This site is dedicated to the concept that complex problems can be solved by simple steps. It's an idea that's been a long time forming, but is really nothing more than a series of problems I and my colleagues have had a chance to solve during our years in the digital media industry.
Sometimes we solve them for clients, sometimes for our own personal need and, from time to time, as a challenge from friends and colleagues.
Too often, though, when we solve these problems outside the realm of a client project, we don't take the time to lay out the solution in a user-friendly way. That's the reason for Workflowed: show the problem, the solution(s) and the path between them.
Metadata, and corresponding workflows, are becoming more important in the field of digital media.
For some workflows, you'll see only a text blog post; for others, when we have the time or feel sharing a more detailed verbal or visual workflow, we'll use workflowed.com to make visuals or additional details available.
In addition, business productivity tools, pitched as timesavers, can sometimes be so much hot air, so we'll take a look at some of the claims of these types of tools and compare them to other tools, creating our own workflows in the process.
IBC Companies of Interest
Workflow - Trimming and Saving video clips in iPhone 3.1
Whereas iPhone 3.0 would permanently trim a clip (the "trim original" option) and erase the portions of the clip that were outside of the parameters of the trim bar, which made for some harrying moments if one weren't paying close attention to the trimmed clip, iPhone 3.1 adds a "save as new clip" option that creates a separate file while leaving the original video file intact.
We tested the feature on a 32GB iPhone 3GS, using clips shot both before and after the upgrade to iPhone 3.1, to see what surprises were in store.
First, let's start with trimming. The ability to trim video within the iPhone 3GS window is very intuitive: select either end of the clip and begin to dragging the trim bar towards the center. The bar will turn from gray to yellow to emphasize the fact that you've chosen to trim. Lift a finger and the trim bar stays where you placed it, and the process can then be repeated for the other end of the clip (assuming you want to trim both the beginning and the end of the clip).
Keeping a finger on the trim bar, anywhere other than the beginning or end of the clip, will result in the video automatically lengthening out beyond the end of the screen. Don't be frightened, as this is intentional: the lengthening is Apple's way of allowing fine-tuned trimming, especially handy for long clips that may be trimmed to 10-20% of their original length.
A note for those frustrated users: 9 times out of 10 during our tests, when we chose to start trimming from the in point, the positioning slider was selected instead of the trim bar, due to the fact that they're both in the same location. The 10th time we actually ended up hitting the "camera roll" button. We suggest turning the iPhone sideways, although this still resulted in numerous touches to the positioning slider, so we also suggest starting the trim from the end of the clip, which makes the positioning slider disappear.
Once the clip is trimmed to your liking, choose the yellow "trim" button to access the two saving options. Choose "trim original" to discard all the remaining video (both before and after your trim points) or "save as new clip" to just save a copy of the trimmed portion while leaving the original clip intact.
It's also worth noting that the new clip will be saved with the current time and date, while the "trim original" clips are saved with the original time and date. While this is understandable, it makes using the iPhone 3GS less effective for multi-shot recordings (such as a short film or news reporting) since one has to search for the original and new clips in different areas (especially if iPhoto, Apple's program of choice for importing still images and video clips from the iPhone, has the "auto split events after import" box checked for splitting imports by different dates).
Finally, while we assume this workflow also works for the new iPod nano's video recording capabilities, we've been unable to test with the new nano and don't yet know which version of the iPod software it uses.
Workflow - Aggregate and Export QuickTime Movies in Snow Leopard
In fact, compared to QT Player 7's Pro options, such as aggregating movie clips together (appending a second clip on to the end of another in basic "cuts only" editing) and the extensive list of export options, the QuickTime X player is a step backwards.
Fortunately, for those who upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6) from the Leopard (10.5) operating system, Apple left QuickTime Player 7 intact, including the Pro version, if Pro was already installed on the old Leopard system. Whether this is an oversight, or a nod to the fact that QuickTime X was shipped too early, the fact that QuickTime Player 7 is still functional is welcome news.
