Axel

1. ND-faders a.k.a. Vari-NDs will not be as usable as a fixed ND8, convenient though they are in many situations, in direct sun around noon they steal even more colors and have other, not controllable effects. 2. There is a problem with saturation in the shadows. In the additive color world of RGB blacks have no saturation, white has 100%. All the usable colors you record live in the middle between two extremes. If you raise the exposure, you havn't as much important detail ('normal detail, i.e. faces) swallowed by shadow, but you will get the highlights clipped. That in mind, you need to assign as many values as possible to the midtones. Best use a histogram. 3. As was said before, preferably have your whole motif in the shadow. 4. Or have the sun in your back. This classic advice, however, is not always good. Sometimes you can't avoid brutal contrasts in harsh sunlight. 5. Then the only way to reduce the contrast is to FACE the sun, open the aperture as wide as possible and expose on the (EVENLY backlit) motif. This will clip the entire background. A mattebox (or at least your protecting hand) can help to stop or reduce lensflares. Do tests with shadows, backlight, underexposure and grading to be prepared in the situation. 6. Should you use as low iso as possible? Looks the wise thing to do, but guess what the auto mode of my old Canon camcorder did? >put on the ND (good) >closed the aperture (bad) >used shorter shutter times (sometimes not so good) >pumped up the gain (seemed to dramatically reduce the contrast). Comments?

We need two things in FCP X for proper grading: 1. The function to save and load a reference clip for a splitscreen comparison (or sth. else that lets you see the grade in context), 2. ALL color correction parameters must be keyframeable. Other than that, for those who don't know FCP X, CC is much simpler and easier than in most other NLEs. It's not an effect or filter, it's done in the always-available clip-info.

  You may not like modern art, or perhaps only if it's complaisantly decorative, which stopped to be considered art of the highest order after Hitler was defeated, who (as a painter of idylls) famously named modern art 'degenerated'. McCarthy actually sells, since decades, he is a  Pro.   But it is admittedly off-topic within the off-topic 'Reverie'. However, what happens here is judgment over a famous videoclip. By what standards do we judge? If the work is well photographed? Edited by the book? Good craftwork?    All that may be. If you like, give it ten of ten. I protest though against the 'narrative montage'. If there was a narration, give me a clue, or I'd rather consume a trailer for Hangover IV.   Nobody asks if the thing makes any sense. Because it doesn't. It is even too professionally cheesy to deserve to be called poetic. It's real bullshit.   It's a demo video of the video capabilities of a new, 'gamechangig' type of camera, featuring a male model, who seems to have almost overslept a date with a female model, wears sunglasses at night and, after an unconvincing kiss, flies off with a helicopter.    On photographers vs. filmmakers: Photography is one of the key arts of cinema. Another is writing/inventing. Another is directing. Another is editing. Sounds like teamwork. If some narcisstic photographer considers himself fit for the lower tasks named above, that's what you get.

  Iconic imagery can be original, intelligent, making a stronger statement than a thousand words and still be mysterious and beautiful. The artist Paul McCarthy, for instance, invented an installation for the documenta (art show in Kassel, Germany), called 'shit plugs'. He designed containers of very thin glas, shaped like sex toys. In these he filled what his audience, his critics and his admirers, had contributed by using the chemical toilets McCarthy had invited them to on earlier exhibitions. The objects were semi-transparent, in colors of yellow and floating earth-colored streaks, like extraterrestrial lava lamps. You cannot in earnest compare some professional face-exhibitor on a nightly cobblestone with such an achievement. The Laforet image may be called iconic, because many (DSLR-videots!) will remember it instantly, but what does it stand for? Is it more than just a modular component of several chic commercials, promoting cars, perfume, cosmetics or, er, helicopters ;-) ? Linked to the promise that this highly polished visual emptiness suddenly was available to the amateurs?   And to assemble some of these nicely photograped, completely exchangeable images to a vague idea of something romantic, maybe a reunion of lovers (can someone tell me what I should think about the plot?), you call 'exiting narrative structure'. I guess by this standard we have quite a few geniuses amongst us, just think about all us wedding filmers!     Bloom and Reid film things they find beautiful, and they edit them in a poetic way. The mood these clips evoke more often than not is triggered by the 'accompaning' music piece. Romantic illustrations. May not sound revolutionary, but is at least honest and a pleasant experience.    Was it just coincidence that almost everybody picked the same frame of the three Brawley clips to show his grading version? Our minds look out for iconic images spontaneously.   @cls105: Thanks for the youtube-link!  

