Gracepoint After Five

Well, there goes that idea

abeyang — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:09:25 +0000

So much for using Posterous — they’ve been acquired by Twitter. Even though they say Posterous will continue as-is, I can’t bet on it.

Search for a new platform is back on…

Future of FCP X and my hopes for Premiere CS5.5

conrad — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:40:47 +0000

So back in Novemeber when I wrote up the long post predicting what has pretty much happened with the release of FCP X and discontinuation of Final Cut Server, I actually wasn’t that confident everything would pan out the way it is. Yup, I was wow’d a little by the FCP X demo video at the LA User Group meetup. But then I shook my head, looked a little closer at the screenshots, and asked myself, “Ok, besides looking pretty, what is FCP X?” I had a lot of questions re: the limitations of background rendering, asset management, and the usability of the entire system. It looked nice, but so did Motion when it was first demoed. Touching Motion for 5-minutes gives you deep insight into the Apple philosophy regarding pro apps, and imho, a lot of critical things they do not understand about professional users. Well, now that I have played with FCP X, all that I feared about background rendering, asset management and usability have come true. Now what? To be honest, Apple isn’t dumb. In a few months, they’ll release patches for free to include Multicam, some limited import of old FCP projects, EDL support, etc. By does that mean all is well? No. Here are my reasons why:

Apple actually has a very poor track record for pro app updates. To get a 0.1 update takes a while. First, compare Apple’s pro-photo tool, Aperture to Lightroom. I don’t want to get into a feature war between the two, but people will have to admit that Adobe is much faster with updates and do so more frequently. When a new camera comes out, count on Adobe to get support out the door ASAP across all its product lines. So, yes, maybe Apple will have the multicam, etc support in like 2 months (they better!). But what about after? An update every 6 months? Is that enough? To be honest, in a pro-level environment, I expect significant updates every 2-3 months. How can you not if you’re working daily with your customers and you’re iterating based on feedback from them?
Even if FCP reaches feature parity to FCP7, we still have the issue of media management. I fundamentally believe moving to the Project/Event folder model was a wrong move. I’m a user experience expert, and I would agree with Apple that people think in terms of events. But do they organize in terms of events? Here is where I think they interpreted the UX data wrong because professionals do not. They’ll organize by project, or organize by keywords, but not by event. Whether I shot it Thursday or Friday doesn’t matter 5 months down the line. And so I drag in a bunch of clips, and FCP X separateds it out by day (and I have like one video per day). So I have this laundry list of video items to scroll through. Yuck!
I think fundamental to their project/event folder is the inability to transfer or copy what you’re working on to someone else. If you really think deeply about it, your footage is spread across a bunch of events. Your projects and all the behind-the-scene render files are stored somewhere else. How can you give that to someone? Perhaps you can consolidate it and give it to someone else. Then what do they do? They import it and it gets dispersed again on their system’s project/event folders. Case in point: how does an iPhoto user transfer 50 albums to you, while preserving meta data and slideshow projects, etc? Not easily, if not impossible. As iPhoto users know, they’re locked into your own computer. I’m afraid FCP X adoption of the iPhoto/iMovie media management philosophy does just that, lock you in. (Btw, I know there’s the “Move” project/reference events to another drive dialog thing. Try to use it.) To be honest, I’m not sure how Apple can fix this easily. They’re essentially built a baby Digital Asset Management system into FCP X. But unless your DAM is feature rich and awesome (which they couldn’t do right even in Final Cut Server), it’s useless and at best, frustrating and wreaks havoc on collaboration. DAMs have to be done right or they create more headache then they’re worth.
I’m gonna go out a limb regarding background rendering because I’ve only played with it here and there. It’s interesting to see how Adobe Premiere CS5.5 and FCP X handle your typical H.264 file. For Adobe, they place all their eggs in the Mercury Playback engine. It’s a playback engine. It never touches or transcodes your H.264 until you’re ready to output. They’ve done their due diligence to make sure as many filters and streams can happen while playing back in real-time. FCP X borrows some of that playback love, and renders ProRes behind-the-scenes. That sounds good in theory. But what happens when you just dragged in 500GB of H.264 files into your project? Background copying, analysis, rendering sequentially kick in. And it takes forever. And the horrible part is constantly that popup you get, “Sorry you can’t do that while there’s background jobs running, bleh!” I find myself constantly going in there and pausing/canceling background jobs. Copying btw is dirt slow. Rendering is even slower. Most editors already did the ingest process, yet FCP X insists on doing it again. Sigh. I prefer Adobe’s approach … get the footage in there, give me the tech to work with the footage without rendering, and I’m okay with a little stutter on 5-stream heavy effects shots. Then you finish your project, hit render, and celebrate, grab a coffee, and come back in 5 minutes (CUDA rendering is blazing!)
The effects management in FCP X is something I will never get used to. It’s the UI, the feel of it, to be honest. It feels like Motion. Feels clunky. I want it to feel like After Effects or Shake (I hoped the new Motion would have been a re-skinned Shake …sigh).
Outputting on FCP X is like iMovie but worse. You can’t even export a down-res’d, low data rate Quicktime without resorting to Compressor (and I’m not going to pay $50 for that!)

