HD For Indies

So yesterday, among other things, I spent some time on the phone with clients doing consulting. Interestingly enough, I ended up having two conversations with DIY filmmakers - one before production started, another at the very tail end of production.

Filmmaker One: Before

First guy was getting ready to embark on his production - he was trying to figure out whether to shoot on F900 or Varicam or HVX200, so I went over the pros and cons of that in terms of color, resolution, ease of working with cameras, which one's easiest to get good looking results quickly without a DIT, free downloadable settings files to improve results, etc., starting out with "If you can afford to do better than the HVX, do so." I then brought up the post ramifications, which was an area he hadn't thought of - one route he could do FireWire ingest and potentially just capture once for offline/online, and the other route would require HD-SDI cards, RAIDs, etc. EDIT - but with Apple's new ProRes, maybe he won't need a RAID...

He was in a hurry because he was on a limited budget (perfectly understandable), didn't want to spend a lot of time on the phone/on the clock, so we zipped through the broad strokes of post production - after acquisition, ingest, editorial, picture lock, audio handoff, conform to high quality, color correct, QC, mastering, etc. He wants to edit his own film, and hasn't edited before.

My spidey sense starts to tingle.

I say that while it is possible for him to figure it out, most self-edited films (that come my way) done by first time editors have problems that cause major problems down the line, often requiring recapturing ALL the footage to sort things out. It'd take him a while to get up to speed, things would be slow and frustrating at first, etc.

I said my biggest concern would be what I've seen happen too many times - that the process would seem daunting and complex and wearying, and if the generic self-editor did learn "the right way" to do it, they'd find it complicated and time consuming, and "Why can't I just do it THIS way, is SO much easier?" Let me make a point about "this" way - while "this" may vary from case to case, it can all too often be similar to the beginning auto mechanic who finds putting all those teeny bolts & screws back in exactly the right place just so much tedious work. You can step back and it will hold together, it might start, but sooner or later, stuff's going to start falling off or the engine's gonna blow, or the pieces are laid out to do quiet, deadly damage that won't be discovered until Too Late. While creativity should be a significant part of the indie filmmakers process, and new tools and techniques are coming out all the time, and I encourage folks to stray from SOME "tried and true" old school methods of post workflows (usually to get better quality at lower cost), straying from the path of Good Workflow Process is a potentially dangerous, dangerous game. Here there be lions, and tigers, & bears...oh my.

I encouraged him to do lots of research, buy books, hit the usual forums up for free (sometimes questionable) advice, or feel free to call me back and I could walk him through the steps on the clock if that were within his budget.

So while it is technically possible to learn the stuff and do it yourself, I really, strongly do not recommend it for most commercial endeavors...is that really where you want your finite, limited mental time and energy going? Or into the creative end of the film? If at all possible, get an experienced editor on the project. Not just the technical skills, but the storytelling ability, and the objective, disinterested viewpoint are actually bigger assets in trying to get a good project made. That said, get your project done any way you can. If ya gotta edit it yourself, and that's the only way it'll happen, more power to you.

But he was doing the smart thing by doing research well before the production started. In my opinion, that's the only way you're going to have any chance at a smooth and hopefully successful project. If you want to focus on the creative side, then surround yourself with the smartest, most informed, most flexible people you can, however you can.

So that's the Before on an indie DIY effort, starting to do the right thing by researching in advance. Here's another route and way it can turn out, call it the After...

Filmmaker Two: After the Edit, Before the Apocalypse

So later that night, after the Tim League outdoor inflatable screen coolness, I got an email from someone I'd never spoken too saying call them, its urgent. So I call (its after midnight), and I get the guy on the phone. Turns out he's basically the above guy, just (metaphorically) some months later. They'd shot their footage on HVX. He'd edited it himself, in Sony's Vegas ("...it seemed the Universe wanted me to use Vegas for this"), using a third party codec/solution to get DVCPRO HD MXF files into Vegas. Now Vegas is a fine little editor, especially with its codec agnostic approach and EXCELLENT audio manipulation capabilities, but not something I'd recommend for feature work usually. Viable for a low cost solution to do audio heavy work for short form - think music videos. His Vegas didn't support MXF ingest, so he bought a third party tool to get his footage in..and the tool wasn't exactly designed for what he was trying to do - a bit of a workaround/hack to use it in this particular way from what I could tell. Now he needed to screen it in high def, in a theater, this weekend, and was trying to figure out how to get the files from Vegas to some playable form to show. He's short on time, tools, and budget.

