HD For Indies

AnandTech: Intel Yonah Performance Preview - Part I: The Exclusive First Look at Yonah

So this is a review of a PC chipset. Why, on God's Green Earth, should I care? Because this is the likely dual core chipset to be used in Intel based PowerBooks next year. It's pretty fast, runs fairly cool, power draw isn't too bad.

Excellent.

-mike

Artbeats - Total Training Promo

Want to see some HD clips? Sign up and you can download some for free from Artbeats...thanks to reader for sending this in.

-mike

Macworld: Review: LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface, 300GB

Favorable review of 300 GB FireWire drive with USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. I have several LaCie drives and they've been good to me so far.

-mike

Think Secret - Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room

Apple's Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.


Well, it ain't as if I didn't predict this one months ago - that it would be Viiv, that it would be living room friendly, and it would be a serious new thing.

The bit about the iPod dock? Definitely, I've read about the hardware bits that were compatible with that in the past.

I hadn't heard the DVR bit suggested before, but that makes entire sense if we're talking Viiv video friendly platform.

Apple's media center intentions have become startlingly clear in the past year since Apple first delivered the Mac mini and customers first started connecting the system to home theaters


Well, duh, I've been saying that since the Intel switch was announced. And yes, I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts, but trust me, they are there.

These guys tend to predict anything and everything, and if it doesn't happen, they imply Apple backed off of the coolness that coulda/shoulda been.

For me, I'd be delighted if this happens, it would be faster than I originally expected. I think Apple is really taking to heart the lessons learned from the iPod group - get out ahead, get WAY out ahead, and nobody can touch you. Marginal benefits do NOT a market crusher make.

Then, stand by for a summer iTunes Movie Store, as soon as Apple can get the studios on board...

PS-all of this may be a part of why Apple's stock is on an amazing run of late, above and beyond the iPod madness. I predict a phenomenal Christmas of iPods - I know of two being bought just within my immediate family as gifts (don't worry, Mason my seven year old nephew doesn't read the blog!) I also put my money where my mouth is and bought several hundred more shares of Apple well before it hit 70 the other day, and I plan on keeping them for years, after the Move To Video has paid off and gone totally mainstream. I noticed a Bose iPod speaker base ad on the side of a bus the other day - in AUSTIN, not in San Francisco where I'd expect to see such things. When your third party accessories are being mass advertised on buses, you got yerself a MARKET.

-Mike

UPDATE - I DIDN'T READ IT CAREFULLY ENOUGH - THIS GUY'S ON A G4 - TOTALLY DIFFERENT STORY THAN A G5, SO DISREGARD See the comments for input from Luke at BlackMagic tech support.


This is an updated article from the other day. The original was:

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/21/05

Ewwwwwwwwww. More reasons I'm not enamored with the Highpoint product - now looks like it conflicts with the BlackMagic drivers. Whose fault? I almost don't care, they don't like each other, and until it is fixed, I STILL don't recommend these cards.

...then I got a bunch of emails saying it works fine. My thoughts are that either:

1.) This user is fubared somewhere else he doesn't realize, or

2.) This user is using RAID 5 not RAID 0 which has apparently worked for other users with the 1820/1820a boards, or

3.) This user has otherwise misconfigured something in a way different from other 1820 and BMD product users who say it has been fine for them.

-mike

AppleInsider | iTunes cracks top 10 US music retailer list

This is from last week, just been meaning to catch up to it. Everything that Apple has done for audio? They're getting ready to do for video. Apple has already cracked the top ten of music retailers with the iTunes Store. And stand by for similar results from the video side in 2-3 years.

Read the other article today about the DVR equipped Mini rumored to be coming in January (already!) by AppleInsider, article on this page.

-mike

MacNN | Addonics ships 5x1 eSATA Port Multiplier

I don't think this is quite ready for Mac stuff yet (dearth of SATA cards that support Port Multiplication - LaCie's does, but does the Highpoint 2320 PCIe? This type of thing could be quite handy in the future for DIY SATA RAID. Why 5 drives? It is a bit of a magic number. If you want to do any HD 4:2:2 format up to 10 bit 1080i60 4:2:2, you need 200 MB/sec of throughput. The nicer drives these days deliver nearly 40 MB/sec even when nearly full, so 5x40=200 MB/sec, the magic number. If the ports on the host card supported that, then an 8 port card could support 8 five drive pods, each pod capable of being a 5 drive RAID 0 (or two pods for RAID 10 redundancy), so 40 drives in all, and each pod fully capable of uncompressed HD. Nice!

It is late and I need to read up some more on port multiplication supported cards for Mac (just one for sure I know of, and PCI-X not PCIe), but a very interesting bit o'tech.

-mike

UPDATE: I misread/overreacted in my first skim-in-a-hurry -- this is Sony Pictures talking about how they'll compress their movies, not Sony Electronics altering the spec for Blu Ray, which has always required all three codecs - MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264. So disregard my paranoid format war ramblings below. Sony is just picking a stable, known tech to deliver their first stuff with. I'm just surprised to hear them say "for the foreseeable future" about MPEG-2. H.264 and VC-1 offer a lot of advantages. This is a signal to me that Sony Pictures is looking for their first Blu Ray discs to be just like regular DVDs, but with more resolution is all.

New high-definition DVDs to use old video technology? | Tech News on ZDNet

Sony is talking about using high bitrate MPEG-2 for Blu Ray, and NOT H.264 or VC-1.

I AM SHOCKED.

I had heard about issues doing interlaced footage with H.264 from Apple folks in the booth at NAB this year, but I figured that was an Apple only thing. I figured they'd do 1080p24 with 3:2 pattern added to make it 1080i60 in hardware during playback.

From the article:

Last week, studio giant Sony Pictures quietly voted for "none of the above," and took a swipe at the new codec formats. The new advanced codecs aren't immediately necessary for discs released in Sony's high-capacity Blu-ray format, Sony Pictures executives said in an interview with CNET News.com, and the studio would instead use the 11-year-old MPEG-2 video codec used on today's DVDs.
"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."


I found this very, very surprising. I had started to write "patently, demonstrably false" but I'm backing off of that. Let's break this down piece by piece -

"Advanced formats don't necessarily improve picture quality" - well, from a broad, blunt perspective, it could be argued this is true. However, at a GIVEN bitrate, this is false. If you have plenty of room, you can get good quality at a higher bitrate of MPEG-2. But that means you can't fit as much stuff on the discs.

I'm just very surprised that Sony is stating that H.264 can't deliver equal quality as MPEG-2 at a bitrate that fits onto the 25GB of a single layer Blu Ray Disc.

Hmm..why? Ostensibly, high bitrate MPEG-2 might be better quality - (and there is a lot of wiggle room to improve a codec within a format, and MPEG-2 is a mature technology that is well optimized)

The cynic in me, after having seen some really good looking H.264 (look at the downloadable HD trailers on Apple's movie trailers site), wonders if there is some other reason for this sudden move - why this late play? Is this a threat to divorce Microsoft from the game, so they have a chip that MS has to "buy back" in negotiations as they push for Mandatory Managed Copy? Or to keep away from the Microsoft/Intel Viiv initiative, keeping Sony in a role to sell more players and not have computers be as friendly a playback device? Is it because they don't want to pay the licensing fees for the other formats to include them in the Blu Ray spec?

Woops, after having written that, I realize that this is Sony Pictures, not the Blu Ray spec Sony electronics group. So disregard all that format war stuff with Microsoft (although that is an interesting thought, too).

Or is it an anti-piracy move, hoping to keep high quality, lower bitrate media out of the hands of the online pirates, making the movies bigger and harder to copy? Or too big to copy onto a 9 GB DVD-R?

The article states that the existing companies involved in DVD production are familiar with MPEG-2 and not with the others - I'd say fine then, leave MPEG-2 is as an option, and oh, I dunno, maybe PLAN FOR THE FUTURE by having support, REQURED, in all the players sold, for the other formats.


