The following is taken from a post to the Telecine Internet Group:

Wanting around at IBC this year, one thing stuck me more than anything else. There are now more proprietary capture formats than ever before.

This isn’t anything new, after all video has a long and unsavoury history of competing formats, much to the chagrin of everyone who backed HD-DVD for instance. But with digital formats becoming dominant, this has reached fever pitch. And I would argue, it’s completely unnecessary at best, and at worst it’s completely detrimental to the industry.

RED gives no impression that their business model is anything other than packaging for a proprietary format. But they give you tools to work with it, that are for the most part pretty good, but also available for free. You can gain access to the SDK, but only if you are willing to sign an NDA. incredibly, this is the most accessible of all the formats. Silicon imaging want to charge you $1000+ just to decode footage shot on their cameras. And the new champion of digital camera formats, ArriRaw, is completely unsupported for the most part. I spoke to someone about the long awaited SDK, only to be told that it is actually available, but only to select Arri partners. Whatever the hell that means. And it goes on and on with the likes of Sony, Panasonic ad naseum.

Granted, this is nothing new. But what I don’t understand is why we as professionals dealing with the ramifications of all of this continue to do so with smiles on our faces. Everyone is excited at the Arri stand this year. The footage looks great. That is more important than the ability to post the footage, as perhaps it should be. But given the footage from the camera is so good, why limit the ability to properly work with it? Why shouldn’t I be able to take my ArriRaw files into any post-house, regardless of the grading system or infrastructure used. Surely this would be best for Arri et al?

And worst of all, why do we, as the hapless victims of this situation, continue to allow it to happen? Why do we continue to evangelise a technology that is ultimately detrimental to our day to day lives? The visual effects industry managed to find a common ground with OpenEXR, I can only hope we might one day do the same.

This new release of Synaesthesia removes EDL and Final Cut Pro XML support, and adds “Publish to Facebook” functions…

…Um no. I was thinking of something else there.

This is just a very minor update to fix some bugs and tidy up some loose ends. It also extends the trial period through the end of September.

Read about the changes here.

Download the new version.

Speaking of everyone’s favourite editing system, Apple have officially announced that there will be APIs made available soon. Hopefully this will allow a future version of Synaesthesia tie directly in to Final Cut Pro, and thus restore some of the missing functionality.

Remember that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Subtitle I’ve Already Forgotten, where sirens attack some hapless pirates in a rowboat? The pirates are gleefully enchanted by the siren’s singing, only to then be dragged to their deaths. Final Cut Pro X is like that. Except with the bitter irony that it wouldn’t be possible to cut Pirates of the Caribbean: The Next One using FInal Cut Pro X.

On the surface, everything is very shiny and modern. The interface, which was somewhat unfairly compared to iMovie, is a much needed replacement for the very stiff throwback to Avid MediaComposer that was Final Cut Pro 7. It reminds me a great deal of Kai’s Power Tools, and it’s just as much fun to play around with. There’s an event library, which gives you some of the functionality of Final Cut Server, in that you can have media that shared between projects, like stock footage. There’s a lot of processing that goes on in the background. There’s some crashes too, but that’s to be expected with shrink-wrapped software.

There’s a learning curve here, as everything now has a different icon from it’s predecessor, but that was to be expected. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?

Breaking. Some. Eggs.

Well, in the case of FCPX, those eggs are everything a professional editor needs to do their job. It seems like utter madness to release a version of Final Cut Pro that doesn’t import projects from FCP7, that doesn’t provide EDL support (in fact, it is currently impossible to online anything created inside FCPX), that there’s no electronic manual (other than the online help) and that doesn’t have deck control, but that’s what we’ve got here.

Instead, there’s the ability to import from iMovie, publish to YouTube and automatically colour-correct everything. I have absolutely no problem with any of that, but those features are clearly aimed at a different audience, one I suspect already uses iMovie for videoblogging and is now looking to do a little more. FCPX is clearly not aimed at post-production professionals who are hoping for an improvement over FCP7.

Which begs the question, why call it Final Cut Pro at all?

Final Cut Pro was always the underdog to Avid in the high-end editing game, but since the release of Final Cut Studio, it was increasingly gaining ground within Hollywood. Hell, I even used FCP 7 to online The Bengali Detective. So it is astonishing that Apple would suddenly do a U-turn and leave that market left out in the cold.

