creative cow magazine new vision

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• Panavision: The Truth About Pixels• Stereoscopic 3D Filmmaking

• Panasonic’s AVC-Intra• Nuke for AE Users

• Digital Cinema

New VisionsNEW CAMERAS. NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN FILM, AUDIO, VIDEO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING AND DESIGN

MORE SIGNAL, LESS NOISE™ — CREATIVECOW.NET JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2009

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As we always do, we’ve taken our hottest product and made it better. Westarted with the 1920 x 1080 recording and SxS PRO™ memory cards of the PMW-EX1 camcorder. Then we added the versatility of interchangeable lenses, the fl exibility of Gen Lock and Time Code jacks and the power of 8-pin interface for full studio remote control. Presenting the EX1’s biggerbrother, the PMW-EX3. To see all the other ways Sony is exceeding expectations, visit us online.

© 2008 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Features and specifi cations are subject to change without notice. Sony, HDNA, the HDNA logo and SxS PRO are trademarks of Sony.

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Contact Chris Del Vecchio with any questions regarding these materialsph: 973.602.3365 email: [email protected]

RDA International - 286970Project: Sony DecemberCampaign: EX - LeaderCreative: 4088 We Never LeaveAE: Chris DelVecchio

Publication: Creative COW IO #: NoneIssue: 09/Jan-FebAd Type: SP4CB bleed = 16 in X 10.75 in trim = 15.75 in X 10.5 in safety = 15 in X 10 in

Creative COW 125 Alydar PlacePaso Robles, CA 93446Attn: Ron Lindeboom | t: 805.239.5645 f: None

Ship Info:

We never leave well enough alone.

click: sony.com/prohdna

As we always do, we’ve taken our hottest product and made it better. Westarted with the 1920 x 1080 recording and SxS PRO™ memory cards of the PMW-EX1 camcorder. Then we added the versatility of interchangeable lenses, the fl exibility of Gen Lock and Time Code jacks and the power of 8-pin interface for full studio remote control. Presenting the EX1’s biggerbrother, the PMW-EX3. To see all the other ways Sony is exceeding expectations, visit us online.

© 2008 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Features and specifi cations are subject to change without notice. Sony, HDNA, the HDNA logo and SxS PRO are trademarks of Sony.

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:10.5 in

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J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9

Creative COWC R E A T I V E C O M M U N I T I E S O F T H E W O R L D

M A G A Z I N E

The New Visions Issue — Creative COW Magazine4

THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING & DESIGN

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CREATIVE COW MAGAZINEA CREATIVECOW.NET PUBLICATION

PUBLISHERS: Ron & Kathlyn Lindeboom

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF/ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER:

Tim [email protected]

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:John Galt, Jeremy Garchow,

Grinner Hester, Russell Lasson,Pete O’Connell, Harry Pallenberg,

Christopher Werronen

LAYOUT & DESIGN:Tim Wilson, Mack De Cypress

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Creative COW Magazine is published bi-monthly by CreativeCOW.net (Creative Communities of the World) at 2205 Villa Lane,, Paso Robles, CA 93446. (805) 239-5645. Postage paid at Hanover, New Hampshire. U.S. subscrip-tion rates are free to qualified subscribers. Creative COW is a registered trademark of CreativeCOW.net. All rights are reserved. Magazine contents are copyright © 2009 by Creative COW Magazine. All rights are reserved. Right of reprint is granted only to non-commercial educational institutions such as high schools, colleges and universi-ties. No other grants are given.

The opinions of our writers do not always reflect those of the publisher and while we make every effort to be as accurate as possible, we cannot and do not assume responsibility for damages due to errors or omissions.

LEGAL STATEMENT: All information in this magazine is offered without guarantee as to its accuracy and appli-cability in all circumstances. Please consult an attorney, business advisor, accountant or other professional to dis-cuss your individual circumstances. Use of the informa-tion in this magazine is not intended to replace profes-sional counsel. Use of this information is at your own risk and we assume no liability for its use.

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In This Issue:Tim Wilson’s Column ............................................ 6The Back Forty ..................................................... 46

The Truth about 2K, 4K & the Future of PixelsPanavision’s John Galt demystifies the mysterious pixel

AVC-Intra and the Panasonic AJ-HPX2000How the new AVC-Intra codec performs in the field

NUKE: An Introduction for After Effects usersA top film compositor and AE user looks at The Foundry’s NUKE

Tenacity: The Secret to Success in Hard TimesLongtime COW leader Grinner Hester sold a show he wasn’t selling to a network he’d never heard of. What? Here’s how.

21st Century Cinema: Its Meaning To IndiesAn Indie filmmaker shows that Digital Cinema is not just for major film studios

Filmmaking Adventures in Stereoscopic 3DThe tools now affordable, filmmakers explore stereoscopic 3D

Film Festival MagicEven if you don’t win, having your independent film in festivals is rewarding. Harry Pallenberg shares some of his own reasons why he and his partners will be back again.

New VisionsNEW CAMERAS. NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9

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The New Visions Issue — Creative COW Magazine6

Tim WilsonBoston, MassachusettsEditor-In-Chief, Associate PublisherCreative COW Magazine

Rubber, meet Road. Road, meet Rubber.

T his issue reminds me of some of my favorite things about the COW Magazine. The first is that our articles don’t come from “the usual suspects;” the second is

that they’re not the usual kind of article. With one exception of an article by me — an unusual suspect to be sure — on

“South Park: TV’s Longest Week” in our Workflow 3.0 Issue, our articles aren’t third-person accounts describing other people’s work. Our articles are first-person accounts by the people who are doing the work.

Another favorite thing is how many stories we get to tell. Yes, we’re bi-monthly, but you’ll find that we have many more pages of real content in our single issue than other industry monthly magazines have in their two issues. With half as many issues, we still tell nearly twice the story content. Definitely one of my favorite things.

One way we pull this off is by having so many stories to tell. I had a general idea, but was still surprised when I actually counted: nearly 50 different authors in the six issues before this, and another 6 new authors this issue! As I said earlier, not the same viewpoints as told by the same usual suspects.

Our stories typically focus more on production in general than on specific prod-ucts. After all, one of the dominant themes throughout the COW’s online community is that skills matter more than the tools do. That said, people need tools, so publish-ing more product feature stories is on the list of things to do in 2009 — so we are starting with Jeremy Garchow’s story about Panasonic’s new HD format, AVC-Intra, and the camera his company chose for capturing it, the HPX2000.

But here’s the thing: it’s not a review. Although I’m sure that the good folks at Panasonic would have been happy to help if asked, Jeremy’s article wasn’t worked through official channels with short-term loaned equipment. His company spent $39,000 of their own money to buy their new camera and fully outfit it for shooting. Jeremy wrote this story after six months of real-world shooting.

Same thing with Rick Bronks’ story in our Non-Broadcast Production issue, about working at Wembley Stadium using the Sony F355 XDCAM HD. He wrote the story months after he bought the camera, as well as the $30,000 Canon J11 HD lens that actually cost him more than the camera did.

This is why, even though we don’t do many product features, they’re all quite pos-itive. People come to us with their stories because they’ve found solutions that have worked for them, and think they might work for you too. So as we get around to more product stories, we’ll keep doing them the same way: not with professional writers, but with production professionals, describing real work that they are doing.

In the meantime, you’ll also keep reading stories about emerging trends and new ways of working. We don’t have to guess at what’s coming, and you don’t have to take our word for it when we tell you what we see. You’ll hear about these trends yourself, from people who are in the midst of these rapidly changing times and trends.

Even in our broader stories, the authors describe the practical details of where the rubber meets the road, which is sometime after their wallets have met product manufacturers and local resellers. Whether you read stories like this in the COW Mag-azine or at CreativeCOW.net, you can count on them having been proven under the same pressure that you face every day, from clients as demanding as yours.

n

Our articlesare real

first-person accounts told by the people who are doing

the work.

In a wide-ranging, 2-hour conversation, John Galt spoke to us about state-of-the-art motion picture technology, and the best first steps to a higher-resolution future. And as Panavision’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Digi-tal Imaging, John plays an important role in shaping the state-of-the-art as we move forward.

What follows is a very brief excerpt from that conver-sation. We know you’ll find it as engaging and thought-provoking as we did.

“P ixel” is an unfortu-nate term, because

it has been hijacked. Historically, 2K and 4K

referred to the output of a line array scanner scanning film, so that for each frame scanned at 4K, you wind up with four thousand red pixels, four thousand green and four thousand blue.

For motion picture cam-era sensors, the word “pixel” is kind of complicated. In the old days, there was a one-to-one relationship between pho-tosites and pixels. Any of the high-end high definition video cameras, they had 3 sensors: 1 red, 1 green and 1 blue photo-site to create 1 RGB pixel.

But what we’ve seen with Bayer pattern cameras includ-ing RED and Dalsa, is that they

are basically sub-sampled chroma cameras. In oth-er words, they have half the number of color pixels as they do luminance, which is what they typically call green. So what happens is you have two green photo-sites for every red and blue.

How do you get RGB out of that? You have to in-terpolate the red and the blue to match the green. So you are basically imagining what that value is going to be. You can do interpolation extremely well, particu-larly if the green response, luminance, is very broad.

Some manufacturers point to this and insist,

The New Visions Issue — Creative COW Magazine 8

John Galt cuts through “intentional obfuscation” as he lays out the difference between “real” pixels and “marketing pixels.”

The Truth about 2K, 4K & the Future of

“Well, I’ve got a 4K camera.” But in the world of the professionals who do this, if they say something’s 4K, it means you have 4096 red, 4096 green and 4096 blue photosites.

In order to get RGB out of a Bayer pattern, you need two lines, because you only have green plus one color on one line, and green plus the other color on the other line. And you have to interpolate that.

To achieve that interpola-tion without moire patterns, you have to design an op-tical low pass filter. If you design it to maintain the high picture resolu-tion which you get from the green, then the red and blue are aliased. Some-body can argue un-til they’re blue in the face that there’s not an alias, but you can’t escape the physics of optics.

If you design the optical low pass filter to make sure that you don’t get the color alias, then you’re throwing away the infor-mation of the green. You can never get the resolution you expect.

So when we developed the Genesis camera, we made it a stripe with an equal number of red, green and blue photosites, on a roughly 12 megapixel sen-sor: 5760 by 2180. Now if you use the same arithme-tic that these people who claim they have 4K camer-

as are using, then Genesis would be a 6K camera: add 1920 red, plus 1920 green, plus 1920 blue, and it equals 5760.

Isn’t all that a little bit nonsensical? But I think it’s no more nonsensical than upsampling a 2K camera to

quadruple the amount of data that you now have to carry around in post. That’s why I call them “market-ing pixels.” These upconverted, interpolated pixels do nothing to improve image quality. They may improve sales volume. But they don’t do anything for quality.

