Filmmakers can be a conservative bunch... It has often been said that cinema is the slowest and most lethargic of all arts to react and respond to change. Cinema progresses only into fields already well trodden by Literature, Music, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Cinema may be the most profound, the most engaging, most influential medium the world has ever seen but its too often the least forward or open thinking.
Of it self this may or may not be a problem. What does however bother me some, a mind-set tied to the innate conservatism of cinema as a medium, is the all too often prevailing anti-intellectualism of cinema practitioners. Academic scholars on one hand, Practitioners on the other with seemingly an unspoken veil between. Scholars aren't to engage with practice and production and, worse still, Practitioners are not to apply critical thinking and bigger a picture conceptualization to their practice.
Now of course I am being verbose (and possibly unfair to many academics and professionals alike) but the fact that everytime I stumble upon a credible professional practitioner who has taken the time to think and consider the ideas behind their practice, I am overtly surprised and pleased.
So it was when I stumbled across this little ditty entitled The Phenomenon of Editing byBill Russo who was Head of Editing at the Australian Film TV and Radio School. What Bill elegantly touches on is the connection of Editing and Montage not just to the process of making cinema, telling stories and creating cinematic engagement but the editing that we perform for ourselves in our everyday lives simply to make sense of the world. In making such a broad connection Bill hints at something intrinsically and innately Human in the cinema construct. Perhaps our engagement with moving image cut from one shot to another is wired into our DNA?
Final Cut Pro freebies for a better edit experience
Little things make a big difference
It seems no matter how mature and complex creative software tools
become, particularly non-linear editing systems, there always seem to
be the extra things you find yourself wishing for. The technology
trickle-down effect has seen enormous changes over the past decade
where the tools that were once the sole domain of high-end turn-key
systems - with appropriate astronomical price-tags - are now stock
standard. One need only look at the complexity of colour correction and
compositing options inside NLE's like Premiere Pro Vegas and Final Cut Pro to see functionality that simply did not exist at the
desktop level not all that long ago. But, big features aren't always
the most useful. Sometimes it's the little things that make a big
difference. Workflow, efficiency, automation, these are the elements
that are high on the agenda for day to day working editors.
Final
Cut Pro is an NLE that delivers a wide array of things it can do but
often seems lacking in efficiencies and pragmatism as to how it does
them or, moreover, is missing all-together simple things that would
make the editor's job easier. This is where the old adage of nature
abhorring a vacuum seems fitting as third-party tools and utilities
step in to fill the gap.
Love or hate FCP, its enormous
popularity means that with a lot of people using it there is invariably
a lot of people seeking to plug some of the holes in its boat. Below
are eight of my favourite free Final Cut utilities to make the FCP edit
more pleasant and productive.
An artist
needs to know their brushes. If they are to render the visions in their
head into tangible reality on canvas then they must be able to
manipulate the tools of that application. They must know how different
brushes react to different pigments, how different bristles will
produce different textures, how each type of brush will effect the work
that is created.
The exact same is true of filmmakers and, in particular,
cinematographers. The DoP must know cameras, all kinds of cameras. must
know their strengths and weknesses, their pros and cons. How different
cameras will handle different types of light, how different sensors
will manipulate the image, how different sizes and shapes will shape
camera movements.
Thee only catch is that cameras are a whole lot more complex than paint brushes, so there is much more to know.
This chart availible here is a good step to that knowledge.
it covers all the major digital cinema cameras from the very high-end
(Phantom and F35) to the efficient-end (Sony Ex1 and Ex3). It details
some of the notable productions shot on the different cameras, lays out
their tech specs and succinctly summarises their key advantages and
attributes.
Never underestimate human ingenuity to fill a void. When a software tool is lacking a needed feature it generally doesn't take long for someone to step up with something to fill that need.
Apple's Final Cut Pro is often lauded on the selling point of wide support by 3rd-party apps and plug-ins. Certainly it's true but there are however 2 ways to look at this - on one hand lots of 3rd-party support validates FCP's industry position and shows trust and faith in FCP as an accepted industry platform. On the other hand, those more perceptive might observe, that such a plethora of 3rd party apps and utilities for FCP indicates and suggests that FCP is so lacking in features and options that users need, that 3rd-party tools are essential to fill the gaps. In less flowery terms; If the software is good, it shouldn't need 3rd party plug-ins...
