DV March 2002• www.dv.com

REVIEWS
Online Finishing Systems

Avid|DS HD 4.0
Avid, $300,000 (After this review was published, Avid released Avid|DS HD version 5 and slashed the price to $180,000.)

Pros: Imports about 60 percent of effects info from Avid Media Composer via OMFI. Effects tree is a powerful compositing aid. Supports render farm. Interfaces with Avid Unity MediaNet for sharing media files.
Cons: Poor media management. Lacks important editing features. YUV 4:2:2 color space limits color control. No RAID protection scheme on the media drives means it's possible to lose all of your media at any time.
Bottom Line: I expect better editing capabilities from an Avid product. If Avid puts the Media Composer front end on Avid|DS, it will have a powerful nonlinear online HD finishing tool.

Discreet smoke HD 4.0
Discreet, $225,000

Pros: In comparison with Avid|DS, smoke has faster render times and higher-quality effects in RGB 4:4:4 color space. RAID-3 protection allows full media recovery from lost drive. Superior media management. Usable edit interface.
Cons: Single monitor equals limited screen real estate, causing a lot of changing among modes and screens. Editing interface isn't as good as Media Composer. Steep learning curve to operate. Version 4.0 only supports EDL import-no OMFI. Runs on SGI platform, which has a questionable future.
Bottom Line: A superior system if you're doing a lot of high-end effects compositing-cleaner output than Avid|DS. If I had to buy a system today to edit and finish HD shows, this would be it.

Avid: Avid|DS HD 4.0
Discreet: Discreet smoke HD 4.0

One of the more challenging parts of my job, is that people expect me to know every last thing about every edit system and format. When we noticed an increase in the demand for HD postproduction, naturally they expected me to have the answers. So I went off to NAB 2001 to find the best HD solution for our needs.I currently work on Avid Symphony for online editing. It has become the preferred system for finishing shows in our facility. With the impending need to complete HD shows, the Symphony will no longer finish all shows for us.

Challenges
My first task was to narrow the field. We are primarily a long-form post house. That means the bulk of our work is half- hour or longer shows. Our clients typically offline on Avid Media and Film Composers. So we decided to start looking at HD-resolution nonlinear finishing systems. We hoped to find a system that would fit fluidly into our workflow, like the Avid Symphony does for our SD material. I was intrigued by Apple Final Cut Pro editing HD via Pinnacle CineWave (www.pinnaclesys.com), primarily due to its relatively low cost. But this system had too many speed and quality limitations for our clients. I was impressed with everything that the Sony Xpri (www.sonyxpri.com) was supposed to do, but from what I saw, it wasn't really working yet. There were several vendors such as Boxx Technologies FusionBoxx HD (www.boxxtech.com) that had midlevel solutions, but they weren't well rounded enough to handle our demands. This narrowed our playing field to two systems - Avid/DS HD 4.0 (www.avid.com) and Discreet smoke HD 4.0 (www.discreet.com). We arranged for a comparison of both systems side by side in our facility. I approached the shoot-out from the point of view of our clients' workflow. Both of these systems are quite complex, and my exposure to them was through industry representatives instead of the "just ship it and I'll install it myself" procedure DV goes through with standard reviews. This, and the fact that I saw some beta gear working, is the reason we didn't score these products in typical DV fashion. But regardless, we thought you'd like to know what I discovered.

First impressions
Both Avid/DS HD and smoke HD are billed as online finishing systems. As such, they should be able to accomplish any task necessary to complete any show. How do they stack up against each other? To find out, we ran them through as many real-world scenarios as we could come up with. We based the comparison on the assumption that we would be working on a project that had been offlined on an Avid system. For smoke, we pulled a 24-frame EDL for each of the layers of video and imported the list. This method gives only edit and motion effect information - other effects and titles needed to be rebuilt. For Avid/DS, we created a 24-frame OMFI export from an Avid Film Composer 24-frame project to import into the system. OMFI files contain all Avid sequence information, so naturally I expected Avid/DS HD to have the clear advantage in terms of EDL support. The reality is that only about 60 percent of the effects carry through. Titles, 3D, or third-party effects don't carry over. Avid/DS OMFI import leaves a marker in your project describing missing effects, but you still must rebuild them as you would in smoke. Avid|DS, however, brings in the nested information that smoke would lose in an EDL. Note that smoke 5 adds OMFI import.

