So, today Apple introduced their new line of laptops and a new 24″ Cinema Display Monitor with built in camera and speakers. The laptop specs are pretty cool and I can not wait until the updated 17″ pro version comes. However, I was really eyeing the 24″ monitor that came out. Built in iSight USB would be great. Right now, I have one of the 1st Generation Firewire iSights that work wonderfully, but it is firewire. I currently use a Canopus AVC-110 Firewire Media Converter and the they fight each other. So, when I do serious editing, I have to unplug the iSight. I also was thinking it for a client I am building an edit suite for so he and I can do video iChats.

I was really looking at it and then it hit me. As far as I can tell it uses only the Mini-DVI connector and there is no way to adapt it to the full DVI connectors on my Mac Pro. 

Basically I’m out of luck until some one comes up with an adaptor…which I am confident that someone eventually will. But this always brings up a good point…

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CONNECTORS AND WHAT THEY CONNECT TO. (Yeah, it is an ‘oh duh’ statement, but be honest, we have missed something like this at one point or another in our lives)

About a year ago I was editing a project for Xavier University. A bunch of basketball player interviews on a green screen. It was a segment that played during the games in the arena and for broadcast called Meet the Musketeer. The keyed-in background was their stats page from the season-long program and a photo doing a little move with titles every once in a while to help break up the questions. The goal here was to add separation between the player and the page. The problem is that the page sits at an angle and leaning away from the player. Your typical drop shadow functions don’t have this functionality. So, option 1:

• Duplicate the clip on a layer below the keyed clip
• Color Effect it so it is totally black outline
• Blur it
• Do a 3D Perspective of it to get it at the desired location.

Now, I had 15 of these with at around 4 to 6 clips per video. That’s a lot of work. I decided it was time to test something I was dying to try…FX Factory’s create your own plug-in feature (by Noise Industries).

However, before I get to that, let me divert for a few paragraphs about the core of this feature, Quartz Composer by Apple, Inc. Introduced in Mac OS X 10.4, loosely as a component of QuickTime, it actually has embedding itself deeply into the Mac Operating System by 10.5. Any Mac, since 10.4 can play a Quartz Composer document. Further more, if you installed the Developer Tools (which comes on the 10.4 or 10.5 installer disc) then you can create these documents. 

A Quartz Composer Document (in my interpretation) is a dynamically rendering technology that is variable based and relies heavily on the computer’s GPU. One example is a screen saver that produces an explosion of orange particles. It will infinitely render a new position, force, amount, etc. at the end of the previous. And for something like that, it is only a few nodes and you are done. I mention nodes, it is node based editing. A node is like building a flow chart, where you connect conduits of information in between areas. 

I’ve used Quartz Composer documents in several of my programs that output directly to a DV Firewire Media Converter, I’m tying them into LED Board Displays, and more. They are also being used by VJs as well as other Display Software. A great example of what compositions can do is quartzCompositions.com.

End of diversion….back to my problem…

So, I wanted a simple filter I could drop on all of my clips. Which, for this was ridiculously easy for Quartz Composer. Here is what I did in a nutshell…

• Tell Quartz Composer the Dimensions I am working in (Image Dimensions)
• Have my drop shadow image filled in with a color (sprite Color Fill)
• Be able to position it X,Y, & Z as well as Rotate it X, Y, & Z (sprite geometry)
• And for added measure, adjust the Width & Height as well (more sprite geometry)
• Of Course, Blur it. (Gaussian Blur & give it a definitive dimension)
• Finally, Super impose the original image on top of my new drop shadow (output on a Billboard)

Once I built the workflow, I then “published” the inputs for FX Factory to use. Once I linked it with FX Factory, it was a plug in. Restart Final Cut and I dropped it into the timeline and worked great and rendered like lighting. (I set the presets to my values for my project…just because I could) 

Attached is a screen shot of the final project. (Used with permission of Xavier University Athletic Department)

My goal is to eventually create a couple of tutorials on how to use Quartz Composer as well as create a plug-in composition.

Image of Versatile Drop Shadow in Use

Podcast Producer is an interesting technology that is only available with Mac OS X 10.5.x server software. One the surface, it is made to execute an unlimited amount of commands and technologies with the simple submission of your audio-only or video of your project. It can take care of placing titles and footers based off the title of your clip for you automatically, addressing multiple versions in differencing compression technologies, uploading to multiple destinations, creating and updating XML structures, e-mailing availability announcements, and more…with the right programming skills. That leads me to my next point…

As it is ridiculously easy to submit a project, it can be just potentially difficult to create these workflow if you don’t have the experience. A workflow is the set of commands you want executed on your media, in parallel. In a workflow, you can define the actions of multiple jobs to be done simultaneously before any compression take place. The compression jobs then can be executed, usually in parallel with one another. After which, the final pieces can be cataloged in XML and uploaded to any of the appropriate places. 

