PASO ROBLES DIGITAL FILM FESTIVAL UNCORKS IN WINE COUNTRY NOVEMBER 20-25 WITH HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDING A TRIBUTE TO CLINT EASTWOOD, MUSIC FROM THE BACON BROTHERS, THE KYLE EASTWOOD BAND, RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOTT AND MORE Paso Robles, CA, October 9, 2008
In the heart of Central California’s “Cowboy Wine Country,” the inaugural Paso Robles Digital Film Festival (PRDFF.com) will take place Thursday, November 20 through Tuesday, November 25. The theme for year one of what will be an annual festival examining the film industry in the digital age is “Music In Film.” Headlining music acts include The Bacon Brothers (actor Kevin Bacon and his brother Michael), folk legend Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Kyle Eastwood Band, The Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet and more.
BCM has completed all color grading for the feature film, "Keepsake" from Stormcatcher Films.
Shot on location in Virginia, the film was Directed by Paul Moore and shot over a 24 day period. D.P. Todd Gilpin did an incredible job with setting up the look of the film. He created a very rich canvas from which Colorist Walter Biscardi, Jr. was able to create an incredible palette of color. Biscardi worked closely with Moore, Gilpin and Producer Scott Tanner to bring out the gritty details and haunting images of the fight for survival.
The PCIe (PCI Express) standard will have a disruptive impact on the business and workflow processes in video/production/post production/etc. Leading storage vendors are catching on to the idea as we speak. The industry currently faces technology challenges in dealing with the continual purchasing of storage equipment to keep up with the rising needs of performance and archiving – and how the PCIe standard will be the enabling tool to keep capital and operational costs down.
Well, we've got our HP workstation up and running with DoStudio's Trial Version now installed. The Trial version is the complete application with only the commercial replication features turned off.
First impressions are this thing is definitely NOT DVD Studio Pro or Encore. This is a very serious tool along the lines of Apple's Color compared to the 3 Way Color Correction filter in Final Cut Pro. There is a learning curve as a lot of programming is manually done rather than simple drag and drop type of operations. This feels more like a professional authoring tool and less like a toy. Don't get me wrong, I love DVDSP and it's simple drag and drop functionality, but it's nice to essentially have almost endless possibilities open to us and forcing us to actually learn what we're doing. Anybody can drag and drop, but it's nice to be able to get your "hands dirty" and go under the hood to see how to really operate authoring software.
Above is the link for the first two episodes in my weird little new web series, Footastic Theatre. This is a study in producing for web as opposed to producing for video and encoding down to share.
The premise is really short amusing engaging scenerios. Video crack. Watch one and you need more and you want to see them over and over. That's what I'm working toward. We are showing only the feet of the talent. Why? Web video is best with close-ups and all headshots are not that exciting to me.
So many of you have read of our failings with Adobe Encore trying to create BluRay discs. Today we start a new chapter in BluRay authoring by transferring all our needs to NetBlender's "DoStudio."
NetBlender has instituted a really neat month to month licensing option that's approx. $250 per month to use the software. This is truly a month to month deal. So I can activate it for September for $250 and then sign up again in December. There's no extra fees, nothing. They have several plans for 6 months, 12 months or you can outright purchase the software if you want. But in my case, we plan to produce maybe 10 BluRays all of 2009. Probably in batches of 3 or 4, so I might spend $1,000 total next year in the licensing fees, which is significantly less than $8,000 for the permanent license. So to start out, I can just go $250 per month which is easily charged back to the client per job.
I'm really happy to report publicly for the first time that we'll be providing all post production for 3 feature length documentaries that are currently destined for major film festivals and network HD broadcast in 2009 and 2010. We can trace at least part of this announcement to our investment in BluRay and in-house self-publishing of the high definition discs.
We're working on a corporate documentary type of project that involves teenagers who lived through Hurricane Katrina. The project is all shot in high definition and of course, the producer was in the market for some news footage of the hurricane and its aftermath to help craft the story.
Looking around the web we found buyoutfootage.com with the most reasonably priced footage, about $450 for 19 minutes of the aftermath rescues and such. The description of the reel describes pretty much exactly what we were looking for with military personnel helping people, flooded streets, the mayor walking around, etc.... It's available on BetaSP so we naturally assumed it would all be clean, good quality footage. Being on a quick turnaround schedule, we simply ordered the master without getting the sample DVD.
That was a bad decision. When we received the tape, a lot of the footage looked like it had been captured at a very low resolution or it had been through about 5 or 6 generations of dubs. Most of it is very soft, again, like bad transfers along the way.
Ok so first you have to win some festival awards or at least be an official selection. Then you have to be on Windows. That said here's a very cool application that will make the creation of festival laurels for your movie's poster, DVD box, etc very simple.
EZLeaves is a FREE application that allows to quickly and easily generate custom festival laurel leave images. Features include:
Choose from four different laurel leave styles
Use any system-defined font
Export to JPG or BMP
Define up to 10 lines of custom text
Full control over the height and font settings of each
line, or you can use one font and color for all lines
EZLeaves runs on Windows and requires at least 1024x768 desktop resolution. For more information, visit this site:
I wrote two articles for the Final Cut Pro User's Group Supermeet at NAB. They appeared in the SuperMag magazine. Here's part one of the second article looking at Simplemente's work with the Phantom HD camera:
Rune Hansen and Monica Reina at Simplemente in Mexico City recently acquired a Phantom HD Digital Cinema camera from Vision Research. We got to shoot a bunch of slow-motion footage and then worked with it in Final Cut Pro to create demo reels for theatrical projection. We needed to accomplish all of this in the space of about 48 hours.
The Phantom HD’s claim to fame is the ability to shoot uncompressed, high speed footage at up to 1,000 frames per second (fps) and up to 2K (2048x2048 pixels) resolution using a special CMOS imager. It accepts standard PL-mount 35mm cinema lenses and is also capable of capturing in standard and HD resolutions from 1 fps all the way up to 1,000.
I mentioned this briefly in my series on how to get your film distributed and I wanted to expand on it just a little. I cannot emphasize this enough, get photos of your movie as you're making it. Now there are two basic types of photos you need and both are important: behind the scenes and production stills.
Behind the scenes photography are the photos where you can see the movie crew and the gear being used to make the movie. Now of course you'll be tempted to photograph your cool crane that you managed to borrow or steal for a day or the Steadicam operator running after your actress. Or maybe you have a car mount or maybe a really nice Panavision or RED camera. These are all great to have but not the most important.
The most important behind the scenes photo, as least as far as the success of your movie is concerned is a shot of you, standing with one of your actors or near a movie camera pointing. Now this is silly, but read just about any movie magazine like Entertainment Weekly, US, Maxim, Moviemaker, etc and you'll see oddles of the directors, "directing." Now of course some of us might actually direct like this but probably not. Anyways it's a must.
Call for Entries - 2nd Annual SFMUG Short Movie Festival
Deadline Physical- Postmarked by 4/16/08
Digital- Uploaded by 4/21/08
Any movie 5 minutes and under, any genre, any topic, but no commercials, industrials, or explicit adult content. Movies do NOT need to be made on Apple Macintosh computers or any specific software.
What makes me like it more is the fact that I WORK in broascast TV, and must adhere to those rigid standards. Frankly, it can be a bit tiring. I mean, make the colors look good, make it not look to hot, but when I get a show kicked back because I am .02 above 100IRE...that pisses me off! What about my content? Oh, yeah, the networks have hacked that to death with their notes and there are structure rules to follow and then we get to the show timing, and my head REALLY swims when it comes to the technical mathmatical crap that we have to know about video levels. Sometimes I just want to make a good story that people will enjoy.
Last December I was asked to edit a trailer for a documentary. This trailer would be used to solicit finishing funds. And while they couldn't pay much, they could pay. Since I wasn't doing anything in January and halfway thru Febuary, I took the job.
The client asked how they should deal with the payment I said that I would like half up front, and half when I deliver the final. That sounded fine to them, so I received half the payment and the tapes to begin editing.
I worked on the project for about 3 weeks, and delivered a rough cut. Then I waited...and waited...and waited. Finally two weeks ago I received word from the director (the guy who hired me). The producers partnership had split due to philosophical differences in the way they wanted to approach the documentary. So not only was it on hold, but it might be shut down altogether. At least the one that I was asked to edit. The producers might end up with separate docs...but for me, the project was done.
Do you feel driven to making Independant Films? Do you watch art house films...and actually LIKE them?
Then you might have INDIE FEVER. Indie Fever is a crippling addiction that effects people nationwide...heck, GLOBALLY. But don't worry, there is help. The first step is to admit you have a problem. Once you do that, then please visit the Indie Fever website to find out how you can get help.
As I write this, it's Oscar eve. Just like Christmas eve, only more exciting. At least to my wife Nora and me. In fact, our primary celebration of Christmas is going to the movies, preferably a movie where things blow up. A festival of bright lights if you will.
It's not really the contest aspect of the thing. Most years we see a significant number of the nominated films. This year, we haven't seen a single one of the movies nominated for a major award. A lot of the movies look wonderful, especially Juno, but we just haven't gotten around to it.
One reason is that we keep upgrading our home theater - most recently with an upconverting DVD player. I can honestly say that our viewing experience is every bit as satisfying as a trip to the movie theater...
...with one obvious exception. There's something tribal about sitting in an audience of strangers, being moved by the same story in our own ways. It can be startling to have the same experience, including those rare occassions...though not as rare as you might think...of rising in a spontaneous ovation at the end.
So I have set my sites on jobs when I graduate. It's pretty clear I'm not going to be inducted to the orphanage as their newest lead compositor straight out of college, not that it hurts to dream mind you, but it certainly hurts to expect such things. So I've been focusing on a much more realistic vacancy: Roto Artist.
Okay, CC bloggers, I just got a new EZ FX jib for my Z1U. Having never used one before, I thought that a blog exploring how to use a jib would make a useful addition to the blogs. So, any ideas on how to best use the thing? I also have the "pedestal" option, and man it's a beast! I'm using it for the first time this morning, so talk now!! I'm stoked but a little bit out of my league as far as skill on using this thing, so any suggestions would be very welcome. TJ
The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has now lined up in Blu-Ray DVD corner effectively giving the Sony format about 70% of the high definition DVD market. They'll continue to release movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until May and then switch exclusively over to Blu-Ray. This leaves Universal and Paramount along with Dreamworks as the only major studios backing HD-DVD.
As a production company that had to jump into Blu-Ray production in support of one of our clients, this is welcome news for us. I have to say, if you have not seen Pixar's "Cars" and "Rattatoule" on Blu-Ray disc, you have not seen the true capabilities of Blu-Ray. Jaw dropping is the only way I can describe what these movies look like in HD. Better than what it looked like in the theater.
So there's been a lot of talk on the forums lately about Magic Bullet Looks now being available for use in editing systems and I'm even going to try it out shortly myself. But for those of you with Final Cut Studio 2, keep in mind you have probably the most powerful color grading software available for desktop computers in Color just sitting there. Yeah it's not perfect, there are some issues to work around, but I have to admit, even with the issues, the end results are nothing short of stunning.
At long last, my traning DVD for Apple's Color is now taking orders! If you've been staring at this incredible color grading software for a while, it's time to start using it! "Stop Staring, Start Grading with Apple Color" is what you need to get going.
Here's the sales page with all the details and an incredibly cool trailer. It's my absolute pleasure to bring this title to you guys!
In Part 2 of this series, I gave you some thoughts on setting up your shop. If you missed that part or Part 1, links are at the bottom of this article. Now that the doors are open, the furniture and equipment is in, we need to get the word out so you can really get your company running and building. Just because you’re open, doesn’t mean people are just going to find you.
Congratulations! Hopefully by now you’ve finished off that bottle of champagne, grape juice, coffee, or whatever it was you used to toast your new company. The doors are open, the business cards are lined up and you are officially In Business! Nothing to do now but just let the folks in and get to work.
Yep, the coffee’s ready, the cups are out……
Just a minute, they’ll be here in just a minute…..
I’m sure they just missed that left turn, they probably turned right……
Anytime now, they’ll just come strolling right into the office……
So we've had a lot of discussions on the Final Cut Pro and Apple Color forums about what can we use to replace the current Broadcast CRT monitors that are EOL? I've not been overly impressed with the current crop of LCD monitors out there. My favorite to date, the Panasonic 1700W and 2600W are both good, but cannot completey replace my Sony CRT Broadcast monitor.