My own observations would certainly place me in the later category of cynics. I look upon my favourite, used daily, FCP plugins such as Colorista as evidence. FCP's own 3way colour corrector is so poor, inaccurate and noisy that the space is wide open to demand the superbly efficient Colorista step into the void. (check out this side by side comparission to see the difference Colorista makes) But in truth I shouldn't need Colorista for FCP - Colorista only has a market because of FCP's failings. Similarly Automatic Duck which invests FCP with the ability to correctly import AAF and OMF files; a task FCP should surely be able to do on its own but fails consistently. So there I am with Automatic Duck to expertly fill the gap FCP leaves open.
But this however doesn't mean I am any less appreciative of a useful tool when it comes along to make FCP a little more functional, since like so many I often can't avoid having to use FCP.
Among the most absurd of FCP's failings is its overt dysfunction in playing back (without rendering) audio files of mixed sample rates or, heaven forbid, MP3 files. The solution is of course to convert all audio files to 48k 16bit Wav/Aiff prior to importing to FCP. This is a tedious process that should not at all be necessary (and isn't in any other NLE) But where there is need there will come a solution...
Final Cut Assistant is one such excellent solution to a range of FCP shortcomings - it can manage, save, backup and restore preference files and provides a central point for launching new projects with consistent settings. But tucked further down in its feature set is its hidden gem. FCPAssistant is a batch processor for audio files and with just a couple clicks it can covert a mixed bag of audio into a consistent set that FCP can cope with. To boot, it will also send those files directly to your FCP project. It's simple, effective and very functional and should be daily part of your FCP editing toolkit.
Sadly, the tragedy is that if FCP's developers got their act together and actually addressed the myriad of shortcomings in FCP (which certainly the recent FCP7 failed to do) then many of these 3rd party developers would find themselves obsolete and out of a gig.
Here's a thought Apple; why don't you just buy FCAssistant, pay its developers a shit-load of cash, which they've earned by plugging holes in your ship, and include FCAssistant in the FCStudio bundle...?
Or does this go against the plan you seem to have of under-resourcing ProApps development and relying on marketing hyperbole and smart 3rd-party developers to dress your software mutton up as lamb..?
Arguably Apple Color is among the most frustrating pieces of
creative software around frustrating because it is on one hand
amazingly powerful and on the other putridity inefficient and
dysfunctional. Simple tasks often seem far harder than they should be
and the round-trip between FCP and Color is not nearly as easy as it
sounds. Its also a tool that makes all but the uber-nerdy feel more
like mathematicians than artists with an interface that just isnt
conducive to creative flow. If you want a colour-grading experience
that feels more like art than science RedGiant Colorista and
MagicBuletLooks are the tools to go for.
But, that said, with excellent secondary colour correction tools and
built-in motion tracking it presents two elements missing from
MagicBullet so it can be well worth the effort if you can wrangle its
quirks and issues into line.
Below is a set of good articles i've found that lay out different Color workflows and how to deal with some of its inconsistencies. Certainly we all look forward to the day when Apple finally convert Color from its clunky, linux-like interface into a real Apple-esque package with a consistent interface to the rest of the FCStudio.
Whilst many of my students have discovered the power of shooting 4k RED is awesome they have also discovered the post-production workflow can be a
total headtrip ! And just to make the task all the harder of navigating
a viable post-production path from ingest to output many of the software developers have been
updating their RED workflow as they go. So what we planned on doing
just a month ago is all different now.....
But, that said, the improvements in systems like Sony's Vegas, Premiere Pro and After
Effects and how they handle and work with RED RAW footage are fantastic. In both Vegas and Premiere CS4 we now have true a
native R3D format 4k workflow with all the metadata controls, so
intrinsic to the way RED works, accessed from directly inside the editing system - negating the need for the still clubmsy and poorly developed RED software tools. The short of this is that once you pull the native RAW R3D files
into Premiere or Vegas you then never have render, export, transcode or re-wrap
until final output. Its really very cool.
