The danger of movie gimmicks

Yesterday I wrote a post about how making your movie 3D affects the post-production process. Although 3D has been around for decades, the technology might soon be available to many more people.

We expect that one day all media will have some sort of 3D element. This technology seems to follow on in the chain of movie realism. We started with hand-cranked cameras: action on screen was hardly ever shown at a natural speed; clockwork motors were added for consistency. Then sound and colour were introduced. 100 years ago people knew that movies weren’t reality - they suspended their disbelief. For those that thought there was a future in cinema, they expected sound and colour to be added some time in the future.

In the 1950s the movie industry started feeling the competition from television. Enterprising producers started adding gimmicks that were hard to implement at home on TV. Widescreen formats became very popular in the 1950s, as did 3D.

It seems that the internet is the new competition to cinema. Film studios are starting to engage in an arms race of movie experience. If home viewers have access to screens showing movies at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 (2K) , cinemas will have screens with a resolutions between 4096×3112 (4K) and 10000×7000 (IMAX). If we have six speakers at home, cinemas will have speakers all along the walls.

The difference in the battle this time is that when people hear about great picture and sound and gimmicks such as 3D, they want to hear how it would work for them at home on their computer and TV. They aren’t so much into experiences that they can’t replicate where and when they want. We now expect technology to take the idea of the special occasion of going to the movies and make it everyday by giving us control. I imagine that if we could fit a collapsable rollercoaster into a backpack for easy erection anywhere we happen to be, we would forego the special occasion of going to a heavily branded theme park. We want special things in our lives, but can they be special if we have too much control over them?

That means we want 3D for our TVs, computers, phones, in-car instrumentation and product packaging. “It makes things more realistic” is the argument. It seems to make sense that one day, we won’t have 2D screens, just 3D projection everywhere: such as that employed by R2D2 in Star Wars.

Unfortunately, there comes a point when the benefit of the gimmick gets in the way of telling the story. If the way you tell the story becomes more important than the story told, then people might care a lot less about what you’re trying to say. If people are waiting for the next amazing special effect, huge sound, vibration in their seat or large 3D object seeming to poke them in the eye, they’ll be paying a lot less attention to the characters and the message. Some films are about the spectacle - the amazing effects, the original way of butchering a young woman, a breathtaking car chase. Better films may have spectacle, but they also have some thematic element that makes them last in the mind and heart. The Matrix may have introduced rarely-seen special effects, but people returned to the film because of the central concept and of the theme: ‘Is freedom possible?’ In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon there are some exciting fights and stunts, but they are more exciting because sometimes you don’t know who you want to win the fight - you are on both sides at the same time.

Successful gimmicks are the ones that might get an audience to go and see a film - movie stars can be included in this category, but they don’t usually get in the way of the story. Some people may have gone to see Braveheart if Mel Gibson hadn’t starred in it, but he ‘opened’ the film. After that, it was the story and the theme that kept people coming back.

That means there are two possibilities for the future of stereoscopic 3D images on 2D screens: it is a fad that will fade away as battles between cinemas and the home move on to new fronts, or it will become so normal in film-making that people will hardly notice it any more.

3D editing secrets

Yesterday, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Avid are researching ways to making their products work with 3D footage. I would characterise the kind of footage they mean as being ‘2.5D’ - two cameras shoot simultaneously from slightly different positions to simulate human stereoscopic vision.

The article refers to the ‘Over and under’ 3D technique. In the days of film, that meant that each frame of celluloid had two slightly different images - anamorphically squeezed so one appeared above the other. These days it probably means that each moment in time is represented by two pictures in a single file, i.e. at 01:04:25:16 in the media file there are two images - one for the left eye, one for the right.

Avid’s current plan is for editors to edit away in 2D - only displaying what one of the two ‘eyes’ would see in the scene. Every once in a while, they could choose a special command that lets them review the cut in 3D.

Editing 3D will only become mainstream once the price of the camera systems come down. The Fusion system uses two Sony F950s (so that’s over $230,000 just for the cameras). There is a system that 21st Century 3D have developed, but it isn’t for sale. They’re going the Panavision way and only making their technology available via hire - with mandatory employment of their staff to go along with the kit. They’ve taken a couple of Panasonic HVX100 SD cameras, synced them together, added 4:4:4 direct to storage recording and combined them in one 24lb package:

Funnily enough, they also require that they are in on the editing of your production too. From their FAQ:

…there is more to the editing process than just matching all your cuts. It is also important to note that our 3DVX3 camera system records RAW CCD data that must be converted by 21st Century 3D in order to be edited in standard NLE software. 21st Century 3D does work with our clients who want to edit their own videos by providing 2D window dubs that you can edit. Send us your Final Cut Pro project file, an EDL or the window dub edit and we will conform your 3D show.

