Sam Can Play It Again: The Casablanca Nonlinear Editing System

The importance of Casablanca is its design philosophy. Over the past eight or so years, videographers have been struggling to achieve high quality results with desktop hardware. This departure from the high cost, single function, black boxes of the '80's has required either the services of a system integrator, a superb value-added reseller (VAR), a lot of heartaches and wasted hours "building your own box," or all three!

Casablanca changes the paradigm of project studio equipment for the next decade. The Casablanca philosophy is to go back to the black box mentality, but with a different set of rules. In our opinion, the new rules for black boxes are:

1. They will do the entire video production process, not just one effect or task.
2. They will be totally self-contained.
3. They will be affordable.

We reviewed the 2.X version of the software. This version has some audio editing drawbacks which would prevent us from recommending the Casablanca as a "broadcast quality" tool, but we believe these are temporary flaws which will be corrected in the 3.X revision, due later this year.

Aside from the audio problem, described below, Casablanca answers Rule #1 by doing the entire nonlinear editing process, including acquisition, storage of clips, timeline editing of audio and video, special effects and keys, and output back to tape.

Rule #2 is met most brilliantly. Casablanca is a slim, black box, about the size of a VCR (it even has a blinking 12:00!) You plug it into power, a video source and a video monitor or consumer TV and switch it on. Presto! You're ready to edit. Based on Amiga technology, Casablanca boots with no visible operating system, no booting procedure, no Mr. Gates! A brief Casablanca logo appears then the master control window. After every major control entry the project saves itself. When you're tired of working, you simply shut the machine off.

Rule #3 is met as well. The base system at $3,995 comes with all cables, a trackball (no keyboard needed), and a 4 gig drive, capable of about 20 minutes Casablanca's highest quality video. Options include extra drives (see "Drive On" below), extra effects, chromakey, a DSP processor for faster rendering, keyboard (you can use most DOS keyboards) and a Firewire card for direct DV interfacing and source machine control. Right out of the box, however, Casablanca does everything it's supposed to do without any time wasted with computeralia.

The first interface screen of Casablanca is the main screen area that can always be accessed with a right-click of the track ball. This area is split into four function categories: Settings, Video, Effects and Audio. The layout suggests the sequence of procedures.

Settings

Settings includes system, project and video settings. The most complicated part of setting up Casablanca is choosing the language in which you'll work! Manufactured in Germany, Casablanca offers its control interfaces in German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, well, you get the picture. With over 60,000 units sold worldwide, here is a system that is achieving global penetration.

Project settings allows you to establish the quality level of video and audio for the project. Since Casablanca does not read timecode, batch recapture cannot be done and the captured quality of the media will be the final output quality. A stunning feature is the quality sliders for video and audio which interact immediately with the "system capacity" window that shows how many minutes of video and audio remain on the hard drive. We set the system at its highest to capture Betacam footage and found that our 9 gig drive gave us 38 minutes of video and 3 hours of audio. As we slid the quality down, the time increased.

Video settings allow users to adjust the quality of incoming video with sliders for brightness, contrast and saturation and a selector for using the front or back media connectors on the box. We think this control should be built into the record window for easier access during acquisition.

The next main screen control group is associated with video, including record, edit and finish. Choose record, to see a feed through of your video input, with a small control panel overlaid. The panel has a start and stop button for executing the record to hard drive, a delete and trim key and a window showing how much time is left on the hard drive. For systems equipped with the optional DV control board, the control also allows direct VTR control of the DV source deck.

As each clip is captured, Casablanca automatically names it "S" plus a sequential number. Later, in the timeline window, the clips can be clicked to bring up a virtual keyboard with which names may be laboriously typed in using the trackball. Buy a real keyboard.

A very useful feature, auto logging, is also included in Casablanca. This tool recognizes scene changes in a long, captured clip. When activated it plays fast forward and splits the long clip into separate clips, storing them in the bin.

Clip-Based Editing

Casablanca, like Avid, is a clip-based editing system, where the editor adjusts the length of a shot in a trim window and places it in the timeline. Other systems, like DPS's VideoactionNT and Premiere, offer clip adjustment directly on the timeline and we call these systems timeline-based editing systems. New purchasers of NLEs should be aware of this philosophical difference and base their decisions accordingly.

The edit window offers what, in our opinion, is the simplest functional timeline arrangement we have ever seen. Those of you who are used to Avid or Razor or any high end NLE will find this screen a bit tight in features, but it works and for its event videography market, it works.

The timeline, called a "storyboard," resembles a seven-frame 35mm filmstrip running horizontally across the top of the screen. Centered in the screen is a gray square around the central frame. Regardless of clip length, Casablanca represents each clip with one, square frame. A scrollbar under the storyboard controls scanning to the left and right of the display. The gray frame indicates the current clip being viewed and the clip which will receive whatever actions are taken by the editor.

The remainder of the edit window is composed of two banks of six controls, a title window and timecode window and a central area for viewing up to twelve, small picons, representing the bin which may be scrolled to see all available video clips.

The edit window can only edit video clips (another window is for sound editing) which are affected by twelve buttons: Split, Trim, Copy, Empty Scene, Special, Delete,
Insert, Add, Replace, Range, Remove and Search.

Any clip can be viewed by clicking on it in the bin and pressing the play button at the bottom of the screen. The split key puts the scene on the monitor with an overlay control for "splitting" the scene into subclips (Geez, we wish they'd call this "scissors" or "subclip," a split means splitting audio and video, no?). After selecting the in and out points of the split, click "drop" to eliminate the selection from the bin or "use" to add another picon, representing the subclip, to the bin.

