6/1000 FPS

When we set out to shoot our feature, The Red Machine, we were running Final Cut v. 5.0.4, and through the entire shoot, that’s what we used to unwrap all the footage from our Panasonic HVX200, taking off the MXF wrapper and creating QuickTimes that Final Cut could use. And everything was great…

…or so we thought.

Welcome to a nasty glitch.

But first, the background: after we got to a picture cut we were happy with and got ready to do our color correction, we did a lot of research and decided to do that work in Adobe After Effects; we’re still in search of a color correction session at a facility, but we knew that working in AE, we’d be able to get a really sophisticated and beautiful version done on our own. Moreover, in AE, we’d be able to do all our effects work in the very same project, just creating a precomp to touch up whatever area of the image needed work — painting out booms that dip into frame, for example, or replacing modern set details like lightswitches with period equivalents.

Fortunately, Automatic Duck makes a great program that converts a Final Cut sequence into an After Effects project. We broke our 83-minute movie into eight reels, then exported an XML version of each reel , using Automatic Duck’s own XML format.

But when we imported the XML into After Effects, we found that nearly every cut was a frame or two out of sync. And what was worse, there was no consistency about how many frames things were out of sync, or in which direction. A series of e-mails back and forth with Automatic Duck ensued, and they were incredibly helpful and responsive.

After getting copies of our projects (both FCP and AE), our QuickTimes and the original MXF files, the people at Automatic Duck realized what we had missed: FCP 5.0.4 had converted all our MXFs into QuickTimes movies that ran at 23.97 frames per second, rather than the 23.976 fps that they were supposed to be. This 6/1000 fps difference was not something we had ever picked up on — especially since our sequences were all set to 23.976, and Final Cut had no problem playing the 23.97 clips in those sequences. Never even asked to render them.

I was stunned that no one had experienced this before — surely someone else must have shot with the HVX200, unwrapped in FCP v. 5.0.4, then converted their sequence to an AE project. But Automatic Duck, at least, had never encountered it before. They were, however, able to make an Automatic Duck patch that enabled AE to interpret the 23.97 clips as 23.976 during import; but even with that, the sync slippage remained, which meant the entire movie had to be hand-reconciled.

Last night, at 10:30 p.m., just before setting out to a New Year’s Eve party, I finally finished the last of that reconciling — which actually was a very nice end to the year, because that was one job I didn’t want to have lingering in 2008.

However, I’d be very curious to find out if in fact other people did encounter this problem, and if they did, how they solved it…

Back into the World…

Wow…almost four months without a single entry. Whatever became of me?!

Autumn was a time of wood-shedding — as Alec and I got into the final stages of editing our feature, The Red Machine, we found ourselves going deeply into hermit mode. For a while, we didn’t even watch other people’s movies, even DVDs, I think out of some subconscious fear that we’d lose our grasp on our own movie if we did. (Not an unreasonable fear: A friend who’s a picture editor talks about a director he works with who watches movies every night during post-production, then comes into the editing room the next morning with his head full of things to try from whatever he’s watched the night before — but while those things may have been great in that other movie, they would be disastrously wrong for the one they’re making. And Alec and I definitely fell prey to the same disease on the first short film we ever made, when we were heavily infected by Jacques Tati during editing (and not to the benefit of our own movie).)

And to be honest, I felt as though everything I was putting up on the site about editing the movie was wrong almost as soon as I posted it; we’d try something new in the cut, and for the first few hours or days, it would seem like a great idea, so I’d post details about it — then we’d work with it some more and decide it wasn’t such a good idea after all, so we’d take it out — but there it would be on the blog, preserved in all its wrongness. To me, editing is a process of trial-and-error, of experimenting freely, almost like the movie’s very last rehearsal, and I found that cataloguing and dissecting our various attempts became very detrimental. (I actually took down all my posts relating to editing the movie, because they were confusing — even to me — and because they didn’t actually reflect the way the movie has turned out.)

And of course, there was also the ever-pressing need to finish the movie, rather than just talk about about finishing the movie.

Anyway, for all those reasons, we went silent, at least as far as blogging goes. But now we’re mostly locked on our picture edit; there are a few story elements we may still tweak, but for the most part, we’re safely enmeshed in the less glamorous yet equally important phases of dialogue and sound editing (Alec) and color correction and visual effects (me). And putting the story behind us has enabled us to begin to emerge from the cave of our movie and venture back out into the world.