      The medium film (tv, video, cinema) helps to govern our population in a way like magic helped the chiefs of the primitives or the church in the Middle Ages to control their people. Without 'film', modern man wouldn't know what to feel, what to think, what to do.   The almost absolute power of the media makes it easy for comparatively silly clips to attract some attention. No doubt there are differences. Say, a music video by Chris Cunningham may show more technical creativity, good craftmanship and artistic taste than 99% of the rest of music videos. But in the end, this doesn't count. Film is a language, and as long as there are still things that need to be said - and THERE ARE! -, it is utterly cynic to compare all this longer than three seconds.   Reverie is nonsense, kitschy and brown-nosing the audience, us. Why should we be impressed? I know, this is probably the wrong place for this objection, but - carefully put - many of us try to impress, are desperate to lead their fellows up the garden path. Mirror, mirror on the wall.

That was witty.

Your post makes me feel uncomfortable for critizising Brawleys approach, and I realize I just missed the point. Also about the DR. You know, I am used to scale the stops for my GH2, cramming all values in front of the lens into the eight or nine stops (does anyone have the hard facts?) I have. Brawley could have done this as well. He could have chosen to shoot on another time of day, when there was no directly reflected sunlight on bright walls, blue sky and a lot of shadow in the image. He could have used an ND grade. He could have used an ND-filter(*) and dial up the iso, which had resulted in noisy shadows, but higher DR (GH2's 'iDyn'). (*) He needed no ND, he could have used a smaller aperture, like f8. Would also have helped to keep everything in focus. But what would doing so show us about the BMPCC? Also, natural high dynamic range is not like the HDR-images you can generate out of 2-9 differently exposed jpegs (principle: Make a LFR image, that shows different bright objects with the same values). It is about having dark and bright areas. And that's how it looks in ProRes 10-bit (on an 8-bit monitor for most, graded as 8-bit). Reverie: I don't hate it, but I never loved it. I didn't like the 30p, it looked like video for me despite the shallow DoF. I had the Canon XH A1 (aka GH1 in the USA) with a Letus. I had the same DoF and 25p, I wasn't much impressed, only by the helicopter ;-)* *EDIT : Wrong! Every 35mm adaptor owner and fan of Blooms Letus clips was VERY impressed by the lowlight in Reverie. This really was something. What can we expect from the BMPCC in this regard?

Looking at the luma waveform, I couldn't understand where the highlights disappeared. They appeared so typically clipped. The shadows Brawley did in one instance expose in such a way that they start at 20. Am I wrong to suspect that this takes away dynamic range? Must be several stops. The first BMCC demos by Brawley also had crushed blacks, also the music video linked above. For most of the 8-bit monitor people (or the ones who grade for vimeo) crushed blacks mean the opposite of high dynamic range. I admit though, that they are a very special cinematic style. How about sorting things out? Does the Pocket have good DR with ProRes alone? Or later with raw? How do you prevent wrong exposure when using the camera only? Is it actually easy through a kind of histogram and Brawley just belongs to those who 'leave the cap on'? Can you change the aperture easily with MFT system lenses? What do you think is the resolution comparable to? 5DM3? Lower? Higher? How sensible is the peaking for focussing? And so on.

