NZVN July 2012 by Grant Cummuskey

JULY 2012

Vol 182

Smoke & Mirrors at DVT Hey, Stuart chose the title for the launch of Smoke 2013 at DVT in Auckland, not me! If you’re not familiar with the term, it comes from the way magicians trick their audiences into believing something that’s not real, by the use of a smoke screen or mirrors hiding a rabbit which will miraculously appear out of thin air. To see if there was any likelihood of prestidigitational subterfuge causing spontaneous release of cash at this event, I questioned two of the audience members before the spectacular began. Firstly, Nick Zieltjes from New Plymouth. Ed: Nick, you’re in the oil industry are you? Nick: No, we’re not, but we are into training and corporate resource development. A lot of the work that we do is high level training resources – not only video, but interactive web based learning, things like that. Ed: What products are you using at the moment in this sort of area – Adobe? Nick: We’re a fairly big Adobe shop, we’ve got instructional graphic designers, we’ve got editors, we’ve got compositors, postproduction Pro Tools, working in those areas and we’re looking at what we’re doing down the animation routes at the moment. Currently we’re using After Effects but we’re looking at what the options are from there; looking at the animation as supplementary to the video aspects, to go where the video can’t go; a lot of high level animation showing how mechanical things and suchlike work and actually incorporating it into an animation design. There’s so much on the market and there’s so much change in the industry, it’s about trying to make informed decisions, because the old dollar is harder and harder to get back these days. That’s why we’re here. Ed: The dollar return is important because you can spend a lot of money on animations and the customer says “oh that looks nice”? Nick: That’s right – I was just laughing with Stuart earlier on because, when I first started in television, lens flare was something that we didn’t want, and now we have to put it in in post as part of a spangley effect.

Ed: So you come along to these shows to see what’s new … have you ever been to an Autodesk show before? Nick: No, not Autodesk. Admittedly, my background is more on the camera/postproduction side, probably more to the camera side to be honest, but being a facilities manager and part of the decision making process, I’ve got to go back to our principal directors of the company with informed decisions about where technology in the industry is going. It’s their money I’m asking to spend, so I need to ensure that I’m actually giving them return for their investment. I know that here we all have that problem and work on that problem … Ed:

Even if it’s our own money?

Nick: Even if it’s our own money – even worse so if it’s our own money! It’s about keeping up with where things are going and I’ve worked with Stuart and the team at DVT for quite a while, I’ve got a lot of my gear through them, and when I actually talked to Chris the other week about setting up a Maya system, he said look this is

Anurag Jauhari and Nick Zieltjes.

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coming up, come and have a look at Smoke, see what it does and see what you think. Perhaps this is where we need to be and at a good price point apparently.

Jason: Yes, they’re all very good … Fusion ( which is a node-based compositor ) is fairly new to us, we’ve only had it for 1½ years, but we’re finding it quite good.

To be honest, I’m still a wee bit in the dark about how it all works. I understand the concepts of it, but we already have an editing platform, so am I adding another editing platform? What are the advantages that this is going to give me – am I throwing the baby out with the bathwater for something new? There’s a lot of questions to be asked and as I said, the compositing animation side is not my forte, but I need to understand more about what we’re doing. We’re currently in a system that we’re looking to upgrade our software; we’re currently running CS5 and we’re looking at upgrading to CS6. But I’ve also got Avid Media Composer sitting in the background that’s being underutilised, so it’s about making these business decisions – what do I do from here; biggest bang for buck … but also what’s the best form of integration and the easiest workflow that I can achieve for our guys with minimum downtime?

Ed: But don’t you find that once you’ve got a particular platform, it’s sensible to keep it?

At the moment, for what we do, Adobe certainly fits that bill with Flash integration, HTML5 coming on board, the interconnectivity of all the products within the one system makes life extremely easy. Versus, and I’m not slagging Avid, because it’s a great product – but it’s a multiple third party plugin to get similar results. Also, I think for where we are, Avid is probably more of a television series tool and we’re not really down that sort of avenue any more. But certainly it’s a product that with my background, Avid was the way to go back then. Ed: Have you got any of your current editors or graphics people who are familiar with Autodesk product? Nick: Yes Anurag who is up with me tonight, he’s actually Maya trained and is very much an animator. That was his core functionality and he’s worked for major productions in India years and years ago, but living in New Zealand now. He’s the guy who’s working, he’s the end user and I’m looking to his advice about what we can and can’t do. So as an operator, he’s educating me from an operator’s perspective and I will then incorporate what he says into the high end big picture to make our informed decision to make a recommendation. So it’s vital that I have him here, otherwise it’s like asking me what the next camera format’s going to be – who knows? I need people here who can help me make the decisions. Ed:

Yes, after a few beers you could buy anything?

Nick: I’m still driving back down to New Plymouth tonight, so I won’t be drinking. We drove up this afternoon for this, and now we’ll drive back down tonight. Another dedicated Heffernan. Ed:

soul

the

event

was

Jason

Jason, you run a motion graphics department?

Jason: Yes, the Broadcast graphics department at Sky Television. Ed: But you’re not using Autodesk product at the moment? Jason: Yes we use Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3D Studio Max. Ed: Okay, but for motion graphics, what are you using? Jason: Primarily Adobe product, which is After Effects, Photo Shop, etc, and we also use Eyeon Fusion. Ed:

So they’ve been good for you up until now?

