Backup computer = secondary screen

16 March, 2008
Apple, avid, final cut pro
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For you editors who go on location with two Macs – a backup and a main, I’ve discovered an interesting piece of software. It uses networking software that lets you use the screen of your backup computer as a second screen for your main computer. As it uses the network, I suggest that you use the backup machine to display browser windows – if there is a slight delay in displaying that sort of content, it is not a big deal. You should be able to drag clips between the screens if need be.

A G5 iMac using an old G4 iMac as an external screen.

Check out ScreenRecycler.

You can see a movie of the application in action at on this page.

You can even use a PC as a second monitor if you have one hanging around.

Slower – going wrong in an interesting way

13 March, 2008
final cut pro
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In Final Cut Studio’s Compressor application, you need yo use different settings for different slow motion speeds. Certain footage cannot be slowed down to 1/8th normal speed and still look as if you used a high-speed camera. However the effect that is produced when you tell Compressor to slow it down that much looks interesting.

So that I didn’t get any motion blur, I set the shutter speed to 1/500th. I shot interlaced because I needed as many samples as possible per second. That is more important than vertical resolution (which is what you get if you shoot progressive).

The sample footage is made up of two shots of my hands and some water.

If you want to see the video at 720p go over to Vimeo.

1. Original footage.

2. Final Cut Pro 1/2 speed version: [‘Speed…’ from the Modify menu] This throws away one field for each frame and creates new frames by blending existing ones.

3. Compressor 1/2 speed frame blended version: Takes each field and deinterlaces to produce a frame.

4. Compressor 1/4 speed motion compensated version: Looks at each frame to see in which direction groups of pixels are moving – creates new frames based on these guesses.

5. Compressor 1/4 speed high quality motion compensated version: As before, but spending more time analysing the pixels in each frame.

6. Compressor 1/8 speed high quality motion compensated version: As before, but slower. This shows that 1/8th speed doesn’t work with this kind of footage, but it does ‘go wrong’ in an interesting way.

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Final Cut Studio slow motion

12 March, 2008
final cut pro
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If you want to do slow motion, shoot interlaced, even if your final project is going to be progressive. It is more important to have twice the samples per second than full vertical resolution.

Compressor is better than using the Clip Speed feature of Final Cut – if the footage is interlaced, FCP throws a field away first before doing any frame blending.

Export your clip as a QuickTime movie.

In Compressor…

If you want half-speed, in the Frame Controls tab, you only need use frame blending because Compressor turns each field into a frame:

If you want to slow down further, set the duration to be longer, you’ll need to use Motion Compensated retiming:

This will take a long time to compress, but should produce good results.


Click to see this in HD

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Star

11 March, 2008
film making, Links
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Suzanne invited me to a show featuring many of the thesis films of last year’s students on the Royal Holloway Documentary MA course.

Two stood out. One was a beautiful documentary about the red light district in Amsterdam.

The other is by Yuan. She is going to be a star:

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMG9VYpasRE&showsearch=0]

She pushes the limits of what documentary can be. However, her film has structure, a clear subject and a very distinctive voice. Important elements.

Business

27 February, 2008
Links
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The handy thing about The Economist is that once you read an article in the magazine or website, you have a good idea to what extent relatively well-informed people are informed about subjects you know and love.

Take the case of the article in last week’s edition on Hollywood and the Internet. If you plan to raise money or interest from businesspeople who don’t spend their time following the business of movies, this is as much as they are likely to know about the internet ‘platform.’ You can keep this link and send it to people who need to know what you’ll be talking about for the next few months.

Budget

22 February, 2008
film making, screenwriting
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Why do car commercials have bigger budgets than air freshener commercials?

Advertising is supposed to be ‘a good story, well told,’ yet why do some tales cost so much more to tell? It is down to sales people: The ad people who sell the budgets to the corporations. Political power within organisations usually goes to those who control the largest budgets, so the big-budget ideas might not be too much of a hard sell to the insecure middle-manager.

