How To Think Like A Post-Production Supervisor

Tonight I’m teaming up with Peter Levin of Splash Studios to do a free seminar, “Mixing Light & Sound: Strategies for Finishing Your Project”.

It could also be called, How To Think Like a Post Production Supervisor.

Peter is a terrific audio mixer, his wife Barbara a talented Dialog Editor. Their recent projects include the festival circuit’s acclaimed My Peristroika (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year) and the upcoming You Tube Symphony Orchestra (it’s a doc commissioned by You Tube following musical proteges culminating in a gala symphony).

Mixing Light & Sound

Peter and I have been working together for over a year (we were introduced by our dear departed friend, Michael Vitti): He’s the ears of the operation, I’m the eyes (and our wives are the brains!). When comparing notes we found are clients are consistently confused by the same technicalities of the last few steps in finishing their projects.

The two of us decided it was time to get in front of producers, directors, editors, documentarians – filmmakers – and start answering all the questions we both get asked, day in / day out. Such as:

• How do your decisions to these (and many more) questions affect the finishing pipeline?

Our number 1 piece of advice: Begin at the end. You need to define where your project will most likely be seen. Once defined, your roadmap becomes very clear – and allows for unexpectedly happy detours (like, getting picked up by HBO).

We did our first free seminar 3 weeks ago. A total success. It ran almost 3 hours, an hour longer than planned. The group was small, 15 people. The questions came from all parts of the room. Tonight’s session is (again) a sellout. This time around we’re adding a ‘recommended workflow’ that should cover about 80% of the projects out there.

Building Out The Concept

We’re excited about this seminar and plan to take it on the road and evangelize these strategies. We’re  developing a website / forum specifically devoted to finishing strategies.

Our goal: Demystify the complexities of finishing picture and sound – resulting in educated clients making informed decisions in pre-productions saving them time, money, and frustration. Stay tuned for more details as the website goes live.

If you think you might be interested in attending one of these NYC seminars (we’re still developing the content based on how the early seminars progress), contact me and we’ll keep you in the loop. Or just subscribe to this RSS feed. Or Fini’s Facebook page… or…

- pi

Lying in bed, sick, watching Prime Time televsion in NTSC for the first time in years - I couldn’t help to juxtapose the train wreck I was seeing on the screen with an article in The Hollywood Reporter concerning the deliverables for Avatar: (stay with me on this…)

“No studio has ever faced what we faced on this,” says Ted Gagliano, president of postproduction at Fox. “Jim wanted the best, most immersive experience possible. So he pushed us to have a multiple-version inventory that would give each theater the best experience it could possibly deliver for that given theater.”

“The best experience it could possibly deliver”

According to the article, the end result:

Cameron made the decision to complete the movie in three aspect ratios: Scope (2:39:1), flat (1:85:1) and Imax (1:43:1). “You are not going to see many directors releasing in different aspect ratios, as most pick their canvas and that is their format,” Fox vp postproduction Steve Barnett says.

The article is a great read about one man’s pursuit and dedication to ensuring his film is seen in its best possible light… staying as true to the director’s original intent as possible. In my mind, there’s no doubt this type of pursuit of excellence can be attributed to much of the film’s success.

But I digress…

So. I’m shivering under my heating blanket and I can’t believe what I was seeing on Prime-Time network television. They made consistently terrible decisions as to how to present their wide-screen originated television on NTSC screens.

Rather than adding an extra few hours to their post pipelines to properly reformat their 16:9 HD pictures to fit into a 4:3 NTSC screen ABC, NBC and CBS made identical decisions, they chopped off the sides of the picture and called it a day. They traded excellence for expediency resulting in a terrible viewing experience for the home viewer. Here’s the type of framing I kept seeing all night long (special thanks to Mike Mazur for the image):

16:9 HD image with 4:3 NTSC Center Cut. Notice the discombobulated nose.

