Billy
12-27-2006, 12:41 PM
I wrote this for another forum but decided that since I spent so much time writing it I'd post it here, too. As if anybody really cares, though...
If anybody has any questions, just ask. Maybe I can answer them but if not I'm sure I can find the answer somewhere.
I've been trying the program out over the past few days while also
trying to spend Christmas with my family. The good thing now is that I
can run all this stuff on my laptop while the family does the things that
they normally do this time of year.
I finally read all the documentation today since there was nothing going
on at work. I normally just try to jump in using a program before reading
everything and although SE has a lot in common with the VT4 that we've
been using there's a lot of new things that were a little over my head as to
exactly how to operate them - most notably the color correction tools. I
played with those and thought I had a pretty good understanding of how
they worked but wanted to read up on them just to make sure. The color
correction is extensive and probably the biggest change in the software
over what the VT currently offers. That being said, we haven't needed
color correction much in the past with the way we shoot so I never spent
a lot of time with those tools in VT and when I did it was somewhat
limited.
To start with this mini-review it's best to tell what computer I installed it
on and the footage I'm currently editing to put it in the proper
perspective. The computer is a HP Pavilion zd8000, about a year old with
a 17" wide screen monitor, 1.25 gigs of ram, a single P4 at 2.8ghz, and an
80 gig HD. I bought a 7200 rpm USB2 Seagate 160 gig HD specifically
for video use and have all my video files and cache folder on it. All other
assets are stored on the laptop's drive in the usual/default locations.
I copied some files off the Matrox machine onto the HD that were created
back in May of this year. The footage is from my wife's sister's wedding
that I shot 7-8 years ago and never edited http://fastforwardclub.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/images/smiles/icon_redface.gif The footage was shot on
SVHS and did need color correction as the white balance on one of the
cameras was off (2 cam shoot). That and the back cam operator didn't do
a very good job of exposing the footage made correcting this a bigger
challenge than what we normally get. The file format was DV Type 2. I
had started editing this project on the Matrox RT.X100 but never finished
it, so I thought this would be a good candidate for my first project in
SpeedEdit.
Loading the clips into the project was straightforward, but then again this
is a little different from some NLE's. With NT products you just navigate
to the folder and/or HD that holds the clips and just drag them from there
into your project. I was taken aback a little about how long it took the
clips to conform, because I thought it was supposed to be faster than
what PPro does. But I could start working with the clips as soon as I put
them into my project while the conforming was taking place.
I immediately put the front cam clip on the 1/2 track and the back cam
clip on the 3/4 timeline. NT products don't have "video" tracks and
"audio" tracks, just tracks. You can put anything anywhere you want -
whatever works best for you. The video and audio tracks stay connected
(so they're AV clips), unlike PPro, so basically I had video on track 1,
audio on track 2, video on track 3, and audio on track 4. I'll eventually
put an audio track in there, probably on 5 or 6, and some CG's in there,
probably on tracks 6 and 7. DVE's basically reside on the same tracks as
the video tracks that they transition between.
One pleasant surprise is that the auto white balance did a very good job. I
could see immediate results from the front camera which is the one that
had bad white balance. I worked on that clip quite a bit in PPro to get the
white balance right, or at least close to right. I didn't have to do anything
in SE to adjust the white balance to get it to work good. But the back
camera clip still needed some work to get the exposure good enough for
it to match the front camera. I decided that I'd go ahead and correct this
clip before doing any editing.
Never having used a color wheel interface to do color correction, I
needed to experiment a lot to get used to it. There are several ways to do
basic color correction, some of which I discovered after trying out
different things. For basic correction of color, brightness, and contrast
there are 2 interfaces, both of which use a color wheel - the Master Color
screen and the 3-Band Color screen. Both are similar in function except
of course the Master Color affects all parts of the image while the 3-Band
color can be used for low, mid, and high bands. I was mainly interested in
adjusting the brightness and contrast and luckily there's a gamma control
which I mainly used to correct the image. I had to throw in some
saturation correction too since adjusting the gamma seemed to desaturate
the image some. After a little bit of adjusting these controls I got both
cameras to match close enough so nobody would mind.
