Quintessential Studios' Weblog

I attended two events last night: Mocha training by Imagineer at New Media Hollywood and the Los Angeles Post Production Group meeting.

I happened to be only one of two that attended that particular session of Mocha training.  I guess people don’t like to go outside in the rain!

New Media Hollywood seems like a chill place.  They have a foosball table in the front waiting area, if that is any indication.  They are your basic post production provider/reseller.  You can get systems, software, editing bay rentals, etc.  After an decent hands-on Mocha class, I decided to tell others about their discounts and took some flyers to LAPPG.

I’ve been impressed with Mocha and Shape ever since they demoed at LAFCPUG a while back.  Mocha is a planar tracker, so it’s very accurate.  It is more accurate if you define more areas to track.  Then you can adjust the “surface” for a clean export of tracker layer data.  It seriously has a lot of “smarts”.

I also learned about another Imagineer product, Mokey.  This one actually tracks and replaces the hole with what should be there.  Pretty cool.  We went through removing a sign from a yard, as a car drives by.

Props to Ross Shain for an excellent training session.

LAPPG

Later, at LAPPG, I met some nice “new” people including a photographer who proclaimed “Stills are dead… Be prepared for millions of new video people.”  I posted that claim on Twitter and it inspired this post: http://blog.jayfriesen.com/2009/10/millions-of-new-video-people-my-take/

Being early to the meeting I was one of the lucky ones who got a $5 gift card to Showbiz Store & Cafe.  I also partook in some coffee, cookies, a piece of pizza and some brownies.

Woody who founded LAPPG said he’s on a panel for “http://backpackfilmschool.com/” which sounds cool.  Check that out.

Jeffrey Way from AJA went on to talk about the AJA KiPro.  I’ve already been aquainted with the KiPro but I did learn some new things.  One, is that the Sony V1U is a small camera, small like JVC GY-HM100 small.  I learned this because one of the LAPPG members brought one and they used it to hook up to the AJA KiPro.

I also learned that Apple’s Pro Res (HD) is 220Mbits/sec.  Random fact, I know, but here’s some more: The AJA Xena card is the same as the Kona card but it’s for a PC and it just uses different drivers.  So I guess that means if you want to use your Kona card on a PC, all you have to do is download the Xena PC drivers.  There are also some ports on the AJA KiPro that aren’t usable yet.  They are for future upgrades.  You can also use your KiPro like an IO HD.  It’s basically the next gen of that product.  Cross, up and down convert to your heart’s content with this little unit.  It also works as a monitoring unit.  By that I mean a hook-up-your-monitor-to-see-your-footage, type of monitoring unit.  (I’m really not hip to that whole side of things yet but those of you that are should appreciate that.)

Then, the best for last, I learned that Philip Hodgetts wrote a book called The New Now.  And in this book, there are lots of pieces of information on how to grow your video business.  His talk was very inspirational, at least I know it was to two people for sure, myself and one friend, Chris, who sends out a newsletter-type email every month or so.  We talked about how we are going to use information from Philip’s talk in our own businesses, after the meeting.

Chris’ website is here: www.chrishartedits.com Hey! He’s done a comedy short that’s winning lots of awards that has that kid from Glee in it!

Philip talked about some things: the clue train manifesto, H.A.R.O. (Help a Reporter Out), caring about the customer and to install Google Analytics on to your site.  I know I’m being random with this post and my facts, I think I’ve been on Twitter too much lately!

If you get a chance to see Philip Hodgetts, do it.  And if you like what he has to say, maybe you’d want to buy his book. It’s available here: http://proappstips.com/TheNewNow/ and I’ll be reviewing it here later.

First Signs of Problems

If you’ve ever been on a film shoot, you know one thing for sure. There is a lot of waiting
around!

One of the first “two-hour film projects” we did was called “Berlin Metro“, not at first but it came to be known as that eventually.

This practice shot was mostly arranged by our Production Manager. Our Production Manager was very good at finding locations and support for our crew as he was “connected”, being a lawyer and all. The first shot was at an empty warehouse that one of his friend/clients had just rented and was currently empty.

The goal of this meeting was to go through the whole process, from random genre, character, prop and line of dialogue selection to writing to shooting to editing.

The basic idea we had was that everyone would be included in the brain-storming process and then after a basic story idea was formulated, the writers would spend time by themselves writing the story. This basically is a good idea and as long as you keep your roles heavily defined, this works.

“Defined roles” are the key words in this case. Who does what and who listens to whom? During the first few meetings leading up to this “dress rehearsal”, we talked about who wanted to do what. I felt it was best to try to let people do what they were most interested in doing, first, then add to that as needed.