He said something to the effect of "I'm not a very technical guy, I didn't want to get dragged into all the technical arcana...I just want to make my movie, ya know?" I totally get it and don't blame him - he wants to focus on the creative, fair enough, and somebody's got to keep the eye on the far horizon - the end goal. However, think of it a bit like going to the moon, or at least taking a road trip through the hinterlands of the desert...it'd be a really, really good idea to have somebody technical along for the ride to make sure you get where you wanted to go, and that if something does come up (or break) along the way, it can be dealt with without unreasonable delays or expense, and hopefully without chaos, blood, or tears.

One of the first things he expressed concern about was that he was seeing what he thought was judder. When I asked him to explain exactly what he meant, he started talking about how the motion looked funny in some scenes, how confusing all this tech was, that his 1920x1080 HD shows up as 1280x1080, that the 24p shows up as 29.97 even though the project settings are for 23.976 and he didn't quite get what that was all about...

Bag the spidey sense, alarm klaxons are going off in my head - it sounded like he broke Rule 4 - he said he saw this ghostly fringe behind the actors when they moved - was this interlace lines scaled down on his screen and blended together? Sounds like he shot at least some of it 24p with 3:2 pulldown perhaps? He also mentioned odd motion - perhaps at least some of it was shot 24pA? Either way, their intended footage was ingested at 30fps not 24fps and had either 24pA cadence or 24p's 3:2 pulldown pattern added. He'd not used the "Remove 3:2 Pulldown" option that he'd seen, or if the software/codec import stuff was clever enough to have a 24pA import mode, he didn't use it. And if it is just getting dropped on the 24p timeline...I could see how that would create all kinds of stuttery motion. Perhaps he should just kick it out at 60i? At this point...PUNT. It would take FAR too long to re-import and correct this issue - gotta go with what he's got. If he had an extra week, a different story. But for now, if he gets a workable playback copy secured, I've got another pass we can take to try to minimize the artifacting caused by this. But this is a classic case of a mistake made early on that messes with you later - like forgetting to put the radiator cap back on securely...

When he called me, he was halfway done exporting massive files via a dozens-of-hours process in a format that was...probably not going to work. He'd previously talked to some folks that gave him a path to work with:

Choice 1: make a Blu-ray disc was recommended that he kick out a high def MPEG-2, buy a Blu-ray player, upgrade the firmware, use software so-and-so that could read that file and burn to a Blu-ray disc with a brand new burner that would play back on the set-top box once the firmware was updated. This may work just fine. But for me, it sounded like a bad, Bad BAD idea for a number of reasons:
-the client didn't have a lot of technology experience and more importantly, troubleshooting resources on hand
-there's lots of "ifs" and "maybes" and "it should work"'s implied in the workflow he was describing
-minimal time to test and troubleshoot any problems
-a 90 minute feature to compress - so would take quite a while to convert
-Would the MPEG-2 be in the right format & settings? Would the software work to make a self playing disc? Would the firmware update let it work right? Would it be easy to get the firmware updated? Would the new Blu-ray burner work right? Far too many variables for me to safely recommend, mostly boiling down to - Neither I nor anyone I knew/trusted had gone through this exact process successfully before. And with the limited time and troubleshooting resources available, that sounded all too fraught with peril. I wanted something that I KNEW could work, in the limited time available, that he could safely do himself. Therefore I recommended:

Choice 2: Macbook Pro playback He has a new Macbook Pro, and the projector he's using has a DVI input, and he can do a dry run on this thing the day before the actual screening. So the plan was to have him play a QuickTime movie from the laptop directly. I chose this route because with time this short and resources this slim for him, I wanted something that I KNEW, 100%, would work.

I was going to have him export to a codec that I knew would cook out pretty quickly from Vegas on his PC but also play back on his Mac, look good, be low enough bandwidth to play back from a FireWire drive, and be low enough CPU load that his laptop could play it back without the CPU choking.

Turns out he couldn't change ANY QuickTime settings - perhaps due to the third party codec he'd used to get MXF in, or perhaps due to something else entirely, if he clicked Custom under QuickTime settings, his machine would crash. UGH. This isn't Vegas' fault as far as I can tell, normally this works fine. So we had to go with the default export, which was the None codec. The good news was that it is a lossless codec, the bad news is that it makes HUUUUUUUUUGE files - his 90ish minute piece was going to be over a terabyte big.

