Genesis to be trialled for Superman

[David Mullen ASC]

My fear (and I think Mike Most's too) is that colorists will be eliminated by editors and DP's trying to do color-corrections on their editing systems. On the no-budget project, that's fine, but on a professional job, you'll probably find some idiotic producer who is trying to save a buck by eliminating the all-important color-correction stage.

 

I used to work in an insurance corporation as a forms designer and back-up typesetter, and when the PC came in, we had executives and insurance agents who thought they could design and typeset their own printed forms on their PC's and eliminate the in-between steps of the typist, forms designer, typesetter, and printer.

 

It was a disaster -- these guys had no design skills, no typsetting skills, not even typing skills, and no sense of why a corporation's printed material seen publicly should have a consistency of look, etc. Plus you had all of these insurance guys wasting their time doing printing-related work.

 

Someone who is a good editor is not necessarily going to be a good colorist. As for a DP doing their own color work, that could also be a disaster since there is an aspect of engineering behind it, not to mention speed -- it's going to go a lot faster working with a colorist who does this stuff every day of the year than having a DP try and do the work.

[Mike Brennan]

On the no-budget project, that's fine, but on a professional job, you'll probably find some idiotic producer who is trying to save a buck by eliminating the all-important color-correction stage.

 

In the last year I have seen a trend toward low budget commercials and pop promos where the editor/director with Apple edits and grades it themselves.

 

These guys are not fresh out of film school, one is 43 and ran a post house, another is 32 with an animation background. They like the idea (at the moment anyway!) of not commuting, and doing their own thing by looking after a job for a price.

 

 

 

Mike brennan

 

 

 

 

 

Mike Brennan

[Sam Wells]

You can easily edit at native 24 and reconform at 2 or 4k with little hassle apart from the expense of equipment and storage. At HD this is achievable on a very modest system and from conversations I've had with Apple 2K will be similarly achievable in the next year or so. Keith

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This thread seems to have branched into a few others; I want to comment on some (I have some disagreement with Mike Most but he's not neccesarily wrong either :)

 

But in the spirit of specialization, One thought at a time.

 

Conversations with Apple, care to say more ?

 

Yes I'm fishing.

 

-Sam

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm sure one can find many examples of someone doing their own color-correction work that makes sense for their project.

 

But if one thinks that an editor can do a colorist's or color timer's work, then why not think that colorists and color timers should also edit the movie? The skills that make one good at one job are not necessarily applicable to the other.

[Mike Brennan]

I'm sure one can find many examples of someone doing their own color-correction work that makes sense for their project.

 

But if one thinks that an editor can do a colorist's or color timer's work, then why not think that colorists and color timers should also edit the movie?  The skills that make one good at one job are not necessarily applicable to the other.

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Yes absolutely. I don't disagree. If they do edit and grade a movie will they call themselves a colourist?

 

 

 

 

Mike Brennan

[Mark Allen]

It was a disaster -- these guys had no design skills, no typsetting skills, not even typing skills, and no sense of why a corporation's printed material seen publicly should have a consistency of look, etc.  Plus you had all of these insurance guys wasting their time doing printing-related work.

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With DTP (desktop publishing), and website designing, and now DV and even HD home filmmaking - it seems that what happens is that at first everyone jumps onto the new technology at first without any training of the craft beyond having seen the end results and lots and lots of really awful work is created. However, in a few years, there is a recognition for what makes someone good at the craft and the noise level dies down where the truly talented get the work and the truly desperate still do it themselves. I think that is going to be the pattern everytime new technology comes out which lets people do previously hired work themselves.

 

I'm going to take your tangent and raise you two.

 

first...

 

I was in a conversation five years ago with some filmmakers and we were all talking excitedly about what would happen now that filmmaking tools were becoming more accessible. We were waxing philosophic about all the gorgeous and unique perspectives that would be infused into the marketplace. But that's not really what happened. Most people began to make their own horror films and action films. Some serious, some spoofs, but mostly immitations of what they had seen. Now, yes, there were some exceptions (Tarnation comes to mind) and I think the entire genre of documentary fiction that is becoming so prevalent is an interesting result - I'm very curious about the film shot in Iraq. However, the truly interesting work is still a rarity irregardless of the tools and it hasn't increased any in the last five years. And generally it's still being made by people who understand the underlying principles on some level - what makes drama.

 

second...

