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Apple Final Cut Pro 7

Helmut Kobler — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:54:00 -0500

Apple’s newest edition of Final Cut Pro polishes an already mature, dominant video editor. That’s good news, since every Final Cut user will find clever, thoughtful refinements in version 7 that make life easier. But the focus on smaller tweaks has one drawback: it’s kept Apple from some fundamental infrastructure work that’s also needed.

One of the Final Cut 7’s standout features is a new version of the popular ProRes codec, ProRes Proxy. Proxy lets you encode video into tiny file sizes that even low-end laptops and iMacs can edit, but keeps the video--even HD--looking surprisingly good (though not perfect). Final Cut makes it easy to convert existing video into ProRes Proxy, and for Web or DVD projects, Proxy’s visual quality may be good enough to use for your project’s final output. If not, it’s easy to reassemble your work in a higher-quality version of ProRes and then output from there.

Final Cut Pro 7 is heavy on polish, but we wish it addressed a fundamental or two as well.

Apple has also redesigned its Speed Change feature, which lets you speed up and slow down a clip at precise moments (you’ll see this effect in any number of commercials or music videos). Of course, Final Cut has been able to ramp between speed values for years, but mastering this effect previously meant working with arcane speed graphs. Now you can simply place key frames in a clip and then drag them together or apart to change the video’s speed or freeze it. It’s all very visual and intuitive.

For editors who work off-site, Final Cut 7 has built-in support for iChat Theater, so you can create a videoconference with another iChat user and then play the video from your Viewer or the Canvas. It worked remarkably well for us using a 5Mbps cable Internet connection and should make life considerably easier for freelancers and those who edit remotely.

iChat Theater gets a little choppy when showing video with quick cuts and fast-moving camerawork, but generally does the job well.

Another improvement is the new Share menu, which lets you export your movie to preset or custom formats destined for websites, DVDs, and so on. The beauty of Share is that it works directly in Final Cut--no more loading up the busy, slightly intimidating Compressor application. Also, while Final Cut renders the video into your chosen format, it lets you keep editing, which is a major time-saver. Finally, Share will even let you burn a Blu-ray version of your movie (provided you have a third-party Blu-ray burner), along with simple menus.

Final Cut sports many other small, useful features, but we also hoped to see more fundamental, deeper improvements. A perfect example is Final Cut’s ancient Browser view, which lets you organize and find all the media in your project. Using the Browser is an essential part of editing, but Final Cut’s current rendition, neglected for years, now feels clumsy and primitive. In the last few years, OS X users have enjoyed new organizing/previewing tools like Smart Folders, Stacks, Spotlight searches, and Quick Look, but none of these tools has made its way into the Final Cut Browser. Even in 2009, the Browser’s most sophisticated tools don’t go far beyond basic folders with colored labels. Apple hasn’t even changed the size of thumbnail icons in the Browser--the largest thumbnail size available is tiny on today’s big 24- and 30-inch monitors.

The Little App Factory RipIt

Ray Aguilera — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:50:43 -0500

In-flight movies suck. They’re usually not the greatest films to begin with, and then anything that could possibly offend anyone--otherwise known as “the good parts”--gets edited out. Lucky for you, all you need is a MacBook and some headphones to stage your own film festival at 35,000 feet. But spinning a DVD takes a serious toll on battery life, which is where DVD ripping comes in.

RipIt takes the sometimes complex task of getting video off of DVDs and onto your hard drive and turns it into a single-click affair. In keeping with that simplicity, the app doesn’t force you to fuss with video codecs or bit rates, instead creating VIDEO_TS folders that exactly mimic a DVD’s structure are played back with the DVD Player app you use on your Mac to watch actual DVDs.

RipIt skips complicated options in favor of a simple interface.

