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.

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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.

Not content to deliver a clear and simple message at today’s launch, Canon also revealed an “EOS Movies” “concept camera” today. I’m just going to let Engadget handle this one:

Promised to be “ideally suited for cinematographic and other digital high-resolution production applications” this camera packs a 35mm full frame image sensor capable of shooting Motion-JPEG encoded 4K video at 24fps.

The Canon lens makes me think of those “Who wore it better?” celebrity fashion pieces.

As promised, Jim and Red revealed a new incarnation of Scarlet tonight, Scarlet X. Gone (for good it seems) is the fixed-lens, 2/3” sensor configuration. Instead, Scarlet X is basically an Epic, but with innards that didn’t quite pass muster for Epic’s heavy data throughput. The result? A camera that looks like an Epic, feels like an Epic, and shoots like an Epic—but with reduced resolution and frame rate capabilities. Specifically:

• 1–25 fps at 4K
• 30 fps at 4K “quad HD” (presumably 3840x2160?)
• 48 fps at 3K
• 60 fps at 2K
• 120 fps at 1K

Those are windowed resolutions, so they change your lens’s Angle of View as well as your pixel count.

Here’s how it’s priced. (Al means an aluminum Canon mount, as Epic X was slated to use; Ti means a titanium mount, which Epic M shipped with and now Epic X as well.) And you can order it now—if you can get through over at red.com.

There’s an FAQ post here with many details.

By all indications, Scarlet X does more than Canon’s C300, for less money. But things are rarely that simple.

Canon has announced the EOS C300, a Super-35 digital cinema camera—along with a slew of new cinema lenses. Coverage here.

• Two models: One with a Canon EF mount, the other PL
• 8.3 megapixel 2160–3840 Super-35 CMOS sensor (4K resolution) with Digic DV III processor—enough pixels for 4:4:4 RGB
• Canon XF codec (50Mbps 4:2:2 1080p30 MPEG2 MXF), records to two Compact Flash card slots
• Canon “C-Log” gamma
• SDI out
• Presets and menus similar to Canon XF series
• Exposure and focus control are completely manual—no AE or AF
• Sold as a system, including LCD monitor/XLR audio unit, side grip, top handle, battery & charger
• Availability: Jan. 2012
• Street price: approximately $16,000 USD (Canon mount version)

Vincent Laforet shot a film with it called Mobius, and his first blog post about it is up now.

Here’s the film, and the behind the scenes.

I contributed a few key VFX shots to the film and therefore got to live with the footage up close for days. I’ll have more to say later about this camera and Red’s 10-minutes-nigh announcement, but for now just know that the C300’s footage looks terrific. Great dynamic range, low noise, and a nice, clean image.

Wow, today is a big day! A new Super 35mm camera has been announced.

Litterally.

Press release here.

Today promises to be a big day. At 3pm PST, Canon will make a product announcement at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. And although the slogan above is theirs, presumed to indicate a digital cinema offering of the kind we’ve been begging them to create, it could equally describe the state of the insular community of future-camera fanatics following Canon’s invitation. Jim Jannard of Red responded by declaring an event of his own later that same evening. At 6pm tonight, the details of Red’s long-awaited (and NAB-demoed) Scarlet will be revealed, possibly having been tweaked to better battle Canon’s offering, but not so much as to prevent Red from taking orders.

Then came the speculation. And the expectations. There’s a great summary of the Sturm und Drang over at FreshDV.

The venerable Mike Seymour will be covering both events and live-blogging them at fxguide. That’s where I’ll be watching.

Kindles are now cheap.1

Many people predicted that there would be a major upset in the publishing world when the Kindle dropped below $99. They were wrong—it happened well before that.

Independent authors have been able to self-publish their work on or through Amazon for quite a while, but in the last year or so there has been an explosion of success stories. Authors like John Locke, Amanda Hocking, Andrew Mayne, and Joe Konrath have appeared on best-seller lists right alongside authors whose names are a part of any trip through an airport concourse.

The Collision

The reason for this, as I see it, is a collision of several factors:

1. The popularity of the Kindle. Even when it was expensive and clunky, the Kindle was a hit. Now it’s cheap and even pretty. And it’s not just a device—it’s a free app for a device you already own.
2. Amazon’s Kindle Store. Amazon recognized a seemingly obvious fact: A Kindle owner doesn’t want to shop for books, pick one they like, and then find out if it’s available for Kindle. They want to shop for Kindle books. The consequence is that self-published ebooks appear right alongside electronic versions of traditionally-published books, with no stigmatizing differentiation.
3. Reviews. Amazon’s reviews are generally pretty good by internet standards. Amazon book reviews seem even better on average. But reviews of indie books are plentiful and passionate. A True Fan of a self-published author is going to write a much more compelling review than a book-of-the-month casual reader—and be much more likely to take the time to do so.
4. The reason for this is that successful indie authors are engaged with their audiences in a way that few traditional authors are. They have no other choice, since they are their own marketing departments. The result is that readers of indie fiction feel a close kinship to their favorite authors. They recommend them to friends, eagerly write heartfelt reviews, and buy without a second thought.

