Tenolian Bell

35mm is sharper simply because it has over twice the area to record image information than 16mm. I haven't heard of anything photochemical that can be done to close that gap. Outside of using some new chemistry technology in the 16 stock that you don't use in the 35 stock. But there is no reason for Kodak to do that. All stocks use a mix of larger and smaller crystals. The slower stocks use a higher number of small crystals, the faster stocks use a higher number of large crystals.

I think this depends more on your expectations. There is grain because the image is made of silver halide crystals. Under various conditions grain will be more noticeable than others. I think its tilting towards unrealistic to expect an absolute "grainless" S16 image. Whether that is good or bad depends on your personal aesthetic. While grain is easier to hide in 35mm the image is still made from the same crystals as S16 so its not really "grainless" either.

The three major concerns I would have with HDD recording. - Confirmation that the data has been recorded and safely stored - Proper organization and labeling of files - Back up My point is I don't know of any system that will do all of this by itself without someone managing it. Data management would still be a dedicated job no matter what title you give the position.

Its not throwing money away, because the information does not reside on a physical medium this is a very important job. At the very least you need someone who clearly understands what they are doing. It would cost a lot more to loose a days work, or come to editing and the files are misnamed and in disarray.

There was no DV when I was in film school either. We were shooting on film and betacam sp. From what I've seen when young film school directors had to learn to shoot film, they took the basics of photography much more seriously. A big detriment with these small DV cameras is that is no longer true. Many young directors don't even have a basic understanding of lens focal length, F-stop, or shutter speed. I would encourage all directors to learn to take pictures with a manual camera. Circuit boards and their manufacture use and produce toxic elements. There are circuit boards in every electronic gadget we use, and their number is increasing every year. Discarded electronic gadgets are pouring tons of dangerous chemicals into our waste disposal systems, most namely lead, mercury, and cadmium. Which has prompted states such as California and New York passing laws making it illegal to toss electronics into the general garbage. By law in these states you are requires to recycle electronics. One billion mobile phones were sold last year. How many of those mobile phones are likely to end up in land fills vs how much film is likely to end up in land fills.

Is that the same way we look at fine art paintings from 200 years ago? Today do we feel fortunate that we can take pictures that more accurately represent reality, instead of those distracting brush strokes they had to endure back then.

In the current environment its not necessarily best to move to LA to start your career. You would spend most of your time working a job to pay the bills and saying you want to do something else. You would rarely have the opportunity to do whatever it is you really want to do. Its better to get your start in a smaller market where there is less competition and you can grow and develop your skills. Then move to LA after your career is gaining momentum and you can attract the attention of producers.

Apple made extensive changes to image rendering and processing in Tiger, as well as updates in OpenGL. Entirely new video and audio API's were developed called Core Video and Core Audio which aren't available in 10.3.9. FCP 5 and Quicktime 7 will look for Core Video and Core Audio to use. While they can work without the API structure, stability and crashing can be an issue.

Tiger 10.4 was released on April 29th 2005. FCP 5 was released in May 2005. FCP 5.1 is the universal binary version of FCP 5 that runs natively on both Intel and Power PC Macs. If David wants a stable system using Panther 10.3.9, he needs FCP 4.5.

Final Cut 5 was designed to run on Tiger. You need to update to OS 10.4

I agree. Most of the government officials were complete idiots. How could you have such a secret division in the government hiding a giant robot and said division is run by a group of bumbling buffoons. Many of the jokes really were funny. But in several places they went over the top in the attempt to reach a joke. Several of the character added nothing to the story. They were only introduced and brought along as a running joke through the rest of the film. Die Hard actually was able to walk this line much better. John McClain would have to deal with inept police officials. But these were serious people they just did not make the right choices. The officials inability to deal with the bad guys and the bad guys ability to outsmart them is where the comedy came from. Not by giving the officials little intelligence in the first place. During that shot. I thought isn't this supposed to be a kids movie. Strange we have an extreme close-up slow-motion shot of a woman's breasts. I blame it on our conservative puritan society. Collectively we are unable to agree to view sexuality in a mature context as a natural part of our development as human beings. The result of that is a backlash that creates sophomoric and immature attitudes towards sexuality and women specifically.

