For those who want to build digital cities for filming, e-onsoftware now had CityEngine Vue. It looks to be quite and impressive program.
Made with CityEngine, you can zoom down to the street level where you can composite your actors.
– Rich Pulham
Read some posts last night by Bloom, Laforet, et al, about HDSLR filmmaking. Checked on lenses and stuff like that. Of course, financially it is way out of my range. Yes, cameras are cheap. Lenses will add up to the cost of the camera or more. And then there are all the add-ons that will boost the price up beyond cameras and lenses. There doesn’t seem to be any real savings here. But you can do things you can’t do with a regular video camera.
I’m not there yet. If I buy an HDSLR, it will be the start of a money pit that will not produce any movies.
Another interesting aspect of this HDSLR frenzy is that you won’t see it in the production values. Sure, you can do some shots you might not see otherwise. It offers more flexibility. But you can adapt and shoot within your means and no one will notice you are missing a fancy follow-focus or whatever.
I’ve been working on a project that requires some setups that I cannot do. One requires a scene shot in a medical research lab. Another has a helicopter flying over and landing at a tent city in an abandoned oil refinery. And I have a shot of a congressional investigation in one of their fancy meeting rooms. Is anyone going to give me access to those? Is there even such a thing as an abandoned oil refinery?
What I’ve mentioned requires digital sets. Those are production values that are seen on the screen. They can make my el cheapo production look like it had a multi-million dollar budget.
I’ve already created my medical lab assembling various pieces in After Effects. Thanks to the U.S. Navy flyover of a tent city in Haiti, I have Photoshoped my tent city. I’ve nearly finished my abandoned oil refinery in After Effects. Got a really pretty sunset from NASA for the background.
So far, I haven’t had to do any location scouting except for some Google searches. I don’t need to make arrangements for shooting on location, getting releases, insurance, and all that stuff. There are no logistics involving cameras, equipment, cast and crew. And yet I can do that which is way out of my league.
Why aren’t I seeing more blogs and articles about those things? Aren’t they what really matters?
– Rich Pulham
I keep getting calls from people who want to convert their VHS movies to DVD. My answer is — You don’t want to.
First, VHS looks terrible when compared to DVD. It is half the resolution. We have an upconverting DVD player connected to our high-def TV. DVDs look great. But when we try VHS, the results are almost unwatchable. Tapes look okay on a smaller, standard-def TV, however.
Second, converting a 2-hour movie will take 2 hours. Then I must add rendering time and burning the DVD. The cost is going to be greater than buying a new DVD.
If you want to have a physical product, go buy a new DVD. Most older movies are available at very reasonable prices.
Another option is not to buy the DVD at all. Netflix probably has just about everything you have in your library. They may also have the movies in video-on-demand so you can watch it any time you want. Newer TVs, DVD players, Wii and other game consoles probably have access to Netflix built in.
– Rich Pulham
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
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