In part three of my series on the Black Magic Cinema Camera I am going to talk about my production workflow using the camera. The BMCC does require that you jump through some workflow hoops in order to take advantage of its powerful imaging capabilities. Continue reading
In part two of my series on the Black Magic Cinema Camera, I will talk about my hands-on shooting experience with the camera. While I’ve only had the camera for four weeks, I’ve shot several test in both the studio and on-location. Continue reading
I’ve been shooting with the Black Magic Cinema Camera for the last month and what follows are my first impressions. In part one of this series on the Black Magic Cinema Camera, I will explain why this camera is different than DSLRs or even pro camcorders
Everybody knows that the Black Magic Cinema Camera was a revolutionary product when it was unveiled at the 2012 NAB show. Why then do they try to compare it to any other camera, and especially the Canon 5DMK2 DSLR? Continue reading
My latest Film “An Evenly Matched Game” is finally available for internet viewing. We produced this film in the summer of 2012, but due to film festival restrictions, we were not able to post it until now.
Please steer your Web browser to AnEvenlyMatchedGame.com To see why we say “Pick on someone your own size!”
You can check out a short interview of me by Patrick Sheridan of the Emerging Filmmakers Project at the Emerging Filmmakers Blog: http://efpdenver.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/an-evenly-matched-game/
We are finally having the public premier of my latest film titled An Evenly Matched Game. The ten minute short sci-fi action film will be shown with some other short films at the Emerging Filmmakers Project. The Emerging Filmmakers Project has been showcasing the best of Denver’s new and established independent filmmakers the third Thursday of every month since 2002, Screenings are held at The Bug Theatre (3654 Navajo St., Denver 80232 – www.bugtheatre.org). The Emerging Filmmakers Project is a great place to meet and network with area filmmakers, actors, writers and many of the talented folks who work behind the camera.
The festivities start at 8PM, Thursday November 15, 2012. $5 admission and free beer till the keg runs out.
Hey, I’ve been offline for far too long. Since the last post, I completed my summer 2012 film titled “An Evenly Matched Game”. Check out the website and trailer here: http://anevenlymatchedgame.com/ And our facebook page at : http://www.facebook.com/AnEvenlyMatchedGame and finally our IMDB page
Wish us luck at the Starz Denver International Film Fest as well as Sundance and others.
I’ve wrapped post production for my short film “Love and Robots” and now I am in the process of entering it in film festivals. The film is entered into the Sundance festival, The Boulder International Film Festival, and the Festivus film festival in Denver Colorado. “Love and Robots” is the story of a female robot who wonders if robots can experience the emotion of love. It was shot with a Panasonic GH2 DSLR camera with a dedicated volunteer cast and crew and no budget to speak of.
I am also in the process of finding a venue for the unofficial world premiere. You can check out the trailer at: http://loveandrobotsfilm.com/trailer.html we also have an Internet Movie Database page and a Facebook page.
Like a Vegas romance, what happens in Vegas, should probably stay there. Such was my brief love affair with Apple’s Final Cut Pro X. I bought Final Cut Pro X, the first day it was released and immediately dove into editing with it. And like a hot love affair, I relished in all the new, different and better qualities and overlooked its shortcomings. I even wrote a long blog post extolling FCP X’s virtues.
It is now some three months since that initial post and I no longer have FCP X installed on my Mac. Here’s the story of how I fell out of love. After editing a couple of minor projects with FCP X, I decided to edit my short film project titled “Love and Robots” with it. First off I struggled with FCP X’s media management when it dated my event as 2009, probably because I hadn’t set the date and time in one of my cameras. I then created my project, thinking that projects in FCP X where similar to sequences in FCP 7. I discovered much to my surprise that you can’t rename a project once it’s created. And even stranger, if you duplicate a project, it duplicates and renames the media associated with the project. And don’t try to move your event from its initial location on your hard drive, because FCP X loses it and you can’t reconnect the event, unless you move it back to the folder where it was created. What about FCP X’s much touted metadata and keyword organization? Well, I had several hours of footage and hundreds of clips that I carefully logged into scene smart folders. I had shot this project on a DSLR, so I was using double system sound. So when I went to use the highly touted sync clip feature, I found the matching video and audio clips for a take and synced the clips, FCP X then proceeded to sync the clips and created a new clip, which lost all the metadata from the original clips. All the hours I had spent organizing my video clips into smart folders were lost. The lesson here being, that you need to sync your clips before adding smart keywords. So like a date that can’t handle their wine, FCP X’s media management turns really ugly, really quickly.
