In LA

A still from the film "The Prestige". Shot on film, photochemical finish, the entire film looks fantastic. Obviously, film can be awesome. Wally Pfister should be allowed to shoot on film, or sparklevision, or whatever he wants, for the rest of his days. See more stills from "The Prestige" at Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films

Manohla Dargis just posted a fine article about the onslaught of digitally acquired films¹. She writes:

Some of this year’s most acclaimed and talked-over movies, for starters, including “The Social Network,” “Black Swan” and “Tiny Furniture,” were either partly or wholly shot in digital. It’s no wonder that more than a third of my 30 favorites this year — because, really, why stop at 10? — were a combination of the two. Does it matter?

Does it matter?

It matters to producers, as digital, used properly, can lower the cost of a shoot.

It matters to telecine and processing facilities, as –telecine? What’s that? Such facilities are quickly diversifying the services they offer, or are closing.

It matters to assistant editors, as they either have to deal with the constantly-changing workflows designed around different digital formats, or have to deal with transfers from film and keeping track of the relationship between the digital clips in the editing system and actual pieces of film.

It matters if you’re a Director of Photography with exacting standards, and you’ve spent your entire career building your knowledge and ability to achieve the images you want on film, surely. That’s probably the person to whom this debate matters the most, from the aesthetic side of the argument. But should it? Would adapting one’s style of shooting to a particular sensor be any different than adapting to a particular film stock? Can one choose particular cameras and sensors based on the needs of a project, as one did film stocks? I think this is already happening. But I can’t speak for DOPs.

But for audiences and cinema enthusiasts, “Does it matter?” was a good question, a year ago. Now it’s an afterthought.

Celluloid film is an amazing technology, and it’s dying, quickly. I’m no purist², but I’m a little sad about this, and hope I can work on a feature film that’s shot on film before it completely disappears.

A still from an as-yet unreleased short film I edited this year. Shot on the Red One with anamorphic lenses.

But as much as I love film, it’s exciting to see digital sensors catch up to film, and quickly. It’s a repeat of what happened in the world of print. I think we’re past the time in which the film vs. digital battle was spirited and relevant. That ongoing argument helped shape the new breed of digital cinema cameras, and it shows. It’s fast nearing the time to rephrase last years question, “Does it matter?” as, “Can we stop counting now, or pretending we can tell the difference?” At this point I’d venture that most³ of the more ardent celluloid enthusiasts and digital bashers have seen and unknowingly appreciated a digitally-acquired film. It’s the cinematic equivalent to the Turing Test, and digital started to pass a couple of years ago.

Dargis continues, and my mood darkens:

Digital images still don’t look as rich and sumptuous as film, which was developed to reproduce the way our eyes see the visible spectrum.

I can’t let either of these sorry old canards⁴ go unexamined.

First canard first: It is a bit unfair to compare the best examples from 100 years of celluloid film against the limited number of existing digitally-acquired films, especially considering that many of the films one thinks of (and notices) as “digital” were shot earlier in the decade⁵ –digital has improved in quality by leaps and bounds in the past few years. One has to compare to something, of course, but if you restrict your view to the best examples of recent digital, it becomes instantly clear that competently-shot digital images can look plenty rich and sumptuous. Even digitally acquired films from the past two years that don’t feature cinematography designed to take center stage, like “Cyrus”, look “rich and sumptuous” to me.

Back to print. Has National Geographic stopped looking sumptuous since they started publishing photos shot on digital cameras? Have people been writing complaints in to Playboy? The shift of the field of still photography from film to digital is relevant to this discussion, as digital sensors for moving imagery and for stills are as closely related as their celluloid counterparts are. The complaints, worries, and about digital for stills seem to have vanished over the past decade as the technology improved to the point that only an engineer could tell the difference.

