EP021: ‘Old’ Postproduction Knowledge

01:00:00:05 - 01:00:14:04
Robbie
Old post-production knowledge. Is it still useful? Well, in this episode of the offset podcast, we're going to find out. Stay tuned.

01:00:14:06 - 01:00:33:09
Joey
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01:00:33:11 - 01:00:40:01
Robbie
All right guys, welcome back to another installment of the offset podcast. I am Robbie Carman.

01:00:40:03 - 01:00:41:10
Joey
And I'm Joey D’Anna

01:00:41:12 - 01:00:48:02
Robbie
And Joey. Today I want to talk about I'm probably not your favorite subject, but one of.

01:00:48:03 - 01:00:49:10
Joey
Literally my favorite. So I'm going.

01:00:49:10 - 01:01:09:04
Robbie
To put it in like the top five, maybe top three subjects of your life. And for those who are not familiar with, you know, Joey, we have not determined yet if he was actually conceived or born in a post-production facility, but it's pretty close. When he started working in a birth facility, his dad was a broadcast engineer.

01:01:09:04 - 01:01:45:06
Robbie
It's run at his family. All his friends growing up were somehow involved in post-production, or their families were so, Joey has, a long, rich history of post-production vocabulary terms, workflows, and the more obscure that, the piece of hardware, the connector type, the workflow, the more jazz he gets about it. But I'm just teasing, sort of, but, you know, actually, in thinking about this, Joey, this topic, this topic for today, the motivation for talking about old post-production knowledge, right, has to do with the fact that I have found myself interacting with a lot of people in the past few years.

01:01:45:06 - 01:02:14:10
Robbie
I don't know, maybe 4 or 5, maybe a little longer, who I just feel like the institutional knowledge of what I learned, you know, coming up in the post-production industry in some shape or fashion, has been lost. You know, I don't know if that's totally true, but like you say things like blocking the tape or you say things like, you know, 3G, SDI or whatever, and people just kind of look at you with like these blank, blank stares on their face, like, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

01:02:14:12 - 01:02:35:22
Robbie
I had one the other day. What we'll talk about here in a second. I was talking about a back timing and edit with somebody, and they were like, what do you mean, back timing and edit? And I just think we've gotten. So the software is so good. You know, everybody's drag and drop everything these days. Nobody's, you know, using old Cmcsa or Sony controllers like you and I were back in the day.

01:02:36:00 - 01:02:54:11
Robbie
So anyway, on this episode, I want to get into a little bit of some of that older terminology, vocab, that kind of thing, and how it's still super old. It is still super relevant today, but some of the terms and some of the connection to the terms might be lost. That make sense?

01:02:54:13 - 01:03:42:04
Joey
Yeah, absolutely. And I, I completely agree. You know some of the the old knowledge has gone away in a, in a way that I don't like. I think there's a balance here between, you know, I'm an old man yelling at the clouds and telling people to get off my lawn, which I am, don't get me wrong. But, there is also still valid uses of this knowledge, even though we're not in a tape ecosystem anymore, and broadcast is getting somewhat less relevant versus streaming and other platforms and things like that, there is still things that we learned growing up from linear editing and broadcasting that I think have, really, you know, stood the test

01:03:42:04 - 01:04:01:01
Joey
of time. And part of that is, you know, yes, the gear changes, the tools change. We went from linear to non-linear editing. We went from, you know, always having to do an offline to now doing a lot of offline and online at the same time. We went from really hardware based solutions to software based solutions. We went from SDR to HDR.

01:04:01:01 - 01:04:20:16
Joey
So the technology is always changing and we always want to stay up to date on that. But there are a lot of concepts, things that apply to both workflows and the technical stuff that, you know, kind of, in my opinion, last forever. And some of that knowledge has been lost. So hopefully we can shed some light on some of that stuff.

01:04:20:19 - 01:04:35:18
Robbie
100%. Agreed. And, you know, I think it's important for us just to say this is not like a stand on our soapbox, but, you know, pontificate kind of episode. I actually I actually really hope that some of the stuff, if it's not, you know, of course, there's a certain subset of our audience where this is going to be like, oh yeah, I remember that.

01:04:35:18 - 01:04:49:07
Robbie
Oh, okay. We just, you know, it was just it's a refresher, if you will. But for another subset, you know, particularly those who might be a little bit on the younger side, hopefully some of this can kind of get you up to speed with some of these terms and kind of see the real world application today. So enter into the discussion here.

01:04:49:07 - 01:05:13:22
Robbie
Fractional frame rates. What I mean by fractional frame rates is like 29 nine 7 or 23 976. But those mean drop frame versus non drop frame counting. And notice that I said counting. I didn't say timecode necessarily just set a way of counting. And then the whole idea of interlacing and interlacing, has some nuances that we'll discover and talk about when we get there.

01:05:13:22 - 01:05:38:07
Robbie
But let's start on the fractional frame rate. Right. Because I think everybody, for the most part, is familiar with 24 frames per second. Right. This is the number that, film true film play out has been out for forever 24 frames per second. And when we got there through a couple missteps over in the early 1900s where we had, you know, we standardize on 15 or 16 frames a second, 18 frames a second, whatever.

01:05:38:07 - 01:05:55:18
Robbie
Eventually we got up to 24 frames per second, mainly because of a cycle phenomenon called the persistence of vision rate, where we can no longer really detect set our eyes, our brains can no longer really detect separate frames coming through once we get to a certain speed.

01:05:55:20 - 01:06:19:00
Joey
And that's, you know, people think that 24 is like this magical thing where everything looks prettier. That's just because all the pretty things that our generation has looked at have been 24, 24 is the slowest you can do it effectively and trick the brain. So not going higher was a economic decision in general to save expensive film now?

01:06:19:02 - 01:06:46:10
Joey
Yep. Television got its frame rate with a completely different methodology, and that is that the United States runs all of their alternating current grid power fixtures at 60 cycles per second. Yep. Okay. England runs all theirs at 50, which is why pal is 25 frames a second and NTSC, which is the United States standard for Steve and broadcast.

