When A.I. works, it can be amazing. BUT you can waste a lot of time and money when it doesn’t work. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. But what is ‘garbage’ and how do you know it’s garbage? That’s one of the things, hopefully, I’ll help answer. Why Even Bother? It’s a bit tedious to do the testing, but being able to identify the most accurate service will save you a lot of time in the long run. Cleaning up inaccurate transcripts, metadata, or keywords is far more tedious and problematic than doing a little testing up front. So it really is time well spent. One caveat… There’s a lot of potential ways to use A.I., and this is only going to cover Speech-to-Text because that’s what I’m most familiar with due to Transcriptive and getting A.I. transcripts in Premiere. But if you understand how to evaluate one use, you should, more or less, be able to apply your evaluation method to others. (i.e. for testing audio, you want varying audio quality among your samples. If testing images you want varying quality (low light, blurriness, etc) among your samples) At Digital Anarchy, we’re constantly evaluating a basket of A.I. services to determine what to use on the backend of Transcriptive. So we’ve had to come up with a methodology to fairly test how accurate they are. Most of the people reading this are in a bit different situation… testing solutions from various vendors that use A.I. instead of testing the A.I. directly. However, since different vendors use different A.I. services, this methodology will still be useful for you in comparing the accuracy of the A.I. at the core of the solutions. There may be, of course, other features of a given solution that may affect your decision to go with one or the other, but at least you’ll be able to compare accuracy objectively. Here’s an outline of our method: Always use new files that haven’t been processed before by any of the A.I. services. Keep them short. (1-2min) Choose files of varying quality. Use a human transcription service to create the ‘test master’ transcript. Have someone do a second pass to correct any human errors. Create a set of rules on word/punctuation errors for what counts as an error (or 1/2 or two). If you change them halfway through the test, you need to re-test everything. Apply them consistently. If something is ambiguous, create a rule for how it will be handled and alway apply it that way. Compare the results and may the best bot win. May The Best Bot Win : Visualizing The main chart compares each engine on a specific file (i.e. File #1, File # 2, etc), using both word and punctuation accuracy. This is really what we use to determine which is best, as punctuation matters. It also shows where each A.I. has strengths and weaknesses. The second, smaller chart shows each service from best result to worst result, using only word accuracy. Every A.I. will eventually fall off a cliff in terms of accuracy. This chart shows you the ‘profile’ for each service and can be a little bit clearer way of seeing which is best overall, ignoring specific files. First it’s important to understand how A.I. works. Machine Learning is used to ‘train’ an algorithm. Usually millions of bits of data that have been labeled by humans are used to train it. In the case of Speech-to-Text, these bits are audio files with a human transcripts. This allows the A.I. to identify which audio waveforms, the word sounds, go with which bits of text. Once the algorithm has been trained, we can then send audio files to the algorithms and it makes it’s best guess as to which word every waveform corresponds to. A.I. algorithms are very sensitive to what they’ve been trained on. The further you get away from what they’ve been trained on, the more inaccurate they are. For example, you can’t use an English A.I. to transcribe Spanish. Likewise, if an A.I. has been trained on perfectly recorded audio with no background noise, as soon as you add in background noise it goes off the rails. In fact, the accuracy of every A.I. eventually falls off a cliff. At that point it’s more work to clean it up than to just transcribe it manually. Always Use New Files Any time you submit a file to an A.I. it’s possible that the A.I. learns from that file. So you really don’t want to use the same file over and over and over again. To ensure you’re getting unbiased results it’s best to use new files every time you test. Keep The Test Files Short First off, comparing transcripts is tedious. Short transcripts are better than long ones. Secondly, if the two minutes you select is representative of an hour long clip, that’s all you need. Transcribing and comparing the entire hour won’t tell you anything