opencut (no, not a post about Amy Winehouse)
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 6:41PM For those aspiring to learn the craft of film editing, one of the trickiest aspects of the journey can be finding good footage to practice on. Even more rare is the opportunity to see how other, more experienced editors would treat the same footage. If you'd like to improve your cutting chops, or flex them for all to see, you could try entering the current competition at opencut.org. You'll get about 160GB of footage from a short film called Susannah (shot with the RED One camera), slice it and dice it however you see fit, and enter the results for judging. From the site:
OpenCut is a completely open-source film competition designed to encourage people to take professionally shot material and edit it in their own way. As there is no "one way" to tell a story, so too can stories benefit from being re-edited and re-told from many different vantage points and perspectives.
The winner of OpenCut 1.0 will receive a brand new AJA IO HD from Silverado. They will also be recognized as the "editor-of-record" at IMDB and will have their cut submitted to multiple film festivals.
Entry will cost you US$25. Grab your copy of In the Blink of an Eye (and maybe even the editing chapter of The Guide) and get to work!
UPDATE: Don't ignore (as I nearly did) the other awesome aspect of this—it's a great way to get your hands on some professionally-shot RED One footage to practice your color grading as well! From the looks of it, the contest is not strictly limited to picture cutting—your finished film will aparently be evaluated for polish and creativity in sound, music, and color as well.
UPDATE UPDATE: You'll notice a comment below from Torrey Loomis, Project Director of OpenCut, addressing many of your questions and concerns. Here's a salient snippet:
We've included an Ubernote to the resources section denoting that this project is NOT limited to Mac.Thanks Torrey for chiming in! I'm sure ProLost readers appreciate your responsiveness. Read the full comment below.Second, we've changed the upload requirements to h.264 720p or 1080p. ProRes is not required.
This project is open to anyone--PC or Mac, period.
Reader Comments (29)
GREAT LINK!
Awesome! I'm in...
Wow, looks fantastic.
Now to check the spec of the machine I'd do it on....
Great link. Now if only this 'OPEN' project would allow for anything else than FCP studio to be used, I might even consider it. As it is now I'd have to invest over $3000 to enter a contest, that I could participate in with the stuff I currently own, but am not allowed to use.
Apple only...??? Great idea for a competition and that's the only reason I can't enter at this time. How frustrating.
When one enters these "competitions", one have to make sure one does not enter something which for all practical purposes is a "free labor" exercise.
Just a thought. Not saying this is, in any way, but some "competitions" are.
/Z
It is strange that they lay down those requirements so explicitly. Of course, RED Alert and RED Cine are Mac only, as is the RED proxy Quicktime codec. I'm sure if you found a way to transcode the proxy Quicktimes to a format that would work with your NLE of choice, they would never know you hadn't used Final Cut.
There probably is a workaround and perhaps they just assumed that Apple was the only way to use Red footage because of Red's association with FCP (an association I find contrary to the company's interest in democratising filmmaking.) It might be an ideal opportunity to convert Red footage to something like DNxHD and edit on an Avid instead. You're right - no-one would notice!
does anybody know if it is possible to download the files, instead of shipping them a hard drive?
Because I had to ship it from Europe...
Yet another "Red is the Revolution" moment when you get shut out 'cause you don't have a pile of Mac stuff lying around. Great contest - feeling pissed that it's locked away behind multiple layers of proprietary file formats. If Red were truly the revolution we could all use it. Like DV. There's your revolution, and an open standard - and with Magic Bullet and some deartifacting it looks fine to me. The revolution happened already - this contest just creates barriers to entry that remind me why a Scarlet costs $3k but needs $15k worth of extras to run :)
What I've done in the past (not internationally) when I had to ship a drive to a company (for example a scanning facility) is just a buy a drive on-line and use the alternate shipping adress to send the drive straight to them.
This way they'd get a brand new drive to work with for a price that was almost cheaper than shipping an existing drive from my office to the facility by courier.
Just a note, I don't think they care at all if you use a Mac or not. I've recieved my entry email and they basically say, "You are free to employ any means necessary to complete your cut." The only Mac specific thing is the final piece needs to be in Apple's ProRes format. Outside of that, I'm sure they don't care at all. And, although we'll be using Macs on this, I'm pretty sure I could get it done just as well on my PC.
Also, great site Stu, thanks for all the info.
This is certanly an 'interesting' competition (or experiment?).
I wish I had more time to spend in somethign like this.
Thanks for the info Stu.
