FCP: Uncompressed on a powerbook hoopla...

I'm not sure why this is such a big deal but I'd thought I'd share it since it's a funny link. Gary Adcock of the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group shows uncompressed HD running on his 1Ghz TiBook. He has no way to capture or output it but he can run one stream of uncompressed. I don't think he can edit it very we'll though. The thing is people like Scott Billups have been using PowerBooks as DDR's for several years using CineWave HD in PCI expansion chassis from Magma. I was close to building one for a job myself but found another solution. On a side note I'd say you could probably tweak a PowerBook to run several streams of uncompressed HD if you use a lossless wavelet codec.


Scott Billups rig running uncompressed HD on a PowerBook. CineWave hooked up via Magma underneath the TiBook. This is from an issue of DV magazine. In this particular case he used Premiere 6.0 on OSX for stop motion animation.

FCP/PPro: New FireWire Box for uncompressed!

Convert Design has a new box out that does uncompresed SD over FireWire. It will retail at about $1495 and it will support both Mac and PC with FCP and PPro as host apps. It has a nice 19" rack design.

Production update: Premiere Pro Long Form Performance

I promised to get back on this since we've just finished editing on STINGER for Shoreline Entertainment. PPro is performing ok on large timelines. But not great. It's still far from the Avid but equal to FCP. I've also discovered a few AAF bugs going in and from PPRO and AE. Some of the Pro bundle plugins stops working now and then when I've imported a timeline from PPro into AE. I still find our PPro setup less "buggy" that our FCP setup.

Format wars!

I predict an uneven battle between HDV and DVCPRO HD in the coming two or three years on the below $10K systems. And I predict HDV will win. Looking at the release of FCP4 I cant stop to think that Apple underestimated the HDV craze that's going on right now. There's nothing wrong with editing DVCPRO HD over FireWire. But the format do have one gigantic flaw that pulls the rug under Apples marketing feets here in Europe (and in places like Australia)...DVCPRO HD is a 30p format running on 29,97 clock. There is no possibility to edit DVCPRO HD in 25p in the 50Hz world and integrate it into a regular post production workflow. My suggestion is that Apple stops marketing DVCPRO HD and FCP HD in PAL countries until they have integrated HDV in the workflow (Hey, FCP has been HD since version 1.5). It's a waste of time and money and resources and the users have better things to do than discover the truth the hard way... HDV however has no problem anywhere in the world. It's 25p as well as 30p.

PPro: Link

Check out Digital Media Nets dedicated Premiere Pro site.

PPro: More expensive solutions for PPro!

Matrox announced the Axio on IBC.

Matrox Axio makes Adobe Premiere Pro the foremost realtime HD and SD editor for demanding broadcast and post-production environments. It features no-render HD and SD finishing in compressed and uncompressed formats, superior color correction tools, advanced realtime effects, and a full range of analog and digital audio and video inputs and outputs. It incorporates Matrox Flex 3D and Power of X technologies to leverage scalable CPU power with the explosive performance of dedicated 3D graphics hardware to provide the ultimate SD and HD editing environment.

The Matrox Axio family builds on solid expertise gained over several generations of Matrox DigiSuite and RT Series products. Well over 200,000 users worldwide currently enjoy the amazing value, stable reliability, and superior productivity of Matrox based realtime nonlinear editing systems. Close collaboration between the Matrox and Adobe engineering teams throughout development ensure the tightest hardware/software integration.

The Matrox Axio software and hardware components are integrated into an approved workstation and sold through a network of Matrox authorized resellers. These resellers also provide installation and training services to customers worldwide.

It's probably good. Still a bit pricey compared to a DeckLink solution. The HD configuration is $12,000.

PPro: The new HDV plugin from Adobe.

There has been some speulation regarding the soon to be released HDV plugin from Adobe that will let you edit HDV in Premiere Pro. The news about the Adobe plugin hit just when Sony showed their new HDV consumer camera (the FX-1) that will probably be used by a lot of independent filmmakers like myself. The rumors say the plugin is written by CineForm. If it's true it's great news because I don't think Adobes current collaboration with MainConcept is going anywhere and CineForms visually lossless codec is awsome. The HDV solution Mpeg Pro coming from MainConcept leaves a lit to be desired in terms of workflow and over all quality. I personally thing that goes for all of MainConcepts Mpeg products. That's sad because MainConcepts are CHAMPS(!) for bringing Non Linear Video Editing to Linux with MainActor. One of the few NLE's available on Linux.

I'm back!
Been gone for a while shooting a new movie...and it was a very tough shoot. This one was shot in a studio in Stockholm and we used a Vaio P4 2,8GHz as an off line suite in a corner of the place. The Vaio was hooked up to a LaCie Extreme BigDisk and a Sony J-H3 HDCAM player that downconverts to DV25 on the fly and outputs through a regular FireWire connection. Very cool.

