what after Cinema Tools?

a friend posed this question to me recently,
at first i was like "oh don't worry about it" but then i thought he had a point.
so now i'm putting it to the group.

Quote

I guess my question is what program do we use to do this "conform" once Cinema Tools breaks once and for all with a new OS?
Are there any Adobe apps that may do it like Media Encoder or some freeware or shareware?This will be a constant problem here at AFTRS.

i know of QT Change from video toolshed,
but for something as simple as Conforming, there'd have to be something more pared back?

and then there's the bigger of question of Cinema Tools, and FCS breaking once and for all.
(abut the same time as the Earth falls into the Sun, i'm thinking)


nick

Forgot our friend Jon Chappell? Digital Rebellion Pro Media Tools.

[www.digitalrebellion.com]

I'll admit, I'm still using Cinema Tools. Then again, I'm still running OS 10.6.8. And I'm not updating again, not on this station.


www.derekmok.com

Indeed, Jon Chappell's QT Edit is better for conforming than Cinema Tools is. See recent discussion.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

thanks, guys, i had forgotten.
but at $100 it's a bit expensive if all that's needed is the one task.


"I'm still running OS 10.6.8"

that's what i've got on one of my home machines,
but the one i'm on at work is Mountain lion, 10.8.something, and everything (FCP & suite) is working well.


nick

Hi Nick,

Yea, there's Jon's tools which is great. With Premiere Pro, there's no need to conform frame rates. Since you can interpret the frame rate with any format. And Premiere is looking like a very worthy replacement for FCP7, if not now, you'll probably see in a few months with the speed of new features rolling out.

One slight issue with Premiere is that you may need to plan your workflow before starting out especially if you're working directly with native formats, especially if you're dealing with more advanced roundtrip workflows and working between different departments. Anyway, FCP is quite limited to QT only formats and you cannot finish in let's say, DPX, within the app, and I would say both versions (7&X) are quite similar in this regard.

But with the new trend in working with LUTs and shooting in log, I have to say that FCP7 is starting to look a bit dated.



www.strypesinpost.com

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strypes
But with the new trend in working with LUTs and shooting in log, I have to say that FCP7 is starting to look a bit dated.

We're all wondering what will obsolete FCP7. Not LUT handling, if Red Giant's free FCP7 plugin LUT Buddy works as advertised.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Unlike Premiere, where the Lumetri effect is blessed by the Mercury Playback engine, LUT Buddy, like all 3rd party plugins in FCP, isn't blessed by FCP7's RT Extreme engine, so it's unlimited RT, which means reduced resolution playback (I don't think this plays back on an external broadcast monitor), you will probably drop frames, and there's the case of superbrights not showing up until after the render, so it's pretty much render city in FCP7. Also, FCP7 doesn't remember renders like Premiere, so when you enable/disable a clip or drag a lower third onto a clip, you'll need to re-render again. Not something I'll recommend for an edit. Of course, you could prep up offline rushes in the Resolve and do an online later on, but when you can just drag and drop and cut away in an app that is not to unsimilar to FCP7, why bother wrangling away on a platform that isn't designed for LUT handling?



www.strypesinpost.com

so Strypes, are you saying that PP can do a CT-type "conform" directly in a timeline?
would that need rendering for play-out to a monitor or projector?

nick

With a conform there is nothing in the picture to render, since conforming leaves every frame as-is. The sound would need rendering to match the timeline's sampling rate.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Nick wrote-

[but the one i'm on at work is Mountain lion, 10.8.something, and everything (FCP & suite) is working well. ]

That tidbit alone is comforting!!

Of course I'm not doing 2-3-4K, just measly ole 1080i... and still wrapping up a couple DV projects.
In fact, I have an unrelated question about that...

Best, as always,
Loren S. Miller
www.neotrondesign.com
Home of KeyGuide Central

>so Strypes, are you saying that PP can do a CT-type "conform" directly in a timeline?

Yes. Except that the slow down occurs in the timeline rather than in changing header information of the file.



www.strypesinpost.com

well that's interesting.
thanks!

nick

strypes: I confess it's been hell trying to apply a 1D LUT in FCP7 using the LUT Buddy plugin. LUTs in Shake format make FCP7 crash at rendering. LUTs in Nucoda (.cms) and Fusion (.alut) formats aren't recognized by LUT Buddy, although they're supposed to be. I've only had success applying a 3D LUT, in Pandora/Apple Color (.mga) format.

With such a proliferation of LUT formats, probably poorly documented, LUT Buddy might not be at fault here. Would Premiere see through the maze better?

It becomes the LUT user's job to (a) find workarounds and (b) know when the results are right. A 3D LUT can do everything a 1D LUT can do, but with less precision -- high dependence on the interpolations used. LUT Buddy has a friendly name and attitude. I think I can make do with FCP7 with it.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

>Would Premiere see through the maze better?