Playing back the resulting files on your Mac works exactly the same way it would as if you had inserted the DVD itself into your optical drive--except you don’t need to worry about losing or scratching your expensive discs, and you can avoid the noise and battery drain of a spinning DVD drive. All of the menus, special features, and other options of the disc itself are intact. On the flip side, the resulting files won’t play on your iPod or iPhone, and they’re quite large--a feature-length DVD typically weighs in between 4 and 8 gigs--although apps like HandBrake (free, handbrake.fr) can easily convert RipIt’s output to compressed files that will playback on your other devices.

RipIt’s simple interface and reliable output are perfect for serious movie collectors looking to consolidate or back up their collection, or anyone who wants to watch DVDs in all their glory on the go, without the inconveniences of schlepping around actual discs.

Elgato Video Capture

Arvind Srinivasan — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:08:34 -0500

If you were a kid (or had a kid) any time between the mid-1980s and the turn of the century, chances are you have a bunch of old videotapes with incriminating footage on them. Chances are also good that your mother (or someone like her) has probably bothered you on more than one occasion about converting those aforementioned tapes—because really, who uses a VCR anymore? Using Elgato’s Video Capture, you can turn any analog source into 640x480 digital video files, for playback on your Mac, iPod touch, or iPhone.

The device itself is both sleek and functional and can be stashed in a pocket easily. Video Capture features composite and S-Video outs, so it’ll easily slurp in signals from DVD players, DVRs, video cameras, and other sources with analog outputs. There’s also an included Composite-to-SCART adapter, although SCART is a French standard that never gained much traction outside certain European countries.

Editing controls let you quickly trim footage.

On the software end, however, we found that Elgato’s solution is lacking in the features department. Though utilitarian, it’s simple at the cost of being too simple. First, processing video is incredibly system intensive. On our test Mac, a 2.4GHz dual-core MacBook Pro, the software used all the processing muscle of one CPU and half of the second during the entire conversion, making it impossible to do much of anything else.

We found that Elgato records video at approximately 13MB per minute—a 90-minute video at 640x480 came in at a whopping 1.1GB. Comparatively, when we used HandBrake, the resulting file size was a relatively svelte (and much more portable-device-friendly) 600MB. While we could have compressed the video with third-party software, it’s an additional step, not to mention another encoding, which can affect video quality. Using a variety of sources, the resulting video was consistently a tad darker than it should be, requiring us to crank up the brightness when watching clips encoded by Elgato’s software. The biggest miss, however, is the lack of a pause function while recording, for editing down clips as you encode them. The software does offer a timer function, which can stop recording in 30-minute increments, but you can’t enter your own record times, and you have to trim the excess blank video after the fact.

Video Capture’s editing and sharing capabilities worked well, but there were a few glitches. For example, the trimming functionality was seriously confusing. It’s color-coded, but there’s no clear indication of what the individual colors stand for. Furthermore, even though we tried logging in with several different YouTube accounts to upload our video to the service, it perplexingly only worked when we used a Google Account. On the other hand, the one-click iMovie export was glitch-free. That said, if you have a huge video file, we suggest you open it directly from iMovie—export makes another copy of the file for you to import into iMovie, but multiple copies of large videos can quickly chew through even the largest hard drives.

Elgato Turbo.264 HD

Ray Aguilera — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:39:04 -0500

It seems like everyone is drowning in video these days. With everything from full-sized camcorders to pocket-sized mini cams capable of shooting in HD, not to mention your DVD collection, there are endless hours of content to be watched. But ask anyone who’s ever waited for hours while converting video with H.264 encoders--for playback on an iPhone, Apple TV, or MacBook, for example--and it’s clear that video can be cumbersome for most consumers, even on recent Mac hardware. Elgato’s Turbo.264 HD aims to make converting video for use on your devices easier. It works with pretty much any kind of video, whether it’s something you shot yourself or video you ripped from your Welcome Back, Kotter DVD collection. Not that you’d do anything like that, of course.

The new Turbo.264 supports full 1080p.

