While I was busy making Canadian Lysol commercial history, Adobe released Creative Suite 6, including a major update for my favorite creative software of all time, After Effects. The new version includes some exciting new features:

• Variable mask feathering
• 3D camera tracker
• Global Performance Cache (sexier than it sounds)
• Rolling Shutter Repair tool
• Ray-traced 3D extruded layers

Each of these features is worth its own post, so I’ll just pick one to start. The ray-traced 3D renderer is the first major update to AE’s 3D capabilities since they were first introduced in 2001–2002. AE was way ahead of most of its competition (except flame, of course) in bringing 3D capabilities to a compositing environment. At the time, adding 3D layers to a dedicated compositor was a somewhat controversial move. But now it’s hard to imagine compositing without a 3D environment, and After Effects has been lapped several times by its competition in 3D features. So I’m happy to see true 3D geometry finally spinning in my AE viewport.

I could be happier though. The After Effects 3D renderer is a powerful and feature-rich ray tracer. It supports motion blur, depth-of-field, diffused reflections, and soft shadows, all in 32-bit floating point color. The results can look amazing.

But ray-tracing can be computationally expensive. Adobe decided to accelerate their new renderer using the NVIDIA CUDA technology, where the massive parallel processing capability of a GPU is turned to general computing tasks. And indeed, on a supported system, After Effects CS6 can ray-trace pretty darn fast. The above iPhone animation rendered in 2 hours, 15 minutes on a machine with a $2,000 NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPU. On a Quadro FX4800, it took 15 hours.

The problem is, I don’t don’t happen to own one of these supported systems. My MacBook Pro has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, but that’s not beefy enough for AE6, so I’m stuck with CPU rendering. And my top-of-the-line, pimped-out iMac has an AMD GPU. So again, no dice. And by no dice, I mean you would not want to try to render something as simple as a pair of dice. On my $3,000 iMac, one frame of the iPhone animation takes 48 minutes.

I don’t begrudge Adobe the decision to accelerate the ray-tracer for CUDA, but I do regret the seeming prioritization of that optimization over any kind of CPU usability. If you have a CUDA card, you can use and enjoy the ray tracer. If you don’t, you pretty much can’t. I mean, sure, you can try, but the render times will very likely dissuade you. This binary hardware differentiation between the ray-tracing haves and have-nots is, to me, unbefitting of After Effects, which has always struck me as the “people’s choice” compositor—such a paragon of accessibility that I consider it a must-have tool for the DV Rebel. I expect Autodesk to ship something that requires esoteric hardware, but not Adobe. And yet, at the same time as the CS6 announcement, Autodesk announced a greatly updated Smoke for Mac, one of the primary features being that it works on just about any Apple hardware, including my iMac.

But surely it’s impossible that a ray-tracer could ever be as fast on a CPU as on a GPU, right? Maybe—but there are numerous well-established optimizations available to ray-tracers, including sub-sampling (where areas of sparse sampling are interpolated rather then allowed to be noisy), adaptive sampling (where the number of ray samples required for each pixel is adjusted based on scene content), and progressive refinement (where low-quality results are shown to the user rapidly, and then iteratively built-upon for higher quality). The After Effects ray-tracer has none of these. It’s a brute-force multi-sample renderer—the kind you’d write if performance in a massively-parallel computing environment (i.e. a specific GPU) was your sole concern. I wish Adobe had put their efforts toward making their renderer as fast as possible for all users.

I know it’s fashionable to hate on Adobe, but I have never felt a part of that crowd—probably because the Adobe tools I use, After Effects and Lightroom, are shining beacons of awesomeness within the company. I’m quite the opposite of an Adobe hater. So seeing After Effects sprout a feature we’ve been anticipating for a decade, only to have it tie users to specific, high-end hardware, feels a bit like seeing a good friend make a bad life decision.

As more and more of us use laptops as our primary machines, and as those laptops are getting smaller and lighter rather than necessarily more powerful, Autodesk is heading in the right direction, and Adobe is not. This, to me, was the big surprise of the post-production announcements at NAB 2012.

Want to know how I rendered these sample movies? I tried doing it on my mini-render farm of CPU-only machines, but it took days (of my laptop being too hot to touch) to produce unacceptable results. Smooth motion blur, fuzzy shadows, diffracted reflections and depth of field require a lot of samples (controlled by the anti-aliasing setting), and if I turned up the quality enough to stop seeing noise (for the iPhone, that was 14), those renders would still be going today. So I sent the project files to a friend with a CUDA GPU. A friend who happens to work at Adobe.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could do that too?

No, seriously.

Along with CS6, Adobe unveiled Creative Cloud, which includes subscription pricing for the Creative Suite applications. But is that really what After Effects power-users need from “the cloud?” What if that subscription also gave me access to a cloud-based render farm that is constantly Backblaze-syncing with my work directories and is ready to instantaneously render my 1,000-frame animation on 1,000 virtual machines at the push of a button?

Then what if Adobe removed the button?

It used to be my dream that After Effects would speculatively render my work in the background, using every ounce of my computer’s processing power. Now I want the same thing, but with Adobe supplying the processors. That would be worth a subscription fee.

The “big iron” days are over. Simplicity is the new powerful. Fast is the new good. The computer is the new hardest working guy in the room. Except it’s no longer in the room.

I can’t wait for my favorite creative software of all time to realize that.

Sorry for the long radio silence. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

In early April I traveled to Montreal to direct a Canadian Lysol commercial for Euro RSCG NY. If you live in Canada and have tried to view a web video recently, you may have already been forced to watch it. When I get my director’s cut done, I’ll post it. We shot on the Alexa, and it marked my first opportunity to direct for Bodega, a production company run by some old friends with whom I’m delighted to be working.

I then flew directly to Toronto to help my friend Scott Stewart with a very exciting new project. Scott was invited to direct the pilot of a new Syfy series called Defiance. The show, developed simultaneously with a Massively Multiplayer Online game from Trion Worlds, was so enormous in scope that Scott lobbied for me to be brought on as “Additional Units Producer.” Terminology in TV is a little different than in features, but the role was very similar to my second unit directing duties on The Spirit. For just over four weeks I shadowed Scott with my mini “splinter unit” crew, picking up inserts and sometimes even entire scenes of this epic show. Scott and his cinematographer Attila Szalay chose the Epic for the pilot, although one of our three camera bodies was a Scarlet. We almost never cared which was which. I met some amazing new friends, learned a ton, and, as you may have noticed, didn’t have much time for Twitter or blogging.

My sudden streak of back-to-back work overlapped with NAB and its aftermath, leaving some to speculate that my silence on certain camera and other filmmaking tech announcements held some portent. People were drawing all sorts of conclusions, none of which were true. Maybe I was testing a new camera and sworn to secrecy? Maybe I was snubbing certain tech intentionally?

The only accurate conclusion, and the one that seemed most obvious to me, was one at which no one arrived:

This is not a camera blog.

There are plenty of wonderful blogs out there that exhaustively and reliably cover every new camera, every new piece of filmmaking tech. You read them every day, and so do I. We can all be grateful for them. But I hope you see a difference between those sites and this one.

This difference must not be as obvious to some as it is to me. I’m always amused when I receive a kind message to the effect of “I can’t wait for you to review this new camera!” Looking back through the archives, I don’t believe I’ve ever “reviewed” a camera.

I do write a lot about cameras. I also write about screenwriting, post-production, and other filmmaking things. Sometimes I write about tasty beverages. This blog is not my work. It’s a reflection of my work. It’s me learning out loud. And I’m always thrilled and honored when you enjoy it.

From Canon:

With an 18.1-megapixel full-frame 24mm x 36mm Canon CMOS sensor, the camera records 8-bit 4:2:2 Motion JPEG 4K video to the camera’s CF memory card at 24 frames-per-second.

Well that’s one way to create a sharp 1080p image.

Note this bit:

4K video is captured by an approximately APS-H-sized portion of the full image sensor, while [1080p] video can be captured in the user’s choice of two different imaging formats… …the full 36mm width of the CMOS sensor… [or] An optional Super 35 crop.

More confusing, imperfect, and expensive options for making beautiful images. With the odd trade-offs in functionality between cinema offerings from two different internal divisions, Canon is starting to remind me of that scene in Bridesmaides where Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne keep grabbing the microphone from each other.

For shooting video, I’ve set up every Canon HDSLR I’ve owned the same way since the very beginning, and the 5D Mark III is no different.

• Start with the Neutral Picture Style
• Set Sharpness to zero—all the way to the left
• Set Contrast all the way to the left
• Set Saturation two notches to the left

That’s it. That’s Prolost Flat—the Picture Style of choice for Vincent Laforet, Philip Bloom, Jason Wingrove, and many others.

Prolost Flat FAQ

How did you come to these settings? How do you know they’re right?

They’re not “right,” they’re just good. Prolost Flat has been tested the only way I care about—by shooting stuff and trying to make it look great.

What about [some other custom picture style]?

It’s probably great. But it is possible to over-think this stuff, and there is such a thing as too flat.

All we’re trying to do here is bring back everything the camera has to offer in an easy-to-color-correct package. To put it another way, what you want from a flat profile is to eliminate the contrast s-curve that the most Picture Styles bake into the footage. Some custom Picture Styles go so far beyond “flat” that they actually invert this curve. This not only makes the image harder to grade, it can cause quantizing and compression artifacts to show up right in the middle of your tonal range, where they’re most noticeable.

What about log? Isn’t log the best transfer function for grading?

Yes. And in particular, Technicolor CineStyle is very nice. If you like it too, please do use it. It’s great.

But without meaning any disrespect to the folks at Technicolor, there’s one big reason why you might not want to use their Picture Style. Prolost Flat can be set up in seconds on any Canon HDSLR, in the field, without any cables, computers, or downloads. What if your camera dies on a remote shoot and you rent a replacement? Or a friend shows up with his 7D and offers it as a B camera? Or you need to work with footage from another crew? Prolost Flat is always available and works on ever Canon HDSLR. It’s easy to set up and you can coach someone through the process over the phone, or even in a text message.

I’ve heard a lot of people use Prolost Flat, but bump up the sharpness a bit. Canon HDSLR video is so soft, isn’t a little sharpening a good idea?

Yes. But not in camera. Never use in-camera sharpening.

• It tends to be of a poorer quality than what you can do in post.
• It’s very difficult to monitor and set up accurately in the field. What looks good on a portable LCD might look hideous back in the grading suite in your calibrated, 1080p display.
• Different scenes can benefit from amounts of sharpening. What worked on the low-contrast charts at your test bench might create horribly over-sharpened results with a high-contrast exterior shot.
• Baking sharpening into your footage is as permanent as a bad tattoo. On your face. Better to give yourself the option to dial it in later, under controlled circumstances, using the amazing array of powerful post-production tools available.
• Different output media require different amounts of sharpening. The sharpening you use for a YouTube upload will be different than what you want for a broadcast master, which will be different than a Blu-ray master.

In the slideshow below, you can see one example of sharpening using the After Effects Unsharp Mask effect, with an Amount of 120 and a Radius of 1.1. You can download full-res comparison frames here.

But doesn’t in-camera sharpening happen before compression? If I’m sharpening in post, aren’t I also sharpening and enhancing compression and noise?

Yes. But in-camera sharpening is such a blunt instrument that even its privileged position of operating prior to compression can’t save it.

A light pass of noise reduction from something like Magic bullet Denoiser II not only cleans up some compression artifacts, it also can promote your 8-bit footage to higher color fidelity by interpolating new, high-bit-depth pixels. So your HDSLR processing pipeline should look like this:

1. In a 16 or 32bpc environment…
2. Reduce noise
3. Visual effects, if any
4. Color correct
5. Sharpen
6. Add back some noise/grain to taste
7. Titles or graphics, if any

Sharpening is a perceptual exercise. You want to sharpen what the viewer sees. So its critical that sharpening be performed after color correction.

Everyone says the 5D Mark III’s video is even softer than the Mark II’s. Maybe just a little in-camera sharpening?

No. The Mark III’s softness is simply the lack of artificial sharpness that came from the aliasing that plagued the 5D Mark II. This means that the footage takes sharpening in post even better than 5D Mark II footage, because there are fewer inherent artifacts to bring out.

It would be nice if the 5D Mark III resolved more detail than it does (there is plenty of room for improvement there), but adding in-camera sharpening won’t make that dream a reality. It only adds permanent, ugly artifacts to your image.

Cool. I’m just going to bump up the sharpening by one tick. Sorry.

Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off with a hacked GH2?

One last strike against in-camera sharpening: It limits your ability to add additional sharpening in post. You don’t want to sharpen sharpening artifacts. You can see in the below comparison how even one notch of Sharpness adds ringing artifacts that will make sharpening in post problematic. These are 1:1 crops—you can download an archive of the full-res frames here.

I’m just a shooter and don’t always have control over what happens to my footage. I like to add sharpness so my clients don’t complain about soft footage. My children need wine!

You might also want to re-think shooting flat then. Prolost Flat is designed to be graded—and specifically, graded underneath an s-curve. If you’re not going to be around to see this done properly, you might not be pleased with how your footage winds up looking in the final conform.

What about Highlight Tone Priority?

Highlight Tone Priority is an optional method Canon uses to capture more highlight detail by “pushing” the ISO one stop. The result is one extra stop of highlight detail (roughly), coupled with one extra stop’s worth of noise (also roughly).

When I first posted about Prolost Flat, I recommended using HTP for bright scenes with difficult highlights. But since then, I’ve completely stopped using it. The benefits don’t tend to outweigh the risks. And by “risks,” I mean that you might leave HTP on and shoot a bunch of raw stills, and wonder why they don’t look as nice as they should in Lightroom. Unlike other settings discussed here, HTP does affect raw stills. Oops.

Speaking of which, what happens if I leave my HDSLR set to Prolost Flat when I shoot stills?

