Archive for May, 2008
A shot across Color’s bow???
Stu Maschwitz on the ProLost blog today points to a filmmaker who used both Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks to finish an entire feature. The film is Wasting Away and has won numerous awards on the film festival circuit. The filmmaker, John Waters Flowers, has posted a nicely detailed explanation on how he used Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks to streamline his workflow and turn the film around in 10 days. One reason I’m writing about it here is some comments John has made in his opening paragraphs about why he chose not to use Color:
“Because of the tight deadline, Apple Color was not a viable solution. The film had been shot on a Viper FilmStream Camera, which gives footage a strange kind of greenish tint, and Color was taking way too long to export footage after color correction had been applied. We needed a solution which allowed us to try different looks, iterate very quickly through them, then export the footage from Final Cut Studio at full resolution once color correction was applied.”
He had 10 days to finish this show – which doesn’t seem like a particularly rushed deadline to me. Although from the picture of his edit room accompanying this post I infer that the color correction in Color would have been driven by a mouse, rather than a control surface. I’ve found the control surface easily doubles my productivity (you can read my initial experience here). So a 90 minute feature color corrected with a mouse could easily take 5 working days… just for the initial grade. And that’s without even getting into establishing a look. And look creation in Color is an exercise in patience + fortitude + luck, as his Producers seemed to have discovered:
“In late 2007, I worked with Sean and Matthew Kohnen to provide Color Correction on the film Wasting Away. The film had already been graded in Apple’s Color (formerly “Final Touch”) but the color just wasn’t what they wanted.”
Without talking to anyone involved in the production, I suspect they tried to use the ColorFX room in Color. They probably found it both slow to render and inflexible. If I were them, I wouldn’t want to tread over the same ground again either. And so John’s decision to give the Colorista / Magic Bullet Looks isn’t just reasonable, it was smart. In my review of Looks I wrote:
“I offer this up as my highest praise: In many respects, I wish Looks was the ColorFX room in Color.”
I still stand by that assessment. In fact, my preferred workflow today is to color correct in Color to set the initial grade and then move into Looks to stylize the image. Setting the base grade, whether in Color or FCP is important. Once you’ve graded an entire scene and all the shots match, applying Looks on top of it helps increase the likelihood that the look you’ve developed will apply consistently across those shots – minimizing the need for time consuming tweaking and re-rendering.
Why Color over Colorista? In two words: Secondary Rooms. The ability to mask/isolate multiple areas of an image really help us sculpt an image. In fact, you could say that one of the main themes of the new excellent book by Steve Hullfish The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction
And while you could do the same thing with multiple layers of Colorista or FCP’s built-in 3-Way Color Corrector – it’s nowhere near as fast and flexible.
But here’s the thing that got me really intrigued and why I’m writing about this today… (from Stu’s blog)
So if you read Flowers’s excellent article and see his screenshots and ask yourself, “Is Stu listening? Does he realize that filmmakers want powerful and easy-to-use color correction tools that turn their NLE into a proper finishing tool? And that they’re already using Magic Bullet for this, despite his intentions?”Well rest assured, the answer is yes.
If Stu adds control surface support and healthy secondary controls in his Color-killer – I’ll be his bestest friend for life. Oh. And yes. I’ll buy the software.
I like Color for it’s ability to help me take the craft to a higher level. I curse Color for its idiosyncrasies that do nothing but inhibit our ability to be assured that the timeline we feed it is the timeline it returns to us. Not to mention the (not so) little bug that kills many interlaced workflows.
- pi
Tapeless Workflow, anyone?
This post is a shameless plug for a great workshop being held in NYC on Saturday May 17th. If you know anyone who might be interested in the following, please forward them any of the URLs listed below.
One of the hot workflow topics these days is “tapeless acquisition”. Whether it be P2 cards for your HVX-200 or those little SD cards for a Red camera, managing that data while on-set has become a valuable asset. Frequently called the “Data Wrangler”, the person who manages the off-loading, verification and subsequent re-initializing of these cards is a position of tremendous responsibility. Given that it’s a relatively new crew assignment, training opportunities are few and far between – while the stakes in getting it wrong can be hazardous to one’s career development.