I agree. I enjoyed the first two. But the third went over the tipping point to become just too big of a movie. And you get tired and don't care anymore. The same thing happened with Spiderman.

Alright, I never thought of that.

Its the codec. Quicktime does not support DVC-Pro HD within itself. You need to play it through Final Cut Pro. I doubt there is a plug-in that allows QT to play it without FCP.

Turbo.264 H.264 dedicated video encoder. Takes the work of encoding away from the CPU. Improves encoding speed by 2 to 4 times. Works with any Quicktime based encoding software. Output formats: -H.264 Main Profile, 5Mbps, 800x600 30fps -H.264 Baseline Low Profile Low-Complexity 1.5 Mbps, 640x480 30fps -H.264 Main Profile, 512 Kbps, 320x240, 30fps

I have a project where the director wants me to research shooting anamorphic on 16mm. Searching around I found a presentation given by John Pytlak on 1.5X squeeze for the 16x9 aspect ratio. In your presentation I found the advantage of the 1.5X lenses vs the disadvantage of using the current 2X lens. In the presentation John you surmised that there would be little interest in 1.5 squeeze lens because movie theaters would need to purchase new lenses to un-squeeze the new format. With this valuable information I can go back to the director and have further conversation about the idea. So John, your hard work and pearls of wisdom are still helping us figure out our production problems. Thank you and all the best.

The guy who wrote this ProLost blog needs to check out the Color website their is a lot of discrepancy between the ProLost blog and what Apple shows on its Color webpage. "Color, when doing the kind of stuff that makes it worth using, is not real-time. Which, of course, is totally OK but what's not OK is that Color doesn't render any sort of interactive preview that you can view in the context of a session. To see your work play back smoothly, you must batch render and view the results in Final Cut! There's no concept of rendering an interactive preview to Color's own timeline." The realtime video on Color's website shows a pre-rendered realtime preview. It shows the preview frame rate can be chaged for smoother playback and it shows rendering in Color before sending the video back to Final Cut Pro. "Color should work just like Final Cut itself, with a bar above the timeline that shows what parts are rendered and available for real-time playback, and which parts have been edited and are therefore in need of a render." The realtime video also shows this. A render bar above the clips, red for unrendered, green for rendered.

To do this most effectively it helps to understand the science of color: luminance, chrominance, and hue. An understanding of the theory of color and how color is represented by different visual mediums. To then use color as an effective storytelling tool. Greyscale, the ability of a medium to reproduce white to black. In the digital world this is determined by bit depth. 8 bit color 16 bit color White light comes from additive color of RGB. The middle colors Yellow, Cyan, Magenta are secondary colors that come from the mixture of RGB. Film print works under the subtractive color model. When film print is being timed, the color grades use Yellow, Cyan, Magenta. Black is represented by K. CMYK color model. The foundation of color science is the CIE 1931 Chromatcity Diagram. Color gamut of Film, Wide Gamut RGB, and HDTV (Rec 709) on the CIE diagram. 3D color space which incorprates RGB color with white to black luminance.

Ah, I didn't know that. But it makes sense as the Onyx was used for super computing. I first learned of Final Touch at the 2005 NAB. It was hailed for providing real time color grading in HD for Final Cut Pro. From what I understand SGI has had serious problems over the past 10 years because desktop workstations have not been far behind in performance with significantly lower price than what SGI was providing. With Intel providing 8 - 3Ghz processors I'm sure adds a lot of pressure on SGI's business model and its ability to survive. Silicon Color made the right decision to go with OS X development. There are now over 800,000 Final Cut users and Irix has been discontinued. I agree, but common sense won't stop people from doing it. Its definitely important to go into a grading session knowing what you want the final look to be. Its the colorists job to help achieve that look and not figure it out for you.

