FYI: Video Demo of Film workflow and Liquid 7.x
 

Hi,

Here is the first in a series of "how to" videos with Liquid 7.1. These type of videos are by the seat of my pants so if there are technical errors with the encoding, it is what it is. But you can be sure the information is accurate (as you watch me demo).

This first one is how to capture, edit and get your HD-100 24p content prepared to send to the film post house. It is end to end and if anyone is cutting a movie with ProHD, this is for YOU! I'll try to do a video for ProHD to SD broadcast, DVD and HDTV when using Avid Liquid 7.1 as I get time.

Click here for streaming WMV best viewed full screen 1280x1024.

Click here for QT Mov (H264) For Macs in the house.
download first, and rename the extension from .movx to .mov

S.Noe
szn89Productions Chicago

P.S. PAL and 25P people take heart. Liquid 7.1 works for you end to end.

Thanks for sharing this Stephen -- if you need help with file hosting just let me know.

Chris, if you could stick it that would be great. I want to add a few more specifically for the different delivery types.

Best,

I'll have to consult with Tim about the stickies... we have so many of them already. There's got to be some easy way to consolidate all these great threads and still keep 'em at the top. We'll talk it over and come up with a solution. Thanks Stephen,

Hi Stephen.

Not to be a PITA but any chance of having the video in another format? It crashes my browser (Firefox 1.5) when trying to play it. If I save it to disk and then playt the player (Flip4Mac for QT) plays only the audio and a popup says that I'm missing a component...

Even a low-quality mpeg4 if you can, no biggie otherwise.

Thanks.

Paolo,

For you my friend a MOV. It starts out kind of dry but picks up at the end.

This represents the 24p film workflow end to end for ProHD using Liquid 7.1. Capture, edit, dump the frame sequence/audio and finally dump the completed sequence to tape (for archive).

Click here for QT Mov (sorenson3)

I used this program called Camtasia. It's an amazing tool for screen capture.

Thank you very much Stephen! Really appreciated.

This is great Stephen. I have something in the works with Chris' cooperation to offer an HTML page with suggested workflows based on shooting mode, platform, NLE, and delivery method. Things are changing rapidly and I wanted to see what progress would be made at NAB with native support before posting a bunch of suddenly obsolete methods. It seems not much has changed.

Of course, I don't own a single Windows machine (until I get the Macbook Pro), so please keep it coming. As a first step, this week I will put together a workflow sticky.
This thread will be included.

thanks again.
Tim.

Thank for the suggestion, in the Mac world there is a program called SnapZ Pro that I have been using in a similar way.

Hey Stephen. I jumped the gun with my previous post. I thought you meant that you captured the original movie with Camtasia (maybe you did) but I finally got at the end of the download and hear your comment at beginning of the video.

This a great Stephen. I don't think they even know about this 7.1 workflow over at the Avid Liquid Forum on the Avid Community site. BTW I checked over there and all of them say that 7.1 isn't shipping. Do you know a dealer who I could purchase 7.1 from?

FYI...I'm playing with the trial disc. And so far I like what I see. The interface is sort of based on these 5 or six sets, but I'm okay with that. An unbelievable amount of EFX presets. Too many maybe for an old dog like me. But I do like the background rendering, very cool. It looks like it uses m2v vs. m2t. How is that different??

Also I noticed you can downconvert to component, DV, etc. by changing the timeline. And clip propeties for scaling SD. Currently in Avid Xpress HD, the HDV 720/30 preset doesn't have a a 30i timeline switch, only DVCPro 720p.

Anyway I'm sold, Pretty powerful stuff under the hood for a $500 program.

Cheers

7.1 was on display at NAB and soon will be available for download. You probably have 7.0 trial. The update will be free for download and once again will include all of the framerates ProHD offers (including 60p, 50p, 30p, 25p and 24p) for capture/edit/output.

Liquid will demux files it imports or captures. m2v (mpeg 2 video) is the video portion of the m2t. The other portions of the m2t are audio (L & R) and timecode.