  If it's magenta or not is hardly any reason to say that it's 'badly graded'. In the end, as long as the flesh tones convince (which they can even do without following the 'flesh line' in the vectorscope, for example at sunset, when these shots seem to have been taken), it's a matter of personal taste if I grade darker, brighter, more or less saturated or with the colors left unchanged like in this auto-balance-screenshot from Color (midtones lifted though a bit):   I don't like the way Brawley grades, but again, that's my problem. I also don't like the opposite of magenta, green, when there was no plausible source of light where this cast could have come from:     But it's Lee's decision, I don't depreciate his effort, for if this is about achieving a neutral and scientifically correct image, i completely misunderstood the whole purpose of grading. Have a go with the clips yourself and explain why your grading is better.   Or, watch again, the camera has poor resolution. Actually, it looks like a combination of oof, terrible lenses and a resolution around 720p. There is no sharpness in the images to begin with. But one shouldn't mistake softness for poor resolution. Generally. But here, we know the lenses from the Lumix. It's true, they have sharpness added and distortion corrected by the system. But adding sharpness doesn't improve resolution and to de-squeeze the distortion really costs resolution. But nobody ever complained. With this in mind, study areas of the images that strike you as 'sharp' or 'well-defined'. How many are there? Look at the hairs and the fabric of the clothes. The crossing with the red house left: Look at the bricks.      I don't see clipping, if this means that values are cut off abruptly. When you look at the luma waveform. On the other hand, you are quite right: There is not much definition in the highlights nor is there in the shadows. I'm not sure, maybe this is because there is also not much resolution in the midtones. Couldn't this have been shot with any AVCHD camcorder in 8-bit? Sharper though and out-of-the-box? (deliberately exaggerating, a bit). But of course: We haven't seen raw yet.     Now I am relieved.   richg101:       I like the many versions you did. The upsizing also shows that there are not many artifacts which usually become visible then.   I don't know. I hope I'm wrong with the bad resolution.  

I downloaded from here (last three files). Graded it, sharpened it, watched it critically. My verdict: > How on earth can you NOT use a tripod, when you know the whole world waits for your shots ??? > The sharpness is quite, er, okay, but not with these lenses (because 90 % of the image is slightly and annoyingly out of focus!) EDIT: Maybe this is the downside of the sensor size. It had better been so small that it allowed absolute focus. Must probably be used with smaller apertures. > Definitely needs some sharpening. > What appear to be clipped walls are out-of-focus walls. > The distortion in the two wideangle shots is absolutely terrible! We really need to find decent lenses that also must have good focus controls. EDIT2: Dammit, doesn't this thing up til now look poorer than GH2 stuff? Do you actually see any better DR? What's going on?

That's peculiar. Ever since I saw The Hire (medieval kind of art sponsoring from BMW), I couldn't get the connection Owen-Bond out of my head: But maybe you're right. Owen often acts as if he was Bond, and no other Bond did (Connery not cool, aggressive, Lazenby cool, but no edges, Moore not aggressive, too smug, Dalton did well, but looked too different from expectation (mine though), Brosnan also can't be convincingly aggressive or show that cruelty Fleming describes). Or, as Stanley Kubrick liked to categorize actors: If James Bond and Richard Burton had a baby, it would be Clive Owen. Continuity errors as well as common logic errors can't be applied to such a show. Continuity is not what makes action flow and gather speed. There are films that have perfect continuity, which is not easy to have, but which always takes out momentum. There are pixel peepers and there are continuity watchers, and both don't see the wood for the trees. As for the logic, there are two kinds of it. If believability is meant, you can't make Bond fly with probability bounding him to earth. Bond wasn't written by John le Carre, the audience must provide the believing. The second kind of logic is the religious logic. Bond had no home, he wasn't raised, he certainly had no childhood traumata. That was the main failure of Skyfall, they reduced a hero to some policeman with a past, how are they ever to let him be an enigmatic archetype again? So, for instance, you can let a bunch of dwarfs win against an army of Orks, but you can't have Clark Kent analyzed to prove his oedipus complex.

