Saul Pincus

Utterly delightful. Great work and I'm sure your kids will love it – mine certainly does!

Plenty of experience here. Best advice: consult an entertainment lawyer or veteran music supervisor for films and television, micro-budget or not.

I shot quite a bit of 16mm Fuji 250T around 1992. It had marvellous color – vibrant and not what you'd necessarily choose for subtle work. But if you were looking for a larger than life sort of look, it gave you that with little work. I guess Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (the Iive action) was shot on the earlier 35mm iteration of Fuji 250T? It seemed very helpful with the redesigned Starfleet wardrobe and the more vibrant, escapist tone of the production design.

Tell that to Blake Edwards! ;)

A printmaster is the master audio mix created for a film. A four-track printmaster is likely just a Dolby-encoded two track, which when unencoded, produces three front channels and one surround. Four discrete tracks are combined into a matrixed stereo channel at the printing stage.

Sometimes these projects take years to complete, and that's part of the plan for how to afford making them.

Indeed.

The answer isn't simple because (1) it was much more common to work in 20 minute reels for features, (2) a lot depended on how complex and layered your color work was, and (3) whether you also worked with live keys. On a single MacPro it might take 20 hours to render a reel – but a simpler job could take less. Again, home brew economics... ;)

I never claimed rendering was "fast." It wasn't – but a lot of indie filmmakers gave up speed if it meant control and less $$$. That's a true snapshot of 2008. Transcoding to ProRes for HD offline, by comparison, was real-time or better and therefore fine for single-camera shoots (which most indies were.)

You required a calibrated monitor, a fast drive array and talent in color correct, but a "post house" by traditional definition was not necessary even when working direct from 4K RAW.

Final Cut Pro 6 was the tool of choice at the time. I worked with the Red One on a feature for six weeks as a producer, director and editor in the fall of 2008, and the workflow was simple and reliable. As Stuart notes, any relatively recent off the shelf Mac Pro of the period was capable of transcoding the material to HD for offline cutting with good efficiency. The $$$ came in external storage, which at the time, could cost the same as a semi-souped up Mac Pro. I think a lot of the "horror stories" conjectured about the Red post workflow from the period come about because the Red truly represented the first time a pro cameraperson or filmmaker could also theoretically be his/her own editor and finisher, with true high end gear and glass – but if you weren't trained in post, a lot of folks got lost and looked to place the blame on the system rather than their own inexperience. If you were a post professional or knew who to hire, then your after-camera life was bliss.

If you want to be precise, Lucas had a hand in the digital revolution decades before he shot Attack of the Clones with a CineAlta. He was always pushing digital imaging, editing and audio innovations, and many of the brightest minds in experimental computing and digital tech were recruited to Lucasfilm in the early 80s due to Lucas' mandate. This excellent and definitive history of Lucasfilm's digital and computer divisions covers the details: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0937404675/qid=1114447087/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-9311989-3816147?v=glance&s=books So, really, his shooting Episode II digitally was the natural final step in his desire for an all-digital pipeline (rather than a first)!

Thanks Richard. Yes, I'm in Toronto.

Hardly... :)

I'll second that - if only because this comes from Jean-Louis, who knows exactly what he's talking about when it comes to Super 8! :)