Jason: It is. I find the biggest challenge is actually getting people to switch platforms and utilise a different one. Ed: You’re dealing with old people are you? Jason: Well I’m probably the oldest! So getting people off, say, an Adobe product and getting them onto, say, maybe a different sort of compositing platform or motion graphics platform can be tricky, unless they have the software there in front of them on their workstation. Ed: Are you finding limitations with Adobe product? Jason: No, not really. I think the only limitations with the Adobe product would probably be the operator, if anything. Ed: So then why would you look for something else? Jason: Primarily because Autodesk product is so good – it’s always reliable and it’s great software. Ed: Do you think Smoke enables you to do things better or quicker than your current software? Jason: To tell you the truth, I’d have to get the machine and software in and trial it to give you an honest answer on that one. Ed: So you’ve come here to have a look at what’s on show tonight and then you could make that decision to trial it in your workplace … that’s where you’re going to tell whether it’s going to work for you? Jason: Yes, exactly, we’ll have to trial it in the workplace to see if it’s going to work for us. Ed: You’ve tried it yourself? Jason: I’ve never actually operated Smoke, but I have used a lot of editing platforms, so I sort of know what I’m looking at. The advantage of the Smoke is it has a proper 3D compositing ability, which very few editors do – well actually none do that I know of. With Smoke, you can import 3D scenes or objects from, say, Maya or 3D Studio Max, and manipulate them on an editing timeline. Ed: So you’ll actually then have more of an Autodesk workflow than an Adobe workflow? Jason: Yes, exactly, Autodesk workflow.

would

complete

Ed: But you’d keep the Adobe there for the old folks who know how to use it? Jason: I think in this day and age when you’ve got a workstation you have all the software on it, so whether you’ve got your Smoke, or your Maya, or your more on page 6

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3D Studio Max and your Premiere or your Eyeon Fusion – every single product is good at some things and bad at others, so it’s best these days to have the whole lot. Ed: If you can afford it? Jason: Well the hardware’s not that expensive these days, and the software comparative to say 15 years ago, is very inexpensive. Ed: But you’d have to say that – Stuart’s standing right beside you? Jason: Well put it this way, a Quantel Editbox in 1998-99 was roughly $600,000. The same power these days ( if not more ) will cost you 50K. Ed: Yes, it makes sense. Now for a word with Rob O’Neill, Smoke artist and presenter for the event. Ed: Have you been with Autodesk a long time? Rob: This is actually my 10th year. Prior to this, I was working for a reseller, not unlike DVT – not as good as DVT though, they’re excellent people to deal with. Ed: They make nice coffee. Rob: They make excellent coffee. Ed: Although I haven’t had one yet … oh, Stuart’s just going to get me one. Well, if you’ve been with the company for 10 years, they either must pay you a lot, or you must really like the product they produce? Rob: They never pay you enough. I’d have to say it’s the latter. I was a Flame artist for a number of years before I started doing this and prior to that I was an online editor, an Avid editor and a film editor and throughout that evolutionary process, I eventually stumbled onto a demo of the Flame back in 1993 and I just thought My God this thing’s awesome, this is like my graphic skills and editorial skills in the one box. Since joining Autodesk, they’ve come out with Smoke, and it’s much the same evolutionary process. They’ve refined a piece of software to make the editor’s job a lot more effective and pleasant I think. Ed: It’s not “dumbing down” the product is it, because I know in some software companies, they produce like a “light” version at a lower price and they strip out a lot of effects, just to piss people off, but this doesn’t seem to be that way? Rob: No, I think what they’ve very wisely done is they’ve realised there’s a different market now from the one that was traditionally using Flame. Flame was always used in the past for very high end expensive postproduction of commercials and people ( particularly advertising agencies and directors ) liked using it because it was a box that had so many tools in it, it just gave them creative headroom. They weren’t the tools that they would use every day, but if someone just said “you know what, we’ve got a problem with this, what can we do to fix it?” generally there was something in the toolset that would allow you to come up with something that no one else had thought of before. The beauty of Smoke is that they’ve taken Flame and looked at the market and said okay, what is it that Flame isn’t doing particularly well, and one of the aspects was editing. It sort of did editing, but it was a bit like … I’d use the analogy “like neg matching film.” You cut two pieces of film and then you glue them together and that’s as sophisticated as the editing got; whereas Smoke, because it uses a timeline, it came from the legacy of what Avid were doing and other nonlinear editors in those days. Ed: But of course Autodesk used to have an editing product didn’t it … there was a bit of controversy at the time I remember?

Rob: Yes there was; in fact I remember because I used to use Edit, and that was under the Discreet banner in those days. It was originally D-Vision and then, when Autodesk acquired Discreet, Edit was in the portfolio of products already and it was someone’s decision to end that. It was when Final Cut was just starting to make inroads into that market and I think management realised that we just weren’t going to get adequate market share. Ed: And I guess Edit was a “no exit street” – it wasn’t linked to the graphics products that were being produced alongside, it wasn’t linked to Flame, it was a separate entity and so now this editing product in Smoke has come out of Smoke rather than beside it? Rob: Yes. In fact I remember some fantastic features that Edit used to have that I always hoped Smoke would adopt, but because of the architecture and its legacy, that’s never happened. But I think, seeing Smoke grow over the last 10 years into what it is today, it really is an editor now and I’m glad they’ve done what they’ve done, particularly from my background. Because I had an editing background, I knew that you can’t really separate the visual effects, particularly in commercials, video effects and editing always go hand in hand. I remember being a film editor where I would go to an online facility and get someone else to finish the job for me. The thing about a box like this is it allows a film editor with a real editing background – even although he might not have the experience dealing with high end visual effects – those guys know how all that sort of thing is done. They know the concepts, they know how to brief a finishing artist to get what they want. But this box allows those people the ability to be able to actually do it themselves. They’ve already got the skillset, they’ve just got to know where the buttons are. Ed: And how did you find your Auckland audience last night. Were there any hecklers? I saw Garry French there and he’s known for his heckling? Rob: No, there was no heckling whatsoever. Ed:

Stuart put a gag on him did he?