JPEG shots and the embedded JPEG preview in raw files (what you see on the camera’s LCD when chimping) will be created using the Picture Style. But of course, the actual image date in the raw file is unaffected. And of course you’re shooting raw, right?

I leave my cameras in Prolost Flat all the time, even for stills. If find that the flat preview image gives me a better sense of the actual raw “negative” that I’m capturing. The only thing you have to get used to is that it’s easy to underexpose slightly if you judge exposure by the preview image, as the Prolost Flat preview looks a touch brighter than most default raw processing.

What’s the right s-curve to use?

The one that looks best to you. All I’ll suggest is that you use the same one from shot to shot.

You can watch me setting up some s-curves and grading under them in my Colorista II tutorials and my demonstration of color correcting food photography.

Share this article using the url prolost.com/flat

They did what to my instathingy?

Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 billion. A lot of Instagram users are worried about what will become of the service they love.

The free service that they somehow thought would never go away or change. I guess they never read this article.

I may not have $400 million in my pocket, but I’m truly proud to work with a great company called Red Giant that has a crazy business model: They make something they hope you’ll love, sell it to you at fair price, and support it like crazy.

Plastic Bullet for iOS is on sale today for ¢99.

I get the sense that Adobe is thinking a lot about tablets and Photography. They’ve released Photoshop Touch for iPad, as well as Carousel Revel, which is like a cloud-based Lightroom-light that syncs across mobile and desktop platforms.

Third-party Lightroom users have also tried to bolster their own photo management experience by creating companion mobile apps. LRPAD turns your iPad into a touch-based control surface for Lightroom’s Develop module, and Photosmith acts as an in-the-field pre-processing companion to Lightroom, allowing you to begin sorting, tagging, and rating photos even before adding them to your Catalog back home.

I’ve tried most of these apps, and while each of them seems logical and desirable on the surface, in actual use, none of them turn out to be what I actually want from a tablet-based augmentation of my already awesome Lightroom experience.

Picture Me at the DMV

The work I do with Lightroom on my 27” display, at my comfortable desk, a cup of something delicious at my side, leaves little to be desired. I’m not that anxious to tweak develop settings on an iPhone screen, or do a bunch of metadata work in a cafe somewhere as a prelude to importing. How many 5D Mark III shots can I really import into my 64GB iPad? How fast will that process be? Whatever the efficiencies of organizing on-the-go might be, they seem more than obviated by the exponential increase in speed and efficiency I’ll have at home on my optimized system.

What I want from a mobile Lightroom companion is a way to utilize whatever idle time I might have here and there for productive work on my main Lightroom Catalog. I don’t want to send new photos to it. I don’t want to adjust exposure and color temperature. I just want to do what I never seem to have enough time to do at home: housekeeping.

Imagine standing in line at the DMV and using that time to add keywords to your photos from yesterday’s shoot, rather than playing Angry Birds.

Imagine you find yourself standing at a spot where you’d once taken a great shot. You whip out your phone, search for that photo in your Lightroom Catalog, and add your current GPS coordinates to the metadata with one tap.

Imagine having your entire Lightroom Catalog available for browsing and search wherever you are. You’re at brunch with your Mother-in-law and she asks you about that great photo of her and her grandson you made recently. You show her your phone and say “This one?” When she identifies it, you add it to a new Collection called “To Print For Mom” right then and there.

When I’m sitting in front of my big, beautiful iMac screen, I usually want to spend my time developing my photos, making them look their best. Not sorting, deleting bad shots, adding keywords, and organizing them into albums. But when I’m stuck somewhere with my phone or iPad and little to do, that’s exactly the kind of busy work I’d love to be able to pick away at.

But That’s Crazy

No, it’s not.

If there’s anything Adobe’s pushing harder than tablets these days, it’s their Creative Cloud thingy. Haven’t heard of it? That’s because it’s not all that useful. Yet.

My Lightroom Catalog, which manages 11 years of active digital photography and over 130,000 shots, is 1.6 GB. That’s just the Catalog—not the photos. 1.6 GB of thumbnails and metadata. Every night this file gets backed up to a local hard drive and to Backblaze (which is unquestionably the best cloud backup solution for photographers—seriously, do it). Some people even keep their Lightroom Catalog file on Dropbox. Even my gargantuan file would fit with the 2GB that Dropbox offers for free.

Although a Lightroom Catalog appears to be one megalithic file, it is actually a package containing many smaller sub-files, few of which are likely to be changed in a typical editing session. This means that it can be synced or backed-up incrementally, for much smaller data transfer rates.

What I imagine Adobe could do to facilitate my dream of accessing my Lightroom Catalog everywhere, is implement a Backblaze-like trickle-up syncing system. It would take a while to complete at first, working in the background whenever Lightroom was open. But after that initial sync, further updates would be relatively painless. Lightroom could warn me on quit if it wasn’t done syncing my changes, giving me the option to let it finish silently in the background before terminating.

Of course, Lightroom is only syncing my Catalog file itself, not the huge camera-original files. But along with the folders, filenames and metadata, it would also upload a small thumbnail file, to facilitate my mobile browsing.

The uploading would not be the hard part. As with any such system, the tricky aspect might be the syncing. Lightroom would have to be able to combine my local changes with those made via the mobile companion app, and possibly provide a UI for resolving sync conflicts.

Not so fun, but totally worth it. Lightroom would not only be providing its users with an excellent off-site backup plan for their valuable Catalog files, it would be giving them a truly useful mobile workflow that could transform spare moments into better photo organization.

People pay money for those kinds of things.

Busy Work is Welcome When You’re Not Busy

At The Orphanage, there was a brief period when we used a node-based compositing system that wasn’t Nuke. This application did not seem to separate its rendering threads from its UI processes, so compositors could not move or organize their nodes while waiting for their images to update. The result was that their node trees were a spaghetti-like mess all the time.

This wasn’t because the app was slow, it was simply human nature. When the app is done processing a frame, the artist sees the result of their last adjustment, and what they want most to do right then is respond to that by making another creative tweak. There seemed never to be a good time to pause and clean house.

Nuke, on the other hand, allows the artist to freely move nodes around while the image is updating. Again, Nuke is fast, so we’re not talking about a huge amount of time here—just hundreds of brief little windows of time during a day where tidying up a node tree is so easy to do that, well, why not? There’s not much else to do while waiting that few seconds for the frame to update. Even our messiest compositors became compulsive neatniks in Nuke.

This is how I feel when sitting at Lightroom. Why should be I tagging when I can be brushing in local exposure adjustments? But catch me at the dentist’s office and heck yeah, I’d rather spend that time tidying up my Catalog than aiming enraged avifauna.

The slogan of Adobe’s Creative Cloud initiative is “Everything you need, everywhere you work.” Sounds great Adobe. Let’s have it.

Dan Chung posted some camera-original clips from his new 5D Mark III. I grabbed one and did a quick color correction. 

• Magic Bullet Denoiser II at default settings
• Three passes of Colorista II

To my eye, in this highy subjective and non-conclusive test, the footage holds up better under extreme adjustments than that of the 5D Mark II.

Shot with a production 5D mkIII in 1080/24P, 24-105mm f4L, 5000ISO , Standard picture style, regular Noise reducion.

My last post focussed on some concerns and questions I had about the Digital Bolex Kickstarter campaign. Despite stating numerous times that “I really want these guys to win,” I didn’t spend much time talking about what I liked about their project—and have thus unwittingly been cast as a vicarious mouthpiece for some far more negative appraisers than myself.

I could have mentioned that I appreciate any camera concept that sets out to capture the highest-quality image and bring it home unadulterated. I could have pointed out the planned on-board XLR inputs and metal construction. I could have talked up the compact size, or the affordable price. I could have cast these positives against the embarrassing backdrop of expensive, brick-shaped cameras made of cheap plastic that hammer your footage into an over-compressed pulp before committing it to a CF card, offered by camera companies with high-end markets to protect.

But all that stuff now pales against my new favorite thing about the Digital Bolex: how its creators reacted to my blog post.

Three days after launching their campaign, which funded successfully in less than 24 hours and has now well exceeded its outside target of $250,000, who do the Digital Bolex creators want to talk to? The grumpy guy who posted a bunch of concerns and tough questions.

Elle was a good sport about my post right away on Twitter, but Joe also sought me out via the Prolost contact form. We had a delightful chat this morning via phone. Joe specifically wants to connect with filmmakers who have reasonable concerns. He sees thoughtful critique as an opportunity, not an attack.

You know, like all our favorite camera makers.

Joe is so mellow in the Kickstarter video that I was immediately taken aback by how enthusiastic and passionate he was on the phone. He and his partners have an idea that seems so simple to them that he’s shocked they’re (nearly) the only ones doing it. Here’s some of what we talked about:

• The reason Joe feels they can make this camera at the price they’ve set is that it is the simplest possible digital camera—just a sensor and a card slot, with the bare minimum of electronics in between. He points out rightly that the D16 needs to do far less than any of the many far less expensive video cameras out there. A $200 flip camera requires more processing power than what they’ve envisioned, because it needs to debayer, color-space-convert, and compress the footage in real time.

• Joe harkened back to the days of the original Bolex and other 16mm film cameras, when the camera “didn’t affect the image quality at all, it just carried the film.” “[The Digital Bolex] is just the carrier between the sensor and the card.”

• Joe’s other passion is about on-set monitoring and the ubiquitous flip-out LCD panel on digital video cameras. He hates them—or rather, hates that they’ve taken the trust away from the director/cinematographer relationship. The director sees the ugly little image and thinks that’s what their movie is going to look like, instead of listening to the DP. “That little LCD has robbed the independent film industry of cinematography.”

• If there’s one criticism Joe’s sick of hearing, it’s “If Red couldn’t do it, how can these guys?”—a chorus of which I must confess to being a part. Of course, the situation is more nuanced than that. Red was aiming for an integrated, electronic zoom lens at that price point, as well as all the powerful internal computing horsepower required to compress Redcode footage.

  Ultimately, it seems clear to me that Red chose not to pursue the 3K Scarlet rather than “failed” to deliver it. “We recently came to the conclusion that, indeed, we cater to the professional market,” wrote Jim Jannard. “We want to build the best tools possible for those that want to ‘man up.’ Life is short and the clock is ticking.”

• Amazingly, Joe expressed the same sentiment, but carried it in a much different direction: “You only have so much time in this life,” he said to me. “I want to spend mine having fun.” I can think of no better expression of the difference between Digital Bolex’s lofty camera promises and Red’s.

• They’re not kids building these cameras in a garage. They have manufacturing partners who know how to bring camera stuff to market.

• I asked Joe about the 4:4:4 descriptor on their site. He said it was pulled directly from Kodak’s documentation of the CCD sensor, and that he realizes it’s misleading in the context of a raw workflow.

• Joe has a background in image software and is very interested in debayering techniques. He’s researching how to provide the best quality 1:1 2K RGB renderings of the D16’s raw DNG files. Now that they’ve hit the $250K mark, raw processing software is a part of what they plan on delivering to their backers.

• But the Digital Bolex also lists JPEG and TIFF output, so real-time debayering is in the plans. Joe estimates that a high-quality JPEG frame could be about 1/3 the size of a DNG frame.

Unlike some seem to, I get no joy from fearing the worst about a project like this. I wasn’t very happy about writing Tuesday’s post, and while most of you got it, the easily-inferred negativity that I tried to dampen with honest optimism was enough to bring the internet to my door, resulting in my first opportunity in months to delete a couple of nasty comments.

Now I’m glad I wrote what I did though, because, as a result, I have a new friend who makes cameras. Thanks for taking the time Joe, and a hearty congratulation and best of luck to you and the Digital Bolex team. Maybe some of my readers will ask themselves the same question I posed to myself: In your short time on this Earth, would you rather be a pessimist and be proven right? Or an optimist who’s occasionally wrong?

My inbox this morning was crammed with mentions of a new Kickstarter campaign for a 2K digital cinema camera called, with the blessing of the nominal company, the Digital Bolex. Philip Bloom has done a terrific job of summing up the camera’s specs and raison d’être in a blog post provocatively titled The Digital Bolex D16. Raw 2K for less than a cost of a 5Dmk3?. He’s even got an audio interview with the creators, Joe Rubinstein and Elle Schneider.

In the time it’s taken me to retrieve coffee and fight my way through the rain to my desk, the campaign has funded—but there are still open pledge spots at the $2,500 mark, which earns you a first-run D16 for $800 less than the planned retail price. Less than 24 hours after launching their campaign, the Digital Bolex is a success. Hooray! Right?

I hope so. But color me… skeptimistic.

Like Philip, I also have fond memories of shooting 16mm film with a Bolex. And I can see where Elle and Joe are coming from with their design philosophy:

There is no camera on the market that offers affordable RAW quality to consumers and independent filmmakers. The Digital Bolex will mean filmmakers who prefer an uncompressed and “film like” look won’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve that. Isn’t it time for the digital generation to have image quality as good as our parents had?

Aren’t these two just adorkable? I desperately want them to succeed.

But after watching the well-financed and well-intentioned Red Digital Cinema company struggle to deliver on their promises, and abandon the “3K for $3K” design/price-point of their Scarlet camera, one has to wonder if these flmmakers-turned-cameramakers have any idea of the challenges they’re about to face.

I wish no ill on anyone. I really want these guys to win. But there are a few things that give me pause as I consider whether to send these kids my heard-earned money.

