The Fire/Smoke part of the NAB users group showed a lot of cool new features. Similar in flow to the effects demonstration, the editing part of the show was hosted by Discreet’s Stephane Labrie and Brian Reid from TOYBOX Toronto. Find out what’s coming up in the next releases of the discreet editing products.
First off was the official discreet announcment that they would be supporting the AAF format in their products. Of course, we’ll see how this transpires in reality, since discreet has been a part of the AAF Association for quite some time now. In fact, a discreet press release from 1998 announced that they were an early adopter. They also announced a partnership with Apple to support Final Cut Pro XML metadata, but were unclear about what exactly would be suppported. Its pretty understandable, since the two applications are very different — no concrete examples were given about what features would be supported. It’s cliche, but only time will tell about these two interchange announcments.
Stephane Labrie took over the reins for the fire/smoke technology demo. Some of these features are part of the 6.5 release, scheduled for later this year (noted by the [6.5] notation). Technology demo items are indicated by [techdemo]. The application is being rewritten in 64-bit code to allow access to more memory (currently limited to 2 Gigs). He also spoke of much better HDSL support — noting the transfer of 2K 4:4:4 frames at 15 frames per second.
Next up was the soft import feature [6.5], which allows fire users to access frames that are located on a SAN, NAS, or local filesystem, but to the artist they appear to be just another framestore clip. Any modifications which are made to the clips on the SAN/NAS/filesystem are automatically reflected in the clip in the discreet product. Unlike stonefs clips which reside on the local system via fibre channel or scsi, the performance of scrolling through the clip is limited by the speed of the filesystem. This is a one-way feature — in other words, you cannot make changes to the clip in the discreet product and have it reflected in the filesystem clip. Similar in nature to the soft import feature is the publish feature [6.5]. You can take a clip that is on the stonefs and have it be published on the SAN/NAS/filesystem. This includes the ability to publish a soft-edited clip with heads and tails. You also have the option of soft-wiring [6.5] clips from other stonefs framestores. When you load a clip using this option, the frames are not copied to the local framestore, but continually accessed from the remote framestore.
Photoshop import [6.5] was demonstrated, allowing you to import a flat photoshop file, a single layer, or all the layers with associated mattes. You can also import the files in the DVE module and have each photoshop layer assigned to a DVE layer.
The ability to utilize burn makes it into the next release of fire [6.5]. Burn rendering support is also built into the library for the inital implementation — allowing you to submit background renders of timelines from the library. Labrie also showed [techdemo] future featuer ideas, where users can select individual clips or multiple clips to burn in the timeline — allowing background rendering to take place while you are working on other scenes. The ability to render to burn directly from the DVE module was also discussed.
Archiving will be improved with the ability to unrender clips [6.5] prior to archiving — a real time and space saver.
Labrie showed a new transparent UI [techdemo] which allows the artist the see the entire image when working with certain controls….especially useful for hires images that are covered by the UI. He used the Colour Warper as an example. As soon as he started to adjust the values in the UI, the gray part of the UI disappeared and you could see the entire image on the screen.
While history is going to be part of the next effects release, it will also be making it into a future version of fire and smoke [techdemo]. Working in the timline, Labrie showed the ability to navigate through the history of a clip, make adjustments, and have the timeline automatically reflect the changes made to the clip. He also showed a new way of looking at history, which is a hierarchial layered listing of the processes done to a clip…which then allows you to adjust any of the processes. Consider it a batch-like view without a connecting flowgraph.
An example of Phython scripting [techdemo] was shown, allowing you to script repetitive tasks and apply them to multiple clips. It seemed as though it provided a lot of the same flexibility of custom batch nodes but in a macro-like way.
An early version of a new motion estimation module [techdemo] should make fire users happy. The demo, of course, looked great, but don’t they all? Effects users should be happy as well, since the original motion estimation batch node hasn’t undergone a major improvement since its introduction years ago (it still utilizes the old RealViz 2.0 algorithm).
It seems as though it has been a long time in coming, but a couple of really great additions to the timeline capabilities were shown [techdemo]. A new Soft Text timeline tool was shown with basic text functions built directly into the timeline. A huge addition is the addition of the DVE in the timeline…most likely made possible with the integration of clip history into all clips. You can select a clip in the timeline and you’re taken to the DVE.
A notepad feature (similar to the batch notepad feature) was shown on the fire editdesk [techdemo]. This allows artists to write notes directly on the desktop. Finally!