I’ve been here before, with an investment in a technology that seems to be going away. I tend to take a pragmatic approach as much as possible. Things usually don’t fall apart right away, but as each new software update is added to the puzzle you start to lose functionality. So you have to start your migration strategy early. I first do an inventory of the current technology landscape and what options are available. If there is a clear migration path (hint to backup vendors: If you can read a Retrospect catalog , reverse-engineer the tape format and make it seemless I’ll be the first in line) I’ll take that path. If not, it usually involves some sort of dual platform support until the first technology platform fades into the background. This path is less ideal because that first platform becomes so archaic, Jazz Disks anyone?, that you end up having ancient workstations dedicated to that format taking up valuable studio space. If the data is important, I’ve found that it makes sense to bite the bullet and migrate to the new format.

Either way, none of this is fun. I don’t have any definitive answers of what is the right direction to take, but I’ll be posting some of the information I find out as I do the research and see what’s out there. Feel free to leave comments about any information you have about good options for small and medium sizes businesses with the heavy back-up requirements that digital studios face.

So, I was primed to enjoy the Apple Leopard tech talk as it rolled its way through the last stop of a 9 city North American tour. I can’t go into a lot of detail because of the NDA, but I left really inspired by the tools that will shortly be available. Apple’s frameworks make it really easy to develop compelling applications where they do so much of the work for you and the developer is able to concentrate on the parts that make the application interesting for his or her niche.

I also think it’s likely if you’re supporting Mac environments that you should plan on quick adoption of Leopard. There are some really compelling technologies that will be Leopard only and my gut says that a lot of must-have applications will start to appear that will require a Leopard install. Apple has traditionally had a quick adoption curve, especially compared to the folks toiling away in Redmond, but I bet it will be an even quicker ramp up with this release.

Mark writes…

This space will contain thoughts on matters relating to my book – digital cinema and visual effects compositing in particular – as well as whatever other miscellany takes hold. Paradoxically, it’s the way that writing these monologues/blogs puts people more in touch with other people that compels me to do it. By all means, especially if you liked the book, let me know what you want to hear more about. …

I’m really looking forward to following what Mark has to say. I’m sure it will be insightful, just like his book.

A dirty document in OS X is a document with unsaved changes. There is a clear way to indicate this. Here are a few examples in some Adobe apps.

In Photoshop, a document before making a change

In Photoshop, after making a change

In Illustrator, a document before making a change

In Illustrator, after making a change

Notice the filled in bubble on the left? Now let’s do the same thing in After Effects.

In After Effects, a document before making a change

In After Effects, after, umm, making a change

In After Effects we lose an OS X interface cue. My guess, is this is an oversight from creating the interface with non-standard GUI widgets and that’ll get fixed in a later verson. But it is a great example of what happens when you try to go it alone in interface land, especially with Mac users who are a notoriously finicky lot. So, when I talk to Adobe developers, I’ll be sure to put in my voice for letting each platform retain its own individual personality.

btw…I am aware of the asterisk next to the file name cue, but this isn’t an either/or situation, so many interface cues are practically subliminal, and if a quick glance to the left corner doesn’t give me what I’m looking for, I’ll just think that it isn’t Mac like without really knowing why.

And it’s not just After Effects. Flash has had that same kind of push and pull between developers and designers. From the hideous Normal/Expert mode to the pick your identity at startup evolution, every version seems to take another stab at the right mix. Even tools that have evolved into developer focused applications continue to show the roots of the struggle. I wince when I watch my Filemaker Pro using friends developing Repetitive Stress Injuries from the legacy programming environment, which amounts to a 400px x 200px bit of screen real estate, filled with buttons. Ok, I exaggerate, but still.

I’ve always been the type of guy who pinballs between the left and right sides of the brain. I’ve got a design background, but I like to program and end up working on the technical side of projects a fair bit. I think this is pretty common these days, Jen deHann coined the term deseloper (not much here right now) to describe that combination of designer and developer. What happens sometimes when I have my developer cap on in a design tools environment is a sort of cognitive dissonance between the ideas I want to express and the program interface.

I think this happens from a misguided understanding of what being a designer is all about. Design is not about being able to twiddle buttons and graphics, but about problem solving. Some of the most amazing problem solvers and process experts I know are designers. There has to be a better toolkit for letting designers express their ideas. There is a term used in computer science about a languages expressiveness or its ability to let the programmer express her ideas easily and without hinderance. I think there is a lot of room for design tools to develop that expressiveness outside of the gui toolkit. It’s obvious from the experimentation in interfaces within design applications that there is an embrace of the problem I’m trying to articulate.

