Red/Che

I've not posted much about the Red One as it seems far above the league of most true independent/no budget filmmakers (after all, Alex Cox made a whole feature for about the cost of three properly kitted out units.) Fitting with this, on the website, a lot of the interviews and promotional material is aimed at/comes from big budget filmmakers (Steven Soderberg, Doug Liman, some other full time Hollywood artists/craftspeople) so rather than a revolution, it seems the camera is more likely to cause something more akin to a cabinet reshuffle.

However it is interesting to note that while the first work is in on Soderberg's Che Guevara Biopic(s) which had it's (their) première at Cannes, very little if any commented on the digital production (e.g. from Salon.com, the New York Times, Village Voice, and the Guardian). Only one review I found, from Variety, even mentions Red, and only to describe the look as "highly promising", a couple of others, another from Variety and this from Cinematical simply mention that it's HD, though cinematical does add "Che doesn't merely look wonderful; it also delivers on the long-promised but rarely delivered potential DV [sic] offers real artists..."

This could be down to Soderberg's publicity department not mentioning it; David Bordwell points out that a lot of the discussion by critics of the digital look of movies like Collateral, Miami Vice or Apocalypto would have been because the publicity packs they received would have pointed it out exhaustively. So this means that either critics really aren't interested in the visual look of a film unless a publicist points it out for them, or the Red cameras really do look as good as the same as film.

Which is great, but so much for the revolution: Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss!

Assistant editors replaced by XML app?

Found this one on the dvinfo.net forums.

www.theassistanteditor.com
the automatic editing app for Final Cut Pro. It throws together a highly competent round cut based on the footage you've logged and captured. This Application shows the power of XML. For lazy editors, it will throw together a round cut based on keywords out oput a XML fil that can be imported into the assistanteditor.app, the exported back to Final Cut Pro. It's not quite as advanced as Avid's Script Sync app, but seems to aim at a similar attitude of speeding up workflow based on prior work done before editing (ie logging, transcripting etc).

Quite who will use it I don't know, it might be good form corporate video editors or some event editors in a hurry, seems ideal for throwing together behind the scenes DVD documentaries, but I can't see real documentaries using it, and, unlike ScriptSync, it looks useless for dramas. To be fair the site does say it's a first cut:

They are not expected to be emotionally compelling nor release grade “finished”. The Assistant Editor behaves as a beginner editor, not a craft professional who knows how to manipulate motion and tell a story across the whole documentary

Though frankly I always thought the first cut was about finding the stiry across the whole documentary.

It does require you to have really good, detailed metadata programmed into FCP so what it does is force you to push your organisation up front. So those threatened assistant editors will find even more of their time taken up with proper logging and data entry.

Ironically in his interview I linked to previously, Walter Murch praised Final Cut for allowing him to pass sequences to assistant editors to they could learn to edit features, here is another feature of FCP that attemtops to cut them out (terrible pun intended)!

Demystifying camera specs,view in online flash

FreshDV has been given permission to host the Panavision/Canon talk I mentioned earlier. The films are lower (but still good) inline flash movies you can easily watch in your browser. Some of the detail if the powerpoint presentations is lost but it's still worth a look

 Watch online here. The first five videos are online, the next two to follow later this week.

DimP - Directly manipulate video.

I don't know what it's for but it looks cool.

Walter Murch on editing, continued.

The final parts of the Walter Murch interview I featured before are now online. Murch continues to discusses his move from film to NLE editing, particularly his early experience with Avid systems, to his decisions to move from the industry standard Avid, to adopt Final Cut Pro for all his films so far since Cold Mountain (his next film, he maintains, will be edited on FCP).

Part 4

Part 5

Open Cut 1.0

Maybe you've heard about the infamous Red One camera. If you fancy getting you hands on some Red One footage to edit, you can enter the opencut editing competition. They're presenting it as an "open source: film project. Basically the winning cut gets to be the official version to the world and the winners will be listed as the official editors. They've released it under the non commercial share-alike attribution version of the creative common's licence, so intheory once you find out everyone who helped make the film you could convievavbly re-edit it and send it out yourself.

