The recent evolution of desktop video is nothing short of astounding. Five years ago desktop systems from companies like Media 100 and Avid were proprietary hardware/software bundles that cost 35 grand and up. In some cases, way up. They could only be purchased through a tiny number of authorized sales channels and required specialized video boards that hijacked your host computer so all you could do with it was edit video. Even running Microsoft Word could lead to big trouble.
Back then virtually all desktop video systems were built on the Mac. A precious few Windows NT systems such as Avid's MCXpress made it to market, but NT was so thoroughly audio- and video-hostile, they were soon relegated to the dustbin of history. Adobe's Premiere and In-Sync's Speed Razor were among the first all-software editing solutions, but general-purpose computers were not up to the task of pushing moving pixels around, so attempting to cut video with them was generally an abysmal experience.
Fast forward to Summer 2002. Almost any computer on the store shelf is video capable. Processor speeds are measured in gigahertz instead of megahertz. Hard drive prices have plummeted from around 150 bucks a gigabyte to a little over a dollar per gigabyte. Garden-variety graphics cards sport tens of megabytes of RAM instead of two, and RAM itself is plentiful, selling for between 20 and 30 cents per megabyte, well less than one percent of what it cost then. Equally important, the Mac OS X and Windows XP operating systems natively support professional-quality audio and video, and you can practically drown in the ocean of great desktop video software out there.
This month I'll discuss the best of the newest nonlinear editing, postproduction, and sound tools I've had a chance to test. On the hardware side there's Sony's GDM-FW 900 monitor, Compaq's (now HP's) Evo W8000 workstation and Presario 2700T portable, and Dazzle's Hollywood DV-Bridge. On the software side there's Discreet's Combustion 2, Sonic Foundry's Vegas 3, Sonic Desktop's SmartSound Sonicfire Pro, Adobe's After Effects 5.5, AIST's MoviePack eXtreme, Boris's RED 2.1, and Matrox's RT 2500 PRO Pack.
The Apple Universe
Historically, the vast majority of video folks have preferred to work on the Mac. Apple deserves tremendous credit for getting the desktop video ball rolling over 10 years ago and committing significant resources to it ever since. Its payback from the video community has been overwhelming mind and market share.
If you attempted to do anything with a Windows video system until recently, you probably wrote Windows off for eternity as a completely unsuitable video platform. But Windows 2000 and XP have come a long way toward addressing their predecessors' shortcomings, and today you can build a superb desktop video system based on either the Mac or PC.
Macs offer significantly fewer hardware and software choices than PCs, but the ones they do offer are excellent. If you choose to go the Apple route, here's what to do. 1) Buy the best G4 you can afford (dual 1-GHz processors and a couple GB of RAM will run anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000, depending on options); 2) buy Apple's $999 Final Cut Pro 3 software; 3) start editing.
So much has been written recently about Final Cut Pro 3 I won't go into its capabilities here. Suffice it to say it's a very solid editing package that will get you through most anything you're likely to throw at it. For editing on the go, buy a Titanium G4 PowerBook with a GB of RAM (around $3,000).
For more complex multilayer postproduction and animation situations there are several good cross-platform choices including Discreet's Combustion 2, BorisFX RED 2.1, and Adobe's After Effects 5.5, all of which I'll discuss below. Apple's recent surprise acquisition of Nothing Real's Shake shows it has designs on this side of the video market as well.
From this point forward the future of digital video is in the software. Processors are already so powerful that specialized hardware boards that capture and speed up video playback are rapidly becoming obsolete, except for the most demanding applications. Nevertheless, choosing the right hardware spells the difference between a video system that's merely adequate and one that soars.
Sony's GDM-FW900 Monitor
No piece of video hardware is more important than your display. It's what you'll have your eyes glued to for hours and days on end. For the last few months I've been using Sony's GDM-FW900 Trinitron as my primary display for both video compositing and 3D work.
Simply put, this is a superb monitor for video applications. Its 16:10 wide-format aspect ratio is especially attractive for HD composition. The FW-900's 24" (22.5" viewable) screen displays resolution as high as 2304x1440 at 80 Hz, but I found its ideal resolution to be 1920x1200 at 85 Hz. That's enough pixels to display your video work window and a nice long timeline without menus and palettes getting in your way. The antiglare-coated screen is perfectly flat, so there's virtually no distortion to the image. The display is very sharp even at the highest resolution settings, with a dot pitch of 23mm at the center and 27mm at the far edges.
