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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

The Production/Postproduction Software You Can't Live Without

Because I can't resist "list" stuff... Production/Post software I can't live without:

iTunes - still the easiest and best way for me to burn a CD. Just no-brainer.

Garage Band - Yeah, ProTools is awesome. But for ultrafast loops and jotting down quick ideas, Garage Band is amazing. (I used to be a pro musician and audio engineer... )

FCP / Vegas - OSX / Windows. Vegas is a vastly underappreciated program. It does some incredible stuff that no other editor at this price point can even come close to.

Notepad/TextEdit - the more technology there is, the more I appreciate the value of a good plaintext editor.

Freemind - for how my brain works, this freeware app is awesome in any kind of creative meeting for following and keeping track of loose and freeform discussions.

Photoshop - no explanation needed.

SCRATCH - (of course. :P) In all seriousness, though... I work for the company, and I also love the product. It has helped me out of a jam in an awful lot of DI situations.

And for the geeky stuff...

WSonyII - a freeware application that tests and performs ultra-basic RS422 control. Can't count how many times this simple little app has saved me.

MacDrive - brainless hookup for HFS and HFS+ drives to Windows.

Camtasia - Can't count how many times I've needed to record screen movements into a quick movie file.

Bootable USB drive - Amazingly useful for those fun times when XP takes a dump. Doesn't happen often, but when it does - having a bootable USB is a godsend.

CCleaner - hands down, the best XP system cleanup tool I know.

NeoDownloader - shareware - will scan through an entire website and download every media file on the website and put into folders. Use this all the time.

EDLMAX24 - various really useful kinds of EDL manipulation. Also home to one of the best (and only) reference texts on EDLs. http://www.edlmax.com/MAXGUIDE.HTML

Thassit for now. :)

Lucas
 
luki said:
Because I can't resist "list" stuff... Production/Post software I can't live without:

iTunes - still the easiest and best way for me to burn a CD. Just no-brainer.

Garage Band - Yeah, ProTools is awesome. But for ultrafast loops and jotting down quick ideas, Garage Band is amazing. (I used to be a pro musician and audio engineer... )

FCP / Vegas - OSX / Windows. Vegas is a vastly underappreciated program. It does some incredible stuff that no other editor at this price point can even come close to.

Notepad/TextEdit - the more technology there is, the more I appreciate the value of a good plaintext editor.

Freemind - for how my brain works, this freeware app is awesome in any kind of creative meeting for following and keeping track of loose and freeform discussions.

Photoshop - no explanation needed.

SCRATCH - (of course. :P) In all seriousness, though... I work for the company, and I also love the product. It has helped me out of a jam in an awful lot of DI situations.

And for the geeky stuff...

WSonyII - a freeware application that tests and performs ultra-basic RS422 control. Can't count how many times this simple little app has saved me.

MacDrive - brainless hookup for HFS and HFS+ drives to Windows.

Camtasia - Can't count how many times I've needed to record screen movements into a quick movie file.

Bootable USB drive - Amazingly useful for those fun times when XP takes a dump. Doesn't happen often, but when it does - having a bootable USB is a godsend.

CCleaner - hands down, the best XP system cleanup tool I know.

NeoDownloader - shareware - will scan through an entire website and download every media file on the website and put into folders. Use this all the time.

EDLMAX24 - various really useful kinds of EDL manipulation. Also home to one of the best (and only) reference texts on EDLs. http://www.edlmax.com/MAXGUIDE.HTML

Thassit for now. :)

Lucas
Click to expand...

Lucas, awesome list. It's so interesting to see what others are using. Half of your list I had never heard of, but have probably spent countless hours trying to problem solve when one little app on that list could have turned an all nighter into a half nighter.

I'm going to check out edlmax, we have been busy writing up a definitive CMX3600 guide for our site and how it applies to all the mainstream NLE's so people can see what transitions and effects will transfer and what will not. I didn't think there was much out there like that, and now I see they have one already.

We're getting our Scratch soon! Not the full 4K system, that's going to have to wait for first quarter 2008, but we'll have the software running at least and the system will handle uncompressed SD, so we can use it to grade and online some commercial jobs and get used to the toolset over the next few months.

I agree on the plain text editor, very useful.

Rich
 
big lebowski said:
Windows 3.1 came out in 1992 and you were impressed?
FIVE years earlier, in 1987, the Apple Macintosh II came out with a color graphics user interface much more advanced than Windows 3.1.
TWO years earlier, in 1990, Photoshop 1.0 came out on the Macintosh. THAT was amazing.
:bleh:
Click to expand...

Well at the time our family had an (even then) old green and black IBM running DOS. I'm sure if I had run across an Apple II I would have been amazed as well. Then in 1993 we got a color Macintosh and July of 05 an advance windows 95 pentium 120 with some $1500 video card that could do 1280x1024 at 32bit color! Windows 95 was pretty mind blowing at the time for me. And I was sick and tired of our macintosh by then because it had no cool games. And visual basic. WOW! How cool I can make my own programs!
 
