It’s been a long time coming, and it still amazes me that there’s not anything else on the market quite like it. With productions increasingly moving towards digital acquisition (and with companies becoming focussed more on environmental impact), it seems that the time is right to end the use of paper-based annotation and logging. Synaesthesia helps you to do that, and more besides.

Starting out as a way for me to work a bit more efficiently on complex productions such as Earth, it soon became apparent that the same tools would be just as useful on a low-budget, independent production, so we gave it a test-drive on an in-house project.

Three years ago we decided the time was right to make it available to others, so work began on adapting the system to make it user-friendly. Then 2 years ago to the day, we announced the availability of the software as part of a beta programme. Initially we thought it was reasonably close to what the final product would be like, but then 2 years went by.

In that time, we’ve listened to feedback, and implemented a bunch of new stuff. We added integration with third-party products like Final Cut Pro (7), Shotgun, Assimilate Scratch, and Final Draft. We added the ability to export everything to CSV files, and created a format that can be used to share data between Synaesthesia systems. We added other features like file checksumming and automatic updates based on feedback, and improved the performance and usability as we went along.

All this, and it still runs on PowerPC macs (running OS 10.5). I wonder how many other applications released this year will be able to make that claim.

If you haven’t yet had a look at Synaesthesia, now is the time to do so. There is a free 30-day trial available on the product website, and you can check out our overview video below.

Synaesthesia demonstration from Surreal Road on Vimeo.

(We’ll decide the winners in January 2012 and notify them by email. By emailing us, you grant us the right to use publish your story, so please don’t break any NDAs!)

Today they’ve announced they will be unable to support their current range of products, and as such, they are giving them all away for free.

Wow.

You can download the plugins from their website.

You’ll now see this button in the Reel Breakdown and throughout the Asset Manager. The purpose of this button is one of the reasons I created Synaesthesia in the first place, and it’s a considerable milestone for it to be included.

Here’s the scenario: during the lifetime of a production, reels (and other assets) that are created will be sent out to post facilities, loaned out to people, and so on. How do you keep track of all of this? Until now, you could do this by simply changing the reel’s (or asset’s) location. The problem is, that doesn’t tell you where the item belongs.

With the check-out system, you still have the original location stored, but there’s a record of who it was checked out to, and when. Nothing earth-shattering, but useful when you later try to track down that reel that’s gone missing. And it’s as easy as going to the reel breakdown and clicking a button (or via the Asset Manager).

Also, Apple today released Final Cut Pro 10.0.1 which has a brand-new XML format. So expect support for that in the next version of Synaesthesia (maybe…).

Current Synaesthesia users will be notified of the new version when running the application during the next few days, otherwise it can be downloaded as usual.

Synaesthesia has been in beta now for almost 2 years, and I believe, is almost production-ready.

James Cameron hates gurus. He imagines them in white lab coats, telling people what they can’t do. On the other hand, him and Vincent Pace want your money in return for certification.

In a nutshell, Cameron Pace Group is trying to become the authority on all things 3D. Their idea is that everything from the workflow and kit used during a shoot, through to the consumer equipment used to playback 3D content will be branded with their logo, much in a similar way to THX and audio equipment. Will they be successful? Well their showreel is certainly impressive.

Adobe has acquired IRIDAS, they of the wonderful SpeedGrade software. Looks like Adobe could be dipping its toe into digital intermediate waters at last. Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is now available for Windows (in addition to Mac and Linux). Filmlight’s Baselight is now available as a plugin for The Foundry’s Nuke, which is a nice idea, especially considering that their Final Cut Pro plugin may turn out to be a waste of time.

The Foundry themselves were introducing a new workflow tool, Hiero. It’s the first stand-alone conforming system I’ve seen (that wasn’t just a cut down grading system at least), and there’s a beta programme if you want to take a closer look.

One of the more interesting products (although not a new one) was Colorfront’s On-Set Dailes. It will ingest and output any format under the sun, has a gorgeous interface, and is the only digital dailies system that I know of that will do sound sync. If you are involved with dailies in any capacity, take a look at it.

There were several “alternatives to FTP” on offer, like TixelTec and FileCatalyst, boasting high-speed transfers, but conveniently neglecting to point out that the transfer speed is almost entirely limited by the lowest speed of either party (oh yes, and FTP is simple and also free to implement). On the other hand, the FileCatalyst Webmail system, which is designed to be a user-friendly front-end to file transfers, is worth a look.

Finally, anyone interested in where colour grading might be going next, should take a look at Bakery Relight. It’s a system for 3D animation rather than post-production, With more work being done in 3D, and with advancements in 2D-to-3D technology, it’s only a matter of time before we start to see tools like that in the grading suite.

Wanting around at IBC this year, one thing stuck me more than anything else. There are now more proprietary capture formats than ever before.

This isn’t anything new, after all video has a long and unsavoury history of competing formats, much to the chagrin of everyone who backed HD-DVD for instance. But with digital formats becoming dominant, this has reached fever pitch. And I would argue, it’s completely unnecessary at best, and at worst it’s completely detrimental to the industry.

RED gives no impression that their business model is anything other than packaging for a proprietary format. But they give you tools to work with it, that are for the most part pretty good, but also available for free. You can gain access to the SDK, but only if you are willing to sign an NDA. incredibly, this is the most accessible of all the formats. Silicon imaging want to charge you $1000+ just to decode footage shot on their cameras. And the new champion of digital camera formats, ArriRaw, is completely unsupported for the most part. I spoke to someone about the long awaited SDK, only to be told that it is actually available, but only to select Arri partners. Whatever the hell that means. And it goes on and on with the likes of Sony, Panasonic ad naseum.