more about the accuracy. The accuracy of two minutes is usually the same as the accuracy of the hour. Of course, if you’re interviewing many different people over that hour in different locations, with different audio quality (lots of background noise, no background noise, some with accents, etc)… two minutes won’t be representative of the entire hour. Chose Files of Varying Quality This is critical! You have to choose files that are representative of the files you’ll be transcribing. Test files with different levels of background noise, different speakers, different accents, different jargon… whatever issues usually occur in the dialog typically in your videos. ** This is how you’ll determine what ‘garbage’ means to the A.I. ** Use Human Transcripts for The ‘Test Master’ Send out the files to get transcribed by a person. And then have someone within your org (or you) go over them for errors. There usually are some, especially when it comes to jargon or names (turns out humans aren’t perfect either! I know… shocker.). These transcripts will be the what
Using After Effects to create burned-in subtitles from SRTs
Recently, an increasing number of Transcriptive users have been requesting a way of using After Effects to create burned-in subtitles using SRTs from Transcriptive. This made us anarchists get excited about making a Free After Effects SRT Importer for Subtitling And Captions. Captioning videos is more important now than ever before. With the growth of mobile and Social Media streaming, YouTube and Facebook videos are often watched without sound and subtitles are essential to retain your audience and make them watchable. In addition to that, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has implemented rules for online video that require subtitles so people with disabilities can fully access media content and actively participate in the lives of their communities. As a consequence, a lot of companies have style guides for their burned-in subtitles and/or want to do something more creative with the subtitles than what you get with standard 608/708 captions. I mean, how boring is white, monospaced text on a black background? After Effects users can do better. While Premiere Pro does allow some customization of subtitles, creators can get greater customization via After Effects. Many companies have style guides or other requirements that specify how their subtitles should look. After Effects can be an easier place to create these types of graphics. However, it doesn’t import SRT files natively so the SRT Importer will be very useful if you don’t like Premiere’s Caption Panel or need subtitles that are more ‘designed’ than what you can get with normal captions. The script makes it easy to customize subtitles and bring them into Premiere Pro. Here’s how it works: Go to the registration page our registration page. Download the .jsxbin file. Put it here: Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Support Files\Scripts\ScriptUI Panels Mac: Applications\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Scripts\ScriptUI Panels 4. Restart AE. It’ll show up in After Effects under the Window\Transcriptive_Caption 5. Create a new AE project with nothing in it. Open the panel and set the parameters to match your footage (frame rate, resolution, etc). When you click Apply, it’ll ask for an SRT file. It’ll then create a Comp with the captions in it. Select the text layer and open the Character panel to set the font, font size, etc. Feel free to add a drop shadow, bug or other graphics. 7. Save that project and import the Comp into Premiere (Import the AE project and select the Comp). If you have a bunch of videos, you can run the script on each SRT file you have and you’ll end up with an AE project with a bunch of comps named to match the SRTs (currently it only supports SRT). Each comp will be named: ‘Captions: MySRT File’. Import all those comps into Premiere. 8. Drop each imported comp into the respective Premiere sequence. Double-check the captions line up with the audio (same as you would for importing an SRT into Premiere). Queue the different sequences up in AME and render away once they’re all queued up. (and keep in mind it’s beta and doesn’t create the black backgrounds yet). Although especially beneficial to Transcriptive users, this free After Effects SRT Importer for Subtitling And Captions will work with any SRT from any program and it’s definitely easier than all the steps above make it sound and it is available for all and sundry on our website. Give it a try and let us know what you think! Contact: sales@digitalanarchy.com
Your transcripts are out of order! This whole timeline’s out of order!
When cutting together a documentary (or pretty much anything, to be honest), you don’t usually have just a single clip. Usually there are different clips, and different portions of those clips, here, there and everywhere. Our transcription plugin, Transcriptive, is pretty smart about handling all this. So in this blog post we’ll explain what happens if you have total chaos on your timeline with cuts and clips scattered about willy nilly. If you have something like this: Transcriptive will only transcribe the portions of the clips necessary. Even if the clips are out of order. For example, the ‘Drinks1920’ clip at the beginning might be a cut from the end of the actual clip (let’s say 1:30:00 to 1:50:00) and the Drinks cut at the end might be from the beginning (e.g. 00:10:00 to 00:25:00). If you transcribe the above timeline, only 10:00-25:00 and 1:30:00-1:50:00 of Drinks1920.mov will be transcribed. If you Export>Speech Analysis, select the Drinks clip, and then look in the Metadata panel, you’ll see the Speech Analysis for the Drinks clip will have the transcript for those portions of the clip. If you drop those segments of the Drinks clip into any other project, the transcript comes along with it! The downside to _only_ transcribing the portion of the clip on the timeline is, of course, the entire clip doesn’t get transcribed. Not a problem for this project and this timeline, but if you want to use the Drinks clip in a different project, the segment you choose to use (say 00:30:00 to 00:50:00) may not be previously transcribed. If you want the entire clip transcribed, we recommend using Batch Transcribe. However, if you drop the clip into another sequence, transcribe a time span that wasn’t previously transcribed and then Export>Speech Analysis, that new transcription will be added to the clips metadata. It wasn’t always this way, so make sure you’re using Transcriptive v1.5.2. If you’re in a previous version of Transcriptive and you Export>Speech Analysis to a clip that already has part of a transcript in SA, it’ll overwrite any transcripts already there. So feel free to order your clips any way you want. Transcriptive will make sure all the transcript data gets put into the right places. AND… make sure to Export>Speech Analysis. This will ensure that the metadata is saved with the clip, not just your project.
Someone Tell The NCAA about Flicker Free
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know it’s March Madness… time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. This is actually my favorite two weekends of sports a year. I’m not a huge sports guy, but watching all the single elimination games, rooting for underdogs, the drama, players putting everything they have into these single games… it’s really a blast. All the good things about sport. It’s also the time of year that flicker drives me a little crazy. One of the downside of developing Flicker Free is that I start to see flicker everywhere it happens. And it happens a lot during the NCAA tournament. Especially slow motion shots . Now, I understand that those are during live games and playing it back immediately is more important than removing some flicker. Totally get it. However, for human interest stories recorded days or weeks before the tournament? Slow motion shots used two days after they happened? C’mon! Spend 5 minutes to re-render it with Flicker Free. Seriously. Here’s a portion of a story about Gonzaga star Rui Hachimura: Most of the shots have the camera/light sync problem that Flicker Free is famous for fixing. The original has the rolling band flicker that’s the symptom of this problem, the fixed version took all of three minutes to fix. I applied Flicker Free, selected the Rolling Bands 4 preset (this is always the best preset to start with) and rendered it. It looks much better. So if you know anyone at the NCAA in post production, let them know they can take the flicker out of March Madness!
Downloading The Captions Facebook or YouTube Creates
So you’ve uploaded your video to Facebook or YouTube and you’d like to import the captions they automatically generate with Artificial Intelligence into Transcriptive. This can be a good, FREE way of getting a transcript. Transcriptive imports SRT files, so… all you need is an SRT file from those services. That’s easy peasy with YouTube, you just go to the Captions section and download>SRT. Download the SRT and you’re done. Import the SRT into Transcriptive with ‘Combine Lines into Paragraphs’ turned on… Easy, free transcription. With Facebook it’s more difficult as they don’t let you just download an SRT file. Or any file for that matter. So you need to get tricky. Open Facebook in Firefox and go to the Web Developer>Network. This will open the inspector at the bottom of you browser window. Which will give you something that looks like this: Go to the Facebook video you want to get the caption file for. Once the video starts playing, type SRT into the Filter field (as shown above) This _should_ show an XHR file. (we’ve seen instances where it doesn’t, not sure why. So this might not work for every video) Right Click on it, select Copy>Copy URL (as shown above) Open a new Tab and paste in the URL. You should now be asked to download a file. Save this as an SRT file (e.g. MyVideo.srt). Import the SRT into Transcriptive with ‘Combine Lines into Paragraphs’ turned on… Easy, free transcription. So that’s it. This worked as of this writing. It’s entirely possible Facebook will make a change at some point preventing this, but for now, it’s a good way of getting free transcriptions. You can also do this in other browsers, I’m just using Firefox as an example.
