Tools

Slugline. Simple, elegant screenwriting.

Red Giant Color Suite, with Magic Bullet Looks 2.5 and Colorista II

Needables
  • Sony Alpha a7S Compact Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera
    Sony Alpha a7S Compact Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera
    Sony
  • Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH4KBODY 16.05MP Digital Single Lens Mirrorless Camera with 4K Cinematic Video (Body Only)
    Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH4KBODY 16.05MP Digital Single Lens Mirrorless Camera with 4K Cinematic Video (Body Only)
    Panasonic
  • TASCAM DR-100mkII 2-Channel Portable Digital Recorder
    TASCAM DR-100mkII 2-Channel Portable Digital Recorder
    TASCAM
  • The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap (Peachpit)
    The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap (Peachpit)
    by Stu Maschwitz

Entries in DV Rebel's Guide (90)

Tuesday
Feb132007

Mastering in the NLE

As I expected, the most controversial tenet of the DV Rebel approach has been my suggestion that you master your film in After Effects rather than in your NLE. From the very first public interview, to comments here and threads on the Rebel Café, I’ve repeatedly been asked variations on the question: “Really? Seriously? But what about [my situation], how about then?”

So I thought I’d try to clarify a couple of things. First of all, I stand by the answer I gave to Mike’s “Really? Seriously?” question, so I’ll paraphrase it here:

At its simplest, the issue is this: Your NLE re-compresses every time it renders. As soon as you move to a codec where this re-compression becomes negligible, you’re talking special hardware. The DV Rebel approach, on the other hand, can be implemented on a three-year-old laptop.

 

When editing, my rule-of-thumb is to avoid anything that makes the process no longer real-time. When onlining, the rule is the polar opposite: no amount of render time is too much to endure in the name of increased image quality. If you’re careful, by onlining in After Effects you can actually achieve better results than you could in an expensive real-time suite. After Effects is the poor man’s Smoke, but it only falls short of a Smoke in that it requires a little staring at a progress bar now and then.

Having said that, I do recognize that there will come a time where this policy will be rendered obsolete. Better integration between After Effects and Premiere Pro could, for example, make the distinction between work done in one or the other of the two applications so blurred as to be irrelevant. It’s pretty obvious that Production Studio’s Dynamic Link feature is still in version 1.0. Apple would appear to be working on their own integration between high-power compositing and editing.

 

There’s nothing wrong with the rendering or image processing in either Premiere or Final Cut. Both have many effects that work in native YUV, and both have high-bit-depth rendering options. Both lack some specific effects that you need for the DV Rebel process, like noise reduction and sharpening, but you can shore up that limitation with third-party plug-ins.

The issues lie not in the processing, but the codec that you are rendering to. If you’re working in HDV, all the floating-point YUV processing in the world won’t rescue you from the fact that you’re recompressing back to a highly destructive codec. Even if you are working uncompressed, you may still be using a 4:2:2 codec (as is the case with the Apple Uncompressed workflow discussed in the comments), in which case you are still degrading the image by re-rendering it (even if you are using effects that are realtime, because although they require no rendering for preview, they still must be converted to the codec for playback).

Meanwhile, in After Effects, you get impeccable 32-bit floating-point RGB processing, the ability to overlay “look” adjustment layers over entire sequences to make them cohesive (which you can’t even do in a Da Vinci!), the ability to create thumbnail comps (automatically, thanks to DV Rebel Tools) to keep track of color continuity, best-in-class de-noise and sharpening algorithms, and a full-fledged compositing environment to tackle everything from painting out an errant boom mic, to replacing skies, to adding the occasional helicopter.

The foundation of the DV Rebel approach is that you can make your film look great with the right off-the-shelf tools. But remember, you are starting from a huge deficit. Your camera, your wardrobe, your locations, your actors all cost a tiny fraction of those in the movies you want yours to look like. The one leg up you have is that you can match or beat the big boys in post. Don’t compromise your one advantage—treat onlining as the part of the process where you can craft your Rebel production into something beautiful and expensive looking, and avail yourself to the best (but cheapest!) tool for the job.

Monday
Feb052007

IRE Ire

Mike Curtis has been furrowing his bloggular brow about highlight clipping issues in his clever Final Cut workflows. I can't solve all his problems, but I can show you how to avoid giving your waveform a buzzcut when using Colorista.

Watch the screencast. You'll see me apply Colorista, which clips off the IRE values greater than 100%. I fix this by first applying Brightness & Contrast (Bezier), and reducing Brightness a bit. From there on out it's all fun and games with Colorista.

The part I didn't show was switching on High Precision YUV processing to make sure I don't lose fidelity in the rendering.

(This is the technique that I would use if for some weird reason I was actually doing color work in FCP—otherwise I'd use the slightly more complex method I outline in The Guide, as it makes for a cleaner export)

Friday
Feb022007

DV Rebel Crash Cam

Canon has announced the HV20, a tiny little 1080p24 camcorder with an MSRP of US$1,099.

Dzang!

It has HDMI out, which means you could pair it with a Blackmagic Intensity card ($250) to capture 4:2:2 uncompressed 24p for less than the price of a decent boom mic setup.

The CMOS chip is true 1920x1080.

We'll have to see how fussy the manual controls are, but this camera just may have DV Rebels everywhere contemplating an impulse buy.

Update: More info from HDVinfo.net.

2nd Update: HV20 now available from Amazon.

Saturday
Jan202007

The Most Unlikely Places

I never thought I'd hear the DV Rebel spirit represented on the director's commentary of I, Robot (a $120M film), and yet there it is, during the scene where Will Smith runs from the giant demolition bot through the crumbling mansion (I'm paraphrasing a bit):

We just dumped a whole bunch of stuff from the roof to fall in Will's path, and used long lenses... Often the best sort of film illusion is one that you can achieve on the set quickly...

CG takes many months to get right, and it's a very analytical process, a very sort of scientific process of getting shots and analyzing them and fixing them and constantly improving them.

It's a hell of a lot more fun to sort of wobble the camera around and run around like crazy with a few strobing lights and get something really exciting happening right in front of you.

Director Alex Proyas also describes perfectly why the DV Rebel approach of working backward, not forward is so important and can save you time and money (on DVD chapters 12–13), and how the Hollywood filmmaking machine unwittingly conspires against this wisdom.