    Drag & drop does not organize your footage. This really feels like a nightmare to anyone used to LOGGING before editing, i.e, someone who knows FCP 7. I will tell you the perfect workflow in a minute.     It turns out that 5D2RGB adds nothing to the GH2 material, which is 16-235 and correctly interpreted as such by FCP (and left as original AVCHD by Premiere, which works best with original clips). 5D2RGB prevents ingesting the clips with the superior Log&Transfer filter: You preview the AVCHD in the (cmd & 8) import window. You shouldn't scratch too much, because FCP 7 is just a 32-bit program. You select the portions of the clips with i & o that you need, you re-name the clip and add metadata. You hit import after every clip-selection, which triggers the transcoding to ProRes in the background. After logging is complete, you wait a few minutes, until the process bar disappears, then you, er, finish editing, which just leaves you the fun part, because you did the knowing and sorting part in advance. It's slower only if you have some freshly captured news reel stuff, otherwise it will still beat Premiere, I bet.   Let me introduce FCP X. It has the best of both worlds. No need for transcoding if you have a good machine (you prevent the default behavior to transcode in the background by unchecking 'optimized media'). You qualify your material after import (just one possible workflow, I recommend this one), by 'tagging'. You create multiple criteria, you can stick as many tags to one clip as you like (which you can see as a mini-timeline-thumbnail that starts playing a full screen preview by just hovering over it with the cursor). You don't need to double click folders or change a clip by double clicking on the next one. A lot of completely useless routines have also been thrown out. You have every clip at your fingertip.   I would like to say that FCP X has a good color corrector, but I can't. It's implemented very well, you can grade right in the timeline. Unfortunately, it has been simplified too much, you can change values in a range from 0-100 %, which is even not precise enough for 8-bit.   Fortunately, the best free grading suite in the world, DaVinci Resolve Lite, works perfectly with FCP X. Check Alexis van Hurkman's Ripple training, and you never look back to any alternatives.

Very good summary. I couldn't recall it exactly, because I saw it only once in a crowded cinema with a deranged audience who really had no hint what it was all about. Other than that, I didn't like it particularly. I just like the Snyder touch in general. And I like the Lynch touch. One could surely translate the Lynch plots to 'straight stories' and analyze the weird aesthetics. By that you could kill any fascination that make an elite like his films and say it's all pretentious rubbish. I am proud to belong to a different kind. Quiz, from which film is this quote: 'Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.' ???

@jgharding First of all, I respect your view. It's the best kind of discussion, when you are able to follow the other's well-put arguments and still disagree completely. I watched only the first half of the first episode of the Moviebob review just now, because for me it's spoken too fast. General impression is, he makes the same point I made above: People don't 'get' the message.   Your answer shows that you did, that you just don't trust Snyder. He is cynic a hundredfold in another way than Bay: He doesn't believe in any values other than the cinematic Wow-effect. He steals from the popular culture what makes his scenes as shrill and contrasty as possible. He stylizes his films to a point where the only rule that reigns is the PLOT, and the plot is always as black, mean, misogynous and misanthropic as possible. He does this obviously with great awareness, his filmic solutions to play with the audience's expectations are smart, I'd say he is indeed very clever.   Nolan has a great interest in philosophical problems. His films are all more or less clever experiments (like the experiment in Dark Knight, the two ships with the bomb and the detonators in the hands of the others), but that's the extent of it. He is more interested in making a situation work as a filmic essay than in the situation itself. He doesn't care about his characters, they are just like chessmen.   Bay? I really wonder how he can fit in this. Armageddon has no real humor, it only cites the cheapest jokes. If you recall the plot, the message goes, trust your government, trust the military, and there are superheros among us, whose mark is their patriotism. The Ministry of Propaganda couldn't have written it straighter.    Compare this to 300: All starts with a fascist society that murders 'degenerated' babies and upholds an abstract idea of honor. They are shown as the spearhead of the occidental way of life. From the orient come the masses of corrupt, frivolous and diplomatic Persians. It's more than a greek myth: It's the story of 'our' culture. A culture that, despite it's differences, is united by the idea of an idea. Something, be it 'blood', 'god', 'democracy' or 'freedom' lets us stand tall when the going get's tough. We will win, we are Sparta. Even if the last of us is killed, even if our madness means extinction (of all). The liberal rest of mankind knows no such life-denying idea(s, meaning, they are exchangeable and too abstract anyway), islamism is nothing else than an allergic reaction.

