It’s a little bit late now, but American Cinematographer ran an article on Synaesthesia in their July 2010 issue:

Surreal Road Maps Production Data

Surreal Road has released a beta version of its flagship software product, Synaesthesia. The new version adds the capability to read-in clip information from Final Cut Pro XML files. The new feature adds to an already rich toolset, including support for Red camera footage and Google Maps integration.

Synaesthesia is a database-driven application for Max OSX, targeted at filmmakers who need to track data across the lifetime of a production. From loading in screenplays and storyboards during preproduction, through logging action during a shoot, to creating sequences during post, it forms intelligent links out of all the data and allows filmmakers to annotate and use modern data management techniques such as tagging to keep everything organized and accessible.

Synaesthesia was created to fulfill a need to organize the massive amounts of data and metadata that can be generated on a shoot.

What does this mean? Well it’s much quicker to do the most common actions on any breakdown. For example, to add a new shot to a scene from the Scene Breakdown, you now have 3 ways to do it:

1. Go to the “Shots” tab, then click on the add button at the bottom (previously this was the only way to do it)
2. From the “Attach” menu, choose “Shot”
3. Press Command-Option-O

With the addition of keyboard shortcuts, navigation becomes much less of a chore. For example, to quickly move between different clips on the same reel, from the Clip Breakdown, you can now use the keyboard shortcuts Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow to go to the previous and next clips respectively. Add the shift key to either of those, and you’ll quickly go to the first or the last clips in the set. Browse the complete list of keyboard shortcuts to see more time-savers.

We’ve also fixed a bunch more issues and made some minor adjustments. You can see the full list of changes in the release notes.

If you’re currently using beta 6, you should be prompted to download and install the new version within the next few days. Otherwise, you can download it here.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to open our doors wider. So now anyone can download the Synaesthesia beta without needing to apply to be in the programme. No email, job title or preferences required. Just go to the download page, give it a spin, and tell us what you think.

This release adds functionality never seen before in a FileMaker database: you will now be notified of any new updates and prompted to install them automatically. It took an awful lot of experimentation and some digital sleight-of-hand, but the end result works wonderfully (as it should do):

Aside from that, this release focuses on asset management. If your Asset Manager is packed full of cast, crew and equipment, it can be tricky to find exactly what you want when adding them to a production. Therefore, we’ve added two new features to help you out.

First of all, there are now additional (built-in) filters for different crew departments, making a specific DOP or costume designer easier to find. Secondly, you can choose between seeing all assets from the Asset Manager, or just those in the current production:

Finally, companies now have their own roles. As soon as you designate a contact as a company in the Asset Manager, you can choose an appropriate default role for it.

You can see the full list of changes in the Beta 6 Release Notes.

Anyone who has previously enrolled on the beta programme will get an email soon with the download link. Anyone else can download it directly from here. Which brings me neatly to the second bit of news of the day…

This update doesn’t really add anything new, but instead focuses on improving the nuts and bolts of the software. We’ve improved some of the codebase, which for you means that we’ll be able to roll out more integrations and add functionality faster and more reliably than before.

We’ve also made big gains in terms of performance. We’ve identified a few areas that were noticeably slow (namely, displaying lists of items on breakdowns), run tests, taken it apart and rebuilt it again to see what we can do to make it faster. That’s led to an increase in speed of about 5 times.

That’s right, displaying lists of items now happens 5 times faster. What that means is that you’ll rarely even notice that you’re waiting for the list to be displayed. And to be honest, that’s the way it should be. Of course, you’ll only really notice the difference if you’re working with huge lists anyway. But given that there are 200-300 scenes on average per production, it won’t be long before you appreciate the difference. Oh and speaking of lists, we also added the ability to filter them by free-typing (in addition to using tags), which will make it much easier to find items when looking through those long (speedy) lists.

There’s the usual bunch of fixes, and other minor changes, and you can read all the gory details in the beta 5 release notes, if you’re so inclined.

The next release is going to incorporate user feedback so far, so keep that feedback coming. As usual, everyone in the beta programme will be emailed soon with a new download link.

First up, Adobe. Of course they launched CS5, upgrading their entire product line. In total, there are dozens of improvements across the line, but one, seemingly innocuous new bit of technology dubbed “content-aware”. This was first demonstrated to me in the form of a “roto brush” in After Effects. The idea being that you draw a loose selection around a foreground object, and After Effects then determines exactly what it is you are trying to isolate. After a few seconds delay, it automatically redefines your selection to create a very convincing roto matte. And best of all, it does it for all frames in the sequence, not just the current one. There are also controls for fine-tuning, such as to account for soft edges, motion blur and so on. Not sure how feasible this would be for feature visual effects work, but certainly for everyone else it will be a real time-saver.

