High Resolution Revolution

Larry Clark on Wassup Rockers:


A few observations about Larry Clark:

•He was born in 1943.
•He shoots beautiful and compelling images.
•His films are often about young kids living sexual
and violent lifestyles.
•He calls himself a method director, and he says that
Wassup Rockers is his best film.

I don't know if I'm going to see this one or not. His films are not for everybody.

Mind Blowingly High Quality DVDs From Master Tape Sources, here's how to do it:

Decklink Extreme™ --> Log and Capture tool in Final Cut Pro 5 --> Export to: Compressor, use the 90min. Best Quality setting --> Import into DVD Studio Pro

Easy Peasy. Now here is what it looks like:

















The picture on the left is the NEW process, the picture on the right is the OLD process.

Because it is possible, that one day I could inadvertantly make something this bad.

And when I say "bad," I of course mean brilliant.

I don't know a whole lot about Errol Morris as a filmmaker and I wish I did, but I don't. But here is one his short films in which millionaire business tycoon in real life, Donald Trump discusses millionaire business tycoon in the most famous film of all time, Citizen Kane:Watch: Donal Trump Discusses Citizen Kane

P.S. I know that this has been on the internet for a long time, and I'm not trying to break ground here. But this is classic.

These days, I'll take what I can get, especially if it works. While one would never invite clients into a room like this, sometimes function wins out over fashion.
Here is what you see:

*G4 1.25 GHz dual processor, 1 Gig SDRam
*Blackmagic DeckLink Extreme™ PCI card being fed SDI from a Digibeta deck
*1 500-gig Lacie Drice via 6 pin Firewire (capture scratch), 1 160-gig Lacie daisy chained through an 80-gig Lacie
*17inch Apple Monitor
*Epson Printer and Scanner
*DVD Duplicator
*Final Cut HD, Compressor, Adobe Creative Suite, After Effects and DVD Studio Pro

This is the setup that I will use to edit the Brazil Documentary from now on. As per my post on burning high quality DVDs, this machine will be used for that tutorial as well. All of my voice over for the documentary will be recorded using a Mackie mic, through a Mackie board and actually recorded into an Avid Media composer through the digitize tool. (If you are interested in seeing what that looks like let me know.)

Two things:

1. Robert Altman is a genius.
2. I haven't enjoyed a film this much in a long time.

Today I began putting together a new setup with the dual processor G4 that I have been using to cut the HD footage for the documentary, only now, the computer will be directly connected to our Digibeta deck through a 10 bit SDI Blackmagic card, thus enabling us to take in 10 bit 1:1 uncompressed video. The advantage to this is that we can make mind blowingly high-quality DVDs for our reels from now on. I will take pictures of the hardware tomorrow morning and post them above this post. I will also be outlining the process to make the highest quality DVDs possible.

Every cut is a learning process. This edit is a lesson in organization. With 11 hours of footage, there are a lot of ways to go about organizing your bins. Because my cut is fairly chronological I have chosen to organize by tape number instead of breaking the footage down into interviews, close-ups, sunsets etc.

One cool feature of Final Cut Pro is that it makes your various sequences into tabs in the timeline. This is proving useful for this edit because I am aranging each day basically as a seperate sequence. Then after I cut each one down I will mix them all into one timeline to produce the final product.

After switching from the 933Mhz G4, to a Dual 1.25 GHz Power PC G4 with 2 MB L3 cache per processor and 1 GB DDR SDRam, my HDV footage is actually editable. It is all running fine, without dropped frames, so it was definitely the processor before. I have 11 tapes worth of footage and I have just finished the first one with 7 minutes and 20 seconds worth of video in the timeline, so my guess is that the video in it's entirety will probably end up at 30 minutes. The majority of my footage is b-roll and I was more excited and ambitious (and nervous) at the beginning, so this may account for why I have so much good stuff so early on. Here is what my screen looks like now:

I've been having an issue that has been keeping me from laying anything down in my timeline, because everytime I would drop in a clip, even if the propotions looked correct in my canvas window, there was still some letterboxing on the top and bottom of the image. This was causing me to have to render everything in my timeline before I could even see my edit. Even when I changed my sequence settings to the correct resolution I still had to render. HDV which I'm cutting has a screen size of 1440x1080i, but even when I manually typed in this resolution my image was letterboxed (you can see this in the image of the little boys in the post below this one).

That's when I deleted my sequence and went into the Easy Setup menu. Usually my pride doesn't allow my to use anything but the advanced settings in any program, however in FCP, selecting this feature when you start an edit is crucial. Here is how to do it for HDV:With all of the different tape formats floating around out there it is important that your timeline and import settings are set correctly at the start of your project. This is a great feature in Final Cut Pro.

I am cutting the Brazil Documentary now, and on a G4 nonethelss. I'm using, a 500gig Lacie drive with a 6-pin firewire cable, Final Cut Hd and a 933 MHZ G4. That's it. It's not a fast machine, but it's working. I can't believe how easy it all is. So, HD is in grasp. Mind you it is HDV so it is about a 5:1 compression, but it's still HD. I figure it took about 15 gigs to cover each hour long tape, so the 500gig drive I'm using is plenty. I'll give some more updates over the weekend. Here is a screen grab of my setup:Notice that there is NOTHING in the timeline...*sigh*

It's been a while. Apologies.

This movie looks like it is going to be really good. It looks indie to the max, and I say that as a kind of joke, but at the same time I am very serious. Movies like this don't come around very often, and when I say that I don't mean movies with no budget and no-name actors, I mean movies with no budget and no-name actors that win prizes at SXSW. This movie may also look so good to me because it speaks to my generation, the 20 somethings who are trying to have careers and plan for the future, for marriage and for getting older. Watch the trailer for the Puffy Chair and tell me what you think.

P.S. Can anyone show me how to make a picture a link? I think I just figured it out while typing this, but nonetheless I need some html help.