Rob: The thing I’ve always found with New Zealanders is that they are extremely polite, not like the Aussies. Ed: I think Garry French actually might be Australian somewhere in his background. Rob: Well that would explain the heckling.

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Ed: So they came out with some intelligent questions did they? Rob: No actually we didn’t have a great deal of questions. We did have a lot of positive feedback though. I noticed in the audience there weren’t too many people nodding off, in fact there was no one nodding off, but there was lots of nodding of their heads up and down and that’s a very good sign. They don’t necessarily have to ask questions, but if I can see them nodding, that means they’re liking what they see. Ed: And if they bring their cheque books out at the end of the session, then you know it’s worked? Rob: Well I think it’s a little early for that, because we’ve released this software now when it’s really only available to be purchased in September. So I’d like to see them pull their cheque books out then. Where you send your cheque is DVT and I followed up with Stuart Barnaby the next day. Ed: Stuart, you obviously listened to Rob because you’ve just given me a demo on how the Smoke 2013 works, and you’re rather competent?

been at the Autodesk stand at NAB and I’ve seen the product, I’ve thought yes, that looks nice but it’s not for me, it’s just too scary. Whereas this, you open it up and there’s a timeline and it’s got icons on it and little buttons and you can actually “edit” something. But, if you want to go that step further …? Stuart: Absolutely, Smoke is a high end product that Autodesk have had for many years and three years ago when they released Smoke for the Mac, they took that high end product, ported it across to the Mac and made it available at a much more cost effective price point. We’ve been very successful with that over the last few years, selling it to a range of customers, but most of the customers who purchased Smoke were people who had come from a Flame background. They understood the complex user interface that it had; they understood the hardware requirements that it needed to run on and everything else.

Stuart: Oh thank you. The wonderful thing with Smoke 2013 is that they’ve changed the frontend user interface to make it look very familiar to anyone who’s ever used Final Cut or Adobe Premiere or Media Composer, so for me to be able to sit down in front of Smoke 2013 and do a demo is not that hard.

Stuart: Correct, it had its own method of editing that Autodesk put together many years ago, but what Autodesk realised with Smoke is that they were missing out on the broader audience. They understood that Final Cut and Premiere and Avid editors have a very common workflow now that they use for editing with source and programme windows and timelines and bin windows. They understood that people don’t necessarily want to put up with using complex methods to import video clips; and they also understood that the

Ed: Oh but I’m still very impressed Stuart – and I see that this really is a big leap forward for Autodesk. This is an editing product as well as a compositing tool and everything else and, in previous versions when I’ve

Ed: Because it still could edit in those days, couldn’t it? You could actually bring in clips and you could put them together, but you had to know the buttons and the icons and the quirky way it operated?

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price of the product was at a premium because of its hardware requirements. You had to have $40,000 worth of hardware before you started, it had to run on a MacPro, had to have a Quadro 4000 card, had to have a Kona 3G card, had to have fibre channel or SAS connected high end storage. Autodesk has addressed all of those issues with Smoke 2013. The first thing they did was to change the frontend user interface to put in a thing they call the “Media Hub” which is just a fancy file browser for being able to import your material into the library - exactly the same as a bin window in any other programme. They also changed the timeline to make it look almost exactly the same as Final Cut and Premiere and Media Composer, so it’s the same editing application that

we’re all using at the moment. They also kept the high end visual effects tools that were already in Smoke with things like the Master Keyer for doing chroma keying, the Colour Warper for doing high end colour grading and the Action 3D compositing environment – it’s all still inside Smoke, but they’ve also added in Connect FX which is a wonderful tool that you can use to join all those elements together. They’ve done an enormous job with Smoke to make it much easier to use, but keeping the high end tools that they already had. Now it’s certified to run on a Retina Display MacBook Pro or an iMac using Thunderbolt video tools for getting video in and out and Thunderbolt storage. The cost of the product is dramatically lower in terms of its hardware requirements – and they’ve lowered the software price as well. Ed: So, all in all, now it’s a very cost effective package for anybody who is looking at an “all in one” editing programme, but you say there are still some areas where you’d want to keep your Photoshop and you’d want to keep some other peripheral programmes? Stuart: Yes, I mean Smoke’s value proposition is that it’s a high end grading tool, it’s a high end compositing tool … Ed: If you want to use those features? Stuart: Yes … it’s a high end editing tool, it does keying like no other, it’s very powerful across the range of products, but the nice thing about the Mac is nobody runs one application at a time, you can still run Photoshop and other applications at the same time. So I would imagine most customers who would jump into

