Axel

Interesting, what you say about the Friedkin film. In a way the most vile films are those that feed the audience with what they expect, be it violence, pornography or romance. The worst kind of cynism is when you tailor your script to do better at the box office. Though this definition surely fits to the kind of 70's exploitation movies that Tarantino likes to exploit, there is one thing to them that made them stand out of all the crap we see now: They didn't respect any rules, they were a direct reaction to the extreem censorship of the decades before and to the affirmativeness of the cinema then (although even then cinema was subversive compared to the upcoming television, which was nothing but a common sense brainwashing-machine).

This interview deals with the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrsJDy8VjZk

  I thought the film was big fun with a lot of irony and a lot of Tarantino-typical sillyness. My favorite was the scene, in which Diane Kruger as a (deliberately bad acting) double agent has to satisfy both nazis and rebels, disguised as nazis. Well written.      I think and can prove that the films we discuss here have very strong moral compasses. What you demand, that the 'villain' has to be executed fast, with precision and without any hint of revenge, satisfaction or even pleasure on the hero's side, sounds wrong to me. Either the hero is as unbelievable as many american heroes were, having to be fit for role models for a quite prudish and bigoted society. Or he is a fascist, heroically performing the right dose of 'necessary evil' to keep the streets clean.   One moral compass in Django is to make the destruction of the (sometimes still romantically distorted) racism a joyful experience. More a reaction to all the cowardice found in popular culture than sadistic violence.     If it's sick, what is sound? Films can anticipate social developments (a black president?), but do they 'shape' the society? Films are like dreams. They show irrational currents, they are subversive, emotional, untamed, unchained. If they aren't, they are bad films. Edifying films. Do your dreams shape your life? I don't think so. They can tell you how much of your daily strife is in vain and founded on illusion. If you are tuned to listen.   An enlightening comment of Tarantino about historical misrepresentation is on Lincoln. He said, would Lincoln not have been murdered, he would have liked to see the blacks sent back to Africa. This is as provocative a statement as it is probably true. He is post-modern, he is a deconstructivist. 

There certainly can be no debate that children should not see SAW or the like (personally, I detest SAW). Also they should be educated better. Some get a very good education by their parents, but 99% don't. They learn hypocrisy, consumerism, conformity. I did not yet make up my mind of whether I find Tarantino to be a master or just a cool poser. But what he did in Inglorious Basterds was cinema at it's best (as a survivor of the Holocaust put it: 'I wished it had been this way'), and Django Unchained certainly made a statement. I think it's not fair to put the stylized, comic violence of these films on the same level as the rude brutality of SAW.    Tarantino is well-educated in cinema history. To all the violence in fiction the old concept of catharsis can be applied. Anyone who was not being lied to in childhood and learned about the dark impulses that can only be controlled by not denying them, will be able to see the difference between fascination for gore and horror and an invitation to actually commit such crimes. And for the real-life killers, they may copy a scene from a movie, but to suggest that the movie made them commit it, is just their lame excuse. And I think it would be naive to believe that.

@markm If someone watches SAW 5 and goes and saws a woman in half, did watching the film cause this? The whole SAW series was a big success, are all the fans sickos? Obviously there is something wrong with human nature, but who is to blame? You want to go back to Pleasantville? Had there been less violence in the 50s, when censorship only allowed victims to die without bleeding? Is the goal of cinema to show the bright side of life? Is violence in fiction a modern phenomenon? What about Homer? The bible? Shakespeare?

(---)     2001 was shot exclusively on 65mm, non-anamorphic, AR 1:2,20   As for the other films on Andrews list, I don't like to check every single one on imdb, but I happen to have read about Magnolia, beeing shot for only about 30% anamorphically, The Master was 65mm again. Most of the original spaghetti westerns were not shot in cinemascope either. A very famous scope film is Apocalypse Now, and you see it in every take!   I think people mix up cinemascope as it used to be projected in the cinemas, where it was always anamorphotic, and the way the films were shot.   However, I agree that for dramatic purposes 1:2,4 is very often* (*depending on the story. Take a look at the Spielberg filmography, most films are 17:9, american widescreen, allowing for a faster pace in terms of narration) the best AR. If Andrew liked to see more real 4:3 sensors that don't sacrifice resolution, I would also vote for special lenses that don't require to put another glass in front, because working that way is for masochists. My 2 cents.   EDIT: Funny that Dr. Schultz was a dentist from Düsseldorf, my hometown.

