Cisco & Flip: video editing on the cloud

Cisco recently bought the San Francisco company that produces the Flip camera for $590 million.. Ok. But Lost Remote notes Flip’s surprising share of camcorder market -- 20 percent!

At Capria.TV, Frank Capria was quick to see Where Cisco wants to take video, perhaps because he works for Avid, which own Pinnacle and its line of consumer video products. He pointed out that Flip has easy editing and sharing software to match it's easy-to-use hardware:

"As GigaOm noted, it can eliminate the computer. Shoot, push to the cloud, and edit on the cloud. No Macs. No PCs. What Polaroid did for photography 50-some years ago, Cisco can do for videography. It can make it instant, inexpensive, and fun.

Cameras preloaded with editing software will be a minor disruption to business as usual. Editing on the cloud is where this is all going, and the industry will be turned on its head."

Perhaps, but online video editors like Adobe Remix and others faded since the excitement of a few years ago.

In any case, the Flip Video camcorder records or "captures" video in MPEG-4 advanced simple profile format, saved as an AVI file. Flip includes the 3IVX codec to work with the AVI files in QuickTime. The Flip Video program uses a starter version of muvee AutoProducer for its automatic stylizing "movie mixing," and this feature so far is not on the Mac.

Of course, Cisco/Flip will have competition from smart phones and still cameras that do video. GigaOm and TechCrunch have background; here's GigaOm's take on on Cisco's buy:

"If Cisco can integrate or transfer the dead-simple Flip software and camcorder into its Scientific Atlanta boxes, and tie the Flip camcorder to its Linksys router, it can offer PC-free telepresence to consumers. This combines Cisco’s hope of wresting control of the digital home from the PC and putting it in the network with its love of video conferencing.

Telepresence, even more than the 2 million Flip cameras out there shooting short videos, would drive the amount of video content on networks sky high. Cisco estimates that a good HD telepresence experience requires speeds of 24 Mbps and requires quality of service guarantees — both of which Cisco equipment could help ensure. Cisco has already indicated its plans to add $20 billion to its bottom line with a focus on video, and it has launched products around the what it calls the “medianet,” to deliver video from the content provider to the consumer. Driving content in the other direction — from the user back up to a content provider — also makes sense, and the Flip cameras offer Cisco control of the consumer video-producing endpoint."

Update: Part of the cloud is metadata, which should help with editing and search results, as noted by Contentinople in Gotuit Enables Video Mashups With Metadata.

Update 2: In case you wonder what online video editors like Adobe Remix were still around, Lonnie discusses a few in Where to Edit Video Online for FREE.

Flip-Book Effect + Cross-processing look in After Effects

Lester Banks noted an After Effects tutorial by Andy Dykstra of GhostRender that shows you how to create a cross-process look with some basic Curves (shown below).

See also an AE preset from Pixel Art and Curvy Cross Processing in Photoshop CS3 at Layers magazine.

After Effects Cross Process Look from Andy Dykstra on Vimeo.


Update: You can't sit on anything... Lester also posted on a text-based After Effects tutorial, Flip-Book Effect in After Effects (includes project) by Jake & Dan. There's a number of other flip projects that are not the magazine book types.

There's a recent example in here:


Making of Adobe CS5 - Production Premium from Seagulls Fly on Vimeo.


Update: Church Media Design helps you create a Magazine Page Flip and how to bend objects in 3D,

CMD 88: After Effects - Magazine Page Flip from Brad Zimmerman on Vimeo.

Note: You can also get an inexpensive AE template like the Magazine Mock-Up KIT.  

Flux VFX is offering Pop Out Book Free After Effects Template also:

Serial 3D flip effect in AE

MaxAfter has posted an After Effects tutorial and project in Flip Effect, which shows you how to manually create a pattern of shapes and flip them.

An alternative might be the built-in filter Card Dance (covered by MaxAfter earlier), which only works in 8-bit/pixel mode, but is able to use AE camera and lights in the same composition. Using a Repeater operation on a Shape layer doesn't seem to offer much of an advantage here either, but for examples check out Eran Stern's More of the Same series of tutorials. For more on Card Dance see other AEP posts tagged Card Dance and Chris Zwar's Halftone effect – using Card Dance, which uses the Card Dance filter and a Shape layer with the Repeater operation.

