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Best of NAB

Jun 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Bob Turner

Apple Motion and Serious Magic DV Rack stand out at a stellar show.

This was one of the best NABs I have attended in a long time! There were so many exciting products making debuts, high-definition alternatives, and more efficient and cost-effective workflows. In my mind, two of the applications offered were extreme standouts: Apple Motion and Serious Magic DV Rack.

Apple Motion

Scheduled to ship later this year, Apple's Motion is a motion video, text, and graphics effects package with realtime previews, particle effects, procedural behavior animation, and Final Cut Pro HD integration. Motion is priced at $299.

It is hard to say whether the graphical user interface with associated pen and tablet control received more “oohs” and “aaahs” when demonstrated, or if there were more accolades for the software's tools and effects compositing capabilities. The user interface looked very much like that of Discreet Flame at first glance. Like Discreet Flame, Motion offers gestural control, but the operations are very different.

Gestural control means that a swipe or a loop performed in a specific direction will access an operation or mode. For example, swipe the pen to the right and move 10 frames forward; draw a greater-than sign (>), and the Timeline starts playing; swipe down, and it stops playing; an L motion opens the library; and an F shape opens the file browser. (This works as well for the left-handed as it does for the right-handed.) There are more than 35 such gestures that allow you to keep your eyes on content creation instead of searching for keyboard commands or menu items.

The concept of the Motion application is to select an effect from a library and drag-and-drop it over an object — a graphic, text, or video clip. It is quite intuitive and easy to use. While a timeline and keyframe editing are available, you may not need to use the timeline most of the time.

The Motion library contains a suite of more than 90 accelerated filters, many of which will play in realtime on a video clip. The filters are divided into 12 subcategories:

• Blur (10 filters including Gaussian Blur, Channel Blur, Radial Blur, and Defocus);

• Glow (Light Rays, Bloom, Aura, etc.);

• Stylize (Color Emboss, Half Tone, Line Art, Tunnel, etc.);

• Border (including bevels);

• Keying (including PrimatteRT for chromakeying);

• Tiling (including kaleidoscope effects);

• Color correction (more than 15 filters including Color Balance, Levels, Color Reduce, and Threshold);

• Matte (Bezier or B-spline drawing and masking tools are available);

• Time (time-based filters including echo and strobe effects);

• Distortion (including Bump Map, Bulge, Glass Distortion, and Ripple);

• Sharpen; and

• Video (including filters for deinterlacing and “broadcast safe” colors and luminance).

There are unlimited video tracks with preset resolutions ranging from DV to HD. There is also an assortment of templates of complex designs ready to use and modify.

Apple frequently says Motion offers “realtime instant gratification.” While this sounds like marketing speak, it is true. Realtime performance encourages creativity, and it is especially important when trying and adjusting filters. The system does not lag in performance, and the interactivity in creating an effects composite may make you forget you are using a low-cost application and a personal computer.

I am most excited about the advanced particle engine. Prices of particle effect plug-ins generally start at $299 and go up. Motion offers an advanced particle engine for its low cost.

Drag-and-drop your dynamic sprite-based particle effects icon over a graphics element, and it starts emission of the clones. You can select a point, line, circle, or geometry for your image-emitting parameter. You can also control birth rate, life, speed, angle, spin, scale, and gradient colors for particle cells. And you can scale particles over their life or add behaviors like orbit and vortex. This is an incredibly creative yet easy to use toolset.

Behaviors are the heart of this application's workflow and offer an alternative to keyframing. Behaviors use procedural animation techniques to simulate organic animations, such as gravity and wind, attraction and repulsion, and other sophisticated fluid motion effects.

Motion comes with more than 40 unique behaviors divided into four types: basic (e.g., position, rotation, and fades/opacity); text-based (rolls, crawls, reveals, and character-by-character animations of vector-based text); simulation (organic effects); and parameter behaviors (apply repetitive functions to a single parameter of an object like oscillate or wiggle). There are also Custom Behaviors, with which editors and designers can create and store unique customized behaviors.

Motion also features timeline controls (trim, cut, shift), a keyframe editor, and a keyframe animation recorder that can record realtime dragged movements or slider movements. Dashboards are semi-transparent palettes that provide the most common tools associated with any selected object in a clean, organized way.

Motion offers media asset management tools, including a File Browser for searching for media, effects, and behavior settings. There are alignment tools such as dynamic alignment guides, grids, and rulers. There is a Project Pane that displays the structure of all the layers, media, and objects in a project, as well as the filters and behaviors applied to those objects. Layers and objects that are arranged higher up in the stack appear in front of the lower layers.