Yet somehow the world has accepted this as 4K. It’s purely semantic, but you’d be

amazed how many non-techni-cal people I meet, often the pro-ducers and directors, and some-

times the cinematographers too, get fooled by that stuff.

The most important issue from our point of view, is that we want to

have equal resolution: true edge detec-tion resolution in red, green and blue.

This points to the fundamental prob-lem with this wonderful idea of the Bayer

pattern. Back in 1972, when Bryce Bayer was working at Kodak, and they couldn’t make sen-

sors for lots of photosites, it was brilliant.

But the most important thing for us is not to have inter-polated information. You want to know that the edge is real. That’s because our cameras are used for doing high-end im-age compositing. I’m not talk-

ing about 100 people sitting there roto-ing. I’m talk-ing about being able to shoot a blue screen or a green screen, and using Ultimatte Advantage software and pulling a matte from smoke, or fire, or liquid — things that can’t be roto’d.

PIXELS AND RESOLUTIONThe third problem with “marketing pixels” is that they

confuse pixels and resolution. What de-fines the resolution, quite frankly, is the optics more than the sensor.

My wife has a Ricoh GX 100. It’s a beautiful little camera with a 12.2 mil-lion pixel sensor. But it doesn’t make nearly as nice a picture as my 6 mega-pixel Canon D60.

When we released the HD900F, dubbed “the Star Wars camera,” it was a 2/3rd inch camcorder. Everybody in the industry laughed at it, but it has prov-en to be unbelievably successful. That camera is still renting every day. And re-ally, you’d be hard pressed to get a bet-ter image.

So you have to look at the whole system, not latch on to one parameter

and say “That’s what we’re gonna go for!” Everything has to work together.

Unfortunately, one of the tragedies of digital im-aging is that now we’ve got these ridiculous num-bers games, because so few people understand the

Creative COW Magazine — The New Visions Issue 9

Note that there are twice as many green pixels as red or blue on this representation of a Bayer pattern sensor. To create a single RGB pixel, there must be an equal number of each color, so the choice is whether to discard green pixels and lose luminance detail, or to use interpolated, aliased red and blue pixels.

fundamentals of the imaging technology. The numbers don’t mean anything in the context of 100 years of development of film and motion tech-nology, optical technology, laboratory practice, etc.

Whenever I do a presentation about digital imaging, my first question these days is, “Anybody know how many grains of silver are on a frame of film? Hands up, hands up!” Nobody ever puts their hands up.

My second question is, “Hands up! Anybody ever thought about this before?” You can tell the nerds if any hands go up.

So why do we care about it? Because now somebody comes along with a completely new technology, and we’re clutching for some magic number that we can carry around in our head that will define the process for us. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. It’s messy and it’s complicated, and lots more so today than it was in the days of film.

IMAX, 4K...AND NOT I agree with Jim Cameron [ed: director of “The Ter-minator,” “Titanic,” and the upcoming “Avatar”] when he says that the move to 4K is all about try-ing to differentiate from high definition television. Well, it’s too late. Talking about 4K belies the fact that most of the theater installations around the world are going in at 2K — but let’s face it, most of the time you get 1920x1080.

We talk about scanning film at 4K, but we don’t, really. We typically scan perf to perf, and the actual Academy Aperture is 3656 pixels. When you scan film at 2K, you’re actually scanning at 1828

across. Just to make things a little more complicated.

So these are all high defini-tion television projectors going into theaters whether you like it or not. Slightly better color gamut, but they are all basically paying lip ser-vice to the idea that it’s not HD.

The 4K system that most peo-ple know is IMAX — and it doesn’t quite make 4K, which is a surprise to people. “How can that possi-bly be?,” you say. “It’s an enormous big frame.” Well, because of what I was talking about earlier: the phys-ics of optics. When you take the en-tire system into account — from the lens of the camera, to the the move-ment of the light through the pro-jector, all slightly reducing resolu-tion — you wind up with less than the full resolution you started with.

A number of years ago some IMAX technicians — and IMAX never let these guys back in their lab again — did this wonderfully


Above, IMAX theater in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina USA. Photo courtesy of Chris Metcalf. Below, motion blur on Galahs in flight, published under the terms of the GNU FDL.

elegant experiment at a large film format seminar at Universal Studios. They showed this film they made that began with 2 rows of 2 squares: black white, white black, as if you had 4 pixels on the screen.

Then they started to double and double and dou-ble the squares. Before they got to 4K the screen was gray. You know what the means? There was no longer any difference between black and white, which is what allows you to see sharpness. It’s the contrast that we see, not the actual information.

Let’s just pretend for a moment that IMAX truly is 4K. You watch IMAX at between one and one and a half picture heights away. So if you had true 4K reso-lution in your local theater, everybody would have to be sitting in the first 6 rows. Otherwise they wouldn’t see any extra detail. Their eyes wouldn’t let them see it.

Another of Jim Cameron’s arguments that I completely subscribe to is moving away from 24 frames to 48. That will be sacrilege to a lot of cinematographers. but we have to remember that 24 frames was never designed from an imaging stand-point. It was designed for sound.

Back when they were creating opti-cal soundtracks, they discovered that they couldn’t get intelligible sound on the film, which typically ran at 16 frames per sec-ond. They eventually settled on 24 frames per second with a 2-bladed shutter: 48 ex-posures per second.

Now if you take a still picture of some-body walking in front of you at a 48th of second, you know that they’re going to be blurred — motion blur. But if we were to record 48 frames per second with a 2-bladed shutter, then the integration time would be only a 96th of a second, and each of the images would be sharper.

Recently we’ve been renting a camera from Vi-sion Research called the Phantom, which easily shoots at 1000 frames per second. When you see a drop of wa-ter in a commercial fall slowly and create a lovely little splash of bubbles, that’s the sort of thing shot by these high speed cameras. They are actually quite low-res-olution, but because they’re shooting at such a short shutter speed, they look much much sharper than

cameras that have four times the resolution. This is why I honestly think that in the future, one

direction we’re going to have to go is to higher frame rates, not more pixels.

DYNAMIC RANGEWe think that the next improvement in digital imag-ing quality is being able to extend the scene dynamic range that you can capture.

We’ve been developing a new sensor technolo-gy called Dynamax. Now, I’ve been telling you that we don’t need 4K — well, this sensor is 37.5 megapixels! You basically have 6 green, 6 red, and 6 blue photo-sites for every pixel.

In the still photography world, people are taking multiple exposures at different stops, and combining them into a single image. This is “high dynamic range” photography, or HDR.

Let’s say I do an exposure at a stop of 2.8. The next one is at 4, then 5.6, then 8, 9, and 11. Depend-ing on what I’m shooting, the 2.8 exposure could com-pletely blow out the highlights, but it would have lots of shadow detail. And the f11 exposure would retain the highlights, but there would be no detail in the mid tones and the shadows. If we were to combine them, we’d have a single image with the most possible detail across the widest possible range.

Today, that’s only available in the still photogra-phy world. Dynamax is designed to do that for mov-

ing images. It has 6 photo sites for red, 6 photo sites for green and 6 photo sites for blue, registering those 6 to 1 output pixel.

But you see because I have 6 individual photo sites I can control those photo sites individually, so on. We can then take those exposures and blend them to-gether to create a high dynamic range image, just as if you were shooting half a dozen different exposures.

With those 6 red, 6 green and 6 blue photosites for each output pixel, you’ll have the equivalent of shooting 6 images with different exposures at once, and blending them together to create a single high

The Phantom camera


Project1:Layout 1 9/29/2008 2:28 PM Page 1

dynamic range image. At least in the first pass, we have no intention of

building a camera with the Dynamax sensor and try-ing to record every one of those photosites. It would be a waste of time. Dynamax is about getting more dy-namic range.

UPSIDE-DOWN DEVELOPMENTOne of the interesting things about Panavision’s head-quarters is that we have research and development here, we have the factory for manufacturing lenses and cameras right here, and we have the rental floor.

The rental floor puts us directly in contact with customers. We know what they want, because they tell us. “No, I don’t want higher resolution; I’d just have to sit closer to the screen. But yeah I’d like to have more shadow detail, I’d like to have more highlight detail. Can you do that?”

Another wonderful thing about the rental busi-ness is that the whole product development process is kind of turned upside down. When you sell some-thing, service is a profit center. When you make some-thing available for rent, service is a cost. Because we rent things rather than sell them, our best way to keep costs down is to build to higher standards.

Lenses are a great example. A zoom lens is built nominally, put together as per the spec. What we do next over in R&D is start making micro adjustments. We have a little eccentric cam that measures the angle of rotation, and the deflection from where the cam is supposed to be. There are over four hundred measure-ments going for the peak performance of that zoom lens at any particular focal distance.

That lens is then taken apart, the cam goes back into the factory, and we re-cut the cams based on the information we get from the tests. Sometimes we’ll do that 3 or 4 times. Why? Because in doing that, we can improve the performance of the lens by 30%, and be sure that it will continue to perform at the same high

level, without coming back for repair. Is it expensive? Yeah, it’s ridiculously expen-sive. But it’s not expensive over the life of the lens.

And it’s not expensive when you know that that that lens will not be sitting on the shelf because a par-ticular cinematographer doesn’t like it. We have a whole floor set up at Pa-navision where customers test equipment every day. They will reject a particular lens not because its pictures aren’t good, but because it doesn’t feel right.

That’s why it’s very very hard to build things for the rental market. There may be builder remorse, but there is no buyer remorse. If they’re not happy with something, back it goes onto our shelf, not theirs.

We can also develop new products in ways that aren’t practical in a retail environment. We just intro-duced the SSR-1, a dockable solid state recorder. We can record up to 80 minutes of uncompressed 1920x1080 at 4:4:4. That requires almost three quarters of a tera-byte of solid state flash memory. (We didn’t consider hard drives because they just aren’t reliable enough.)

When we started that development about 2 and 1/2 years ago, the flash memory cost alone to give you that recording time would have been $68,000! Of course what happened during the few years of de-velopment is that the price of flash dropped to 1/10 of what it was when we started. Now, had we been build-ing this to sell, we’d never have built it at all. It would have been totally impractical to even consider.

But if you’re going to rent it out, you can look at the longer term. That expensive piece of flash memo-ry saves us money because we never need to service it, or replace it for wear and tear. You only have so many read and write cycles, but one of our flash manufactur-ers calculated that we have at least 35 years! The tech-nology will be long obsolete before then.

It’s a win-win. We put a bit more into the design, manufacture and assembly process, and we get few-er equipment rejects, and fewer service problems over time. The rental environment requires you to make a better product available to the customer.

We’ve not come close to covering all of what John Galt had to say during our interview. To hear how the Genesis camera originally failed to meet Panavision’s first, most basic goal, how increasing the number of pix-els can actually degrade an image, and why non-linear transfer functions might be the most exciting part of your digital future, please visit:

creativecowmagazine.net/panavision n

The New Visions Issue — Creative COW Magazine 14Copyright © 2007. Sony Creative Software Inc. All rights reserved.