Can someone from 21st Century 3D come to my office and show me how to edit 3D videos?

Unfortunately no. 21st Century 3D utilizes techniques that are in some cases proprietary and have been developed over the course of years.

I suppose you could do it with multicam mode when editing, place the sequence in a 48p sequence to view in 3D using a fxplug scripted plug-in.

I’m surprised that companies such as 21st Century 3D think that it is possible to keep post-production secrets. I doesn’t sound like too much of a challenge to me, but maybe I haven’t thought it through. I wonder if the aesthetics of editing 3D can also be kept secret too. People thought that editing with the Cinemascope 1:2.35 required a new visual language.

21st Century 3D believe that the best results come from having a large depth of field. They want to give the audience the choice of what to focus on. I think that cinematographers and editors have spent the last 100 years using depth of field and focus to direct the audience’s view. We should have a good idea of which part of the frame they are looking at. That determines the timing of the next shot - we need to know how long it takes for the audience to notice the edit and then search the new shot to find the most interesting thing to look at before we let new information be conveyed (a person’s expression changes, a bomb starts ticking). If we still can use framing, composition, sound, a shallow depth of field and focus to direct the audience’s eyes, we may need to take account of how much longer it takes for people to find what we want them to look at if they are looking at 3D footage.

What else determines how we’ll be editing 3D footage?

Creating empathy with your protagonist

A pretty good film that (co-incidentally) may have to say something about the Iraq Occupation (it isn’t a War).

Downloading better quality YouTube videos

This may be old news to you, but as I’ve only just heard, here it is: To make YouTube content work on non Flash-based devices (AppleTV, iPhone), recent videos are available in higher-quality, non Flash versions.

To view higher quality MP4 (H.264) versions of videos, add ‘&fmt=18′ to the end of the address. You’ll see a big difference between

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImyTzI7OSHM

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImyTzI7OSHM&fmt=18

The audio is also better. The quality will only be better if the originally submitted file was better quality than standard size.

If you are running Safari, you can download the Flash and MP4 files from sites that don’t provide download links:

1. Before you go to a page with a Flash or MP4 video player on it, open the ‘Activity’ window using the Window menu.
2. Go to the video player page and carefully watch the list of items being loaded by looking at the list in the Activity window. You’ll see the Status of each item. Most will load quickly - they’ll show a file size of anything from a few bytes to a few K for the images.
3. Find the item associated with the video you want to download. The status for the video item will take longer to appear. The ‘Address’ of the item will be a long line of gobbledegook, but the status will show values such as ‘2.6 of 3.2 MB’ as the video is loaded into the player.
4. If you double-click this item, Safari will either download the video (check the Downloads window), or it will open a new window containing a load of garbled text. If a new window opens, wait for it to finish loading and then choose ‘Save As…’ from the file menu and save the file - without the suggested extra .txt suffix.

This works on the Mac version of Safari, but I haven’t tried it on a PC yet.

The other side of editing

Over at Norman Hollyn-Wood, Norman wrote about how directors aren’t usually the right people to edit their films. Scenes aren’t usually the problem. It’s structure.

If you write, shoot and direct your film, you sometimes cannot keep the version of the film in your head that actually exists. You remember what you planned. You remember the versions you liked, the versions that the studio liked. You want to believe what you hoped for is there on screen.

The one time that I saw Robert Rodriguez’s “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” I couldn’t understand what was going on. I remember repeated quick-fire exposition scenes. The plot seemed complex, and I’m usually the one that friends turn to to explain what was going on. Rodriguez may know how to edit a scene, but he was too close to the film to make the structure work. I think he thinks that there are scenes in the film that the rest of us never saw. He can understand the plot because he wrote the backstory and many unused scenes. I didn’t have access to any of that.

The editor is the one who’s job it is to keep track of all that. It is their skill to watch the film each time as if it is the first. The problem is education. If you think that teach people how to edit scenes is hard, just think about trying to teach people how to maintain the structure of whole films.

There are some director-editors who can watch their films as if it were the first time. I think Kevin Smith is a good editor for structure. That comes from his writing ability. He is a writer first, an editor second, and a director third. Not a bad order for the genres in which he works.

Editors who don’t know how to assist editors

Scott Simmons has tackled the subject of the lack of post-production knowledge in up-and-coming editors in an article at studiodaily. It is couched in terms of ‘What’s wrong with the young FCP editor’ because ‘the young FCP editor’ is the current definition of the next generation of editors.