Yes. I haven't used Premiere for color critical work, but I have used Lumetri to attach a C-log to 709 LUT to some Canon footage during the offline edit. I basically exported a LUT from SpeedGrade, applied it to a Lumetri effect, added a curve to tweak it a bit and saved it as an effect preset, and then I threw it on an adjustment layer. And that worked a charm and I had real time playback for the 1080 footage. And after the cut was done, I deleted the adjustment layer and sent the edit to the Resolve.

FCP7 has been pretty flakey with FxPlugs, and from experience, I have often found FxPlugs crashy and worse if you render in high precision YUV. With the tools being so affordable, and my set up on that project was pretty cheap- a BMD mini monitor, a RAM upgrade to 16GBs, and the only thing that was pricey was the graphics card which was a Mac card and you can probably use a cheaper PC version of the card. The Resolve Lite is free, and Adobe CC is $50 a month for a yearly sub, and if you're not working with 4K and you had the stock ATI card with 1GB of VRAM (5770), you could test it for real time performance. There's really no reason to try to cobble the workflow together in FCP7.



www.strypesinpost.com

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strypes
FCP7 has been pretty flakey with FxPlugs, and from experience, I have often found FxPlugs crashy and worse if you render in high precision YUV.

You found it! FPC7 can render the 1D Shake LUT applied by LUT Buddy provided YUV rendering is limited to 8-bit. 10-bit rendering is what crashes it. But 10-bit rendering is necessary for my online edit goal.

Since we're in an FPC7 forum please indulge my wish to find a workaround for FCP7. LUT Buddy can apply a 3D .mga LUT which FCP7 renders in good 10-bit. I made both 17cube and 32cube .mga LUTs for the "no change" effect, and after application to a 10-bit (4-to-1019) grey wedge target both were perfectly accurate from 64-to-1019*, but both clipped off the sub-blacks below 64. LUT Buddy and FCP7 worked correctly together (if sub-blacks are unnecessary).

I'm hoping that LUT Buddy in FCP7 can also apply 1D LUTs in good 10-bit. I'll work on it, with Red Giant kindly offering support on this freeplugin. All software tools have limitations. We've spent years finding workarounds within our use of FCP. Motivation declines as FCP7 approaches obsolescence. Some will save their energies for finding workarounds within their next editing softwares.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

*Note added 2 December 2013: actually LUT Buddy's implementation of the 3D .mga LUT is limited to legal range 64-to-940. It doesn't let you specify what happens to inputs over 940. It accepts inputs over 940 and does a crude extrapolation, making an output based on what it does to 940. This is not good for treating log footage, which records about a stop of exposure information between 941 and 1019 at a rather low slope.

this is all over my head, but i saw this recently, it might be of interest:

[www.youtube.com]

>We've spent years finding workarounds within our use of FCP. Motivation declines as
>FCP7 approaches obsolescence. Some will save their energies for finding
>workarounds within their next editing softwares.

Yes. That's one reason I've been working more intensely with the newer NLEs. With Premiere or Avid, they will improve. With FCP7, it is a dead app. Admittedly, I'm less enthusiastic about FCPX because it becomes the responsibility of the 3rd party developer to make their apps work.

Many FXPlug issues are intermittent, some are due to the graphics card, some probably due to the heavy lifting involved with 32 bit float rendering.



www.strypesinpost.com

Red Giant concedes that LUT Buddy doesn't support any 1D LUTs for 10-bit YUV rendering in FCP7. Yet it does support .mga 3D LUTs for 10-bit YUV rendering in FCP7. I can live with that. I've made a spreadsheet to convert 1D lists to 3D .mga format, available here.

If you think about it, 1D LUTs are stupid, because all channel-by-channel operations in video are stupid. TV engineers did it that way because it was easy, but color science says it shouldn't be done that way.

3D LUTs are liberating.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, German

I'm finding it very worrying that all the apps we use day to day are no longer being supported by Apple in favour of iTunes or streaming delivery.

Just got your PM. Superwhites is a tricky thing. Never existed in the film world where LUTs originated from.



www.strypesinpost.com

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strypes
Just got your PM.

I PM'd stypes about the footnote just added to my 11 October post.
Before we reject FCP7 for inability with LUTs we need to look critically at how well LUTs are handled in other software. A 1D LUT looks like a sketch of function from [0,1] into [0,1] and a 3D LUT looks like a sketch of a function from [0,1]^3 into [0,1]^3. The LUT-applying software has liberty with interpreting the 0's and the 1's. How it handles sub-blacks and super-whites should suit the use of the LUT and therefore should be documented.

There are no rules for the handling of video sub-blacks and super-whites; video software writers work by the seats of their pants. I was shocked that a LUT written to completely flatten an image -- all 32 values alike in the LUT's basis -- applied by LUT-Buddy flattened all of the image except the super-white parts which came out lighter than the rest. Of course one doesn't expect a LUT to completely flatten an image. strypes points out that LUTs originated for simulating film looks, for fine adjustments rather than for gross transformations. But LUTs, for me, are a way to escape the gruesome errors in available video filters, if the LUT-applying software behaves.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany