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.

This is an application for Mac OS X to convert Media 100 Batch (*.m1b) files to Final Cut Pro Batch List files.

The Applescript source and some documentation is included. This is provided free of charge without any support.

Download it here…

As far as I can tell, there is no “formal” (nor informal, for that matter) specification for a Final Cut Pro Batch List anywhere, despite being in regular use (this is unfortunately the case for several file types in regular use in post-production). FCP’s manual provides a few hints, but nothing completely definitive.

So here goes:

1. The first line of the batch file must contain the headings of the relevant fields, separated by tabs. These must be named precisely (see below for possible field headings).
2. The fields “Name”, “Media Start”, “Media End” and “Reel” are required.
3. The information for clips must be provided on one line per clip.
4. Folders in a project are defined on a line by starting with an asterisk (*), a space, and the folder name (e.g. “* AAA_cut_aways”). All clips listed after that label will be placed are in that folder. Strangely though, FCP seems to ignore these labels when importing a batch list.
5. The file must be plain text.

As of Final Cut Pro 6.0.3, any of the following field headings can be used:

• Name
• Duration
• In
• Out
• Media Start
• Media End
• Tracks – must be in the form “1V,2A” (for 1 video track and 2 audio tracks in this case)
• Good – “Yes”/”No”
• Log Note
• Label
• Label 2
• Audio
• Frame Size – must be in the form “pixel_width x pixel_height” (e.g. “1920 x 1080″)
• Vid Rate – must be in the form “25 fps”
• Compressor
• Data Rate – must be in the form “2048/sec”
• Aud Rate – must be in the form “96.0 KHz”
• Aud Format
• Alpha
• Reverse Alpha – “Yes”/”No”
• Composite
• Pixel Aspect
• Anamorphic – “Yes”/”No”
• Field Dominance – “Upper (Odd)” or “Lower (Even)”
• Description
• Scene
• Shot/Take
• Angle
• Reel
• Master Comment 1
• Master Comment 2
• Comment 1
• Comment 2
• Master Clip – “Yes”/”No”
• Offline – “Yes”/”No”
• Last Modified – Must be in the form “Tue, Mar 4, 2008, 17:19″
• Film Safe – “Yes”/”No”

Other things to note:

• Although many people are under the impression that right-clicking on a sequence and choosing Export->Batch List will produce a list that only contains clips used in the selected sequence, this is actually not the case. Exported batch lists will always contain all clips in the project. UPDATE (25/August/09): See the comment by Josh below…
• Exporting a batch list from FCP will only export field data for columns that are visible in the project. So if you have the “Master Comment 1″ column hidden, that data won’t get exported.
• The frame rate gets determined by the project that the list is imported into, and is not specified in the list directly.

UPDATE (07/April/09): It was brought to my attention that there is an issue with manually creating text files for Batch Lists. It seems that yet another requirement of the Batch List is that every line must be terminated by ASCII character 13 (rather than ASCII character 10). Not doing so will produce the error that one or more headings are invalid.

I have created an AppleScript that will convert files that are producing this error.

Batch List Text Conversion AppleScript

Where part 1 of this series… was mostly theory, anticipation and about establishing best practices for RedCode data, this part is all reality: what happens in practice  when you try and work with it.

After all, the vast majority of discussions of Red camera workflow are necessarily theoretical, after all very few people are using it for anything other than test footage. The editing stage is often the first stumbling block, as actually getting any of the footage into an editing suite to play around with can be challenging. There’s also a much more problematic issue that deserves attention: ensuring that the finished edit can actually be used for an online somewhere.

There is a popular workflow with Red footage which is to edit the R3D files directly in FCP. The benefit of this is that it is very simple: you just load the QuickTime proxies into a project and snip away as normal. You can even do your online in FCP if you wish, putting Final Cut’s colour correction and effects tools to good use. You can then export to a wide variety of formats, including some uncompressed* variants.

*Note: I’ve not done any tests on this workflow to see if working in this manner produces a “true” uncompressed result (compared to converting the RedCode data directly to an uncompressed format first, and editing with that). It is possible that somewhere along the path, probably at the Red proxy file, some amount of compression is introduced.

However, I’m not a big fan of workflows like this, because they make the process proprietary and reliant on specific software configurations. It’s entirely feasible that at some point RedCode will be treated in the same manner as formats such as DV, universally recognised, and with predictable results regardless of your editing system. Furthermore, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to having to use FCP for cutting (although ultimately that was exactly what we used). And finally, I was concerned that the cases of clips with duplicate  names would give us grief when un-picking the edit in preparation of the online.

The method we used in the end was to convert everything using the Redline command-line processor (from Red), by creating a batch script using our Redemption… database. We set everything to output 1920×1080 DVCPROHD movie files (which would retain the original timecodes) but prefixing our own reel numbers to each file. There were a couple of bugs in the Redline code (which are being addressed) that prevented the iso value of each file being read automatically so we had to plug those numbers in ourselves. It was also apparent that it was necessary to apply a gamma-curve during the conversion process to prevent everything looking flat: helpful for the online process perhaps, but not so much for the edit.

We then had a folder of movie files that could (in theory at least) be loaded into any editing system. We went with Final Cut, and an additional step was that we had to change the reel number FCP had assigned (based on the filename I assume) to our reel number.

That done, the editor took over and started to cut, as if working with any other footage. Meanwhile, we could start looking into getting the material prepped for the 4k online.

As a side note, one of the other things we were able to do easily due to the digital nature of all this was have our proprietary database automatically match the shoot notes to the Red data logs, so we were also able to produce a reference log for each clip.

The third and final part will look at using Autodesk’s Lustre to online the 4k files.

Mac users: Get Cineon & DPX functionality with Glue Tools’ Quicktime Components…

The full version will also integrate nicely with FCP, giving you access to metadata such as timecode. At $400 per license, it’s a bit too pricey for us to use here but the demo mode will at least let you see DPX thumbnails in the Finder. I tried out a folder of DPX files with Leopard’s QuickLook and it actually plays through the sequence (although with red bars in demo mode). I did notice a few problems though, such as the image preview in Finder’s detail pane only shows the first frame of the sequence rather than the selected frame, and the thumbnail preview seems to select a random frame from the sequence and then use that as the thumbnail for every frame. I’ve still yet to find anything that shows DPX files quickly and correctly in Coverflow view.