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