The work-around workflow, then, for aggregating clips and exporting content to more than just an Apple TV, iPhone, iPod or Macintosh computer, is to use QuickTime Player 7 with Pro options.
If you've already upgraded and didn't have Pro installed at the time, you'll need to downgrade to Leopard, or find an alternate paid application, until such a time as Apple chooses to add back the functionality it stripped from QuickTime Player.
The Metaphorically Invincible Armada?
In this first IBC without Neal in the CEO slot, Inlet has cranked out an enhanced version of its Armada workflow, which was launched at the National Association of Broadcasters' show in mid-2008.
Like the name implies, Armada consists of a grouping of stand-alone products intended to create an invincible gestalt of speed and quality benefits.
Spinnaker, the company's encoding devices, form the core of the live ingest portion of Armada.
Semaphore, the quality control software tool used to identify out-of-range portions of an encoded file, including errors, can also be used to re-encode problem areas.
A third aspect, part of Armada 3, is Inlet's tie-in to the Apple Segmenter, which is necessary to allow adaptive bitrate HTTP streaming to the iPhone, either via WiFi or EDGE/3G. Inlet showcased this integration at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) back in June and - with Apple's release of Snow Leopard a week ago - the WWDC demonstrations will now be shown at this week's IBC.
We'll post more about Armada enhancements when an overview workflow becomes available.
iPhoned
Workflow - PDF with OCR - NeatWorks 2.1.7 for Mac
A lot has been written recently about the NeatWorks software for Macintosh and its ease of creating PDF documentation of receipts for reimbursement. David Pogue, for instance, in The New York Times gave it rave reviews for its multi-page PDF generation capabilities.
While the program can be used for many more options, such as creating records of receipts, complete with subtotals, sales tax and aggregated totals, the Windows version does a much better job than the Mac version for these tasks. The accuracy (or inaccuracy, to be precise) of the Mac version means that the practical use as a Mac replacement to the Windows version is severely limited for the time being until both applications are brought to parity (more details on this in a separate product review can be found at www.bitoftech.com).
Despite the Mac version's shortcomings, though, we've found it to be a timesaver for some of the simpler scanning-to-PDF processes that we go through for scanning phone bills, receipts and other reimbursements that we don't need a permanent record of. In fact, we've found it cuts out numerous steps for both single- and multi-page PDFs, complete with optical character recognition (OCR) when compared to the built-in solution for Apple Mac desktops and laptops, mainly Image Capture.
The NeatWorks Mobile Scanner (we have the 2008 version to test) can scan both to Image Capture and to NeatWorks.
So the primary question is, can you scan to PDF without opening Neatworks? The short answer is NO, for two reasons.
1. Due to an error in Snow Leopard Image Capture, PDF files scanned with Image Capture and the Neat Mobile Scanner 2008 generate a file that won't open up in Preview or Acrobat Pro, even though QuickLook shows the image.
The files, when opening is attempted in Preview, generate an error message stating:
The file "name.pdf" could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize.
In Acrobat Pro, the error message states:
Acrobat could not open 'name.pdf' because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged (for example, it was sent as an email attachment and wasn't correctly decoded).
To create an Adobe PDF document, go to the source application. Then print the document to Adobe PDF.
2. Acrobat Pro 9.0, another potential timesaving application for scanning to PDF, does not recognize the NeatWorks Mobile 2008 as a valid scanner, eliminating its 2-step process to multi-page scans (and significantly reduced file sizes of more than 66% when compared to both Image Capture and NeatWorks).
Before stepping through the workflows for single- and multi-page PDFs from NeatWorks and Image Capture, it's important to note the button settings on the top of the NeatWorks Mobile 2008 scanner. On the top of the scanner are two buttons, Scan and PDF. These buttons are considered "soft" buttons as they can be reassigned to a variety of options.
