It’s been amazing to me seeing folks on various social networks like Twitter and Facebook pondering the negatives of Adobe’s new upgrade to its CS video production pipeline. As an “avid” user of the new CS4 products and a beta tester of Premiere Pro, I am here to say “What are you guys thinking?” I for one love, yes love, the workflow of Premiere Pro CS4. This is editing program is ready for the big leagues and will rival Final Cut with its amazing workflow.

I have one disclaimer: I own Avid Media Composer, Final Cut and Premiere Pro on my Mac Pro. They are all tremendous programs.

So what makes Premiere Pro CS4 stand out? Let me explain.

My prior workflow for features that I make has been to edit in either Avid or Final Cut Pro then export via Automatic Duck Pro Import AE into After Effects. My Holy Grail program has always been Adobe After Effects. I can color correct, do keying, effects and master from that lovely program.

Ok so what about Premiere Pro CS4?

Adobe has really stepped up a huge notch in the editing world with its latest release of Premiere Pro. Its overall appearance has been streamlined and the platform in my usage has been extremely stable. No beach balls here. I love the ability to make the user interface extremely dark too. It’s much easier on my eyes.

New to Premiere Pro CS4 is its broad format support. Whatever you shoot, chances are that it can easily be imported into the program. Yes this even includes the Red camera. Premiere Pro CS4 now offers native support of Red R3D files.

Working in a tapeless format? CS4 now allows you to edit content from P2, Red and other tapeless formats without having to transcode or rewrap. This is a huge timesaver that allows you to retain the source materials quality.

I can export an OMF!

A few projects ago, I cut in Premiere Pro on my PC. At that time I knew very little about post audio and relied on my audio person to do my sweetening and fixes. I remember him cringing when I said I cut in Premiere Pro. “That program wont export and OMF I need for Pro Tools” he said. It was a huge problem that still haunts me and my wallet today. When I saw CS4 including an OMF export I jumped in the air like a cheerleader.

Batch encoding? I can keep working!

For those who use Nucleo Pro in After Effects you know how great it is to keep working while your works of art are rendering behind the scenes. I for one love that about After Effects. As long as my machine is up to it I can render a slew of work while working on the next title or effect.

Premiere Pro CS4 now allows me to do the same thing. I can now batch encode a variety of formats including WMV, h.264 and .FLV while I continue to edit. This is another huge addition to this release.

Also working with the Adobe Media Encoder, I can create .FLV cue points in Premiere Pro CS4’s timeline. This is tremendous especially if the end result is to go to the web.

The key word is Metadata

Wikipedia says “Metadata is data about data”. That phrase is putting it mildly when looking at Premiere Pro CS4’s new metadata abilities. Not only can you get instant access but you can also customize and save your XMP metadata right in the project panel. You can even import custom metadata schemas. Knowledge is power right?

Inside the new metadata panel is a wonderful new application called speech to text. This is one of my favorite new additions to Premiere Pro. Simply click on the audio file you want transcribed, then in one click on the transcribe button and off it goes. What you get in return is good text transcription of the audio. When I say “good” I mean good but not 100% accurate. That being said this is version one and it is a giant step in the right direction.

With speech to text not only can I search easier for exact footage I need but I can also export it to be used in flash later. I will be doing a video tutorial on this as I believe it needs its own stage it’s so cool!

Integration is tight!

What I love most about the entire CS4 product line is its extremely tight integration with each other. It’s a perfect family of products. Here is what I mean.

Let’s discuss the great Photoshop. If you are creating a lower third in it and bring that graphic into Premiere Pro CS4 you will have full control over your layers. Want to import only a few layers? Have those as individual layers or a sequence? Now you can. Blend modes? Apply them right on the Premiere Pro timeline! Also the modes are fully keyframeable too.

After Effects workflow is solid. The new ability move groups of clips from Premiere Pro into After Effects for motion graphics, effects, or titling work is smooth. When done bringing them back into the timeline via Dynamic Link is a breeze. And all this without having to render! Need to make a change? Do it in After Effects and when you save it will be updated in the Premiere Pro timeline.

Other great integration is moving audio into Soundbooth for fixes and sweetening. Bringing in graphics from Illustrator is also simple and best of all the image remains rasterized retaining image quality. Again instant updates when making changes.

Lastly, and certainly not least, is the ability to export sequences into Encore for BluRay, DVD or Flash creation. Bringing in sequences is a new and much appreciated feature in CS4. Make changes to anything in the pipeline and it will update in Encore too!

Final Thoughts

I love Premiere Pro CS4. The new user interface and features make it a solid contender for your editing workflow. I will be using it on my next move not only because of its wonderful new features but you must agree the integration with the other application is a must have workflow. I give Premiere Pro CS4 a solid 5/5 stars for being a solid application in my arsenal. Visit www.adobe.com and download a demo. As always try before you buy.