5. And of course, price. Many indie novels are as inexpensive as 99¢. As self-published author John Locke said in his book How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!:

   …when famous authors are forced to sell their books for $9.95, and I can sell mine for 99 cents, I no longer have to prove my books are as good as theirs. [They] have to prove their books are ten times better than mine!2

The 99¢ price point is particularly interesting, and has, of course, been the subject of much hand-wringing. Amazon has a fixed royalties model for ebooks: For titles priced between $2.99 and $9.99, publishers take home 70%. Any other price nets 35%. For every book an indie author sells at 99¢, they receive 35¢. For a $2.99 book, a self-published author sees a royalty of $2.00. Again, Locke has an emphatic point of view as to why he chooses 99¢:

My decision came down to whether I thought I could sell seven times as many books at 99 cents as I could at $2.99.

By my calculations he only has to sell six times as many books to beat the $2.99 model ($0.35 x 7 = $2.10). There’s much more to Locke’s position on this though, so I recommend you read his book if you’re genuinely interested.

Some decry the buck-a-book pricing as devaluing literature and destroying humanity.3 What it’s meant for me in practice is that I’ve discovered some fun new authors, and that the “gateway drug” principal is real. Cheap books got me reading more, and now I buy regular-priced ebooks more frequently than I’d ever bought dead-tree fiction.

I’m not the only one. Amazon’s Kindle best-sellers page has been a mix of indie offerings and traditional titles for as long as I’ve been aware of it. Books there range from New York Times best-sellers to pulpy self-published impulse buys, at prices ranging from $12.99 to free. Indie publishing has arrived.

The Opportunity

I write a lot here about accessibility of storytelling tools. Cameras keep getting better and cheaper. Post tools once reserved for the stratospheric high-end trickle down to our laptops. But there is no more democratized form of expression than the written word. If there’s a story in you, write it down.

That’s been true forever, but now you can take a small additional step and share your story with the world. Maybe you’ll give it away. Maybe you’ll sell a million copies.

I’m writing this now because National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is about to begin. If you’ve ever had the itch write a book, you can do so virtually surrounded by a supportive internet community of writers who gather once a year to bang out a draft in 30 days. It’s a wonderful way to practice the best writing advice there is: Don’t get it right, get it written.

NaNoWriMo considers a novel to be 50,000 words or more. To get there in 30 days, you’d need to write 1600 words per day—fewer than in this blog post. It’s not easy, but it can be done. More importantly, failing at something like that is a lot better at succeeding at the dumb crap you were planning on doing in November.

But I’m a Filmmaker

This is the bit I’m still working out. So it’s obviously the most interesting part.

As wonderfully detailed on the excellent Scriptnotes podcast by screenwriter and master blogger John August, when you sell a script, you enter into a somewhat fictitious work-for-hire agreement. Your script and its copyright become the property of the purchaser. Even though it was your idea, you agree to pretend that the studio hired you to write it. There are several very good reasons for this structure that John and his co-host Craig Mazin explain perfectly, but one downside is that you maintain no ancillary rights to your work, You can sell a script and never see another dime beyond the sale price.

This is not true of novels. You’ll hear stories about producers developing projects as graphic novels first before pitching them as movies. Part of the reason is so that a studio can see pretty pictures of what their movie might look like, but another big part is that the copyright holder of the comic will maintain the literary rights to the story. This means royalties on any film that gets made based on that work, including any sequels, TV series, or stage production—royalties that would not likely be a part of a spec script deal.

On top of that, Hollywood is currently beyond reluctant to invest in any idea that doesn’t have built-in familiarity with an audience. It’s potentially easier to get Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made than Inception, even though Scott Pilgrim was a niche comic with tiny circulation, and Inception was the pet project of a can’t-lose filmmaker, with a huge star attached.

As a filmmaker, you might have an easier time pitching a movie based on your “breakout hit” (hundreds sold!) or even “cult classic” (dozens sold!) self-published novel than you would with an original spec screenplay. And if your pitch is successful, the “back end,” as Hollywood folks like to say, could look much better for you, depending on the deal you negotiate.

Nerd Your Way To 50K

If you decide to accept the NaNoWriMo challenge, I have one and only one recommendation for you: Get Scrivener. Last time I pimped Scrivener to you, it was version 1.0, Mac-only, and had only fledgeling screenwriting features, which comprised my primary interest in it. Scrivener 2.0 offers many improvements to the screenwriting features, but helping you write long-form fiction is what this beast was truly created to do, and at that it excels.

There’s so much to say about Scrivener that it deserves a whole post (maybe more), but my most recent love affair is with its Dropbox syncing feature. To get a taste of it, go here and scroll down to Folder Syncing. Combine this feature with one of the many Dropbox-enabled mobile text editing applications such as Elements or WriteUp and you’ll never be more than a few taps away from tweaking your prose.

