Below are the slides from the lecture Jon Thompson and I gave at the FACT centre in Liverpool on June 19, 2012 to a small group of enthusiastic students. The event was organised by First Light, and the students still have several more interesting lectures to look forward to.

Jon talked a great deal about getting into the industry, as well as many great anecdotes from his time in the industry. We talked about our work together on Earth and The Bengali Detective. For my part, I covered post-production, the benefits and pitfalls, and how it applies to any size production.

Synaesthesia, our film production & logging software has been updated. The latest version fixes a number of issues with shooting mode that were discovered on a recent multi-camera shoot, where Synaesthesia’s shooting mode was used to retrospectively log their clips (more on that at a later date).

The update adds the ability to apply a “template” to file paths in exported documents (accessible from the preferences window). So you can now for example, have Synaesthesia automatically change all file paths from  /Volumes/Data/file.mov to n:\file.mov if you need to send the file to a Windows user.

Finally, we’re announcing a permanent price reduction of Synaesthesia. Effective immediately, the new price will be $199 per user license (anyone who purchased a license in the last 30 days will be credited the difference).

Get the new version here.

The following table shows the data transmission speeds of common interfaces.

Note that you should always use the slowest interface for reference. So for example, if you copy a file across a gigabit ethernet to a drive connected via USB 2, you should refer to the USB 2 speed only.

Also bear in mind these are theoretical maximums, and real-world speeds will vary greatly. For example, although 802.11g has the same theoretical speed as 802.11g, the latter is far more stable in the real-world.

I was initially very excited by the promise of Adobe Prelude (replacing Adobe OnLocation as of version CS6). The idea that it can streamline (even automate) the Digital Image Technician’s workflow of copying and checking digitally-sourced footage on-set and making proxies, thus freeing up the DIT to focus on more useful tasks, such as logging information into the footage’s metadata.

I spent a couple of days using it on a multi-camera shoot, but the results were disappointing. Allow me to count the ways:

1. It hangs a lot
2. It’s impossible to batch-edit metadata (it seems to work in principle, but ultimately it will hang)
3. If any errors are detected during an ingest, none of the footage ingested shows in the project window
4. You can create bins, but cannot open these bins in separate windows
5. There’s no way to create metadata templates (so that you only see/edit the metadata tags you’re interested in)
6. Ingested footage doesn’t appear in the project window until the entire ingest has completed
7. It’s not possible to transcode footage from the project window
8. It’s not possible to duplicate footage from the project window
9. There’s no way to apply metadata during ingest
10. Despite it being plastered all over the product page on Adobe’s website, there’s no way to transcribe the audio from within Prelude
11. There’s no way to do anything clever with the metadata. For example, I was hoping I’d be able to produce copies of the clips but renamed to the scene and take number. No such luck.
12. There’s no thumbnail view
13. You can’t sort clips by any metadata field (in fact, you can’t display the metadata fields in the spreadsheet-like project view)
14. You can’t set any event (notification, action) to trigger on completion of ingest
15. There’s no way to filter the event list
16. The help system redirects to the Adobe website (because when you’re on-set you always have a reliable internet connection)
17. Worst of all, it seems to be corrupting files whilst copying (although I can’t prove this conclusively, I did encounter 2 corrupt copied files although the originals were intact)

Although this isn’t a case of “Adobe dropped the ball” (it is only the first release, after all), it does seem like even basic functionality that is required by all DITs is missing. Part of the reason this is so disappointing is because they already have much of this working in Lightroom. They’ve even structured the UI with a 4-room (ingest, logging, list, rough cut) metaphor along the same lines of Lightroom, but have failed to properly utilise it.

It does seem that Adobe is using Prelude to push you into moving the footage into Premiere and then doing more there, but I don’t really want to start moving data between applications at this stage. There’s a “rough cut” feature that I didn’t even use, because well, that’s what Premiere is for.

The Foundry’s Hiero launched last month, after a public beta period. Described as “a pipeline in a box”, perhaps the best way to think about is a bells & whistles conforming system.

Here are some of the things it can do:

• Conform media
• Transcode or rename media
• Track versions (to some extent)
• Generate NUKE scripts

It’s fully extensible through python, so in theory a lot of features can be customised to specific workflows. Quite frankly, I would have killed for this on almost every production I’ve worked on. It would have made a lot of data management chores a breeze. There are a few notably absent features, such as the lack of scene detection, and the extremely limited notation functionality, but that will happen in time no doubt.

The Foundry view Hiero as a kind of post-production hub, managing shots coming in, and shots going out. A client can view the latest overall version of a show, before going into a grading room. On one hand this is a necessary step: colour grading is less often about colour and more about asset management and versioning. This fulfils a crucial need: to have a stage that exclusively deals with editorial issues prior to grading.  So with Hiero, the production team goes over to the Hiero system, reviews visual effect versions, checks editorial issues, delegates more work and so on. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that in the real world.

For starters, who’s responsible for maintaining this hub? In general, the production team would lack the expertise required to manage the process, and in any case, from their perspective, they are paying everyone else to ensure the various pieces fit together. At the launch event, there were talks by people who’d been using it at visual effects houses The Mill and Framestore. But even these are edge cases: it would be extremely unlikely to have a single facility responsible for doing the bulk of the post work on a major film. On a typical film, The Mill might be handing off a bunch of effects to a DI facility elsewhere, and not really care how it fits in with elements from other sources (let alone that the production might not want the Mill having such a level of control over the film). Likewise, the DI facility will expect to just conform everything in the grading suite, as they always do. There wouldn’t be much benefit to adding another link in the chain.

So it could fall to a third party, who would coordinate everything, but then who is going to pay for such a service? I agree with the principle of Hiero, and I’d argue that someone should be paying for such a service. But if there’s one thing we know about post, it’s that people hate having to change their workflows.

So where does that leave us? Currently Hiero is around $5,000 for a node-locked license, and that prohibits it from being considered a utility a freelancer could invest in, or that a facility would pay for “just in case”. I hope that the Foundry can crack this problem, because it can arguably make post easier for all of us.

The Foundry offer a 15-day trial of Hiero, as with all their products.