More Photoshop Tips…

Came across this fantastic site with lots of Photoshop tutorials, resources and tips:

http://www.heathrowe.com/tutorials.asp

This particular page on the site…

http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/tips.asp

…has lots of nice little mini techniques that make working in Photoshop a little faster and easier. For instance, the thing that led me to the site was that I wanted to find a way to cycle through fonts without having to go to the drop-down font menu every time. The trick is, you select your text layer in the Layer palette, then in the Character palette, highlight the current font. The up and down arrow keys will now let you cycle through all the fonts. Very useful!

Also, I like working with my painting and erasing tools set so that they have what Photoshop calls Normal Brush Tips, which means that I get a little circle showing how broad the brush is; if you put on the Caps Lock key, the normal brush tip is replaced with the Precise cursor — a little cross-hair — which can be either very helpful or incredibly annoying if you don’t know why it’s switched.  The thing to remember — if your brush tip suddenly changes form, check that Caps Lock key…

Photoshop Droplets

Here’s a little recipe for making Adobe Photoshop droplets…

A droplet is program that performs a series of operations on a group of files, which is a very useful thing to be able to do.

For instance, I had a collection of still images that I’d exported from our Red Machine editing timeline, and I needed to resize every single one of them, something that would take a very long time if I were to try and change each image individually.

(The problem with the images was that computer monitors have square pixels, while most video formats have rectangular pixels, which means that frame grabs from a timeline will appear distorted when displayed on a computer monitor — in the case of our camera, the Panasonic HVX200, the images appear to be taller and skinnier than they should, and the simplest way for us to restore normal proportions was to resize each image from 960×720 to 1280×720.)

Making a droplet is actually a two-step process: first, you create an action, which is a recording of a set of operations that can be applied to any images within Photoshop. Second, you turn the action into the droplet. The droplet means that you can apply your action to a whole folder of files without having to actually open the files yourself.

Here’s the workflow I used:

1) Open the first image in the folder of images you want to batch-change.

2) To get ready, you may need to do a little prep work. In my case, I knew that I would want to change only the width of my images, so I opened up the Image Size dialog box (Image>Image Size…) and unchecked the Constrain Proportions box.  (If the box is checked, then any change made to one dimension is automatically applied to the other, so that the overall shape of the image is maintained — exactly what I didn’t want!)

I also created a new folder to hold my resized images.

3) When you’re ready to make the action, open up the Actions palette (Window>Actions). Create a new action by clicking the New Action button at the bottom of the palette (it’s the icon that looks like a piece of paper with a folded edge, next to the trash can). The New Action dialog box will open, giving you the option to name the new action; I called mine “ResizeDVCPROHD.” Click the Record button.

4) You should see that the red Record dot at the bottom of the Action palette is now illuminated. From this point onward, every keystroke you make will be recorded. Do the whole series of operations that you want to apply to each of your images.

My series of keystrokes were:

• From the menu bar at the top of the screen, choose Image>Image Size…

• The Image Size dialog box will open. Change Width from 960 to 1280. (No change to the height.) Click OK.

• From the menu bar, choose File>Save as…

• Keep the file name the same, but save into the new folder you made earlier.

• Command-W to close the file.

When you’ve finished with all the keystrokes, click the square Stop button at the bottom of the Actions palette to end recording.

I did a quick test on another image to make sure that the ResizeDVCPROHD action worked.

Once you confirm that your action is working, you’re ready to make the droplet, which will allow you to apply the action to a whole folder of images.

Go to File>Automate>Create Droplet…

This ppens a new dialog box. By default, the action will be set to the last action you created. Keep that, and make sure that no other boxes are checked. You can choose where you want to store the new droplet; for convenience, I put it onto my Desktop.

That’s it! Now all you have to do is drop any folder of images onto the droplet, and it will automatically execute the entire action on all the files in that folder.

Photographing the Past

One of the biggest benefits to putting one’s work out into the world is how it draws people to you — and of course, if they’re writing to you because they liked your work, they obviously have superlative taste, so it could be the start of a beautiful friendship!

It’s certainly the chance to find kindred spirits out there in the world; for instance, we were recently contacted by a man in Texas, Wendel Dickason, who runs www.vbbtexas.org, a great website about vintage baseball in Texas.