It is probably possible to make a perfectly effective car ad for the same money as one for shoe insoles. You’ve got to be in the business of getting the right message across, instead of making sure you and your friends have more toys to play with and each of you has another item for your showreels.

The lesson for those of us creating action-adventure movies on micro-budgets? Make sure you have a good story, well told – and make sure your set pieces come from the emotions of your characters, not from the one-upmanship of ‘my SFX is better than yours.’

Woah

21 February, 2008
film making, Links
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So here I am, gulping down the the ‘internet means no barrier to content distribution’ Kool-Aid when I read a contrary article over at a scurrilous tech ‘news’ site.

There I was, planning my own ongoing internet-hosted original drama series. I was going to workshop some ideas with some friends; write a tight 10 times three minutes pilot season; shoot it on my HD camera (in case NBC wants to pick it up); edit it on my Mac (not sure which software to use) and upload it for my future sponsor’s pleasure.

What if my subscribers had to pay for each download? What if ISPs went bust until the merged semi-monopoly ISPs started to charge for each megabyte streamed? What if that Web 1.0 verb (disintermediation) won’t apply in the Web 2.5 world?

Maybe I will have to forget the DIY ethos and move to LA and hope for a position in the CAA post room…

…or make sure my content is good enough to pay for. Let’s see, how much do Apple charge to download each $3 million episode of Lost?

Flirt

11 February, 2008
editing, Links
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This link is nothing to do with the Hallmark holiday that’s coming up. It’s a coincidence…

I know that when two people talk to each other in the movies, they stand much closer than real people stand, they don’t look where real people look, but it is still a good idea to notice the way real people act. We need to understand the non-verbal cues that communicate character and story. At slideshare.net, there is a presentation on flirting. Most of it is the same old Cosmo advice (you can certainly ignore almost everything after slide 28), but there is stuff in there for editors.

The presentation ‘slides’ are more like pages, so if your monitor is any smaller than 1200 pixels vertical resolution, you’ll have to read the text from the notes at the bottom of the page (which is the same as on the slides).

For example, it is a good idea for editors to follow eye-trace… We need to make sure that what actors are thinking and feeling is revealed by where they look. Even if it is for a few frames in a shot:
Excerpt from slide 8:

Once a conversation begins, it is normal for eye contact to be broken as the speaker looks away. In conversations, the person who is speaking looks away more than the person who is listening, and turn-taking is governed by a characteristic pattern of looking, eye contact and looking away. So, to signal that you have finished speaking and invite a response, you then look back at your target again.

Excerpt from slide 23:

The essence of a good conversation, and a successful flirtation, is recipro-city: give-and-take, sharing, exchange, with both parties contributing equally as talkers and as listeners. Achieving this reciprocity requires an understanding of the etiquette of turn-taking, knowing when to take your turn, as well as when and how to ‘yield the floor’ to your partner. So, how do you know when it is your turn to speak? Pauses are not necessarily an infallible guide – one study found that the length of the average pause during speech was 0.807 seconds, while the average pause between speakers was shorter, only 0.764 seconds. In other words, people clearly used signals other than pauses to indicate that they had finished speaking.

You’ll find all this in well-scripted, well-directed, well-rehearsed and well-acted rushes. However, as we editors are in the business of solving problems, it’s a good idea to have some social psychology resources to turn to – just in case.

We also might be able to make that connection that gets us the job in the first place too…

Scary

9 February, 2008
editing, Links
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Twenty years ago US network TV was edited on film, yet the deadlines were as scary as they are today.

Check out this interview with the post supervisor on Moonlighting. They were shooting on Monday morning for a show that went out on Tuesday night:

But this editor said it was the strangest experience for him because he came into work, edited all night, went home, went to sleep, woke up and turned on the TV, and it was on the air. It was as though the network had just plugged a big cable into the back of the moviola.

There are many other interesting things in this article, including the use of music, stunt doubles, ordering music by the yard and using the emotion of a scene help the editor know who to to favour. Also there is a great deal on the editorial choices in the making of Boston Legal.