WWDC2003 Session 729

Transcript

Kind: captions
Language: en
well good afternoon everybody hope you
had a good lunch I'm to subscribers does
I'm Amy Nugent I'm from the QuickTime
product marketing team so thank you all
for coming first just want to make a
housekeeping announcement the QuickTime
feedback forum which will be after this
session at three-thirty the room has
moved to marina which i believe is down
this hallway so if you would like to
join us for that then please note that
change it's now in marina now onto why
we're here I'm very pleased to introduce
to you session 729 industrial-strength
encoding workflow automation for
QuickTime we have two great presenters
for you today we have hege Van Dyke from
discrete and Jim Baker from 21st century
media and what you're going to see today
I think is a great session that's going
to pull together a lot of the concepts
that you've been learning over the past
couple days so no further ado I'd like
to introduce hege and a one-note about
questions we'd like to ask that you hold
until the end of the session you've got
a lot of material to cover and when you
do ask a question please come up to the
microphone and speak clearly we do have
a translation going on so now hege thank
you hi everybody thanks for having me
here and thanks for coming down and
again as Amy mentioned what we're
talking about today is
industrial-strength encoding what we
wanted to do here was to take some of
the concepts that have been covered
during the various sessions of this week
and really put them all together and
apply them to some real-world scenarios
for encoding so to kind of take that up
again what we want to do is talk about
the different elements compression
encoding but also really with a focus
towards planning and executing large
encoding task successfully so again what
is industrial-strength encoding really
trying to take large amounts of media
into quick time doing it as fast as
possible without compromising quality
again encoding really is a
I'm measured job you really charged by
the output in time it's the kind of task
that you want to execute with acceptable
quality and as fast as possible so
obviously the tools that use the
workflow that you design and the
technology that you use are all relevant
to pulling this off again with without
compromising quality as much you know
getting the best possible output in the
quickest amount of time so again what
does that entail well it's really a
little more than sitting down on a
desktop computer and capturing and
outputting it's really a matter of being
able to take that process and scale it
and apply it to a variety of situations
and equipment locations a lot of factors
involved in in every particular encoding
situation so again the first thing that
one has to do is sort of step back and
talk about workflow workflow design
really want to show you some examples of
workflow today and some of the workflows
that are being used to take on large
compression task so we'll spend a little
bit of time on workflow design obviously
hardware configuration you want to get
the fastest hardware as possible to get
the job done as quickly as possible so
hardware configuration becomes extremely
important as does the ways that you
connect all that hardware together
essentially any encoding process is
going to have bottlenecks associated
with it so as a manager of that process
you really want to constantly be aware
of what your bottlenecks are what your
risks are associated with those
bottlenecks and you want to be able to
observe as you know in a certain case as
will be looking at in just a second
maybe capturing from tape might be the
bottleneck maybe networks could be
uploading review and approval those kind
of things even getting the tape very
interesting that you really want to
understand who creates the tape at which
point are you just digitizing something
that has already been created
as opposed to taking on the editing task
and at which point do you deal with
review and approval who is ultimately
responsible and how do you handle your
hardware configuration based on that do
you get in a situation where you have to
go back to a tape do you have enough
storage at your facility to store all of
the stuff prior to it being approved
questions like that so again hardware
configuration and network topology are
both important concepts here and then
lastly software automation as you'll see
no one product does it all and really
the ability to design a workflow is to
is really a process of taking the
various elements that work that you're
comfortable with the products that you
have the tools that you have at your
disposal and creating a workflow that
that isn't burdened by too much human
interaction and again what we want to do
is it would be great if we could just
take the tape you know throw it in there
and have it compressed but it doesn't
really work that way we have to sort of
take a variety of tools and string them
together and again automation is key to
doing that successfully and efficiently
so we've talked a little bit here about
what we're trying to do who would need
to do this type of encoding well I would
hazard to say that anyone in this room
who has an encoding task could benefit
from the things we're going to be
talking about but really more and more
people are communicating with video and
communicating with video on the web so
television stations and cable companies
have web presences record companies have
a need for displaying music videos
corporations have a need for
communicating stockholder meetings CEO
announcements just corporate technology
in all kinds of ways we see more and
more people communicating with the
visual medium this whole idea that if I
can see it and hear it that I will have
a chance of remembering it so again
video as a communication tool is an
extremely powerful medium and the
internet and computers give you a great
way to communicate through that medium
so what we'll learn today we're going to
talk a little bit about workflow work
slow process and design
plan out a product project understand
the scope of that and apply a workflow
to that video capture and encoding we'll
talk about selecting and configuring the
right hardware and software why and when
to use that to capture and some issues
about the captured image that you need
to be aware of in addition we'll talk
about setting up a network that's
suitable for digital video be V + DV cam
which is what we'll be talking about as
the input format runs at 3.7 or four
megabytes per second obviously we're
going to try and create multiple outputs
for that so again a network that's
suitable for storage and transferring
all this digital video is important to
this process and we will be talking
today about quicktime mpeg-4 as the
codec that we're going to use and again
i'm going to get a little bored in to
codex and codec analysis a little bit
later in the session and automating a
workflow with apple script i'm going to
save this specifics for example that
we're just about to talk about but
oftentimes you get a source that might
have certain audio tracks and you need
to output in multiple formats so often
we need the ability to have a tools
person or certain types of tools
available to you and again we're going
to cover some clever applescript that
really help the workflow here for
encoding content management so one thing
to create the file it's another thing to
create 500 or five thousand files and
keep track of them so it's obviously
very important to the naming conventions
that you use and the way that you keep
track of what has been captured what is
currently being digitized where you are
in that process and again we're going to
be covering that and lastly just bass
batch managing the publishing of your
content on the back end how is this
information reviewed and approved and so
you can successfully say that you're
done with it all ok so again we'd like
to do is we're going to do a case study
today and what we chosen as our example
is the encoding of the various sessions
that were attending here I have Jim
Baker is going to join me Jim in
is the CEO of leading Hollywood area
encoding facility called 21st century
media and they have the distinction of
being the encoders for the WWDC so what
we wanted to do is spend the majority of
this session really talking about the
work that will be coming up for Jim and
I in the next few weeks as we take these
sessions and digitize them all so that
you'll all be receiving them on a DVD
rom I believe and viewing them on the
web so again I'd like to bring up Jim
Bakker my colleague from 21st century
media I could all fit in thank you for
joining us this afternoon and he's done
a great job of introducing what the
session is all about and my father in
this session is to explain how we're
actually tackling a very specific job
and Peggy explained as the WWDC 2003
this is actually the fourth year that my
team had produced this content and each
year has been under little getting a
little bit closer to doing it the right
way the first year after losses the dirt
was was extremely interesting i can tell
you i think being immersed in boiling
oil would be more fun than going through
what i went through that first year the
second year was we tried a different way
and the second year we we threw a very
very large amount of Sam storage at the
project and surprisingly we still got
the job done but it wasn't quite as
efficient as I was expecting it to be
last year we tried a different aspect
altogether that didn't involve max which
was probably not such a good thing and
this year we've decided to build a
workflow that is completely Mac OS 10
based and I'm delighted to be able to
share that with you today I think it's
the most efficient system that we built
so far for dealing with this particular
type of project what's interesting about
it is though they're over 170 sessions
of WWDC I things are 175 something like
that this year so there's a very very
large amount of contents over 200 hours
of material and just make things even
more complicated it's in multiple
languages we have the English that