Trinitron tubes are noted for their rich colors, and the FW-900 is no exception. It's hard to talk about true color accuracy in relation to film or video because projected light and NTSC video signals are very different from the RGB color space of computer monitors. Film is considerably easier to color match on a computer screen than NTSC video, which has a very narrow color gamut and radically different brightness and contrast characteristics. If your final output is analog video, you'll need a separate television monitor to get a real picture of what you're doing. If your budget allows for one, a studio-quality reference monitor will save you a lot of aggravation down the line.
The FW-900 weighs in at over 92 pounds. The front of its base has a four-port USB hub and dual switchable video inputs. I found the two inputs very useful, since I often have an editing application and a compositing package running simultaneously on separate machines that I trade data back and forth with over the course of a project. I've used KVMs (keyboard/video/monitor) for this purpose, but have observed some sort of impedance problem that sometimes affects the brightness of the image just enough to affect color fidelity.
At $1,995 the FW-900 is hardly inexpensive, but it's worth every penny. Compared to an equivalent LCD display, it's an excellent value. Given my druthers, I'll choose a top of the line LCD over a tube any day, but the very few LCDs that come in this format and offer this much resolution — such as Apple's gorgeous 23" Cinema HD — cost nearly twice as much. Samsung has a couple pricey, wide-format LCD beauties as well.
My only complaint about the FW-900 is its onscreen control system, which is somewhat clunky to navigate, and in my estimation doesn't give deep enough control over the tube's color parameters. I've tested a lot of high-end monitors over the last couple years, and in terms of price, performance, and overall quality, the GDM FW-900 is the best display I've seen for any kind of video work. Recommended.
Compaq/HP'S Evo W8000
Macs are great for video editing, but if you're serious about postproduction compositing and animation, you need every last bit of processing horsepower you can muster. In this department Intel- and AMD-powered PCs are both more powerful and cheaper than Macs. Apple's assertion that MHz don't really count is simply not true.
We used to recommend Intergraph machines for demanding video postproduction and animation work because they were architected with that in mind. But SGI bought out Intergraph's Windows workstation division a year and a half ago and ran it into the ground. There are good workstations sold by Dell, IBM, and others out there, but in my estimation Compaq (now HP) has taken over the leadership role in media production workstations, in both the desktop and portable arenas.
I did most of my video testing for this story on a Compaq Evo W8000 workstation with dual 2-GHz Xeon processors (now they come with 2.4-GHz processors). This machine is built to handle just about anything you can hurl at it. It's one of the few systems that can accommodate the Creative Technology/3Dlabs Wildcat III 6210 AGP Pro OpenGL 3D card or Pinnacle's CineWave HD board. It's also certified to run hugely demanding applications such as Avid's top of the line DS software and SensAble's FreeForm 3D voxel-based haptic modeling system.
The Evo W8000's Intel 860 chipset supports up to 4 GB of ECC PC800 RDRAM. I tested it with 2 GB of RAM and found that the RAM preview players in programs such as Adobe After Effects and Discreet Combustion 2 take advantage of every bit.
Most of our video testing at the Media Lab is currently limited to digital video (DV), so we can get by with 7200 RPM IDE drives, singly or in arrays (5400 RPM is actually enough to capture and play back DV). But for uncompressed or high-definition video, the W8000 can be configured with Ultra160 SCSI 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM hard drives.
There's a lot of ongoing discussion as to whether Intel or AMD processors are superior for video rendering. A couple weeks ago fellow Byte.com Contributing Editor Alex Pournelle cobbled together a dual-processor AMD system with an ATI 8500 card and two-thirds of a terabyte of disk space that we'll be testing head to head with a similarly configured Intel system.
There's no question that AMD's newest CPUs deliver very impressive results. However, the Pentium 4 Xeon chip is no slouch, and many software developers optimize their code to enhance P4 performance. For the time being, we continue to recommend PCs over Macs for video postproduction work, and the Evo W8000 workstation as the box of choice.
Compaq/HP's Presario 2800
Earlier this year I reviewed Compaq's Presario 2700 portable computer. The 2700's successor, the Presario 2800, is targeted at general consumers, but in my opinion it's probably the best portable video machine you can buy. This distinction is generally awarded to Apple's Titanium notebook, which is indeed a wonderful machine, as well as the coolest looking portable ever made. But the 2800 is better. Here's why.
First: the screen. The 2700 model I tested has a perfect page-white 1600x1200 UXGA resolution LCD that delivers excellent color rendition and extremely sharp type display. Second: the CPU. I tested the 2700 with a 1.2-GHz PIII. The 2800 supports a 1.8-GHz P4. As I mentioned above, video postproduction is all about crunching numbers, and I suspect the 2800 will deliver rendering performance that's twice what the 800-MHz Apple Titanium yields. Third: the video card. The 2700 came with a 32-MB ATI Radeon Mobility that was good enough to run AliasWavefront's demanding Maya 3D animation software. Now you can get a 64-MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 that has far superior OpenGL performance, which is used by video programs like Discreet Combustion 2 and AIST Movie Pack eXtreme.
Finally, the 2800 supports a full GB of RAM, 5400 RPM drives, and with its second battery, delivers five and a half hours of battery life. The Titanium has these last features too (and is a little lighter), but overall the advantage tips to the Presario. It should run between two and three grand fully ported out.
Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge
Another piece of video hardware I've found very useful is Dazzle's $299 Hollywood DV-Bridge. The DV-Bridge transcodes DV data to analog and vice versa. It has FireWire, S video, and RCA inputs and outputs. I connected it to several Windows 2000 and XP systems that immediately recognized and configured it as a FireWire device.
The DV-Bridge is an easy way to convert your old 3/4-inch or VHS tapes to DV without a computer. The quality of the transfers is very good. You can also capture video from an analog camera or deck into your computer without having to install a finicky capture card inside your system. If you've got analog tapes on your bookshelf or want to distribute your DV work on VHS, you need one of these.
Matrox RT2500 PRO Pack
Last year I reviewed several real-time DV boards. One of the best performers was Matrox's RT2000, since updated to the RT2500. The RT2500 delivers the same performance as the RT2000, but uses a single board instead of two. I found one for $775 on the Web.
On the PC side, the hardware is locked to Adobe's Premiere 6 software (included in the price of the board). The Mac version is called the RTMac. It runs Premiere or Final Cut Pro (a separate $999 purchase). The RT2500 does all the heavy lifting for two streams of real-time DV playback plus an image layer even on a 400-MHz Pentium. It also renders all sorts of effects and transitions in real time.
As I mentioned above, tomorrow's processors will make dedicated DV boards like the RT2500 obsolete. But until then, these cards can continue to benefit from ongoing software development. Since its introduction a couple years ago, Matrox has refined the RT2500's software with significant enhancements such as improved batch capture. The latest addition to these is the $99 PRO Pack.
The PRO Pack has several neat features such as real-time blurring, improved keyframe control for effects, the ability to use 8-bit Targa files as cutout masks, and lots of control over particle effects such as border softness, gravity, and dispersion range. Two big wins are hardware-assisted batch encoding of RealMedia and Windows Media files, and the ability to display the video output of After Effects on an NTSC monitor (worth the price of admission alone — Canopus charges $249 for this feature).
The Matrox Video Products Group tells me they are developing a new series of real-time, keyframeable 3D transitions and filters such as ripples and mesh warps that'll be available free of charge to RT2000 and RT2500 PRO Pack users.
Matrox has created an exchange community at http://www.fxzone.matrox that lets registered users of Matrox video products download new effects and exchange their own effects, masks, and keyframe sequences with other users. Matrox has also built a free web video hosting site at http://www.matrox.tv where you can share your video creations with others. You get 20 MB of space on the server, with a maximum data transfer of 1 GB per month.
On the down side, dedicated video boards harken back to the nasty old days of cantankerous standalone systems. We've tested the RT2000 and other boards such as Pinnacle's DV 500 in several machines, and usually had unpleasant configuration and stability problems, including unpredictable system crashes before we got them to work properly.
Another issue is that if you do any really complex effects or transitions with these boards, you still need to render those sequences, and that can take forever. A certain amount of this time sump can be laid at Premiere's feet. Similar previews and renders in Sonic Foundry's Vegas 3 are easily an order of magnitude faster.
One solution to this slowdown is Canopus's $1,299 DVStorm SE Plus board that gets more capable the more CPU cycles you throw at it. Canopus recently released a new driver they claim can run five streams of video in real time. DVStorm also outputs to tape in real time.
Premiere has improved a lot over the years, but I'm still not crazy about it. Matrox, Pinnacle, and Canopus DV cards are all locked to Premiere, as is Matrox DigiSuite MAX, a powerful high-resolution system that costs many thousands of dollars.
Even though the combination of powerful CPUs and plentiful RAM is enough to render multiple streams of DV with complex effects and transitions in real time, this solution works best for short form productions like commercials or trailers. If you're working in a longer format, you should consider a real-time DV board.
New Software
Most of what I've got to report about new video software is overwhelmingly positive. Unfortunately, a lot of the software developers are stuck in the mentality of bygone days when digital video was still a rare and expensive commodity. The business model then revolved around making a small number of very high-end sales. The key to success was to keep the products from being easily reproduced, so all sorts of copy-protection schemes came into being.
As software becomes cheaper and the consumer base for it expands by leaps and bounds, profit derives from volume sales. Rigid copy protection doesn't work so well in this scenario, but old habits die hard. We used to have as many as nine hardware copy-protection dongles attached to a computer's parallel port in years past. All of them wanted to be the first one in the chain, which led to no end of problems. Now the dongles are mostly gone, but Discreet's Combustion 2 and BorisFX RED 2.1 still require them.
Combustion also requires an authorization code, a CD key, and product registration before it'll run. The free Invigorator program from ZaxWerks that comes with After Effects 5.5 has a temporary code that works only for 30 days unless you register the product, at which point they e-mail you a new code you'll have to keep track of. Other software locks itself to a specific machine and must be reauthorized if you want to move it to another system. If the company goes under or is absorbed by another entity and you can no longer reach it, that's too bad for you.
All this is aggravating and time consuming. Two companies that bucked the trend and changed their policies are Adobe, which used to require a dongle for After Effects, and Sonic Foundry, which used to make you get a new registration number every time you changed the machine its software ran on. Now both companies' products install right out of the box. And in case the competition hasn't noticed, their software is selling like hotcakes.
Back to the good news. The capabilities of all the products I'll discuss below are simply staggering. Once unaffordable to normal human beings, tools such as image stabilization, high-resolution titling, advanced color correction, and 3D layering and effects are now standard in most packages, some of which cost as little as a few hundred bucks. There's far too much depth to each of these applications than I can possibly report on here, so I'll pick out the features that impressed me most about each one.
One program I didn't have a chance to test in time for this story that deserves attention is Avid's cross-platform $1,700 Xpress DV 3. Xpress shares Avid's time-tested interface and asset management tools with its bigger siblings, so if you rent time on high-end Avids at hundreds of dollars per hour, Xpress DV 3 is probably indispensable as a front end.
Xpress DV's asset management capabilities put those of virtually all the other products I looked at to shame, incidentally. This component alone justifies taking a serious look at it. Unfortunately, Xpress DV 3 is only certified to work with a limited number of workstations and portables, which is hard to understand in a software-only product.
Vegas Video 3.0
Vegas Video 3.0 is a Windows video editor from Sonic Foundry, the makers of the ubiquitous Sound Forge sound editor. Vegas started its life as an extremely capable software sound mixer, and evolved into a video editor. It has by far the best audio tools of any video editor I've tested, comparing very favorably with products costing orders of magnitude more.
Vegas's sound-mixing heritage affects its onscreen layout. It's very timeline focused, and it took me a little while to wrap my head around it. But working with Vegas is very intuitive, and the more I work with it, the better I like it.
The program is packed with features. Unlimited video and audio tracks, resolution independence, a wide variety of video adjustment and effects plug-ins, real-time nondestructive audio editing, and envelope speed controls are just a few. On the audio side there's control over equalization, amplitude modulation, chorus, pitch, reverb, and much more.
Vegas has a tape capture utility that's invoked from within the application, but is a separate program. It performs automatic scene detection, and in some of my tests did a better job than Adobe's Premiere at bringing in video without dropped frames. Vegas can also encode MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. On the output side, you can burn video DVDs and professional-quality Red Book CD masters directly from the timeline.