Now I have a few things I wish Adobe would do (hopefully Todd Kopriva is listening).

Adobe Dynamic Link should be just available. Don’t force people to buy the whole suite to get it. There are cases where they only want After Effects and Premiere together, and they have them as separate licenses, but they don’t have the interconnectivity between unless they’re from the same suite.
The monthly subscription price is a little hefty. The math just doesn’t make sense to me. I know for many Adobe users like myself, I skip upgrades. I never went to CS4 because the benefits were not that great to warrant the expense. CS5 however, deserved it. I think the subscription model should be priced assuming that kinda of behavior is the norm. Basically, slash the subscription price in half.
I really wish Adobe would offer competitive cross-over pricing. I think there’s a ripe opportunity for Adobe to welcome a whole bunch of unhappy FCP users. This one facility manager posted on Creative Cow how he can’t expand his facility because Apple discontinued FCP7. To be honest, the $299 price for FCP X was irresistible for pro-users. With compressor, it was more like $350. I think if Adobe offered Premiere Pro CS5.5 for that price to existing FCP users, it would do much to gain entry in the video editing pro-level market that was once dominated by Apple. Come on, where’s the “Switch to Premiere CS 5.5″ campaign?
I wish Premiere CS5.5 could refresh some of it’s layout UI. The myriad of in/out type buttons below the viewer/canvas is just too much. FCP X does look slick because of it’s minimal design, and I think Premiere could use a little layout clean up to make it a more space efficient.

30-minutes with Final Cut Pro X

conrad — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:49:02 +0000

30-minutes is not a lot of time with software. I edited a few things in FCP X to get a hang of it, and here are my findings:

It’s the big question on ppl’s mind. Yes, it feels like a glorified iMovie. I wish it weren’t so, but a lot of it has that feel. When I started using it, it was the exact same feeling I had going from After Effects to Motion. Yes, technically Motion has a lot of features of AE, but there’s the subtle cues that what you’re using doesn’t have a pro edge to it and that is what FCP X exhibits.
The interface is clean, though I don’t consider it intuitive. Apple really believes in showing you what you need to see, so often things are hidden away. Hiding the Project window is awkward. Do not think going from FCP7 to X will not have a learning curve. Actually, it’s a pretty dramatic shift in things, especially in media management.
It feels very slow. Primarily due to the background render management. When I first heard of it, BG rendering sounded nice. K, I admit, I was getting jealous. Now, I don’t want it. It’s too slow, and hinders the zippiness that I need. As a reference point, I have a 17″ MBP 2.66Ghz Core i7, 7200RPM HD, 8GB RAM. Everything feels sluggish. I tried it on a 16-core Mac Pro and it was better. But it was still gonna take hours to transcode all my H264 to ProRes. Sorta like Motion if you’ve experienced that before. If you look what’s going on in the background, FCP X is doing ingest, analysis, and rendering simultaneously via the new multiprocessing Grand Dispatch tech. That’s way too much imho and my laptop was on the verge of setting aflame. Maybe it would be smooth on the 16-core Mac Pro, but not on my teeny quad-core MBP.
No Media Manager .. so Im not sure how we’ll archive projects. Project consolidation feature wasn’t very helpful here.
Can’t open previous FCP projects. Rumor is they’re working on a utility of sorts, but I don’t expect it to be perfect. How can it be? If it was easy to do, they would have done it. But because it’s not in FCP X, it’s therefore hard to do. Therefore when they do release it, it won’t be perfect. Things that are hard to make never produce perfect results; they’re not supposed to.
Media Metadata Management is kinda nice. Auto balancing is good, as is the face detection. But the Events thing is horrendous. Forces you to use iPhoto-like thinking when managing assets. I know it’s a good way to think, but in all honesty, the way we work on projects at church doesn’t really fit this model.
Bad! importing footage is copied to your local drive! I don’t know how FCP X can work effectively in a networked, shared environment. I was watching how it was doing all the symlinking of footage in the background, and honestly, it felt very brittle. You can disable this, but having a local copy of FCP handle organization-wide digital asset management is kinda scary. Until I look into this more, this is the major deal breaker for us as we need a very seamless, reliable integration to our server assets. The same above goes for organizing Projects (it’s all inherently local, like an iMovie project). I know you can disable the copy, but now the project/events/assets are beginning to look quite dispersed. I think the major mistake of FCP X is insisting on using their own folder structure akin to iPhoto. They should have taken tips from Adobe Lightroom in this regarad, which does a great job of handling metadata without touching your folders.
Effects handling was clunky. Keyframing is not easy to use, and hard to edit (they use the timeline itself to show you the keyframes, which I like, but it’s tiny!) A lot of the effects like ken burns and stabilization is very nice. A lot of good out of the box effects are available. In the past, I did a lot of hackery to get some decent motion graphic effects in FCP7 without having to go to After Effects. I think you’ll have a much harder job doing that now in FCPX. There are a lot of nice effect in FCP X, period. However, using them felt like iMovie, rather than the power of After Effects. It’s as I feared. They reduced options to make it look easy, but in the end, it takes control away from the editor.
Titling is pretty nice. Nothing to call home about; it was about time.
Magnetic Timeline was annoying. I think it’s good for the person who doesn’t understand clip handles and blank space, but one move, and the whole thing starts moving. Like trying to create some blank space between clips to insert a new clip is quite a challenge. There are no slugs also :( Requires me to insert a gap? Really?
It couldn’t import my AF100 AVCHD footage that I copied on my HD. FCP 7 was able to. The directory structure was intact. Dunno why … boo!
Color Correction… I really thought FCP X would shine here. They have masking tools and grade saving, just like in Color. But the color board UI is just hard to use and is confusing. No control of numerical values either, so it’s all done by hand. I think ppl will have trouble using this… and as much as I hated the 3-way color corrector, I’m hating this FCP X’s color table more. Match Color is pretty amazing btw.
No 3rd party plugin support. Sorry, seems like we’ll have to re-buy some of our plugins…argh!
No multi-cam support. Let’s hope they add this in before our next big show.
Tape support is bad. I know we’re past tape, but capturing a lot of clips of an old DV tape is gonna be very tedious. No more log and capture folks… it’s all “Capture Now” button, ala FCP Express. Sigh.
When exporting there are no options to resize your video, etc. Suppose your project is 1080p, there’s no way to set your own data rates or down res it, without sending to Compressor (which is another issue altogether imho). When considering price, expect to spend $350, not $299. You have to buy Compressor to finish your footage out of FCP X. To be honest, I’m fine in a way (as this was the old Export via Quicktime Conversion). But I wish they didn’t force you to buy Compressor to get any decent settings. Compressor just isn’t easy to use. Workaround: export as 1080p ProRes (the default) and bring into QuickTime 7 to convert it. Ah, old school!
Final Cut Pro X crashed a few times on me. Launching FCP X made all the videos in Keynote go black, so be sure to install the Pro Apps update. Just feels a little finicky. As expected in a 1.0 of course
Motion still sucks. They just don’t understand compositing and motion graphics. Only benefits seems they are moving to become a motion graphic publishing platform, where ppl can share their work. If community contributions start to pop up, this can be interesting!
Compressor still looks buggy, and now it’s gonna try to do auto-qmaster.. uh oh. I’m looking to move into Adobe Media Encoder, now as they added watch folders to it. If nothing fundamentally changed about compressor, it’s time to look for something else imho.
No DVD Studio Pro. Bye bye, DVD mastering. All digital distribution is the new way (not sure how subtitling would fit into this).