What hats were given out? Well there was the “Production manager-writer”, the Producer, the “Director-writer”, the “Assistant Director-writer”, a “Grip”, some “Sound Guys”, an “Editor”, a couple of “Actors (who ended up wanting to be writers)” and a couple of just “Actors”. Oh! And, my two “Writers”. It was all a little up in the air at this point, ’cause you never know who’s going to be with you at the end and I was a little unsure how it would all settle down and sort itself out.

The “pre-production” meeting is still a little fuzzy to me, as it was while it was going on (just because it was a bit chaotic) but I do remember some details and the production and the post pretty vividly! There was some talk about a character and a prop and an escaped killer and the writers started to put it all together. During that time, we started setting up lights in the warehouse and stuff and our production manager kept “writing” with “the girls” (the writers). (more on this later)

While setting up, one of the crew says, “this looks like a subway” and thus the subway shot came into being.

While the girls were writing, our director-writer was doing some writing of his own. He kept popping out and telling the writers, “Okay, this is the story!” He would add, “Oh, but don’t let me mess you up.”

I recall one of the writers saying, “Oh but I like that idea” and eventually they just went with his idea.

INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT

Camera blocking, lighting and actions were being set. The first signs of problems weren’t even apparent to me but they were occurring. The 1^st AD had set up a way that the lights and fan should be run (for a subway effect) and had someone set up to run them. Then our “creative” production manager, who was running the b-camera decided that he could run the lights instead, to solve a problem of our director wanting more people in the shot. (This would cause effects problems, more about later, but was just another example of his not being able to think outside the box.)

During the setup of the lights, I had my first personal indication of future problems. One of the actors (that really wanted to write too) came up to me and said, “Who’s in charge? I mean who should I be listening to?” She went on to tell me that we were doing a lot of standing around doing nothing and that this was all taking too long. Basically, she was right in her observations but to me it was her attitude and delivery of said communication that rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like, “You know, you just don’t go up to your producer and say those things!” I suppose it was my lack of initiation in “running things” that led to these attitudes but inside, I also felt I should let these things shake themselves out at this stage of the game.

As we shot, and shot and shot, the night became longer and longer and attitudes were starting to show themselves. The production manager kept stewing and saying loudly under his breath that we had to wrap things up. The feisty “actor” kept mentioning how late it was. Our director just had to get another take of that shot. And, I eventually had to say, “Okay, THIS will be the last shot.”

We wrapped and everyone was pretty beat. I thanked everyone for their time and work and the “post-production team”: director, production manager and I went off to “edit”.

Later, I would discover that my 1^st AD was very happy with “his experiment” of seeing how people would react under the continued stress of an unorganized situation. That, I would immediately decide was a good idea and continue on with. The 1^st AD, the director and I would have many meetings as to what worked and what didn’t and, believe it or not, these personnel “problems” would eventually sort themselves out.

What I learned: Defined roles are defined for a reason. Stick to them!

To be continued…

(Next 48 Hour Installment: The Assassination at India Palace)

Borrowing from the title of one of the shows I like to watch, I’m going to talk about doing my first 48 Hour Film Project. I’m going to break this down into installments as there is a lot that I have to write on this. So here’s the first.

June 22, held my first 48 HFP meeting. This is where I asked people who responded to my Craigslist ad to attend. From that first meeting, I believe I got three new people who stuck all the way to the end of the project. Two other attendees went on to start their own group for the 48 HFP and one more quit near the end and I opted not to bring them back on. The rest just disappeared.

There were more meetings and practice “two-hour film projects” and in the end there were a little over 20 people involved in the project, in one way or another.

The reason I wanted to do this 48 Hour Film Project in the first place is that I have spent the last year and a half studying about editing, video and film making and while reading and doing little practicals here and there, I knew that nothing would compare to actually getting out there and getting my hands dirty with some project with a hard deadline.

At first the group that I co-founded, The 20 Projects Project, seemed lackadaisical about doing the project but as we spent more time preparing for the show, they got more and more excited and active in relation to it.

Around the same time, we got interested in finishing an old project (with a new re-vamped ending) and starting using the practice sessions as “20 projects” projects.

I have studied a few film contests and the 48 Hour Film Project, overall, seemed not so professional that we couldn’t compete and also professional enough that we didn’t feel silly entering it.

I became interested in the Inland Empire 48 Hour Film Project last year but we heard about it too late to really enter and so I put myself on their mailing list to hear about the next year’s competition. Thus I got early emails about it and also had time to get things together in time to enter.