Regarding Canard #2: So much of the film vs. digital argument has for so long been couched in pseudoscientific mystical pronouncements, and the idea that film is somehow better suited to replicating the way the human eye sees the world than digital is one of such. Both film and sensors designed for photography are designed to create pleasing images for people to stare at. Neither technology really reproduces “the way our eyes see the visible spectrum”, nor would anyone really want that.⁶ What film and sensors can do to reproduce the qualities of the visual spectrum that our eyes can sense, they do. Digital sensors follow film note for note in this regard. Both have the same design goal. The statement that film was designed to reproduce the way our eyes work and the implication that digital sensors are not, is simply wrong from any angle.

Nit picking aside, the article’s worth a read.

The battle that made the question “Does it matter?” relevant, is all but over. But “Will it blend?” –I think celluloid’s got a lock on that one.

1. I nearly put the word “films” in quotes, but if I did that I’d have to start calling the “bins” in Final Cut Pro what they look like: “folders”. [↩]
2. That should be obvious, given this blog post. [↩]
3. It’ll be all, by the end of 2011 [↩]
4. Well, if they haven’t achieved canard-status it’s not for lack of trying. [↩]
5. It’s also worth noting that many of the digital films shot until recently chose to go digital for reasons of flexibility or cost-containment, and didn’t place a priority on picture quality. The results speak for themselves, and should not be compared to the visual impact of films that put a priority on appearance, such as Lawrence of Arabia, but instead should be compared to similarly oriented uses of celluloid such as 60′s man-on-the-street news footage or Monty Python’s outdoor segments. [↩]
6. Human vision is fantastic, but that’s mostly the brain’s doing –in many ways our eyes are surprisingly crappy. The brain creates fantastic imagery out of surprisingly little information, and a lot of what we see is the result of pattern recognition and quick deduction in the visual cortex. Our impressions of color and light are relative to neighboring colors, rather than absolute measurements, and the way we see images is in a sense hallucinatory.

   Though neuroscientists and opthalmologists would love to get together and watch a sequence that actually reproduces the way our eyes see, it’d be jarring to an audience to watch footage that features a tiny, darker circle of very high detail and color saturation in the center with blues that tend to the violet, a larger empty black spot nearby, and all surrounded by an increasingly blurry and warped bright green-blue miasma in which motion is detectable but not details. Of course the view would continuously jitter around at high speed and never hold still so that the tiny spot of clarity can flit from detail to detail and take in enough for the brain to make its assumptions and create what we see. [↩]

When doing sound mixes, film/video editors often make use of hardware control surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal Pro. Such mixers connect to the editing system via MIDI. The editor slides the faders on these fancy control surfaces to adjust the volume for each of the edit’s audio tracks during playback. When the editor is not moving the faders, motors built into the control surface move them to match the edit’s pre-existing settings. The automatic movement of the faders can seem a little like something from Poltergeist.

Unfortunately, the motorized movement of these faders can also be noisy, especially the clacking sounds emitted as many faders pop into position at once. This can be distracting when trying to mix a quiet, emotional scene. These controllers are also pretty expensive, starting at about $1000.

Enter the iPad and Saitara Software’s “AC-7 Pro Control Surface”:

(problems with the embedded video above? try this direct link)

The control surface in the video looks very cool to me. It’s silent, can be seen in a dark editing room, appears to function as well as I’d need, and the cost of the app is only $9.99. I’ve played with a friend’s iPad, and know the touch-sensitivity of that screen is accurate and responsive enough that I’d have no problem adjusting several tracks at once with this interface. For those addicted to the feel of hardware faders this might not cut it¹, but for me it’d be a big improvement over moving the faders in Final Cut Pro’s “Audio Mixer” window with a mouse. I can’t justify spending $1200 on a set of faders I’d barely touch except a bit towards the end of a project, but $10² ? Hmm.

Yet another reason to consider an iPad. I wonder how long I’ll hold out? Sigh.

