K1 key

NAWK NRWEKA BK BJ KS AWMR JLYA TUBRGZJ
KAWK NR YWGGSK KABGD ST KARF NBKASLK RERMWKBSG.

(Cryptogram courtesy of The Rat)

Baseball in the Depression

We’ve made two movies set during the Great Depression — Gandhi at the Bat and The Red Machine — but despite having spent so much time there in my imagination, I never really wanted to actually live the experience…

The one good thing about this economic disaster is that it is sparking a lot of interesting writing about the Depression, like this New York Times article by Ken Belson, about baseball during the 1930s.  (Of course, the article plays into my solipstic delusion that anytime anyone mentions or writes about the New York Yankees or the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1930s, they’re mentioning them specifically because those teams are featured in Gandhi at the Bat.  I had the same problem when I was in Cooperstown for Gandhi at the Bat’s appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame Film Festival: I really did think that all the photos and memorabilia for “our” players had been put out just for us, for that weekend.  I’ve been told this is not the case, however.)

The other two Depression-related books that I’m reading at the moment are Anxious Decades, a history of the period by Michael Parrish, and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes.  But on the whole, I’m thinking that right about now, pulp crime novels might be a lot more fun.

Fun with the Sony EX-1

Last weekend, we helped a friend on a short project, which gave us our first real-world experience with the Sony EX-1; overall, we felt that it was a good strong image coming out of the camera.   Here are a few of our other first impressions and experiences:

•Before our shoot, cinematographer Eric Adkins very generously shared some of his EX-1 tips with us; one was that if you output from the camera using the HD-SDI port, you can go through a Blackmagic HDLink box to connect to an Apple Cinema display monitor for on-set viewing.  We happened to have an HDLink and a 23-inch Cinema display, and it worked great.   At 1080, the image filled the screen completely; we were shooting at 720 because we wanted to be able to do slow motion, so the image didn’t fill the screen, but it still looked very good and gave us the ability to really evaluate what we were shooting, especially focus.

• Most prosumer cameras have lens barrels that rotate without any stops on either end, so it was nice to find that the EX-1 (in manual focus mode) performed more like a standard movie lens, allowing us to properly pull focus as needed.

• Like the Panasonic HVX200 (which we have a lot of experience with), the EX-1 has a noisy image in general, but the fact that you can shoot at -3dB gain does help that, and we tried to shoot at -3dB as often as possible.

• The camera handled overexposure well; we could go to 106% exposure and still have it look decent.  Above that, it looked like ugly video overexposure.  (Eric did caution that unless you’re doing color correction that can accommodate those extra high values, it’s likely that anything over 100% exposure will get chopped off — but we haven’t gone through post or color correction yet, so we haven’t encountered that personally.)

• Don’t leave the batteries in the camera if you’re walking away from it for more than a few minutes, because the power will slowly drain out.  (This is apparently also true with the Panasonic HVX200.)  So during lunch and certainly overnight, take the batteries off the camera.

More will follow later, as we track the footage through post-production…

QuickTime Pointers

While looking for info on downloading AJA codecs, something I needed to do to get ready for the color correction on The Red Machine (more on that soon!), I stumbled across this nifty page filled with tips on working with QuickTime:

http://www.fxguide.com/article462.html

FXGuide.com is affiliated with fxphd.com, a very cool-sounding online VFX training program; I’ve had fantasies about taking some of their courses — but no time, so for the moment, I’ve consoled myself with the bite-sized learning available at www.lynda.com, which is great.

I was recently talking to someone about learning about filmmaking technology, and I realized that aside from spending years interviewing the best in the fields of cinematography, visual effects, film editing, sound editing and mixing, I’d learned most of what I knew from www.pixelcorps.com, with Lynda.com a close second.  I’ve taken a lot of real-world classes too, some of them quite expensive, but those two online sources beat them all, and for a relatively low price.

Anyway, I thought the QuickTime info was very good.

Final Cut Pro Mini-Tips

Sometimes you want to read a 600-page manual on a software, and sometimes you don’t…

I’ve been giving people a lot of little tips about Final Cut Pro lately — those time-saving mini-techniques that we all pick up in our own particular ways, and I thought I’d write up a short list of those.

But first, I decided to go prowling around the web to see what other lists and tips were out there.  Here were a few that I found especially useful:

http://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/ten-tips-for-a-better-final-cut-pro-experience/

http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/18576.aspx

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/freshdv/story/top_10_final_cut_pro_tips_and_tricks/

This last one is from 2004 but still has lots of good info — and Ken Stone’s site is great, one of the first places I look when I need an FCP answer:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/option_key_fcp_4_balis.html