• “Raw” is just a word, it’s not an acronym. So you don’t put it in all caps. Don’t you want to buy a camera made by someone who knows that? No? Just me?
• The spec sheet lists the color depth of the files as “12 bit — 4:4:4”. But the accepted understanding of a bayer-pattern sensor is that it does not deliver 4:4:4 color at its native resolution.
• That’s important. Take a nice, sharp, raw photo with your DSLR, and process it with your favorite software, such as the awesome new Lightroom 4. Now crop a 1:1 1920x1080 window out of the middle of it. Does the image quality thrill you? There’s more to Red’s 4K and 5K specs than simple pixel-count boasting and dreams of 4K presentation. Oversampling is a good thing. The 3K scarlet was as low as Red was willing to go, I imagine in part because 3K bayer downsamples to a nice, clean 1920x1080. The Canon C300 uses a 4K sensor to provide full 4:4:4 color sampling at HD resolution, even if it offers no way to get that color sampling fidelity out of the casing.
• Raw is big. The D16 is said to shoot uncompressed Cinema DNG frames of 2–3 MB each (which seems small to me) to dual CF cards. If each of those is 32 GB, that’s about 18 minutes of recording time per reload, on $130 worth of media at today’s prices.
• Raw requires transcoding. When you get home with your CF cards full of footage, you’ll be processing it with some as-yet-unknown software for a good long time before you can work with it, or even review it. I suppose you could think of this as reminiscent of sending your 16mm rolls to the lab. Except you’re the lab.
• All this adds up to a huge data footprint for images that might not be as mythologically “film like” as one would hope. For me, personally—and you are welcome to disagree, as this is a subjective as it gets—uncompressed 2K bayer is precisely the “sour spot” of digital cinema; a data-heavy, workflow-intensive image that won’t survive much pixel-peeping.
• Monitoring and focus could be an issue. The cute little viewfinder is planned to be only 320x240. Video out is also SD. HD-SDI is said to be offered “in [a] separate unit.”
• We’ve had a fun ride together over the past few years working out for ourselves what a “film like” look means to us and to an audience. Is it uncompressed 2K frames? Or is it soft, rolled-off highlights? Maybe it’s 35mm depth of field characteristics. Or maybe it’s just where you put the camera.
• Or maybe part of the new “film look” is “Look, I’m editing my film on my MacBook Air on the ride home from the shoot, because I shot to a mildly-compressed codec that’s compatible with my editing software.”
• But don’t discount 16mm sensor size. Two years ago, a film shot on Super 16 won the Best Picture Oscar—and was nominated for Cinematography, where it lost to a movie shot on 2/3” digital cameras.
• This camera almost already exists in the form of the A-Cam dll from Ikonoskop, a Swedish 16mm camera manufacturer. You can order one now for €7,700 ($10,000 US). It’s interesting that the Digital Bolex team, in celebrating the legacy of one European 16mm camera maker, is effectively claiming the ability to beat another at the digital game.

I Worry Because I Care

I’ve funded a few Kickstarter campaigns, and it’s never lost on me that It’s an odd (but kind of exciting) thing to send a stranger your money in the hopes that they’ll send you a thing sometime in the future. Joe and Elle remind me of another breakout Kickstarter project, the PID-Controlled Espresso Machine. Two adorable, scruffy guys promise something that seems too good to be true—a commercial-quality, temperature- and pressure-regulated espresso machine for a $200 pledge.

For comparison, my dual-boiler, temperature-controlled espresso machine costs $2,000 today. I recently had the PID unit replaced, and the part cost alone was over $300.

These guys were hoping for $20,000. They funded successfully—at $369,569.

They win! Right?

Well another way of looking at that is they have $370,000 of other people’s money, and less than a year to deliver 1,300 commercial-quality espresso machines to eager backers, at a price-point that no one in the coffee industry has ever touched. Have they promised the impossible?

What do they do when they hit a snag? When something costs more than they thought? When life gets in the way? When they realize they just volunteered to work their asses off for a year for a combined salary of whatever profit they can scrape from that investment that thousands of people have made?

If responsible Italians (or in my case, Spaniards) need to charge upwards of $1,500 for an burly espresso machine, and trusty Swedes need to charge $10,000 for a digital 16mm camera, one has to ask: Do scruffy hipsters know something that responsible Italians and trusty Swedes do not?

What a Grumpy Gus I am (did I mention it’s raining?). Why can’t I just be happy for these guys? Look at their adorable glasses! Every industry needs a shake-up now and then, someone to come in with a fresh perspective and no entrenched interests. Remember “Here’s to the crazy ones?”

I worry because I care. I want it to work out, I really do. Count me in for a dollar.

Check out the Digital Bolex Kickstarter page. Follow @digitalbolex on Twitter. And don’t miss the follow-up.

From the Writing Kit Blog:

Today I’m excited to announce Fountain support in Writing Kit 3.2. You can now open, edit, navigate, and preview Fountain screenplays right within the app.

This is exactly the kind of thing John and I hoped would start happening, and it’s happening fast.

What you set up with the inciting incident…

The simplest way to begin screenwriting with Fountain is to open any text editor and start typing something that looks like a screenplay. You can then send that file to the free Screenplain web app to turn it into styled HTML, or a Final Draft file. You could also import the file into Fade In or a growing number of screenplay apps that support Fountain. Soon you’ll also be able to use Highland to convert a Fountain file directly to a printable PDF.

But if you’re just getting started with Fountain, you may like some assurance that your text is being interpreted correctly. And even a seasoned Fountain writer could benefit from a bit of WYSIWYG.

Marked for The Kill

Enter Marked. As I’ve mentioned, Marked is a simple and powerful HTML preview app for writers using the popular Markdown syntax that inspired Fountain. Marked is flexible enough to be configured to use other syntaxes—so Marked, combined with the Screenplain engine and some custom CSS, becomes a live preview tool for writing in Fountain. Use whatever text editor you like. Every time you save, Marked will update, showing you what your screenplay will look like.

Click to enlarge. Don’t make me say it for all of them.

Simple enough, and a great way to get used to working with Fountain. And there are some nice perks to Marked, such as the navigation pop-up that shows you each of your Scene Headings in a menu. That feature, while handy, suffers from a common screenwriting software pitfall: Scene Headings are often not a very useful way to navigate a script, as they don’t necessarily line up with what we think of as the beginnings of actual “scenes.” What you or I might consider a single “scene” might contain several Scene Headings.

Outliners

Organization and structure are such an important issues that I made sure Fountain had some provision for supporting them. Fountain’s Sections are invisible, hierarchical markers that you can use to demarcate the structural points of your story—or anything else you like. Synopses allow you to annotate a Section—or a Scene Heading—with non-printing descriptive text.

You can add Sections and Synopses to your Fountain screenplay as you work, or as a part of rewriting. You can also begin the writing process with them. You can use them to denote scenes, sequences, act breaks, or whatever is helpful to your writing process.

Every writer is different, but most utilize some method of outlining their story—usually in a completely different app, or in no app at all (3x5 notecards are a popular meatspace method). My problem with those techniques is that they’re not writing. When I’m several days into the road trip of my story, those disconnected outlines feel like a map locked in the glove compartment of the car we decided not to take.

Fountain fixes the disconnect between the outlining and writing process. You can begin your outline as a text file using Sections and Synopses, and then seamlessly fill in bits of the actual screenplay as they come to you. All without your hands ever leaving the keyboard, all in whatever text app you prefer, on whichever platform.

That last bit is important: Although you may not see yourself writing an entire screenplay, or even a scene, on a tiny device such as your phone (yet), I bet you could imagine jotting down an idea for an outline there.

Sections and Synopses: The Syntax

A Section in Marked is exactly like a Header in Markdown: you simply precede it with any number of pound signs. The more pound signs, the more “nested” the Section:

Synopses follow Sections or Scene Headings and begin with a single equals sign.

Screenplain and Marked will display your Sections and Synopses in HTML, using a lovely style sheet created by Jonathan Poritsky. Of course, they are not meant to be included in printed output, so Screenplain ignores them when creating a Final Draft file, as will Highland. But seeing them while you write is nice, and reminiscent of Movie Magic Screenwriter’s integrated outlining features.

And that navigational pop-up in Marked? It displays your Sections, indented according to hierarchy, and allows you to navigate by them. Scene Headers are still there as well, nested below Sections.

This behavior is also available in some Markdown editors. MultiMarkdown Composer, for example, displays your headers as a live, nested Table Of Contents on a side panel.

Writing Kit for iOS also has this Header-based navigation built in.

To demonstrate how an outline might look in Fountain using Marked, I whipped up a quick outline of Die Hard using only Sections and Synopses. Even in plain text, this document is readable and clear. In MMD Composer, the structure is navigable via the TOC panel on the left. And in Marked, the outline is presented in a clean, attractive layout.

And here’s what it would look like if Jeb Stuart had started writing his amazing screenplay right within this hypothetical outline:

If you’re the kind of writer who likes to work with a general-purpose structural guideline, Fountain’s Sections and Synopses are perfect for you. Much to the chagrin of seasoned writers everywhere, you can begin your writing with a template. Here’s the well-known Save The Cat beat sheet in Fountain format:

Or maybe you’re the anti-structuralist who poo-poos “templates” and even rejects the classic three-act structure. You can still use Sections as simple bookmarks to mark important beats and make navigation easier.

Story Arch

…you must pay off at the climax.

Sometimes, when writing, I feel that my story is too unwieldy to grapple with. It’s composed of thousands of tiny details, and yet they must all add up to a singular experience that carries the audience on an emotional journey. I like what the current Wikipedia entry has to say about the architectural innovation known as the arch:

An arch requires all of its elements to hold it together, raising the question of how an arch is constructed.

Writers, too, know this feeling.

Of course, the answer in arch-building is to use a wooden frame, or a centring. You build the frame, and lay the stones over it. When you remove the frame, the stones remain in place. The shape of the frame defines the shape of the arch, but the frame itself is discarded, an now-useless artifact of the arch-building process. The arch, however, is more beautiful for the precision of the frame—and appears to hold itself together impossibly, an intoxicating combination of monumental might and graceful weightlessness.

Can you tell how I feel about outlining my writing?

Marked for The Law

I hope this exploration of Fountain’s outlining features sparks some ideas for how you might begin putting Fountain to use. And I hope it’s clear that neither I nor Fountain are trying to prescribe any particular workflow or writing style. Quite the contrary—Fountian is designed to be flexible enough to support any screenwriter’s habits.

Marked is available for OS X on the App Store. Download links and installation instructions for Screenplain can be found on Jonathan Poritsky’s blog.

Image courtesy fxphd.com

You probably saw this one coming. I just pre-ordered a Canon 5D Mark III from Amazon. Here’s why.

A Focus on Photography

I shoot a lot of stills with my 5D Mark II. It’s a great camera. But it’s a camera out of balance. The sensor can work in light so low that the autofocus system, inherited from the original 5D, can’t keep up. The 5D Mark II today is still a great camera—but its autofocus technology is six years old!

The 5D Mark III, on the other hand, arrives with Canon’s most recent and potentially most awesome autofocus system to date, the same one as the highly anticipated 1D X.

This plus the 6fps burst speed means the next time I’m chasing three-year-olds around Oakland with a fast 50, I hope I’m using the 5D Mark III.

Medium Megapixels

Speaking of shooting stills, I’m thrilled at the restraint that Canon showed in the 5D Mark III’s megapixel count. It’s barely bumped from the Mark II, meaning that all the advancements in sensor tech translate directly into reduced noise.

I’m not a resolution fetishist, and I still kinda miss the enormous, velvety-smooth pixels from my original 5D. So my hopes are high that Canon’s restraint reflects well in the 5D Mark III’s stills.

Moiré? Significantly Less Ré.

As much as I love shooting stills, video is a huge part of my purchasing decision. For the first time, Canon’s marketing directly addresses the HDSLR community’s biggest gripe about EOS video: the aliasing/moiré artifacts caused by the hasty downsampling off the sensor. The sample films we’ve seen so far back up Canon’s claim that the 5D Mark III features a dramatic reduction in these artifacts.

DPReview had this to say:

Although at first glance the video specifications of the 5D Mark III might look very similar to those of the 5D II, the results should be greatly improved. From our limited use, the new sensor shows much less of the rolling-shutter effect that was very apparent with fast movement on the Mark II. The more powerful Digic 5+ processor is also able to reduce moire artifacts in videos, giving cleaner output.

If this doesn’t turn out to be true, I can always send the 5D Mark III back. Pre-ordering now gives me that option. But I’m sure long before it shows up at my door, we’ll all be treated to endless “short films about charts” showing just how the Mark III behaves itself around tiny lines. I just hope some are as good as this one.

Sound On

The 5D Mark III is the first EOS DSLR to feature a headphone jack for audio monitoring. Embarrassing, but true. This, combined with the manual audio level control, might save me from a dual-system audio setup on some shoots. When you’re as lazy as I am, that’s a good thing.

The other thing that I like about Canon’s commitment to audio is the touch-sensitive feature of the rear dial. You can silently adjust audio levels while recording.

HD Out

Although the 5D Mark III’s HDMI out is not a clean, capturable 1080p, it is HD, which is not the case with its predecessor. This should make catching focus on my 5” Marshall LCD easier.

This is a real concern, by the way. One of the sneaky reasons it’s possible to manually focus your HDSLR off the tiny rear LCD screen is the very line-skipping that the Mark III allegedly does away with. The artificial sharpness of the poorly-sampled video we’ve grown accustomed to from our EOS HDSLRs causes in-focus detail to “pop” into crisp relief, acting as a kind of peaking focus assist. Unfortunately, this effect is permanently burned into your footage. If the 5D Mark III truly addresses the downsampling/moiré issue as Canon claims, the downside may well be that we’ll find it even harder to keep our crazy-shallow DOF shots in focus. An EVF or external LCD may go from a nicety to a necessity.

60p

Full-frame slowmo. Hopefully with less ré.

Last Longer

Again, quoting from DPReview:

The camera is also happy to record for its maximum 29:59 minutes without overheating risks in normal working temperatures and can split a single clip across multiple files so that it isn’t impeded by the 4GB file limit of the FAT 32 file system.

