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Cutter's Blog
Cool New Product Releases and Anything Worth Mentioning, for Now
by Cutter Stevens
DV411's Resident Geek and Technical Director
So here's a few words on the current product releases that are not only catching the industry buzz, but are, in my humble opinion, worth it.
Adobe CS3 Production Premium - Now Shipping
From Adobe news release: "...Creative Suite 3 Production Premium, the total post-production solution available for both Mac and Windows. Now including Adobe Flash Professional software for output to the web and Adobe Soundbooth software for audio — ensures fluidity in every aspect of your workflow, including capturing, editing, motion graphics, effects, compositing, audio, and interactive authoring."
We talked and Someone listened!! The last few revisions of the Creative Suite have proven successful... in pieces. The individual apps have never been the problem. It's the workflow that has been lacking. Bow with CS3, this problem has been corrected thanks to a complete reworking of the Suite's memory management coding.
So now... as a result... we see After Effects using all the cores available to it. Clips Notes encoding will be dramatically faster. Dynamic Link will be the most notable improvement. You'll be able to set up multiple Dynamic Links between After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop and Encore while not only maintaining a semblance of stability but decreasing our render amounts saving a cart wheeling, giggling, hand clapping amount of time.
Illustrator is the one app I barely use so I'm unclear on what the new improvements will bring but I'm sure we'll see lots of new advancements.
As far as "the new apps in town" in the CS3 bundle, there are quite a few. Most notably Flash! Flash is quickly becoming the most used codec on the web. If you're not using it now you are going to have to later. Also neatly packaged are:
- A retooled audio mastering program, Soundbooth, much better designed for the filmmaker than Cool Edit was.
- OnLocation
which we all remember as DVRack for on set capture and dailies,
...and rounding out the package is... - Ultra (formerly Ultra, of Serious Magic). Even if you already own a copy of Ultra, hey, it's practically free and one more added bonus if you don't own it.
Needless to say that whether you use Final Cut, Avid or anything else, you are going to need After Effects, Photoshop and Flash, so for the same price you can get the whole kit and caboodle!
Final Cut Studio 2 - Now Shipping
"Final Cut Studio 2 is an integrated collection of applications that allows professional editors to elevate production values. Now includes: Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Sountrack Pro 2, Color, Compressor 3 and DVD Studio Pro 4."
The big hullabaloo with this new version is the Apple Pro Res codec. Though I have yet to see the full measure of DCT VBR (Variable Bit Rate) encoding in the long run (encoding to H.264 for example), it does look beautiful while you are working with it AND bloody tiny to boot! This feature in conjunction with AJA's I/O HD (see below) is going to give everyone a run for their money..
SIDE NOTE: There has been a lot of hullabaloo about the addition of Color (formerly Final Touch HD) to the package, all I can say is be careful!!! This is not a an easy tool to play with. Yes it's neato torpedo to have it (especially for the price -- it used to retail for $5000 alone) but without an FX4500 card, a colorball console and a nice production monitor and uncompressed footage etc. etc, it may end up doing more harm than good. Still, neato torpedo.
As well the usual extras with quite a few upgrades, Compressor now has H.264 support, Motion now uses all the procs for rendering, Soundtrack has a couple new ideas I still need to explore such as the 3d mapping (looked really cool at NAB). And finally, DVD Studio (previously Spruce) remains one of my favorite authoring tools.
All in all, when it comes to price, functionality and performance, Final Cut Studio 2 is IT.
AJA I/O HD - Now Taking Pre-Orders
"AJA's Io HD — 10-bit transportable editing for working with HD and SD in Apple's new ProRes format. SD-SDI and HD-SDI I/O (2), Component I/O (SD and HD), Composite and S-video I/O, HDMI video w/2-ch audio I/O, Embedded SDI 8-ch audio I/O, RS-422, Genlock and more."
AJA I/O HD is one of the most innovative ideas of the year. If you are one of the ever increasing number of directors, cinematographers, editors and producers out there, this it going to become an integral part of your workflow. Bring it to the set with your laptop and ingest, storyboard monitor etc. With your laptop, bring it back to the edit suite and plug it into your workstation and do your edits, effects, titles, encodes, dailies etc. Bring it back with yesterdays outputs and start again on set. Looks beautiful, light, easy to use and actually works, believe it or not!
I am very excited for this item, mostly because I don't think I'll have very much support to deal with which is actually more important to you but I take the bonuses where they come. The unit costs $3,495 but I'm going to wrap some discounts in studio and field configurations so check back with us!
Intel 8 Core Systems - Now Available
"Leaders of the pack seeking monster performance, look no further. With four execution cores, the Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor blows through processor-intensive tasks in demanding multitasking environments and makes the most of highly threaded applications."
You just have to love these new chips. Here at DV411 we pride ourselves with being on the cutting edge of systems' evolution, which in this case means; making the fastest machines faster. Thanks to Intel, opportunity for progress keeps knocking.
