The next debate was Black Magic or AJA for video cards. These cards allow us to pro-export to DBC and most decks in the control room. AJA offers a converter that goes pretty much to and from any video format. Previously, this was only capable through a Divinci Box or other hardware converters but now it’s much cheaper, around 4 grand. We should get this. We got some Black magic cards that output HD-SDI donated a little while ago, and I didn’t notice any change from these versions to the ones currently available. The black magic cards work on both PC and MAC, so theoretically, with bootcamp you could use programs through both windows and mac using the same card.

The Red Camera is a pretty cool invention despite looking like a Quake 3 weapon. It shoots in resolutions of 720p AND 1080p(not i) as well as 2K and 4K. A full package could run up to around 50,000 with all lenses and adapters and peripherals. The images do look quite good, but most importantly, I think this could be the camera that finally levels the playing field between film and video cameras. The problem that arises out of this is storage space for these massive images and video files. Furthermore, I didn’t hear of an NLE system that could effectively edit 4K natively. I think we’re still a little bit away from that.

I stopped in on the Autodesk space and saw the demos for both Smoke and Flame. Let me just say that these were pretty cool items. They demonstrated the workflow of putting together a commercial that was really graphics intensive, natively 2k media, the machine moved and rendered amazingly fast. I think it’s a little overkill for our needs here at BAVC but it handled the emerging 2k media better than any of the NLEs at NAB.

I found NAB less daunting than I had anticipated since I knew what we came to see, where it was and scheduled a few classes to take. It will be interesting to see what becomes industry standard from this years releases since it seemed that everyone AVID to Apple had something new to say.