Speaking of DSLR files, Adobe has totally reinvented the way they are handled in CS5.  Most applications, including the CS3 and CS4 versions of both Premiere and After Effects, use QuickTime importers to access the content of Canon DSLR files.  This makes sense, since they are stored in an MOV wrapper, but leads to two issues.  One is that is specific to Adobe is that on a PC, QuickTime files go through a few extra steps before they are accessed by the application, so there is a performance hit, and with lots of files accessed at once, there are usually stability issues as well.  The other issue effects all applications that use QuickTime to access DSLR files, and that is that ever since QuickTime 7.6.2 was released, Canon DSLR files have been decoded in a much more flat and washed out color space than they were designed to be viewed in.  Prior to version 7.6.2, they were decoded in a way that clipped the highlights and shadows, which was even worse.  In CS5, Adobe worked with Mainconcept to create an importer that reads the DSLR source files without involving QuickTime at all.  This alleviates both the performance hit on PC systems, and the color space issues of QuickTime’s default decoding.  A lot of work was put into getting the decode matrix and color space exactly correct based on the processing that Canon’s hardware does to the file in the camera.  This should allow CS5 to decode the files more correctly than any other application that I am aware of, and give more options for color processing at later stages in the workflow pipeline, since more of the original color data is preserved.

The Mercury playback engine has a significant impact on the user experience, with most frequently used tools being available in real time.  Supposedly most of the decode and playback improvements are based on the new code written for native 64bit execution, with the GPU offload limited to effects processing.  While many editors don’t use very many discrete effects in their work, there are some intrinsic playback functions like scaling frame sizes and adapting frame rates that are considered effects and offloaded to the GPU.  This allows content of different frame rates and resolutions to be intercut seamlessly on the timeline, and it is truly seamless.

I have occasionally found myself editing in the wrong sequence frame rate without even noticing it, since the software makes the conversion on the fly.  Even more frequently I have found a clip shot in the wrong frame rate on a tapeless camera almost escaping detection because gone are the red render bars and playback glitches that used to stand out.  This allows editors to import media from many different sources without prerendering everything to a normalized format.  I used to spend about a quarter of my time at work converting strange source footage into 1080p24 intermediate files, because any footage not matching the timeline format would cause previous versions of Premiere to glitch during playback and occasionally crash.  Now I would recommend carefully converting any footage used in a final piece to the correct format for maximum control, but this step can now be put off until the online stage, since it is no longer required for playback and stability.  Since 90% of footage usually ends up on the cutting room floor, putting off these time consuming conversions until after the creative edit is finished, will drastically reduce the amount of footage you end up needing to process.

So this clear increase in performance leads to the question of: how far can you push it?  A few months back I processed an ISO noise test in After Effects CS4 for Shane Hurlbut.  We were comparing the image noise produced at twelve different ISO levels on the Canon 5D, and the project involved twelve streams of video with masks, levels, and position adjustments for a tiled view.  I was getting about two frames per second when rendering previews, which seemed reasonable considering the amount of processing involved.  When I saw the list of GPU accelerated effects in Premiere Pro CS5, and was asked to create torture test for Adobe to show off at NAB, this jumped to mind.  I recreated the entire project, using twelve layers of native DSLR footage, each layer having a motion effect and a 4-point garbage matte to create the tiling, and a color correction applied to exaggerate the noise to a clearly viewable level.  The same basic setup that was getting 2fps in AE CS4 played back in real-time in Premiere Pro CS5.  (Dual Xeon X5365 CPUs and 16GB RAM with a QuadroFX 4800) Needless to say I was quite impressed with the outcome, since it was deliberately beyond Adobe’s ten-layer playback claim, and using a complex format to decode and playback.  Clearly GPU acceleration can have a dramatic impact on application performance.

There has been much discussion and debate on tech forums and blogs about the specifics of Premiere Pro’s hardware support for CUDA acceleration.  Adobe has severely restricted the number of cards for which they officially support CUDA based GPU acceleration, to maintain control over the hardware environments upon which their accelerated code is tested, supposedly for stability reasons.  The official list is limited to QuadroFX 3800, 4800, and 5800, as well of the discontinued GeForce 285 GTX, with certain limitations, for those on a lower budget.  There are currently no officially supported mobile GPUs, even though notebook CPUs are usually more in need of a performance boost than desktop chips.  This may be due to the fact that even the newest mobile QuadroFX 3800M is still based on the G92 core from the GeForce 8000 series, but I don’t like seeing software artificially limited in regards to performance or hardware support, and this is an example of both.  Don’t confuse legitimate limitations and artificial limitations, since clearly a powerful GPU is necessary for optimal performance in CS5, but there are cards of equal capability that are specifically excluded from the list, supposedly for stability reasons.  Luckily Adobe has left an option for knowledgeable users to override some of those artificial limitations, and I anticipate seeing them being dropped completely in a future update.  I anticipate a more reasonable requirement of any NVidia card supporting CUDA 1.1 or 1.3, with at least 785MB of video memory, at some point in the future.

