Testing conditions for Video Stabilisation software!

My last post, a general mediation on the Apple Macbook Air, Final Cut Pro X, and editing video while you are waiting attracted a reasonable number of comments. Stabilisation seems to be a hot topic at the moment, especially considering that it is one of the planks that Adobe’s new After Effects CS 5.5 is standing on. The piece of video I used to illustrate my recent post was a challenging piece for any stabilisation technology, considering that I was hand holding an iPhone 4, on a windy day, walking backwards on a beach!

In order to demonstrate what’s possible, I ran the same footage through the following tools:

• iMovie 11 on the Mac
• A demo ProDAD Mercalli V2 plugin for Premiere Pro CS5, hence the diagonal lines
• After Effects Warp Stabilizer in CS5.5

The Beach

My day job is IT; a necessary part of that role is waiting. Wait for a process to finish, wait for somebody to complete a task, wait for equipment to boot up.

I dread to think how much of the last 15 years have been spent waiting.

So while implementing a major production change this week (and encountering some frustrations) I put my “waiting” time to good use by testing out Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and Premiere Pro CS5.5 on my Macbook Air to put together this little video. Shot on an iPhone 4, Warp Stabilizer in After Effects (more on that in another post), and finished up in Premiere Pro. I don’t think it turned out too bad, and the “Air” behaved very well, especially considering it is the lowest, 2Gb RAM, 64Gb HD model.

What’s really great about it is it’s “there when you need it” availability. Small and light is good, but some of the other things really make a difference. Like it’s ability to wake instantly from sleep, whether it’s 5 minutes or 2 weeks since you used it; or it’s long battery life. Sure, I had to go for lunch when rendering out the stabilized footage from AE, and the final footage from Premiere, but the video mostly played back in real-time on Premiere, and if I rendered the time line, I could scrub forwards and backwards without pause.

Premiere Pro CS5.5 on Macbook Air

This was my first time using After Effects, and similar to Premiere Pro, there is a fairly steep learning curve. That said the Warp Stabilizer is simple to use, and very, very effective. It practically looks like I am floating out there! I know that it is one of the key features that Adobe is using to sell the CS5.5 upgrade, and it nearly looks like it might be worth it. Premiere Pro and After Effects are getting a lot of interest of late since the release of Final Cut Pro X from Apple.

Apple Final Cut Pro X

A lot of the pro video and film editors are dissatisfied / distraught over the missing interoperability features in FCPX, and videos comparing features, performance, and migration methods abound. I like this one comparing the Stabilizing function in FCPX and the Warp Stabilizer in After Effects:

When all is said and done though, FCPX looks like a very polished offering for the casual / prosumer video editor on the Mac, such as I am. One app (essentially), with all the output options I would typically need, and interesting media management capabilities; I only wish there was a trail version available. I would love to compare the performance of both when editing Canon 7D footage on my Macbook Pro. FCPX seems to offer GPU rendering on all Macs, whereas the magnificent Mercury engine of Premiere Pro is only at it’s best when paired with one of a select group of Nvidia GPUs, none of which are typically offered by Apple. Or are they…?

How come I didn’t find this link sooner? More on this too, later.

My Mac!

This post has little to do with photography, but it perhaps does answer some of the most common questions I have heard at trade shows, in forums, and the like… What’s your setup? What do you use? Many will lament the complete lack of photographic merit in those questions, but as a tech head, I will indulge my inner geek.

I recently started reading a great set of interviews where IT personalities give an overview of the hardware and software they use personally called “The Setup”. I really love the format of these interviews, being very breezy, not getting bogged down in the details, while still providing some great insight, tips, and hints for helpful tools and software. I doubt I would ever be invited to feature in “The Setup” but I will try to write this post in the same style.

Who Are You And What Do You Do?

I am Jonathan Bourke, currently living in Sydney, Australia. By day, I am a corporate IT guy, but by night I dream of being a professional travel photographer. Some day…

What Hardware Are You Using And Why?

The title refers to my first real computing experience, editing a school magazine on an original Macintosh. About a year ago I went “back to the mac” from a hot and heavy 18.4″ Sony Vaio laptop to a 17″ Macbook Pro. I love it, the pure clean lines, the excellent battery life, and the lack of extraneous stickers! I have the matte screen, but I must admit, it’s not as good as the one on the Sony, which definitely had a wider gamut for photography. One unexpected benefit of the screen though, is its extra “depth”; the extra 200 or so pixels it has over the Sony are great in Lightroom or other full screen apps. The Sony also had a BluRay burner, but considering I never burned a single BluRay in it, or watched a full movie, I don’t miss it at all. At the time, I couldn’t stretch to an SSD, but I have just upgraded to a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive, which has provided a bit of a boost when opening apps.

