The Editblog

If you havne’t heard … the cost of the 2009 Editors Retreat has been reduced. From the Editors Retreat email:

With respect to the current economic times and in response to your requests, we are pleased to announce a price reduction for 2009 Editors Retreat. By shortening the length of the Retreat by one day, we’ve managed to cut the price from $3,150 to $2,300 without losing any of our key sessions.

A Full Pass to the 2009 NAB Post-Production World Conference in Las Vegas! (Valued at approx. $700)
An Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium! (Valued at $1700)
With all of the give-aways and savings you actually receive more than the price of the retreat!

That’s not a bad deal with Adobe CS4 suite thrown in! Submit your registration by December 10 with a 30% down payment. I think this would be a great event to attend but it’s a shame that it is so soon after the Christmas season and not far from NAB. I really want to make it one of these years. If you have been before please comment below and let us know how it is.

TechCrunch has an article titled “Ian Rogers On The Death Of The Music CD Business: “I Don’t Care.” If you are a music fan who enjoys the convenience of buying music online and really sees online delivery as the future then click over and give this article a read. This Ian Rogers guy hit the nail on the head when he says:

“Continuing to talk about the health of the music industry on these terms is as if we’d all been crying about the dying cassette business in 1995. The difference is that when we moved from cassette to CD the winners were the same (big companies who owned access to cash, distribution, and marketing) and the definition of winning was the same (more units sold for these big companies).”

If that quote intrigues you then read the whole article and say AMEN! The sooner the old-guard, ivory-tower music industry collapses in upon itself the better off we will all be, at least from a consumer standpoint. If you are a signed artist then you might feel differently. It’s amazing to me to read that the artist Joe Purdy paid for a house with proceeds from iTunes. If that’s true then there might be hope for “regular” artists in this digital distribution model.

What we really need for us in the filmmaking world is our own equivalent to iTunes. Yes it’s possible to get indie content on iTunes but it hasn’t broken open for filmmakers the way it has with music. I wonder if any independent filmmakers have been able to even buy dinner off of their profits from Amazon On Demand or Jaman?

If you aren’t listening to That Post Show then this is the week to start! John Flowers invited myself and Paul Zadie (Paul also does Film Dojo … John also does That Media Show) to sit in last night and we recorded a great (at least I think it’s pretty great) episode talking about … wait for it … POST! The episode is titled Avid Post Production and we touched on a lot of topics. We veered into the technical side of things a bit more than we all had expected but once we got going on the Avid vs. Final Cut Pro talk the ball really got rolling. While it may feel like we were (are) really down on Final Cut Pro I think a lot of the frustrations that we (me) are feeling at the lack of updates and attention that Apple has given to FCP really came out during the show. With the great upgrades that Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro have both seen recently FCP is sitting at the end of the line right now …. so let’s hop to it Apple!

Grab That Post Show as an mp3 at the show’s website or subscribe in iTunes. It you are doing the iTunes route then give the show some comment love if you don’t mind.

I’m not one to force my political thoughts on to anyone else so I’d certainly never tell anyone who he/she should vote for so please don’t consider this an endorsement of this candidate (I actually think we should throw almost all of Congress out on their ass since they aren’t there representing their constituents anymore [okay, maybe that's forcing my political thoughts]) but I keep seeing this commercial for Lamar Alexander over and over and over (direct You Tube link where you can watch in the You Tube “high quality”) and I can’t help but think how lazy the color grading on the spot really is. It’s not as easy to see in the You Tube clip below as it is on broadcast tv but can get an idea. The majority of the spot looks as if had a preset applied to it with little to no shot specific color grading. In fact, my guess would be it had a preset from Magic Bullet Looks applied to the majority of the spot. It looks a lot like the Grad Sunset:

If you look closely you can see a redish-pink tint applied to the top third of most of the shots regardless of wide shot, 2 shot or close up. Color grading is supposed to be carefully applied shot by shot, scene by scene to achieve a look or a mood that enhances your story, not to make the subject look kind of strange. The color correction challenge over at Prep, Shoot, Post is a good example of this.  Just look at this shot of Alexander’s face:

It’s red near the top and more of a flat skin tone at the bottom! He looks like he is sick. Of course this probably doesn’t matter to the average voter and he will win since he is the incumbent and is an entrenched career politician with so much more money to spend than his closest rival that he’d have to be revealed as a criminal to lose at this point so bad color grading really doesn’t matter. But I thought it was worth pointing out because if you are going to take the time to produce what looks like it could be a nice spot please take a little time to perform a proper color correction session or just don’t do one at all. Lamar should fire his media company. Here’s the entire spot:

And just to give equal time to his main opponent, here’s a link to Bob Tuke’s campaign. But let’s be honest, with Congressional approval near single digits the slate needs to be wiped clean. Elect more Independents!

