In LA

The Jackie Chan and Jet Li film I’ve been working on for the past eight months in China and Los Angeles, The Forbidden Kingdom (Chinese title: 功夫之王), is nearing completion. A couple of months ago, some very pretty footage from the film first appeared on the internet. Now the first actual trailer¹ has surfaced. Enjoy:

Technorati Tags: Chinese, entertainment, film, Hengdian, Panavision Genesis

1. a trailer is an advertisement for an upcoming film [↩]

This post is going to be very geeky, and is probably only relevant for those of you who do any film editing or VFX work.

Today I needed to process a few clips with Shake to convert their colorspace from Panalog to linear. Rather than just do a bunch of pointing and clicking in the Shake gui to process each clip, I figured it might be worthwhile to spend a little bit of time scripting now to save a lot of time and finger joint wear and tear later.

I wanted my script to process any clip thrown at it, and to render out the result as a 1920×1080 Apple Prores 422 QuickTime file at 23.98fps. The script would append “_PL” to the filename before the extension to indicate that a panalog conversion had been done, so if the original file was A38.mov, the resulting file after running the command “myscript.sh A38.mov” would be “A38_PL.mov”.

I typed “shake -help |& less” to browse through Shake’s available command line arguments, and to find out how to address the “panalog4lin” macro I would be using to do the conversion.

There were two problems that made this a not-so-straightforward task. The first was that there is no way that I can find to tell Shake what kind of QuickTime file you’d like it to write (most professional users likely have it write out individual Cineon or DPX files for each frame, which would have been a simpler solution but didn’t fit our workflow). I found in the manual how to set Shake’s default QuickTime format, and set it to ProRes 422 1920×1080 in a .h file. The second problem was that Shake only renders out one frame by default unless you tell it the time range you’d like it to render. My script would have to know the duration of a clip to process all of its frames. Luckily I could use Shake’s “-info” flag to determine the duration of a clip.

Here’s the script (looks pretty simple eh?):

#!/bin/tcsh
set duration = `shake "$1" -info |& grep "Duration" | cut -d ":" -f 3`
shake -fi "$1" -t $duration -panalog4lin 1 1 -fps 23.98 -fo "$1:r_PL.mov"

I wanted to apply the conversion to all of the clips whose name contained the string “AT”, so I typed the following at the tcsh prompt:

% foreach foo (*AT*)
foreach? echo "processing $foo"
foreach? myscript.sh "$foo"
foreach? end

I walked away, ates some food, came back, and a set of clips that had been converted to linear space were sitting there waiting for me. Excellent!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh, OS X, Panavision Genesis, software, unix, vfx

(hover over any of the Chinese text below to see a pop-up translation. Technique grabbed from the tip here.)

My cell phone just rang, I fumbled to place my bluetooth headset on my ear and answered.

Caller:	Can I speak to Yang Xiao Hong?
Me:	Who?
Caller:	mumble fuzz mumble Yang Xiao Hong
Me:	您找谁
Caller:	杨小红
Me:	我不认识杨小红，我是范杰。杨小红是功夫之王的演员马？
Caller:	不是， 杨小红是什么什么什么什么什么
Me:	Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Is Yang Xiao Hong related to the film 功夫之王? I ask because I might know who you’re looking for. I was just in China working on that film.
Caller:	Oh, sorry, this is a wrong number. 杨小红 just called me on the other line. Your number is very close to hers.
Me:	OK.
Caller:	Sorry, bye.

There were many odd things about this conversation:

1. Someone with a 626 area code called me, looking for someone with a Chinese name.
2. I heard a Chinese accent and reflexively switched into speaking mandarin –This is something I do with some regularity now in China when communication in broken English doesn’t seem to be working out. I did this quickly and without thinking.
3. Conversation continued for a bit in Mandarin.
4. When I realized I was not in China, was missing some relevant vocabulary, and that communication would likely be more fluid in English (the caller’s English was likely way better than my mandarin) I switched back.
5. My mandarin pronunciation sounded significantly worse to my ears than it did when I was in China –gotta get more practice.

Technorati Tags: Chinese Language, context switching, mandarin, wrong number

A large 40-page hole-punch

People often ask me what I do at work. Well, today, I used a gigantic hole-punching device to punch holes in hundreds of pieces of paper, which I then stuffed into very large binders.

The reason for this task: All of our notes and paperwork were shipped to LA from China and were handled roughly along the way. The Chinese binders didn’t work that well in the first place, but now they’re just broken. The nearby Office Depot did not have A4-sized 2-ring binders, so I had to buy letter-sized 3-ring binders and transfer everything.

While this might not be representative of the sort of work I really do every day, which always involves incessant clicking on mouse and keyboard, it was a fun day-trip (more like an hour-trip) into the world of actual physical objects. I also helped move a few tables.

Today I captured the last of the footage from the film’s 402 HDCam SR tapes, all shot on the Panavision Genesis camera. The total number of clips I’ve logged and captured¹ for this film: 10,062. That’s got to be some kind of record.

1. If you don’t know what this post means, what a Genesis is, etc, don’t worry. This post is just a brief bit of gloating. I’ll cover some of the details later. [↩]

A friend of mine is putting together a behind-the-scenes featurette for the DVD of his short film. In his film, he made extensive use of Apple’s Final Cut Pro 5 software for editing and Motion 2 for effects and motion graphics. For his featurette, he wanted to explain the integration, or round-trip, between these two applications. I volunteered to create a Motion project that would demonstrate the basic concept through the use of animated titles. In the featurette, this animated demonstration/title-card will be followed by in-depth real-world examples using his footage and workflow.

The result can be seen here as a QuickTime file. As an aside: That movie is 720×480 resolution, 29.97fps, and 16 seconds long. It is a testament to the capabilities of the QuickTime H.264 codec that the resulting file is only 716k. Unbelievable! If your computer complains and won’t play the file, install QuickTime 7 (mac || windows) and it should play just fine.

If you have Motion 2 on your computer and wish to take a crack at my project — to alter it or see how it was done, the project is here.