The HD-100 is affordable and Liquid is affordable. Now that the workflow is available to the masses, there is no reason ANYONE can't cut a film with ProHD. The sky is open.

Hey Stephen.

I recompressed the video because, at 183MB, can be a real drain on your bandwidth. If you want there is an H.264 version at http://www.paolociccone.com/clips/Fi...quid7-H264.mov. This file is ~42Mb.

If you want to grab it and post it on your site, otehrwise I'll leave it there for the next week.

Take care.

Paolo,

You're great man. I wish I could get my arms around H.264 like you have. I can host the file with no problem. The big problem here on dvinfo.net is that you can not edit your post after a certain amount of time so I can't update the original post to reflect the new encode.

Thanks a bunch for taking the time.

Stephen -- great tutorial! You showed it all in only a few minutes.

Mac folks need to understand that if you do cuts-only edit with Liquid, there is NO "conform" time. You can simply export to tape as you do DV.

FCP and Canopus (and likely Premiere and Premiere+Cineform) don't have Smart GOP splicing. So if you are not working with 24p, with Liquid there is no conforming except where FX have been placed. (Just wanted folks to know the "conform" you went through was only for the 23.98 to 24 conversion.)

Does the audio change pitch or is their constant pitch technology built in?

Stephen, you should do one more example that shows making a true 23.98/24 DVD from the Timeline. Both letterboxed and anamorphic.

Are you using the "old" or "new" interface? It looks like the "old" one. Perhaps, next time you can use the "new" GUI.

Looks like my HDV is not going to be done on a Mac. There are three good solutions for the PC. But, for Native HDV, Liquid looks like a winner.

Hey Stephen, least I could do after you took the time to make the QT file. Why don't you just rename my file with the same name of the original that you posted so that people that download it from now will get the smaller version.

Thanks again for the great tutorial.

Liquid 7.1 now INCLUDES MagicBullet II Movie looks for free. 55 movie looks in all inserted as a standard FX editor in the library rack.

It just gets better and better!

Great stuff Stephen, thank you!

So if you want to edit footage in AvidProHD, you import the uncompressed Targa-files into Avid, and thus have imported uncompressed HDV from the HD100?

Also, when selecting presets, what is the difference between the "HDV 720/25p" and the "720/24p" (except the framerate of course). Since I am in PAL-land, I'm looking for a way to get 720/25p in Avid.

Hi Nima,

Not exactly. Liquid uncompresses the frames when you select "uncompressed 2vuy" as the timeline codec. The exercise in the video is to show that the audio stays in sync and indeed the program does export the 24fps as needed by the film post house.

I'll work up a tutorial for the PAL amongst us. Essentially it is the same except the control panel settings are different in order to accomodate PAL
s framerate. The workflow would be identicle.

Whats the difference between this Avid 7.1 workflow and Premier+Cineform or Vegas+Cineform workflows?

Both workflows get you where you're going just fine. Cineform is a wavelet-based intermediate codec that allows a big speed boost when working within Premier or Vegas when compared to working with native HDV, which tends to choke those systems up.

Liquid, on the other hand, handles the native MPEG streams a lot better than Premier or Vegas, which lessens the need for an intermediate codec. However, any CC, compositing work, or effects need to be rendered out uncompressed when working with Liquid, as native HDV doesn't recompress well at all.

If you absolutely have to work with a lot of footage, Cineform's codec can be a huge space saver when compared to uncompressed files, and holds up extremely well through multiple generations of compression. Beyond that- it's really six of one, half a dozen of the other. If you're already working in Liquid, there's little viable reason for you to switch to Cineform via Premier or Vegas, and vice versa. Any of these workflows can take you where you need to go with minimal fuss.

Question. Do FX need to finish rendering before you can view them?

Well, that depends on the system you're using. Simple CC and transitions will often preview out in real time or close to real time straight out of your NLE- but you'll still need to render them out before sending your finished project either back to tape or into your DVD authoring software, etc. As far as I know, Liquid, PP2 (with Cineform) and Vegas (with Cineform) will all give you decent preview out of light effects work without hiccups. It just depends on how intensive the effects are and how many layers are involved.

