Resumé Item

For anyone who's interested, there's a little taste of what I do over at MTV.com (apologies for the ridiculous fact that you have to sit through an ad for one movie before you watch an ad for another). That behind-the-scenes piece was cut by one of our editors, and I did the online - adding final graphics and doing the color correction, cutting in the audio mix, and delivering the final tape.

More of our work will start hitting the web as the summer gets going, so there may be ore as the weather gets warmer...

[link courtesy of io9]

Technology Horrors and Making Movies

Read this blog entry for the ultimate movie-making nightmare. In the old days, the danger was destroying your actual film stock; in the digital era, it's all about losing your video data.

Considering the manpower, time, and money that go into making even a low-budget movie, the physical end result is staggeringly small. A few miles of film, a couple dozen video cassettes… or a several hundred gigabytes of abstract data.

The "all digital workflow" is always brought up as the coming Big Thing. Shoot your footage digitally, not to a tape, but to files on some kind of computer drive, either solid state (P2, Flash) or traditional (spinning platter hard drive). No need to capture or digitize footage into a computer-friendly format, because it's natively stored that way. Edit the original files at full resolution. Never have to worry about going back to tape, or negatives, or anything. Glory, hallelujah.

Overlooking some fundamental flaws in this logic (try doing offline editorial for a feature with uncompressed HD media, 4k files, or anything of finishing quality, and feel the pain), there is a danger inherent in this thinking – that this makes the movie-making process simple and easy. It goes something like this: "We don't have to have to worry about film labs and transporting stock, telecine and vaulting negatives. We don't have to worry about dubbing tapes and digitizing, using rented decks on a fully built-out edit system. We can build a cheap Final Cut station on my buddy's old G5, and buy a couple of firewire drives to edit on. We don't have to worry about the technology, we can be cheap and worry about the art!"

The digital workflow is not the magic bullet. For every worry you manage to avoid, you introduce one.

You don't need AC's on set loading film canisters, but you need someone whose entire job is to track which cards/drives have been shot, which have been transferred, and which can or cannot be wiped and reused. You either need a computer and electricity for reliable hard drive storage on set, so you can back your cards up in the field, or you need enough cards that you can afford to wait until the end of the day, and have someone spend the downtime transferring the data – preferably in an organized and careful fashion. Your media is your movie, so you want it taken care of!

You don't need to vault negatives or tapes, or deal with dubs and prints and telecines. Except that you do. All of those procedures are, essentially, backing up your media by making copies, and then storing the originals. The nice thing about tape dubs and film negatives is that you pay someone else to have the expertise to make accurate "copies" for you, so you don't have to worry about it. But if you're treating the digital workflow as your cheap solution, you probably don't realize that you have to do the same thing with your digital media, and so have no expert available to you. Someone has to import every clip, using the metadata from the shoot. This takes time and drive space. Then (especially if you're shooting uncompressed HD, 2K, 4K, or RED), you need to generate a proxy, or transcode the media to a video format easier on your system, that takes up less space. This requires even more time, and still more drive space. Now you're ready to work… but you should make copies of everything to a different set of drives, and ideally also a tape-based computer backup, and store those at a different location. When your drives fail (and they always will) or your facility is broken into, you don't want to lose everything, like those poor people from the blog posted above.

And, because you're doing this cheap and easy, odds are the only person available to do all of this is the editor. He may or may not be up to the task; there are a lot of video editors out there who know just enough about software NLEs to enable them to practice their craft, which is editing movies, and not much else. If this is the case, you need a strong assist to take care of all of this administrative BS, which is yet another cost and consideration, and he still may not be experienced in the formats you chose to use.

This has been kind of a rant, for which I apologize. This all comes from feeling bad for the people who lost their movie, yet being frustrated with their stupid decisions. Every few weeks, a friend or a friend of a friend asks about ways to shoot a movie with direct-to-disk cameras, and I give my advise, only to be told they're trying to do it cheaply, and won't do any backups or transcoding. It makes me want to pull my hair out. You don't edit your film using negatives on a flatbed, do you?! It all comes from this willful lack of common sense; people need to think about these things, and not just assume that, because the marketing tells them it's easy, that it actually is.

I am not any kind of feature film expert, but I am knee-deep in post production and current video technology, and I tell you now, if it can go wrong, it will, especially if you assume it won't.

Backup your stuff. Treat it like a film negative. Because it is. And once it's gone, you can't get it back.

[c/o Little Frog in High Def]

The Bright Side?

The only good thing about leaving work at 1 a.m. is that it only takes about 10 minutes to make the drive.

And it's not worth it, not by a long shot.

Looking like another busy one here, folks, so please try to bear with me. Or bare with me; whichever sounds like the most fun to you.

Long Week

Taxes done, Universal and HBO projects (partially) delivered, switch to PC Avid systems (mostly) complete, bay painting finished, online schedule planned, bills paid, Galactica watched, kitchen cleaned.

Phew!

Time to take a little break and head to Vegas for the weekend, play some cards, see Kevin and Sarah (again!!), go out with Will, Tracy, and the afore-mentioned two, and do things with friends I don't often have a chance to.

It may not be my scene, but it's time to get out of town for a few days.

Plus, when we get back, Bear McCreary does the music of Battlestar at the Roxy...

Enjoy your weekends everyone!

NPR On Digital Color Correction

From Hollywood Makeovers, Frame by Frame, over on NPR.org:

Nowadays, films are edited digitally, get their sound digitally — and, in just the past few years, rely on technology that can change the colors of a costume or a background digitally, without fancy lighting or painted sets.