For instance, Scan can be assigned to scan in color or black and white, or to scan to PDF in color or black and white. The PDF button can be set for the same PDF settings or to "scan extra page". While this last command would be very helpful for scanning multiple pages directly to PDF, it only works within the NeatWorks database, so to scan a multi-page PDF requires launching NeatWorks, scanning into the database and then exporting to a PDF. A long process, to be sure, with room for improvement, but it still beats the Image Capture workflow by at least four steps.
WORKFLOW 1: Single Page PDF with OCR
WORKFLOW 2: Multi-Page PDF with OCR
A final note about Image Capture and Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). Snow Leopard's Image Capture is also a bit spotty; while it will scan JP2 (JPEG2000) files, which will open in Preview, the same error message is generated in Acrobat for JP2 files as is generated for PDF files scanned via the NeatWorks Mobile 2008 scanner in Image Capture. We put this down to an Image Capture issue, but further testing will be needed to determine whether Snow Leopard's Image Capture via other scanners result in JP2 and PDF files that Acrobat can open.
Google Purchases On2 - Additional Thoughts
What is Workflowed?
Metadata Conundrum, Part 2
As a continuation from the previous post, which lays out the basic reasoning for the metadata conundrum, we’re going to look at the the multiple points at which metadata is lost.
The first phase of metadata loss - acquisition - is one that has had the most progress in the time from which this information was first presented (1999).
Metadata Conundrum, Part 1
Back in 1996, I began the quest for the perfect metadata system - one that would track stock or syndicated clips throughout the production and distribution process. By 1999, during consulting work with a client with a compelling need to track metadata across the total production landscape, we prototyped a metadata tracking system that MCI then turned into a media asset management (MAM) service.
The core prototype had a part that was never built into the MCI system - a measurement tool designed to differentiate between stock footage downloaded for introduction into a rough timeline versus content that ends up in the final product.
Consider this scenario that was first proposed in a 1999 white paper.
An independent filmmaker, who is creating short-form content for the web, decides she needs a montage of video clips that show the history of rocket launches. She finds stock or historic content that includes captured German V-1 and V-2 test footage, Goddard’s initial rocket tests, Apollo and Gemini lift-off sequences and several clips of recent shuttle launches and landings.
She likes the footage enough to pull down the “trial” versions (low-resolution and watermarked, of course) but then finds that these versions have key resolution deficiencies and watermarks in places that may limit her FX compositing. As such, to work around both limitations to the creative process, she’s compelled to download (and pay for) higher-resolution files.
After sequencing the FX compositing, she makes a creative decision to pare back the number of clips used. This paring could be done for a variety of reasons: she sees the original resolution on several of the clips isn’t going to allow complex compositing; she finds the sequence needs to be shorter; or she sees the shuttle she’s chosen is one that has been de-commissioned. Regardless of the reason she
At this point, though, she’s already paid for the clips and can’t exactly ask for her money back. The requirement to pre-buy stock content, regardless of whether it’s used or not, severely impacts other portions of the limited indie production, overwhelming an already tenuous production budget.
Sound farfetched? It happens every day in a variety of productions, as old business models meet new business realities.
The old business model of pre-paying for stock footage holds on for good reason: the companies selling stock or historic content can’t accurately track where their content is being used, either in finished timelines / productions or in types of distribution. That’s the essence of the work being done to maintain metadata throughout the production and delivery process.
Why not go with an even older business model - the “honor system” that was part of music production libraries when I was in film school, where music usage was reported by the content creator after the fact? For those of us who used these tools, there was a double penalty: pay for the music library up front and then pay for usage, with uncertain results at best for libraries like DeWolfe as independent content creators didn’t have much control over where their content was shown. The rise of royalty-free music libraries (and the inherent deficiencies of putting the burden of usage tracking ad infinitum on the content creator) deep-sixed the honor system as the proliferation of new venues and distribution models blossomed at the dawn of the Internet era.
Still, the basic problem remains: clips dropped into a non-linear editor’s bin lose about 60% of about of the pertinent metadata; clips then dropped into the timeline lose an additional 20% of metadata; and clips output to a rendered file (or tape) lose 99.999% of metadata about its sub-components.