"For the first year or so, inertia and familiarity may count more than being more efficient," said Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty. "The professionals that do this for a living at Technicolor, Disney, Fox, Warner and so on are much more comfortable with MPEG-2."


Warners wants to make a 9GB disc with high def content - ONLY possible with VC-1 or H.264, NOT possible with MPEG-2. It would be produced with existing red laser disc technology, thus cheaper to crank out. H.264 and VC-1 are making entirely suitable HD movies at SD movie bitrates.

This article is really stating that Sony PICTURES likes MPEG-2 - their recent test of Charlie's Angels Full Throttle as a Blu Ray disc was compressed using MPEG-2, and maybe that is what they are happy with.

I'm just hoping this doesn't lead to a threat to the format is all. (Woops, hope I'm not misleading about that).

OK, pardon my misread on all that situation - in a hurry here to get to next meeting - been SWAMPED.

Variety.com - H'wood belt tightening

Variety writes about how studios are thinking that cost cutting is the answer to their financial woes. Or staying leery of "mid priced" movies that cost $30 to $70 million dollars to make. Or shifting advertising from TV and print to the web.

Each studio has its own mandate, its own needs to fulfill, but they are all talking about cutting back the number and/or cost of their movies in order to react to the dwindling market, chiefly due to the ever improving home alternatives - DVDs, HDTV, cable, sattelite, Amazon, Netflix, etc. The theory is that fewer movies produced will allow staffs to spend more time and focus on putting out better quality movies. Budget cutting is just being, well, cheap. My opinion: entrenched power structures and players don't scale back well. In much the same way that you'll never get a 30% raise but will have to quit and find a new job that pays 30% more, the nature of business is to NOT change internally very much. Cultural inertia in large companies, where there are egos and entrenched players with positions and budgets to defend, is an amazingly powerful force for...not much to happen.

I haven't made fun of it in a while so here goes - the writing style of Variety is hilarious - it is so self important with all of its contractions and shorthand - auds, prexy, perfs, etc. I misuse its vs it's with reckless abandon and have more craggy, consonant laden acronyms than an Eastern European governmental committee, but I don't call audiences auds.

CinemaTech, as usual, has excellent coverage/commentary on all of this, summed up by the headline Wrong Answer: Make Fewer Movies, which is how I found this article. His closing line posits the question well:

Studios already know how to make and market expensive, big-budget projects. But what about the $10 million feature film - or the $100,000 video series for cell phones?


If Wedding Crashers can be made for $30 to $40 million (plus a huuuuuuuge long running advertising budget - it feels like I must have been seeing those first ads in high school) - why can't entirely entertaining movies be made with those kinds of budgets consistently? They had some decent name brand actors in there, plenty of locations, some good gags, no need for tons of VFX work. It was simple, it was FUNNY AS HELL as was The 40 Year Old Virgin. For each demographic, what is to stop more movies from being made in that budget range - comedy is clearly doable, how about drama? Action obviously demands a higher budget, as do period pieces, but come on - how hard does it HAVE to be? I keep hearing stories about poor planning and rushed prepro (woops, see, I'm doing shorthand, I mean pre-production) costing TONS more later. The focus of the movie matters, too - Wedding Crashers/40 Yr Old Virgin obviously aren't winning any awards for set design, costume design, lighting, cinematography, etc., which all take time/skill/money more than a competent/professional/non-outstanding job, but look at the high dollar, total busts that the article points out - Stealth and The Island. Stealth was dumb and stillborn from the get-go, but The Island COULD have been good - good cast, good concept, but just stuuuuupid execution.

Perhaps the industry as a whole needs to just change its ways? I don't know, I'm not privvy to enough inside action on all of that to say with any certitude. It just seems ridiculous at times, but then again, I'm not making big feature movies....

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/25/05 has coverage of the issue that out of the box, CP 4.5 won't run on a PCIe Mac. There are hacks out there to make it run, however.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND THESE FOR SSERIOUS WORK, and here's why: if it suddenly doesn't do something you need it to do, you are STUCK on that system - tech support will not help you, there is no "for real" workaround. You're down to begging for help from strangers on user boards (then again, that's where most indies seem to be, sooooo.....).

But this is to let you know that:

1.) FCP 4.5 won't run on PCIe Macs without...
2.) altering some text in the Info.plist concerning AGP to let it run, but that
3.) if you run into trouble, you might be in Big Trouble, since Apple will flatly deny to help you

This is NOT an Evil Scheme to make you upgrade, simply indicative of the fact that when they wrote the spec for FCP 4.5 two to three years ago, they had no idea that there were going to be PCIe Macs, and it certainly didn't make sense to write code to plan for them that far ahead.

Just upgrade to the new version. If you're really a starving indie, you're a student, or close to being one, right? Academic version discounts.

Plus, there are numerous reasons to upgrade:
-more flexible realtime architecture
-support for HDV
-more bug fixes
-runs on latest OS stuff
-oh yeah - it's officially supported so if there is a problem, you can get Apple to help you (somewhat)

-mike

MaxUpgrades.com: MaxConnect Internal hard disk drive mounting solution for G5 Power Macs (PCI Express)

....and I don't like it.

YES, this kind of systems can be made to work.

BUT - I don't like the massively larger power draw - sometimes these systems will fail to boot due to too much power draw. Yes, you can run them off an external power supply, but then WHY? It definitely will tax the cooling system more - fans run louder. You also can't move that array somewhere else, such as to another machine or to a vendor. The full 9 drive kit (allowing the addition of 7 more drive locations in the G5) costs $599. For that amount of money, you can get a couple of MacGurus Burly Box 4 bay enclosures and have an external, properly powered, portable solution with no weirdness involved. The only difference then is how much space it takes up. Or look at the miniG enclosures I'll be posting a review of as soon as I can plug it in and play with it, or other options as well.

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/28/05 has some quickie text (below) and some pics of the cooling stuff in a Quad G5. Reminds me of the line from early on in The Professional over the phone: "There's a guy here." "What's he look like?" "Serious."

It shows that the new quad cooling system has 2 pumps vs the 1 on the dual 2.5 and 2.7 models. There is also a new sealant applied to the hose connections to ensure there are no leaks, and what looks like an absorbent padding on the bottom of the assembly. It is marked with a Cooligy part # but still has some componenents from bankrupt (ch. 11) Delphi onboard.

Final Cut Pro 5 and iMac G5 (iSight): Video from built-in camera is seen in Edit to Tape window


Had a reader run into this problem - they saw themselves in front of their computer on screen when trying to edit to tape! Read for how to un-snargle the FireWire stuff so that you're not seeing iSight output.

-mike

Avid Liquid 7 -- a review by broadcast designer Mark Harvey on Creative Cow. See what Avid is starting to do with Liquid, a popular Windows based NLE system.

-mike

Quad Core G5/2.5 versus Single Core Dual G5/2.5

Testing results from the ever dilligent Rob-ART at barefeats.com, running a new Quad G5 vs the older single core dual G5.

Tests included Photoshop CS2 (impressive), After Effects rendering (quite impressive), Cinebench rendering (pretty good), QT 7 HD to iPod Video encoding (not so impressive), and Motion (no real benefit).

-mike

Quick Takes on Real World Macintosh Performance:

Rob-Art from Barefeats.com does some very nice commentary and analysis of the Quad G5 based on some first hand testing he's done. Some early recipients are complaining that the Quad G5 isn't living up to their expectations. In response, he's taken a step by step approach to explaining what's reasonable to expect, including this useful nugget:

Not all MP aware apps fully use the four processors.When we ran Apple's own applications (including iMovie render and QuickTime Player export, and Motion RAM Preview render) we didn't see more than 160% usage. Some readers reported as much as 230% usage when they did Final Cut Pro renders and DVD encoding. However, when we ran Adobe Photoshop CS (certain filters), Adobe After Effects (render), Maxon's Cinema 4D (render), and Deep Shredder (Chess game analysis) we saw usage of over 390%.