My Pants Still Fit

All of my existing support gear for my 5D Mark II and 7D will work beautifully with the 5D Mark III, including my batteries and chargers. No need to upgrade my Redrock Micro shoulder rig or my various other camera support gear.

Bigger is More-er

I’ve long characterized the 5D Mark II as the video DSLR that makes up for its technical shortcomings with gobs of sex appeal. Though I love so very much about the Canon C300, its Super 35 sensor is, you know, “only” as big as motion picture film. Once you get a taste for the sultry, soft depth-of-field control possible with a full-frame sensor, it’s hard to go back.

I don’t know about you, but when I feel a $3,500 purchase dimishinging my desire to make a $16,000 one, I go with that feeling.

Canon 5D Mark II For Sale

Seriously. It’s still an amazing camera, and I’ll probably get decent money for it, so although I agree with those who lament that the Canon 5D Mark III is “overpriced,” I can’t exactly say that it’s “too expensive,” because, looking less at the price tag and more at the upgrade cost after selling both my 5D and my 7D, I just ordered one.

If you do the same, and go through these links (Amazon, B&H), you help support my hasty decision-making and encourage future Prolost blathering. And your earn my gratitude. Thanks!

Canon has shown restraint with the megapixels, which is nice. But they seem to have shown restraint everywhere else as well. Although the 61-point autofocus system (same one as the 1D X) is probably enough to get me to upgrade.

• 22.3 Megapixel, full-frame CMOS sensor
• 61-point AF with up to 41 cross-type AF points
• DIGIC 5+ processor
• Up to 6fps shooting speed
• ISO 100 to 25,600 standard, 50 to 102,400 with expansion
• HDR shooting in-camera
• Full HD Movie shooting with ALL-I or IPB compression
• 29mins 59sec clip length in Full HD Movie
• Timecode for HD Movie shooting
• Headphone port for audio monitoring
• Transparent LCD viewfinder with 100% coverage
• 8.11cm (3.2”), 1.04 million-pixel Clear View II LCD Screen
• EOS Integrated Cleaning System (EICS)
• CF and SD card slots
• Silent control touch-pad area
• Dual-Axis Electronic Level

What about video? From the product description (emphasis mine):

Full HD video recording is supported in multiple formats, including 1080/30p, 24p, 25p; 720/60p, 50p; 480/60p, 50p. While recording video, a 4GB automatic file partition is employed in order to gain longer continuous recording times, up to 29 minutes 59 seconds. Both All i-frame and IPB compressions are supported as well as the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec. Embedding the timecode is also possible…

Video performance is further enhanced with the ability to manually adjust your exposure settings and audio levels while recording. By employing Live View, you can view your recording on the LCD and make settings changes with a dedicated menu tab on the fly. The DIGIC 5+ processor also dramatically improves video response times and helps to reduce color artifacts, aberrations, and moiré.

Sounds good. We’ll have to see. The Verge writes (again, emphasis mine):

Unfortunately, there’s still no option for clean HDMI output (which allows the uncompressed video footage to be captured on an external recorder)—when we asked about this, Canon’s reps said “not yet.” However, it does sound like the HDMI signal output won’t downsample from 1080p to 480p when recording, thanks to the DIGIC 5+.

I know the lack of a clean HDMI out upsets a lot of people, but personally I’ve never been a fan of the outboard recorder workflow. The 5D Mark III’s updated autofocus for stills, 720p60, manual audio levels and headphone jack, and the promise of reduced moiré may not add up to “revolution: part 2,” but they may well be worth the upgrade for many.

The bummer for me is the lack of an articulated LCD, but I imagine this has to do with weatherproofing requirements.

More thoughtful analysis to come of course! And I’ll let you know when and if I pull the trigger and order one.

From the Red Giant blog:

• We’ve developed Magic Bullet Denoiser II from scratch (completely new code) to bring you the quality of Denoiser 1, but with more stability. Red Giant owns this code 100%—which means the product is not going anywhere.
• We have spent lots of time developing the default settings for Denoiser II to give you the best possible look as soon as you apply. There’s is always room to tweak setting, but often you won’t need to.
• Currently Denoiser II is only available for After Effects, but it will support multiple host apps in the future (read this FAQ for more info).
• Denoiser II is a Free Update for all Denoiser 1 and Magic Bullet Suite users. I repeat: If you already owned a license of Denoiser or bought the Magic Bullet Suite after Denoiser was discontinued, you get Denoiser II for FREE.

I use this on everything I shoot.

It’s Oscar time again, which means that one of my weird pet peeves is back in circulation. It comes in many variations, all centering around the idea that some film or person should win (or should have won) the coveted award.

A film that should have won didn’t, so that film was robbed. I can’t believe the Academy failed to recognize his performance.

Here’s the thing: The right films always win at the Oscars. Because the Oscars are a popularity contest. You should no more lament “incorrect” Oscar results than you should question who was awarded prom queen.

If you and your friends held a poll to choose your favorite beer, you wouldn’t ever think the results were “wrong”—they are what they are, just an amalgam of your tastes. Same thing if y’all got together voted on your favorite films of the year.

Now expand your circle of friends a bit and add some membership criteria, and you’ve got the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“Popularity contest” sounds harsh, but I don’t mean it that way. As far as I know, Academy members receive no instruction to choose the “correct” film for each award. They are simply invited to vote for their favorite. The Oscars are, essentially, an opportunity for the film industry to express their collective opinion about what they like.

Nominees are selected by individual branches of the Academy, but every member’s vote counts toward selecting a winner. Most of the Academy members are actors. So a handy rule of thumb when predicting Oscar winners is to ask yourself “Which film would a bunch of actors think had the best makeup? Or the best original music?”

Actors know movies well, and so they often make reasonable choices for Best Picture, Best Achievement in Screenwriting, and, of course, the performance categories. But when it comes to the more technical awards, their collective (and yes, this is a horrible generalization, which is why it is true) unfamiliarity means that often you can predict the results by replacing “best” with “most,” e.g. “Most Makeup,” “Most Visual Effects,” or “Most Sound Design.”

You’ll be even more accurate if you add “…in a film with good performances by actors who are well-liked by their peers.”

Often it seems that Oscars are awarded to the same kind of predictably Award-friendly films again and again. That the Academy’s choices aren’t that interesting. Another way of looking at a popular vote is that it represents an average opinion. And averages are never interesting.

Is there no hope for awarding Oscars to “the right” winner instead of “the most popular?” Yes, but you won’t see much of it on TV. The Scientific and Technical branch of the Academy, chaired by Visual Effects legend Richard Edlund, has a specific charter to award the creators of technological developments that move the film industry forward. Voting committee members are required to validate and back up their opinions about who should win, and each award comes with a detailed write-up on why the technology and its creators deserve to be recognized. The subcommittees, broken out by field, research each potential award carefully, and often bestow them simultaneously to an early pioneer as well as a more recent champion of a particular technique. You can apply for consideration for a “Sci-Tech” award, as they are called. If your competitor applies, you’ll be invited to throw your hat in as well. Even if you fail to apply, the Academy might still inform you that you’re being considered. It’s possible that your competitor’s application could trigger an investigation that results in an award for you, and maybe not for them.

In other words, the Sci-Tech awards are the only Oscars that, by definition, and to the best of a well-intentioned group’s ability, go to the right person. It is an honorable and time consuming process, one to which I am proud to have contributed a few times.

Am I saying that the Sci-Tech awards are paragons of untarnished virtue and the regular Oscars are a sham? Not at all. The Sci-Tech award process isn’t infallible. And the Oscars are fun, meaningful, and respectable. Just don’t watch them with any sense that there’s a right or wrong way for them to pan out. It’s not an evening of what’s right. It’s an evening of what’s most liked.

You can listen to the show at the SpotCast site, but really you should just subscribe in iTunes.

I very much enjoyed my chat with Ron and love that he’s taken on the task of this show. I like the way our episode turned out, and I hope you do too.

John August’s video demo of his new app Highland, for converting screenplays between Fountain, Final Draft, and PDF formats. It even lets you go from PDF to Fountain or FDX. In private beta now, Mac App store soon. Read more at John’s site.

Final Draft Inc. announced yesterday that they’ll be releasing Final Draft Reader for iPad next week. The company had already warned us that they were scaling back their iPad efforts from a full screenplay editing app to just a reader. It will be interesting to see what they’ve come up with.

There’s nothing new about reading FDX files, the native format of Final Draft, on an iPad. Screenwriter and Fountain co-creator John August has an excellent app for just that. FDX Reader is a must-have for any screenwriter, and a model of iPad beauty and simplicity. But it lacks annotation features, so there is room for Final Draft Reader—if FDX files and their embedded “scriptnotes” are exclusively the world you tread in.

But of course, that’s not the case for most filmmakers. Most screenplays are shared in PDF format, and that’s a very good thing.

A Thousand Screenplays in Your Pocket

Before the iPad was even announced, I dreamed of a better way of reading screenplays. The only real option I considered was the (now discontinued) Kindle DX, which could correctly display PDFs and cost $489.

So for this reason alone, the price of the iPad felt “pre spent” to me on the day of the announcement. I knew that there would be some way that the iPad would become the powerhouse document reader I’d dreamed of. And it did—but not right away.

It’s painfully obvious that the iPad is good for reading. Maybe not as good as a Kindle, but darn good. Reading screenplays, however, is more than just “reading”—it’s work. You’ve promised to give a friend your honest opinion on her latest effort. You’re “breaking down” a script for production. You’re proofreading your own draft, checking for plot holes, misspellings, or colossal suckiness. Even if you’re reading a screenplay purely for fun, you’re reading something that isn’t a final product. You’re reading a recipe book while your stomach is growling.

All of these tasks require attentive reading and some form of note-taking. The very least I do when reading a screenplay is mark character introductions and major plot beats. When you’re watching Ocean’s Eleven, it’s never a problem to keep track of the characters. Brad Pitt is rather memorable, and quite distinct from George Clooney and Matt Damon. But when reading a screenplay, they’re not movie stars yet—they’re just “Danny,” “Rusty,” and “Linus.” You’re going to need some way to keep track of them amongst Frank, Reuben, Livingston, Virgil, Turk, Saul, Yen, and Basher. You’ll be forgiven for flipping back to that dog-eared page to remind yourself who is who.

No one reads a printed screenplay without a pen in hand. So a tablet that allows “reading” a PDF isn’t enough to replace a hardcopy for the work of reading a screenplay. We need digital dog-ears.

Of course, one could simply use a computer for this. But there’s something both awful and impossible about reading off a laptop screen. My computer feels like a thing to do work with. I lean forward to use it. It bleeps at my with distractions and beckons me to be productive, or to research how felines behave when video cameras are nearby.

The iPad, on the other hand, invites you to lean back. To not switch apps. To read attentively.

On my sixth day of owning an iPad, I wrote about my experience reading screenplays on it. I’d found an app I liked called ReaddleDocs. I’d bought, but was not happy with, the most popular iPad reading app at the time, GoodReader from Good.iWare. I found it ugly, clunky, and un-iPad-like—but I relied on it for its bevy of features that Apple couldn’t or wouldn’t include in the initial iPad release, such as Dropbox file access and handling compressed files.

A year and many apps later, the two apps I use for reading screenplays now? GoodReader (now $4.99) and a newer app from Readdle called PDF Expert ($9.99).

Pretty vs. Practical

Rather than build true PDF annotation into ReaddleDocs, Readdle instead chose to launch an entirely new app. PDF Expert does a lot of what GoodReader does, and it is much prettier. But I’m a little grumpy with Readdle for making me buy a new document-reading-and-management app rather than simply improving their existing one (like Good.iWare did with the orginally 99¢ GoodReader). I shared this feeling with them, and it obviously fell on deff ears—they recently released yet another PDF annotation app.

GoodReader on the left, PDF Expert on the right, both with their dismissible HUD UI’s shown. Click to enlarge.

Compared to PDF Expert, GoodReader still feels clunky and cluttered. It’s un-Apple-like in that it excludes no features for lack of polish. But it has been getting steadily better. And those plentiful features are pretty handy.

PDF Expert, on the other hand, is gorgeous. It’s also quite feature-rich, so it can be a bit daunting, but the taste level will be refreshing to aesthetically-sensitive filmmaker types. While this prioritization of prettiness is mostly welcome, it potentially fails the user in one very important case: the text selection widget—the tool you’ll be using more than anything else while annotating—feels a tiny bit laggy and tap-resistant compared to GoodReader’s unadorned iOS-native version. It’s pure speculation on my part that PDF Expert’s extra UI chrome is to blame for this of course. I’ve mentioned it to Readdle and they say they’re looking into it.

My favorite feature of both apps is, of course, Dropbox sync. Every time I get a new screenplay, I save it into a specific folder on my Dropbox, and then press “Sync” in GoodReader or PDF Expert. Not only do the apps load any new documents, they also save back to Dropbox my annotated copies. The annotations that GoodReader and PDF Expert add to PDF files are standardized and compatible, so I can open a marked-up scripts in Preview on my Mac and see—even edit—my notes.

GoodReader and PDF Expert have nearly identical popover windows for browsing your bookmarks and annotations. This makes going over your notes a breeze. If I’m sharing my thoughts on a script with the writer, I’ll sit with this window open and tap each note, which takes me to the correct page. It’s a live list of things to talk about.

Digital dog-ears.

The best notes-givers follow up an in-person or over-the-phone conversation with a emailed write-up of all notes discussed. Both apps make this wonderfully easy. You can email the annotated PDF, or a summary of your annotations, or both. The annotations summary is probably the “killer feature” of these two apps for me. The only bummer is that your page numbers will be off by one, since PDF screenplays tend to have a title page before page one. I have contacted both Good.iWare and Readdle to request a solution to this problem, which is not unique to screenplays. To their credit, Readdle replied, where Good.iWare did not.

Surprise: I Choose The Hot Russian Model

Very much due to their responsiveness to my feedback (not that they’ve implemented any of my suggestions—just that they replied), I now use Readdle’s PDF Expert almost exclusively over GoodReader. Software is about relationships. So PDF Expert gets my recommendation as the screenplay reading app of choice. Its polish, design, and the communicativeness of the developer is well worth the negligible extra cost.

I know there are many out there who accuse the iPad of being a “manufactured need,” a device that fills a gap that, for many, is a hairline crack, if it even exists at all. But for me, reading screenplays is something I honestly wonder how I ever accomplished before the iPad. With PDF Expert and FDX Reader already so well suited for the task, I somehow doubt I’ll be doing it any differently next week.

See also: What I Do With My iPad Part 1: Storyboarding, and What I Do With My iPad Part 2: Writing with a Keyboard

Screenplay Markdown has a new home, a new name, and some very cool new friends.

Screenwriting Nerds Unite

As the SPMD spec was making the rounds late last year, I was contacted by John August, a well-known screenwriter and the creator of Scrippets, an elegant tool for embedding short sections of a screenplay in a blog or web site, using formatting hinted from plain text. It turns out John was actively working on expanding Scrippets into something that could support an entire screenplay—in other words, exactly SPMD’s charter.

When we compared notes, the similarities between his format, called Fountain, and SPMD were overwhelming. We decided that we would merge our efforts into one. And his name was way better.

Check out the beautiful new Fountain site, created by John, Ryan Nelson, Nima Yousefi, and me. You’ll recognize much of the content as originating from the SPMD spec.

I’ll pause here to gush a bit: I am delighted to be working with John. That he is a respected, working writer/director, a huge nerd who both blogs and podcasts eloquently, a software designer, a father, and a genuinely nice guy, makes it feel a little less crazy that I’ve attempted do be all those things at once as well.

Your New Screenwriting Software: Anything You Like

Fountain is everything SPMD was, now with the support of a respected industry pro with a track record of creating best-in-class apps for screenwriters. There are some minor changes to the syntax, but the mission is still the same:

• Allow screenwriters to write anywhere, using any tools they choose
• Support all the formatting conventions of a modern screenplay
• Archive screenplays in an obsolescence-proof format
• Welcome developers to support the format

If this is the first you’re learning about all this, read more on the Fountain FAQ, or check out John’s announcement post.

Apps Out the Gate

Using Writing Kit for iPad to edit a Fountain screenplaySPMD champions Martin Vilcans, Brett Terpstra, and Jonathan Poritsky have been working hard to bring the SPMD + Marked workflow in line with the new Fountain spec. Check out Fountain for Marked.

Kent Tessman, creator of the Fade In family of screenwriting apps, was an early contributor to and outspoken advocate of the SPMD spec. He has updated Fade In to import and export Fountain files.

There is open-source code available now on Fountain’s Developer Resources page.

For a complete list, check out the Fountain Apps page. But remember: the best Fountain app is one you already have—your favorite text editor, on any platform.

Fountain: Act I

Neither John nor I are done with Fountain. There are wonderfully cool things to come. So stay tuned. Or just get busy! Script Frenzy is coming up—maybe you could be the first person to write an entire feature-length screenplay in Fountain.

Read John’s announcement post here (if for no other reason than to learn the origin of the name Fountain), and if you haven’t seen his screenwriting-related apps, check out FDX Reader for iPad and Bronson Watermarker for Mac.

Final Cut Pro X was essentially version 1.0 of an entirely new app, and it shipped with enough features absent that many questioned the continued use of the “pro” name. Today Apple released a free update to FCP X that restores many of those missing features, including:

• Import FCP 7 projects via 7toX
• Media re-linking
• Multicam editing
• Video out via Blackmagic and AJA PCIe cards, as well as Thunderbolt devices

In this way FCP X is following the Apple pattern that is as hated as it is admired: if you can’t make it perfect, don’t release it. Some of these reinstated features are better than they ever were in FCP 7. Multicam tracks can be synced automatically based on audio waveforms, or even metadata. The new chroma keyer is greatly improved.

All these new and not-so-new features are wonderful to see, and I’m delighted that Apple is advancing FCP X so quickly. But what makes me happiest today is that this new release represents the collaborative effort between Apple and Red Giant to resolve the issues that were preventing Magic Bullet Looks 2 from working properly. Starting today, Looks users can download a free update that enables full FCP X compatibility.

Red Giant is so excited about this that they’ve put Looks on sale for 50% off (that’s $199). For every platform.

So if you haven’t tried FCP X or Magic Bullet Looks, today is a great day to do either, or both.

The 50% off sale (offer code LOOKSFCPX50) is for the next seven days. Magic Bullet Mojo already works wonderfully in FCP X, and is still 50% off—only $49.

The Canon EOS C300 is now available for pre-order at B&H, for $15,999—in both its Canon and PL mount variants. Expected to ship around the beginning of next month.

Looks like Nikon is starting to take video seriously with their new D4 flagship DSLR, announced yesterday.

I watched this very nice sample film by Corey Rich at 1080p and it looks great to my eye—no aliasing, no rolling shutter issues, plenty of detail, luscious “Top Gear” grading.

• 1080p 24, 25, 30
• 720p 60 (and presumably 50)
• 30 minutes record time
• H.264 B-frame, 24Mbps
• Two different movie crop modes, DX and 1:1 (2.7x)
• Smooth exposure adjustment while recording
• Tracking autofocus while recording
• External mic input with manual levels
• Headphone jack for audio monitoring
• Clean HDMI out (it seems)
• Remote control via iPad/iPhone
• MSRP $6,000, available in February

Great to have you back at the table after starting the party with the D90 Nikon.

UPDATE: The Nikon D4 is now avaiable for pre-order at B&H.

With the iPad… You can devote nearly every second of your time to the task at hand, rather than babysitting a balky computer. I don’t feel like I’m “using an iPad to write.” I’m just writing. It’s a far more tranquil, focused experience than using a PC or Mac.

McCracken and Kendrick agree that using an iPad to write tranquilly and focussedly requires a physical keyboard (both like the Logitech Keyboard Case). I love using my iPad with my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. I really wish someone at Apple did too, because unfortunately, the device’s keyboard support feels like a bit of an afterthought. I can’t help but feel that if anyone on the iPad team was passionate about the physical keyboard experience, a few glaringly obvious shortcomings would be corrected.

• Command + Tab, optionally in concert with the left and right arrow keys, is the keyboard shortcut for switching apps on Mac. I want this functionality so bad on my iPad that I actually mocked up what it might look like. I hope this video makes it as clear to you as it is to me how incredibly useful this would be.

I know, first I extol the virtues of the iPad’s focus and single-app view, and then I beg for an easy way to bounce among my apps. What can I say—the only thing a writer likes more than a distraction-free environment is distractions. Now on with the gripes.

• When a search or other text entry, such as an email field, presents a list of suggestions based on what I’ve begun to type, I should be able to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate that list, and Return to select—just like we do on OS X. iOS 5 added this functionality in a few places (address fields in Mail, for example), but there are still many text fields where it is frustratingly absent (most notably Search in Safari).

• If you purchased your Apple keyboard after July 2011, your F4 key is devoted to Launchpad, the iPad-esque app browsing screen in OS X Lion. This key, with its grid-of-apps icon, is just dying to function as an iPad home button.

It’s not just Apple that thinks of iPad keyboarders last, if at all. Most of my writing apps exhibit an understandable, but nevertheless frustrating behavior when used with an external keyboard. Writing often means adding text to the end of a document, so frequently the part of the screen that I’m focussed on is the very bottom, as far from my eyeballs as possible (especially when I’m using my Incase Origami case/stand). You can work around this by padding the end of the document with a bunch of empty lines (or, better still, raising the iPad closer to eye-level if possible—not easy, but if you can pull it off you’ve created something much better for your posture than any laptop), iA Writer in full-focustard modebut I do wish that some of these apps would recognize that without the on-screen keyboard naturally pushing my words up to the center of the screen, there’s utility in padding out the bottom of the screen and keeping your typing area near the vertical center—the way, say, Scrivener does on the Mac in its excellent full-screen mode. Of all my iPad writing apps, the only one that nails this is iA Writer—but only in its full-focustard mode.

McCracken wrote about using his iPad as a laptop replacement. That’s not how I see it. There are many occasions when the power to do anything that my MacBook Pro offers is exactly what I want. But there times where that potential creates such a distraction that I long for something simpler. The amazing thing about using the iPad for creative work is that the device goes away, and the task at hand becomes the entire experience. With a just little more of Apple’s characteristic attention to detail, the physical keyboard experience could be just as transparent, and the iPad would truly be the best writing tool I’ve ever known.

If you agree with all or any of this, consider letting Apple know via their iPad Feedback form.

See also: What I Do With My iPad Part 1: Storyboarding

I encouraged you to eschew experts and follow the curious.

I went to New Zealand with the fxguide/fxphd guys and shot with the Epic under epic conditions.

We color corrected some food.

I accused your new TV of ruining movies, and then weighed in on filmmakers choosing high frame rates.

The DV Rebel’s Guide became available as an eBook, and still sells well despite being written back when our cameras were still being used for what they were intended.

Red Giant released two new iOS apps, Movie Looks and Noir, and then released two free color correction tools for the desktop: Colorista Free and LUT Buddy. All the Red Giant iOS apps became universal, and we even released Plastic Bullet for Mac.

I saw the very last Space Shuttle launch ever (after failing to see the second-to-last), and I cried.

I rapped about storyboarding on my iPad, which led to a cool friendship with the creator of Penultimate and some thoughts on “feature requests.”

I appeared on a couple of podcasts.

Red Giant released Magic Bullet Suite 11, which includes Looks 2.0, a completely redesigned Magic Bullet Looks.

My wife and her sister started a company, and I got to contribute some photography to their site.

I told the story of directing my first music video.

I complained about Netflix, at first by myself, and then in chorus with the rest of the internet.

Apple released Final Cut Pro X, and Red Giant began porting plug-ins to it. Mojo works, Looks doesn’t—yet.

Steve Jobs died. I never met him, but he knew who I was.

I met a real, live Ninja.

I helped fxphd with a color correction class and explained how I reverse-engineered an optical bluescreen extraction for fxguide.

Amazon announced new Kindles and I took the opportunity to share some thoughts on indie publishing and how it relates to filmmakers.

Canon announced the C300, and I wrote about the state of low-end Super 35mm digital cinema cameras.

I proposed a plain-text screenplay format called SPMD and some wonderful folks got on board and made it real.

What you didn’t see is that I was also busily developing numerous film projects, including one original screenplay, Psyops with Bold films (who made the amazing Drive), and a few other collaborations.

I also worked on some new filmmaking tools that I can’t talk about yet—but you’re gonna love them.

I didn’t shoot any personal projects this year, which is something I plan on correcting in 2012.

Prolost served over two million page views to over 650,000 unique visitors. I don’t know what that means—but what I do know is that I continue to get a lot out of this blog and Twitter. When I look around the interwebs I feel particularly fortunate about my little slice of it. People say lovely thing about what they read here, even though I am always careful that this site reflect my work rather than become it. The comments I get here on Prolost are often better-written than most blog posts. So thanks for a great year. Here’s to all the crazy stuff we’re going to see and do and think in 2012.

Thanks to the hard work of Brett Terpstra, creator of the Markdown preview app Marked, along with Martin Vilcans and Jonathan Poritsky, there is now a functional workflow for SPMD.

Screenplay Markdown, or SPMD, began as some musings here and matured into a full syntax proposal. Martin adapted his pre-existing Screenplain engine to SPMD’s syntax, and Brett was able to use that engine within Marked to create HTML that could, via a CSS style sheet, be formatted to look exactly like a screenplay. Jonathan stepped up and worked on the CSS, dialing it in to match Final Draft’s formatting, and making sure that it would print as accurately as possible.

If you’re not familiar with Marked, here’s what it says on the tin:

Marked opens MultiMarkdown, Markdown, Text or HTML files and previews them as HTML documents. It watches the file for changes, updating the preview any time the file is saved. With a full set of preview styles, Marked adds an ideal “live” Markdown preview to any text editor.

Marked is designed for Markdown, but flexible enough to use a custom processing engine. So you download Screenplain, point Marked at it, and then add Jonathan’s CSS file to Marked’s Custom CSS list. Complete instructions and download links can be found on the Marked support site, and on Jonathan’s blog.

Once you have this configured, you can type your screenplay text in your favorite text editor, and Marked will show you a preview, updated every time you save.

Martin’s updated Screenplain engine is live at screenplain.appspot.com, where you can upload an SPMD document and get a PDF or Final Draft .FDX file in return.

Like the Markdown syntax that inspired it, SPMD is designed to be as transparent as possible. If you just type some text that looks like a screenplay, SPMD should do a darn good job of interpreting it. If you want to do fancy things like text emphasis, non-standard sluglines, or overlapping dialog, there are simple tags to learn—and Marked will show you right away whether you’ve got the hang of it.

So now you can write a screenplay anywhere, using any writing software you like, on any device you like, without sacrificing any formatting capabilities.

You can also, for free, on any platform, convert this text-only screenplay document to printable HTML or or a legit Final Draft document.

For the tiny cost of four dollars you can get a live preview of your screenplay while you work on your Mac, and print to paper or PDF.

Awesome.

I’m so inspired by this whole process—four guys who have never met in person collaborated on making something awesome, and now it works.

Are we done? Not even close.

There’s room for writing applications, whether WYSIWYG or more Byword-MultiMarkdown-preview-style, that support SPMD internally as their native format (Fade In currently has limited SPMD support via import/export). And not every feature of SPMD is implemented in Screenplain, notably cover pages and notes.

I’m not sure how fun it would be to work on a very long screenplay using the Marked workflow, even with the super cool feature of navigating by sluglines. And screenwriters think in pages, so a screenwriting tool that doesn’t paginate will rapidly feel like a car without a speedometer.

What something like this needs most is users, and I’m thrilled that we’re at that stage that you, the Prolost reader, could use SPMD for your creative work. We need the feedback to keep this project going.

See also: Brett’s blog post, Jonathan’s blog post, and Martin’s blog post.

Buy Marked on the Mac app store.

I recently contributed a color correction lesson to the current fxphd term, and I grabbed some footage from Brick & Steel to use as examples. As I was going through these year-old shots, I was struck by what a damn good time we had shooting that little fake trailer thing. And these two takes in particular seemed to sum it all up for me.

With all the talk about new cameras lately, there’s been a sort of spec-studying urgency in the air that I hadn’t even realized I’d begun to find a bit stifling. Watching this footage reminded me that the hard work of filmmaking is sometimes indistinguishable from having a great time with friends.

(Please note that the behind-the-scenes is as unrated as the trailer itself.)

Remember when I said I don’t like camera tests? I’ve been proven wrong.

Canon, not thrilled with my sense of humor, does not credit or condone this video…

Typical.

I’m hard to shop for. If I want something, I tend to buy it. This annoys and distresses those around me. But there is an opportunity lurking in that situation—every once in a while, I get the delightful surprise of a gift I didn’t even know I wanted.

Usually socks.

Looking for gifts for the DV Rebel in your life? Or for an easy link to send those flummoxed by your bizarre filmmaking nerd lifestyle? Here are some ideas.

Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Innovation

Another in the must-have series of big-ass ILM books. Enough said.

Visual Stories: Behind the Lens with Vincent Laforet

It’s rare that a photographer is even consciously aware of the specifics of their style and technique. Rarer still that a world-class photographer with such an awareness has any interest in sharing these insights with the world. And then there’s the rarest of all cases: A world-class photographer who can inspire and educate us with truly revelatory words about some jaw-dropping pictures.

Rare as in, just this one book. Vincent slam dunked this one.

Screenwriting Tips You Hack

Images on the screen start as words on a page. A blank, terrifying, soul-crushing page. I’ve been following and enjoying Xander Bennett’s Screenwriting Tips You Hack blog, and now he’s compiled the best of it into a book. If had just been a collection of his pithy and insightful blog posts, that would have been great, Instead its, like, an actual book type book that expands on the blog’s best bits. Even better.

The Art of Pixar: The Complete Color Scripts and Select Art from 25 Years of Animation

Animation studios use something called “color scripts” to plan out the color palette of a story. These long, filmstrip-like pieces of artwork are loose in detail but rich in storytelling color.

In other words, they are my favorite thing in the world. There’s so much beauty and inspiration in this book that it’s a bit overwhelming. That’s why I keep it in the bathroom.

Dot

Strap this little gumdrop to your iPhone 4 or 4S, download the companion app, and capture 360º panoramic video.

On your telephone.

For $79.

I need to sit down.

The DV Rebel’s Guide

Is it possible that you still know someone who doesn’t have this book? Heck, maybe the thing to do is buy the friend who already has it the Kindle edition. Speaking of which…

Kindle

This might be the Kindle year for me. I love my iPad, but I also love the imaginary notion that I’ll someday be somewhere sunny and the iPad will suck for reading there. I’ve also recently become infatuated with the indie author phenomenon, and I feel like simply owning a Kindle helps that movement grow.

I changed by mind since the last Kindle post. I think the simplest, cheapest one is the one to get. But I’d splurge and grab the one without ads.

A 50mm Lens

Please stop with all this “roughly what the human eye sees” baloney. The reason 50mm lenses are great is that they are fast and cheap. On anything but a full-frame DSLR, a 50 is a portrait lens. You know, for taking pictures of people. Which are the only pictures anyone cares about.

If you have a friend who has a DSLR with the crappy kit glass, get them the thrifty fifty for Canon or Nikon, show the the Aperture-priority mode on their camera, and transform their photography overnight from information gathering to emotion preserving.

Lightroom

Another photography life-changer. Whatever you’re using for your photography, if it’s not Lightroom, you’re doing it wrong.

Incase Origami Workstation for iPad

I’m writing this blog post using my iPad 2 (a great gift idea as well of course, if you are a Super Pimp Monster of Giving), Elements, and Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. When I travel for less than three days (a carefully-tested and validated threshold), I don’t bring my laptop. The reason this works is that if it’s more than one day, I bring the Bluetooth keyboard. But the keyboard is a bit awkward to pack and lug around. In fact, mine has gotten a bit beat up, with some keys held on by tape and school prayer.

Enter the Origami Workstation. It’s a case for your keyboard, not your iPad. But when you open it, it becomes a stand for the iPad. It’s simple, brilliant, and best of all, non-commital. Your iPad never gets connected to the thing, it just rests on top, in whichever orientation you like. It even works with iPads in cases (mine is in the Apple SmartCover, which is so wonderful that there are days I don’t even think about how overpriced it is).

Apps

Speaking of Apple stuff, everyone’s favorite evil company makes it easy to gift apps for both iOS and Mac. This is a really cool thing to do, and it’s often cheap as bad coffee.

• Of course I’ll start by suggesting that if you still have a friend who doesn’t have Plastic Bullet, Noir, or Movie Looks, you can set them on the path of righteousness for just a few bucks.

• Similarly, giving Plastic Bullet for Mac to your friend is a gentle but firm way of saying “You have no idea what to do with five dollars, do you?”

• I mentioned I’m writing this using Elements. It’s a great little iOS writing app. Thanks to SPMD, I’ll probably write a good chunk of my next screenplay on it.

• On the Mac side, Byword is a simply lovely app for writing. Both it and Elements work beautifully with Markdown. Life is good in textopia.

• Here’s a fun double-whammy. Order your friend a Wacom Bamboo Stylus for iPad and the ArtRage painting app. It’s like handing them a license to smoke clove cigarettes.

• The gift of a Kindle is an invitation to read more. But maybe you don’t really care, like $100 care, that your friend reads more. Maybe you more like $5 care. In which case, buy her Instapaper. It’s the best app for reading web articles on your iOS device, and it’s integrated with Twitter. The next time someone posts a link to a cool article that you don’t have time to read right now, you’ll tap “Read Later” and it gets saved to your Instapaper library. Or you do it from your web browser using an easy-to-install toolbar bookmark. Later, you can read the day’s articles in a lovely book-like presentation, even when away from your internet connection. This is a home-pager for me on both my iPad and iPhone.

  Either this or a smack in the head would be a perfect gift for your friend who types “TLDR” a lot. Your choice.

Monsters

Inspiration. It’s a strange thing. Sometimes a great movie inspires me, other times, a festival of back-to-back terrible films is what it takes to get me writing like the wind. But the film that has kicked my ass up and down the block with shameful, abusive inspiration lately is Monsters by Gareth Edwards. He flew to Mexico and shot this movie himself with a crew of fewer than ten, including his two lead actors. He had a loose plan and a ton of faith in his ability to make something out of nearly nothing. In his own words:

I guess creativity is just being stupid enough not to realize you can’t do something.

The Blu-ray is gorgeous, and packed with supplemental features. I keep the slipcase tacked to my office wall.

Happy holiday shopping from Prolost!

Oh, wait—one more:

Point-Blank Sniper Gear

The man’s a myth.

Maybe this helps explain the mixed reactions to Canon and Red’s November 3rd announcements. Both companies have, it seems, had plenty of time to assess what we wanted and just fricking make it. Both have done so, but in the process have left some of their devoted fans behind. We now have so many cameras from which to choose that it feels like there should be a perfect choice among them, but what we actually have is a more complex array of compromises to wade through than ever before.

We fell in love with the sultry, cinematic images from our HDSLRs, and then begged Canon and/or Red to fix what we didn’t like about them. They did—in spades—but in the process, they built professional cameras that are priced accordingly. You might respond with a pavlovian Click To Buy that leaves your wallet smoking like no SLR could. Or you might take a deep breath and realize that a bargain-basement DSLR is still the best filmmaking tool for your needs.

Graduation Day

A big part of the DV Rebel strategy is to save money by repurposing tools designed for other industries. Film gear is expensive, because it’s designed for a relatively small customer base. A dirt-cheap film lighting kit is about $1,000, whereas a quartz shop light can be in the neighborhood of $50 with a stand. If you can bash or borrow a dolly from home-improvement-store parts, you’ll spend a tiny fraction of what you’d pay for a proper film dolly.

The 5D Mark II and its successors were accidental successes in cinema. They were not designed for filmmakers, but it turned out they were eminently repurposable for our needs. There’s nothing accidental about the Canon C300 and the Red Scarlet X though. They completely solve the problems with our HDSLRs, and in the process, they exit the category of commodity consumer items and join the aery echelon of proper filmmaking gear—priced accordingly.

And although the price points of each might still be considered revolutionary, they do fit into a continuum of offerings now available. Here’s a brief survey of that landscape, written from the perspective of a DSLR shooter considering an upgrade.

Red Epic M ($43,000 with PL Mount)

I list this here only for comparison and context. To upgrade from a DSLR to an Epic is not an organic transition by anyone’s measure. I’ve never owned a car that costs this much.

Canon C300 ($20,000 list, $15,999 street)

As I write this, the exact price of the Canon EOS C300 is still not clear—nor did it seem to be a planned part of the camera’s elaborate launch. When Mike Seymour asked the panel at the end of the event, the answer was simply “$20,000.” Later, this figure seemed less set in stone. Canon’s Larry Thorpe said to dpreview:

At the moment we’re still working out the details. The list price is around $20,000 but it be another month or so [before details are finalized].

UPDATE 1/17: The street price is confirmed at $15,999 and the camera is now available for order.

Canon could have used a dash of Apple showmanship at this lavish event. Remember the days leading up to the iPad announcement? Rumors swirled that the tablet device would cost $1,000. When Jobs announced that it started at $499, the audience cheered (even though many of them would go on to buy the most expensive model, priced at $829). Apple fans and detractors alike imagined that Apple themselves may have spread the $1,000 rumors, in a brilliant context-setting strategy pulled straight from Predictably Irrational.

The street price of the C300 matters, because the most common reaction to the $20,000 price is that it’s way too high. More nuanced reactions are that it’s a perfectly reasonable price, but that it may have missed its sweet spot in the market.

The C300’s Canon Log imagery has been favorably compared to footage from the Arri Alexa, a camera that doesn’t get out of bed for less than $80K. A quarter-price Alexa seems like a great deal. So what’s to complain about?

The C300’s data rate is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can shoot to commodity CF cards and edit on a laptop without transcoding. On the other hand, 50 Mbps is the bare minimum accepted by some broadcast institutions, such as the BBC. For $20K, folks start expecting a little more than the bare minimum.

In practice, I found that the data rate of the C300 footage was ample. None of the raw footage I’ve examined suffers from significant compression artifacts. I personally like the production-ready nimbleness of compressed, industry-standard codecs. So I don’t hold this limitation against the Canon.

Similarly, some lament that the MXF-format footage is only 8-bit, rather than, say, 10-bit as is the case with the Alexa’s ProRes recordings. I think a more valid complaint is that the HDMI output of the camera is only 8 bit. The ability to record clean HD to an outboard device is a touted feature of the C300. But again, the $20K MSRP will have this kind of shooter expecting more than 8 bit.

Again, a pro of this camera crops up to dampen this con: The C300 is not a noise-free camera. Its noise is, in fact, quite lovely and cinematic. Noisy images don’t have to be as high-bit-depth as clean ones to look good. And a very gentle denoising pass can promote C300 footage to 16-bit without much loss in detail.

The C300 is crippled in ways that one would not expect from a $20,000 camera, but it is also empowered in ways usually reserved for much more expensive rigs. It uses a 4K sensor to make its HD images, meaning that all its internal processing is 4:4:4. It kills in low light and when it gets noisy, the noise looks like film grain.

But perhaps the most shocking capability of the C300 is its latitude. It’s here that the comparison with the Alexa is most surprisingly appropriate. The C300 simply has a jaw-dropping ability to hold shadow and highlight detail in the same frame. Check out this frame from Mobius, shot in near-noontime sun, with only natural light:

There are countless other examples in Vincent’s film where the cinematic look of artfully exposed desert sun fights everything I think I know about digital cinematography. About the last thing I’d ever attempt with my 5D Mark II would be a pan off a car interior out the window to a high-noon bald sky exterior. That’s pure Alexa or Epic + HDRX territory.

This, more than any other spec, has my attention. Some care a lot about spatial resolution—4K, 5K, 8K is what gets them excited. What excites me about a new camera is this kind of latitude. Most of the detractors of the C300’s price seem to be ignoring this significant achievement.

It matters to me that the C300 can use Canon lenses and use them well. It has no autofocus, but it can electronically focus EF-mount lenses.

The C300 is a strange mix of pro features and consumer limitations. There’s a huge crowd for whom it’s too much camera and certainly many for whom its not enough. I wonder if there are enough folks in between to make this camera a success.

Pros: Uses your Canon glass well, plug-and-play codec, pro video features pulled directly from successful camcorders. The only Super 35 camera with built-in ND filters. Possibly the low-light king of all cameras listed here.

Cons: No autofocus. 8-bit everywhere. Overcranking requires dropping to 720p. The price is a big f-you to the HDSLR community that welcomed Canon to Hollywood.

The Verdict: A badass camera that has stepped far enough away from the DSLR economy that it must be evaluated in a completely new context—a disappointing situation for Canon fans hoping for a “DSLR, but better.”

The Twist: We don’t actually know what this thing costs yet. (UPDATE: Yes we do.)

Sony PMW-F3K ($13,960, $17,820 with S-Log Upgrade)

This is the closest analog to the C300, and it’s been out for a while. Why hasn’t it taken the world by storm? My theory is that, like the C300, it is an odd jumble of body parts, some too big and some much to small for its price-point britches.

