High Resolution Revolution

There is a website called Lynda.com, on which, one can access hours and hours and hours of really well put together tutorials on how to use various pieces of software. Here are some of the ones that I am learning:

After Effects
Final Cut Pro
Soundtrack Pro
DVD Studio Pro
Compressor
Illustrator
Photoshop

And many more. It is a great resource for any serious editor. The payment options start at $25 a month, and it is worth every penny. If you wanna be a technically proficient editor, these resources are probably better than college for that.

I watched Jackass Number 2 the other night with a friend who I hadn't seen in a long time. I laughed uncontrollably throughout most of the movie even though deep-down I knew that the Jackass guys were taking it too far. I value that kind of self-expression, however, I'm a little fearful of how far the envelope is being pushed. I just as much enjoy seeing guys race down a hill on giant blocks of ice, as I do any stunt they pull, however, seeing a guy get blind-sided by an explosive balloon and nearly blinded for life is over-the-top and unnecessary. If you are a girl, don't go see the new Jackass movie, I can't imagine that you'd find it remotely interesting. But if you are a guy and you've never seen the CKY movies, look them up on Youtube, it's pretty interesting to see the evolution of these guy's filmmaking.

For those of you anxiously awaiting my return from Europe, here are some clips from the first Episode of Project MyWorld.

The show airs on Direct TV "Channel 101" on Mondays at 5pm.

When this is all through, I will post a lesson in how to correctly expose video images. There is definitely a difference in exposing a 4:4:4 color space as compared to a 4:2:2. HDV doesn't hold up when the forground is correctly exposed and the background is blown out, this makes shooting in high contrast tricky. More news about traveling Europe and shooting a dramatic travel-documentary using the Sony Z1U. L.A. has been eye-opening so far.

Here is the itinerary:

Begin in LA for a few days to establish the 3 characters. Head to Spain for the Tomato festival. Drive up the French Riviera heading for Venice, Italy. Fly to Croatia, for the beaches. Fly to Munich for Oktoberfest. Take the train heading for Paris. Take the Chunnel to London. Fly to Reykjavik Icleand before heading home.

I'm really excited about this.

12:00am - Wednesday - Finishing up project to be burned to DVD the next morning. The product of 2 months of work.

9:00am - Wednesday - Plug in drive to begin working on Project DVD, get an instant message hear a click and an electro-static noise. Get an error message saying, "improper device removal."

9:30am - Panic sets in as I realize all 11 hours of footage has gone offline. Panic more when the power button on the 500gig Lacie drive that I have borrowed does not work.

10:00am - Try to stay calm, try to find our IT guys.

11:00am - Open up the project backup and try to relink the footage that I have backed up to another drive. Panic again as I realize that I only backed up 4 hours out of 11 hours of footage.

12:00pm through 7:00pm - Everything I touch is falling apart in my hands, footage is not relinking. Pay $65 to rent an HDV camera, footage will not redigitize correctly. Learn that the hardrive is dead. Go to the Apple store and spend $370 to replace the drive that just died, because it didn't belong to me.

8:00pm through 10:30pm - Hang out with friends try to remain calm. Drink a Carlsberg and talk about the Bible.

10:30pm - Come back to the office, delete the 6 hours of recovery work from that afternoon and start fresh, create a new project backup using Final Cuts "Media Management feature" in which a new project is created using only the selections in your timeline, begin to recapture new offline clips.

12:31pm - Thursday - Official last day at work. Read and try to stay awake as I feed tapes into the HDV camera.

To sum up, I spent about $470 today and lost a large amount of the work that I having been consumed by for 2 months. It could be worse though. If I hadn't backed up the Final Cut project file before I left last night, much more could have been lost.

*Moral Of The Story - Back up your projects constantly, and never ever trust hardrives, especially Lacie hardrives.