As far as just editing video, FCP X did an admirable job. There were some little peeves, like not being able to copy and paste clip attributes, not being able to key frame color correction parameters, and not being able to edit a text template without, creating a new template in Motion. All of these were little irritating things, but not relationship breakers.
That brings us to the big break-up. Everybody knows that FCP X’s most glaring flaw is its inability to export XML or even an old fashioned EDL. Having XML support is critical in any film project because several people need to collaborate on the project. So when it came time to want to do some effects work in Adobe After Effects and to edit the soundtrack, FCP X essentially locked me in the hotel room. I was stuck not being able to export my sound as tracks. Practically every editor out there separates their audio into tracks, usually the first two are for dialog and then ambience and then effects and then music. And usually you can send these off to the sound editor for further editing. Well since FCP X doesn’t use tracks per se. You can’t separate the various parts of your soundtrack. And worse yet, you can’t export your sound as separate clips. “Round-tripping” soundtracks is critical to film workflow, and this is something that slammed the brakes on my project and made me abandon FCPX as a viable editor. This is a massive fail, that unless it is resolved, will kill Final Cut Pro as a professional editor.
I had to export my movie and since there is no EDL support, I had to go through the movie cut by cut and hand-log all of my shots. I then reconstructed my entire edit using Final Cut Pro 7. Essentially Final Cut Pro X cost me four weeks of editing. Needless to say the thrill was gone. And like the end of a bad romance, in a fit of rage I threw out Final Cut Pro X. Now my Mac is free of it, good riddance.
I finished the film in Final Cut Pro 7 and now I am slowly weaning myself from eight years of loving Final Cut and have started to edit on Premier CS5.5. It is sad.
You can see the trailer for Love and Robots at: http://www.vimeo.com/28967865
Okay, first sentence; it’s not perfect. But something this revolutionary, never is. In the words of Morpheus, you need to “Free your mind.”
iMovie Pro...Not!
I should just say that I have been editing video as a profession since 1985 and I’ve worked on everything from old CMX tape editors to KEM flatbed film editors to most the NLEs out there, I’ve edited national PBS shows and I teach Final Cut Pro editing at the local community college.
The most important thing I ask of an NLE is that it be fast and be intuitive. On these two counts, I’ve found Final Cut Pro X to be both. I’ll also add the caveat that while I’ve only logged about 16 hours using the new app, I’ve been able to do some pretty amazing stuff in that 16 hours.
Before I get to all the complaints that editors are posting (and they are well documented, to say the least) I want us all to take a deep breath and look at the bright side of life, as it relates to video editing. FCP7 was getting old, editors have been flocking to Premiere because of 64bit architecture, and “native editing” which FCP7 didn’t do. Also for the five editors in the world that edit 4K on a regular basis, FCP7 didn’t handle that workflow , so you had to use proxies (boo hoo!) Well, ladies and gents, FCPX does do 64bit, “Native” editing and 4K. I’ll actually use that 4K editing for time lapses, so hooray for 4K! The 64 bit is nice and in case you haven’t noticed we’ve now got a whole new host of 64 bit effects, They alone are worth your $300 that you are crying about spending on a full-featured NLE. It’s even got “Looks” included. I do love Stu and Red Giant, but for the price of Red Giant Looks, I’ve got a whole NLE attached.
Titles and Text sucked in FCP7, They suck a whole lot less in FCPX, font previews is just one little thing that makes me edit faster, and everyone knows a fast editor is an employed editor. Oh yeah, those nice 64bit effects and transitions are rendering in background while I keep editing, I wonder if I’m going to miss the “render wander” hmm… no more billing for watching the render bar, no wonder some editors are upset.
