THE DONNY AWARDS 2012

Awards for the best film, tv and media production at Centennial College were celebrated this past week at the Royal Cinema, on College Street.   During the two hour celebration awards for drama, documentary and craft categories including screenwriting, cinematography and art direction were handed out.  The work was amazing.  Great to see that the quality of work is superb and that the stories are getting better and better.

Open Source Cine and free stuff

As mentioned previously on the blog, open source camera technology is emerging very rapidly. A group called Apertus is collaborating on a digital cinema camera. This is worth checking out and invites participation. Open source software has made a big impact so there's nothing to stop open source hardware projects. The Apertus project is currently using a science based camera called Elphel and manipulating the image with open source software such as OpenCine. The sensor of the Elphel is only about 1/4" so the scale of the camera and lens configuration is very limited. Elphel is developing a larger sensor so this can only get better. The Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera is more than 1/2" so there's already a commercially available camera ready to go.

By the way the Blackmagic comes with a range of software including DaVinci Resolve and a Waveform. If you are interested Resolve is available as a free download here.

Creative Producers User Group Supermeet

The Supermeet is a highlight of the week at NAB where 2000 show attendees converge to see special demonstrations and presentations for production and post. On the productions side, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera made an appearance as expected although, again, the camera was not monitored so we could not really witness the camera's capability. There were demonstrations of Autodesk Smoke (spectacular) and Premier Pro 6 (very promising). Smoke is an advanced editing tool, with a wealth of new features. In the demo, a tracked, layered mat was inserted into several shots creating a reflection in a character's glasses. The speed and ease of this was impressive. Of course the editor onstage was a whiz, but Smoke makes it very possible to try things out quickly and execute them flawlessly, indeed a powerful tool. It would be great to add this level of experience to our program. This may be a good way to converge some activity between Animation and B&F too. Premiere Pro 6 is a major upgrade pushing Adobe's editing platform into the limelight as a major contender. Given the problematic development of FCPX, it looks as if Adobe is finally realizing that they are sitting on the possible contender to challenge FCP. In the demo, we could see a new look and feel, a vastly improved set of tools and ways to quickly get from stage to stage in an edit.

Although Avid wasn't demoing at the event, their presence was felt. Avid's presentation was the highlight of the night as documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock talked for almost an hour about his past and present filmmaking activity. Spurlock is a big Avid user with a dozen edit suites on the go, collectively working on several of his productions at once. Spurlock talked about the making of Supersize Me. Produced on a shoestring and a fistful of credit cards, Spurlock pushed his credit limits and amassed a credit card debt of $250,000. He was booted out of his apartment and living on a couch at his office. But he persisted and the film was programmed at Sundance where it was a critical success. Even so, a year later, despite the film's success, he was still $200k in debt. But it launched him and allowed him to get funding for subsequent work. Currently he is producing series for Hulu and Google.

Driving The Camera and Space

It's fascinating the way that innovations for camera rigging have evolved. You can roll the camera on track of every size, shape and configuration, fly the camera around on cranes and jibs of ever imaginable design. Take the Polecat for example, an adjustable carbon fibre pipe with a remote pan/tilt. The three inch pipe can fly out 12 feet in the air and carry an 8 pound camera such as the C300 with a prime lens on it. There's always been a huge range of heavy duty cranes such as the Technocrane but the real news is in small, easy to set up, super portable light weight rigs that a student or independent filmmaker can use inexpensively.

How about a $300 remote control quadracopter with a GoPro on it, or a $20,000 quadracopter with a Red flying anywhere you want in your set or location.

Line Up For The Line Ups

If you haven't been to Vegas then you haven't experienced the joy of lining up. There's line ups for coffee, escalators, buses, taxis, restaurants, snack foods, you name it. At NAB the line ups continue for screenings, gadgets, lunch, more coffee, swag, appointments with sales reps, on and on. I find myself lining up to see the latest line up of product launches at every popular booth. There's a line up to listen even!

Some of the line ups:

Red is everywhere now and delivering Scarlet cameras in five to seven days and with the booth in open concept the mystique is gone. They are just there.

3D is getting much more sophisticated. The next wave of cameras and rigs makes it much more easy to shoot. Dolby and others showed 3D monitors that don't require glasses.

Augmented Reality is starting to take off. One demo I saw showed several ads that integrated AR nicely. In an ad for boots, a bootprint magazine photo, when viewed on an iPad reveals a three dimensional boot that you can fully explore by rotating the paper ad.

LED lights have matured beyond expectations and are quickly replacing florescents. Rotolight, for example, has a range of portable lights, great for documentaries that are inexpensive, superbright and very flexible. Their studio lights are completely programmable with dial-up color temperature, bluetooth remote controls over dimming and temperature plus you can chain them to each other and make any size light you want.