01:06:46:13 - 01:07:07:04
Joey
So black and white broadcast starts and the TVs are all synchronized to the AC signal. This makes it a lot easier to make the television, because it doesn't need to have any kind of re timing logic or synchronization. It just goes, hey, when the wave of the power is going up, we know it's 1/16 of a second. Great.

01:07:07:06 - 01:07:44:04
Joey
You know, it made all the signal processing and driving the CRT and everything else kind of something they could do. Here's where we get the fractional frame rates. A decision was made, on a color television system. And when they, there was a bunch of competing color television broadcast systems that came out around the same time when the standard NTSC color system was devised, they found that on some older televisions, when you add the chroma sub carrier, because the color, like we talked about with 422 and was kind of.

01:07:44:04 - 01:07:45:08
Robbie
Layered on top of the signal.

01:07:45:08 - 01:08:10:17
Joey
Yeah, yeah, you have a luminance signal, and then you also have a sub carrier that has the color signal there separate. That means the luminance signal can still be displayed. A black and white image is still a black and white image inside a color TV signal. Now what the engineers found was that if they kept the broadcast at 30Hz, that color sub carrier would flatten some nasty stuff.

01:08:10:17 - 01:08:33:03
Joey
In certain legacy black and white televisions, and it would make the signal not demodulator correctly and look either bad or un viewable. So what they came up with was for color TV, we're going to make the signal very, very, very, very small slightly slower. So we went from 30.0 frames per second.

01:08:33:05 - 01:08:33:12
Robbie
Yep.

01:08:33:17 - 01:09:04:16
Joey
229 .97 which is 30 multiplied by 1001 divided by 1000. So it's basically 0.001, different multiplication of the signal speed. Now, the reason why this is so small is because guess what? It's still close enough to 60Hz that all of the analog circuitry in the televisions will work, right. They can still synchronize to power. Everything's fine. But now we're not breaking our legacy.

01:09:04:16 - 01:09:17:23
Joey
Black and white TVs. When we switch the broadcast to color, and we can move on with color for the rest of our lives. Everybody was happy. This was at the time when television broadcasting was almost entirely live, though we weren't doing a lot of post-production.

01:09:17:23 - 01:09:18:17
Robbie
Right of.

01:09:18:17 - 01:09:37:07
Joey
Shows, so little. So down the road, what happened was when they started producing a lot more, you know, done recorded shows. Well guess what? Now one hour of timecode numbers on a tape does not correspond to one hour of actual physical time in the real world.

01:09:37:09 - 01:09:49:13
Robbie
Because 3030 fits into 60 minutes or 60s or whatever. That denomination is really, really easily and simply 29, nine, seven. You get a whole lot of decimals after the fact.

01:09:49:15 - 01:10:11:01
Joey
And so if you're counting time codes for every frame, well guess what? That adds up over 30 minutes, 60 minutes. So at the end of the day, a 60 minute program is actually 3 or 4 seconds longer on the actual tape or in the file these days than it would be when it was actually airing in real time.

01:10:11:01 - 01:10:19:06
Joey
And that was a nightmare scenario for people trying to schedule shows and more importantly, commercials that pay for all this stuff.

01:10:19:08 - 01:10:36:12
Robbie
That method of counting when, if we just took 29, nine, seven with counting every single frame, whatever, it led to a disconnect between real time, actual, real time that we all experience in the world and the runtime of the actual program.

01:10:36:14 - 01:11:04:10
Joey
Exactly right. So how was that solved? Drop frame time? Timecode. On the purest level, what drop frame timecode means is that every minute we drop two frames. So basically from 5929 timecode, the next frame is 0002. Yeah. Right. And you do that once a minute except on the hours and the ten minute mark. So it's a.

01:11:04:12 - 01:11:06:00
Robbie
Three minutes 30 minutes.

01:11:06:02 - 01:11:29:07
Joey
Absolute nightmare for software developers because there's all this logic has to go into it. But the result is if you have an hour duration in your edit, you play that out to television at 29, 97 and it will be an hour of real time. And this has given us a kind of long ripple effect over the years of confusing issues with time.

01:11:29:07 - 01:11:48:17
Robbie
Well, so so it's it's a it's a great that by the way that was awesome explanation of of drop frame timecode and fractional frame rates. And I think where this comes into play is a couple things for confusing was because. So we get back to that whole 20 love of 24 thing, right where people were like, well, hold on a second.

01:11:48:17 - 01:12:09:09
Robbie
The the faster we shoot, the more frames we shoot, the more real it looks. I don't like it. I want to go back and shoot 24 frames a second. But guess what? 24 has that same sort of similar math problem, right? So to solve that, we had to come up with a fractional number for 24 as well.

01:12:09:11 - 01:12:44:21
Joey
Right? Yes. So that number is it's not 23 9839 is round. It is 23.976 again 1001 divided by 1,000.001 difference. And the only reason for that there is no such thing as drop frame 24 timecode or 20 398 timecode. And this is a confusion that happens a lot too, because 24 or sorry, 23.98 still has the same problem of an hour of 24 frames, a second timecode in 23.98 or 23 9276 does not equal an hour of real time, right.

01:12:44:22 - 01:13:11:21
Joey
But 23.98 isn't broadcast anywhere in the world. It's either put on streaming online theatrical. Well, though a lot of theatrical now is still true 24 because there's no real reason for them to change. Or converted to 29 nine 7 or 50 994 for broadcast. So, you know, we ran into this actually earlier this week, Robby opened up, deliverable.

01:13:11:23 - 01:13:23:15
Joey
That was a 23, nine eight master, and he opened it up in QuickTime player and goes to the little about and has a minor heart attack because the timeline was 50 minutes, 51 seconds. Is that right?

01:13:23:20 - 01:13:27:01
Robbie
No, the clock was supposed to be 5150 and it ended up being.

01:13:27:02 - 01:13:52:12
Joey
One 5150. And what ended up happening is because QuickTime thinks it's clever, it told us the duration in real time, not timecode time. So the deliverable spec for the network said 5150. Right. And that's exactly what the master was in 23.98. But QuickTime tells you the real time duration, which was 5153. Yep. So, you know, it was just this confusion.

