HD For Indies

After my last post about Final Touch HD, I was thinking about the evolution of desktop tools.

When I was at the NAB Digital Cinema Summit in 2004, I overheard someone (sounded like a colorist or DP) say to someone else something to this effect:

"So now I have producers emailing me stills from the shoot that they've created a look for in Photoshop. As if anyone with Photoshop could do what we do."

There's two sides to that - on the one hand, having a producer mess around in Photoshop and then instruct a DP to "do that" could be pretty infuriating, especially if the producer has no idea how he created his look or how viable it is to create that look in post.

Clearly implied in the speaker's comments was the concept that Others were encroaching on His Turf, and having amateurs dabble (presumably badly) in his profession that he'd spent decades mastering was very frustrating.

However....

...the advent of accessible tools to others outside the traditional cadre of those who've Done These Things can be a very interesting thing. Often a scary frustrating thing if the user doesn't know what they're doing, but eventually, ultimately, as the market matures, a powerful thing.

When I was doing desktop publishing in the early 90s, photo compositing had been done on big, expensive, dedicated "heavy iron" systems. When Photoshop came along, a lot of traditionalists pooh poohed it calling it a toy. How many Scitex color station or compositing operators are around now? Incredibly few I would imagine. I could see the possibility of some of the best, most talented artists still using the high end tools, but they are losing a LOT of work to talented artists using Photoshop or similar tools on desktop Macs & PCs.

Their used to be a job title called typographer - an expert in typesetting, who knew all about fonts and kerning and leading and proper word wrap the way a DoP knows about depth of field, exposure, panning rates, etc. The way a Bedouin knows about sand.

Then came desktop publishing, and that job category pretty much evaporated. Those folks either lost their jobs to other individuals that could operate the new tools (PageMaker, Quark, etc.) or they themselves learned the new tool. Did the quality of typography out in the world decrease in the next few years? Definitely. Did tons more work get done out there, enabling people to communicate via this medium that couldn't before? Absolutely. Over time, as either the old school experts adapted to the new tools, or the new kids that grew up on this stuff learned their chops and started to do new work, a whole new aesthetic evolved. Folks like David Carson came along and changed not only our expectations of type layout, but also of print design in general.

Another example closer to home for this audience - remember when motion graphics were almost done over black? It was the introduction of a generation of print based designers that had been working with Photoshop that were then given tools and opportunity to work in video that changed things. The first motion graphics that you saw built on a white screen were probably done by somebody raised on print design on a blank white page, rather than a video guy that considered a black screen "empty."

Look at how far motion graphics lept forward in the 90s from where it had been for years - not just a new generation of designers and artists got into it, but a whole new breed that brought an entirely different approach, that thought about things in an entirely different paradigm.

This has its risks and rewards - I remember being embarassed in the early 90s when an art director asked me to make something cooler and I didn't know what he meant - should I rotate the color wheel to the left or the right to get the desired result? This was both my shortcoming in terms of knowing the lingo of the business; as well as a dichotomy of schools - I had this new, very technically oriented understanding of color, he wanted an aesthetic result. I hadn't yet achieved enough artistic understanding of what he was after to immediately understand how to translate his request into meaningful results. My bad.

All this got kicked off by my thoughts about Final Touch HD - while it's been possible to get realtime color correction to a certain limited extent with Final Cut Pro HD, Premiere Pro, Motion, and similar applications, FTHD is opening new doors to a fluent, highly interactive creative process with a great deal of control and precise results at a price point that didn't exist at all before its release.

While $5000 isn't "purchase and doodle" by any means, it's affordable enough that smaller studios could buy it, and individuals could get time on the system to do interesting doodles. And doodles is where new art comes from. Lots of doodles are required to get someplace interesting, and to do so the tools need to be accessible.

How many people get doodle time on a Da Vinci or Inferno? Statistically speaking, practically zero.

How many can doodle with Final Touch HD, or After Effects, or Photoshop? Increasingly more (in that order) for each product I just mentioned.

What if paint brushes were $20,000? How many great artists would we have? The truly great, if identified early, and dedicated to the pursuit, would probably Find A Way. But how many great artists would never have the chance to discover their talent, or have their talent discovered?

An artist must be prolific in order to grow.

And these new kinds of tools enable the prolific efforts required for great new art to be born.

End of rant.

-mike