The 1st needed convincing, the grip wasn't sure, everyone else was sold

[David Mullen ASC]

The trouble is that while digital technology allows more films to be made by people with small budgets, there is not an equal increase in the number of films released to the public, either on DVD, cable TV, or theatrical. We are seeing a bottleneck in the distribution system. Now some will argue that the future will be some sort of web distribution, for example, but anyone wanting a moderately-sized audience for their movies needs some system of marketing to promote that movie.

 

I mean, people have been able to make movies cheaply with digital cameras for over five years now, and some of those have gotten distribution, but nothing compared to the number of movies being made by indies.

 

Anyway, after spending a decade shooting indie features in the under 1-mil range and making about $20,000/year doing that, I can pretty much say that you can't really make a middle-class living as a crew member if you only work on small indie movies. Nor do most directors make a living doing these small films, hence why there are so many first-time indie directors but very few second or third-time indie directors. You can only risk everything you own, work for free, and barely turn a profit (IF you're lucky) years after the movie is completed, if sold, once in most lifetimes. After that, you start to have to really find a way to earn a living.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

The trouble is that while digital technology allows more films to be made by people with small budgets, there is not an equal increase in the number of films released to the public, either on DVD, cable TV, or theatrical.

The most horrible aspect of this for me is the spectre of "cable-ization" of the movie industry. Your local cinema complex will start to look like your local news stand, groaning under the weight of countless "low-budget" publications barely worth more than the paper they're printed on, full of shallow, boring articles mostly written by the publisher and his wife and/or dog, thanks to the "miracle" of desktop publishing.

 

This is also one of the troubling aspects of the notion of cheap Digital Projection: will we have multiplexes of say fifty mini-theatres, all showing much the same drivel? You know: "fifty Cinemas and there's nothing on!" It's bad enough going to my local video library: Ten thousand DVDs (allegedly) and I can't find a single one worth watching!

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, considering that the average multiplex is just used to run the latest studio releases in more than one theater, rather than a different movie in each theater, I wouldn't necessarily mind if more screens were open to a wider variety of films -- not just indies, but foreign movies too.

 

Trouble is, without proper marketing, it's hard to know what movie to go see. I mean, I just came back from three months in Santa Fe, and I look in the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly and see several indie movies in release that I've never heard of and have no idea if they are worth seeing. It's like when you get a catalog for a film festival and see a hundred indie movies listed but have no clue as to which are worth checking out other than a plot description (and half of those make you want to stay away.)

 

Despite the fact that film production is much lower than in the heydey of the studio system of the 30's & 40's, I came out of a theater yesterday after seeing the forgettable "Legend of Zorro", saw a slew of posters for upcoming studio releases, and it struck me how forgettable most of those will be as well, despite all the hard work that went into them. Yet I would love to get some of that work, and yet it distresses me that so much of that effort is wasted on drivel, even if well-shot drivel. I'm not talking about a lack of intellectual content out there, I'm just talking about a lack of merit, the fact that so many movies made don't even need to exist. Do we really need "Cheaper By the Dozen 2" -- a sequel to a remake? And then fill up three theaters out of ten in a multiplex with it when it gets released?

 

Speaking of "Zorro", I kinda liked the first one (and love the old 1940 Tyrone Power version). Obviously a lot of hard work went into this sequel, with the same actors, director, and DP. But whatever magic the first one had is lost in this one, which seems like it was made for the Disney Channel. It was shot in Super-35 this time, it appears, rather than anamorphic, and used a DI. Image quality is OK, lighting is the same more or less, but the day exterior scenes lack the richness of the first one. But in general, it looked nice. Just wish there hadn't been so much of a creeping blandness to permeate the production.

[Max Jacoby]

David

 

I can confirm that 'Legend of Zorro' is Super 35. When I was at Panavision London earlier in the year for tests, they had a printout of the equipemnt ordered for that film lying around. The usual suspects of Milleniums, 435s, spherical Primos and Zooms,etc...

[Balazs Rozsa]

RGB|RGB|RGB

RGB|RGB|RGB

------------------

RGB|RGB|RGB

RGB|RGB|RGB

 

and he didn't seem to understand why you'd want to do it any other way. He didn't seem to have any answer to the question: "why do they simply average adjacent pairs of pixels, instead of having just one taller pixel (which would give a better signal-to-noise ratio)?" either. He stopped replying after that!

 

If it was only the chroma information, they could unite these pairs into smaller pixels. But that would halve the vertical luma resolution to 1080 which is only the native resolution of the output. Now without uniting they can use downsampling to generate the output that will give you a sharper luma image.