In the next couple of weeks I'll be able to report how well Premiere Pro 1.5 does on a feature length project. This is my first one using Premiere Pro. The others have all been Avid or Final Cut Pro.

PPro: Where are my DeckLink HD PPro drivers?
Blackmagic Design just announced a $1000 dollar price drop on the DeckLink HD card. I need PPro drivers now.

PPro/FCP: More NAB.
Apple introduced the free update FCP HD. If you've got the new Panasonic DVCPRO HD machine you can edit DVCPRO HD (1080i/720p) over FireWire. Even on a Powerbook. Let's hope the codec is OK. The new update also introduced the coolest thing yet - something everyone on Avid has been spoiled with since the early days of NLE's - Digital Cinema Desktop. Preview DV, SD and HD content full screen on your monitor. No need for additional software. That's the way it should be done. Apple also introduced Motion - a motion graphics app - a bit like LiveType on steroids. And no - it's not an After Effects killer. I'm only guessing but it seems to me like Motion could as well be integrated into FCP. Let's wait and see what happens.

On the PPro side there is a new cool product called Prospect HD from Cineform. It uses an AJA Kona HD card and regular IDE drives and Cineform's own wavelet algorithm to capture and play out HD in a visually lossless fomat. It can do nine streams of RT. The downside to this product is that it seems to be extremely over priced. Disk drives are not that expensive these days that we can't live without the Prospect HD wavelet algorithm.

RT = Don't believe the hype. IMHO most RT effects are highly overrated and totally unusable.

Blog update:
Since I'm currently a 50/50 user of PPro and FCP I've decided to cover as much as I can for both editing systems. Mostly a way for myself to keep track with the two NLE's and the hardware world around them.

PPro: Matrox announces HD support at NAB.
Built around the "power of X" engine found in the lower end DV25 solutions coming from Matrox. I'm not sure if this is a HDV solution or actually uncompressed 4:2:2. It's supposed to do both 720 and 1080 formats. Check it out.

PPro: Premiere Pro 1.5 is here.
There are some major cool features added to release 1.5.

Project Management Tools:
Remove unused media. We've been missing that one.

24P/A support:
Support for true progressive footage.

Effect Favorites:
The first thing a noticed where missing when I started using PPro.

More AE integration:
Support for using clip board data. And cross reference use of AE plugins.

AAF and EDL I/O:
This my friends is what's finally making PPro a truly professional application. Move over all else.

This is a really nice upgrade.

PPro/FCP: Blackmagic Designs AGAIN.
I just got a mail from Grant Petty. He's introducing the new DeckLink Pro HD at NAB. It's dual 4:4:4 1080 HD uncompressed. The most quality you can get within the SDI broadcast specs. He's giving it away at $2,495. The mail doesn't mention WinXP support but I'll bet they're working on it. He' also got a neat product called HDLink that turns an Apple HD flatpanel into an editing monitor for full screen HD previews. Very cool indeed. The Apple flatpanels are awesome.

People are WEIRD!
You think bringing the price of uncompressed 4:2:2 SDI editing down to the cost of a Sony Playstation would make people happy? Wrong! There's been a lot of hateful bashing in forums regarding the DeckLink cards and Blackmagic price policies. Some folks express anger because they loosed a couple of hundreds when the DeckLinks where lowered even further. Of course; If you've been in the business for a while that's ludicrous. What about the guy that invested hundred of thousands of dollars in the same type of hardware just a few years ago and now he has to sell it at DeckLink prices on eBay? For some reason that guy is not complaining.

People are also bashing DeckLink because it has 8-bit D/A analog monitoring. Phew! Get real people. When did 8-bit stop beeing a professionals choice? Digibeta, DVCAM, D-9, SX, D1...it's ALL 8-bit.

I'll end this post by quoting Niccolo Machiavelli:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,
than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

PPro: What's happening in Matrox land?
I've never been really impressed by all these DV RT solutions like the ones coming from Canopus and the other from Matrox. RT effects are highly overrated and they give the word "cheesy" meaning. RT effects are also impossible to integrate into the beautiful AAF workflow. But from what I've seen the Matrox Digisuites are awesome hardware. Why do they still only support Premiere? And why would you use "non Pro" Premiere (version 6.5 and earlier) in the first place? I really hope we'll see some drivers from Matrox this NAB. I'm starting to get the feeling that they have abandoned the Digisuite family. Sure hope not.

