Flame ain't all that

The facility that I'm building at the moment has a couple of Flame Premium suites - the very best version of Autodesk's TV and film compositing and finishing tool. Now I know very little about Autodesk products - I've never really worked in facilities where they were used. Flame, Smoke and the rest of them have been around for nearly twenty years and so you'd think they are what software people would describe as "mature products".
Anyway - a currently model Flame runs on an HP Z800 workstation with a Kona K3 card for video i/o (more about that in a minute!), an nVidia 4500 for desktop and their own proprietary fibre attached storage called "stone". They can typically handle two streams of 2k in realtime.
All very good, but everything is specified in a system - even down to the Eizo monitor you can use for the desktop display. This is because the SDi output for preview (which is not the output of the K3) is made by looping the 2nd DVI output of the graphics card into a daughter card that converts it to SDi. Consequentially you often see bits of the GUI on the HD video monitor. Now the reason for them specifying a certain model of GUI monitor becomes evident - they have to run the output at a rate near video for the DVI output to be convertible! This gets even more silly when you find out you have to use their own provided long DisplayPort cable to run it. We'd run in LC loose-tube fibre with DVI extenders which initially only worked whilst Linux was booting in text mode (i.e. before the X11 display subsystem could run). I had to throw in a Lindy EDID manager to fool Linux into thinking it really had the Eizo directly connected before we could run the desktop (and hence the Flame application).
This, along with a ton of little bits that the kit ships with; an 8-port ethernet hub, Lucid AES->analogue converters etc gives the impression they expect you to install the system on your dining room table rather than in a pro video facility. It really has the feel of a v.7 Avid from 1996! Cobbled together from third-party bits and only just running (everything on the hairy edge).
It reminds me of the Abekas DVEous (again, 1996) - one of the design engineers confided in me that if every bit of silicon on the video-processing board only performed to published spec then the system couldn't work. They relied on everything outperforming itself.

Video post production a 'dying industry' - yikes!

This is a table nicked from the Wall Street Journal (via my pal Hugh - @hugh_waters on Twitter). On one hand it's very worrying but on the other hand it's what I've suspected.

1. The equipment required for TV post production is now a £1.5k laptop and not a room that cost a million quid to install (twenty years ago). It's why audio still makes money (you still need an expensive room even thought the equipment is cheap) and why OBs, studios etc will always be profitable.
2. Post production is largely run by owner-operators; folks who have an emotional attachment to it and will do work at a loss for the love of it and have a far too optimistic view of the future.

I don't know what the answer is - I'm going to try and concentrate on designing/building audio suites, TV studios etc and avoid edit rooms!

Where I lead the BBC follow!

I spent hours last year re-cutting episodes of Torchwood so that my kids could watch it - they are monster Dr Who fans and were devistated when they realised that the spin-off was going out after the water-shed. Anyhow - click the link in this entry's title for details of my workflow.
I was very pleased to see that the BBC are now doing it for me! By the end of season one I was knocking out a dozen DVDs per week to keep up with the demands of school friends!

After Effects, Kona and video colour-space

Final Cut Pro is a proper video app that knows about video hardware. If you have a Kona card (or worse a Black Magic card!) then you ingest YUV data off tape and lay-back in the same way. The colour space is the same throughout the process and there is no colour space conversion.
See a previous entry here for details on TV colour space matrices.
Anyway - we're finishing a project at five and we discover they want to use a feature of the Kona card called Desktop Passthrough (or somesuch) which allows the SDi output to appear as a second GUI monitor. It is a feature specifically for those apps that don't know about video hardware but where having a preview on a video monitor would be useful. As far as After Effects is concerned the Kona card is a second Mac desktop monitor and you can send it's output full-screen to that display. My initial worry was that being an RGB-only program how would the Kona deal with the RGB feed? I imagined it did a quick and dirty transcode, probably not paying any attention to the 601 or 709 matrix (depending on standard or hi-def). We were pleasantly suprised when (after having calibrated the SDi monitor for correct colour in FCP) we found the probe telling us that the whites out of After Effects were bang-on!

Microsoft Research Group Shot

Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image. This image was made up from three taken at Sarah's folks' on Christmas day - in one image one of the kids is making a silly face, but in another Brenda has a nice smile - it took about ten minutes to build the composite image. I know you can do this sort of thing in Photoshop but this automates the process entirely. I haven't played about with it much but the examples online suggest that they don't even have to be very similair so long as there are common details the algorithm can find.

End of Torchwood!

The trouble with Torchwood is that it's not really clear who it's aimed at. It contains swearing, blood and sex, yet still somehow feels like a children's programme. Thirteen-year-olds should love it; anyone else is likely to be more than a little confused. Which isn't to say Torchwood is bad. Just bewildering. And very, very silly.

Charlie Brooker, Oct 28, 2006 The Guardian

I said this all along - a series that was ideal for my three except it has a few adult add-ons. Quite quickly I realised I'd get little peace unless I did them a version and so every week for the last three months I've dutifully copied the MPEG2 transport stream file onto my laptop (captured straight from the BBC Freeview mux - see Media Portal in my previous entry) and cut it down (using Video ReDo - again see previous entry) into a version I'd be happy for my seven, eleven and thirteen-year olds to watch. In most cases it's been very easy - just the Father Jack language (¨arse¨, ¨feck¨, ¨girls¨!) - I know they hear it all the time at school and on the bus but the youngest does have a habit of picking up what he sees on the tele and I want him to stay a innocent just a bit longer!

Episode 6 - ¨Countryside¨ was the most brutal (check out the cut-list, right) involving cannibals and required a bit of work to make the story hang together and yet keep it out of nightmare territory! Still - I think as far as cutting a P as B goes it worked out well and we made our own set of DVDs of the whole series (with annimated title screens etc.) which has proved very popular with parents of school friends! If only I had access to the rushes I could do a proper CBBC version!

Now, I could cut some of the extracted Torchwood footage into the Sarah Jane Adventures to make a late-night BBC3 version of that show!