Turbo.264 HD is a hardware video encoder and accelerator. The USB thumb drive–style form factor makes it easy to use, a theme that carries over into the bundled software. All you have to do is drag your video files into the app’s window, choose an encoding resolution, and you’re off. A previous incarnation of the hardware encoded standard-def video content, but the new HD version can handle both 720p and full 1080p HD video.

For home-movie mavens, the Turbo.264 HD has several handy tricks up its sleeve. Converting videos and uploading the results to YouTube is a one-click operation, once you’ve entered your YouTube credentials. It also speeds up transfers from your AVCHD camcorder and gooses video exports from iMovie, Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Pro, and Elgato’s own EyeTV hardware. Simple edit tools also allow you to preview clips and trim them before you spend the time encoding them in other formats. Using the Turbo.264 HD with iMovie ’09, we exported a 9-minute, 35-second HD video clip using settings for Apple TV in 5 minutes, 27 seconds. Using iMovie’s native export—without the Turbo.264—the exact same export took 16 minutes, 28 seconds.

Turbo.264 HD speeds up H.264 video conversions...making it easier to cram the Bluth family into your iPhone.

Even if you’re not an amateur Scorsese or Warren Miller, the Turbo.264 HD comes in handy for converting DVDs for playback on your MacBook or iPhone. Of course, breaking the copy protection--it’s so easy, can it really even be called breaking anymore?—is still technically illegal, but if you were to happen upon some DVD video that somehow got decrypted, the Turbo.264 HD makes quick work of it. A 28-minute, 36-second episode of Arrested Development took a mere 4 minutes, 54 seconds to convert for use on an iPhone, using a 3.06GHz iMac with 4GB of RAM.

As for the video quality, we found that videos encoded with the Turbo.264 HD didn’t look quite as good as the same video encoded with iMovie ’09, but for most personal applications, the dramatic increases in encoding speed were worth the small hit to quality.

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone

Roberto Baldwin — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:08:06 -0500

Since the introduction of the iPhone, SlingMedia has taunted us with news of SlingPlayer Mobile for the device. Even when the Sling app finally entered the iTunes App Store approval process of mystery, the delay of the app's release to the general public spawned talk of AT&T keeping Apple from approving the app.

With the iPhone approaching its two-year anniversary, SlingMedia has finally kept its promise.

After a few years practice on the Treo, Blackberry and other smartphones, it seems SlingMedia has learned that UI on a small device can make, or break, an app. Signing into a SlingBox is a painless affair and controlling the device via the iPhone is split between an easy to use D-pad setup for general navigation and a more robust Remote option that attempts to recreate the physical remote of your device. Options also include a useful Favorites feature where you choose your favorite stations for quick navigation. While the navigation is easy to use, because of latency issues, it's not exactly speedy. Tapping to change channels means stopping your video stream momentarily. Fortunately, when you tap three times during this lull, the app displays the number of taps and sends them to your home AV unit. We just wouldn't recommend navigating during the final seconds of the big game.

While watching TV over Wi-Fi on the iPhone--And for the release, it is only over Wi-Fi. More on that later--you can choose high quality and standard quality video or, if you just want to listen to the audio your show, an audio only setting. We didn't experience any hiccups while watching via Wi-Fi and surprisingly very few video artifacts. Of course a slow connection either on the SlingBox's side or on the Wi-Fi network you're connected too will determine your video quality.

The big drawback is that all of this depends on your ability to find a Wi-Fi hot spot. The pre-release versions of the app did ship with the ability to connect to your SlingBox via a 3G connection. The video cut out a few times and the quality wasn't on par with the Wi-Fi connection. But, even with those issues, we were able to enjoy a show while on the go. AT&T released a statement stating that apps like SlingPlayer could create congestion on the network. Of course, congestion doesn't seem to be an issue with other phones on the AT&T network that have the SlingPlayer Mobile app. AT&T's claim to the fastest 3G network seems like a moot point when they're not allowing software that will run on it.