Smoke will already have the Adobe CS6 tools, they’ll already have Media Composer, or they’ll already have Final Cut. That’s cool, you can run all that stuff at the same time. Of course Smoke is really very friendly with those applications as well – you can import Photoshop documents with all the layers and work with them in Smoke, so by all means, use those other tools. You can bring in Media Composer projects, Premiere projects, Final Cut projects and open them in Smoke. So if you’re happy editing in Final Cut or Media Composer, or you’re getting material delivered to you in those sequences, just do that, that’s fine and then just import them into Smoke when you’re ready to do your finishing. So many workflows are possible. Ed: From what you demonstrated, I can see that somebody who is used to using Premiere and After Effects, and bringing those After Effects compositions into their Premiere timeline, in a package, a container or whatever and then being able to jump backwards and forwards – Premiere, After Effects – this is simplified, this is just all now in one timeline and once you get to understand the node principle, the way the nodes work ( which I think I’ve done in about 5 minutes ), it’s a good proposition? Stuart: Absolutely. Node based compositing systems like Shake, Nuke and Smoke work differently to layer based compositing systems. Layer based compositing that everyone is familiar with in editing applications like Premiere and Final Cut Pro have existed for quite some time. You take track one and then I put something on top of it on track two and then do something else on track three – that’s the way they tend to work. When you do layer effects in After Effects or Photoshop you can have a layer which has just got an effect on it, like a blur but it affects all the layers underneath it. Smoke has got all of that and if you want to use Smoke as a layer based compositing system, then by all means you can do that. However the problem with some of these applications is at some point you hit a brick wall. For example you may want to do various things but because you have a layer effect on track six and that’s affecting all the ones underneath it, it might prevent this. Smoke breaks those boundaries down by allowing you to use a node based compositing system instead. You never hit a brick wall with Smoke, you’ve always got more fuel in the tank, so it’s really powerful. Ed: I see that the major advantage is that it’s all in one package, whereas I know in some applications, you have to go out to third parties to do some of these effects. That arrangement works but you can get that situation where, for example, you might upgrade your operating system, or some part of the package is upgraded, but the other parts aren’t – there’s your brick wall? Stuart: That’s right. One of the things that Smoke addresses nicely is the multi application, multi plugin workflows, which exist today and when they work, they work well. Say you’re using Final Cut for editing and then After Effects for some compositing and then you’re using DaVinci Resolve for some grading. People will pay you for grading, they’ll pay you for editing, but they don’t pay you any money to get the material out of your editing system and conform it in a way that’s going to then get it into the DaVinci Resolve system. They don’t

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pay you for taking material out of your Resolve system and working it back to get it into your editing system. Heaven forbid they come back and want to change a shot or two at the eleventh hour, as typically happens in our workflows today – and that’s where it all comes unravelled. And then of course you’ve got plugins involved, and there’s complexity in that when it works. When suppliers come out with a new operating system, or Adobe comes out with CS6 but the plugin manufacturers haven’t done that yet and then CS6 doesn’t work with some flavour of some other application you’re using. It can get very complex. Smoke dramatically simplifies that and what Smoke gives you ultimately is time. It gives you the freedom to be able to play with your productions and be as creative as you possibly can, not worrying about having to stop at 3 o’clock because you’ve got to spend the next 2 hours rendering from one application to another. You can continue playing and being creative with your product with as much time as you need. Ed: Training is available? Stuart: Training is available. DVT are available to provide one on one training if that’s required, so the entry level training there’s no problem and of course there’s extensive training material available online on a YouTube channel that Autodesk have set up specifically for Smoke, which it is very complete. It takes you through every nuance of the product from whoa to go. At your own time, and your own pace, in your own facility, you can sit down and easily learn Smoke all the way through. And the great thing is that with the new interface we already know how to use the product – it’s a timeline, a source and programme window and a bin window. It’s really not that hard to get up and running with editing, and I can imagine most customers that get into Smoke, if they spent two hours with us and the rest of the day themselves, they would be quite proficient editing inside Smoke. In terms of getting into the compositing environment, again a small bit of time spent with us and we can get them up to speed with that too. So it’s not hard to learn. It’s a complex product, but it’s very intuitive and very simple to get into. Ed: And just like the Adobe CS packages, you just go to help and bingo you’re straight on the YouTube Smoke learning channel and everything’s there and you just search for what you want. Easy as. But as always Stuart, this isn’t “one ring to rule them all” is it, because I know over the years there have been various products that have come through the DVT stable that you’ve said “this is great, this is fantastic and everyone should have it” but that’s at that time.

You can’t see the future, you don’t know what somebody else is going to come up with in six months, but for now, for a lot of people, this is the way to go. However, there are other situations? Stuart: Absolutely. We sell and represent a wide range of products and, of course, because we understand all of the different products, it gives us a great opportunity to be able to talk to our customers, find out what they’re actually doing, what cameras are they using, what formats are they shooting, what type of postproduction system are they currently using, how are they delivering their content – is it for web, is it for the iPad, is it for broadcast, is it a high end commercial, is it a television series? All of these different workflows require different tools to do the job and so … Ed: Require different tools to do the job well and within a budget? Stuart: Absolutely, we’re very conscious of first of all making sure that the quality of the productions that our customers are producing is the best possible, they’re doing it as productively as they possibly can, with the minimum wastage of time. That allows them to focus on their creativity; you know really crafting a production that’s fantastic. For example, if you were doing a television series with collaborative editing, Avid Media Composer is a pretty strong proposition for being able to put that type of show together. In that case, we would highly recommend five seats of Avid Media Composer running in a collaborative shared storage system, so that they can all be working on the same media and the same project at the same time. It makes a lot of sense. But then of course, once each show is edited, they’d then want to finish it and that’s where a seat of Smoke alongside that would work very well. And of course Smoke will import Final Cut projects, Avid Media Composer projects, Adobe Premiere projects, no problem. So you can actually edit in whatever editing application you’ve got and bring it into Smoke. But, like I say, we represent many different products and they’ve all got their place in the marketplace and I think the great strength of DVT is our ability to understand our customers’ workflows, to ask the right questions, and then to be able to provide the right advice and tools that they need to get the job done. Ed:

Is it all getting more complicated – life?