01:13:52:12 - 01:13:57:00
Joey
Wait, why don't these numbers match? That's why those numbers don't match.

01:13:57:02 - 01:14:24:00
Robbie
Yeah. And I think for people who out there are like, well, I mean, I just deliver to the web, what does this really matter? Well, I think you have to think about 2 or 3 things. Number one, as Joey kind of pointed out, with 23 9976, one of the, you know, one of the underlying things to consider some of this stuff is where is it going down the line, you know, later on, right, if you know for a fact that it's only going to theatrical or only go to the web, sure.

01:14:24:00 - 01:14:52:07
Robbie
The whole frame rates call today and be done with it, right? Shoot. True. 24 right. But but here's the second part of that is that you don't know that for sure. Might need to be converted somewhere to go later. And that math can get really complicated really fast with fractional non fractional into fractional and back and forth to a lot of the equipment and software and that kind of stuff that set up these days is expecting fractional frame rates for like especially in 24.

01:14:52:07 - 01:14:59:22
Robbie
Right. 23 976 20 398 is more of a thing than 24 for for a lot of equipment, a lot of pieces of software, that kind of stuff.

01:15:00:01 - 01:15:24:15
Joey
Now I want to mention one thing, and where I think the biggest confusion around this happens is that people throw these numbers around willy nilly without specificity. I would say 80% of the time someone is saying 30, probably 95% of the time someone says 30 frames a second, they mean 29, 97. Nobody actually means true 30 ever, because nobody ever actually uses it.

01:15:24:15 - 01:15:42:11
Joey
But if you didn't know about this hundred year build up of, you know, ridiculousness, someone says, oh, we need it 30 frames a second, you're going to open up premiere, set it to 30 frames a second, and then after you're done editing, they're going to be like, oh, why is this failing? Can you see everywhere I said the do 30, I meant 29, nine, seven.

01:15:42:13 - 01:16:10:18
Joey
And you're like, wait, what 29? You said 30. It says 30, right? Yeah. So watch out in your day to day and look for specificity because people will transpose 20 398 20 397, six and 24 to all mean the same thing, and they will transpose 29, nine, seven, and 32 mean the same thing. There is been a call from the youngsters on the internet for many years now to eliminate fractional frame rates.

01:16:10:20 - 01:16:31:11
Joey
And I am the lone voice of reason in the wilderness saying, no, no, no, we have a 100 year history, like a fractional frame rates almost. We have all the workflows figured out and we have gigantic amounts of archive material. That's that way. If we tried tomorrow to make fractional frame rates go away because it would technically be possible in a digital world, we wouldn't be.

01:16:31:11 - 01:16:51:04
Joey
It would be a nightmare. Because like Rob said, so much stuff is built around these defaults that you get into an edge case. They go 30 frames a second even is a very rare use case that most software manufacturers haven't really tested for. It would be a nightmare. So I think it's just important to understand all this stuff.

01:16:51:05 - 01:16:54:14
Joey
But I don't think we need to go reinventing the entire world to get rid of it.

01:16:54:14 - 01:17:17:07
Robbie
All right. Well, one thing that you just said also gets us into the last part of this equation, the interlacing part of the discussion is that I do believe you're right that people use these terms as kind of a catch all. The other thing I will say that is pretty interesting about this is that, oftentimes when people put those numbers, we'll talk about file names later, but they put those numbers down.

01:17:17:09 - 01:17:43:20
Robbie
Oftentimes they're not actually referring to frames per second. Right. They could be referring to fields per second, not frames per second. So I'll give you an example. I label all of my interlaced files which we talk about next. I label all of them say 1080 I 50 994. Right. And I've had people say to me, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not a this is not 59.

01:17:43:23 - 01:18:05:10
Robbie
This is not a 60 frames a second show this, you know, 59 nine and a second I'm like, yeah, yeah I know. And they're like, why did you label it that way? I was like, well, because the I in the file name stands for interlacing. And the 59.94 is not frames per second, it's fields per second. You combine 50 994 times two because you have two fields in the file.

01:18:05:10 - 01:18:17:08
Robbie
Guess what you get. You get 29, nine, seven. So Joey yeah, what the hell is interlacing? Why do we have it and why is it the worst thing ever?

01:18:17:10 - 01:18:18:11
Joey
It's not the worst thing ever.

01:18:18:11 - 01:18:19:15
Robbie
I know, I know, I know, and.

01:18:19:15 - 01:18:39:13
Joey
It's it's a great thing for its design goals. Transmit exact interlacing is this interlacing is taking a single frame of an image. Yeah, and splitting it into every other line. Now, that means you've got line one, three, five and then line two, four, six.

01:18:39:15 - 01:18:41:09
Robbie
I didn't even fields.

01:18:41:11 - 01:19:09:17
Joey
Didn't even fields, you know, and you broadcast one field first, so half of the vertical image, then the second field first, the second half of the vertical image. So what you're essentially done is in one frame, you've split it into two fields. And at the end of the day, for every unit of time, for a discrete unit of time, one frame or more, you're not actually, you know, people think that that interlacing reduces resolution.

01:19:09:20 - 01:19:10:05
Robbie
It doesn't.

01:19:10:05 - 01:19:35:03
Joey
It technically doesn't. What it does is it converts basically spatial resolution to temporal resolution and vice versa. So for any given resolution, right, say 1920 by 1080, if you split it in half into two interlaced fields at 30 frames a second, you get 59.94. I just did it 30 frames a second, you just a 997. If you split that up.

01:19:35:05 - 01:19:58:22
Joey
So now you have a 59 nine for AI. So you've got 50 994 fields per second. Yeah. That's easier to transmit because you're transmitting in smaller chunks. But for each chunk you have sacrificed 50% vertical spatial resolution. So a little bit less detail and you have increased your temporal resolution. So you actually get a higher motion frame rate.