Establish your horizonYour creative vision knows no limits. Where others end, you continue to the next horizon. Your production technology needs to keep up with you.

New Vegas™ Pro 8 software delivers the ultimate all-in-one video and audio production environment for creative visionaries like you. Its unique, progressive approach to video production, unrivaled audio control and powerful DVD authoring tools set it apart from other non-linear editors. Having established the benchmark for speed and ease of use, this new version moves the bar higher with additional features that offer increased power, functionality, and creative potential.

Now with ProType Titling Technology, multicamera editing, a comprehensive channel-based audio mixing console, Blu-ray Disc™ burning, and superior 32-bit fl oat engine processing – in addition to its robust support for HDV, XDCAM™, 5.1 surround encoding, and 3D compositing – Vegas Pro 8 offers an unlimited array of opportunities to reach your production goals.

It’s more than audio, more than video, more than media. It’s your vision, a notch above the rest. Reach that new horizon with the power of Vegas Pro 8.

Learn more at www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegash

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Copyright © 2007. Sony Creative Software Inc. All rights reserved.

Establish your horizonYour creative vision knows no limits. Where others end, you continue to the next horizon. Your production technology needs to keep up with you.

New Vegas™ Pro 8 software delivers the ultimate all-in-one video and audio production environment for creative visionaries like you. Its unique, progressive approach to video production, unrivaled audio control and powerful DVD authoring tools set it apart from other non-linear editors. Having established the benchmark for speed and ease of use, this new version moves the bar higher with additional features that offer increased power, functionality, and creative potential.

Now with ProType Titling Technology, multicamera editing, a comprehensive channel-based audio mixing console, Blu-ray Disc™ burning, and superior 32-bit fl oat engine processing – in addition to its robust support for HDV, XDCAM™, 5.1 surround encoding, and 3D compositing – Vegas Pro 8 offers an unlimited array of opportunities to reach your production goals.

It’s more than audio, more than video, more than media. It’s your vision, a notch above the rest. Reach that new horizon with the power of Vegas Pro 8.

Learn more at www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegash

VP8b_CreativeCow.indd 1 12/6/07 4:11:08 PM

W e were in search of a new camera here at Maday Productions, so we asked ourselves

the new age-old question. Considering all the possi-bilities, which camera should we buy?

Terry Maday (Director, DP, Editor Extraordinaire), Richard Sims (smart gear-savvy producer we work with a lot), and I (Editor, Post Production Supervisor, Sometime DIT-ish type) all sat down over lunch one day to discuss it.

The shop already owned a Panasonic SDX900, their full-sized DVCPRO 50 camera. We decided when we bought it to get everything we needed to own and operate an HD production business: a $25,000 Fuji HD lens, nice sticks, Anton/Bauer HyTRON Batteries, an HD field monitor, the whole nine yards. When it came time to purchase a “big body” HD camera, we’d be ready to simply swap out the camera body.

We agreed on a few things right away. We’d had a great time renting the Panasonic Varicam over the past 5 years, but since we didn’t own it, we couldn’t keep playing with and tweaking it just like we wanted.

We also had an HVX200 with three 8GB P2 cards

and one 16GB P2 card. We had become comfortable with P2 workflow using the 200 mainly as a second camera, and depending on the job, sometimes as the primary camera. We were just looking for a big-body camera with interchangeable lenses and a little more in-camera image control.

Our first question, was — as I’m sure it is for a good portion of you when deciding to throw down serious dough on a nice camera — what’s up with Red? Were we ready? Was Red ready? What’s the real deal? Could we afford it? Would it fit our production lifestyle?

That last question pretty much made the decision for us: it came down to workflow. Since we do so much of our shooting on location, Red couldn’t give us a fast enough turnaround time from shoot to full-quality ed-itable material.

The digital content management process for any new camera had to be simple and accessible enough to begin editing in the field on a laptop pretty much instantly, or given to a production assistant to transfer and understand what needs to happen once you hand them a P2 card on a laptop. The Red does not meet that

Jeremy Garchow started his HD production career with Panasonic’s DVCPRO HD, so when he heard about a new Panasonic HD codec, he knew one thing: he wanted to hear more!


A new world of shooting:

AVC-Intra and thePanasonic AJ-HPX2000

Jeremy GarchowChicago, Illinois USA

This issue went to print over the holidays, during which Jeremy tells us he’s been “perfecting my skills killing pesky aliens that are capturing humans in Gears of War 2. I feel good knowing I have a role in saving life as we know it from absolute destruction. Back on terra firma, we’re posting recent shoots for Harley Davidson and GE, and we are in pre-production on several new projects.”

requirement for us, at least not very conveniently.There are many other reasons, but, after talking

it through, it was clear that the Red was not the most practical camera for us now.

AVC-INTRA Our collective attention then turned to Panasonic, as we had been fans of their cameras for a long while. I had heard about their new HD compression scheme called AVC-Intra, so I tracked down all the info I could. On a personal note, DVCPRO HD had launched my HD career, so if Panasonic had a new and improved codec, I was all ears.

I started by taking a closer look at the name. AVC: Advanced Video Compression, the basis of MPEG-4/H.264. Could be cool. Check.

Intra, as in all compression being done inside each frame. No long GOP messiness? Cool. I like that. Check.

It turned out AVC-Intra is an in-camera I-frame, 10-bit, full raster 4:2:2 codec, recorded to P2 solid state media. Tapeless. Check.

AVC-Intra comes in 2 data rates: 50mbps com-pares to DVCPRO HD quality, and 100mbps is touted as being “Master Quality.”

Recording at 10 bits really jumped out at us. Why do we care? Since we aren’t going out to film, HDCAM SR, D5 or anything of the sort, why go through the trouble of extra hardware, bigger files and longer ren-ders?

Our productions involve a lot of motion graphic integration, a little bit of green screen work and lots and lots of running around and shooting in all sorts

of environments, from inside to outside, sunrise to sunset, desert to rainy equator, interviews to beauty shots, domestic studios to foreign countries.

Ten-bit codecs capture more of that detail with-out creating banding and allow us to maintain optimal quality throughout the rigors of editing. Every graph-ic, gradient and key that I pull works out for the better in a 10-bit pipeline.

A shortcoming of tapeless workflows is that you can’t recapture 8-bit footage into a 10-bit codec like you can from tape. This doesn’t add any information, but preserves the video information as it makes its way through post. Software-only 8-bit to 10-bit con-versions can be less than reliable.


AVC-INTRA IS NOT AVCHDAVCHD and AVC-Intra are both H.264 codecs, but they’re very different. AVCHD is a con-sumer, long-GOP format jointly developed by Panasonic, Sony, Canon and others.

AVC-Intra is a professional intra-frame codec. Compression is performed within a frame, rather than referencing other frames as part of a group. AVC-Intra 100 is master-ing quality, while AVC-Intra 50 provides vid-eo quality similar to DVCPRO HD, but at half the bit rate (50 Mbps)

This is one of the reasons why broadcast and news are adopting AVC-Intra so quick-ly — high-quality HD in half the bandwidth, with ENG-grade pro cameras to capture it.

Terry Maday on the road with the Panasonic AJ-HPX2000 in Jilin Province, China

The use of a 10-bit camera codec resolves this: images stay 10-bit from beginning to end. The higher the quality of the master, the higher the quality that will translate down to whatever format you’re master-ing on, be it HD or SD tape, or any digital, web or file based delivery.

Working 10-bit also allows us to create very nice images with color correction and motion graphics, which to some of our clients is just as important as the content. When the production leaves my hands, I know I’ve been able to push every pixel as far as I can.

Since we primarily shoot and edit all of our own material, a tapeless environment also has some huge workflow advantages for us. When we are on the road shooting, we can start to review and organize our foot-age right away.

We have a visual log of everything that we’ve shot, and can figure out if there are any shots we still need. This has brought a new level of freedom to our pro-ductions, as well as speed. We can get interviews out to transcription and window burns made (if need be) of exactly the shots we need in extremely short order.

Sometimes, especially if we are working with a new client, we put together a rough assembly of the piece with scratch music, and upload it to an iPhone for the cli-ent to review the next morning.

This process brings a new level of confidence to the shoot as the client can relax, knowing that the work we’re doing is good. It can also bring out new and cre-ative ideas, as the process really helps the client visualize the piece more clearly.

We used to try this with tape, but it was much more difficult. In order to edit together something from 40 minutes of tape, for ex-ample, you have to first log and capture 40 minutes of tape before editing. With P2, you take 8-16 minutes to transfer the card, and then you edit using the clips you

choose at a glance. If you’ve flagged your best takes as you shoot, you’ve got even less to transfer.

Now multiply that out to a day’s worth of shoot-ing, and you can imagine how much faster it is to work with P2 than tape.

It was also important to us that, like DVCPRO HD, AVC-Intra is a “portable” format. We can edit and en-tirely finish pieces with even higher quality 10-bit AVC-Intra in full, mastering resolution on a laptop in the field.


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While we were capturing with the Io HD, I also managed to simultaneously record to P2 in the AVC-Intra 100 mode. Later, I compared the 100 megabit AVC-I footage to the 220mbit ProRes HQ files captured over HD-SDI through the Io HD — they were identical! I was very, very pleased, especially as this was coming

off in-camera compression. I had never seen anything look quite like it.

AVC-INTRA IN POSTWorking with AVC-Intra in Final Cut Pro is a fairly easy process, but it can be time consuming if you have a lot of footage. The log and transfer process for AVC-Intra from the P2 card is exactly the same as it is for DVCPRO HD on P2, except that the Quicktime files that are cre-ated are ProRes or ProRes (HQ) files. Transcoding to ProRes can take a long time, especially when working

with laptops in the field. Recording to P2 cards results in MXF files gener-

ated by the camera, organized in folders as shown be-low.

MXF programs (such as MXF4mac, Raylight and others) allow the passing of the P2 metadata, whether that is metadata you set up while shooting, or meta-data that has been added after the shoot. This com-pletely skips the log and transfer transcoding process and allows FCP to use the actual MXF media from P2 cards. With this, the power and ease of tapeless edit-ing can really start to be fully realized.

(Even though Red is tapeless, you have to convert the footage to some sort of editable codec/resolution, as there’s no way you’re editing full-scale 4K RAW, 2K RAW, or 4:4:4 HD on a laptop.)

SEEING, BELIEVINGSo tapeless and Panason-ic it was, but was 10-bit AVC-Intra the way to go? My curiosity was piqued and I was jonesing to get my hands on a camera that could shoot this new format just to see what it looked like.

As we kept the new camera discussion going, we were hired to produce, shoot and edit a national spot for Wilson Staff. I called the local rental house to see what they had in stock to make a rec-ommendation to Terry and Rich as to what camera we should kick the tires on. They had the AJ-HPX2000, and it had the AVC-Intra option installed. Perfect.