PPro: Missing something like Pixars Pixlet (MacOSX) with Premiere Pro?
Pixlet is a brilliant wavelet codec that let's you playback and edit large aspect files with minimum loss. Pixlet let's you playback (and edit) HD on very slow machines with a minimum of visible quality loss. I've been looking for a good wavelet codec for my Premiere Pro setup and I found the very promising PICVideo Wavelet2000 codec from Pegasus Imaging. The Wavelet2000 codec is designed to work within Premiere Pro. However I found a few small glitches (the source window doesn't play back satisfactory) but it can be edited and it's RT in the timeline. And the image quality is excellent. At the highest setting in Standard Definition it has a data rate of 1,8MB sec and I can't tell it apart from uncompressed visually without looking really hard. Keep in mind that DV that's compressed 5:1 produces a rate of 3,5MB/sec so the Wavelet2000 stream is really tiny in comparison.

PPro: Quiet Case - I like it.
I've just bought two Antec Sonata cases. They produce very low noise levels. I upgraded both with an extra disc fan and I'm not running them in quiet mode since they'll be doing a lot of heat generating video editing and rendering. The Sonatas can be run in silent mode and regular mode. So far highly recommended by me...

PPro/FCP: Holy Moses. I'm blind!
Blackmagic Designs also introduced new low prices and I must have missed them when I wrote my last DeckLink post. Uncompressed SD via SDI is now $298. My jaw is dropped. This is a dream - don't wake me up. Thank you Monsieur Grant.

PPro: ScenalyzerLive + PPro = No Go.
I've read so many positive comments in different forums the last couple of month regarding Scenalyzer - a very smart capture tool that let's you capture with scene detection using both the typical date/time information available in PPro's own capture function and optical detection. Since most of what I've done is shot on 35mm and 16mm film I have no date/time codes on my tapes and PPro can't capture my material using scene detection. So I tried the trial on for size and it works great. It recognizes the cuts and turns every cut on a tape into a separately captured clips with all the log information. This of course saves a lot of manual log/capture labor. But as I investigated further it turns out that Scenelyzer has no built in function to save itself as a "project" so you can never recreate a capture batch. All you can do is export an EDL. But PPro can't import EDL's so the two can't be used together unfortunately. Let's hope that there will be a change in the future because Scenalyzer is really awesome.

PPro/FCP: AAF (Advanced Authoring Format)
When I started using PPro I found the lack of EDL export frustrating and limiting. I didn't realize that AAF is supposed to replace both EDL's and OMF. There's a lot of interresting stuff at the official AAF Association website. It's nice to see that Adobe is one of the key companies behind it.

After all; EDL's where created to be used in digibeta tape-to-tape suites. We're past that and AAF is a much more flexible format that can hold a lot more information then just in and out points and dupe reel/dissolves.

PPro/FCP: Adobes Primers.
I hope you've all had a chance to take a look at Adobes Primers. They are neat little .pdf documents that goes through the basics of digital video, audio and streaming. Great resource. You can download them here.

PPro/FCP: Blackmagic Design introduces DeckLink Extreme
This is a new SD card (NTSC/PAL) that does Uncompressed. Nothing really fancy is added compared to the other SD cards but the price is amazing. You get SDI and Component 10-bit and 8-bit for $895. Listen up all you other hardware developers; resistance is futile... Grant Pettys in town and he's kickin' some serious butt.

DeckLink supports Premiere Pro and all major QuickTime applications.

PPro and FCP related in a way...
Sony is releasing a new camcorder to the market. Their first HDV model. It's got three CCD:s. JVC was the first to introduce HDV camcorders but the fact that Sony does it will change a lot of things. Sony rules the post production market and them supporting HDV will bring us almost the same impact as the introduction of DV25 to the market. HDV means we can edit 720 and 1080 HD on regular desktops and laptops through FireWire setups. I hope Adobe will introduce a good integration path for HDV. Read more.

PPro: 2D3 and Premiere Pro - the great SteadyMove plugin.
2D3 - the makers of the worlds best camera tracker Boujou - collaborates with Adobe and bundles the "lite" version of SteadyMove with PPro. The full version is a masterpiece in motion stabilization technology. This one is going to save a lot of shots in a documentary I'm working on. Take a look at the official website and learn more.

HDTV anyone?
This is a "got to have". The Dell 23" LCD W2300 is HDTV ready. A great alternative to a broadcast monitor in a budget HD editing setup. It's native 720p.

PPro/FCP: The ProMax ProMedia Converter.
There has been a lot of talk regarding this product over att the Creative Cow forums. It's basically a FireWire outbord box for uncompressed SD editing. It's based around regular FireWire400 technology. I'm a big fan of laptop editing and this could be a cool solution. ProMax says it's going to support PPro (among others). The ProMedia Converter is a 2U rack mount unit and it connects to everything you need (SDI, Component, Y/C, Composite). It's got four channels of on board AES/EBU (aaargh, 2 channels too few for surround editing). The product has not been released. Lets hope it's not vaporware.