Greetings to all the great FilmmakingCentral audience! As always we are having our annual Christmas show! The difference is this year its LIVE! Thats right LIVE via our ustream.tv channel! Join us for an evening of fun discussions, recaps and more! Have questions? Want to join us live on the show? Have an interesting tale to tell, a new product or want to send us to see your latest works? Feel free to chime in on the show! (If you send me an email I will properly introduce you!). Visit our channel for info on how to join us live here.

OH…I almost forgot (not really!). We have amazing giveaways for you as well! Since we love our listeners and members we are going to be randomly giving away some great presents! Here are a few:

• A copy of Sorenson Squeeze 5 Pro a $599 value!
• Imagineer Systems Mocha Tracking Station  a $2,995 value!
  
• 2 copies of TweakRV  a $299 (each!) value
• Particle Illusion 3 (awesome particle generator!) a $399 value
• EditGroove Usermatic for FCP a $39.95
• A RedGiant Software pack that includes text anarchy, toonit and magic bullet looks WOW!

And much more plus lots of training book and DVD’s (you have to pay the shipping though!)

The show starts at 8pm PST on Friday December 19th. Join myself and KOhost Ko Maruyama, bring your own eggnog and have some holiday cheer! Invite your friends too! There will be live chat!

See you then! Dave

Special thanks to all of our sponsors for some great gifts!

(If you would like to participate, donate prizes, or anything else email me here or skype me themediamogul)

I just love interviewing filmmakers who are doing what they love. They don’t wait for the perfect budget or stand in line for permits. The cool folks over at Probell Fims are Patrick Bell, Mo Whelan, and Joe Garcia. They make movies. Enjoy!

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Nothing excites me more than saving my precious time. Whenever I am told about a new application that will do so I engulf myself into its full potential. When a friend told me about “Cram” (love the name!), a pack over 330 presets that work in Compressor 3, I was all over it.

My usual workflow was to encode a .mov from Final Cut Pro, then take that into Sorenson Squeeze. Why? Squeeze has all the presets I need for web video and more.

Although Final Cut Studio 2 comes with Compressor 3, I never really used it unless I had to. Its custom settings workflow is a little complex. Luckily for me Cram now makes encoding to any format simple with its amazing amount of presets. If its out there Cram has it covered.

Another great point to Cram is its price! A mere $39.95 and you are off to the races! Even better, the fine folks at RobotHand Software are offering FilmmakingCentral members $10 off! Use the coupon code 85BC6X83. Believe me if you encode a lot with Compressor 3 then Cram will be a wonderful addition to your arsenal. Save that precious time I say! Big thumbs up here!

Enjoy this little walk through video review.

By Michael Auerswald

Introduction

When you think of “sexy” software you think of feature rich applications that make polygons dance or things explode. Image viewing or video playback software usually does not rank high on the list of most people. But like with many applications that offer “basic” functionality, you only ever notice how much they are an essential part of your pipeline when you find yourself stuck on a system with only its default viewers.

Tweak Software released their new image and sequence viewer RV 3.4 earlier this year and from the looks of it they seem to have focused their development on two things: performance and customizability. That’s an approach you can hardly fault – that is, if power has not been traded for usability.

Installation

But first steps first, let’s have a look at the installation. For this review I will test RV on a 64-bit Vista machine, using a Dual Core Intel CPU with 8GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 260 graphics card.

The installation itself is rather unremarkable, which is a good thing actually. It just worked without a hitch. Once installed you can run RV through its shortcut, but the recommended way to do it is through the command line, be it the Windows command line or cygwin (or the terminal on Unix/ OS X).

User Interface

Tweak Software make it clear on their website that their goal for RV was to produce a streamlined interface that does not get into the user’s way, while still offering lots of power - and it shows. The UI is basically a menu bar, some optional and unobtrusive palettes (”heads-up widgets”) and a single big work area. It is as minimalistic as it can get - and that is a good thing. Other, similar applications went the opposite direction and earned quite a bit of criticism for it. Framecycler for example - while still an excellent application, don’t get me wrong there - went from a clear if already somewhat crowded interface to something that is trying to be too many things at once on a single screen and barely leaves any space for the actual workspace. As 1080p video runs at almost the same resolution as an average 24″ widescreen monitor these days, every bit of UI just gets in the way of the image. For that alone I would chose the minimalistic interface style of RV every single time.

Basic functions can be controlled by the mouse - for example you can scrub, pan and zoom with it - or simple keyboard commands, each of which can be customized.