While Premiere Pro CS5 is not perfect, it is a complete reversal from the previous fiasco that was CS4.  It clearly demonstrates the possibilities provided by GPU acceleration, resting solidly on 64bit code with proper multithreaded programming, it scales to take advantage of whatever hardware is made available for it.  Since Adobe has made a practice of introducing significant improvements in incremental dot releases, I am looking forward to seeing how else they refine it in the coming months.

FTC Disclosure: I have been on Adobe’s beta team for many years, and Adobe has provided me a copy of CS5 for this review.  NVidia has provided me with graphics hardware in the past, which I utilized in this review.  My only admitted personal bias is my preference of Windows over OSX, because I like full control over every aspect of my computing experience.  If for some reason that bothers anyone, there are plenty of other sources of information on the internet, but I try to provide unique insight on how each of these tools fits into the larger post-production picture.  Any relevant critique or response is welcomed.

The other major new feature for this release of After Effects is the Rotobrush.  Based on Photoshop image processing functionality, extended to account for the information made available from multiple frames, this is the closest thing you are going to find to magic in a current generation compositing application.  It allows you to automatically separate foreground and background objects in a video image, otherwise known as rotoscoping.  Of course it is not perfect, but it is a huge advance, compared to previous tools.  Automated tools like this are usually much more impressive if you aren’t expecting a miracle going into the process, but as long as you have reasonable expectations, Rotobrush can give you usable results in a rush, or a good starting point when more precise work is required.  Much of the “magic” of the new tool is in the processing of the automatically defined edges, and this capability is available without using the Rotobrush, in the form of the “Refine Matte” effect.  This effect can be used to polish the edges of standard keys, or manually rotoscoped footage.  Most of the other major feature enhancements for this release come in the form of integrated third party plug-ins, including Color Finesse for grading, Mocha for tracking, and DigiEffects Freeform for 3D simulation.  Each of these are feature rich plug-ins that include functionality that is beyond the scope of this overview, but are well worth experimenting with if you spend a lot of time working in After Effects.

There are quite a few new features in Premiere Pro CS5 that don’t hinge on the new Mercury Playback Engine.  These relate primarily to metadata and content organization, as opposed to the media itself.  Speech detection tools were introduced in CS4, and now those can be used in conjunction with the features of Adobe Story, to link your actual footage to your original plans, including scripts, storyboards, and shot lists.  Much of this footage processing links to OnLocation CS5′s features, which besides monitoring the technical details of a captured media signal, allow ingest of metadata during the acquisition process.  Building up as much information as possible during production, on a per-shot and per-take basis, will further streamline the organization process during editorial.  All of this information is searchable, with the intent being that an editor will have a much easier time finding what they are looking for, as this metadata is passed down throughout the post production workflow, based on source timecode.  This content logging metadata is not the only way that CS5′s handling of non-media information has improved.

Adobe has also been working hard to streamline the process of exchanging existing projects with Premiere from Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer.  They have further refined the FCP XML import and export functionality that was first introduced in version 4.0.1, which offers some interesting options for Mac based workflows.  Working at a PC based facility, I have had more opportunity to take advantage of Premiere’s support for exchanging timelines with Avid.  My current workflow is to use EDLs to move my sequences from Avid to Premiere, but with CS5′s improved support for AAF import and export, hopefully I will soon be able to leverage the additional functionality offered by AAF exchange.  (One caveat with using EDLs to move sequences, is that occasionally Avid adds spaces to the end of every line, and CS5 will not relink to the source footage automatically, unless you manually remove those spaces)  I have yet to find the optimal settings to switch to AAF files, but I have talked with people who have it up and running.  Combining this sequences exchanging feature with CS5′s support for DNxHD in both MXF and MOV wrappers, offers some interesting possibilities, but the truly revolutionary workflow will finally arrive when Media Composer 5 is released next month, allowing Avid to link to external QuickTime files thru AMA.  Hopefully this will allow Premiere Pro CS5 and Media Composer 5 to exchange sequences that all reference the same source files, without any conversions or transcoding.  Since Canon DSLR files will be supported natively both applications, this should totally streamline my current workflow.

Now why would someone want to move their project between different NLE applications?  An editor’s familiarity with a specific toolset is usually important to them, so certain offline creative editors are not going to switch their primary editorial app no matter what.  To its credit, Avid has a solid reputation for handling extremely large projects with no decrease in performance.  While Premiere Pro has taken a huge step forward in that regard, it is going to take a long time for it to build a stable reputation, since trust usually develops very slowly.  On the other hand, Premiere makes a perfect interactive online conform tool, especially compared to Avid.  It can ingest most digital formats in their native form, supports SDI capture and playback over a number of different hardware solutions, and scales to 2K and 4K resolutions, in RGB color space if desired.  It is compatible with DPXs for color grading, and can playback surround sound for reviewing final mixes.  The fact that Premiere can use Dynamic Link to ingest your visual effects changes from After Effects, and to output to Encore for adding interaction becomes an added bonus for this conform solution.