 

But yes, the chroma resolution is about equivalent to what you could get from a 6 Mpixel Bayer imager. But chroma resolution doesn't need to be as high as luma (still it is quite high resolution considering it is downsampled from 6 Mpixels).

[Stephen Williams]

HD WILL eventually replace film.

 

I am better than you.

 

Hi,

 

I am fairly sure that HD as we know it today will be replaced before 35mm film.

 

Just my 2c

 

Stephen

[John Sprung]

Also, sensors for most video cameras have to be designed with mass production in mind; if you're only going to build a hundred D20's or Genesis or Dalsa cameras at the most, you can use more expensive sensors.

Sensors are chips, and like all chips the economics are sort of like direct to DVD movies. It costs you $5 - $10 million to make the first one, and they're four bits a pop from there on out. Short run chips are inherently more expensive, even if they're not as well designed as mass produced ones.

 

Owning the rights to the mask set for a chip is sort of like owning the negative and all rights on a low to medium budget feature. If you own them, you look for a way to make money from them.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Mark Allen]

I mean, people have been able to make movies cheaply with digital cameras for over five years now, and some of those have gotten distribution, but nothing compared to the number of movies being made by indies.

 

....Trouble is, without proper marketing, it's hard to know what movie to go see.

 

I think this is exactly the paradigm though which will emerge and the reason for it. The fact of the matter is that there WERE some cheaply made movies that got distribution and did gang busters. And what did it cost the studio to make it? Nothing - they bought it once it was done. That's a great deal for the studio. It's much easier for them to look at everything that is out there and then pick up about 10 of them at a reasonable price and then use their marketing powers to try to get people into the movies on those 10 movies. Now, there were probably 1000 movies that they reviewed to pick 10 from. Let's say the wow'd the indie producers by offering a million in upfront cash. They still only paid 10 million. Then they niche market these movies out at about 10 million each to see which catches fire. They've spent less than Harry Potter and have a chance at getting their big hit ten fold.

 

As filmmaking becomes more affordable, there will be more people trying their hand at it. (Think of Primer - where the guy had never even made a short film before.) And most of these movies will be hurrendous - but some will be interesting to a niche if not to a wide audience.

 

I'm using simple numbers just to emphasize the point that from where I stand - I could see this being where "things" could be heading. (In addition to the single huge massive marketing tie in extravaganza movie.)

 

The interesting thing is this. One thing the studios have had which separates them from any random company with a notion for marketing and a big bank account is ties to the theaters. Once theatrical is not necessary - any company with enough cash could pick up movies and market the hell out of them to get their buyers.

 

Right out of college I spent a few weeks at an ad agency and one of the interesting things I learned there was that basically if you advertise something - you will get your money back for that. This was the basic assumption. The goal was to see if you could get them to keep buying when you stopped advertising. But the power of suggestion alone was strong enough to cover the cost of your advertising. I suspect there is some truth to that in the film makreting world as well.

 

 

Just know that I'm not saying any of this is good (or bad for that matter) - I'm just saying that it's my perceptioin of where the industry is headed for now.

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't see it happening myself. The industry is run partially by agencies working to keep their clientele well-paid. So for agents, there is no incentive for movies to be made cheaply and economically. Studios partially fund their movies through presales and foreign tax breaks and other investment schemes that only really make sense when you're financing a huge movie because the lawyer fees, bank transaction fees, etc. take too large a percentage of a smaller loan.

 

Honestly, there is little incentive for the studios to buy & release mainly cheaper fare, even if it's guaranteed to turn a profit. That's not the sort of business plan that excites Wall Street investors. They want more "Spider-Man" sequels with tie-ins to other non-theatrical markets.

 

Besides, such a system of mainly low-budget digital indie movies made outside the studio system and bought & distributed by the studios would be disasterous for the average film worker, who is almost guaranteed not to see any profits from such ventures. All they can look forward to is lower pay and longer hours in such a world.

 

Just like everywhere else, as long as the rich keep staying rich (or getting richer) from the current system, which is mainly driven by star actors and their agents, they have no incentive to make changes. We've seen other periods in Hollywood's history where the studio / star system has weakened and independent producers, movies, etc. have found a larger marketshare (like in the 1950's with the rise of companies like AIP), but there are always limits to how far they can takeover the system. Truth is that the average viewer doesn't want to see only "small" movies made on limited budgets.

[Mark Allen]

My suggestion was that it would be a split between the two and there would be no middle ground (10 to 50 million dollar movies), but your points are well put and well taken. I will still hold the ground that there will be an increasing number of these breakout smaller films and an exponential increase in the number of people trying to make them (even at higher quality levels). I absolutely agree that it would be hard for production people to make a living on lower budget movies.