It ships with a PL adapter, inviting you to put costly cinema lenses on it. But then it only records to a 35 Mbps codec. It has terrific latitude, but tantalizes you with an expensive option to make it even better (the S-Log upgrade costs $3860 and requires an external recording device for anything better than 8-bit 4:2:0).

Take that PL adapter off and you have the Sony mount, which is only as useful as whatever other adapter you put on it. I’m not exactly sure what kind of farm animals you have to sacrifice to get your hands on an electronic Canon adapter for this thing.

These pros and cons create such a rocky landscape that it’s hard to feel strongly one way or the other about this camera. It’s not easy to love, but it’s impossible to hate.

Pros: Pro video features. All the frame rates you’d ever want from 1 to 60. 10-bit 4:2:2 HD-SDI Output. S-Log.

Cons: 4:2:0, 35 Mbps internal codec. Overcranking requires dropping to 720p. Aperture control of Canon lenses requires an electronic adapter hand-hewn from unicorn horn. S-Log is an expensive upgrade and requires an external recorder.

The Verdict: If the C300 eats anyone’s lunch, it’s this guy’s. But maybe the opposite is also true. If you’re looking at that S-Log feature and planning on using PL or even Canon glass, why wouldn’t you consider a Scarlet instead?

The Twist: Does this camera’s modest success mean that the semi-pro Super 35 space is a fertile land yet to be properly plundered, or a barren landscape of neither here nor there?

Red Scarlet X ($14,015 with display and media)

I’m listing the package price rather than the $9,750 body-only price because all the other cameras listed include a display and batteries. And although it’s not apples-to-apples, as the other cameras do not include media, the media costs for the other cameras are negligible, while the Scarlet’s are significant.

For example, if you wanted to record an hour of footage, you could compromise and get 50 minutes of RedCode 12:1 24p 4K HD on a 64 GB SSD, which would cost you $950. Compare that with a 32 GB CF card, which will hold 80 minutes of Canon C300 footage, and cost you only $67 (probably less if you’re reading this more than 15 minutes after I posted it).

Vincent Laforet shot 18 hours of C300 footage for Mobius. At Scarlet X 4K HD 12:1, that would require enough SSD media to cover the cost of a C300 body. But Vincent, shooting to inexpensive CF cards, was able to shoot redundantly and keep a duplicate copy of all that footage for safety.

Philip Bloom recently posted a balanced take on the Scarlet. As an owner of both an Epic and a Sony F3, he’s in a good position to be realistic. What I found most illuminating was his breakdown of the costs involved in keeping the Epic turned on:

If you run JUST on Red Volts, which I do sometimes, and no AC then you will burn through those batteries like crazy. I have 12 of them which will JUST get me through the day. V mount batteries with ViewFactors V mount adaptor is the most cost effective solution. That is $700 but my IDX batteries power my EPIC for WAYYYY longer than a Red Volt. Still they are not cheap either, nor are the good chargers. Just remember 12 Red Volts=$2340 and that is without extra chargers.

Of course, you get what you pay for—the Scarlet’s footage is not just 4K, it’s also raw, meaning that you can grade it with impunity. The image quality and latitude are the same as the Epic (at matching data rates), which is worth reiterating because it feels too good to be true.

Is Red crazy for selling a camera body for $10K that does much of what its flagship Epic does? Not at all. As Jim said at their November 3 announcement, this is a way to utilize under-specced Epic electronics that they’d otherwise be discarding. But the real crazy-like-a-fox angle is probably the good old razors/blades model. The Scarlet body is a killer deal, but it uses (and/or requires) the same accessories and modules as the Epic (such as the gorgeous touch LCD included in the package price), and Red is probably doing just fine with the profit margin on those.

Cunningly, Red announced their price after Canon. Negotiators know that whoever mentions money first, loses. Apple knows that “cheaper” only means something if you have a point of comparison. Regardless of the realities of building a functional kit, the gut-level takeaway for many on November 3 was that Red announced a camera that shoots four times the resolution of Canon’s at half the price.

Never mind that most people shooting with the Scarlet will be mastering in HD. In other words, using a 4K sensor to make an HD image. Just like the C300 does.

There is also the sneaky little fact that this “Super 35” camera will not shoot 24p at a full utilization of its large sensor. To make a movie, you have to window down to 4K, which means that suddenly your Super 35 sensor, well, isn’t. The 4K window that Scarlet uses matches the Red One’s 4K though, so if that’s what you’re used to, you’ll be right at home with Scarlet.

This windowing effect increases as you up your frame rate, so while you can shoot 120 fps with your Scarlet, at that point you’re actually shooting to roughly the 2/3” sensor that Red decided not to make.

I think the Scarlet looks to be a terrific camera—but like Mr. Bloom I suspect it’s the exact right camera for something less than 100% of the people who fancy it as the exact right camera.

Scarlet is a great camera for someone who already owns an Epic or a Red One. Someone who has the data management backend (Mike and Jason insist that you’ll need a $4,750 Red Rocket card, for example) and pro accessory front end to deal with a sweet deal of a camera that demands top-quality glass and cranks out big, expensive footage. But if you’re a recent DSLR graduate, or hoping to be, beware the ancillary financial effect of joining the 4K club. This enticing battleship-gray camera body will be a small part of a very large investment.

Pros: Gorgeous image quality. The same Epic raw that is being used on major Hollywood films. Works with all Epic modules and accessories. Best overcranking rates of all cameras here.

Cons: Footage requires transcoding for most editing workflows. 4K window is where you’re going to be most of the time. Overcranking reduces the sensor size, forcing you to compensate with wider lenses. It’s easy to be fooled by the $9,750 base price. The heaviest and most accessory-wanting of all the cameras listed here.

The Twist(s): Small camera, big workflow. Try explaining to your client why your lens options change when selecting different frame rates. And good luck trusting them to properly massage all your multiple resolution shots into something they can cut.

Sony NEX-FS100U ($4,999)

If you asked a Canon HDSLR shooter what they’d be willing to pay for a proper video camera with a Super 35 sensor, no moiré, and the pro video features camcorder shooters are accustomed to, such as zebra, focus-assist peaking, and XLR audio inputs, they would probably answer somewhere around $5,000 US. And lo, we have a camera at exactly that price point, that offers all that stuff.

One wonder why we keep complaining.

As usual, it begins with data rates. The FS100 maxes out at a paltry 24 Mb/s for 24p.

The next thing we usually gripe about is frame rates. Although the FS100 will allow you to record 1080p60, it doesn’t have a “slow and quick motion” option for slightly-off frame rates. You’re stuck with the standard missionary-position speeds of 24, 30, and 60; or 25 and 50 for PAL.

As with the F3, the FS100’s Sony mount is primarily useful in that it allows adapters for many other lens types. A friend of mine just wrapped a feature using Nikon glass. Canon glass is trickier, because the lenses don’t allow manual irising. Although let’s be honest—it took me a week before I noticed that my Canon 24–70 F2.8L had been damaged and was stuck wide-open, and the only thing that clued me in was an attempt to shoot a DOF demo for fxphd.

This camera isn’t going to knock your socks off with colorimetry or latitude, but it deserves our attention for shoring up many of the shortcomings we lament in our HDSLRs without leaving the price strata that inspired its existence.

Pros: The price is right—this is what a DSLR shooter probably expects to spend when “graduating” to a proper camera. 60p recording at 1920x1080—something the F3 can’t even do.

Cons: Cheap-feeling plastic construction. Maximum 24p data rate is 24 Mb/s. No useful funky frame rates (like 22 fps for fight scenes, or 48 fps for perfect 1/2 speed slow mo). No currently-available adapter allows aperture control of Canon lenses.

The Verdict: More like this please.

The Twist: A new company has popped up to pimp this ride. Solid Camera sells a beautifully engineered cage with a built-in PL mount.

Panasonic AG-AF100 ($4,795)

I really thought we could count on Panasonic to step up, and they finally did with the AF100. Unfortunately, this camera is another confusing parade of difficult-to-weigh pros and cons.

First, there’s the Micro 4/3 sensor. Having spent some time with one of these, I’m sad to say, size matters. The AF100 is the odd-man-out in this Super 35 roundup.

Then there’s the colorimetry. With the DVX100, Panasonic popularized the idea of a “CINE-LIKE” gamma setting on a consumer camera—a flat, uniform transfer function that preserves detail and allows for creative grading. So we trust Panasonic to do what’s right in this area. But even with these settings enabled, the AF100 turns in disappointingly contrasty images.

Between the smaller sensor and the video-like images, I simply having seen anything from this camera that got me cinematically excited.

Pros: Any frame rate you like between 1 and 60 fps at 1920x1080. There is a lovely electronic Canon adaptor available for this mount from Redrock Micro. Internal ND filters. Pro video features.

Cons: Micro 4/3 sensor is smaller than Super 35 by a meaningful amount. Contrasty, low dynamic-range images.

Canon 5D Mark II ($2,370)

The only camera to attempt to dethrone the full-frame 24p glory of the 5D Mark II is the not-yet-available 1D X, which will cost significantly more. The sex-appeal king is still the sex-appeal king.

By “full-frame” I of course mean a stills full-frame, which is 8-perf 35mm run horizontally. The standard for celluloid stills, this format was rare in cinema. The extra real-estate means that, in broad terms, lenses are wider, DOF is shallower, and pixels are bigger.

While not strictly necessary for by-the-book “cinematic” depth of field, the double-size sensor of the 5D allows you to fight off the bitter twinge of its technical shortcomings with heaping, buttery globs of shallow focus and low-light performance.

But what of this awful aliasing/moiré issue? HDSLRs in general, and the 5D in particular, are best suited for true DV Rebels—the one-man-band director/DP filmmaker who can factor this camera’s strengths into a film holistically. This shooter can reject wardrobe she knows will alias, re-stage a shot to frame out the sizzling rainbow of a cobblestone road, and block a scene to emphasize sultry soft backgrounds rather than poorly-rendered detail.

The DV Rebel also controls post, so when she brings home footage that sparkles and moirés like mad, she can knuckle down and fix it by hand (don’t let anyone tell you a plug-in can do this).

These are luxuries on which a pro shooter cannot rely. I’d hate to be in a position of saying “he can’t wear that” or “we can’t get this angle” to a paying client.

But when it’s just me and I want sexy cinema to spare, I reach for my 5D Mark II.

Pros: Full-frame 35mm sensor yields cinematic DOF from even slower lenses. Images that make you want to lick the screen. A world-class stills camera in its off hours.

Cons: Aliasing and moiré. No 720p overcrank option—max frame rate is 30 fps. Poor quality HDMI output. Fragile connectors. Video features are outclassed by much less expensive Canon HDSLRs.

The Twist: A company called Mosaic Engineering makes an add-on optical alti-aliasing filter for the 5D Mark II called the VAF-5D2. This filter snaps on non-destructively over your actual sensor and eliminates moiré and aliasing by scattering the light just before it hits the photosites. This process is relatively seamless once the filter is installed, although there are a few limitations. The examples are compelling, even if the company itself is oddly antisocial. I contacted Mosaic Engineering for additional information and received no response. Other blogger/shooters I know received a similarly cold response from the company.

The Verdict: The DV Rebel’s love affair with the camera that started the party has not flagged over the three years of HDSLR madness. The perfect camera for the DOF-obsessed shooter whose only client is himself.

Canon Rebel T3i ($659)

Perspective time: This camera body, which shoots 24p on a Super 35 sensor, costs less than 20 minutes of recording media for the Scarlet X.

Welcome back to the DV Rebel land of repurposing. This near-bottom-of-the-line camera, that actually has the word Rebel in its name, has the most up-to-date video features of any Canon DSLR save the 1DX.

I’ve got a full blog post coming on this little camera, but in short, the articulating LCD and video crop mode make this bargain body the best low-cost choice for those willing to work around the limitations common to all HDSLRs. If you were looking for the 7D or the 60D on this list, they’ve been replaced by this little guy. I know, crazy.

Pros: Articulating LCD that you can still use with a Zacuto Z-Finder. Movie crop mode. Chiggity-cheap.

Cons: No pro video features. Aliasing and moire. Controls a bit more fussy than those on the 60D or 5D Mark II. Limited frame rates, 50/60 fps only at 720p.

The Verdict: What a time to be alive.

The Twist: If we’re going to talk about the ancillary costs of the Red Scarlet, we should do the same for any HDSLR. Factor things like a Zacuto Z-Finder and a follow-focus rig (such as the Redrock Micro Captain Stubling or EyeSpy Deluxe) into your purchase plans for even the cheapest Canon body.

The Twisty Twist: For the adventurous, the Magic Lantern firmware hack is available for the T3i. It adds exposure zebras, focus peaking, false color overlay, waveform monitor, bit-rate control, and even a built-in intervalometer for time lapse. [via @salah_baker]

Conclusions

In every movie about a mousy girl with glasses and a ponytail, there’s the “friend” who helps her with her makeover, and then gets snubbed when the transformation is, surprise, a huge success. In this case, we, the HDSLR community, are the friend. We helped get the Canon and Red cameras we love so much to clear up their complexion, throw on some contact lenses, and let their hair down. And now we’re standing here with our Zacuto dinguses and our Redrock doohickeys in our hands while the newly-gorgeous cameras are twirled around Tinseltown by the Handsome Quarterback.

All filmmakers are on a journey, and that journey is going to take you through many cameras. It’s dangerously easy to get swept up in advancing technologies, and all-too tempting to think that a new camera will slingshot your filmmaking forward.

The real tricky thing is that this is actually true—sometimes. There are moments when the capabilities of a new camera are exactly what we need creatively. How do you know when this is? A good indication is when you’ve repeatedly run up against the limitations of your current camera.

In other words, shoot, don’t spend, your way into your camera upgrade.

There are wonderful cameras at almost every price point. So don’t let any one new camera change your idea of how much you should be spending on gear.

