|
|
All the news now and in your digital future
Instant Final Cut Server expert
Posted by jfm5440
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 10:30AM |
I attained my Final Cut Server "expertise" (I laugh hysterically at that) by buying one and screwing around with it ten hours a day, six days a week for a month.
The most important lesson I learned in that time is that the first step must be to decide precisely what you want to accomplish, and how you want it all to work, in detail. Then you adapt the Final Cut Server system to the way you've decided you want to work. Final Cut Server basically doesn't do anything out of the box; at least, it doesn't do anything particularly useful. Opening it up and saying "We'll adapt our workflow to this new system" is a recipe for frustration and alcoholism.
Or, y'know, you could just hire me to do it all for you. End shameless self-promotion.
The most important lesson I learned in that time is that the first step must be to decide precisely what you want to accomplish, and how you want it all to work, in detail. Then you adapt the Final Cut Server system to the way you've decided you want to work. Final Cut Server basically doesn't do anything out of the box; at least, it doesn't do anything particularly useful. Opening it up and saying "We'll adapt our workflow to this new system" is a recipe for frustration and alcoholism.
Or, y'know, you could just hire me to do it all for you. End shameless self-promotion.
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 10:48AM |
> Or, y'know, you could just hire me to do it all for you. End shameless self-promotion.
Helping people set up their system properly, avoiding future pain and disaster?
Jeff, tsk, tsk, tsk. For shame.
www.derekmok.com
Helping people set up their system properly, avoiding future pain and disaster?
Jeff, tsk, tsk, tsk. For shame.
www.derekmok.com
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 10:49AM |
I know, Derek. I'm a very bad person. I'm sorry.
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 07:07PM |
Agree a million percent. Employ someone to do it who know how it works. It's really not something you can get working properly by luck.
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 08:51PM |
If you're not familiar with such a system, just stick with the tried-and-true. It's so easy to share things in FCP. My last show (The Jacksons on A&E) had four editors, and we used an XSAN to share only media. It took all of 10 seconds to save any edited timeline, bin or other project component to its own project file and then throw it to another editor via the SAN. Just make sure you have good file management and date/time-stamp the projects and timelines which are being sent.
www.derekmok.com
www.derekmok.com
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 09:14PM |
What's that line from The Dark Knight? "If you're good at something, never do it for free." That said?
I just need to stay organized with a central location for a mountain of footage (8 bit, 1280x720p, 24 fps) and multiple people working on it
In point of fact, that's a pretty good example of what I wasn't talking about.
Final Cut Server will not help you stay organized. What Final Cut Server will do ? and this is really true of all asset- and workflow-management systems ? is to automate some of the drudgery once you've already gotten organized. Copying files from server to edit system? Final Cut Server takes care of that for you. Moving no-longer-current files from high-speed, expensive storage over to lower-speed, cheap storage? Final Cut Server takes care of that for you. Giving you a convenient user interface so you can access the vast mountain of metadata that you yourself have already accumulated and keyed into the system? Final Cut Server takes care of that for you.
But Final Cut Server will not keep you organized. No asset-management system will. Because in a creative workflow, staying organized relies too much on extrinsic properties of assets, not on the kinds of intrinsic properties that computers can suss out for themselves.
Lemme give you an example. Say you have a Quicktime movie, and you hand it to Final Cut Server. The computer can look at that Quicktime movie and discern that it's in 1080p24 format, that it uses the ProRes 422 codec, that it's got one uncompressed audio track and that it's four and a half seconds long. The computer cannot look at it and figure out that it's a close-up of your lead actor. And it certainly can't tell that it's an unusable take because the actor flubbed his line.
Properties like size, frame rate and duration are intrinsic properties; the computer can figure those out for itself. But when's the last time you were in session and said to yourself, "Gosh, I really could use a 24-frame-per-second shot to go here." Never! You say "I need a different take of this shot," or "I need a reaction shot of the other actor in the scene" or whatever. "Staying organized" means being able to find those things quickly and without a lot of fuss ? and that's something a computer simply can never help you with. Because the computer can't know all those extrinsic properties.
Now, what Final Cut Server can do is give you a big, blank sheet of paper where you can write down all those details. And one written down ? that is, once keyed into the database ? you can go back and search for those things. For instance, if you're working on a feature, you can link your database closely with the shooting script, so you can search for takes with individual lines of dialogue in them. In that case, Final Cut Server can help.
But even then, you're just raising further questions. Do you want to search for the line as it was written in the script or as it was delivered on the day? Because the actor didn't say "Dammit, Marty, we have to get those people back!" in his best take. He said "Goddammit, Marty, I'm getting my people out of there!" Okay, maybe you want to keep track of both the line as it was written and a verbatim transcript of the line as it was delivered, so you can search for either.