But playing around with these controls made me want to know more. I
discovered that in lieu of the color wheel I could open a waveform
showing either Y, YC, YUV, or RGB, or a vector scope and use that to
adjust the video signal with. With any of the waveforms screens open I
could click and drag within the scope to adjust the gain or offset of the
properties of the respective type of scope. In other words, with a YUV
scope open I could change any of those properties by clicking and
dragging in the respective section and see immediate results on the video
monitor and in all of the scopes that are open (you can have a WF/VS
open in another window at the same time as the color control scope). I
actually preferred using the scopes to adjust with instead of the wheel
and/or brightness/gamma sliders.
There's a lot of things in the color correction that I don't have the time to
go into here. There's also a selective color correction where you can pick
a color and change it to something else. 4 of those so you can change 4
different colors in the same image. I didn't play with those at all because I
didn't need it. And of course there's chroma and luma keying in real time
that I didn't play with either because that's available in the VT4 and I've
used that.
BTW, all the color correction was done in real time and didn't affect the
playback of the clips at all. As soon as I did something I could see the
results in the monitor. I could then play the clip back immmediately and
see if it created any artifacting or other problems.
After getting the color correct for that clip I did the poor man's version of
MCE - I shrunk the rear cam to 37%, placed it in the bottom right hand
corner of the monitor, and turned on overlay so the clip behind it would
show thru. This basically creates a PIP so I can see both clips at the same
time. This is done in real time with no rendering required for this to
happen. Playback is not affected by doing this. If I had 3 cams I could do
the same for each of the clips. The only thing that limits the number of
clips you can do this with is the horsepower of your computer. I didn't
experiment to see how many I could do with this computer. Playing back
the timeline I could see that I was using between 80% and 90% CPU.
This is real-time playback, BTW, not a reduced frame rate.
At Chris's suggestions I did some other experiments. I played around with
the keyframing a little and noticed that NT added an "Ease In" and "Ease
Out" button to all the keyframing capabilities. Previously they only had
the ability to add nodes and influences which was kind of tedious to do,
but they automated all that with these new buttons. Every function you
can think of is keyframable. Everything.
I'm not sure what you're asking about Alpha support because everything
has Alpha capabilities. You can add a shadow to a PIP and change the
Alpha of the shadow and the PIP itself. You can also add a colored
border to a PIP and adjust its Alpha. You can adjust the Alpha of a clip
so it's translucent or transparent and keyframe that if you like. You can
also render to a SpeedEditHQ codec which has 4:2:2 color space and an
Alpha channel.
I cut the clip in a place where I'll probably use slo-mo and decided to
play with that. I set the clip to several different and odd percentages
47.3%, 37%, things like that, then played the clip back to see what it
looked like. Again, no rendering and playback was available immediately.
As far as I could tell the playback was smooth as silk and I couldn't see
any picture degradation from the original. I even butted the slo-mo clip to
a regular speed clip so I could see if the picture changed when going from
one to the other and I didn't notice any difference in quality. Slo-mo
looked like a winner to me.
I haven't finished the project or put it out to tape or disc yet, but from
what I understand it will play directly from the computer to DV tape
through firewire without rendering, if your computer has enough oomph.
From the looks so far I should be able to do that with this project. You're
also supposed to create mpeg2 elementary streams in real time for DVD
authoring. Haven't tried that. The only rendering I did was to Flash, just
to see if it would work. It did, but I only made a small clip from an mpg
file that I wasn't happy with the final look, but then again the source
wasn't real good. I need to play with that some more.
Another thing that is supposed to be real cool is the ability to send your
timeline output to a firewire device in preview mode. In other words
while you're working on your project you can send it to a firewire camera
hooked to a TV so you can preview colors on the monitor. It will also
play back like this, but probably not at a full framerate so they don't
suggest trying to record this.
I can only compare SpeedEdit to PPro and the VT4 since those are the
only other edit apps I've used. SpeedEdit just gives me one more reason
to hate PPro. I'm looking forward to VT5 now as SpeedEdit is supposed
to be incorporated into it. Also, I've not tried any HDV clips but I did
hear from one guy who said he could edit 2 HDV clips quite easily on his
dual Xeon computer. NT recommends Core Duo or Core 2 Duos to edit
and play HD clips on.
Sorry this is so long but there's a lot of stuff here and I still didn't mention
all the things about it like the 5 pages of keyboard equivalents or the 6 or
so different ways to adjust a clip's in and out points. Plus the CG has
been much improved from what the VT offers, in a lot of instances. That's
one of the things I've always liked about NewTek, they give you so many
different ways to do things that one of them has to be your favorite.