Of course, the networks could decide to follow the direction of almost every cable station and letterbox the image – maintaining the intent and storytelling authenticity of their programs. But rather than doing a shot-by-shot Pan & Scan, re-framing shots so they fit best in the 4:3 screen, the major Nets all seem to be happy to have noses talking to each other, network bugs covering key pieces of information, and generally showing a complete lack of caring for their audience or the visual quality of their content.

Need another example of network carelessness? Take a look at this post with a screenshot from the March 30, 2010 episode of Lost. The first thing to notice, the image they’re showing is from the 4:3 centercut. Notice how half the words on the notebook are cut off? The entire sentence is readable on the 16:9 version. Except, of course, that the V countdown clock takes this in-camera subtitle, already difficult to decode due to the center cut, and renders the conversation unreadable.

How mad were the fans of Lost?

“I try to avoid Twitter around 6 p.m. PT on Tuesdays, in order to steer clear of Lost spoilers from eager East Coast Tweeps. But tonight, with the Tweet Deck still on, I couldn’t help but notice the increasing anger from Lost viewers, as an on-screen clock counted down the minutes until the return of V.” – Michael Schneider, Variety

Counterpoint: Here’s one more excerpt demonstrating James Cameron’s pursuit of excellence:

Creative decisions involving light levels also led to additional versions. 3D projection and glasses cut down the light the viewer sees, so “Avatar” also had separate color grades at different light levels…

“If we had just sent out one version of the movie, it would have been very dark (in the larger theaters),” Barnett says.

As network and cable companies attempt to compete more effectively with the Internet and video games, their willingness to accept mediocrity is their single greatest challenge.

Here’s a new mantra for Network Execs making these bone-headed decisions:

What would James Cameron do?

- pi

What are the big items that have caught my eye watching Twitter feeds and reading Press Releases on Day 1 of NAB? Here are my (purely selfish) top three:

DaVinci Resolve on Mac

DaVinci Resolve Control Surface

When BlackMagic bought DaVinci last year here’s what I wished for this NAB:

• DaVinci Resolve.
• For Mac.
• Under $15k.

I figured that BlackMagic would price the Resolve near Smoke on a Mac. I underestimated Grant Petty, CEO of BlackMagic. Grant has built his company by pursuing disruptive technologies that are  priced aggressively.

Man, he got disruptive big-time.

Here’s what Grant delivered to me this NAB:

• DaVinci Resolve.
• For Mac.
• Under $1k.

Even better, Resolve on Mac (unlike Smoke) when compared to its full-blown Linux counterpart doesn’t hobble the software. It doesn’t hold back features. It doesn’t require a Support Contract. It’s only restriction – 1 GPU; according to the Press Release, the GPU limitation is due to lack of support for InfiniBand for Mac.

Fini, my color correction company, has a 9-month roadmap that I’m executing as I re-tool the company and better position it to compete in the market I’ve targeted (more on that as The Plan moves forward). Resolve on a Mac couldn’t fit in more perfectly. I’m beyond stoked.

The only question I haven’t gotten an answer to: Will Resolve on Mac support RED natively in 2K and HD workflows? It really needs to.

Avid Buys Euphonix

The other news that grabbed my attention was Avid’s announcement of their intention to buy Euphonix – maker of outboard control surfaces.

I’m not yet sure if this is a good thing or not.

I’ve read a few people opine on this topic – but I think most are missing the point of this acquisition. The Euphonix secret sauce is their EuCon protocol. It’s the protocol that controls the interaction between the hardware control surface and the software being controlled. Their product that most interests me, MC Color, is buttery smooth… and it’s EuCon that’s responsible for the feeling that the software, via their hardware, is an extension of your brain. The immediacy of even the most subtle inputs is fantastic.

In the past, an acquisition by Avid was where great products went to wither away. Avid over the last two years seems to have turned over a new leaf and this year has had a great new release.

So now? What is the future of EuCon? I’m nervous. I just don’t know.

I can only hope that Avid decides to continue offering the amazing value that Euphonix seems to be built around.

