Automated editing...eeeekkk

filmy wrote on 1/12/2004, 3:59 PM

I have to say the recent thread about how big a role editing plays (http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=243283&Replies=23&Page=1) is a brillant topic and this sort of fits in with that but I wanted to give this little thing it's own thread.

First today I was thumbing through a mag and saw an ad with a headline saying "Now that you can burn DVD's at 8x speed, why are you still editing video at 1x speed?" The ad is for a product called Visual Communicator by Serious Magic. It seems to be more aimed at the news/broadcast market - but still the headline grabbed me.

Now - in the 'weird mode', a few minutes ago I just heard/read the new press about Pinnacle Systems Studio 9 software. Today is the day I seem to be seeing editors are no longer needed. Studio 9, yeah it is Pinnacle - and they have the usual "new" items such as Surround Sound and 16:9 ability. They also supposedly have "Automatic Color Correction"...but the *real* element that caught my eye and follows suit with Visual Communicator is the "SmartMovie" feature. get this - direct from the press release: "Users select raw video footage, add a song for a soundtrack, and choose an editing style for their finished movie. With one click, Studio will create a movie with titles, transitions, and special effects, all synchronized to the beat and duration of the music."

Um....I dunno but don't you think that things overall are a bit too 'boiler plate' allready? Now all we need is another 'ease of use' concept where not only can anyone 'make a movie' or 'author a DVD' but now anyone can edit. Imagine this being at the point of "Style: Suspense - Hitchock - Frenzy" or the like. You dump in your unedited footage and choose the "Saving Private Ryan" template and go out for dinner and when you come back all your footage has been edited, letterboxed, color corrected and mixed in DTS. Sorry, but this is not a good trend....call me a nay sayer, but what is really the point? it goes beyond easy use, this goes to just plan lazy ass people who don't want to think anymore. Seriously. Please tell me, or at the least hint at, Sony isn't taking Vegas this direction. (Although the automatic color-correction might be kind of cool...not to mention the $99 price tag. LOL)

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filmy wrote on 2/5/2004, 1:30 PM

I had a chance to play a bit with Studio 9. My main intrest was the "automated" portion of it.
It is a bit clever, but very uncreative. I can't see where it really syncs up to the beats however. They have this little "tool box" icon and one side shows a video camera, the other audio. You choose the video side and up pops a sub interface. Down near the bottom of this interface there is film clapper and it allows you to "Create a Music Video automatically." Up pops the interface. First you select one of 5 types of editing. (Yes, only 5). You type in the name of your "moive". You type in your "closing credits". Click create video and that is it. (Ok, well you have to put media on the timeline, but the idea is that you just dump it there - on the timeline. You can pre-edit it or you can choose "Use clips in random order") I loaded up a fast paced song by the Donnas and dumped in some random footage and clicked on "Fast paced Music Video" and watched. It put it together in under a minute and the results were - ok, but not at all how I would have done it on my own and it wasn't even very flowing with the music. I tried the "Simple and Elegant" pre-set for the hell of it and it did not go with the music at all - this is why I can't see how this automates to the beat. Also you can redo the video and each time it comes out different so it isn't as locked in as I thought it would be. I dunno - for me it wasn't all that impressive and it seems to be really designed with extremely lazy editors in mind.

The automated color correction is not very good because you don't have any settings. You just drop the clip onto the timeline and add this filter - it does what it feels will fix what it sees wrong. You get one slider for overall brightness but that is it. I dropped in a clip that had a red back ground - actually it was a white background that had a red light on it, so it went from off white to red, side to side. Dropping the auto color correct on it put a blue cast on everything, it timed out the Red all together. Another clip had a nice warm tone to it, almost magic hour-ish. Auto Color Correct took off warm tone and, again, timed out the reds and gave a blue (Cool) tint to it. Overall everything I tried it out on became blue-ish.

Something I did not expect from a sub $100 piece of software was the ability to do offline!! You can capture DV material (or anything via firewire I would think) in "Preview" quality choosing from MJPEG low, medium or high. Provided the source material has time code you can do an offline edit and than recapture at the DV quality setting. I think if Vegas had this ability a lot of people would put it to good use, especially those doing HD. Bad thing about this is that it is sort of like giving someone this really great toy but not allowing for the power needed to use it - you can't do batch capture or logging so unless you are only using material from one tape or each tape has a unique timecode (i.e - 01:00:00:00 for tape 1, 02:00:00:00 for tape 2 and so on) this feature is usless.

John_Cline wrote on 2/5/2004, 3:03 PM

I certainly don't think automated editing is going to replace any of us. However... I have played around with an automated editing package called "Muvee" and, as much as I didn't want it to work, it did a pretty respectable job. It's actually an interesting and potentially useful piece of software for consumers with a bunch of boring, un-edited home movie footage. It seems to work a lot like Pinnacle's SmartMovie, perhaps they licensed the SDK from Muvee.

Muvee.com

John