This link below is to a 45min video from Adobe that takes you through the
major changes in the RED worflow and has a host of great tips on how to
get the best out of the process.
But, having said that, a native 4k workflow isnt necessarily the
best solution. The other option several of my students have chosen is to shoot 4k as an acquisition, perform a
1-light colour balance in REDAlert and then Batch-Process all the R3D
fiels to 2k ProRes files for FCP to be edited on a 1080p timeline (with a bit of overscan) to
deliver as HD. With this workflow you can literally cut with real-time playback
a 1080HD project on your laptop with files sizes (1gb/min) which are
really very reasonable on your harddrives.
Oliver Peters, a well respected editor, has written an excellent and easily digestible article on RED worlflow in FCP using ProRes that is
must-read material for anyone planning a RED project and wanting to
keep things efficient and in proportion.
What does a Director do? It's a question in infinite loop, being both endlessly broad and yet decidedly specific. Arguably, what the Director does is VISUALIZE. Everything else they do is simply the execution and implementation of what they have VISUALIZED. The director envisions what doesn't yet exist and guides people to help them deliver that vision in their head.
In this context the fundamental tool of the Director is the Storyboard. Whilst they may employ a professional Storyboard artist or work with the DoP to construct the Storyboards, the SB's are none the less the very heart of what it is to DIRECT. The SB's are the first Shoot and the first Cut.
This article, entitled 'Coen Brothers Movies: Drawing Storyboards', is an excellent look at the work of a storyboard artist and the relationship with the director. It includes SB cells from No country for old men.
I wrote a little while back a 2-part article on on DIY Colour Grading (read Pt1 HERE and Pt2 HERE). In these writings I overviewed a number of the software-only low-cost solutions for manipulating colour and some of the key considerations. This included Adobe Kuler, an online application for 'colour profiling' that really should be the indie filmmaker's best friend.
In the latest episode of RedGiant TV, Stu Machwitz presents a detailed look at using Colorista and MagicBullet Looks to emulate a number of specific grades from big budget films at the cinemas right now - Transformers2 and Terminator4 among others. In the solid 3min video Stu goes over the process of grading for a specific look at how to use Kuler to create a colour swatch profile of a scene you wish to emulate.
The video is very commendable colour grading class delivered in 30mins and should be compulsory viewing for every indoe filmmaker. As I wrote at the end of my article - "Just as we shouldn't hesitate to pick up a camera and shoot we similarly shouldn't hesitate to pick up a computer and grade."
There's a substantial history of camera technology being released to
the public before the technology of post-production has caught up. HDV
springs as an obvious example where the long-GOP structure was
fantastically efficient for image acquisition and recording but
presented considerable issues for non-linear editing systems
traditionally reliant on individual frames and not groups-of-pictures.
AVCHD presents the same issue where shooting is easy but timeline
performance is less than stellar. And Sony's XDCAMEX is a great balance
of quality and efficiency but it's wrapping in an Mp4 format initially
gave many NLE's considerable trouble.
And of course at the top
of this heap is the RED ONE camera. No doubt a paradigm shift in
digital cinema - 4k resolution, RAW metadata and all kinds of digital
flexibility and power - but wrestling with a brand new format, uncommon
resolutions (particularly the RED unique 3k) the new headspace of RAW
workflow and tapeless ingest, has made post-production of RED far from
simple. All the major NLE developers have moved to accommodate the
RED's unique format but to date few filmmakers would attest that any of
the available editing options are as good as they could or should be.
By defintion a 'Plug-in' is a small piece of software that adds functionality to a larger 'host' software application. So, as such, a good plugin is one that adds a feature to the application that otherwise is there. Its exactly this mindset that led me to Alex4D's collection of free Final Cut Pro plug-ins.
Whilst FCP has some excellent strengths, it also has some major weaknesses - audio, effects and titling are certainly three areas where FCP is sub-par by comparison to other NLE's. But our friend Alex4D, an editor from the UK, has produced a suite of little plugins that deliver to FCP some very bloody useful features otherwise absent.
You can get the whole range of Alex's plugins from his website http://alex4d.wordpress.com/finalcut/Of particular interest and usefulness are the titling plugins - Closing Credits which allows for easy creation of movie closing credis using multiple fonts and side by side Name/Title; and Lower Thirds which is perfect for an easy way to generate subtitles with shadowed backgrounds.