Me -> Apple: In ProApps, Silence Is Not Golden

Apple doesn’t get it. I don’t build my business based on if I want to operate a Linux-based business or a Mac-based business. I don’t really care what new features the next version of the Mac OS is going to offer. Or when. On this count, Apple can be as secretive as they want.

I build my business with software products designed to allow me to provide amazing value to my clients. If I’m going to plan the direction of my business, I need an understanding of where I think the software I use is going to go. Currently, my software happens to be owned by Apple.

Apple, extending it’s corporate Cone Of Silence around the Pro Apps division, offers me nothing but a blank expression and puckered lips.

And a frustratingly long 2 year development cycle.

So what am I to make of Apple’s silence concerning their ProApps products?

Is it because they’re ready to leap-frog the competition?

Or does de-coupling Final Cut Studio from big events like NAB go counter to Steve Job’s excellent quote: “Real Artists Ship”? With no more external target dates, is shipping Final Cut Studio becoming internally de-valued?

Here’s what’s so surprising to me after Day 1 of NAB 2010:

More and more I’m caring less and less about those answers.

- pi

I just wrapped a 14 minute interview on Digital Production Buzz with Larry Jordon and his trusty sidekick Michael Horton. It seems I’ll never kick those pre-stage jitters that always haunted from the earliest time I acted on stage in junior high.

I’ll update with a link to audio once it’s up.

UPDATE: Here’s the iTunes feed - the interview is March 18, 2010.

UPDATE 2: Here’s the link to my specific interview.

The conversation moved quickly. We covered my career, the purpose of Fini, my clients. I might have given the impression I only deal with small under-funded clients. Those clients are my passion but the “bigger boys” pay the bills.

Larry and Michael are clearly ‘into’ the topic and we could have spent 30 minutes chatting away. Topics we missed: Control Surfaces, Working Quickly, Displays. I’m sure there were others.

I managed a quick plug about KeyShots in the last 30 seconds.

Thanks for the time Larry and Michael! I hope we can do it again.

- pi

In this previous post I lamented how Apple seemed to be dragging its heels on providing BluRay authoring tools in its Pro Apps suite.

I got at least one fact wrong: Compressor 3 does export for BluRay.

Where did I go to find this out? Adobe!

Specifically, the DAV TechTable blog – which is filled with useful how-to’s on BluRay authoring and I’ve placed into my RSS reader (now that I’m an owner of the Adobe Production Suite CS3 bundle, which supports BluRay authoring on the Mac).

Here’s the post which gives explicit instructions on how to export from Compressor for BluRay authoring in Encore DVD. It’s not a built-in preset in Compressor, so you’ll want to build and save these settings as a Custom Preset.

If you’re a glass half empty person, you’ve got to wonder why this setting isn’t shipping as a preset in Compressor. Is it an ominous sign of Apple trying to keep its boot on the neck of BluRay? If you’re a glass half full person, hopefully this is a positive omen that the next version of Final Cut Studio will have much more explicit support for BluRay authoring.

- pi

 Subscribe in a reader

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

 Subscribe in a reader

I’m just bubbling up to the surface after 2.5 weeks of non-stop Color’ing. 10 hour days. 600 shots / day. Fair amount of secondary isolations with vignettes. Exhausting. More exhausting than I expected.

I usually have a few intense days of color correction that are followed by a day or two of finishing. I switch gears fairly regularly. 10 hour days are common and not too stressful.

On this past job I was downtown at Outpost Digital working as a freelancer on a Discovery series (all other details of the job are embargoed). I had the luxury of an Assistant Editor prepping timelines for the Color roundtrip and a Finisher to handle the graphics, formatting, & outputs. For me, it was all color correction all the time.

I was able to turn around 50+ minutes of footage, about 600-700 shots, in 13-16 hours across two 10-hour days. Essentially, an episode every 1.5 days (including client revisions). By each Friday I was completely wiped out. Far more so than if I put in a 50-hour week doing finishing. I contacted a friend who’s a long-time colorist about his stamina on the job. I was wondering if his eyes were used to the routine.

Apparently not.