See also: Pictures and Clarity (November 2008)

Adobe After Effects is my go-to tool for most homebrew VFX and finishing tasks. It has the perfect blend of powerful features and editorial, layer-based ease of use. Is it as fast as a dedicated color grading system, or as responsive and powerful as Nuke for VFX compositing? No, but it offers a flexible, creative environment that’s tough to beat for the kind of creative, rough-and-tumble cinematic problem-solving that comprises most of my work.

After Effects is a professional tool by any measure, but it is designed for a broad user base. So an artist who plans to push it hard will want to tune the application accordingly. Here’s what I do to a default installation of After Effects to prepare it for my special kind of abuse.

Preferences

There’s a lot you can adjust within the standard After Effects Preferences window. Here’s what I set, and why:

• I set Levels of Undo to 99, because why should I expect to have fewer problems than Jay-Z?
• Enable Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network, so that you can run some very cool scripts. More on that below.

• I turn off Use System Shortcut Keys, because on my Mac, Command + M should map to Composition > Make Movie, not “purposelessly minimize the entire application in the most annoying way possible because I never learned Command + Tab for application switching.” This setting is a must for any Mac user who prefers using After Effects to hiding it.

• Under Previews, I set Zoom Quality and Color Management Quality to More Accurate. The latter especially matters if you use After Effects’s built-in support for a color managed linear-light workflow. You’ll see nasty banding during RAM previews at the default Faster display color management.

• Under Display, I turn on Show Rendering Progress in Info Panel and Flowchart. Although this may slightly slow down your interactive rendering, it’s worth it to be able to see what After Effects is doing under the hood. Be sure to expand the Info Panel vertically so that you can see the text display of the render activity.

• Under Import, you can set the default file sequence frame rate. I don’t know anyone for whom the cretaceous factory setting of 30 fps is useful. I set it to 23.976, but a PAL person might choose 25, and an NTSC nerd should probably choose 29.97.

• The After Effects Disk Cache (under Media and Disk Cache) is a splendid feature that is rightfully switched on by default, but you may want to both increase its size and choose a location for it on your fastest volume, preferably not the one where your media is stored.

• Appearances matter to pros, and under the Appearance section I always darken down the UI a bit,

• Turn on Cycle Mask Colors (so that each new mask you create will be a different color),

• And turn off Use Gradients. This UI preference was once offered to boost performance, but now is simply an aesthetic choice. I think After Effects, like almost everything, looks better without superfluous gradients. I wish Premiere had this option.

• Under Auto-Save, I always enable Automatically Save Projects.

• I Save Every 5 Minutes. Yep.

• And I set Maximum Project Versions to 20.

• Memory and Multiprocessing is one of the most critical areas for tuning your After Effects instal for the best results. Here you can make After Effects fly like a bird, or bring your machine to a crawl.

  And I have absolutely no idea what to do here. I’m not joking. The day I understand these settings is the day Adobe removes them.

  I would sooner fiddle with switches on a cockpit tour of a 747 I had just boarded for a transatlantic flight than touch this stuff.

Project Defaults

There are some settings in After Effects that are invisibly established as you use the application. After Effects will remember your choices and default to them in the future. Some I find important enough to preemptively set up.

• I choose File > Project Settings, and select Frames as the Time Display Style, and set Frame Count to Start at 1. You’ll still see a timecode display in your timeline, but the primary expression of time will be in frames, which is much easier for me to conceptualize and type. This is very much a matter of personal preference.

• Then I create a new Composition, and without doing anything else, I tap the Shift key. This brings up the Composition Mini-Flowchart, which is a really spiffy navigational tool that any Pro AE user should embrace. It solves the single biggest problem with After Effects—the lack of a visual way of navigating between Compositions. The problem is that, by default, it’s backwards. Find the menu button in its upper right corner and select Flow Left to Right, and never worry about this again.

Text Prefs

There is a secret world of After Effects customization. Like rigging your Nissan Skyline for NOS, this is purely an at-your-own-risk endeavor—but the rewards can be mighty.

Mac users will find the After Effects preferences file here:

/Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/
[version number]/Adobe After Effects 10.5-x64 Prefs

And Windows users here:

\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\
After Effects\[version number]\

In those directories you’ll find a file called something like Adobe After Effects [version] Prefs. This plaintext file is editable with any text app. Use a search to find these areas and make careful changes. But don’t worry too much—if you corrupt this file, just delete it. After Effects will create a new one with the default settings. You can also make a backup of this file right there in the same directory. And eat your vegetables.

Here are the changes I make in the text prefs:

• "Show Tracker Apply Dimensions Dialog" = "0"

  By changing this from 1 to 0, you defeat the annoying dialog box that comes up after a 2D track asking you if you want to apply the tracker in X, Y or Both. You always choose both, because as a pimp, you know how to extract one dimension later if you need it. So save yourself the annoyance of being asked if you’re a doofus each time you track.

• "Cone Size" = "0"

  The text above this line gives you the clue as to what it does: ["3D Light Dimensions Preference Section"]. Here you set a number of “pixels” to use for the size of the spotlight cone widget in 3D views. No matter which size you choose, it will usually be wrong for what you’re trying to do. Unless you choose zero—in which (special) case, After Effects will draw the cone all the way out to the Point Of Interest, matching the behavior of most 3D apps. Nice.

• "Pref_TRANSPARENCY_GRID_COLOR1" = 00888888
“Pref_TRANSPARENCY_GRID_COLOR2” = 00666666

  Photoshop has a preference for setting the brightness level of the checkerboard backdrop used to show transparent areas in your image, but After Effects lacks this control—unless you’re elbow deep in this text file with a scalpel like we are now. Make the above changes for a nice dark gray checkerboard that better matches your gradient-free, subdued AE UI.

• "Mouse Wheel Zooms Around Pointer" = "1"

  Setting this to 1 will cause the scroll-wheel zoom to center around the mouse cursor rather than remain fixed to the center of the image. Although it can cause some disorientation at first, this mode is more like other apps with scroll-wheel zooming, and can speed your work by eliminating the need for panning around after a zoom.

Scripts

Scripting in After Effects is very powerful, and luckily for we minor nerds, its power can be harnessed with little technical know-how. There is a rich community of scripting resources online; some cheap, many free.

• An indispensable source of AE scripting awesome sauce is aescripts.com. Here you will find Load Project or Template at Startup. Drop this script in your Scripts/Startup directory and it will run every time you launch AE. And what it does is what it says: it opens a project file that you’ve specified. The same one, every time you launch AE.

  Why is this awesome? I’ll let the script’s creator, Lloyd Alvarez, explain:

  For example, if you have a certain folder/file structure or camera rig, etc that you like to keep for your AE projects, you can setup a virgin project the way you like it and save it as a template by giving it a .aet extension. Now every time you launch AE your custom setup will be automatically loaded.

  These .aet template files are unique in that, after opening them, you’re still in an unsaved, un-named After Effects Project. So you’ll never accidentally save over your template. My template contains camera rigs, folder structures, letterbox presets, and other goodies that I always seem to need.

  Price: Name your own price.

• I’ve written about BG Renderer before. It is just unbearably useful. Render in the background and keep working, or, better still, render in the background and go take a “walk” (an ancient Sanskrit word meaning “nap”), confident that your phone will alert you to a completed render.

  Price: $29.99 (for the version that supports alerts) and worth every penny. This is my first suggestion that costs money so let me be blunt: If this sounds expensive to you, you should have stopped reading at “pimp.”

• The DV Rebel Tools, once only available with the DV Rebel’s Guide, now free, are a set of scripts that turn After Effects into a powerful color correction and mastering tool. Learn more and download here.

• There are many more scripts that I use routinely, too many to list here. Be sure to peruse aescripts.com, and keep an eye out for the redefinery scripts. These are the after-hours work of Adobe engineer Jeff Almasol, who also helped me make the DV Rebel Tools a reality—and some of them are similarly based on humble requests by yours truly.

Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy

Settings will only get you so far. The fully-pimped AE setup will include custom hardware, third-party plug-ins, calibrated displays, special input devices, chairs with umlauts in their names, and espresso gear. But some of these simple textual tweaks will dramatically change your After Effects experience.

Now go on, brush your shoulders off.

Listen. Subscribe.

Sensor size isn’t everything, but it’s worth examining how many different definitions of a “Super 35mm” -sized sensor there are when thinking about last week’s camera announcements.

The Scarlet X has a larger sensor than the Canon C300, but you won’t be using it all to make movies. You can only achieve 24 fps at 4K and below—where the window you’re shooting to is actually smaller than the C300’s near exact match to the Super 35 frame width.

Canon’s APS-C HDSLRs, such as the 7D and my new favorite, the inexpensive Rebel T3i, are also very close to to the canonical Super 35 width.

On an Epic, shooting 4.5K WS gets you similarly close to the dictionary definition of “Super 35.” I don’t see this resolution listed among the Scarlet X’s options, although it’s possible that was simply for brevity.

What you’ll probably be shooting on your Scarlet X is 4K HD, where your frame size is noticeably smaller than Super 35. So is it fair to call the Scarlet a “Super 35” camera?

The Scarlet allows overcranking, but only at windowed resolutions, as shown above. As you gain frames per second, you lose resolving power, and the ability to achieve shallow depth of field at a given Angle Of View. Your lenses become effectively more telephoto as your sensor goes Costanza on you.

The Canon C300 on the other hand will force you down to 720p for any frame rate between 30 and 60—but it’s a downsample, not a crop, so your lenses will still behave the same way. 

Red Giant wasted no time in porting Magic Bullet Looks to Final Cut Pro X, but the all-new Final Cut is a young platform and there have been some hurdles. We’re almost there, but we’re working with Apple to resolve a critical bug (theirs, not ours) that’s preventing us from releasing. Aharon Rabinowitz explains:

Apple is taking this issue very seriously, and they’ve been very responsive. We know their team of developers is dedicated to giving you the best possible user experience in FCP, so we expect a resolution soon.

I haven’t fallen in love with FCP X yet, but seeing this preview has me hopeful. The realtime interactions and seamless background rendering are how everything we use should work.

For all intents and purposes, both of these cameras are $16k (without lenses), and both of them are shipping in 2012.

The Devil is in the details. Canon has posted a FAQ for the C300, and there are some interesting tidbits to be found therein.

• This is a brand new sensor, “designed from scratch by Canon, entirely for cine and video applications.”
• The native ISO of the camera is 850.
• Canon thinks that with their Canon-Log color space, the camera allows “800% overexposure… which translates to …an Exposure Latitude of 12 f-stops.” Graeme Nattress of Red disagrees.
• Graeme also points out that Canon is not obsessed with proper spelling.
• There’s a built-in waveform monitor overlay.
• And focus-asist peaking (which I learned here).
• No autofocus. Hilariously, Red promises that Scarlet X will autofocus your Canon lenses. File that under Red out-Canoning Canon tonight.
• There’s built-in vignette reduction for Canon lenses. EF-mount version only.
• Maximum ISO is 20,000, or 30dB of gain.
• You can specify shutter by angle.
• “The EOS C300 is equipped with three built-in, durable glass ND filters” Two stops, 4 stops, and 6 stops. Very nice.
• “When the Slow and Fast Motion setting is enabled, frame rate selections can be made in one frame per second increments…” So apparently you can shoot at funky frame rates.
• Everyone has been talking about how 60 fps recording is limited to 720p, but that’s not entirely true. The C300 also has 50i and 60i modes. So you could shoot 60i with a 1/120 shutter, and convert each field to a frame using the method I describe in The DV Rebel’s Guide for slow motion. Although this is likely to result in more flicker artifacts than simply shooting 720p60.
• A 32 GB CF card will hold 80 minutes of footage at 50Mb/s.
• The camera has two CF card slots. You can record across the two cards, or you can record redundantly to the two cards.
• A separate Wi-Fi unit will be offered that will allow any smart phone or tablet with a web browser to control basic camera functions.
• It has a fan.
• “Canon Log and Cinema Lock options allow motion picture users to get a very flat, low-contrast result that’s ready for extensive color grading during the editing process.” Nice.
• “Canon Log is a log gamma setting that retains maximum image information for post-production. It has high dynamic range and records the image with a flat image quality with subdued contrast and sharpness. This is ideal for color correction.”
• “Cinema Locked Mode… enables Canon Log Gamma, and effectively ‘locks out’ any other image adjustments. This is a no-nonsense way for cinematographers to ensure that all settings are optimized for post-production, without having to dig deep into menus to check and re-set parameters back to zero. It simplifies the whole process to ensure that no matter what, you are getting the most out of your camera for post-production.” Very nice.
• There’s a “View Assist feature” designed for those shooting in Canon Log who wish to monitor a more pleasingly contrasty image. “When it’s active, View Assist lets the user toggle back and forth from the flat look of an actual Canon Log file, and a generic, contrasty and saturated look that simulates typical results after color grading in post-production.” Again, very nice. There are some expensive cameras out there that require external hardware to accomplish this.

When you contemplate this camera’s seemingly high price point (reported to be anywhere from $16,000 to $20,000), you have to factor in all these little details. Many of these seem to me to bear the fingerprints of Canon’s Larry Thorpe, formerly of Sony, who was at the event today, knows more about cameras than anyone I’ve ever met, and was the first person I called back in 2008 when I began to sense that Canon might need help understanding the profound effect of the 5D Mark II on the filmmaking community.

There’s some very cool stuff here. And if it breaks, you can have it fixed or replaced at Canon’s new service center smack in the middle of Hollywood.

Red certainly seemed to sweep Canon’s leg today by pitching a Scarlet that out-specs the C300 at half the price, but I’m not content to leap to any conclusions without comparing these cameras—and the ecosystems that accompany them—at the atomic level. Allegiances are convenient. Analysis is difficult.

And Scotch is delicious. Goodnight.