Axel

One of the biggest successes recently was Avengers - Age of Ultron. It was shot with Alexa 3,5k, Pocket and GoPro. And mastered and released in 2k. Because all experts agree that 4k is of little advantage for the cinema audience. The screens can't get any bigger, and the higher resolution is distinguishable only from those seats where the image is heavily distorted anyway. Avatar 2 is shot in 8k, 60 fps and will be mastered in 4k, 3D. The 2009 Avatar (shot, as mentioned above, in 1080p) changed the whole industry, because all of a sudden every screen had to be 3D-able. It may very well be, if the successor does well, that from then on HFR will be accepted or even expected, but I'd guess for cinematic releases 4k will never be a must. At home, you can make your TV as big as you like, you can sit as close as you like and stay centered. 4k makes much more sense there. I'd guess on the long run 4k will become the standard there. But Netflix won't be able to get Avengers for a lower price just because it's only 2k. Action movies don't profit from higher resolution in the way docs do, for physical reasons. As far as the camera choice is concerned, 4k alone is just a label that says nothing about the quality. I borrowed the FS7, and the video looked terrible (XAVC-I, Sony S-Log3). Many HD cameras make better images (the C300 for example, but in my opinion also my tiny Pocket). I borrowed the BMPC (4k raw), and that was the best footage I had ever seen on my 1080 monitor, I'd say it was the surplus of resolution. Apart from what the VoD distributors "demand", I'd say the Ursa Mini on paper is the hottest choice for a lower budget. But certainly not for really low or no budget.

​I think TestingOneTwos (f.k.a. Ed) video is a hoax. It's not Herzogs voice, not his words. And that's why there are also no good skin tones. The clip makes fun of us videots, and that part you seem to have missed. Herzog, however, may sound preposterous to english ears, but he is a serious man. In the way Don Quixote is serious when he attacks the windmills. BTW: He never really criticised the RED one, he just said it wasn't yet reliable enough for his kind of work, but lately he shot his stuff with Reds, as you can check on imdb.

​As plugin, it has an alien GUI within FCP X. If you know what you do, you can do a lot with the built-in colorboard or Color Finale. It depends on how deep you want to delve into the colors. Resolve is free, it's not too hard to learn it's basics, and they are constantly improving the workflow with FCP X (where you just edit), Once you have your XML in Resolve, it's much faster than FCP X, because in the color tab you can easily jump from clip to clip in the timeline, load reference grades as split screens (to better compare with ungradet clips), group clips, copy grades from previous clip, asf. We are now only discussing FCP X vs. Premiere CC, but there could be a third option from July on: Resolve 12, with much improved editing functions - including sychronisation of external audio, multicam, an audio mixer. Okay, it's 'track based' like Premiere, but if I want to shove clips back and forth in independant tracks, I can as well do that for free.

​A foreign object. Either you grade quickly and dirty ("intuitively") within FCP X or with Color Finale (which fits seamlessly, even more so since CC became an effect in FCP X) - or you roundtrip to Resolve. My opinion.

I recommend that your friend makes a Timemachine backup of the current state, then COPIES his libraries on an external drive (if he didn't already). upgrades ("clean install") to Yosemite (yes, some bugs, but one really can't keep things running for long if you don't) and to FCP X 10.2. When re-opening the old projects, those will be conformed - with the warning that they won't work in older versions of FCP X; - that's why I wrote COPY. Many things have changed, and of course I can't guarantee that everything is alright. I had only finished projects for testing, but everything seemed to be fine. Of course he then can export XML for current Resolve versions. He will be happy to see that FCP was improved in many ways, performance, stability and ease of use. The upgrades are free, and if sth. goes wrong, he can restore his projects within an hour or so.