That's the kind of thing you have to decide before implementing your system. Well, okay, in that particular example it's not; a change like that could be made to a running Final Cut Server system, within reason. But it would be a giant pain ? you'd have to have an assistant or somebody go back and key in all those as-delivered lines for all the footage that's been shot to date ? and other, more complicated changes can't be made to a running system at all without purging and re-ingesting media. Those are the kinds of decisions that have to be made, or at least thought through, up front.
In other words, you have to get organized first. Then you sit down with Final Cut Server and have a little negotiation. You say, "Ficks, this is how we've decided to get organized. Is that all right with you?" And Ficks ? 'cause that's how you pronounce "FCS" ? will be all, "Bidi bidi bidi. Sure thing, Buck." Because in my head, Final Cut Server speaks in the voice of Twiki from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century." And then you spend a month going over with Final Cut Server all the fine details of how you've already gotten yourself organized. And periodically Ficks will interrupt with an only vaguely apologetic wisecrack to let you know that's not going to work, and you'll have to chew on your pencil eraser for a while until you figure out how to make things consistent and logical.
And once this lengthy negotiation is complete, you'll say to the computer, "Okay, Ficks, that's how we're going to work. Are you ready?" And the computer will be all, "Bidi bidi bidi. Lemme attem!"
And then it'll throw up a completely empty database with about a zillion blank fields for each and every piece of media.
And at that point, you can actually begin working.
Who knows. Maybe someday we'll have software of sufficient sophistication that you can hand it the script supervisor's script and a big stack of telecine'd tapes, and after letting it grind and wheeze for a while you can say, "Show me all the takes of 31B where Ben Affleck looks boyishly charming instead of punch-him-in-the-face smug." And the computer will be all "Bidi bidi bidi, file not found," and will pour you a stiff drink.
But that day is not today.
I just need to stay organized with a central location for a mountain of footage (8 bit, 1280x720p, 24 fps) and multiple people working on it
In point of fact, that's a pretty good example of what I wasn't talking about.
Final Cut Server will not help you stay organized. What Final Cut Server will do ? and this is really true of all asset- and workflow-management systems ? is to automate some of the drudgery once you've already gotten organized. Copying files from server to edit system? Final Cut Server takes care of that for you. Moving no-longer-current files from high-speed, expensive storage over to lower-speed, cheap storage? Final Cut Server takes care of that for you. Giving you a convenient user interface so you can access the vast mountain of metadata that you yourself have already accumulated and keyed into the system? Final Cut Server takes care of that for you.
But Final Cut Server will not keep you organized. No asset-management system will. Because in a creative workflow, staying organized relies too much on extrinsic properties of assets, not on the kinds of intrinsic properties that computers can suss out for themselves.
Lemme give you an example. Say you have a Quicktime movie, and you hand it to Final Cut Server. The computer can look at that Quicktime movie and discern that it's in 1080p24 format, that it uses the ProRes 422 codec, that it's got one uncompressed audio track and that it's four and a half seconds long. The computer cannot look at it and figure out that it's a close-up of your lead actor. And it certainly can't tell that it's an unusable take because the actor flubbed his line.
Properties like size, frame rate and duration are intrinsic properties; the computer can figure those out for itself. But when's the last time you were in session and said to yourself, "Gosh, I really could use a 24-frame-per-second shot to go here." Never! You say "I need a different take of this shot," or "I need a reaction shot of the other actor in the scene" or whatever. "Staying organized" means being able to find those things quickly and without a lot of fuss ? and that's something a computer simply can never help you with. Because the computer can't know all those extrinsic properties.
Now, what Final Cut Server can do is give you a big, blank sheet of paper where you can write down all those details. And one written down ? that is, once keyed into the database ? you can go back and search for those things. For instance, if you're working on a feature, you can link your database closely with the shooting script, so you can search for takes with individual lines of dialogue in them. In that case, Final Cut Server can help.
But even then, you're just raising further questions. Do you want to search for the line as it was written in the script or as it was delivered on the day? Because the actor didn't say "Dammit, Marty, we have to get those people back!" in his best take. He said "Goddammit, Marty, I'm getting my people out of there!" Okay, maybe you want to keep track of both the line as it was written and a verbatim transcript of the line as it was delivered, so you can search for either.
That's the kind of thing you have to decide before implementing your system. Well, okay, in that particular example it's not; a change like that could be made to a running Final Cut Server system, within reason. But it would be a giant pain ? you'd have to have an assistant or somebody go back and key in all those as-delivered lines for all the footage that's been shot to date ? and other, more complicated changes can't be made to a running system at all without purging and re-ingesting media. Those are the kinds of decisions that have to be made, or at least thought through, up front.