Actually you get the choice of render/fuse codecs with Liquid (MP@HL, RGB-AVI, or 2vuy uncompressed).

There are a lot of advantages to the Liquid workflow over any other method, especially for ProHD and film (as displayed above). RT HD timeline preview up to 6 layers out VGA second head to HDTV is gold. Dumping straight back to HDV tape right from the timeline is a tremendous advantage. The native way is definately advantageous.

I'll work on some more tut's...

Sounding better and better for native HDV.

I'm reviewing the FOCUS and it might be good to do it and Liquid 7.1 since I wouldn't have to wait for Apple's 24p support. I assume I would just set the Focus to make .m2t AVI's rather than movies. Correct?

Correct. Allow the FS to capture the m2t's and then import them into Liquid. I have not gotten far enough with experimentation to figure out what it does with the timecode. Liquid normally will assign TC (and disregard embedded TC) when it imports files into the rack. I'm checking into it...

Otherwise the workflow would be the same and Liquid will maintain the framerate as if it were captured with the logging tool. The only thing in question is the TC on imported files at this point.

To reiterated. TC is maintained as usual when using the logging tool and frame accurate recaptures via time code work properly when the source was the tape and the capture method is the logging tool. Importing files is different than capture in that Liquid usually assigns TC.

you mean in this in a mac prespective or you recommend it for PC based editing as well?

Of those three choices, only one is good enough for doing serious finishing work, and it can eat up an ungodly amount of hard drive space if your project is long format and requires a lot of CC or FX work.

I'm not going to cheerlead for one of these systems over the others at the current time because I see tradeoffs across the board. The PP2+Cineform workflow gives you the advantages of built-in After Effects integration and the ability to work with a variable bitrate codec that gets you very close the robustness of uncompressed frames at a small fraction of the hard drive real estate. The downside is that you're performing your work using a proprietary codec, and everything you do will have to be transcoded to a standardized format on its way out the door.

Liquid gives you 24p support right out of the box, and rock solid native performance with smart GOP splicing for substantially less money than PP2 (or Vegas) + Cineform. The only potential downside being that any work that requires recompression will need to be rendered via a different method than MPEG, which will cost you a lot of your initial advantages, as well as potentially costing you a lot of storage real estate.

Avid is building smart GOP splicing into Xpress Pro 5.5 and Media Composer 2.5 as we speak- so there will be even more options to consider, although MC will be the only one of the two offering 24p support for the JVC, and it will come at an extremely high price point compared to the other solutions.

I still say that the process of choosing an NLE depends mostly on how much effects work and CC you traditionally perform. If you're typically just a capture, edit, and print to tape type of practitioner, it's hard to see any reason to look beyond Liquid as your NLE. If you deal with a lot of footage and/or do a lot of post work, you're going to see benefit from using an NLE that offers you a robust intermediate codec, which will allow you to do your work at a high quality without having to step all the way up to uncompressed frames.

great mini review jake -

You nailed it Jake. The questions are HOW LONG is your Timeline and HOW DEEP is it.

Stephen has raised a critical issue to some -- will FS timecode come in? Does Liquid assign a timecode IF there is already timecode present in the file?

Still waiting for the Focus.

I export back to D-VHS or HDV or to the IOLINK DVD recorder. That makes Liquid's no conform solution very attractive to me. However, if you CC every frame then Smart GOP Splicing is no advantage. Unless, of course, Liquid conforms really fast. Don't know.

EDIUS supports both native and intermediate editing. This means you are set for any kind of work. So I'm not picking winners in any way. Also, I'm open to PC or Mac solutions since I have both.

What a fantastic job! I'm going to make sure the folks over at Avid realize just how easy this process is! We get a lot of calls about Liquid & 24P. Until this post, I've always told folks it's coming soon. For JVC Pro users - it is HERE!!!