 

I think the general public's increasing desire not to pay for entertainmentt will have a large effect on movies in the future as well. I wonder sometimes if the economics were shifted to simply be more affordable if that would encourage more sales or if there is simply a philisophical shift that art and entertainment should not something one must pay for. On that, I really have no predictions.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

If it was only the chroma information, they could unite these pairs into smaller pixels. But that would halve the vertical luma resolution to 1080 which is only the native resolution of the output. Now without uniting they can use downsampling to generate the output that will give you a sharper luma image.

That's what I would have thought too, but they don't. In any case, that would improve the vertical resolution but not the horizontal.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Hi,

 

Huh?

 

It comes off the CCD output amp as an analogue waveform representing in some nonlinear fashion the electron accumulation of each photodiode, and gets thrown into a high-bit-count video ADC. Recording that gives good results..."

 

Phil

Huh???? What comes off the CCD chip is a bloody mess! Apart from dud pixels, and clock hash, it usually has significant shading errors, all of which have to be carefully "masked out" by means of a EEPROM lookup table which is generated during the setup phase of manufacture. How are you going to duplicate that in post-production?

 

In the bad old days of analog CCD cameras, each camera had a "forest" of preset pots to try to balance the shading errors, and that was after the set of three CCDs had been carefully selected for best match. It was only after they were able to develop all-digital in-camera signal processing that CCD HD cameras became possible at all.

 

I'd really like to know what you think somebody else could do to the CCD signals that's going to give so much better results than what the Manufacturers are already doing now. Apart from gain matching, white balance, plugging all the missing CCD "holes", detail correction and setting the gamma curve to TV standard, what else do they actually do?

[David Mullen ASC]

Apart from gain matching, white balance, plugging all the missing CCD "holes", detail correction and setting the gamma curve to TV standard, what else do they actually do?

 

To quote "Life of Brian": What have the Romans ever done for us?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

For all of that, images off the DVX-100 output mod look fine. There are examples on the Reelstream site that make it very clear that the DSP electronics in a DVX crop off enormous amounts of dynamic range in order to get to the picture they output; enormously overexposed frames, according to the default camera, recover beautifully.

 

So, while I appreciate that dud pixels will not be fixed by this stage, it has been shown to work well. Really serious problems with lens shading could be fixed with a vignette in grading, I suppose, but it's not exactly a showstopper.

 

Phil

[Mark Allen]

And now back to our previously scheduled programming....

 

Keith - Any luck on getting those high rez files approved for uploading? As I said I could provide a temporary host for them if necessary.

[John Sprung]

My suggestion was that it would be a split between the two and there would be no middle ground (10 to 50 million dollar movies),

I'd expect to see the whole spectrum covered, with growth at the low end.

 

Low end entry getting easier will, alas, grow the haystack much faster than it increases the needle supply. Finding the needles will be, as you suggest, a function of the studios' distribution people.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Mark Allen]

grow the haystack much faster than it increases the needle supply.

 

Great analogy. If you speak to distributors who actually search for material they will tell you flat out that the submission rate has increased massively in the last few years and the quality of the submissions has dropped an incredible degree. They have begun to really value production quality. But... there will be some gems in there. I think the lower end market will very much turn into a niche market. The whole mustang verses the edsel analogy may come into play though.

 

Mustange was designed very specifically for just a exactingly specific kind of person. Edsel was for everyone. Released in the same year, Mustang became the best selling car - Edsel... well... have you ever heard of an Edsel? Flopped.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Great analogy. If you speak to distributors who actually search for material they will tell you flat out that the submission rate has increased massively in the last few years and the quality of the submissions has dropped an incredible degree.

And this is EXACTLY what has happened to the book publishing industry. It's now close to impossible for a new writer to even get a reputable agent to look at his or her work, let alone an actual publisher. I know a woman who used to work as a submissions editor at Random House, and she said you just wouldn't believe the mountains of absolute drivel they used to get sent to them, once word processors started to proliferate. (Well they still do, but they never look at any of it).

 

Virtually none of the established literary agents will accept new clients, although there is now apparently a vast army of people quite willing to take money and pretend to "try" to show it to a publisher!

 

Will film go the same way? I'm sure all the big publishing houses know only too well that there are probably thousands of potentially profitable new writers out there, but how do you find these golden needles without getting buried under an empire-state-building-sized stack of hay! (Or buried under an avalanche of crap DVDs!)

