This month I want to celebrate three cool image-oriented tools: Vortex Media’s Hands On® series of “living camera manuals,” Cleaner®, and Cinematize®.

HANDS ON HDV

The HandsOn® HDV series are Vortex Media’s (www.vortexmedia.com) first entries into making complex cameras understandable to new and experienced shooters– but who hate printed manuals and need a fast start. If you’ve ever had to tackle a camera manual, such as from Sony, you’ll enjoy tracing a reference on page 5 to page 65 to follow up a crucial detail. It’s easy to get lost wading through a lot of unneeded data. Sensible information design seems to elude some of our finest equipment manufacturers, thus the proliferation of live video manuals.

Vortex Media's HandsOn DVD series offers "living camera manuals." Photo courtesy of Loren S. Miller.

For the new Sony HVR-Z1U, HDR-FX1 and HDR-HC1 cameras, Vortex, a Rhode Island company headed by Doug Jensen, comes to the rescue. Pop one of these DVD’s into your computer or set-top player and there it is, a layout of chapters spotlighting all the essential features, with “gotcha’s” and tips thrown in where useful—did you know the camera iris will change even under manual control, if you’re not careful with settings? Just follow along using your camera, or use it for window shopping.  Primarily a studio set illustrated lecture with polished talent delivering the goods, the content is nicely distilled, the camera features grouped intelligently by need, the viewpoint is you-- and there are breakout location examples—such as motion depiction of frame rate and shutter speed changes. Vortex goes the extra mile to show you the camera in the field, to make operation and settings choices clear.

These are largely task-driven DVD’s—what do you want to know or do? The chapters are sensibly laid out from general to specific. You can watch the $85.00 DVD for the HVR-Z1U or HDR-FX1 (Sony’s professional and prosumer HDV models) and noodle with your new camera in real-time to get a feel for it. Vortex groups both cameras onto one DVD. They also offer a $45 DVD covering the prosumer-level HDR-HC1. According to Jensen, more productions are planned as they hear from users and determine the market interest.

Camera instruction on video (or online in Java or Flash slideshows) is not a new idea, but I’ve never seen a better implementation, produced by pro’s who use this equipment. It was amusing to hear that Sony uses these for in-house training!

 

CLEANER 6.5 Mac/1.5 Windows

Cleaner® is the veteran cross-platform compression utility once known as Media Cleaner. It’s now owned by AutoDesk (www.usa.autodesk.com), well known for its AutoCAD software, now moving into the entertainment arts space with high end acquisitions like Combustion, Maya, MotionBuilder, Flame and Smoke. The just-released Cleaner 6.5 for Mac, and Cleaner XL 1.5 for Windows, has capabilities not available from out-of-box Avid or Final Cut Pro Studio systems.

If you’re concerned with image quality you must pay attention to compression. These days, producers and editors usually need to compress their program material for the web or DVD delivery. But new markets have emerged which aren’t fully addressed, such as Flash video and cell phone playback. Final Cut Pro’s QuickTime export choices, for example, do not completely support such formats.

Flash itself is a major component of an entirely new and growing industry: web-based distance e-learning production. If you use instructional authoring programs like Captivate (www.adobe.com) which include video clips, you need Flash-based video (.flv and .swf formats) and Cleaner directly supports compression to Flash video from any original format.

Cellphone and handheld video formats vary, and for now it’s a novelty feature without much impact on moviemaking, other than trailers. I would never watch LAWRENCE OF ARABIA on a cellphone. But for shortform with lots of close-ups, it’s great. Cleaner dances all over the “studio” solutions from Apple and Avid, supporting 3GP and Sony MQV as well as Kinoma for Palm®-based smartphones and handhelds.

Drag and drop your video clip or batch, even full 10-bit uncompressed, into Cleaner’s main window, select a preset, or tweak it, crop it, filter image and/or audio, to process it directly into your desired delivery format, including improved speed MPEG-2 with 2-pass variable bitrate encoding for DVD delivery. Once upon a time this cost thousands in special hardware. On recent Macs and PC’s with dual processor or dual core engines (recommended), the price/performance compares favorably to dedicated compressors. At $599.00, Cleaner delivers MPEG-2 and far more, and your control over fine encoding settings is absolute.

Maintaining its rep as the Swiss Army Knife of encoder-compressors, Cleaner offers popular formats like Sorensen, Windows Media (up to version 7 format); Real® 10, DiVX formats; not to mention all your QuickTime codecs, still image, audio formats, and classic video codecs like AVI and CinePak. I love the “before-after” comparison window. It allows you to tweak your compression before committing to a full encode. Popular settings are provided as presets and you can roll your own. It belongs in any serious media author’s toolkit. A 30-day free trial is available.

 

CINEMATIZE for Mac and Windows

Cinematize®, on the other hand, (www.miraizon.com), does one thing and pretty well. Now at version 2, this is a cute little bundle of digital joy for folks who need to extract (or “rip”) DVD content for re-use. Cinematize allows you to load any unprotected CD or DVD right into its work window to get a list of its contents. You then select the “video title set” you want ripped, indicate the start and end points of the segment you need, specify the video output and let it extract the video.

I tested this specifying DV output and it imported into Final Cut Pro with no rendering, image and audio crystal clear, with no artifacts.

Until Cinematize came along, a variety of freebie and shareware rippers owned the market and most all of them offered awkward interface or incomplete solutions. At $59.00, Cinematize provides utterly the simplest workflow I’ve encountered thus far for this particular task, and saves tons of time hooking up a DVD player to your deck just to copy a short segment, or even a whole show. In addition, it exports your video via QuickTime — any codec you have loaded can be accessed. Bring this baby home to your desktop!

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Loren S. Miller regularly discovers and reports on cool tools, timesaving tech, and wild workflows for IMAGINE, and works as a feature and documentary editor in the Boston area. Reach him anytime at lormiller@mindspring.com