February 3rd, 2010 Rich
By this weekend, Avatar will becoming the highest grossing movie in history. Ironically, it beats out another James Cameron film, Titantic.
I saw the film in an IMAX theater on Christmas day. It was sold out for nearly a week in advance so I was lucky my family was able to get reservations. Yes, seating reservations. But that is also a contributing factor for the movie to become the highest grossing film. In the regular, non-3d theaters, there was plenty of room. People were paying higher ticket prices for the IMAX experience. Higher ticket prices means higher grosses.
I must say it was a fabulous experience. I don’t remember ever watching a 3d movie before. If I did see one as a kid, it would have been with the blue and red paper glasses. Yuk. This movie was real 3d like I imagined it should be.
The movie wasn’t perfect. I saw flaws that reminded me of cutting my own films using HDV and AVCHD. For example, a shot in the control room had a close-up on one of men while another walked quickly by behind him. I saw the stuttering image but I don’t think anyone else around me did. There were also some problems with a darker foreground character against a bright background image. It seemed to form a halo around the foreground person. Very disturbing.
When I read about all the 3d television coming out (and some already out) for home viewing, I was all excited about the possibilities. In fact, that was the hot subject at CES this year and maybe very well be for NAB in April. We’ll have a 3d sports network in June and a 3d channel by satellite. Discovery Channel, et al, will also be doing 3d.
No wonder I was ready to jump on the bandwagon. I’d buy a second camera and I’d being doing 3d as well. But wait. I didn’t have a way to see 3d. And how would I edit it? I thought I could manage.
As I researched the subject, I discovered a mountain of technological problems in doing 3d correctly. Well, you don’t find it by search for 3d. That gives info on digital 3d objects. You need to search for stereoscopic filmmaking.
First set of problems was that the lenses of the cameras should be the same distance apart as the eyes. Well, I have small cameras. Is mine close good enough? I don’t want to have to shoot into front-silvered mirrors set at 45 degrees and flop the images in post. Hand-held also becomes a real mess.
Then there is a problem with parallax. If both cameras are pointing straight ahead, they won’t be covering the same area. One image will be shifted a little to the side. So convergence needs to be set so they will be covering the same area. The closer the scene is to the camera, the bigger this problem becomes.
Next is an issue with keystoning. If the camera is in a room and tilts up, parallel lines converge. That convergence will be different for each camera. And there goes your 3d.
Another issue is depth of field. Independent filmmakers having been doing all sorts of things to reduce depth of field like the big movies do. But for 3d, you need as much depth of field as possible. What happens when the audience looks beyond your subject? It isn’t normal for us to look past someone and see an out-of-focus background. Whatever we look at should be in focus.
With the focus issue, we lose a great advance we had while making 2d films. So do we shoot 2 ways so we can release in 2d and 3d?
Shooting 3d could give an independent filmmaker a real advantage when competing with the big boys. And the dearth of content would work to their advantage. That’s IF we can do a credible job.
But there are still some bumps in the road.
Cineform probably has the key to being able to go 3d. Their product, Neo3d, solves the editing problems. It will render to different formats. Viewing the edit can probably be done on a 3d gaming machine. So the problems are surmountable.
So where are we at. Neo3d costs $3,000. And I could easily that much or more on hardware to film and view it. And there are the technical difficulties.
The biggest question of all: Will there be an audience?
I’m not thinking 2010 will be a great year for home 3d viewing. Not with the slow economy and people having to replace obsolete equipment (televisions and blu-ray players). And there are those glasses which could cost as much as $50 each.
I can’t afford the switch. And there are too many pieces of equipment on my want list already. How about a nice jig I’ve had my eye on?
– Rich Pulham
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September 10th, 2009 Rich
I was so pleased with the performance of my HF S200 that I purchased it’s big brother, the HF S100.
I wanted to be able to shoot a three-camera setup. The third camera allows me to shoot an interview, for example. I have a camera on a two-shot of the interviewer and interviewee. Another camera is close on the interviewee. The third camera is close up on the interviewer. I have all three cameras running, introduce a sound sync mark, and then I can easily edit in a multi-camera mode. It’s a piece of cake. And if someone flubs, I have coverage to edit past that.