The 500 gig Lacie drive that I had all of my footage, voice-overs, graphics and music on just crashed. It has been shutting off and then coming back on each morning when I turned it on for the first time and I knew there was a problem. This time it didn't turn back on, and won't turn back on no matter what I do. Most of what I had on it was backed up, thank goodness, however, the drive doesn't belong to me and it's overdue which is going to strain my relationship with the friend I borrowed it from (I will of course buy him a new one). Some data will no doubt be missing and irreplaceable, this is a major setback under the time constraints I am in.

Oh, and also, my sister's wedding video that I was cutting was on the hardrive that crashed and that wasn't backed up at all, which means it's gone for good. - "Deep exhale."

*It turns out that I didn't have everything backed up like I thought I did. I have to recapture my footage and I don't have a deck to do it with. This is not good.

With the cut now complete, the real work begins... Next step, finishing, then authoring, then packaging, then distributing. I would venture to say that this video took 200 hours to complete. This is the first long-format mission-doc that I have created. The first time is always a learning process, and usually painful, but I'm already looking forward to the next one.

Last night a friend brought me a DVD that I had given to another friend to check out almost a year ago. After the first friend's dog ate the DVD case, that friend gave the disc to yet another friend who then kept the disc for 8 months. The last friend in the chain finally went over to the second friend's house, picked up the DVD and brought it back to me, chewed-up case in all.

I had actually never watched the DVD. I had watched episodes of the TV show that were on the DVD, but I'd never actually seen the content of that disc, which contained the first 3 episodes of a TV show called Travel the Road. Today after work I watched the first episode. I was blown away. It is the best program on television. It is the best program on television. Find out where and when Travel the Road plays in your area (on my cable system it comes on a crazy religious network at 1am), if you have Tivo, Tivo it, if you can stay up, watch it. This show is amazing for so many reasons, the story, the photography, the adventure, the passion behind it all, and the message.

Travel the Road is the product of these two men (among others):

Timothy Scott:

And William Decker:

After a month and a half of editing, and losing weight and procrastination...the video still isn't done. But it's getting close! So far I have cut 10 sequences, all ranging from three minutes to about six minutes. I think their will be two more, which I should finish the rough cuts of today.

I saw three minutes of this film the other night on PBS, the last three minutes, and I said to myself, "yeah, I like that."

There are certain concert films that capture the emotion of the performers in a way that television has completely forgotten, call it the MTV generation. Even my beloved Conan O'brien falls into this trap to some degree. There is something about a close up, unfaltering on a vocalist's face as they sing a song that moves us more than a million crane-shots and fast cuts and inserts of fingers on instruments. If you know what I'm talking about than you've probably seen Martin Scorceses "The Last Waltz," his film of The Band's farewell concert in the late 70's. It is an amazing film, and I highly reccomend it.


Which brings me to this:

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, which will soon hit select theatres is another amazing concert film and documentary in the same vein. Even if you have no idea who Leonard Cohen is, and even if you have no idea who the performers who play his song are in the film, you will enjoy this movie. And chances are, you will fall in love with Leonard Cohen.

There is a new show on Animal Planet called Caught In The Moment, and it is fantastic. It hearkens back to the days of classic National Geographic nature documentaries, or the sort that were mastered in the 1980s and have since fallen by the wayside in favor of assembly line homogenous garbage with "Extreme!" in the title. The difference in this particular show is that it is a behind the scenes look at the "making of" process of classic nature-doc filmmaking.

The two hosts are Tristan Bayer and Vanessa Garnick, both gorgeous, environmentally conscious "Green" travelers and filmmakers. What's funny is that these young filmmakers are of my generation (early 80's babies) and thus they talk and act and think in a similar way to my own MTV generation. They say "like" a little too much, and use "awesome" as their adjective of choice, but they don't shy away from genuine emotional outpouring at the majesty of natural creation. I've only seen one episode, but the show holds great promise as a refuge from the current trend of mindless fodder disguised as "nature-loving" entertainment.
If it takes gorgeous people to get a new generation to be passionate about conservation, then that's what it takes, but these two are the real deal.

I saw a good movie tonight. It shook me. On a scale of cinematic quality I give it a 5 out of 10, I mean it's Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation.But on a scale of cinematic and pragmatic importance I give it a 10 out of 10. This, along with a film called The Corporation, may be the most important movies you will ever see, at least on a worldwide scale. They offer no easy solutions, but they may well motivate you to take on the small changes in your life that will secure the possibility of a future for your children.