This is a very good answer to the question "Hutson, just exactly what do you do," which always follows when I tell people that I am an "Online Editor."

No, it has nothing top do with the internet.¹

I've actually worked with Stefan; he has no idea who I am or what my name is, but on some of our Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure: Book of Secrets marketing pieces, we've sent our fully onlined pieces to him to correct dailies and go over our b-roll, and I've had the pleasure of seeing, on a few occasions, that he barely touched my color.

So that feels good.

I do object to the premise of this article, that yopu don't need to worry about set design, costumes, or lighting with a good colorist. Solid, seamless work (like the change of that scarf from purple to green) takes a long time to get right; it is incredibly easy, however, to make it look like crap. Plus, as someone who is always coloring stuff that wasn't dressed or lit — all of my work is on Behind-the-Scenes material — there is no substitute for getting it right in-camera.

For the record, I don't work on a Da Vinci system, but the Avid finishing systems. Usually a Symphony Nitris, occasionally an Adrenaline. Not as specialized, but we don't do features, so it makes sense for our work. My specific job is to take a final cut of a piece (known as the "offline sequence," since it was edited at an "offline" media resolution of highly compressed video), and "online" it by reproducing the cut at full resolution (be it HD or SD), color correcting it, cutting in all final graphics and mix, and finally delivering the finished piece on video tape.

Regardless of the differences, I do like seeing someone in my line of work (though far more advanced!) getting some notice over at NPR.




[ ¹ At least not directly; my work is often shown on the internet.] [⇪]

[c/o Daniel M.]

My Work

A couple of pieces I've onlined have gone up on the internet.

Yay!

Check out the list below to see how I make meaningful contributions to a healthy society.

Charlie Wilson's War “The Real Charlie”

Go to the "Video" section, and click on "Real Charlie." I knew nothing about him, so I thought it was an interesting piece.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets “Locations Around the World”

Rotten Tomatoes has this as "Exclusive Featurette," with a couple of viewing options. I recommend the "High Resolution" Quicktime. Sadly, we did this piece in HD, but they only have it at SD size. Oh well.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets “MySpace”

A collection of lo-res pieces that are a little less formal; plus, the "Locations" piece pops up again.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets “The President's Book”

This is in really low quality, which is, again, a shame since we did it in HD, but it's still there. Funny note: Fandango has mis-spelled the title as "Presidents." Which make sense, but doesn't match the card in the piece.

Another HCE Piece

Over at Apple.com/Trailers, at least today, one of our pieces for Gone Baby Gone is on the front page item. Awesome!

Here's a direct link to it; it's the one called "Featurette."

Farewell Hotdog

Tonight was John Harris' last night at HCE. He's leaving us for the far off shores of Japan, where he'll be teaching English.

Way to take advantage of your youth, Hotdog!*

If we're lucky, when he comes back to town in 3 or 4 months, he'll want to come back and work Post. If he's lucky, he'll end up married to a wealthy Japanese babe and be able to buy back all of the comics Will's selling on his behalf.

But either way, someone wins.

John is mulling over starting up a blog/photo group, so hopefully I'll be able to set up a link at some point. I know I'm hoping I can see what kind of mischief he gets into in the Far East.

Those of you familiar with my more awkward years know that I spent several weeks in Japan as a small-scale exchange student. I actually spent most of my time in a small town in the northern Aomori prefecture; we only flew in and out of Tokyo, where John will be based. So I'm fairly curious to see what that life is like.

We'll miss you, Hotdog, and we sure are jealous.



[* John got his nickname (Hotdog) when the Post Dept. decided everyone needed Battlestar Galactica tags. I can remember who everyone was (Will was Tigh, Josh was Apollo, Holland was Anders, I was Chief Tyrell, and so on), but Hotdog's was the only one that really stuck. Although anyone who wants to call me "Chief" without being condescending is more than welcome to.]

Pirates Again

Here I am, finishing up a working weekend, and another of our Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End pieces is up on the internet!



It's pretty satisfying seeing this short featurettes going up; if only they started using these as tv spots...

Pirates 3

Someone just told me that some of the promotional pieces we've been cutting for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (the third in the series, out on Memorial Day) are online now. This a project everyone at the company has been busting their butt on, so it's pretty gratifying to see the results available for all.



Comingsoon.net has the exclusive clips as of now; they're available on this page here. Just go to "Featurette 1" and "Featurette 2 - 'Captain Jack Sparrow.'" You may have to control-click (right-click) the link for whichever format you chose and select "Download Linked File," and they play the clip from your desktop, as some people here at the office haven't been able to get it to work through the browser. But I hope you enjoy them, we're all pretty proud.

Fire on the Mountain

Looking to the south-east here from the Herzog Cowen offices, a big fire has sprung up on the Hollywood Hills today.

Photos taken with my laptop camera, so no zooming or easy framing. This is probably about 2 miles away, and has been spreading fast. Wild. Reminds me of fire season 2 years ago, when, while working the night shift, the mountains to the north looked exactly like volcanos. The fires were that big and bright.

We're safe here in the office, though, and while it's a windy day, the wind is not blowing the fire towards us here at work, nor is it in the direction of my apartment. Winds blowing North/East, and West Hollywood is South, so that's comforting.

Tracy just found this link to a KTLA news post about the fire.

I feel bad for anyone whos home is near this raging beast.

EDIT: This is about 30 minutes later:

Word is that Warner Brothers and Universal have evacuated. Totally nuts.