Tonight, on the Digital Production Buzz, Mike Horton and I interviewed Ken Miller, formerly the #2 executive – and 20-year veteran – at Aaron Spelling Productions, and now head of his own production company – My Media Productions.

It was great fun to talk with the producer of such massive hits as “Love Boat,” “90210,” “Charmed,” and dozens more. He had a very simple philosophy – focus on the story. However, in this case, we got him to describe his process in more detail.

Ken’s background was film. He started as a music editor and worked his way up. Toward the end of our interview we discussed the impact tapeless media is having on episodic production, as well as the changing dynamic of funding production.

Mike and I both found the interview fascinating. I’ve created a special excerpt of it, which you can listen to here: (TRT: 14:41)

Ken Miller interview on Digital Production Buzz

Or, click here to listen to the entire show:

Digital Production Buzz – Jan. 28, 2010

Thanks,

Larry

Today, Apple announced its new tablet – the iPad. Which is great for watching videos, but not so great at creating them. For that, we still need laptops and tower computers.

With that in mind, I’m up in San Jose, CA, this week in a series of meetings with Adobe about all kinds of interesting stuff.

During the course of our conversations, I learned a couple of things that I wanted to share with you.

First, Adobe made the decision that all their future applications will be 64-bit only. For Mac users, this means that this will require hardware that can run OS X 10.6. Fortunately, Apple has made 64-bit support simple by building it into the OS. If you can run Snow Leopard, you are all set.

For PC users, the issue is more complex. 64-bit means that you need to buy a 64-bit-capable system. However, many less expensive PC computers on the market today are only 32-bit. This means that whenever Adobe releases new software, it won’t even install on these 32-bit systems; even if you bought it recently.

(Note: This also means that new Adobe software won’t install on Macs that can’t run Snow Leopard; which includes all non-Intel/Macs and anyone not running at least OS X 10.6.)

As a side note, the reason that 64-bit support is so important is that it provides support for vast – and I mean truly HUGE – RAM memory. Currently, 32-bit systems, like Leopard, only allow an application to access 4 GB of RAM. 64-bit systems allow applications to directly access HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of TERABYTES! Sheesh….!

The second big benefit of 64-bit support, according to Adobe, is that applications run much faster because they need to access the hard disk much less frequently.

Better speed and performance are both good things in my book!

A second new technology that Adobe is talking about publicly is what they call the Mercury Playback Engine. Currently, this runs only in Adobe Premiere Pro and what it provides is blazingly fast performance for video editing.

The Mercury engine works in both software and hardware. And, using just the software engine, its pretty interesting.

However, when you add hardware, the speed explodes into almost frightening performance. The key point, though, is that the playback engine is optimized for NVIDIA graphics cards. (Meaning that ATI graphics cards are not supported.)

When you connect an NVIDIA graphics card to your system, performance is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Real-time multi-camera playback of four native RED 4K files. Real-time color correction with multiple filters applied to the same clip. Real-time editing of native AVCHD video, no transcoding required.

Adobe tells me that when assisted by an NVIDIA card, Premiere Pro operates 50-100 TIMES faster than it does in software alone.

At this point, both of these are technology demos. Current versions of Adobe Production Premium don’t support these features. However, as you are planning your hardware purchases for the year, you might want to keep these thoughts in mind.

Currently, Final Cut Studio does not support 64-bit memory addressing, nor does it support hardware acceleration (Motion does, but the other applications do not).

Adobe is giving us just a glimpse of what we can look forward to later this year. Hopefully, Apple will follow suit.

One other note. Next generation Adobe software will also be multicore aware. This means that the more processors you have in your system, the faster the software will run. This, too, is something Final Cut Studio does not currently support.

Adam Connell, a long-time reader of my monthly Final Cut Studio newsletter, sent me the following:

I recently downloaded and tried out 10.6.2 on my ‘experiments’ mac, a 17″ MBP 2009 edition. On exactly the same HDV and XDCAM sequences that worked perfectlyu well on 10.6.1 in FCP 7, droped frames galore on regular sequence playback, crashing when tying to crop video etc… glad it was in a controlled enviroment and it didn’t go anywhere near my main cutting machine, the mac pro. – That would have had me u all night. Curiously, the software description for 10.6.2 says that it is meant to improve FCP. HOW?

Larry adds: I have not tested this, so I don’t know the extent of the problem. However, I wanted to give you a heads up so you can determine for yourself what you want to do.

These thoughts have been bubbling around my head for the last few months, but developed into an article as I was trying to learn Mocha from Imagineer Systems. They were also the philosophy behind my recent book for Focal Press: Adobe CS Production Premium for Final Cut Studio Editors.

As always, let me know what you think.

The folks at Imagineer Systems sent me a demo copy of Mocha, which is used for motion tracking. After installing the software, which proved very easy, I launched it only to discover an opening screen intimidating enough to scare most adults.

Hmm… time for some training myself.

It just so happened that Imagineer was holding a training workshop locally in LA, so I signed up. I spent a couple of hours at the session, did my tracking and thought: “Wow! Piece of cake.”

Then, I came home. Work intervened. Time passed. I didn’t open it again for a couple of months. But I was feeling guilty and realized I needed to write my review. So, during a recent video shoot I recorded a short clip of me moving a white card around. I decided to create a motion track of this in Mocha as a way to learn the software.