This QuickTime application integrates seamlessly with Final Cut Pro HD (bypassing import/export steps) and DVD Studio Pro 3, and makes excellent use of LiveType. Adobe Photoshop layers can be imported with blend modes and vector-based PDF graphics can be imported from Adobe Illustrator. Motion is also Adobe After Effects plug-in compatible. A RAM flipbook is available for viewing complex animations at full frame rate.

Finally, there are web-based Quick-time tours and a tutorial available that make this intuitive program easy to learn.

I only wish I could recount the excitement found at every demo. I must assume that most Mac-based postproduction facilities will have this low-cost application installed by next year's NAB.

Serious Magic DV Rack

DV Rack is the other application I would rank at the top of the NAB product introductions. Serious Magic President and CEO Mark Randall said this product could be the equivalent of a production truck for the DV-format videographer who is either a “one-man band” or has a serious shortage of production staff.

DV Rack is designed to work either on a laptop or desktop platform. With a price of $495, this is a remarkably cost-effective solution for DV-format digital recording and quality test-monitoring.

A production truck, he says? Well, think of what is found inside a production truck and the workflow involved. Engineering staff use instruments to assist with lighting. An audio engineer sets audio levels and monitors those levels.

Before shooting, DV Rack's scopes and monitoring can set up and adjust camera/lights/audio. During a shoot, DV Rack can perform DV Recording, which is triggered on and off by the camcorder if setup is chosen, and if the camcorder allows it (with back-up tape recording if desired). Instant reviews, automatic quality monitoring, and alerts can instantly report problems after the take, just as an engineer monitoring from the truck might. After the shoot, there is no waiting for ingest from tape — you can begin editing the DV files already recorded on the hard disk.

DV Rack's instruments include:

• A broadcast test monitor with DV input, Underscan, Title/Picture Safe display, and Zebra modes (similar to high-end viewfinders). The monitor is also 16:9/4:3 switchable and has the ability to freeze, zoom, split, and display dual zebra patterns.

• Waveform monitor and vectorscope with industry-standard monitoring functions and a direct DV signal input.

• DV Recorder with a pre-buffer so you actually begin recording at a preset amount of time prior to hitting the record button.

• A Video Analyzer that monitors on a pixel-by-pixel basis by moving a crosshair over the video displayed on the monitor. Numeric readouts are available in five color spaces: RGB, YUV, HSV, HSL, and CMYK.

• A Frame Grabber that grabs frame in standard JPEG, BMP, or PNG format.

• 32-band realtime audio spectrum analysis monitoring (stereo or mono) with peak metering holds and the ability to freeze the analysis.

• An automated realtime video and audio quality monitor with visual alerts for signals hitting user-defined limits.

• A video stopwatch clock featuring a display in video frames (drop frame or non-drop frame) and a time-of-day production clock that can be automatically calibrated to the atomic clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Each of these features can be user configured in the rack in any combination the operator wishes. At NAB, DV Rack was being used on a laptop. CEO Mark Randall also mentioned that an HDV expansion option for DV Rack is a possibility for the future.

In addition to its primary intended use, there is an important secondary reason that DV Rack was developed — for educating a new breed of professionals about quality test-monitoring. The majority of windows in this application offer the various test monitoring capabilities found in a production truck. The user interfaces make the test monitors look and feel like the traditional monitoring devices with similar operations.

Serious Magic plans to include tutorials for each “instrument” in this suite of test monitoring virtual devices. I believe this training will become a valuable tool for educators. It was impressive to see astonished broadcast engineers saying that this product works just the way you expect. The virtual knobs are similar if not identical to the real hardware knobs, and the operations are the same.

“This highlights one of the ways that inexpensive digital video has been both a great boon and a bane for the evolution of visual storytelling,” says Mark Randall. “Today, the number of videographers who value and know how to use monitoring equipment but don't due to weight/cost is eclipsed by the number who wouldn't know exactly how to use these tools to get better video, even if the tools were lightweight and inexpensive. Thus, we believe the educational aspects of DV Rack must be addressed in spades.

“However, we're hoping to make this a seamless part of using DV Rack so it doesn't seem like old-style ‘education,’” Randall says. “In my experience, gaining the best knowledge never seems like studying.”

This new application could have a significant effect on both electronic field production and on educating the next generation of video professionals on the importance and operation of test monitoring instruments.

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Bob Turner says he is still recovering from one of the more exciting NABs of his 35-year career. Bob can be reached at bob.turner3@comcast.net

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