Sonic Foundry has developed its own multithreaded DV codec that's more efficient than the generic Microsoft one. I was able to preview my projects at full resolution in real time, even when I piled three or four effects onto the clips and added complex transitions. Audio effects play in real time as well. I'm very impressed with Vegas's memory management. Its RAM preview is smart enough to rewrite only changed frames in a sequence, something programs like Premiere are incapable of.
I have a few quibbles with Vegas. The interface has some very nice features such as the ability to use the mouse wheel to zoom the timeline, but it could be streamlined further. The program is supposed to be able to output its video window to an NTSC monitor via FireWire. I've yet to get that to work. But make no mistake about it: Vegas 3 is a superb piece of software engineering.
Sonic Foundry is proving to be "the little engine that could" in both audio and video software. Vegas 3 deserves a place in your toolkit for its audio capabilities alone. You can buy Vegas directly from Sonic Foundry's web site for $479.96 packaged, and $419.97 as a direct download. This is a truly great deal at an incredible price. Highly Recommended.
AIST Movie Pack Extreme 4.0
AIST is a German company that's just begun to get noticed in the U.S. market. Its Windows-only MoviePack line of products combines both editing and animation effects.
In a sense, MoviePack is the most forward-looking video product I've ever seen. Like Discreet's 3ds max 3D animation software, MoviePack is designed around a modular plug-in core. In fact, practically every component of the program is a plug-in, making the application infinitely scalable. This opens up some very interesting possibilities.
For example, MoviePack comes in several flavors. The core program is the $399 MoviePack VE 4. MoviePack Pro 4 has more postproduction features and is priced at $699. The $1,299 eXtreme version I tested is its top of the line product. It has dozens upon dozens of sophisticated tools, including image stabilization and tracking, 3D object import and mesh deformation, particle effects, and nearly every imaginable transition. All three programs share the same video engine, but each has a different level of capability.
Why pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars extra for a program that has mountains of features, such as 18 different page curls, that you'll never use? MoviePack's scalable structure lets you purchase only the plug-ins you need, when you need them. This makes tremendous sense. The plug-ins range in price from $24.99 to $99.00.
Another aspect of the program I really like is its customizable interface. In addition to a choice of skins, MoviePack windows can be sized, moved, and docked. The program's components are all seamlessly integrated into the overall interface design, unlike apps such as After Effects and RED, in which every window on the screen has an unnecessary and real-estate-consuming title bar.
The interface has many nice touches, including a small preview window that pops up and plays your video when your mouse hovers over a clip icon in the media bin. My only beef is that some of the interface icons are very small, although that's a minor point, since experienced editors use keyboard hot keys for most functions.
Another significant feature is that MoviePack takes advantage of your graphic card's OpenGL capabilities. This enables real-time previews of 3D deformations and many video effects. The program is also DirectX-aware. Its SmartRender keeps track of what's already been calculated in RAM, similar to the way Vegas 3 works, and AIST's Adaptive Mesh Technology selectively updates only changes in 3D meshes, which further speeds up the display of 3D surfaces and effects.
There's a lot of brawn under MoviePack's hood. In addition to working in both PAL and NTSC, it knows about high-res SD, HD, and 24P progressive formats, as well as Cineon film files. It generates film frames at up to 4Kx4K resolution.
MoviePack Version 4 has standard editing controls superior to Version 3. However, my general sense is that the program is still oriented towards producing short, complex segments of film or video. I haven't tried a long form project with it, but I did notice in my tests that it tends to suck up every bit of available RAM at a great rate.
MoviePack is an economically priced package that bridges the gap between editing and postproduction. Its plug-in architecture puts it in the position of being highly adaptable to incorporating new directions in video technology. This is a forward-looking product with great growth potential. You can download a free 30-day trial version from the AIST web site.
After Effects 5.5
Once upon a time, video postproduction tools cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then along came CoSa's After Effects, which performed many of the same functions on the humble Mac. That was the start of the now flourishing desktop video postproduction business. Adobe bought After Effects from CoSa, and today it's widely disseminated on both the Mac and Windows platforms.
Because of its history and the doors it opened, After Effects holds a special place in the hearts and minds of video makers around the world. It's no exaggeration to say After Effects is the program against which all other desktop video post products are measured. Adobe recently released Version 5.5 of the program (click here to read my full review of Version 5), which smoothes over some of the bumps in the 5.0 release.