Dynamic Link is now on its fourth iteration, and has matured into a functional tool, even at HD resolutions.  It is designed exchange media between apps, without having to waste time or disk space by rendering.  While it started as a method for importing AE comps into PPro, it became the backbone of PPro’s export capabilities thru Adobe Media Encoder as well.  While Media Encoder CS5 is a dramatic improvement from the previous version, Adobe also added back in the option to export files directly from within Premiere.  This is much quicker for rendering out small parts of large projects, avoiding the overhead of syncing the entire project with Media Encoder before rendering a couple of frames.  They also brought back the ability to easily export single frames from the timeline, a function that had been removed in CS4, an inexcusable oversight that has now been rectified.  Exporting a Premiere Pro sequence thru Media Encoder, while not transparent, is now a much faster and more stabile process than it was in CS4.  Media Encoder also now supports DPX sequences and AVC-Intra MXF files, for both input and output.  Still sequence support in both Premiere Pro and Media Encoder is still missing crucial options, for relinking footage in PPro and manually overriding the frame rate in AME.  Hopefully we will have more user control of these settings in future versions.

One thing that I would like to see handled differently in Media Encoder, as well as the Premiere exporter, is the default settings for each export plug-in.  Adobe is never going to be able to predict what settings every user is going to want, but it would be nice if it defaulted to whatever I selected last time I used that particular output option.  As it stands, Media Encoder defaults to the same output as the last file queued, but if I choose any other output (AVI, MOV, DPX) it returns all of the individual settings to the original default, which is usually DV based.  Now it is possible to save presets, but I hesitate to do so unless I anticipate using that exact configuration frequently, because sorting through too many presets can become harder than manually defining the individual settings.  On a relate note, be careful where you save your .prproj files, since selecting “Save As” does not default to the current project location as it should.  Instead it defaults to the folder containing the last piece of media that you imported.  I usually follow a strict project organizational pattern, but I have saved projects in the wrong folders daily since switching to CS5 thanks to this “feature.”  Hopefully this can be fixed in a minor update.

Now a subsidiary application to Premiere Pro, Encore CS5 is the next logical step in that application’s evolution as an interactive authoring tool.  The most significant new feature for larger productions would have to be support for DDP output, so that your Encore projects can now be replicated at a professional facility without any special hardware required on the authoring side.  Adobe has also continued to develop the Flash export options, allowing Encore users to output their interactive experiences directly to the web, now with most of the BluRay interactivity features, including the new multipage menus, supported as well.  Encore projects are now completely cross platform compatible, between the Mac and PC versions.  There is also better support for 23.976p and 24p source files, and an easier subtitling process.  AVCHD files can now be authored directly to BluRay discs without any transcoding, decreasing processing time, and increasing output quality.

Previous versions of Encore have used Dynamic Link to import Premiere Pro sequences as source clips, and more significantly in my opinion, to import After Effects compositions as motion menu backgrounds.  I was never really that impressed by Dynamic Link for Encore source clips, because your Premiere Pro sequence is usually finished by the time you make a DVD, and since you are going to have to transcode to MPEG2 at some point anyway, little time is saved.  Motion menu design on the other hand seems like a much better fit for the workflow benefits offered by Dynamic Link, since the menu needs to be edited in both Encore and AE during the authoring process.  Encore now also uses Dynamic Link to offload transcoding of those sequences, or any other incompatible source footage, to Adobe Media Encoder.  This will free up Encore to continue interactive authoring work, while asset transcoding proceeds in the background, and also allows third party accelerated encoding plug-ins that are compatible with Adobe Media Encoder, to be utilized for these internal transcodes.  While I am unaware of any CS5 compatible encoders, this was an issue with the Elemental Accelerator in CS4.  The files it generated at 24p were re-transcoded in Encore anyway, and Encore couldn’t utilize the accelerated plug-in directly.  Anyhow, while no CS5 version of Elemental Accelerator has been announced, Matrox’s CompressHD should be able to accelerate Encore’s BluRay H.264 encodes, once Matrox releases CS5 compatible drivers.

The one thing still missing from the Adobe package is a good intermediate format for exchanging files between other applications, systems, or facilities.  This capability is available from 3rd parties like Cineform or Matrox, but until Adobe integrates support for one directly into the suite, there will not be a single universal standard format, that can be counted on to be compatible everywhere.  It needs to be compatible with both Mac and PC, and store at least 10 bit HD footage with sufficient compression to playback smoothly on a laptop.  Apple and Avid have both recognized this need, and developed ProRes and DNxHD respectively.  AVC-Intra is Adobe’s current recommendation to meet those workflow needs, but that format has a complicated file structure, and is not a codec optimized for smooth playback.  This universal format would tie in well with OnLocation, if Adobe ever added support for HD-SDI capture capabilities.  That would allow ingest, either live or from tape playback, into a compressed format for editorial, with log notes entered in real-time similar to their current tapeless solution options.  And if a professional selection of scopes could be viewed of the SDI input signal, you would have an all-in-one onset workstation solution.  OnLocation CS5 currently offers most of these capabilities, but is limited to HDV, XDCam, and P2 acquisition for most of its features.  Oh, and if it supported my Canon DSLR, that would be pretty cool too; maybe next time.