Sign up, (registration is $25) and send the organisers a 160GB hard drive and they'll send you back  the footage in 4K HD. You'll need Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 (no other editing system is Red compatible at the moment) and a pretty powerful computer to edit it on.

Best use of Word for Mac ever...

After the heavy material in last week's post, something FUN!

A good example of independent creativity finding an audience via Youtube, it has in one week so far racked up 377,000 views. The band's original video (a rather tired 60's retro Euro-art movie homage), posted by Blue Note Records, their label has has so far garnered the same number of votes over a whole year.

Demystifying Digital Camera Specifications

Found this via Mike curtis' new Pro Video Coalition blog. It's a presentation given by Larry Thorpe of Canon and John Galt of Panavision (the direct link to part one is here) and a lot of the terms regarding digital imaging technology and what this all means. The big sentiment of the talk seems to be to debunk the idea that a camera's pixel resolution equals its imaging resolution.

Beware the download is a monster, It's been broken down into seven chapters, you can get each in 480p. 720p or 1080p but the server doesn't seem to be very fast. It would have been nice if Panavision could have release these clip's on Bittorrent so those interested could grab the movies from peer to peer and watch at their leisure.

It's actually a great primer on image and optics and how video imaging video systems work, so worth the work of getting it down, especially for ANYONE interested in cinematography.

Feature film making in HDV

ALex cox's latest film Searchers 2.0 is a comedy road movie, with nods and references (as usual with Cox) to Hollywood's past, especially westerns. It was filmed in Monument valley, but most interestingly was made in 50i HDV on a sony Z1.

The budget for the film was a measly $175,000 (less than £100,000) but this was a fully professional production, with veteran DOP Steve Fierberg head of the camera department, in a production that was backed by the BBC and low budget legend Roger Corman, and produced Robocop/Starship Troopers producer Jon Davison.

An interview at DV.com with Fierberg and gets the lowdown on why the Z1 was chosen over other more glamorous cams like the JVCs and Canons, and how the Z1 performed (quite well, apparently to the DP's surprise). One useful tip, to judge exposure, Fierberg set the zebra stripes to 105% and then tried to get everything under that, skies were darkened with a polarising filter and the final show was colour corrected in Avid Nitris. Cox also spills some of the beans on the production in an interview on his own website. He also talks about the production on his blog, though there are no links to the relevant articles, so you have to scroll down articles around mid 2006 and ending about 2007 for the relevant entries. One encouraging quote on the film's 2007 Venice Film Festival showing, "The screen is huge, and our film - shot on my funky Z-1 video camera - is in perfect focus, and the film sounds ten times better in the larger space."

Fierberg has also written about the film in the April 2008 edition of American Cinematographer, though the article is not available online.

The BBC will broadcast the movie this June, as it's a BBC co-production, hopefully it will also be available online via the iPlayer.

Another feature shot on the Z1 in 50i was the Irish low budget (€100,000) hit Once.

Blu Ray is not benefiting from the death of HD-DVD

Despite winning the format war, it seems Blue ray is not surging ahead as the new video format of choice. It seems that upconverting DVD players are still seelimg very well, and BLue ray isn't even selling as well as HD DVD did when the format was was still. So it seems SD still has a lot of life left in it, and HD still has a long way to to go. Read the story here

So Blu Ray could in fact still fail as a format if consumers prefer to stick with tried and trusted standard def' DVD until the weight of HD from other sources (mainstream terrestrial broadcast, online video, cable video on demand, satellitesports boradcasts in pubs and the like) finally overwhelms it, by which time blue ray may have withered on the vide, and online HD could be a significant challenge.

Realtime animation.

In don't know if this relly should go in this blog, but thanks to Quba at imagonewmedia for the heads up on this. It creeps me out but it's pretty astonishing all the same.

www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf