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Editors Guild Magazine invited editors Farrel Levy and Howard Smith and assistant editors Patrick Gallagher and Jordan Goldman to meet at the Avid office in Burbank on June 24 for a thorough introduction to the new Media Composer Adrenaline system with product designer Michael Phillips. But while the day began as an overview of Adrenaline and Avid’s other new DNA products, it evolved into a more wide-ranging discussion about Avid’s underlying philosophy, as well as the company’s relationship with those working in motion pictures and television. At the end of the day, Levy, Smith, Gallagher and Goldman held a conversation about what they’d seen and heard, and Phillips sat in to offer Avid’s perspective and to hear where the Guild members thought the company was doing well and where it could improve. Levy: I’m impressed with Adrenaline. The company’s years of experience and research on different editors’ needs have been boiled down to this system. It also anticipates future technological developments — it will be able to accommodate and integrate DV, high-definition and other digital formats that most of us are not using yet, but will be in the future. Goldman: From a marketing point of view, Avid should stress that performance is now related to processor speed. To me, that’s the breakthrough — whenever I upgrade my computer, my Avid goes faster. Phillips: We’re trying to convey two messages: your software gets faster with the processor, but we also have this family of DNA products, the “digital non-linear accelerators,” that add extra performance beyond the CPU’s. This is a hybrid solution, rather than all hardware or all host processing. Either one of those are going to be limiting.
Gallagher: The three-tiered product line has been thought out well. You have the low-budget Xpress Pro, then the mid-range Adrenaline for everyone cutting TV and film, and then for really post-heavy image processing, Nitris. That breakdown will make it easier for individual users to decide which system to use. Smith: I probably won’t use some of the new features immediately — the media information, the data files that are capable of such sophistication — but they are very exciting. They are the future. I’m sorry to say it, but I’m beginning to experience what feature filmmaking is going to be like without film. We’re going to be working digitally and electronically. Less celluloid, more zeroes and ones. Gallagher: The last Avid I used was a Meridien v. 10 with Unity. It was new at the time we started using it, and I was blown away by ts flexibility, its tools, its sharing capabilities with Unity, its ease of use. To hear that Avid had something completely new was a little bit shocking. I was skeptical of what they could be planning, because I thought Meridien was quite awesome. Levy: One aspect that disappoints me with this version is that multi-camera is not as advanced as even an ABVB system. I understand that’s going to be changed, and I look forward to it. On the other hand, an innovation that I appreciate is that Adrenaline is compatible with older systems, whether Meridien or ABVB. That’s a real break from the past. Phillips: In many ways, Adrenaline is a version 12, and in others, it’s a version 1. It’s an interesting hybrid. With certain features, like multi-cam, it’s behind what you can get on the Meridien, but you have to balance that against everything else it can do. There are areas where it’s not as good as Meridien, and others where it absolutely is the next generation product.
Goldman: Another thing that’s good is that you can upgrade the Adrenaline box with the Flash Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), rather than having to go out and buy a whole new expensive set of cards, wait for them to arrive and have somebody install them. With this, you just download the updated FPGA from the Internet. But as an assistant editor on a multi-cam show, I have to say that until real-time multi-cam is working, we wouldn’t use this product on our show. The picture would look better, the systems would go faster, and they’d be compatible with everything else from Avid, but if the editors can’t see the A and the B cameras playing at the same time, that’s a deal-breaker. Smith: Michael, do you have any sense of when that might change? Phillips: No. We know that’s one of the things we have to do next, but when “next” falls is unknown. We just shipped this version, and we’re getting Xpress Pro out next, then we’ll revisit Adrenaline.
Gallagher: I have two technical issues as far as assistant editors are concerned. First, there is the inability of FilmScribe to address the complexity of some visual effects sequences. The problems have been around for a long time and it is something that can cost an assistant a tremendous amount of time — and it often comes up when we’re in a crunch, trying to get lists out fast. Second, I’m concerned that use of the Adrenaline over a shared system is uncharted territory right now. I’d love to see Adrenaline tested in a shared environment and find out how many machines I can have online, with how many streams each. I’d like a realistic benchmark for the kinds of shows we do. Phillips: A spreadsheet will come over the next three or four weeks. When you have 10 or 15 systems sharing, that’s where it gets a little hazy at this point. But certainly anything under 10, you can go full bore. And in work group environments for feature films, which would be three, four, five systems — what’s the biggest one you ’ve ever seen? Gallagher: On Spiderman, we had one Unity system, and at any given time we probably never exceeded eight Avids. But Sony is now hubbing their Unities in one central server location and doling those out to more than one cutting room. They’ll want to know what it can do. Phillips: That’s a slightly different issue. If you just create work groups that are allocations, like these five and those five, they never have any impact on each other. What is unknown is how many Avids can use the same media. Over time, we’ll be able to say that you’ll be safe with 10 clients, 12 clients — we don’t know what that number will be. But those are being worked on now. Goldman: There are other good features, like Expert Render — it’s been around for a while, but being stuck on Version 7 for the last few years, I haven’t been able to use it. I really like the automatic 4x3 and 16x9 matte functions, where you can just drag the effect onto your sequence, and it will turn one into the other. Time ramping is nice, and the color-correction is good. But unfortunately, a lot of these features can’t be translated out of offline into conventional on-line, because there’s no language that offline and online share. Unless you’re mastering on a Symphony or Nitris, you’re stuck making an EDL that can’t contain any information about time ramping or color effects or mattes or simple supers. If there’s a way that a new EDL format could be created, that would be fantastic.