Speech to text using Speech Analysis in Premiere Pro Creative Cloud
Premiere Pro CS6 has the ability to turn speech into text and put it into the Speech Analysis metadata. You can still use it in any version of Premiere Pro. In Premiere CS6 you can right+click on a piece of footage and select ‘Analyze Content’. This would turn all the speech into text. Adobe removed it in later versions of Creative Cloud but all that infrastructure is still in Premiere Pro CC 2018 (and other versions) and this post will tell you how to make use of it with, and without, Transcriptive, our plugin for transcribing video. First off, if you have Creative Cloud, you still have access to CS6 (or CC). You can download it and use that to turn all your speech to text. This will get saved with your file and when you import it into Premiere 2018, all the text will be in the Speech Analysis field of the Metadata panel. This is very handy as you can use the text with the Source panel to set in and out points and edit with text. To get older versions of Premiere, go to the Creative Cloud app and find Premiere Pro. Click the menu button (or down arrow) and select ‘Other Versions’. You can install all the way back to CS6. Once CS6 is installed, you can import the footage, right+click and select ‘Anaylze Content’. It takes some time to do this, but once it’s done, you’ll have all the speech turned into text in Speech Analysis. Import the clips into the version of Premiere you’re using and all that text will show up in the Metadata panel. Voila! It’s not an awesome interface for editing the text (and it needs a lot of editing as it’s not very accurate, which is why Adobe removed it) but it’s there. Transcriptive can also use that data. If you’re using Transcriptive and drop the footage into a sequence, it’ll pull the text from the Speech Analysis field. As mentioned, the CS6 speech-to-text isn’t very accurate, which you can see below. So it’s usually worth it to pay a few cents a minute to get a good A.I. transcript or $1.25/min to get human transcripts (which Transcriptive can import). However, if you want free, then the CS6 trick is one way of doing it. Or you could use YouTube and import their captions into Transcriptive. It’s free, easy and we have a great tutorial that shows you how to get YouTube captions into Premiere!
Photographing Lightning during The Day or Night with a DSLR
As many of you know, I’m an avid time lapse videographer, and the original purpose of our Flicker Free filter was time lapse. I needed a way to deflicker all those night to day and day to night time lapses. I also love shooting long exposure photos. As it turns out, this was pretty good experience to have when it came to capturing a VERY rare lightning storm that came through San Francisco late last year. Living in San Francisco, you’re lucky if you see more than a 3 or 4 lightning bolts a year. Very different from the lightning storms I saw in Florida when I lived there for a year. However, we were treated to a definitely Florida-esqe lightning storm last September. Something like 800 lightning strikes over a few hours. It was a real treat and gave me a chance to try and capture lightning! (in a camera) The easiest way to capture lightning is just flip your phone’s camera into video mode and point in the direction you hope the lightning is going to be at. Get the video and then pull out a good frame. This works… but video frames are usually heavily compressed and much lower resolution than a photo. I wanted to use my 30mp Canon 5DmarkIV to get photos, not the iPhone’s mediocre video camera. Problems, Problems, Problems To get the 5D to capture lightning, I needed at the very least: 1) a tripod and 2) an intervalometer. Lightning happens fast. Like, speed of light fast. Until you try and take a picture of it, you don’t realize exactly how fast. If you’re shooting video (30fps), the bolt will happen over 2, maybe 3 frames. if you’ve got a fancy 4K (or 8K!) camera that will shoot 60 or 120fps, that’s not a bad place to start. However, if you’re trying to take advantage of your 5D’s 6720 × 4480 sensor… you’re not going to get the shot handholding it and manually pressing the shutter. Not going to happen. Cloudy with a chance of boring-ass photos. So set the camera up on a tripod and plugin in your intervalometer. You can use the built-in, but the external one gives you more options. You want the intervalometer firing as fast as possible but that means only once every second. During the day, that’s not going to work. Lightning And Daylight The storm started probably about an hour before sunset. It was cloudy, but there was still a fair amount of light. At first I thought, “once every second should be good enough”. I was wrong. Basically, the lightning had to happen the exact moment the camera took the picture. Possible, but the odds are against you getting the shot. As mentioned, I like shooting long exposures. Sometimes at night but often during the day. To achieve this, I have several neutral density filters which I stack on top of each other. They worked great for this. I stacked a couple .9 ND filters on the lens, bringing it down 6 stops. This was enough to let me have a 1/2 sec. shutter speed. 