LEITNER’S MONDO NAB, PART 3: ON SSD, TAPES AND STORAGE

By David Leitner

Originally posted April 2011.

At back-to-back press conferences prior to the opening of NAB’s show floor, both Panasonic and Sony acknowledged the still-unfolding natural disaster in Japan and asked that our thoughts be with the Japanese people. Sony added that despite critical damage to its media plant in Sendai, supplies of HDCAM-SR tape would return to normal by June.

Sony’s Sendai Technology Center (which I’ve visited) practically invented the high-performance tapes necessary to DV and HDV (metal evaporated) and HDCAM-SR (metal particle), and still manufactures a preponderance of them.

Having persuaded both film and television industries to adopt HDCAM-SR as their mastering format, Sony is now caught in a nightmare. When I left New York for NAB last week, there wasn’t a fresh HDCAM-SR tape to be had in all of Manhattan, including Maxell and Fuji brands.

A savvy New York rental house exec told me poolside that for his business, this NAB had been “pivotal.” Not only had large-sensor cameras exploded, he said, but decks are “dead.” By which he meant the future of renting videotape decks for production. Sendai was clearly the subtext.

Perhaps this unforeseen if temporary shortfall will do to videotape what the Writers’ Strike did to scripted television: provide the opening for an aggressive new form to take off, much as reality TV, unfettered by Guild contracts, did.

At NAB this year, 128GB solid-state drives (SSD) based on nonvolatile flash memory popped up everywhere, like weeds.

SSDs are consumer technology that can be sourced from multiple directions. Created to replace tiny 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. hard disk drives in netbooks and laptops (I’m saving this blog to an Intel 80GB SSD as I write), they’re hardly larger than a credit card, with distinct advantages of lower power consumption, no moving parts, no fragmentation, and invulnerability to shock and vibration. Think of them as ready-made video cartridges.

They’re also blazing fast, fast enough to capture uncompressed HD and even 4K. Slo-mo and time-lapse are a snap too, since unlike film or videotape which travel in a linear path at a fixed speed, SSDs record picture data non-linearly.… Read the rest

LEITNER’S MONDO NAB, PART TWO

By David Leitner

Originally posted April 2011.

I wish to continue my notes about developments in large-sensor cameras, but of course the magnesium-powder newsflash sucking up all the oxygen at NAB today is Apple’s stealth sneak peek at Final Cut Pro X last night.

Apple hasn’t officially attended NAB for several years—many of us miss the consummate showmanship of their former press conferences—so when news broke on the eve of NAB that an entire slate of speakers at the 10th annual FCP User Group SuperMeet had been swept aside for a special guest, Apple fever took hold. The event sold out in a nanosecond.

I held a second-row seat in the huge convention room at Bally’s, surrounded by the largest, most energized throng I’ve encountered at this year’s show. Ironically the SuperMeet is a satellite event, not officially part of NAB. Apple, in other words, had it both ways—avoiding the costs of a massive trade show yet reaping the promotional benefits.

As a result, you’ve probably heard the news already: dramatically revamped interface, 64-bit processor capability, no more RAM ceiling of 4GB, continual background rendering by means of unused CPU cycles (the more cores, the better)–and sayonara to transcoding. You can mix and match different codec’s and formats, from DV to AVCHD to 4K, and enjoy native editing of each on the same timeline.

The light gray background of FCP’s current interface has been replaced by serious-looking dark gray with big clips containing thumbnails of their contents. A “magnetic” timeline protects complex arrangements of clips from accidental bumps and sync loss. New “compound” clips incorporate entire sequences for a decidedly less-cluttered appearance. These are readily “auditioned” anywhere on the timeline without essentially disturbing it.

A new single-click color matching capability joins instant cropping and keyframing in the Viewer window (upper right, where the former Canvas window was). Power windows now isolate color correction. Scrubbed clips are pitch-corrected for audio. Clips are automatically image-stabilized and color-corrected upon ingest if desired.

Randy Ubilos, Chief Architect, Video Applications, who demoed a beta version of FCP X on stage (no crashes), emphasized that in FCP X, “timelines … Read the rest

LEITNER’S MONDO NAB, PART ONE

By David Leitner

Originally posted April 2011.

The big NAB show in Las Vegas opened Monday, and I’ll be filing reports for Filmmaker’s readers at the end of every day through Thursday, when the show floor closes.

For those unfamiliar with NAB, it stands for National Association of Broadcasters, a powerful trade association and influential Washington lobby, no bastion of progressive politics.

But for filmmakers and indie producers, it also stands for the huge annual April trade show in Vegas, where the latest in cameras, lenses, recorders, lighting, audio, and all manner of production gear are introduced.

TV execs, techies, DPs, and crew fly in from all over the world, filling several large halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the site of the massive Consumer Electronics Show only a few months earlier.

For the 100,000+ attendees, this is Sundance, Cannes, and SXSW rolled into one. The keynote address Monday morning, for instance, was delivered by James Cameron and Vince Pace, Cameron’s design partner in 3D camera systems. They came to preach, you guessed it, the gospel of 3D.

Pronounced “N-A-B” instead of like something you’d hail on a New York street, the NAB convention is a four-day whirlwind of talks, meetings, seminars, dinners, parties, and serendipity. Every manufacturer is here and eager to discuss what they make and how they can make it better.

For this reason NAB is one-stop shopping. Every new piece of gear that will arrive over the next year can be seen and touched at this show. Like Sundance, I never miss NAB. This is my 20^th.

If you want to follow breaking news from NAB, there are dozens of breathless blogs and anxious tweets and Google will serve up a flood of coverage. I intend to mention as many new products as possible, but always from the unique perspective of indie production.

Speaking of perspective, I see several strong trends here. This NAB will be remembered as the year of large-sensor cameras, PL-mount lenses, and 4K, which I’ll explain when we get to it. There is also growing emphasis on solid-state recording and its … Read the rest

THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: “EX-GIRLFRIENDS”

By John Yost

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to take a master class with Ted Hope and Christina Vachon.  Now out of respect to them I will not reveal all that was discussed, but what I can tell you is that my perspective of things has been altered quite a bit. I first started this blog with the intention of showcasing microbudget work as the passionate filmmaking it is…and fuck the rules. (The whole series of manifestos is evidence of that.) We were making cinema fast and cheap, and we needed to completely re-write the rules; a message that can be exhilarating if not short-sided. Don’t get me wrong, the old way of making films will soon be gone forever, but there are just some tent poles that can’t be taken down. I don’t think the goal of this column has changed, but the amount I have learned from our readers and the wonderful folks I’ve met because of this column cannot go unabsorbed. This is a time for learning and growth in this industry, and my time waiting for the ground to stop shifting is over…it’s time to embrace the future with new ideas built over the skeleton of tradition. One of those beams is Authenticity. A wonderful byproduct of a collapsing industry, like the new elements formed from an exploding star, and if embraced could lead to a community of artists, audience members, and gatekeepers that could spell nothing but Renaissance.

This week our contributor is Alexander Poe, a recent Columbia graduate and filmmaker with plenty of experience under his belt. In this play by play of how he was able to “just go out and shoot” his first feature Ex-Girlfriends, Alex shows us that the “go get’m” attitude has to be mixed in with the foundations of good cinema; story, collaboration, and professionalism.

When I set out to write and direct my first micro-budget feature, Ex-Girlfriends, I tried to find out as much as I could about how other filmmakers had done it. To some degree each film requires a unique approach, but still … Read the rest

DATA WILL BE THE DEATH OF US

By Michael Murie

The death of film, the evolution of technology, and the days of shrinking budgets have put into question the existence of the 2nd AC. Who needs someone to load and manage film when there is no film?

Ironically, the position may be more critical than ever. Whether you’re a sole cameraman, or working on a large production, managing the data coming from the camera remains critical, and is becoming more difficult. Increasing resolution and higher data rates mean that more disk space and more time is being taken up wrangling the data.

And if your capture media needs to be recycled during the shoot, you expose yourself to the risk of accidental data loss.

Having a Plan
The most vital part of the process is having a plan. Ideally, when data is copied from the card or solid-state recorder, a second copy should be made on a separate drive before the original source is erased. It’s also important that this process doesn’t happen while you’re under the gun. If you don’t have someone who has the time to manage copying data during the shoot, you should have enough storage to shoot for the entire day. That way copying the data can happen at the end of the day, when some of the pressure is off. Mistakes – and data loss – happen when you’re rushing to copy a card so that you can erase it and continue shooting.

Small flash cards, SD and Compact Flash, are easy to lose and confuse. Many people label them based on the camera (camera A, B, etc.), and store them in separate card holders that denote whether the card is blank or has been used. Even so, if your camera has the option for outputting to an external recorder, making two copies during recording (one to the card, one to an external recorder) decreases the chance that a mistake will lose everything.

At the high-end, companies are recognizing the problem and offering solutions for on-set backup and data distribution. Codex Digital offers the Digital Lab, a device that digests the content and will … Read the rest

TARIQ ANWAR ON THE ART OF POSTPRODUCTION

By Randy Astle

Thursday night EditShare sponsored a seminar with Oscar-nominated film editor Tariq Anwar at the Florence Gould Hall on East 59^th Street in Manhattan. Despite rain the evening was well attended by writers, directors, and especially editors, and Anwar’s presentation — basically a low-key Q&A session moderated by Manhattan Edit Workshop’s Josh Apter — was fun and informative. Here are a few thoughts he shared.

Anwar got into filmmaking somewhat accidentally, starting by driving a truck then getting work as an assistant director. After doing a great deal of yelling at crews, he decided “the cutting room was the most civilized place working on a film” and began moving up the postproduction ranks at the BBC. He praised the education he got there and advised one young attendee that editors should consider skipping film school in favor of more practical work. Even film school grads, he said, unfortunately have to start at the bottom of the ladder anyway, so why not save the money and get straight to work?

There were a lot of questions about his specific process and how he makes individual cuts, but he declined to articulate too much about his process. Editing is largely intuitive, he said, and it’s tiresome to have to explain the reason behind every cut to a director. In fact, Anwar said — only semi-jokingly — he’s happiest with directors who don’t micromanage but instead trust him to make the edit himself, especially early in the process. Theater directors can be better in this regard than highly technical commercial directors; they tend to be confident in their technical crew and allow the DP, editor, and others to do their job unfettered.

On the other hand, there comes a point when a director needs to make a decision. Anwar showed a scene from American Beauty, for which he and director Sam Mendes created nearly 50 permutations — and any one of them, he said, would have worked fine. Likewise with his most recent film, The King’s Speech. That film had a 70:1 shooting ratio — a number which caused an … Read the rest

WEEK FOUR AT THE EDIT CENTER

By Alix Lambert

Monday brings more scene analysis! We watch three scenes: one from Fearless, one from Punch Drunk Love, and one from Mulholland Drive; all of them are specifically chosen not just for picture, but also for sound. The scene from Punch Drunk Love is one I remember especially well. Adam Sandler’s character discovers a lone harmonium in the street. It sits in near silence. Sandler stares at it. The silence extends and then is abruptly broken as a truck zooms by – but we see the truck approach way before we hear it … which is jarring in an effective way, and an illustration of how much sound editing can change the way we absorb what we are watching.

On Tuesday we finish our work on The Happy Sad and disconnect our drives so that the whole film can be strung together for viewing on Wednesday. It is intriguing to see the scenes we have been editing suddenly in the context of the entire story. Even though we have all read the script, it is easy to forget that there is continuation on either side of the individual segments we have come to know so well.

Over the weekend we have read a new script: Family Tree, written and directed by Brian Savelson. We start working on it Wednesday morning. It is the story of a father and a son and their respective girlfriends who unexpectedly find themselves at the same country house for the weekend. It stars John Slattery, Zach Gilford, Jena Malone and Gabrielle Union. I have one scene that includes all four cast members and another between Union and Malone. On Thursday Savelson comes in to introduce his film and answer any questions we might have. He is funny, but I already knew that from listening to him talk to his cast and crew before and after takes.

