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MillimeterCool Tools: The Best Production and Post Tools-For $10,000 or Less
Aug 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Matt Cheplic
Movie studios and animation companies proudly point out their latest high-end digital workstations and software when promoting a new film or TV commercial. But powerful production and post tools are available for well under six figures.
Millimeter surveyed production and postproduction experts to find out the most important gear in the field, available for less than $10,000. We asked respondents to factor in productivity, cost/benefit, reliability, longevity, and even less quantitative factors (i.e., the "security blanket" factor).
Then there is the Final Jeopardy question: What is the single most valued piece of equipment at your facility-no price limit? While people were quicker to jump at this question, it presented a caveat of its own: Most people did not mention production gear. Audio guru Howard Schwartz named his cappuccino maker. David Cornman of New York's Blue Rock pointed to his vintage Theremin, and Brian Diecks is most protective of his collection of Pez dispensers, (he hasmore than 100 of them-domestic and foreign). Look for the Top 10 favorite production tools on page 44.
But first, the best "bang for the buck," in no particular order. Many of these prices are the official list prices; local street prices will vary.
Product: Adobe Photoshop Price: $995 for Version 5.0 Purpose: Is there anyone who does not own a copy of Photoshop? Invaluable to those on a tight budget, yet still a staple for the biggest kids on the block, Photoshop finds its way into plenty of print and Web design as well as production. Says New York-based director and DP Cosimo: "It's an unlimited resource to illustrate anything I can imagine. At the moment, I'm using it primarily for visualization."
Product: Adobe After Effects Price: $995-$1,995, depending on options Purpose: Adobe's other ubiquitous workhorse, this digital compositing, 2-D animation, and special effects package grabbed even more supporters with its recent Intel release. As Bruce Copeman, editor and partner of AXYZ, Toronto, says, "After Effects is my biggest tool, without a doubt. I have a souped up little Powerbook I bring to my transfer. I have the clients gather around it; 50 percent of the time I'll actually output right from the laptop." Editor David Cornman of Blue Rock, New York, concurs. "It helps me do more than the straight Avid," he says. "It handles easier. And even though it may take more time, you can do more. I've used After Effects a lot on three recent NASDAQ spots. It lets me see outside the frame and create layers there. The Avid slows down with a lot of layers, but you can import a 25-layer After Effects composition, and the Avid will read that as one layer." And more than a few even cited After Effects as their single most important tool-with no price limit.
Product: in:sync Speed Razor Price: $2,100 for 4.0; $5,000 for 4.0 RT Purpose: To provide solid, affordable video editing options for the NT crowd. Infinite audio and video tracks, nifty transition effects, resolution-independent compositing, plenty of file compatibility-there is plenty to play with. And the 4.0 RT release means real-time effects, direct support for Matrox's DigiSuite capture boardset and Truevision's RTX, and speed, speed, speed.
Edward Bishop, president of ColorCast Productions, Severna Park, Maryland, says, "Speed Razor was a major step in us getting national work and enabled us to compete with New York and L.A. [post houses]" ColorCast Director Pericles Lewnes adds, "We were looking at Avid, and the more we looked, we saw it would be like buying a house. Getting enough storage at the right compression, the expenses started to mount." They run the software on off-the-shelf Intels with DEC Alphas.
With the DigiSuite card, Speed Razor yields full uncompressed D-1 quality. "We get a surprising number of layers working in real time," says Bishop. Lewnes adds, "People snickered and said we were wasting our time, but ColorCast has built its reputation on being wise guys, and in:sync is a bunch of wise guys. When people said, 'You can't do RT on an NT system,' they did RT. It's a good system because it feels like we're working with a bunch of renegades."
Product: Integrated Computing Engines' ICE board Price: $3,995 for Mac or Windows, $4,995 for 3-D version Purpose: Simply put, to give desktop apps a turbo charge. While the ICE product line began with its most popular product, an After Effects accelerator, ICEfx now supports Avid's Media Composer and Xpress. In addition, alliances with Matrox, Puffin Designs, Artel, and DigiEffects were announced at last NAB. Blue ICE uses Avid's new AVX plug-in interface, so it is directly accessible as a menu option.
