After the infamous Apple’s mess-up of its Final Cut Pro X, I seriously started to think of covering my back and learning Adobe Premiere. Just in case, so I can continue my work if the good old FCP 7 fails to run after another upgrade, and new FCPX versions fail to meet my expectations. And with the awesome 50% SWITCH discount – when else will I have another chance like that? So, I downloaded a trial of Video Production Premium and ran through the features I’ve been using the most in Final Cut. The result is the following table that I hope will be helpful to those trying to decide between the two systems:
I’m actually comparing the entire suites – Adobe Video Production Premium CS5.5 and Final Cut Studio 3. Overall, the two systems look surprisingly similar, but there are a few fundamental differences that make me want to own both at the same time. Here are some highlights.
Adobe’s great at:
- Mastering & burning Blu-ray in Encore (hello, Apple, get a grip already!)
- Native support of most formats, including AVCHD. Drop in and edit, no transcoding required. I hear FCPX is trying to emulate that, we’ll see.
- Different formats in multi-camera tracks (must match in FCP)
- Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash as a bonus
Apple FCP beats Adobe hands down at:
- Offline editing (with proxies). I mean, come on, Adobe, you cannot scrub 4 tracks of HD with effects on them, not on my laptop anyway.
- 16 tracks of multi-cam (vs. only 4 in Premiere). Might not be a big deal, most of the time I use 2 or 3, but there was a project where I used 12. Seriously. And with proxies it worked smoothly on my laptop. Total awesomeness.
- Motion templates. Ohh, I love those! If you need 20 lower thirds of exactly the same elaborate design but different text, you do it once in Motion, and have 20 instances in FCP, editable directly in the Viewer. And you can also add drop zones for videos and stills. Adobe – you probably have to duplicate an AE project 20 times and edit each of them. Extensive googling didn’t produce even a slightest hint at how to do templates in Adobe. One thing is clear, either me or Adobe is missing something…
Both are great at:
- The primary function: editing. Apart from slightly different keystrokes, the two systems are almost twins in basic functionality. Well, maybe FCP is slightly more intuitive, but I may be biased.
- VFX – I still have to see for myself, but for the most part what people say they can do in AE, I was able to reproduce in Motion. Those who use Motion claim AE is more advanced. Go figure.
- Integration between components. Adobe might even have it slightly better, but at least as good.
Both suck at:
- Subtitles / Closed Captions. What’s up with that?
- Reverse Telecine. OK, I figured out the flow in both, but it involves transcoding individual clips. FCP may on occasion do the right thing in batch mode, but no guarantee. Adobe claims to be doing the right thing on the fly, but it doesn’t. Royal pain, given that all 24p HDV cameras record with pulldown. Same for most consumer AVCHD camcorders that claim 24p, and even some AVCHD DSLRs.
Tags: Adobe Premiere, FCP, Final Cut Pro, PPro
My friend Jennylyn Gleave has interviewed Steve Wozniak on her show, Give It A Name with Jennylyn. Steve is quite inspiring to listen to. For those on the run, I’ve edited a short teaser below. You can also watch the complete 30 min interview at Give It A Name TV.
Tags: Apple, Community Television, Jennylyn Gleave, Wozniak, youtube
Or “what mischiefs have I done this summer” -- a movie that we shot together with my brothers. For English subtitles, enable closed captions (CC button or that upward triangle under the video):
Based on a story by Alexei Berezin.
Starring:
Igor Ovchinnikov
Roman Toschakov
Alexei Berezin
Ekaterina Alipova
Natalia Berezina
Director, editor: Sergey Berezin
Producer, Sound Editor: Dmitry Berezin
Cinematographers: Marina Vedernikova, Dmitry Berezin
Production Assistant: Yulia Grinko
Music by Alexei Vedernikov & Kevin MacLeod
© 2011 Creative Association “Berezin Film”
in collaboration with Studio Berezin Film, NSK Records, Elephan in a Wheel
Special thanks to the staff of the House of Children’s Art (Novosibirsk, Russia) and personally to the director Olga Vagner
***************************
По одноимённому рассказу Алексея Березина.