My experiences in trying to get that card tracked was the inspiration for this editorial — because Imagineer has made it really difficult for new users to figure out how to use their software.

I am not a motion graphics designer. I am in awe of the talents of folks like Mark Spencer, Damian Allen, Tom Meegan, and many other wizards who make magic happen with a couple of quirky shapes, a dark background, and two or three blend modes.

Suddenly… poof, Poof, POOF! They have the opening to Monday Night Football.

All I want to do is replace the graphic on a card my talent is holding because he grabbed the wrong prop and no one noticed it during production. Or the logo on the stupid cap worn by the stupid talent has the wrong stupid logo on it.

You know, the stuff that drives you nuts.

So, I open the Imagineer manual and start reading. I get about six pages in and I’m feeling lost. So, I go to Imagineer’s website and watch their intro tutorial. Not only do I get lost, I start getting angry.

After reading the first chapter in the manual, and watching the entire “Learning to Use Mocha” tutorial it was impossible for me to figure out how to use the software. The narrator of the tutorial kept describing Mocha as “intuitive.” If you already understand motion tracking and have used a variety of other high-end tools, he may be correct.

But it isn’t intuitive to a new user.

NOTE: After some searching, I found a demo on Imagineer’s website of Mocha for Final Cut Pro by Ross Shain which is really very good. As a suggestion, if Ross isn’t doing the tutorial, don’t bother wasting your time watching it.

After years of doing training myself, I know that the hardest person to teach is the new user. It is so easy for them to get lost and so hard to get back on track.

That’s what makes video training on the web so great. You can watch the same video over and over until you understand. Provided the person doing the training realizes the difference between a demo and training. And that is where Imagineer got lost.

A demo is what you do to show how spiffy your new product is. Demos are all speed, polish, fancy tricks and glitter. You hide the hard stuff with fancy footwork and glib patter. Demos get people excited. Apple has turned the demo into an art form. A demo is created to impress.

Training is what you do when you want people to learn a product. It explains where to click and why. It creates a solid foundation then builds from there. It takes longer and moves slower. Training creates understanding.

Imagineer’s tutorials and manuals lost sight of that.

Because my reactions were so strongly negative to what I was reading and watching I came up with some simple rules that folks that do training need to follow, most of which Imagineer forgot.

• Give us an overview of the steps before plunging into the process.
• Always explain exactly how to create a new project.
• Always show exactly where to click – show, not describe.
• Show something simple before showing something complex.
• Always show exactly how to save and export project data, and whether what you choose makes a difference.
• Always show exactly how to get your information back into the application that needs it.
• If the default settings don’t yield the best results be VERY clear what needs to be changed.

Here are some specifics:

1. Most Macintosh applications create a new project when they are first opened. But not Mocha. It displays a work screen, which isn’t the same as a project. You need to select File > New Project before you can do anything.
2. The Learning Mocha tutorial runs about 12 minutes. Never ONCE did the narrator say “Click here” and show us where to click. Instead his mouse would fly so quickly across the screen the compression software would lose sight of it. He referred to the location of where to click in the jargon of the application; for example, “Click in the View tab.” However, the only thing displayed on the screen was the View menu – which is not the same thing.
3. Yes, Mocha is a sophisticated program. Yes, it does a lot. But we need to be successful doing something simple before we can move on to the complex. If I can’t successfully do the easy stuff, there’s no incentive for me to waste my time figuring out the hard stuff.
4. In training you are not trying to convince me how wonderful the software is. You need to convince me that I’m smart enough to be able to use it. Start simply. Build slowly. Lead me by the hand to the complex stuff. If at the end I lean back and say, “Wow, that trainer is smart,” you’ve failed. If, on the other hand, I lean back and say, “Wow! I never knew I could do that!”, you’ve succeeded.
5. Like Soundtrack Pro or Final Cut Pro, saving a Mocha project saves the instructions on how to motion track, it doesn’t actually save the track data in a form that Final Cut can use. Exporting does. Exporting is essential as it is the only way you can get motion data into Final Cut. However, there are two types of exports Mocha provides for Final Cut – the default setting, which doesn’t handle perspective changes (which is why you bought Mocha in the first place), and a second export option which should be the default, but isn’t. It would be nice if they made that clear.
6. If the default settings don’t yield the best results, and there are two instances where the default settings lead you severely astray, take extra time to show what needs to be changed and why.
7. Once you learn a piece of software, creating new files, importing media, exporting data and saving your work is easy. UNTIL you learn that software, not knowing one of those four steps makes it completely impossible to use. The on-line tutorial forgot this point.
8. Getting motion tracking data back into Final Cut Pro is not simple. It takes a minimum of four steps, two of which are not obvious. The manual discussed this, the on-line tutorial did not. (This was remedied in the Ross Shane tutorial, but that is not the featured tutorial on their website.)

Training is not easy. Yet without it, a company loses the ability to gain new users, improve its market share, or continue to grow the skills of their existing users. Inadequate training frustrates new users and creates the impression that products from that company are not worth the money they cost, as they are too hard to use.

None of us benefit from training that doesn’t teach.