Scrivener also offers detailed options for exporting .epub and .mobi files, the book formats for Apple’s iBooks and Amazon Kindle, respectively.

Sure, if you’re a great writer, you don’t need anything special (services such as Smashwords will create an ebook for you from a properly formatted Word file). But if you’re a terrible writer like me, you need all the help you can get. Scrivener is a lifesaver. Check it out for Mac and Windows.

Read. Write.

Writer read and readers write. As Merlin Mann wrote recently regarding the lovely new Instapaper 4.0, the mere decision to read more can make your life better. I look at the purchase of a Kindle as an active step into an exciting new world of democratized storytelling that starts with the written word but that ripples out as far as blockbuster movies. Get reading. Maybe even get writing. You’re a part of something important.

He was sharing with me his nerd-joy over being able to interview Jon Alexander at ILM about the history of optical compositing. I offhandedly mentioned that I had once, out of pure lifelong curiosity, re-created the optical bluescreen extraction workflow using After Effects.

Oops. The next day Mike was in my office with a camera. Watch this whole video. My bit is nerdelicious, Jon’s is wonderflully insightful and grounding, and it all adds up to a great taste of what fxphd members get to enjoy heaping tons of.

Read the companion article here.

This is long, personal, rambling, and a week too late. There are so many better things your could read about Jobs than this. I’m posting it because I didn’t want to look back at this year on Prolost and see just a hole here. If you decide to read on, this is as good a time as any for me to humbly thank your for your attention.

In 1985, i was learning to program BASIC on an Apple II in my 8th grade computer programming class. I wrote a Death Star trench flight simulator that was every bit as impressive as my ability to not ask girls to the dance.

That same year, a friend whose father worked at the local university took me to a special room where they had a Macintosh. Instead of our usual skateboarding and lighting things on fire, we spent hours drawing Opus the penguin in Macpaint.

In film school I used Amigas for filmmaking, but when I graduated I bought myself a PowerBook 170 with a black and white screen. I felt I could afford it because I was working at my dream job, using a $40,000 Silicon Graphics workstation to create visual effects for movies like Twister and Mission: Impossible. On the latter, I met John Knoll, who showed me how he was using his Mac to recreate space battle shots for the Star Wars special edition.

He looked like he was having so much fun. My SGI workstation felt like an incredibly powerful computer. John’s Mac seemed like a limitless creative tool. I started taking my own time to learn After Effects, Electric Image, and Photoshop. I spent close to $10,000 setting up a pimped-out PowerMac at home. I started writing screenplays and dreaming up short films. After a year of learning how to be a post-graduate human, I was back to making my own movies with computers.

John Knoll started the Rebel Mac Unit at ILM and asked me to lead it. The systems guys took my SGI workstation away and replaced it with a Mac. For a minute, I panicked. I was about to bet my career on the theory that I could create ILM-quality effects using a computer and software that any idiot could buy.

We made space battles for Star Trek, displays for Men in Black, a minefield for Galaxy Quest, and hundreds of shots for a new Star Wars movie. We had jackets made with the Rebel Alliance logo on one shoulder and an Apple logo on the other, stitched black-on-black because there were people at the company who genuinely hated what we were doing.

When I saw the first digital video camera, the Sony VX1000, I bought it immediately. I got my hands on an early prototype of a FireWire card and put it in one of the two Macs I had on my desk (that was Rebel Mac’s version of a multitaksing OS). I started writing a short film that would be finished completely on a home computer.

The name “Rebel Mac” hearkened back to the stories of Jobs starting the Mac division at an Apple that had sprawled out of his control. But we couldn’t use it in public, because ILM had an exclusive PR deal with SGI that ended the year I quit that dream job.

Rendering The Last Birthday Card in After Effects 4 on the blue G3 in 1999. Click to enlarge. Don’t miss the render time.

With my new blue G3 tower and version 1.0 of Final Cut, I finished my short and joined two friends in starting a company to make films and effects. We had grandiose ideas and “Lombard” PowerBooks. To promote our launch at the Sundance film festival, we made a promotional DVD with a pre-release version of Apple’s DVD Studio Pro.

We released version 1.0 of Magic Bullet. It was Mac-only and cost $999.

Our company grew, and our PowerPC-based Mac Pro workstations started to feel slow. We decided to switch to Windows, in part for access to faster Intel processors. Adobe and Intel worked with us on that transition, and I even took out an “advertorial” with them talking about our decision. We didn’t receive much in exchange for the promotion. Amidst rumors of a skunkworks division at Apple testing OS X on Intel processors, I had been considering writing a letter to Steve Jobs explaining the difficult position we were in. The advertorial was the easiest way to make sure he’d read it.

Apple responded by terminating our beta testing of Final Cut Pro, and retracting an offer to bid on the launch video for a new PowerPC Mac. I heard through a friend who got the video gig that Steve Jobs had referred to me as a “whore.”

I remember being so thrilled that he knew who I was.

Two years later at WWDC, Jobs announced that Apple would be switching to Intel.

