Media Composer 5 has been out for a while now… And since my initial impressions of it I’ve been thinking more about what it signals for the future of Avid in general and Media Composer specifically – about what I expect to see in the coming versions.
VHS of the Future
July 19th, 2010
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In discussion about the recent crop of HD DSLR cameras on RedUser the RED head honcho Jim Jannard famously said “1080P is the VHS of the Future” – implying that 1080P video wasn’t going to be good enough for cinema in the future, in fact barely good enough for home movies.
He was quite widely dismissed at the time, but he has a point. At the moment 1080P is about the least resolution you could reasonably project cinematically, but does that matter? It’s acceptable at the moment for ‘cinema’ and it seems likely that it will continue to be acceptable for quite some time. Do better options exist? Of course, but it’s not all about the pixel-count.
But the bigger question is, does it really matter what’s good for cinema? Only a tiny fraction of what’s made ever ends up projected on a big screen. At this stage, probably most of the video that filmed and made available to the public is put online (YouTube claims that 24-hours of video is uploaded every minute), and then there’s TV. YouTube has recently announced support for 4K video, and various higher-definition TV formats have been devised, but for the moment 1080P is more than suitable for the vast majority of purposes, and “good enough” for cinematic exhibition.
What about the future value? When we’re making 4K video regularly, will your old 1080P footage be good enough? Well yeah, if the content justifies it, as it is now with HD production. If the shot we need only exists on a BetaSP tape, or even VHS, then we’ll use it. Similarly if the content of a film justifies, we’ll look beyond technical short comings, as we did with 28 Days Later and many others.
So yeah, at some stage 1080P will have fallen down the technical ladder to, perhaps, where VHS lives now, but in the mean time we can keep on using it without too much fear. And a little while later 4K will have be the future 1080P.
Does Sony “Get It”?
July 18th, 2010
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Just about two years ago Canon caused quite a change in the independant film making market with their 5D Mk II DSLR – recording 1080P video with a big sensor it suddenly delivered two of the main factors of the always popular “film look” that indies have long strived for – shallow depth of field and progressive motion. While the initial model lacked 24/25fps, subsequent models (at an even lower price) offered more frame rates and firmware eventually sorted out the 5D too.
In that two years many people have been waiting for the ‘big boys’ to offer a proper video camera that leverages the large-sensor technology to provide these things but in a better form-factor and better able to fit in to existing video workflows. Both Sony and Panasonic announced cameras at NAB in April, but neither of those has a shipping date or confirmed specs yet, and RED’s Scarlet seems perpetually delayed. So there was some excitement when the first actual ‘video’ camera based on a large sensor, the Sony NEX-VG10, but for most people that excitement lasted only about 30-seconds until they got to the format and discovered that it’s interlaced only – 1080i60 in the US and Japan, and 1080i50 elsewhere.
Obviously the VG10 is the first model, and Sony have a more professional product coming in the future too, but an interlaced-only camera isn’t going to really capture the same sort of attention that Canon’s DSLRs have. In fact it’s a bit of a franken-camera really – too complicated with interchangable lenses for most casual users (the Soccer Moms as Jim Jannard liked to term them), and not flexible enough, with interlace-only recording, for filmmakers looking for a low-cost camera to create digitial shorts and features.
The first video from the camera is very pretty and it’s a massive step up in terms of ergonomics, but it’s definitely not a DSLR killer.
Edited to add:
As people are starting to get hands on with the camera, it now seems, despite Sony’s use of the terms 60i and 50i in the specs, that the camera actually shoots a progressive image in an interlaced video stream – which would be better defined as PsF usually. If that is the case then perhaps Sony aren’t as out of touch as it seemed. The omission of 24P on the NTSC model is probably unfortunate, and may actually mean that US users will be seeking out imported PAL (“E” model) cameras for the 25fps rate.
While all Sony’s consumer cameras are regionalised, this seems like an anachronism with current technology where there is no hardware difference.
RED: MC5 to DS Workflows
July 2nd, 2010
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With the introduction of AMA support for RED media in Media Composer 5 it has become a easier to edit RED footage in MC, but it’s still not a finishing solution for many jobs. Avid’s DS product, on the other hand, is a great RED finishing tool.
Tape is Dead!?
June 30th, 2010
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A few days ago Post-Production blogger Philip Hodgetts caused soemthing of a stir among the editors of twitter by suggesting that Apple should do away with support for tape capture in the next version of Final Cut Pro. Other’s have weighed in, so I thought I might as well add my voice…