Fortunately, he has a new 1.25TB LaCie drive. The catch - if he wants to use that drive cross platform, he will either run into a maximum file size problem if the drive is formatted so Mac/PC can both read it, or he needs a piece of third party software to mount his Mac formatted volume on the PC so that he can write out a 1TB+ file (we touched on kicking it out in smaller pieces, but the technical challenge of putting the pieces back together for him led me to the One Big File approach).

THAT hurdle cleared, he'd already kicked out some short (5 second) test clips, so I quickly built him three customized Compressor setttings (he fortunately was on latest version on his Macbook Pro, FCP 5.1.4 same as me), emailed them to him (they are tiny), told him where to drop them, and he cooked out his test file. Codec 1 had a gamma shift and looked washed out - scratch that. Codec 2 at quality settings medium and high both looked fine. Higher quality (higher datarate) played back fine full screen in loop mode - so let's try that.

Before we hung up, I gave him a roadmap to try:
1.) Cook out a one minute test sequence from PC
2.) Bring to Mac, via either Mac formatted LaCie Drive using 3rd party tool, or just write across the network to the LaCie.
3.) Test codec presets again, running full screen (he had a DVI to HDMI adaptor running to his HDTV as a practice setup for the DVI connection to projector this weekend)
4.) Pick the one that looks best but still plays smoothly
5.) Then convert your whole movie to that.

At dry run, make sure all is going smoothly, hopefully will have finished file by then. If all goes smoothly, bank that one, and try to address the 24p/30p motion issues with a post filter. If there's a problem, he'll still have 24 hours to try to fix it, and the codec I'm recommending will let him make multiple attempts in that timeframe.

In the end, he'll have something that he can show. I haven't seen a frame of the film and know nothing of its content, but I'm confident he'll be able to show SOMETHING on the big screen at full res. It may have some motion artifacts, but his story will be told (OK shown). I have no idea what kind of color correction or anything else has been done with the project, we just focused on these issues in the wee hours of the night.

But if it were my film, I'd want that 24p to all be done right.

Point of all this being....do your homework, or get someone else to do it for you to draw you a detailed map. Get the help you need to navigate the treacherous waters of all the possible choices in this new world of post. It used to be pretty easy - didja shoot DV or Digibeta? Didja shoot drop frame or non-drop frame? You could get fancy and maybe shoot PAL instead of NTSC. Go back far enough, ya cut on Avid, because That Was It for NLEs. Nowadays, there are two sizes of HD to contend with, half a dozen possible frame rates that might be used all with their own twists for ingest depending on format, many different HD acquisition formats, tapes vs. solid state vs. optical discs, lots of different NLEs with different versions & feature sets & support for the different formats that varies yes/no even depending on the frame rate...it is complicated. WAY complicated. Even though there are lots of low cost tools out there that CAN be used to make good to great looking results at low cost with the right post workflow and folks driving the process, it is also ENTIRELY possible to go with inexpensive tools and bury yourself in time and costs later by making the wrong decisions at various points along the way. I keep encountering folks coming to me AFTER mistakes have been made, and they inevitably spend more of their own time fixing it, and spend more of their budget talking to me, than if they'd come to me (or somebody else like me) and gotten a good roadmap before driving off the cliff (or at least into the ditch and needing a tow, causing expense & delay...and maybe scratching up their Pretty Thing in the process).

No names have been used, and certain details fuzzed over to protect the privacy of the individuals & some of the companies involved.

I'm sure there are DIY efforts out there that go flawlessly, and the Gods of Post smile benificiently down upon them, and all goes well.

I rarely get urgent emails from those folks after midnight.

-mike

PS - if you haven't read my 10 things NOT to do list, and you're planning on DIY, perhaps you should.

EDIT - other little story - got on the phone with a client recently and talked about their potential project, they had a particular tool they wanted to use, I didn't think that was a wise choice given their intended deliverables and creative goals...but that is what the client wanted to use. They had a very decent sized budget, but were reticent to spend $10K+ on a workstation and software setup that would comfortably do what they needed it to. Just because advice is given, doesn't mean that it will be taken. It's hard to hear someone say "I'm buying steel wool underwear" and you say "I really don't think that's a good idea." and they smile and nod and still pick it up off the shelf - what do you do then? How hard do you press the point?

Talking to my editor friend Rita today another analogy came up talking about tools and the above situation - "Just because I like my little Honda doesn't mean I should enter it in the Baja 1000." Just because a tool is similar to that which is used for more demanding tasks, and you are familiar and used to using it for those lesser tasks, doesn't make it the best or even a good or even valid choice for that task.

-m

Labels: original, techie, tutorial, workflow