Stuart: Oh look this technology is such fun. I mean the things that get us out of bed in the morning are the customers we deal with and the technology. It’s just fantastic. Ed:

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Well for me it’s coffee and hot toast.

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Secure Data Holograms at NAB At last, really secure deep archive data storage from Holographic Storage Systems hVault. Ed: We’ve talked about long-term archive, we’ve talked about things going “belly up” when you try and put a hard drive back in the caddy after a few years on the shelf and it doesn’t spin up, but optical discs do. They’re limited in their storage volume, but Bland McCartha, you’ve solved that problem – well, you’re on the way to solving the problem? Bland: We’re on the way to solving the problem, yes. This is disc storage technology, but it’s not like the typical optical discs that you’re familiar with, it’s holographic disc, where we take two pieces of polycarbonate with a photosensitive layer in between similar to a DVD but a bit thicker, split a single blue laser beam into two, a reference beam and a data beam and focus them into the photosensitive layer which creates a 3D hologram of data. It’s like a data page, sort of like a big QR code or a 2D barcode, but it’s 1½ megabits of data per flash of the laser. So unlike optical discs, or magnetic discs where they’re spinning all the time, all you do is flash that one spot, move a little bit to the very next spot, flash it again and it’ll load 1½ megabits each time. So it can lay down these patterns of data – 1½ megabits at a time, until you fill up the disc at about 500 gigabytes. Of course reading or writing 1 ½ megabits per laser flash is much faster than spinning optical discs where each flash of the laser is one bit. Ed: And it’s basically the same size as an XDCAM disc, a Blu-ray in a cartridge? Bland: Exactly, yes. You can see in this case, which looks kinda like a very large floppy disc, it’s shuttered to keep the light out, because it’s light sensitive before you expose it and you write to it. It’s a

“write once” medium. I like to use the analogy of black and white film, because that’s light sensitive until you expose it. Then when you develop it and fix it, it becomes inert and it becomes archival. Well this is the same thing – instead of blasting holes in a dye layer with a laser like a typical optical disc, once the photosensitive layer is exposed to the laser, the data in that 3D hologram becomes inert and it becomes part of the plastic matrix. So the archival lifetime of this is in excess of 50 years and the accelerated life cycle testing was done under intense ultraviolet light, brighter than sunlight, 99% relative humidity, temperature cycling between -20C and +80C, for months and months and months – at a 50 year equivalent lifetime, we had zero failures. So we know it’s a very robust disc and because it’s not magnetic, it’s not susceptible to magnetic fields, electro -magnetic pulse, static electricity, mold and mildew, sand, saltwater, surface scratches … all in all, it’s a very, very robust medium. Ed: And the read-write is done by a not highly technical laser arrangement?

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Bland: Right. On the write side, a single blue laser beam is split into a reference beam and a data beam that is modulated with the digital data. Where the two beams intersect they form this interference pattern which creates the 3D hologram. When you want to read the disc, you shine a single laser through the disc and the hologram is captured by a sensor, just like the ones in a digital camera. Ed: Because in some systems, the read-write requires a very complicated spinning head. That’s fine if you’ve got a machine, but if you don’t have any more machines, you’ve got data that you can’t retrieve. With this, you’re really always going to be able to retrieve it, because blue lasers are easy to make? Bland: Right – so all it would take to retrieve it is a blue laser, a little bit of lensing and a camera sensor, so we use that simple, low cost technology for recovering the data. Into the far future, you can be sure, just like today if you want to recover stuff off of film, all you need is a light and some lenses. You know, black and white film is a pretty robust, archival medium. Ed:

As long as that film is in good condition?

Bland:

That’s right.

Ed: Now the big question, what are the read-write speeds? Bland: The read-write speed right now on the prototypes is 20 megabytes per second … plenty fast for some people; way too slow for other people. We expect it to be probably in the neighbourhood of 50 megabytes per second one year after initial release – it could be maybe as high as 100 – but it will double every year, as well as the capacity will double every year. Ed: But I’m sure you can come up with some sort of RAID arrangement ( or somebody will ) where you can read these and write these in parallel? Bland: Well, because of the archival nature of the holographic discs, RAID is not needed as it is for maintaining data integrity when hard drives fail. To get higher throughput, the systems we will sell will have up to 8 drives that can write or read in parallel to get very fast I/O. You can see from the pictures on our website ( www.hvault.com ), that we’re focusing on the large archive problem, where people have got petabytes of material already and they’re looking to find a better way to store it. We put them into these robotic

cabinets similar to a tape library, where we can store up to 500 discs in one cabinet, up to eight drives. So depending on what your throughput requirement is, it can be streaming out of eight drives simultaneously. Now we don’t have a process at the moment for striping those, so that you can bring them out as like one stripe for eight set, but if that’s a requirement, we could certainly do it. We don’t think it will be. With hVault’s system, there is no need for the cost and complexity of RAID that is used with hard drives. It’s just not necessary. Ed: That’s it, this is emerging technology and really, you’re requiring the users of archival storage, or people who need it, to come to you and say “we need you to solve this issue”? Bland: Right, and so we’re going to be flexible. Things like our network interface … most people want fibrechannel; some people want infiniband; some people might want Thunderbolt. Whatever they want, we’ll make sure that we have the interconnectivity … Ed:

They’ll all want something different?

