To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade—that is the question.

…Whether 'tis nobler to stand pat with what I’ve got….

As next spring’s post on our DVD draws nearer, I’ve been contemplating the post-production aspect of it: do I have the tools to do a really good job by current standards?

I could produce a functioning DVD with basic tools, even freeware apps, but the goal with this project is to produce a demo reel to put into the hands of the mighty. If we sell a few of them, all the better, but I wouldn’t want to sell anyone something that wasn’t the result of Mullet and I playing at the top of our game. Mullet takes the same approach with the comic, as does our artist, Kameron Gates.

At the moment, I have a G5 (single 1.6 GHz processor, the original low-end G5 model) and Final Cut Studio 1 as my software. I have a pair of 250 GB external hard drives for video capture, and I listen to the whole thing via a 10-watt Radio Shack amp and $30 Radio Shack speakers. This is probably as no-budget as you can get! I won’t be replacing the G5, so my focus will be on the software.

I’m running OS X Tiger, and I haven’t decided whether I’ll upgrade to the new Mac OS, Leopard, yet. I usually wait some time before upgrading, but I’m happy with how fast and stable Tiger is—Leopard’s new features haven’t prompted me to run down to Riverdale Mac just yet. I’ll revisit the OS after the DVD’s done, but I don’t anticipate, at this point, upgrading based on some of the negative experiences people have had. If the consensus on the various forums that focus on all things Final Cut and Mac come back with reports of speed increases or can’t-work-without features, I might take the plunge.

I am, however, evaluating 4 options for upgrading my current apps:

• Stand pat with what I’ve got ($0)
• Upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2 ($545 CAD),
• Buy Magic Bullet Suite ($799 USD) or just one of the Magic Bullet apps
• Buy Adobe AfterEffects ($1149 CAD for CS3, $1969 CAD for the Production Premium version, which adds PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc.).
  
  Taking Magic Bullet for a ride is step one in my evaluation. Magic Bullet was created by Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage, and it’s been a well-known plug-in and stand-alone app for years. Last spring, I bought Stu’s book, The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap, which I’d recommend to anyone making no-budget movies (even if you’re not shooting action flicks, there’s plenty of good information there), and found his blog and forum there quite interesting.
  
  Magic Bullet Suite is priced at $799 USD, and you get Magic Bullet Looks (applies preset or user-created “looks” to video), Magic Bullet Frames (converts 60i to 24p, also deinterlaces video), Magic Bullet Colorista (3-way colour correction), and Instant HD (converts SD video to HD video). These programs are either stand-alone or plug-ins for FCP and Motion, but the demos seem to be plug-ins only. I’ve read a few reviews for Colorista, plus various forum comments, and all have been positive. I can’t recall any negative comments, actually. I downloaded the demos for Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista, and in a future post I’ll let you know how they’ve worked out.
  
  Upgrading to Final Cut Studio 2 would give me the latest versions of that bundle: Final Cut Pro 6, DVD Studio Pro 4, Motion 3, Compressor 3, and Soundtrack Pro 2, plus the new app, Color. At the moment, this would be a $545 CAD investment. The learning curve is the lowest here given that I’m familiar with the previous versions of all these apps, with the exception of Color. There are no demos available for FCS 2, so I’ll have to rely upon reviews and the Apple website for evaluation. The reviews of FCS 2 have been positive overall, although some people don’t like Color.
  
  Whether I upgrade or not, I’ll be using FCP, Soundtrack Pro, Compressor, and DVD SP for the DVD. These are good, stable programs that meet most of my needs for no-budget post-production. The only needs I find wanting are in the areas of mastering and onlining.
  
  Stu’s book goes into onlining quite a bit—getting the video from your non-linear editing program to the final version enjoyed by millions. Colour correction and mastering are the two main areas. In the book, Stu has reservations about using FCP for onlining and recommends using AfterEffects since FCP renders at 8-bits and AE can render 8-, 16-, or 24-bits. The higher the bit rate, the better the filters and transitions look. With Stu’s workflow, you don’t do any rendering at all in FCP—you export everything sans transitions and filters, and apply them inside AfterEffects instead.
  
  In FCP 5, you’re limited to 8-bit rendering, but Apple promises that FCP 6 does 16- and 24-bit rendering, as does Color, but I haven’t seen anyone come out with a clear statement on whether it works as well as AE does, even on Stu’s blog and forum.
  
  I’ll download the AfterEffects CS3 demo and try it out once I’ve played with Magic Bullet. I had AfterEffects 3 way back when OS9 ruled the Mac world, so I’m somewhat familiar with the program, but I suspect that CS3 is probably a lot more sophisticated than 3 is!
  
  To evaluate the 2 demos, I’ll take the same sequence from a Final Cut project, export it as a DV QuickTime file, and import it into each program (bearing in mind that the Magic Bullet demo is plug-in only, I’ll presumably be using FCP’s rendering engine when I test Magic Bullet, so I’m testing the interface more than I am the output).
  
  I’ll come up with 3 or 4 different things I want to test, and use Magic Bullet, AfterEffects, and Final Cut Studio 1 to independently come up with 3 different versions. Once I’ve done all 9 or 12 tests, I’ll export them as QuickTime files and bring them into Compressor to convert into H.264 and DVD files. I’ll run the DVD files through DVD Studio Pro to create DVDs to look at on various TVs, and I’ll test the H.264 files on a mix of computers, mostly Windows.
  
  I’ll post results for these evaluations in the coming weeks.