Final Cut User

Another NAB has gone and lots of announcements big and small came but nothing from Apple camp about full Blu-ray support.This topic has been buzzing around for a while now and you can see it really being brought up in response to Adobe having the only solid way besides Sonic Solutions for full Blu-ray authoring .Look I am a Mac zealot and part of my workflow on a daily basis includes Adobe apps like Photoshop,After Effects and now Encore. To be fair I did not touch Encore until mid 2007 because  I needed to upgrade all my Adobe apps to Production Premium because I had never really needed to go outside Final Cut Studio for disc based authoring.We know Apple has been on the Blu-ray Board since 2005 ,remeber this Apple Blu-Ray Board Press Release. and we also know backing HD DVD was something they thought was the right option for that time only to see its demise happen.

So where does this whole mess leave us and by us I mean the smaller shops , the freelancers,  and even big studios on the being able to have full support for Blu-ray authoring on the Mac from Mac based applications ? The answer is who knows . Do I think Apple has been working on updates? YES they are .When you ask ?I hope soon because going from one app to another and having to worry about what will work and wont for file support and failed encodes I do not want to deal with.I want a solution that works so I also do not mind waiting a little bit longer and i would also like to not only be able to author my work or clients work on a personal level I would like to have the option to back up a huge chunk of personal and business information to a 50gb disc.With only a few big release’s that usually drop between now and September we have minor machine updates coming and WWDC in June could we see Blu-ray capable Mac’s? Let’s hope so because the Adobe workflow I have going now is pretty solid for authoring Blu-ray and testing on a PS3. Did I mention Dynamic Link and not re-rendering is also nice .

Here is also some helpful workflow between Compressor and Encore from Adobe’s Dave Helmly.

 Compressor & Encore workflow.

And is clearly evident by the flurry of production announcements and updates on the front page of the Hollywood Reporter’s Site today.

Everyone is feverishly pushing to get productions running again to make up for lost time, and get what they can in before the actors potentially jump on their looming strike opportunity when the SAG contract ends this summer.

Last week Red rolled out the newest version of Red Alert.

If you take a look at the top of the support page you’ll also notice this little warning

Read before upgrading to QuickTime 7.4
Warning: Stability issues working with Red Footage using QuickTime 7.4 on Mac OS 10.4.11 (Tiger)
There are reports that QuickTime 7.4 is causing stability issues with both RED ALERT! and Final Cut Pro when working with RED footage. RED does not recommend that users upgrade from QuickTime 7.3 until these issues are resolved. We’re working closely with Apple to resolve the issues and will post more information when available.

More quicktime issues! There have been so many quicktime issues this past year that have cause so many problems and headaches for ProApps users. Granted, this specific one is related to a 3rd party conflict, but most of the others have infected Apple’s own. Personally I think it has to do with the ultra fast push in the consumer/itunes area of quicktime (which is a larger source of income - just due to the vast number of itunes users compared to ProApps). Undoubtedly the pressure coming from the itunes side of quicktime for bigger-better-faster has caused the Pro User part some serious neglect and pain.

The writer’s strike has been a nightmare for a lot more people than it appears in the surface. There are countless number of crew workers that have hit hard times in a production slow down or in some cases, a halt. A friend of mine at Paramount had me out on lot a week ago and there was absolutely nothing shooting. I was lucky enough to catch a peak at people breaking down the sets for J.J. Abrams new Star Trek Movie, though there wasn’t much going on otherwise.
Besides crew members being affected, rental houses and other industries have taken a hit as well. If you start to factor in the triple trickle down theory (where a production dollar is spent three times by the employer to pay, the employee to purchase and the place of purchase to sustain) the economic effects get really nasty real quick. Thank god the strike is coming to an end. I’ve been in LA for the past month working on a Reality TV series, one of the few areas minimally affected by the strike.
Here is an article in the Hollywood Reporter about how things are getting prepared to be ramped up as the strike cools down. Hopefully any pending actors strike this summer will be quickly resolved!

I have to say that Cloverfield is hands down one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.  I won’t use the hyperbole of saying that its the worst, but it’s definitely down there.  

The film is a classic example of excellent marketing that shares little or no information about the film, but just enough to encourage large ticket sales.  

The film is dizzying, irritating and unbearable.  I had a migraine halfway through.  Handheld action taken way to far.  No still frames or images to focus on, which help take attention from mid quality CG - tricking the viewer into potentially thinking that it looks better than it does.  

Cloverfield is a rip off of the Blair Witch, but with Aliens.  The Marketing ploy is the same, the structure is similar and even the ending and final shot of the film is the same as Blair Witch.    

Now that I’ve finished bitching.  The technical stuff. The film was shot with a the Viper, the F23 and the HVX.  Director of Photography, Michael Bonvillian said that they would use the HVX whenever possible, when the shots weren’t needed for compositing.   Makes sense as the other cameras are difficult to whip around like that.  

This month’s ICG has an article on filming.   The link is on the mainpage. I’d post direct, but the php is preventing it.