you're hearing we speak now and we have
some ladies and gentlemen in the middle
box in the bags we're translating
everything that I'm saying into
two japanese so we're going to be
receiving caves that have both Japanese
and English on them what we're doing is
we're encoding them for streaming over
the web you'll be able to review and
view the sessions as easy ABC members
you'll be able to view the sessions on
the ABC TV website at some point in the
near future and then as you know if
you've been attending to the past you
receive a box set of DVD roms that has
all of those sessions encoded on them as
well an interesting thing about the DVD
ROM since those are in multiple
languages too on those discs and only
explaining how those work we're using
mpeg-4 this year at the first year that
we've used mpeg-4 and he's going to go
into much more detail about why we're
using mpeg-4 and the advantages of doing
that and the improvements that we've
seen in using that as a codec as I
mentioned before it's completely Mac OS
10 base now which really streamlines the
workflow it leverages a lot of the
functionality that you find in mac OS
term and applications that run on mac OS
turn and we do some assembly as well and
that's pretty much what the apple
scripting is all about it's not just
about encoding it's about once you've
encoded files you're taking some stuff
from parents and stuff in there and
putting it all together and creating
this this finished content so this is
pretty much what the workflow looks like
essentially we we're capturing we're
capturing from dvcam we get the tapes
like this fortunately we're not editing
them the first year we added to dominate
that was one of those big hell's that we
went through unfortunately somebody else
does that this year and we just get the
tapes all fully edited which saves an
enormous amount of time so pretty much
week just as an in point and out point
in captured and we then encode it a
multiple bit rates within assembling it
as I said already in multiple language
versions English and Japanese standalone
English standalone Japanese for
streaming and then a combined Japanese
and English version for DVD so you have
one set of dvds and two languages we
have a quality control stage very
important to make sure that everything
you've been coded looks right functions
correctly before it goes on to the next
stage which is then delivering it up to
to the customer the streaming version
and then off for replication on the on
the DVDs
so obviously when you're planning a
workflow you've really got to think
about how long this is going to take
you've got to figure out how long it's
going to take to capture this content in
the first place you got 175 sessions
you've got physically take those tapes
put them in tape machines set the
endpoints at the out point capture it
that's going to take some time
throughout just real time so it's going
to take over 200 hours to capture that
on one tape machine right so that's
obviously you need just like spread the
workload you've got to calculate the
encoding times as well per bit rate per
minute you can just do that with some
math look at that map in just a second
so once we figure that out it's like
well how much power how much horsepower
I need to throw at this to get it done
in the time that I've got all the time
that my client wants me to do it it
changes figure out how many CPUs we're
going to need to hit that deadline and
then we've got to figure out how fast
our network needs to be what kind of
network topology do we need to build
that is going to be able to suck digital
video in off these decks and push it
over a network and get it to load
encoders and then get it to the assembly
stations so these are the sorts of
considerations that we've got to take
into account to figure out how this is
all going to take how much space do any
storage space to capture all of this
quite a lot actually it's like you said
it just on the form megabytes a second
for DV and over 200 hours that's a lot
of storage that's terabytes worth of
storage you really want to do this
manually no I tried doing that and it
was a really bad idea so automation is a
really good way to do it an applescript
side of the day for that are we looking
at some of the Apple scripts we've
written in just a moment on my
applications scriptable fortunately yes
Mr and unfortunately some aren't and
I'll highlight why that is important
that applications the developers
developed should be scriptable and then
lastly how does the client actually get
to cedar stuff to sign off on it and
we'll be looking at some an awesome
database driven system for for doing
that let's look at some of the math very
quickly as i said before dvcam it'sit's
720x480 about three and a half megabytes
a second time 200 hours it's about two
and a half terabytes of storage if you
want to have any kind of redundancy
you're up to five terabytes of storage
that you should have available for doing
this kind of a project now each one of
these WWDC sessions is about sixty five
minutes some little shorter people who
don't have much to say take about 35
minutes 40 minutes some have far too
much to say you can take an hour
off but the average time is about 65
minutes so those metrics allow us to
figure out how long it's going to take
to capture these if it takes five
minutes to put the tape in mark the
endpoints school to the end of a tape
mark the out point rewind hit batch
capture it's about five minutes to set
that up about 70 minutes per session to
get that ingested into your system so
your overall production metrics that
you've got 171 sessions I think that
figures have gone up to like 175 or so
that's 12,000 machine hours to process
this but if you now split that load
across multiple machines for the capture
you can actually capture all of this
content in just 50 moschino so you can
suddenly see how distributing this
workload really is plowing through this
material in double-quick time this is
what the encoding mathematics looks like
takes about three minutes to encode a
900 kilobit per second stream we encode
the material at 900 kilobits a second
for dvd-rom email to why that particular
bit rate well we want to try and fit all
of these sessions on to a certain number
of DVDs so that kind of tells us what
bitrate we must use for the video of
course you could encode DVD you know
dvd-rom remember about DVD video DVD ROM
QuickTime movies is much higher bitrate
but they're going to chew up much more
disk space so it want to be as economics
as possible keep the production costs
down on the dvds then on the the
broadband look about one minute 30 to
encode one minute at 300 kilobits a
second and just 44 seconds to encode a
low-end broadband at a hundred kilobits
a second so you can see it's pretty fast
to encode that stuff that's the beauty
of mpeg-4 very quick and haig you will
go into more detail about the settings
that we use a little later this
incidentally is running on a dual 1.3
three gigahertz so excellent so once we
figured out that how long it takes to
compress each clip per minute we can
figure out how long it's going to take
to compressor session about five and
just under six hours to compress one
session on a single machine so 171
sessions picks up thousands machine
hours or 42 days if you're just using
one encoder so now spread that across 20
excerpt and there's that magical figure
again 50 hours you could potentially
encode this entire conference
in 50 hours or even less if you three
more machines that is but the reality of
it is it's never going to happen in that
amount of time and the biggest
bottleneck of that is we are just not
going to get these tapes from the
editors in 50 out just not going to
happen you know these guys gotta sit
down with the source they've got to
check it for content they go to set me
in an hour points they've got a top and
tail it with graphics they're going to
do all sorts of things so it's really
the flow of the content that's coming
into this workflow that it's going to be
be the key bottleneck and then at the
other end the client in this case apple
is actually got to look at this material
and say well yes this is okay could he
really say that and then that may change
that session they might have to go back
and we edit it let me have to cut
something or the audio levels like that
you know let me drop out and that
happens all the time nothing's ever
perfect so you do have to take some
things into account so we reckon that
realistically this project could be done
in two weeks which is not bad for over
200 hours of encoding and editing and
all of that sort of production I'll let
you know if we actually achieve that
amount next year ok so then there's the
assembly we've actually got a peaceful
these things together we're creating
English language movies at 100 and 300
kilobits a second and then a different
set of Japanese so if you want to watch
in Japanese you've go and watch those
online over here if you want to watch
English you go over here you can't
actually serve a single movie with your
language language tracks over rtsp
streaming alas progressive download yes
obviously screaming no at this current
time but however on DVD we can deliver a
single movie that has multiple audio
tracks in it and it will intelligently
switch out the audio tracks depending on
what you're looking at we'll look at how
we do that so what we do is we encode
the Japanese audio separately as an
audio only file and then we encode the
English video and the English audio
together and then we have a automated
process that opens up the English one it
strips out the English audio and it pops
in the Japanese audio saves it out there
to a Japanese file and therefore DVD it
open ups the it opens up the Japanese
audio copies it opens up the English DVD
file pops in the Japanese sets up the
multiple language tracks thing adds
annotations does all kinds of cool stuff
and saves it out and I'll show you those
scripts shortly so it's already
completely automated which doesn't take
very much time at all
this is a manual process you should have
somebody sitting there doing this it
would be a nightmare an applescript
really solves all of that so how we
doing it what does the work unit look
like and I call this a work unit and
you'll see why I refer to it as a unit
in just a second this is kind of what it
looks like we're capturing off Sony
dvcam decks and really just remember
this is just playback only so it doesn't
have to be super high-end it can be
something that suits your budget if you
can afford to use a very very high-end
DV contact fantastic dsr-50 hundreds of
very nice dictionaries one of those in
this case we're using 25 and 45 which
have little built-in monitors to allow
you to see the session as its Jenny
digitized really nice GBC also make a
great unit that has a built in monitor
as well this is coming in over firewire
into an xserve capture station and then
that's going over to gigabit fiber to
half a side of an xserve raid so one
machine is share is sharing a single
x-ray unit but just is dedicated to half
of it for capturing so it's pulling it
off the tape the video the English on
channel one and the Japanese on channel
two or simultaneously on that capture
station we've got QuickTime 6.3 and
final cut pro for taking mentioned
earlier establishing a naming
conventions critical particular for
you're automating a process everything
has been named identically it's got to
have the right extensions on it so that
the scripts can pick it up detect it and
know what to do with that specific file
because all of that scripting is totally
dependent on what that file name is so
we're pulling in that video in the audio
with an exporting it out of final cut
pro x reference so we don't have to go
through a long rendering time once that
session is captured we just go export
and point it saves out in just in less
than a minute it what it renders the
audio but not the video and then for the
japanese audio we're just exporting the
audio alone no video so we know the two
files for each session that we capture
and they'll sit on the x rayed on the
xserve raid ready to ready to be encoded
you'll notice that the naming
conventions there so what we're doing is
they come out of final cut they've got
session ID with an underscore and then
the language identifier and that
language identifier is used throughout
the process to make sure that goes in
the right down the right path through
the automation
so a full work unit comprises the entire
workflow from capture through to to
encode and an output and this is what
one work unit looks like so we've really
covered that capture stage what happens
after its captured when it gets read off
the raid by the encoders and each work
unit in other words each capture station
has five dedicated X serves to do the
encoding us doing the encoding over
Gigabit Ethernet you might ask why'd you
give it ethernet and why not just stick
with fiber it's purely a financial
decision if you think about how many
fiber cards you would need to support
will you need 20 if you're going to have
four work units it's extremely expensive
than five or six hundred bucks each so
for a cost point of view when we analyze
how much data we're actually pushing
through this network we realize that we
didn't really need to go to a gigabit
fiber you know we're not pushing that
whole digital video file over to the
encode it's just reading it a little bit
from doing the encoding and switch like
the asante switch is extremely good for
doing digital video encoding DV anyway
encoding over a network so this is
pretty much what a work unit looks like
you can scale this you see so now you
can take that work unit and you can
duplicate that as many times as you like
to cope with however much content you're
you're trying to encode so what's on
these clusters that you see down here we
running discrete cleaner 6 still very
much the industry standard for our video
encoding does multiple formats obviously
we're just encoding quicktime mpeg-4 the
great thing about cleaner though is it's
fully scriptable and in fact there
really isn't a competitor to cleaner
that it's fully scriptable and that's
one of the main reasons why we chose it
because of its script ability and also
it's great workflow functionality using
watch folders which shakeys going to go
into more detail about in a minute which
is key to the whole process of our
encoding we're also using a very neat
little thing called whistleblower much
on some of you may be familiar with
whistleblower whistleblowers essentially
an application which allows you to
monitor servers and other such things
remotely I got in touch with the guy
James sent man who wrote whistleblower
and I told him what we were doing and I
said that what I really wanted was not
something to monitor the machine
I wanted something to monitor a very
specific application that was running on
the machine because if it's a machine
freezes then you can detect that right
machine freezes it whistle burn pings
that if it doesn't respond to the ping
than the machines crash and it notifies
you that it's crashed and it restarts
but an application might crash but the
machines still running and whistleblower
couldn't attack that so what James did
is he wrote up this great little client
which is now released as part of
whistleblower I believe and that runs on
the client machine and it can actually
do process monitoring and whistleblower
can monitor those processes so it sits
there going is cleaner alive with
cleaner life is cleaner lines cleaner
alive and if clean is dead that's built
and it works who reports back to
whistleblower and at pages you will
called you on your cell phone or you
know wakes up your wife or something
like that okay I'm going to hand back to
hating just one second and we're going
to take a closer look at why we do the
encoding in the way that we do but this
is a very quick a high-level overview of
what we've done this year last year and
then previous years we've done 56k
settings hands up any of you who
actually watch any of the conferences on
56k modem perfect okay good so we made
the right decision in killing that and
so this year we're just doing 100
kilobits a second for those of you who
are like dieter sorry a dual ISDN or the
sort of low end of broadband
connectivity the mid-range broadband
which is probably what most people watch
around 300 kilobits a second much better
quality obviously both of these are rtsp
streaming they're not downloading there
they're streaming in in real time and
then the dvd-rom I already explained
about that at 900 kilobits because we do
it that way so we can fit that many on
on the disk so I am going to hand back
over to Hagee who's going to tell you
how we do encoding thank you thank you
Jim so I'm going to walk through here
using cleaner 64 Mac the process really
two things I'd like to cover I'm going
to show you how we make the settings and
then really the workflow for cleaner
because they are slightly different I
really want to show people that watch
folders is a really a
efficient way of organizing a workflow
and using cleaner within a workflow but
you still got to create a setting so
let's kind of walk through that process
I'm pretty sure most people are familiar
with cleaner they're familiar with the
interface I'll cover a few things and
again we will be able to take questions
at the end when cleaner launches you
have a batch window and what I can do
here is just drag my source right inside
there when the source first comes in and
again I can drag multiple sources I can
double click on each one of these
columns and get a window associated with
that project and an element in the batch
window is called the project what I have
here is a little tight a little slice
from last year's WWDC and here in the
project window again I get some
information about the video format the
display ask for display aspect ratio
things like that I can also play the
file here in the project window or I can
sort of look at it and what I'm looking
at is I'm looking at my content and
watching my subject and just noticing
how close they are to the edge of the
frame checking the framing of the video
you'll notice too that there's a black
line here on the left side so the first
step to encoding is is the idea of
cropping and that it's really the one of
the few times in the encoding process
that you're dealing with aesthetics more
than mechanics obviously frame size
frame rate data rate are all in a
certain way restrictions that are given
to you by the output format that you're
going to but the cropping necessarily
isn't cropping is something that is
picked up by the camera and often times
as encoders you might be getting content
that was designed for full screen full
motion for television or film etc so the
framing of the character may not
necessarily be appropriate for viewing
on a player on a screen on your computer
and so that's one of the reasons why to
consider cropping that the placement
that an image would be more effective
particularly a medium shot maybe if you
crop into it a little bit
so that there's more of the subject in
the center of the frame so these are
some of the things that you want to
consider when profiting you also have a
few Givens there in this case there is a
black line here so I want to kind of
clean up my video make that as as clean
as possible there's also a little bit of
the edge of the X here so that might
benefit from from a little bit of
crappie but again just want to
distinguish between the idea of framing
as almost an aesthetic consideration
versus the other considerations that you
get about bandwidth and delivering
smooth good looking video I'll go ahead
and close the project window right now
just bring up one other thing here I can
inside cleaner I can have custom
destinations so this is very powerful
because I have a default destination
here my movies folder inside OS 10 I can
also go to the desktop and create an
output folder and then here inside the
cleaner batch window double-click on
that column to bring up my custom
destination and go ahead and add that
folder as a customized output that way
all of the files that I'm making can go
right there to that folder I know where
they're going and why this is really
