Today's digital filmmakers, including those that shoot with Canon's new breed of HDSLRs, are always on the lookout for the latest tools that reflect their creative spirit and are designed with their constant storage needs for acquisition archiving and editorial in mind. The new i5 and i7 quad core 27 inch iMacs certainly fit the bill here (I own an i5 quad for archiving and media file management), addressing both power for editorial with the new processors and design aesthetics with the inclusion of a beautiful 16:9 display fitting for viewing 1080P HDSLR footage from my Canon 5D Mark II HDSLR. On any given shoot day, however, I may blow through three or four 32gb compact flash cards in capturing RAW plus jpeg files or in shooting HD video. Seeing that this all adds up rather quickly, using an iMac for managing your HDSLR media file acquisition without the proper storage solution can be challenging and it is certainly tedious having multiple external firewire or USB drives laying around for the job to keep track of. But I think I just found a solution I am willing to put into my archiving and editorial workflow.
Stardom DeckRAID DR4's sleek design factor frees up your workspace
Stardom Storage Solutions has announced the DeckRAID DR4, a $499 RAID 5 "content safe" storage solution designed to sit neatly underneath an iMac footprint (think space saver). Of course, it can be used with a MacBook Pro or Mac Pro if that is what you have via its' quadruple interface: FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA (with expansion card). All you need to do is add your own SATA II hard drives to the DR4 (it is sold empty with no drives).
The New Now: Grow Your Production or Post-production Business in a Changed and Changing World Philip Hodgetts (Intelligent Assistance, 2009) 160 pages, $9.95 (PDF) / $18.95 (paperback) http://proappstips.com/TheNewNow/
A couple words of introduction. No, make that a few paragraphs, because it’s useful to assess an author’s bonafides. Philip Hodgetts, honorary member of BOSFCPUG, is fast becoming one of America’s premiere media gurus, with focus on production and digital delivery, and that’s not bad for an Aussie transplant.
In between writing prescient books on the business of video and movies in today’s turbulent markets, writing downloadable handbooks on compression recipes, guides to HD technology, joining panel discussions covering media and tech at the Director’s Guild, and showing up at LA and Boston FCP User Groups, he and partner Dr. Gregory Clarke has saved the television industry with products like Sync-N-Link for FCP, which at $495.00 is one of those deceptively simple utilities for leveraging XML metadata to automatically line up video timecode and dual system audio for deadline-pressed reality-type shows.
This cool tool has post house owners nationwide kissing their feet in gratitude for saving days of tedious pre-edit prep, and has an upcoming Technical Emmy nomination written all over it. One hopes somebody in the field will soon take that important step of recognition.
To continue cherrypicking among their many projects, they also devised a $295.00 automated rough cut editing system, First Cuts Studio for FCP which rewards thoughtful documentary footage logging with sequence auto-assembly, even including lower third titles. Their companion piece called Finisher delivers a near-final cut. I screened their demo video to one of my college classes a while back and jaws dropped. Hodgetts and Clarke have become the American magicians of metadata.
I can’t tell you how many clients bring in a DVD as the only source, desperately needed for an important presentation, and 1 always caution them that quality will not be up to their first-generation material. But Cinematize Pro often makes me a liar.
Cinematize Pro's simple drag-and-drop interface accepts DVD title sets.
I enjoy Cinematize Pro over freebie rippers for its orderly approach to extracting chapters from unprotected DVD discs. It's as easy as loading a DVD and dragging the disc icon into the CP window, CP sorts out all the video assets into title sets. You simply select one and painlessly open it into the content selection pane. Cinematize Pro allows you to span and join DVD chapters into a single QuickTime movie-- any format supported, including HD-- a continuous extraction range from the first frame of Chapter I to the last frame of Chapter XX. or defined regions of several segments. The onscreen preview window lets you drag to fine· tune your entrances and exits. One by one, you add to a list of segments to extract. then tell it to do so, and go to lunch. No surprises.
If I had one enhancement wish It would be a custom output settings list I could set up and then choose from for multiple exports in a single session .. as in Episode Pro or After Effects. This becomes critical with so many new video venues opening up. But CP does a nice job of covering iPods and 3GPP player presets in popup menu choices, so this is a quibble.