1/2 sec. shutter speed and 1 sec. intervals… I’ve now got a 50/50 chance of getting the shot… assuming the camera is pointed in the direction of the lightning. Luckily it was striking so often, that I could make a good guess as to the area it was going to be in. As you can see from the above shot, I got some great shots out of it. Night Lightning To the naked eye, it was basically night. So with a 2 second exposure and a 2 second interval… as long as the lightning happened where the camera was pointed, I was good to go. (it wasn’t quite night, so with the long exposure you got the last bits of light from sunset) I did not need the neutral density filters as it was pretty dark. By this point the storm had moved. The lightning was less consistent and a bit further away. So I had to zoom in a bit, reducing the odds of getting the shot. But luck was still with me and I got a few good shots in this direction as well. I love trying to capture stuff you can’t really see with the naked eye, whether it’s using time lapse to see how clouds move or long exposure to see water flow patterns. Experimenting with capturing lightning was a blast. Just wish we saw more of it here in SF! So hopefully this gave you some ideas about how to capture lightning, or anything else that moves fast, next time you have a chance!
Speeding Up De-flickering of Time Lapse Sequences in Premiere
Time lapse is always challenging… you’ve got a high resolution image sequence that can seriously tax your system. Add Flicker Free on top of that… where we’re analyzing up to 21 of those high resolution images… and you can really slow a system down. So I’m going to go over a few tips for speeding things up in Premiere or other video editor. First off, turn off Render Maximum Depth and Maximum Quality. Maximum Depth is not going to improve the render quality unless your image sequence is HDR and the format you’re saving it to supports 32-bit images. If it’s just a normal RAW or JPEG sequence, it won’t make much of a difference. Render Maximum Quality may make a bit of difference but it will likely be lost in whatever compression you use. Do a test or two to see if you can tell the difference (it does improve scaling) but I rarely can. RAW: If at all possible you should shoot your time lapses in RAW. There are some serious benefits which I go over in detailed in this video: Shooting RAW for Time Lapse. The main benefit is that Adobe Camera RAW automatically removes dead pixels. It’s a big f’ing deal and it’s awesome. HOWEVER… once you’ve processed them in Adobe Camera RAW, you should convert the image sequence to a movie or JPEG sequence (using very little compression). It will make processing the time lapse sequence (color correction, effects, deflickering, etc.) much, much faster. RAW is awesome for the first pass, after that it’ll just bog your system down. Nest, Pre-comp, Compound… whatever your video editing app calls it, use it. Don’t apply Flicker Free or other de-flickering software to the original, super-high resolution image sequence. Apply it to whatever your final render size is… HD, 4K, etc. Why? Say you have a 6000×4000 image sequence and you need to deliver an HD clip. If you apply effects to the 6000×4000 sequence, Premiere will have to process TWELVE times the amount of pixels it would have to process if you applied it to HD resolution footage. 24 million pixels vs. 2 million pixels. This can result in a HUGE speed difference when it comes time to render. How do you Nest? This is Premiere-centric, but the concept applies to After Effects (pre-compose) or FCP (compound) as well. (The rest of this blog post will be explaining how to Nest. If you already understand everything I’ve said, you’re good to go!) First, take your original image sequence (for example, 6000×4000 pixels) and put it into an HD sequence. Scale the original footage down to fit the HD sequence. The reason for this is that we want to control how Premiere applies Flicker Free. If we apply it to the 6000×4000 images, Premiere will apply FF and then scale the image sequence. That’s the order of operations. It doesn’t matter if Scale is set to 2%. Flicker Free (and any effect) will be applied to the full 6000×4000 image. So… we put the big, original images into an HD sequence and do any transformations (scaling, adjusting the position and rotating) here. This usually includes stabilization… although if you’re using Warp Stabilizer you can make a case for doing that to the HD sequence. That’s beyond the scope of this tutorial, but here’s a great tutorial on Warp Stabilizer and Time Lapse Sequences. Next, we take our HD time lapse sequence and put that inside a different HD sequence. You can do this manually or use the Nest command. Now we apply Flicker Free to our HD time lapse sequence. That way FF will only have to process the 1920×1080 frames. The original 6000×4000 images are hidden in the HD sequence. To Flicker Free it just looks like HD footage. Voila! Faster rendering times! So, to recap: Turn off Render Maximum Depth Shoot RAW, but apply Flicker Free to a JPEG sequence/Movie Apply Flicker Free to the final output resolution, not the original resolution Those should all help your rendering times. Flicker Free still takes some time to render, none of the above will make it real time. However, it should speed things up and make the render times more manageable if you’re finding them to be really excessive. Flicker Free is available for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid, Resolve, and Assimilate Scratch. It costs $149. You can download a free trial of Flicker Free here.