important is back to the network we
really want to output these files to
essentially the folder for the quicktime
streaming server on the xserve a network
share point to be picked up by the next
step in the process etc so having custom
locations for your project is an
important and powerful feature inside
cleaner now let's go ahead and actually
look at the settings i'll double click
on the settings window and I have my
basic settings this morning Jim gave me
some more settings he had actually
updated the settings we've been working
on for this so he gave me the folder
here and I'm going to go ahead and take
a look at those what i can do is he just
placed them on my desktop and again I'll
just drag them right into the settings
area one of the great things about
cleaner 64 makya settings management I
can go ahead and drag settings in and
out if I wanted to give to him a copy of
my mpeg-4 test I can just drag those off
to his firewire drive here
and he's got a copy of those so again
it's very flexible about moving these
settings I don't need to restart in
order to use those settings again so
what I'll do is we'll take a look at the
900 k bit settings first I'm going to go
ahead and apply that to the project just
initially so then we can step through
the process here you just make sure it
is that right so select my setting there
we go I'm actually left handed so I'm
going to move to the other project be a
little more efficient you'll notice that
that there is a crop on there and it
gives me a little indication of the crop
in the in the project column there so
the settings window inside cleaner is
really divided into two parts the side
on the left the column are all of the
default presets that come inside cleaner
six as well as all of the settings that
I've created as I've worked with various
clients on the right side is really a
hierarchy of the various functions for
the output format that you're choosing
to use your inside cleaner in this case
we'll be discussing quick hun and we're
creating mpeg-4 movies in quick time
again we could have gone just with a
strength mp4 file but we decided that we
really wanted to in case those or
contained that media inside a QuickTime
movie using the impacts for codec so we
could take advantage of fast start again
that's why we actually have it on a
QuickTime movie you can see they're
listed or some of the other formats that
cleaner does support so again because
it's a dot move the file suffix will be
that move a little bit of a legacy thing
at this point but we are always
flattening cross-platform fast start
you'll notice that I don't have to
prepare hint for string and server check
that's because there is a problem
currently with the QuickTime exporter
for mpeg-4 so we have to take care of
that in the applescript and we'll show
you that demo a little bit later so we
do have a way of working through that
and we're all going to go to the
feedback form and request that they fix
that for us
we don't have to do that in the next
session here in compressing movie header
again a little more of a legacy thing at
this point but you know trying to make
the file size as small as possible means
faster download games better user
experience the tracks tab inside cleaner
is just an acknowledgement of the
different types of tracks if i was using
flash or MPEG i could choose to copy or
process those tracks so i'm not really
doing a whole lot with the trackpad so
the image the image tab now we're going
to start to get into it a little bit
you'll notice that jim has placed a
numeric crop on the video what I can do
is go ahead and double click on the
project window bring that up again and
you see that what he's done is you set a
framing in here to just cover the edges
and to get rid of any possible tape
anomalies that might be in that so again
I just discussed discussed cropping as
an aesthetic thing and and you really
want to take a look every every piece of
content has its own consideration so you
really have to take it on a case-by-case
basis with regard to crop in there you
can also do a manual crop if you need to
image size basically dictated in this
case by the client if you will so we're
working with the sizes the next
parameter or now we get into really the
filters inside cleaner and this whole
idea of pre-processing then did a great
session that the other day about
pre-processing for video and again
pre-processing is really important to
preserve the quality as much as possible
we're capturing these sessions on a DV
cam tape looks very good and what we're
trying to do is compress that down so we
always want to really preserve the
quality maintain as much of the color
balance and really I go a little farther
than maintain increase it they used to
say that editorial touches every frame
well now these days really encoding such
as every frame as well and that
increasingly assets are delivered in a
variety of format and especially in
bandwidth restricted the Internet
for video on avenues you really need to
do everything you can to make the video
look as good as possible and again
pre-processing is critical to the key to
that at discrete we kind of have
identified this processes called media
mastering and its really getting the
most out of any particular piece of
content as you deployed to a variety of
formats and locations sizes and bitrate
so getting into the pre-filtering the
first thing I'll talk about a little bit
as deinterlacing the interlacing is the
ability to these video cameras shoot in
alternating field so if you eliminate
half of that it's a good way of reducing
data the adaptive deinterlace here what
that does is only the interrelations two
pixels that move so well what good is
that hey can be happy to show you what
I'm going to do is just scroll through
here where our subject is kind of
throwing around as glass of water there
and then I'm going to bring up the
dynamic preview window so this is giving
me a preview have a at a
before-and-after slider here I can also
go to an a B on the same I joke for an
apples-to-apples comparison thank you ok
so these are lacing why is dinner laced
and important well because video cameras
shoot in these alternating fields when
you have areas of fast motion the you
can start to see that split in in the
content when you view that on an RGB or
progressive display like you have on a
computer so here because he's moving his
hand with the water you'll see that
there is interlaced artifacts or some
people just my mom public distortions in
the video here and what you want to do
is buy the interlacing and particularly
adaptive deinterlacing you lessen those
artifacts so again and see that when I
go to the after view there that is
really cleaned up and again because
you're going into you're taking
high-quality full res video and
compressing it down anything that you
can do to preserve that look is how you
get the best look
you preserve the quality of your content
as you scale through the encoding
process so the interlacing is a very
important way of reducing or eliminating
a distortion that's almost inherent in
the technology which is the what happens
when interlaced video moves is it
creates these so called interlaced
artifacts so again the interlacing is
very critical to getting a crisp image
in your output friend moving down
through the filter set you'll notice
that I have sharpened on and I realized
that there's a bit of debate about using
sharpening in pre-processing for
compression what sharpen can potentially
do is cause ringing in your video and
can over accentuate it looks like you've
had five too much cups of coffee so
sharpening is something that you have to
be very careful about but when used in
conjunction with the adaptive noise
reduction filter inside cleaner really
get the best result that the adaptive
noise reduction might not be sharpening
as much as a it could so adding the
sharpen filter just prior to that is
again helping me preserve the quality of
my image through my output adaptive
noise reduction boy do we have two more
hours I could really talk a lot about
this filter this is the vacuum pack
filter for video it's really incredible
what the filter does is identifies edges
and again sharpens them a little and
blurs the sections in between so again
this whole process of preserving the
quality of your video or scaling it well
is really relying on the adaptive noise
reduction filter you'll notice that this
is in every preset inside cleaner and if
you haven't really experimented with
this filter go ahead and please do so
the difference between mild and mod can
really be useful for most types of
content you do want to check out your
text obviously and look at the text
particularly in the slides for a session
like this to make sure that you don't
distort them in any way by using
adaptive noise reduction particularly at
lower bitrate but again adaptive noise
reduction is an excellent filter for
scaling video well at any bitrate you
tend to use it less for full size stuff
just to mention mention that as far as
adjustments gamma is a filter that
raises midtown
why gamma is important is because the
display between Windows and Mac is
different that the mac is darker and I
mean the windows windows displays are
darker and more similar to a television
set and the mac is lighter so when
producing content that may be viewed on
both platforms you really want to
consider a gamma filter again what gamma
does is raises your mid-tone that
brightens the image up a little bit
again I can turn the game off and you
can see as I update that it has a slight
effect but again this makes your content
much more viewable and accessible on
multiple platforms so what I did was I
brightened it up a little bit it didn't
look too bright here on my Mac but again
this will allow it to be much more
viewable from the Windows platform ok
brightness and contrast to really
important filters what I'm going to do
you'll also notice how I'm going through
this is I have my settings window here
sort of left in a column for me here on
the right record still get access to the
controlled as a dynamic preview there