That was 2005. Around this time, I was collecting my thinking about accessibility, creativity, filmmaking technology and post production into a book. It’s pointless to describe how essential my Apple laptop was to creating The DV Rebel’s Guide. Now you can read it on an iPad.

I directed the Second Unit on a movie in 2007. I had my 17” MacBook Pro with me every day. So integral to my process was it that the grip crew built a stand for it on my monitor cart. We called it the Nerd Station.

When we closed our company in 2009, I was once again left with nothing more than my Mac laptop. Now, when I walk into the offices of an executive who might be greenlighting the next phase of my career, it’s either that laptop in my hand, or my iPad.

Steve Jobs was instrumental in creating the tools that were not only the means of my creative work, they made me feel that there was no limit to what I could do. Everyone else makes computers for people who like computers. Steve Jobs made computers for people who like life.

He also made computers for people who can’t help but make things. When I’m working on the next Magic Bullet idea, there’s not a moment that I don’t try to imagine what Jobs would do in my shoes. How would he handle this idea, these products, this launch? On my best days I feel like I’m channeling a hundredth of a percent of his design principals—but in my own way, as he so eloquently reminded us.

As it happens, the day we all learned that Steve Jobs was gone, I had lunch at Pixar. A beautiful place full of amazing people using groundbreaking technology to do great work.

That’s the world I live in. That’s the world Steve left behind.

Shot with my iPhone 4 and processed in Noir for iPhone

Plastic Bullet Camera 2.0 for iOS went live today, with new sharing options (like Twitter, and something called “face book?”), support for larger image sizes and arbitrary aspect ratios. And Plastic Bullet is now a universal app, meaning it works beautifully on your iPad. You can develop a full-res 5D Mark II shot on the iPad version.

Which might seem like an odd thing to do—why not just have a version that runs on your Mac, where all your photos are? OK, we did that too. Plastic Bullet is now available on the Mac App Store for $4.99.

SpeedGrade 2009

Earlier this month Adobe announced the purchase of “certain assets” from a German company called IRIDAS, including their SpeedGrade software color correction system.

In many ways, this is a lot like Apple’s purchase of a small company called Silicon Color, announced in October of 2007. Like Silicon Color’s Final Touch, which became Apple Color, SpeedGrade is a powerful, but oddly clunky, standalone application that does nothing but GPU-accelerated color correction. As was the case with Final Touch, SpeedGrade is not among the most popular systems for professional film DI, but its featureset is comparable to those that are, such as Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve and Autodesk Lustre.

Apple never sold Color (once a $25,000 purchase) on its own, instead choosing to bundle it with Final Cut Studio. Similarly, Adobe seems to view IRIDAS’s color correction technology as a value-add to its existing suite of video products. From the blog of Adobe’s Todd Kopriva:

Not only have we listened to your requests for better, faster, and more powerful color grading and finishing tools—but we’ve also looked ahead to the future needs of professional video, including HDR (high dynamic range) and raw video workflows.

Adobe, being a publicly-traded company, doesn’t talk openly about its product plans, but one could imagine possible futures for SpeedGrade under Adobe’s wing by looking at other technologies Adobe has acquired over the years. Audition, for example, was added to the video suites right away, but took many years to be truly integrated. Others, such as Curious gFx Pro, seemed to disappear entirely.

SpeedGrade’s fate at Adobe is interesting to me both as a user and a designer of color correction tools. While Magic Bullet Looks is popular because it’s powerful, unique, and fun, Colorista—especially Colorista II—has become popular for a very different reason—it fills a void. It provides professional color correction in your favorite NLE and in After Effects, apps that mysteriously lack solid, user-friendly, telecine-style color control.

When third-party software fills a notable gap in a product line, it is naturally at risk of being rendered obsolete. What happens to Colorista when the makers of its host applications finally start taking color seriously? I’ll answer that in a bit. But first, let’s get back to the two hats that I wear: “user” and “developer.”

That was sort of a trick set-up. The truth is, I only wear one hat. I’m a user. I want what’s best and easiest. The difference between me and most users is simply that when I can’t find what’s best and easiest, I become obsessed with designing it—and I have a direct line to a wonderful team of people who can help me make it. But I’m always happy to have my creations rendered obsolete by advances in technology. Magic Bullet was originally a tool for converting interlaced video to 24p. But when a team of Panasonic engineers showed me a prototype of what would become the DVX100 and asked me what features I considered “must-haves,” I said 24p before they even finished talking.

As a user, I’d be delighted to have Adobe build in class-leading utility color correction to After Effects and Premiere. As a developer, I’ll be thrilled at the challenge of continuing to build great things that you want to use, even as the shortcomings we once shored up seem to disappear. Colorista has always “competed with free,” and I enjoy that spirit of healthy competition. It’s fun for me and great for us users.

So with that complex depiction of my two-hats-that-are-really-one out of the way, here is my advice for Adobe on how to handle their new acquisition.