Bland: They’ll all want something different, idea is … they have a big problem now – the solutions of spinning discs have too much consumption and the discs wear out so you’re replacing discs all the time.

but the current power sort of

Hard discs are great for short term, but they’re not good for archival; so the only other archival solution is data tape and the people who are using data tape are finding out now “well yes, but I’ve had to replace that media about every three years”, that’s an expensive proposition. It’s the lifecycle costs that we’re looking at, where you write to this disc one time and you can access it within 10 seconds in one of these large libraries. That’s much faster than tape libraries and unlike tape, you don’t have to keep replacing the media to protect your data. Your initial cost is basically the whole cost, rather than this initial cost and a replacement, and a replacement, and a replacement cost of tape. The one thing we have learned from customers here, is that their storage problems are getting bigger by the day and they are in need of this type of technology. Current technologies like hard drives and magnetic tape cannot cope with the exponential explosion of data. Ed:

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You’ve sold me.

NZVN

Lectrosonics for Sound Techniques Stephen himself is going to tell us about the latest from Lectrosonics at NAB. Stephen: Lectrosonics has got one new product this year, and that’s an upgrade of its waterproof transmitter. You’ll see in the photo that it’s completely immersed in the goldfish bowl and the item is working. Lectrosonics has had a transmitter, the MM, around for several years and they’re used a lot in New Zealand, particularly on those action shows where a lot of water is involved – people kayaking down rivers and that sort of thing. You can imagine the risk if the transmitter goes in the water. So this is basically an upgrade of the MM and I believe the model “Bowling ball v. bowl” - and we liked the beard. number is WM and what it does is it incorporates the newer style of Lectrosonics the MM you’d have to undo it and adjust the switching transmitter with all the controls on the outside, using a inside, on this one, you can actually adjust all the touch membrane switching system. So whereas with parameters from the outside of the device, while keeping the batteries in and keeping it waterproof. Ed: And it’s within the frequency range that we’re allowed? Stephen: Well we get them made in the blocks that are usable in New Zealand, yes. Ed:

That’s a good thing to have?

Stephen: Well the problem with that is we still don’t know exactly what those frequency blocks are, but we have a pretty damn good guess! Ed: Are they changeable on this … if they did get it wrong? Stephen: Well inbuilt, there are obviously still 256 frequencies you can choose from. But if it happened to be in a block, look I don’t know, but I guess you could get it rechanneled. I think where we would advise people to buy should give them a degree of futureproofing, but if someone decides to go their own way, or we decide we were wrong, we’d do everything we can to sort that out. Ed: And the waterproofing features go as far as the connectors into the device, both for the aerial and for the microphone; the standard microphone is not completely waterproof, but there are versions available? Stephen: Yes, there are waterproof microphones and any microphone can have the waterproof connector added to it, but you couldn’t swap your regular microphone on your transmitter and plug it directly into the waterproof version. I’m trying to make this clear … you could use any microphone, as long as it was wired for the transmitter. Lectrosonics don’t specifically make a waterproof microphone because people would like to use their favourite microphone with it. Ed: It’s just then a case of getting the waterproof connector correct? It really was underwater for four days.

Stephen: Page 20

That is correct.

NZVN

Avid at the High End While in Wellington, I had the chance to visit at the Gibson Group with Richard Kelly from Atomise. We spoke with Richard and Adam Sondej, Online Editor and Colourist. Ed:

Richard, what do they do here?

Richard: Well the Gibson Group is one of our key clients and they’ve got an extensive postproduction workflow right from offline through to a full Avid DS online suite and Avid Media Composer for their offline. These guys are great; they turn out some excellent high quality product and Adam is a guru for the technical aspects of what everything needs to be to get it out to air. When you asked about people to come and talk to in Wellington, Adam was the first man I thought of. Ed:

Now Adam, is it only Avids around the place?

Adam: We also have Final Cut Pro systems and that’s part of the reason that we went with the Macintosh base platform for our Avid offline software, so that we could keep abreast of Final Cut's capabilities and be able to work on Final Cut jobs.

Adam: It’s security probably, more than anything. With Avid, each drive only has one media files folder on it and everybody knows where those files are; whereas with Final Cut, it’s much more flexible than that, so projects can quickly become messy if you have multiple people working on them. It’s pretty rare for a job to even have an edit assistant anymore, so it really works in our favour when we can keep media management predictable. When we were researching all the different online systems like Quantel and Smoke and the like – we found a little known Avid product called Avid DS, which is, in fact, their most powerful programme and was originally designed by Softimage. I found it to be much more usable than Avid Media Composer and Symphony and the like, in that any user can look at an Avid DS timeline and quickly read what has been done to it, how the tracks are laid out, what the effects are – and so it has like a mix of all the best things of Final Cut Pro, in that you can interact with clips on the timeline; After Effects where it’s got layer modes and mattes

At first Avid was the only real choice. Despite being attracted to the cost and flexibility of Final Cut our early tests weren't really working out for us. Our editor base was more comfortable using Avid, but we were never really that happy with the flexibility of the programme. We bought into the Mac hardware platform so that we had the option to switch to Final Cut Pro if we wanted to in the future. The Macs were also pretty simple to load software onto and to maintain. We also always kept an eye on Final Cut, but it’s never quite got to a point where we’ve wanted it to be.

Adam at his DS desk.