One of the key factors that has shaped the way we teach editing and post-production at the International Film School Sydney where I work is the dramatically evolving nature of what the 'editor' is and does, the ever broadening scope of what post-production encompasses and indeed the increasingly hazy line between where production ends and post begins.The curriculum at IFSS is built around an holistic and integrated approach that seeks to focus on where roles in cinema overlap rather than where they diverge. As such we seek to see the whole landscape and build consummate skills across all the tentacle-like arms contemporary production.
The aim is not to make everyone and expert at everything but rather to ensure everyone has a solid understanding of what all the pieces are and where they lie. Only then can you really see the holistic shape of cinema as a Director, Writer, Producer or Cinematographer.
Norman Hollyn is the head of Editing at the renowned USC school of cinematic arts in LA and he shares this perspective on this, succinctly summing up this new environment and its demands on 'editors' with an article on one of his blogs entitled :
After taking in the bigger scope of things Norman breaks down some pragmatic fundamentals that he believes should be at the heart of the Editor's toolbox.
Familiarity with at least two editing systems. Id choose Avid and Final Cut, though some industries and many European and Middle East markets really want Adobe Premiere.
Ability to do soundtrack manipulation. For some people, this means a great familiarity with all of the filters and plug-ins available on your editing system. Thats crucial but an additional skill would be to know applications like Pro Tools, Soundtrack Pro, Logic or Audition.
Ability to do basic color correction. My wife is convinced that Im completely color blind because of the way I dress every morning. That excuse wont save me in the editing world (remind me to tell you about a color blind director I once worked for). You need the ability to take a shot which looks too gray and touch it up so that it matches the shot immediately following which is more blue. You can do that on a basic level within any good editing program. You can do it really well using the color correction modules in Avid and Final Cut (I dont know about Premiere since I dont use it). But add-on programs like Color and Looks, and to manipulate what youve shot to give you some very different. These programs help you get even better color correction results, though the learning curve is horrific.
Visual Effects creation savvy. With nearly every single film and television project out there having some visual effects (even if its just adding a skyline to a scene which has too many buildings in it), it is important to be able to work with green screen, to create mattes, and manipulate the image in increasingly complex ways. Facility with programs like Photoshop are also a real plus.
Along with that comes the ability to create the internal and transition effects that are on every show nowadays. Being able to create good titles in Apple, Avid FX or another program, as well as to move the image in and out of split screens, is an essential skill if you want your collaborators to understand the vision for the film.
Compression knowledge. This is actually a placeholder for all of the skills that youll need in order to output cuts from your system and put them on a DVD, server, or some web-based location, for viewing by your director, producer, studio exec or your favorite dentist/financier. It is also helpful, if your film is going to end up on the web in some way (and whose film isnt?) to be able to know the workflow that will get it there. Familiarity with Compressor and the much better (in my mind) Sorenson Squeeze is essential for this.
It is these same key elements that I hope underscore the whole post-production curriculum at the International Film School Sydney; an holistic and broad base of production skills that see the role of the 'editor' as much more than just 'cutting'.
After an established history of developing lossless compression technology predominantly for the Windows platform - and particular Adobe's Premiere Pro NLE - Cineform has at last brought its lossless intermediate, high performance codec system to the Mac.
Where once post-production software developers sang the praises of their NLE systems as working 'natively' with acquisition formats, there is now firmly a different prevailing attitude in the mainstream. Native production is still valued but Digital Intermediate formats using lossless compression schemes are now seen as an optimum workflow choice for many productions with numerous advantages over cutting 'native.'
A number of NLE developers have directly implemented their own lossless intermediate codecs, namely Avid, which delivered DNxHD that can operate in a number of different data rates. Originally intended as a high quality and performance optimized off-line codec, the higher bitrate versions of DnxHD soon proved to be very viable online formats without the data overhead of uncompressed media.