• Exporting a Premiere Pro timeline into SpeedGrade is a good and natural start. My guess is that Adobe agrees, based on their recent “partnering” with Automatic Duck.

• The biggest effort here will be some kind of translation from IRIDAS’s “unique” user experience into a human-usable interface. Seriously. You can’t know how weird this software is until you try it. It makes Color 1.0 look like Delicious Library—although it had been getting better.

• But moving a project to a dedicated color app is simply not the way of the future for most users. Apple has the right idea by killing Color and making color correction a native property of every clip in a FCP X timeline—even if those new color controls are—how should I say this—a Colorista opportunity.

  This is important, so I’ll say it another way: Apple screwed up by making the FCP X “Color Board” less industry-standard (I mean sure, dream up a better way—but it has to actually be better), but their decision to make color controls part of the settings inherent to any clip in the timeline is spot-on.

• It’s often desirable to move from a dedicated editing environment to a dedicated finishing app, but (again, for most projects) not to a dedicated color-with-no-other-finishing-capabilities app. So:

• Encapsulate the SpeedGrade color correction controls into clip properties that make sense in Premiere. This should not be an “effect” any more that we should have to apply an effect to change an audio clip’s volume or stereo panning. In other words, do what Apple did in FCP X.

• Build a workflow that allows users to begin color work in Premiere with these controls, and then fine-tune it in SpeedGrade. Very much like what Magic Bullet users are doing now with Premiere Pro and After Effects.

• Make all of the color controls that we like in SpeedGrade work in After Effects as well. Here it’s OK to do this via effects. Give AE an NLE-style timeline and a more realtime disposition where possible. Enable AE to import both Premiere Pro projects with color settings and also SpeedGrade sessions with more advanced color adjustments.

• Premiere becomes a place where color is ubiquitous and useful.

• SpeedGrade becomes the place where color alone is done quickly and well.

• After Effects becomes the place where color is only a part of the complete finishing power.

In short, it’s a three-step process:

1. Ship it.
2. Integrate it.
3. Render it obsolete.

If you do that Adobe, you’ll have created the true home movie making studio for which I’ve always said you already have the ingredients.

In the meantime, I’ll be there to fill the gaps and the non-gaps alike, with filmmaking tools designed out of the day to day needs of a filmmaking nerd.

Speaking of which, Red Giant posted an update to Magic Bullet Suite today (v11.1) that includes bug fixes, Sony Vegas Pro compatibility (!), and Red Giant Link, an updater designed to make sure you don’t miss important updates hidden at the bottom of long-winded blog posts.

We discuss living in San Francisco, Star Wars, finding and doing what you love, trusting your grandmother’s advice, being unemployed after having lunch with Stu and a lot more.

Check it out, as well as Kanen’s other podcast, That Post Show. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how to find Merlin Mann’s amazing 5 by 5 show Back to Work.

If there’s anything I’m proud of about this episode, it’s that I may have tricked Merlin into being inspirational.

Subscribe to Scruffy Thinking in iTunes.

The bookshelf of Netflix’s highest-paying former customer

Netflix announced Sunday night that they’ll be splitting off their disk rental operation to a separate company, called Qwikster.

There’s been a lot of discussion about this on blogs and on Twitter. The comments on Netflix’s blog post present a good overview of the customer response. Some have praised Netflix for their foresight, while others have derided the move vociferously (and comedically). I found this breakdown of reasons why Netflix might have made this move insightful, but not as much as this one and this one.

I love Netflix, enough to complain about them here from time to time. But this latest announcement reminds me that Netflix doesn’t really love me. And by “me,” I mean the die-hard movie fan. The four-disk plan, Blu-ray option, twenty-disks-a-month user. You know, the ones who spend the most money with Netflix.

When Netflix effectively increased their price by removing the combined disk/streaming plan, I did not complain. Netflix has always been a good deal, and I don’t mind spending money on movies.

I can see how the split into two companies makes sense at a corporate level for Netflix, and might even be bold and daring. Some have even drawn analogies to Apple’s disinclusion of a floppy drive in the original iMac. The idea is that by becoming a streaming-only company, Netflix will have no choice but to make streaming better. This makes sense, and they do need this focus apparently, because Netflix’s selection of streaming titles is currently a “we guess you’ll rate this one star” rough with a few diamonds scattered in—a situation that’s about to get much worse as their deal with Starz ends.

It makes sense that Netflix, which always viewed DVDs by mail as an interim solution, would make this change and strive to be the best at streaming. Streaming is better for most people, and for every big-spender film fan like me, Netflix is betting there are a ton more “most people” And, of course, they’re right.

Sure, I enjoy streaming—for TV shows in particular, but also for the occasional movie. But I’m a film nerd with a 1080p projector, and I appreciate the quality and extra features of Blu-ray. I may be in the minority, but I am willing to spend money to make up for that.

Part of Netflix’s oddly-handled message (a part that many choose to take at something less than face value) is that by being its own company, Qwikster has an opportunity to focus 100% on disk delivery and do it better that Netflix ever could. Assuming that intention is real, here are my suggestions for how to make that happen. Call it an open letter to the recently-christened CEO of Qwikster, Andy Rendich.