Video editors hate making friggin’ slide shows. But almost every friggin’ project involves animating Joe the photographer’s wonderful stills into the project. At times I’ve contemplated (gag) going into iMovie just to use the Ken Burns effect. For the record, I hate iMovie and I would hate iMovie Pro, if that’s indeed what FCPX was (and it isn’t.) But if I can take a still sequence and Ken Burns it without having to key frame, that’s mo’ money in my pocket. Yet another FCPX feature that makes me a faster editor.
Once you get over the initial new GUI shock, FCPX turns out to be very intuitive. I was able to make some edits right away without even opening the Help menu, where all the documentation is stored, a far cry from the four volumes of dead tree manuals that came with FCP6. For me anyway, the trim window and the precision editor are far more intuitive than FCP7. Slipping, sliding rippling, and extend edits are all a piece of cake. Also I have to mention how easy syncing is now. On FCP7 I have the Plural Eyes plug-in just to handle syncing dual system sound. I shoot with a DSLR, so most of the time I’m doing dual system sound. With FCP X it’s as easy as importing the sound clip and choosing “Synchronize Clip” from the Clip menu, that’s it ! It’s simple and just works.
I’ll have to say that initially I’m not a big fan of FCPX’s media management. You kinda have to get over the ideas of projects, sequences, and bins. And that’s sorta like saying you have to get over the idea of breakfast, lunch and dinner. And no “Save As” is just freaky. I’m thinking events are like projects used to be and projects are like sequences used to be. I’m still messing with this whole new paradigm, So I’m going to say that I need to mess with this more to judge it. But I will say this, there are those that are saying you can’t put footage on an external drive and that you can’t share projects and assets, That is just plain wrong. You can import clips to wherever you want, and FCPX can use them, it does give you the option to copy the clips to the same drive as your project file, but you can opt out if you wish. And you have menu options for sharing and copying assets and projects for another editor to use. It’s no Final Cut Server, but big post houses that are running FCP Server are going to stick with FCP7 as long as their slow moving corporate giant minds will allow.
That brings me to “native” editing. Why the hell do you want to edit h.264 on a SD card natively? Because you like to be slow? Okay, most of you are smart enough to transfer your cards to the hard drive where you can import them into the NLE for editing. But then you say “I’m editing H.264 natively” you may think you are, but for all those edits you’re making, the NLE has to transcode and make I frames and reconstruct the GOP structure, that’s just the way it is. So while FCPX will let you do that now, the smarter way to edit is to let FCPX turn all that long GOP crap into beautiful 422 I framed ProRes for you in the background while you edit away “natively” and when you export your project , you’ve got a nice archival quality ProRes copy of your program. You DO have an archival ProRes copy of every program that you create, don’t you?
If you are worried about output formats, spring $50 for the new compressor or use your old compressor on your exported master file. And if you need to go to tape, you really should already have AJA or Matrox or Black Magic hardware. DVD? You probably already have DVD Studio Pro and the DVD standard isn’t going anywhere soon, so upgrading DVDSP is pointless. Blu-ray? You can output to an external burner and you even have limited custom menu options available in Compressor.
At this point I should point you to the excellent David Pogue article where he talks to Apple product managers to dispel many of the myths about FCPX. You can read that article here: Pro editors weigh-in on Final Cut Pro X
Now, let me tell you what i hate/ dislike or need to have added to FCPX. I need AAF export or XML export to send projects to After Effects. I need round-tripping or multitrack export to Soundtrack Pro or (gag) OMF export to send audio to Poor Tools (SIC.) Multi-Cam would be nice, although I don’t use it much in FCP7. I need more numeric input options. There are a lot of the time where I’m editing “by the numbers”, so knowing where to type in time code numbers for ins, outs and durations would be great. You should be able to tag clips on import like the old “Log and Transfer.” I’ve found in the “Import from Devices” window that you can import partial clips from devices, but you can’t label them in that window before importing them.
Finally, I’m going to directly quote David Pogue as to the bottom line:
“Professional editors should (1) learn to tell what’s really missing from what’s just been moved around, (2) recognize that there’s no obligation to switch from the old program yet, (3) monitor the progress of FCP X and its ecosystem, and especially (4) be willing to consider that a radical new design may be unfamiliar, but may, in the long term, actually be better.”