​No. It's thorough and reasonable. ​A misunderstandig. Profiles with cine in their name usually refer to very neutral values. They are also called flat. That means they have a very flat gamma curve applied. For 8-bit this results in (hypothetically) 256 luminance values almost evenly spread. By grading this flat video, you can apply your own curve in post ... *BUT* There is a reason that profiles like landscape or portrait exist. I elaborate on these two examples. With a landscape, you have the sky in the image. It is (really!) a few thousand times as bright as the rocks in the shadow. To depict this sky in it's glory, you need quite a big portion of the 256 on the bright side of the spectrum. But you also like to see the rocks. So many values get spared for the lower mids. The least values remain for the mids. Someone walks by. His/her face may be of natural 'porange' (pink-orange, term coined by Magic-Bullet guru Stu Maschwitz), given you had roughly the right WB and exposure, but it looks like a colorized pancake nonetheless. Because for natural and rich skin tones, you also need well quantized mids, and those weren't baked in the 8-bit video. In portait mode, you may have a sky that looks like watercolored, but the person will look good. Think of it like audio frequencies. You have a camcorder stereo mic and a person in the street ten feet away, saying something important. Bad choice. You'd try and use the microphone that prefers voice frequencies, a lav perhaps. Only with raw (where nothing but the bare signals are stored) you can hope to change colors completely. You have better chances with 10-bit (Shogun?), but generally it's a good idea to record neutral and many colors. Avoid clipping, avoid underexposure, choose a profile that fits, expose skin tones @ 50% in the histogram, if they are important.

Great article, which sums up all points. Let me add some thoughts: True. I'd like to add a rule-of-thumb: To get a soft, natural image, you need sufficient resolution. How much is sufficient, depends on the size of the image, which is relative. You need very low resolution for a giant billboard that is supposed to be seen from across the street (way below 50 dpi, you can literally count the dots from a close distance), you need much higher resolution for a 6x4" for a group picture with 30 pupils (usually at least 300 dpi, better more). The same is valid for video/film. ​You are talking about texture detail (term from an ancient german textbook on filmmaking). In a Tom & Jerry movie, there is no texture detail. Yet every motif detail (same source) needed to comprehend the sequence is deliberately put into the image. Can there be enough texture detail in a live-action-movie? On the contrary, there can be too much. If there is no narrative reason to let texture detail pop out, one should reduce it, blur it. Or otherwise the image will look videoish as hell. Take for instance the JVC HM Q10: No eye-catchers, just a mess of meaningless detail. Wouldn't gain much with better colors or grain. Opposite extreme: scene from famous low resolution movie Saving Private Ryan, watched in even lower resolution: Skin detail? Fabrics of uniforms? Nothing of the kind. What pops out are exploding pieces of dirt (small shutter angle too to reduce motion blur) and air bubbles under water. Texture detail embossed and sharpened to evoke a sense of heightened reality. Can you imagine how this scene would have looked if recorded with a JVC Q10? BTW: When you state that analog film was 2k and higher, you are just referring to the last decade. Yes, the 35mm stock could indeed resolute more than that, but what remained of that in the distribution copies wasn't much. And on the big screens the resolution was around 1k, slightly better than the SD interlaced we watched on our own TV sets. Not a consistent position and pattern, but a random one. The analog film's grain particles are it's smallest picture elements, in three differently colored layers. And because their position is random, the resolution is sufficient. The enlargement of a single 35mm widescreen frame (17:9, common AR), could never be projected to a big screen with sufficient resolution, it's just too small: But with different positions of the individual grains, 24 times per second - 60 feet, no problem. Temporal samples. You could almost double the resolution with 48 fps. But only with film, of course. That's why I don't think superimposing grain on a digital image can be anything else but a cheap effect. It isn't the real thing, it doesn't look like it. ​ ​