There are two kinds of customers for disks, and they are very different. The first chooses not to use streaming due to technical reasons. They have a slow internet connection, or bandwidth caps, or don’t own a device that streams Netflix, or just don’t like new things. Disks work in their minivan, their business laptop, and at home, and they don’t see the need to change. These are likely to be your 1-disk-plan customers. Maybe 2.

The other kind is me, the film buff who appreciates quality, loves special features, and doesn’t mind waiting a day for a movie. These are likely to be 3-disk or more customers who will (if you insist) pay extra for Blu-ray. These customers are also more likely to have multiple accounts per household.

Netflix is currently failing to address the needs of this big-spender film fan customers in two key ways:

• Netflix has a 28-day delay on many new releases (which, of course, affects all customers).
• The Blu-rays that Netflix sends out are often stripped-down versions with no special features.

So Andy, while $8 of my monthly budget may well continue to go to Netflix, I’ve got $27 that I’d been spending on disks that you could capture. But since Qwikster offers no synergy with Netflix (such as shared ratings, or notification that a disk in my queue is available for streaming), the competitive field is open for that $27. I’m already trying out Blockbuster’s Total Access service—3 disks per month for only $20, no extra charge for Blu-ray, and I can swap disks at two locations close to my home.

You seem like a smart guy, and I’m pretty sure you know that you need to earn your own customers. If you want me among them, here’s what you could do:

• Create social features that make sense. Let me choose who my friends are and prioritize their opinions when suggesting movies I might like.

• Steal a great idea from GameFly (the very cool company whose lunch you’re reaching for) and let me buy the disk if I like it. Mail me the packaging and the next disk in my queue.

• Use that last point as a negotiating point with the studios. You’ll immediately become a major sales outlet for the Blu-ray disks they love so much, so force them to make the disk experience great, instead of stripped-down and buried in skip-proof ads. Vow to only carry the full, feature-laden versions of movies when available, and market this as a huge content advantage over streaming services.

Obviously the last point is the main one for me. You’re selling disks now. Make them great. Simple as that.

It may be brilliant or it may be crazy, but Netflix has eliminated the advantages of convenience and interoperation that they once uniquely possessed. I love movies and I have money. Who wants it?

I just rented Unknown from Netflix, on Blu-ray.

The first thing you see when you pop in the disk is a big, long, loud ad—for Blu-ray.

Hello. I own a Blu-ray player. I’m watching a Blu-ray. Why are you trying to sell me Blu-ray?

Skip.

Oops. Can’t skip. “This feature is not available here.”

So let’s see. I’m a Blu-ray owner, and you’re trying to sell me on Blu-ray by demonstrating Blu-ray’s ability to force me to watch an ad.

Fast forward maybe? Success!

But wait, now I’m curious. Let’s watch this Blu-ray ad.

It talks about image and sound quality. Yep, those are important to me.

Now it’s going into a big section about special features. “Go deeper into the movie.” Yes, this is the main reason I love Blu-ray so much. Picture-in-picture commentaries. Behind-the-scenes stuff. Awesome.

OK, ad over. Now some trailers.

Wow, lots and lots of trailers. For movies, and TV shows, and games, and…

Skip. Oops, nope. Fast forward.

Fast forward fast forward fast forward.

Aha. The menu.

And here are the two options:

• Play Movie
• Languages

Let me get this straight. After forcing me to watch an ad touting the amazing special features of Blu-ray, a thing of which I am already clearly a fan having spent hundreds of dollars on a player, you present me with a movie featuring exactly one “special feature”:

Spanish.

One of the most prominently featured movies in that unskippable ad was Sherlock Holmes. I rented that too. It also featured a stripped-down menu with only two options and none of the special features advertised. Except, of course, for the unskippable ads.

I get it. These minimized disks are pressed specifically for the rental market. I’m supposed to buy the “real” Blu-ray to see the good stuff. I actually do buy tons of Blu-rays—usually after renting them and experiencing how great all the special features are (Universal, ironically a late adopter of Blu-ray having supported HDDVD, doesn’t do the bare-bones thing). Looking back at my Amazon buying habits, turns out I buy a lot fewer movies these days—with “these days” coresponding precicely to the advent of these stripped-down “rental only” disks.

I’m a filmmaker and movie fan with a 1080p projector, 100-inch screen, and surround sound. Everyone I know streams nearly all their movies, but I specifically seek out the quality and extra features of Blu-ray without a second thought to the expense. But my love affair with the format is being killed by these bare-bones disks.

Here’s a crazy idea. How about instead of forcing people to watch an ad that talks about how Blu-ray provides a great movie watching experience—and then providing a shitty movie watching experience—how about just providing a great movie watching experience?

Let the experience be the ad.

Or, like Seth Godin says, “the product is the marketing.”

