As part of the North project we’re developing in partnership with folly I needed to produce a new web presence. It was quite a quick job, as time and resource were at a premium, but I thought it would be fun to do a screen capture of the design process. I’ve condensed the entire process, which was about 5 hours spread over 3 days, into just under three minutes.

You can watch it below, or head over to Vimeo to see it in glorious HD.

This was a really quick job, implementing a design which is flexible and which can be developed over time. The foundation is a fairly rigid grid system with a strong emphasis on typographic style. I went through three different iterations before arriving at the final blue/green version. Most of the work was done in Photoshop, with some of the graphical elements sketched in Illustrator.

I really liked the second iteration, with the paper plane sketches, but it just wasn’t cutting it with the rest of the team. I’ll shelve that idea for a future project though, as I really like the aesthetic.

I hope this is an interesting little insight into the way I develop concepts when working on a new design. Feel free to let me know what you think, and whether you found it useful/interesting.

If you want to see the finished design in all it’s HTML markup glory, or just want to know more about North, then head over to the website.

So, it was time to say goodbye to the G5 (it’s now relocated to the other side of the office and has had a fresh reinstall ready to jump into action as a second editing workstation), and hello to a shiny new MacBook Pro. We decided to plump for a refurbished notebook, which saves a little money (every little helps). This is the second time I’ve splashed out on a refurbished machine and it’s something I’d recommend to anyone looking to purchase a new Mac. Apple’s refurbished products are usually either returns (people get them, open the box, decide they don’t want/need them) or dead-on-arrival (something was broken coming out of the factory. Might sound scary buying something which might have once been broken, but they get a full refurb, are thoroughly tested, and you get a full warranty, just like if you were buying a freshly-boxed machine.

With a 1TB firewire drive hooked up, this new Intel machine rips along at an impressive speed. And since we’ve been angling towards recording to Compact Flash cards, it was also time to upgrade to Final Cut Pro 6, so that we can benefit from importing clips using a card reader, rather than capturing from tape. The benefits of this are going to be brilliant – transferring files from the card reader will take about a quarter of the time it takes to capture in real-time from tape, making for a much more pleasant editing life.

I’ve yet to use this workflow to any great extent (other than a few tests), but now that it’s tried-and-tested, we’re going to start using this approach as standard – just as soon as I source the cheapest and most reliable Compact Flash cards.

With the upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2, I’ve also had a chance to play around a little with Motion 3, which has some great whizz-bang 3D tools built into it. I’m really impressed with what I’ve managed to get from it so far, and can see some great possibilities for creative work further down the line – especially compositing stuff in 3D space.

A while back I wrote about the woes of trying to downconvert HDV footage to standard definition for use in DVD Studio – it was one hell of a hack, and felt really clunky. When you consider how far NLE software has come in recent years, it seems odd that it becomes a really painful process when you want to publish your work to various formats. Also, I’d completely abandoned trying to use Compressor, since it didn’t seem to be compatible with PowerPC chipsets on OS X Leopard anymore (that was a painful lesson to learn after upgrading to version 10.5 of the OS). Instead, I’d resorted to using VisualHub – it has a really impressive feature-set, runs fast, but is not a very pretty application. That just added to the feeling of a clunky workflow, and made the whole process of rendering anything feel like a chore, rather than just a simple task.

It would appear that with the latest release of FCP and Compressor 3, all of this kludging is no longer necessary. Hooray! Creating M2V files for import into DVD Studio is now a very simple process – no need for converting to an intermediate codec and clicking on mystical settings in the depths of Final Cut’s option panes. It’s still not the fastest of processes, even with QMaster running, but at least I know I can choose the options, hit Submit and know that the file I’m after will pop out the other end when it’s done; no more worrying about whether I’ve forgotten to check a certain checkbox, or change a certain setting; no more sitting at 2am, waiting for a freshly rendered DVD, which is the product of a 4 hour rendering process, hoping to any god that might be listening that it is interlaced properly so that I don’t have to start the whole process again.

There’s a lot to be said for having a reliable, easy-to-use workflow. Not only does it help to prevent things from going wrong, it allows me to apply more effort and brainpower to the creative task at hand. A good creative tool should help you to achieve a creative vision in the most unobtrusive way possible, so that it is almost synergistic with your thoughts and ideas. It shouldn’t be a hindrance, nor should it be an overriding influence. Final Cut Studio 2 is getting there – especially the way you interact with Motion – and the improvements in rendering workflows are making me very happy (well, as happy as one can be about rendering workflows).

Editing is a breeze, and since we set up our new company, we decided that in order to future-proof all of our work, and to attain the highest quality video footage, we’d put an HDV workflow in place.  That means that we shoot in HDV, and we edit HDV.  That way we can distribute HD resolution video online, and be prepared for when we’re (finally) able to produce HD resolution DVDs.

But it introduces a sticky element to our workflow, which ought to be easy to negotiate, but which can really clog up the whole process.  Having all this HD resolution footage around is great, but we need to create DVDs to distribute our films, and to prepare stuff for broadcast.  And Final Cut makes that really, really difficult.