Now Apple has made this relatively easy, considering you have to think in parallel for the entire job and you literally could have 10 things going on at once with in the workflow with another 15 waiting on the end condition of each of those 10. It still takes time to develop. Now, not as much as it would if you had to process 5 or 30 videos a week. 

This is no small set up. In my experience, you need at least one Intel Mac with multiple cores running Mac OS X Server 10.5.x and at least one independent partition or drive dedicated to Podcast Producer. The optimal setup is multiple Intel Macs running Mac OS X or OS X Server 10.5.x. They need to use XGrid which is parallel processing software (built in to all versions of Mac OS X) and either shared space over Gigabit Ethernet or a XSan Fiber Channel System for shared storage. Podcast Producer only has to be on the controlling machine and it comes with OS X Server. If you want to do other formats than that of standard Quicktime, then the easiest is to spend $2,000 on a product from Telestream called Episode Podcast for Podcast Producer. As I understand it, you install this on the Podcast Producer Server and it will allow all of your machines in your XGrid to convert a myriad of formats, including MPEG-2, WMV, Flash. 

My experience has been that this is a richly powerful system that was initially designed for the people who want to get a message out there but don’t have the skills to do 3 videos a week of prepping the title, closer, compression, xml documentation, and posting. This was designed for teachers and professors to get class recordings out for students in a timely fashion that can do a whole lot more.

For instance, I used this with a project I worked on in my days at the Cintas Center at Xavier University. The organization is called NDICE and you can see the 2008 talks here. We recorded roughly three 1 hour talks a day, in three days. I would crash digitize on a FCP system on my laptop. I would make sure to have a clean beginning and end. I would export without doing any titles or copyright info. I would then submit the file with the appropriate title, author, and timing information and let it rip. What I had Podcast Producer do is create an audio-only version and a video version with an opening title and closing copyright. For the audio-only version I wrote a little script to speak the title and place it at the head of the audio. For both clips I wrote another piece of code to do a custom insert into my XMLs for the website as well as place them at a location for me to move them to the web server. (I was using a different machine for my web server than my Podcast Producer Server and did not have the time to setup the transport script between the two). It worked well for our needs and when I had to change one title on a clip, all I had to do was resubmit of Podcast Producer and then after it was done do a little manual cleaning of the XML which wasn’t too bad. (The page uses the same XML as iTunes uses to generate its list) Just so you know, I never got the XGrid to run on more than one machine (I suspect my limited knowledge of Kerberos, and yes you have to use Kerberos and Open Directory only on Intel Macs) but it ran well on an 3.0 GHz 8-Core Mac Pro with 8 Gigs of RAM. Each Parallel process took up 3GHz, running 4 processes simultaneously.  One more thing, in theory, you could write a piece of code to make sure that if the XML contained that clip, it would replace instead of appending.

Bottom line, it took me some time to come up with the code segments to do all of my customizations, but the infrastructure is sound to do it. And while you can’t submit a Motion Document or LiveType disguised as a Quicktime file (Believe me I tried since I STILL can not get Compressor to use a Cluster) you can take any other quicktime compatible file or anything else if you have the Episode Engine and use it to process to multiple formats. I have even come across people using lame and ffmpeg in XGrid to do all sorts of things. For large productions with multiple iterations requiring multiple outputs in different ways and locations, this is a dream…once it is configured correctly.

Simply, I try to be a repository of technical information on many subjects pertaining to media, kind of like a stew pot is a repository for many flavors. Does that mean I know it all…heck no…but I do enjoy learning new things everyday. I also enjoy seeing a problem in one area and use resources from other areas of expertise to aid in the solution. Hence the name, Media Stew was born. The name just fit both my skill sets and my personality.  Plus, I couldn’t resist the potential for puns.

This is Kevin Lewis’ Blog, owner of Media Stew, LLC. The goal of this blog and my Wiki is to document certain technological holes that people typically fall through in the various media industries. Generally, I will cover topics in Professional Video Production, Live Events, Post Production, and Programming/Scripting that I troubleshoot.