I have to agree with David, Phil. I've had colorist perform wondrous tricks that I would not have been able to do with the same software tools. You (Phil) have the natural talent, knowledge, and respect of the tools that most people don't have. I agree with Michael Most in that most people are lazy. There likely will be a thriving plug-in market around Color. People will use the "Sin City" plug-in or the "Saving Private Ryan" look up table and at the push of a button have that look without the knowledge of how to create it, or earned the discipline of how to most effectively use it. I believe we will always see the difference between a canned effect and the nuance of a professional colorist. Not necessarily, Final Touch was Mac only and had no intention of being ported to Windows. Every (except Motion) application in Final Cut Studio Apple acquired from other companies that designed the software for the Mac. Apple was extremely profitable for nearly 20 years and in the late 90's hit one big slump. At that time and was the only time Avid threatened to leave the platform. Avid's health is tied closely with the Mac. In the late 90's when Apple was doing bad Avid was doing worse. Its sales were down and stock price plummeted 50%. Much of Avid's management team was fired or restructured. More recently, last November Avid's stock price took a hit because they were too slow in releasing universal applications for the new Intel Macs, specifically Pro Tools sales were down.

Honestly Apple is not winning the race for cutting edge GPU. The ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 currently used in the MacBookPro is decent for most tasks, but is pretty old and not anywhere near the best. There is a trade off. PC laptops that use better GPU are generally larger, heavier, with loud fans to cool the hot interior, and have less battery life than Apple laptops. For Apple to have its thin sleek laptops the components inside cannot draw too much power or produce too much heat. I'm looking to buy a new MacBookPro sometime soon, I'm hoping Apple will update the graphics card to at least an ATI Mobility Radeon X1700, the X1800 would be great.

I'm not too concerned about this, it'll shake itself out. I think its true to a degree that having these cheaper and accessible tools does help really talented people who either do not have access to or can afford the more expensive tools. I know several editors in the low budget world who are really good and stay busy. They would not be able to practice their trade if they had to invest in a $250,000 Avid system. For me as a DP with cheap DV being around for about 10 years now. Many expected that directors would shoot their own films and attempt to cut the DP position. But that has not really happened. I shoot a lot of narrative shorts in the low budget world, using DV, HD, and Super 16. Every director I work with fully understands that they do not have the skill to create the images I can and very much respect my abilities. That respect generally filters into all other parts of filmmaking. I agree that sometime you run into a young director with a Robert Rodriguez complex and thinks they can do it all. And the end result speaks for itself. I don't believe that's true. Apple is simply providing a tool. I see no where Apple telling people FCP can make anyone into an editor. At least not in the same way Nike attempts to make everyone feel that with their shoes they can play basketball like Michael Jordan.

From what I've heard about Final Touch and Silicon Color, the company consisted basically of five guys undertaking an ambitious project to bring high end color grading from a $100,000 system down to $10,000. From what I've heard its a great system built on a solid foundation, but was plagued with bugs. Because the development team was basically five people that did not have the sheer number of software programmers to test and debug all of the code as quickly as a larger company. I would imagine Apple has been working with Silicon Color on Final Touch long before the purchase was publicly announced. Apple would have the resources to leverage a larger team of software programmers to polish up Final Touch for the transition into Color.

Apple bought Silicon Color and its Final Touch color grading software and folded the acquisition into Final Cut Studio 2. The 2K version of Final Touch sold for $25,000, now comes bundled in a $1299 production suite. Color Features: Real-time grading controls for SD, HD, and 2K without proxies, support for 4:4:4 2K as DPX or Cineon files, uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2, uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2. Primary, Secondary, and Primary Out grading functions, color wheels with hue, saturation, and luminance controls for highlights, midtones, and shadows. Curves for individual adjustment to R,G,B and luma with B-spline control points. Advanced RGB and Printer Points controls for precise film printing and ASC-style Lift, Gamma, Gain controls. Live coloring, 3D Look Up Tables, and pre-saved looks. Keyframing, eight secondaries per shot with custom mattes, key blur, and motion tracking. Animated circle, rectangle, and user shape vignettes with inner and outer softness. Geometry Pan and Scan. Renders at 8-bit, 10-bit, and 32-bit floating point. Customizable node tree for effects creation. 3D Color Space scopes for RGB, HSL, Y?CbCr, and IPT display, interactive 2D waveform and vectorscope.

Well you miss one of the important points of cinematography. The point isn't always about the highest quality. That is important at times but creating a look that fits the mood and tone of the material is more important. Thinking this way you limit yourself creatively. You probably missed a few years ago when Pixelvision was a big fad. These were toy camera from Fisher Price. They recorded video on compact tapes. From a quality standpoint the picture was horrible. But it was a unique look that was used for a dramatic effect.