Tag Archives: Editing

Network Storage

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It’s an uncomfortable sight:


That’s the amount of space I have left on my main editing drive, a 2TB firewire 800 affair. My other editing drive is worse, giving the proverbial sardines a run for their money in the “tightly packed” stakes. I’ve even resorted to using my desktop drive (which we all know we shouldn’t use for video editing) and even that has less than 100GB available from a totoal of 2TB.

With so little space, the drives’ performance starts to suffer and of course you can’t add new footage. Time for some new drives, and large enough to cope with two or three big film projects and still have room to spare. With that requirement, you have to start looking beyond the usual Western Digital-type external drives you find in FNAC or MediaMarkt. With a budget of ~£1000 I was looking for 12TB of Network Attached Storage (NAS) and thought I’d settled on a QNAP 469 with four, 3TB Seagate SATA III hard drives.

But then I started getting a little jittery (that’s a lot of money after all). My editing machine at the moment is a 2010 iMac i5. Apple, being Apple, had put a below-par network card in this machine. It supports Gigabit ethernet, but not, amazingly, jumbo frames. I was a little concerned that without this support, the drive speed wouldn’t be as good as firewire 800, which is 100MB/s. I’d been reading on the internet that people were getting transfer speeds with NAS drives and this iMac of around 50MB/s which is not good enough for editing. So I started looking at a G-Tech G-Speed Q firewire drive. I didn’t really want to get firewire; the beauty of a NAS is that it connects to the computer over ethernet, so you can just set it up and forget about it, even have the unit in another room. A firewire drive would take up my sole firewire port and I’d have to watch where I put my feet so as not to pull out the cable.

So I took the risk and bought the NAS. I figured I’d learn more at least anyway.

Hardware Setup
Very easy this one. Insert the four hard drives, connect the unit to a gigabit ethernet switch (I use the Netgear GS108) and connect the mac to the switch as well.

RAID
I’m not an expert on how RAID works. All I know is that it allows you to link together several hard drives into a single volume and offers different levels of protection against data loss. If I was using a single disk and that disk failed, I’d very likely lose all the data. With a RAID however, that wouldn’t be the case, depending on what RAID level I’m using. I experimented with RAID 1+0, and RAID 5.

Checking the disk performance with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, RAID 1+0 came out on top: a whopping 100.5 MB/s read/write. (Those fears about speeds were unfounded, but I think that what jumbo frames does is to take the load off the CPU in processing the ethernet data.) RAID 1+0 can survive two disk failures, as long as the disks are not adjacent to each other. The penalty is that the capacity is reduced to 50% of the total array size, so in this case I’d have 6TB available.

RAID 5 only uses one disk to store the protection information, so would give me a total of 9TB. The trade-off is that only one disk failure can be tolerated. If a second drive were to fail before you replaced the first faulty one, the data would be gone. There’s also a slight speed penalty; the Balckmagic app was giving me a read/write speed of about 94MB/s. I can live with that!

NLEs and NAS
Next step is to get the editing software working with the NAS.

FCP: No problem. FCP don’t care where the media is. Set your Capture Scratch folder to wherever on the NAS and it’s good to go.

Davinci Resolve: Little confusing this one. I navigate to the NAS and select a folder in the top level, but this only appears as “/”, the absolute top level of the computer. A test sequence sent to Resolve works, but first, in the conform window, I have to navigate to the NAS folder where the media is for Resolve to bring it in to a session.

ProTools: No problems here. Set the Volume to “Record” in the Workspaces window and it’s ready to go.

Avid: Heh heh, Avid. This one really does care where your media is and it has to be in the the Avid MediaFiles folder on the drive top level. Normally this is automatically created and normally Avid only likes network storage like ISIS, way beyond my current budget. And in any case, I’m only one editor, and ISIS is geared towards large post houses with several editors working on a project. Initially Avid didn’t recognise my NAS, but typing ALLDRIVES into the console window tells Avid to recognise every drive on the system as a media drive. This works but there’s an annoying feature that tells me Avid can’t save the project when I create a new bin or click Save. The project does get saved, so why this is happening needs some figuring out. Anyway, performance seems to be good for now and it’s very nice to see this:

Colour Grading with DaVinci Resolve: Overview

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To complement Quentin’s workshop on colour grading, I thought I’d chime in with an article on my recent experiences grading a film with DaVinci Resolve. Whilst colour corrector effects that come with editing software are functionable and will improve the look of your film, to do more advanced and complicated work you need to look at stand-alone grading tools. (That being said, plug-ins from companies like Baselight could be starting to change that, but that’s another topic.)

Previously I’d done my grading work using Apple Color. This was an application included with the old Final Cut Studio; powerful, but had some constantly niggling features with the workflow. It was very difficult to get all the footage from the FCP timeline into Color and back again. Even more difficult when the footage was coming from a source other than FCP.

So I was very happy when Blackmagic Design released a totally free version of it’s high-end grading tool, DaVinci Resolve. Here’s a quick write up of my first full project with the software.

Out of Avid into Resolve
I’d edited the film in Avid Media Composer and there are three options to get the footage out of Avid and into Resolve:

1) Export an AAF (Advanced Authoring Format)
2) Export an EDL (Edit Decision List)
3) Export a Quicktime movie.

Option 3 can be used with the Scene Detection mode in Resolve. What this does is to analyse the Quicktime file for cuts and then chops the file up into separate clips to be graded. Not really ideal, but it can be extremely useful if someone just gives you a Quicktime file of their movie without the original source footage.

Option 2 is the classic way of getting timeline information out of NLEs, but is usually limited to one video track. So if you have multiple tracks in your edit you’d have to export an EDL for each track.

Option 1 is by far the best and the method I used. HOWEVER, frustrating experiences with Color still made me cautious and I followed the usual procedure before exporting the timeline which was to put all clips on one video track, remove titles and remove audio tracks. You would also remove any effects you had applied. Now, I’d applied some resizing and retiming effects to some clips, but completely forgot to remove them. It didn’t prove to be a problem though, as we’ll see.

The next step is to open up Resolve and import the AAF.

Through the dialogue box you can automatically set the project settings (frame rate, frame size etc.) and automatically import the source file clips. So what have I just done here? Basically, I’ve exported something that resembles a text file from Avid, saying what clips I’ve used and what portions of those clips I’ve used (the timecode), what I’ve done to those clips (effects) and where I’ve put them in my timeline. Sort of like a description of the edit in words and numbers. Resolve then reads this file, goes and gets the clips and puts them into its Media Pool. It then picks out the portions of the clips I’ve used and assembles them in the order I’ve edited them into.

Now this allows for a nice feature: doing a very easy online conform. For example, suppose we’re editing some RED footage at 5k resolution and the lowest compression. Not many of us own a computer powerful enough to handle that footage, even at 1/4 resolution. So perhaps we would edit with proxy files. These proxy files would be no good for a cinema release, so we’d have to somehow replace the proxy clips with the real high-res clips when we’re done editing. Resolve would let us do that, simply by unchecking “Automatically import source clips”. We would then put the high res footage into the Media Pool ourselves and Resolve would select those portions of the clips we used.

Back to importing our AAF. This is a nice screen to see:

Now, you can see it didn’t pick up the effects I’d applied to two clips, because they’re Avid effects and Resolve doesn’t support them. We’ll come back to those in a minute. For the time being, we’re free to grade! I’m not going to go into actual grading much in this article, but here’s a quick video showing how I graded a skyline in my film:

Getting out of Resolve
Now to get out of Resolve and into my finishing application (where we re-apply effects, add titles etc. In my case, it was Avid again) I rendered the graded clips and exported another AAF. I opened up this AAF back in Avid and my edit is there, but with the graded clips. And here’s the bit that really impressed me: those effects that Resolve didn’t show were re-applied back in Avid! I didn’t have to do anything. That never happened to me in Color…

There’s still a huge amount to learn with Resolve. I’ll continue to post whenever I find out something cool.

Ready for Departure

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Almost, I think. The cling film’s packed anyway. Wednesday myself and two other people leave for Jordan for nearly a month to film our 30 minute documentary for our MA second semester project (working title Desert Spring). Although right now we have no contributors and no clear idea of our story. Giuseppe, our director, has a long-term plan to set up a string of AV training centres in developing countries and this is kind of the kickoff event for that project.

Giuseppe has a fixer in Jordan who will set us up with Bedouin in Wadi Rum (Lawrence of Arabia country) whose day to day life will form the spine of the story. The difference is that we adopt a hands-off approach and put the cameras (for the most part) into the hands of the locals so that they shape and decide the content rather than us imposing any potential pre-conceptions. There are probably books and books eulogising this sort of approach; I don’t know if it works yet but I guess we’ll find out.

Sam, our producer (and camera op), has been doing a great job and he’s really making me appreciate what a good producer brings to a film. He’s been ensuring that Jordan customs have a detailed list of all our equipment (which includes a HPX301 and the classic HVX200) and serial numbers; been writing call sheets so that we all know where we have to be each day (and where the nearest hospitals are); he’s been preparing consent forms and location release forms, risk assessments; and been managing the budget and sourcing essential but easily overlooked bits of kit. (Masking tape? Portable power packs? Spare batteries?)

It’s often said, but filmmaking really is a collaborative effort and works best when everyone does what they’re supposed to be doing and understands what they’re supposed to be doing. So Sam and Giuseppe’s efforts have been inspiring me to make sure that I fulfil my role, the film’s editor (and doubling up as sound recordist), as best I can.

This edit is really challenging. We’re taking nearly 5TB of external disks to backup and edit from (being quite conservative in our pre-production estimates: 20 – 30 hours total footage all on AVC Intra 100). I wanted to edit in Avid Media Composer 6 but my old laptop (2006 MacBook Pro 2.1GHz core duo 2GB RAM) can’t handle it. I’ll try Media Composer 5.5 tomorrow but the baseline is FCP 7. I know that my ageing laptop can handle a couple of AVCI-100 clips in FCP but I don’t know how (if at all) it will handle 20-odd hours of this stuff.

Clip logging database

If the edit system does all fall down on location, the turnaround from assembly to picture lock when we return is really tight; we get back on the 7th May and the film has to be submitted on the 18th, so 10 days essentially (I hate last-minute export and burns). I made a quick MySQL database so that we can take detailed notes on each shot so if everything does go pear shaped cutting-wise at least we’ll have some fairly detailed notes to refer to and from those a detailed paper edit to speed us towards the final cut.

If the NLE works as hoped, we’ll be presented with another challenge. In this case I’ll be editing pretty much as the footage comes in. Walter Murch, in The Conversations, says that this is not ideal because, without most of the material, you don’t know enough about the film yet to be making creative decisions. I don’t know how we’ll handle this but it’ll be important to bear in mind during fine cut and I suspect that the database will help here too.

Technical testing

All that said, the biggest challenge will be the environment. I understand that there’s a lot of sand in Jordan and of course that’s a risk to lenses and computer kit. Hence the cling film. I’ll need to stretch it over my keyboard to stop the grainy stuff from breaking my old workhorse. I hate cling film. I acknowledge its utility in the kitchen environment, protecting, as it does, raw and cooked ingredients alike, but it is really a most frustrating material, clinging to anything but the object you wish it to cling to. Reaching for the splice-in key is going to be a fistful of frustration…

I’ll try and update here with news and photos of our progress over the next month. Happy filmmaking everyone,

Matt