Outside of class we have all watched two episodes of Boardwalk Empire (HBO), in preparation for Kate Sanford and Tim Streeto, the editors on the show, to come speak with us, which they do on Friday. … Read the rest

WEEK THREE AT THE EDIT CENTER

By Alix Lambert

On Monday, each of us sits down to address the notes that we received from Rodney Evans, the director of The Happy Sad, on Friday. We are all tapping away with our headphones on, filling a common room, but simultaneously lost in our personal space bubbles. We do this for the better part of the day. Tuesday we have scene analysis. This is, of course, my favorite because… we are watching movies. Watching movies has been my hands-down favorite pastime since, well, forever. We watch Monique’s award-winning performance in Precious. If you have seen Precious (sorry, I’m not going to refer to it as Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire) then you know which scene we watched. If you haven’t seen Precious, trust me, Monique earned her Oscar. Then we watch the scene(s) in Silence of The Lambs where Clarice shows up at the home of the serial killer, and we (the audience) mistakenly think that the house is surrounded by the SWAT team, only to find that the SWAT team is at a house miles away. We talk about the films and learn that that decision to intercut the two Silence of The Lamb scenes was a decision that was made in the edit room.

I start editing a second scene from The Happy Sad. My friend Maria Dizzia is in this one, which is super fun for me, and also, I am not flailing quite as much as I was the week before, and am able to assemble my own scene with fewer questions for the teachers. Periodically we break for tech lectures on subjects ranging from markers, to three-point editing to sound short cuts.

On Wednesday Sabine Hoffman, the editor for The Happy Sad, visits to look at our scenes. It is interesting to hear her different perspective. A third scene is put on my hard drive for me to work on. On Friday Evans visits the class again to see what kind of progress we have made. He watches the changes I made to the scene that I … Read the rest

WEEK TWO AT THE EDIT CENTER

By Alix Lambert

It is the first day of my second week at The Edit Center and we are no longer paired off with partners. Left alone with my computer, I cannot remember how to do anything. Alan Oxman (whose editing credits include Control Room, Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse) has joined us, as our teacher. We are to start working on a feature film currently going into post-production. The film is called Happy Sad, written by Ken Urban and directed by Rodney Evans. I am delighted to learn that my friend Maria Dizzia is acting in it. We have all read the script over the weekend, and are each given a hard-drive with footage that will comprise one scene of the film. We are to start editing our scene together. Every one begins working like busy bees, while I stare in despair at my keyboard.

Oxman is a man of enormous patience. He sits with me on and off for the rest of the week. If he can teach me how to edit, he can teach a space alien how to edit (space aliens: if you are in fact all great editors, then please insert some non-editing entity into that sentence). Oxman shows me how to create interruptions and looks, which is often how an editor finds a rhythm and natural flow to a conversation between actors. I am easily frustrated, resistant, and all around difficult to teach. My hands don’t seem to listen to my brain, and my brain – let’s just say it – isn’t working at full capacity either. Slightly dyslexic with numbers, and completely without any sense of direction, I move things left when I want them to go right, I “ripple” when I want to “roll” (both names of edits). I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get it. I even manage to press a combination of buttons that turns on the voice program for the blind, which is apparently, a first for a student. Oxman spends hours with me and never loses his temper. He shows me how … Read the rest

WEEK ONE AT THE EDIT CENTER

By Alix Lambert

Over the next six weeks director and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert is taking The Edit Center’s course in feature film editing. This is the first of her weekly blogs on her experience. — Editor

As a director, I have sat in the editing room for the better part of two decades. My long-time friend and brilliant editor, Hannah Neufeld has talked my off the ledge, dissuaded me from many bad ideas, and brought her own keen eye and internal rhythm to projects that we have worked on together over the years. Other editors (notably David Ritsher) have done the same for me. So, when my friend and recent co-director David McMahon (Bayou Blue) suggested that we take an intensive editing class at The Edit Center, I immediately agreed. I continue to want to collaborate with editors on my feature-length projects, but I have a number of short form projects on the horizon that don’t have the budget for an editor, and I would like to be able to edit these short pieces myself. I am also just interested in all aspects of filmmaking. I think the more I have an understanding of the editing process, the better I will be at directing. The course runs six weeks. Week one goes from 10AM – 5PM everyday. The five weeks after that are five to seven-hour days.

Week One

Our class, we are informed, is unusually small with eight people — and this is a good thing. We are given books; a plastic laminated keyboard that shows all the short cuts for Final Cut Pro (FCP 7, not the new FCP X), and a script. We are introduced to our teachers: Chris and Betsy (Alan Oxman, who founded The Edit Center, will start teaching us at the beginning of week two). We go around and introduce ourselves to each other. We listen to our first tech lecture: How to set in and out points, import media, open bins, etc. Then we are paired off. I am paired with David. This relieves me as we have worked together for a year … Read the rest