Title: GOLD
Dates Shot: July 2015
Cameras: 35mm Film Anamorphic.
NLE: Avid
Software: Assimilate Scratch
Total Hours Shot: 26
Total Data: Approx 140,000 feet of film.
Category: <span>Blog</span>
Title: The Man with the Iron Fists 2- Sting of the Scorpion
Dates Shot: Feb-Mar 2014
Cameras: Red Epic, GoPro, Canon 5D
NLE: Avid
Software: DaVinci Resolve, Pomfort Silverstack, Tolis Tape Tools, Shotput Pro
Total Hours Shot: 160.5
Total Data: 17.02TB
Much like the physician who secretly hopes for someone to say “Is there a doctor in the house?”, or a pilot who longs to hear “Can anybody fly this plane?”- I await the day when I’m sitting in a post house and someone comes running down the hall screaming “Can anyone do a split edit on an RM 450?” I see it now: I’d slowly rise from my chair, flex my shuttle wrist, spin my jog finger, and turn to them and say “Yes…Yes I can.”
Despite the fact that I should probably have a better fantasy life than that, there are an awful lot of utterly obsolete skill sets that you acquire after 20 years in post production. Using an edit controller is one of them, and the Sony RM-450 was by far the one most widely used.
We live in a golden age of post-production. Equipment that used to be specialized and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, now can be done on an off the shelf computer that costs a thousand. You don’t need $50,000 VTR’s to ingest anymore, you need a $20 card reader. The latest processors and SSD drives achieve unheard of speeds, driving software that’s 10 times more powerful, at one-tenth the price it used to be. What seemed like impossible wishful thinking in the 80’s and 90’s, we now live in a time where just about anyone can afford to have their own edit suite in their home.
Thanks to the good folks over at LSV and Sony, I was able to spend an hour or two with the new Sony F55 CineAlta 4K digital cinema camera. Of course the big draw of this camera is it’s ability to shoot 4K raw (with the AXS-R5 recorder), its global shutter, and the ultra-wide color gamut of its big brother the F65.
I wanted to get some test footage of both the Sony RAW and XAVC flavors of 4K and drop them in Resolve and push them around a bit, to see how they held up in grading. This is not a really exhaustive test, as we only had the camera for about three hours, and it was beta firmware. It’s more of a first look and general idea of what you’d get out of the shipping model.
Avid announced to day that it’s shedding it’s consumer divisions, to focus solely on the enterprise and professional markets. It’s selling off all of the apps that it acquired from Pinnacle (Avid Studio, Pinnacle Studio, and the Avid Studio App for the Apple iPad), to Corel, and all of its M-Audio software and hardware to inMusic. This leaves them selling the Media Composer family, and ProTools, as well as their media storage systems.
The Sony reps came by yesterday to let us check out the new FS700 NXCAM, and another local vendor came with a new set of Leica Summilux-C Cinema lenses, so it seemed like a great opportunity to grab some test footage!
First of all, this is not a review, as we only were able to have the camera in house for a few hours, but more of a first impressions of the Sony NEX FS700. It’s a bit larger than the FS100, but has the same basic form factor. The main handling differences are the large ring with the built in ND filters at the front, and the re-positioning of the XLR inputs to the side. The big news is of course that it is 4K “ready” and does some pretty impressive slow-motion.
It’s been a year since the release of Final Cut Pro X, and there are several retrospectives being posted around the post production blogosphere.
- Larry Jordan’s asking you what you think
- Shane Ross’ succinct appraisal
- fcp.co has a great re-cap of the progress that FCPX has made so far
- The EditBlog also recaps FCP X’s rocky start
However, I decided to go in a different direction for this post to take a look at Final Cut Pro 7, one year later, and see how well it still holds up.
When Apple effectively killed Final Cut Pro 7 (and all it’s companion apps) last year, I immediately stopped working with it. I finished up what projects I had, and any new projects immediately went into Avid. Having been in this business long enough to become proficient in several obsolete pieces of software (see my Editor’s Wake series), I knew that any additional work in polishing my FCP skills would be time wasted. It would benefit me more to learn how to optimize my other editing tools for what I had used FCP for, rather than hang on to an obsolete skill set. Now, that wasn’t to say I wasn’t miffed about having 10 years of FCP knowledge suddenly become useless overnight, but hey, life is change.
I just came back from Broadcast Asia 2012, and had a great time. Like I alluded to in my last post, because of it’s intimate nature, I was able to walk right up and have a demo of the new Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera, get a one on one with Avid, attend the Zacuto 2012 shootout, try out an F65, and cap it off with a nice dinner from Cine-Equipment. I also saw the latest gear from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, Sound Devices, Go-Pro, Assimilate, etc., all in the same day.
The state of the film and video tech industry in 2012? Book it. Done. And my feet didn’t even get sore. I wish more trade shows were like this.
I attended a great talk last night hosted by the Asian Film Archive. They brought up Ray Edmondsun from Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive to give a Q&A session about archiving, preservation and ethical issues in film restoration.
Some of the more interesting topics discussed were of course the film vs. digital debate. Of course film is still by far the best archival medium we have. Properly stored, it can last over 100 years, and the technology to read it is easy to reconstruct all you have to do is simply shine a light through it.
So my question was, if film is the best archival method, what is the second best for digital assets? The answer was there wasn’t one. Things get trickier when you move into the digital format. Tape or Hard Disk? Will that tape or disk format even be readable in 30 years even if the media survives? What file format to store it on? Essentially while film is a long term archival solution, digital requires a constant migration from format to format throughout its life. The downside of this is that it’s very likely that somewhere along the way, someone won’t migrate it fast enough and the data will be lost. The upside is that digital distribution means that it’s easy to propagate many copies around the world rather than striking film prints. Archiving digitally is a moving target.