Sorry, double post.

I can't say anything about Man of Steel, because I didn't see it yet. The other Snyder films are bursting with refined cinematic inventions and consequent story lines. The problem is that nobody reflects on movie plots anymore, which we should, because they are our culture. So the films were mistaken for Michael Bay kind of blockbusters. The latter of course have messages too, rather affirmative messages, cynic in the way that they take our way of life for granted. Now just do that: Take any of Snyders films and tell the story in ten sentences. Say it aloud. How does it sound? Harmless blockbuster entertainment?

  I didn't like Dune very much when I first saw it in the cinema, but I guess I was too young then. I also didn't like Coppola's Dracula then, but now I must admit both films get miraculously better every time I see them.   BTW: Do you know this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjvuCOlkO4E   or the Goofy version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7baCckh-XE   It's fun to think about other directors. Years ago I read in a german book on Kubrick that one should imagine A Clockwork Orange as written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise. And only today I found a satire with that connection, here.   The article mentions A.I., and I found it a great movie (though probably not too Kubrickian). In the end, when the Blue Fairy actually appears, I found it so much over the top, I was reminded of David Lynch. It was an effect like this:   But of course, Lynch had his own fairy:    

1. A good film may appeal to the masses, it's doesn't HAVE to be a contradiction. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what we witness right now is absolute dullness as a result of EXCLUSIVELY trying to repeat former successes. 2. This justifies the equation 'a mainstream film is a bad film'. Exceptions only prove the general rule. 3. Spielberg, who now complaints in a chorus with Soderberg and Lynch, contributed to the misery. He is a master of the big budget movie as well as of the serials, franchises and remakes. And he is responsible for quite a bunch of terribly stupid movies. 4. So maybe Lynch has lost it. I don't know, but I accept that creative people can burn out too. Their work survives. If not for the masses, then the more for few. Rock'nRoll (cinema) is bigger than all of us ...

  It's not a matter of getting used to a habit or of overcoming a distaste. There have been studies in the 90ies about the correlation of the film image's size (relative to the viewer's field of vision) and how many details of the plot could be reported afterwards. There is a clear proof that size matters, and the advantages lie in the two-digit percent-range. Is this so hard to imagine? What about Blue Velvet, with all it's very dark scenes? What about Lawrence of Arabia, with it's grand panoramas? What about 2001, with it's dominating blackness that represents immeasurable distances and works as a wormhole for our 'doors of perception'? But even an easy-to-digest movie like Transformers will never have the same impact on a phone, retina display or not.   If small screens were the future, why then discussions about 4k? You can do without higher resolution (see Lynch's Inland Empire), but for a cinematic experience you must blow it up!   Today, giant tv sets and high quality beamers have made home cinema installations easy and affordable. With the right attitude (isolation of your screening room from the rest of the mundane world, dimming the lights, raising the volume, becoming unavailable for calls or other messages), you needn't go to the cinema, only if you want to see a new film.   What is more, people in their 20's suffer from a form of deprivation, for which their smartphones are as well the cause and a kind if remedy. I am in several facebook and whatsapp groups (I have to, if I want to keep in touch with people of that age). I assure you, it's not just a silly game like when we used to send us silly or obscene letters under the desks. It's stultifying. The road to disaster.   However, as the very interesting 'Lincoln'-thread suggests, cinema is experiencing a crisis. Maybe two hours are either too long to transport an audiovisual idea or way too short. Films should either run 3 minutes or develop interactively as a television/internet series with open end. If the form can change - the size, the length, the narrational structures, what have you - the content will allow for new ventures as well. An example: Erdogan might learn from a short clip that he no longer represents his people and is disempowered effectively, making the future development a mere formality. 'Film' could become an instrument of communication in the best sense. 