Getting transcripts for Premiere Multicam Sequences
Using Transcriptive with multicam sequences is not a smooth process and doesn’t really work. It’s something we’re working on coming up with a solution for but it’s tricky due to Premiere’s limitations. However, while we sort that out, here’s a workaround that is pretty easy to implement. Here are the steps: 1- Take the clip with the best audio and drop it into it’s own sequence. 2- Transcribe that sequence with Transcriptive. 3- Now replace that clip with the multicam clip. 4- Voila! You have a multicam sequence with a transcript. Edit the transcript and clip as you normally would. This is not a permanent solution and we hope to make it much more automatic to deal with Premiere’s multicam clips. In the meantime, this technique will let you get transcripts for multicam clips. Thanks to Todd Drezner at Cohn Creative for suggesting this workaround.
Creating the Grinch on Video Footage with The Free Ugly Box Plugin
We here at Digital Anarchy want to make sure you have a wonderful Christmas and there’s no better way to do that than to take videos of family and colleagues and turn them into the Grinch. They’ll love it! Clients, too… although they may not appreciate it as much even if they are the most deserving. So just play it at the office Christmas party as therapy for the staff that has to deal with them. Our free plugin Ugly Box will make it easy to do! Apply it to the footage, click Make Ugly, and then make them green! This short tutorial shows you how: You can download the free Ugly Box plugin for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Avid here: https://digitalanarchy.com/register/register_ugly.php Of course, if you want to make people look BETTER, there’s always Beauty Box to help you apply a bit of digital makeup. It makes retouching video easy, get more info on it here: https://digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/main.html
Sharpening Video Footage
Sharpening video can be a bit trickier than sharpening photos. The process is the same of course… increasing the contrast around edges which creates the perception of sharpness. However, because you’re dealing with 30fps instead of a single image some additional challenges are introduced: 1- Noise is more of a problem. 2- Video is frequently compressed more heavily than photos, so compression artifacts can be a serious problem. 3- Oversharpening is a problem with stills or video but can create motion artifacts when the video is played back that can be visually distracting. 4- It’s more difficult to mask out areas like skin that you don’t want sharpened. These are problems you’ll run into regardless of the sharpening method. However, probably unsurprising, in addition to discussing the solutions using regular tools, we do talk about how our Samurai Sharpen plugin can help with them. Noise in Video Footage Noise is always a problem regardless of whether you’re shooting stills or videos. However, with video the noise changes from frame to frame making it a distraction to the viewer if there’s too much or it’s too pronounced. Noise tends to be much more obvious in dark areas, as you can see below where it’s most apparent in the dark, hollow part of the guitar: Using a mask to protect the darker areas makes it possible to increase the sharpening for the rest of the video frame. Samurai Sharpen has masks built-in, so it’s easy in that plugin, but you can do this manually in any video editor or compositing program by using keying tools, building a mask and compositing effects. Compression Artifacts Many consumer video cameras, including GoPros and some drone cameras heavily compress footage. Especially when shooting 4K. It’s difficult, and sometimes impossible to sharpen footage like this. The compression artifacts become very pronounced, since they tend to have edges like normal features. Unlike noise, the artifacts are visible in most areas of the footage, although they tend to be more obvious in areas with lots of detail. In Samurai you can increase the Edge Mask Strength to lessen the impact of sharpening on the artifact (often they’re in low contrast) but depending on how