Extraction Is fast on new multicore towers. I could see almost every core engaged in my Mac Activity Monitor. Even non-64-bit apps like CP are multi-processor aware and really cut down on wait time. CP has currently little reason to access or load more than 4GB of RAM, the 32-bit limit. so it's not a huge issue.
Select and build an extraction list of chapter segments; join them all or keep them separate, export into any QuickTime codec available.
The latest Cinematize Pro 2 includes extraction of menu screen graphics, ability to extract subtitles on separate QuickTime layers, even select discrete audio tracks-- just a taste of a large list of thoughtful features worth discovering. Those not requiring such pro features can get a less expensive version called simply Cinematize 2, CP has been on my "short shelf" of must-have utilities for years now, and continues to gain power.
Topaz Enhance Suite of plug-in filters for Final Cut Pro 6 or later, After Effects CS4, and Premiere Pro C54 on Intel Windows or Macintosh www.topazlabs.com $349.00 MSRP
In a nutshell. Enhance was built to revive old films on video and upscale good standard definition video to near-HD quality. It's not out of the scope of this product to deliver from well-lit and shot NTSC-DV material a very adequate near-HD video Image, and as we see here, it's great in reviving old film·to-video transfers from which you just wish you could wipe away grain and analog artifacts.
Topaz Enhance: a filter suite for Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere Pro, shown here in FCP's Effects menu.
That's a mouthful, and with it comes a bucket of time. Even on fast multicore machines. Topaz wants to take its time chewing on noisy. grainy motion images, because certain Enhance filters can sample neighboring frames for additional data to reconstitute Into each frame. I call that cool. This is what computers like to do!
The range of filters in the suite includes DeInterlace. DeNoise & Enhance, Clean (RGB) and Clean (YC), Remove Compression Artifacts, Wavelet, and several others for tackling compression "blockies" and other image issues. It's affordable, but no toy.
The test clip original was a 2-minute opening sequence to a prizewinning film I cut years ago. THE POWER TO CHANGE, produced by the ubiquitous Jamil Simon, whose Third Eye Films in Cambridge was the starting point for my professional career. Jamil now runs Spectrum Media, still producing global-scope films revealing social programs to help repair the world.
THE POWER TO CHANGE, narrated by Joanne Woodward, told us about energy-saving appropriate technology. First released on 16mm film, eventually transferred to video. captured to digital, it was finally burned to DVD. Whew! That's a lot of image pounding, colorspace shifting, and artifacture (a word I just invented) and it showed.
I extracted the DVD to DV-NTSC using Cinematize Pro 2, (see separate review), at highest quality. It was good, but when I re-extracted to ProRes422 I got a richer look, so the remainder of my workflow was in ProRes422 (LT).
I then loaded it into Final Cut Pro and first deinterlaced it, because the most powerful of the Enhance filters requires the clip be deinterlaced of its video fields and made into a progressive clip at exactly the same frame rate. I found the easiest way to do it was to next the clip within a sequence with Field Order set to None.
Two passes of Topaz filters: DeNoise & Enhance, then Sharpen(Line Accent) which isn't recommended for organic forms-- note posterized effect on face.
This is all explained in the easy-to-read Topaz Labs user guide, which lacked only a few details on using Enhance specifically in FCP, some of which is covered in their website tutorials. There's also a growing online community there. l first applied the DeNoise & Enhance filter. While the test clip was 2 minutes long, it required close to two hours to render on an older, 2.16 Ghz Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro laptop. The results using out-of-the-box filter settings were pretty good, There was far less noise and some enhancement to detail after first pass. You can set multiple passes for some of the multiframe filters if you desire.
I exported the enhanced clip in its native settings and reimported it into a new sequence and applied another filter, Clean(RGB).This is a recommended workflow since you want to treat dips with multi-frame filters one at a time. This pass took 2 hours as well, But now the results looked like a thin film had been peeled off. practically no grain noise, only smooth surfaces.
At default settings, three passes of Topaz filters: DeNoise & Enhance, Clean(RGB), and finally, Sharpen(Line Accent) which improves well-defined object edges.
Finally. I added Sharpen (LineAccent). One of three specialized Sharpen filters offered, which only took 20 minutes on the laptop. The results were mixed, depending upon the image. Faces became mildly posterized. Objects with hard edges became nearly perfect. With careful filter selection, this show would be ready for FCP color correction, paint-out of film cement blemishes, minor dust and scratch removal: video touchup now supported in Photoshop Extended CS3 and 4.