If anybody has any questions, just ask. Maybe I can answer them but if not I'm sure I can find the answer somewhere.
I've been trying the program out over the past few days while also
trying to spend Christmas with my family. The good thing now is that I
can run all this stuff on my laptop while the family does the things that
they normally do this time of year.
I finally read all the documentation today since there was nothing going
on at work. I normally just try to jump in using a program before reading
everything and although SE has a lot in common with the VT4 that we've
been using there's a lot of new things that were a little over my head as to
exactly how to operate them - most notably the color correction tools. I
played with those and thought I had a pretty good understanding of how
they worked but wanted to read up on them just to make sure. The color
correction is extensive and probably the biggest change in the software
over what the VT currently offers. That being said, we haven't needed
color correction much in the past with the way we shoot so I never spent
a lot of time with those tools in VT and when I did it was somewhat
limited.
To start with this mini-review it's best to tell what computer I installed it
on and the footage I'm currently editing to put it in the proper
perspective. The computer is a HP Pavilion zd8000, about a year old with
a 17" wide screen monitor, 1.25 gigs of ram, a single P4 at 2.8ghz, and an
80 gig HD. I bought a 7200 rpm USB2 Seagate 160 gig HD specifically
for video use and have all my video files and cache folder on it. All other
assets are stored on the laptop's drive in the usual/default locations.
I copied some files off the Matrox machine onto the HD that were created
back in May of this year. The footage is from my wife's sister's wedding
that I shot 7-8 years ago and never edited http://fastforwardclub.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/images/smiles/icon_redface.gif The footage was shot on
SVHS and did need color correction as the white balance on one of the
cameras was off (2 cam shoot). That and the back cam operator didn't do
a very good job of exposing the footage made correcting this a bigger
challenge than what we normally get. The file format was DV Type 2. I
had started editing this project on the Matrox RT.X100 but never finished
it, so I thought this would be a good candidate for my first project in
SpeedEdit.
Loading the clips into the project was straightforward, but then again this
is a little different from some NLE's. With NT products you just navigate
to the folder and/or HD that holds the clips and just drag them from there
into your project. I was taken aback a little about how long it took the
clips to conform, because I thought it was supposed to be faster than
what PPro does. But I could start working with the clips as soon as I put
them into my project while the conforming was taking place.
I immediately put the front cam clip on the 1/2 track and the back cam
clip on the 3/4 timeline. NT products don't have "video" tracks and
"audio" tracks, just tracks. You can put anything anywhere you want -
whatever works best for you. The video and audio tracks stay connected
(so they're AV clips), unlike PPro, so basically I had video on track 1,
audio on track 2, video on track 3, and audio on track 4. I'll eventually
put an audio track in there, probably on 5 or 6, and some CG's in there,
probably on tracks 6 and 7. DVE's basically reside on the same tracks as
the video tracks that they transition between.
One pleasant surprise is that the auto white balance did a very good job. I
could see immediate results from the front camera which is the one that
had bad white balance. I worked on that clip quite a bit in PPro to get the
white balance right, or at least close to right. I didn't have to do anything
in SE to adjust the white balance to get it to work good. But the back
camera clip still needed some work to get the exposure good enough for
it to match the front camera. I decided that I'd go ahead and correct this
clip before doing any editing.
Never having used a color wheel interface to do color correction, I
needed to experiment a lot to get used to it. There are several ways to do
basic color correction, some of which I discovered after trying out
different things. For basic correction of color, brightness, and contrast
there are 2 interfaces, both of which use a color wheel - the Master Color
screen and the 3-Band Color screen. Both are similar in function except
of course the Master Color affects all parts of the image while the 3-Band
color can be used for low, mid, and high bands. I was mainly interested in
adjusting the brightness and contrast and luckily there's a gamma control
which I mainly used to correct the image. I had to throw in some
saturation correction too since adjusting the gamma seemed to desaturate
the image some. After a little bit of adjusting these controls I got both
cameras to match close enough so nobody would mind.