Like most state of the art desktop video postproduction programs, much of the big AE 5.5 news is in the 3D department. 3D is important for two reasons. For one, 3D layers allow you to move video clips in space and use lighting simulations that emulate real lights and cast shadows. But more importantly, file formats such as RLA and RPF preserve the camera data that's generated in 3D animation programs like Discreet's 3ds max (http://www.discreet.com/) and AliasWavefront's (http://www.aliaswavefront.com/) Maya 3D, and that data can now be imported into After Effects.
Something that's not well understood by most video newbies is that virtually all professional 3D animation is imported into postproduction packages like After Effects for messaging. This is where the complex layer compositing, color tweaking, and other image manipulations take place that make Yoda look believable when he wields his light saber. After Effects now reads 16-bit-per-channel RLA, RPF, and Maya IFF files as well as SGI and Cineon files. Maya scene files are imported as layers. This is good stuff.
Version 5.5 adds much-needed multiple 3D views and now performs 3D intersections properly (a deficiency in version 5). A feature called "Smart Shape Interpolation" makes for considerably more precise auto-generated interframe masks, and a new Effects folder goes a long way toward making the ocean of After Effects plug-ins manageable. A very nice addition is the Color Stabilizer that intelligently averages color discontinuity in a scene, coping with things like the flickering caused by stop-motion animation.
The one aspect of After Effects that could stand huge improvement is its aging interface. Navigating the timeline's eentsy icons and text can be painful, and the number of windows and floating palettes After Effects uses is simply unnecessary. I find I need a secondary monitor to shove all that clutter over to. Programs like Discreet's Combustion 2 show there is a better way, and I'll be happy when Adobe sees the light.
That aside, AE's seamless layer integration with sister products Photoshop and Illustrator yields a family of highly evolved products whose whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. At $649 for the Standard edition and $1499 for the Production Bundle, After Effects remains an outstanding value in an increasingly crowded field.
Boris RED 2.1
When is a plug-in not a plug-in? Answer: When it's Boris RED 2.1. RED works as a plug-in for video products from Avid, Discreet, Media 100, Apple, Adobe (including After Effects), and others. But it also stands alone as a powerful postproduction tool with its own rendering engine that itself accepts After Effects plug-ins.
Version 2.1 is much more than a point release. It incorporates Boris's two flagship products, BorisFX and Graffiti, a plug-in effects collection and a 3D titler respectively. RED 2.1 takes the collection several steps further with the addition of powerful keying, motion tracking and stabilization, vector paint, and other sophisticated post tools. It's really three powerful programs rolled into one.
Boris led the way in desktop 3D video, and RED 2.1 continues that trend with 3D intersections, 3D extrusion and beveling of native or imported 2D vectors, a 3D particle system, and OpenGL support. Surprisingly, it does not provide multiple 3D views, which makes navigating complex multilayered scenes a challenge.
RED has a large set of vector tools, including vector paint for rotoscoping, animated vector text, and Macromedia Flash .swf export. Another strong area is compositing, with 13 keying filters, including tools for alpha matte creation and adjustment.
I enjoyed playing with RED's procedural component, which creates organic textures and backgrounds. Another feature I like is the Natural Media filters, which includes one called Snow that, in addition to creating falling snow, builds up snowfall over time based on an image layer's alpha channel.
RED 2.1 comes with a component, called the "Standalone Keyframer," which you can use to create projects on any machine, but not render them. RED has a standalone renderer too, but rendering requires separate per-machine licenses.
One of RED 2.1's most outstanding features is its Help system. The program's Intelligent Assistant has the equivalent of 600 pages of text and two and a half hours of narrated video. The video tutorials float above the program so you can work along with them. The Intelligent Assistant is instantly updated over the Internet with additional tutorials and features. Even if you know a lot about video, programs like RED and After Effects are deep and getting deeper. Projects often become very complex very quickly, so anything that makes them easier to learn is a Good Thing for novice and expert alike.
Although RED 2.1 is very different from After Effects, its layout shares some of AE's weaknesses. There are multiple windows, lots of tiny buttons and icons, and I got lost more than once scrolling up and down the plethora of layer elements. I originally installed RED as a plug-in to AE (you invoke RED from within AE, and it imports your composition into the RED workspace). But the profusion of the two programs' combined levels, layers, and settings was too much for me, so I reinstalled RED as a separate program.
