Facebook Mobile spot, Shot on RED

“Hey Art,” said director Ian McCamey, “I want to shoot a Facebook spec spot. I’ve got no money. Are you in?” “Of course I am,” said I. “Let’s do it.” And we did.

Please label tapes and disks: An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs

Man, there are a lot of high definition formats out in the world today. Just to spell them out would be a dizzying array of letters and numbers. 720p, 1080i, 23.98, 30p ... this list could literally go on and on so I won’t even attempt a partial list other that what I have above. Just take a look at this HD format chart. That’s a lot of different formats and it doesn’t even take into account the different flavors of a particular format that camera manufacturers often come up with on their own.

With that in mind this PVC post is an open letter to all DPs, ACs, camera ops, DITs, anyone and everyone associated with the camera department to please label their tapes and hard drives with the usable, relevant information of shooting format and frame rates, codecs and cameras so post-production will at least have an idea of what is being handed to them.

Black Glimmerglass and Hollywood Black Magic Filter Tests

World-class camera assistant Mako Koiwai recently shot a camera test with two new sets of diffusion filters: Black Glimmerglass from Tiffen and Hollywood Black Magic from Schneider Optics. He compared them to diffusion filter sets that he has in his own collection, which includes Tiffen Soft Effects and Schneider Classic Soft filters.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

I posted a fun little video about creating a shoulder mount rig for the iPhone 3G S on Friday. You can see it here.

While done in a tongue and cheek way, the most important thing for Pros watching the video is actually the first minute. I was dead serious there. The new iPhone is a game changer… make no mistake about it.

Avid:  Editor or Database?

I’ll admit it, as I have before:  I’m not an Avid guy. Of course, that doesn’t stop my employer from being an Avid house.  We are currently installing an Interplay system, which centralizes all our assets, and allows many different people throughout the plant to preview the video, audio, graphics and such.  As a part of the installation process, all of us who have to edit must get an Interplay tutorial.  I sat through mine this morning, and for four hours I was reminded of a statement I have heard again and again:

“Final Cut and Premiere Pro are great editors with crappy databases.  Avid is a crappy editor in front of a GREAT database.”

Interplay drives that message home - with a sledgehammer.

There are at least three (and maybe more - I’m not sure) ways to tiptoe through the Interplay database.  The one that looks the most useful to me is the Interplay window that lives inside the Media Composer editor.  This window seems to hold the promise of wiping away all of the various bins (except the bin with the sequence in it.) Big step forward, IMHO.  Next is Assist, which is a standalone app that can offer logging on a desktop, which of course requires database access.  And speaking of access, then there is Access (wasn’t Microsoft using that name just a minute ago?), which is the heavy-duty search monster, with Boolean searches that can drill through your pile of video like an Exxon oil rig through the Gulf of Mexico.  Not to mention the several administrator tools, which I will never hold permissions for (and rightfully so.)

And I wonder...three (or more) applications?  Wouldn’t one be enough?

I suppose that an argument can be made for each, but really - how complicated do we have to make our systems?

Of course, I probably wouldn’t mind half as much if I could just graft the Premiere Pro interface onto it.  Is that too much to ask?

Diffusion Confusion

Digital filters are awesome for post image manipulation if you have enough bits to throw away. Glass filters, though, work at the highest resolution possible, in the camera head itself, and you’ll never have a better image to tweak than that.

Cine Gear Expo 2009

The “expo” part of Cine Gear Expo took place on Friday and Saturday last week (there were also Master Classes and film screening starting Thursday and ending Sunday). This year it was at “the Studios at Paramount” in Hollywood at Gower and Melrose. It was a balmy 70ºF (21º C) under cinematically cloudy skies, a far cry from the 100+º F of last year.

Far red on the EX1/EX3/F35: “It’s a feature, not a bug!”

I asked Juan Martinez, of Sony at Park Ridge, New Jersey, what was up with far red contamination and the Sony EX cameras. Here’s what he had to say:

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