No pre-production software?

'cause I'd have to say Movie Magic Screenwriter... Love at first sight. NeoOffice and TextWrangler to accompany it.

iCal, Apple Mail and Firefox. Some Widgets: Jason Cox's Aspect, Digital Heaven's VideoSpace 2.0, JiWire HotSpot finder and Chronotracker.

For post, Final Cut Studio and After Effects.

And to waste time, X-Moto. Try it out :)
 
big lebowski said:
Windows 3.1 came out in 1992 and you were impressed?
FIVE years earlier, in 1987, the Apple Macintosh II came out with a color graphics user interface much more advanced than Windows 3.1.
TWO years earlier, in 1990, Photoshop 1.0 came out on the Macintosh. THAT was amazing.
Click to expand...

I remember being very impressed with the Amiga OS running it's true multi-tasking OS and GUI, having integrated 8 bit stereo sound, while displaying graphics in 4096 colors (Deluxe Paint, DigiPaint). This was in 1985, while most other systems were still working in 16 color palettes. Even in 1987, the PC and MAC graphics standards were just introducing 256 color palettes (VGA, etc.).

That was truly impressive to me at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_And_Modify
 
Awesome, Casey, didn't know you were a Deluxe Paint user too!

Aquafox, RE pre-prod software, I listed Final Draft... and am interested in Celtx versus Movie Magic Budgeting / Scheduling / etc... what do you guys like?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Sony Vegas. (Hope there will be a 12 bit release soon.)
 
Vegas ( with lots of scripts) & DVDa4 , Sound Forge, Combustion 4 , AE7, Primatte 3 , photoshop cs2 ...

not sure what i'll use with RED ??
 
donatello said:
not sure what i'll use with RED ??
Click to expand...

The most cost effective resolution independent solution is Scratch, which can be bought software only for +/- $5000 (Lucas... is this right?) but you will want some additional Scratch modules, and without the right hardware, it's going to be tough to grade even at 2K as you will need to get a decent 300MB/sec off your drives just for one 2K stream. 10 SATA drives in RAID 0 should give you the throughput you need. I would recommend the Hitachi Ultrastar drives. For 4K you are in Fibre Channel territory and would be looking at something like the Bright Systems Brightdrive4K but then you're talking about a serious cash outlay.

The thing that I feel people don't understand (some people at least) is that they are not going to do anything with thier beautifully shot uncompressed 4K or even 2K footage when they get back to thier MacBook Pro with FCP.
 
not looking to CC a final project ... i'm not a editor ..
for on set - something i can drop in TL and view it ( 1080P will be fine).. something to move shots around , CC a frame or few seconds (1080p) ...
perhaps CC & render a single 4k frame ...
the demo at NAB FCP booth could do it ... and of course whatever RED had at their booth could do it ...
i'm currently on a PC .... i really don't want to have to render out to another file ....

then there is the Aja I/O - come out of RED HD-DVI into Aja then into mac ... and view proRes clips...

not looking to CC on set - just create some LUT's

for final CC i'll go to a post house ...
 
In RedCode I trust

In RedCode I trust

4K Hub said:
(Snip) The thing that I feel people don't understand (some people at least) is that they are not going to do anything with thier beautifully shot uncompressed 4K or even 2K footage when they get back to thier MacBook Pro with FCP.
Click to expand...

The key word here is "uncompressed". IMHO the axiom that only uncompressed will do is based mostly on codecs engineered when the design parameters, particularly for the client side, were based on a lot less horsepower than we have today. There were also some assumptions about what the human eye could perceive that turned out to be incorrect but I digress.

It might be premature to call wavelet compression a "mature" technology but for a variety of practical reasons I am jumping on the RedCode RAW bandwagon. I suppose Cineform deserves kudos as well, J2K is less impressive but still better than any DCT based codec I have ever seen on a proper display.

Perhaps when Moore's Law has a few more years of run, uncompressed will become the standard once again. IMHO for the foreseeable future the quality of available display tech and distribution codecs will limit image quality in ways that will make it virtually impossible to differentiate between an uncompressed pipeline and a good wavelet based pipeline in production and post.

Ignoring story/acting/prod. design/etc for the moment I think the more meaningful technical factors are good lighting, talent in the grading suite, etc more so than "good" compression versus no compression. A year from now that statement will be proven or disproven on screen, until then its only an opinion. Now where is that fire proof suit :devil:
 
More than just the CPU

More than just the CPU

Good point Gavin, bandwidth is the principal issue at the moment. The modern computing environment as it interfaces with the kind of work we do taxes many aspects of performance besides the CPU. One reason I am holding myself back from buying the newest Mac tower is I am waiting for several improvements starting with better GPU options, an HD capable optical drive with read and write capability that is supported by FCS/Studio Pro, the Leopard version of OSX which should better utilize the multi-core Intel chips and of course the rumored resolution independent monitor support.