I still keep a Dell desktop as a media centre and as a backup destination using Crashplan. Despite my years in IT using many operating systems, I found the move to the Mac a little of a challenge. I really missed the Windows 7 snap to edge feature which I have since solved with Cinch. I continue to miss the global shortcut Windows Key — E to open an Explorer window, so if anyone knows of a way to implement that in Finder, please let me know!

I have Epson R1800 and Dell 3100cn printers and an Epson V700 scanner. Thankfully, all of which are fully supported under Mac OS X (although the Dell driver requires Rosetta).

What Software Are You Using?

My Applications Folder

I believe a lot of people have the perception that moving to the Mac means missing out on all the software that they already know and (perhaps) love.

Not so!

The majority of the software I used on Windows I also have for Mac, such as Microsoft Office 2011, which is such a major improvement on Office 2008 for a user migrating from Office on the PC, and Adobe Master Collection CS5, which is effectively identical. I have always used iTunes to manage my media; migrating this wasn’t child’s play, but help is available.

I use Lightroom 3 to manage my photo library, and this was a joy to migrate. Just download trial version from Adobe, use your existing serial, which is platform agnostic, open your migrated catalog, and reconnect missing photo’s by selecting the top-level folder of your Lightroom managed photos.

I have always used some excellent Open Source or freely available software, and most have versions for the MAC:

• VLC — for playing assorted media files
• HandBrake — for DVD ripping
• Google Chrome — I flip-flop between this and Safari, only for full screen view and the Omnibox
• Google Earth — well, for travelling the world
• Skype — for a long time the Mac version was much neater, better looking than the windows one
• Evernote — for general note taking / scans of documents, etc.
• Sun, now Oracle, VirtualBox — for when I want to test something out on another OS
• Tweetdeck — for Facebook / Twitter stuff

I have also discovered a thriving world of beautifully designed Mac specific software such as Skitch for screenshots, Tranmission for Bittorrent, CyberDuck for FTP, and Growl for system notifications.

I have never used Apple’s Time Machine, though it looks magnificent. I have been a Crashplan user for a while; It gives me continuous, automatic, block level, differential, deduplicated, versioned backups of all my photo’s, documents, movies, music, and everything else sent to an external disk, my Dell desktop, and a datacenter in the US. Takes some beating!

I love Mac OS X’s integration of mail, calendar, and contacts syncing either from MobileMe or GoogleApps. While there are those who complain about the native clients, I am quite happy with them. I am still looking for a good task management app; I would love to get OmniFocus or Things, but I just can’t justify their cost so I currently use Toodledo.com.

My main camera is a Canon EOS 7D, with Sigma 12–24, Canon 28–135, 50 F1.4, and 70–300 IS lenses, but I use the camera in my iPhone 4 surprisingly often.

What Would Your Dream Setup Be?

I love screen real-estate; you can’t have too many pixels! So the 27″ iMac or the Apple Display are very tempting. I would love to get one, a Bluetooth keyboard and magic trackpad, a BookArc from Twelve South to give me more of a desktop setup.

I would also need to look at some more external storage, preferably Firewire 800 (oh, how I would love that ThunderBolt port now!) for raw, in use movies and photo’s to live before being archived. As it is the internal drive on the MacBook Pro is nearly always at 80% full.

Two last things for the wish list:

• I always struggle with colour consistency from screen to print, so I would love a proper colour management system such as a Spyder3Studio SR or a ColorMunki Photo.
• Now that I am doing more localised adjustments in Ligthroom, a Wacom Tablet would be nice

I get asked for product recommendations frequently. And my recommendations are ignored frequently .

Oh well.

I am a bit of a “gear head”, and love researching new camera gear. If only I had some way to pay for this obsession?

What about an Amazon Store you say? A good idea indeed. Behold my new Recommended Page!

In the spirit of full disclosure, as a signed up Amazon Associate, I get a tiny percentage of any products bought through the links in this Amazon store. I won’t be buying a private jet anytime soon, but it should help towards the cost of running this site. And just in time for a Christmas bailout!