I recommend you take a look at FCS's Color. You own it already, the grading performed by jgharding and richg101 can be done with it. Usually I would have taken the bait, but I don't think I could do much better. I learned the software with the manual and the very good Lynda tutorials. Workflow: You 'send' an FCP-sequence 'to Color', you jump from clip to clip and from 'room' (correction state) to room. In the end, you 'render all', save and send back 'to Final Cut Pro'. Sounds more complicated than it is. Very fast and straightforward grading suite.

Those CLIPINFO and PLAYLIST files containt texts that you'd need to understand to edit them in such a way as to enable FCP X to find the corresponding video/audio/timecode/spanned-file-stuff. I couldn't, but I am no hacker. Look, no matter how many clips you have recorded that you want to delete, just do it after importing. If you copied 2000 CDs into iTunes, you'd better not sort them manually in advance, because iTunes will then not load corresponding infos such as titles, cover images, different kinds of useful tags that let you find one song out of tenthousand within seconds. How much space on your harddrive can be temporarily used to store the originals anyway? Did you know about the clever way to create a 'sparse disc' with disc utility, a volume that grows with it's content and that can either be copied to any external drive or, as I said, deleted after FCP X made it's already consolidated copies? I turn back to the iTunes analogy: iTunes makes a copy from every song (as AAC, mp3, to your preferences). You can of course eject the originals afterwards (as physical discs or disc images). You can also delete every already imported song from within iTunes, but if you start to mess around with the actual FOLDERS in >users >iTunes, you will experience 'issues'. The costs for storage space are ridiculous. Since you need the space only for the few minutes before you import, what is there to lament about? Of course, the professional way is to always keep a backup. I occasionally deleted clips in-camera. There are no problems with this method, but I don't find it smart. Many other NLEs, as i.e. Premiere, import naked mts-files. But again, you are then forced to do any sorting manually, using folders instead of smart collections or renaming the files. Not smart, not AT ALL. And no option in FCP X.

FCP X is a good tool to organize your media, you don't seem to have understood that. No need to 'keep' unusable clips after you picked the good ones by previewing them, importing them (which, as mentioned, will make an independent copy). But FCP X will refuse to import naked mts-clips. And also orphaned mts-clips. An mts-clip is already orphaned if you manually change anything on the file structure of your original folder. Files can only be deleted in the camera, which will then write a new index reading 'file .00005 is missing' (or so). Or by FCP X. Full stop.

These questions have already been answered. You mentioned your NLE was FCP X. This needs an intact SD-card-folder structure, at least until the import procedure is done. Importing is where you choose and reject. Once imported (as an 'optimized media' copy in ProRes or original AVCHD wrapped as movs, a copy also), you can format the card.

Just to think about what old toys Hurlbut finds in his attic ... Thanks for the link.

Superb introduction to the - from the start! - very, very crucial background of FCP Xs media organization. Check everything about the tagging options in the event browser before you perform a single cut. You are doing tests still, but the sooner you rely on these tools, the better you will handle thousands of clips when the going gets tough.        ... and there are, as I see it, a bunch of very good reasons to tell FCP X in advance what to look for. Eventmanager X can do this for you. The price is $4,99, you check the box with the event and project you want to work with, and let the tiny programm start FCP X. Faster launch, more real estate on the screen, tidy.