01:19:59:00 - 01:20:26:05
Joey
Now in the old days you had what was what I refer to as like true interlaced where you had, either analog or digital cameras record in interlaced as well. So it would record a field, then would record the second field. And when you looked at those fields separately, they would not assemble together to make one frame. They would assemble together to make one frame of time, but they would actually move interest free.

01:20:26:07 - 01:20:49:02
Joey
Oh, sorry. Intro field. And you know, for some people this looks great. It looks like 60 frames a second because time unit wise it is right. You get smoother motion with 59.9 for AI. And that's why it was, you know worked really well for broadcasters at the time. But what people found is they wanted kind of that 20 398 more step look.

01:20:49:08 - 01:21:19:06
Joey
So what they started doing and another reason why, you know, not to go a little crazy here, but another reason why interlacing works is because CRT can scan interlacing very easily. Just because of the way they work. And fully digital displays like LCDs do a very bad job showing interlacing. They physically can't do it. So there's all kinds of software that goes into showing interlaced images on an LCD or on an OLED or something like that.

01:21:19:12 - 01:21:34:09
Joey
So these days, most of the times when you've got something that is an interlaced file, you're actually taking the same frame with no motion between the fields and just just splitting it into two fields and then playing it back.

01:21:34:09 - 01:21:34:22
Robbie
Well, I mean.

01:21:34:22 - 01:21:42:23
Joey
Those cases, it's a completely reversible conversion, right? You can take those two fields. Yeah. Put them back together in one frame and you don't lose anything.

01:21:42:23 - 01:22:04:06
Robbie
Well, I think one of the reasons that what you just said is really dramatically important is because where does interlacing come into play? Well, for most people, it's going to be not in in the pipeline. It's going to be a deliverable that's required to them specifically for broadcast. Right. Because interlacing the way that it works, as you just eloquently described it, can lead to problems.

01:22:04:06 - 01:22:26:04
Robbie
Interlacing can, depending on where it how it was introduced in the pipeline, can cause, some motion artifacts. Right? Like if you take something, and you interlaced it incorrectly, perhaps you can get some tearing, some banding, some things of that nature that people object to. And you specifically see this when you're converting files to and from interlacing a lot.

01:22:26:04 - 01:22:27:19
Robbie
Right? You can see that.

01:22:27:20 - 01:22:49:10
Joey
Yeah. So I see this all the time. And it's a it's a huge pet peeve of mine. And I think this is, this is this is like probably the best example of yeah. The old knowledge being being very valid today. Like I said, a progressive frame can be converted to two interlaced fields and then back to a progressive frame again with zero loss of data.

01:22:49:15 - 01:23:14:13
Joey
Okay. It will be pixel for pixel perfect, but anything that has motion between the fields can never be converted to a single progressive frame, because you're trying to convert two discrete captures in time to one discrete capture in time. And where this is relevant today more than anything, is when you look at things that are shown online, you look at documentaries on streaming, you look at anything with archive footage from television.

01:23:14:15 - 01:23:41:15
Joey
You will see these horizontal jittery lines, right, right, right. And the kids these days think that's just how TV used to look. That's what interlacing is. No, what you're looking at is you're looking at two fields, two discrete moments in time, overlaid on top of each other. Because nobody thought when we were converting this broadcasted archive material for our new 23, nine, eight or even 20 997 progressive documentary that's going to master progressive.

01:23:41:15 - 01:24:08:15
Joey
Nobody was thinking about how we convert that interlaced material, and you see it all the time, and it looks horrible every time. And it absolutely drives me nuts, because if you're talking about archive footage, that footage was never presented that way. Yeah, original. And there's a couple of ways you can kind of get around that. You can either take both fields and resample them only vertically, which is kind of my preferred way to do it.

01:24:08:15 - 01:24:29:06
Joey
In fact, I've written a d CTL that does that. Actually a fusion macro that does that very well. But you could also just take one field and double it. You lose some resolution that way, but you don't get the tearing either way. If you start seeing that tearing in an image, that's because you've converted from interlaced to progressive somewhere along the pipeline incorrectly.

01:24:29:08 - 01:24:45:17
Joey
Sometimes it happens before it ever got to you, and there's nothing you can do about it except try to fix it. But no amount of sharpening or noise reduction or traditional tools is gonna eliminate that unless you you really start to think about how the interlacing worked and what's actually going on there.

01:24:45:19 - 01:25:10:06
Robbie
Yeah. So that was my that was my third thing that you kind of just alluded to. Is that paying attention to that, that that conversion is important. And you actually do have a little bit of a choice on how that conversion is done. Right? Sometimes when you do this conversion, you can either, as you said, double up on the fields to get a whole progressive scanned image, or you can even blend the fields sometimes to where you get people see that.

01:25:10:08 - 01:25:29:13
Robbie
Why do people object to that, even though that's technically a fine way of doing it, where you get blended fields where you'll see like at a cut point, for example, you'll see that fields kind of blend together. I don't particularly like that look, but it's a technically fine way of doing it. But your greater point is just pay attention to that conversion, because once that's baked in, it's just a bandaid on a bullet hole.

01:25:29:19 - 01:25:54:00
Joey
And and, you know, on the overall subject of the episode, why does this old information matter in today's world? That's I think the best example is that people will look at those jaggy images and think, that's just how old TV looked. So it's okay to put in my documentary as is. No, that's not how old TV looked. We were not looking at CRT TVs with interlaced broadcasting that had jaggies.

01:25:54:00 - 01:26:10:16
Joey
It actually looked really good when displayed properly. So be conscious of that. Documentary editors and online editors and colorist. Watch for those jaggies and fix them when you see them, because it's just not right. And I think a lot of people don't realize that.

01:26:10:17 - 01:26:33:01
Robbie
Yeah. And in general, I think for again applicable for today is stay progressive as long as you can in the pipeline. Think if you have a deliverable that requires interlacing, don't do that at the start. Don't shoot that way, don't embed, you know, don't embed interlacing in the pipeline. Make it part of your deliverable. Progressive. Going from the progressive to an interlaced image as you detailed, is super easy to do.

