Beta 10 of Synaesthesia has been released.

As usual, there’s a bunch of stuff added and fixed. This release focuses particularly on making editing a little bit easier, with some “real-world” tools added.

What do I mean by “real-world”? Well, they were put in specifically to address a problem during some post-production I was involved with. A problem I’ve had to deal with many times in fact, and that I’ve never been able to address with any software at all.

The problem is this: let’s say you have an EDL from somewhere. For whatever reason, you need to swap the source and record timecodes (or copy one to the other). How can you do it? The low-tech solution (editing the EDL with Notepad) works, but due to the way EDLs are formatted, you have to edit them line by line. Yes, it works, but it is painful. I defy anyone to look at an EDL with more than 100 events and not wince at the prospect.

Enter Synaesthesia. Or more specifically, enter the new Transpose Time feature. Choose Modify > Transpose Time… from the Sequence Breakdown, and you’ll get this shiny new dialog:

Transpose Time Dialog

This dialog allows you to set any timecode of an event to any other timecode. You can swap timecodes, set them all to be the same, set them to zero, and so on. You can choose whether to affect the entire sequence, or just selected events. Import an EDL, transpose it, and then export it. Very handy (and fast). And while we’re at it, you can now also add handles to sequences from within Synaesthesia.

As if that wasn’t enough, there are also a couple of other new features and some more bugs fixed. See the release notes for more information.

Download Synaesthesia Beta 10

Anyone working with digital intermediates will undoubtedly have experienced this situation.

You start off with a frame sequence, let’s say 090000.dpx through 180000.dpx. However, there are gaps in the sequence (maybe because these frames were captured using an EDL, or maybe they’ve been selectively exported from a more complete timeline). You process them in some processing application, but now you have something more like 0000.dpx through 7864.dpx.

Often it doesn’t matter how the modified files are named, such as if you are going to edit them into a timeline by eye, but sometimes you just really need the names to match and so you have to waste lots of time massaging all the filenames until they are just right.

I found myself in just that situation recently. We’d exported a bunch of frames from a timeline that needed some last-minute dust-busting. The quickest, most available option was to run through them all in After Effects. Great but then the problem was getting them back in. I imported the renders as a single, new reel, and then proceeded to cut and splice them back into the timeline shot by shot. That took around 2 hours. But we had time.

The next time we were in the same situation, I decided I would make like easy for myself. I essentially had a list of filenames I needed to use (from the original exported folder), so surely there had to be an easy way to automate renaming them. Well there wasn’t, so I made one.

One of the things that I’ve come to love about working with OS X is AppleScript. The process of writing some AppleScript, testing and running it can be done (in this case) much more quickly than just doing everything manually. Granted, there’s a learning curve, but the other good thing is that even if you can’t program AppleScript yourself, you can benefit from someone else’s.

With that in mind, I’ve released the AppleScript I made on Google Code. If you find it useful, let me know.

Download

Just a minor update this time, Beta 9 improves performance and reliability of Google Maps integration.

View the release notes

Download

Download the newly-released Synaesthesia beta 8, and you could be forgiven for wondering where all the new stuff is. Well, beta 8 adds two major new features: Final Draft 8 support, and Shotgun sync. This is the eighth significant update to our product in as many months, and as with many of our new features, was based entirely on the needs of our existing users.

Final Draft is without a doubt the premier screenplay-writing software on the market, so it has always made sense for us to support their document format.After a number of requests from our users, we raised the priority of adding Final Draft document import, and with the help of the Final Draft team, we now have what we consider to be a very powerful way to get pre-production data into Synaesthesia. Building on our previous text-only screenplay import, Final Draft document import provides a number of added benefits.

When you import a Final Draft 8 document, Synaesthesia will break down the text into scenes. With the plain text screenplay import, this could be a bit hit-and-miss, as it relied on correct capitalization of scene headings, amongst other things. However, due to the way Final Draft documents are structured, this works, dare I say it– perfectly. But wait, there’s more. Synaesthesia will also break down shots, characters and sets that it finds in the document. It will also include any script-notes it finds in the document, as well as scene titles and summaries (if you’ve used them).

Excerpt from Final Draft 8 document

The imported scene in Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia doesn’t hold a candle to Final Draft’s capabilities (nor should it), and as such, there are still some elements, such as dual dialog that do not get imported. You can read more about the technical details of Final Draft import, if you’re so inclined.

Now, on to the other big new feature. I first came into contact with Shotgun at Framestore CFC about a year or so ago, where it used for project managment, tracking the high volume of visual effects shots that they create for features such as Avatar.. After a couple of people requested some sort of integration with Shotgun projects, and after a few months of development effort, and a lot of great support from the Shotgun team, we are now happy to reveal the result of all that work:

Sync with Shotgun button

It may not look like much, but it’s an incredibly powerful little thing. Click that button, and all the scenes, shots and takes (and their thumbnails, tags, and notes) are synchronised with the relevant project on Shotgun. Yes that word was synchronised*, as in, any changes you make to anything in Shotgun are then replicated in Synaesthesia, and vice-versa. Add a note to a shot in Synaesthesia, and it will appear in Shotgun. Delete a version in Shotgun, and… I think you get the idea.

(*In British spelling at least.)

Here's that same scene in Shotgun

As with the new Final Draft support, there are some limitations and caveats to what data can be sent and received, and you can read up on the technical details of Shotgun integration to find out more.

Synaesthesia beta 8 is available for download now. Enjoy it, and let us know what you think.

Here’s a quick way for anyone looking to save a number of stills from a Final Cut Pro project:

1. Create a new sequence at the desired resolution and open it in the timeline
2. For each still you want to output:
   1. Open the clip or sequence in the viewer
   2. Cue to the frame to export
   3. Mark in/out (type “IO”) on the frame
   4. Cut it into the timeline (press F9)
3. Select all the clips in the timeline
4. Add a “de-interlace” filter to them
5. From the File menu, choose “Export > Using QuickTime Conversion”
6. Change the format to “Image sequence”
7. Click options
8. Choose the desired file format
9. Make sure the frame rate matches the frame rate of the sequence
10. Click ok

Strange that there isn’t really a more convenient way, but there you go.

(For more tips and tricks, see my book Fix It In Post)