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flipbooks, dailies and whatnot...


Marc

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Colour will eventually be important so I'd like to plan ahead :). Mplay is ok for looking at things at people's desks, but it would be nice to have a system that does both (desk flipbooks and dailies). The last thing I want to do is manage colourspace issues in more than one package.... ugh.

Dailies will require playlists and hopefully the ability for realtime playback... although it's early days yet, so I'm just getting a feeling for what people are using.

@lynbo: I knew about Iridas, but I was wondering if there was anything else out there that I hadn't known about.

Thanks all

Marc

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quicktime in the obvious choice for dailies - it can be view on a workstation or in a web based tool(s)

no linux though...

I've been looking into flv as a replacement for mov...

one of the biggest problems with this is that people tend to want one tool/format etc to cover all their needs...I just don't know what that is at the moment...

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Doesn't MPlay support some kind of playlists? And it's scriptable too.

I use MPlay generally. I like FrameCycler too (I used the one bundled with Nuke).

The problem with MPlay is that it displays TGA's (from AfterEffects and Nuke) upside down (known bug). Since we receive lots of TGA sequences it makes it unusable for us in many cases.

Dragos

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Doesn't MPlay support some kind of playlists? And it's scriptable too.

I use MPlay generally. I like FrameCycler too (I used the one bundled with Nuke).

The problem with MPlay is that it displays TGA's (from AfterEffects and Nuke) upside down (known bug). Since we receive lots of TGA sequences it makes it unusable for us in many cases.

Dragos

To make it better for Dailies, it would be great to have Mplay...

- support Quicktime playback.

- have a docked abbreviated sequence list, the population of which should be fully scriptable. The current one is too wide and has too many controls for simply switching between sequences.

- support annotation.

- support truelight luts

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I think mplay is great for what it was designed for, which is a flipbooking tool to support Houdini... but it feels too clunky for a general use tool (IMHO anyway). Framecycler is a good example of a general use flipbooking tool.

In other words, I generally agree with what other people have said about mplay :).

M

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have you guys ever heard about avisynth?

it's a very powerful frameserver, though i think only for windows.

you create simple scripts that read anything, including image sequences and you can do operations like flip vertical and overlays, then just play the script in any media player.

this way you can fix the tga flipping issues that were mentioned and use any player even if it doesn't support image sequences natively

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MPlay and Framecycler are very good, Framecyler has many many options and is very powerful.

But if you have limit memory for caching, I usually use:

mplayer "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=24 -audiofile audiofile.mp3

is able to reproduce at realtime direct from disk using virtually no memory.

-audiofile param is optional of course.

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the biggest problem with using quicktimes is that most codec's alter the color of the images!

unless one of you guys know a good one that doesn't change the color and still has good compression?

js

PhotoJPEG at 90% is good - and scrubbable.

But, to be clear - a dailies system should mostly handle WIP dailies - where color doesn't have to be 100%. And the color issue is lessened if you bake in your LUT before encoding. A good dailies system loads shots instantaneously from a list of shots (say, all shots for a team for a time period) and loads sequence audio /etc.

For 2k's (or finals) - then yes, lossless compression is necessary... so you may as well load your original .dpx/.exr/.cins, run through the viewer LUT.

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MPlay and Framecycler are very good, Framecyler has many many options and is very powerful.

But if you have limit memory for caching, I usually use:

mplayer "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=24 -audiofile audiofile.mp3

is able to reproduce at realtime direct from disk using virtually no memory.

-audiofile param is optional of course.

Nice tip:)

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For your needs I think that framecycler is the best, specially due to the color space handling.

Also you can use a lut and adjst gammas in mlayer, but in my opnion framecycler is a bit better.

Probably true.. unless you need to save $$ and have access to a scripter to bring Mplay under your control. MPlay is free for your whole studio, and tweaking a Mplay "Profile" to expose only the features you need can help, probably.

The problem with quicktimes is that you need to automate the creation of the bloody things... and even that takes a bit of pipeline work. But it's awesomely useful once you've done it.

PS. A good quicktime dailies system should maintain a good database of shots - a persistent database where you can refer back to any jobs in the past. It's fantastically useful.

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actually using quicktimes in a dailies system is very doable with free stuff you get from itunes. you can create your quicktimes from any software and convert them to ipod format or even apple tv. the nice thing about this is that you can always have access to your files, and the dates they were created in, and by which team. We have an apple tv synched with the main workstations that have all the stuff submitted. We even use our ipods to discuss stuff over lunch or something. the only problem with this pipeline is that it's not readily doable on linux. It's more of a small studio/ boutique way of dealing with dailies. Plus it's promoting a lot of apple products and i don't like that.

cheers

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