Another drawback is SlingMedia's recent announced that didn't plan to support legacy SlingBox devices for the iPhone app. After a small uprising on the internet, Sling now says that legacy devices will work, but will not be supported. Sling also warns that updates to either the Sling software or the iPhone could potentially render legacy devices completely useless with the iPhone app. We attempted to connect the iPhone to a legacy SlingBox AV and were thwarted by a pop-up that informed us that we should upgrade to a new SlingBox. Since the SlingBox AV isn't supported to work with the iPhone app, calling SlingMedia seemed like a waste of time. In other words, If you own a legacy device, you might want to save your money.

At $29.99 the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone is financially on par with SlingMedia's other mobile apps. Of course those apps work with legacy SlingBoxes devices and and over EDGE and 3G networks. Making it a pretty tough sell to iPhone owners.

Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro

Roberto Baldwin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:08:00 -0500

Burn Hollywood, burn!

Macs have shipped with the ability to burn CDs and DVDs--via the finder or an iLife application--for a while now. With all that disk-burning going on for free, some people wonder why Roxio continues to produce its Toast application. Despite the Mac’s burning chops, for some, the built-in applications in OS X just don’t cut it. We’re happy to say that Toast 10 Titanium Pro is still the heavyweight burner of choice.

Toast 10’s core functionality is still rock solid. If you need an audio CD burned, Toast is there for you. If you need an ISO 9660 disk burned, Toast has your back. Even DVD-ROMs…yeah, Toast can handle it. With the myriad formats Toast already supports, Roxio has added the AVCHD archive. This new feature gives you the ability to back up your DV tape to disc. And while no Apple computer ships with or will play Blu-ray, Toast 10 will burn disks for your Blu-ray player. Plus, your HD digital video camera doesn’t seem like a waste of pixels when you burn a disc for TV viewing. If you haven’t dropped the moolah on a Blu-ray burner for your Mac, Toast also allows you to burn up to an hour of HD video on a DVD that will play in a standalone Blu-ray deck. It’s not as nice as Blu-ray proper, but it’s serviceable until Blu-ray discs drop in price.

Beyond its core functionality, Roxio has included seven apps that complement Toast and four additional media-centric apps. SoundSoap SE 2 cleans up all those scratchy audio files; it does a good job removing the hum from that podcast you recorded near the air-conditioner. LightZone is like Aperture Lite, with its ability to adjust images. The Spanish-sounding FotoMagico creates HD slide shows for people who just can’t get enough of those Ken Burns documentaries and can’t wait to make their very own. And finally, SmartSound Sonicfire Pro fills the gap left by Apple when it stopped selling the standalone Soundtrack app for creating video soundtracks. These applications are a nice add-on value, but it’s the core applications that make Toast worth its $149.99 price tag, if you have the right equipment.

For TiVo owners, Toast comes with TiVo Transfer and Mac2TiVo. TiVo Transfer allows you to copy your TiVo recordings to your Mac and automatically convert them for use on a wide range of devices, including iPods, iPhones, Xbox 360s, and PS3s, or you can burn the videos to disc. Mac2TiVo does exactly what the name implies, moving videos easily from your Mac to your TiVo--but we wished Mac2TiVo gave us true video streaming over a network. You can begin watching a video while it’s copying, but even with a gigabit Ethernet connection, our video stopped playing a few times during the hour it was loading.

Toast 10 Titanium Pro does give us what Sling Media promised over a year ago: the ability to stream your own videos over the Internet to your iPhone or iPod touch. Streamer converts video and allows you to set up an account on Roxio’s website to watch your videos. A huge oversight on Roxio’s part is that the media browser found in Toast is nowhere to be seen in the Streamer app, making streaming a bit more tedious than in ought to be. You can batch-convert videos from Toast to Streamer, but it would be helpful if you could automate the conversion process.