01:26:33:01 - 01:26:56:08
Robbie
Just divide it in half to two different fields. And there you go. All right. Moving on, Joey, a couple of things I want to talk about. This idea of transparency. Transparency is pretty easy these days. When we talk to people about transparency, you're going to kind of have two flavors of it coming out of most systems, depending on the file format, of course, because not every file format can support transparency.

01:26:56:10 - 01:27:12:23
Robbie
And just to be clear, that's the RGB information plus a separate channel, which is the transparency or also known as an alpha channel. And that's going to come in two flavors. It doesn't really matter which one you use, just as long as you know which one it is. And the rest of the pipeline is set up to to use that.

01:27:13:01 - 01:27:19:10
Robbie
So we have straight alpha channels and we have three multiplied alpha channels. What's the difference between those two. Yeah.

01:27:19:12 - 01:27:42:20
Joey
So basically, the way kind of transparency has always worked. Let's go back in time again. Like you said, there's a there's your fill, which is the actual video, and then there's a matte or an alpha channel that holds that video and tells whatever your system you're on, what to make transparent, what not to make transparent. That's a black and white or monochrome image, right?

01:27:42:20 - 01:28:04:14
Joey
So let's say you had a letter. That letter will be drawn out and then the edges would actually be scaled outwards a little bit. So you didn't have a bad edge. And then the transparency signal would cut that letter out. That's what's called a straight alpha where the edges bleed over and it's going to look really weird in your viewer until you put it on top of other footage.

01:28:04:14 - 01:28:30:12
Joey
Right. So in the digital world, that's and then that's kind of how everything was transparency wise in the analog world forever. In the modern digital world, we have what's called a pre multiplied alpha, which came out of, you know, digital compositing, which means you've taken that black and white alpha image and multiplied it with the fill image, giving you essentially a clean looking fill.

01:28:30:12 - 01:29:10:09
Joey
If you open it up in QuickTime player, it's going to look like your, your, graphic, but on a black background. Yep. Right. But it will also key cleanly over top of your footage, but only if the software knows that it's a pre multiplied alpha, because mathematically it has to handle it all a little bit different. And how this will come into use practically is let's say you bring in a graphic and you put it over some footage and you see like almost a little blackish edge around, the edges, or you see where it should be a smooth fade off, it might go to gray, you know, you see weirdness around the edges.

01:29:10:09 - 01:29:37:21
Joey
You're like, well, this is keying. Fine. You know why are the edges look weird? Maybe it's a problem with the graphic. No, that's because it's trying to treat a pre multiplied alpha as if it was a straight alpha. So you would just need to change that file in your settings to be pre multiplied. And that's one of those things where communication communication communication of specificity is no important because we've had shows just recently where they had an entire team of designers outputting graphics for us.

01:29:37:21 - 01:29:38:06
Robbie
And everybody.

01:29:38:10 - 01:29:52:16
Joey
You get them sometimes pre multiplied, sometimes straight. And it was kind of a guessing game each one. So we had to go in and check every graphic. This is something that should be standardized and you should know what to look for when you're putting shows together that have cable graphics.

01:29:52:17 - 01:30:18:13
Robbie
But now you mentioned something that I think is is worth mentioning too, is that you mentioned the words key and Phil and I remember, being a lowly assistant back in the day, having to do graphics reels, for, you know, a deliverable for a network. And in those graphics reels, what we had to do was we had to put the Phil and the, the key, signal the mat next to each other, break them up with a slate or whatever, and or with black on a tape and just string that out.

01:30:18:13 - 01:30:42:23
Robbie
So for every graphic you had the Phil component, which was the RGB information, and then you had the matte component, which was that monochrome, that black and white image. And it's really interesting because there are certain compositing workflows, even to this day, that people do inside of resolve, for example, or whatever. Like maybe you have a rotoscope artist cut a matte for you, and they're tools where they can be very precise about, you know, positioning, the sky replacement, whatever it may be.

01:30:43:01 - 01:31:00:23
Robbie
Well, you can take a matte and have resolve or whatever tool you're using. Do that math correctly to go, oh, this is the this is the matte channel. I know what to do with that and use it to cut this RGB information out. So then you can have like essentially a movie mask or whatever. And so it's still very valid today.

01:31:00:23 - 01:31:17:21
Robbie
And I do think you're right. People get confused. It was another good explanation by you that pre multiplied and strafing I think my my confusion lies where you just said where people just don't label those kind of things and it can be a lot. It can be a little bit of a trial and error trying to figure out what's what.

01:31:17:21 - 01:31:28:20
Robbie
But, I think that's a step that you should always do in every show is just verify that your graphics are overlays, lower thirds, etc. are using the right type of alpha channel because it can get really confusing.

01:31:28:22 - 01:31:52:02
Joey
Yeah. And I want to go from ancient times all the way to the most modern times, which is how do you use these alpha channels, whether they be matte anvils or whether they be pre multiplied, not pre multiply, whatever. How do we deal with that in a modern HDR color managed workflow? Because that is a question that I get all the time.

01:31:52:02 - 01:32:19:05
Joey
And there's some, some major confusion around it, because a lot of people, we actually just ran into this recently. A good friend of mine, friend of the show called me up and we had some, some issues trying to troubleshoot his color management pipeline because his graphics were looking quite weird. Yeah. And the result of this is if you do a color space transform for example, in resolve, it's going to color space transform, just the RGB, not the alpha channel.

01:32:19:10 - 01:32:25:08
Joey
So when it blends together, it will have the wrong transparency and the wrong levels.

01:32:25:13 - 01:32:30:23
Robbie
Same is true, same is true. Same is true with the math of composite modes too, right? Those composite modes can.

01:32:31:03 - 01:32:34:06
Joey
Oh yeah. No, that's why I can cause it. Modes don't really work in color, right?

01:32:34:06 - 01:32:38:22
Robbie
They can. They can ignore or at worst mess with the object information.

01:32:39:00 - 01:33:06:22
Joey
So if you're working scene referred, which we pretty much always advocate that you do. Right. The bad news is alpha channels don't work in seen referred workflows. They just don't. You can convert even if you convert the alpha channel to the right input transform. Unless you're grading the alpha channel with the exact same kind of levels changes that you're doing on your background, they're not going to line up.

