•postbrooklyn•

I searched high and low on the internet for an explanation on how to do this, but found very little of value to my own circumstance, namely — someone who doesn’t know squat about unix shell scripting and is in the position of watching his Qmaster program not function correctly (which seems to be the way it was designed to work…). Anyway, it works fine on the intel mac pro, but on a G5, qmaster is a deadbeat. What to do? Well, the only way to batch render in Shake (something I have to be able to do, or I can pretty much kiss this deadline goodbye) is through qmaster…or a series of exec commands issued from the Apple Terminal. I found that nugget online. Well, I tried it and it gave me a bunch of gobbledygook for error messages. I knew that I was having trouble getting the exact right connection of pathways and whatnot to make it sing and I didn’t have a clue as to what that would be. Enter Qmaster! It appears with a “submit” button grayed out so you can’t use it, but you can select a Shake script to render. And when you do select one in Qmaster — it gives you the exact command line terminology to use. So, you copy and paste a series of these selections together, separated by a semi-colon and then you can paste it into Terminal, hit return… and watch as the unix shell powers your batch render. Kind of a crappy workaround (and I hope to figure out Qmaster’s foibles at some point), but it beats not being able to batch the files (considering I have approximately 80 composites to render out in the next few days)…

I learned how to make an explosion in 3D today. Needless to say this is quite exciting, but I’m sure I’ll abuse it far better than I’ll use it for the next few months.

I’m sure tomorrow will bring some newfound excitement, too.

Sometimes… but, today, it seems to be working with me. I made the mistake of “downloading” some models of neurons for our latest show “The Brain Fitness Program.” And after playing around with those very capable little models, I discovered that the kind of animation I needed to do would require a bit more flexibility than those models could provide. Rather than trying to tinker with that and risk blowing it all up… I figured, “Heck, why not reinvent the wheel?”

This is the kind of thinking that usually gets you into trouble. However, after a few cautious experiments, I found that I could place a glowing orb in a semi-transparent rough cell body…and voila, nucleus! And then, a few more shaders, and the neuron axon looked kind of electron microscopic and bumpy. And with this, I could actually make my pre-synaptic neuron ends partially transparent and put little baubles inside them to be neurotransmitter stand-ins. And the coup de grace? Finally figuring out how to make a little pulsing trace of volumetric light to show the nerve impulse. And the result:

So, Apple Shake is indeed an incredibly powerful program. I do read, though, that it’s at EOL in terms of development (which is saddening), but seeing what it can do currently is really pretty amazing and I’m not sure what you would want from it that isn’t being handled by some other application. It’s clearly a compositor’s tool — and that’s pretty much it. I’ve been working in After Effects for nearly a decade, so I get compositing — but node based compositing was a totally new idea for me.

It seems highly ironic that I’m starting to compile green screen composites for the show “The Brain Fitness Program” — about neuroplasticity — with a program that I have to struggle to simply understand to begin with. But, that’s the good thing — learning, as I’m now quite aware, is really what you want to keep doing in order to strengthen your brain as you age.

So, I guess it’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing because Shake can handle keying some of these tougher green screen shots far better than After Effects with a simple swap in the metaphor. Plus, it’s integrated with Final Cut, so it makes the whole process a little bit less of a data management nightmare. I think. We’ll see…

We’re rabidly awaiting the (fedex delivery delayed) arrival of the latest addition to the post arsenal around here. It feels like we’ve really been adding capabilities lately, which is a good thing, since the kind of work we’re starting to do has more and more visual effects. And in case you’ve been living under a rock near a repertory moviehouse, you’re also certain to realize that everyone is doing more visual effects. Even the stuff (they call it “invisible”) that doesn’t seem to have visual effects, has a lot of visual effects. We’ve recently added the 3D option (and have already created a few very rough composites with it — soon to be posted on the reel page) and now, we’ll be adding a previously unattainable program that can make those invisible composites come to life — Apple Shake.

Even for someone who’s been using After Effects since before it was owned by Adobe (I did my first compositing in 1995 on a Mac Quadra 840 AV using a little program called CoSA in the service of the PC game for the movie “Eraser,” if you can believe that…), I’m a little excited by the possibilities I glimpsed in a brief trial run of Shake. Of course, I’d heard all of the PR on it — Lord of the Rings, King Kong, blah, blah… but, really, it was the cost of it versus buying a plug-in that would get a better roundtrip key in Final Cut (Automatic Duck for import into After Effects) that finally pushed me over the edge. I like the idea of keeping all the footage in the same application family, largely because every time you start outputting and re-encoding the footage, things start getting a little screwy. As I’ve noticed before, DVCPro HD is a fine acquisition format, but it doesn’t hold up so well as it starts to get rendered and re-rendered… I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do the final composite in Uncompressed HD, but that has yet to be determined…

More info on Shake as we run it through its paces… and run it like a marathoner, I imagine.

Well, we’re into the homestretch on the Good Night sleep program and the ugliness that is HD to SD conversions has reared its awful head once more. As I began to look at the downconverted signal out of our Kona 2, I was thinking it looked relatively soft. I had heard rumors on the internet that the DVCPro HD codec itself had a “soft” look to it. I hadn’t really seen this in a downconversion before and began to worry that all of that “let’s do it in HD and create an SD and HD master from the same material” may have been a pie in the sky ideal.