As a whole the CS5 release is a major turning point for Adobe, especially with the problems their users experienced with CS4.  While I don’t yet fully utilize many of the new features, CS5 has already revolutionized the way I work.  Premiere Pro CS5 has replaced After Effects CS4 as central application from which I manage my projects.  I was lucky enough to be on the beta team, so most of the major issues I encountered with the software in my specific workflow, have already been resolved during the development process.  While CS5 is by no means perfect, it is a huge step forward that will begin to rebuild user confidence in Adobe products.  Once third party hardware and plug-ins have had time to be updated to be compatible with the new 64bit native applications, I see no other disadvantages or caveats to upgrading to CS5, which I highly recommend.

FTC Disclosure: I have been on Adobe’s beta team for many years, and Adobe has provided me a copy of CS5 for this review.  My only admitted personal bias is my preference of Windows over OSX, because I like full control over every aspect of my computing experience.  If for some reason that bothers anyone, there are plenty of other sources of information on the internet, but I try to provide unique insight on how each of these tools fits into the larger post-production picture.  Any relevant critique or response is welcomed.

Twixtor is a plug-in from ReVision Effects that allows you to change the frame rate of your footage thru motion compensated frame blending.  While it can be used to add frames for slow motion effects, I have found that I get much better results when removing frames, such as when dropping from 30fps to 24fps.  Regardless of the specific settings, Twixtor takes a lot of time to render.  In our first tests on 8-Core Xeon systems, processing one minute of source footage required one minute of render time.  Now with Intel’s new Nehalem based CPUs, and recently their even newer Gulftown 6-core chips, we have seen that reduced by about fifty percent, to a half hour per minute of source footage, which is still a long time, but feels great compared to where we were a year ago.  Since our footage re-link process is based on frame counts, we have to process our entire source clips in order to take advantage of that level of workflow automation, even if we are only using the last ten seconds of a 14 minute take.  Obviously there are ways around this, but we currently have more render time available to us than man hours, and it gives us more flexibility later on anyway, so we just let it go.  We took advantage of every night and weekend during creative editorial to Twixtor every clip that made it into the rough cut, and now we just have to link to that bank of processed footage to conform our cuts in CS4.  The fact that all of Canons DSLRs now support 24p should alleviate most of the frame rate and Twixtor issues in future projects.

Besides frame rate issues, Canon DSLRs present another unique challenge, in regards to color space and bit depth.  Many professional video codecs store the color values in the range between 16 and 235, of the 256 possible 8bit options.  (The reasoning for this is fairly complicated, and relates primarily to legacy analog video signal issues)  This limits pixels to 220 levels for each color in most 8bit codecs, but the MOV files from the Canon DSLRs use the entire 256 possible options (0-255) for each color.  This increases the number of possible values for each three color pixel by over 50%, (220^3 vs 256^3) but also means that converting your DSLR footage into most other 8bit formats will result in one of two issues: either the extreme values will be clipped, losing detail in the highlights and the shadows, or all of the dynamic range will be squeezed into the reduced sample-space, meaning certain intermediate values are going to be merged together if you edit in an 8bit codec.

Clipping was the most likely possibility in most existing applications prior to the release of Quicktime 7.6.2 in mid 2009.  Previous to that point, Quicktime displayed Canon clips incorrectly (clipping the values beyond 16-235) but after that update was released, most applications that used Quicktime to decode DSLR footage, were able to access the entire dynamic range of the source clips.  This support is not a foregone conclusion though, since DSLR files could be imported with a more generic MPEG4 decoder without Quicktime, and still be displayed incorrectly.  Even with properly calibrated import processes, compressing the 255 possible values for each color channel into the limited 220 values that most 8bit video formats offer, will lead to a loss of precision, and a potential increase in color banding, especially if you plan to color correct the footage later.  A 10bit video format will offer four times as many possible legal color values, and will be able to store all of the original image data with precision to spare.  Once you have color corrected your footage, and any visual effects are complete, an 8bit distribution format may be sufficient for most uses, but any image processing that takes place on the original files before you apply the “look” that you want, should definitely be processed in at least 10bit color space to preserve as much of your original image information  as possible.

When editing DSLR footage in Avid, DNxHD is the recommended intermediate format.  DNxHD files can be encoded in either HD 709 (16-235) or RGB (0-255) color space, but any DNxHD files encoded in RGB are converted to HD 709 upon import into Media Composer, regardless of the original output setting.  Therefore any DNxHD MOV files generated elsewhere for ingest into Avid should be exported at 16-235 to match Avid’s target color space, for a lossless “Fast Import.”  On the other hand, when importing DSLR footage into Avid, you should select “Computer RGB (0-255)” as the SOURCE color space, in the “File Pixel to Video Mapping” options.  (Rec. 709 is always the TARGET color space for DNxHD MXFs in Avid)  While importing with the 0-255 setting retains the full dynamic range, it still squeezes the entire range into the 16-235 gamut.  That loss of precision should not be as significant as viewable dynamic range for an offline edit, but if you planning to export your Avid sequence as your master without a separate conform, you should consider using a 10bit codec in Avid, like DNxHD 175x.  That will allow you to maintain both the original dynamic range and the bit depth, at the expense of higher storage space requirements.