Granted, this is nothing new. But what I don’t understand is why we as professionals dealing with the ramifications of all of this continue to do so with smiles on our faces. Everyone is excited at the Arri stand this year. The footage looks great. That is more important than the ability to post the footage, as perhaps it should be. But given the footage from the camera is so good, why limit the ability to properly work with it? Why shouldn’t I be able to take my ArriRaw files into any post-house, regardless of the grading system or infrastructure used. Surely this would be best for Arri et al?

And worst of all, why do we, as the hapless victims of this situation, continue to allow it to happen? Why do we continue to evangelise a technology that is ultimately detrimental to our day to day lives? The visual effects industry managed to find a common ground with OpenEXR, I can only hope we might one day do the same.

…Um no. I was thinking of something else there.

This is just a very minor update to fix some bugs and tidy up some loose ends. It also extends the trial period through the end of September.

Read about the changes here.

Download the new version.

Speaking of everyone’s favourite editing system, Apple have officially announced that there will be APIs made available soon. Hopefully this will allow a future version of Synaesthesia tie directly in to Final Cut Pro, and thus restore some of the missing functionality.

On the surface, everything is very shiny and modern. The interface, which was somewhat unfairly compared to iMovie, is a much needed replacement for the very stiff throwback to Avid MediaComposer that was Final Cut Pro 7. It reminds me a great deal of Kai’s Power Tools, and it’s just as much fun to play around with. There’s an event library, which gives you some of the functionality of Final Cut Server, in that you can have media that shared between projects, like stock footage. There’s a lot of processing that goes on in the background. There’s some crashes too, but that’s to be expected with shrink-wrapped software.

There’s a learning curve here, as everything now has a different icon from it’s predecessor, but that was to be expected. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?

Breaking. Some. Eggs.

Well, in the case of FCPX, those eggs are everything a professional editor needs to do their job. It seems like utter madness to release a version of Final Cut Pro that doesn’t import projects from FCP7, that doesn’t provide EDL support (in fact, it is currently impossible to online anything created inside FCPX), that there’s no electronic manual (other than the online help) and that doesn’t have deck control, but that’s what we’ve got here.

Instead, there’s the ability to import from iMovie, publish to YouTube and automatically colour-correct everything. I have absolutely no problem with any of that, but those features are clearly aimed at a different audience, one I suspect already uses iMovie for videoblogging and is now looking to do a little more. FCPX is clearly not aimed at post-production professionals who are hoping for an improvement over FCP7.

Which begs the question, why call it Final Cut Pro at all?

Final Cut Pro was always the underdog to Avid in the high-end editing game, but since the release of Final Cut Studio, it was increasingly gaining ground within Hollywood. Hell, I even used FCP 7 to online The Bengali Detective. So it is astonishing that Apple would suddenly do a U-turn and leave that market left out in the cold.

Editors need to be able to preview their work on a broadcast monitor. They need to be able output edit decision lists in one form or another. They can’t, and yet the wealth of output options can only suggest that this was entirely deliberate.

There were a lot of people who were worried FCPX would be dumbed-down, on the basis that the interface was very similar to iMovie. Then the Apple PR engine rolled out a bunch of testimonials from people claiming that it was going to be great. Even Steve Jobs got in on the act. But in all honestly, nothing about it seems dumbed-down. There’s an absolute ton of innovation in there, a load of features and performance improvements that people have been clamouring for. You just can’t shake the feeling that every single omission is deliberate. It’s just that, in true Apple style, they seem to think they can tell editors how they can be doing their jobs better. At best it shows a lack of understanding of real-world editing (i.e. not direct-to-web editing), and at worst it shows contempt for its own market. It’s not that it isn’t a great product for the right audience. I dare say it will get some use from me on specific, straight-to-web jobs. But an upgrade it is not.

FCPX is also the first Final Cut Pro that is only available via digital download. It’s reasonably-priced because of this (at $299) but then again, many people who paid, thinking they were getting an upgrade to Final Cut Pro will find themselves out of luck, and with no recourse for a refund.

As well as having known each other for over half our lives, we also worked together on several projects, most notably “Films by Surreal Road”, an attempt to utilise digital production and distribution to create independent low-budget films. That didn’t work out well enough to be commercially viable, but it was a great experience, and the test films we created, which Scott either wrote, produced or starred in (putting his acting skills to great use), still live on.

Scott was always on a personal crusade to try and right injustice, and in 2008, around the time Surreal Road switched its focus to software development, he had decided that he wanted to turn his attention to far more noble causes, such as supporting human rights, and in particular, protecting privacy in an age where the subject is becoming increasingly important and complex. So it was that he enrolled into a college and started studying for a Law degree, which he would have completed by next summer.

It’s weird to have so much of his history recorded somewhere, what with both of us having been technophiles, and his love of writing. I still have thousands of emails from him (a great many of them being multi-page monologues) going back to 2003, when we came up with the company name, Surreal Road (looking back now, I can see that we also considered such exciting names as “Pupil of Dilation” and “Bloodshot Eye”), as well as the everyday ones he sent me that showcase his special brand of dark humour and sum him up better than anything I can come up with, such as:

30/03/2003: oOPS, I just woke up two days late.  It’s not entirely my fault though.  I have a fucking bug or summink again and spent the last day and half stuck in a fucking dream about hamsters in pink skirts only to wake up in solidyfied sweat.  Mum says its sunday but im not quite sure I believe her.

not to mention the countless voicemails he left me that I saved over the years because they were so damn entertaining. Each of these little treasures will no doubt provide me with a great source of nostalgia in the future and I’m glad to have kept them.

Scott Lust, c.2004

We will miss you.