Each of the hand-picked items listed I have either owned in the past, own currently, or would love to own in the future. There is no filler here, it’s all good stuff, and I would happily recommend to my family or friends.

Enjoy.

Adobe Lightroom 2

In my previous post on Digital Asset Management, I briefly outlined some of the entry level contenders for DAM software such as Google Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Elements. In the rest of this series, I will look at some of the heavy weights, the professional asset management systems. I will start with the one I use most —  Adobe Lightroom. Not sure if this is a good idea as I it is the product that I am most intimate with, knowing its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s get started…

Adobe Lightroom is now the elephant in the room of DAM software. As John Nack (of Adobe) revealed a short while back, Adobe Lightroom pretty much owns the professional market, beating it’s next nearest competitor, Apple Aperture, by a considerable margin. I have been using it since the very early beta’s (and Pixmantic RawShooter before that, which Adobe bought to kick start Adobe Lightroom), and hopefully, am somewhat qualified to give you a non-professionals opinion.

Library / Catalog Tools:

This is the module of Lightroom where I spend 85%+ of my time. I am slowly working through my back catalog of images, and suffering from OCD as I do, I insist on all images being correctly located, named, tagged, etc. Lightroom is very strong here, having the ability to apply extensive keyword tag hierarchies to images. A strong file renaming engine, along with virtual collections (and collections of collections), and numerous methods of catagorizing images (by colour label, by star rating, and by Pick/Reject) are available. Apples’ Aperture was the first major DAM product to be announced in my memory, but immediately there was a lot of critism regarding it’s approach to asset management; namely migrating all managed images INTO it’s database, removing all external access. While this had it’s merits, Adobe chose to go another way, winning lots of friends in the process, allowing the Lightroom user to:

• Reference the image file from it’s existing location
• Manage the image file by copying it to a managed location, still on the file system and accessible from other tools (I will touch on this again at a later date).
• Manage the image file by moving it to a managed location.
• Manage the image file by converting it to Adobe’s open DNG RAW standard, and moving it to a managed location.

Image Editing:

The second major module with Adobe Lightroom is the develop module, which is where the real fun starts. Here is where you apply image adjustments such as exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation, and a host of other modifications. Version 1.0 of Lightroom restricted these adjustments to the whole of the image, requiring the use of Photoshop for more targeted adjustments such as removing blemishes, or other distractions. Thankfully with version 2, Adobe introduced the adjustment brush and other specific pixel level adjustment tools. Now you can remove spots and blemishes, smooth skin, whiten eyes and teeth, apply graduated filters as well as adjust other settings relating to the entire image. You still need Adobe Photoshop in order to perform more advanced adjustments such as panoramas, collages, HDR, or other major image surgery. I would recommend Martin Evenings’ book if you want to get best value out of the Develop module though…

Altering white balance in Adobe Lightroom

Exports / Sharing:

In some respects this is where Adobe Lightroom has lost ground on the competition, especially Apple Aperture. Out of the box, Lightroom can export images to disk, and to CDROM (not on 64 bit windows), as well as having modules to govern printing, creation of a web gallery, and a slideshow. Doesn’t sound to bad… but Facebook, Flickr, and other online resources are now becoming major marketing tools for photographers, and exporting directly to these locations is a capability now offered by some competitors. Another major gap was the ability to export to a Photo Book creation service. This capability may feel a little consumer orientated, but again, it is offered by Apple Aperture.  Yes, export plugins are available, and I use them myself; they are very capable, but the lack of a native ability to export to the major hosting sites feels like an omission.

The X Factor:

What do I mean by the X Factor? Basically, why would I buy this over a competing product when, on paper,  the competing product is more capable. And for Adobe Lightroom, the X Factor is this… community. Lightroom has a massive community around it, producing tutorials, presets, blogs, reviews, reports, etc. When you are getting started with a product as advanced as Lightroom, that really helps and can’t be overlooked.

Details:

• Link: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
• Cost: US$ 229
• Platforms: Windows, Mac OSX
• Buy: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop — But is it Still Relevant for Photographers?

That said, it really has been a phenomenon; so much so that it is often used as a verb:

That image looks photoshopped!

A result of that is that in popular culture it now stands for all that is wrong with magazine images of skinny models. It is accused of being complicated, difficult to learn and use, and extremely expensive. So much so that it must be one of the most pirated pieces of software on the internet.

Still amazing software though…