Once you have a re-linked timeline of high quality 24p footage, there are still a few more steps that can be taken to cleanup the footage.  Dead pixels should be the first thing on the list to deal with.  Dead pixels can be caused by physical debris on the sensor or lens of the camera, or by an electronic malfunction with one of the photo-receptors on the CMOS sensor.  The result is the same regardless of the cause, with one of more pixels locked at a static value throughout the shot.  The simplest way to fix this is to cover the effected pixels with information from the surrounding area.  One procedural way to fix this is to duplicate the layer of footage in an AE comp, and mask out a similar section nearby and cover it.  (If you have a horizontal row of three dead pixels, mask the three pixels above them on a second layer, and then drop the top layer down one to cover the spot)  In most cases the duplicated data will be totally invisible, but be sure to QC the result.  If you are Twixtoring your footage to a different frame rate, fix the dead pixels before applying the rate change, otherwise the motion compensation process will cause the dead pixels to move around, making them much more difficult to remove in a procedural fashion.  The next step is to look for any rolling shutter artifacts, caused by the slight difference in time between when the top and bottom of the frame are sampled.  This difference in time can manifest itself in a number of interesting ways, including distortion, with the top of the frame seeming to “lead” the bottom.  It can also cause horizontal bands of brightness with quick flashes of light only being recognized by part of the sensor.  The Foundry has a plug-in called Rolling Shutter that can help reduce the image distortion caused by motion of the camera on smoother shots.  The horizontal bands have to be removed manually in a VFX process if you want to get rid of them, borrowing data from the preceding or following frames if needed.  The Canon DSLRs also exhibit some moiré and other aliasing issues due to the way they sample the low resolution video from the high resolution sensor.  The only way to really get rid of those artifacts is to selectively mask and blur the effected sections of the frame.  Lastly, if you are using Twixtor, QC the output for corrupt frames caused by the interpretation engine being unable to guess the proper motion of the moment in the shot.  If re-rendering with different settings doesn’t help, covering the bad frame with an original frame of footage from that moment usually solves the single frame issues.  Luckily the most difficult sections of footage to calculate motion compensate for, are usually segments of where using frame dropping conversion instead is undetectable, since the extreme motion should hide any stutter caused by the missing frames. (This is coming from a guy who is processing a lot of handheld combat footage)  Once these steps, as well as the rest of your visual effects work, are finished, you are ready to export and color, which should be similar to most other workflows at this point.

Adobe announced all of the features of the new highly anticipated Creative Suite CS5, which will include native 64bit, CUDA GPU acceleration, and better support for formats like DPX and DSLR clips.  I will have many more CS5 details in future posts, delving into how that will change the landscape of many workflows.  There are lots more new developments in the post world, but those are the primary things that stick out to me right now.  We still have two more days, and I will be spending a good bit of time demonstration Cineform’s Neo3D features at their booth at the back of the Lower South Hall.  So if anyone wants to catch up with me, feel free to stop by.

Canon DSLRs name each video file “MVI_####.mov” where “####” is a constantly incrementing 4 digit number.  It is easiest to identify individual cameras if each one is shooting a totally different series of numbers. (Like CamA = 1000′s, CamB=2000′s, etc.)  While there are no options in the Canon menus for manually setting the starting file number, there is way to trick the camera into starting at any number you want.  Reset the counter to zero in the menu, and then return the setting to Continuous.  Take a picture, and then use your computer to rename the JPEG file on the card to the desired number.  (In this case: 5000)  Put the card back in the camera and take another picture.  Verify that it incremented from there. (IMG_5001)  Format the card or remove it, and your camera will continue incrementing from that point. (So my next shot, will be IMG_5002, or MVI_5002 if you switch to video mode.)  You can reset it to any four digit number you want, and it will increment from there, unless you shoot with a card from another camera, without reformatting it first.  In that case, the camera will increase the file number if necessary, above any files already on the card.  The Canon 1D MarkIV has a few more options for filename prefixes, but the objective is the same, to create a uniquely identifiable series of filenames for each camera on your shoot.

Doing this will make it much easier to sort through your files, since you will be left with a separate numbered sequence of files from each camera.  I was recently on a two week shoot with twenty Canon cameras, and by setting their initial numbers 500 apart, (Since four digits gives you 10K possibilities, divided by 20) it was easy to sort the resulting files, even though due to logistics, I got some of the files many days after they were shot, and out of order.  If you set the clocks on the cameras accurately, the timestamps on the files will make it easier figure out which files are different angles of the same take.  Even with all that, I still had duplicate file names on that project, with 5600 files for that shoot, so renaming to a better convention will be important on most large projects.

Having a good naming convention for your media files can save a lot of time and trouble.  The info that needs to be contained within the file name will vary depending on the nature of the project.  For the Navy Seal movie I setup a convention that included Scene, Setup, Take, and Camera.  The next project I worked on was more of a documentary type shoot, with no script or scene numbers, so the file name was composed of Date, Camera, and an incrementing shot number.  The important things to keep in mind are: order the info intelligently for searching, keep place values consistent for sorting, (Use leading zeros) and make it unique within the first 8 characters for EDLs.  For the movie, 005A_02b.mov is: scene 5, first setup, second take, camera B.  If I want to see the other camera angles for this take, they should be nearby if the footage is sorted alphabetically.  And if I want to find other takes from that setup, I shouldn’t have to scroll too far. If during onlining I am looking for a specific clip based on the name, I go to the proper scene folder, and scroll down to the right setup, and start looking from there.  Now if you want to include descriptions in your filenames, put them after the unique identifiers up front.  This is because sorting descriptions alphabetically is relatively useless, but you can still search through them with regular OS tools, as long as the description is somewhere in the filename. (10_E_026_BigExplosion.mov)  And if your software at some point in the process truncates the name, there should still be enough info in the first 8 characters to identify the exact source file.