​ ​I only know the phrase in this connection. I always felt The Shining was about the desperation of not being able to be creative, to let your inspiration guide you - and what that means for yourself and the ones you love. For the german version, there was a slightly different phrase, translated by Kubricks german wife and approved by him: Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen! (This sentence, typed on hundreds of sheets in different layouts, forever. And ever. And ever.) Quite literally (from phrasen.com): Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today! Kids hear that often from their mothers. Do your homework first before you go outside to play, that's typically meant. Alternative suggestion from phrasen.com: Procrastination is the thief of time! If you consider the situation autobiographical (to some extent), Kubrick knew what wasting time felt like on the long run. He didn't shoot a lot of films. And he was a gear nerd too. ​Agreed. Just let me say that I really wasn't aware of being offensive. EDIT: Navel-gazing leads nowhere, it's not only irritating others, it's de-motivational for everyone, including oneself. We shouldn't mud the water, we should stay abstinent for a while and concentrate on actually executing our plans.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. ​

​'I just watched Night Of The Living Dead, and I thought of you.' Seems artistic ambitions/delusions are your subject anyway. Must see Frank.

That's why all the content-is-king threads never had a long lifespan. Why should an artist talk about his motivation, when film is his medium? Actions speak louder than words. I don't see where Fuzzy or I attacked anyone. I also can't see why this should be a de-motivational behavior. The cap doesn't fit? Don't wear it. ​Isn't that the point? Finding a balance? The serenity to accept the things I cannot change (time, money, experience), the courage to change the things I can change (making full use of what I have, which isn't little)? I apologize for having abused this forum for personal psychotherapy, for openly wallowing in self-pity and for bashing anyone who might feel bashed. I just don't know what you are talking about.

​Your passion for film is highly visible. It seems to me you just found out something about yourself. You question your ambitious goals probably because they were to prove sth. to others. Why should one? ​No, you want to cut the bullshit. See it that way.

​This makes perfect sense to me.

In a perfectly balanced image - in which all colors were neutral ! - the skintones would be exactly on that line: But if your image is cold, warm or whatever, they need to slightly deviate from that line. There is the paradigm preserve the skintones, but if you don't allow the skin to reflect light, you did too much. You make the perfect skintones, then you let them slightly reflect the overall color. Secondary corrections.

​Two things. First of all, you are right. Then, just like in my 'being careful'-thread, your tone seems to me somewhat patronizing, if not self-righteous. In the Adobe thread in your conversation with Mercer, I suspected my untrained english ear (excuse the awkward idioms). If I got fuzzynormals point, I am in a similar situation. It became clear to me recently that my time is too limited to live a family life, meet friends, go to work (not film-related), follow my creative plans and discuss gear in minute detail. The latter clearly is procrastination to a high degree (again, obviously not for everyone who reads this, so don't feel addressed). That's coming out, confessing, debating a personal concern with others who might (or not) share the problem. It was no request for a sanctimonious and simplified answer. So please don't offer more of those platitudes. Nobody expects a tutorial how to be creative, and certainly nobody wants to hear The Secret of how to experience life more deeply. Other than that, you are right. It's only my problem if I act like a consumer, if I spend my precious time with calculating future gear purchases and what I then could do with them.

​I often wonder what defines a filmmaker. I once planned to write a book 'filmmaking' without ever even mentioning any techniques. As a hobby psychologist, I try to monitor the way I form thoughts - or rather watch them unfold. Did you ever seriously try this yourself? It's like seeing, hearing a film - and simultaneously editing it, constantly changing it, repeating takes, alternatives for scenes, for off-screen dialogs (or monologs), 'the voices in your head'. ​What if the obvious was this: ​Only true for the minority of course. The majority here just occasionally checks if there are any new technical developments they should be aware of and then return to their creative work ;-) ... and people who are obsessed by or addicted to gear are the pawns. But as I said, these are rare on EOSHD.

​Probably a bad 'swish pan' transition (I believe that's a Boris plugin). We still don't know whether these transitions were scripted or if they are done (well done) in post: EDIT: Seeing them now, I'd say both. EDIT 2: Below, in the comments, the trick is being revealed. It's an old fashioned one:

I did not download the clip. But the description reminded me of something my beloved GH2 did. Bright sunlight and noise? That was due to the setting 'iDynamic' (or sth. like that). Shadows (compared to the sky, the pagoda may be several stops darker) were 'pushed' and therefore showed this red mosquito noise. Check that. If that's not the case, you could buy a cheap IR-cut-filter, because with my current Pocket, I also get weird noise without the filter (I have a good one though, the Tiffen, that has been tested to cut off the right frequency for the BM sensor).

