The Video Road

Happy Holidays!

Technically, I'm off this week, but I had to share a small technical tidbit you may not be aware of. My friend and boss, David Helmly, just sent me a wonderful Christmas gift - a Flip MinoHD video camera, in a special CS4 Production Premium - colored edition!

If you're not aware, the Flip MinoHD works natively with Premiere Pro CS4 without any need for re-wrapping or transcoding the files. In fact, you can play the clips direct off the camera inside of Premiere Pro.

The secret to doing this is picking the right timeline sequence: The MinoHD uses the exact format of MP4 file that the Sony XDCAM-EX camera uses. So, for North America, choose the XDCAM-EX 720p 29.97fps sequence preset when you create a new timeline, and you'll be editing the MinoHD clips natively with no red or yellow bar in the timeline! Very cool stuff!

Have a Happy New Year, and I'll post again after the holiday break!

Posted by Karl Soule at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a new episode of Short and Suite up on AdobeTV that covers using OnLocation in the field. Check it out here:

Posted by Karl Soule at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With all the new news about the Scarlet camera series from RED, I've gotten a couple of emails about how the new Adobe Mercury Engine will work with RED footage.

If you go to this video on Dave Helmly's wonderful AdobeTV show:

and scrub to about the 9:20 mark, you'll see some examples of how the Mercury Engine plays back RED footage. Dave has 4 RED R3D files (full 4k files!) playing back in the Multicam monitor in real-time. He also shows real-time chroma keying of RED files. Incredible.

Posted by Karl Soule at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I normally try to keep this blog focused on Adobe tools and techniques, but seeing it's a holiday weekend, I'm deviating to talk about something cool that may give you a gift idea for the movie fanatic in your household.

If you haven't guessed, I'm one of those fanatics. I love owning movies. I have about 500 movies on DVD, and about 65 on Blu-Ray, and that number grows monthly. I love the feeling of physically owning a copy of a movie, and even though Netflix and on-demand has made me more picky about my purchases, I still love buying movies.

There are hundreds of movie titles out there that never see a home video release. In many cases, these films were not successful at the box office, are too old, or just not recognized as 'significant' films, and thus will not be profitable enough to garner a widespread release on DVD.

In the past year, I've noticed a couple of sites that make it easier to see these types of movies. The first is the Warner Brothers' Archive, which features a burn-on-demand way of owning some of these lost gems of movies. I've purchased a couple of discs from the archives, and the quality is better than my VHS copies. I wouldn't call them "reference" quality - in many cases, the prints have some dirt and/or scratches. And, there's very little in the way of extras. The menus are also generic "Warner Archive" menus. But this is still a wonderful way of getting a movie that's unavailable for any reasonable price otherwise.

Universal is also jumping on the Archive bandwagon by teaming up with Turner Classic Movies. Lately, they've been focused on their "horror collection," including some of the really obscure titles like "The Mad Ghoul." It's cool seeing some of the lesser-known Universal monsters see the light of day.

For an online experience, check out the Criterion Online Cinematheque. For US$5, you can watch a movie on their web site, and if you want to own it, the $5 goes towards owning the disc! Since Criterion has such a wide array of movies from many different eras and genres, there's bound to be something worth checking out.

I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving weekend, and stay safe on Black Friday!

Posted by Karl Soule at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dennis Radeke has a wonderful new entry on his blog talking about his experiences with the Adobe Mercury Engine.

In my last post, I made one statement that isn't completely true - I said that EVERYONE will benefit from the Mercury Engine, and for the most part, that IS a true statement. However, you need the hardware to run the Engine, and although Adobe hasn't mentioned when the Mercury Engine will be widely available, you should start planning for the future now. If you are running on an older, single-core CPU, with a 32-bit OS, an older video card and 2 GB of RAM, you probably will not see much improvement from the Mercury Engine. However, if you are planning a new purchase (possibly around Windows 7,) here are some things to keep in mind:

1. The Mercury Engine is 64-bit only, and that's not likely to change. Any new system you get should be 64-bit ready, running a 64-bit OS (Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X.5 or X.6 are great.)

2. Multiple cores are good. Really good. I don't have firm numbers on this, but I would probably go for cores over CPU speed when things are close. The Mercury Engine is fully multi-threaded and optimized for multi-core systems. A quad-core 2.4 GHz will probably win out over a dual-core 2.8 GHz processor in a competition.

3. CUDA is the icing on the cake. The GPU acceleration is powered by the Nvidia architecture, and requires an Nvidia card to run. Currently, there's a limited list of supported cards that Mercury is supporting. I would expect more cards to be added to the list at some point in the future, but you can't go wrong today with one of the supported cards.

Posted by Karl Soule at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)