If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Scott Simmons wrote an open letter to cameratechs, Please label tapes and disks: An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs. He pleads to label tapes/harddisks in the following matter:

a descriptor of the project

date of acquisition

resolution w/ progressive or interlaced

frame rate

acquisition codec

camera used

contact information for questions

notes

So a tape label might look like this:

Fluffo corporate video
6/25/09
1080i
29.97
HDV
Canon HV20
Michael Bey cell 555-1212
director shot 24p

All pretty reasonable, and should be adopted as common practice. Actually, I would suggest adding ratio, operator and sound information.

Download the pdf

I prepared a simple form in the popular .pdf format that you can download here: Tape card

I also added a line for ratio, pre-filled some standard values, and added some info as to sound. Feedback is very welcome!

You can print out a couple of these sheets, cut them in fourths and have them in the camera bag. Even when you are in a hurry, you can quickly give valuable information to the hard working editor. (If you have an inkjet printer, it might be an idea to get those labels photocopied, so that they will survive the rain you and your camera will have to endure.)

…and since we are into co-operation: An open letter to editors

Dear editors, it would be great if you could give us camerafolk some feed-back about the raw footage. Both what you liked (we are humans, too), what is useless, what would make your life easier, and any other form of constructive criticism. (And if you could make a copy of the finished edit in the highest possible quality, you are entitled to some serious cameraman love )

As a follow-up to yesterdays’s post on Clients not paying, here is one from the writer’s perspective – but that one works just as well for any one who has ever worked for “deferred payment.” I’ve done that mistake as well, and of the maybe dozen (mostly short) films I’ve done that way, I ended up getting paid exactly zero times. And I have never met a single sould who did end up getting some money from a deferred payment job.

If you need the experience, you may consider working for free – just do not fall for the production assistant’s crap promising money down the line. If a film by chance should turn out to be a financial success, any self-respecting producer will immediately start a new production company, sell all rights to the film to this new company, and can rake in all profits.

And when it is time to make the next, proper budgeted, film, guess who they will not call? You. Because if you work for free, you can’t be any good, right?

Harlan Ellison with sharp, sharp teeth

Ellison is a veteran Hollywood writer, and even he get occasionally asked to do freebies. Here is an extract from the documentary “Dreams with sharp teeth”

If you are intrigued as I was, have a look at the well made trailer:

It made me order the DVD.

Jay Moeller has been working as an editor for over 10 years. Here are her 21 (funny, fitting) tips to clients on how to behave in the editing room

It is not often that I get to play games, and even more seldom that I write about them, but Splitter is a game that has many of the elements I like:

• It takes no time to learn
• You can play it for just a few minutes (perfect while waiting for a render)
• You have to think about solutions
• There are many solutions to each puzzle
• No killing necessary
• You can restart each lever without penalty
• And it involves real life physics

Another game I can recommend is Buggles Connect over at the Casual Collective. Here you can play against other online players. It is quite fun trying to guess what the other player(s) might do and adjust your own strategy accordingly.

You place your markers in an empty spot and try to grab as many little Buggles as you can. Whoever has caught most of them at the end of 10 rounds, wins.

Enjoy.

Before Graeme Nattress started at RED he was very well known for making exceptional plug-ins for Final Cut Pro. To celebrate his interview in the Digital Producer Magazine, Graeme currently makes his Bleach Bypass filter available for free. You can read the whole article to find the link, or click here. Installations instructions are on page two of the interview.

nVida just announced a supercomputer that would feature 960 cores and the speed of 250 computers, all for the price of under 10 grand usd. Read here for more.

Looks like our Birger mount is on its way home.

Soon I’ll be able to give our Contax Zeiss lenses a proper try.

And my new laptop from Apple (MBP 2.8ghz Intel Duo, 4gig – my first Intel Mac) is also on its way, enabling me to work R3D files on the road.

Exciting times. All puzzle pieces are coming together.

Hungry Man/Grey London has made this new commercial for Toshiba, employing 200 hidef cameras.

20.000 gigabyte of data. 2 1/2 million individually renamed frames. $4.7 million dollar.

Some background footage:

Some facts

• The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
• This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
• The rig was custom built weighing approximately half a tonne, including 200 cameras and electronics
• The rig measures 14m diameter circle and 1.8m high
• The 200 cameras were all triggered using a single remote control
• Once the rig was built, four focus pullers spent three days focusing and aligning all 200 cameras
• The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks – 24 hours a day seven days a week!
• New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
• In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on – 20TB of data

Credits

Production Company: Hungry Man LTD
Director: Mitch Stratton
Editor and editing company: The Whitehouse / Christophe Williams
Post-production company: The Mill
Music: Crystal Castles – Air War
Voice-over: Kira Lauren

(from the Press Release)

On a current job the client wants the videofiles on an external harddisk in FAT32. One of the problems with FAT32 is of course that it doesn’t allow for file sizes of 4GB or bigger, which translates to roughly 20min of DV material, and less on better codecs.

One way would of course be to use Final Cut, iMovie or QT Pro to mark each 15 minute segment, and export that to the external harddisk. This means a lot of button pushing, when there are hours of material to be transferred.

Doing a longer search on Macupdate did not come up with any easy solutions. So here is a step by step guide for non-geeks. Those who know their way around UNIX will probably know of a quicker solution…

Solution

1. Fire up OSX’s Terminal (Go to programmes > Utilities > Terminal, or just do a search from Spotlight)
2. Enter this command (copy & paste works; this will make the Finder restart and then display also hidden files): defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
3. Download the manual install version of QTCoffee – look for the .dmg file, or the “manual install package”.
4. Open the disk image file (double click on the just downloaded file.)
5. Open the QTCoffee folder.
6. Open the bin folder
7. Open a new finder window (pressing Command-N or from the file menu)
8. Open your system disk
9. Open the bin folder
10. From the other finder window, drag the file “splitmovie” to the newest window
11. In the Terminal enter defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder This restarts the Finders and hides the system files again.

Now you are done with the installation part. Now, if you want to split a video file, simply enter the following code into the Terminal: splitmovie /volumes/sourcedisk/original.mov -duration 10:00 -self-contained -o /volumes/targetdisk/split.mov Sourcedisk is the name of the disk that contains your source footage, target is the name of the targetdisk and duration is the length of each segment (in this case 10:00 minutes). Afterwards you can drag and drop the split files from the finder.

If you need to split AVI files, you can have a look at Explicit.

It is easy to lose track as to which version of Final Cut should go with the plethora of Quicktime and Mac OS versions. But help is at hand.

Jon Chapell at the Digital Rebellion has put together a nice recommendation of which Final Cut Studio/Final Cut Pro versions go best with which QT and Mac OS versions:

Final Cut Pro Version	Mac OS Version	QuickTime Version
6.0.3	10.4.11 / 10.5.2	7.4.5
6.0.2	10.4.11 / 10.5.1	7.3.1
5.1.4	10.4.9	7.1.6
5.0.4	10.4.9	7.1.6
4.5	10.3.9	6.5
3.0.4	10.2.8 Update 2	6.2
3.0	10.2.8 Update 2	5.0.6
2.0.2	9.2.2	5.0.1
1.2.5	9.2.2	4.1.3
1.2.1	8.6	4.1.1
1.0.1	8.6	4.0.3
1.0	8.6	4b16