One place where RED 2.1 stands head and shoulders above its competition is its extensive integration with the major nonlinear editing programs (NLEs) on the market. This includes Apple's Final Cut Pro, Avid's Symphony, Composer, Xpress, and XpressDV, In:Sync's Speed Razor, Media 100's iFinish, Adobe's Premiere, and Discreet's edit.
Having RED plug in to After Effects may be a bit of overkill, but integrated into any one of these NLEs, it becomes invaluable. If you need to fix something like a video clip with a bad case of the shakes, or add a bit of digital rain or noise to a scene, all you need to do is go to your Filters menu, click on Boris RED, and fix it on the spot.
The alternative is to stop what you're doing, export the troublesome clip to another program, fix it there, rerender it, and reimport it back into your timeline. It's hard to imagine a video project you couldn't produce with the combination of a top flight NLE and RED 2.1. RED sells for $1,995. It runs on both Macs and PCs.
Discreet's Combustion 2
Discreet's cross-platform Combustion 2 started out as two separate programs from Denim Software, called Paint and Effect. Discreet bought the two applications, and a year and a half ago combined them into Combustion. Combustion 2 is the latest iteration of the program, and to use an expression I hear on the playground these days, "It's tight."
Combustion 2 is very deep, but it wisely doesn't cast its net too wide. The program's designers assume you're animating effects sequences for a short form film or video that has an existing soundtrack. Within those parameters, they have, in my opinion, nailed everything exactly right.
Let's start with the interface. Longtime readers know that clunky interface design is one of my pet peeves. But Combustion's is everything I believe an interface should be. It's functional. It's elegant. It's easy to navigate. And most important for a video app, it's not in your face. The Combustion interface is user-configurable, but except to add additional 3D views from time to time for certain complex multilayered scenes, I found no need to change it.
Combustion's interface is smart, too. It only provides you with what you need to see at the moment. This is a remarkable accomplishment, given the program's extremely wide range of capabilities. A real strong point is the Schematic View, in which you can arrange, connect, and disconnect all the video clips, images, and effects in your project. Other video post and 3D programs have schematic views, but this is by far the best implementation I've seen.
Combustion is resolution independent; it has the latitude to handle anything from web video to all the way up to high-definition video and film. It can render images at up to 16 bits per channel (64-bit RGBA). The program provides excellent previews thanks to OpenGL support. It has a very efficient RAM player and extensive multithreading. Version 2 comes with a component called "Backburner" that lets you render on multiple machines across a network.
Combustion's keying, color correction, and grain management tools are world class. The color correction module is particularly robust. Motion-tracking, image stabilization, vector paint animation, and 3D raytraced lights and shadows are all beautifully implemented. The program has the best 2D particle system I've seen, bar none. There are presets for sparks, smoke, flame, fireworks, and explosions, to name only a few, and all of these are easily adjustable with a wide variety of parameters. You can also assign any bitmap as a particle.
Combustion 2 supports most After Effects filters and offers layer interoperability with Photoshop and Illustrator. It also provides highly precise integration with Discreet's high-end products (tens and hundreds of thousands of bucks) inferno, flame, flint, smoke, and fire. Many of Combustion's components share identical code with these products, making it a superb offline front end for them.
Combustion now has an interactive paint link with Discreet's 3ds max that imports a 3D object's texture UV coordinates, then lets you paint on the texture map, and send it back to max. I haven't tried this myself yet, but combined with Combustion's ability to read camera and other 3D data from max-generated RPF files, the tight integration of these two products makes for one of the most complete end-to-end 3D animation pipelines ever.
One of the interesting things about Combustion 2 is that it was originally created and continues to be developed by a very small team of programmers. Given its depth and overall structural coherence, as well as the fact that it works equally on Macs and PCs, it makes you wonder why large programming teams don't often pull off products this solid and elegant. Sometimes small really is beautiful.
I found very little to criticize in Combustion 2. One thing I'd like to see is stronger audio support. I understand the thinking in providing a single audio click track for this kind of product, but I don't agree with it. Sometimes visual changes require audio changes, and it would be good to be able to make them on the spot. Other Discreet applications have decent audio tools, so it would cost little to port them to Combustion.
The only technical problems I came across were that it didn't recognize our Panasonic DVC Pro deck, and I managed to crash the program when building multiple particle layers. A patch came out yesterday that may address these problems. Otherwise, the program is very solid.