While the HPX2000 can shoot 1080 with pixel shifting, its native format is 720p, a format that I am very comfortable with. Working with true progres-sive images makes post life easier, and shooting at 24p also allows for easy creation of virtually any other format, be it PAL or NTSC, HD or SD, interlaced or pro-gressive.

For this particular shoot, we needed a 720p HD master, an SD NTSC master and a PAL SD master. 720p24 was a very obvious choice, and we were ready to see what AVC-Intra and the HPX2000 could do.

To me and my eyes, AVC-Intra definitely proved itself on this shoot. The images were very clean, with a higher quality and less compression noise than DVCPRO HD (especially in the dark areas of images) with similar file sizes. We had a P+S Technik Pro35 adapter on the 2000 to give us lens flexibility as the shoot required not only great quality, but also vary-ing depth of field. Zeiss standard speed primes, and a Cooke 18-100mm zoom, allowed us to capture the client’s vision in the optimal quality.

Since this was a studio shoot, we used the AJA Io HD to record the HD-SDI stream out of the camera, captured directly to beautiful 10-bit ProRes 422 HQ images that allowed us to immediately start cutting…and when I say immediately, I mean we were assem-bling rough cuts right there on the set, as this particu-lar job had an extremely tight turn around.

The Io HD also allowed for easy review and play-back to monitors strung around the studio. It was a totally fantastic piece of machinery and I was able to do it all from the ease and comfort of my laptop. Awe-some.


These workaround applications certainly aren’t problem-free. For example, using MXF4mac, I can send all of my AVC-Intra P2 CONTENTS folders to FCP, but FCP interprets the footage as 8-bit and knocks the video levels down to SMPTE range. This significantly reduces quality and negates the strengths of the AVC-Intra codec.

While other NLEs handle AVC-Intra (and DVCPRO HD for that matter) natively right off of the bat, com-plete with metadata, Final Cut Pro doesn’t. That means FCP can’t fully exploit the convenience and speed of tapeless production, archiving, and compatibility with broadcast infrastructures.

Right now, this is my only gripe with AVC-Intra and, again, it has nothing to do with the format itself. It only has to do with the NLE I choose to use.

If you work with AVC-Intra in FCP, I encourage you to ask Apple to enable real time AVC-Intra editing, en-coding and decoding. Panasonic has built a very stable and solid I-frame environment, so the foundation is there. Native support would make our tapeless lives so much easier.

THE BOTTOM LINEAfter that shoot and post process was complete, we knew that we had our new codec. Now we just had to decide on the camera.

The new Varicam 2700 is among the cameras that records AVC-Intra. I suspect that we would have thought long and hard about it if it had been an option when we were making the choice last summer, but it was months away from being released, and we had too many shoot days booked to keep renting.

We obviously went with the HPX2000, and using it over these past six months, we have been loving every minute of it. We‘ve dragged it around to both Africa and Asia within a single month, in both rainy and extremely dusty and dry conditions. The camera has held up flawlessly.

The in-camera colorimetry is very pleasing and the 2000 has the controls to let you get in there and really tweak the matrix to your liking. If you have a high contrast scene that you can’t con-trol, such as a camera being positioned inside with a sunny window in the back-ground, the Dynamic Range Stretch is also a very cool feature.

The low light performance has also been great, and 10-bit recording has re-ally allowed us to keep our creative vi-sion intact.

Among the few things that ended up in the “Con” column for the HPX2000 is that there are no variable frame rates. It’s not a huge deal, but we do use them on occasion. Since we mostly post in 720p24, we overcrank by shoot-

ing 720p60. Conforming down to 24p results in silky smooth slow motion.

The downside is that we can’t get true offspeed frame rates like 36 or 48 fps. We have an HVX200 if we really need a specific frame rate, but so far we’ve been doing well with overcranking to 60 fps as we need it.

Along with the camera body ($27,000 SRP), we also got two 32GB cards to complement our assorted 40GB of P2 cards, Panasonic’s five card P2 reader (AJ-PCD20, in my opinion an absolute essential if you’re shooting P2 all the time), a new Sanken onboard ste-reo mic, and a 2” 1080i capable viewfinder. We also decided to upgrade our Anton/Bauer charger to a four bank charger.

Add in the optional AVC-I board (standard with the HPX3000 and the new Varicams) for another $3000, and when it was all said and done, we paid around $39,000 (not counting our previous purchases of sticks, monitors, lens and batteries). Since the pur-chase, we have been extremely happy with the results, and so have our clients.

With the advent of the new Varicams that are now shipping (the 2700 and 3700), I am sure that the AVC-Intra format will quickly become more and more popular. I’m also sure that people will have more and more questions about this high quality, highly prac-tical format, as well as the cameras that support it. I recommend renting an AVC-Intra-capable camera and checking out the results for yourself.

And if you have any more questions, you can al-ways find me in Creative COW forums including Pana-sonic HVX-HPX (P2), Apple Final Cut Pro, and AJA Io.

n

September / October 2008 — Creative COW Magazine 22

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Nuke was originally developed for in-house use by Digital Domain, the effects house for over 60 major films. They won Academy Awards for their work on “Ti-tanic” and “What Dreams May Come,” as well as nomi-nations for “Apollo 13,” “True Lies,” and “I, Robot.” One of their most recent projects is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Nuke was released commercially just after the Academy gave Nuke a Technical Achieve-ment Award in 2002.

The most recent version is 5.1, and it runs on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard, 32-bit only), Windows XP SP2, XP64 and Linux CentOS 4.5 (32-bit and 64-bit).

I work in Montreal for the Toronto-based effects house Mr. X, one of the world’s leading Nuke houses, which is one of the reasons I was excited to start work-ing there.

This article is an introduction to Nuke for people coming into Nuke from After Effects, like I did.

LAYERS VS. NODESSimilar results can be achieved in both Nuke and After Effects on any given shot. In my work I use them both, but for more complex compositing I prefer to use Nuke because of its “node-based” design.

If AE is like a stack of images, Nuke is like a table

with all the images spread out. Each “image” would be a composition in AE. In Nuke’s “node tree,” the equivalent of an AE composition would be a branch comprised of several nodes. The benefit of the node-based interface design is that you can see everything at once.

For example, let’s say you have an unwanted roto mask pop on a certain frame. In AE, you might have to hunt it down inside a comp, inside another comp, inside another comp. In Nuke, however, you will likely be able to see the bezier culprit in the node tree im-mediately.

To better understand my analogy of Nuke as a table with everything laid out in plain view, I’d like to briefly show you a shot I worked on. It’s from the re-cent movie “Death Race,” starring Jason Statham and Joan Allen.

The director wanted a couple of helicopters com-ing in from camera left as part of the chase scene near the end of the movie.

The first thing that needed to be done was to clean up the background plate —there weren’t supposed to be any apartment blocks in the scene. This was done using tracking, bezier masks and sampling from clear parts of the sky. At left, you can see the apartment


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NUKE!An introduction forAfter Effects users

buildings, as well as part of the node tree for this shot.

The helicopter in the center photo, below, was a still that I found rummaging through the database. I created an alpha for it, and added some flashing lights and specularity using beziers.

To the helicopter, I added a search light which was created in Nuke using the Vol-ume Rays effect.

To create a reflection of the helicopter in the water, I flipped the animated helicop-ter, blurred in and used a portion of the rip-pling water as an alpha matte.

You can see part of the final composite at the bottom left of this page.

With that, I had a “finalable” shot, which is VFX lingo for a shot you can show the director that won’t make him/her up-set.

In AE, it would have been much more of a challenge to, for example, integrate the darks of the helicopter to match the sky. In Nuke, I used the ColorLookup node, and

had to bring the dark helicopter values down into slightly negative territory in RGB space (which is still positive in Cineon color space).

AE’s Curves won’t really let you do this. It could be achieved in AE with the Levels effect in 32-bit mode, although with less accuracy.

Ironically, even though AE is a program that does a lot of calculation behind the scenes and is more user friendly, getting a good result doing the kind of color correction I am describing above requires a greater in-depth knowledge of floating point workflow and log colour space and than in Nuke, because Nuke is principally designed with Cineon-based workflows in mind. Cineon files are less a record of color intensity than light intensity,

which allows interactions between layers in the comp to look much more realistic.

MORE FUN WITH NUKEHere are a couple of my favorite nodes in Nuke that might be of special interest to AE users.

ColorLookup The closest thing in AE would be the Curves ef-fect. In both, the image is altered by manipulating points on a diagonal line.

However, I like that Nuke’s ColorLookup node is infinitely zoomable, both in and out, and that


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you can manipulate points below 0 and above 1 along the curve (see below).

Also, the values of the colors you sample in the viewer are plotted as vertical lines in the ColorLookup Properties Panel. This is very handy for doing very ac-curate color correction interactively.

HueCorrectNuke’s HueCorrect node (similar to AE’s Hue and Satu-ration controls) works well to reduce or boost the satu-ration of any specific portion of the color spectrum.

As with the ColorLookup node, you can sample RGB values in the viewer (see red rectangle on bus, above windowshield), and the sample’s hue value will be shown as a vertical line in the HueCorrect node’s properties panel.

This hue can then be reduced or boosted by drag-ging down or up a point on the horizontal green line in the center of the image. Su-per handy!

EXRs AND CHANNELSNuke supports EXRs better and more completely than any other compositing pack-age. Understanding EXRs also helps understand some of Nuke’s advantages for handling every aspect of an image, and for organizing very complex compositions.

OpenEXR is a high dy-namic range format devel-oped by ILM, and now an open source format. An EXR has an unlimited number of 32-bit channels that can be assigned to a wide range of attributes — Z-depth, mate-rials, motion, shadows, spec-ularity, and so on. Nuke can read, process and write up to

1023 of these channels in a single stream.This multi-channel workflow highlights a major

difference between Nuke and other apps. Instead of having a huge tree with hundreds of nodes, I’ve been

joining separate passes on 3D objects into one EXR. This makes it easier to map many channels, combined in a single node, to other nodes in one step. Of course, I still have complete control over every channel in that EXR, and can still individually map any nodes to any channel.

Bringing all of an EXR’s channels into a single node reduces the mess on screen, but to take advantage of all that power, you have to keep track of everything in your head a little bit, too.

You also have to get used to the idea that every channel — shadows, specu-larity, ambient occlusion, in-dividual roto masks, etc. — is represented by a black and white image.


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You can see this in Photoshop or After Effects, where the Red, Green, Blue and Alpha channels are all represented as individual black and white images that create blends of opacity and transparency — but you might be working with several dozen of those in a single Nuke node.

In other words, you have to get used to the idea of adjusting lots and lots of black and white images. In many ways, this is the essence of compositing: getting transparency right by visualizing it as a black and white image.