If you are a regular listener to podcasts about movies, media and filmmaking then you’ve most certainly heard John Flowers of Lifezero fame on a number of them. In addition to John’s own (other) podcasts, netcasts, shows (whatever you want to call this brave new world of Internet programming) Life Zero and That Media Show he’s just launched That Post Show. It’s an audio / discussion type podcast that’s about … something near and dear to all our hearts, post-production! From the That Post Show website:

An open conversation and roundtable discussion with experts in new media, film and moviemaking, about the process of film and creating media.

The maiden episode features John, Mike J Nichols and Paul Del Vecchio. Topics discussed include favorite movies, movie trailers, film theory and (among other things) one of my favorite topics: Final Cut Studio vs. AVID. I can’t wait to hear the discussion on that one. This first episode is currently available as an mp3 download from the That Post Show website and should be available on iTunes in the future.

So after a lot of complaining there’s finally a few timecode calculators available in the iTunes app store for the iPhone. I monitor this feed for recently added iPhone apps and hadn’t seen these guys come online so thanks to the readers who sent a message. Sometimes when I check the feed there might be 100+ new apps that have been added. God knows there’s no shortage of tip calculators, flashlights and other useless crapola so it’s nice to finally see timecode calculators! Unfortunately they are just okay:

The first is called TC Calculator (iTunes direct link). On the surface it looks cool but it’s functionality isn’t good. It seems to always default to 25 fps which is okay if using PAL but there should be an option to always have it default to NTSC rates as well. Plus, it doesn’t add right!! I chose 30 fps as my frame rate and added 15 frames + 15 frames and the answer comes out to be 1:05. It comes out that way as the answer is in 25 fps mode. I could tap the 30 fps button and get the correct answer but who wants to do that at the end of each calculation. Then I tried to add 1:00:00:00 + 1:00 and got the answer 1:00:00:25. That’s just wrong. This thing needs work. It is free but if a free app doesn’t work right then it’s not worth it.

TCCalc (iTunes direct link) is better but it isn’t cheap at $4.99. While $4.99 really isn’t all that expensive, when you consider that most iPhone apps seem to be between 99¢ and $1.99 that does put TCCalc at the higher end of the iPhone app price spectrum. It’s much better than the other application mentioned above as it provides support for drop frame timecode, custom frame rates, better input methods and a nice help page. It doesn’t look all that sleek and iPhone like but it works pretty well. The developer’s web site is in French but you can send suggestions to the developer via email so support should be available.

Time:calc is a basic time calculator that recently added support for timecode. (iTunes direct link). They get a plus as they have all the basic frame rates that must be available. But it’s far from perfect as you have to always hit the colon : button when entering values. A timecode calculator should not require that as you have to be able to enter values fast. Close, but no cigar.

What do all these (and pretty much any timecode calculator) calcs need to make a fully functioning and very useful application? First, you have to have support for all of the high definiton frame rates to make a timecode calculator really useful. I don’t want to be guessing as to what I am importing so a button with 23.98 fps, 59.94 fps, 29.97 fps are buttons that make me feel better about my calculations. And drop frame is essential. Plus memory function and a way to review your last few calculations would be nice too. And you have to understand that when I type 1000000 I am typing one hour: 1:00:00:00. And a double 00 button is icing on the cake since you so often type two zeros together. I hope that TCCalc gets better but I’m also hoping a good United States based developer will still build the best dedicated timecode calculator for the iPhone that looks sleek, is easy to use quickly and supports all the frame rates we have to deal with today.

Hot on the heels of LlamaSlate comes another film slate-style application for the iPhone called … Slate! Where LlameSlate was more of a rethinking of the traditional camera slate Slate actually tries to look and feel like a real timecode slate. They’ve done well in that you can just tap the Scene and Take numbers to increment and you can also type in custom production and director names. Tape the clapper bar and it will beep or clap. It could be used to actually sync audio and video. What seems to be the best feature are the actual running timecode numbers though they only seem to run on time. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to actually set a custom timecode or take an external timecode in feed via wifi or a hardware adapter. That’s when things like this move from novelty to an actual useful product for production and post. Plus it would be great if the slate would switch to a landscape view with bigger timecode numbers when you tilt the phone on its side. Hopefully it will get better with updates in the future. Here’s the iTunes link to Slate. It’s $1.99.

Now I ask again, where’s that timecode calculator for the iPhone!?!? That would be useful.