When not helping people play baseball according to rules written in the 1800s, Wendel spends part of his time creating some very cool vintage photographs. He shared a few of them with me, including these beautiful shots of the Alamo:

He also told me a little bit about his technique:

I tried to emulate what I had seen in the thousands of nineteenth century pictures I’d studied over the years while trying to avoid some of the stereotypes that many of the modern day ‘Old Tyme Photography Studios’ use. One key element regarding the image was the lenses I used. I found a couple brass mounted lenses that dated back to the late eighteen hundreds and attached them to a 1940s era Kodak studio view camera (which differs very little from those of the later eighteen hundreds). Because trying to sensitize my own plates would be time consuming and expensive, I used a high contrast (#3) black and white glossy photo paper as my negative. The combination of the old lens and the orthochromatic photo paper gave me an image very close to those of the nineteenth century. I had a very shallow depth of field, little differentiation between clouds and blue sky (black on the negative) and exaggerated reds and yellows (lighter on the negative). Those ‘red effects’ showed up mostly with swarthy or ruddy complexions because the negative was not sensitive to those colors (which are used for darkroom safelights), and that rendered Indians and others with such skin darker in the print than normal.

Because the image projected by the lenses is roughly 10″x10″, there is no way I can use them on any modern camera, but lately, I’ve been experimenting with attaching a pocket digital camera to the front of my view camera, ‘looking’ through a small hole drilled just above the lens barrel and photographing the image projected onto a screen in the back of the camera where the negative would have gone.

This is the view camera that he uses for the stills:

All this naturally makes me want to do the same in live action, and I was reminded of an article I wrote a couple of years ago for the magazine American Cinematographer about a short film called Tongue Bully, which featured the poet/dancer Learie E.A. McNicolls performing on the streets of Havana. The movie was shot partly with what the cinemotographer, Marcus Elliott, called his Art Box — essentially a bellows with a primitive lens on one end and a ground glass (consisting of a piece of glass with 216 diffusion on it) on the other. A motion picture camera looks into the box and shoots the image off the ground glass, and the images are very ethereal and soft — but I couldn’t help wondering what Wendel’s lenses would do with a box like that…

Time for a Civil War movie, perhaps?

Bokeh, Texture Libraries and Photoshop Tutorials

In thinking about the matte paintings and other images that we’re creating and manipulating for The Red Machine, I’ve begun reading about bokeh, which is the ability of a camera lens to produce out-of-focus areas that guide the viewer’s eye by emphasizing certain areas of the image.

Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

I also came across this very nice website:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/

…which also includes an extensive list of tutorials (not specifically about bokeh at all — lots of general photographic tips and recipes):
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/

Next, looking for textures that I could use for paintings, titles and transitions, I found several very useful collections of free high-resolution textures:

http://www.mayang.com/textures/
Over 3400 free textures and images for artists to download and use. The only catch is that one can only download 20 textures a day — they track it by IP address, which you may be sharing with someone else. However, if you need a lot of textures all at once, you can also buy the entire collection for $50.

http://www.imageafter.com/textures.php
Another very extensive collection…

And finally, because I’m creating a few matte paintings to help establish scenes that take place at night, I went looking for tips on turning a photo from day into night, and I found this recipe for dong so in Photoshop:

http://www.effectlab.com/tutfullmoon.php

On top of this, I add a lot of lighting effects (which I’ll elaborate on in a later post), but I’ve found this does work well for the overall color/contrast shift.

Photo Inspirations

Maybe it’s because I’m getting ready to do a lot of matte painting for our feature, which is putting me into a very photographic state of mind, but I’ve suddenly started stumbling across some very interesting photo-related information.

 

Here, for instance, is the Getty Conservation Institute’s program to preserve what’s left of photochemical photography:

 

Digital photography is replacing traditional photography. And it’s happening so fast that traditional photography, and the knowledge about how to create it, is in danger of disappearing altogether.

We need your help.

Scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute need your old photographic papers, film, negatives, and prints to build an archive of knowledge and materials from the era of classical photography. This archive will become a reference collection for future generations of photo conservators and scholars, and will allow them to research and authenticate the treasures of the classical photography era.

More information can be found at: http://www.getty.edu/conservation/science/photocon/photocon_wanted.html#what

Also, I came across the very fun site MattePainting.org, which has an almost overwhelming number of links to tutorials and galleries and other sources of inspiration…

 

Advice on Post Technique — The Start of a Series…

In co-directing The Red Machine, I’ve found that there are a lot of things I don’t know yet. But fortunately, I spent over a decade as a journalist writing about the art and craft of filmmaking, and in doing that, I met a lot of people who do know about those things. So my strategy is to call them and beg for advice, suggestions and overall guidance — which I’ll post here so that other filmmakers can take advantage of that information, too.

