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Editing and Output at NAB 2007

Apr 27, 2007 6:39 PM, By Jan Ozer

At NAB 2007, the lower level of the South Hall was dominated by computer-related technologies. This article first describes video editing related announcements, then announcements relating to streaming media encoding. On the video editing front, I’ll describe the big three first, then the rest in alphabetical order.

As the historical market leader in the film and broadcast market, Avid boasts the most comprehensive product offering. For this reason, it’s perhaps no surprise that Avid had no new product announcements. The most important new feature announced at NAB was ScriptSync, an indexing feature that automatically matches dailies to script scenes in seconds, offering a great time savings over the manual matching that was required previously. Avid also announced price and performance improvements to its Unity MediaNetwork, adoption figures for Interplay (150 clients/5400 seats), and its Open Platform Initiative (including 50 leading hardware and software vendors).

Also at the show, Avid announced Avid Liquid 7.2, which features native ingest, editing, and export support for the JVC GY-HD100 and 200 series of HDV cameras, the Panasonic HD P2 format, and for Canon XL H1 Frame capture. The company also announced Avid Liquid Chrome Xe, which works in conjunction with the AJA Xena LHe board to provide SD and HD analog and SDI I/O, and realtime HD preview from the timeline. With Adobe pulling DVD authoring from the Premiere timeline, Liquid is the only major video editor with integrated DVD authoring, a great feature if you’re pumping out lots of discs. Avid also improved Liquid’s streaming output capabilities, which were critically deficient in previous versions.

Apple made several very significant announcements, including Final Cut Server, a media asset management and workflow automation tool based on technology acquired from Proximity in December 2006. Apple also announced Apple ProRes 422, an intermediate format like Avid’s DNxHD codec that offers two bit rates (145 and 220Mbps). According to Apple, “[The codec] offers uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes.”

Also new is Apple Color, the fruit of Apple’s acquisition of Silicon Color, where it was sold as FinalTouch for $24,995. It’s a tremendously functional program, with color correction, motion tracking, pan and scan, and many predefined looks that make its advanced features accessible even to novice users. I can see this being useful for everyone from a film producer to wedding videographers who previously had to buy plug-ins such as Red Giant Software Magic Bullet to achieve a certain film-like look.

Apple also upgraded several suite components, including Final Cut Pro, which saw the addition of the Open Format Timeline, which now lets you mix formats with different resolutions, frame rates, and even video standards (NTSC and PAL) on the same timeline. This looked very impressive during the demo. It also fills a critical feature gap for me, because previously it was challenging to mix DV and HDV on the same timeline. That said, you still can’t mix formats with the multi-cam tool, which is unfortunate.

Basically, this is the only editor I’m aware of that’s subject to this limitation. Premiere Pro, Liquid, Vegas (with third party plug-in), and Avid can all do this. I’m shooting my wife’s ballet on the weekend. It will be a two-camera HDV shoot, but if I added a DV camera, I couldn’t edit the multicam footage in FCP without upsampling the DV material to HDV first. That takes a couple of hours, potentially degrades quality, adds 60GB to my storage requirements, and isn’t required by any other editor.

Apple also added 3D effects to Motion, added multi-track production to Soundtrack, and completely revamped Compressor. The encoding tool—now a standalone—features new “optical flow” technology that Apple claims improves format conversions. Notably, however, Apple did not upgrade DVD Studio Pro 4, which means it's now the only major authoring program without Blu-ray capabilities. Pricing for the complete product suite is $1,299.

Before NAB, Adobe announced that the company would ship the next version of what was previously known as Production Studio on both the Windows and Intel-based Mac platforms. At the show, Adobe fleshed out the new features and integration advances of the new suite, now known as Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. (Creative Suite 3 Design, which includes Photoshop CS3 Extended, began shipping during the show. Creative Suite 3 Production Premium, which includes new versions of Premiere and After Effects, will ship in July.)

For example, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended supports video layers, for video painting and cloning over multiple frames. New features in After Effects include Shape layers, a puppet tool and per-character 3D text animation. Premiere Pro boasts new speed controls for variable speed changes. Both After Effects and Premiere Pro can work with Adobe Device Central, allowing new preview capabilities for producing content for mobile devices. As I discovered while working on the beta, Premiere Pro can no longer author DVDs with menus, a feature I’ll sorely miss for simple productions.

Adobe’s late-2006 acquisition of Serious Magic yielded two additions to the suite, OnLocation and Ultra. OnLocation (formerly HDV Rack and DV Rack) is a killer product that adds tools such as a waveform monitor and audio spectrum analyzer so you can fine-tune exposure and audio settings before capturing. It's also got digital disk recorder functionality. Ultra supplies very high-quality chroma keying capabilities and virtual sets, though I’d prefer to key directly from within Premiere Pro and After Effects. Note that neither OnLocation nor Ultra will run on the Mac. They’ll be in the box, but you’ll need a Windows computer to run them. (Or Boot Camp.)

Adobe added Blu-ray support to Adobe Encore, which can now also export your DVD project as a SWF, which sounds very intriguing. Speaking of sound, Adobe removed Adobe Audition from the bundle and substituted Soundbooth, which has a narrower, video-oriented feature set that doesn’t include multi-track editing. Soundbooth looks good, but I’ve become a big fan of Audition and I’m sorry to see it go.

Suite pricing is extremely aggressive. Although the new Production Premium suite retails for $1,699, if you own any single component like Photoshop, After Effects, or Illustrator, on Windows or Macintosh, you can upgrade to the new version for $1,199. If you’re a Mac producer and add up the upgrades you’ll probably have to make anyway—such as Photoshop and After Effects—and throw in the $500 or so you’ll need for Blu-ray authoring (Sonic DVDit HD, which runs only on Windows), you’re close to the upgrade price for the entire suite. With After Effects and Photoshop as anchor tenants—and because DVD Studio 4 lacks Blu-ray authoring—the CS3 suite has the potential to be an absolute blockbuster on the Macintosh platform.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.