01:33:06:22 - 01:33:33:02
Joey
Right. And it's not going to key correctly. So, the hard thing with this is it gets worse and worse. The more complex the graphic gets, right? If it's just a simple text overlay with a hard edge, you'd never know the difference. Color space transport, transform the fill. It'll look totally fine. And you'll think, wow. Yeah, I can color manage these key graphics, but really advanced gradation and blending and stuff like that in an alpha channel graphic is not going to color manage correctly in a scene report workflow.

01:33:33:02 - 01:33:58:16
Joey
So in those cases we recommend doing the graphics in a separate pass in your display space, whether that's in the timeline. Using different ways of doing your upward transform or in a nested timeline is a great way to do it as well. But doing that composite in display space is actually one of the few areas where I think display working in display space is appropriate, because that's where that alpha channel was designed to be made.

01:33:58:16 - 01:34:08:21
Joey
Now, I would love to see software figure out a really robust color management solution for alpha channels, but it's a pretty hard mathematical problem to solve, so I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

01:34:09:01 - 01:34:31:07
Robbie
A few last things before we wrap up here, but I think are also in the same vein, obviously. So a little bit for our editor friends, and then we'll get into some packaging and delivery things to wrap this up. So one of the things that I, I don't have as many old man moments as you do, I don't know how to get off my wall as many, or, old man moments, I should say.

01:34:31:09 - 01:34:53:09
Robbie
One of the things that really frustrates me from looking at how people work these days, but also you've seen people talking about it online is because we can the pervasiveness of drag and drop, editing styles and where, that gets people into trouble. And I'm not here to judge. Drag and drop. I drag and drop.

01:34:53:09 - 01:35:14:15
Robbie
Just. I will say, I drag and drop just as much as everybody else. But I think if we're on the theme of this episode, I think it's important to understand the origins of what gave you the ability to drag and drop and how the how that really works, right? So anytime we're going to do an edit, right, it basically consists of, a few different points.

01:35:14:15 - 01:35:37:12
Robbie
Right? And those points can either be in the source or they can be in the timeline. Right. But to make an edit happen, you either have to have two points in the source and one point in the timeline, or you have to have the opposite two points in the timeline, one point in the source. Right? So I think for most people that two points in the timeline, knowing where you want to start, knowing where you want to end and knowing where you want to go, go in or go out on the timeline is probably probably more common method.

01:35:37:13 - 01:35:59:09
Robbie
But there's often times where you're like, nope, I gotta, you know, I gotta go right here. In this duration, you figure out the in or out point. So doing the opposite of what I just said, two points in the timeline, one in the clip is a other way. By the way, for those of you who aren't familiar with those terms, that kind of thing is often called back timing in edit or for timing in edit, where you know where you have to be out, and then just let the computer figure out where it's going to go in or go out.

01:35:59:09 - 01:36:21:01
Robbie
Right. But let's talk about this for a second, because so what I just described is three point editing, three points to have any given thing happen. And back. If you can picture this with Joey with long, luxurious hair, listening to some, you know, poison or Motley Crew or something like that doing these edits. Joey, you had three points to make anything happen, right?

01:36:21:03 - 01:36:21:22
Joey
Yep.

01:36:21:23 - 01:36:27:01
Robbie
Okay. What happened when you had four points? What does that what does that do for you?

01:36:27:02 - 01:36:44:15
Joey
This is where where you would have things that don't line up. Right? Right. They call it today a fit to fill. Right. And it was a quick way of saying, okay, I've got this two second part of my source. One second opening in my record timeline. Stretched that thing.

01:36:44:17 - 01:37:05:02
Robbie
Yep, yep. So a fit to fill on is basically these days is an automatic speed change, right? Is you're basically saying, hey, I got this two seconds, I need to fit into a one second hole, double it up by 50% to make that two seconds fit into the one seconds. And that can be very useful for depending on what you're doing, without having to calculate the math about an experiment.

01:37:05:02 - 01:37:34:01
Robbie
Okay. 97.03% 96.49%. So three point versus four point and I, I just bring it up because I find myself not that I do a whole lot of editing, but what I do, I just find myself being a whole lot more precise when I'm marking and marking out overwrite insert, marking out overwrite, insert rather than this whole, you know, wrist gymnastics and hand gymnastics of dragging down the timeline, waiting for it to pop open.

01:37:34:04 - 01:37:58:23
Robbie
Oh crap. I you know the arrow was facing right instead of down. I'm doing an insert, not an overwrite and all those kind of things. I think a lot of that, can be avoided with the basics of three point and four point editing by using the keyboard marking ins and outs. I mean, I'm we make fun of black, or I make fun of black magic sometimes because they seemingly grant seemingly has the same love affair with old school video, hardware that you do.

01:37:59:05 - 01:38:13:20
Robbie
But that was one of the best things that ever came out was with that editor keyboard, because it I think it got a lot of people back to the tactile approach of editorial versus the drag and drop, approach of editorial, which I think paid big dividends.

01:38:13:22 - 01:38:41:20
Joey
Yeah. And I will go even dramatically more dogmatic than you are. I think if you are dragging and dropping in your timeline, you're you're almost definitely doing it wrong. And you need to learn to stop doing that. The reason I say that is simply because of precision. Yep. And the likelihood of mistakes. Right. When you marking in marking out and then mark a third point or a fourth point or whatever.

01:38:41:21 - 01:39:00:07
Joey
Right. You can look at your source, look at your your timeline and see exactly what it's going to do. And then you put that edit in and everything's great. Or if you don't like it, you undo and you can try things around. The reason I do this is because if you get into this easy peasy, I'm going to drag and drop and wave things all around with the mouse kind of way of working.

01:39:00:07 - 01:39:19:09
Joey
Yes, I can feel more interactive, but you're going to mess up. You are, especially if you have an hour long timeline with a bunch of different things. You're going to drag too long of a clip over top of a shot and not notice it, and then come back and that shot will be missing, and you're gonna have to go back and do detective work, or you're going to be off by one frame or.