next to it and that can still with the
project when they'll kind of jump back
here and change frames and update that
window so it's a nice way of working and
laying out the windows to be able to get
good feedback while you're developing
your setting back to brightness
brightness is a filter that you use to
readjust your black level what you want
to be aware of is that when you take
digital video and you capture it on a
computer the Headroom that there is some
Headroom applied to that the scaling of
the colors isn't matched exactly so
there's a potential for your blacks and
your wife to dilute a little bit so back
into the spirit that I mentioned before
about media mastery and really getting
the most out of a particular piece of
content what I really want to do is I
want to look at that and I want to reset
my black level so you see here in the
before view that it is enough it is over
there for you but I can see it here that
it's a little snowing in the black and
again I can use the brightness control
just by adjusting that to go back and
buy black buy back or readjust my black
level so again i use brightness to get
readjust my black and I sort of look
through the old Photoshop Ansel Adams
way of analyzing a piece of video
look for the darkest point and then the
widest point and scale between those
that's why I went back to the black
slide to check my button to check my
brightness because again there isn't
except for the lavalier microphone tip
here there really isn't a whole lot of
black in this image unless I go to the
edge here and then contrast contrast is
opposite it adjusts your whites for you
so you want to you want to go ahead and
take advantage of that but you want to
also be really careful because it's very
easy to make your video look a little
too contrasting and again this is rather
content dependent but you really want to
be aware of over saturating or causing a
little too much contrast which might get
you to go back to the saturation control
and either back off or increase the
saturation so I sort of used the
brightness contrast and saturation
parameters in tandem with each other
black is pretty obvious white you have
to be careful not to over contrast a
little bit and then again if you do
start to think that the video is a
little too high contrast you go ahead
and can bring down the saturation so
these are again filters that are
adjusting the color values of your video
it is a single filter for the whole
process but what we're trying to do is
get those color values up the better
color values you have in your content
the less artifacts and distortion you're
going to see through the entire process
so this is why it's really important
it's sort of like an audio you know
quality input equals quality output this
is a visual analogy of the same thing
really and that again if your colors are
not quite pure black if your wife's to
dilute it a little bit those are areas
of potential Distortion once that
pre-processed video hits be encoder so
you want to make sure that you can use
these filters to get the best color
values that you can moving ahead now to
encode as I mentioned before we're using
the Apple mpeg-4 compressor I think of
QuickTime at the container that holds
codecs and
content so mpeg-4 is a great codec I'm
going to contain it into quicktime and
get even more functionality out of it
I'll get fast start I'll get annotations
all of those things there was a at the
impact for discussion of the day
gentlemens we're talking about how again
you can contain that and pick up the
benefit of that functionality there my
key frame rate is usually ten times my
frame rate so in this case at 2997 for
our DVD ROM sighs I'll set that just 300
and again I have a video data rate here
basic there is no to pass yet here for
mpeg-4 and I'm limiting my data rate to
8 810 kilobits per second so that's just
some of them again the mechanics here
and as I switch between my other sizes
the data rates frame rate and sizes are
adjusted accordingly then I'll hit on
audio here and peg for audio well I'm an
audio person so I really really
appreciate what's been what's happened
with the AAC audio I have an ipod that
had five 5000 tombs on it and I redid
all of my encoding to AC and now i have
6500 tunes in my ipod and they all sound
better than the original mp3 the AAC
audio codec is just incredible and you
should be using it especially for
download stuff again any codec that
you're using can benefit from the AAC
audio codec it's a just incredible the
way that it sounds so go ahead enjoy so
again we have the MPEG audio codec here
16-bit mono and that's set here to 40 41
at 96 k bits per second as my data rate
and again i am discussing the high the
higher-end dvd-rom setting that we'll be
using for the WWDC encoding and then
lastly here a few things in the
beginning and ending we are applying
video and audio fades to our content so
that in post-production orion encoding
if you will the fade to and from black
and the audio fades are applied during
the encoding process so they're
consistent for all of the clipped one
last thing that's down here is there is
an end frame URL link that you may or
may not be aware of
what this can do for you if you choose
to use it is launcher your website when
the movies playing so another good way
to drive traffic back to you so okay
then i just have the alternate which
talks about what the connection speed
and the required Chris I'm version and
the metadata and stuff which gym will be
covering in just a little bit so again
what I've just sort of stepped you
through is the process of taking a look
at some of the aspects of the source
video and creating a setting of
pre-processing filters and output
parameters to create this encoded output
and what that resulted in is these three
settings here the way I would
traditionally use this on a clip by clip
basis is kind of go through this process
of analyzing the video and tweaking the
various parameters using the preview but
now I'd like to talk a little bit about
using cleaner and some of the best ways
to again create an efficient workflow
with this product how I do that is with
this concept of watch folders so I'm
going to go ahead now and go back to the
finder and create a new folder called
900 w f WQ pass and what I'm going to do
is use folders as a way of managing
these presets so I spent a little time
checking a representative slice of my
content now I'm going to go ahead and
set up a workflow that really maximizes
the efficiency of OS 10 fast computers
network based in computing and a variety
of applications in the workflow what I
do is go up to the batch window here and
I'll say add watch folder I'm going to
go up and select my 900 W F and you'll
see much as when I drag the individual
file there I have now a folder instead
of a file a location as my input source
to cleaner this is great because I can
complement this machine next to my final
cut pro capture station and export my
captured media off to this folder or if
it was a project export a reference
movie to that folder and again
after 45 seconds that will be picked up
and encoded for me so now what I'm going
to do is go to my settings window and
I'll just apply my 900 setting to that
folder so they're flawed created this
watch folder so now what happens when I
press in code inside cleaner is my
folder sitting there cleaner sitting
there watching my folder ready to encode
it to that setting so what I'll do is
I'm going to go ahead and launch this in
movie player I'm just going to select
none and take a small segment of this
copy it create a new taste it then I'll
go ahead and save that I'm going to save
that as a reference just call this task
again save that back on the desktop so
what I've done is created just a little
piece of media that I can run to my
watch folder to create to make sure that
everything is working you'll notice that
when I double click on the folder
there's I'm giving my secret away well
I'm just going to go ahead and drag that
file into the watch folder and what's
going to happen is cleaner is going to
pick that up and encoding encoding what
it'll will also do is create a folder
structure for me that I can use to
create multiple watch folders and then
concatenate them all together so one of
the things that we want to do with the
xserve for encoding for WWDC as we want
to have one export output three
different movies but really we're going
to make five different movies because we
want two different language tracks on
the lower end ones and again Jim's going
to go through and help us understand how
we do that in a few minutes here so I'll
go ahead and stop encoding as you saw my
file did get picked up there and when I
go to the next level you see that two
folders were created in use by creative
name my administrators computer there
and completed source files and there my
source file is my source so now what
I'll do I'll go back to cleaners batch
window I'll select add watch folder and
this time I'm going to go inside the
first watch folder create a second
folder location
open up the settings window and go ahead
and apply my 300k setting to that folder
now I'm go ahead and click watch
clicking code again and you'll notice
that because my little test file was
sitting there in the completed folder it
was picked up automatically and this
created the folder structure inside that
second watch folder so i can add my
third output so again now and do that
i'll go ahead and stop go ahead one more
time at the watch folder and select it
and so on and so on and open up my
settings window and go ahead and select
the last 100 k bit output and then you
notice too that I could easily select
all and go up to my batch window and set
a custom destination and go ahead and
make sure that all of those outputs go
to my little output folder that I'd
specified as a custom destination when
we first started so again now that I
have this batch window set up on this
particular version of cleaner any file
that I drop into this watch folder will
be encoded with the setting that I
developed and then placed into the other
watch folder and encode it again and so