A couple of key camera features include zebra bars and exposure adjustment so it is much easier to get the exposures you desire. On occasion, I want a scene dark, for example. Instead of having the camera turn up the gain automatically and create noise in the dark areas, you set a lower exposure value and it doesn’t auto adjust. It you are getting zebra bars, it is also helpful to lower exposure so you don’t blow out your whites.
I also enjoy the 8 megapixel still pictures. This allows me to shoot clean plates for use in green screen and compositing. The 16:9 format may not be so great as a still format but turning the camera sideways can give some big verticals.
– Rich Pulham
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September 8th, 2009 Rich
I was shooting a client’s musical DVD where performers lip-synced to pre-recorded music. Having a second camera made a lot of sense for reducing the amount of time shooting. I could get two different angles of a performance at the same time.
I found a refurbished Canon HV20 for under $500 and purchased it. My first camera had done a great job and this fit my price range. However, part way into the shoot, the camera failed. B&H Photo was very helpful in getting an RMA. I got a credit because I planned on buying a third camera.
So I would have a second camera on the shoot, I purchased a Canon HF200. At first, I was leary of going to an AVCHD camera but decided to give it a try when I learned it did 24 mb/sec., the same as the HDV format on my HV20. It turned out to be a good move.
There were several features lacking on the HF 200 that I decided I could live without since I was using my HV20 as well. The main one was zebra bars. That feature really helps with getting good exposures. It also didn’t have an eye-level viewer. But the pluses far outweighed the negatives.
The first thing I found was that there was less blurring on fast action. This has always been an issue with HDV. It shot full 1920×1080p instead of 1440×1080p I got with tape. That gave better images with fewer artifacts.
Shooting on a 16 gig class 6 SDHC card gives about 90 minutes worth of recording. Once a shot is taken, it can be watched on the camera’s display to make sure you got what you wanted. And of course, it doesn’t take an hour to dump a tape. It’s a drag and drop operation.
The camera feels tiny in your hand. I have heard that small cameras are hard to hold steady. But this one is easily cupped in two hands for rock steady operation. I can also use the loosened strap to hold it in one hand for a fairly steady picture.
– Rich Pulham
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September 7th, 2009 Rich
I made a trip to New York for the B&H Photo classes on AfterEffects. I didn’t have the money to fly there but fortunately my wife works for JetBlue and I get to travel free. So I flew on the red eye from Salt Lake and arrived at about 6:30 local time. After eating and hanging around the JFK for a few hours, I took the subway into downtown New York. After the classes, I went back to the airport, had dinner, and flew home. It was exhausting but I brought my own food so all I had to pay for was the subway.
The classes changed my world. CS4 links all the parts together making it much easier to work. For example, I can work in Premiere, link the clip to a composition in After Effects, make my changes, and go back to the Premiere window and see my changes updated. Any change I make in After Effects will automatically update when I look at Premiere.
Photoshop can be brought into After Effects and the layers used there. This is very helpful in doing motion graphics for titles, etc. I can also link a sequence in Premiere to an Encore project and burn a DVD, with or without menus.
Perhaps the biggest realization was that this suite is fully capable of editing a full-lenth feature. Rather than using Vegas and exporting clips to After Effects, then rendering the clip and importing it back into Vegas, I could skip all those steps.
Price was an obstacle. CS4 Production Premium goes for about $1600. But I found an upgrade at Newegg.com $760 and a copy of CS3 Web Premium for about $300. That gave my wife Photoshop and her other favorite tools for her computer and the Production Suite for mine.
– Rich Pulham
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September 7th, 2009 Rich
I became very frustrated with using Sony Vegas Pro 8. My feelings, of course, may be because of my inexperience. But I had a lot of trouble with rendering more complex projects. If often crashed before it completed. And my green screen efforts didn’t do well when I added more layers.
My long-term goal is to make movies and I just didn’t feel like it was up to the job. I learned a lot. It was inexpensive and gave me a lot of basic tools. It has an easy-to-learn interface. Then I went to a seminar on CS4 at B&H Photo in New York City. That was an eye opener.
At NAB, Sony announced Vegas Pro 9. They touted the features in the new version. It sounded exciting. But when I went home, I found most of those features were already in Pro 8. There was no compelling reason to upgrade. Maybe they fixed the rendering problem, maybe they didn’t. I didn’t care.
– Rich Pulham
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