Im Starting off the new year with a wipe and fresh install on my laptop, to ensure stability on a coming trip to LA for a month.  I’ve been slowly plugging away at reinstalling some of my staple apps and ignoring a few that i never seem to use.  I was hoping to install Quicktime 7.3 rather than 7.3.1 for a couple of reasons - One being that I want to retain the flash support of 7.3 that has been removed in the upgrade and another reason is that I’ve had a ton of issues with compressor and motion related to 7.3.1.  I dug around for a while yesterday and most of the morning have been unable to track down just the 7.3 install.  
It no longer exists on Apple’s support site. Mention of it is still there, but when you click anything that has to do with version 7.3 you get the quirky apple page not found error. All the older versions of Quicktime are still live, like the far more stable 7.2 link below the broken 7.3 links.
I have a feeling that this is no mistake. I’m guessing that it has something to do with the lack of flash support in 7.3.1 as well. Im thinking that Apple’s flash licensing has expired and that Adobe is playing hardball, so they’ve been forced to pull the older version all together. If this is the case, it doesn’t bode well for flash support in iphones any time soon. Just my guess, anyone got any better theories?

Getting ready to head to Phoenix in a

couple of hours. 6am flight, which means 5am arrival at airport, which means I probably won sleep tonight, Ouch. I’m am still laptop-less due to a back order of parts at Apple. I might cry. Hopefully they finish it soon and fed ex it to my hotel. I may expire without it. I’ll be bumming the use of other people’s computers while on the trip… stay tuned.

Continuously overwhelmed is the name of the game lately. Been working on tons of intersting stuff and am wiritng a wrap up on whats been going on lately. Also dying form wiating for my laptop to return from apple. Doing a large Apple network setup for the next couple off days before I take off for a feature shoot in Phoenix. Hopefully my laptop will return before then, so I can blog and catch up on all the cool RED news.

After perusing some magazines, blogs and online communties I’ve been incredibly angered by inaccurate information provided by people with the improper mental facilities to review or describe what they are talking about. I had almost forgotten a few instances that i had wanted to blog about until I came upon this 2 month old article moments ago. Granted this article isn’t necessarily wrong, it is just retarded, biased and uniformed. People with adversions to new technology and changes in workflow shouldn’t be given endorsement from reputable sources for their opinions. Bloggers have some sort of unspoken freedom to be wrong on occasion, mostly due to that many blog about opinions but also because noone is paying them or endorsing them to blog, but people who right reviews for websites. magazines and industry journals, which professionals turn to for informtion, should be held to higher standards.

Now I’m motivated to go back through and dig out one such instance I ran into recently. Ooh, luckily thanks to the digital revolution the article is also available online so we can oogle together!!!

While reading this review in Digital Content Producer, I was taken aback when I reached the portion of the Final Cut Studio review that focuses on Compressor. Jan Ozer opens the section by stating “Compressor has always been amorphous to me - hard to get my arms around.” What the Fuck? Who in their right mind puts any stock in a review of an application that is written by an author who admits up front they have no idea what they are doing with it? What kind of quality control does Digital Content Producer have that they allow this to go out? Are they that hard up for writers? The section on Compressor also cites compressor’s “reputation for glacial encodes” and then goes on to cite a chart of tests against Episode pro where Compressor is the fastest in 3 out of 4 tests.
I’m thinking, “This is rediculous” , then I look back a page at the opening paragraph. “For this review, I’ll touch Final Cut Studio 2 where I live and practice in the world of DV and HDV — not uncompressed HD and 4K — with an emphasis on getting long-form tutorials, weddings, and concerts done efficiently and well, rather than wreaking the last bit of potential creativity from a well-funded 60-second spot or full-length movie.”

So this article is being written by someone who uses DV footage all the time to shoot weddings and botmitzvahs? No wonder the magazine is free. I find that people who use strictly DV, and maybe a little HDV and know nothing about the actual ins and outs of standards make up 99% of Final Cut Owners. The other 1% are people that are actually editors and weren’t upset by that comment. I find that the majority of people that present themselves to others as editors don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. Then again I’ve seen a handful of amazing cutters who have never worked with anything but mini DV and wouldn’t know what a codec was if it hit them in the head (or rather a book containing information about codecs hit them in the head).

My Favorite line from the article “There’s tons more enhancements in Final Cut Pro, of course, including the new ProRes codec and a number of new FxPlug filters and transitions, including a killer vignette filter I can’t wait to use on my next wedding video.”

WTF. In comparison these aren’t so bad, but I picked out some horrible ones in the other pages of that issue as well as a recent issue of DV. I’ve never actually bothered to read either cover to cover, just recently in my many hours on many planes. I realize why now. They are aimed at “videoguys” and event videographers, nothing against either and they are respectable ways to make money, just not the way I make mine. I probably won’t ever read Digital Content Producer again, I’ll put it on the shelf with all the other Bullshit like the Weekly World News.

Just picked this up from HDFORINDIES during a little render downtime. Looks like another huge bump in the Format Wars. Paramount and Dreamworks have dropped support for Blu-ray!!! Ugh. Man. I was really hoping that Blu-ray would hold strong. Not to mention that this pretty much just leaves Studios with shitty catalogs making Blu-ray movies. At least it will be the best looking, highest-capacity crap.
Read more at Times Online.