[Keith Mottram]

And now back to our previously scheduled programming....

 

Keith - Any luck on getting those high rez files approved for uploading? As I said I could provide a temporary host for them if necessary.

 

we're still waiting for lock from the client, so i should say no, but as i've just sent two stills to arri and am about to send two to Highdefinition magazine, i don't think they'll be a problem- email me the details and i'l send them up. might have to pull them off at some point though.

 

keith

[Mark Allen]

Virtually none of the established literary agents will accept new clients, although there is now apparently a vast army of people quite willing to take money and pretend to "try" to show it to a publisher!

 

Jim.... I think you just gave me an idea for my *new* career in movies!!! ;)

 

All kidding aside, I've already met two people who do this in movies. Small fee for consulting on this, small fee on that... pretty soon... you can imagine.

[Mike Brennan]

Huh? Well, 1,920 x 1080 x 3 = 6,220,800 nicht wahr?

 

Nein! (no German dictionary!)

 

I was asking if the unit cells were individually addressed at the ccd then sub sampled to create 1920x1080 recording or if it is just output of the 1920x1080 Macro cells.

 

 

Mike Brennan

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

"I was asking if the unit cells were individually addressed at the ccd then sub sampled to create 1920x1080 recording or if it is just output of the 1920x1080 Macro cells.

 

 

Mike Brennan"

 

As far as I've been able to determine, (and not through lack of trying) they don't do anything other than simple averaging of the vertical cells.

 

Which doesn't make much sense. As I mentioned earlier, it would if they used an alternating pixel color layout, as that would tend to cancel a lot of the filter artifacts and allow less-savage spatial filtering. This is in fact what they always did with standard definition cameras that used the same sort of RGB filtering, but John Galt says they don't on the Genesis.

 

Certainly, over-sampling would allow a smart processor to get more from the 1920 x 1080 format than Nyquist theory would suggest was possible, but for that you would need to over-sample in both directions, not just vertically.

 

Some time back somebody here suggested that the Genesis sensor may have two interleaved sets of different-sensitivity sensors, which would give it a significantly improved dynamic range. However, from what I've read so far about the Genesis chip, I doubt that Sony could have produced a chip with that level of complexity and also with 12 megapixels.

 

Also if that were the case we immediately run into another same ol' same ol': if they can do that with a really-difficult-to-produce 12 megapixel ship, you'd think it would be a piece of cake to make a four megapixel version for their 3-chip HDTV cameras and clean up in the Video and TV market.

 

Which also begs the question: why is a 30 billion-dollar company going to all this trouble for a (last time I looked:-) $170 million-dollar outfit that in turnover terms accounts for little more than a smudge on the bottom of the Entertainment Industry balance sheet :P

 

I don't get it. I wish I did, but I don't.

[Guest Jim Murdoch]

Jim.... I think you just gave me an idea for my *new* career in movies!!! ;)

 

All kidding aside, I've already met two people who do this in movies. Small fee for consulting on this, small fee on that... pretty soon... you can imagine.

 

I've got this huge book I bought at a garage sale from a US outfit called: "The National Library of Poetry".

 

It's jam-packed with poems, some of whose badness is bordering on Vogon-level (in the order of making "Plan 9 From Outer Space" look like "Blade Runner", if you know what I mean :D)

 

What they used to do is place ads in local newspapers all over the US announcing a "Poetry Competition". Entry was free and there were some attractive-sounding prizes, and even if you didn't win a prize, "selected" poems would be published in their upcoming volume!

 

No obligation, but people whose poems were published in there could buy copies at a "special price", and you could even have them sent gift-wrapped to family and friends!

 

Well needless to say (according to what I've heard anyway), virtually no poem was rejected, and the competition apparently ended when they had enough poems to fill the book!

 

And obviously a large proportion of the people who "entered" were a likely to want to buy a book with their poem in it! I've heard there were several volumes printed this way, but now they've moved to the Internet!

 

Could you imagine a short-film version of this?!!

Edited November 7, 2005 by Jim Murdoch

[Mark Allen]

Could you imagine a short-film version of this?!!

 

Can I imagine it??? Jim, I've got the domain name registered already! ;)

[Tim J Durham]

Can I imagine it??? Jim, I've got the domain name registered already! ;)

Don't forget to include Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in your story:

 

http://tinyurl.com/dnjhy

The worst poem in the universe

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.

They lay. They rotted. They turned

Around occasionally.

Bits of flesh dropped off them from

Time to time.

And sank into the pool's mire.

They also smelt a great deal.

This sounds very much like a Monty Python skit where Paula turns out to be Graham Chapman in drag.