Phillips: It’s called AAF. It’s descriptive metadata, and it’s a lot richer than OMF. Think of AAF as the next generation EDL: instead of having something called .edl on a diskette, there’s something called .aaf on a diskette. AAF is the industry standard that we’re all trying to get to, so that people can move from system to system to system. It’s not an Avid thing — we have to implement it just as much as everyone else. But it’s a two-way street. We put everything into AAF, and other manufacturers can take as much as they want. But it’s up to them to do it. It’s hard to make other companies do that part of it, unless it’s requested by users saying, “We want to keep using those traditional linear suites, because they have advantages in certain environments. ” Smith: I’ve always been annoyed by this supposed battle between the PC and the Mac. What’s happened with Adrenaline is that this whole issue has evaporated. When you get the software, you can install it on a PC or a Mac. The dongle works on either system. At the moment, it looks like the PC is running the Adrenaline a little faster and more efficiently than the Mac. But Apple yesterday announced its G5, and it looks like they are going to catch up. Gallagher: When you see the Mac and PC versions of Adrenaline side by side, they look identical, which makes it that much easier to get over that barrier. I’ve never worked on a PC Avid, but I’m thinking of purchasing Xpress Pro on a PC. Goldman: When you’re editing within the application, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a Mac or a PC, because they’re identical. But from an assistant’s point of view, when something goes wrong and you have to get into the guts of the operating system to make it work, then there is a very major difference. Gallagher: One thing that impressed me was Broadcast Wave File (BWF) import with metadata included. From what we saw today, it seems that media can go straight from the field into the Avid, be edited, sent to the sound editors and to the mix stage, and never change data or form. It appears to me that this will eventually happen to picture, too: somewhere down the line, it will all be shot on HD or transferred to digital intermediate, and there won’t be any need to output or redigitize. It will all be streamlined. Levy: I know that our sound editor has been crossing his fingers, waiting for 24-bit audio compatibility, and we sadly informed him that Meridien, which we’re going to use next season, does not have it. But the Adrenaline does, which means that the same audio could be used throughout the editing process —picture editors will be able to hand off their cuts to the sound editors on a removable drive, so that they’ll get our audio tracks exactly as we cut them. Gallagher: Another change with these new DNA systems is that the creative process doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the cutting room. Because Xpress Pro is compatible with Adrenaline media, you can have an editor on location working on a scene, which can be e-mailed back and forth to the cutting room, as long as both places have the same media. Or you can have a director with a laptop viewing the scene wherever he happens to be. That gives you a lot of freedom and ultimately saves you time. [Xpress Pro will play Adrenaline 24-fps media, but can ’t digitize it.] Smith: As an Avid owner who recently upgraded to Meridien, I thought, “Uh-oh, have I just spent a lot of money needlessly?” But after today, I don’t feel that way. I’m hungry to jump into Adrenaline, but I know I don’t have to. Meridien does a perfectly fine job and probably will for a number of years. In terms of compatibility, Adrenaline is very happy with Meridien media. So if I buy an Adrenaline — and I think the price is right — I would add it to my collection and be happy to spend the extra money. It will be interesting to see how this evolves for other editors and rental companies. Levy: Having also just purchased a Meridien system, I’m not about to go and replace it, because Meridien has many features that are quite useful for what I do. But the encouraging thing is that the Adrenaline can be used in addition to what we already have and has features that the Meridien doesn’t have, such as real-time multi-layered effects and the ability to do 24-bit sound. Gallagher: I imagine that when you share a Meridien and an Adrenaline together, your audio bit rate has to be the lower of the two. Phillips: Correct. You’d have to work in 16-bit. We’re probably looking to give the Meridien the ability to import 24-bit files and play them back as 16-bit while leaving the full bit depth intact so that the files can be used later in a sound-editing application in their 24-bit form. Gallagher: And if you had one Adrenaline and a bunch of ABVBs, if you digitized on Adrenaline, the ABVBs couldn’t read the media, but if it went the opposite way …? Phillips: Adrenaline can read ABVB, but it can’t create ABVB. It’s a very different frame structure. For Adrenaline, we had to create codecs that knew how to interpret, say, AVR6 from an ABVB system, and play it back in real-time, next to Meridien 14:1, next to DV25, next to IMX, through dissolves, supers, all that kind of stuff. Levy: We have stock shots that have all been digitized on ABVB, which we can’t use on Meridien machines without redigitizing. If we were moving to Adrenaline… Phillips: It wouldn’t be an issue. You could just cut them right in and keep working. Gallagher: High-def is going to be a bigger part of the puzzle every year. Recently I attended the Los Angeles Film Festival and was surprised to see how many films are being shot that way. And they need to be edited somewhere, somehow. So it’s great to see Avid making high-def part of the equation and to know that there will be a reliable place to cut HD, as opposed to having to relearn the whole process on another