The most jaw-dropping moment of NAB for me was the demonstration of the content-aware deletion in Photoshop. There was in image of a horse in a field. A selection was drawn around the horse, and the content-aware deletion was applied. The horse was removed from the scene. Let me back that up a bit. The horse was deleted precisely, which is kind of impressive. But more amazing is that rather than leaving an empty space in the image, the “hole” was filled in by interpolating the content (not just the pixels) of the image. By which I mean the fence behind the horse was automatically generated. Even as I think about it now, I still think it must have been some kind of trick. Wow.

Another talking point has been BlackMagicDesign (who recently acquired DaVinci) porting the Resolve grading system for the Mac, and then practically giving it away for under $1000 (although if you want the control surface, that will still cost you an additional $30,000 or so). The technology looks a little dated when compared to some of the heavy-hitters out there, but come on, at this price it’s competing with Apple’s (almost unusable) Color.

Arri was showing off its new Alexa camera, which seems to be taking on the Red One, although at a higher price point (and I’ll skip comparing the picture quality of the two to more knowledgeable people, personally I think they produced quite similar results when all is said and done). And speaking of Red, there were a few glimpses of the new Epic camera at some of the events.

The FCP user group, although a fun night out, was desperately lacking any talk of Final Cut Pro (with more time devoted to talking about Avid than Apple!), however there was an interesting concept presented, which was the notion of using the iPad as a control surface for grading (or anything really), which I completely agree is an excellent application (of an otherwise questionable product).

Finally I want to thank everyone I spoke to about Synaesthesia. Based on those conversations, I’ve got a couple of new short-term plans for new features. I’m not going to reveal too much now, but one area I will be focussing on is methods for verifying data transfer, and the other is to do with different workflows. Demoing the software on a rusty old laptop also revealed that I need to spend some time looking at speeding up certain processes, so there will be a big push on that too.

What’s new in this release? Well, according to our statistics, 89% of you use Final Cut Pro, so integration with Synaesthesia is a big priority for us. In this version, you can export clips to Final Cut Pro XML. (To do this, go to the clips tab of a breakdown, select the clips to export, and click export). When you import the XML into FCP, the exported clips will be added to a new bin, along with all the metadata Synaesthesia has for that clip, such as the scene, take, editing format and so on. And speaking of exports, it’s now possible to export screenplays (as text) and sequences (as EDLs).

FCP development is still ongoing, so expect a lot more in that area in future releases. Also new in this version is tighter RED camera integration. Whereas beta 1 would only retrieve RED metadata from files with RED’s software installed, beta 2 eliminates that restriction entirely. So when linking a clip to a file (via Clip Breakdown > Digital > Linked File), just point it at the R3D file and let Synaesthesia do the rest.

Some processes in Synaesthesia can be quite complex (and therefore lengthy), and so the latest version also includes feedback in the form of progress bars, so you can be confident that it is doing something, rather than just hoping it hasn’t crashed.

You can check out the release notes for more details on the other improvements and fixes. As always, the best way to send us feedback is from the software itself (Help > Send Feedback).

If you have already been accepted into the beta programme, you should be receiving an email soon with a link to download the latest version. If you have not yet enrolled in the beta programme, you can still apply to take part now.

The core application hasn’t changed very much in the last few months whilst we’ve been working out these issues. There a couple of small things that didn’t make it into this version, but on the whole, there’s nothing that really detracts from the underlying principles of the software. As it is a beta version, I don’t recommend relying on it for critical production work, but by all means give it a trial run on the occasional shoot or prep meeting.

Any new software requires a bit of a learning curve. We’ve tried to make Synaesthesia as self-explanatory as possible, but ultimately some of the things it can do are quite sophisticated and thus deserve a little more contemplation. Our plan is to provide online documentation via our wiki, adding more information as we go (and as people request it). But to help you get started, as well as provide a hands-on overview of Synaesthesia’s capabilities, I’ve written a short guide that covers the main points (and to give you some idea of just how quickly you can dive in, the entire Die Hard project used for the guide was created in under 20 minutes).