"It's a supercomputer in a board," says Alan Miller, VP of postproduction at Moving Pictures, New York, whose Avid system and Mac graphics station are ICE'd. "The difference in render times is extraordinary. We're running Commotion and Cinelook; without the ICE board it's 20 seconds a frame and five seconds a frame with ICE .
Product: Apple's Macintosh G3 Price: desktop models start at $1,699 Purpose: To pack a lot of computing punch (and help Apple on the road to recovery). While it remains debatable whether or not Mahatma Gandhi would have liked his new image, the G3 has found a lot of fans in the production community. Brian Diecks, who runs Brian Diecks Design, New York, uses his G3 Powerbook to get work done on the run. "It's changed my life," he says. "When I got it, my wife was expecting a baby. The baby came six weeks early, and I had my whole life in the hospital with me. I did a whole spot for ESPN. Some of the frames had 119 layers, and I had no problem opening them up. The thing runs like lightning."
Philip Owens of Windmill Lane Productions, Santa Monica, says, "We do everything on them. We're working on a job where we scanned original art and did demo comps, storyboards, and scene layouts all on the Mac."
Of course, the G3 is not the only Mac with a place in the production world. Plenty of shops have an array of Macs performing everything from word processing and Web access to complicated graphics work. In the words of Jonathan Applebaum, VP of engineering and editorial services at Broadway Video, New York, "It is rare to see a Mac not be used for more than a few minutes at a time."
Product: Kinetix 3D Studio MAX R2.5 Price: $3,495 Purpose: To lead the low-cost NT revolution that has taken the 3-D animation world by storm. If you have seen that dancing baby in action, you have seen Studio MAX. But gyrating toddlers aside, there is no denying what MAX means to animation and modeling. Stephen Cocks, creative director at Big Mouth Post in Atlanta, says, "3D Studio MAX, plus every one of its plug-ins, is pretty much invaluable."
Phil Price, president and creative director of Click 3X in New York, says, "More and more things are done on the desktop now, and budgets are coming down, so we use equipment together. The combination of MAX with [Discreet Logic's] effect* and paint* provide some features no other system has. In 3D Studio, they have real 3-D motion tracking, which isn't available in other packages."
The latest and greatest is R2.5, released a few months ago. Besides motion tracking, it incorporates sophisticated NURBS points and curves, new NURBS surfaces, and added surface approximation options. The new version also offers displacement mapping, a powerful zoom feature, and some nice tools for game developers.
Product: Discreet Logic paint* Price: $895-$1,995, depending on options Purpose: To marry captivating 3-D tricks with the ease of a 2-D environment. It is actually a bit awkward to mention paint* while excluding effect* as the two (formerly known as Illuminaire Paint and Composition) are usually discussed in tandem.
The migration of the two products-as well as their bundling with 3D Studio MAX-was announced at last NAB, offering legions of MAX users a new slew of weapons. paint* itself is notable for its vector-based nature, permitting access to infinitely scaleable, painted bitmap-style textures. Users can import IPP files as resolution-independent textures for MAX objects and scenes and paint textures to objects in a drag-and-drop environment-all while maintaining timeline synch. While integration with 3D Studio MAX for interactive real-time feedback is available only on NT, paint*(and effect*) supports Windows '95 and Mac platforms as well.
Product: Media 100 lx Price: $9,995 Purpose: To eat up a big piece of nonlinear's suddenly huge middle market. The lx features the company's Vincent digital video engine, composite, S-video, and Y, R-Y, B-Y component video input/output, real-time ColorFX, preview MotionFX, preview dissolve and 24 accelerated transition effects, and CG Studio (an integrated character generator). The lx is compatible with QuickTime with alpha-channel support and features some nice audio options like real-time crossfades and mixing.
Don Lennox runs Don Lennox Productions in Washington D.C., where he makes documentaries and cable TV spots. "I bought it because it has the best picture quality in the business for online," he says. "I was looking for a system where I could online without spending $450 an hour at a post house. When I went to NAB, the Vincent board delivered the best quality, and there was no comparison when I considered the difference in price."
Product: NewTek LightWave 3D Price: $1,195 for version 5.6 Purpose: seaQuest DSV, Babylon 5, Robocop, The X-Files, Star Trek: The Next Generation: LightWave has compiled a resume that would be the envy of any Hollywood producer.
Maury Rosenfeld of Planet Blue in Hollywood (now in Santa Monica, too) says, "It has a good-to-excellent quality renderer, an excellent modeler, a good user base, relatively short learning curve, and very large feature set. Put in the hands of the right people, the output is excellent."
Product: Puffin Designs' Commotion Price: $2,495 Purpose: Playback, paint, and rotoscoping. Recent buffing-up included enhanced wire removal, Cineon file import/export, QuickTime 3.0 support, and a motion tracker that allows creation of an unlimited number of points to track objects over multiple frames. Late last year, version 1.1 was outfitted with natural B-splines (instead of traditional bezier splines), field/frame painting (both NTSC and PAL), camera-realistic motion blur (applied to rotosplines), stroke rotosplines (allows object or vector-based paint support), automatic dirt and dust removal, and support for new file formats including TIFF, TARGA, SGI, and Adobe formats.
Product: Strata StudioPro Price: $1,495 Purpose: An exceptional 3-D package for the price, StudioPro is now in version 2.5, which includes inverse kinematics, open GL, and improved QuickDraw. The package is especially popular among game developers. Omni Creative Group Int'l in St. Louis is one such customer. Creative director Jeff Tobler says, "The new features are great. The IK is hugely powerful for adding bones to meshes, and the scan line renderer with soft shadows is nice. I believe it's the best renderer out there, and the bulk of our work is images, so we can spend a little more time than other people."
Product: Sony DSR-PD1 Price: $2,795 Purpose: To further disprove the "bigger is better" myth. This is a 1.1-pound digital camcorder that lets shooters navigate smaller, tighter spaces. In filming a new space shuttle documentary called The Real Stuff (by Dan and Annie Wetherbee), the astronauts agreed to take the camera into orbit with them (look for the full story in the September Millimeter). The camera was so unobtrusive that it fit into the pockets of their space suits.
Product: Digidesign Pro Tools Price: $7,995 Purpose: To help the audio world inch slowly closer to a tapeless existence. Digidesign is owned by Avid, which is only fitting, since Pro Tools is gaining a broad acceptance among audio professionals comparable to Media Composer's popularity among editors. Effects, music, dialogue, narration, mono mix, and stereo mix are all easily stored and recalled. With the software now in version 4.2, Digidesign reports more than 100,000 sales worldwide.
Product: Yamaha O2R Price: $8,899 for Version 2 Purpose: Howard Schwartz, who helms Howard Schwartz Recording in New York, says, "Pound for pound, it's the best piece of gear out there for the buck. >From a post standpoint, it's not a finishing console, but it's a great workhorse." Apart from film and video post work, music producers like Phil Ramone have been tracking with the O2R-a hefty endorsement, indeed. Thanks to a recent software upgrade, it now supports 24-bit recording, surround panning, and can link to remote control the ProMIX 01.
Product: Equilibrium DeBabelizer Price: $599.95 Purpose: To process and convert graphics and animation for multimedia and print applications. DeBabelizer recently came out in Version 3 and now automates work with multiple graphics file formats by processing and optimizing files for delivery in any medium. Version 3 also features full CMYK color printing, expanded Web support, and a revamped, easy-to-use interface. The package supports over 100 file types-including new ones like QuickTime 3.0, Windows BMP (16- and 24-bit), Scitex CT, DCS, Sony Playstation TIM, Animated GIF, Progressive JPEG, and Photoshop palette files (8BCT).
Product: ScheduALL Price: up to $7,000 Purpose: To get things at your facility organized! The popular ScheduALL is made by Miami-based company VizuAll, Inc. There are a few iterations of the software, and some price under $3,000. Will Hoover, president of Realtime Video in San Francisco, says, "It's not just accounting software, but a package unifying everything: client data, quotes, job data. It has made a huge difference in throughput."