For the budget conscious among us who can't afford a $3000 Teranex box. but who did spend $3000 on a new multi-core tower and wondered why, the $350.00 Topaz Enhance suite is the first line of attack to revive a project like this. It might take only a couple normal workdays, perhaps a long weekend. Of course this can only improve as faster hardware appears.
Not a bad solution for a process which, done well. usually requires thousands of dollars in hardware or time in a costly vision engineering suite. or both.
Episode Encoder and Episode Encoder Pro 5.x Media compression for Macintosh and Windows $495.00, $995.00 for Pro edition www.telestream.net
Episode Encoder and Episode Encoder Pro, previously “Episode” and “Episode Pro”, have been renamed to distinguish them from Telestream’s enterprise-strength “Engine” product line. It maintains its respectable lead over tools like Apple’s Compressor with both speed, choice of formats and additional features.
Episode Encoder's interface is pure simplicity. Drag files into the big window. Drag settings from the robust list of codecs, or tweak, save, and apply your own.
If you compare the two programs, you’ll discover Compressor’s interface is cluttered; and Encoder’s interface is clean and simple, yet offering much more power, with more code choices—it is a tool reaching out to the real world which includes Flash, Windows Media and standards conversion from PAL to NTSC, and many other workflows. It supports closed captioning, up to 16 audio channels.
Capabilities aside-- compare to Compressor 3's interface!
I did a ten minute encoding test of a DV NTSC anamorphic ProRes 422 clip in both Apple Compressor 3.5 and Episode Encoder Pro 5.3. Both finished compressing a web-ready H.264 320 X 240 clip in less than five minutes on a 2.26 Ghz 8-core Mac Pro tower-- I give the edge to Encoder based on stopwatch test. (Compressor 2 users however should either get Encoder or upgrade to Final Cut Studio 3!) I applied each product’s H.264 300-kilobit-per-second codec, ideal for very fast web streaming. I did nothing to either setting.
Out of the box results from selecting a 320 X 240 H.264 codec at 300 Kb/s in each utility: on the left, from Compressor 3; note squeezed image; half frame rate. On the right, Episode Encoder detected anamorphic aspect ratio and default settings honored original frame rate.
Results, however, really differ. While quality to my eye seems the same, the Compressor codec apparently didn’t see the clip’s anamorphic flag. Episode Encoder did, letterboxing content in the 4:3 format I chose. Compressor’s default setting gave me half the frame rate I wanted; Encoder honored my existing 29.97 frame rate, which is the only reason Compressor’s file size and data rate came in lighter.
Encoder and Encoder Pro are available standalone for both major platforms, yet it plays very well with Final Cut Pro, expanding the range of workflow choices directly from the FCP timeline. While Apple’s Compressor will give you excellent workflow within Final Cut Studio, it’s not available outside the package. While it offers a few global standards like MP3, presets for encoding your YouTube clips and the like, it’s primarily Apple-centric. It has no Windows Media, Real, and special workflow codecs for standards conversion. For that, turn to a real Swiss army knife: Episode Encoder.
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Reviews 
Today's digital filmmakers, including those that shoot with Canon's new breed of HDSLRs, are always on the lookout for the latest tools that reflect their creative spirit and are designed with their constant storage needs for acquisition archiving and editorial in mind. The new i5 and i7 quad core 27 inch iMacs certainly fit the bill here (I own an i5 quad for archiving and media file management), addressing both power for editorial with the new processors and design aesthetics with the inclusion of a beautiful 16:9 display fitting for viewing 1080P HDSLR footage from my 
A couple words of introduction. No, make that a few paragraphs, because it’s useful to assess an author’s bonafides. Philip Hodgetts, honorary member of BOSFCPUG, is fast becoming one of America’s premiere media gurus, with focus on production and digital delivery, and that’s not bad for an Aussie transplant. 
Loren Miller, a professional longform editor, operates the boutique post house NeoTron Design out of Boston. He is a participating member of Los Angeles and Boston Final Cut Pro User Groups and occasionally reports for both, along with Imagine News in print, where this review in another form first appeared. Reach him anytime at
. ©2009 Loren S. Miller All rights reserved.