We have a ton of ideas of where to take the software next. We’ve got plans to integrate with software you already use, such as Final Cut Pro and Shotgun, and to export data to formats like Excel. Those are what we think are the most important things right now, but we want to know what you want. Maybe you think it’s more important to have more fields on the character breakdown, or you can’t live without a Final Draft importer. Maybe it’s already exactly what you want. Either way, we’d like to hear from you.

Synaesthesia is the new software product by Surreal Road. It’s been in development for around four years now, and is almost at a point where it is production-ready.

But what is it?

Having worked on all sorts of film and TV productions in different capacities (of greatly varying budgets), it often amazed me how “disconnected” every role seems. This is especially true in areas like post-production, where people employed to enhance or otherwise change particular shots would do so without any knowledge of the history of that shot. It might be possible to find out the camera and lighting setup used for a particular shot in some cases, but what about the intent behind that setup? What was the cinematographer aiming for, and how can I better enhance that, as opposed to the more usual practices of (at best) attempting to reverse-engineer a shot in order to understand it, or (at worst) changing things in a more haphazard manner until something looks good.

This was a problem I’ve encountered on almost every production, and in part it’s unavoidable. The reality is that just as the writers are often left outside the gates of production, so too are the production crew long-gone when it comes to post. This also becomes a practical and logistical problem. Where is a particular reel of film? What was the time and date of a particular shot? On a very organised production, it is likely that the editor would be armed with most of this information, but in all other cases, there is simply no one around to ask.

I look at software created for the visual effects industry, and it is staggering: the functionality and capabilities of VFX software is advanced to the point where it’s possible to use these tools to quickly create shots that are indistinguishable from reality. But when it comes to the actual production process, we’re in a technological drought. Even popular writing software, such as Final Draft, is only slightly more useable than TextEdit, even with years of industry experience and development put into it. What was I supposed to use in my capacity as data manager on various things to stay on top of everything? Excel?

The solution of course, is that (those computer-savvy enough) people tend to cobble together some sort of database (usually in the ubiquitous FileMaker Pro) which serves the immediate needs of the production. Much of the time this works out rather well, the production ends up with a bespoke system that covers most of the bases, something “good enough”. But what about those people who haven’t the time or the resources to create something from scratch, or those people who just want to hit the ground running? Well, you are who Synaesthesia was designed for.

At its core, Synaesthesia is about keeping track of things about a production, from start to finish. Here’s a typical scenario:

1. You have a production. You add notes, storyboards, descriptions of characters, of sets, all to get a sense of what it’s about.
2. At some point you have a screenplay. You import that and it links all the scenes with sets and characters you’ve previously created, and adds anything that’s missing.
3. You refine the script, importing new versions as you go along, further fleshing out what you want to shoot and so on.
4. You create a database of people and equipment  you’re going to need, and assign them to different parts of the production.
5. You start shooting. You log what’s shot as it happens, along with notes, things like whether the take was good or not, what was recorded and making last-minute script updates.
6. You import data directly from digital footage (such as RED camera footage), in order to accurately log timecodes, and shooting parameters.
7. You start editing, having access to all your previous notes for each clip of footage that was shot. You can import sequences from an editing system and have Synaesthesia tell you which shot is used where. You can make changes to the edit from within Synaesthesia, and save those back to your editing system.
8. You can designate certain shots as needing effects work, and update those shots as new effects versions are completed.
9. Finally you can archive all the reels of footage, noting their locations, in case they’re ever needed again.

That’s quite a broad overview, and it assumes you’re going to use Synaesthesia from start to finish. But perhaps the best part of it is that you don’t have to. Maybe you’re only concerned with pre-production, and just want a place to keep storyboards, concept art, and screenplay versions organised? Maybe you just want to log continuity during a shoot? Or maybe you just want to tweak a couple of edits? Well then, Synaesthesia can help you.

It’s probably also helpful to mention what Synaesthesia (at least, in its current form) isn’t for:

• It’s not for budgeting or scheduling
• It’s not a replacement for software such as Final Draft
• It’s not a replacement for systems such as Final Cut Studio
• It’s not a server-based system, (it’s not possible for multiple people to make changes to the data at the same time).

A more detailed list of features is available  here. As I’ve said, Synaesthesia isn’t quite finished yet. It’s capabilities are still being worked out. But there are several key principles that we’ll always try to adhere to:

• It will be simple to use
• It will integrate with software you already use
• It will give you the information you need

But more than anything else, I want it to be for whatever you (the user) need. With that in mind, we will be inviting people to try out pre-release versions in order to tell us what you like, what you don’t, and what’s missing. You can sign up for an invitation here.