After all, look at the enormous popularity of the easiest way to have a high-quality movie watching experience at home, without any ads, trailers, FBI warnings, or firmware updates.

Talk about a successful product.

In 2001 The Orphanage was still a brand-new company, and I was not yet a professional director. The project that changed that was a music video for Cher’s A Song For The Lonely, which Cher had dedicated “to the courageous people of New York especially the fire fighters, the police, Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki and my friend Liz.”

A huge architecture buff with fond memories of a recent Manhattan film shoot in my mind, I pitched Warner Records an idea for a Cher-guided tour through New York’s proud history, exemplified by a multiple reverse-timelapses of some of the great buildings of the city rising up before our eyes. Here’s a page from my treatment:

I got word that the job had awarded and that Cher would be calling me on my cell phone. Her enthusiasm for the concept apparently steamrollered any trepidation Warner might have had about assigning this video to a first-time director.

I was terrified of the entire thing, but when Cher called, she immediately disarmed me. “So what are we supposed to be talking about?”

We shot in December, in New York. We got special permission from the Mayor’s office for live audio playback in the streets of Manhattan, a practice that had recently been outlawed. I hadn’t even met her yet and I was already experiencing how much the city of New York loved Cher.

Photo by John Benson

Cinematographer Rolf Kestermann and I decided to shoot on the brand-new-at-the-time Sony F900. This was in part due to the rapid post schedule and large number of visual effects, but it also facilitated a DV Rebel schedule hack that I had devised with my producer Scott Kaplan. We shot on a Thursday and Friday, and our camera kit wasn’t due back at the rental house until Monday morning. On Saturday, he and I took the F900 and a rented convertible around Manhattan and I shot the B-roll that became VFX plates for some of the signature effects, such as the Flatiron and Citicorp building shots.

One of the best pieces of advice I received was to schedule the shoot so that the very first thing up was complete coverage of the song with Cher looking her absolute best. So we scheduled the “black void” shot for early Thursday morning. This, along with the greenscreen stairs, we would shoot in Brooklyn, and then move to Manhattan for the rooftop shoot.

The black void shot was a huge success, but it almost didn’t happen. The sun wasn’t even up yet and we got word that Cher’s makeup artist, the famous and gifted Kevin Aucoin, was nowhere to be found. Of course much later we would sadly learn that this had been due to his struggling with a terminal illness, but at the time all I could think was that my directorial debut was about to be cancelled before it even began.

Then word came back from Cher’s trailer that she was going to proceed with the shoot—and do her own makeup. She was 55 at the time, and she was about to get in front of the cameras without the aid of her star makeup artist. That was when I realized how committed she was to the project. When she was almost done, I was allowed into her trailer to say hello for the first time that day. She was stunningly, unbelievably beautiful.

Between takes of the Technocrane shots of her running up the greenscreen stairs, Cher didn’t return to her trailer or even to her chair. She jogged in place near the stairs to keep her energy level up. As I explained the effects that we’d be adding in post, I stopped myself, realizing that this Academy Award-winning actress and accomplished director needed no coaching from me. “You’ve done this before,” I said. “Yeah, but you haven’t.” Was her reply. She was onto me. She smiled and put her hand on my arm. I’d walked over to comfort my star and she had wound up comforting me.

That was a pattern that would continue. On day two of our shoot, on the cobblestone streets of Manhattan’s Meat Packing district, I offhandedly called out to my first AD that the extras needed to walk faster in the next take (weirdly there’s sort of a rule that director’s shouldn’t talk directly to background talent—something about it meaning that they are no longer background). As we reset back to the end of the block for another Steadicam take, Cher took my arm and said, “Babe, if you call them ‘extras,’ they’ll act like extras. But if you call them ‘actors,’ they’ll give you their best.”

At least, I think that’s more or less what she said. I had a hard time concentrating after Cher called me “babe.” If there’s one human on the planet who owns that word, it’s her.

We were shooting on public streets with a large crew and full street closures, but we had some challenges dressing our little corner of New York to the appropriate periods. To cover that, we smoked up our streets with big, loud smoke machines. The events of 9/11 were still a fresh and painful memory for the city though, and complaints about our smoke started coming in. The police officer manning the intersection gave word that we’d have to shut down our atmospheric effects, but I still had one more shot that I desperately needed.

My AD leapt into action, borrowing “first team” (that’s Cher) and the script supervisor’s camera and walking over to the cop. An autographed polaroid later, we were shooting one last smoked-up street shot. Again, the power of Cher. On her walk back a guy yelled out his third-story window: “Yo, Cher!” In the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard. Without skipping a beat, she yelled back: “Yo!”

All of this, by the way, in the most brutal December cold that I’d ever experienced in New York. Look at the parka I’m wearing in these photos—It’s designed for summiting Everest. Meanwhile, Cher was strutting up and down the street in skinny jeans, heels, and a thin shirt under a light jacket.