 

It's really common to hear about penny pinching idiot producers and variations thereof - but I just wanted to mention that just because a producer is concerned about the money he is spending - he is not necessarily the enemy. Now... trust me, I have dealt with as many producers who did not know what they were doing except how to manipulate people as anyone here - I'm not saying this archetype does not exist in reality. I am just putting it out there that there are also a lot of really respectible producers who go against the odds and resources trying to make something greater than their resources because of their passion for the project. I don't think that's so bad even if it means they use their editor and DP as their colourist.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I think the various crafts could do themselves a favour in this regard by avoiding cliche. I mean, we've talked recently about "Underworld" - sorry, that you absolutely CAN do in After Effects and it isn't that damn hard. Call the person who does it what you like, but it's a pretty simplistic approach. Smart people with desktop systems will continue to ape this kind of work until they start doing something that's actually hard to pull off.

 

Phil

[Tenolian Bell]

What I've seen from talented colorist, which is difficult to do, is have a subtlety to their eye and their work. Much of the time when I've seen editors (or even DP's) color correct they work in broad strokes. Turn the entire scene into a mass of orange to warm it up, or into a mass of blue to cool it down.

 

Colorist understand how to make a scene feel warm or feel cold without having to turn everything orange or blue. Colorists also know how to place complementary accent colors around a scene. Highlight that slight green in the background, or highlight that warm fill under the chin. They understand how to use small strokes to balance the large broad strokes.

 

Accross my body of work you can clearly see, it is obviously evident when I've had a very good colorist or a mediocre one.

Edited February 5, 2005 by tenobell

[David Mullen ASC]

Just remember that a colorist usually does nothing but color-correct 8 hours a day, nearly every working day of the year, minus vacations, year after year (I know, it sounds awful actually...) Same for a color timer at a lab. As a DP, I might get to color-correct a feature twice a year. An editor of features would probably be in a similar situation. So the chance that either of us would come close to knowing the subtleties of color-correcting compared to an experienced colorist is unlikely.

[Michael Most]

 

"Dust to Glory" is a good example posted on Adobe, and mixing HD, DV 16mm and 35mm.

Would these projects benifit from expert involvement, sure, but can they afford it, not always.

 

 

Dust to Glory is a very good example of desktop finishing done correctly. The assembly was done by an experienced "finishing" editor, and the color correction was done by a colorist with desktop experience, brought in from Digital Film Tree. It was also done under the roof and auspices of Laser Pacific, so the color calibration could be checked and the transfers would be done correctly. In many ways, it is the best model for desktop based finishing that I have seen so far, taking advantage of the less costly equipment, but using experienced professionals and the expertise of a leading post company to make it sing.

[John Sprung]

My fear (and I think Mike Most's too) is that colorists will be eliminated by editors and DP's trying to do color-corrections on their editing systems.

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Your fears are well founded. At HPA this time there were three different desktop color correction systems, each with the traditional three trackballs. There are a few professions, color timing and plastering spring to mind, where you really have to do it every day for a long time to be any damn good at all.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

I've just heard that they've now finished shooting the Genesis tests at Fox Sydney; the resulting footage has now been shipped back to Hollywood, and they're waiting for a decision from Warner Bros. From what I can gather, they've also shot identical tests with a PV millenium for comparison.

 

Whatever the decision, actual filming starts in about six weeks.

[Keith Mottram]

Your fears are well founded.  At HPA this time there were three different desktop color correction systems, each with the traditional three trackballs.  There are a few professions, color timing and plastering spring to mind, where you really have to do it every day for a long time to be any damn good at all. 

-- J.S.

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I agree with you in principle, there is however two paths here. On the one hand you have the system where everyone has there own singular role and if you can afford it you get the best of each. On the other is the simpler more indy or even auterish system, in this case you will get editors or cinematographers or directors who want to do their own colour work. At the end of the day why shouldn't they? So they might not be such good colourists, but they are working in their own way and this in itself can produce some fabulous and sometimes superior results. At the begining of the nineties I worked as a still retoucher in the earliest days of Photoshop. I worked at an upmarket lab in London and we had some of the best fashion photographers walking through the door, at that time being a retoucher was a seperate skill and photographers would be amazed as I manipulated the colours and composited. Nowadays no one walks around saying photographers should leave photoshop to the proffesionals and at that time if you'd asked me I'd have said get the software, get a computer and learn. That does not mean that every DP or editor or director will be a decent colourist, most of them will be poop, but it does not mean that people should sit and be pidgeonholed. If everyone wants to multitask then let them- what is there really to be scared about? We already have badly shot films, badly edited and badly acted, so I'm not going to loose any sleep about a 'non-colourist' doing some mediocre colour correction.

 

Keith

[Mike Brennan]

I Nowadays no one walks around saying photographers should leave photoshop to the proffesionals and at that time if you'd asked me I'd have said get the software, get a computer and learn.  Keith

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Here here.