application. Phillips: On the East Coast, you see a lot of Super 16 films using D5 as a digital intermediate. Instead of cutting Super 16, they scan selects to D5, conform there, do all their primary and secondary color correction, then output to film from there. Gallagher: Is that something that the DS Nitris will be able to handle? Phillips: Yes. We’re putting together a workflow for Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who did Amélie, and who is starting his next film. They’re going to shoot film, but all their dailies will be HD. They’ll down-convert, then do a Meridien offline with DS conform of dailies for HD screenings. Gallagher: Then they ’ll also use their HD for their digital intermediates? Phillips: I think they’ll go back to 2K if they’re doing digital intermediates. They’re just doing this to eliminate workprint and have high-quality screenings. Smith: I’m sure that in the future we’ll be working with higher and higher quality images in our offline. But quite honestly, 14:1 works very nicely. When I did my first feature on the Avid, I think I was at AVR2. I anticipated that after the cut and conform, we would project the film and there would be 50 glaring errors, because the clarity of the Avid image was so poor. It turned out there wasn’t one. I felt very comfortable after that experience, and the images have just grown better and better. I’m happy here, but I know what’s coming — we will all be cutting with HD-quality images, maybe not next year or in two years, but soon. Levy: That’s going to be an important factor, certainly in TV. How much storage are these high-def images going to take up, and how much is storage going to cost? Though we broadcast in high-definition, we don’t work in high-def. When we screen our final, sometimes there are surprises, because we haven’t been able to see into all the dark areas, and then those need to be fixed. Ideally, it’s best to work in the clearest image possible. But the cost of storage is going to determine when we change over. What we want to see, and how much visual information we expect to see, is inevitably going to increase. Smith: On Torque, we up-resed our 14:1 Avid output and projected it onto a 50-foot screen with a Christy projector. I couldn’t believe how acceptable it was. It wasn’t film, it wasn’t HD, but it looked great. We previewed better than that, basically a beta online. But we did a test with the 14:1, and I was just stunned. Phillips: That’s where the Adrenaline can help, because you can recapture at 1:1 in a film project. Levy: I’m going to be starting on a Meridien system in the summer, and I know there’s a lot that system has to offer that I’m not sure how to access. I was lucky enough to learn the system from Michael originally, because 11 years ago, we were a beta site for Avid 4.5. But after that, you’re kind of on your own. Maybe you should hold training seminars or informational meetings, so we can learn about the new features and how to use them. A lot of people would welcome that. Phillips: At the time we had the Hollywood Council, we did four or five instructional presentations to the Editors Guild at large. We would bring up topics like, “What’s new for handling television in an HD environment.” We’d say, “Here’s a workflow that we know works,” and we’d take you through it. And that would bring up questions and issues. Levy: At the same time, couldn’t that be reflected in a website or a live video stream? Many of us can’t go to these things, but that doesn’t mean that the information couldn’t be someplace on the Internet. Phillips: It could be something like, “Ask the Avid Specialist Questions ” — an area that would focus on particular issues. Gallagher: Is there a bulletin board service where you can post questions on the Avid website? Phillips: There’s the Avid-L mailing list. And there’s Creative Cow (www.creativecow.com), and there are forums on 2-pop.com related to Final Cut Pro or Avid Xpress DV. You find a lot of different pockets of stuff. I think Avid-L is probably the one where the most people go for anything Avid, but because it’s so huge, you can get lost in the noise — everybody’s philosophies on life. I just go for the digest version, or you get hundreds of e-mails a day. Smith: There was a period of time when Avid lost the good will that had built up in this community. For a while, it seemed to have turned into a different company. I wasn’t angry personally, but I know there were people who were. I always felt that the product itself was the most important part. But since Barry Nulman has become more active in the last three of years, Avid has recovered a bit of the face it had when I first got involved and Martin Vann was running the L.A. office. [Nulman is Avid’s Director of Market Development for Entertain-ment, and Director of Western Sales Operations.]
Gallagher: A
lot of the good things that have come out of Avid in the last couple
of years have been partly
due to the increased competition they’re facing. Phillips: No, that would be tracking industry trends and desires. You really get a survey of opinions — that would be a great thing to do. Levy: I must admit that when I first learned about Adrenaline, having just bought the Meridien upgrade, I thought, “How could they do that! That’s not being responsive to editors or owners at all.” I now see that there is more to it than that, and I have more insight into what Avid does in terms of outreach. But what we started here today should be expanded and continued, made wider and more open. Before, people would say, “I love the machine, but I don’t like the company and the way they relate to us.” I feel that you and Barry Nulman are changing that. Giving Avid a face in the editing community is important, and continuing to involve us in the development process is a necessary component of that.
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