BTW, Apple, I would settle for the first two :help:

Now how about a way to connect my new Mac tower to a 4K projector or monitor without 8 lanes of HD-SDI...
 
Just an interesting point I've observed... HD NLE for the "masses" started out as uncompressed with initial products and boardsets needing massive SCSI raids, and later moved into compressed territory. Which of course, is the inverse of what happened in the SD world for the masses, which started with HIGHLY compressed footage and moved slowly toward "BetaSP Quality" and then to "uncompressed".

Even DVCPRO 100 was edited as a 1280 by 720 uncompressed product on Macs and PC's until the FCP released that changed everything. The great irony was that there were very few uncompressed SOURCES in the first place, as most HD material was Sony or Panasonic HDCAM or DVCPRO 100.

My understanding, talking to vendors at the time, was that it was easier to build uncompressed capture boards, as there was no universal and good full raster compressed codec that they could use. I remember one NAB, checking out products from EVS, BOXX, and other integrators wondering "Where the heck is the compressed HD????"

DPS/Leitch/Harris at the time released the Altitude boardset which was one of the first cards to offer "lightly" compressed full raster HD as an option using their own variable compression codec. I generally chose to work with it at full raster 10bit 40 to 60 MB/sec HD, which was of very good quality and I could do two streams with DVE/dissolves, etc.
 
Gotta have it

Gotta have it

I think Jim's analysis fits my own read on the situation and when I first heard about Apple's ProRes codec at NAB my reaction was "what took you so long?" Perhaps that's not fair since a codec of sufficient quality took time to develop and FCP was still seen as a poor man's knockoff of Avid until the last year or two. Hopefully ProRes will become an accepted deliverable on disk since I hate spending huge bank on studio decks. I have primarily been using Panny's implementation of DV100 (DVCPRO-HD) despite its technical limitations due to its tight integration with FCP, but the non-square pixels and lack of a full raster option was killing me.

In any case, I stand guilty of threadjacking and throw myself on the mercy of the listmums - now, back to the topic.

Software I can't imagine doing this work without:

Photoshop, QuickTime, Final Cut, Motion, After Effects, Final Draft, MYOB, Safari, MacMail, Quark, Compressor (which still isn't as easy to use as Cleaner), Acrobat, DVD Studio Pro (hate the interface), Illustrator
 
I suppose as with anything in the end it comes down to what you want to do. I am not aware that any of the DI solutions that will conform, grade and finish at 2K and above will handle anything other than uncompressed image data.

So 4K footage shot in Redcode at 27MB/sec will have to be converted to full uncompressed 4K RGB, which in 12-bit color depth will require 1312.87MB/sec. So sure, Redcode is great for on-camera recording, but to process it in Scratch or Baselight or whatever at full res can only take place in the uncompressed domain (at the moment at least).

I was only meaning that I speak to some who think they can buy a RED, shoot 4K and somehow magically finish a project at 4K on thier Macbook. If you are working in HD resolutions from your original 4K source that's a different story because all the SD/HD NLE's handle video in compressed form on the timeline. You can't do that at 2K and above, it's uncompressed or nothing (that I am aware anyway, please tell me if I'm wrong).

Rich
 
4K Hub said:
I am not aware that any of the DI solutions that will conform, grade and finish at 2K and above will handle anything other than uncompressed image data.
Click to expand...

AFAIK, Apple's Color does at 2K. Not that I'd call it a "solution" that I'd recommend to anyone just yet. But that's due to general bug issues, etc. Maybe version 1.1 / 1.5 / 2 / 3 will be workable...

Blair S. Paulsen said:
I think Jim's analysis fits my own read on the situation and when I first heard about Apple's ProRes codec at NAB my reaction was "what took you so long?" Perhaps that's not fair since a codec of sufficient quality took time to develop and FCP was still seen as a poor man's knockoff of Avid until the last year or two.
Click to expand...

If you compare ProRes to DNxHD, I think the "Avid knockoff" theme continues ;)

Blair S. Paulsen said:
Hopefully ProRes will become an accepted deliverable on disk since I hate spending huge bank on studio decks.
Click to expand...

For that to happen, Apple would need to allow non-FCP Studio owners to download the codec. Avid does this with DNxHD. Apple needs to do this if they ever want it to be a standard.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Bruce Allen said:
For that to happen, Apple would need to allow non-FCP Studio owners to download the codec. Avid does this with DNxHD. Apple needs to do this if they ever want it to be a standard.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
Click to expand...


I was just going to say. They better not send us any Pro-Res Footage. We'll look at it put it back in the mail and ask for real footage.
 
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