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.

This is an outline of the new edit suites my company will be setting up in July:

That's Two 24inch Dell LCD Monitors, Quad 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5s, Avid Mojo SDI, and Final Cut HD.

There's really no need to have both Final Cut and Avid on the same machine, but if the option is available, why not go for gold. In my humble personal opinion Avid is a better piece of software to work on trimming and timing, especially when clients are sitting in with you. However, if the name of the game is simple keyframing, light compositing, moving titles etc., then Final Cut Pro is the way to go. So, it's going to be nice to have both options at the click of the mouse. By the way, our original systems which consist of Avid Media Composers, 1.5 GHZ G4s, and old school monitors ran a bill of $55,000 a piece. Our new set up will cost under $10,000 a piece. And Avid has released the Media Composer software for the Mojo, which means two tracks of real-time effects. With SDI we can also connect digitally to our Digibetas, DVCAMs, and HD decks.

Whatever that means...The trailer that we were working on never got shown anyway. So after 48 straight hours of hard work, well, our work was in vain. And added to that, I have no way of cutting the HD footage, because I don't have access to a system that can handle it, nor do I have a deck to digitize the tapes, so for now I'm moving on.

Just a recap:
Ask various people for money totalling $2,300 to go to Brazil.
Going to various meetings for months planning for the trip.
Asking friends for cameras, tripods, cases, microphones, various equipment.
Taking on $7,000 liability for their equipment.
Going to Brazil, working butt off, getting sick, getting to see the Amazon.
Coming back after 24 hours of flying and 4 flights.
Asking a friend to edit the footage into a trailer over night.
48 straight hours of work...
Then the video doesn't get shown.

*sigh* Welcome to filmmaking.

This is when P2 would come in handy. I shot 11 hours of footage in Brazil, which means that it took well over 11 hours to digitize the footage. After passing the tapes and camera off to Steven on Sunday night at about 11pm, the tapes didn't finish being captured until 11:30pm on Monday night. This gives Steven roughly 16 hours to complete the trailer for the doc, and that does not alot any time for sleeping. We shall see if it is turns out as awesome as it should be.This is a very flattering shot.

So I'm back from the Brazilian Amazon. It took 24 hours of flying and 4 flights to get back but somehow we all made it. I'm feeling extremely jet-lagged, but we have to have a theatrical trailer cut for the doc by Tuesday evening so there is no time to rest. I ended up shooting 11 hours of footage. The other people on the trip were neither encouraging nor cooperative, so instead of it being a team effort to make a film together, I became the annoying guy who was always filming everything. This has taught me the following very important lessons in documentary filmmaking: Have a crew (even if it's only one other person), make sure your subjects understand the project, the process, and the sacrifices that have to be made to capture the footage, and make sure that these details are completely taken care of before filming begins.

One light at the end of the tunnel, is that my friend Steven, who is an incredibly talented editor is cutting the trailer so that I can get back to work today (I already missed 6 straight days to shoot the film). We had a problem importing the HDV footage so he is having to down convert to SD DV which also made the footage 4:3, even though it was filmed in 1080i (16:9). At this point I could care less. I just can't wait for the members of the trip to see the footage, so that FINALLY, HOPEFULLY, they can understand why I was there.

Packing Light

Sony HVR-Z1U

Consumer Tripod with Remote

The guy who donated the camera insisted that I use Professional HDV tapes

As you can see, I don't have a Pelican case (yet). The crayons are to give to the children

These five items are some of the most important things that I will carry. A fold out bug net to cover my face from swarms of Malaria ridden mosquitos, cleaning tablets to cleanse my Nalgene bottle each morning, The Bible, because there's no better time to read the word than when you are traveling, a headlamp, to light subjects in low light conditions, to read by and just in case, and bug spray with 20% deet, because I heard there are a lot of heinous bugs in the Amazon, and I don't think it's just a rumor.