01:39:19:11 - 01:39:48:11
Robbie
That's that's something you do. That's what I want. That's what I want to talk about, is the pursuit of the timing and playhead positioning, whether it's inclusive or exclusive, is something that in drag and drop editing, you probably never pay attention to but creates, creates problems. And what I mean by that is, is it is your playhead position on the timeline is the duration that is calculated inclusive of the frame that that playhead is looking at, or is it not inclusive?

01:39:48:13 - 01:40:13:21
Robbie
But knowing that and what the how that works. People never consider and drag and drop because they're just like, oh, I got five seconds. And the result is we get acts that are 1 or 2 frames long all the time, right? We get commercial breaks that are, you know, they're supposed to be five second commercial breaks and they're 501 or they're 427 or something like that, because I think people are just doing this drag and drop and not being precise with that math.

01:40:13:23 - 01:40:34:22
Joey
And I think you're giving the younger generation a little too much credit here, because there is a clear right and wrong here. End points are inclusive out points are exclusive. That is how it's always been. So it's always will be. This means if you say marking in at one hour and then marking out at one hour and 10s, that is 10s of time.

01:40:35:00 - 01:40:50:12
Joey
And you are not including the frame that lands at 10s in your timeline. If you were to put the playhead there, and if you zoom all the way in and resolve and marking in and out, you can see visually how that works. I think a lot of people don't think about that. Like you said.

01:40:50:14 - 01:41:09:23
Robbie
No, I think it's a it's a great point. And that precision is really where we get there. Speaking of precision, the last thing I want to talk about, is this idea of file naming. I'm a little more precise. I think about this than than you are just because I.

01:41:10:01 - 01:41:11:18
Joey
I, I'm more than a little.

01:41:11:20 - 01:41:32:22
Robbie
Yeah. Burned a lot by imprecise file names. Right. And so some of my file names are kind of ridiculous, to be honest with you. They have, like, every technical specification you could possibly think about in the file name. But what I'm really talking about here is, again, going back to that same thing we're talking about with transparency and stuff is descriptive, well understood.

01:41:33:00 - 01:41:51:04
Robbie
File names. Right. Calling a file like, you know, name of the timeline, underscore graded doesn't do a whole lot for me because I can't just look at that file and go, oh, well, that's the HD one versus the HD one, or that's the 20 997 version versus the 20 398 or whatever. Eight I like.

01:41:51:04 - 01:41:52:03
Joey
That.

01:41:52:04 - 01:42:11:03
Robbie
Yeah, I know you're probably yeah I attacking you a little bit, but it's all right. The other part about this is that I do not want to have to open up a file and do a discovery on some of the, some of these basics. I want to just be able to glance at it. And the same thing is true, by the way, with people naming, files like stupid, like final, final, final.

01:42:11:08 - 01:42:12:04
Robbie
I mean, there's a meme there.

01:42:12:04 - 01:42:13:14
Joey
Never name anything fine, a.

01:42:13:16 - 01:42:29:21
Robbie
Million memes about that or whatever. Here are the things I think all file names should have. I think the all the file names should have the name of the project, right? Potentially the name of the client, but at least the name of the timeline or project, whatever. I think they all should have the resolution size and or frame rate in the file name.

01:42:29:21 - 01:43:01:10
Robbie
So you know, you know, you FD at 23.98 or whatever. I think they should have the codec name I think they should have whether they're text list, and I think they should have the date. You can add more or less upon that. Right. If you want to do version two, version three, if you want to put in some other information about, oh, this is Rex 7 or 9 or whatever, but knowing the resolution, the frame rate and the codec something is just lets me be able to glance at something really quick and go, oh yeah, that's the that's the version without having to open it up in QuickTime or some other player import it

01:43:01:10 - 01:43:04:03
Robbie
into resolve. I can just quickly know what it is.

01:43:04:05 - 01:43:32:13
Joey
Yeah. And yeah, Robbie's completely right here. I am like, I'm the anarchist with file names in a very bad way, for one particular reason. And I'm going to fix this, Mark my words. But I have a firm belief that your timeline name in your in LA or your finishing system should match the file output. That way, if a client says, hey, it's this file, I can cross-reference exactly what sequence it was in.

01:43:32:13 - 01:43:52:09
Joey
Resolve. I'm very bad about naming things in resolve. And then when I go to render, I just say use timeline name. I never use the custom name in resolve because I want it to match the timeline. And that comes out of kind of my origin story of working in promos, because it would just be the name of the promo and like version 11, version 12, version 13, right?

01:43:52:13 - 01:43:55:19
Joey
Some of the client says, hey, I want that shot from version 11. I've got the timeline for.

01:43:55:20 - 01:44:19:03
Robbie
It to be. And to be clear and to be clear, Joey, in in those workflows where specificity doesn't really gain you much because it's internal or everybody is clued in to a standard set of naming. I'm fine with that. Like, that doesn't bother me. What I'm talking about is more of like, if I'm handing this file over to a distributor, another artist, or something like that, I want it to be very or I'm getting files from somebody.

01:44:19:07 - 01:44:34:17
Robbie
I want to be very clear what it is. And like you were talking about the Alpha channel thing earlier, it would be great if a motion graphic designer could just put in the file name straight alpha like that would be or re multiply that would like that would solve a crapload of problems. You know.

01:44:34:19 - 01:44:46:21
Joey
Yeah. And like I said I know I'm bad about this. This is something I want to try to fix in my workflow. And in my head, I just need to figure out how to do it in such a way that it kind of works with how I organize my projects. And I haven't done that yet.

01:44:46:23 - 01:44:47:12
Robbie
And I think, I.

01:44:47:12 - 01:45:03:21
Joey
Think Robbie is very good at this. His file names are legit. They tell you everything you need to know and everything I said earlier about how, you know, specificity and, you know, detail is so important. It it definitely applies to file names. I'm not great at that.

