HD-SDI Out Quality?

[Nick Wernham]

Hey Nick, the advantage of the DNXHD workflow are as follows.

1) The quicktimes are fully AVID native, and are much smaller and mangeable than R3D's
2) AVID's can import the QT's "lowrez" (at DNX35), and later conform to the high rez QTS or the orginal R3Ds
3) Typically, they are given a "one light" (a nice even uniform grade) and look pretty awesome.

The new Adobe Premiere sounds SICK, and I'm sure its awesome. But a lot of us still run AVID, which is still the standard for facilities and post houses running multiple rooms. What makes AVID rock is its ability to provide shared media for literally dozens of edit rooms all at once: an army of editors can even working in the SAME project if need be, without a hitch, which is pretty amazing. AND...the media is all mirrored and backed up.

For example, I write and produce promos at AETN, and they run 20 edit rooms day and night. That's 40 edit shifts a night, and there is literally 40 TB's of media being used all at once. You can imagine how a 5 to 10 TB RED shoot is frowned upon by the engineers - it just takes up too much space for one single promo project. I'm trying to encourage them to keep cutting from the proxies, but always conforming at the end to the R3D's when it comes time to deliver and grade.

Premiere is, as far as I understand, more of a stand alone system. Great for the indivudal editor or preditor that's rocking out a single piece, trailer, doc, etc. But Adobe has not concentrated at all, as far as I know, into that much larger facility type workflow which has always been Avid's bread and butter.

That being said, Avid CAN now play down R3D's natively, and they are getting better. We are currently moving our Avid into a new space and will start to play with R3Ds with our new Red Rocket, so I'll have a better sense in the next month or so of JUST how good Avid can handle native RED media. From what I'm gleaming from the boards, Premiere is currently the king in that department. Which is great...because that just means it's all the more likely that Avid 7 (the next build) will follow suite.

Hope this kind of helps demystify at least some of the DNX workflow....

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reponse, Nick. I didn't think about what advantages Avid might have for a project involving a lot of editors. I suppose that, somewhat predictably, it depends on the nature of the show being produced and the post-production talent involved in said project. Even if it's the kind of piece that could easily be edited by one person then Avid is probably still the right tool for the job if your editor has a lot of experience with it.

On another note (and perhaps this is the wrong thread for this sort of discussion), I wonder what kind of advances Adobe could make with their Creative Cloud to close the competitive gap between them and Avid on projects of the kind you are describing. I mean, part of the idea behind this adaptation of Cloud technology in Adobe's software suite is supposed to be people working on the same project together over the internet. Sharing project files from Premiere, After Effects, Speed Grade, etc. in a more seamless way. At the very least it is an interesting concept. I haven't used that part of the package yet so I can't comment on how effective it is currently, but given how new everything is I'd be surprised if it's up to scratch for the kind of work you are describing and wonder what needs to be done to get it there.

 

[Bob Gundu]

It should but there is no timecode through HDMI.

Does the HDMI out on the EPIC look identical to the HD-SDI out?

 

[Nick Morrison]

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reponse, Nick. I didn't think about what advantages Avid might have for a project involving a lot of editors. I suppose that, somewhat predictably, it depends on the nature of the show being produced and the post-production talent involved in said project. Even if it's the kind of piece that could easily be edited by one person then Avid is probably still the right tool for the job if your editor has a lot of experience with it.

On another note (and perhaps this is the wrong thread for this sort of discussion), I wonder what kind of advances Adobe could make with their Creative Cloud to close the competitive gap between them and Avid on projects of the kind you are describing. I mean, part of the idea behind this adaptation of Cloud technology in Adobe's software suite is supposed to be people working on the same project together over the internet. Sharing project files from Premiere, After Effects, Speed Grade, etc. in a more seamless way. At the very least it is an interesting concept. I haven't used that part of the package yet so I can't comment on how effective it is currently, but given how new everything is I'd be surprised if it's up to scratch for the kind of work you are describing and wonder what needs to be done to get it there.

Nick, that's a good question, that I can't answer. My gut tells me that the Cloud probably can't handle 40TB's of footage (and growing) that Avid facilities need. It probably can't handle 20 edits sharing at once. And it certainly can't handle frame accurate layoffs to HDCAM. A huge part of an Avid facility is all the high data cabling that allows all the rooms to run multiple streams of HD w/out a hiccup, and lay off frame accurately.

To give you a sense of how important frame accurate edits are....this was something even Final Cut 7 (at its best) struggled with...I worked at a large Final Cut facility and there were many times FCP struggled to make PERFECT frame accurate layoffs.

Where I currently work, FCP is now only used for web work. It too was incapable of INSERT editing onto previously cut MASTERS and making quick revisions..it was routinely several frames off and kept destroying edits. So now its just used for the web and is purely tapeless.

I know this may sound old fashioned, but my experience in cable broadcast is that tape is still king. HDCAM and HDCAM-SR are what every show is delivered on (even at HBO). It's just a very effective way to archive literally MILLIONS OF HOURS OF PROGRAMMING. Tapeless files are certainly better, but there is something to be said for a nearly indestructible HD-CAM SR tape. You can literally throw it across the room and it will be fine. They are shipped up and down in messenger vans all day long where I work, and the are flawless.

So that's where AVID really thrives...piping huge amounts of sharable data to an infinite number of edit rooms, and it guarantees perfect HD-CAM workflow.

It may sound archaic, but there you have it.

I don't think the cloud can do this...yet.

I just cant imagine ingesting an episode of ICE ROAD TRUCKERS off an HD-CAM and having our media go straight to the cloud and that be usable yet...as fast as the cabling in the facility.

Plus..there are questions of ownership..Im sure networks would feel squeamish about giving Adobe so much access to their content. It would have to be customizable.

Anyway...interesting conversation...

One day...it will all be tapeless and in the cloud...and it will be such a horizontal world that it WILL be much more about talent vs tools, but...we are a still a way off from that...

 

[Nick Wernham]

Great thoughts, Nick. Based on your comments here's a few ideas for what needs to be done.

1) We probably need something a good bit faster than even gigabit ethernet for the kind of file sharing that you are talking about.
2) Adobe needs to develop a way of licensing the ability for a post-production facility to build their own cloud-style server for internal use with the same sorts of ever-expanding features that the Creative Cloud allows. Basically, you build your own Creative Cloud that works just like Adobe's, but the only people who have access to it are the ones who the production wants to see the work.
3) We need really good backups of everything. The media itself, the project files. Not only does there need to be a lot of redundancy, but it needs to be every bit as safe and secure as the tap workflow that you are describing.

Do you agree that those would be three big steps in the right direction?