While he’s no stranger to much longer days – he also finds diminishing returns after the 10-hour day. His words:

“I hear you 10 hours and I’m done.  I start to loose my peripheral vision and I know it’s time to rest.  Longer than 10 hours the slower I go to the point when I realize how long this is taking and stop.  I’ve worked in a few places and when I was at the CBC they had a nice monitor surround to take some of the stress off your eyes.  In my new place I have some strips of white LEDs behind the monitor and until they finish the room this will have to do.  I had a killer week last week and I wish I had the Herman Miller chair that I had from my last company.  This makes a big difference as well.”

Dittos on the Herman Miller chair (the one with lumbar support and tilt forward control).

In the future I need to dial back client expectations so my eyes are as fresh on Friday as they are on Monday.

- pi

 Subscribe in a reader

In a previous post I lamented the high costs of BluRay replication for short runs (less than 5,000 pieces).

These costs can be attributed directly to the mandatory copy protection scheme (DRM) for the BluRay specification. Not only will a company like my wife’s (Dubs by Pam) have to pay a one-time fee to place orders on behalf of her customers. Her customers will have to pay a per-title fee. And these fees are non-trivial for these types of short runs, $5500 for the duplication house, $1900 for each title (according to Larry Jordan on Digital Production Buzz).

Why, I ask myself, must they (the AACS) keep ringing us up for copy protection when almost none of our clients want to pay for it now or for the foreseeable future?

Ars Technica has the rather in-my-face-now-that-I’m-looking-for-it answer: The AACS needs to keep paying for continual development of new DRM schemes because they know they’ll be cracked every few months. I betch’a if my accountant took a look at their books, that line item on their Income Statement is probably the budget for creating new “uncrackable” codes.

What a joke.

The only way the large motion picture distributors will ever be able to keep their content from being illegally distributed is to implement DRM directly in the human optical system. Otherwise, if they want us to buy their DVDs to watch a movie at home – at some point the signal must be decrypted for the digital-to-analog conversion and that will always be the point of attack. You can’t have mass distribution while having a lock-solid distribution method – then it’s not mass distribution.

So. The AACS maintains the fiction of DRM for the movie studios and the rest of us have to pay. Literally.

I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining too loudly – it makes services such as those offered by Dubs by Pam that much more economically feasible…

Still – the short-sightedness of the whole DRM racket is stunning.

- pi

 Subscribe in a reader

UPDATE 2: It’s been commented to me that my opening line, “Color is broken” is a bit extreme. I’d agree – if you work in a purely progressive frame workflow or a purely interlaced workflow that involves no resizing, distorts, or anamorphic flags – Color is fine. For the rest of us… I think it’s broken. (In fact, I had a meeting this afternoon where I made clear my preference for progressive with no mixed formats in a single timeline)

—————

UPDATE 1: More on the Geometry Room issue I mention in the original posting – A posting on the Apple message board mentioned that he uses the Geometry Room to zoom in on skin tones to check them in the scopes to see that they properly lay on the skin tone line (something I first saw suggested in the Ripple Training Color tutorials ). He’d then click the reset button in the Geometry and move on to his next task. In my own testing I’ve confirmed that this is enough to force Color into flame blending mode of interlaced footage. Pressing reset doesn’t help. Once a shot is flagged as having touched the Geometry Room – that shot is toast.

I haven’t found a workaround to this particular problem.

————————–

Color is broken.

But before I get to the specifics, some quick background.

There’s an old problem that dates back to Color’s Final Touch days, before the Apple purchase. In those days (and to a certain extent, these days as well) you had to be very very careful how you handled interlaced footage. Color was originally designed for high-end Digital Intermediate work – which means it was optimized to for a film-based progressive RGB workflow.

It wasn’t until after development was well under way before the original management team decided to open up the software to High Def and Standard Def formats. In doing so, they never really solved how to get Color to handle interlaced footage if that footage had to be blown up, shrunk down, or repositioned. If you “repo’ed” a shot and that shot was recorded on an interlaced codec, all you got back was mush. That “mush” ranged from slightly softening the image to horribly destroying the image, depending on the nature of the content.