The advantage of this ap-proach is that you have very simple tools to give you enormous power over a virtually unlimited number of attributes, to better integrate composited elements into the real world.

3D COMPOSITINGNuke’s 3D compositiing environment is both excep-tionally advanced and exceptionally well integrated into its overall toolset.

This also translates to integration with other ap-plications: objects and sequences can be imported, transformed, relit, and motion blur applied based on camera matchmove data.

Objects can also have images UV mapped or pro-jected on them, which lends itself to high-end set ex-tensions that require camera projection in conjunction with solving for camera position.

You can do some set extension in AE if you stay organized: a few years back, I did several set extension comps for the film “Stranger Than Fiction” in AE. But working and rendering in Nuke is so much faster that I would have finished more quickly, and Nuke’s more advanced compositing would also have made it easier to integrate the finished effects into the scene.

NODES, SCRIPTS AND CUSTOMIZATIONAnother one of my favorite things about Nuke is that

nodes are, in fact, plain text. If I select and copy any given node (in the example below, a Grade node), I can paste it to a text editor. It works the same way for a group of nodes. When you put them together for a single effect, Nuke calls them “gizmos.”

At Mr. X, you tend to hear a lot of “Email me that roto when you’re done,” or “Send me that iDistort giz-mo you made when you get a chance.” So if I come up with a cool recipe for, say, an edge detect, I just pass along the text.

I can also customize Nuke with this human read-able code. I can change the way it looks, create custom buttons, sliders and plug-ins, set up batch rendering and make other repetitive tasks much easier, as well as make Nuke fit into any unique production pipeline. This can all be extended especially well if you have knowledge of a coding language like Python, which is now integrated into Nuke.

NUKE IS EXPLODINGIf you are an AE user and considering getting into high-end feature film compositing, Nuke is a great and fun option that’s fast becoming the feature film com-positing industry standard. Nuke’s growth has already taken off, as all the major houses are already using it to some degree. In the next year, you’ll see virtually all high-end film work being done in Nuke.

Nuke is also affordable enough for most indepen-dent producers. To get started, The Foundry provides a free “Personal Learning Edition” for download, a great way to explore Nuke for yourself.

n

For much more on moving up to Nuke , please visit creativecowmagazine.net/nuke


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While my daily grind is playing media proces-sor between man and machine, I think all of

us vidiots fancy ourselves as creators.I started out making stop-motion shorts with a

Quasar VHS camcorder in 1984. There was no dead-line, no budget. I wasn’t aware such things existed. I was fourteen and I just wanted to make TV shows.

In 1990, I began my pitch-quest. I was working as a camera operator for the local ABC affiliate in Lub-bock, TX. While watching COPS with my buddies one night, I envisioned a local version shot with Lubbock’s finest over a local backdrop, with suspects that view-ers probably know.

Small markets have their downsides, but they do make it easy to schedule meetings with persons of po-sition. I scheduled a meeting with the local Fox affili-ate’s program manager.

He loved the idea, but weeks went by with no re-sponse. Then he stopped even taking my calls. I was surprised to watch the premiere of his version of the same show the next season.

I had handed my first show away on a silver plat-ter, but managed to take the experience as a compli-

ment. At least he liked my idea.

THE HARD LIFE & SNERKMy wife, Nancy, and I met in 1995, and in our first living room together, we began constructing sets for a stop-motion claymation comedy called “The Hard Life.” It featured a laid back duo with grand visions of great things they’d probably never get around to doing.

We scripted nothing, and did not shoot with hopes of selling anything. We simply had fun, created, and

Grinner Hester will never tell you success comes easy...or fast. After 25 years in the game, he’s learned success never comes at all, unless you keep going.


The secret to success in hard times? It’s no secret. It’s

Tenacity.

Grinner HesterSt. Louis, Missouri USA

Making his living primarily with a Sony FX-1 HDV camera and an Avid Adrenaline edit suite, he pleases clients ranging from ESPN to Anheuser-Busch. Wind in his sails, Grin-ner continues to create labors of love, while working to make a living on the side. “Fan-tastic Voyages” is set to begin production in the spring of ‘09, and Grinner continues to pitch “Moddin’ Art” to any network that will listen.

only later decided that MTV should look at it. Viacom accepts unsolicited material, or at least that’s what the receptionist on the phone said when I cold-called the network. I signed a release, mailed a pilot/treatment package, and waited. And waited.

And then came my first letter of death. If you have ever been turned down for anything, you know the “We have received your submis-sion, but unfortunately...” letter I speak of. Any-one that pitches shows will become familiar with them. Think of them as trophies. At least that’s how I see ‘em.

Nancy and I had our first child the next year, and turned our creativity towards chil-dren’s programming. Long time friend and artist extraordinaire Mark Gilmore brought his puppets and a story board to our home in Nash-ville. Over the next 36 hours, we shot a pilot for a children’s show called “Snerk.”

It was a true midnight production. I got permission to borrow a Betacam from TNN, the network where I was staffing as an editor — af-ter I borrowed it. I got permission to shoot in a grocery store after getting the shot, and got permis-sion from TNN to edit the pilot after hours in TNN’s lin-ear suites, after I’d already edited it.

I did the blind submission thing with both PBS and Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon called back twice with teases, but after months of phone-pitching on my lunch break, the only thing that came from the Snerk project was an awesome weekend and my kids’ favor-ite video.

BEYOND BACKSTAGEIn 2001, I was staffing for an entertainment company in Indiana that specializes in making tour spots for

prominent bands. You’ve seen these commercials: “Sunday! At your local Aaaampitheatre! Your favorite Baaaaaand!”

I met with one of the bands, gave them a couple of mini-DV cameras, and explained that I wanted to make

a show from their home movies, called “Beyond Back-stage.” The band I pitched was Styx, and they agreed! It led to a show I am proud of to this day. Rare are the projects that turn out ex-freakin-zactly how they were envisioned, and this one did.

The submission process could not have been easier, as I edited it on the clock and turned it in to my boss when done. It floated its way to the top, legalities trickled down, and in the end...nothing.

Again, I saw it as a positive experience. It was cool to have had the opportunity to create a pipe dream, and it was partially the success of this project that gave me the courage to start my own company.

MODDIN’ ARTBy 2004, I was self-em-ployed and needed a project I could be pas-sionate about. I’ve been a car-lover all my life, so I created a documentary series about car enthu-siasts called “Moddin’ Art.”

It’s cool because I simply shoot what I’m doing on weekends any-way, attending or enter-ing various motorsports events. I record these events first person, pay-ing an entry fee and shooting the race, show or meet from the partici-pant’s point of view.

I’ve pitched “Mod-din’ Art” to network after


network over these past 4 years, with no agent or en-tertainment attorney. I’m not holding out in the name of pride. I just haven’t found a suit that digs what I do yet. If you can get an agent to represent your project, man, do it.

For the solo show-slinger, there are pretty much three ways to get a pitch opportunity. Two of ‘em are “who ya know,” and “right place at the right time.” While these sometime work, they’re not something you can count on.

That leaves cold-call pitching, whether to the net-works directly, or by attending conventions designed specifically to couple show creators with show buyers. NATPE (National Association of Television Program Ex-ecutives) is an ideal example. For your entry fee, you get the opportunity to sell your show or concept to networks and agencies.

Even though I couldn’t really afford the trip this year, with so much invested into Moddin’ Art already, I didn’t feel like I could afford to miss it either.

I was thirty-eight and this was my first personal response to a life’s calling. I scraped up our last nickels and flew to Hollywood, where I believed the rainbow to end.

Days 1 and 2 of the festival consisted of semi-nars and panel discussions covering all the “what to dos” and “what not to dos” when pitching a show. It dawned on me that I had not pitched a show in person since sitting with that dude in Lubbock almost two de-cades ago.

I had mailed hundreds of pilots, treatments, sizzle reels and one-sheets, and I now wallpapered a wall in my office with network rejection letters. Going by the “ten nos for every yes” rule, I was due big time.

Day 3 was what they call the Pitch Pit, three 10-minute pitches for everyone at the Hollywood House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, with an execu-tive from someplace impressive at every table, and an actual timer set for ten minutes. It’s fair to picture an amusement park for grown ups with ADD. There is much line-standing, huge, short-lived adrenaline rushes, then more line-standing.

There was also a bull pen, a place for pitchers to scavenge over random availabilities with elite catchers of content. It is not a line. The most aggressive get the most pitches, and I managed 7 of them.

It was exhausting. It was exhilarating. It was a fine combination of dream and disappointment. It was ac-tually awesome to have a heartless stranger stare at me without emotion and say “Pass.”

I had a couple of prospects who were not interest-ed but knew someone who might be, and a few who took my one-sheet and a sizzle reel. I had my phone in my hand and was supposed to be calling Nancy and the kids with a “Woo-hoo!” right now, but the “We love it! Let’s do it!” response still eluded me.

FANTASTIC VOYAGESI spent the next weeks following up on every lead I

could, and turned up nothing. I was back to cold-calling as I worked my way through an online cable network directory.

I was in the Bs when I stum-bled on The Boating Channel. I had never heard of them, but I envisioned “Moddin’ Art” on the water. After all, it’s about people, not cars, and it would be as easy as hoppin’ on a boat and hittin’ some lakes.

I called them, the reception-ist sent me right through to the president of the company, and I verbally pitched a water-based version of “Moddin’ Art.” After five minutes, a sample reel of some

sort was eagerly requested. I had recently been on a cruise as a cameraman

on an unrelated shoot and had shot a segment for “Moddin’ Art” while on the ship. It was just kind of a documentary of my trip, but it was all I had that was boat-related, so I sent it in. It was such a long shot that I didn’t even mention this one to my family.

Once again, weeks went by. I was on a shoot for a new project when I got a call from The Boating Chan-nel. They took my sample reel much more literally than I anticipated, and tucked away on the side of a shoot with my cell phone, I heard an enthusiastic voice de-scribe a dream gig to me: I’d go on cruises in every epi-sode, and would document my trips as the average Joe in a new series called “Fantastic Voyages.”

About the time it was soaking in that this man wanted to pay me to repeatedly go on vacation, I heard, “We love it! Let’s do it!”

It had been a quarter of a century since I first picked up a camera and held big dreams. In that quar-ter of a century, I never stopped working toward those dreams. My cell phone still in hand, I called home.

“Hey honey, I just sold a TV show I wasn’t tryin’ to sell, to a network I’ve never seen before!”

n


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Adobe Photoshop for Video is not only the name of Richard’s best-selling book on the subject but is also the focus of his new Creative COW podcast, filled with great free tutorials to increase your Photoshop skills. Richard is also an Apple Certified Expert on Final Cut Studio and his Final Cut Help Podcast available from the COW is another great podcast you won’t want to miss!

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RichardHarrington,host of ourPhotoshop& FCP Podcasts

H ave you ever been in a position where a producer asks you to do something that

you’ve never done before? Your first reaction might be to stare, and say, “What are you, crazy?” But, after biting your lip and gathering your thoughts, you re-spond, “Sure, I think I can arrange that.”

