Industry – The DIT Spot

Published June 21, 2012 by John Burkhart

Broadcast Asia 2012

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.

Avid Blog DaVinci Resolve Industry Post Production Southeast Asia Video Cameras

avid blackmagic broadcast asia

Published June 19, 2012 by John Burkhart

Archiving Issues

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.

Blog Industry Post Southeast Asia

archive archiving asian film archive

Published June 18, 2012 by John Burkhart

Broadcast Asia Starts this Week

I know that as far as industry trade shows go NAB and IBC usually get all the press, but I really like Broadcast Asia. First of all, it’s much smaller. I don’t know how many kilometers I’ve racked up walking the halls of the LVCC in my life, but there’s something relieving for a trade show veteran to the concentrated physical area that the show’s held in.

Secondly, its much more intimate. It’s very easy to walk up to anyone and get a demo, or arrange an appointment, and actually talk to company reps rather than temp booth-staffers. Broadcast Asia gives you the luxury of time and personal contact that the other shows lack.

Blog Industry Southeast Asia

broadcast asia trade show

Published July 27, 2011 by John Burkhart

Leaving FCP and Moving Forward with Avid

Add us to the list of people boned by FCPX.

At the NYU Grad Film department at Tisch Asia, we used to teach FCP the first year, and Avid the second year. The third year students were allowed to use either program. We felt that knowing both programs was essential to getting hired in the feature film and broadcast industry.

It’s not necessarily an easy job, being in charge of a film school. Especially in a field that is changing as rapidly as video post-production. It’s hard enough right now to figure out which direction the industry is headed in, but we have to figure out where the industry is going to be three years from now and prepare our students to have those skills when they graduate.

I can tell you one thing, in three years, no one will be using FCP 7. Apple has stopped development of FCP Studio, in favor of FCPX, and in a field that changes this fast, if you stop, you’re dead.

Avid Blog Final Cut Pro Industry Post

avid final cut pro

Published April 25, 2011 by John Burkhart

Paying for .5 releases. Really?

As professional NLE software users, we’ve been conditioned to the 18 month release cycle, wherein we dole out our hard-earned cash about every year and a half for a new version of the software we already use, with a new number attached (i.e. version 6 becomes version 7, etc).

In the meantime we’ve come to expect that any version of the software that includes our original version number (say 6.3. 6.6 etc), should be ours to download for free. On the whole this is because successive versions are generally bug-fixes that fix problems that should not have been there in the first place, that they released anyway. They modify our ire at purchasing buggy or broken software, by making the fixes downloadable for free. It’s an assumption that’s now built into the customer-software vendor relationship.

This somewhat masochistic policy of buying known buggy software and hoping that the company eventually fixes most of the major issues, was the price we paid for the rapidly developing technical capabilities of our software and hardware. While the software was buggy, it made up for it in additional productivity features that our old version and old hardware just couldn’t handle.

Adobe Premiere Avid Blog Industry Rant

.5 release adobe avid update upgrade

Published April 11, 2011 by John Burkhart

NAB 2011- Sound Devices

I’ve always loved the products from Sound Devices, we own several of their 702T recorders, and 302 field mixers, that we use on our student films, day in day out, year after year. They’ve been very rugged for us, and that’s saying something for the amount of student productions they’ve been exposed to. In fact, I can only remember one time when we had a student break a 702T, and our first question was “how did they manage that?” (the forcible insertion of a mis-aligned compact flash card in case you’re wondering). Sound Devices products usually have that winning combination of high-quality, dependability, and reasonable price that film schools appreciate so much.

Industry Production Sound

mixpre NAB pix 240 sound devices

Published April 1, 2011 by John Burkhart

The Hangover 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYL_T7f59o8 My good friends at Living Films produced the film The Hangover 2 in Thailand late last year, and it looks fantastic. Shooting films in Southeast Asia, and Thailand in…

Industry Production Southeast Asia

hangover living films

Published March 30, 2011 by John Burkhart

NAB from Afar

So NAB 2011 is next week, and I won’t be attending this year. I’ve done NAB more times than I can count both as an attendee and a journalist, and have probably racked up at least a couple of hundred miles in the LVCC over the years.

Partly because I’m based in Singapore now, and partly because I’m just tired of the show floor experience, I’ve decided to try something I’ve always suspected would work just as well. I’m going to cover the show from the internet.

Industry

NAB

Published March 22, 2011 by John Burkhart

Archiving in the Digital Age

It’s no secret that there’s a hole in the digital filmmaking workflow when it comes to archiving. In the days when film acquisition was the only game in town, your negative was the archive, it stayed in the can ready for whenever you needed it. In the days when videotape ruled the land, each tape was the archive, you put it on the shelf and it was waiting there for you years later. In memory based recording, there is no physical object on which your media lives permanently. It’s shuffled from expensive media card to inexpensive hard disk, where it’s edited, and when it’s done, perhaps laid off to tape, or more and more these days, delivered on a another hard drive.

Some people are using hard disks as an archiving solution. Shane Ross of Litte Frog in High Def fame, has come up with a nice system, but it’s really more of a 3-5 year medium term solution rather than a true archive.

Hard disks are intricate mechanical devices, not designed for long term storage. And who’s to say when the data interface will be obsolete? (Try to get data off a SCSI II drive these days).

Industry Post

archive archiving film video

Published March 21, 2011 by John Burkhart

AVCHD is NOT AN ACQUISITION CODEC!!!

OK. I get the love for the Canon 5DmkII, I understand that sometimes artistic expression DEMANDS that only the one eye of your talent is in focus, while the entire rest of the frame consists of that rich, creamy, frothy, bokeh that we all know is the real reason we shoot movies in the first place.

I understand that the Panasonic AG AF-100 will allow you to use ALL THE LENSES IN THE WORLD to make your web masterpiece, when those loser Hollywood types are limited to shooting their films with just a handful of primes.

I comprehend the need to shoot your 8 hour documentary on yarn twisting on a Sony Handycam, so the intimidating size of a real camera won’t scare the old ladies.

BUT IN 2011 THERE IS NO REASON TO USE AVCHD AS AN ACQUISITION CODEC!

Industry Post Rant Video Cameras

AVCHD codec rant

Category: <span>Industry</span>