Blogging – Page 11 – Post Fifth Pictures

Red Workflow in a Star Wars Universe

This is a guest post from Chris Smith (yes, that is his real name) from Rivetal here in Orem, Utah. Rivetal does a lot of work with great companies like Sorenson (yes, Sorenson Squeeze) and has produced Blu Ray authoring for movies like Hairspray and Pan’s Labyrinth. I freelance with them from time to time and asked Chris to write a post on his Red workflow with his short. He has decided to show some perspective on this new journey by comparing it to something we can all understand; Star Wars.

At the risk of sounding like a complete dork I present the following:

A long time ago,(November 2009) in a galaxy far, far away(Rivetal sound stage) I officially took part in the digital rebellion against the evil film empire. On the 21st day of that month a small crew of 15 people came together to commence principle photography on a short film. Filmed in digital on the Red One camera we were able to match the resolution and look of 35mm film. Granted filming this way is nothing new, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Stephen Soderberg all have tapped into the force of digital film making. They are in effect the Luke Skywalkers and Han Solo’s of digital film making, and I am a Youngling jedi trying to learn the ways of the force. Speilberg has yet to film in digital and would like to continue using film, his sad devotion to that ancient religion as not helped conjure up the future of film making(I love Steven Speilberg movies and have a great deal of respect for him).

Why I Love Clip Colors

ClipColor I love the clip colors feature in Avid Media Composer. It is so helpful. If you haven’t ever used it to its advantage, check it out.

From the hamburger menu in the bottom left corner of the timeline, select clip color. You have several options. The ones I use the most are HD/SD and offline.

I have this sample project open. It’s an SD project so I changed the settings to 1080 (HD) and then I turn on the HD/SD setting in the clip color. I can now see all of the titles stay one color and the clips become highlighted in yellow.

Sneak on the Lot

Our friends over at ISM FILMS have created a great new site called Sneak On. It’s a new site and is in the early stages of developing, but will be launching March 3, 2010. I’ve been lucky enough to take a sneak peek. In fact, if you visit the site you can now register for free. In the future, the site will cost $5.95. However, it should be noted that the site will offer over 30,000 royalty free songs and 100s of 1000s of free sound effects. It is totally worth it.

One of the reasons I am so excited about it now is that if you register and start it out, take a walk around the lot (like my Stormtrooper avatar here pictured), you can invite your friends to join. For every friend that joins, you extend your membership for a month for free. There isn’t a limit on this and so act quickly. It’s a great time to build your contacts on the site and prolong free membership.

Shots I’d Use: The Killers Live at the Royal Albert Hall

In the off chance that a DP asks me before he goes off to a shoot what kind of footage I would like, I always answer lots of coverage and points of view that I wouldn’t be able to see with my own eyes. I think this is the difference between a DP that can bring quality to your video and one that can’t. It’s easy to shoot what we can see with our own eyes, but the ones that can find something else, something we don’t see or normally notice, those are the ones I love to work with.

An example I will use is from The Killers new Blu-Ray/DVD from the 2nd track “This is Your Life.” The video is directed by Dick Carruthers, who has a great background of live concert DVDs. It is a fantastic live concert, I’d highly recommend in for your HDTV setup and Blu Ray collection. Some of the shots are a tad fast for me, I end up wanting more. That may be because I’ve been to a couple of The Killers shows though.

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An Experience with Final Cut Pro, After Effects and Gamma Issues

I’ve put off writing this entry for about three weeks because it was such an awful experience for me. I just finished a documentary and for the SEO sake of it I will refer to it as Hockey Doc. Overall it was a great experience. I finished the edit, locked picture and sent it off to Technicolor to get colored. It comes back, looks great and I plug in the newly colored version into my sequence. While editing the project I created these left or right third graphics that gave biographic information on each of the players, coaches and the others interviewed. So I took the raw file (before color correction mind you) from Final Cut Pro, exported the 7-10 second clip, imported it into After Effects, animated the clip in and out (see the example below) and then spit it back into my Final Cut Pro project.

It all seemed to work really well. That wasn’t the case though.

I got my colored version back, spit the new color corrected versions back into my After Effects compositions and then exported again. I rendered for DVD output using compressor. I burned a master DVD of the project in DVD Studio Pro. It should have just worked, right? Well it didn’t. The color of the After Effects clips would change slightly, becoming a little darker. The graphics also did not slide smoothly across the screen either way. Now normally I would spend a lot more time trying to fix the problem, but I had a deadline. This was on a Tuesday and it needed to be back in Valencia, California on a Thursday morning at the latest. I ended up staying awake until 4 AM trying to figure the issues. Here are a few steps I tried.

Don’t Think I Don’t Watch My Footage

Bryce: Every once in a while I find myself a tad bored in a project, so I look through my footage for an answer. And then there is a clip. A fun clip. Not because of the footage, but because I listen to the hilarious off-camera conversation between the DP, director, and/or other people involved on set. While freelancing on a recent project, I caught our director talking with Cole Webley (our DP) about another editor on the show. That editor is Mark Gillins, our production manager and editor with Post Fifth Pictures.

Mark is joining me on this post to give us some background. Tell us a little bit about the background context of this conversation and a little bit about the director.

Mark:

Microwaves Don’t Have Timecode

When going from edit bay to microwave, be sure to remember that…