The use of a manufacturing term to describe clips on the timeline is intended to make this point: video and audio editing / distribution - almost exclusively performed on computers and digital media - has less metadata tracking capability for its subcomponents than the average 2000 model year car rolling off a Detroit assembly line. Even the glass on the car can be traced back to a particular vehicle, assembly line and date of creation. Sheesh!
Additional information regarding acquisition, production and distribution metadata, including additional excerpts from past white papers and reports (as well as the foundation for a new set of white papers) will be posted over the next few weeks.
What Is Up WIth Final Cut 'Native' HDV Capture?
A recent blog post discussed both Windows and Macintosh workflows to capture and transcode native HDV files.
While options available on both platforms, namely Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro and Canopus Edius Neo (or Pro), there’s one other wildly popular editing tool that claims native HDV that didn’t stand up to the native HDV test.
So What’s Up with Final Cut and HDV?
It does capture HDV, but not in the standard .M2T (or even .MPG) extension. Final Cut’s scratch captures are listed as .MOV files and the Movie Inspector in QuickTime shows the footage as HDV1080i60, with the HDV resolution the correct 1400x1080 (1888x1062) and the frame size as 1920x1080, meaning that it is correctly extrapolating the additional lines. So far so good.
But converting Final Cut’s HDV footage (even the scratch footage) in to an .M2T extension isn’t so easy, as Apple apparently is doing something with its HDV files that adds a proprietary twist to the files. Changing the extension to .M2T did absolutely nothing; changing it to .MPG also did nothing, and any extension confused Handbrake enough that the “beach ball hell” kicked in and never stopped.
Another confirmation that the Apple HDV files wasn’t conforming to the HDV MPEG-2 LongGOP spec was the fact that MPEG Streamclip could open it on the machine on which it was captured (ie, a Mac that had Final Cut Pro 6 installed) but opening it on any other Mac with the MPEG-2 Playback Component only yielded a white screen in the MPEG Streamclip window with an audio bar directly across the middle. So the audio would play but nothing else. Oh, and on no Mac would MPEG Streamclip ungrey the option to demux the MPEG-2 file, probably because it wasn’t an MPEG-2 file and therefore not in a native HDV format ;)
Compare this to CS3 Premiere Pro, which output a .MPG file which we changed the name on to a .M2T extension, loaded it up in Handbrake and spit out a .MP4 file, flipped over to MPEG Streamclip and demuxed a .M2V video file and and an AIFF audio file (just as MPEG Streamclip on Windows had done) and then opened the latter the M2V in QuickTime Player, where the audio was automatically linked to it.
Saved that MPEG-2 1440x810 resolution file out as a .MOV (didn’t export, just did a “Save As”) and now had a native HDV and a native MPEG-2 MOV to work from on almost any Flash transcoding system. Oh, and changed the extension of the .M2T back to .MPG and opened it up in Sorenson with no problem at all on a separate Mac machine that didn’t have Premiere or the MPEG-2 Playback Component loaded on it ;)
And don’t get me started on Apple’s Intermediate Codec (AIC) used in iMovie 08 and Final Cut Express 4; this lossy compression isn’t supported by QuickTime for Windows, plus yields additional concatenation issues. Bad move and poor timing as the new Final Cut Express 4, with its price reduced to $199, would be an ideal base-level system feeding up to Final Cut Pro as iMovie 08 feeds into Final Cut Express 4. And Apple can’t say AIC is used because the machines don’t have enough power or storage: FCE and iMovie 08 are both running on Macs more powerful than those that Apple says are the minimum for native HDV editing.
Almost workable on a single platform except for that stupid AIC codec. And no support at all for moving either FCP’s ‘native’ HDV or iMovie and FCE’s AIC files to Windows. I love my Mac and use it for almost every video test I do, but now have to settle for Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro to get true native HDV out of the Mac. Triple ugh.