In other words, you have to get organized first. Then you sit down with Final Cut Server and have a little negotiation. You say, "Ficks, this is how we've decided to get organized. Is that all right with you?" And Ficks ? 'cause that's how you pronounce "FCS" ? will be all, "Bidi bidi bidi. Sure thing, Buck." Because in my head, Final Cut Server speaks in the voice of Twiki from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century." And then you spend a month going over with Final Cut Server all the fine details of how you've already gotten yourself organized. And periodically Ficks will interrupt with an only vaguely apologetic wisecrack to let you know that's not going to work, and you'll have to chew on your pencil eraser for a while until you figure out how to make things consistent and logical.
And once this lengthy negotiation is complete, you'll say to the computer, "Okay, Ficks, that's how we're going to work. Are you ready?" And the computer will be all, "Bidi bidi bidi. Lemme attem!"
And then it'll throw up a completely empty database with about a zillion blank fields for each and every piece of media.
And at that point, you can actually begin working.
Who knows. Maybe someday we'll have software of sufficient sophistication that you can hand it the script supervisor's script and a big stack of telecine'd tapes, and after letting it grind and wheeze for a while you can say, "Show me all the takes of 31B where Ben Affleck looks boyishly charming instead of punch-him-in-the-face smug." And the computer will be all "Bidi bidi bidi, file not found," and will pour you a stiff drink.
But that day is not today.
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 25, 2010 11:57PM |
Actually, I'm not sure I'll ever want a computer that knows a close-up is a close-up.
That's the human part of the job and needs to stay human.
One early, inexperienced editor on my last show's pilot put "Close-Up", "Wide" into the file names, and organized the stringouts by wide, medium, close. I blew up when I found out she'd messed with the chronological order of the footage (and this was reality/documentary, not single-camera narrative fiction with pre-determined shot names).
I'd loathe the day computers thought they knew better than I did. Some of Apple's products already try to think like that. Who the *&^% told iTunes I wanted an iTunes Store link on every MP3 in my playlist...including tracks I'd recorded myself that aren't in iTunes Store!?!?!?
www.derekmok.com
That's the human part of the job and needs to stay human.
One early, inexperienced editor on my last show's pilot put "Close-Up", "Wide" into the file names, and organized the stringouts by wide, medium, close. I blew up when I found out she'd messed with the chronological order of the footage (and this was reality/documentary, not single-camera narrative fiction with pre-determined shot names).
I'd loathe the day computers thought they knew better than I did. Some of Apple's products already try to think like that. Who the *&^% told iTunes I wanted an iTunes Store link on every MP3 in my playlist...including tracks I'd recorded myself that aren't in iTunes Store!?!?!?
www.derekmok.com
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 26, 2010 12:05AM |
About ten years ago I (with a business partner) started a company that was intended to create, sell and deploy large-scale asset-management systems. One of the emphases was on computer vision and image recognition. It started out as simple scene detection ? the software could identify a cut, and generate a keyframe for each shot in a given sequence of frames. But then I got ambitious. I was able to get the system to the point where it could pretty reliably discriminate close-ups and two-shots as long as the lighting was reasonable ? before we ran out of money and had to scuttle that business plan.
Today, facial recognition would be a fairly trivial thing to implement if you licensed the right algorithms. But first of all, it's not foolproof, and secondly it's just not an important feature when you weigh the cost of implementation. Twice the retail cost and ten times the processing time just so you can automatically identify people in the shot sixty percent of the time? That's what they call a diminishing return.
You can even use optical flow to identify tracking shots, dolly shots, crane shots and so on. But again, how often do you say to yourself "Golly, I wish I had a dolly shot to use here." Rarely. You're far more likely to say "Golly, I wish I knew which of these six takes the director liked best," and that's a piece of information that can't be extracted from the frames alone.
Today, facial recognition would be a fairly trivial thing to implement if you licensed the right algorithms. But first of all, it's not foolproof, and secondly it's just not an important feature when you weigh the cost of implementation. Twice the retail cost and ten times the processing time just so you can automatically identify people in the shot sixty percent of the time? That's what they call a diminishing return.
You can even use optical flow to identify tracking shots, dolly shots, crane shots and so on. But again, how often do you say to yourself "Golly, I wish I had a dolly shot to use here." Rarely. You're far more likely to say "Golly, I wish I knew which of these six takes the director liked best," and that's a piece of information that can't be extracted from the frames alone.
|
Re: Instant Final Cut Server expert January 26, 2010 01:37AM |
Now Xsan. That's useful.
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.