The old FCP has very few 32-bit filters, see here (at least the main CC-filters among them). FCP X has only 32-bit-filters. Premiere has very few 8-bit filters left. The 'good' ones are distinguishable by those icons:

  It's in the way filtered values are being computed. There are i.e. operations that multiply the original value (by more or less than "1"). So, if you have the value of 10 of 0-255, and you multply it by 1,32, you won't get 13,2 in 8-bit,  you get 13. There are only integer numbers, and every other result is rounded.    This doesn't mean instant banding. But almost. Because every change you make is performed on top of the one before (*the rendering order must not be same in which you applied the filters, another BIG pain in the ass with 8-bit). The next filter takes the not-so-exact 13 and rounds again.   With 32-bit floating point, the 13,2 of the first filter is contemporarily stored. The next filter adds 2,87 to every value, the next divides by 2,51, the last multplies by 0.3.   At the very end, the result is rounded again to fit into 8-bit. Now look at the outcome: The final value with 8-bit is 2, with 32-bit it's 14!   I read (but don't know why), that only one 8-bit filter in the render pipe makes everything 8-bit.

Indeed. With the very lightweight Oly 12mm. Allowed to take away all counterweights and mount an external monitor instead. Can't recommend it though for this camera. (Popeye-like forearm due to wideangle distortion, but you surely feel the weight!) I think there are two options: 1. Make it as light as possible (difficult with the SLR magic, with the Oly you can buy this or sth. similar), so that you can hold it without vest. 2. Buy a setup with a proper vest.

  Sounds like a rehearsal or practice room. I think, no matter how diminutive that room is, just one LED torch will not get you to make it look interesting. You can as well make it look like a makeshift 'studio' by blatantly putting some lights into the room, in full sight of the camera. Let blacks be blacks, let light sources flare into the lens. Work with reflectors.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZfDbEQAfOY (three lights, one of them a cheap fluorescent light, and a big reflector)   I don't say, do it this way. It's just done quite often and often works well. You can't 'paint' too much with just one LED, that's right.

  I didn't mean to promote a fix it in post philosophy. But I had been working in a specialized photo lab long enough (and long ago) to know, that analog photos used to be enhanced as well and to a degree (masks, dodge, burn, color filters, almost the whole photoshop palette) only few seem to be aware of nowadays.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MceO4EvnAjY   What software have you got? A lot of things can be done without a dedicated color grading software, but of course with one your life will be easier. Find one, then watch tutorials for it.   'Chief lighting cameramen' as well as digital colorists sometimes describe the core of their work as 'painting with light'. It's useful to arrange everything before shooting in such a way that motif and background are composed and lit to form a perfect image. If what you aim your camera at looks good already, the only thing you need to know is, how the camera reads light in a different way than your naked eye. Easy as it sounds, it obviously divides the boys from the men.   So *just* train yourself to see, where in the frame you need to add or take away brightness, reduce or accentuate shadows asf. Paint with light.

I think there are more basic questions to consider when discussing light(s). What is the purpose of it all? To pump enough light into the room? This is the one obvious. But unless you are a news reporter, you might want more.    You want to control the appearence, the mood. With modern equipment, it's not too hard to get sufficient light for correct exposure from existing sources. And if you don't get it from the source light, you have to decide whether you want to *add* more light or exclude the natural/existing light(s) completely and lighten everything with special lamps.   Old textbooks on filmmaking let the latter option look like the more sophisticated one. Since almost fifty years though, the concept of controlling (or mimicking) existing sources has become an alternative to a dogmatic view on film light.   Simply put: The more you want to use artificial light in the sense of a 'dodge tool' (*don't forget the relatively new possibilities to 're-light' an image through color grading) or 'fill light', bounce shadows a.s.f., the less you need to look for a big variety of specialized lamps (floods, spots with different power).    The thing is, that once you start to plan the lighting with external lamps exclusively, you are condemned to follow this path consequently. The physics of light say, that greater distances (bigger sets) need high power lamps, and you end up sitting in midst of a hot film studio, where every mood and atmosphere needs to be created from scratch.   Old hands detest LED lights, for a variety of reasons. They may not be appropriate for every situation. For a very soft light, you can use china balls (cheap, make experiments), for the odd spot you can literally buy or borrow a disco or theater spotlight. Scale everything down to your (comparatively) fantastic low-light capabilities of your modern camera.

I bet you used all pre-production tools of the trade, storyboards, moodboards, production design planning. What else? Very impressing.