The whole user interface is written in RV’s script language “mu” and is event-based. It is thus highly configurable, simply by modifying a script file. For the user, this can be a blessing - and a curse. A blessing for the obvious reason that whatever your facility requires, you can add it to the menu, assign a keyboard command etc. A curse however when you notice that many menu items are basically just wrappers for a function call. Some of those require the user to type in command parameters in what is basically a single command line at the bottom of the window. There is no context sensitive help for this, so either you know what to enter, read up on it in the manual, or, well, hope for the best. Others, like the Open… dialog, open a regular Windows file dialog with a bookmarking feature bolted on (quite handy) but are then missing a filter by type function or a way to interpret image sequences as single items, as other applications do. However, Tweak Software told me to expect an improved file dialog in a future release, so this will be fixed eventually. Furthermore, another modification for opening image sequences was quickly implemented by modifying the interface’s script file.

The scripting language will come through at many points of the application where in other programs you would expect a dialog to pop up. While this can be frustrating at times, once you get used to it you can feel the potential that slumbers below the surface. A good pipeline engineer will be able to transform this interface into anything he wants or needs.

Features

It would be foolish to try and list all features that RV offers (plus, you can look those up on their homepage anyway), but to mention some: it supports all major image formats, HDR and stereoscopic playback, real time colour correction and also offers some basic compositing features. Especially the latter is quite useful indeed. You can add multiple sequences to your session. These can then be watched either in sequence or stacked on top of each other. If you stack them, you can apply some basic composition to them, for example a Difference or Add composite. You can also use wipes from every corner to compare several clips in realtime. In the screenshot you can see me comparing three clips, two on the left separated horizontally and another below those two.

Again, the interface for many of these features is very minimalistic. For example, correcting the saturation works by pressing shift-S, dragging the mouse to the required value, and that’s it. Depending on how you look at it, you will either find this highly efficient, or you will miss some sort of optional slider to move around. Personally once I got used to it, I tend to find it just efficient, but would like the option of a dialog, if only for references sake.

Something that is getting increasingly popular is stereoscopic 3D. I tested stereoscopic playback with some OpenSXR (stereo EXR) files and it worked as expected. All the “regular” features work with stereoscopic images too. Stereoscopic support will be a big deal in the future, so it’s good to see that RV comes equipped with full support already there.

Another interesting feature is the remapping of image channels. This performed flawlessly - until I broke it. After some fooling around I ran into a situation where even after clearing the current session the CPU usage would not fall below 50% anymore (blocking one core) and memory usage stayed firmly at 1.1GB, without any clip open or cached. This was, as it turns out, my own fault in so far as I chose to remap some of the colour channels, but then apparently had a typo in my remap command. This did throw an error in the RV Console, but it kept on trying the same erroneous command for every single frame, eating up memory on the way. So, syntax error handling could still use some improvement. I want to again point out however that the function as such worked just fine. But holding the users hand by having some sort of syntax hints or contextual help would be beneficial. (I am told btw. that this problem is about to be fixed)

Performance

To test RV’s performance I chose a 1920×1200 IFF image sequence (ca. 1GB) and another 2K DPX sequence DPX (ca. 650MB). Opening the DPX sequence felt significantly faster than opening the IFF sequence (and not just because it was smaller). To compare, I selected the free player djv as well as fcheck. The RAM usage of all three viewers was more or less identical, which was to be expected. What was very different though was the time it took the viewer to open and cache the image sequence. For the test I set RV to Region Caching, which tries to read the region from In to Out-point into memory. Fcheck and djv use a similar strategy (it basically means the viewer reads the whole sequence into memory). It took both fcheck and RV approx. 2m 30s to cache the entire IFF sequence and offer smooth playback. Surprisingly it took djv only 20s for the same sequence. Luckily the DPX sequence did not have the same problem, in fact the situation was reversed and RV was quicker at opening the sequence than djv. It seems like the IFF importer could use some optimising. DPX and OpenEXR did not have this problem.

Speaking of caching, RV offers three caching strategies to, namely no caching (if your data source is able to deliver the data quick enough), a ring buffer like cache that caches the next x seconds of playback in advance or full caching.

Playback - once cached - is as smooth as it can be. Both sequences played back at a stable 24fps while I panned the image, zoomed in and out and even freely rotated the image, all without ever pausing the playback or noticing a stutter.

I then added a Quicktime clip on top (720p DVCPRO50), stacked the clips and ran them as an additive composite and a difference composite. Again the playback was smooth and stable.

Integration

Integration is without a doubt the strongest point of RV. The application is highly flexible and customisable. This begins, as mentioned before, with the user interface, but does not end there. You can write your own plug-ins to support custom file formats. You can write your own “heads-up widgets” and more importantly you can easily generate RV session files.

As mentioned before, RV’s UI is all scripted and it only took me a few minutes to change some of its behaviour to suit my needs. For example, the default scrubbing behaviour is to stop the playback. I was quickly able to add a new mouse and keyboard command to scrub without stopping, and that is just scratching the surface of course.