Read the full article for all the details.

Best Boot Drive for the Quad-Core G5 Power Mac

Rob-ART at barefeats.com goes through a bunch of different boot drives for a Quad G5. No clear leader, but read on for details.

Yes, I'm back, and all kinds of awesome stuff happened over the weekend, but all I can say is that I saw some exotic game (blackbuck from Asia) up in the hill country.

Just Click Me.

Thanks, robogeek.com, for sharin' the luv.

-mike

I'll be completely off the grid over the holiday weekend - I'm goin' up to the Texas Hill Country and won't be blogging Friday and Saturday and probably not Sunday either.

I'll be completely off the grid - no cell phone, no Internet, I don't know if I'll go into convulsive twitching withdrawal or what. How old is the place we're going? They have a two parter phone in this old guest house on a ranch - the hand piece you hold up to your ear and the talky part mounted to the box on the wall. I love it.

We'll be overeating, makin' 'smores by firelight, watching deer (and maybe gazelles and pronghorn antelope, too) wander through the giant open field in front of the house.

It is a longtime family friend's place (our families have known each other for five generations now), and I really treasure every chance I get to be out there. My parents, my sister and her husband and kids, me and my girlfriend Melissa will hike, cook, eat, shoot off rockets with the kids, wander around Fredericksburg, and do other fun lazy stuff.

I may or may not blog on Sunday, but I'll definitely be back on Monday.

Until then, count on my fellow Americans to all put on weight, and to everyone else in the other 115 countries that have checked out the site over the last two weeks, just know we're overindulding, American Style, over the weekend.

The dogs unfortunately aren't coming, the neighbor is feeding them, and all they have are a couple of howling G5s to keep them company as some new fonky math algorithms get tested uprezzing a feature length piece whilst I am away...making money while you sleep, drink and overeat - the American Dream!

Signing off, and thankful for all the good stuff I've found, friends I've made, and kudos I've received from doing this thing,

-mike

Turner Entertainment turns to holographic storage - Computerworld

In an interview to be published today (see link in other article), I was asked how/where we'll be backing up the video from all of these P2 cards and hard drive based recording systems where the capture media is too expensive to use for archiving. I was suggesting data tape or optical disks, but both have their inconveniences. I've been reading about holographic storage for a year or more, but didn't realize how close it was to commercialization. Well, Turner Networks does, they just tested holographic storage and like. They like it a lot:

The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That's pretty inexpensive," said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment. "Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That's burning. Then combine it with random access, and it's the best of all worlds."


Groovage.

DV Guru

Part Two of Ajit Anthony Prem's interview of me (Mike Curtis) is up on DVGuru.com.

I talk about prepping and preparing for shooting indie projects, discuss some common pitfalls, talk about the Adobe and Apple integrated suites and when to use'em and when to go "outside the box" for software solutions beyond the bundled apps, what I'd like to see Apple do for indie filmmaking (including my guesses as to what I THINK Apple should do for FCP 6), I talk about Final Touch HD and how I'm starting a business around it, my picks for most interesting hardware and software out right now, future of HD, HD DVD vs Blu Ray, and the future of HD For Indies itself.

Check it out - he's edited my usual rambly self down to something readable.

: )

Here's a link to Part One if you missed it yesterday.

-mike

It's here! Now on sale in Japan. - The Digital Video Information Network

DVInfo.net reader on the scene in Japan. A picture, too.

DV Guru has posted part one of me being interviewed (that's a switch) by Ajit Anthony Prem. We had a loooooooong iChat text a few weeks ago that he's edited down and posted the first half of online at the above link.

He prefaces the interview with the following description:

HD for Indies has quickly become one of the most important websites for digital filmmaking. Whether it be HD, DV, Apple or Adobe, the man behind the blog/site, Mike Curtis provides an experienced, thoughtful, unbiased, truly independent point of view, all the while learning and teaching with his readers. Mr. Curtis has been in digital media production for over 15 years producing content for everything from cell phones to Hollywood movies. He has recently partnered to create [omitted], a HD post-production house (based in Austin, TX) with Indie Filmmakers in mind. My chat with him covered topics such as the future of HD; the positives and negatives of HD; how filmmaker can better plan their post-production workflows; archiving in the age of tapeless acquisition; Apple's Final Cut studio; Adobe; upcoming technologies whether be camera's, codecs or software; and the list goes on. Because of the length of the interview, the conversation will span over two installments.

Aww, shucks, man, thanks!

I'll publish on here when Part 2 goes up as well.

One note - the coloring website is NOT up yet, and not likely to be for weeks, so if you have any questions about that service please just email me directly at mike@hdforindies.com.

Got this from Cynthia over at VSA:

I would like to invite you all to visit the VSA Indie Film Maker's HDV
Show, Novemember 28th - 29th 10:00am - 6:00pm hosted by Austin
Studios. Stop by for hands-on demos of Sony's hottest camera ever, the
HVR Z1U. We'll have Cinema packages on site including matteboxes with
follow focus and rail system, Glidecam camera stabilization systems
and HD field monitors. If you need an edit system, we will also have
information on site for Final Cut Pro, Avid Liquid, Sony Vegas and
much more. If you need more information please feel free to contact me
by email or phone (512-563-0844).

Hope to see you there!

Cynthia Stein
VSA


So if you're in Austin or surrounding area and want to see a Z1U in action, check it out...

Dialogue: George Lucas

Groovy interview with Lucas about the future of moviemaking. Includes comments about movies needing to move to iTunes model, etc. More later, must scoot.

-mike

I'd previously covered a rumor site's supposition that the first Intel Macs on were track for January, but I tend to take those guys with a grain of salt, since they fling out a million rumors and when one of them happens to stick, they say "See! We knew all along!"

But I recently got a report from a friend who said someone they knew who worked for Apple wasn't around to hang out with because they were spending a loooooooooooot of time in Cork, Ireland, where there is an Apple production line. Some brief Googling didn't reveal what models they've been building there recently - anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

-mike

Macworld UK - Sony, NEC to combine optical drive businesses

...and yes, this will extend to Blu Ray drives as well.

Even more interesting, NEC has been an HD DVD backer, and the new company (that Sony will be a majority holder of) will ostensibly make BOTH Blu Ray and HD DVD players and drives.

Is this Sony just hedging it's bets that Blu Ray will win?

Or is Sony being shrewd yet again, as they were in the DVD+R vs DVD-R war, and they are going to produce "combo" players capable of reading (or writing?) both HD DVD and Blu Ray, akin to their DVD+/-R combo burners? A combo HD DVD/Blu Ray player is a more difficult tech merge than the DVD+/-R thing, but it is possible to do, just potentially pricey...but a combo player solves the whole "which do I buy?" conundrum entirely (except for the likely higher price of that box, supporting both HD DVD and Blu Ray disc reading firmware, as well as two different laser pickups with different spot sizes and different focal planes).

-mike

OK, file this as unconfirmed gossip, I only have one source on this so far, but it boils down to this:

-I had mentioned the possibility the other day that it was proposed to go into the spec, but now it looks like it IS going into the spec

-as I'd hoped, it would appear now that the official Blu Ray spec will support, meaning all Blu Ray players should be able to play, a "properly" formatted DVD-R with MPEG-2 HD content on it. As in a red laser disc, be it DVD-5 or DVD-9, with HD content on it, would play in a Blu Ray player

-you'd have to use Blu Ray style authoring tools - your traditional DVD authoring software would not suffice, because Blu Ray discs are a different file/data/disk format than regular DVDs

-H.264 may be having trouble with interlaced content, so MPEG-2 may have to be used. Apple folks also told me of similar H.264 difficulties at NAB this year, I thought it was just because some Apple engineers were being laggards in their implementation, but it might be an issue with the core H.264 spec itself. Which I don't understand, since I'd think they'd have two independent fields to be processed as two separate progressive images, and could just process them to display as fields...blah blah blah but the intraframe (or interframe? Late/tired, whichever is frame to frame) compression is probably the hold up there.