Just a note. Avid Liquid 7.1 is now available as a free download to ALL Liquid 7 owners. In addition the 7.1 updater also includes a link to Magic Bullet Film Looks - 55 presets for making your video look like film.

AL7.1 is a download, it's not going to be included in the box for quite some time - simply becuase there is a good supply of inventory available.

For those interested in Liquid but a littel intimidated by the interface, we include class on demand complete Liquid trainings DVDs with your purchase of AL7. http://www.videoguys.com/avidliquid.html

Gary

Steve, it conforms so fast that I can't believe it. I work on 30 minute and 60 minute timelines (mostly) and dump to tape is a walk in the park.

Also I do not %100 agree with Jake's post. I have both Liquid and Premiere/Cineform and use Liquid 99% of the time merely because it is so easy and the results are predictable with great quality. Liquid's toolset includes Commotion plugs, Magic Bullet plugs (now) and 1000's of effects, and you can always Xsend to After Effects.

The advantage I see with Cineform is capture and manipulation in 10bit. This requires capture from the component of the HD-100 to maximize it's workflow. If the material is sourced from the tape then I see no real advantage to Premiere/Cineform.

Anyway, if you want to cut a film you can get the job done on Liquid no matter how long the timeline.

@Jake- If you can ever make it to the Chicago ProHD user group (third Wed every month) we'd love to have you. We can explore not only Liquid(native) but FCP(Aja) and Premiere(Cineform) all together and talk about workflow and delivery. It'd be a treat!

Thanks for the offer- I'll keep that in mind. I'd love to come out and meet you guys. Hopefully it won't be too long before we have more workflows to examine than just those three!

Rendering is something you hardly ever have to do in Liquid. Most of what it can do including color correction, 1000's of 3D effects and most filters will run in realtime. If you have the pro version you can watch your HDV timeline down converted to component SD on your TV on the fly in realtime. That means everything that will play on the timeline will be realtime on your TV. You can even use the second head on your graphics card to hook up to a HDTV and watch your HDV edit in realtime in HD.

Any rendering that needs to be done before sending to HDV device will only happen at the end. Or if you want Liquid renders in the background while you work. By the time you figure out how to cut everything together your whole project will almost be done rendering.

Cineform does have it's advantages but Premiere Pro is so out of touch compared to Liquid that for me it wasn't even worth it. Using Premiere Pro for me was like running a marathon on crutches. Liquid is the only NLE that allows me to work closer to the speed that I would like to work at.

I just received the Liquid 7 trial DVD, and will be messing around with it tomorrow. I had read in Videomaker magazine that Liquid offers both timeline and storyboard editing options, is this true? Timeline is the way to go, but when you just have to move a couple of scenes around really quickly, storyboard can allow that to be done really quickly. It's exciting to see that Avid has a great all-around NLE for JVC ProHD users. The 55 Magic Bullet looks are also a great bonus as well.

Rendering is something you hardly have to do in ANY NLE as far as preview is concerned.

I'm an Avid guy myself. I don't really care for the interface in Premier or Liquid- but these are matters of personal taste. When looking at things from a purely functional standpoint- there are tradeoffs involved in these different workflows- and the one that's right for one type of project may not work as well for another, depending on the amount of footage you're dealing with, the amount of post production (FX) involved, and the amount of hard drive space you have available.

The advantage of Premiere is its integration with all the other products you likely use.

I tend to only use Photoshop so its not a big deal. Amazing no one has put a still image program into an NLE to save time.

since this video seems to be offline/deleted from saltar's server - I uploaded my copy to Google Video (with stephan's copyright intact - let me know if u dont want it there)

http://snipurl.com/Liquid24ptutorial

I wouldn't be so quick to applaud Avid. This HDV1 support and technology is legacy from the Fast/Pinnacle team. Note that Avid's more expensive, established tools (AXPro, MC, Symphony) do NOT fully support HDV1 even though they've been promising 'soon' since September last year. I doubt that anything good about Liquid has much to do with Avid itself.

I have been using Liquid since version 5.5. I have put in hundreds of hours on it, probably over 1000.