RV’s project files are called sessions. In addition to the location of files that are part of that sessions sequence or stack, the session file also contains every option you could select in the interface. This means your session can be preconfigured with a certain colour correction setting, zoom or rotation etc. Tweak Software have developed their own plain text file format for this called GTO. It is open sourced and they provide C++ and Python code to generate GTO files from all sorts of applications. Or, if you feel so inclined, you can just open it in your favourite text editor and change things by hand.

This means you can send your clips directly from any application that offers custom exports to RV (or you could write a simple tool that takes the export of any app and creates the GTO file from there). An example would be to automatically send a clip from your editing application to RV together with another clip (and possibly audio too), colour correct one or both and render out a Difference composite of the two. Or you could input a number of clips, stack them and output them as a tiled video, showing all at the same time. All that without ever even touching the RV UI.

To give you an even better idea of what is possible, Tweak Software shared some user stories with me, illustrating what the integration has been used for:

- add custom menus and functions, for example menus that are populated dynamically based on the shot the artist is working on. The menus call functions that query the  production database and provide for things like ‘load adjacent shots’ so that artists can easily grab the bookends to the shot to view it in context.

- a pipeline application where an image a shot is rendered that uses colors as an index for each object a CG scene (i.e. every object gets a unique color and that color value acts as an index). A tool was then built inside of RV that lets the user move the cursor over  a final rendered image to get information about the assets in the scene from a database (like which version of a model is being used in the render etc.)

- use other applications to write out RV session files from their own databases and browsers and use RV as a central viewer to view sequences, EDL’s etc.

- apparently one company actually wrote a 3D viewer in RV (using the scripting language) and an OBJ file parser, that then imports scene geometry and camera animation into RV to play back matchmoves over background plates.

More tools

With RV also come two command line tools called RVIO and RVLS. RVLS is basically used to gather file and folder information. RVIO offers format conversions (size, sequences>clip etc.), applies LUT’s, overlays (watermarks, frame counters…), generates slates and more. I have grown to like it quite a bit, it’s a straightforward tool that performs well - and putting watermarks and frame counters in your clips with a single command line is just handy.

Final Words

If I had to chose a metaphor, RV would be the software equivalent of a rough diamond. The out of the box interface could use some polish and the learning curve to get to all the “good stuff” that lies underneath will be too steep for most “normal” users. But these are not the target group for RV. Where RV shines (again with the diamond metaphor!) is in a complex pipeline, highly customised and with tight integration into a specific workflow. It is as much a viewer as it is a framework and this is what should make RV so attractive to every medium or large sized facility. There is a reason why ILM and Weta use RV. That said, RV does have its problems. It is a product that is actively being developed, and as such not all of its components are as optimised yet as I would have liked. Most of its functions work as expected, run stable and the main functions are performing very well. Sometimes though, like in my example with the IFF format, there is still room for improvement. Luckily this was the exception and Tweak Software was extremely responsive to every problem I reported.

So, in conclusion: RV is not a tool made for the user who just wants a viewer to watch his rendered image sequences. You can use it for that of course, but most will be happier with the free djv or the numerous other commercial offers out there. RV is a tool made for a professional, larger scale environment, where the person implementing it does not mind getting his or her hands dirty. Those who do will be rewarded with a feature rich, powerful, highly customisable viewer that will get the work done the way you want it.

***Michael Auerswald, currently lives near London, UK, and works as a software engineer and “aspiring” character animator. His website is http://michaelauerswald.de/. You can also follow him on twitter @mauerswald***

At SIGGRAPH 08 I had a chance to speak with Tweak Software President Seth Rosenthal about their next generation image and sequence viewer Tweak RV. Enjoy!

Welcome to an introduction to FilmSchoolOnDemand.com. We are excited to get the site launched! We look forward to teaching many of you how to make your first feature film and sell it!

FlmSchoolOnDemand Intro from David Basulto on Vimeo.

Greetings, today I have the pleasure of speaking to filmmaking and graphic design guru Kenn Bell. Kenn’s a guy who is really embracing the digital age of filmmaking. Among other projects, his webisodes of The Dog Files are extremely entertaining and well produced. Kenn produces, directs and edits the show who’s tagline is “Everything you ever wanted to know about dogs and the people that love them”. This is one great interview. Enjoy.

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We picked up a refurbished MacBook Pro for the wife (she needed one desperately for work) yesterday from the Apple Store. First of all the refurbs there are priced tremendously. Secondly, we were able to take advantage of the Section 6378 Blanket Exemption Certificate that enabled us to pay less sales tax! Hey in this day and age every penny counts! Check with your state, you may have one too.

I recently have been slamming through various DVD extras, commentaries and behind the scenes. Some are so in depth while others are just expanded trailers to me. La Femme Nikita was just up and it was great! Last nite was Van Helsing which showed how they did some of the tremendous effects in the film.

What are some of your favorites and why? Please share with us and comment below! Cheers, Dave