To me, independant cinema doesn't mean films that compete with the latest blockbusters (as the popcorn selling spectacles are inapprpriately called). Or that they are shown in cinemas at all. I doubt, however, that the internet is a good forum for anything that strifes to be a cinematic experience. For tablets and smartphones because they are too small, and principally because our patience has been ruined by the possibilty to skip and switch. If anything, cinema is synonymous with 'larger than life' and something that demands exclusive attention.

In art, beauty often means that something looks absolutely purposeless, but with a hint that it's purpose is just too advanced for the recipient to see. You admire the form because it expresses a bold thought. In design, beauty has a condition: It must never contradict functionality, usability. The axiom reads 'form follows function'. I don't like the probably very high price of this, higher even if you think about all the expensive periphery, but it surely is a fantastic machine. It will be accompanied by a new version of FCP X. This software made many professionals switch to Premiere, because it had many flaws (and still has some). Today, it is stable enough, fast and with Resolve makes a dream team on the Mac. Once one overcomes initial preoccupations and edits a project with it for real (provided one has a fast enough machine), one will see Premiere as hopelessly outmoded. If not, that's the implied statement of this new Mac, you can as well stick to an array of PC-tower gadgetry with Adobe.

It is a psychological problem. And there is no universal answer. Thinking is mainly a subconscious process like digestion, and only the last steps emerge into conscience. They lead us to believe we were making a decision with our minds, but it's just the literal tip of the iceberg. The seemingly reasonable outcome of it is founded entirely on instincts, emotions and social conditioning. How do the 'voices in our head' sound? It depends. Most people never think in words. They 'make films', daydreams, audiovisual scenes. Some phrases hover over the landscape like banners in the sky, alien voices. Parental voices, benevolent, malevolant, It, encouraging, guilt- or lust-provoking, repeated like mantras. If forced, one translates this rich material into the threadbare, more abstract language of words. A certain sound for thinking would be a creative interpretation, something that is right, without actually being correct. Closer to the youngest findings would be: > An inserted sequence that's colored by the character's mood and that deals with the problem surrealistically. > A bubble above the head of the thinker, in which we see the thoughts unfold. > The inner world projected to the outside. It may sound weird, but that's actually what happens. The input from 'reality' diffuses through mighty filters, what we see, hear and take for real is really our own feedback.

Yes. I don't remember how this is done in Dexter, but generally you assume that thinking is a voice out of nowhere, it doesn't reach out, reflect or resonate. It's mono always, captured in a silent room (no dictionary at hand, but since you know german, "schalltoter Raum"). You cut out breaths (unless they are inward sighs) and in the mix you contrast it to a stereophonic panorama or make it the only event in the center channel. The more primitive way to make clear that a voice is supposed to be a thought is, er, "Hall". It implies that the voice comes from far away (in time) or that the skull is hollow. Today only used in parodies ('Scary Movie').

I like the slogan of a german car ad: REDUCE TO THE MAXIMUM. I can't understand people who try and make their equipment as bulky and heavy as possible. I am a fan of Rungunshoot.

I don't know the GH1, but I'd say qualitywise they are both more than enough (for webfilms, indie-cinema) and not enough (tv features require at least 4:2:2, big popcorn cinema will look way better with 10-12-bit). Apart from that consideration, what I still like, no, LOVE about my ole GH2 is it's happy marriage with old and manual lenses and it's manual-intuitive functions.