He enumerates the many technical failings of editors he has been coming across recently. There has been a lively debate in the comments section on that same page. I think the answer to his point is nothing to do with editing or technology. I think that the more people enter a field of endeavour, the more likely you will come up against the different natures of the way people approach problems.

I know it was some U.S. politician who came up with the following, but it makes sense nonetheless: it is the distinction between ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns.’ Some people find out the minimum required to get the job done. Others understand the wider context and have a framework in which to place new knowledge. The first people to attempt to learn how to edit/shoot/write/fix cars/do DIY are those who put the time in and understand to some extent the magnitude of the job that they are taking on. As tools are developed to make the job easier for more people to have a go, the second group get involved.

All the lack of knowledge that Scott was pointing out was in the technical aspects of editing. I argue that technology isn’t editing. Technology is for assistant editors. These days budget restrictions mean that editors don’t get the opportunity to be assisted as much as they used to, but I think that editors should know when they are assisting the edit and when they are editing.

My current definition of assistant editor is the person who creates the environment in which the editor can edit. Why should today’s editors learn new technologies in the coming years? If they are well assisted, the environment in which they edit may be implemented in a different manner, that isn’t the business of the editor. They need to find people they trust to work with. They can concentrate on evolving the art of the edit, not on the evolution of technology.

So, in this case I think Scott is talking about new editors who can produce programmes on tape, disc or online that may seem well edited to audiences, but those who have a deep understanding of the post-production process know that the technical knowledge was weak. They need to be assistant editors as well as be editors. Hopefully, once their artistry matters more than the technological understanding, they’ll be able to forget about keeping up with technology and trade their storytelling knowledge with the next generation of assistant editors.

Media Composer now $2,495, Xpress Pro discontinued

Avid have finally done what many have suggested: simplify the range and reduce prices. Composer is now $2,495. Xpress is discontinued. $495 to upgrade to Media Composer. If I can work on Xpress at home and Composer on jobs, why would I want to upgrade?

This is Avid attempting to set the agenda for NAB. Will it be enough?

Final Cut Pro and SmoothCam

I’ve been doing more playing with the SmoothCam effect in Final Cut:

What SmoothCam does:

Click to see this at 720p

It moves and rotates your source video to smooth a shot. It doesn’t make a shot look like it has been shot on a locked off tripod, it takes large translation, rotation and scale moves and smooths the movements.

As you usually don’t want the edges of your video to be seen when it is smoothed, it gives you the option of scaling your video up so that you don’t see past the edge of the video. That means you should make sure you shoot progressive, and frame to allow for what SmoothCam will do. As some HD video is delivered in 720p format, you can scale up your 1080p video by 50% without any loss in resolution.

The following video shows what is produced if your shutter speed is too low. If you shoot at 25p and your shutter speed in 1/50th, the motion blurs look like distortions:

Click to see this at 720p

So use a higher shutter speed that you would normally.

You can also smooth a (very long) series of stills too:

Click to see this at 720p

Backup computer = secondary screen

For you editors who go on location with two Macs - a backup and a main, I’ve discovered an interesting piece of software. It uses networking software that lets you use the screen of your backup computer as a second screen for your main computer. As it uses the network, I suggest that you use the backup machine to display browser windows - if there is a slight delay in displaying that sort of content, it is not a big deal. You should be able to drag clips between the screens if need be.

Check out ScreenRecycler.

You can see a movie of the application in action at on this page.

You can even use a PC as a second monitor if you have one hanging around.

Slower - going wrong in an interesting way

In Final Cut Studio’s Compressor application, you need yo use different settings for different slow motion speeds. Certain footage cannot be slowed down to 1/8th normal speed and still look as if you used a high-speed camera. However the effect that is produced when you tell Compressor to slow it down that much looks interesting.

So that I didn’t get any motion blur, I set the shutter speed to 1/500th. I shot interlaced because I needed as many samples as possible per second. That is more important than vertical resolution (which is what you get if you shoot progressive).

The sample footage is made up of two shots of my hands and some water.

If you want to see the video at 720p go over to Vimeo.

1. Original footage.

2. Final Cut Pro 1/2 speed version: ['Speed...' from the Modify menu] This throws away one field for each frame and creates new frames by blending existing ones.

3. Compressor 1/2 speed frame blended version: Takes each field and deinterlaces to produce a frame.

4. Compressor 1/4 speed motion compensated version: Looks at each frame to see in which direction groups of pixels are moving - creates new frames based on these guesses.

5. Compressor 1/4 speed high quality motion compensated version: As before, but spending more time analysing the pixels in each frame.

6. Compressor 1/8 speed high quality motion compensated version: As before, but slower. This shows that 1/8th speed doesn’t work with this kind of footage, but it does ‘go wrong’ in an interesting way.