The trim button offers similar functionality which limits the bin picon to a shorter length than the original capture. Copy places a duplicate picon in the bin. This is useful prior to executing filter effects on a clip, so that the user can retain the original clip.

Empty Scene brings black, bars, solid color backgrounds, noise patterns and an interesting effect where a background of randomly changing colors can be created.

The Special key opens up a collection of effects that may be applied to any clip. These include slow motion, fast motion, reverse, still and strobe. Each option makes a copy of the clip and offers several controls for fine tuning the effect, such as choosing the rate of slow motion. Each choice affects the audio of the clip as well as the video. We found slow motion effects to be a bit jerky due to the fact that Casablanca is executing slow motion by duplicating frames and not by increasing frame rate.

Another key, found in a separate area of the main menu under, "image processing," offers further effects within a clip, such as "rectangle" (which allows of the placement of a sizable, colored rectangle in various levels of transparency to be placed anywhere on the clip), and wave (which makes the clip ripple). We can't understand why this collection of very useful effects should be found separately from the Special collection. A bit confusing.

The delete key removes clips from the bin, but does not restore hard drive space until the user requests a "project cleanup" (in the project settings window).

The first clip is put on the timeline by selecting the clip in the bin and clicking the left trackball button. The selected clip appears in the cursor frame. The next clip is placed by selecting the clip and then pressing the "add" button. This brings up a choice window placing the new clip "in front" of "behind" the cursor clip. The remove and replace keys take clips out of the storyboard and swap clips between the storyboard and the bin. The insert key brings up a playback window that allows the editor to insert the selected clip into a selected point in the current clip. The current clip is then divided into two new clips in the bin. The search key scans through the bin and highlights the clip corresponding to the clip in the cursor window.

A very useful feature of Casablanca, that we haven't seen elsewhere is a feature that places a small, black dot on each bin clip that has been used in the timeline. This feature can save a great deal of time when searching for clips that have not been used in a long production with a large bin.

Transitions for Effect

A wide assortment of effects may be created in Casablanca by selecting the Transitions key from the main menu. This menu returns the user to the edit screen except that the gray cursor window surrounds two frames in the storyboard and the left side features a scrolling list of effects. Choose an effect and an associated control screen will pop up, offering duration and feature controls, such as the direction of a page turn.

Casablanca comes with enough transition effects to satisfy most editors, but more are available as options and more are being developed for periodic release. Both 2-D effects, such as picture-in-picture, and 3-D effects, such as edge-panneled DVE moves are included. Once the parameters of the effect are set, press the preview button to see a small, realtime playback of the effect using the selected clips. Once the preview is satisfactory, the render button produces the transition and stores it for full screen playback.

The most useful transition effect is the picture-in-picture effect which allows for any clip to be inset into another. The tool allows for size, border, drop shadow, border color and position.

You are Entitled

A fully featured titler is also included in Casablanca for creating anti-aliased supers and graphics. The titler control interface, similar to the editing interface, places titles on the clip selected in the cursor frame. Some fonts are limited to still positions, but most allow scrolling and crawling. The text may be created in any color, with bold, italic, outline and shadow as selectable options, though the parameters of these options (i.e. edge thickness or shadow depth) are not controllable.

Audio Editing

Casablanca supports three stereo audio tracks; original, background and commentary. The original track, obviously, is imported with video captures. Background (music, for instance) and commentary are recorded from a screen which is opened in the main menu. Level meters and a gain control allow for accurate monitoring of record levels, while a gas gauge measures remaining hard drive capacity. The captured clip may be played and trimmed and the clip stored with a unique name.

Audio mixing is done in another screen similar to the master edit control window, which features the existing edit storyboard at the top and, alas, a three-bar timeline below, indicating the entries in each of the three audio tracks. A text window on the left lists all the audio-only clips that have been acquired. Using the previously described buttons, insert and remove, the clips may be placed on the audio timelines in relation to the pictured video clips.

Using trim and "range" controls, the precise in and out points of the audio can be moved and cut to fit the video, but unfortunately, scrubbing of audio and waveform display are not supported. Therefore, precise synchronization between internal elements of audio and video clips cannot be easily matched.

Setting the levels of audio within a clip is also burdensome. The workaround is to import a silent audio clip into an empty track (assuming you have one), wherever an level change is required. For some reason, this allows level setting between tracks. This is a most cumbersome way of achieving useful results. Audio editing is the only serious drawback of Casablanca and the area we hope to see the most improvement in version 3.0.

Drive On

Once familiar with Casablanca, users may wish to add extra drive capacity or to use the easily changed drives to temporarily store and shelve projects. Users may order or individually install larger or smaller drives by simply pulling the drive out of its front-mounted slot and slipping in a new drive. No configuration of the drive is needed.

Casablanca can only support one project title per drive. The workaround is to name separate projects as sequences within a project, but the system was designed so that the hard drives could be easily swapped out as projects get shelved between revisions.

Documentation

The documentation and update addendum is an adequate 55 or so pages of well illustrated instructions and tutorials. We found a few explanations missing, such as the use of the "range" command. The index could also be improved with the addition of an entry for every command button on the program's screens.

Aside from these drawbacks, the documentation and the program's intuitive interface were sufficient to get even a newcomer to video editing started on the road to success.

Executive Summary

Casablanca represents one of the first all-included, turnkey solutions to nonlinear editing. No installation or configuration is necessary and everything but a monitor and VTR are included in the package price. While audio editing is still in the developmental stage, the remaining features are robust and adequate for event videography with very high image quality and effects rendering. This is an ideal system for the beginning videographer, education environments or as a backup for an industrial studio's quickie projects.