Where we needed to share the systems between multiple editors on the same project, from the media management point of view, the Avid system was much safer for us with its more constrained set of parameters for how it works. That really suited us, because less could go wrong. But over time, Avid has stepped up with being more flexible with the number of formats that it handles and the features of the software as well; that’s kind of worked for us and we never got to the point where we felt that Final Cut had more to offer us than the Avid platform. Ed: For many people, having a single editing platform is all they need if they’re not collaborating, whereas in your situation you have, as you say, a number of editors all working together, sometimes on the same job, you need that collaboration, you need that clear stable workflow and you also need that media management, and that’s what Avid offers?

which can be applied directly onto clips. It’s also got a node based effects system, like Shake and Nuke, where you can build complex effects quickly and simply. DS also best supports Avid conform, so I can bring in, using AAF or AFE the exact Media Composer session, with my online media from Media Composer. We ingest all our media into our offlines at online quality and then we can consolidate that down with handles to Avid DS. In my DS timeline, it all appears conformed with no sync issues, all ready to go. We haven’t actually done a tape conform for a couple of years now – we’ve been adopting the tapeless formats like XDCAM and some of the field recorders like the nanoFlash as well as the RED camera system for our high end jobs … and that sort of brings us to our current big project which is the movie Fresh Meat. EPIC had just come out researching cameras and

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locally there

when were

we were particular

requirements of the shoot where they wanted the high resolution of the 5K EPIC system, but also to be able to do slo-mo effects which was not available at high res on the RED One camera system, the older RED camera. These were some features that the company really wanted to embrace, but it was hot off the press and we were pretty nervous about using it, but as with any of these modern workflows, just about every job that comes your way now is a new research project. There are so many different formats that you can choose from; ALEXA, the new Sony format, RED EPIC – you know there’s a constant barrage of cameras and formats and workflows that both give you features, but can also be very limiting and in some cases not work at all. Ed: But Avid would have told you that the RED 5K RAW was not a problem, it’s provided the codecs so you can edit that on your DS timeline without a problem? Adam: There is that, but when it’s hot off the press, it is bleeding edge and we’re often pushing the formats beyond where they’re happily normally used. For instance, on the Cloud feature – Gibson Group recently designed the 18 metre LED screen installation for the Rugby World Cup for a promotion for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, which had a horizontal resolution of 2,880 pixels, approx 3K. Normally films are still 2K and we had a custom LED modular screen built in China, that had the resolution required for the giant installation. We needed a way to be able to play back the film for the screen in real time, for onlining, and when we asked Avid “can we play back 3K in real time?” they said that at this stage DS couldn't, but they hoped to be able to support this in the future. Ed: So when he’s talking “Avid” Richard, is this Avid or is this you? Richard: This was Avid – this was Adam and I on a con-call with the two gentlemen who are the product managers and designers, coders for these products, and we found ourselves in the interesting position of being the first to try a proper high res workflow above 2K. It was good fun, yeah, great – we must do it again sometime! Ed:

And it worked?

Adam: Well, as I say, Avid told us that they didn’t think it would, because Avid plays the safe approach, they want to stick with industry workflows; they don’t really want to push the systems to where they fall over. It worked fine for the offline stage where we convert everything to DNX and we use the RED Rocket

transcoding system, so that the rushes get converted to Avid Media. That’s all fine; but in online, we needed to check that our 3K files looked good at their native resolution. In order to do that, we had to go beyond the Avid approved drive storage system and buy a high performance RAID from JMR that had just been released. They promised us that it was capable of that performance and when we actually got it into the country, we found that Avid DS could not only play it at 3K, we were getting the full 5K off the RED uncompressed playing back in real time at 1200 megabytes per second. Ed:

Did this make you happy Richard?

Richard: It made me very happy when it was all working – very, very happy. It was an extremely “out there” workflow at the time and thankfully it’s all actually been all qualified workflow now, so we know we did the right thing. Ed: I’m sure JMR were happy to hear that it was working well too? Richard:

JMR were very happy.

Adam: They were pretty confident about their product from the start. We had to go out on a limb to get what we wanted, but luckily, they were confident enough to do it on a “sale or return” basis. What we found was, despite the online hype of RED cameras, we had instances where we found defects that were visible at high resolution that weren’t visible at low resolution. So to see the media in its full native resolution playing back in real time was very useful to us. There was only a very, very small percentage of clips that had a problem but that’s the nature of the game now, that you have to adopt something so quickly off the shelf that it hasn’t really been fully battle tested. That’s also true of Avid who are trying to keep up with all the emerging camera formats. So it’s very critical for any project you have to test it early, take it right through from your shoot, to your online, to your film, make sure it’s going to work and then you can be pretty confident that anything you come across the way, is just something that is a small glitch that can be fixed, but fundamentally you’ve got a good workflow. Ed: Now, speaking about the workflow, if we can go on here to a bit more about media management, because from what I understand, this is something that Richard’s really helped you with. You’ve gone off tape – and I know you love tape, I love tape, but hey we’ve got to move on, because I’ve seen Adam’s stack of 1 inch tape that he’s got in one of his suites, and it’s a

Page 24

beautiful stack, it’s dusted regularly. So, going away from tape, you’re into that solid state media, you’re into data, was this a nervous experience for you? Adam: Actually it was and you hear the horror stories of people losing all their dailies from bad set practice and the like, but if you’re careful with your media management, always keep two copies from every card as backup and then backup to a server and then on to LTO, then you’re safe. But until the media is on LTO I don’t really feel that secure at all. But from a workflow point of view, we’ve found we have virtually no timecode sync errors, which always used to be the dreaded time in online, that you’d go to conform the tapes and none of the syncs matched up, because of timecode break errors. So we really quite enjoy and embrace the new digital format, but from an archiving point of view it is a nightmare. When a job hangs around in high res, it chews up maybe 5 terabytes of storage and you find yourself buying a lot more storage than you would have initially planned, just because of not being able to put the tapes on the shelves and go back to them when you need them. But, on the whole, it is working very well for us, yes. Ed: So Adam, are you going to stick with LTO tape as your deep archive? Adam: Yes, it’s pretty much the only format that we can see surviving into the future, in that the Quantum LTO system guarantees to be backwards compatible through tape to tape versions, so even when the new format of LTO comes out, they’ll still be able to