EDLs and digitizing
The first problem we encountered was Avid/DS's inability to bring in the 24-frame OMFI. Avid repaired the problem within three days, but the Avid/DS system lost the potential advantage in this comparison. Then we had both systems working with imported EDLs. Smoke blends EDLs so there is no need to redigitize material that's used on multiple layers. Avid/DS must load each EDL separately, which slows it down - a real speed disadvantage. I really liked one digitizing feature in smoke when I put in a tape. Smoke senses where the tape is parked and digitizes edits near that point, then works backward. Both Avid/DS and smoke have the ability to take in a split audio/video edit in one pass and continue to roll through if the edits are less than five seconds apart.

The basics
Smoke has the advantage in the media management department. This is surprising considering the refinement of the Avid Media Composer line. For example, if you need to change a reel name on smoke, you can change it on one event and have it apply to all other events from that reel. With Avid/DS, you must modify each event individually. Smoke's single CRT means you must switch back and forth among different views. Operators who are used to a single monitor don't mind this, but those with Avid editing backgrounds may feel hindered by this. The dual CRTs available on Avid/DS let you look at source clips, the timeline, and the record window at the same time. Being familiar with the Avid, I was able to sit down and edit with very little instruction. You can customize the Avid/DS keyboard to match Avid Media Composer, further simplifying the transition. I thought smoke's edit interface was far less user friendly. Toggling between source and record makes editing difficult. You can trim in the timeline on both systems, but in smoke you need to go into another mode to do this, which is more difficult.

Shot replacement
Replacing shots is difficult on both systems. Due to the single monitor on smoke, you need to toggle back and forth to find the matching point, or cut the shot to be replaced onto a higher layer, create a split screen to compare with the lower track, and slip the replacement shot until it lines up. Because Avid/DS uses a source and record monitor, I was able to find the matching points on both shots very easily. This is the point where I expect to hit Replace Edit as I do on the Media Composer and move on. Much to my surprise, Avid/DS 4.0 doesn't have sync point editing. This means you actually have to do the math and figure out where the head of a shot should cut in. Avid/DS won't even let you gang the source and record media to each other, which could help in this situation.

Timeline editing
Both systems let you drag a shot straight to the timeline. You can use Fit to Fill for motion effects in either package. They both allow you to lock head or tail of a motion effect and drag the other side. Fully keyframable speed ramping (aka time warping, after Discreet's original effect) is available on both systems. You can also lock several different groups of tracks in the timeline in both systems. Neither Avid/DS nor smoke will allow you to "reverse matchframe" from the source to the timeline. This limit surprised me.

Audio
We didn't spend much time on the audio features because usually we do all of our sweetening in audio rooms, but both systems seemed capable of holding their own in this area. We were testing HD, so it should be noted that smoke HD and Avid/DS HD are capable of handling a 5.1-channel mix.

Effects
The next challenge was the effects conform process. Again, if the Avid/DS OMFI import had worked properly, more than half of the effects would have been imported prebuilt. OMFI support for 23.976 lists should be available by the time you read this, but because it wasn't for us, the operators of both systems had to rebuild everything. We didn't time this portion of the comparison because the operators' skills were a variable. We were more concerned with comparing the effects building in each system. Both systems are similar in their ability to build effects. They both take advantage of third-party effects plug-ins. You can increase third-party support within Avid/DS by using a program such as Boris (www.borisfx.com), which would in turn give you access to other Adobe After Effects-compatible plug-ins. The titling capability of each system is very good; however, Avid/DS handled sophisticated title animations while smoke seemed limited in this area. Discreet also offers higher-end effects systems such as flame or inferno, but Avid/DS is Avid's go-to effects solution.The effects tree is a great compositing feature. The effects tree allows you to lay out your effects like a flow chart. If you want to change ordering or remove an effect, you just patch around it. The effects tree is available in Avid/DS but not in smoke. Again, Discreet reserved its effects tree for its effects systems. If you pretreat elements in smoke using a combination of timline, paint, plug-ins, DVE, etc., you would have to memorize the entire series of steps if you wanted to change one piece of the process. Smoke also has a limit of six DVEs (although version 5 will support 100), whereas Avid/DS provides unlimited DVEs. Third-party plug-ins can't be accessed from within the DVE on smoke, which is another advantage the Avid/DS effects tree approach has. It should be noted that the smoke DVEs looked better and seemed to operate faster, indicating that the Discreet hardware is more robust in this department.

Color-correction
Both systems sport decent color-correction tools, but neither makes color matching to other scenes easy. Either system will let you carry a correction and apply it to other shots from the same scene, but you must find those shots in the timeline. I am probably spoiled by Avid Symphony, which lets you automatically apply those corrections. Both systems allow full RGB channel manipulation through various interfaces, including curves.