My main hope is that there continues to be a flowering of cross discipline avenues of exploration. I hear similar complaints from my developer friends who feel like they are pushed away from creative solution making. I think there will always be folks who are more comfortable in a more analytical setting as well as others who embrace the more feeling parts of the Myers Briggs spectrum, but there’s also a fertile middle ground for us deselopers to explore.

What I do want to do however is rave about a great little freeware app from Squared 5 called MPEG Streamclip. When we started to have issues with our usual suite of software we looked around for some alternatives and ended up here. I must admit I was skeptical that it’d really be able to help us on a job of this scope. I’d played with earlier versions of this software when I was doing some HDV conversion and thought it was a pretty cool little utility, but the latest version is really fast, has really stunning quality options, does batch processing, is available in Mac and Windows versions and is free. Really nice work and it looks like the developer is adding features and tweaking the interface at a nice clip.

I’ve crashed a couple of times during heavy batches and it’s a little bit of a concern putting complete faith in a product where the support path is unclear, but download the app and see if it meets your needs. Looks like it’s going to really help in a pinch.

Uncompressed 422

Uncompressed 422 delivers a fix for changes in color-space and/or gamma when moving clips between Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects and addresses a codec issue leading to drawing errors in 16bpc After Effects projects. It also fixes discrepancies found between former AltiVec and the current Intel (scalar) code and delivers some performance improvements on Intel-based Macs.

This update is required for customers using Final Cut Pro 5.1 and recommended for customers using any of the Final Cut Studio 5.1 applications and Shake 4.1

This is a big deal if you work with FCP and After Effects. I’ve been chasing my tail with color shifts between these two apps for too long and I’m hoping this takes care of it once and for all.

Also…

FxPlug

FxPlug delivers a single image-processing plug-in architecture for pro applications.

This one has been out there for a while in Motion, but it’s good to see a cocoa plugin architecture develop for FCP which is a big deal if your a cocoaHead developer and great as a user because you get accelerated GL graphics and things like Core Image and Core Video. Combined with the rumblings about the Shake price reduction and rolling in to some unnamed future compositing app there seems to be a lot of rumblings behind the scenes. I just wish Apple wasn’t so secretive in announcing their plans so I could, I don’t know, plan and stuff. That’s why you get all of the crazy rumors sites, etc. and it’s kind of fun if your just a casual user, but it’s much less fun if your trying to figure out what your next steps should be. And while I’m wishing, I wish they’d publish the PRODataInterchange cocoa protocol as a public spec.

When I was putting together a spec for our HD rig circa 2003 I knew I wanted to deliver on HDCAM and I figured I’d also use HDCAM and HDCAM tape as an acquisition format for our green screen captures etc.. I was never really happy with the results however. After doing a bit of research I started to see what I was up against. Once the signal is recorded to tape some pretty major compression is introduced. We go from a 1920 x 1080 4:2:2 signal from the single-link HD-SDI and once we hit the tape it is compressed into an 8-bit 3:1:1 color space before being DCT compressed aprox. 6:1. The frame size is also nudged from 1440 x 1080 and then stretched back out to 1920 wide. yuck.

In all honesty, the image looks pretty nice for delivery. Since cable and satellite companies will introduce yet another round of MPEG 2 or H264-MPEG 4 compression. This is the best your image is going to look in it’s final form, but what we are interested in as image makers is how we can manipulate and process our image. Here is where it falls short.

So if you can shoot in a studio it makes a lot of sense to capture directly off the single-link HD-SDI to a 10bit 4:2:2 stream. Or even better, shoot…

HDCAM SR. HDCAM SR is capable of recording in 4:4:4 1080p RGB over a dual-link HDSDI. Dual link HDSDI is a fatter data pipe necessary to carry the approximately 237Mbps video signal. I’ve been really impressed with the results. Colors pop. No Interlacing with 1920×1080 30fps frames. 4:4:4 color space. This is more like it. We’re using a Kona 3 from AJA, but there are similar product offerings from Decklink. We are using a 8port E-SATA raid and a Quad G5 over dual-link HDSDI and then moving selects to our Apple XRaids via an internal LAN for processing. We also have an HDCAM SR tape as a safety with much less compression if we need to recapture. I’m a happy camper and it looks like my HD visions are finally starting to play out how I’d hoped.

So bottom line, if you can afford to put it in the budget, HDCAM SR is a no brainer win for HD acquisition.

• Some additional resources:
• The great HD For Indies site is your one-stop-shop for the latest in hardware, format info and news for HD production.This post particularly covers the issues above in detail.
• Alex Lindsay gives a great demo of 1080p 4:4:4, 4:2:2, and 4:1:1 color space and gives the case for high-quality acquisition even for broadband delivery.