Create a Split-Flap Type Display

Mattias Peresini of the pleasant French AE website mattrunks has done his first English tutorial for AETUTS. Create a Split-Flap Type Display helps you build "displays that are found in train stations and airports, where they typically display departure and/or arrival information and do that cool flipping of letters to display the new information. This tutorial does not show how to create the effect from scratch but instead it is a tutorial to explain how to use the example project file."

For a glimpse at future tutorials check out mattrunks; see for example Effet Coverflow 3D automatique sur After Effects (includes the project in English).

Update: see also Flipside Clock by Brandon Smith, which also creates an old school style of a flip clock using Digieffects Buena Depth Cue v2 Flipside:

Also, check out Flip Clock Stater Project Tutorial by ngambles, who has more info and a project file on his Vimeo pages, and Create An Animated Split Flap Clock by Matas Zaloga:

iPhone and other gadget teardowns

MacVideo has a nice feature video in Tearing apart the new iPhone 3GS: Interview with Kyle Wiens from ifixit.com:

"The iPhone 3GS has only just been released and already people are tearing it apart. We caught up with Kyle Wiens, CEO of ifixit.com and documented the opening up the new iPhone and a breakdown component by component to find out exactly what this thing is made of. This provides a rare glimpse into the way Apple manufacture their technology and reveals secrets such as processor speed and other possibilities for those who love to investigate technology."

ifixit.com, a Mac-oriented parts resource with repair guides, has more user-contributed sneak peeks inside the hottest new gadgets on their iPhone and other Gadget Teardowns page.

Not all interesting teardowns have video; see for example Teardown: Inside Cisco's Flip UltraHD digital camcorder.

Apparently teardowns are new class of tech reporting. Similar phone teardown are featured by phoneWreck. Here's another iPhone 3Gs Teardown from Teardown TV, a series just starting from EE Times:

Pop-up books in After Effects

AEtuts posted Unfold A Magical Pop Up Book Simulation by Nicolas Plaire, an After Effects tutorial video in 2 parts. In part 1, the pop-up and 3D scene is built, then in part 2 trigonometry and more is used for interaction between layers to unfold elements with a minimal number of keyframes. Seems pretty cool and you can adjust the camera animation to taste.

Update: there was another pop-up book tutorial at Digital Arts, AFTER EFFECTS TUTORIAL: MAKE AN ANIMATED 3D POP-UP BOOK, written by Sam Hampton-Smith.

For something not completely different see Cross-processing look in After Effects + Flip-Book Effect.

Stereo3D Toolbox: Mac filter for AE & FCS [updated]

Stereo3D Toolbox from Tim Dashwood is a new FxPlug filter designed to work with After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Final Cut Express. It requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and a supported graphics card.

Built upon technology from FxFactory, Stereo3D Toolbox lets you output "media to a wide range of Stereoscopic 3D formats (side by side, over/under, checkerboard, interlace, anaglyph) as well as manage the demuxing of side by side, interlace and over/under formatting. Comprehensive compositing features and capabilities include keyframeable x, y, z axis convergence, individual left/right eye scale, color correction, selective flip/flop, reframing and 'auto scale' compensation."

They have several tutorials up already; this one that demonstrates how Cineform Neo3D works and how to add Stereo3D Toolbox to Neo3D muxed clips:



Update: Fxguide.TV (#64) talks with Enrique Criado on the different aspects, both technical and narrative, of stereoscopic production.

720p: the web video gold standard

Many web video services are now serving HD 1280 x 720; we'll see how much it'll cost to stream millions more video from the cheap Christmas "flip" cameras at rates 7-10 times the original YT bandwidth. Facebook is also letting you embed on other sites now. YouTube hasn't acknowledged their HD (link/format "&fmt=22"), but they added a "watch in HD" link if the uploaded content was that size. Maybe they want to avoid Hollywood's reaction to seeing stuff in HD; see Big Buck Bunny.

Techvideoblog has a quick Online video sites HD quality comparison. He misses YouTube quality level "&fmt=06" mentioned here last month in YouTube gets HD & quality confusion, and there's tangerine in with the oranges, but I've never even visited referenced sites SmugMug or Sevenload.

Here’s an interview Robert Scoble did recently with Chris Putnam, a leader of Facebook’s video efforts, who discusses the move to a new codec and other aspects of the upgrade.