I was in such a position a couple of years ago. I had just finished coloring a local feature film shot on Vari-cam when the producer asked if I could arrange to play the film at a local theater that had recently converted to digital cinema projectors.

After researching the options available at the time, I decided that the most cost effective way to do this was to actually drag my edit system up to the pro-jection booth, and play the film out to the projector and audio sound system using a AJA Kona 3.

It worked out great! The producers loved it. From that time on, it was clear to me that digital cinema was the future of theatrical film distribution and projec-tion, and that I had a real business opportunity.

In early 2008, I started Ridgeline DCM, specializ-

ing in digital cinema mastering for feature films. The mastering equipment is based around QubeMaster Pro from QubeCinema. Clients have ranged from multi-million dollar feature producers to ultra-low budget filmmakers.

SAY GOODBYE TO TRADITIONAL DISTRIBUTIONTraditional motion picture workflow begins with shooting on film. The original camera negatives are cut together to assemble the story, and the assembled film is then transferred to a positive film stock (inter-positive, or IP). The positive film print is then trans-ferred back to a negative film stock (inter-negative, or IN). Finally, release prints are made from the inter-negative film print, then shipped to movie theaters to be screened on a film projector.

This means that, by the time a film print reaches a movie theater, it’s at least three generations away from the original camera negative. Quality suffers with each generation, so that what you see in the theater never measures up to the original master.


Russell Lasson Provo, Utah USA

Russ is now head colorist and digital cinema technician at Universal Post in Salt Lake City, Utah. With two RED ONE packages and an Assimilate Scratch system in house, he specializes in RED post-production workflows. “With all the advances in digital cinema, it’s been a lot of fun to be on the cutting edge of the technology.” You can find him hosting Creative Cow communities for Apple - Windows on Mac, and RED Camera.

Digital cinema is coming. Russell Lasson is one of the people bringing it.Here’s his experience of what’s next, from an indie point of view.

21st CenturyCinema

On top of that, every time the film print is shown it collects dust and scratches. After three or four weeks of four or five screenings a day, that film print ends up looking like it’s been drug behind a pick-up truck that’s been driving circles in the desert.

After more than 100 years of this traditional film distribution, the major Hollywood studios created the

Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) in 2005, to encourage the adoption of digital cinema throughout the world.

The DCI standard was the tipping point for get-ting digital cinema rolling. In 2005, there were just a few hundred digital cinema installations. Today there are more than 5000 of them. Even though the major-ity of theaters are still using film projectors, that will change within the next couple of years. High-profile films ranging from “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones” to “The Dark Knight” have helped drive adop-tion, as have alternative uses, such as theatrical pre-sentations of live concerts and sporting events.

3D is also helping push adoption of digital cin-ema, as many digital cinema projectors can easily be adapted to play 3D content. With the wide success this year of 3D features including “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus 3D concert, you can expect to see 3D making a bigger surge in the future.

Even the National Football League is getting in the action by broadcasting an American football game to theaters in 3D! While 3D is still only in use in a frac-tion of the overall installations, companies like Dolby and Real D are shipping 3D digital cinema units at an accelerating rate.

HOW D-CINEMA WORKSMost major motion pictures are shot on film and finished using a digital intermedi-ate (DI) process. It starts as the original film frames are scanned in as digital files. Col-

or correction, visual effects, dust removal and titles are done digitally. This digital master is then printed back to film stock using a film recorder.

Even with DI post, a film shown in a movie theater using a film projector is still at least three film genera-tions away from the digital cinema master.

The development of digital distribution allows filmmakers to send a digital cinema mas-ter to theaters instead of sending film prints. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them digital film prints. These digital film prints consist of the film encoded into a JPEG2000 image sequence, and an audio mix for the film.

The JPEG2000 encoding reduces the size of the film from a couple of tera-bytes down to a few hundred gigabytes. This compression is also visually lossless, meaning that the digital print looks virtu-ally identical to the original digital master and, even compressed, will actually look much better than what you see from a film projector.

There are several different systems for digital cinema encoding, ranging in price from $799 to over $100,000, de-pending on the features.

For my own system, I choose to use QubeMaster Pro from Qube Cinema because it offers me all of the professional features that I needed without requiring expensive proprietary hardware. Plus, I’ve been really satisfied with their support team.

QuVis has recently released Wraptor, a $799 digi-tal cinema plug-in for Apple Compressor. It’s tempting because it runs on Mac, but it simply doesn’t have the options I needed for full professional encoding. So I went with QubeMaster Pro — which even though it’s a Windows program, I’ve been running on my Mac using Boot Camp. (See sidebar, “Using Mac and WIndows Together.”)

When it comes down to it, you can run just about anything through digital cinema encoding. I recently did a test with a feature film being shot in DV with a Canon XL2. I played it out from one computer, and dig-itized through the AJA IoHD to upconvert to ProRes at 1080. From there, I used Apple’s ProRes decoder for Windows to go straight into QubeMaster Pro for en-coding.

In another recent project, the film was archived as DPX sequences on LTO. After restoring the DPX files from the archive and making the needed changes to



USING MAC AND WINDOWS TOGETHERIn starting a new company, it was important to me to invest money where it would make the biggest difference and to cut costs that weren’t necessary. One of the ways I saved thousands of dollars was to run Windows software on my Mac.

The Boot Camp Assistant is a utility included with Intel Macs that installs Windows drivers for your Mac hardware, and clears a partition for you to format using your Windows installation disk. You can also create that partition on a second hard drive, but either way, you’ll need to provide your own copy of Windows.

You can choose which OS to boot into by holding down the option key at startup, but this method doesn’t allow communication between them. Neither OS knows that the other is there.

Here are some basic ways of transferring between the Windows OS and Mac OS that will hopefully make the process a little less painful — or at least less painful than it was for me!

The first way is by formatting a drive as a file structure that both operating systems can understand, such as FAT32. The disadvantage with this is that FAT32 is an outdated file system, with limitations on things like the maximum file size. There are also applications, including operating systems, that simply won’t work on FAT32-formatted drives, so it’s sometimes simply not an option

There are programs that allow you to read the file system of the other operating system you’re using. MediaFour MacDrive sounds like a program for the Mac, but it’s not! It’s a Windows program that mounts Mac Extended format (HFS) drives while running Windows.

On the Mac side, Paragon’s NTFS For Mac OS X allows you read and write to Windows formatted (NTFS) drives or partitions. Both of these programs run in the background, invisibly.

Regardless of which operating system you have running, you’ll be able to access your files on drives formatted by the other OS.

I have a Mac Pro that’s running both Mac and Windows. I also have a 5TB SATA RAID connected to the system using the ATTO R380 host card. Obviously, I need both operating systems to read and write to

the RAID. Running QubeMaster Pro on Windows is the priority for me on this system, so I formatted the RAID using NTFS.

By installing NTFS for Mac OS X, I can see the RAID in Windows — and I can write to it at over 400MB/sec!

While both MacDrive and NTFS For Mac OS X work great with video files, I have found a limitation to them. If you open a folder with 30,000 TIFF files in it, both programs behave unreliably. This was a really big workflow issue for me as I deal with reels from feature films that are often provided to me as TIFF or DPX image sequences.

On one project, I was provided with a FireWire drive formatted for Mac and I needed to get those files into the Windows OS. Neither MacDrive or NTFS for Mac could deal with that much data without passing out. So I needed a different solution.

This is where I learned about share points. Using share points does require two computers. In my case, I had a Mac Pro desktop running Windows Vista, and a MacBook Pro laptop with Mac OS X 10.5. I connected the computers together via Ethernet.

With the Firewire drive connected to the MacBook Pro, I opened up the Sharing panel in System Preferences. I selected the FireWire drive as a shared folder under the Options menu, I turned SMB Sharing on and enabled my user account to be used with SMB.

Now from the desktop Mac Pro running Vista, I navigated to the network icon in Windows Explorer and sure enough, my MacBook Pro showed up. I logged in using my user name and password and just like that, I was able to see the FireWire drive in Windows and was able to copy the files over without a problem.

There are several other basic ways to let Mac and Windows talk, including virtualization software like VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop that run Windows as if it were a Mac application, with Windows apps running inside it. (Once again, you’ll need to bring your own copy of Windows.)

However, these are the techniques that I’ve been using, and so far, I’ve been able to do everything that I’ve needed to do.

n

with the Christie CP2000M DLP projector, a 20’ wide screen and an Assimilate Scratch system. As we’ve brought in clients and potential clients, everyone has said, “Wow, this is exactly what we need here in Utah.”

Since then, it’s been crazy. We’re completely booked with features right now.

DELIVERYThe main means of distributing these digital film prints today is shipping hard drives around. With films need-ing only a few hundred gigabytes each, they can be delivered on a single drive with room to spare.

the film, I sent the file sequences directly into Qube-Master Pro. Part of what has made QubeMaster Pro so attractive is that it really has directly handled every file format I’ve needed to work with.

After encoding a project, things can get tricky, because the encoded files can’t just be checked on any computer. Instead, they must be transferred to a digital cinema server, which can cost between $14,000 and $20,000. The server has to be connected to a digi-tal cinema projector, which can run from $60,000 to over $100,000.

I’ve recently partnered with Universal Post and we’ve set up a theater for color correction, equipped

In the future (hope-fully the near future), shipping drives will tran-sition to delivery over sat-ellite. This will mean that the film is delivered to one central distribution location, and then trans-mitted to all of the digital theaters that need it. It’s going to be awesome!

Piracy prevention is one of the most interest-ing topics when talking about digital cinema. For example, digital film prints are encrypted dur-ing mastering. Decryp-tion requires a digital key file called the KDM, which resides on a se-cure server. Even if you robbed a delivery truck carrying the latest block-buster film, you couldn’t play it without the KDM file. The KDM can also be used to specify playback dates to prevent early screenings, or to prevent theaters from collecting films to show again in the future.

In addition to encrypting the content in delivery, the digital cinema servers encrypt the dual-link SDI video stream sent to the projector. The DCI projector then decrypts the stream for playback. So even if you intercepted the video stream as it comes off the server with your own dual-link capture card, you wouldn’t get anything useful out of it.

Finally, there is also digital watermarking. If someone records a film in a theater with their little vid-eo camera, investigators can track down the theater it was captured from, the screening date and time, and more — even if the film is recompressed and played on the web.

PLAYBACK AND BEYONDThe easiest way to describe how a digital playback sys-tem works is by comparing it to a home media server, like an AppleTV. You load your content onto it, then select what to play back as you need it. You can even make playlists to choose the order in which the con-tent is played back.

With digital cinema playback, each projector has its own server, with content and playlists that schedule showings. It’s all quite straightforward.