10.8 is already announced. I didn't install 10.7, for there seem to be more bugs than in 10.6 (always wait for bug reports, at least keep a backup of older versions or make a timemachine-backup first!). I found all demos of plugins to at least slow down FCP X, with the exception of those apparently built within Motion 5. To use Neat without issues would really be a big improvement. My biggest wishes for future updates (aside from stability with certain plugins) are keyframeable color correction parameters and assignable audio tracks (not just 'roles'). Furthermore, I'd love to see better integration with Motion, I'd like real authoring of DVDs (BDs?) in Compressor and a DCP-export. Of course with 'optimized media' transcoding is running in the background (making ProRes copies of your mpeg4-clips to your assigned harddrive). You will notice that after a few minutes the skimming speed improves. That's when FCP X plays back ProRes instead of AVCHD.

I used to borrow a Cineroid headlight for wedding videos from my pal. It's fantastic, but quite expensive. For a christmas present, he gave me the HDV Z96, the version which has both accu and batteries. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8rpfgiH9bQ   It's, say, 90% as good as the Cineroid, and it is cheap(er).      'I am pretty mobile, mainly shooting bands but also screenplays/short films.'   Very good is the very costly Litepanel Ringlight , my friend has this and some big litepanels (akku operable), that cost over 1000 bucks but fit in a laptop case.   To light a room the way it should be done, you'd need different light sources, and surely fresnels (available with LED also, i.e. from Arri, but still the most versatile are HMI) are the best choice for that.   An LED headlight is useful when your motif would otherwise be either too dark or noisy. Comparable to a flashlight, but dimmable. One would avoid it whenever possible, but sometimes it comes in handy.

Right: It depends. If your particular cam sets the right flag (metadata) for the NLE to decompress to RGB, if the NLE reads the flag asf. I remember that the FS-100 has a range of 16-255 (instead of 16-255 or 0-255), I may err. Maybe the FS-700 does the same. Now, it seems you got it wrong the first time with 5D2RGB (banding). Imho the greatest adavantage of FCP X over other NLEs is it's way to give you access to your original footage. It's not 'import & edit' like in Premiere, it's not 'log & transfer & edit' like in FCP 7, it's 'browse without delay & edit'. If you really need 5D2RGB, it's a pity. Try the 'archive' and compare the 'optimized media' results with the original clips. If they look the same, forget 5D2RGB.

Makes playback smoother on any Mac, makes AVCHD edible on not so fast or older Macs. Not available for easy codecs like HDV or XDCAM EX. Try the same clip with FCP X 'optimized media', the default for AVCHD, just leave it checked. With 5D2RGB, you can choose the wrong range by accident. I bet, with the automatic import, there will be no artifacts. If the problem persists and if your machine is fast enough, you can edit original media. As I wrote above, there actually is no right or wrong way to do it. There is an unnecessarily complicated way through 5D2RGB, because you lose the intelligent import functions of FCP X. And 5D2RGB uses the same Quicktime encoder for ProRes as FCP X (or FCP 7, for that matter).

'The other folders' contain file infos (comparable to playlists in a VIDEO_TS folder), without which FCP X will not import anything, if AVCHD, movs or what have you. Three ways to proceed: 1. Preview your clips in-camera and delete the bad ones there. The index will be changed correctly on the card. 2. Connect your card or camera to the Mac, preview them via FCP Xs import window and import only the files you need (as original, optimized media or proxy). 3. Make an 'archive' of the card that you name "TEST SHOOT CLIPS". The big advantage of this method is, that afterwards you can skim faster over all of the cards content compared to the speed possible with a USB connection. And that you can use the 'clip view' instead of the 'file view'. For any other program (i.e. Premiere) the archive is just another folder, containing the original file structure of your card. Sort your content using FCP X or sooner or later you will lose connections.

Using the ''optimized media' in FCP X (meaning ProRes) is visually lossless and won't introduce banding (but neither make it disappear if it's in the original). It's hard to have a wrong workflow with FCP X . Working with AVCHD (an H.264 copy without changing a single pixel is made on-the-fly) treats the 8-bit video with 32-bit floating point precision. A proxy copy (for lame Macs or multicam with ten or more pip-streams) refers to the originals in the end, no quality loss there as well. Just one thing: NEVER delete a clip from your card prior to starting the import process of FCP X. Preview and import only the clips you intend to use. Or else ...