Tim Robbins' NAB keynote speech

Tim Robbins' NAB keynote speech was funny and serious, and criticized the broadcast industry focus on fluff. Robbins could be wrong -- maybe we aren't better than that!

Anyway, there are various versions of the speech available now:

- AR&D's Media Reinvent shot a big screen on a $100 Flip camera.
- Tim posted audio and text on Huffington Post.
- Ad Age has audio in Hear the Six Best Minutes of Tim Robbins' Controversial NAB Speech.

Robbins had much more to say than Ad Age gives you, but they do hint at background details. Lost Remote gave more background in a live-blog.

Update: There a few more... Broadcasting & Cable has an article and the mp3, and TV Worth Watching has more.

'Matrix' AE script makes cards dance

AE Scripts has a new After Effects script, Matrix, which breaks your layer into pieces and animates it for you with a bunch of options.

It's an inexpensive script, but it's not clear what advantages it has over built-in effects like the Card Dance filter [see comments for some good reasons]. For more on Card Dance and similar effects, see Animate a Photo Mosaic in After Effects, Card Dance transition, Camera Rig script & Particular 3D Ribbon, and Serial 3D flip effect in AE.

See also a Total Training video from Brian Maffitt (he created the effect) on Using gradients to control the Card Dance plugin's behavior, and Ayato's Card Dance Flag.

Color management in AE CS3

Mark Christiansen's After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques has a great discussion of film, HDR, and 32-bit compositing, but AE8 adds a few wrinkles with a complete color management workflow through Project Working Space options, to preview color and simulate final output in different mediums like broadcast monitors or film stock.

As in Photoshop, I'd keep Color Management off to avoid inadvertent color shifts from embedding or converting to default profiles unless I've worked out a specific workflow. Files embedded with Adobe default profile sRGB might sneak in, so getting color management under control for all codecs and file types might take some serious thought. I had standardized on Adobe RGB (1998) and ruthlessly convert graphics from others if they use a profile. There's even a new utility filter to convert per layer, Color Profile Converter (pictured). I don't have a firm handle on the new color management yet (I'm fine as an NTSC island) but hopefully these Adobe white papers will help clear things up: Color Management Workflow in Adobe After Effects CS3 and Color workflows for Adobe Creative Suite 3 .

There's a basic video tutorial on color management in the Video Workshop. And you can also flip through the documentation for color and color managment at AE LiveDocs, for example High dynamic range color and Why you should use color management.

Update: this is a hairy issue...according to Studio Daily, "Post Logic Studios announced the launch of its Image Science Division...[to offer]...clients “the assurance of consistent color management across every stage of a production, regardless of acquisition format or output medium.”

Update 2: On the AE-List (18 Aug 2007) Chris Meyer responded to a question about a gamma shift between AE8 and AE7, "The short answer, in most "AE CS3 does not match AE7" cases where Color Management is _not_ enabled for the project (Project Working Space = None), is to enable the Legacy Gamma switch in the Project Prefs. The long answer is...a long answer. (I'm writing that chapter this week, as a matter of fact.) The text in the Project Prefs, Interpret Footage, and Output Module dialogs help, as does the Adobe white paper..."

Cisco readying high end teleconferencing for consumers

An Overview of live video over the internet, the AEP post from April, summarized some options available up to early 2009. Now it looks like options will be expanding, as Beet.TV reports on a New York Times article on high-end systems from Cisco (TelePresence) and Teliris., and that Cisco is Readying High End Teleconferencing for Consumers.



Of course this fits another recent Cisco move; see Cisco & Flip: video editing on the cloud.

Update: For a broader perspective, see Cisco’s Latest Consumer Play: The Smart Grid at Earth2Tech.

iPhone pans Flash to make platform play

Many are raving over the iPhone SDK and the big bag of money for development, and often don't even mention that Flash isn't part of the deal. But what is the deal really and how much influence will mobile devices have over the Internets and Rich Media Applications?

AppleInsider attempted to justify answers on Flash that were panned in comments, but the sneaky CounterNotions may have anticipated the apparent (QuickTime, HTML, WebKit, JavaScript, CoreImage, Cocoa Touch) platform play, to borrow the Ryan Stewart phrase he typed from the Silverlight conference.

37 Signals is thinking phone but the observation applies more generally:

"Apple has the superior product, the big momentum, the cool, the lust, the business hooks, the consumer hooks, the customer experience, the interface, the design (interface and industrial), the smooth development environment, the vision.