Tracking and dirt fixing
Tracking is also similar on both systems, but smoke is much faster. Dirt fixing was convoluted in both systems. Dirt fixing needs to become more automated. Both systems allow you to select material from the same shot as many frames forward or backward as you like and paint that material through. But it would be nicer if one command threw you into paint mode with the shot doubled up and onion-skinned, while allowing you to move the source shot freely for alignment purposes.

File format support
Each system imports and exports most standard graphic file types; however, only Avid/DS can import and export QuickTime movies, which we see a lot for motion graphics delivery. Avid/DS imports Adobe Photoshop files with layers so you can use them independently. You can also import Adobe Illustrator files with all of the vector and color information intact, allowing you to resize elements without any degradation. You would need to buy a third-party plug-in to accomplish this within smoke.If you are working with advanced 3D modeling, only smoke will import 3D models and 3ds max files. Smoke can also import the information from a motion-control camera, which is very helpful when you composite effects.

Networking
Avid/DS has a clear advantage with its ability to tie in with Avid Unity MediaNet. This allows an Avid/DS workstation to access any uncompressed 601 media in a facility. If I'm working in SD video on a Media Composer that's tied to Avid Unity MediaShare and I need to have some complex effects work done, an Avid/DS operator can access my media and build the effects while I continue to work. This sure beats sneakernet. This also streamlines the audio process by allowing ProTools stations to access the Avid/DS audio for sweetening. If you need to stream any of your projects over the Net, you can use Avid Pro-Encode on Unity to create various streaming formats in the background while you keep working. Discreet offers Jobnet as its solution for networking their products. This wouldn't work for us because we primarily use Avid offline, online, and audio sweetening.

HD format support
Both systems can support 1080 24p, 23.976p, and 1080 60i. Both also support 720p. You must purchase a trilevel sync generator for smoke HD, but it comes built into Avid/DS HD. Avid/DS can also import 4K film resolution, while smoke tops out at 2K, but smoke actually plays 2K 24p material where DS doesn't output anything higher than 1080. Running in HD mode forces both systems to render every effect. In our informal testing, the smoke averaged three times faster on renders, and on some effects it was as high as nine times faster. Avid/DS has render farm capability, which the smoke doesn't have, but this feature wasn't available on our Avid/DS test system. Render farm capability allows you to use less-expensive workstations to render while you continue working.Color space The difference between RGB and YUV color space is important. Conversion between these two different formats causes rounding errors that degrade composites when the rounding errors concatenate. Avid/DS stays in 8-bit YUV 4:2:2, except for some effects that require RGB, and includes controls to tailor conversions. Smoke converts to 8-bit RGB 4:4:4 on input and stays in that format until output. This allows you to work in a much larger color palette in smoke while eliminating constant conversion issues.

Storage
HD needs a lot of storage. The biggest difference between these two systems is the RAID protection scheme. Smoke has RAID-3 protection-if a drive goes bad, you remove and replace it. The system rebuilds the drive, and there's no data loss. This has come in handy several times on our smoke SD. Avid/DS has RAID-0, which means no data protection. If you lose a drive, you lose your media.

Platform
The platform was the final consideration for us. Smoke HD runs on UNIX, which means you need someone in-house who is comfortable with that operating system. Smoke gets its speed from a Silicon Graphics Octane 2 - a powerful machine, but one whose long-range viability I question. Avid/DS runs on Windows 2000 on dual-Xeon Pentium processors in IBM's Intellistation ZPro with an OpenGL Wildcat video subsystem. It is easier to handle Windows as an operating system, and PCs will continue to increase speed, which will give Avid/DS boosts in performance.

Conclusion
Figuring out which system best fits into our workflow was not easy. All in all, both systems are powerful and will get the job done when you do nonlinear online HD finishing. The OMFI ability of Avid/DS HD should give it a clear advantage; but smoke 5, which I saw in beta, supports OMFI import, so that playing field looks level to me. We gave the final nod to smoke. Superior media management, speedier digitizing, and better image resolution led us to this decision. But if Avid had the Media Composer editing interface with Avid/DS HD effects compositing, it would be a perfect fit for anyone finishing a Media Composer offlined show.

Terence Curren is the principal owner of Alpha Dogs (www.alphadogs.tv), a postproduction and design house in Burbank, CA. He is also an instructor of advanced editing techniques at Pasadena Community College.

Copyright 2003, CMP Media LLC