-In any case, using a tool like an updated DVD Studio Pro, you'd author your HD content and burn it on a DVD-R, and it would play in ANY Blu Ray player that properly and fully supported the Blu Ray spec

-this is hot, since that may well mean that pretty much raw HDV footage could be piped over onto a Blu Ray disc, although Sony specifically said that wouldn't work or wasn't planned to work as of MWSF almost a year ago (back in Jan '05). HDV is long GOP MPEG-2 with a GOP of 15, which sounds to my mind similar to what Blu Ray would need for HD content. Maybe Blu Ray is full raster 1920x1080 instead of HDV's 1440x1080, I dunno. But something software could fix during an encode, certainly.

-this'd be HUGE for the home market - FINALLY a way to watch your own high def content on your own HDTV without having to plug the camera into the HDTV (so 1980s a solution!). The ability to author to a convenient, nonlinear access shiny disc is a world of difference from mastering to tape.

-I don't know/don't recall/don't remember reading that HD DVD would offer a similar capability

In a losing race with the zeitgeist is the LA Times' smackdown on Hollywood, in effect saying "You're too old, too slow, too out of touch, and too in love with your own way of doing things. You're about to die, Mr. Dinosaur."

Some delicious pullquotes:

The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business. Put simply, an explosion of new technology — the Internet, DVDs, video games, downloading, cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than 90% of the movies in theaters

Anywhere you look, the news has been grim. Disney just reported a $313-million loss for films and DVDs in its fiscal fourth quarter. Sony has had a disastrous year, with only one $100-million hit ("Hitch") among a string of costly flops. DreamWorks not only has had theatrical duds but also saw its stock plummet when its "Shrek 2" DVD sales fell 5 million short of expectations. Even Warners, the industry's best-run studio, laid off 400 staffers earlier this month.

Although the media have focused on the economic issues behind this slump, the problem is cultural too. ...... Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much — the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall. When MPAA chief Dan Glickman goes to colleges, preaching his anti-piracy gospel, kids hiss, telling him his efforts don't help the public, only a few rich media giants. Say what you will about their logic, but, as anyone in the music business can attest, those sneers are the deadly sign of a truly disgruntled consumer.

There are still optimists who say the sky isn't falling.....

To them, I say — go ye to Costco or Best Buy and watch the giant HDTVs zooming out the door, the TVs that used to cost $7500 that now go for $1995 and allow middle-class people to have a marvelous moviegoing experience right at home without $10.50 tickets, $4 popcorn, 20 minutes of annoying commercials and some guy in the next row yakking away on his cellphone.


That is the bulk of it - that the studio system is too slow in this age of rapid cultural development, when the cultural half-life of a Cool New Thing is shorter than that of some rare hypothetical radioactive isotopes, capturable only perhaps by a shot on DV, web posted short movie made in a day and widecast worldwide within the next, that the studios are too old, slow, disconnected, and just plain hoserated to possibly reel it in, suck it up, and get their shiznat together in time to rescue their threatened industry.

Too little/too late/not enough efforts like 3D-ized movies are a stab in the right direction, but I just read that IBM thinks it can add passive (not red/blue and not flicker glasses) 3D to DLP TVs for about $20 manufacturing cost per set doesn't sound like it'll be long before 3D will be easily possible at home.

Hollywood in part did it to itself - in their rush to monetize their backlibrary via DVDs, they created a market to watch movies on big HDTVs at home such that it just isn't worth going to a theater for $75 (drive, park, $10 tix apiece, $4 sodas and $6 popcorn all around, etc.) with the family to see something they can stay at home and watch for $4 a pop via Netflix.

All of this is good news for indies I think - movie theaters with film prints and ad budgets are driven by the urge to make blockbusters, swingin' for the fences with each shot. With the multi-channel, multi-avenue home viewing experience, indies have more inroads. Cable, internet downloads, PPV, Amazon, Netflix, etc., are all viable avenues for indies.


I very much liked the quote about how many films in theaters today SHOULDN'T be released theatrically:

...most of the movies in theaters don't deserve a theatrical release, at least not by the rules of today's game. Until the DVD and pay TV money kicks in, they're money losers. Yet the studios are forced to spend more marketing money every year to chase after increasingly resistant moviegoers, then go dark for months before spending another big chunk to remind people the DVD has arrived.

OK, enough ranting for today.

I wrote some more, but I'm going to break it off into another posting.

I'm writing this after writing about the LA Times article about Hollywood being in a losing race with the zeitgeist. In fact, this was written at the end of that blog entry, and I decided it didn't really belong there, so I started a new entry. Here goes - consider this from where the other entry left off:

Today, there are 60 movies listed as showing (or about to show) in Austin, Texas, my hometown. So probably about 45ish showing today, what with all the one night only custom gigs at the Alamo, and unreleased movies like King Kong that are already selling tickets in advance, etc. So about 45 movies to chose from. Kind of a lot, but not a huge number. How many if I were looking at my choices for home? Hmm. I've got 6 HBO's and I ain't even TRYIN'. Plus all the other cable movie channels, and the Discovery Channel, A&E, and other viable avenues for indie content. I've got two DVD rental places within a 3 minute drive of my house (and doesn't my grocery store HEB sell'em, too?). I've got pay per view, I've got Amazon.com at my fingertips, I've got Netflix too if I got off my lazy butt and used'em (I'm afraid to sign up, I already have too little free time...). Or just 45 movies showing theatrically in town. Wake up, folks - theatrical is a romantically attractive thing - who WOULDN'T want their movie up on the big screen across the country, where hundreds of people travelled across town to sit in the dark and laugh and cry and be scared together? There are plenty of movies being made these days, more than can fit in the theaters. Are there enough good ones showing? TAWOB. (I'm dubbing that a new acronym right now - That's A Whole Other Blog.) But there are tons of niche movies available through all the other avenues, and frankly, that's where most of you, dear readers, should be focusing. Like I said the other day - Sundance Film Festival had 2600 submissions. Probably a good half or more of them sucked balls outright and shouldn't have even been sent in. Because there were only 120 selected for viewing. Even there - one hundred and twenty movies! That is a LOT of movies to show during one event. And of those? Something like 10 or 15 got picked up for any meaningful theatrical distribution (and somebody bust me on that figure, I don't have hard numbers). Most films that get completed will not get theatrical distribution. THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Don't read this as "I hate movies and yours suxors," that is not my intent at all.

DO go out and make a movie. Just plan for where it might be seen realistically.

My favorite approach of late:

-shoot HD (or film if you can afford it and want the look)
-shoot the best looking format you can afford that fits the look you want your story to have, keeping the budget in balance - don't shoot on an F950 to an s.Two if it makes you use cardboard boxes for sets, bums for actors and your old gym clothes for wardrobe. Come on folks, balance in all things.
-whether you shoot 24p, or shoot 50i and make it 24p, or whatever, plan on being able to make a good looking 24p master if it makes sense for your project and content
-do your own post, or at least your own offline edit
-do your own online if it makes financial sense and somebody ACTUALLY knows what they are doing. That said, there's lots to be learned when you get in over your head. Just do you want to know that much about it?
-submit it to the festivals, so you can get good press, this will help sell your movie. I specifically heard an exec at Paramount Classics suggest this instead of a limited LA or NYC release
-master to HD, or if broke wait until you get in at festivals, and THEN master to HD for your screener
-(of course, consider having my company, color correct, color enhance, and master your project!) : )
-run the festival circuit and see if you get any traction
-if you DO get picked up for any kind of distribution, you can either:
a.) hand over your HD master for standard and high def deliverables. With a 24p master, you can get to every format worldwide with minimal fuss. Congrats, you did it right
b.) if they want to distribute theatrically, pop the champagne cork and celebrate. Depending on the funds involved, either hand over the HD master and supervise a filmout from there (possible color tweaks), or go back and remaster at 4:4:4 RGB or 2K if you shot film (if you were smart, your post house can use their color correction settings from the prior pass. Ahem. We can do this.)