If you live in New York City metro area, next Saturday May 17th The Moving Pictures Collective (Mopictive) is offering a Tapeless Acquisition Workshop. By the end of the day you’ll walk away with a system for data management that can be applied to any tapeless shoot. It’s being taught by Michael Vitti – the Fearless Leader of Mopictive who has extensive experience with “data wrangling” – and Jamie Hitchings – an Apple Certified instructor – who will walk the attendees through the entire Log & Capture process. Special Guest is a great guy I’ve known for many years, Michael Woodworth of Divergent Media, developer of the software app, ScopeBox. He’ll be talking up scopes (how read them, how to use them, and why you need them) and monitors – a great ancillary skill for anyone who’s trying to break in onto the set.
Here’s the rub – signups have been light. If a few more people don’t get signed up before next Tuesday or Wed, the event will be cancelled. Keep in mind, class size is limited to 10 people. This is nearly a one-on-one workshop. You’ll have full access to the instructors and plenty of time to get all your questions answered. You’ll learn the theory which can be applied to any tapeless situation as well as practical applications that’ll allow to immediate implementation of that theory.
You can find out more details about the workshop here.
You can sign up here. Price is $300.
Full Disclosure: I am the Treasurer of Mopictive (which is a DBA of the New York Final Cut Users Group and also a certified NYS 501c3 not-for-profit). Over 50% of the proceeds will go to Mopicitive and furthering its mission to the training of Digital Storytellers.
Sour Apples
I first heard the name “Final Cut Pro” in November of 2001. This was when a producer asked me to get up to speed on it for a corporate gig the following January. It was probably the very next day that I read online that Final Cut Pro was going to be sold.
It’s a rumor that won’t die.
Ever.
This years’ rumors have a slightly different tenor. Apple pulled out of NAB. For whatever reason they state, with $18 billion cash in the bank – money isn’t the issue. Or – at least, potential access to money isn’t the issue. This non-MBA imagines that Jobs forces each division to stand on its own and if ProApps has money problems such that they didn’t think a booth was worth the expense… perhaps they’re having trouble meeting their margins. At least Avid has an excuse for its NAB disappearing act that Apple doesn’t, Avid is undergoing a major re-organiztion. They’ll be back at NAB once their new strategy is ready to roll.
If you want to read what I consider the most interesting analysis on Apple selling ProApps, then check out this article by Robert X. Cringley.
Cringley’s analysis helped me gather my thoughts on something else that is bothering me about Apple’s handling of its ProApps division. And its has me starting to wonder if Apple is the best company to manage the Final Cut Studio array of products. Specifically, it’s Apple’s handling of BluRay that’s the heart of my misgivings.
None of Apple’s ProApps support BluRay DVD creation. Final Cut won’t export to BluRay. Compressor won’t encode to BluRay. DVD Studio Pro won’t author BluRay. Not a single Mac ships with BluRay playback or burning. And my wife’s business is getting weekly calls for BluRay duplication and authoring.
For the first time in my memory, Apple has fallen behind my customers!
Why? Why? Why is Apple forcing me to consider buying Adobe Encore or (hissssss) a PC-based authoring tool for a need my clients want today?
It drives me nuts that a company so forward-thinking is dropping the ball on next-generation content creation. As Cringley points out in an earlier article on Apple’s (lack of) BluRay strategy, the answer is probably summed up in one concept: High-Def Downloads.
In other words: Apple’s consumer strategy is now at odds with its development of its ProApps product line.
Is it possible that Apple no longer deserves to handle the ProApps division? Has Apple finally reached its inflection point where it will sacrifice its traditionally strong and loyal ProApps customers for its newfound success in content delivery?
I don’t know.
I know this: For the first time in 7 years I’m not discounting the Cringley analysis. For once, the rumors may be true.
If Apple does sell the Pro Apps division at a time when it’s still holding back on delivering BluRay creation tools… I’ll say, good riddance – it was a great ride but it will have been time for both businesses to move on.
UPDATE 1: Not everyone buys Cringley’s analysis.
- pi
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Meet Your Colorist: Patrick talks Color Grading, Finishing, Workflows, Final Cut Color
via Digital Production Buzz