At the heart of most digital cinema projectors is DLP technology developed by Texas Instruments. While Texas Instruments makes the technology, com-

panies like Christie, NEC and Barco license it to make their own projectors. Projectors intended for digital cinema installations are different than other projec-tors because they must comply with the DCI stan-dards for color conversion, decryption, and resolution: 2048x1080, or 2K.

Many people might wonder, “What about 4K pro-jectors?” While they certainly exist, there are currently fewer than 20 installed in digital cinemas throughout the United States, compared to the thousands of 2K cinemas — which, I might add, still look awesome!

The future of digital cinema looks very promising. It already provides new opportunities for studios and theater owners trying to adapt to the new entertain-ment landscape. It is allowing more independent films to reach theater screens by avoiding the costly film-out process. It has rejuvenated 3D technology by mak-ing it easier for theaters to show. It has even allowed live concerts and sporting events to be broadcast to theaters to expand the potential audiences for those events.

Regardless of how individual installations are be-ing used, digital cinema really is the future of film mas-tering, distribution and projection. You can be sure of one thing: it’s coming soon to a theater near you — if it’s not already there!

n


A documentary I was shooting called “Healed By the Earth” required substantial visual support in the form of nature scene footage. I knew that I could manage at least one good HD video in the Colorado Rockies, but that’s not the game I was hunting. I went there to capture Stereoscopic 3D landscapes.

It was up there, in the isolation, that nature pro-vided a breathtakingly pleasant surprise. A waterfall hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park called Alber-ta Falls offered a spectacular opportunity to recreate what we naturally see, as 3D imagery. Fortunately for the production, that high altitude shoot at 10,000 feet forced me to stop every five minutes for air. Asthma concerns, combined with the steep grade of the hike, gave me opportunities to film about forty varied shots of beautiful, cascading waterfalls.

Only the rushing water could be heard, but I was sure that the 3D images would reveal more than words.

STEREOSCOPIC SHOOTINGNew tools for stereoscopic 3D production have started a grassroots revolution. Even in HD, stereoscopic 3D is quite affordable. Any kind of video camera can be

used, and although I’m using Final Cut Pro for editing and Nuke for compositing, specialized software can be found for under $100.

In some ways, 3D movie technology has changed little since the 1950s. Two cameras record the same scene. The relative angles of the cameras during shoot-ing, as well as the separation between the images as they are combined in post, show depth when viewed through cyan and amber glasses easily and inexpen-sively available online.

[Ed. note: The stereoscopic images in this article will properly display depth when viewed with these glasses.]

Using 3D glasses with no electronic elements is known as “passive” stereoscopic display. “Active” sys-tems often found in theaters show depth by synchro-nizing LCDs and shutters built into both the glasses and the projector.

I used twin Canon HV-30 HDV cameras for my shoot. The HV-30 manual states that there may be problems with cam function at high altitude, including lens haze. I opted for .5 Canon WD wide-angle lenses, polarized filters, and UV lens caps.

I had filmed with one of these cams time before,


Christopher WerronenPainesville, Ohio USA

Chris’s career has included working with special needs kids and adults, organic farming, and acting. He is developing the pilot for a stereoscopic 3D TV series as he works at the farm shared by his wife, son, a stable full of horses, some chickens, cats and a dog. You can find him posting in COW forums including HD-High End, Final Cut Pro, and Nuke.

The tools for creating 3D stereoscopic movies are now amazingly affordable. A few challenges remain, but you can easily see the possibilities.

Filmmaking adventures in

Stereoscopic 3D

but the setup for shooting in 3D was quite different. There were numerous checks to be made prior to each shot. The cameras are first mounted on a slide bar, something like a tripod plate that holds 2 cameras at adjustable distances from each other. The minimum I tested on my shoot was on 72mm centers, just wider than the 65mm typical of adult human ocular spread. For long vista shots I tested the maximum slide bar width, 104mm. Identical camera settings needed to be checked and set, over and over. Zoom off.

My concern prior to a shoot is that both cameras attached to the slide bar are squared and not slightly skewed. This is one way to avoid disparity errors such as double images and misalignments. Making sure my camera lenses are squared off also results in more comfortable viewing, and a natural 3D depth, just like looking through a window.

After I manually start each camera (the HV-30 lacks remote LANC triggers), I use a simple thumb cricket clicker, which I will later use as a guide to help sync the two tracks during the edit in FCP.

I expected to fill 20 hours of mini DV tapes in the mountains of Colorado, 10 hours total for each mono side of the stereo files. I hoped to see positive results, but as of this writing, I have not found a monitor or

software that I can use to display stereoscopic shoot-ing in the field. There was no way to know how this would turn out until I got back to Ohio.

DEPTH GRADINGThe process after shooting is simple. I align and trim each corresponding stereo video channel, and, after the edit, each is separately rendered as a .mov file. (I’m still testing, but am presently using H.264.)

The Foundry’s Nuke is a compositing application that imports and joins the files, then renders them as a stereo “anaglyph,” a movie with two color layers whose offset creates the effect of depth...if all goes well.

I wear my 3D glasses when joining the files in Nuke, and again when editing the composited anaglyph file back in FCP. I wind up putting the glasses on and tak-ing them off a lot.

Editing an anaglyph works just as it does for any other video file, except for some specific attention to 3D stereoscopic motion and correct orientation between cuts. Scenes on either side of an edit must balance in such a way that the audience is not pulled out of the 3D illusion. The resulting attention errone-ously becomes placed on “3D effects,” rather than “3D story.”

This is why telling the perfect 3D story requires “Depth Grading” to manage the internal depth of the scene.

One aspect of this is “depth matching,” so that the viewer’s eyes are not forced to change their focal plane from shot to shot. You might have experienced this difficult transi-tion while driving, by looking back and forth from your dashboard to the hori-zon. It takes time for the eye to settle, which is why edits that require rapid visual re-convergence are unpleasant for an audience to watch.

“Scene ramping” is another aspect of depth grading: changing an object’s or shot’s stereo distance gradually, so that the viewer’s visual convergence on one shot picks up where changes to the previous shot have left off.

Nuke is an excellent compositing program, which I use to join stereo-scopic files, correct for lens barrel dis-tortions in the wide angle lenses, and adjust speed as much as -50%, among other things. However, the depth grad-ing features are what make Nuke such a great choice for working with stereo-scopic images.

A new set of Nuke plug-ins called Ocula has become available to work even more specifically with stereo-scopic 3D.

For example, vertical disparities


will sometimes present them-selves. Those stereo images will have severe ghosting and will not focus into one clear image when combined into a stereo anaglyph image. Ocula can address this, not just with a simple Y-position shift, but by rebuilding frames to com-pensate for key-stoning and other errors.

I’m especial-ly interested in the 3D paint and roto features in Ocula that allow treatments for one eye to be automatically mapped to the other. I’ve had wonderful results using Synthetik Studio Artist to roto/paint HD frames in 2D so far, but the video tracks for each eye must be treat-ed separately.

Ocula presents a small problem for some 3D ste-reographers: it is priced at $10,000. I’m primarily a writer/ director, now beginning as a producer. I’ve learned the compositing programs well enough to know when it’s time for me to contract with special-ists to help with vertical disparity issues in particular – which I’ve now done.

STEREOSCOPIC DRAMA I still sometimes shoot landscapes, but I’m now curi-ous about dramatic performance in 3D. That search has taken me to a little village on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, with small retail shops, restaurants and one Method Acting school, run by owner-teacher Jessica Houde. I’m now filming young actors in 3D as they train and develop. These 20 –30 year old students convey tons of emotion for me to capture.

Filming 3D dramatic action has a whole set of considerations not found in stereoscopic landscape filming. I initially filmed the actors in HDV at 1420x1080/30, which had worked well for stationary nature scenes. But mo-tion artifacts in filming the actors be-came a considerable problem, often confusing to diagnose

After hearing that James Cameron has found doubling his normal frame rate to 48fps to his liking in the produc-tion of his epic, “Avatar,” I’m presently testing 780x420 @60p, and am pleased so far.

(Even though we are nearly a year

away from the scheduled release of “Avatar,” it is al-ready having a profound effect on 3D filmmakers at every level.)

Whereas in 2D productions, strong control of vi-sual depth of field directs the audience into the action or characters on screen, I prefer not to do this in 3D. Allowing the audience to choose their personal focus opens the field of vision to more natural 3D experi-ences in a scripted story. My work so far has led me to write scene structure so that the entire scene is in focus, writing for and encouraging multiple minor ac-tions as supporting stories within the scene.

An option that may work better for guiding audi-ences watching stereoscopic scenes is “audio depth of field” adjustments, panning from in-focus reference points within the scene, rather than forcing visual depth of field corrections.

Trial and error also shows me that all action needs to remain inside the frame to avoid the risk of actors appearing to float off the screen. Smooth transitions


43

capture the 20 hours I planned without data transfer options, which weren’t practical for these extended excursions. Tape has worked well enough so far, but a camera upgrade is definitely on the list of things to do.

Stereoscopic production obviously brings in a dramatically wider range of troubleshoot-ing questions. Were problems caused by cam-era misalignment? Uneven adjustments of cam-era settings? Can these problems be addressed in post? Or are they being caused by post?

Stereoscopic 3D is magic when it’s work-ing, but truly confounding when it’s not. So why bother with HD stereoscopic 3D at this point in its development for independent pro-ducers? For me, I like the serious challenge. I like the filmmaking and storytelling options it opens up. I also like the possibly fantastic out-come I see taking shape. The ability to create stereoscopic 3D at this level of production has the potential to once again reshape the indus-try from the grassroots up!

The ongoing editing of my stereoscopic mountain scenes continues to guide this story to its end. But as a first experience, my 3D spirit was awakened by my baptism in Colorado’s “God’s Country.”

nof their movements in 3D space across cuts require careful choreography. Early tests show that lighting plays an even bigger role in devel-oping the impression of depth in stereoscopic shooting than it does normally

As these elements come under control, they open up numerous screenwriting, performance and presentation possibilities.

TOWARD 3D PERFECTIONSo how did my Colorado footage turn out? The HDV footage itself is impossibly beautiful. Viewable as 3D, but flawed. The stereo shots from stationary points often come close to the state known as “3D Perfect,” but as I work more with them, I can see small issues that require some divergence correc-tions.

Although I recorded to mini-DV tape in Colorado, and so far continue to do so back in Ohio, I don’t recommend it. Tape systems drift if takes are longer than a cou-ple of minutes, so most of my shots have been intentionally brief, at 30-second bursts. I understood the value of tapeless shooting before I left for Colorado, but solid state ca-pacities were too small. I couldn’t

Creative COW Magazine — The New Vision Issue

My partners and I spent three years working nights and weekends around our day jobs to make “Women in Boxes,” a documentary about magic’s better half: the assistant. It was a labor of love. We begged, bor-rowed and stole (AKA, deferred payment) — whatever was necessary to get the job done.