Mini cameras are popping out everywhere. Like the GoPro and Contour, there are numerous knock offs in every shape and size, even a camera mounted in sports sunglasses.

Open Source camera making is taking off. It is now possible to manufacture small HD cameras from off-the-shelf parts. Dozens of manufacturers are packing these in their own boxes. These are professional quality, som rigged for stereo 3D, some for action / sports rigs, some for surveillance and scientific use. Even a remote control sphere that you can control like a strange cousin to HAL.

Magic or monster?

I am a technology junkie but only to a point, as long as it doesn't hurt. When you walk in the door of the geekiest conference on earth it's with a sense of wonder at the magic and dread at the sheer overwhelming task ahead. Just walking a show like this takes a toll, physically it's like you are lost in an endless maze, with no way out.
As yesterday was about acquisition, today is mostly about post production. I visited with our switcher partners as we own both a Broadcast Pix switcher and a Tricaster studio in a box. Both were offering incremental upgrades for nominal fees which is good. As we know, it's all about the upgrade as that's how companies keep you tethered to their product. BPix now brings virtual sets into their software and Tricaster now features a range of new features not the least of which is a control surface. These kinds of features are not surprising given that the competition is fierce. For example Blackmagic Design now makes a software switcher as well and it starts at $5k for the software/control surface. Couple that with a good Mac / display solution and for about $10k you have a studio in a box capable of cutting eight cameras and two DDRs. Our Tricaster is only a four camera but also handles live graphics, internal recording and streams on the fly, all in HD. We'll be looking for our students to be trained on the unit and hope to give them more experience in this area in the next year or two. Ideally we should have a three or four class training module around this.
Blackmagic also showed their own Cinema camera, a 2.5k RAW capable of using a range of lenses such as canon and Pl mount. Priced at $3000 it's aimed squarely at the DSLR market. Strangely, they were not monitoring the cameras to a large monitor so results were not really that clear. I suspect they may have a way to go, and we will wait for the bugs to shake themselves out. Given the Ikonoscope and the promising digital Bolex this is another similar product that offers yet another flavor of image capture. It has a very simple interface so this may attract some users.
At the Red booth, many changes are in evidence. It's interesting that they have positioned themselves in the post area of NAB. This is partially because they are actively promoting their laser projector. In the Red theatre, the film 'Loom' plays, a featurette directed by Ridley Scott's son Luke. This 3d story is a dystopian vision of a genetically engineered future where a lab tech steals some growth hormone. Shot on the Epic 4k it does look beautiful. Although the flaws in the 3d are distracting, the laser system supplies super bright imaging to both eyes simultaneously. I never once felt my brain getting weary from left/right processing. Afterwards, we demo'd the Scarlett and were pleasantly surprised. The camera is remarkably friendly to use. The image is lovely and the company is promising delivery in 5 - 7 days on average. This is a far cry from the six month long waits that owners have endured for their first generation Reds. After seeing all the cameras at the show, I am strongly in favor of a Red for the college. I believe it will give senior students a strong edge of experience that employers will notice. And this will serve them well in production and in post workflows.

Thoughts about NAB day one

Gadgets. There's lots of them. For film and tv makers the endless rollout of cool gadgets to use to tell the story just doesn't end. And it's getting very competitive. At the Steadicam booth, a young woman is demonstrating a combination Steadicam / crane boom. Someone asks her how long she could carry it on her body. "Twenty minutes", she says. Watching her put the rig through its paces, I couldn't help thinking about the way that attention span and this strange rig were linked. We're now so used to shots that move endlessly, cuts that are a second or two or less, all constantly shifting our attention. At the Canon booth, a short demo film made with the 4K 1D starts with two characters talking in a hospital hallway. Every second or two the view changes. A close up to an over the shoulder, a low angle side view, a top view, a closer two shot, an extra close up of each, etc. At NAB my gaze is constantly being diverted with shot making devices, cages, sleds, mini cameras, high speed cameras, Swedish retro cameras, stereo rigs, tiny microphones, 2k, 4k, 8k, every focal length of high speed prime lens, ridiculous zoom lenses, cranes, remote pan tilt heads, an amphibious rolling tirecam, a Segway Steadicam. Every item adds a slight edge in the range of shots that you can create. Are we bowing to some kind of demigod here, a technological demon that is sucking the life out of stories. Are we reaching a level of contrivance where the manipulation of the image outweighs the story within the frame? And are the makers of all this gadgetry kidding us? As the dancing girls hit the concrete stage, and the features of the 'new' products are revealed, so we're lured into believing that all of this is good.