Editors need to be able to preview their work on a broadcast monitor. They need to be able output edit decision lists in one form or another. They can’t, and yet the wealth of output options can only suggest that this was entirely deliberate.

There were a lot of people who were worried FCPX would be dumbed-down, on the basis that the interface was very similar to iMovie. Then the Apple PR engine rolled out a bunch of testimonials from people claiming that it was going to be great. Even Steve Jobs got in on the act. But in all honestly, nothing about it seems dumbed-down. There’s an absolute ton of innovation in there, a load of features and performance improvements that people have been clamouring for. You just can’t shake the feeling that every single omission is deliberate. It’s just that, in true Apple style, they seem to think they can tell editors how they can be doing their jobs better. At best it shows a lack of understanding of real-world editing (i.e. not direct-to-web editing), and at worst it shows contempt for its own market. It’s not that it isn’t a great product for the right audience. I dare say it will get some use from me on specific, straight-to-web jobs. But an upgrade it is not.

FCPX is also the first Final Cut Pro that is only available via digital download. It’s reasonably-priced because of this (at $299) but then again, many people who paid, thinking they were getting an upgrade to Final Cut Pro will find themselves out of luck, and with no recourse for a refund.

My good friend and colleague Scott Lust passed away last month, aged 33. Tragically it was a fatal asthma attack that claimed him so early, something he had battled with his entire life. At any point, he could  easily have been described as a writer, researcher, actor, rights activist, musician (at one point he sang on stage with Prince) and comedian, but more than any of that, he was a great friend.

As well as having known each other for over half our lives, we also worked together on several projects, most notably “Films by Surreal Road”, an attempt to utilise digital production and distribution to create independent low-budget films. That didn’t work out well enough to be commercially viable, but it was a great experience, and the test films we created, which Scott either wrote, produced or starred in (putting his acting skills to great use), still live on.

Scott was always on a personal crusade to try and right injustice, and in 2008, around the time Surreal Road switched its focus to software development, he had decided that he wanted to turn his attention to far more noble causes, such as supporting human rights, and in particular, protecting privacy in an age where the subject is becoming increasingly important and complex. So it was that he enrolled into a college and started studying for a Law degree, which he would have completed by next summer.

It’s weird to have so much of his history recorded somewhere, what with both of us having been technophiles, and his love of writing. I still have thousands of emails from him (a great many of them being multi-page monologues) going back to 2003, when we came up with the company name, Surreal Road (looking back now, I can see that we also considered such exciting names as “Pupil of Dilation” and “Bloodshot Eye”), as well as the everyday ones he sent me that showcase his special brand of dark humour and sum him up better than anything I can come up with, such as:

30/03/2003: oOPS, I just woke up two days late.  It’s not entirely my fault though.  I have a fucking bug or summink again and spent the last day and half stuck in a fucking dream about hamsters in pink skirts only to wake up in solidyfied sweat.  Mum says its sunday but im not quite sure I believe her.

not to mention the countless voicemails he left me that I saved over the years because they were so damn entertaining. Each of these little treasures will no doubt provide me with a great source of nostalgia in the future and I’m glad to have kept them.

Scott Lust, c.2004

We will miss you.

Happy NAB! Yes, it’s that time of year when products that are not updated very often, finally get updated (yes, I’m looking at you, Apple).

In other news, Synaesthesia Beta 12 is now available. This latest release adds the ability to create sequences using just the data in Synaesthesia. So while we’re all waiting for Final Cut Pro 8 to become available, you can build sequences directly from Synaesthesia, and then export them as EDLs.

Why on Earth would you want to do this? Well let’s say you’re logging Red footage into Synaesthesia. You of course already know how little effort this requires- simply create a new clip, and then drag the R3D file onto the clip breakdown. But now you can create a new sequence, go to the Events tab, click add, and then click next to “Clip:” to choose your logged clip. Synaesthesia will read in the clip information previously logged, and use it to generate a new event in the sequence. You can use this process to quickly create an EDL of footage to be used for VFX work for example (or in YouTube-speak, create a “playlist” of certain clips).

Great? We’ve also added some more Sequence-modifying tools, such as the ability to automatically renumber a sequence, or to regenerate sequence timecodes so that they flow continuously without any breaks between events. You can also lock the duration of events when making changes to source or sequence times. Oh yes, and the aforementioned automated Red logging will now also read some additional data from R3D files, such as the camera model and sensor. Then there’s some more eradicated bugs and other stuff.

Read up on it if you want to know more, and then download the new version.