I really consider this more of an experiment in human nature and accomplishment than a film contest. This is a test to see if people working together in stressful situations can actually get a completed product and if they fail, where are the out-points so that they can be improved upon. It was an exercise in management.

I learned a lot of things about myself and different personality types and a whole lot about what not to do. I learned areas that needed improvement and I think we all learned new skills. After all, practice makes perfect and this was really good practice.

There were a reported 25 teams that competed this last weekend and of those, I watched about half. Everyone did a great job completing the task that they set out to complete. I gather that some had the end product that they wanted to achieve. We didn’t.

Stay tuned for more….

Chris Hart, an L.A. area editor and shooter, sends out a regular email to his industry contacts met through various events. Usually you get one reminding you about upcoming events that he might attend and sometimes one after events he’s attended to share information from the event.

Both Chris and I attended the April LAPPG meeting and here are our email notes from it:

Chris Hart:
“At the LAPPG last night I learned a lot about all the latest digital cameras, a little of which I share below, and I won the Duck. That’s right, a free Automatic Duck plugin with which to translate all my FCP timelines into AE timelines with a keystroke. WHOOOOOO!!!! I’m still stoked, as you can tell.

…

“Aaron McNally of Moviola gave a breakdown of all the latest cameras. Here are various interesting tidbits from what he said: The RED camera, on which Knowing was shot, can use a 16G card that will store 9 minutes of its 4k footage; it can also use a DLT tape which can store more. It produces 32-bit raw files that probably require serious color adjustment. In a discussion of cards vs tapes, Aaron remarked that some cameras can record and transmit the data wirelessly to a capture device! No card OR tape! Also, some 2k and 4k cameras can simultaneously record a low-res proxie on an SD card.

“Panasonic’s HVX200, which uses P2 cards, is getting a fair amount of professional usage: studio footage in Dancing with the Stars and certain Biography channel docs use it. It records @ 480 but can enhance that signal to 1080 @ 100 mbs. On the other hand, Discovery channel requires all its docs to be shot with a 1920×1080 native 3cc camera or better. Project:Runway shoots with 10 cameras simultaneously, using the HVX900 DVCPRO50, which uses cassettes, at 24p. An HVX900 is a $20,000 camera.

“Wes Plate then spoke about Automatic Duck, which translates timelines from FCP to Avid or Avid to FCP or Avid or FCP to AE, depending on the plugin. An awesome product, which as I mentioned I now own. Sweeeeeeet!”

My reply:
“WTG Chris! I was there too but all I won was a mouse pad…. lol

“I’d like to add a little more to that camera part you wrote, Chris. Here’s something else that I learned from last night’s talk. This is in regard to the compression rates Aaron spoke of. He basically compared Sony to Panasonic (as well as others) but it went basically like this. Sony can capture at full 1080 but it compresses the file down to like 30mbs and you lose a lot that way. Panasonic HVX200 is like you said and you lose less with the 100mbs compression of the file, but it captures at a lower (res?) and computes the rest to make up the HD.

“So, either way you lose something, it just depends on where you want to loose it. He also said that the Panasonic Cine-gamma developers were really good and in the computing of color for your shot came up with some nice end results.

“That’s where RED is different because it doesn’t compute any color to save to the image. It’s just raw and you have to create the color you want in post. (basically) The other cameras have to compute to create the color data to save to tape/data card or what have you.

“Also, the wireless transmitter still has to send to some sort of recording device but that it’s not on the camera.

“The other part I learned was that sensor size, 1/3″ or “2/3″ etc. determines depth of field. The smaller the sensor the less depth of field there is and the larger the sensor, the greater the DOF. And RED with their “Big Ass” sensor has a depth of field like film cameras, very shallow. (Which I have heard at various RED demos too.)

“Sorry to get all technical on you. I just really learned a lot from that part of the talk and sure wish I had recorded it for future reference! I definitely will call Aaron up at Moviola if I need to know any camera specs!

“I’ll just add that Wes Plate was very cool and funny and I did learn a lot about FCP and Avid and AE workflows from him. Good stuff.

“Also, shameless plug here. I was on the Digital Production Buzz tonight, should be archived soon for all to hear. Read my blog to get more of the info I wanted to say: http://wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net”

LAPPG is the Los Angeles Post Production Group and they meet every second Wednesday of the month at Allied Post Audio in Santa Monica. RSVP is required as space is VERY limited.

P.S. Don’t forget to call HD Expo to get a 20% discount on one of their two upcoming P2 camps:
Either April 19-20 in Las Vegas or August 6-7 in Los Angeles. Info here: http://wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net/?p=44