In any case, it is good to be prepared to deliver for any medium - broadcast TV/cable, SD or HD DVD, broadcast/cable HD, filmout, PAL markets, all of it.

Be smart with your efforts, to, and realize you can sell the same thing more than once.

There's a guy I know that produces a show. Kinda cheesy, a bikini babes travel the world kind of a show. Set aside your Art and put on your Commerce hat for a sec and ride this one out with me.

First off, he shoots 16:9, but frames for 4:3 safe. This means that if they need to crop the SIDES of their HD stuff off to fit in full frame 4:3, he's not cutting somebody out of frame or cutting something in half. He shoots so that the middle 4:3 of the 16:9 looks good on it's own, and the extra stuff in frame looks good too - no mike booms in the shot, just more usable scenery etc.

Then he sells the HD domestic rights to one company.

Then he sells the domestic standard def rights to somebody else (SpikeTV I think)

Then he sells the international HD & SD rights to somebody else

And since he travelled to all these gorgeous exotic locations to shoot his project, he also shot tons of HD b roll too, and he sells THAT to stock footage agencies.

That's an example of an extremely well leveraged piece.

If you're on a super tight budget, consider HDV or the HVX200 that records to DVCPRO HD on P2 cards or hard drives eventually.

If you have a better than that budget, consider Varicam. Moderately expensive but nice image quality camera, super easy and inexpensive post route (you can edit native HD content on a laptop, such as the 12" model I'm writing this on. How's that for cool!). I've written about the post workflow before, search for Varicam or 1200A on the blog.

If you have some more money, consider HDCAM, and then F950, or Viper, or D-20, or Genesis, blah de blah on up to film. Ugh. A whole other world of speeches, conversations, lectures, etc. in there, so don't take the above as flat gospel, just some general advice, as each project has it's own needs, etc.

And if you shoot film, do a DI. Traditional color timing just isn't cost effective in comparison to what can be done digitally today (the Paramount Classics guy said that too). 2K DI is pretty expensive still, consider an, um, intermediate level digital intermediate, such as we're advocating at our shop (and yes, I am shilling for my company, but the general advice still holds as valid I firmly and honestly believe) of a 10 bit RGB 4:4:4 1920x1080 losslessly processed digital intermediate. For the money, it's a helluva bang for the buck, and most audiences will never notice the difference between that and a 2K DI unless you're doing some fairly unusual stuff.

OK, argh, it is after midnight now and I'm still at the office.

To home, to bed, and to all, good moviemaking.

-mike

UPDATED SIGNIFICANTLY TUESDAY NIGHT - SEE BOTTOM

This is a long one, so I'll boil it down this way: not all decks are created equal. Not all decks, even for the same format, will kick an identical signal out of the SDI or HD-SDI taps. FireWire capture doesn't give the same quality as SDI or HD-SDI capture. Read on for details...

This morning I had a conversation with the rep from a video production rental house and we were talking about renting HDCAM decks. I was asking to see if they had a half day rate for their high end HDCAM deck that has all the boards and goodies in it (the HDW-F500).

He was wanting to know why we wanted it for just a half day, I said we were just doing layback to tape after color correction (so just mastering really). We chatted about rates, and then I asked him if they had a JH-3, the inexpensive playback only deck. He asked what I wanted that for, and I said to capture in. What kind of capture he asked - I said for uncompressed online.

Then he said I wouldn't want to do that.

I knew that the JH-3 was the inexpensive playback only deck, but I didn't know that the playback quality was NOT the same as on the bigger decks. Earlier this year I got tipped that DV was better captured over SDI than over FireWire thanks to Graeme Nattress (or use plugins, such as ones he makes, to help improve the FireWired footage), and I'd heard that the SDI (or HD-SDI) outputs were better on studio decks than the regular decks, but I'd always kind of doubted that, that it was some kind of juju that wasn't the same, that these old school post house guys weren't getting the whole native code stuff.

Woops - they were, I wasn't getting the difference between hardware and software decoding (or rather, decompressing) of the compressed data on tape.

The rep was telling me about a project being shot on HDCAM that was trying to use a JH-3 to clone HDCAM tapes for safeties, and what a BAD idea that was. At that point, they were making DUBS, not clones, and even worse, the JH-3 doesn't fully decompress, or doesn't compress the same way/as well, as the higher end studio decks such as the 500. The rep was saying it has always been this way - that there is the plastic deck and the studio deck, and the studio deck actually plays back tapes (and records them as well I would presume) a little bit better. So in the case of this production, which was for a feature film (OK movie since HD), this was a disastrously bad idea - JH-3 inferior playback into an HDCAM studio deck via HD-SDI, which itself recompresses any incoming signal (YES even though it is over the uncompressed HD-SDI pipe). Why so disastrously bad? Because they are shooting greenscreen! The most persnickety, sensitive, picky type of footage that can look fine to the naked eye and be a nightmare to get a good key out of. The correct path? CLONING, not DUBBING, via HD-SDTI. What is that "T" doing in there? It is Sony's proprietary interface to move just the compressed bits of HDCAM around without recompresssing them or changing them. The "T" stands for "transfer", as in high def (or is it data rate?) serial digital TRANSFER interface. Think of HD-SDTI as Sony's version of FireWire for HDCAM. Oh, so can you connect that to your Mac or PC and edit it natively, as we do for DV, DVCPRO, DVCAM, DVCPRO 50, HDV, and DVCPRO HD? No, dammit, because Sony wants to keep it to itself, and is only available on their own Xpri editing system, which I see as pointless for the indie filmmaker market (expensive and non-differentiating except for that one feature). I'd VERY much like to see Sony open up that so that companies like AJA, Avid, and BlackMagic could incorporate it into their boards for Avid, FCP, Premiere Pro, Vegas, etc.

So my current understanding and feeling is that the JH-3 is a good deck for OFFLINE capture, but it is NOT the correct, nor ideal, nor best deck to capture finals on. I've posted otherwise in the past, and hey, I apologize for not knowing then the best route. So when you get down to finishing your project, whatever your workflow, the recommended workflow would be to offline with JH-3, and online with the HDW-F500 deck. If you could pull it off and had time, run the math and see if it is feasible to capture online/uncompressed quality footage, render your final color corrected footage, and lay back to tape with a single rental. It is common to have a "3 day week" on deck rentals, meaning the cost of a week is the same as 3 times the daily rate. If you can pick up/drop off the deck locally, two one day rentals is ideal. If you have to ship it or drive it, consider the week option that would give you plenty of time.

I spent a lot of time last year, early on with this blog, saying that there was no difference to capture via FireWire or SDI/HD-SDI. That the data on the tape was the same either way. Not quite right. The data on the tape IS the same either way, but you are relying on either software or hardware to decompress that data. In software, it comes in (using FCP as a model) as a QuickTime file, and QuickTime decompresses it. Not always very well, such as in the case of DV. But you can enhance the software methodology with plugins (I'm liking the ones from nattres.com at the moment) for better/smoother chroma results. Some formats do better than others - I did some extensive testing with DVCPRO HD footage, capturing with FireWire vs capturing over HD-SDI with both BlackMagic DeckLink HD Pro and AJA Kona2 cards. The FireWire footage was a tiny, tiny bit different, mostly due to the software vs. hardware scaling from the natively FireWired 960x720 Varicam footage as compared to the HD-SDI captured footage. Doing a mathematical comparison on them using a differnce filter in After Effects, and cranking up the contrast on the results to magnify the differences, the differences were extremely slight, and mostly had to do with every forth column of pixels and the scaling math to get from 960 to 1280 pixels wide. I didn't do a chroma comparison, but overall it looked very good. Now, would I see a difference between the two in real world footage? I'm inclined to think not, but I'd want to do some greenscreen tests to see. Woops, but that was with the 1200A deck, not the higher end studio deck - need to test that to really know.

