Innovation and Annotation in the NLE
In the context of movie production technology, the term 'innovative' is one thrown about with far too much ill-considered regularity for my liking.
The word Innovative has become marketing-speak and lost all meaning. Every little non-event technical add-on seemingly is branded Innovative for little apparent reason.
When Apple declared their Open-Timeline for FCP6 'Innovative' because it could mix resolutions and formats it heralded that we really had hit the peak of vacuous usage of the word Innovative. Since every other NLE on the planet had been mixing formats and resolutions for several years before FCP caught up - Avid, Vegas, Premiere, Edius, Liquid - it begged the question of what should actually qualify as Innovative (let alone how the word is defined in the dictionary...
But, if we must use the word, then surely we need to look at the those things within our production tools that change not just the mechanical How we do things but rather the culture, attitude, and perspective of the doing itself. Not to mention the things that are genuinely New and without direct precedent.
Invariably there arent many things that truly deserve the moniker of Innovative. Precious few. One that I believe did pop its head up in the last couple of years was Adobes Clip Notes system. Its a tool that I suspect is largely under-utilised. For those who havnt yet had the pleasure ClipNotes is an export option that embeds the Video in a PDF file with dedicated space for timecode specific annotations to be made by the reviewer (a director, producer, test audience, sound designer, colourist and so on) Those notes can then be emailed back as a small text file to the editor who can import them direct into their Premiere pro editing system and have the notes appear at their timecode specific points on the timeline of the NLE.
Its elegant, simple, highly effective and represents a true innovation in the simple sense that it is something quite new that hadnt been seen before. It has the potential to change the culture of production workflow, making it more inclusive and more efficient.
Its in this vein that I have this week discovered a
superb free plugin for the Vegas NLE made by the guys at VASST (the well known and much respected Douglas Spotted Eagle). Called simply NOTEPAD the plugin provides a floating dockable window in the Vegas interface that can be used for notes and annotations on the project at hand.
As well as text and formating options the NOTEPAD plugin provides direct buttons to add Time/Date info, bullet points and most significantly Timecode location. In this fashion a review could be made of a project with timecode specific comments mapped to points on the timeline.
NOTEPAD aint rocket science but it is enormously functional and delivers some fresh thinking to the process of editing. Poking around as I have want to do, I also found a preference that allows for the Notes to be maintained either inside the Vegas project or as an external call-up RTF text file. This got me thinking....
I opened up a Celtx project containing a screenplay and copied the text into the sidecar RTF file for my vegas project. Re-launching Vegas I found to my delight that I now had a copy of the script embedded in my Vegas project in a very handy floating window.
It may not be in the same league as Avids ScriptSync system (one of the other precious few truly innovative NLE developments over the past few years - and certainly the only New Thinking Avid have shown in a decade despite their new marketing bent) But the VASST Notepad is a highly functional way to utilize a script inside the the NLE environment.
The next step, that has me having strange damp dreams, is if I could get a system of editing a video direct from the screenplay text inside Vegas and communicating directly with a Celtx project file....
In the meantime Notepad has demonstrated some excellent forward thinking and if youre a Vegas user youd be nuts not to jump over to VASST and grab it now.
Posted at 12:00AM Jul 28, 2008
by Mike Jones in video |