On the PC what we are able to achieve makes me giggle. The other week I made such a ridiculously fast system that even I was shocked at the benchmarks. Unfortunately none of the software I was able to test it with (with the exceptions of Sorenson Squeeze and Rhozet Carbon Coder) could really take advantage of the bewildering speed that the machine was capable of performing. (This too, will change.)
So let me bend your mind a little, check this out. This is my recent conquest: 2x Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 2.66, Quadro FX 5600 - 1.5GB GDDR3 Video Adapter, Dual System boot (32 and 64 bit) on 10K drives, 4TB video array on 4x 1TB Hitachi 32MB cache drives.
Too bad CS3 with the new After Effects was not available at the time of my tinkering, the 5600 card can make it sing I'm sure.
On the Mac side things are equally fast, and although we are limited to the older FX4500 card, we won't complain too much. These MacPro systems kick ass whether configured for Final Cut or Avid. Between system speeds and price/performance ratios, things are simply becoming a matter of OS preference and conformability. In the past you all may have known me to have allegiances to the PC world and it's flexibility of configuration, these days however the choice is a more difficult one. The systems are pretty much equally as fast and, as it should be, our configurations are ruled by our clients' software needs.
So... MAC or PC, you tell me!! You're getting the DV411 equivalent of a Ferrari anyway whichever way you choose. Basic specs are laid out on our website for both MAC and PC. And of course, we can custom this up for you so call us, 877-299-4111.
Sorenson Squish - Now Available
"Sorenson Squish® embeds the power of Sorenson's award-winning Squeeze® Compression Suite into any Web page on your site, allowing you to easily accept user-submitted video."
So we've talked about the hottest new software versions and packages that give you everything you need and more to improve your workflow. But wouldn't it be cool to find an innovative software package, unique in its approach to video so that it makes you money in a whole new way... while reaching whole new markets?
I'm talking about Squish and SquishNet from Sorenson Media. The success of Youtube, Myspace video, Atom films, etc., foreshadowed its arrival. Difference with Squish is, this little piece of software allows you (YES YOU!!!) to do exactly this without having to do much of anything. Squish works within your webpage allowing your visitors to simply drag and drop their videos on it and voila you have yourself a sharing website. The beauty of it is that all the encoding is done by your visitors machine. The applet leaves their giant source file alone and publishes a high quality, Sorenson compressed flash video to the page. To install it you barely need to know how to speak, and to use it you don't even need that much schooling. Simple, easy and relatively inexpensive licensing make this a product worth salivating over.
Honorary Mention - Dulce Systems
No doubt you've been hearing a lot about Dulce Systems storage solutions on the various forums out there. I had the opportunity to check one out a couple of months ago and I'm initially impressed... even if cautious, as I usually am till I really get my hands into something. Let me tell you a story.
So Bill of Dulce Systems calls me out of the blue and basically says we'll send you a demo of our new external SATA product so you can run it through the motions. I'm thinking, external SATA, like I need that bloody headache in my life right now. (Sorry Bill, but every time external SATA came into my lab before I puked on it and sent it back.) Unafraid, he explained to me that for they use Infiniband SAS cables for the external connection. This grabbed my attention. The biggest problem with external SATA historically has been the lack of a stable connection. So hearing this info, I figured I'd give it a try.
First thing the next morning a nice young woman pulled up to the office and dropped off the unit. Wow, a manufacturer that actual got something to me the next day, and, didn't push buying a demo unit on me. Sweet!
Initially I had a lot of problems with striping the 2 controllers together in either raid 0 or 5. I was getting under 100MB/s reads which was laughable, each side was doing around 200, but when you tried striping them together... no fun. So I call them up and told them I couldn't use it. Later that afternoon I get a call from Robert (their engineer) saying he'll come over tomorrow to see what's wrong with the unit. First thing in the morning he's waiting for me! Not only that but, it's Robert Leong, who used to be my contact over at Huge/Ciprico. This put my mind at ease a bit.
So we worked on it for a few hours and eventually got the speeds up. It still has some issues with striping; you have to adjust the block sizes and a few other things to get the bandwidth up. But this is not really a big deal if you buy it from us. Or you can span the array and get the same speeds. Even though I haven't tested it with capacity through the span, I thought screw, lets fill out all the paper work.
I got the price list and I did a double take... 8TB's for 8 grand? Including the card and cables?! Even at 300MB/s this product is going to sell. Seriously people $1 freaking dollar a gig! Fast enough for all you compressed HD, a very limited amount of uncompressed (24psf pushing things for the high frame rate stuff) and all the uncompressed SD you can handle. Certainly makes the honorable mention list for price/performance alone.
So that's it for everything and anything worth mentioning till IBC rolls around then we'll see who's got what up their sleeve. Keep checking the blog.
Coming up from DV411: full workflow (camera to Blu-ray) configuration specials. Configurations for the HD I/O that consist of a camera package with a laptop and storage, with a studio configuration (workstation, monitors, production monitor, speakers , mixer etc.)