I recently had lunch with a friend who spent a number of years as a sound editor, then switched over to music editing. My questions for him were mainly about workflow and tools for post sound, and how to set up our process so that we could maximize creativity and quality, and minimize problems and tears.

At the moment, Pro Tools is still the dominant application for editing the sound for movies, and if you want to fit into the standard sound world, you need to be using at least v.6, and preferably v.7. At the moment, we’re running v.6, because that’s as far as we can go without upgrading our hardware, but that may have to change soon. My friend pointed out that while it’s possible to do some serious work in the less expensive Pro Tools LE and DV Toolkit, you can’t use TDM plug-ins, because those run on the auxiliary hardware necessary for full-blown Pro Tools, and you’re limited to 96 tracks.

While 96 tracks may seem like a lot, those can get used up very quickly when you start breaking down your tracks the way mixers need to have them. He explained that it’s important to keep different types of sound separate so that everything is grouped together in a way that will make it easy for the mixers to find what they need. For example, there could be different groups of tracks for:

1. Production dialog
2. ADR (dialog recorded by the actors after production to take the place of production audio)
3. Source music (music that plays as part of the story)
4. Score
5. Sound design elements
6. Backgrounds
7. Hard sound effects

And so on…

Although he’s never been a dialog editor, over the years he has picked up a few techniques on grouping dialog tracks. Most importantly, it’s better to have them grouped by sound than by character. For example, if a scene is recorded on both a boom mike and a wireless body mike, it’s better to have one track for each type of mike, rather than put everything for one character on a single track. The reason is that during the mix, the mixer will add EQ to each track to even out its sound, but the type and amount of EQ will depend on the overall sound or “air” of the audio, and each mike will have its own type of air. If different types of mikes are on the same track, the air will keep shifting, so it won’t be possible to apply the EQ evenly to the whole track.

At the same time, simplicity is important — especially on a low-budget production. Part of the craft of dialog editing is learning what should be on different tracks, and what can be put onto a single track yet still made to sound homogeneous.

Audio levels can be set on the sound editor’s system, so that the mixers aren’t given sounds that are too quiet. While most mixing consoles give the mixer a range between +6 and -∞, the area where they have the most control is generally between 0 and -20, and even if a sound is going to play very quietly — a background, for example — it’s still better make it so that it falls into that sweet spot for the mixers.

At the same time, it’s also important not to tie the mixers’ hands. For instance, while it’s possible to apply audio effects in Pro Tools, then render those effects permanently, doing so would mean that the mixers can’t remove them and apply their own. It is possible to render two versions, though — one without the effects, and one with, for reference.

And sometimes, the goal with applying plug-ins in the editing system is to create a totally new sound, for instance, a backwards gunshot. In a case like that, you may prefer to permanently render the effect — because it’s gone beyond just being an effect. The bolder the stroke you want to make, the more you can leave your experimenting behind and declare the sound permanent; the subtler the adjustments you want to make, the more you should leave your options open.

Finally, there’s foley, which is the recording of sound effects that match action on screen, such a footsteps. While other sound effects, such as the sound of a glass being put down, are often also recorded on the foley stage, my friend said that he’d been able to save money by only foleying sounds that really had to be done by a foley artist — again, footsteps, which are very complex and need to match the on-screen action. But a single sound that could be easily moved around — the glass being put down, for example — could be recorded much less expensively off stage. And, he pointed out, many people overlook foley as a creative part of the filmmaking process: choosing a different sound for a footstep or a glass being put down can change the entire tone of a scene, even altering the feeling of a performance.

The Beginning of the Middle of the End

Today, I finished the first cut of my first feature film, The Red Machine, which I co-wrote and co-directed with Alec Boehm.  And since that represents a huge milestone to me (Sort of a cinema bat mitzvah: “Today I am a feature filmmaker!”), it seemed like the right time to start something new — specifically this blog, which I hope will be a way to share a little of what we’ve learned and are continuing to learn while making this movie.

There’s a quote from Charlie Parker that’s up on my studio wall: “First, master your instrument. Then forget all that #*&%& and play.” To me, that’s the point of this blog. Filmmaking — especially digital filmmaking — can seem like an extremely technical exercise, and it is. But when you’re buried in pixels and hard drives and this week’s new application, it’s easy to forget that all that technology is really only a tool for story-telling.  So in this blog, you’ll find a lot of thoughts on the tools I use for filmmaking — the nerdy, gearhead, master-your-instrument stuff — but also a lot of reminders about about forgetting all that and keeping the focus on the story.

Here’s one more quote from Parker: “Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.” I’m discovering that it’s just as true of movies…