PPro: AJA SD and HD for PPro in the future?
In-Sync is offering a SpeedRazor solution with two cards from Aja. One is the uncompressed SD card called Loki. The other is Thor and it does uncompressed HD. Both in 4:2:2. There is nothing about these cards on the Aja website. Will these cards be offered to the PPro crowd? Let's wait and see if NAB will bring more light on the subject.

PPro: BOXX DV, SD and HD.
BoxxTech builds very solid workstations from what I hear. Unfortunately they are not sold in my part of the world. They have three custom configurations for DV, SD and HD based on PPro.

MicroSoft and HighDef
Like everyone else in the world I'm not the biggest fan. But I have to admit that WMVHD (and WMV 9) is soooo cool. There are still only one option for HD with PPro and that's the Bluefish444 solution.

When DeckLink releases the same hardware at a fraction of the cost HD will be a viable alternative and WMVHD is the greatest distribution option ever. Period. WMVHD has just bean announced as a part of future dvdspecs by DVDforum and that means WMVHD is going to playback in future HD-DVD set top players and a lot of other home entertainment products.

Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/create.aspx
Exporting WMVHD from the timeline in PPro is actually a dream come true. The presets produces stunning results.

PPro/FCP: Canopus ACEDvio
I bought the Canopus ACEDvio just to discover it has an NEC chip set. That means it is not as compatible with periferals as the OHCI cards with chip sets from Texas Instruments. The first rejected gear in my setup is MOTU. MOTU drivers (I have the classic Motu 828 for 8 channel monitoring on laptops). I have no idea why Canopus chose NEC. Perhaps they just wanted to save some money to afford the development of the strangest NLE this side of Pluto -- Edius.

PPro: HDV and PPro
I have to tell you I am e x t r e m e l y sceptic of all of the third party HDV editing solutions out there. Mpeg2 editing is a whole different ball game and the NLE really have to be written for it to handle the Mpeg2 stream correctly (AND with FireWire preview as you edit). There's one from CineForm called AspectHD. I suspect all of these third party solutions will go out of business by the next major PPro update. HDV is here to stay -- no question about that. NAB 2004 will have a lot of neat surprises in store for HDV. JVC just announced a really cool desktop player/recorder with a flip out screen.

PPro: Mpeg2 encoders for PPro
If you like me don't like the MainConcept Mpeg2 encoder that came with the PPro installation I suggest you check out the Cinema Craft SP encoder from Cinema Craft. It's expensive but it's a quality encoder. The mainConcept encoder is fast and good for making previews and things like that but it can not be used as a master encoder.

PPro: Check out Steven Gotz
Great website. Great link collection.

PPro: Pulling out the feet from under Bluefish444's feet?
Black Magic Design announces PPro support for the DeckLink SD cards. That means the first really competitive option for uncompressed 4:2:2 10-bit editing. There is a lot of talk of the limitations of PPro beeing only an 8-bit app. That's true but if you only do straight cuts you will not affect the compression and video stays 10-bit all the way. I do everything but editing in After Effects where I get 16bpc handling of the footage. It would be good to have 10-bit or even floating point timeline in PPro but it's not as limiting as some people may suggest.

About this blog
In 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro - a software they aquired from Macromedia developed by the team behind the original Premiere. In 2003 Adobe introduced Premiere Pro as a new competitor on the mid range pro market. I decided to publish this blog to keep track of everything that happens to the two competitors. I'll be keeping my eye out for updates, third party software and everything hardware related.

So who am I? I'm a 33 year old Swede that has been working in the broadcast and feature film industry for fourteen years. I've been running my own production company for ten years and I mainly work as an editor, director of photography and director. I've done lots and lots of music videos and I'm currently working on my third feature film. I jumped onboard the desktop DV revolution back in '97. I've been on Macs since I was a teen and Digital Origin's EditDV was my first FireWire NLE. I started on Avids back in '92. When the original Premiere developer moved to Macromedia I kept my eyes open for the new super cool tool (Premiere Mark II) called Final Cut that would hit the market soon. Apple aquired Final Cut and released it as Final Cut Pro and I was with it from day one. I soon bought one of the FCP hardware tools for uncompressed editing - Aurora Video Systems Igniter. I've loved FCP (and still do) but the introduction of OSX and version 4 of the software simply leaves a lot to be desired so when Adobe announced a completely rewritten Premiere version I just had to download the trial and try it out. And it did everything I expected - frankly I didn't have very high hopes after a few encounters with the earlier versions of Premiere - and a lot more! On the other hand Apple has always pushed things forward. Desktop Video would not have been where it is today without Apple.

I also feel there is a lack of good websites covering whats happening to Premiere Pro. There are an infinite number covering Final Cut Pro. That's part of the reason I'm posting this blog.