During the process of renaming, it is a good idea to keep a log of what you have done in case you make a mistake, and it forms a basis for content logging as well.  I do this with a simple Excel spreadsheet that records: Original Name (MVI_####), New Asset Name, Description, Comments, as well as CameraName, Date, FrameRate, or any other data that might be relevant depending on the project.  I also sort out the bad takes and delete the .THM thumbnail files during this stage. (The THM files are actually JPEGs that can be opened if you rename them, but I have never found any practical use for them)  Once I have this list of what I want the files to be renamed to, to fit the filename convention for the project, I convert the log into a renaming batch file.

To do this, save a copy of your log sheet as a “Text (Tab Delimited)” file from Excel. Then delete every column except the original name and the new asset name, and insert blank columns before, in between, and after those two columns. Fill each of those three columns with a unique character, like #, $, and %. Save your file and close Excel. Open the file in Notepad, and press CTRL+H to bring up the replace window. Replace “#([TAB]” with a command and the path to your media files. (“REN D:\ProjectName\Footage\”) Replace “[TAB]$[TAB]” with “.MOV[SPACE]” unless your log included file extensions, in which case just replace that with [SPACE]. Replace “[TAB]%” with “.MOV” unless your log included that, in which case replace it with nothing. (In WinXP the only way to insert a [TAB] into the Replace dialog box is to cut and paste one from the document, with CTRL+V.)  You should be left with a text file with a series of commands that each look something  like this:
REN D:\ProjectName\Footage\MVI_0001.MOV 057_T12A_NewClipName.MOV
Save this document and rename the file extention to .bat, and double click on it to run the batch.  This should assign new names that match your log to each of your files, and make it much easier to sort through your footage, if you designed your naming convention well.

The other thing you can do with you footage log is generate an ALE, so that if you are editing in Avid, your log notes can be linked to your clips within the program.  I will go into those details, and other tips for editing DSLR files in Avid, in my next post.

I know I haven’t posted anything here in a while, but there will be quite a bit coming in the near future.  I am writing a series of articles that will be posted between here and Shane Hurlbut’s blog at hurlbutvisuals.com.  I have worked with Shane on a number of projects, the largest one being the Navy Seal film over the last year.  I will be offering an overview of the post workflow options for video DSLRs on his site, with links back to this one to delve into the less glamorous, nitty-gritty details.  So stay tuned for some very focused articles detailing specific workflow obstacles in the next few weeks.  And then NAB is only a month away, which I am sure will bring a whole variety of new things to talk about.  I will be at Cineform’s booth as a demo artist/workflow consultant again this year, so feel free to stop by and check it out.

So once the lenses issue was dealt with, were left with a selection of AVCHD encoded MOV files.  AVCHD is a processing intensive format that does not playback or edit very well.  While Quicktime would play the files, it clipped the blacks and the whites at incorrect levels.  16 and 235 were being stretched to 0 and 255 on decode, lowering the dynamic range.  This was caused by Quicktime incorrectly interpreting one of the header fields on the file.  The solution to this was to use CoreAVC to decode the files when converting into a different, and ideally more edit friendly, compression format.  Shortly after this workaround was developed, Apple released a Quicktime update (7.6) that fixed this particular issue entirely.

Beyond the clipping issue, there are other tricks to maximize the dynamic range of the 5D.  The picture style is used to control the way that the camera converts the 14bit RAW still into an 8-bit JPEG.  The same picture profile settings are applied to the 8-bit recorded video.  This allows you to do things to get the maximum detail out of the available 8-bits of color depth.  The first few projects I worked on that used the 5D, we used a custom picture profile that I got from Stu Maschwitz’s ProLost blog, High Gamma 5.  We did a number of comparison tests, and while High Gamma 5 gave us a wider total dynamic range, for our feature film, we eventually decided to use Neutral, one of the default Canon presets.  Neutral gave us a file that was closer to the final look we were going for, and with only 8bits of color depth, burning in your look, at least to a degree, should result in better picture quality at the end of the day.

Every file the camera records is named MVI_####.mov, with an auto-incrementing number, and no real override options.  That makes things simple on tiny projects, with one camera since each file has a unique name.  On larger projects, and ones that use more that one camera, (We usually have 15) file management can be a bit more work, to keep things straight throughout the post production process.  Our solution was to rename each MOV file with a unique 8 digit identifier as the new filename, and store the key to the original card and filename in a database.  This allows each clip to have a consistent name throughout the process, to show up on EDLs as a tape name or clip name as desired, without truncating unique values after the 8th digit for certain formats.  By the time we are done ,we usually have a source MOV, an Avid MXF, and an online Cineform AVI, all with the same content and file name.