forth and all of those outputs will then
be taken and placed in the custom
location that I've chosen so again to
reiterate a little bit about how cleaner
works this is really the best workflow
that you know all too often we used to
do encoding we'd edit all day and then
set up the encoding that night and get
ready to go out to the car and get our
sleeping bag and hold up in the corner
of the lab as we waited for the things
to crash all night now really computers
are much more you know computers are
getting faster networks are getting more
you know efficient and all of this so
everyone's got an old Mac around or to
old Macs or a rack of Xers the fastest
max ever so why not attach those and
encode you know in parallel using the
network ok so using watch folders is a
real powerful way to integrate an almost
faceless encoding station to your
creative work stations so we figure you
know it's really complements non-linear
people doing compositing and affects
people just doing encoding the idea here
is to separate the process from encoding
and not to tie up everything but to use
the network and to use these tools
efficiently and again watch folders
inside cleaner six is is the X is the
way to create a workflow that takes
advantage of all of that so with that
I'd like to hand it back to Jim who's
going to pick up on the process now and
take us through some automation and the
rest of the VAR case study thanks Iggy
that was great for those of you who
haven't seen that kind of nested watch
folder or or cascading watch for the
functionality before it's a real eye
opener as how you said this is an
incredible way to distribute your
encoding across multiple machines that
you never really have to touch and it's
definitely been absolutely key to the
entire way in which we built the the
workflow for this particular oh yeah
slightly thank you sorry I don't you
thank you so how do we actually take
this this process that Hague is just
described and and apply it to our
problem well first of all what we're
doing is those exports that we looked at
so that I described earlier the Japanese
and the English exports what we're doing
is as soon as we've exported those from
Final Cut Pro we're just dropping those
into a receptacle a folder just drop
them in and bang off they go down the
river being encoded so that's the last
time you have to see them until
essentially you assemble them and review
them so really it's going to go to all
of that encoding process being renamed
and being taken through the the workflow
wall with with hands off it's all
completely unattended once they've been
encoded through that cascading process
they get then pushed up to another
server which we call the repository and
there they set ready to be assembled
into the different languages I mentioned
before it's completely headless process
you don't need to have monitors attached
to these computers they even have to be
in the same room or eaten in the same
building you can utilize any computers
that happen to be
round that you can install cleaner on
they can be added to your to your
workflow and whistleblower as I
described earlier is going to let you
know if there any problems with those
encoders if cleaner crashes for whatever
reason something goes wrong with that
computer and things always happen you
will be notified to be the first person
to know and it's very easy to set up a
system so that you did get paged or it
sends an SMS message or it rings your
cell phone and it works really
efficiently as I said you don't have a
monitor on the encoder so how do we get
to them well we have our remote desktop
and every single encoder and that
enables me wherever I am or whoever's
administrating the the project to be
able to look on and see at any
particular machine if there's been a
problem he can he or she can log in and
see whether it's a problem that can be
dealt with manually through a promote
desktop or whether the machine has to be
restarted remotely or something like
that and then lastly because we're using
exurbs we can also take full advantage
of server status which is a little app a
utility that comes with the xserve that
reports to wherever you happen to be
everything about that particular machine
or the hardware configuration and
everything else let me let me give you a
closer look at how how this looks this
is encoder monitoring this automatic
notification with whistleblower that
little clients that I was describing
that James 10% man wrote for us the
whistleblower process model you can see
that up in the top left-hand corner
there that's running it just sits there
in the background very lightweight app
doesn't take any processor cycles really
and it's just sitting there looking at
what's going on and if it has a problem
it's gonna it's going to notify the
whistleblower main software which can is
running on a totally different machine
could be anywhere in the world doesn't
matter that's just sitting there looking
at in fact all of our machines are being
monitored constantly both the
repositories all the encoders or the
capture machines everything's being
monitored 24 7 so you've got a complete
update on those you can see how it looks
if a machine goes down there you can see
in Kota for has reported an error it's
not responding and it immediately sends
out a signal to a pager saying Code it
falls down killing 60 please so that's
the use of whistleblower after remote
desktop this is a great application and
really well integrated of course of Mac
OS 10 in this particular example i'm
looking at four different encoders there
i can just move around i can take one
pin code and let it fill the screen i
can just have four or i can cycle i
prefer the cycling thing where it just
like steps do so every now and then i
can have it up on a monitor I don't like
Morris plasma or something and you can
just keep an eye out in your
administration room as to what's going
on in every encoder and if it's like
kernel panics then you know you've got
to do something with that particular
machine and then of course there's
server status and this is really
reporting anything about the hardware of
the machine that you're running on so
not specifically the cleaner application
it's pinging that IP address it's that
it's letting you know what's going on
with that you know things like
temperature whether you've got full
power with all the blowers are on
correctly you can restart the machines
you can and if you've identified a
problem I you know you'll see in a
minute how many of these excerpts we've
got in rags it's like Jesus which one is
which you can actually set a little flag
here the system identify like you click
that button for encoder one and you then
you turn to your rack and the little
light will be on so you'll be able to
see though that's the encoder number 418
and that's the one that you need to
replace the drive them okay let's talk
about the assembly process today I don't
want to run out of too much time we've
still got a bit to tell you about
automation by applescript this is really
sort of the glue for it's very specific
to what Apple wanted which was these
multiple language versions that have to
be assembled and annotated as QuickTime
movies so as I mentioned before what
we're doing is we're coming out of the
encoding system up to the central
repository so who will leave movies
there unfold as they've all these
correct names and all ready to have
stuff done to them we build the Japanese
and the DVD versions in quicktime player
using Apple script it's all completely
automated with that those scripts and we
log everything about what we've done
into a text log as well we could be
passing that text mug if we want and
bringing that information back into an
online database so that we can see
what's going on in fact we do something
similar to that although we don't pass
the log we have another applescript that
that sort of gives us a health check on
the whole work pro so i'll show you what
that looks like so what are the scripts
do okay well they assemble from the
individual files or
folded the files i'm going to show you
in the example in a second just
assembling a single file of course we
don't do it like manually do this one do
that one we just like batch process
everything that gets dropped into a
folder we check for possible errors so
how does a script check for errors well
typically we found that errors might be
just corrupted files where they didn't
get encoded properly and what we do is
we do some basic checks we look at the
exact sample length of each track and we
compare it to the other ones and if
they're even slightly out where we're
told about that because they should be
pretty much same certainly within like a
second or two right otherwise your video
tracks going to be out of sync with your
audio track we add annotations remember
he said earlier that we don't do that in
in in cleaner we do that afterwards in
this script is much easier just a batch
process all these annotations because
we're hinting you have to do annotating
before you do you're hinting that after
you do you're hinting because if you do
then your annotations don't get carried
over into the hills we hint those
streaming versions and then we set these
flags for the DVD versions these
alternate language tracks which is a
pretty cool process i'll show you how
that how that works 20 times me to show
you how that works okay let's have this
laptop up here so here are some scripts
let's err first of all look at what
we've done here for the english one
because this is the simplest applescript
of all i'm just going to open this up
and i'm really not going to bother to go
through this line by line for two
reasons first of all i don't know what
it means line by line but secondly i
don't really want to bore you with all
the sort of intricacies of this script
there's a lot of sort of set up and
checking and things like that what we're
doing is we're just setting up the
script start with then where we have
some code that allows us to set up
whether you're choosing a file or
choosing a folder and then going back
down through here we've got sort of cool