“OK, timecode is a boring topic but it is of vital importance in post production. Timecode allows you to track every frame of video in your post-production project. It’s the kind of thing that you often don’t notice until it’s screwed up. Repeating timecode, broken timecode, dropouts … all the things that when they give you trouble you suddenly realize that timecode is very very important. Studio Daily has posted a very encouraging article about what may be the first changes in timecode in a long time. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers are looking to make the first changes to timecode in some 40 years. If you think about it, today we have many different timecode rates what with all the high definition formats available, many different recording mediums from tape and disk and speeds that are way above and way under the usual 30 frames per second. It’s high time that SMPTE made some changes. The questions now are: how long will it take them to ratify this new timecode standard? and how long will it take hardware and software manufactures to implement these changes and how difficult will it be?  There is a mention in the article that “proprietary solutions could work their way in and gum up the works.” For the love of all that is good and holy, let’s hope that SMPTE and the manufactures are able to agree on some kind of standard before every tom, dick and camera manufacturer drops their own version of timecode 2.0. Just look at all the different HD formats and codecs and how they seem to come along every other day. It’s easy for a camera company to introduce a codec but not always easy for non-linear editing software to support it. So let’s all work together and make the future of timecode useful and, more importantly, compatible!

Well it looks like the $700 billion + bailout bill has passed both the House and the Senate. The Senate loaded it down with a lot more than just the $700 billion for Wall Street and added some $100 billion + for a bunch of earmarks. One of those earmarks includes tax breaks for film production. This is from cnn.com:

I guess that’s good that if all this pork $$$ will be spent at least our industry might see some of that. I dug into the actual 400+ page bill and found the actual text. Good luck understanding it …. I guess it’s for the accountants to make sense of:

•HR 1424 EAS
SEC. 502. PROVISIONS RELATED TO FILM AND TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS.
(a) EXTENSIONOFEXPENSINGRULESFORQUALIFIED FILMANDTELEVISIONPRODUCTIONS.—Section 181(f) (re-lating to termination) is amended by striking ‘‘December 31, 2008’’ and inserting ‘‘December 31, 2009’’.
292 •HR 1424 EAS
(b) MODIFICATIONOFLIMITATIONONEXPENSING.— Subparagraph (A) of section 181(a)(2) is amended to read
as follows: ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—Paragraph (1) shall not apply to so much of the aggregate cost of any qualified film or television production as exceeds $15,000,000.’’. (c) MODIFICATIONS TO DEDUCTION FOR DOMESTIC ACTIVITIES.— (1) DETERMINATION OF W–2 WAGES.—Paragraph (2) of section 199(b) is amended by adding at
the end the following new subparagraph: ‘‘(D) SPECIAL RULE FOR QUALIFIED FILM.—In the case of a qualified film, such term shall include compensation for services performed in the United States by actors, production personnel, directors, and producers.’’. (2) DEFINITION OF QUALIFIED FILM.—Paragraph (6) of section 199(c) is amended by adding at the end the following: ‘‘A qualified film shall include any copyrights, trademarks, or other intangibles with respect to such film. The methods and means of distributing a qualified film shall not affect the availability of the deduction under this section.’’.
293 •HR 1424 EAS
(3) PARTNERSHIPS.—Subparagraph (A) of section 199(d)(1) is amended by striking ‘‘and’’ at the end of clause (ii), by striking the period at the end of clause (iii) and inserting ‘‘, and’’, and by adding at the end the following new clause: ‘‘(iv) in the case of each partner of a partnership, or shareholder of an S corporation, who owns (directly or indirectly) at least 20 percent of the capital interests in such partnership or of the stock of such S corporation— ‘‘(I) such partner or shareholder shall be treated as having engaged directly in any film produced by such partnership or S corporation, and ‘‘(II) such partnership or S corporation shall be treated as having engaged directly in any film produced by such partner or shareholder.’’.
(d) CONFORMINGAMENDMENT.—Section 181(d)(3)(A) is amended by striking ‘‘actors’’ and all that follows and inserting ‘‘actors, production personnel, directors, and producers.’’.
(e) EFFECTIVEDATES.— 294

(1) INGENERAL.—Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, the amendments made by this section shall apply to qualified film and television productions commencing after December 31, 2007

(2) DEDUCTION.—The amendments made by subsection (c) shall apply to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2007.

Uh huh …. our government at work. Read the whole 400 + page report here at this pdf link.

I’ve posted the second of our videos from the IMPA track days at Pocono Raceway. This was a road and track test of the BMW M3. I can tell you thus far that if you want to learn about shooting quality video in a run and gun situation all you have to do is shoot for a day and then try to cut that material into a finished program and you will learn a whole hellava lot about the next time you go out to shoot. I’ve shot a lot of video in my life but the last few years had been pretty much editing. Needless to say I have been reminded of a lot. Remember to click over to the Garage Blog channel on Vimeo to watch in Vimeo HD.

BMW M3 at the IMPA test days from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.