Next up was the framerate problem, at 30p.  The first few projects I did with 5D we posted at 29.97, so the issue was solved with a simple reinterpretation of the framerate, when converting from the source AVCHD into an editing codec, and tweaking the audio .1% to match.  Unfortunately 29.97 footage doesn’t intercut with film very well, and won’t print back for theatrical masters either, so sometimes a 24p workflow is required.  For 24p projects, the conversion solution is much more complicated, involving motion compensated frame blending.  After extensive testing we concluded that this was best done with the Revision Effects Twixtor plugin for AE, or using Optical Flow in FCS Compressor on OSX.  Having a PC centered workflow, I favor the AE based solution.  With render times at around an hour per minute of source footage, it is impractical to convert all of the source footage on large projects, which necessitates an offline edit.  Since we don’t have timecode and keycode, relinking for the online requires a bit more creativity.  We have found some interesting options that are unique to Premiere Pro CS4, related to the way it links EDLs to existing source footage that make this much simpler than our first tedious tests, which involved manually rebuilding projects at 24p back in Premiere Pro CS3.  The new CS4 version can convert the TC-In on an EDL to a framecounted In-point of an existing media file, with makes the onlining of 5D footage a relatively simple automatic process after a few find-replace edits (.mov to .avi in our case) to the EDL.  In the future, it looks like Canon is going to support 24p recording on all of their DSLR offerings, so all of these crazy 30p workarounds will soon be an obselete thing of the past.

Although it is much better in rough environments than most other electronics, Canon DSLRs do have their weaknesses.  I have operated a 5D in temperatures of 20 below zero, and in the desert at over 120 degrees fahrenheit.  While we had no issues in the cold, where solid state recording has a huge advantage over tape, there are some issues at higher temperatures.  The camera sensor itself is a large piece of silicon, that generates a lot of heat on its own, and when combined with a high external temperature, in the worst cases is shuts off the camera.  You probably have to be over 150 degrees to get to that point, leaving the camera in a black metal box in direct sunlight for an extended period of time, but we have seen it happen.  A much more frequent problem, that is harder to detect, is that as the sensor begins to overheat, there will be much more video noise in the recorded picture, especially in the darks.  This is probably due to a higher latent voltage on the chip as its electrical resistance changes with the temperature increase.  This has only been a problem for us when shooting with the same camera for many hours in a hot environment, and our solution is usually just to swap the camera bodies for one that has not been used in a while.  This obviously requires having multiple cameras on set, which isn’t always an option on lower budget projects.

The last issue, that we are still finding new ways to deal with, is rolling shutter.  Having a large format CMOS sensor, DSLRs are subject to rolling shutter, or inconsistencies between the top and bottom of the frame.  I have spent the last few months working on a project that put the 5D into some of the most intense situations.  As a fairly lightweight device, it is subject to more jitter and shake than a larger camera with more inertia, and with the camera moving, the rolling shutter results in the recorded picture being slightly geometrically skewed, depending on the direction of the motion.  We also shoot high speed objects, like helicopter rotor blades, which are known to cause strange artifacts in certain instances.  So far we have been lucky with that, and haven’t found any of those types of issues in our footage.

The type of rolling shutter artifact we are struggling with the most, is gunfire muzzle flashes, especially at night.  In the dark, the flash blows out the imager, but the flash does not last as long as even a single frame.  So with the rolling shutter, the top half of a frame will be totally blown out, with the bottom part looking normal, because the flash had subsided by the time that part of the chip was sampled, or vice versa.  Setting the shutter speed lower than the frame rate causes it to screw up more of the frame or frames, and setting it higher causes it to narrow the flash into a distinct horizontal band in the footage, neither of which is desirable.  One thing we have found that helps is setting the shutter on the 5D to 1/30th.  (We usually set it to 1/50 to get similar motion plur to film shot with a 180 degree shutter)  With the 30p framerate, the flash either affects an entire frame, or matching parts on two subsequent frames.  (Bottom part of one frame, and the reverse area on the top of the next one)  This gives us an entire over exposed frame if we stitch the two parts together.  This can be hand cut back into footage that has been brought from 30p to 24p by manually selecting frames.  It remains to be seen if this solution can be scaled practically to our entire movie.  The best way to avoid this issue is to avoid recording gunfire at close range in very dark environments.  The farther you are from the muzzle flash, and the more ambient light there is, the less it is going to flare out your camera, minimizing the degree of the resulting rolling shutter artifact.

So that should convey some of the challenges are in faced in using DSLRs for filmmaking, especially on large scale projects, but it is by no means an exhaustive list.  As the tools evolve to suit the cameras, and the cameras evolve to suit the tools, many of these issues will become much easier to solve and require fewer workarounds.  The AVCHD decoding issue was solved by a new release of Quicktime, the manual lense control was solved with a new firmware release from Canon.  The 30p conversion process is the next issue I see becoming a thing of the past, if Canon can get a 24p recording option onto the 5D.  I am looking forward to that day, but in the mean time I have 2TB of 30p footage, divided into 5,000 shots, to cut into a 24p film, so I have a lot of work ahead of me.