support your older tapes, at which point you can choose what’s important and restore it and copy it over to the new format. We were thinking about using hard drives as the archival medium, but we’ve found that hard drives left to sit on the shelf do tend to not come back to life after a certain point in time, whereas we’ve had much better success with LTO. Everything we’ve attempted to restore has always restored fine; it’s been a strong format; it records really quickly, we can backup 8 terabytes over a weekend or restore that much, so it’s really pretty quick and useful. It is still ironic that you’re going from a tapeless format to a tape, but there you go. Ed: Yes, there is life in tape. But the current project – I see a very clear crisp picture there on the screen. Is this part of something that the Gibson Group is doing right now? Adam: Yes, this project’s called Fresh Meat. It’s a comedy horror we’re releasing later in the year. That also had high res technical challenges. We bought the technology from Atomise for the Cloud project which was the 3K we’d finished for the giant screen, but this is film. The Cloud film was shot on RED One and then, when we went to do Fresh Meat, we were hoping to get one EPIC and one RED One, but we found that they didn’t have a common recording format at the highest camera sensor resolution, nor was the colour science common to the two cameras. So we ended up having to get a second EPIC for the B camera shoots. The film uses a lot of slow motion effects and that worked beautifully with the EPIC, but also, shooting slo-

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Page 26

mo at a high frame rate, chews a whole lot of data. We researched thoroughly with Park Road, who are outputting the film to both film and to DCP, and they were very helpful with choices of data rate that we can use for recording with EPIC. We’re doing the colour grade at the Gibson Group and then taking it in DPX format to Park Road for output. During the camera test stage, we shot off some 5K 2:1, took it into the online, put it through the offline process, conformed it in online and took it back to Park Road and had a look at that in their DCP suite and were confident that we had a working system. So there’s very good support in New Zealand for filmmakers to use whatever technology or limitations that you have ( not everybody can afford to grade at Park Road ) to take your project and still have an excellent result at the end of the day. Ed: So what’s been your involvement with Fresh Meat Richard?

Richard and Adam.

Richard: Technical support I guess is really what it’s come to. The equipment that we put in was all put in prior to Fresh Meat and certainly had a good run-in period with the Cloud project and from then on, I just maintained my involvement with Adam and Rex Potier, Gibson Group's Facility Manager, and the editorial staff here and just help them make sure everything keeps going. Adam: We wanted to set up an online where we could hold the whole film in a single timeline, so I have a 90 minute RED project linking back to 5K files. I’m using uncompressed 444 HD proxy files which are huge files, but that enables me to have real time colour grading in my project and also to view … Ed: Hang on – so you can actually colour grade a proxy file and then, when you output the original, it will do the same colour grade on the original, full res? Adam: That’s correct, yes. For instance, here I’ve got a graded section off the timeline and I can play that through in real time and if I wanted to check that in my 2K resolution ( which is our deliverable format ), then I can just switch on my 2K viewer here, process, and view at 1:1 pixel what the final film will look like in Real time. We’ve also got all the vignetting and extra effects that you may want to utilise for blurring backgrounds and the like available to us as well. The film has about 200 effects shots … we’re using a local posthouse called Dusk, who have worked with us in the past, and they come in as DPX files. We also do workflow tests with them prior to start, to output and import their files to make sure it all works. Pretesting is just so critical to the smooth flow of the project. So, as you can see, it’s quite a flexible system and it really suits us. We’re always open and always looking – we’re checking out Resolve and the like and we had our eyes on Apple and Color for a long time, but then we were quite concerned about Apple’s decisions with changing to Final Cut Pro X and stopping development of Color … Ed: Well you weren’t the only ones – but Avid have stuck by you? Adam: It’s heading in the direction we hoped. We still see the Media Composer as a good offline system. It’s very fast, responsive, clips and sequences load instantly, but it’s pretty limited for compositing.

Ed: Now Adam, at the top end, to be fair, at the sort of level you’re working at – the feature film level, everything RAW, Media Composer would have its limitations, but Avid have got the DS to cope with that? Adam: Yes – we see Media Composer as a fantastic offline tool, but you need a good online application to finish your projects and, for us, Avid DS definitely does the trick. We do everything from broadcast to our museum jobs – like a large component of the Cloud project that I mentioned was finished in DS; it handles the high res fine and with going out on a limb a bit with unsupported storage, definitely gave us the benefit to give us the performance that we need, whereas the Avid specs themselves were a bit too conservative, being based more around the needs of high definition broadcast. Ed: And that’s it Richard – obviously they’re doing something here at that top end level, but Avid have got the product that can cope with that, whereas for most people, Media Composer would be perfectly adequate? Richard: Media Composer’s a great product for a lot of people but, when you get to the level at which Adam works at the Gibson Group, it’s another story. You know, you’d never be able to put Adam back onto a Media Composer, he’d never be happy with that feature set. That would be the same for anyone who has actually used a DS. Once you’ve made that step up it brings up a different level of artistic ability and also technical ability into a workflow, that a very high end job does require. Ed: And as we discovered at NAB, there’s a good deal going at the moment? Richard: There are always good deals going. DS is not one of those cross-grade deals that you’re thinking of – that’s Symphony, which is a different product line, but yes, DS is a very cost effective tool now. Certainly in the years Adam’s been working on it, there’s been a massive price reduction and also capability increase in it. So it’s definitely a product which is current … Ed: It’s something you could show somebody if they wanted to see it? Richard:

Page 28

Absolutely, yes.

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