PunyPNG hits the 10k mark

conrad — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:49:24 +0000

PunyPNG finally surpassed it’s 10,000th user. I guess not such a big milestone for most web services out there. Two years later, almost 2 million puny images later, on a shoe-string budget, it kinda hit me there are that many developer/designers out there that rely on PunyPNG in their daily workflows. That’s awesome! Going into the future, we’ll be moving to a HTML5 backend soon and offer drag-and-drop support, so stayed tuned.

I’m through with Final Cut Pro

conrad — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:17:17 +0000

I never though I’d say this, but I’m finally through with FCP and I’m moving over to Adobe Premiere CS5. Farewell, Final Cut Pro, it’s been nice knowing you. So why am I switching? I was really skeptical at first, but I’m now convinced that Premiere gives the best results and fastest editing for prosumer and independent editors.

Here are my reasons for switching:

Apple recently announced they are discontinuing the XServe, which means Final Cut Server won’t be seeing any major upgrades. It signals to me that Apple isn’t that invested in Pro Apps any more since they will no longer have server-level architecture to support the Pro Apps (like a Final Cut Server or QMaster nodes). Which means, bye bye render farms and video archiving.
There were rumors have it that the Pro Apps team at Apple were given a directive to focus on bringing more newbie users from iMovie into the Pro Apps, and cater less to the power users. Basically, all the cool features are coming into iMovie first (like in iLife ’11), and then later onto FCP. If you look at the last FCP7 release, it was a lame release with virtually no really improvements and I never felt any real benefit from it. iChat integration? Motion has fundamentally been flawed. Color 1.5 is as hard to use as Color 1.0. Soundtrack crashes the same when round-tripping with FCP. Apple knows the money is in iLife apps not Pro Apps. Look at the latest iMovie ’11, with it’s fancy new rolling shutter fix for DSLRs, which was missing in Final Cut Pro 7. So, iMovie will be in the lead for product innovation? Please.
Premiere’s rendering/playback engine is superb. I can have 7 layers of text, animated blur, blending modes, transparency composited over moving video. You preview close to 20fps with no rendering (that in just software, without leveraging the NVIDIA GPU CUDA). If you do want to render, rendering is multiprocessor and 64-bit, same goes for exporting.
Premiere’s text tool is far better than FCPs. You can have multiple text per title, with fine control of kerning. Font preview actually works and wrapping is all done for you. You can preview titles over the video, and create templates.
Color Correction tools are better. Though it’s not as good as Color, the UI however is more accessible. FCP’s 3-way color corrector felt clunky. Moving the controls on the color wheels always felt imprecise.
Premiere CS5′s UI is great. Just being to adjust UI brightness is a plus as I need to work in dim environments when editing to maintain color accuracy. Values are precisely set similar to the After Effects UI. Setting and moving keyframes is like After Effects. Keyframe editor that actually feels usable and unconstrained to a little palette window. Coming from a UX background, CS5 (and I would guess CS4 as well) inherits the UI investments that Adobe has made across all their Creative Suite. Compare to FCP, where none of the applications in the Final Cut Studio look, feel or work the same.
FCP import/export will allow decent interoperability.
This is a big one. Premiere CS5 allows editing of DSLR footage at various formats without having to use ProRes. On FCP, we convert to ProRes in order to make editing easier since applying effects to H264 footage means tons of rendering in FCP. Well, because of Premiere’s awesome playback engine, you can use H264 native footage from DSLRs without having to convert ahead of time. This means we save like 4 times the hard drive space and time! Plus, this is nerdy, but when converting H264 footage to ProRes there are huge gamma bugs and your almost always ends up dark and saturated. You get none of that in Premiere.
Premiere is cross-platform, so we can have more editors and edit stations.

There are cons to Adobe Premiere CS5 as well:

There’s about a second or 2 delay when starting a playback (I assume it’s caching). JKL works but not as responsive as in FCP. I’m willing to pay for this to avoid rendering and I heard is solved when you have a more powerful graphics card.
Premiere is expensive at $800. Final Cut Studio is $1000. Adobe Production Premium which includes Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects, etc is $1,700. Hopefully student/nonprofit discounts can help here.
There are some silly bugs on the timeline when dragging clips in and targeting the proper track. For example, when unlinking a video from it’s audio, you have to deselect and re-select it for the link to actually break so you can roll edit one without affecting the other. Razor tool hotkey is funky, requiring you to enable tracks that you want to cut. You’re forced to use the razor tool (c) to do any cutting, and I hate lifting my hands off the keyboard when I edit. Perhaps I’m a newbie, but it does have some annoying hiccups and there’s less hotkeys to selecting edit cuts, extracting empty space before a clip (hotkey ‘x’ in FCP), etc.