Combustion retails for $4,995 (there's also a noncommercial $695 student version). That's more than three times the cost of the After Effects Production Bundle. The price actually jumped fifteen hundred bucks from Version 1, bucking the general industry trend. Is it worth it? You bet. In my opinion, Combustion 2 is the best desktop postproduction software ever made. If you can afford it, buy it. Right now. Today.
Sonic Desktop Sonicfire Pro
Video is really a misnomer. Audio is just as much a part of video as image is, but audio is usually treated as a neglected stepchild. This is a dangerous misconception. Poorly recorded audio will kill any production, and trying to fix sound in postproduction is expensive and time-consuming.
Sound can make a production as well as break it. The mood and texture of films from Psycho to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is created by the films' score as much as any other element. But an original score is expensive to commission, as is leasing the rights to existing music.
Enter Sonic Desktop's SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 2.1 soundtrack creation software. Sonicfire Pro's sole function is to create royalty-free soundtracks for film and video productions.
The Sonicfire Pro software works in concert with a series of music and sound effect CDs produced and distributed by Sonic Desktop. The program knows where, and more importantly, how to end each track of music so that it fits any time frame. The music compositions and other audio sources on the CDs are broken up into segments called "Blocks" that are embedded with information that can be controlled through the software, such as fading in and out.
The first step in the process is to import a video clip into Sonic Desktop (it reads DV, AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Motion JPEG, and Sorenson Video formats). Next you import a Sonicfire sound file and move it to the timeline. You can drag the end of the sound file to make the soundtrack longer or shorter, and the program automatically adjusts the segment to fit the length of the clip. Then you can adjust the fade in, fade out, or cross fade rates, and voila: Instant film score. For many projects, that's all there is to it.
This scoring process is a lot more flexible than it might sound. There is considerable latitude in rearranging and deleting the musical Block sequences to make your own variations on the themes (note that most but not all soundtrack selections have this option). You can adjust the location and duration of musical segments with timeline markers, and you can create your own Blocks from music you import.
Creating a score this way is drop-dead easy and very fast. It can save you tens or even hundreds of hours on a production. When you're done, you can export the final score with or without the video. Sound import/export formats include WAV, AU, and AIFF. You can also import MP3s.
Sonic Desktop has produced over three dozen CDs to date and releases a new one about once a month. Each CD runs about 40 minutes with songs averaging around two and a half minutes apiece. Categories include Jazz, Swing, Suspense, Action, Classical, international styles, and sound effects collections. Sonic Desktop licenses the music from professional producers and musicians. I tested a half dozen CDs and the sound quality on all of them is excellent.
Sonicfire has a feature called the "SmartSound Maestro" that searches for appropriate music tracks from its database and winnows down a group of selections for you based on criteria you provide, such as Background/Jazzy. I doubt this is really very useful to professional film and video producers, but it may have a place in corporate or educational video environments.
Currently, Sonicfire Pro is limited to a single track of audio. A couple more wouldn't hurt. I'd also like to see some additional interface skinning options, as the default one is kind of garish. Other than that, this is a very well thought out and implemented piece of postproduction software that you probably shouldn't be without.
Sonicfire Pro doesn't replace real composers, nor does it intend to. But if you can't afford a human being to score your production, or need high-quality temp tracks, this program is significantly cheaper, more efficient, and far more satisfying to deal with than the horrors of matching and timing tired canned music to your work.
The Standard Edition sells for $349 with two CDs of music, and the Pro Bundle Edition goes for $499 with four CDs. Each CD costs between $69 and $129, depending on whether the tracks are recorded at 22k or 44k quality. A "light" version comes bundled with certain products from Adobe, Canopus, Dazzle, and Pinnacle, although if you do any serious work, you'll want to pop for the full version.
The Future
Desktop video has come a long, long way over the last five years. If your final output is digital video, you might even say that "We've Arrived." Over the next two years, I expect to see faster processors and programmable video boards that do the same thing for uncompressed and high-definition video. At that point feature-film quality cameras, editors, and projectors will become commonplace, and none of us will have any excuse for not going out and shooting The Great American Movie.
Contributing editor David Em's digital art has been exhibited in museums and broadcast in America, Europe, and Japan. You can e-mail David Em at: davidem@earthlink.net
For more of his (and associate Alex Pournelle's) columns, visit the Media Lab Column Index.