Photo by John Benson

Despite the cold, the street shots went incredibly smoothly and I’m still amazed that we got all the coverage that we did in that one short day. But the rooftop shoot the previous day was another matter. It seemed to take forever to move the company from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan, and when we got up to the roof, the weather turned on us. Our gorgeous view of the Empire State Building was blocked by dense fog that rapidly became a light but persistent rain. Nevertheless, Cher climbed right up onto the roof—part of which was only accessible by a rickety ladder—and sang her heart out. There are shots where she’s standing in heels a foot away from a thirty-story drop, with only me and her bodyguard holding her feet for safety.

Like every first-time director, I planned a 360-degree dolly shot. I’m not sure which is a more popular bad idea for first-timers, this or the powers-of-ten shot. 360-degree dollies are almost never as interesting for the audience as they seem like they will be to a new director, and they are incredibly challenging to pull off. Imagine lighting a movie star on a giant rooftop, trying to hide the lighting gear from a camera that will see everything, and then asking the entire crew to leave so you can shoot. Including Cher’s vanities team. Guess what happened. The shot wasn’t that great, but worse still, without hair and makeup being allowed their “last looks,” our star didn’t look her best, and we wound up leaving most of the shots out. Although I must say that it was fun crouching at Cher’s feet with my clamshell monitor while the Steadicam rocketed around us on that roof.

I’m more proud that I survived the process of making this video than I am of the job I did as a director. It was my first directing job and my last music video—I wound up being a lot better at commercials. But I’ll never forget the experience and the numerous lessons I learned on this project, and I’m honored to have been a part of Cher’s tribute.

Scott Stewart, Jon Rothbart, Me, Scott Kaplan, Cher, John Benson

Martin Vilcans is in the process of updating Screenplain to use SPMD. You can give it a test run here. Try feeding it this sample file, or make your own. Any text file that contains anything remotely like a screenplay should work well.

This is a very early work in progress without any real utility yet—the only output is a simple “look, it works” page—but it’s still exciting to see. There’s no forced line break support yet, nor any text emphasis, but he does have dual dialog working.

Martin is not the only developer to express interest in SPMD, but he’s the first to show progress. Nice work Martin, can’t wait to see more!

In conjunction with the Original iPhone Film Festival, Movie Looks HD is free for two days. Get it!

More info here.

When technology and art intersect, its often the case that those who know how have no idea why, and those who know why have no idea how.

I can’t stop thinking about this SIGGRAPH video. It shows realistic lens flares being computed in real time using a ray tracing technique. There are some lens artifacts shown here of a complexity and beauty that I’ve never seen faked convincingly before.

Lens flare is caused by light passing through a photographic lens system in an unintended way. Often considered a degrading artifact, it has become a crucial component for realistic imagery and an artistic means that can even lead to an increased perceived brightness.

Jesus nerds. “Increased perceived brightness?” That was the best sales pitch you could give on why being able to synthesise realistic lens flares is worthwhile?

Lens flares are awesome because they are fricking crazy. They are completely unreal. They increase the veil of unreality between the audience and the movie. They are beautiful. They are tiny imperfections magnified by orders of magnitude. They are aliens. And scary buildings. We give them sound effects and music cues. They make movies bigger than life because they have nothing to do with life.

And I want yours.

In the Vimeo comments the poster said:

Anamorphic optics are currently not supported, but this is not a principal limitation of the rendering scheme.

If they had put anamorphic examples in this video I think I’d be standing on their lawn with a boom box right now.

Physically-Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering — Hullin, Eisemann, Seidel, Lee

Today Red Giant announced Magic Bullet Mojo for Final Cut Pro X. Hooray!

Mojo was conceived as a super simple effect for creating a sexy look quick, with a minimum of fuss. I designed it to be based entirely on sliders and other controls easily ported from one application to another, so that we could make it a screaming good deal and get it working on as many hosts as possible.

That turned out to be a lucky move, because so far it’s almost the only Magic Bullet plug-in that Final Cut Pro X can support. Both the graphical controls that Colorista II uses and the dense “custom data” blocks that Magic Bullet Looks relies on are victims of bugs or shortcomings in the initial release of FCP X.

The good news is that Red Giant is working directly with Apple on addressing these issues. But rather than simply tell you that and expect you to believe it, we knuckled down and got Mojo working as quickly as we could so that you’d know we’re taking FCP X seriously.

And by “we,” I mean the hard-working Engineering and QA folks at Red Giant, not me. I just got to sit back and watch.

Mojo is a dream in FCP X. It plays back at 1080p in near real time on my iMac without rendering, but the background rendering is so seamless you’ll never even know its happening. Love it or hate it, FCP X really nailed the whole background processing thing, and it’s fun for me to see one of our tools working so seamlessly with the new architecture.

For one week only, Mojo is on sale for $49, which is roughly half price (use coupon code MOJOFCPX). And that’s one license that works in every host Mojo supports — so if you’re in NLE limbo right now, Mojo can be a companion to you as you wander. Mojo for FCP X is a free update for existing customers, as will be all of the Magic Bullet Suite updates for FCP X as they become available — or possible.