The Web Video feature in Toast pulls Flash videos from the Internet and gives you the ability to convert them to multiple formats. The app works well with YouTube videos, but has problems with those from other sites.

iMovie '09

Helmut Kobler — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:16:47 -0500

When Apple introduced iMovie ‘08, it created a schism in the Mac video-editing world. On one hand, the new version introduced an entirely new interface that made editing quick, casual movies far easier than before. On the other hand, Apple was so busy implementing this new model that it didn’t have time to reimplement all the features of previous iterations, leaving a lot of iMovie users believing the new version was really a step backward. Now, Apple has updated iMovie for ’09, and this time around, it’s bound to please almost everyone.

iMovie '09 piles on the features without cluttering up its intuitive interface.

For starters, iMovie ‘09 offers most of the features found in previous versions. One of these sorely missed features is Themes, which lets you incorporate snazzy, broadcast-quality motion graphics into your projects (there are six customizable themes to choose from--fewer than previous versions, but more polished). Video effects have returned as well, including effects like Aged Film, Film Grain, Glow, Dream, and Vignette. You can also now speed up, slow down, and freeze-frame your clips, as well as separate audio from video within a clip. More importantly, iMovie now acknowledges the existence of iDVD. iDVD is apparently the black sheep of Apple’s iLife family, but iMovie nonetheless is deigned to let you embed chapter markers into your projects and export projects directly to iDVD.

But not only does iMovie ‘09 finally catch up on features from older editions, it also breaks entirely new ground…lots of new ground, in fact. A prime example is the new image-stabilization feature, which helps take the jitter and bounce out of your handheld shots. Of course, many video cameras today already offer image stabilization, and some models--those using optical stabilization--do a pretty impressive job. But iMovie can help even more.

We tested the feature with a number of shots--for instance, in one test, we walked down a long path while keeping the camera focused straight ahead, and in another test, we stood still while zooming in all the way on a distant object (the zoom magnifies any movement in your hands and arms). For iMovie to work its stabilization magic, it has to analyze y our clips first, which takes time--a 15 second clip took about 5 minutes on a 2.8GHz iMac.

Results weren’t miraculous, but in most cases made an appreciable improvement to our original footage. One downside, however, is that stabilized footage significantly loses sharpness. However, iMovie lets you control the level of stabilization (and by extension sharpness loss) with a slider, and fortunately, you can tweak that setting on the fly. But in general, k eep in mind that what you gain in a steady picture, you lose in resolution.

The Precision Editor lets you quickly and precisely change the start and end frames of two adjoining clips.

Another big addition to iMovie ’09 is the Precision Editor, which lets you fine-tune the precise frame your edited clips begin and end on.

Why the need for such precision? Say you want to cut from a close-up of a batter hitting a ball to a wide shot of the same action, but you need the two shots to end and then begin exactly when the bat makes contact with the ball. In iMovie ’08, this kind of control was possible, but time-consuming. Now, you can roughly edit two clips together in iMovie’s project window, and then open the Precision Editor. Here, you’ll see a magnified view showing the edited and unused frames of the two clips, and can then drag the bar to quickly change both the end and start frames of just one or both of the two clips (Final Cut users know these as Ripple and Roll edits). You can also edit the start and end points of a clip’s audio, letting audio from one clip spillover into the next. If you’re quickly throwing together clips for casual home movies, you may never need the Precision Editor, but if you’re a perfectionist, you’ll definitely appreciate the control.

iMovie also makes it easier to wrangle all the media files you may be keeping on multiple hard drives. A new Consolidate Project feature will copy or move that media to whichever drive your project file is saved on, so all the files related to a project reside on one drive. We wish it offered a few more options for how to copy and move files around, and that it was also more intuitive to use--we actually had to look it up in the Help system, which is rare with Apple software. But we’re glad it’s there.

You can apply multiple effects to a clip--timing effects, filter effects, and images stabilization--via one simple palette.