But playing around with these controls made me want to know more. I
discovered that in lieu of the color wheel I could open a waveform
showing either Y, YC, YUV, or RGB, or a vector scope and use that to
adjust the video signal with. With any of the waveforms screens open I
could click and drag within the scope to adjust the gain or offset of the
properties of the respective type of scope. In other words, with a YUV
scope open I could change any of those properties by clicking and
dragging in the respective section and see immediate results on the video
monitor and in all of the scopes that are open (you can have a WF/VS
open in another window at the same time as the color control scope). I
actually preferred using the scopes to adjust with instead of the wheel
and/or brightness/gamma sliders.
There's a lot of things in the color correction that I don't have the time to
go into here. There's also a selective color correction where you can pick
a color and change it to something else. 4 of those so you can change 4
different colors in the same image. I didn't play with those at all because I
didn't need it. And of course there's chroma and luma keying in real time
that I didn't play with either because that's available in the VT4 and I've
used that.
BTW, all the color correction was done in real time and didn't affect the
playback of the clips at all. As soon as I did something I could see the
results in the monitor. I could then play the clip back immmediately and
see if it created any artifacting or other problems.
After getting the color correct for that clip I did the poor man's version of
MCE - I shrunk the rear cam to 37%, placed it in the bottom right hand
corner of the monitor, and turned on overlay so the clip behind it would
show thru. This basically creates a PIP so I can see both clips at the same
time. This is done in real time with no rendering required for this to
happen. Playback is not affected by doing this. If I had 3 cams I could do
the same for each of the clips. The only thing that limits the number of
clips you can do this with is the horsepower of your computer. I didn't
experiment to see how many I could do with this computer. Playing back
the timeline I could see that I was using between 80% and 90% CPU.
This is real-time playback, BTW, not a reduced frame rate.
At Chris's suggestions I did some other experiments. I played around with
the keyframing a little and noticed that NT added an "Ease In" and "Ease
Out" button to all the keyframing capabilities. Previously they only had
the ability to add nodes and influences which was kind of tedious to do,
but they automated all that with these new buttons. Every function you
can think of is keyframable. Everything.
I'm not sure what you're asking about Alpha support because everything
has Alpha capabilities. You can add a shadow to a PIP and change the
Alpha of the shadow and the PIP itself. You can also add a colored
border to a PIP and adjust its Alpha. You can adjust the Alpha of a clip
so it's translucent or transparent and keyframe that if you like. You can
also render to a SpeedEditHQ codec which has 4:2:2 color space and an
Alpha channel.
I cut the clip in a place where I'll probably use slo-mo and decided to
play with that. I set the clip to several different and odd percentages
47.3%, 37%, things like that, then played the clip back to see what it
looked like. Again, no rendering and playback was available immediately.
As far as I could tell the playback was smooth as silk and I couldn't see
any picture degradation from the original. I even butted the slo-mo clip to
a regular speed clip so I could see if the picture changed when going from
one to the other and I didn't notice any difference in quality. Slo-mo
looked like a winner to me.
I haven't finished the project or put it out to tape or disc yet, but from
what I understand it will play directly from the computer to DV tape
through firewire without rendering, if your computer has enough oomph.
From the looks so far I should be able to do that with this project. You're
also supposed to create mpeg2 elementary streams in real time for DVD
authoring. Haven't tried that. The only rendering I did was to Flash, just
to see if it would work. It did, but I only made a small clip from an mpg
file that I wasn't happy with the final look, but then again the source
wasn't real good. I need to play with that some more.
Another thing that is supposed to be real cool is the ability to send your
timeline output to a firewire device in preview mode. In other words
while you're working on your project you can send it to a firewire camera
hooked to a TV so you can preview colors on the monitor. It will also
play back like this, but probably not at a full framerate so they don't
suggest trying to record this.
I can only compare SpeedEdit to PPro and the VT4 since those are the
only other edit apps I've used. SpeedEdit just gives me one more reason
to hate PPro. I'm looking forward to VT5 now as SpeedEdit is supposed
to be incorporated into it. Also, I've not tried any HDV clips but I did
hear from one guy who said he could edit 2 HDV clips quite easily on his
dual Xeon computer. NT recommends Core Duo or Core 2 Duos to edit
and play HD clips on.
Sorry this is so long but there's a lot of stuff here and I still didn't mention
all the things about it like the 5 pages of keyboard equivalents or the 6 or
so different ways to adjust a clip's in and out points. Plus the CG has
been much improved from what the VT offers, in a lot of instances. That's
one of the things I've always liked about NewTek, they give you so many
different ways to do things that one of them has to be your favorite.