Oh to choose a carreer where technology does not devaule your skills, John Sprung mentioned plastering, I guess doctors and lawyers would be included too

 

 

Mike Brennan

[Mike Brennan]

I've just heard that they've now finished shooting the Genesis tests at Fox Sydney;

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A reminder to Forum readers that Jims recent posts quoting John Virtue of Panvision Australia saying that Star Wars Episode Two didn't shoot on HDCAM was grossily inaccurate, in fact the opposite of the truth.

 

Jims post stating that the striped design of theRGB layout on Genesis ccd as being "impossible" is totally innacurate as John Gault has present papers to SMPTE and HPA detailing the design.

 

I have re re re confirmed the facts with the two individuals.

 

Had Jims post not been so vehnemant and sparked such a lot of time wasting response I would let them pass as

 

 

I can't seem to find Jim Murdoch anywhere on the net that makes a living in the UK in

Maybe like the content of his posts the man is a fantasy?

 

Of course Rupert Murdoch's son who runs Europes largest satellite company is named James!

Maybe it is a piss-take as the brits say?

 

Mike Brennan

[Tenolian Bell]

I've just heard that they've now finished shooting the Genesis tests at Fox Sydney;  the resulting footage has now been shipped back to Hollywood, and they're waiting for a decision from Warner Bros. From what I can gather, they've also shot identical tests with a PV millenium for comparison.

Whatever the decision, actual filming starts in about six weeks.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Considering how much money Sony spent on Spiderman and Warner's has spent on Batman (north of $150 million).

 

I would imagine Warner's is about to spend somewhere the same on Superman. It's hard to believe they would even consider risking that much money on a system that is absolutely brand new.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

A reminder to Forum readers that Jims recent posts quoting John Virtue of Panvision Australia saying that Star Wars Episode Two didn't shoot on HDCAM was grossily inaccurate, in fact the opposite of the truth.

 

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Well I was actually at a demonstration of the CineAlta five years ago and that was what they told me, had diagrams and everything. The whole thing is pretty bizarre really.

 

Jims post stating that the striped design of theRGB layout on Genesis ccd  as being "impossible" is totally innacurate as John Gault has present papers to SMPTE and HPA detailing the design.

 

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I never said it was impossible, I said it was impossible to get the alleged resolution with that layout. I'm still trying to get more information but none is forthcoming. At the very least it should logically be

 

RGBRGBRGBRGB

BGRBGRBGRBGR

RGBRGBRGBRGB etc

 

since averaging the 2160 lines to 1080 would then tend to cancel colour aliasing.

 

 

Had Jims  post not been so vehnemant and sparked such a lot of  time wasting response I would let them pass

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Bully for you. I make people ask questions.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Considering how much money Sony spent on Spiderman

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Yeah, and how come they don't use their own bloody cameras for their own movies?

 

 

It's hard to believe they would even consider risking that much money on a system that is absolutely brand new.

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Also considering that the only cameras available are only prototypes! This is what's always bugged me too. Why do they insist on jumping in at the deep end all the time? Maybe Siegel was the only taker.

[Mike Brennan]

Well I was actually at a demonstration of the CineAlta five years ago and that was what they told me, had diagrams and everything. The whole thing is pretty bizarre really.

I never said it was impossible, I said it was impossible to get the alleged resolution with that layout. I'm still trying to get more information but none is forthcoming. At the very least it should logically be

 

RGBRGBRGBRGB

BGRBGRBGRBGR

RGBRGBRGBRGB etc

 

since averaging the 2160 lines to 1080 would then tend to cancel colour aliasing.

Bully for you. I make people ask questions.

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Jim,

no one else has reported this presentation. Was it before they began principle photography?

 

Yes the layout of the Genesis chip as stated by Panavision and papers presented to SMPTE by John Gault

 

RGBRGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGBRGB

 

This has been previously posted on this site and elsewhere. The layout was a surprise and even caught out Thomson who were unaware that it was even a ccd, they had pre-prepared a press statement outlining the issues about bayer filtered cmos cameras.

 

Amazing that Panna/Sony kept it a secret. If you are trying to find more detail try SMPTE

 

 

 

Mike Brennan

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Jim,

no one else has reported this presentation. Was it before they began principle photography?

 

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It's possible, but I really don't remember. I was in Sydney for about 18 months over 1999/2000 and I stumbled on the presentation almost by accident. I suppose I wasn't really paying much attention, as I presumed everyting would become clearer as time passed. I remember seeing the odd magazine article that seemed to confirm what I said, but again, at the time I didn't really see the need to "archive" this material as it were.

