Real time, real accurate
Echo Fire provides a number of functions otherwise unavailable in most desktop graphics applications. Chief among those for After Effects users is real time performance. "The number one request we had from users of Echo Fire 1.0 was for real-time video previewing in After Effects," says Bob Currier, president of Synthetic Aperture, "so that's what we added to version 1.1. It goes beyond standard RAM preview by showing you your work on a real video monitor, and gives the option of previewing from disk, reducing the need for huge amounts of RAM.

Echo Fire can not only display your work on your video monitor, but it can also adjust the aspect ratio for proper display of 16:9 images, both cropped and letterboxed. It also supports the 14:9 format favored by many producers. Previews can even be saved for repeated viewing.

But even for still images, video previews are just the beginning, albeit a crucial one. "Using Echo Fire allows video artists to see their work in its actual destination," says Currier. "There's no need to guess about flickering lines, or wonder how the square pixels of a computer image translate to the non-square pixels of a video monitor. The images are presented exactly the way they need to be.

"Echo Fire does more than just preview your projects on a video monitor. It can also overlay test and diagnostic information on your preview, including a waveform monitor, vectorscope, safe action and title areas, and a variety of color bar test patterns. Evaluate your video signal, verify title placement, and calibrate your monitor, all with Echo Fire."

Indeed, the waveform monitor and vector scope in Echo Fire are significantly more powerful than those provided with even higher-end video workstations, almost of all of which are solely intended to monitor incoming signals. These do nothing to check the suitability of outgoing signals for broadcast or reproduction.

The assumption has been, I suspect, that professional producers who are paying five figures for a top-flight editing system are also willing to pay the couple of thousand dollars necessary to buy outboard waveform monitors and vector scopes. They should, but they often don't. And new editors coming to video from graphics backgrounds often have no idea that they should be monitoring their outgoing signals to keep them at legal levels.

Not just a good idea, it's the law
The concept of legal colors isn't one that even crosses the minds of designers new to video, but it's a crucial one. The easiest way to understand this is with a quick trip to the Levels window in Photoshop, illustrated at left.

A typical computer image has a full range of color output, which in Photoshop is represented as 256 levels of brightness: full black is zero, full white has a value of 255. Simple enough, except that full black in most video systems is at 16, and full white is at 235. Anything outside that range is described as "illegal."

We're talking about ranges of brightness here, of course, since television can obviously handle more than 256 colors. But if television has limits to the range of its brightness, and color in television is a function of mixing different colored lights (which it is: red, green, and blue, to be precise), then it's easy to imagine that television has limits to the saturation of colors it can accurately represent.

Colors outside that range can cause problems including smearing, and in the case of the lightest colors like illegal whites, a humming or buzz that's audible over the speakers of some televisions. Hence the term "noisy colors:" you can actually hear them.

There are few desktop graphics applications that even acknowledge video color space, and none does so as elegantly as Echo Fire, which provides a special Video Color Picker for use in After Effects, Photoshop, or other graphics programs.

Echo Fire's Video Color Picker, at right, previews color choices on your video monitor, showing you exactly what the color will look like. It also lets you know if you've chosen an "illegal" color and will "legalize" it at the touch of a button. Unlike the rather blunt gamut tools in Photoshop, which only warns for colors out of CMYK print gamut and offers corrections that can only charitably be described as unpleasant, Synthetic Aperture's corrections are gentle and focused specifically on the video gamut. Again, crucial capabilities not easily available elsewhere.

How many slots is this going to cost me?
Real time previews, pro caliber calibration tools...it's not unreasonable to hear all this and wonder how you'll find another precious PCI slot to fit all this in. In fact, nearly all of this is done in software. The video output is provided at its most basic level through the FireWire ports built into all recent Macintoshes. To be precise, FireWire out to a deck or other device that can provide a video signal out to a monitor.

In other words, no slots at all, unless you're desperate to add a FireWire card to a Mac that doesn't have FireWire built in.

There are other options, though. Among the most significant advances in Echo Fire 1.1 is the range of new video devices supported:

I've also heard field reports of Echo Fire working with other cards, including Digital Voodoo's D1 Desktop and the Accom StratoSphere, but those haven't been tested by Synthetic Aperture yet.

There are other cool new features, including some that I've already mentioned:

Tim Wilson, Man About Town™, is the Producer of Plug-in Central. He is sitting well outside legal video gamut as we speak.