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…

To resize footage quickly and easily, you can’t beat using the options built into Final Cut Pro’s interface. The results can be quite pleasing, and this method works particularly well for making images smaller, such as when adding 1080p HD footage into a 720p HD timeline.

FCP makes it very easy to resize footage directly from within the interface. In fact, this ease can be a bit of a double-edged sword; in many occasions it can be difficult to tell precisely which shots are being scaled and which are not.

The problem with this method is that you don’t have much control over it. There are three different methods available (Linear, Normal and Best), and images will almost certainly fall to pieces with a lot of scaling.

To scale footage in Final Cut Pro:

1. Double-click the shot in the timeline or bin.
2. Tear off the Motion tab so you can see it alongside the image. You should also stretch the canvas out as big as possible so you can see the effects of the changes.
3. Select Sequence / Settings…
4. Under the Video Processing tab, set the Motion Filtering Quality to the desired level (Best is usually the one you’ll want unless you’re in a hurry, and Linear will perform only very basic interpolation, good for fast previews).
5. Adjust the Scale parameter percentage to suit.

Tip: Shake can be used to resize individual QuickTime movies too, and includes a much bigger selection of filters, such as Mitchell and Lanczos, each of which is better for different types of footage.

Last week I got up in a discussion with someone at NBC Universal about archiving. “We reckon the solution is holographic storage,” they said. They then went on to say that such systems have been in development by companies such as InPhase Technologies… for around 7 years now, and the PhD’s who have come up with the idea reckon it’s good for around 50 years.

Well, I’ve heard holographic storage mentioned a few times, but I remain skeptical that this is the right way to go for now. The obvious problem is that it’s unproven. I take issue with the prediction that it’s good for 50 years when it’s only been in development for 7. I have had DTF2 tapes that have developed faults within a 6-month period, and countless disk drives that have died within a shorter period. It’s for the same reason that we don’t yet use LTO4 technology here at Surreal Road yet- it looks good on paper, but not yet as proven as LTO3…

Even so, let’s assume that they live up to the hype. What you essentially have is an investment in a particular product. If the company that manufactures the readers/writers or the company that manufactures the media (or both) goes bust, you’re left with something that then becomes useless. And as far as I’m aware, holographic storage technology is not particularly lucrative right now. So that adds a huge risk to the investment. On the back of this is that the technology isn’t exactly widespread. You couldn’t for example, archive to a bunch of holographic disks and then send them off to someone to restore them at a later date.

Aside from all this even, there is a larger issue lurking under the surface: no-one is particularly sure what data to archive anyway (in the film/video world at least). Right now, it seems that the digital cinema master is the best bet, as it is the format least likely to change right now. But what of non-D-Cinema productions? For instance, if your final output is DVCAM, should you archive the DVCAM avi or Quicktime files?

Personally I always convert everything to still sequences and then save off the audio separately. This minimizes the impact of any data corruption, allows quick access to specific portions of the production (if you only need to restore a specific shot later on for instance). It goes without saying that I also aim to create two copies of everything and keep one off-site if possible. Using an image format such as DPX means that it should be readable by at least some software in 10 years time. I have also anticipated the need to do spot-checks on the data integrity every year, and am ready to transcode everything completely or copy to a new media at some unspecified point in the future. Back in the ’90s I was archiving to CD-R (and slightly later to DVD-R), until it got to a stage (around 4-5 years later) when the discs were starting to become unreadable (despite being kept in ideal conditions). At this point I transferred everything to a new format (at that time I was actually using a nifty little system to back up raw data to DV tapes via firewire), and have repeated this a couple of times since. Needless to say, I still have data hanging around that is 15 years old. I now rely on Internet-based storage almost exclusively for everything except large files (but that’s a discussion for another article).

Another problem is metadata. There’s no agreed specification for many types of metadata (at least, not yet). By this I of course mean things like the title of a project, the respective rights to the images and so on. This isn’t a huge problem, you can pretty much get away with saving any relevant detail in a text file or Excel spreadsheet for instance (although notice how frequently Microsoft change the Excel and Word document formats- will they still be good 10 years from now?), but it is something that should be standardised. There is also the issue of other metadata, such as project files and software settings. Final Cut Pro XML is absolutely the right way to go in this regard- provided that you are using FCP of course. And even then, the project data is only really useful if you backup all the source data along with it, and let’s face it, that can often seem like a waste of time.

Ultimately, holographic storage may provide a decent long-term archive medium. But without a robust, long-term data strategy to support it, what is the real benefit?