Digital Video - January 2009 - (Page 19C)

Automatic Duck AUTOMATIC DUCK EXPANDING THE TIMELINE TRANSLATION TOOL BY OLIVER PETERS It all started with the lowly CMX Edit Decision List (EDL) and for more than 30 years the video industry has collectively been unable to move past it for a common timeline and project interchange format. AAF interchange has largely been ignored, because many member companies still opt to keep a large portion of their effects metadata proprietary and therefore “dark”. One small company stepped into this void to provide a virtual editor’s Rosetta Stone and to this day, Automatic Duck remains the premiere timeline translation company that the video industry relies on. It started out as a way to get Avid timelines into Adobe After Effects, but Automatic Duck hasn’t rested on those laurels. The product line today offers import and export plug-ins to permit editors to easily move among various companies’ applications, including Apple Final Cut Pro and Motion, Avid, Digidesign Pro Tools, Quantel, Autodesk Combustion and Adobe After Effects. The direction you need to move your project will determine the specific Automatic Duck module or combination of modules required. MODULE MANIA I recently put the Final Cut Pro and After Effects modules through their paces on a MacBook Pro—moving media and timelines between several different apps, including Avid Media Composer (software version 2.7.2), Final Cut Pro 6.0.1, Motion 3 and the Adobe CS3 products. The primary conduit into After Effects is Automatic Duck’s Pro Import AE 4.0, which lets you import various AAF, OMF, XML and Motion project files into After Effects as native, layered compositions with interpreted effects values. Since Adobe permits you to copy-andpaste of After Effects tracks directly into Premiere Pro, it is possible, by default, to bring the imported media and translated timelines into Premiere Pro CS3, as well. If you were primarily moving from Motion or Avid to After Effects, then you would only need to purchase Pro Import AE, since Automatic Duck imports native files from these apps. Automatic Duck offers its own free XML exporter for Final Cut, so moving FCP sequences into After Effects also only requires the purchase of the Pro Import AE plug-in. On the other hand, if you want to move FCP sequences into an Avid NLE, then you would need Pro Export FCP 3.0, since Avid can’t natively open an FCP XML file. Automatic Duck has been busy updating all of its traditional plug-ins, making it possible to better deal with 24fps media, to read new media file formats and to translate an ever-greater ADVERTORIAL number of timeline effects. One of the ways Automatic Duck has chosen to add media interoperability between NLEs is to use QuickTime reference files as an intermediate format. For example, Avid uses its DNxHD media format for compressed HD and wraps these files inside an MXF media container. As part of an Avid software installation, compatible QuickTime versions of the DNxHD codecs are also installed on your computer. These QuickTime codecs may also be downloaded from Avid’s website and installed on non-Avid workstations. Once you export an Avid sequence as an OMF composition file, Automatic Duck plug-ins for After Effects, Final Cut Pro or Combustion can open that OMF file and read the media if its available on the drives. As part of this import process, Automatic Duck generates a matching set of QuickTime reference files, as long as the appropriate codec is installed on your computer. In the case of DNxHD, this makes it possible to open a DNxHD clip inside any QuickTime-compatible application and the reference file will link back to the original MXF video. It blew me away to see 220Mbps DNxHD media (1080i HD) play in realtime—not only within Avid Media Composer, but also Apple Final Cut Pro— all from my 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro using a single LaCie external FW800 hard drive.

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Digital Video - January 2009 Contents First Look: D90 Camera Sonicfire Pro 5 You Pod Instant Expert Muse 2.0 FXFactory Pro 2.0.5 Motype Fxpack DV Product Directory All Powered Up Creating Your Own Sun DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - January 2009

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