Monthly Archives: June 2011

If Apple called it iMovie Pro…

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I’m very impressed with iMovie Pro. It’s very quick to edit with, there’s lots of powerful controls to do things that can be tiresome in Final Cut Pro, the interface is clean and uncluttered, and there are ways to bend the way the application works into a professional workflow – and by professional, I mean an environment where you’re earning money from editing footage according to the desires and ultimate direction of a client – specifically where ‘I can’t do that’ doesn’t enter the equation unless budgets say otherwise.

The release of iMovie Pro has been somewhat mucked up by its publisher, Apple. They’ve decided to release it with under the ‘Final Cut’ brand, and this has caused a backlash in their established user community. In doing so, they’ve elevated expectations as the FCP brand is a ten year old product that, while creaking a bit in its old age, has a reliable and stable workflow with lots of workarounds to hide the issues with such an old product. To introduce this new package as its next generation is about as subtle and believable as a 1920s SFX shot of teleportation.

Let’s say I cut Apple some slack here: Final Cut Pro was born in the mid 1990s as a PC package, then ported over to Apple’s senescent OS9 and vintage QuickTime technologies that were approaching their own ‘End of Life’ or ‘Best Before’ dates. Nevertheless, Apple soldiered on and built a strong following in the Non Linear Editing market, excusing FCP’s little ‘ways’ like one ignores the excessive, erm, ‘venting of gas’ from a beloved Labrador.

As time goes on, Apple has to look at the painful truth that FCP is getting old. It’s just not able to easily evolve into 64 bit and new video technologies, and rewriting it from the ground up could be a long, frustrating process of ‘recreating’ things that shouldn’t be done in ‘modern’ software. After a few big efforts, it becomes painfully obvious that we can’t make a bionic Labrador.

So Apple were faced with a difficult choice: rebuild their dog, their faithful friend, warts and all, from the ground up, which will please a few but will never help the greater audience, or… and this is hard to emote: shoot it in the head, kill it quickly, and do a switcharoo with their young pup iMovie, fresh out of Space Cadet Camp, full of zeal and spunk for adventure but still a little green.

So here’s where the scriptwriter faces a dilema. Do we do a Doctor Who regeneration sequence, or do we do a prequel reboot a-la Abrams’ Star Trek? Or do we substitue an ageing star with a young turk with is own ideas on the role and hope the audience buys it?

Exactly.

Imagine if Apple said this: ‘hey guys, FCP can go no further. Enjoy it as is. From now on, we’re investing in iMovie’s technologies and will make it the best editor ever – our first version is for ‘The Next Generation’, but it’s going to grow and develop fast, it is tomorrow’s editor, it does stuff you’ll need in the future – welcome to iMovie Pro’.

Okay, so you’d have to invest $400 in this new platform, but it’s got potential. Imagine letting producers do selects on an iPad, emailing you their collections ready for you to edit. Imagine identifying interviewees (not in this release) and linking them to lower third and consent metadata, or (as would have been really useful) ‘find this person (based on this photo) in my rushes’ (again, not in this version but the hooks are there). Imagine not having to do all the grunt work of filing twiddly bits, or identifying stuff shot in Slough. This is clever. This is exciting. And skimming? Actually yes – I like that.

But if Apple tries to sell us all this sizzle as Final Cut Pro, I want my controls and my media management clarity. I want to know why I am paying $400 for an upgrade that gives me less features.

The new FCP-X has iMovie icons (see those little ‘stars’ on projects?), offers iMovie import, looks like iMovie, works like iMovie, has iMovie features and then some. It IS iMovie Pro, and I am happy with that. All the crap that Apple get for them calling it Final Cut Pro, which it is most certainly and definitely (nay, defiantly) is NOT, is fully deserved. May they be bruised and battered for their arrogance.

Apple: rename FCP-X to iMovie Pro. It’s the truth, and it’s good.

IP Videography

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Sony SNC CH210I’m shooting timelapse today – a build of an exhibition area. However, the brief posed some challenges that meant my usual kit would not just be inconvenient, but almost impossible to use.

The exhbition area needed to be filmed from high up, but there were no vantage points a person could film from. It meant fixing a camera to a bit of building, then running a cable. There were no convenient power outlets nearby, either. Once rigged, the cameras would be inaccessible until the show was over. The footage would be required BEFORE the cameras were taken down. There wasn’t a limitless budget either.

So… we couldn’t strap a camcorder or DSLR up – how would you get the footage? How would you change battery? Webcams need USB or are of limited resolution. Finally, I settled on a pair of SNC-CH210 ‘IP’ Cameras from Sony (supplied by Charles Turner from Network Video Systems in Manchester). These are tiny, smaller than the ‘baby mixer’ tins of tonic or cola you’d find on a plane. They can be gaffer taped to things, slotted into little corners, flown overhead on lightweight stands or suspended on fishing line.

The idea is that these cameras are ‘Internet Protocol’ network devices. They have an IP address, they can see the internet, and if you have the right security credentials, you can see the cameras – control them – from anywhere else on the internet using a browser. The cameras drop their footage onto an FTP server (mine happens to be in the Docklands, but it could be anywhere). They have but one cable running to them – an Ethernet Cat5e cable – which also carries power from a box somewhere in between the router and the camera. Ideal for high end security applications, but pretty darn cool for timelapse too!

So I’m sitting here watching two JPEGs, one from each camera, land in my FTP folder every minute. I can pull them off, use the QuickTime Player Pro’s ‘Open Image Sequence’ function to then convert this list of JPEGs into a movie at 25fps to see how the timelapse is going. So far, so good.

The most difficult thing, which I had to turn to help for, was the ‘out of the box’ expierience of assigning each camera an IP address. Being a Mac user with limited networking skills, the PC-only software with instructions written in Ancient Geek was of no help. A networking engineer soon had them pulling their identities of DHCP, and other than one mis-set DNS, it was a smooth process to show each camera where the FTP server was, and what to put there.

It was quite a surreal experience, sitting on the empty floor of the NEC with nothing but a wifi connection on my MacBook Pro, adjusting the cameras on a DIFFERENT network, and checking the results from my FTP server somewhere ‘in the cloud’.

The quality is okay, but not spectacular – I’d say it’s close to a cheap domestic HDV camcorder. But at a few hundred quid each, they’ll pay for themselves almost immediately, and they’ll get rolled out again and again. I doubt they would be of interest to the likes of Mr Philip Bloom et al. Notwithstanding that, I just need to sharpen my networking and cable-making skills!

Matt administering an IP camera from Wifi

Matt administering an IP camera from Wifi