cred about how to process a file or how
to process a folder that we have an
interesting thing here this is actually
pretty neat this as a hack god bless the
QuickTime and Apple script folks this is
a hack whereby we we actually use a
thing called a cutie export to be able
to set up parameters for in this case
I'm hinting and we
movie we actually have a file that tells
the apple script what to do with in a
quick time when it's doing an export
because when you export from quicktime
you have lots of different options and
usually what quicktime player does is it
just remembers the last thing that you
did but what if you did something
different the last time you have to set
up a template well currently the way the
only way to do that is a little hat call
it qts utes file and this is the way we
set up the parameters for that and i'll
show you how i use a cutie earphones
second we got sort of open and then do
this and do that and do this and let me
just scroll down you see it's quite a
big script and basically we go down and
then we log everything here as well so
essentially what the script is doing is
its opening it up it's adding some
annotations and then it's saving it as a
as a hinted QuickTime movie so if I just
go ahead and look at some source here's
some sauce right here so here's the
input here some stuff that has just come
fresh out of our encoder so you'll see
here I'm going to be the 300 k files
just shorter that's the naming
convention the session ID the language
and the bitrate that's going to change
in a minute but this is what it looks
like on the way in and we use different
naming conventions this side of the
script so it's not confused with the
file as well it's come out the other end
so I'm going to process that particular
movie and so I can just manually run
this just for the sake of it so I get to
run my script I choose a file I'm going
to choose that English 300 kilobits a
second one it's going to process it it's
asking for that qts template there it is
that's telling it that I wanted it to be
a hinted movie as opposed to it not
hinted to mpeg-2 movie or something else
so you can set of all these templates
you see it's very neat and now I choose
the output folder you only have to do
that once then it's going to do it for
every other thing you do and it's done
its exported it it's ready it's ready to
go and you can see it's dropped into the
output folder there's my movie it's been
opened its been hinted it's been
exported and annotated open that up you
can see that it's um it's got a name now
and we've intelligently given it that
name we looked at the file name
and then we extracted this number and we
created a title for it so all of that's
done in an automated fashion and if we
actually look here you can see that it's
now a hinted movie as well whereas it
wasn't on the way in so that's how we do
the English now that it is gets a little
bit more complicated now to get into the
Japanese because what we're doing with
the Japanese is we're opening the
English version stripping out the
English audio pasting in the Japanese
audio comparing the length of the
Japanese audio the link to the video
make sure they're not too different ie
is it the wrong audio track and then
we're adding annotations and hinting it
and again fully automated open this
puppy up hit run run the script choose
the file this time we're going to choose
the Japanese remember this is just audio
only there's not video chat with audio
only file and just open up the Japanese
select the export settings it tells it
exactly what we want to do with the file
and choose the output folder and off it
goes it opens up the Japanese audio
copies it tastes it done hinted
annotated completely done less than a
second to do that entire thing and there
it is dropped into the output folder we
open that up again it's got the correct
name its ended it correctly got the
information and it's done so it would
miss little know it would look at the
log in on it now let's look at the last
one the DVD assembly witches put more
complicated still this is doing quite a
bit more because this is setting
alternate language flags as well and it
has to language tracks in it and if we
zip all the way down to about here I was
good you can see right here we have this
is the code that sets track one the
language track of track one which of the
English and the language req attract too
and then the various alternates of so if
it's a text that you're on a Japanese
computer it will automatically play the
Japanese all you if you'll put it the
disc into an English computer will
automatically play the English audio so
it's totally intelligent let's run that
run the script choose the file choose
the input so we're choosing the Japanese
900 kilobits a second audio you know so
I'm not choosing the English audio at
the English video it's intelligently
saying oh you want session number 6 01
Jaffee's then that means you need
session 6
one english right yes okay let's do it
you can see it piecing it all together
it's moving some tracks around you're
going to rewind it's going to select
none it's done and now we can close that
script and we can go and look in the log
here and there you notice it's given all
of these different names you see as well
so we can identify now that's the
finished movie where it's at the input
movie there's the DVD movie used to be
called 900 but what does that mean
that's the important thing that it's for
DVD and if we look at this we can see
now there we go to soundtracks ordered
correctly if we look at soundtrack one
at the alternate the alternate
soundtrack one is soundtrack too if we
look at soundtrack to the ultimate
soundtrack to which is language is is
one so it's like if not Japanese then
English or if not English then Japanese
and if you wanted to do this manually
you could play this delightful clip of
ian ritchie here and hear him being
simultaneously translated good morning
everybody welcome out to the quicktime
session 601 how to oh there you go
perfect okay pretty cool the eq with
nothing to do with us on that japanese i
should point out that was how it came to
us so that gives you an idea of how
these assembly scripts work now
obviously what i've done here is i've
just one blip select this one next
select that one these scripts i just put
together purely for this demonstration
this is completely faceless you never
see these scripts they just run in the
background there watching folders stuff
gets dropped in bang they just
automatically process this stuff there's
never any human interaction with these
scripts at all and the logs because i
like to keep paper records and all these
things i get the logs emailed to me so i
can see everything's being done
correctly there we go japanese has was
done yeah there was no difference in the
audio so all those were great they
lasted 20 seconds each so you know we
have a good record of exactly what was
done and as i said you could be passing
these into a database that we actually
have a different system which i'm not
going to bore you with because it's
incredibly proprietary and so
so what am i showing you now oh yes so
I'm going to go back over to the slide
thank you okay so this is now we've got
out of the encoding system and donnell
this where does all that happen what
this is where it happens it happens in
this one rack so in the middle there
below the Assam tea switch and what
below the asante switch we have the
repository that's where everything gets
delivered to and that's actually got for
180 gigabyte drives in it so they come
in on one drive they get assembled and
put out to another the English ones
assemble pronounce a lot of the Japanese
assembled for that to another DVD so
those drives fill up so we have
dedicated drives for each ones that were
not over stressing any particular drive
below that we have the quicktime
streaming server which is delivering the
test streams to be approved and
monitored by the customer and by admin
folks we have a FileMaker 6 server
that's running the backend database that
drives all of this stuff we have to
assembly machine so actually running all
of these scripts that do this automated
assembly and below that we have my slim
p3 server just because i love the slim
petrie cera and if you don't have one in
your home you really should have one for
that complete automated wireless musical
experience by an mp3 serve only three
hundred dollars okay and that's what
that thing is on the top it's a little
LCD display that allows you to just
control all your music directly and just
brilliant oh and the big thing on the
top the power file are 200 really really
amazing device you should really look at
this if you're very serious about doing
any kind of archiving the power file is
a dvd-ram based jukebox to take 200
disks and we've automated the whole
archiving process out to DVD so when
these files have been finished and and
assembled they're automatically written
out to DVD so we don't have to like put
discs in and you know 200 should be
plenty for this project these are the
arc these are the compressed files not
the uncompressed file you need a lot
more than 200 disks for that but the
powerful are Theon is great and what
makes it possible to add to this
workflow is just last week power file
came out with the mac OS 10 version of
their media find of software that makes
that possible
thanks to power file for giving us one
of those okay so before we sort of wrap
up which we should do anything the
workflow monitor is a really neat thing
and that lets we have this projected we
have a big room where we're doing all
this work and we have a big drop down
thing with a LCD projector and this is
projected up on that screen so at any
time I can look over and I can say okay
what's exactly the status of this track
or that track has you know there are
multiple tracks in the wwc conference in
this example I'm using track 700 from
this year which is the QuickTime track
this is just populated with focus data
because we haven't started encoding yet
but this is what it would look like
hopefully just a few days from now where
I can look up at the chart and say okay