Anyway, it boils down to this: if you want the best possible quality out of your workflow, examine every piece very carefully to make sure there isn't a weak link in the chain.

Here's a quickie link to B&H's page on the JH-3. I'm not endorsing them as a vendor, they were just the first Google hit for stats on that model.

UPDATE TUESDAY NIGHT - So apparently, I touched off a lot of debate about this one. It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that there is a difference when using DV to use the SDI vs FireWire for ingest, to the point that a documentary with 372 source tapes is going to the trouble of recapturing their source tape selects via SDI, with the additional caveat that it is shot on a mix of 24p, 24pA (Advanced Pulldown) and 60i and it needs to all be 23.976 when its done. Oh, and none of the tapes are labelled as to which format they were shot with. A shout out, my brethren, to our poor sistah Rita who must tackle all this on her own, and resolve the issues of incorrect (24.0 not 23.976) Cinema Tools menu usage in FCP, cranky batch behavior with Cinema Tools, and the fact that Remove Advanced Pulldown ONLY works on DVCPRO/DVCPRO50 media. Light a candle, drink a beer, say a prayer, send some stout hair care product (she is so punk rock born too late), do something for one of our own in the line of fire.

But I digress (as you do), since itsa-blog, so back on track:

I have one reader who claims to have captured uncompressed over HD-SDI from an F500 and a JH-3 and done the white count test (tests for any mismatch) and he says it is a dead-on match, there is no difference whatsoever.

This may well be true - but I haven't done or seen the test myself, and I haven't talked to him about his testing methodology, and since I haven't (no offense to the guy!) I won't vouch for it Until I Know For Sure.

Another possibility - perhaps the inferred quality inferiority of the JH-3 was in comparison to the cloning (vs dubbing) of the footage. If Option One was HD-SDI into the F500 studio deck produced a dub, not a clone, and Option Two was two F900 decks connected via HD-SDTI not HD-SDI, was the signal from JH-3 assumed inferior due to that? Were any tests done comparing JH-3 to F900 over HD-SDI vs F900 to F900 vs HD-SDI?

I dunno, just some thoughts to try to explain all this.

IF ANYBODY HAS ACCESS TO A JH-3 AND AN F500 DECK, AND HAS A KONA2/KONA LH/BLACKMAGIC DECKLINK HD AND AN ARRAY AND CAN TEST THIS, PLEASE EMAIL ME!

Or to the guy who tested it, please email me directly so we can chat about testing methodology and put this to rest.

-mike

Microsoft and CableLabs Enable HD Programming on Windows PCs

HD Cable ready Media Center Pcs for holiday 2006 (NOT 2005) using Cable Card, the groovy way to handle secure cable content access.

Yet another example of more ways to get digital content into the home. Two years of testing and evaluation and tech reviews to get to this point.

Convergence, baby. A few years after they said it would happen, but itsa comin'.


-mike

AppleInsider | TiVo: Mac TiVoToGo support coming in 2006

TiVo representatives this week reiterated a company pledge to release a Mac-compatible version of its popular TiVoToGo software, according to an online report.

On Monday, the digital video recorder maker announced that it will be extending the feature to allow subscribers to transfer content to Apple's iPod digital music players and Sony's PlayStation portable devices.

File this under "more things leading to more digital distribution."

-mike

I've been crazy busy as we prepare to color correct FOUR feature films between now and mid January, a pretty daunting task as I stare down that particular gun barrel at the moment, and I prepare to whip out all my logistical project management skills. Tomorow, I prepare to Gantt chart that mutha into shape. A huge, gnarly, multi-threaded conditional events shape, but into some kind of shape nonetheless.

As I've been crazy mad busy, I'd been stacking up articles of interest to read and potentially blog about, and I had a pretty deep stack - about 30 or 40 "I should scan some more and see if it is blog worthy" articles - and the other day I shut my notebook and when I opened it back up it was OFF - I lost everything not saved, which was a loooooooong article, dammit, that'll probably never get written now, and all my open Safari windows. Battery hadn't run down, just my trusty little pitted handrest 12" PowerBook was OFF, a state it pretty much never sees.

So I missed things like Tivo coming to Mac, something about Tivo content for iPod Video, Disney stuff, some new hardware, bunch of New York Times Sunday magazine coolness, all went poof-gone-bye-bye-now. I look at hundreds of web pages a day and I don't have time to go find it all from the maze of my History menu.

A ton of useful links were sent in that I had stacked up too, going back to last Wednesday or Thursday. With over a hundred emails a day, it is too much to go back and find it all.

So it boils down to this:

1.) I missed some significant news, or at least I didn't cover it here. Sue me, it's a free site. :D

2.) If you sent me a link of interest since last Wednesday and I didn't blog it, I didn't blow you off, just lost it. Send it again if you still think it relevant.

-mike

Quad Core G5/2.5 versus Single Core Dual G5/2.5

barefeats gets hands on

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/21/05

discussion as to whether SSC drives are fully supported on G5s, and whether Deep Sleep vs. Spin Down Drives When Not Active constitutues sleep, or is even advisable (on my editing systems, I might sleep the systems, but I keep the drives spinning when "alive" although I am sure to sleep the screens).

really only pertinent for owners, not potential purchasers as there is a perfectly acceptable workaround for editors.

UPDATED SUNDAY NIGHT AD THEN AGAIN MONDAY MORNING- SEE BOTTOM


Camcorderinfo.com Message Board - Latest Info on the HVX200, although DVInfo.net had it about two days before here, or really even here on the 15th, I just didn't find it that way first (thanks to sharp readers for pointing out the timeline for who should get the original credit).

The above text chart was snaggged from the Panasonic Japan page on HVX200, and is not of my own creation - it is theirs. Credit where credit due, etc.

Worth noting is that it will definitely do regular 3:2 pulldown as well as Advanced Pulldown mode for a variety of formats.

According to the Panasonic Japan website on the HVX200:

-1080 line, progressive CCDs - this is different from what I assumed by a longshot, I've been assuming they'd use 720p imager and uprez so as not to numerically upstage their much more expensive Varicam $65,000 720p camera (even though Varicam has beeter glass, pro outputs, etc.).

-720 and 480 res footage will be downsampled from this larger imager - Graeme, thoughts on contrast and detail in that context?

-Analog to Digital signal processor (A/D DSP) is 14 bits with an internal precision of 19 bit

-variable frame rates (for fast/slow motion through over/under cranking) is only available in 720p (but could you use built in downconversion to copy over FireWire as DV downconvert or somesuch?) adjustable in 11 steps from 12 to 60 fps (drat, hoping for slower, but can do that in post I suppose)

-Variable frame rate has to be recorded to P2 or external disk

-Yeah, HD can be downsampled from P2 to internal DV cassette (nice!)

-variable slow shutter down to 1/12th second

-Cinegamma - 8 gamma modes (choice is good), including news

-link to Babelfish translated version of Japanese page

Bear in mind this is all someone's interpretation of the Japanese site's translation, so could be wrong. I'm just reporting what Camcorderinfo.com reported with some commentary thrown in.

I'll believe it when it is clearly stated, in English (not badly mistranslated Engrish) what the true native resolution of the CCDs is.

Thanks to Matthwe Jeppsen from FresHDV for sending me the link!

-mike

I emailed Graeme Nattress of Nattress Plugins, and he responded:


Hi Mike,

Ah, but Jan on the cow (CreativeCow.net - mike)said it uses both horizontal and vertical pixel shift. This would make it a not 1080p imager. I'm guessing:

960x720 chips, approx with h and v pixelshift

pixelshift gives about a 1.4 factor rez so...

that gives you your 1280x1080 progressive.

Now that is now sampled down to 720p which is 960x720, or to 1080i or etc....