В фильме снимались:
Игорь Овчинников
Роман Тощаков
Алексей Березин
Екатерина Алипова
Наталья Березина
Режиссёр, монтаж: Сергей Березин
Продюсер, звукооператор: Дмитрий Березин
Кинооператоры: Марина Ведерникова, Дмитрий Березин
Ассистент режиссёра: Юлия Гринько
Композиторы и исполнители: Алексей Ведерников, Kevin MacLeod
© т/о Березин Фильм 2011
При участии Студии Березин Фильм, NSK Records, Слон в Колесе
Отдельная благодарность всему коллективу ДДТ им. А.И. Ефремова (г. Новосибирск) и лично директору Вагнер Ольге Николаевне.
Tags: Meeting, NSK Records, Слон в Колесе, Совещание
A friend of mine started a new show at a local public access TV station (KMVT), and I’ve designed the opening and closing titles for her in Apple Motion:
The effect is designed as a static 3D model, and the only moving part is the camera. The camera moves are programmed with the camera framing behavior -- I specified the locations, and it flies right in.
In the closing credits, the final move to the disclaimer is programmed with “null objects” -- a couple of invisible rectangles. The camera first frames one null object, showing the cool 3D perspective I wanted, and then proceeds to the other null object with the disclaimer text attached to it, making a nice turn. This is a technique I learned from the MacBreak Studio podcast.
The flashing “floor” is another technique from a book. The floor itself is a static rectangle. The flashes are also just a single rectangle with animated gradient fill, replicated a bunch of times with a random start frame. This way the flashes seem to go chaotically, yet in the same direction and the same speed.
Tags: Apple Motion, KMVT, TV, VFX
I had an interesting discovery about Final Cut Studio today (FCS 3, FCP 7). I went and shot something with my HD camera in 1080/60i format with the idea of using it later in the SD NTSC timeline (the NTSC DV, to be exact). My camera shoots HD only, so I didn’t really have another option, and I naively thought, what the heck, it’ll just work. Well, not so fast…
First of all, my camera’s real-time downscaled RCA output to NTSC for some reason looked pretty bad compared to that of native DV cameras on the same shoot. Bummer. So I tried to drop my HD footage into the DV timeline to replace the bad looking clips. To my utter disappointment, the HD footage in Final Cut looked horrible, even worse than the RCA feed.WTF?
So, after a number of hours and extensive tests, here’s what I finally concluded.
First, my RCA output is not that bad after all. Even my horribly outdated DV palmcorder digitized a decent picture from that output. Something must have gone wrong in the switch board somewhere down the line. Screw that, not my problem anymore.
Next, Final Cut only displays the scaled-down frame badly, but on export the frame is actually good. Better than going through in-camera RCA and external DV recorder. And fast. Contrary to many online complaints, Final Cut is smart about downscaling interlaced footage, so you actually get a true interlaced downscaled version of each frame. Or maybe they fixed it in the latest version – either way, it works for me.
What’s weirder, if you convince Final Cut that your clip requires rendering (orange/red bar instead of green), and your rendering quality is set to High, then the frame in preview will look as good as in the final render. Go figure…
A couple of words about working with interlaced footage in Final Cut. You should be aware that any time the preview scales the frame, it effectively de-interlaces the image. So, if you did something wrong and mistakenly de-interlaced your footage (e.g. ran it through Compressor with the wrong settings – see below), then you may not notice it until way later. And even worse, if by mistake you flipped your fields, the result will still look fine in Final Cut, but totally unwatchable on TV.
To avoid the disaster, check your clips: set the viewer to 100% and look for movement. In a properly interlaced clip, you will see the “jagged” lines – that’s a good sign. I also apply the “de-interlace” filter and check which field is displayed first – this is crucial for matching the field order. DV NTSC must show upper field first, while 1080/60i apparently shows lower field first, so they have to be flipped (filter “Shift fields” – FCP applied it automatically for me).
Finally, if you really want to go for quality, Compressor can do a splendid job downscaling interlaced footage, but ONLY with Frame Control enabled, and ONLY with “Deinterlace” option set to “Best (Motion Compensated)”. This takes about a year to convert half an hour of footage, but the results look really good. Oh, and remember to set the “Crop to” option to 4:3 (in Geometry section) if needed; otherwise you’ll get an anamorphic 16:9 DV clip.
Happy downconverting!
Tags: 1080i, 480i, DV, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Studio, interlaced
Today I was faced with a problem of creating an interlaced NTSC video (“30i”) from progressive HD footage, in my case 60p – that is, 60 progressive frames per second. A quick web search brought up a tutorial from Creative Cow by Marco Solorio, where he converts a 30p footage into a 60i video. Unfortunately, his process doesn’t work when the footage is already at 60p. So, here are a couple of ways that worked for me.
