Walter Murch on the History of Editing

A fascinating interview: apparently, film editing was invented in Brighton, and non-linear hard disc based computer editing was in use in 1969!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

I love the sound of his still image gallery database, a frame selected from every set up taken in the film, and then printed out, while also stored in a database and cross referenced to other edit log notes (you can see this in use in the documentary The Cutting Edge.) Someone needs to add this feature to Final Cut Pro or Avid, and SOON! How about a tool that allows you to output poster frames from QuickTime to iPhoto (soon to be on PC too), where you could then send them off to be printed by your local photo developing company of choice.

Extreme Indie Small Crew Filmmaking.

Two stories here about some low budget feature films with one-person crews. The first is on new animated Sita Sings The Blues, a strange blend of 20's American Blues and Hindu mythology. The 80 minute long film was animated entirely by one artist, also the writer , producer and director Nina Paley. After six years of production, for a budget of $200,000, the film received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film was made mostly in flash with some hand painted images scanned an animated in After Effects. The project started on a lowly Powerbook Laptop, but was finished (in HD) on a Intel Mac Pro (story via www.wired.com).

While obvious it is a tremendous achievement to design and animated a feature length film on your own. Sita is made with the necessary support of voice actors, a sound designer and a composer. The Lone Filmmaker on the other hand is trying to make a film entirely on his own: writing, acting, directing, costume design, makeup, cinematography, editing, composing. While one can't doubt the commitment and enthusiasm of the filmmaker, Robert Hindle, this seems a pretty cart-before-the-horse project.



Inspired by the video-blogging success of Four Eyed Monsters, the gimmick of a true one man feature is designed to garner attention on Youtube rather than produce a really great film. (also, one would think it advisable to make a normal film first before embarking on this extreme sports filmmaking style project). Four Eyed Monsters started as a film and became a blog about distributing the film. It seems the films that his girlfriend is making about him are the starting point for this project (Some have already hinted at a Lonelygirl15 style fakery). Unfortunately his audience in the regard is dropping off. After getting around 400,000 views for his inaugural video post, his subsequent video views have dropped to around 15,000-30,000 per video.

That said there is a lot of useful info buried in these blogs for those not on such a low budget, low manpower project (like what insurance cover you can get), though it often is swamped out by some rather cringey LG15 style goofing around with his girlfriend.

Previous Single Handed (or as-near-as) productions of note are the very professionally produced Lisa Gerrard documentary Sanctuary and the truly bizarre experimental animation We Are The Strange. by M.Dot.Strange.

The Future of 3D.

It's not news that 3D (or better stereoscopic) film is making a return to cinemas (of course it's been a mainstay of Imax for nearly a decade). However it is hotting up and starting to make roads into the feature film mainstream beyond CG animation projects.

A three good articles to read:

From Variety Online, this interview with James Cameron, who has made a number of 3D films (the two undersea documentaries on HD for Imax and the Terminator2: 3D ride for Universal studios) talks about the challenges and opportunities of 3D (or stereo as he prefers to call it) while he is shooting his first 3D feature film. Cameron is at the very top end of the filmmaking spectrum, commercially and technologically. Almost every feature film he's made from Terminator 2 on has been the biggest budget movie to date. This latest project , Avatar, STARTS with a budget of $195m (and I don't think Cameron has brought a movie in on budget since Aliens!)

Second. two articles on Lower budget production. Also from Variety online: The Mortician (a British film) and Dark Country have single figure million dollar budgets and are thriller/horror films, genres more traditionally have been associated with gimmicks like 3D. An interesting quote from the article: "For 3-D evangelists, this is both good news and bad. Good news: There is growing acceptance of the digital 3-D format. Bad news: The arrival of low-budget 3-D indies could undermine efforts to position 3-D as a premium format that can command higher ticket prices." There is another article here, from Showreel Magazine specifically on the making of Dark Country (which is also using the new RED ONE cameras). Dark Country is interesting as it is specifically the sort of situation Cameron discusses in his article, of low budget character centered drama by a first time director, previously an actor ratherthan someone from aVFX or technical backgroud, that stands is contrast to Cameron's own position as a filmmaker with a huge budget and resources as well as a phenomenal understand of the technical processes of film production.

Free Music from Moby

Moby has released some of his music for free (as in free beer) on his website, or on a special site www. mobygratis.com.  Here's the man imself explaining it...

He actually first did this months ago (here he is promoting it in an older, slightly rougher, self made Youtube clip) but is still promoting it. The sign up is a little fiddly and he has a few stipulations (one one on "no violence" is a little weirds from the man who remixed the James Bond theme and gave music to Heat and the Bourne Trilogy) but I guess he means real acts of violence rather than fictional fight scenes.

No charge as long as the film is non-commercial/independent/not-for-profit, and you'll ave to buy the rights should your film ever actually make any money. These generally seem to be odd pieces of musical noodling (no he's not giving away "Natural Blues") and unfinished bits of tracks. I guess this s an atonement of sorts for letting the entire Play album be licensed to advertisers. But still, it's good of him and part of a growing trend for musicians to allow fans access to their music (see also Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails giving away re-mixable versions of their music).

Daily Motion, another HD video sharing site.