I own version 7, though I am using 6.1 since version 7 was a mess on its release. Version 7.1 is supposed to have fixed many of the problems... though not all -- but i don't have the time to waste right now to find out.

I use 6.1 for DV and it works very well for very long timelines.

However, anyone who is thinking of it should download the the trial and make sure it does everything that will be asked of it. A lot of workflows are only partially implemented, so make sure your workflow is complete.

It should be noted that 24p is not officially supported by Avid. Here is a quote from the Liquid product manager, Jim Thill, that appeared on the Avid Liquid forum:

"The JVC support is in a category we call "implemented but not yet tested". The engineers have done the work. The QA team has not completely tested it. Product Marketing has not yet added it to the official feature list."

Here is the complete thread on the Avid Liquid forum:
http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/thread/92838.aspx

Avid rarely makes comments on these kinds of discussions, so I believe the fact Jim Thill made his comment is significant.

Avid is already known to remove features previously available in Liquid. For example, the import of VOB files used to be supported, but no longer is. Here is a quote by one of the moderatores in a recent thread:
"The importing of VOB files is no longer officially supported by Liquid. Please see the 7.1 readme file. For that reason, VOB files have been removed from the import list of file types."
Here is the full thread on the Avid Liquid forum:
http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/thread/110862.aspx

At the end of last year, Tim Wilson from Avid, said at the end of the year, when specifically asked about using Liquid for a project that would go to film, he answer not to use Liquid, use one of the other Avid products.

Liquid is very finicky with the system it is running on. It is advised to download the trial and make sure it will run on the system you want it on.

There are are lot of workarounds needed when using Liquid. For most people these these take days and days to first, figure out the documented feature doesn't work, second, go to the forum and be told that there is an undocumented work around, third get the workaround to work. Typically, at least one two weeks needs to be added to a project when a new Liquid user or an old Liquid user tries a new workflow.

In some areas Liquid is not professional class, such as MPEG encoding, DVD creation, and there are many little examples.

The technology in Liquid is dated and not standard to modern applications. Examples are AfterEffects plugin support, VST support, etc.

While lots and lots of formats are listed on the box, there are abberations in in the workflow. For example the SD uncompressed capture format (using the Pro BOB and component in) uses an old Pinnacle/Fast non-standard pixel size that will not import into other programs. It must be transcoded and exported at an inferior quality (I spent three weeks figuring this one out.). If your project is going to stay 100% in Liquid, this is not a problem... but if you are going to DVD you are stuck with the substandard one-pass encoder in Liquid and the inferior, built-in DVD program.

When I did the uncompressed work I ended up with Black Magic capture and Edius editing out to Encore DVD. It worked flawlessly the first time.

A friend did a video 15 project for the first time which ended up a big hit at a large board meeting. He used Premiere Elements, including timewarp features, key frames, 3 track soundtrack with on camera sound, voiceover and music and had it edited in 3 days, at odd moments through the day. The company just bought an FX1, Premiere Pro 2 suite and a new editing computer.

This kind of experience is rare (if ever) with new Liquid users.

Liquid is excellent for what it does. However, every scenario is different and the _complete_ worked flow needs to be tested multiple times before depending on it for an important job.

There are fervent cheerleaders for Liquid (and for the right person in the right situation Liquid is outstanding), but some of the fervency is from a fear that Avid will drop Liquid and not get it working right if there isn't a large enough user base.

I would be concerned that Avid might pull the unofficial 24p support from Liquid then they get support in Xpress Pro and other systems up and running in a few months.

On the other hand, a lot of new users that expressly want HD100 support in Liquid might cause Avid to officialize the support and not take it out.

At the Liquid Immersion event at the end of last year, Tim Wilson, the last day in the discussion, specifically asked how many people were using or were thinking of using the JVC 24p camera. He made his interest in this clear by bringing the discussion back when he didn't get an immediate answer and asking twice again. It appeared even then that the JVC camera had Avid's attention; it's just not clear which product Avid will aim at it.