There are tons more useful new features in iMovie ’09. For instance, you can play a music track, and press the M key to place a marker on every beat of the music. Now, you can drag clips or photos to the music, and iMovie will start each element on a new beat. Another nice touch: If you’re shooting Star Wars fan movies or other special-effects extravaganzas that involve green screen footage, iMovie can key out the green from your shots. There’s also a unique map animation you can customize for travel videos. You can place an animated dot on a major city around the globe, and draw stylized lines between cities as well, creating a nice visual opener when your video moves to a new city.

Apple clearly spent a lot of time on small details in iMovie ’09--making one missing feature all the more strange. It’s not possible to change audio volume within a clip over time (earlier iMovie versions called this Rubberbanding). You can fade audio at the beginning and end of clips, but if you want to raise and lower volume selectively throughout the clip, you have to manually cut it up into small segments, and then give each segment a different volume setting. This is a pretty clunky solution given all the other elegance found under iMovie’s hood. Still, it’s by no means a deal breaker for the vast majority of projects you’re likely to tackle with the app.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4

Helmut Kobler — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:53:00 -0600

Premiere can convert dialog to text, but makes enough mistakes for us to wonder if it's worth it.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is a major milestone in the Mac video-editing world. The software isn’t perfect, but this is the first Premiere in a long time that can handle plenty of real-world, pro-level projects without any excuses.

For starters, Premiere can now import video from a wide variety of different cameras used by indie filmmakers and broadcast studios alike. It has always handled DV, HDV, and uncompressed video, but can now import formats like AVCHD, XDCAM HD, and DVCPRO HD.

Our one disappointment: Premiere doesn’t yet work with Panasonic’s AVC-Intra format, recorded by its newest, coolest broadcast cameras. But get this: A beta plug-in now available for Premiere lets it import, edit, and color-correct video from the hot new Red One camera ($17,500; www.red.com), which shoots a super high-resolution picture that’s four times as sharp as HD—up to 4096x2304 pixels, compared to HD’s 1920x1080 pixels. The Red camera is shooting major feature films these days, and at this moment, Premiere is the only editor anywhere to work with the camera’s files in their original form. Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Media Composer need to convert Red footage to wimpy HD size before editing it, forcing you to reassemble the original footage later on.

Adobe has buffed up the new Premiere in other areas too. For instance, Premiere has a new Media Browser, which lets you quickly find and view all the media on your computer before you actually import it to your project. We love the ability to selectively view only certain kinds of files, such as Photoshop and P2 files.

Premiere also ships with a new Media Encoder, which lets you batch export edited video into many digital formats aimed at the Web, DVD, Blu-ray, Apple TV, the iPhone, cell phone, and whatever other gizmo you may have. Media Encoder works very much like Apple’s Compressor application, except it doesn’t let you preset destinations or upload encodes to an FTP server. On the other hand, Media Encoder is intuitive, and on our 4-core Mac Pro, it actually performed encodes faster than Compressor by tapping into more of the Mac’s cores.

There are plenty of other nice touches, like robust metadata support and the ability to replace a clip, while retaining the original’s effects. Remember, too, that some of Premiere CS3’s best features are still here, like tight integration with Adobe’s Photoshop and After Effects (letting you easily move your projects between applications without rendering, and updating any changes automatically). Also, Premiere ships with Adobe’s DVD-authoring Encore. Besides letting you author feature-rich DVDs, Encore also creates high-def Blu-ray disks and can even publish your DVD designs to Flash, making them available on the net.

As we said, Premiere isn’t perfect. It can’t open multiple projects at once. There are some minor inefficiencies in its editing interface. It doesn’t have networked media management features like you’d find in Apple’s Final Cut Server.

Also, Premiere stumbles with its new Speech Text feature, which is supposed to turn spoken dialog in your video/audio clips into searchable text, to make it easy to find the exact scene you are looking for. Transcribing a clip’s dialog takes only a single click—and a short wait for processing. Unfortunately, the results are usually filled with errors. Words like “um” and “uh” may not be in the dictionary, but a text transcriber needs to be able to recognize them. You can edit the text to correct mistakes, but it may be more trouble than it’s worth.