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Nitris Alleviates Pain of HD Finishing for Assistant Editors
by Ranier Standke

Graphical User Interface (GUI) of Avid DS Nitris. Courtesy of Avid Technology, Inc.

This past August, I had the opportunity to attend three different free seminars offered by Avid to Guild Assistant Editors. The focus was on using Avid DS Nitris systems to conform HD dailies to a regular Film Composer offline cut.

The DS, or Digital Studio, was developed by Softimage, a company Avid bought from Microsoft in 1998. It was one of the first nonlinear editing systems capable of uncompressed video. The software is deeply rooted in the Windows operating system, and runs on high-powered PCs with some proprietary hardware. The outboard Nitris box houses all the video and audio connections and also provides certain real-time effects. Disk storage for video media can come as a local drive array or in the form of an Avid Unity.

Instead of the Media Composer bin system, DS Nitris uses the standard Windows file/folder system to store media, projects, clips and sequences which can be directly accessed from within the application. The core Avid DS software is resolution independent, which is why it was the first Avid system capable of handling HD media. The DS Nitris system works with all varieties of HD as well as standard-definition video. It can play media from Meridien- and Adrenaline-based Media Composer systems, with the exception of material from 24 fps projects.

The Avid DS Nitris system is quite a powerful machine that can do a lot more than just conforms. Features include editing, painting, graphics and titling, 3-D, compositing and audio. Not surprisingly, the user interface is “deep,” to put it politely. In spite of recent revisions that make the Nitris system look more like a Composer, it doesn’t really feel and behave like one.

Feature Film Workflow with Avid DS Nitris
In the feature film arena, Avid sees the DS strictly as an assembly and finishing tool, with the offline editing done on the Film Composers we are all familiar with. A big advantage of the DS Nitris is that it can access sequences cut on an offline Avid system rather seamlessly. However, you will not find any key numbers in the DS, as it tracks media strictly based on tape name and time code.

Avid DS Nitris systems are now in many of the big post facilities and rental houses in Los Angeles. It is to be expected that more and more features films will rent a DS to conform HD dailies for previews. That’s where the Guild Assistant Editors come in, as someone needs to drive these machines.

The process of getting a cut from a Film Composer to a DS Nitris system is relatively straightforward. In Composer, you decompose a video-only version of the cut, export the sequence as an Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) file, open that in DS Nitris, and drop the sequence icon in a certain place in the timeline. Any pre-existing media will automatically re-link, making changes to previous versions quite painless. An audio track would usually come from a temp mix session or straight from an Avid system, but could also be conformed just like the video. Digitizing is in real time, and screening can then happen from an output tape or straight from the system, which can be set up to be remote controlled.

The AAF file brings across all cut data as well as most of the effects to the DS. A slightly less complete transfer path exists from older version 7 Media Composers, which uses MediaLog to generate AFE (Avid File Exchange) files. But both those paths work only if the frame rate is consistent between offline editing and the Avid DS Nitris conform session. Otherwise, individual EDLs have to be made for each video track, yielding errors of up to two frames, losing all effects and greatly slowing the process down.

Change lists for cut versions made within the DS Nitris have to be made manually. This makes the DS a rather less than ideal tool for changes in a film-based workflow, where keycode-based cultists and change lists are required. However, HD finishing for low-budget films that were shot on film and telecined to HD is commonly done today on the DS Nitris system for a final film out. Future versions are reported to support 2K and eventually 4K film scans, so that final conforms for Digital Intermediates could be done within the system.

Also on the horizon is the capability to digitize compressed HD into Adrenaline-based Composers. That media would be compatible with the DS Nitris.

Differences from Other Systems

Avid Nitris workstation, including SD and HD video monitors, PC drive array and graphic tablet. Courtesy of Avid Technology, Inc.

The three-hour seminars were not enough to train us in any depth. But, just like with foreign languages, learning the second or third nonlinear editing system is a lot easier than the first one. Among the things that struck me as different from other systems was the Nitris system’s ability to set up workgroup-rendering across several networked machines, and the way that back-ups are handled. Anything inside the project’s folder, including sequences, any external graphic files and text documents, can be saved into a compressed archive from within the application. The same procedure is used for audio media, but video media must be archived to videotape, which makes reloading it a much speedier process.

Avid’s objective in having these classes seemed to have been for us get our feet wet, and they said they were going to help us through our first jobs. They suggested that there is a whole career path open to us once we start using the system. This makes a lot of sense to me. Being part of a digital workflow is a very good thing for us, especially in light of Digital Intermediates becoming such a pivotal point in feature film finishing.

So where can you take it from here? At the website http://www2.softimage.com/ you can find the ‘Learning Collection’ with video presentations about various DS topics. To learn about HD, you can start at http://24p.com/. And then there is also a training version of the DS Nitris software that runs on many regular PCs with Windows XP Professional. A copy of this nearly full-function software (outputs are disabled) resides in the Guild’s training room in Hollywood.

Many thanks for a full week’s worth of free training to Guild Assistants (and more to come?) are owed to Avid Technology’s Barry Nulman and Sandi Yunt, for setting up the classes, to Bruno Sargeant and David Maheu for teaching them, and, of course, to our own Board member Sharon Smith Holley for all of her coordination.

Guild member Rainer Standke, who has previously written about Digital Intermediates in the May-June 2002 issue of Editors Guild Magazine, can be reached at rainer_s@earthlink.net.

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