-Graeme


the saga continues,
-mike

UPDATE
From this forum on Creative Cow from Jan, The Woman Herself from Panasonic:

The camera starts with a progressive chip, a 1080/60P chip. In its 24P or 30P modes, or its variable frame modes, it will change to that time base for capture, but it starts as a progressive chip capture and then makes the conversion, cross conversion or down conversion from there. It is a true progressive chip set and will make progressive pictures, not marketing, but rather, engineering.

Hope this helps,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

...however, this still doesn't answer the "true resolution" question.

But she previously said:


But then you do nothave to be disappointed because it does use horizontal and vertical spatial offset.
here, so to me that reinforces the circa 960x720ish resolution, and the pixelshift/spatial offset will generate the 1280x1080 for 1080 res DVCPRO HD.

A big THANK YOU to readers for pointing out links to all these tidbits in the comments section, I wouldn't have found'em without you. Working together, we can get some good answers, so I VERY much appreciate your time and contribution.

Somebody in one of the forums claims the native res will be 1280x720 which is DVCPRO HD so therefore I am wrong...but the PLAYBACK res is 1280x720, internally it is only 960x720, literally just twice DV res.

Bottom line - I'm still thinking 960x720 "true" native, with pixel shift it'll give a nice 4:2:2 1080p res. Larger pixels on the sensor are actually a good thing, since it gives better contrast and better signal/noise to my understanding. The Z1U uses 960x1080 as a 1080i camera, Jan has stated that there will be both horizontal and vertical spatial offset, so that might support 960x720.

But of course, this is all my own speculation, and IANAE (I Am Not An Engineer).

The REAL issue is how good does the footage look when the camera is in YOUR hands (or your DoP's) on your set shooting your movie/project.

Graeme posted this in the comments, I thought it worthy of inclusion:

Pixelshift is not upsampling. It's real rez you get, and you get lower noise / better dynamic range benefits too. Indeed, you'll end up with a better, contrastier picture this way.

Other affordable HD cameras might have "resolution" but they don't have "definition", and certainly not "high definition" in the way that say, a varicam or HDCAM image just pops off the screen (and that's before post production).

Panasonic really seem to be doing the engineering right on this one, from all we've heard. But the proof is in the pudding, and that's just about baked.

-mike

Join a Revolution. Make Movies. Go Broke. - New York Times

...is a brutally honest Telling of The Tale.

Most movies lose money.

Most movies don't even recoup their original investment to even break even.

A LOT of good, interesting, artistically interesting movies that do well on the festival circuit don't make a dime.

This is the story of Arin Crumley (24) and Susan Buice (27), who sank more than $75,000 of their own money, credit card debt, and their parents' money into making and showing "Four Eyed Monster" at a bunch of festivals.

I met these two people, the actors and stars one and the same, and talked to them at SXSW.

I saw this movie, I like this movie, I was blown away by the audacity of this movie, flaws and all.

But it isn't going to make them a dime it looks like.

Read this article, my friends, if are thinking you want to make a movie.

If you still do, God bless you and protect, because you'll need it.

I'll support you, I'll help you, I'll give a lot of free advice on the blog, but for a lot of folks if you call or email me asking for help I'll ask for money, because I too wish to keep a roof over my head. I've said it before and I'll say it again -

for projects that offer me a learning opportunity, or a chance to try something I've been meaning to get around to (aka use your project as a guinnea pig), or I think is Just Cool, I'll get involved and help out for free. But if I've already done one like that, or it doesn't float my boat, I'll ask to be compensated for my time. Because I'm in this for fun, but I'm in this first as a business to support myself. I had a producer dance the line with me the other week saying "We're in the film business. For the 20 year olds saying they should be getting paid more on a film, I say you're getting paid, and that's better than most at your age. You're in the film business, be happy about it." That attitude scares the hell out of me, because frankly, I'M NOT IN THAT BUSINESS. Or at least, I certainly don't want to be in any business that says I should be happy and lucky to get paid baloney sandwich wages to take part in. And the producer was perhaps (not sure) implying that I should be in that boat too, and I refuse.

I want to see more cool movies get made, most assuredly. I think digital is a great way to do that. If you are reading this, you've probably been here before and seen my earliest posts about WHY to go digital, and seen the reviews, tests, FAQs, etc. that I've given to the community because it was fun, interesting, and also a way to get my name out there. I want to help filmmakers achieve their dreams and visions with HD For Indies and the services we'll be rolling into the market - it looks like it is working, we appear to be booked well into January solid at this point, with more services to follow beyond just color correction of SD, HD, and film originated material.

I'm in this to make a living assisting others make movies, and hopefully make art.

I think about Four Eyed Monsters, and how they did something really honest, really brash, really interesting and amazing and Of Our Generation, not some watered down filtered version like You've Got Mail. They tackled real world issues of today's emotional landscape in a way that frankly, most commercial films wouldn't. I thought about this - if they'd removed the section on Topic Y, it would have been a more marketable film. But it would have been less honest, and decisions such as that would swing it away from something with a tentative claim to Art towards something more towards Commerce and Entertainment. And as a filmmaker, you need to be very clear about which you are doing. Do you want to tell your Story, or do you want to make a Good Movie. It is a Great Thing when you can do both, but very very difficult and rare to achieve. For the most part, I'd say pick one, and live with the consequences of that decision, may God (whom I don't believe in) have mercy on your soul, since either path has serious challenges for the soul at hand.

OK, that's harsh, but that's as real as I see it.

Other than that, come on in, we got a special this week on coloring documentaries...

OK, back to the article. Some good pull quotes:

Sydney Pollack, the director - who has served as a creative adviser at the Filmmakers Lab of the Sundance Institute -said a price must be paid for democratizing any art. "The minute everyone is allowed in, something changes in terms of standards of excellence," he said. "I don't know whether that is good or bad."

And Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, warned that tales of overnight success can have a negative effect. "One of the problems with the Cinderella stories is that they create enormous expectation that people come out of the box fully grown," he said. "Filmmakers are not allowed enough time to enjoy a sense of growth."

---
What makes the independent film landscape particularly treacherous, though, is that most independent pictures are either self-financed or backed by individuals who've staked their own cash - and are left holding the bag when, as in the vast majority of cases, the movie turns out to have no commercial future.

Even without a distributor, "Four Eyed Monsters" is hardly an epic failure, if a failure at all, but the situation is dire for its creators. "My parents are really supportive of the creative lifestyle," Ms. Buice said. "But they're not rich people. They are middle class. It's causing problems at home. They like the movie but they are really freaked out by the financial situation. They're constantly on my case. 'Are you eating?' 'Did you pay the rent?' 'Did you pay your taxes?' My mom is very concerned about the credit-card debt."

...and what I consider to be the most astute and realistic quotes in the entire article:

"Media is not completely democratized yet because distribution is not a democratic thing," Mr. Crumley said. "We're looking at other ways to make our movie available in these different formats so that word of mouth can take over where we left off."
....
Ms. Morse, who lives in San Francisco, feels some creative people today are too fixated on using film to tell their stories, particularly in a climate where finding a distributor is so tough. "You need a reality check that a lot of people aren't getting," she said. "There are lots of other ways to get your story out there. Right now the convergence of media is moving so quickly."


Ya gotta be realistic about the odds of distribution. I've been misquoting the Sundance stats, instead of 2000ish submitted and 100ish shown, it was actually 2600 submitted and 120 shown according to this NYTimes article. And of those, what, maybe 10 or 15 got any significant distribution? I hear tell that the hot movies are already known to be snagged going into Sundance etc., the screenings are just further media and verification of critical acceptance at that point.

So get realistic about what future your film has. This is NOT AT ALL to say don't swing for the stars if that's what you think it should be. But also consider the paths of cable, direct to DVD, web download, or even podcasts for some material.

And scale your efforts - personally, I'd rather do something small & simple and do it really well rather than something overblown that I KNOW going in I'm going to have to stretch thin on and do a crappy or even mediocre job. Nobody longs for mediocrity - we want to watch greatness. So do something great, but small, is my advice.