To get semi-technical: The problem exhibits itself as really bad frame blending.

When Color was released, Apple decided to avoid the whole “mushy image” problem by having Color ignore all Motion Tab effects and let FCP handle that portion of the job. It was a smart way to address the issue. And it worked. With emphasis on the past tense.

Interlace footage is broken again in Color 1.0.2.

In my testing last week I found that when it comes to handling Standard def footage there was only one way to avoid the “mushy image syndrome”. That’s by being sure both these are true for any project I send to Color:

1. No repo’s, distorts, or anamorphic flags on the footage.

2. The FCP timeline frame size must be a preset that exists in Color. For instance, 960×720 always renders with frame blending – no matter what and regardless of the previous Condition #1.

(Note: A recent posting on the Apple Discussion Board suggests that even doing a “repo” in the Geometry Room and then canceling it out is enough for Color to frame blend its renders)

What does this mean to those of us still working in the SD world?

It means we now have to go through our timelines and strip all motion effects from our timelines before color correcting. And then add them back one-by-one after color correcting.

This is NOT progress. It’s been a year since I’ve had to do this and I had hoped we had put this behind us.

For all the nifty improvements in Color 1.0.2 – for me and my clients – this workflow is not worth the pain. But there’s a question that, after a weekend of pondering, I haven’t found an answer:

Is it safe to reinstall just Color and upgrade it only to Color 1.0.1?

The Color 1.0.2 upgrade happened in conjunction with the entire Final Cut Studio 6.0.2 upgrade. And that upgrade contain some very important bug fixes within Final Cut Pro.

So do I add a half day to every job to handle the new bugs in Color 1.0.2? Or do I add a half day to every job because Final Cut Pro 6.0.1 loses my renders and I have spend 4 hours re-rendering?

My head’s spinning here. And my favorite people in the world who’ve I’ve never met (the entire FCP and Color teams) are responsible for it.

Is this the perfect Monday morning blog post, or what?

 Subscribe in a reader
- pi

HD-DVD is dead!

Long live Blu•ray??

Not so fast. In the current issue of Digital Production Buzz’s newsletter (I’d link to the actual piece but the content is refreshed every week) Larry Jordan lays out the costs of replicating on Blu•ray. I knew the costs were high since the Blu•ray spec requires copyright protection – and not just for Hollywood movies but also for your HDV baby pictures.

Or your demo reel.

How much? Here’s Larry’s breakdown:

• $2,500 : License Fee to author and distribute Blu•ray
• $3,000 : One-time fee to AACS. (I think this is billed per production company / individual)
• $1,585 : Per complete Blu•ray project
• $.04 : Four cents per disc. Fee paid to AACS
• $.01 : One penny per disc paid to Sony to handle all these payments on your behalf

So, for your first project licensing alone will cost $7,085. That’s in addition to the actual costs of replication/duplication and packaging that we’re already used to paying.

Idiotic.

If you were wondering why Sony spread their dollars around so liberally to pay off movie studios, you’ve got your answer.

It looks like Blu•ray is going to be the exclusive domain of the Studios. I guess the rest of us will have to settle for HD-DVD on standard DVD 5′s (except that the players won’t be made anymore).

Oh, and who is AACS? Just a couple of guys named IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros…

Huh. Suddenly this is starting to make sense…

UPDATE: The Avid-L list was on this discussion a week or so ago. It seems there is some compatibility issues with duplicated (not replicated) Bluray discs depending on the authoring software and the playback machines (which, of course, also bypasses all the fees detailed above). Apparently some Bluray players want to see a copy protection folder, even if it is empty and some authoring apps don’t put those folders on their burns.

Don’t ask me to confirm this… calls have only now just started to trickle in to our sister company Dubs by Pam asking about Bluray duplication. But this blog is named the Finishing Line and for many clients, delivery will soon become straight-to-DVDBluray.

- pi

 Subscribe in a reader