First off was the Nikon D90, that shot 720p24.   That is a good frame rate for film makers, but the quality of the MPEG4 files is not worth serious work, especially with a lot of motion in the frame.  Canon’s 5D MarkII was the next option to hit the market, with 1080p30.  Dealing with the framerate is the most challenging aspect of using this camera.  30p is a fairly unusual framerate, supposedly requested by the AP for reporters to get both pictures and video for the web.  Canon’s next 1080p release in the Rebel Ti offered an even more awkward and useless framerate of 20fps.  Canon finally got it right with the next release, in the new 7D, which has options for 29.97, 25, and 23.976 fps at 1080p.  It also has options for 50 and 59.94 fps at 720p, which makes it a much more versatile film making tool.  The new 1D MarkIV offers those options on a slightly larger sensor, and with less rolling shutter artifacting, a phenomenon I will go into more detail on later.  Nikon has released a number of other cameras, but with no new features beyond the D90′s 720p24.  Panasonic released the Lumix GH1 which offers 1080p24, but the 4/3 lense system is not as universal as the Canon and Nikon offerings.  Canon has pushed the technology the furthest, so most of my dialog will be in regards to their offerings and workflow options.

Regardless of which DSLR camera you chose, there are many challenges to be overcome in using them on a large production.  First off, as mentioned before, you don’t have real timecode or keycode to track your footage or sync audio with.  It is a tapeless format, so you have to have a separate data backup solution.  In the case of the 5D there is the framerate issue if you plan to intercut it with film.  There are also issues with monitoring and playback, since calibrated HDMI based monitoring solutions are hard to come by.  All video capable DSLRs have CMOS sensors and therefore exhibit rolling shutter issues during rapid movement.  This is caused by the top of the frame recording a slightly earlier moment in time than the bottom of the frame, with any rapid changes producing inconsistencies in the picture, changing from top to bottom.  I am most familiar with the specific issues of the Canon 5D workflow, since I am in the middle of production on a feature film that is being shot primarily on the 5D.  I will go into much more detail about how we solved those issues to leverage the enormous potential of that camera in my next article.

NVidia and Elemental Technologies report that the accelerator can provide up to a 10x increase in encoding speeds, but mileage may vary in real world use.  With my system, I usually found encoding rates to be 50% to 100% faster with real world work, depending on the output settings, which is still a significant improvement if you do a lot of exporting.  The relative increase in encoding performance that you will experience depends on the speed of your system.  Older systems will see a major improvement, while newer high end workstations are already quite fast, so the change will be less dramatic.  My 3Ghz 8-Core workstation can already encode my HD timelines to MPEG2 for DVD faster than realtime, but with the Elemental Accelerator, I was able to cut the time for a two minute export from 1:27 to 30 seconds.  On a two hour clip, that would be a thirty minutes instead of an hour and a half.  My 1080p H.264 encodes for BluRay output only saw a 50% increase in encoding speed.

Exports of more complicated timelines see less of an improvement because render speed is not accelerated by the GPU as much as encoding speed is.  If you coming from a single flat clip, the increase in export speed will be much more apparent.  I don’t use AVCHD footage, but when encoding from those types of source files, the GPU can accelerate the processing intensive AVCHD decode, as well as the MPEG2 or H.264 encode.  This should lead to more dramatic performance improvements, especially on laptops, where available CPUs are not as powerful as their desktop counterparts.  When I first reviewed the accelerator software earlier in the year, I anticipated that laptops would be even better served by a GPU based accelerator than desktops.  If you frequently make these types of exports from a laptop with a Quadro GPU, this plugin will be worth it.  In the desktop world it isn’t as simple, since the CPUs are not so weak by comparison to the GPU. If you make DVDs or BluRays for a living it will be a no brainer, but otherwise it all depends on how much of your day you spend waiting for exports to complete.

There are still a few other issues to be worked out.  The Adobe Media Encoder CS4 is designed to minimize the decrease in system performance during background rendering by pausing exports during timeline playback.  This may be necessary on lower end systems, but eight-core workstations should have power to spare, before we even factor in the GPU.  This prevents Adobe Premiere CS4 from really utilizing the CPU power being freed up by the GPU acceleration, because any time it is called upon, the render gets paused anyway.  Adding the option to disable that functionality would be beneficial to both Elemental Accelerator users, and anyone else with a high-end workstation, so that they could truly multi-task their system.  Until then, its probably best to work outside of Premiere Pro during your accelerated exports, to truly take advantage of your available system power.

With NVIDIA’s Digital Video Pipeline in the works, its easy to see where this could be going.  Once they have SDI video inputs available, we could see realtime capture directly to H.264 and MPEG2 files, among many other things.  With professional I/O, the available GPU power could be used to turn the video card into a full editing accelerator card.  With SLI Mosaic and other new developments with the QuadroPlex, I can see it being scaled up to 4K frame sizes with realtime performance, and I am definitely looking forward to that.

It has been a long time since I have posted, but more is coming soon.  I spent the last few months working at a summer camp, but I am now getting back in the swing of things.  NVidia sent me some more cool new things to try out, so I will be posting about that soon.  Also at some point I should probably start posting about my extensive experimentation with the Canon 5DMkII.