Is this entry an essay, a review, a scolding, a recommendation, a sales pitch, or what?

I dunno, man, it's just a blog, and that's the beauty and the curse. It's just what I'm thinking tonight.

But despair not - there's also this article in the Times as well talking about how entertainment spending is zooming up amongst consumers. There's always new opportunities, and more than one way to present your masterpiece to folks in a way that they pay for it. There's theatrical, sure, but also DVD, cable, sattelite, internet download, PPV, video iPod, PSP, Netflix, Amazon, etc. etc. etc.

-mike

(and Adam and Susan, I hope you find a way to find a market for Four Eyed Monster. I really do, I fervently wish you the best of luck on this that you really did so well on)

UPDATE: I've included some stats from prior generation G5s for comparison, and the link that generated them.

Macworld: News: Benchmarks: Quad G5 on top

Notables:

Compressor 2.0 MPEG-2 encode on new PCIe G5s:
Dual 2.0: 6:20
Dual 2.3: 5:35
Quad 2.5: 3:23

For comparison:

Dual 2.7: 3:52 (not far behind the Quad AT ALL, so perhaps Compressor 2.0 needs an update? Or to use 2.0.3 for testing?)
Dual 2.5: 4:19
Dual 2.0 (2004, PCI-X): 4:59

iMovie HD Render: no speed difference, obviously the function was either single processor or hard drive constrained.

Updated: see this page to see how your box holds up in comparison (Macs only). Presumably their testing methodology was consistent so that this should be, pardon the pun, an Apples to Apples comparison.

In the comments somebody said the Quad G5 might be slower at some things, I'm not so sure - with the dual cores communicating faster on the same chip, and the faster memory bus, I'd expect that wouldn't often be the case. Then I checked - the dual 2.7 IS faster at some things, such as the iMovie HD render. Then again, these tests were conducted on 10.4.2, not 10.4.3, which speeds some drive related things up considerably (like the 500MB Finder folder dupe test).

-mike

CinemaTech: Technicolor vs. Christie/AIX

The two leading vendors in the digital projector space duke it out. Technicolor is pushing 4K, in an effort to have a theatrical experience above and beyond what can possible be done in the home (the 2K digital standard is barely higher pixel resolution than regular HD video, 2048x1080 rather than 1920x1080).

Read the article for details on that, and the push to get digital into all 36,000 US theaters by 2010. Below is my own commentary on the whole 4K vs 2K thing.

I had previously heard/read somewhere that 4K is a false economy that has little value beyond the marketing value of "we got more." The comment was something to the effect of "with 4K, only the first X frontmost rows can see the difference, for the other Y amount (the majority) of the theater patrons will not be able to perceive the advantage of 4K." As in, even if their vision was good and they saw the two side by side, if you were sitting so-and-so far back from the screen, you couldn't tell the difference between 2K and 4K.

I could believe that argument even though I haven't sat down with protractor to figure out the arc degrees of perceptual difference between 2K and 4K at a given distance.

But I do recall another quote about 4K, that it may not be advantageous or useful given the age and skin condition of our leading actors. In current cinematography, a LOT of filtering is used on the lense during close-ups of actors to hide skin imperfections in "beauty" characters. I noticed a lot of poorly done skin smoothing for Scarlett Johansen in The Island, for example. 4K would be GREAT for wide shots of luscious scenery or battles, but wouldn't be utilized in close-ups. Again, it all boils down to the the science of what people can see, but of course, that gets over-ridden by what people believe, and we can all see how marketing driven our culture is these days. Can you really believe that one any pair of mall blue jeans is "better" than another when we know they are all cranked out in China/Taiwan/wherever by the same underpaid, underage workers? But that's another blog, entirely.

Will digital sell, in the end? In my own experience, it has failed to make ME visit the only digital projection theater in town for 6 months. I'd read that as a big goose egg. Digital 3D, however, got me in there twice in the opening week (once for me once again for me w/neice & nephew, ages 4 & 7).

If 4K projectors can in 10 years be cost competitive in the end financial results compared to traditional film projectors, with ALL costs included - mailing film prints, print costs, digital duplication/DRM costs, the flexibility to run multiple copies of a single file during the opening weeks, etc., then it will prove itself long term. Or does the industry take a bath up front, and recover/recoup the expenses long term? Wait and see, wait and see...

-mike

Ciprico Huge MediaVault 4110

Reviewed by Charlie White, who gave it 8 out of 10 stars for this over $4000 fiber channel array with 1.6TB capacity as RAID 0, 1.2 TB capacity as RAID 3.

PROS: fault tolerant, even on the fly recovery in the event of data failure. Fiber channel means it can be cabled at a distance, or possibly integrated into a SAN. Very small form factor - 1RU by 19 by 25 inches.

CONS: It better be far away, such as in a closet, because it is LOUD. It is pricey, too - over $4000 for 1.2 TB of fault tolerant storage? Ouch!

If you have a generous budget and need some uncompressed HD storage capacity with fualt tolerance, it'll work, but it isn't my first choice.

-mike

Sony Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc - Aviran's Place

-first movie to be mastered to a Blu Ray
-Charlie Angels: Full Throttle
-compressed with MPEG-2 according to this article
-1920x1080
-being sent to player manufacturer's for compatibility testing
-interestingly, NOT H.264 or VC-1. It is already known that with the prosumer tool DVD Studio Pro that H.264 "has problems" with fields, so that is really only intended for progressive stuff, aka 720p resolution. I don't know, off the top of my head, whether the Blu Ray spec allows for 1080p24 H.264 content (as opposed to 1080i60 3:2 pulldowned footage) which would be a more efficient way to encode the info on the disk. MPEG-2 for a given quality level takes more space than H.264, aka MPEG-4 AVC.

Thanks to Mike from B-Scene films for sending this link in!

-mike

Exhausted pull quotes for the day:

"Where's the Porn Cops?"

(In a grocery store, instead of Corn Pops)

followed by

"I want to have a New Year's Eve Party in the Lex Luthor Lounge at the top of the Eye of Sauron Building."

must get some sleep..."sooner or later...your head gives way and hits the ground" (saw English Beat in concert tonight...)

Posted by: Mike Curtis / 11/18/2005 11:39:00 PM (0) comments links to this post

CinemaTech: Another Disney 3-D flick on the way; ILM retrospective

"I AM SCOTT'S REPOSTING ENGINE. SEE ME POST ARTICLE LINKS."

I am Jack's prostate. See me get cancer. See me kill Jack.

I am Mike's Sleep Deprivation. See Mike type nonsense.

Mike is barely here, so he's posting this nifty link to Scott's summary of a bunch of cool things, like Disney working on a 3D movie they expect to have 750 to 1000 3D screens around the country to show on (3D versions bringing in twice as much as 2D versions) for "Meet the Robinsons" next year.

-ILM is 30, lots of coverage of that
-mikey

Just saw the XL H1 today...here's my report! - The Digital Video Information Network

OK, this is just chock full of good info. Kudos to Chris Hurd for the site and especially to Jae Staats for taking the time to document all this for our behalf.

Read the whole thing to get the big picture, but some highlights:

-Canon was a little dodgy about answering some questions, with a lot of "I can't answer that now" or the more telling "I can't reveal that now."

-lens is all new and HD and lovely

-still images captured w/2 megapixel imager, BUT more importantly, text metadata file that includes all the camera settings! - Somebody at Canon Gets It.

-viewfinder has all kinds of guidelines, including 2.35:1. NICE

-I didn't clean a clear enough answer out of what was said about help with focusing in HD beyond a 2X mode...which isn't enough

-FU 2000 remote gadget includes an LCD. Perfect for boom/crane stuff

-16 bit four channel audio. Woo Hoo!

-DV Expo LA - Footage Will Be Shown. On A Big Screen.

24p/24f - no new stats, but glowing report on footage shown

-$9500 street price

-starts shipping in two weeks

Read on for lots more details, then