​ ​Avatar was 24p. Cameron later said he would have preferred it in 48p or 60p, but the cinema servers in 2009 couldn't handle that yet. He was right. There were scenes in the military base where pans (in 3D !) looked terrible. ​Yeah, I agree, but not totally. I think the only good film Cameron made was the first Terminator. I hate Aliens, True Lies and Titanic. I absolutely hated the first Avatar trailers, I thought they looked like Fern Gully. So my expectations were low. I had to test preview the film alone, a few hours before the first open screening, and I was deeply impressed. You are right, the story is harebrained. In a way, but not totally. What worked (for me and about 11.000.000 others) was the idea that someone wakes up in a fantasy world and then alternately he wakes up in 'reality'. So there is a subtext about cinematic immersion. In german, there is a tenderly disrespectful name for this kind of cinema: Kintopp. Maybe the english word movie comes close (like in Scary Movie), if it describes a film of little meaning but great fun factor. Like Eisensteins 'montage of attractions', but without any dogmatic background. I am not looking forward to Avatar II though.

​There is imo a simple way to see it: Avatar @ 48p (or higher): Works, because the narration itself says this is virtual reality. This is N O W. Hobbit @ 48p: Doesn't work, because the narration says Once Upon A Time. 48p - present tense, 24p - past tense How many novels are written in present tense and why? Resp. why not? This is not going to change. ​One can try. Put on motion smoothing (or how your TV calls it) and watch the bluray. Of course it's not exactly the same, but the main characteristics will be there. The higher the frame rates, the less any esoteric distinctions of cadence count.

​Some of the best short films deal with an isolated incident without exposition, much in the 'man bites dog' manner, like the urban myths we tell another in the subway or the staff canteen. Feature films are too much classical drama with predictable plot points. Everybody sees how the cookie crumbles, the characters can only be walking clichés, because their motivations must fit exactly to the structure - exceptions prove the rule, and they are risky, Series are the ultimate narrational form, they are epic. They combine isolated situations with slowly developing characters and fates. Audiences love long excurses in modern series, something they seldom accept in a feature (The Lonely Grave Of Paula Schultz, derisive chapter title that could also say And now for something completely different, and absurd). The stories are almost deconstructivistic, and the suspense can't be more addictive.

​ ​I agree, but I didn't suggest to make a dozen different low quality films. For an indie filmmaker, who somehow has to master many if not all crafts and arts, it could be efficient to combine some of the preproduction stages that professional filmmakers use (for good reasons). To quote Mercer: Let me explain. Usually someone has an idea for a film. He writes a synopsis, sells it, then treatments, and when those are approved, he writes a script, then another one, and so forth. Paralelly, a production designer is hired. He discusses the current script with the director and visualizes the scenes, using photos from location scouting, moodboards, paintings. Models of the sets are built (like doll houses), and the preproduction people make up their minds. Costs are being calculated, and the script is being revised again, storyboards are drawn. One could cut corners by making a low quality version of his first temporary script at an early stage. Seeing the outcome, it would be much clearer where adjustments were needed and where improvisation brought new ideas. One could scrutinize the scenes take by take, decide when and why certain things are missing or should not be in the frame, make a list. Where exactly digital tricks (more time and care) could help dressing sets or where additional props were necessary to guarantee production value. Make up, costumes, light, fog (other actors) ... And then, back to topic again, one has to know what software one really needs and what is best. Color correction only or serious grading with re-lighting and tracked masks? Greenscreen? Serious compositing? CGI? Can one master the tools he has? Do the demands of professional productions apply at all? Just one instance. Say, your humble goal is to publish your film on Vimeo. You shoot 8-bit, which limits your options for grading anyway. But you need to have some greenscreen compositing. For that, FCP X could be sufficient (good keyer for 8-bit, because the background colors are used with subpixel accuracy to counteract green spill instead of magenta, easy to use). Gunfire? Explosions? Is Hitfilm the right tool for that? You are an AE old hand? Gratulations, you can obviously add production value on a big scale in post (where old Hitchcock, talking about Rear Windows, needed giant sets or complicated glass matte paintings). Don't know a lot about Fusion (not yet Mac-compatible). You really are determined to enhance colors and lighting, and you therefore shoot raw or at least 10-bit log? Then of course you have to learn Resolve, in earnest. What is more, if you spent so much time for every individual clip, you can as well edit in Resolve 12, even if the (then allegedly advanced) editing tools still not reach Premiere's or FCP X's. An edit decision is nothing to be done in a hurry anyway.