1. I don’t think this is just a matter of purely subjective preference –one can feel where a hardware fader’s control is in space, and there’s probably a bit of resistance built in so the user can feel when the level has been set at unity without having to look. [↩]
2. $510 if factoring in the cost of an iPad, which can also be used to access the iPoo social network. [↩]

I’m pleased with the look of the footage. The edit was just a quick bit of fun. Mostly this was about testing my DSLR video workflow, with a secondary goal of cracking my sister up.

If you set HD to ‘on’ and go fullscreen, or click through to the video’s vimeo.com page and find the download link low in the right column, you can see this one at 1080p resolution. If the embedded video doesn’t play smoothly, try pausing it and waiting for it to finish loading before hitting play, or toggle HD to off.

pizza and the dream of not being filmed from ZachFine on Vimeo.

A little video of an evening of pizza-making and camera-dodging.

Shot and uploaded at 1080p resolution, so feel free to toggle HD to on and play this one back fullscreen.

Video shot with Canon Digital REBEL T2i DSLR set to the “superflat” picture style. Canon 50mm f1.8 lens.
Converted to Apple Prores, edited in Final Cut Pro 7.0.2, graded in Apple Color.

Exported to the QuickTime H264 at 1080p24, restricted to 8000kbps, audio 44.1Khz 16-bit AAC 128kbps.

Music: the first third of “free space incesticide” by Eight Frozen Modules.

Oh how I hate the above error message. It’s not that it’s completely uninformative, but it’s a perfect case of “so close but yet so far”…

Anyone who uses as many external disks on a Mac as I do is apt to occasionally have trouble properly unmounting and ejecting those disks¹. Before unmounting a disk, it’s necessary to stop accessing files on the disk. This is often an easy thing to do –if I’ve loaded a file from an external disk into an application, I just close the document or quit the application entirely. If I’ve goofed and am still using files on the drive, OS X will refuse to unmount the drive and will display the error dialog I’ve pasted above.²

But often it’s less than obvious which application or function built-in to the operating system is using a file on the drive. There are applications that don’t play nice, and keep file handles open to files on a disk even after you’ve closed all documents that use those files³. There are functions built into the operating system that access files on a disk without calling any attention to themselves. This error message could and should be a hell of a lot more informative and useful.

A simple set of commands in Terminal⁴ can reveal which application is using a file on a particular disk. Since this information is available, is incredibly useful, and can be quickly retrieved in the Terminal, I see no reason that it is not just included in the initial error message. Telling me that a disk is still in use is not nearly as useful as telling me that a disk is still in use by Microsoft Word, or that a disk is still being shared with another computer.

In this case, the terminal command “lsof | egrep -i 400Gb” reported that a process named “smbd” was still using the drive. Since I’m a Unix geek this is useful information to me, but since OS X tries to also be useful to people who wouldn’t know a Samba daemon if it ate their grandmother, this process should be simplified. In an ideal world, the error message above would read “The disk ’400Gb_Thing’ is in use by OS X’s Windows file sharing. Would you like to stop sharing this drive and eject it?” and would feature both “OK” and “Cancel Ejection” buttons.

This is a no-brainer. Apple, please fix. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Final Cut Pro, Macintosh, OS X, software, unix, Win2K, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows XP

1. It’s a good idea to actually unmount disks prior to unplugging them, modern filesystems need to be given a proper send-off before disconnection to keep the data in good shape. [↩]
2. Windows users (and I am one), please refrain from feeling smug at this tale of Mac woe. Don’t get me started on the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” dialogue and how much fun it is to try to remember the model numbers of each of my external drives so that I can find them in that list. It’s unconscionable that this feature wasn’t redesigned for Windows Vista. They must have used a single USB drive as the test case. [↩]
3. I often just have to quit Final Cut Pro before ejecting a drive for this reason, sometimes it just won’t let go of a file even when all FCP projects have been closed and I’m looking at an empty Browser [↩]
4. “lsof | egrep -i portion-of-disk-name”, or in this case “lsof | egrep -i 400Gb”, without the quotes. [↩]

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.