ShaunGish.com

Not many posts lately because we’ve been in the thick of it for a few weeks.  Here’s a quick recap:

I spent the last 2 weeks working with Hit Entertainment, transitioning them to HD.  They’ve had HD cameras for a couple of years now, but their post production workflow hadn’t been upgraded to allow for it yet.  So - they went all out with HDCam SR decks (6 of them) and new Media Composer Nitris DX systems.  I worked alongside James Johnson building cables and getting the decks setup.  Barney in HD!

We’ve also been getting ready for the upcoming Varsity Wired season. We had our annual meeting yesterday and it went well; we’ll be handling a few more events this year and we also have a couple of cool apps in the works to make things a bit easier on everyone.

I leave for Anaheim, CA for a shoot for an optical pharma company on Friday. I plan on stopping by the San Diego zoo while I’m out there (and the lego store!).

Just picked up the CS4 Production Premium bundle and so far I’m impressed - I’m looking forward to using OnLocation. Photoshop and After Effects seem like minor upgrades but Flash is rocking - I finally feel comfortable animating in Flash!

Had to jump back into an Avid for a gig this morning and man is it a rough transition.

I grew up editing on an Avid and I have to say, aside from a few tools, I absolutely despise them…
I hate the idea of ‘modal editing’ - let me drag clips around without having to hit an extra hot key…
And I absolutely hate the way that Avid forces you to import footage… “No rendering” they say… but I’d rather grab a cup of coffee when I’m almost done with a project than wait until all of my animation codec files import and get wrapped in a proprietary format…

All that being said, Avid’s are still everywhere and they still have their uses.

So - in case anyone wants a crash course on either system:

• Avid2FCP
• FCP to Avid

Anyone out there using Final Cut Studio 2 needs to read this post.

If you have any of the Intel based Mac products and want to get a little bit more oomph out of Compressor all you have to do is setup a virtual cluster.

Compressor setup on a solid network is a really cool way to encode and transcode alot of footage quickly. The problem is that sometimes you don’t have any other macs on your network (or a shared storage setup).

A virtual cluster allows you to run an instance of compressor that acts like all of the processors on your machine are machines that it can use to distribute its work to. All of those dual core and quad core and dual quade core systems out there don’t really use more than one processor during an encode (generally compressor distributes the encode to one processor and then to another and then to another in a multi-core tease that drives anyone that knows what’s going on under the hood insane).

QMaster Panel - Setting up a QMaster Virtual Cluster

To set up a virtual cluster go System Preferences > Apple QMaster

QMaster is the distributed rendering/compressing app that ships with Final Cut Studio. It’s basically your network traffic controller. The easiest way to get up and going is to use a QuickCluster with services.

Check the Share and Managed boxes for Compressor and set your instances to how ever many processors you have - my laptop is a dual core so I set it to two - if you’re lucky enough “gishcluster” and click on start sharing.

Now - next time you’re in Compressor and you want to take advantage of your virtual cluster just submit a batch and instead of using the “This Computer” option send it to the cluster you just created.

There are a few caveats about this whole process:

• You must have the machine connected to the network protocal that you had it connected to when you installed compressor - this is beating of an issue but one that sort of makes sense - compressor was meant to be an application that lived on a stable network so it wants to know what ports are being used and how everything is connected.  If you installed compressor on a laptop and you had the ethernet port setup for your network connection then you always have to use an ethernet connection to use compressor and its virtual cluster (it will hang/freeze if you try it with wireless).
• Sometimes things just freak out - I used a setup like this for a lot of very intensive encoding for 3 months straight and only had a couple of issues - generally they were resolved by following this procedure exactly

1. quitting compressor and batch monitor
2. turning off the QMaster sharing
3. restarting the machine
4. opening compressor and clicking on Compressor > Reset Background Processing
5. quitting compressor
6. turning QMaster sharing back on
7. opening compressor and submitting my batch

• Keep your Final Cut Studio install discs and serial numbers handy - if the above steps don’t work and you’ve checked your network connection then you may have to reinstall.  It sucks but that’s part of the risk you take with using something in a slightly different way than it was intended.

After hitting the magical render button during a late night editing session I began perusing the web to pass the time.  I hit up the usual suspects: Gizmodo, Woot, Coding Horror… I spent some time on the CakePHP IRC and the Creative Cow forums…

Then I went to Red.com.

Red Epic - 5K digital film camera

I’ve followed Jim Jannard (creator of Oakley) and his market strategy for his camera line for the past four or five years.  I haven’t had the chance to work with the camera or footage from it yet (I’m sure that day is coming fairly soon) but their initial offering (the Red One) was a game changer in some respects.  The camera is completely modular in its design so it can be outfitted for any scenario; a newser’s ENG loadout, an Indie’s DP setup, a grunt’s anti tank missle launcher…

In addition to being able to make the camera into whatever the situation calls for the Red One is damn near resolution and frame rate independent.  The camera can be set to record in DV, HD (720 or 1080), 2K and 4K with frame rates from 1-100 fps… all for under $20k… hmm… interesting.

The big deal this year at NAB for the guys at Red was the announcement of Scarlet and Epic along with the RedRay drive.   Scarlet is a more affordalbe 3K model and Epic is a whopping 5K…

Being able to shoot something at twice standard film resolution for under $20,000 is very, very cool.  But something befuddles me… Actually a few things befuddle me…

Red’s always marketed itself as a game changer - video/film forums across the net are filled with rantings from their engineers taking a “David vs. Goliath” stance.  Sony and Panasonic (along with Panavision and Thomas) all have very expensive offerings for digital filmakers.  The agressive pricing and feature set that Red offers is impressive and fills a serious gap in the market but my question is - how are they making money?

The question’s always been in the back of my mind but the visit to the site last night raised a big red waving flag.  Current Red One owners can return their camera and get a $17,500 (full list price) discount on the new Red Epic.  hmm…

Sounds like a great deal right?  Well, lets connect the dots…

Red was supposed to be the big field leveler - a 4k camera in every indie director of photography’s hands… but when the product launched there were just not enough to go around.  In a market like Dallas 2 years after it’s launch there are only 3 or 4 in town and several people cancelled their orders because of the rollout lags and holdups.  So… looking at the forums it appears the cameras are made in small batches (presumably by hand).  This would seem to raise the production cost of the camera considerably compared to mass production yet the camera is still being offered at an incredilbly low price point…

Now with the release of Epic you can turn in your depriciated Red One camera for basically a full refund.  So… to keep up with demand for the Red One they’re refurbishing previous cameras?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love what Red is doing… the idea that you can invest in their brand is very appealing.  So many people have been burned by buying the “hot” format of the minute (read BetaSX, and probably P2) only to see their manufacturer switch directions altogether leaving them stuck in a bugetary black hole.  I just wonder how long a company can deliver on a dream without making a dollar…