​Good point. Do you remember how Peter Jackson gave his 48 Epics for The Hobbit nicknames, a method for him to keep track of their individual tasks? This was covered in a 'production diary', and though those making of teasers often were mockumentaries (i.e. the production designers who painted 3D drafts, one in red, one in green), I do believe this detail. You should read a Peter Jackson biography, on how he started as a filmmaker. His early attempts could hardly have been called professional. He filmed with a 16mm Bolex, spring mechanism, see the crank in this image: The tricks were shirt-sleeved, if not outright crude, but he could do them all alone. The unauthorized biography by Ian Pryor also shows his somewhat darker side. Of course he couldn't make Bad Taste alone, he had a talent to get people work for him like slaves, even unpaid, sometimes with vague promises to share any possible profit. His early experiences as a one-man-band, controlling every aspect of the process, just having 'helping hands' around him, made him the best producer and VFX/SFX supervisor in the world. Without such knowledge and giant self-esteem the LOTR trilogy could not have been made. People tend to forget the roots. So imo there is nothing wrong with a hands-on approach, if you haven't money to do it professionally. One should just be able to scale down expectations. ​All lectures on writing (novels or screenwriting) stress the importance of not simultaneously inventing and editing. If you doubt that what you write down is any good, don't stop writing. Keep the flow. And then, instead of script doctoring weak parts (made easy by Word or the like), you dismiss the whole and start over again. Every new version is a better one. Wash, rinse, repeat. This could also be a good advise for us indie filmmakers. So we've got a plan. Why not make a very amateurish first version? Built-in mic (could as well be a smartphone version), no lights, no tripod. Location scouting as you go. Some friends to play the characters. Like children re-enacting The Avengers. Improvisations welcomed. Temporary score. Makeshift, deliberately crude tricks. After editing this shit, you know better. You can kill your babies, you know where you need to invest more time and/or money to enhance story and production value. You could do a second, a better version, and so forth. What think?

​ ​I was referring to your irritation, that people on this site "look down on you" for willing to sacrifice technical perfection in order to get a film finished. Whereas I really believe this is the wrong approach, nobody is in a position to "look down on you". Back on topic, which is about the distinction of professionalism on one side and amateurs (or better ambitious indie​ filmmakers) on the other. The whole purpose of this forum, as I see it, is to discuss low-budget means for not having to sacrifice technical perfection. There hadn't been many excuses twelve years ago, when people had DV-cameras with 35mm adapters and some other things. There are less excuses today. You can buy cheap equipment with high image quality, you can even rent it. A BMPC (4k raw), for instance, costs around 50 € a day in my area, if you rent it for 10 days and you are nice, you might even get it fully rigged for that. The software is *free*. Designing sound is a whole different chapter, but recording usable sound on low budget isn't, as Jay_Rox wrote. But there should be someone in your *team* who is responsible for that.

​Probability says there aren't so many filmmakers around (like folks who can link to something on Vimeo or Youtube that makes people like us shut up). My EOSHD profile reads 'filmmaker', but I have no idea who labelled me so. As an avid cinema goer, I visit the screening room here regularly, and if I like something, I bookmark it. It`s a short list. Maybe you are naive to think you can top these clips, but feel free to prove the opposite.