By Oliver Peters, April 25, 2007
Periodically I review various tools that enhance the editor's creative options, such as effects plug-ins that add more pizzazz to the look and feel of video that an editor can create. This month I'm focusing on tools designed to enhance your workflow to make editing more productive. The first set of choices comes from Digital Heaven, an English software developer that grew out of Martin Baker's creative editorial shop. Baker, a former Avid Media Composer and Avid DS editor, took to Apple's Final Cut Pro for his own shop and started developing useful applications to enhance this ecosystem.
MovieLogger
Digital Heaven's MovieLogger is a very simple logging program designed for transcribers, loggers and assistants who might not be comfortable with an editing application. Those who've never used Final Cut Pro may find the interface daunting if all they need is to log footage. MovieLogger is a Mac OS X media player application that opens and plays QuickTime movies. The newest version, 1.5, is a Universal Binary release that adds support for DVCPRO HD and HDV files. The operator can add markers and comments at points along the clip's timeline and save these to the log.
Upon opening MovieLogger, you first save your work as a project file. Each project file can hold information for up to 16 QuickTime movies before a new project must be started. The interface is simple and elegant with very precise control of the playback, jogging and shuttling of movie clips. Literally in five minutes, someone with basic logging skills is ready to use MovieLogger. One killer feature is a jump back command, where the playhead will jump back a user-configurable number of seconds and playback continues automatically. This is a great feature for fast logging and is very popular with customers. As part of the project, the application also reads timecode and reel names embedded in the QuickTime movie's metadata. When logging is completed, the files can be exported in either Rich Text Format (RTF) for printing or as XML files that can be imported into Final Cut Pro. Once you import these XML files into Final Cut, the markers and comments show up in your project browser and the clips are linked back to the QuickTime media files.
AutoMotion
When you purchase or upgrade to Final Cut Studio, you gain two powerful title animation applications: Motion and LiveType. Motion is a radical new approach to compositing that, when used correctly, offers real ways to enhance Final Cut graphics in ways that are unique among compositing applications. It's easy to build title animations and place them directly on a Final Cut timeline as an FCP effect without any prior rendering. Motion permits the creation of templates for frequently reversioned animations, such as TV promo end tags and lower third supers--which brings me to Digital Heaven.
Fancy lower thirds are great, but if you have a ton of them and have to type all the names by hand, it can be very time-consuming. Digital Heaven's AutoMotion is designed to automate the process. After all, someone probably had to type all those names on a script to begin with, right? So why not take advantage of that and save some time. AutoMotion combines a list of names with a set of Motion templates to create new Motion project files automatically. These Motion files can be placed onto an FCP timeline, and voil%E0, instant lower thirds.
The first step is to create a series of names and titles in a spreadsheet program, like Excel. This file is saved in a Tab Delimited Text format, which in turn can be imported into AutoMotion. The text file shows up as a set of fields with the same names and titles as in the spreadsheet. The editor then assigns a template to an entry row and the field (name, title, etc.) that corresponds to a specific text field of the template. Templates are easy to create and save in Motion, so you aren't limited to the same handful of styles. Templates can include any of Motion's animation, text effects, filters or media clips.
So now, if your show has 100 lower third supers and you want a nice title treatment to establish a graphic look, the process can be extremely quick and simple. When I've made other editors aware of this application, they've been extremely thankful that something out there could save them from the wrist stress such typing would have caused. Digital Heaven expects to release AutoMotion 1.5 (a Universal Binary version with support for Intel-based Macs) in March.
There's a lot more available on the Digital Heaven Web site, such as Big Time, which adds a large timecode display on screen from a Final Cut Pro timeline. This is something many Avid editors who are now using Final Cut requested, and Baker was able to oblige. The trick was to link the small Big Time application to the MIDI control surface commands available inside Final Cut
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Another useful piece of software is EDL Mirror, which takes a standard CMX 3600 edit decision list and places all the record times into the Source In and Out columns. Modifying an EDL in this manner enables you to capture a single edited master tape but have the individual shots show up as discrete clips in your bin. This becomes a godsend when you use your favorite NLE to color correct an already edited master. Without this tool, you would have to manually find all the cut points and "razor blade" a new edit on the cut in the timeline.
Last but not least, look for Final Print, a new standalone application that prints a list of markers from a Final Cut Pro sequence. Comments and fixes are noted as markers directly in the Final Cut Pro timeline, which is exported to an XML file. Final Print opens the XML file and displays a list of clip and sequence markers along with name, comment, timecode and thumbnail image. The list can be printed or saved as a PDF file.
Xprove
Clients have shorter attention spans than in the linear editing days, when they would spend hours on end in the suite. Today's clients may or may not drop in, but they expect you to send DVDs or post work in progress on FTP sites so they can review your cuts at their office and on their own schedule. Long-distance review and approval is increasingly the norm for many editors. Frank Capria, a veteran editor/designer and columnist for our sister publication, DV magazine, decided to address this trend with a startup company, Xprove.com. Busy editors may not be Web-savvy enough to build sophisticated Web sites with secure client areas. Xprove has lifted this burden by providing a professional Web site with a very clean graphic design that is mildly branded with your company information. The company offers three plans based on potential traffic at prices competitive with other Web hosting alternatives.
You'll be asked to choose a domain name when you establish an Xprove account. This will appear as the Web address of Name.Xprove.com. You can add an identifying company name such as "Joe's Review and Approval Site," which becomes the graphic branding that appears on the Web pages.
Let's say you have several projects in the works. For each of these jobs, you would create a company and a project on your Xprove site. A "company" consists of a set of e-mail names, while a "project" is a place to upload clips for review. Lastly, you match a company to a project. Whenever a new name is added to a project, that person is sent an e-mail message notifying him of the Web location, user login name and password. The information for each company is kept separate from the others, so when Company A's team members are notified of the access to Project 1, they are not aware of--and do not have access to--the other projects or companies on your account.
As the site owner, you have the right to upload clips for review and approval, and you can also assign upload permission to other members in a company. A clip is a movie uploaded specifically into the review area. Once a clip is there, authorized people can log in and view and/or download it. The account owner (and other project team members who have been given authority by the owner) can upload clips, but all members can upload standard files like scripts, graphics, etc. There's an area on the clips page to add comments, and, if desired, these comments are e-mailed to all members of the project team (the assigned "company").
Xprove lets you post QuickTime or Windows Media files but advises that QuickTimes offer the best playability. They recommend H.264, but I found Sorenson compression to be more consistent for my clients, since H.264 won't play on older versions of the QuickTime player application. With a cable modem or DSL connection, these 320x240 QuickTimes uploaded in about two to three times the length of the file and were immediately available to be viewed after the upload. If the file was optimized for streaming (a standard preset in Apple Compressor or Sorenson Squeeze), then playback on a broadband connection didn't require any waiting or buffering.
The beauty of Xprove is that it is accessible by standard Web browsers, like Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. No special application is required. Better yet, it's really simple for your clients. They don't have to try to navigate to a folder on an FTP site or do anything else special. In the handful of real-world projects I've tested with Xprove, I found that clients took to it easily and were able to give me quick feedback that sped up my turnaround for revisions.
Innovations like AutoMotion, MovieLogger and Xprove.com come out of the experience of working editors, who say to themselves, "There's got to be a better way." In a world that expects everyone to work faster, it's great to find tools that let you work smarter.
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