In the past, I’ve used Compressor to render MPEG files ready for use in a DVD project.  But there’s three snags with that:

1. Compressors rendering quality is pants.
2. There’s some voodoo you have to carry out in order to deinterlace the source video in Compressor.
3. It’s really slow.

And I’ve been forced to completely abandon the Final Cut > Compressor > DVD Studio workflow entirely since upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard, since Compressor no longer works (thanks Apple – as far as I know, this is something which Apple are aware of, but are only fixing in newer, Intel versions of Final Cut Studio).

That could have been a really nasty brick wall to have hit, and for a while I was a little lost with Compressor.  I trialled a few other programs which were meant to do a similar job, but they just didn’t cut the mustard.  I was ready to break stuff, until I realised that DVD Studio Pro has it’s own renderer built-in – and from what I can tell it’s much faster, and better than the one found in Compressor.

But, there’s a fly in the ointment.  If you take a HDV file and throw it at Compressor, it’ll happily import it and allow you to work with it just like any other asset.  But when it comes to render, there’s a serious problem with deinterlacing, where you get strange shimmers appearing in some shots, and some really ugly jitters in others.  It just doesn’t work as a method for downconverting.

That’s when I stumbled across the Bonsai method.  This technique is absolute genius, and gets around all the problems, with a pretty fast workflow.  The theory goes:

1. Create a standard definition timeline, using the DV50 codec.
2. Drop your HDV footage into that DV50 timeline – Final Cut will deal with all of the rescaling and de-interlacing.
3. Export the timeline.
4. Import it into DVD Studio

Et voila!  It sounds simple, and in essence it is.  There’s just a few settings which might trip you up along the way, and I’ve had to experiment with using a few different settings to get good results.

I’ve converted the workflow so that I generate PAL footage, and here’s a brief step-by-step guide to what to do to get HDV footage onto a SD DVD.

First you need to create your sequence for the downconversion:

1. You should have your finished edit in a HDV or Apple Intermediate Codec sequence.
2. Create a new timeline, and call it something like “Final Edit – DV50″.
3. Make sure you have this sequence selected (sometimes Final Cut can be picky over editing settings on something you haven’t selected) – just click on the sequence timeline to make sure it’s at the forefront.
4. Go to “Sequence settings”.
5. At the bottom of the settings window, click the “Easy setup” button.
6. Select “DV50 PAL 48 kHz Anamorphic”.
7. Back in the sequence setting window, make sure that “Field dominance” is set to “Upper (Odd)”.  This will save you a world of pain when it comes to importing into DVD Studio.
8. Click the “Video processing” tab.
9. Towards the bottom, you’ll see a “Motion filtering quality” setting.  Set this to “Fastest (linear)”.  This makes sure that your deinterlaced image doesn’t look like it was done on an Etch-a-Sketch!
10. Drag your master sequence (your HDV one), and drop it into the DV50 sequence.  Final Cut will scale your footage anamorphic DV resolution.
11. View the master sequence in the viewer (select it in your timeline and hit return).just check the Filters tab for the sequence, as Final Cut can be prone to add a Field Shift filter if you haven’t set the field dominance correctly – you don’t want that, as it’ll cause headaches later on, and add time to the rendering process.

That’s all the tricky stuff out of the way, you can now go ahead and export a master copy:

1. Select “Export > Quicktime Movie”.
2. Make sure “Make movie self-contained” is selected (else you’ll end up with reference movies, and that’ll open a world of pain for you).
3. Don’t change any other settings – you want to be exporting with the default codecs for the sequence.
4. Go make some coffee.

Once your file’s rendered, just give it a check.  It’ll play in Quicktime et al in 4:3, so will look all squashed – that’s just because it’s an anamorphic file – we’ll be stretching it out again in DVD Studio.

Final step is to import this footage into DVD Studio Pro:

1. With your DVD Studio project open, select “Import” and locate your file.
2. In your asset viewer, right-click on the video file, and choose “Encoder settings…”
3. It should be set by default, but just make sure that “Field Order” is set to “Top”.  This makes sure that the interlacing of the MPEG encoded file will be the same as your source file.
4. Set “Aspect ratio” to “16:9″.  This will stretch your footage back to it’s original size.

And that, should be that!  Work with your assets just like you would for any other DVD project, and when you come to build and format your discs, they ought to play back with crystal-clear clarity.

Some things to note:

• It really is worth always checking your DVD builds on a proper cathode TV.  A lot of the time, the scanning of LCD monitors will hide nasty interlacing problems, and you won’t be able to tell if things have gone astray.
• I’m working with Final Cut Pro 5 – I’ve not had a chance to upgrade to version 6, so couldn’t say whether this process works in the latest version – or indeed, whether this whole process is no longer needed.
• There are other elements of the Bonsai Method, such as applying a channel blur to reduce flicker.  I’ve not felt the need to use these, but it’s worth reading about them, as they could be useful to you.

So now, I’m happy because I have a full HD to SD workflow back in place, and it works much faster and with better results than the Compressor workflow I’ve used in the past.  It may not be the best way to do this process, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.  It’s interesting that this is a workflow which Apple shys away from discussing or documenting on their website, or in any of their documents.

I’d be interested to here any input from anyone who has suggestions on improving this process – or indeed from anyone with a quicker, easier alternative.