Premiere Pro CS5 with NVidia CUDA
Posted by McCarthyTech on June 3rd, 2010 filed in Product Reviews, Software NewsTags: Adobe, AVCHD, Canon, Compression, DSLR, Nvidia, Windows | Comment now »
While all of the Adobe applications have been updated in CS5, clearly Premiere Pro is the centerpiece of this release. Adobe has been touting the Mercury Playback Engine for months, with new 64bit code, and additional GPU acceleration through NVidia’s CUDA technology. This acceleration allows highly compressed formats like AVCHD and H.264 to be played back seamlessly in the timeline, and intercut with other formats without transcoding intermediate files or rendering previews. Premiere Pro now supports native editing of a stunning number of acquisition formats, including HDV, AVCHD, XDCam-HD and XDCam-EX, DVCProHD and AVC-Intra files from P2 Cards, Red R3D files, and my favorite: Canon H.264 DSLR footage. It can also edit DNxHD and ProRes footage, for greater compatibility with Avid and Final Cut Pro. DPX sequences are another significant addition to the formats natively supported, for both import and export. This greatly enhances Premiere Pro’s usefulness as a DI conform tool, especially when combined with native support for so many other source formats.
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Adobe Creative Suite 5 Video Apps
Posted by McCarthyTech on June 2nd, 2010 filed in Product Reviews, Software NewsTags: Adobe, AVCHD, Avid, Canon, Compression, DSLR, HDV, Red One, Windows, XDCam | Comment now »
Adobe announced CS5 at NAB 2010 and has recently begun shipping the retail version. Now in its fifth iteration, Creative Suite has grown from a compilation of four stand alone applications into a fully integrated product line with extensive content creation functionality. It is hard to count the number of individual applications that make up the suite, since sub programs have been folded into other applications, and Flash now has multiple variations, with Builder, Catalyst, and Pro. From a digital post production perspective, the primary applications of concern are clearly Premiere Pro and After Effects, with their subsidiary apps: OnLocation, Media Encoder, and Encore. Premiere Pro CS5 is clearly the centerpiece of this release, with its new Mercury Playback Engine and optional CUDA based GPU acceleration, but non-video applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash still play an important role in many large scale post production workflows, because they are useful in creating supporting artwork and other imagery, and for interfacing your project with the internet in a variety of ways.
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Editing DSLR Footage in Avid
Posted by McCarthyTech on April 24th, 2010 filed in Tips & Tricks, Workflow IdeasTags: Avid, Compression, DSLR, Intel, Xeon | 4 Comments »
Avid Media Composer works on a very different paradigm than either Premiere or Final Cut. This makes the application more stable than its competitors on larger projects with lots of source footage, but involves more steps in the workflow to get your final product. (The recent announcements about Avid’s new features in the upcoming version 5.0 will offer dramatically different options. New AMA support will allow you to work with DSLR footage and other Quicktime files in a similar fashion to how they are handled by Premiere and Final Cut. These new workflow options will be further examined in a separate post once the new version is publicly released) While Avid is capable of doing online quality work, it is most popular as an offline editing program. Â
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Live from NAB 2010
Posted by McCarthyTech on April 13th, 2010 filed in Hardware News, Industry Status, Software NewsTags: Adobe, Avid, Blackmagic, Canon, Cineform, Compression, DSLR, Matrox, Nvidia, Stereoscopic 3D | Comment now »
So after the first two days of the show, I have finally found some time to post some info here. By far, the most revolutionary new development announced at the show, is Avid’s new native support of Quicktime files via AMA in Media Composer 5, which is scheduled to be released on June 10th. This will effectively eliminate the need for a lengthy conversion process to DNXHD upon import of any Quicktime files. The primary uses I see for this capability are for native editing of Canon DSLR MOV files which are explicitely supported, even with speed changes and effects, and for live support of Cineform’s active metadata updates, to impliment non-destructive color and stereoscopic 3D workflows.  It also supports native playback of Red R3D files, and hardware outputs from Matrox MXO2 devices.
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Managing Footage in Tapeless Workflows
Posted by McCarthyTech on March 28th, 2010 filed in Tips & Tricks, Workflow IdeasTags: Avid, Canon, DSLR | 3 Comments »
File organization has been an important aspect of media management ever since the advent of tapeless workflows. Prior to that point, any frame of footage could be identified by, and presumably recovered from, a tape name and timecode value. Once you remove the tape from that paradigm, a new organization system is needed.  In the case of DSLR cameras, this problem is compounded with the removal of unique timecode from the equation as well. The following post is a detailed description of how I deal with those problems during the post process of large scale projects originating on Canon DSLRs. Many of the tips below can also be implemented in other tapeless workflows (XD, P2, EX, AVCHD, etc) if desired, but this article will be tailored to DSLR acquisition.
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