There’s good and bad news coming out in this process, so first the good news: I don’t have to redigitize everything into standard definition or even uncompressed HD. In fact, it’s quite surprising to realize that there is no visual difference (to the eye, mind you — engineers will undoubtedly balk at such claims) between the downconverted HD that’s been compressed and the source downconverted HD from camera original into SD 4×3. That’s a good thing and saves on both space and time. The bad news? It appears that the Kona’s own DVCPro HD downconversion induces some amount of softness into its resolving of creating the cropped master. That’s bad news — basically, you can’t get quite the same quality out of the card that you can out of the tape. A strange thought to think about since there’s even more circuitry going on between the image and the tape in the convoluted “output at HD res and re-import at SD res from the HDCAM tape.” But, that’s apparently what happens. I’m not sure if the Kona is actually inducing the softness or having difficulty decoding the codec at a high enough resolution in the downconversion, but it’s definitely noticeable, as opposed to the redigitization process.

Fortunately for me, I was already planning on doing this output and re-import process, since there’s no other way to encode the captioning data from an NLE in HD with software (we don’t have the pockets to do the hardware HD captioner). So, making outputs it is…

As we continue to do work on the PBS pledge special, “Unlocking the Power of Your Brain” (tentative title), we also move forward with some other interesting visual effects capabilities as we’ve moved into the world of Apple Shake, a node based compositing program (best known as the compositor of choice for WETA effects in New Zealand, among other things). The “Brain” project features over 12 hours of green screened interviews and will probably have nearly 30-40 minutes of final composited shots in the final documentary, which is well beyond what we’re used to doing in terms of time. Even crazier than the sheer volume of compositing, though, is the hairpin deadline. I’ll report back on whether the “round trip” functionality of Final Cut to Shake and back really makes the difference in creating a workflow to conquer this particular deadline. Needless to say, after poking around the web and seeing the trial version in action, I’m excited at the sheer possibilities that Shake offers in comparison to After Effects (a program that I am quite happy with for other reasons).

On other notes, I also watched some demo footage from something called “Mocha” which is a 2.5D planar tracker that looks fantastic in terms of its capabilities. I’m strongly considering the purchase of that, as well, as it might be a tool to make our workflow far more robust — many’s the time I wish I could pull out a background image quickly and replace it with the right one, but the camera moves left or right… and a planar tracker seems like it’s possibly the only real way to work with it.

I’m thinking it may come in handy with the visual effects heavy short film that we have slated for post in the winter, but I’ll have to learn more, I think.

Well, we’ve finally gone and done it. We’ve joined the world of 3D here at postbrooklyn. We’re currently designing the open animations for the PBS show “Good Night with the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus,” as well as some of the medical illustrations. We’re also under contract to produce many of the background animations for the upcoming PBS documentary release, “Unlock the Power of Your Brain” (working title), which is also very exciting. Mostly, the possibilities here are moving forward.

We’re also tentatively involved in the pre-viz of the short narrative film, “Dream Thieves,” which is an apocalyptic futuristic drama… more on that as events transpire…

After running a multicam edit with 5 cameras of HD footage compressed to anamorphic SD ProRes HQ files, I’ve definitely gotten my head around the “not all codecs are for all things” idea. While this worked fine, it did limit the amount of real-time playback that the system (a G5 Dual 2.7Ghz) could actually handle. The MacPro seems to handle it better, but it still seems like overkill when you’re working in offline. Perhaps if we were also going to finish it in this resolution, it might make more sense. I think ProRes (and the specs I’ve been reading) make it a great intermediate codec, but not so much for a source codec — the processor load appears to be too great to take advantage of it and the other features of FCP. I will say, though, that for a compressed codec, it does look quite good. The footage would be difficult to spot versus uncompressed footage.

postbrooklyn is proud to announce that we’ll be providing the offline and HD online services for “Good Night with the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus” which will be airing on PBS stations this winter. The show just wrapped this weekend as a five camera HD shoot. We’ve already begun digitizing, using the latest FCS 2 and doing an anamorphic SD downconvert digitize into ProRes files. Those files will serve for the multicamera offline and then will lead to an online file format of DVCPro HD. Why not uncompressed HD? Well, PBS doesn’t accept delivery of these programs in HD, actually, so the added resolution would be lost upon them. Since the online will occur on a G5, though, the ProRes file format at HD resolution doesn’t appear to be qualified for use, so that option might be preferable (we’re going to experiment… stay tuned!). Uncompressed HD would make some sense (and might be the way we end up going), but the quality differential between the two formats upon a hardware downconvert appears to be relatively negligible. More experimentation will be required. There are a number of concerns with creating an HD master, chiefly, HD closed-captioning is difficult to accomplish for our budget (and pointless, considering the final delivery format), but moreover some of the shots may require a slight reposition to frame up properly. Things looked great in 16×9 sometimes, but seemed on the edge of the line when cropped to 4×3. Never looks great when you online that in SD, though, and then try to do a reposition. I haven’t had good success with creating the HD version, then creating a SD safe version in FC — it usually requires a lot of rendering, and when you’re dealing with 90 minutes of final product… a lot of disk space and bandwidth, too.

More as events warrant, of course…