compressed the footage is you may not want to sharpen it. Oversharpening Sharpening is a local contrast adjustment. It’s just looking at significant edges and sharpening those areas. Oversharpening occurs when there’s too much contrast around the edges, resulting in visible halos. Especially if you look at the guitar strings and frets, you’ll see a dark halo on the outside of the strings and the strings themselves are almost white with little detail. Way too much contrast/sharpening. The usual solution is to reduce the sharpening amount. In Samurai Sharpen you can also adjust the strength of the halos independently. So if the sharpening results in only the dark or light side being oversharpened, you can dial back just that side. Sharpening Skin The last thing you usually want to do is sharpen someone’s skin. You don’t want your talent’s skin looking like a dried-up lizard. (well, unless your talent is a lizard. Not uncommon these days with all the ridiculous 3D company mascots) Especially with 4K and HD, video is already showing more skin detail than most people want (hence the reason for our Beauty Box Video plugin for digital makeup). If you’re using UnSharp Mask you can use the Threshold parameter, or in Samurai the Edge Mask Strength parameter is a more powerful version of that. Both are good ways of protecting the skin from sharpening. The skin area tends to be fairly flat contrast-wise and the Edge Mask generally does a good job of masking the skin areas out. Either way, you want to keep an eye on the skin areas, unless you want a lizard. (and if so, you should download are free Ugly Box plugin. 😉 Wrap Up You can sharpen video and most video footage will benefit from some sharpening. However, there are numerous issues that you run into and hopefully this gives you some idea of what you’re up against whether you’re using Samurai Sharpen for Video or something else.
Thoughts on The Mac Pro and FCP X
There’s been some talk of the eminent demise of the Mac Pro. The Trash Can is getting quite old in the tooth… it was overpriced and underpowered to begin with and is now pretty out of date. Frankly it’d be nice if Apple just killed it and moved on. It’s not where they make their money and it’s clear they’re not that interested in making machines for the high end video production market. At the very least, it would mean we (Digital Anarchy) wouldn’t have to buy Trash Can 2.0 just for testing plugins. I’m all for not buying expensive machines we don’t have any use for. But if they kill off the Mac Pro, what does that mean for FCP X? Probably nothing. It’s equally clear the FCP team still cares about pro video. There were multiple folks from the FCP team at NAB this year, talking to people and showing off FCP at one of the sub-conferences. They also continue to add pro-level features. That said, they may care as much (maybe even more) about the social media creators… folks doing YouTube, Facebook, and other types of social media creation. There are a lot of them. A lot more than folks doing higher end video stuff, and these creators are frequently using iPhones to capture and the Mac to edit. They aren’t ‘pro editors’ and I think that demographic makes up a good chunk of FCP users. It’s certainly the folks that Apple, as a whole, is going after in a broader sense. If you don’t think these folks are a significant focus for Apple overall, just look at how much emphasis they’ve put on the camera in the iPhone 6 & 7… 240fps video, dual lenses, RAW shooting, etc. To say nothing of all the billboards with nothing but a photo ‘taken with the iPhone’. Everyone is a media creator now and ‘Everyone’ is more important to Apple than ‘Pro Editors’. The iMacs are more than powerful enough for those folks and it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple just focused on them. Perhaps coming out with a couple very powerful iMacs/MacBook Pros as a nod to professionals, but letting the MacPro fade away. Obviously, as with all things Apple, this is just speculation. However, given the lack of attention professionals have gotten over the last half decade, maybe it’s time for Apple to just admit they have other fish to fry.