The Apple Motion Way
The most reliable, in my opinion, is to pipe the footage through Apple Motion. This flow will also work for footage other than 60p. Here are the steps:
- Create an interlaced (30i) sequence in Final Cut
- Drop your 60p footage in it and do the necessary scaling and positioning adjustments (in my case, I had to scale the HD 16:9 footage to fill the SD 4:3 frame)
- Control-click (or Right-click) on the clip in the sequence and choose “Send to -> Motion Project…”
- Choose the file name for the Motion project, make sure “Embed Motion Content” box is checked. Press “Save”.
- When Motion opens, it should already be preset to your sequence output format (30i). If your original clip is not 60p, you can set Frame Blending to Optical Flow in the Properties / Timing pane (otherwise leave it “off”). In the preview you should see the jagged lines for any moving objects in your clip – that’s exactly what you want.
- Save the Motion project and return back to Final Cut. The original clip should now be replaced by the perfectly interlaced Motion clip.
Motion (unlike Final Cut) does not de-interlace the frame for display, so you can see the actual raw interlaced fields as they are. It is also much smarter about retiming, and will grab the correct frame of a 60p footage for each field automatically.
A fair word of caution – if your clip is more than a few seconds long, don’t try to render it in Motion. Or, before you do, reduce the Memory Cache setting to something low, like 20%. Otherwise Motion will hog all your available RAM and will take hours to render because your computer disk will be thrashing. However, rendering the same clip within Final Cut will work fast and furious with no noticeable memory overhead.
The Final Cut Way
Now, if you do not have Motion installed, you can still do it in Final Cut with a little help from Cinema Tools.
- Open your 60p clip in Cinema Tools and conform it to 29.97 fcp. The clip will now play at half the normal speed.
- Import the clip into the Final Cut 30i sequence and speed it up by 200%. Make sure your sequence has frame blending turned on. You are done.
The key here is the speed up by exactly 200% with frame blending. Turns out, Final Cut can do frame blending for individual fields of the interlaced frame, but only when the footage is retimed. If you try to drop an un-retimed, un-conformed original 60p footage in the same sequence, the fields will be pulled from one and the same progressive frame, which is not what you want. This was the problem somebody posted in the comments to the above mentioned article.
Instead of Cinema Tools you can use any other software that can conform clips to the required frame rate (Compressor, Adobe AfterEffects, etc.).
Tags: Apple Motion, Final Cut Pro, interlaced, progressive
Improvised Entertainment (originally Gang of Five Production) has released their first short film “Improvise”:
Tags: bangity, Improvise, Improvised Entertainment, stabity, tankity
Another movie I’ve worked on at Scary Cow:
Written by Sara James, directed by Sabrina L. Nelson, camerawork by Sergey Berezin and Samir Sinha, editor Sergey Berezin (yes, me again). Sara is also the lead actress, together with Tony Sommers.
This project was screened at the 12th Scary Cow Film Festival in San Francisco on June 6th, 2010 at the Victoria Theatre.
A short video I did for the martial arts school of Kaze Arashi ryu in Mountain View, CA:
If you are curious about the school itself -- visit their website.
For the technical video geeks, the footage is shot at 720/60p with a 1/1000 exposure. This made each frame crispy-sharp, with virtually no motion blur even for the very fast moves. Then I slowed it down in Apple’s Motion using optical reflow -- that’s the secret behind the Matrix-like slow-mo effect.
The “talk” is the only exception: 24p at 1/48 with a long zoom and open aperture (about 2.0). This “tricks” the small sensor camera into a shallow depth of focus, making the background soft.
Oh, and by the way, the last fighting sequence is no special effect -- all real, unrehearsed, actual speed. It looks a bit weird and “too fast” precisely because it lacks the motion blur. I found that not only it’s impossible to take the blur out once it’s there, it’s also quite hard to put it back in believably. So I didn’t 
The entire clip was shot on a single Saturday morning and edited together in a couple of evenings. Having a great “cast” makes a world of difference!
Tags: Kaze Arashi ryu, Martial Arts, Motion, SFX, Special Effects, youtube
Another short movie from the Rhobot Team:
I did the editing. All day during production, then all night long, then all day the next day. Pretty crazy, I know…
Tags: 48 hour film race, Movie, Rhobot Team, San Francisco, Scary Cow, youtube