Whoops. this one slipped past me: www.dailymotion.com, a French video sharing site (don't worry the site is in English) is also now offering HD video sharing. You need to get registered as a "MotionMaker" but you do this simply by uploading an original piece of work and labelling as creative content. Once you're approved you get to have 720p video (up to 25fps) and unlimited time and file size uploads (Normal users are limited to 250MB or 20 minutes per movie)

It's easy. I uploaded Lenny's Luck, labeled it "creative content". Within two hours I'd been given MotionMaker status. Very flattering, - the video has since been removed. Based on a quick comparison, I couldn't see any difference between the picture quality of the online file from Vimeo or Daily Motion (both encoded from the same source file), the files are both 1280x720 On2 VP6 with stereo 44.1 MP3 stereo sound at about 840Kb/s; sharpness, brightness, gamma and colour all seemed identical.

Of course Vimeo still offers a couple of other sweeteners that separate it, such as the ability to download the full quality original source file and the option to swap out the movie with a newer updated version (something that's happened to Lenny's Luck a few times!).

Update: Tuesday 8. April 08 - actually after a bit of playing, Dailymotion is beginning to sneak in a couple of extra plusses. Its embedded player is HD capable, whereas with Vimeo you need to go to the Vimeo site to see content in HD, and I'm finding on older hardware (such as my 2 year old iMac PPC G5) that the Dailymotion video plays at a much better frame rate - at 24p, on my G5 Dailymotion is dropping a frame or so a second, whereas on Vimeo 24p plays consistently at about 12fps. However, faster moving material, such as the (dreadful) Wanted trailer that's been hosted in HD drops a LOT more frames on that computer, so your milage may vary.

I still much prefer Vimeo's site design. It definitely gives a feel that the site, and the movie's page is about YOUR movie, wheras Dailymotion has a definite youtube-esque/viral video/"hey there's a ton of other crap you could surf to right now" vibe to it.

2nd Update: Friday 11. April - scratch that frame rate advantage. Dailymotion are now running extremely intrusive animated Flash adverts on the movie pages (Vimeo already ran flash ads on movie pages but farther down the page rather than right next to your film). This means a major performance drop for HD and even some SD material. At least Youtube shares advertising revenue with users if it posts ads on your page (which it only does in agreement with the user) or Vimeo posts ads but leaves your page free of links to other films.

H.264 HD flash demos

Some extraordinary results for flash using the H.264 codec can be seen on this page. Double click the image for it to play in full screen. 

The encoding was done by Fabio Sonnati (his English language blog is here) and he gets a 1280x 720 version of the trailer for  the Sigur Rós concert/tour film Heima into a 500kb/s stream. To put that in context, Youtube's older .flv streams are usually at about 200-250kb/s at 320x240. So at just over twice the bandwidth, Mr Sonnati has managed to cram 12 times the image!

Now there are a few caveats. 

• The Heima footage is very compression friendly: clean, grainless images, largely still frames or slow pans with little fast cutting and almost no fades or dissolves. Faster cutting, grainer footage or more movement (especially hand-held) would look much worse. (I posted before about how to get Youtube or web video in general to look better and Heima it seems follows almost all those rules - it still looks GREAT in HD though.)
  
• This was hand crafted compression. On his blog S. Sonnati explains that he worked very hard and carefully optimised the settings for the footage at hand. This wasn't a pre-baked server side formula as used by Youtube/Vimeo et al.
  
• Despite the above, severe compression artefacts are very clearly visible on the footage, expecially in mid range detail, high frequency/contrasty detail shows up quite clearly but slightly softer textures and backgrounds quite obviously suffer at this extraordinarily low bit rate, and smooth gradients (such as skies and clouds) have noticeable quantizations blocks in them.
  

Still, let me just say that again, 720 HD at 500kb/s. The entire four minute video is only 15MB! 

S. Sonnati reckons "generic" 720p footage  (so a bit more aggressive, but not The Bourne Ultimatum or 24) would look OK at about 1 Mb/s and above (i.e. 2 times the data rate here) for similar results, 1080p would look OK at 2Mb/s and above.

By comparison, FFmpegX recommends 2.5 Mb/s for 720p and 5.8 at 1080p (assuming 24fps) if using all the features, encodes can be a little more efficient than that. Apple trailers in H.264 run at about 5MB for 720p  and 8-10MB for 1080p.

There are more examples at www.lithium.it/fvf/demoH264/demo.html, including a 1.5 Mb/s 1080p version of the Heima trailer, the far more visually aggressive trailer for a Nine Inch Nails concert film (1080p 2Mb/s), as well as some very sedate 720p BBC wildlife footage encoded at slightly higher bit rates. Be warned, you need a fairly powerful computer to watch the footage at their full frame rates (they work OK for me well on an 2Ghz intel core duo iMac with 2GB of ram) and the server they on doesn't really have enough bandwidth and there is a lot of buffering on the higher bandwidth videos.

Open Source Compositing

Blender is well known as a free, open source 3d modelling and animation application that can produce results to rival commercial products such as Maya, Lightwave or 3DS Max. However it also recently had a node based compositing system added. Blender is open source so is not necessarily the most user friendly piece of software to learn and documentation is often literally years behind the actual product.

However this will hopefully be address in the future, and it would be a great addition for low budget film makers who want to do keying and matte work, even if they don't have any need for Blender's 3d creation tools.

Hopefully at some point I'll get a chance to try the compositing side of the app to see what it offers us no-budget-blue-screeners.

Apple Color Tutorials.

There are a series of tutorials for Apple Color (Part of the Final Cut Studio suite) on CreativeCow .net by Walter Biscardi. They are very elementary and really only serve as an introduction. Mr Biscardi has also released a more comprehensive tutorial disc called Stop Staring and Start Grading with Apple Color. It has a rather naff trailer but comes recommended by Paul Harrill in a review at the excellent Self Reliant Film blog.