And, maybe the secret key to it all, they have the commercial platform that makes it possible for a developer to actually sell, distribute, and update their software with the flip of a switch. And don’t forget the customer experience revolution — buying and it-just-works installation of iPhone software will be as one-click easy as buying music from the iTunes store. It’s all wrapped into one beautiful package. A package that only Apple can deliver."

Update: Frank Capria looks at Emerging Mobile Trends (Mobile video’s not hit the mainstream… yet).

Update 2: Adobe says Flash is coming to the iPhone.

Customizing pixel aspect ratios in AE CS4

Chris Meyer explains the new corrected pixel aspect ratios in After Effects CS4 and how you can deal with some of their ramifications in the New Pixel Aspect Ratios, a free video in the Lynda.com After Effects CS4 New Creative Techniques series.

But some people have problems with the new CS4 pixel aspect ratio (PAR) when working with other video systems and apps. If you can't live with the new PARs, there are undocumented and unsupported workarounds to:

1. add custom PARs
2. disable the automatic interpretation of PAR
3. add anti-aliasing to pixel aspect ratio corrected comps

First, via Joost van der Hoeven, you can add custom PAR to the popups (pictured above) in Interpret Footage and Compositions Settings using interpretation rules. Here's example text to add to the file "interpretation rules.txt" that adds custom CS3 NTSC and PAL 601-SD PARs to the list in CS4:

# adds custom pixel aspect ratio to the PAR popup for CS3 PAR
0, 0, 0, "0000", * = 648/720/"D1/DV NTSC (CS3)", *, *, *, *, *
0, 0, 0, "0000", * = 768/720/"D1/DV PAL (CS3)", *, *, *, *, *

You can find the "interpretation rules.txt" file here:

• On Mac OS: Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4
• On Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS4\Support Files

Next, Chris and Trish Meyer have already explained how to flip a switch in the Preferences to disable the automatic interpretation and allow you to continue to work with the old PARs in CS4. This will still leave you with a command to Upgrade Pixel Aspect Ratios (under the File menu when you follow their instructions). See Make It Go Away! Undoing the PAR and color management enhancements in After Effects CS4 at PVC.

Finally, in Non-Square Strategies: Suggested workflows when dealing with non-square pixels and anamorphic formats, Chris Meyer expands on the Lynda.com explanation, and shows you the secret text preference which enables high quality PAR correction in After Effects (with a performance hit). The Throttle script by Lloyd Alvarez works with the new multi-processing system in CS4, and also exposes the hidden preference that allows you to set the quality of the Toggle Pixel Aspect Correction button in the Comp View (After Effects needs to be restarted after changing the PAR quality).

Additional info and background on pixel aspect ratios can be had in these resources:

• Adobe AE Help page has the basic rundown with always refreshed resources in Pixel aspect ratio and frame aspect ratio.
• The new PAR scheme is also explained in Chris and Trish Meyer's free CS4 upgrade chapter for Creating Motion Graphics owners. See the summary at PVC, The Differences Between AE CS3 and CS4.
• Mike Afford, who did graphics at the BBC, has put together his own explanation for PAL users, with diagrams and as little mathematics as possible: PAL D1/DV Widescreen square pixel settings in After Effects (CS4 vs CS3).
• Chris Pirazzi, who with Chris Meyer interpreted the tech dirt for regular users even before Apple stopped developing eWorld, has all sorts of material on videosyncracies.

The Well-Tuned Piano available again

I got a chance to re-listen to La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, a just-intonation harmonic cloud send-up (with occasional circle of wolves) of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. The 5 CD box came out in 1988 but I sold mine in a fit in the early 90's.

You can get this rare record and others at Classical Connection, but skip dominatrix Diamanda's deathtrip -- flip the script and instead try Sussan Deihim (or Laswell's remix).

If you like this sort of thing, UbuWeb covers a big historical slice of NYC media arts.

Update: this set remains out-of-print and hard to find, though lower res copies can be found,

The Anvel offers free AE projects

The Anvel, producer AE tutorial CDs, has launched a new site and as enticement to visit posted the AEPs that were used for the NAB Post Production World classes presented by Dean Velez. There's even preview movies that you can flip through to see if there's something you want to deconstruct.
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