well I can see session 700 has been
fully processed captured and code that
it all bit rates assembled all bit rates
it hasn't been approved yet and so that
it hasn't been archived and I can look
down so we have got very fun obsession
702 but a needle someone about that 704
great that's been approved it's been
archived we can put that to bed and so
on and so on and this is all totally
Apple scripts and FileMaker driven this
display system its web based on the
browser so a very very nice way of being
able to see exactly what's going to the
process so if from you know my phone
starts to ring and I have someone from
advanced relations giving me hassles
about where session 700 is I can tell
them it's their fault they haven't
approved it yet okay last but not least
and unfortunately this is not quite as
fully fledged a demo as i would have
liked thanks to the wonderful security
of apples firewall i was unable today
through the softening to actually
punched through to be able to show you
this server which is running down in
cupertino alas but i can give you the
general gist of it i can show you the
actual file maker source what I can't
show you is actually running in in a
browser I just I couldn't get access
even with VPN so okay so what does this
do well the whole FileMaker basting
enables us to enables the client to look
at all of this content and give feedback
and accept or reject sessions they can
be inside or outside file hopefully
outside a firewall by next week
and so the Apple reviewers can be
anybody and they can be sort of assigned
tasks I'm sure Amy you'll be doing some
reviewing at some point you know
everybody gets to review sessions and
you really have to because you're
looking for context linked to what
people are saying make sure they didn't
make mistakes it's very important that
the messages community communicated
correctly so it's not just about the
encoding look okay course the
incredibles liquor it's about the
content of that particular session so
and there's an admin mode which allows
people like hating myself to sort of get
in there and and fix things if Apple say
all this once rejected we can use that
same interface to re-submit that
particular thing back into the workflow
for whatever reason and this web-based
review process really does speed up the
whole the whole review process and again
it's one of the bottlenecks that we
talked about earlier the bottleneck is
either on the input the tape coming into
we don't get them so that's a bottleneck
or it's in it's in getting them approved
so what we hope to see is lots of green
lights in that it workflow saying up
until sort of red lights are okay and
the approval thing but red lights are
not okay and the other columns that are
our responsibility so if we can just go
back to the laptop very quickly I'm just
going to show you what this looks like
in FileMaker it doesn't look very much
it looks much more sexy in a web browser
but this is basically how the database
sort of hangs together we have the
session ID and the name of the session
at the top we have a status here that
lets us see whether it's been accepted
rejected or reviewed the length in there
whether it's been pushed to the ftp or
not whether it's been released in other
words whether it's something that we can
now archive we have we have the URLs to
the sample where do these movies
actually live where they have delivered
at a particular URL and don't try
hacking back so I invented that IP just
for this session and and so you know
that's where the movies leave the
database knows where the movie isn't had
to be on the same machine it's on a
separate server all together they're
just some sort of internal stuff here
internal notes and these are the notes
that somebody like an apple would submit
not through this interface through the
web interface / sitting there watching a
session and they'll say in which you
just said something that you can't
possibly say in that session you know
they'll write in here
that and we will get notified of that
and we can then make the arrangements
for that thing to be rieta t'adore or
whatever and then below that we just
have some sort of Global's access
information to prevent unwanted people
getting in and all these sorts of things
as well and there are some apple scripts
that we use to sort of complete a
complicated to simplify it is quite
complicated those to simplify the
process so you know the the great thing
is that this is not super super high-end
stuff and this is what I wanted to show
you this is not a particularly
complicated database but it's this
database with the apple scripting with
the web based browser with that
monitoring with all these other mac OS
10 s all fitting together in this
framework is literally saving us the
contractor weeks of production time and
saving Apple the customer an enormous
amount of money because we're able to do
it fast well do it quicker than we did
in previous years more efficiently and
with less problems arising during during
the production process if we could go
back to the slides please but just to
wrap up this is what the complete system
looks like if you are interested to know
we're using for complete work units for
this project doesn't take up very much
floor space just around a lot of
hardware but it really works flawlessly
we've been hammering it pretty solid for
a while now looking forward to getting
our hands on what we doing here is we
just use last year's content so we just
been plowing through the 2002 tapes to
make sure that this all works and ready
to receive where did you see the next
ones I'm get a hand over the hey thank
you should I guess that computer going
just for one second I wanted to finish
off with just one then notice then
there's a debate about codecs going on
so what I did this morning was took my
example and what I'm going to do is show
you two movies what I like to do when I
compare these I will put them both in
loop mode and what I'm going to do is
I'm going to start one and then tap to
the other one just so you can look I'll
turn off the audio so you can see one
image and then the next image and your I
can kind of move from one to the other
so this was taking an MPEG for example
the setting that we're using and last
year's codec and put them together and
again I've been noticed in that there's
a lot of people use in well people are
reluctant to upgrade to n pegs for so
I'd like to take a few minutes and and
just challenged some quality assumptions
that I've been hearing about regarding
these various codecs let me just bring
up the info window here ok so these two
movies look different they look
different to me they look different
probably to most of you and if we SAT
here for a while we could discuss the
merits advantages and disadvantages of
both of them but clearly they do look
different and so as viewers we can make
a sess minh about the quality so all
right that's what that's fine I I
appreciate that Hagee great thanks so
what all right so what I did was I took
a look at a little bit of brightness and
contrast again the idea of media
mastering and getting the bolts out of
those and again with these examples if
there was enough time I'd be happy to
run people through this but we want to
take some time for some questions so
what I'll do is we'll give my contact
information if people are interested in
repeating these types of examples i'm
happy to send you my settings and tell
you how i do this ok so what i did here
was I am did little brightness and
contrast in a gamma adjustment what I
did was my mpeg-4 I kept with no filters
and what i did was i modified my
Sorenson pro codec to look like my
impact for and so now I'd like everyone
take a look at that and well I can hide
this
but you know I challenge people I know
that there's a few eyes in this room
that can see the difference between
these two movies but I'd hazard to say
that they do look very very similar and
the point of this is to show you that
mpeg-4 at the same bitrate and frame
size and frame rate is very compelling
especially when you figure that for Jim
and I this entire encoding process will
be finished in one-third less time Oh
camiseta again one-third less time that
means out of that 50 hours we could add
a few days and maybe one of those days
would be a weekend and we could all take
three or four weeks to do a gig like
this so again encoding in one-third less
time oh and not having to buy the pro
kotick and put it on all those machines
for a quality debate okay if you look at
the lines here on the edge again it is
possible to tell the difference between
these two clips you'll notice that
there's a little bit of edginess little
difference in some of the lines that
they both have a certain amount of
artifacts they both do have artifacts I
will admit that but one has a little was
a little sharper one is a little less
capable in that transition so again just
leaving those up for a little bit of
example there then okay yes Virginia
this is the Sorensen and that is the and
pick for over there but again I just
wanted to finish with this because this
is a sort of important hearing I hear a
lot of people debating these
technologies and these codecs so I
wanted to further that debate because i
work for discrete we make cleaner so we
live in that debate i wanted people to
consider some of that while they're
choosing a kodak and lastly just before
we finish up and take questions just
like to point this out to that
increasingly we're going to see devices
mobile devices like the sony CLE a and
next year you probably all be watching
the session on something like this again
i have the same same video encoded with
the kinoma exporter that's inside
cleaner 6 off to my PDAs so I just want
to sort of remind people that this is
where all this is going and
again this whole idea of media mastering
of workflows of encoding is really a
matter of taking our media and deploying
it in the highest possible quality in
the most diverse number of places to
reach the largest number of people so I
just wanted to kind of remind people
like that now bring up Damon will do the
rapa thank you
[Applause]
you