 

I guess the problem is that since then, hardly anybody else has used the cameras for making cinema-release movies, and even fewer of these did any chroma-keying where a direct RGB output is desirable. To be honest, while I never thought so-called "Digital Cinematography" was anywhere near ready for the general marketplace in 1999, I still expected there would be more cinema-release stuff shot digitally then there actually was!

 

Yes the layout of the Genesis chip as stated by Panavision and papers presented to SMPTE by John Gault

 

RGBRGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGBRGB

 

This has been previously posted on this site and elsewhere. The layout was a surprise and even caught out Thomson who were unaware that it was even a ccd,  they had pre-prepared a press statement outlining the issues about bayer filtered cmos cameras.

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Not surprising they were suprised! And so we come back to the same ol' same ol'. As anybody with any real knowledge of TV camera technology can tell you (e.g. the engineers at Thomson:-) this technology is not new; there have been single-chip colour TV cameras that use exactly the same principle for well over 20 years! Compared to a Bayer Mask (and any of the other plethora of filtering schemes), this system gives fairly good colour fidelity but suffers from poor sensitivity and even poorer resolution, something in the order of about one-twelth the actual monochrome pixel count!

 

The only difference I can see is that the Genesis chip has more pixels; so apart from the extra resolution, nobody has explained why the Genesis chip should work any better than what has gone before and not been particualrly competitive in the marketplace.

 

I'm really baffled as to why they don't use the alternating RGB layout, that's the only logical reason they would want to average the 2160 lines into 1080. I've never met John Galt, but I don't believe he has any real technical background, not on video technology at any rate.

 

And in case anybody wants play the "secret new digital processing technologies that I don't know about" card, the problem is that any such technological breakthroughs would surely could be far more lucratively applied to Sony's existing range of HDTV cameras.

 

 

 

Amazing that Panna/Sony kept it a secret. If you are trying to find more detail try SMPTE

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Yeah, considering the amount of Hype surrounding the Star Wars Episode II thing! A few people I know have tried getting this information from Panavision. Every time the result is the same; they say they'll email it to them, but it never happens! <_<

Edited February 10, 2005 by Jim Murdoch

[John Sprung]

I've never met John Galt, but I don't believe he has any real technical background, not  on video technology at any rate.

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Thanks for the best laugh of the week.... ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Thanks for the best laugh of the week....  ;-)

-- J.S.

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Well I've had so many real "knee-slappers" from some of the other "experts" who post here, I guess it's only fair I return the favour.

 

Are you saying that he does, and if so, what qualifies you to make that assessment? I have a contact in LA who certainly is so qualified, and he isn't terribly impressed with him.

 

As for me, apparently I'm a figment of somebody's terribly well educated imagination:-)

 

But you'll note, I was the only one who knew about the Superman/Genesis thing and told you all about it. There's still nothing about it anywhere else on the Net as far as I'm aware. You heard it here first.

[Michael Most]

I've never met John Galt, but I don't believe he has any real technical background, not  on video technology at any rate.

 

Clearly you haven't met him.

 

On everything from lens design to electronic sensor design to video signal path design to video theory, John is one of (if not the) most knowledgeable people I have ever known. There are those who occasionally disagree with his conclusions and opinions, but nobody would disagree with his level of knowledge.

 

The fact that you can make this statement indicates just how little you really know about those you criticise. For someone who seems to spend a great deal of energy bad mouthing everything Panavision does, you seem to have very little awareness of the actual company or the people who work for it.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Clearly you haven't met him.

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What the hey? My response to this post has disappeared!

 

Well I'm not going to type all that again. All I can say about John Galt is that I've found a number of old articles of his on the Web dating from his days at Sony when he was trying to sell cinematographers their ludicrous "Hi-Vision" analog HDTV system.

 

I may not have met him, but I've certainly met the cameras he was trying to flog! Excuse me if seem a little skeptical....

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Clearly you haven't met him.

 

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OK I've had some contact with him now. And what is my opinion?

 

I guess it would be surprising if someone who has spent the last 15 years of so shoveling millions of dollars of first Sony's and then Panavision's money into a large black hole labelled "Digital Cinematography" wouldn't have picked up a fine repertiore of techno-buzzwords to fool the great unwashed (which included the likes of John Farrand), but he can't fool me.

 

I mean, he was just a bloody "C-list" Canadian cinematographer who was hired by Sony in the late 1980s because he had "film knowledge"; what magical process turned him into a top-notch electronics engineer?

 

Oh sure he'll string this crap out for all it's worth; what's he going to do otherwise: Go back to making kiddies' serials for Canadian TV?

 

>On everything from lens design to electronic sensor design to video signal path >design to video theory, John is one of (if not the) most knowledgeable people I >have ever known.

 

You really need to get out more, son....