The Video Road

I recently had the opportunity to spend time with the team from Cineform. Many of you probably know Cineform for their high-quality intermediary codec, and their HDV workflow add on for Premiere Pro.

At HD Expo this past month, I got to meet David Newman and some of the other Cineform people, and I got to see Prospect 4K in action for the first time, and it completely blew me away.

Before I can go through and explain exactly what Prospect 4K is, I first need to explain a little bit about the concept of RAW. It's been in the digital photography space for quite a while, but this is the first example I've seen of a video RAW workflow on a desktop editing platform.

Continue reading "More on Cineform" »

Posted by Karl Soule at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey everyone - sorry for the lack of posting in March. This month has been absolutely INSANE with travel and events, and April is going to be doubly so.

Here's a quick list of where I was in March:

LA for HD Expo, hanging out with the Cineform team. Cineform has some really exciting stuff that adds to Premiere Pro's capabilities, including working with RAW files originating from the DALSA and RED cameras. Need an online 2K or 4K worflow with RAW image manipulation in real time? Check out Premiere Pro with the Cineform Prospect 4k Add-on. Simply amazing! I hope to blog further about it in the upcoming weeks.

I was also in LA for CLASSIFIED where we were shooting for CLASSIFIED. It was a terrific experience, and I have to thank CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED for all the work they did!

On a similar note, I spent a couple weeks now in the Bay Area working on CLASSIFIED for the CLASSIFIED CLASSIFIED.

Well, I hope that clears up how I spent my March! Here's to a busy April! Next week, I'll be presenting for the AIGA in Providence, RI chapter, and then it's off to NAB for a week of exciting Vegas action. I'm especially looking forward to CLASSIFIED when I'm in Vegas!

Peace!

Posted by Karl Soule at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Special thanks to Claudia Crask and everyone at the SF Cutters user group for having me last Thursday! I had a lot of fun presenting Encore, and showing off Adobe's Blu-Ray authoring solution. We had almost 100 people in attendance by my count.

Posted by Karl Soule at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had the opportunity last week to work with Robert McDaniels, a member of the Education team here at Adobe. We covered 2 different events, one in Birmingham, and one in Tampa. The events were sponsored by the AIGA, which is one of the oldest and largest organizations for design professionals. In both cities, it was a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable crowd.

Robert and I covered a lot in the 3+ hours, including web, print, and video workflows. I found it interesting that the attendees came from all 3 parts of design, and almost all of them now have to work outside of their core area of expertise - print people jumping into video, web people creating PDF's for print, etc. We really are seeing the age of the "renaissance designer" that has to move between disciplines when necessary.

Out of my video workflow demonstration, I think seeing video in Photoshop was a big hit among the print crowd. Using a tool they already know and love to manipulate video is really exciting. The Puppet Tool in After Effects also gets high marks from both the web and print crowd because of the ease-of-use factor.

I'm looking forward to later this week - I'm doing a Blu-Ray authoring class tomorrow night in San Francisco. Blu-Ray is a very hot topic now that the format war is officially done with, and we have a nice solution for early adopters.

Posted by Karl Soule at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've gotten some questions lately about how to do Time Lapse shots with Adobe tools. There's actually a fantastic way of recording Time Lapse directly off your DV/DVCPRO/HDV camera using a laptop computer and OnLocation.

Start by launching OnLocation, and connect your camera to your laptop via FireWire. If your camera isn't automatically recognized, right-click anywhere in OnLocation, choose Devices, and choose your camcorder from the list.

Starting a timelapse clip is easy - just push the red record button that has a clock face on it, found here:

By default, the time lapse option will record 1 frame per second, but you can customize that rate very easily. Click the Menu button on the Field Monitor, and look for a value called TmLps Frequency, shown here:

Altering this number will do different things depending on the native frame rate of the signal you are working with. The number refers to the amount of frames to skip before recording another frame. So, for example, this will mean different record rates if you are working with a 30fps video signal vs a 60fps video signal. The best way to determine the rate is to use the charts found in the Help menu, which I've replicated here:

Use the above chart if you are working with DV or DVCPROHD signals to determine frame rates. So for example, if I was working with an NTSC signal being recorded at 30fps, and I wanted to record a frame every 15 seconds, I'd set the value to 450. To record 1 frame a minute, I'd set it for 1800.

With HDV, there are slightly fewer choices because of the long-GOP nature of HDV. Here's the chart for HDV:

In most circumstances, OnLocation only records the I-Frames from the HDV signal, resulting in a slightly larger file size than a typical HDV file of the same duration.

Normally, OnLocation will keep recording time-lapse footage as long as there's hard drive space. However, it's possible to set a recording limit in the menu. If the TmLpse Net Frames setting is set to a value other than 0, OnLocation will record frames up to the Net Frames value and stop. For example, if I set the Net Frames value to 360, it will record 360 frames, and stop automatically.

Posted by Karl Soule at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)