Similarly, Apple got on the bandwagon with ProRes 422 although their back flip in delivering ProRes was profound. Apple had rallied hard against intermediates in their advertising, even using misleading language implying that anything but 'native' post resulted in 'generational loss' and this 'native' focus was what made FCP 'superior.' It was of course simply marketing spin to hide the fact that Apple didn't yet have a viable Lossless Intermediate format. Then out of the blue Apple delivered ProRes and very quickly changed their advertising tune. But, despite the hyperbole, the move was a good one by Apple and ProRes has proven itself as a reliable, high performance, intermediate format.
But amid these deliveries from the NLE developers themselves Cineform has continued, out of necessity of competition, to innovate and refine its product. When codecs such as ProRes come free with the NLE, Cineform is in the challenging position of being a 3rd party product needing to convince users to fork over extra cash beyond their NLE purchase. The only way to do this in business is to have an utterly compelling product that offers more and goes 'one better.' With the move to a real cross-platform, status, Cineform is aiming to demonstrate exactly that to a wide user base.
The most profound shifts in creative technologies can often be distilled to distinct keywords; idea-terms that encompass a range of tools, techniques and technologies. In the current age of digital software suite packages, that keyword is Metadata.
Across the spectrum of creative software tools we see this odd little term sprouting up and heralding all manner of strange and dynamic possibilities for managing, tracking, sharing and manipulating digital projects.
The term itself simply means extended or extra-data that relates to, but sits alongside, the core information of a media file itself. The scope and diversity of metadata is extensive but typical common examples can be found in digital photographs where the metadata records the model of camera, the date and time of the image, and camera settings such as ISO and shutter speed at the time the shot was taken.
The newly released Adobe CS4 embraces the management and utilization of Metadata right across the software suite aiming to deliver new levels of sophisticated workflow management. While metadata of various kinds is present to some degree in all digital media files the exploitation of metadata as a creative management tool has been largely under utilized by contemporary software applications. Adobe aims to change this by putting metadata front and centre of the CS4 suite. Here we'll take a look at some of the key uses and features of CS4's metadata in the Production Suite applications Premiere, Soundbooth, Bridge, Onlocation and Encore.
Ive never met an editor yet who wasn't, if not an actual musician, a avowed music fan - one of those perpetually headphone wearing, mp3 player plugged-in types. There is good reason for this; Editing is synonymous with music. Any good moving image sequence, any good scene that ebbs and flows with an organic seamless rhythm, is one that has found a distinct musicality. Any good movie sequence, I believe, can be understood by analyzing it as a form of song structure.
As I found myself pondering this and thinking of a way to describe classic movie sequences by way of musical structures I stumbled across another superlative blog post by my old colleague Mr Tom Ellard. In a decidedly eloquent blog post entitled Music Class: Lets write some music, Tom artfully and humorously lays down how a song structures are formed by drawing connection to games of Peak-a-boo played with young babies (or, alternatively as Tom muses, Senile Old Uncles)
Classical composers are good at Peek A Boo. They give you an
overture, which provides the rules. Then they start messing with the
melodic structure, wandering off in apparent disregard for the game,
but just when you think theyre halfway to China they pop back into
view to ensure you know theyre really just teasing. Then they give you
a finale that shows how it only seemed to wander off"
The post is most definitely worth a read regardless of whether your interest is music or movie editing as the notions of supervise, familiarity, tension and expectation are part and parcel of both.
This connection, of the structure of music arrangement to moving image editing, is one that I attempt to exert upon my students and the tools for this sit often unrecognized right under their noses. Whilst most (all to easily) dismiss the idea of scoring a film project with simple audio loop sequencing tools such as Acid or SoundtrackPro, these tools provide a perfect, and totally accessible, means to explore musical structure. With pitch and tempo correction taken care of, a pack of loops becomes, by way of the DAWs visual arrangement of blocks of sound, the perfect place to experiment with the assembly of experience. You may never be a working muso or wish to actually score your own films but there is not a filmmaker alive who wont understand dramatic structure, surprise, familiarity and anticipation better for having played at loop sequencing.
Its why I think any good DJ is potentially a world-class editor waiting to get their calling. By nature of what they do they understand assembly, how to get the listener into a groove and then surprise, offer them something familiar and then shift it to take them somewhere new. These are the qualities every editor needs to hold dear when hey sit in the edit bay.