Product: MetaCreations Poser 3.0 Price: $199 Purpose: In June, MetaCreations released version 3.0 of Poser, a 3-D desktop posing and animation tool. It features realistic, poseable hands, faces, hair, clothes, animal models with articulated body parts, a library of facial expressions, an easy interface, and the ability to read BVH motion capture files. It also has a number of walk options, like "sneak" or "shuffle," plus some cool head bouncing and arm swinging tricks. This latest version also offers improved export into other 3-D apps, including a direct plug-in to the company's RayDream Studio. And for 200 bucks, it is hard to go wrong.
Product: Impulse's Organica Price: $150 Purpose: To (very) cheaply enable make-believe people to look and act like real ones. Organica is made by Impulse, Inc., makers of Imagine. In the words of Stephen Cocks, creative director at Atlanta's Big Mouth Post, "A good metaballs software will cost up to $1,500. This is a $150 program that does a great job. I stumbled across it when I downloaded a one-meg demo from the Web. I've been using it a lot lately for character modeling; I made a really cool little old man with saggy jowels."
Product: Wacom Pen and Tablet Price: $174.99 and up Purpose: To give artists pressure-sensitivity for those subtle areas of the job. "You can't really paint any textures without one of these," says digital effects supervisor Mitch Kopelman of Blue Sky|VIFX in Harrison, New York. "A mouse without the pressure sensitivity is just too clumsy." Wacom's pressure-sensitive pen input interacts with a 256,000 active-matrix LCD monitor. The 10.4-inch PCL-300 LCD Display Tablet works with Wacom's Erasing UltraPen to offer an interactive display for imaging, writing on documents, and entering signatures or other info directly-all at a resolution of more than 500 lines per inch (about twice that of a mouse).
Product: Ikegami TM20-20RH & TM14-20RH Monitors Price: $5,700; $5,500 Purpose: To see video the way it is meant to be seen. Mitchell Brill, director of operations at New York's Lifetime Studios, swears by the 20- and 14-inch auto-setup/digital ready monitors. He explains, "The rationale is quite simple. A lot of directors are getting up from the control room and going out on the floor. They want to see consistent image and coloring. We recently went around the house and replaced or upgraded all the primary monitors to be digital-ready. We have two 20-inches in the control room, a 20 and two 14s in the video engineering room, and a 20 out on the floor." Brill sums up, "There are a lot of gizmos out there, but what's the point if the images aren't consistent around the house?"
The Cool Tools Panel These are just a few of the people using this equipment. More importantly, they are ones who took the time to talk about the gear.
Jonathan Applebaum, Broadway Video, New York; Greg Ciaccio, Anderson Video, Los Angeles; Edward Bishop & Pericles Lewnes, ColorCast Productions, Severna Park, Maryland; Mitchell Brill, Lifetime Studios, New York; Nathan Byrne, Post Millennium, New York; Stephen Cocks, Big Mouth Post, Atlanta; Bruce Copeman, AXYZ, Toronto; David Cornman, Blue Rock, New York; Ken DeGrande, Metropolis Digital, San Jose; Brian Diecks, Brian Diecks Design, New York; Jim Fancher, POP, Santa Monica; Eric Guagliano, Disney Feature Animation, BuenaVista, Florida; Gavin Holmes, Mindflex, Atlanta; Scott Holmgren, First Edition, New York; Will Hoover, Realtime Video, San Francisco; Patricia Judice, DNA, Hollywood; Manny Kivowitz, KSK Films, New York; Mitch Kopleman and Dan Whiting, Blue Sky/VIFX, Harrison, New York; Igor Kovalik, Inside/Out, Santa Monica; Don Lennox, Don Lennox Productions, Washington D.C.; Marc Levisohn, HUM Music + Sound Design, Santa Monica; John Lindauer, Pavlov Productions Culver City, California; Jeff Lotman, Virtual Celebrity Productions, Los Angeles; Alan Miller, Moving Pictures, New York; Barry Nulman, The Post Group, Hollywood; Philip Owens, Windmill Lane Productions, Santa Monica; Maury Rosenfeld, Planet Blue, Hollywood; Howard Schwartz, Howard Schwartz Recording, New York; Adam Shaheen, Cuppa Coffee, Toronto; Jeff Tober, Omni Creative Group Int'l, St. Louis; Richard Winkler, Curious Pictures, New York; Dave Winter, WinterWorks, Topanga, California