I’ve read some reviews and comparisons between Adobe Premiere CS5 and Final Cut Pro, but they tend to be pretty superficial. The Adobe Premiere users tend to be PC users that have a gripe against Apple in general, and the level of editing expertise is a little underwhelming from the points they raise against FCP. Well, as a Mac users and admittedly an Apple fanboy, I’m finally leaving Apple pro apps. First, it was my decision to use Adobe Lightroom over Apple Aperture,which I never regret doing. Now, it’s FCP. I love OS X and it’s the best platform to code, edit, design, and manage files. I just can’t say I have the same love for Apple’s pro apps. They need to learn a few lessons from Adobe here.

Disappointed with the new iPod Nano

conrad — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:58:38 +0000

I think there comes a point where size of a product does somewhat dictate price. $150 for something that small seems too expensive. I don’t recall ever owning anything that small yet that expensive.

What Makes a Good Creative Director

conrad — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:15:12 +0000

Just ate some humble pie this morning reading this article, What Makes a Good Creative Director from Design Taxi. Honestly, when I took up the design director role at Ask.com, I’m not sure I knew what I was doing. It’s nice to finally read something to tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. At least, all the things I am doing right, I owe to either the mentorship afforded to me from my old boss, Dahveed, or just cut my teeth learning from painful mistakes I made in the past when leading designers.

Anyways, it’s a good read for anyone aspiring to be a design lead, and better, what you should be look from your design lead.

PunyPNG on a New Server

conrad — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:57:24 +0000

I finally found some time to move PunyPNG to its own dedicated slice (previous it lived on Gracepoint After Five’s slice).

You can now go directly to PunyPNG via this new URL:

http://www.punypng.com

(http://www.gracepointafterfive.com/punypng will now be redirected to the new URL, but any API calls will not be redirected)

Alltop is Psychic

conrad — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:49:16 +0000

I heard about Alltop on Smashing Magazine so I decided to check it out.

This is what I saw on it’s homepage:

Smashing Magazine
Strobist, DPreview, Joe McNally’s Blog, Digital Photography School
Mac Rumors, Mac World
Lifehacker, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki

Wow! How did Alltop anticipate all of my interests? It was like it knew what all my subscribed RSS feeds were. Perhaps some new fancy Web tech where they got into my Google Reader feeds or something. So I fired up another browser, cleared the cookies and went back to Alltop, only to see the exact same feeds!

And so, it hit me. Alltop is psychic.

That or perhaps all who are part of the my middle-age web techie demographic are all predictably into the exact same things.

Sigh.

Anyways, check out Alltop, it’s pretty cool.

Getting into the Heart

abeyang — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:13:28 +0000

If you were given the task of making a commercial for something — and you were given all the resources you’ll ever need — what would you do? Of course, it depends on what that something is, but what is your first natural inclination? What would you be striving towards? The cool factor? Show how awesome the thing is?

That’s the general take of commercials these days, and you’ll see an abundance of visual effects and 3D shtuff out there. The market is over-saturated with commercials (and movies) like this.

Special effects are no longer special*.

Now, rather than trying to wow people with flares and whistles, let’s say you want to get down to the emotive core. What would you do? Apple’s done an incredible job over the past few years, and now, so has the firm that’s responsible for pumping out Google Chrome ads.

There’s something about videos with practical effects — practical, as in, non-visual effects. There is something special about doing everything in-camera. Rather than being super-slick, it’s much more homely, which adds to the emotive value. The Google Chrome ads have been faithful in keeping everything practical, going as far as revealing the harpist in some. Practical effects to visual effects is like hand puppets to slick cartoons, Old Star Wars to New Star Wars (though, Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks are equally annoying), and Jackie Chan to Jet Li. The great news is that practical effects are more accessible to you and me, though that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily easy to pull off.

* Not all special effects are no longer special. I do think, however, that it’s much harder to impress the crowd these days via vfx, unless it’s done really well. (Think Avatar.)