01:45:03:23 - 01:45:22:21
Robbie
Actually. We skipped we skipped one last step before the file name thing because that's final output. And by the way, I don't care what the file name is. Some of that specificity if you're working with a group just like anything else like same thing with like keywords, right? Just like get together as a team, figure out how you want to name things and just standardize that and stick to it's really all that matters.

01:45:22:23 - 01:45:43:01
Robbie
One last thing that I before the output thing that we didn't mention that I think is a little legacy, but still is important and that is the leader information and tone, countdown slates, that kind of stuff. Right now, different distributors are going to kind of ask for different things. And for a to a large degree, some of this doesn't serve the same purpose that it used to serve.

01:45:43:01 - 01:46:04:11
Robbie
Right? So, for example, putting down, bars and tone on a tape used to be a calibration step for whoever was getting that tape right to make sure that their monitor aligned phase, you know, and, you know, color wise to the signal. Same thing with the tone. Okay. Yeah, we have that tone, one k tone that, you know, -20 DBM fast.

01:46:04:11 - 01:46:23:01
Robbie
We can, you know, turn our speakers to match that. That doesn't nobody's really doing that anymore. It's more of just a legacy thing to keep bars and tone on there. I don't really care. So much of a file doesn't have bars in tone, but especially on, short form where there's a lot of like, cut down. Okay, there's a 60, there's a 15, there's a, there's a six.

01:46:23:07 - 01:46:44:09
Robbie
It's, you know, tomorrow night, Tuesday night, Thursday night, whatever. Slates will never go away for me. Like, slates are something that I think especially that's where you can share additional information about the file. Audio configuration, Alpha channel configuration or whatever. But it's also where you can really clearly go, hey, from here to here, this is what this is from here to here.

01:46:44:11 - 01:46:53:22
Robbie
This is what this is. And especially if you're doing multi deliverable parts, you know as I said the spots slate information I think is still is still vital.

01:46:54:00 - 01:47:18:17
Joey
Yeah I the only thing I'll say about that is obviously do whatever the distributor or deliverable requirements ask you to do. Yeah. But if they ask you to do a slate, make darn sure everything on that slate is correct. Yeah. And specific because you get into really confusing things sometimes especially, you know, a lot of people, like we said early on, they will transpose 30 and 29, nine, seven as the same thing.

01:47:18:19 - 01:47:34:21
Joey
You want to be specific on that slate with the accurate correct information. And as far as bars and tone go, I honestly like it when distributors and deliverable specs ask for a little bit of bars and tone because no, we're not calibrating our monitor to it, but it real quickly lets me see, hey, what color space is this in it?

01:47:35:02 - 01:47:47:08
Joey
Well, that's good point levels. It's a good gut check, but yeah, it's not completely necessary. But yes, when those things are in place, don't let it be an afterthought. Make sure it is right.

01:47:47:10 - 01:48:05:13
Robbie
Yeah. And related to that, is that the timecode part of that's important too? I think this is probably pretty well known, but we should just state it. Almost every deliverable here in the US is going to like the actual first frame of picture in sound is going to be right at one hour. In the power world, that's usually at ten hours, right?

01:48:05:13 - 01:48:23:08
Robbie
And then whatever time run running from there. The stuff we're talking about bars and tone, slate, countdown, etc. that's all pre that hour. So if you're at hour one for your first frame of picture, all that stuff is occurring in the 5859 range. You know, you might you might start at 58, 30 and have a minute of bars and tone, whatever.

01:48:23:10 - 01:48:45:17
Robbie
This is when we were young, this is what we got paid to do at night in the machine room is go black and striped tapes with timecode starting at, you know, 58, 30 or whatever, 58 minutes and have a control track down the whole tape. Right. But that's the same thing. Still apply. So when you're setting up your timeline, just adjust your starting timecode, you know, 58, 30 or 59, 30 or whatever it is, and then line up things in sequence to that time.

01:48:45:19 - 01:49:01:05
Joey
Yeah. And it's a question we get all the time from from younger or newer editors is why does this timeline default at one hour? Why shouldn't it just be 000? Because that's all. Because when you need to put a slate or a letter or bars on tone or anything on something, you still want your show to start at one hour.

01:49:01:05 - 01:49:04:21
Joey
Even so, then we go before one hour. There's no before zero.

01:49:05:00 - 01:49:21:08
Robbie
But it's also it's also easy location thing, right? If you're talking about a long form, like a film or like a long show, you can say, oh, that mistake is in our two, right? Oh two and be able to go, you know, they don't mean the first hour of the film, they mean the second hour of the film.

01:49:21:14 - 01:49:39:18
Robbie
And that was germane for tape reasons. You know, oftentimes real long play tapes like 120 minute tapes could be hard to find. So you might actually separate a tape over a couple 40 minute or 50 minute tapes, depending on the frame rate. And do it that way as well. All right. All right. Good stuff. Hopefully we haven't bored you to death with some of these.

01:49:39:22 - 01:49:57:21
Robbie
Get off my old man terms, but I think you can see how you know some of this information. Yes, some of it is jeopardy knowledge. You can, you know, impress your friends with. But a lot of it is still really germane to the way that we work, these days. So keep it in mind if you have any questions, feel free to let us know in comments.

01:49:57:21 - 01:50:13:18
Robbie
Wherever you're watching this or listening to this. And to that end, of course, the offset podcast can be found on every major podcasting platform. Please tell your friends, and colleagues we're also on YouTube if you find us. Please like and subscribe wherever you find the show. You can always follow us on the social media as well.

01:50:13:18 - 01:50:30:04
Robbie
We're on Facebook and Instagram. Always feel free to follow us and ask us questions there. And you can always go over to offsetpodcast.com and submit a question if you'd like for future episodes. So Joey, good stuff I had. I had fun reminiscing about some of the stuff. It's good reminder on some of it as well.

01:50:30:06 - 01:50:36:15
Robbie
And I always appreciate your, your very knowledgeable explanation. So for the offset podcast, I'm Robbie Carman

01:50:36:17 - 01:50:38:04
Joey
And I'm Joey. D’Anna thanks for listening.