Our first festival stop was CineVegas, in — you guessed it! — Las Vegas, which made perfect sense for the subject of the film.

From the word “go,” this was a glorious experi-ence. A few years ago, Trevor Groth left the fabled Sundance festival to become the artistic director for CineVegas, now in its 10th year. The list of who’s whos is endless, but includes Dennis Hopper (resident fes-tival host), this year’s honorees Anjelica Huston, Don Cheadle, and James Caan, just to name a few.

After getting our acceptance letter, we were as-signed a liaison who guided us through the festival with deluxe treatment. We felt like stars.

When we arrived, there was a big black Cadillac

Escalade waiting for us at the airport to whisk us to our free rooms. But who wanted to stay in the room? We headed for the filmmakers lounge, which was decked out with a bank of computers for our use, a ping-pong table, Stella Artois and Bombay Gin on tap, free mas-sages, daily buffet, and a media relations person who drove us around to our various morning news show interviews. (Side note: wacky AM news shows start re-ally early.)

There were numerous other perks, including my favorite: midnight bowling with Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me,” “Where In the World Is Osama bin Laden?”). We played with films like “Get Smart” and “The Rocker.” I missed those, but we had a red carpet entry with Robin Leach making us feel rich and fa-mous, even though we are neither, and our film played to a packed house.

Although this was the best experience of the three festivals, it was also the most “Hollywood.” This is not always a bad thing. I’m just saying that my memories


Harry PallenbergLos Angeles, California USA

“Women in Boxes” was also an official selection of Ireland’s Foyle International Film Festival. Critic Leonard Maltin hails, “What a remarkable group of wom-en — and what an entertaining film!” In addition to his work at KCET, Harry is working on the official video news release for the Hollywood Sign Trust. You can find him hosting in the Cow’s HDV and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

After 3 years working on their labor of love, Harry and his partners tasted the full range of film festival experiences, some more magical than others

Hit, Whiff, Miss!

Film Festival Magic

of this fest will be the events and royal flush treatment, not the films themselves.

So maybe Trevor has a tiny bit of work left to bal-ance the parties and the films. I hope (and pray) to be back to see how he does it!

DANCES WITH FILMSWe were soon set for our Los Angeles premiere at Dances with Films, which bills itself as the last truly independent independent film festival. If you have a known star, producer or director, don’t even apply.

I love this! It drives me mad when I hear of “indie films” with superstar actors and multi-million-dollar budgets. Indie film is when you spend years of your life on a project you really believe in, and you beg, borrow and steal for every inch you get.

An inch? Dances gave us a mile!Leslee Scalon and Michael Trent started the fes-

tival eleven years ago to help promote their own film. They did it again the next year just to prove that they could, and by year three they had alumni coming back with their next film. Nothing would stop the indie spirit.

They were organized, helpful, supportive and fos-tered a communal feeling for all those involved. Grant-ed, there was no ping-pong or free beer on tap, but there were lots of good films playing to full houses, with genuine people (a very rare thing in LA) behind them.

WHIFFI should have known when I heard that the West Hol-lywood International Film Festi-val crushed their name down to WHIFF.

WHIFF! My first thought was smelling a gross WeHo scent, and then I started thinking of the sports connotation…a miss. Who would want to associate their film with missing?

My next clue was when, five days late for the notification, the festival director called and said, “I was very surprised by your film. I thought it was going to be about women who wear men’s under-pants.” It went downhill from there.

Whereas CineVegas and Dances were in regular contact via email and phone calls, WHIFF would take 4 or 5 days to return a call. The other festivals either had a delivery check list months in advance, or at least kept us up to date as to how we could screen the film, get help with the press and so on.

At WHIFF, I had no idea how

bad it really was until the day of our screening. Our showing was set for 5 PM. I was still not sure what for-mat would or could be played. I got there an hour early with an HDCAM tape, a DigiBeta tape, and a DVD.

There was only a single person in the WHIFF booth. I started to ask about formats when the woman there said, “Oh, I’m not sure that film is even going to play!”

What?! I really started to lose my cool. “Hey, don’t yell at me — I don’t even work here,” she said. “I’m just a friend of one of the filmmakers. All the WHIFF people left the theater an hour ago. I just decided to sit down and try to help.”

What?! No WHIFF people were even there? It turned out that there were three screens, but

only one projector — until another filmmaker rented one out of his own pocket. (A few of us took his card and offered to send him a check to help. Mine’s in the mail.) That still only left two screens available, which meant many films were scratched. The saddest situa-tion involved a short film, “L’Altro,” by two Italian kids who flew with their dad all the way from Italy for the world premiere. What a letdown!

It turns out that three different filmmakers and an audience member knew a little Italian and tried to help them. After a false start (they had a PAL Beta), their film finally got to play about seven hours later…to a packed house of nine people. It really broke my heart. They were devastated. The look on those almost baby faces was sooo sad. Afterwards, they came up to me and said, “This is Hollywood.” I don’t know if it was a question or a statement. Either way, they were de-


pressingly right.We managed to get our film on too, only about

one hour late, to about the same nine people, but at that point, I really didn’t care. I became enamored with the bonding together among us, with anyone who was there trying to get it done.

In a way, more than any of the others, it was actu-

ally our festival.

LAURELS AND LOVEBeing treated like a high roller is awesome, Dancing without any stars is great, and really puts the focus on the films. Even when you smell a rat, well, it’s prob-ably still a rat, but running the maze with fellow rats can be fun.

So, fellow indie filmmak-ers, I say enter as many fests as you can. Get those laurels. Just don’t hang

your hopes on having distributors standing outside the theater to greet you with a bidding war. Go be-cause you have to make your movie, go because you love to see others with the same drive and passion ex-press themselves.

Go for the love of film.n


THE MAKING OFMy partners — Phil Noyes, Blaire Baron Larsen and Dante Larsen — and I knew we wanted to shoot in HD from day one. Besides, we had free access to a Sony Z1U (the top of the line at the time), and could rent another for $75 per week.

We would later get access to the HD XDCAM, but honestly, we were all stunned by the good looks of our little $5000 camera blown up on the big screen.

We supplemented this with a tiny, basic 4 light kit: key, fill, kicker, and eye light. Sound was a combo of Sennheiser 66 (anybody not using one of these?) and an AT 835 shotgun. The lav was… well, whatever was in the bottom of the drawer at my day job, KCET — PBS in Los Angeles.

We only had 35 shoot days in all, about 20 of them in the first 6 months, the rest scattered over the following year. By 18 months, we were pretty much done with the shooting and were well into the editing.

This was the really hard part. First we had to literally scan through and make transcripts (thank you, Blaire) of about 70 hours of interviews, and from the over 200 hours of magic footage that came

to us on every format you can imagine: from 2-inch tape to 8mm, from DVHS (had to buy a deck on eBay for that one) to D5!

Once we had transcripts, we had an editor chop away the dead wood for a few months, until she got ill.

We were racing for the Sundance deadline, so we took the drives back to our office. As soon as our day jobs ended, we’d go into the trailer for another few hours of editing each night, with me driving the machine while Phil and Blaire would scan for good lines and make fun of me.

Another few months later, we had a 102-minute version that did not get into Sundance, but really did start to show us that we had something good.

As Phil and I continued to work our day jobs together, and were seeing more of each other than our wives and kids, we called in another editor to tighten it up and add some spit polish that I lacked. At 80 minutes, we had a cut that started making it into festivals.

We were in!Now for the hard part — selling it. Maybe that

will be part two....

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T H E B A C K F O R T Y

“Why are you launching a new magazine when the publishing industry is in trouble?” We

were often asked that question a few years back when we launched Creative COW Magazine. But as I told many back then, we knew it was going to work — you told us that it would by the things you were saying online.

I can still recall the day we conceived Creative COW Magazine. It was during DV Expo in December of 2005. We had been moved into the far back corner of the hall, about as far out of the traffic pattern as the show’s man-agement could seemingly place us. We rarely had anyone come that far back and we sat there for a few days won-dering why we were there. From a distance, I watched the audience and began to notice the look on their faces.

It was clear that 2005 was not 1994.Back in 1994, people who were in this industry were

changing the world and they knew it. They were like those that I had seen back in the mid-80s who were fo-menting a digital revolution in the field of print publish-ing — and print would never be the same after them.

But the people we saw during DV Expo 2005 had lost that fire and their faces were almost universally void of enthusiasm as they traversed the aisles.

As I watched, I began to think about what had changed. My thoughts turned to earlier days when those who pioneered tools like the early Radius, Avid, Me-dia 100, Truevision and other systems, all fed on the en-thusiasm that they also were living in a time that would change the history of human communication.

As these thoughts were going through my head, I turned to Kathlyn and said that “I think we need to start a new magazine. The industry really needs a new voice in print. They need vision again.”

Kathlyn, ever my better-half and guide, said that “Ron, how do you propose to do it when you are sick a lot and are already over-worked as it is? There is a glut of magazines in this market and they are well entrenched. The COW doesn’t even have a sales staff.”

Did I mention that Kathlyn is smart? She is also the rudder that guides much of what I do and aspire to. She also listens, truly well.

I asked her to look at the people’s faces and I talk-ed about what was lost in the industry and why people needed another magazine; one that championed this in-dustry and held a viewpoint that we were still those peo-ple that stood in one of the most exciting times in all of human history. It must have worked because after a day of this, Kathlyn was sold and ready for the adventure.

We understood why magazines were struggling to find their footing on the Net and we knew that the huge user base we had online was our secret weapon for both stories and insight — our 24 hour a day focus group.

The Net contains voices that know as much as the host of writers that Tim Wilson calls the “Usual Suspects.” A new organismic “collective” has developed and the COW has proved itself adept in serving as a focal point for this collective.

It was logical that a magazine come from such a vital community as Creative COW. It is also just as logical that the COW Magazine will continue to grow in 2009.

With magazines like Studio Monthly announcing that they have ceased print publication in favor of digital-only editions, we have been asked if we will follow suit? No. We find no need for that kind of move, presently.

There are many things that the Net can and does do better than print. But there are also things that print does better — and the kinds of stories and themed issues we create need more than a PDF or a Flash file online.

Yes, the future is changing and we need to keep in step with it. A wise man once said that people without a vision, perish. That is still true today.

But in the past, this industry’s visions were those of publishers whose belief was that their ideas and timeta-bles were the ones that mattered. Their writers would tell you what you should know. Our belief is that in a commu-nity as vast and as expansive as the COW is, there is al-ways a number of voices on any subject that are the de-finitive voice. Our secret is that we not only watch you but we listen to you. We bring you the voices that matter.

We know that you are the secret of our success. You are our eyes, and we will continue to serve your vision.

n

New Visions: The Future of Creative COW MagazineWILL WE FOLLOW OTHER MAGAZINES INTO DIGITAL-ONLY EDITIONS IN 2009?


Ron LindeboomPaso Robles, California USA

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