DV wasn't 'open' when it was first introduced. It was incredible proprietary and only the news organizations could afford it. Then the tiny cams came along years after.
How old is RED? You gotta start somewhere. So why not start in an area that you know your ways around in? And for the RED guys that just happened to be a Mac.
Get a Phantom or a Weisscam if you're limited to Windows only on your 'intel box'. Or boot into OSX if you're on a more versatile 'intel box'.
The specs on Assimilate's Scratch are sparse and misleading at best on their site. But that's your toolset on Windows. Then go to any format from there. Or get a Mac Mini for the transcoding. Takes longer and might drive the mini into suicide but works.
Couple of quick questions before I enter, i just called them and left a message. Is the due date June 18th? Can we ship them a drive direct from the manufacturer as was suggested above?
Frank, help me understand how DV was ever a "proprietary system that only the news organizations could afford."
Other than some local stations - I don't know of ANY network affiliates that ever use DV. (Most stuck with their Betacam SP, untill SX or DVCam came available). But DV (ieee1394) has always been an international standard. There have been proprietary build on top of the DV standard, case in point is Sony's DVCam. So what are you talking about?
Not trying to flame here - just don't agree with what's being said.
Just had a look at the rules. Although they don't state specifically whether you have to edit on Mac or Windows, you HAVE to deliver Apple ProRes, which can only be generated on a Mac.
Does anyone know where we are supposed to mail our Hard Drives to?? Stu Where are you sending yours?
Does anyone know where we're supposed to send our Hard Drives? Stu what address are you sending yours' by chance. I can't find one on OpenCut's site.
As touched on by several others, I too am quite discouraged by the participation and deliverable format requirements for this contest.
I suppose I could understand limiting it to Mac based editing, etc, IF it Apple were a sponsor of the contest. As they are not -- at least from what I can see -- I wrote them a brief email via the contact form:
"I would have liked to participate in this, however your participation and deliverable format requirements preclude anyone not working on an Apple platform to do so. I would respectfully suggest you reconsider this in the future."
Do we send to the address listed under contact? I entered but haven't heard anything back or been sent any e-mails yet. Want to get my drive in!
Folks,
My name is Torrey Loomis and I am the director of OpenCut.
We've never intended to exclude anyone and I can see how the language on the site could show that.
We've included an Ubernote to the resources section denoting that this project is NOT limited to Mac.
Second, we've changed the upload requirements to h.264 720p or 1080p. ProRes is not required.
This project is open to anyone--PC or Mac, period.
This isn't a "Edit our stuff for free!" contest. We've already invested over $20,000 in time, resources, and gear to this idea. We shot on RED 21 and have SCRATCH sitting in-house. We aren't doing this because we are lacking editorial resources.
Further, in addition to the IMDB posting and submissions to other festivals, we are putting up an AJA IO HD as the main prize. We also just had Assimilate sign on as a sponsor to cover the entire cost of conforming and finishing in 4k. I would hope that those would be a great incentive to any editor--regardless of skill level.
Since this is OpenCut--we want to make it as open as possible. If you have any ideas for making it more open (besides making it free...running a project like this does cost $$$ and $25 isn't unreasonable...) please send them directly to opencut@silverado.cc
Thanks!
Torrey
----------------------
Torrey Loomis
Project Director - OpenCut
2600 East Bidwell Street, Suite 280
Folsom, CA 95630
(916) 760-0032 * FAX (916) 404-5258
opencut@silverado.cc
http://www.OpenCut.org
Check out the Silverado 4k Market at http://www.silverado.cc
Torrey,
Very very cool. I can't wait, my drive is already in the mail. Thanks again!
Very cool...
(Somehow I can't help but think my comment led to Torrey's message here.)
:)
As I'm from Germany shipping costs would ruin me if I'd be part of it. Is there any way to get some red files like from the CF to test with (wouldn't want to cut this, just test out my setup with _3k_ prores made out of the r3ds...)
Any Idea how to get some files for personal use? I'd maybe make a screencast out of it about how to work with 3k... not that I'm running a http://extreeeme.org/digitalredvolution" REL="nofollow">scarlet-blog...
So I'd use it online to show it of to people...
@George P.Schnyder
you can download r3d files from redrelay.net to test your workflow!
Oh, thanks a lot. I'll start downloading right now...
I love this blog
Registration for OpenCut "Susannah"
is now closed.
I have receved the news too late ;(
... and that happened only a few days _before_ I added R3D-file support to Blender.
So no opencut with open source software, I'd assume...