BulletProof, which Red Giant revealed at NAB, is now availble for download as a free public beta.

You’ve got a great camera, you’ve got a great editor — how do you manage everything between them? BulletProof is a complete media prep solution that bridges the gap, with a workflow that simplifies how you handle footage every day. Offload, backup, organize, review, color, deliver: BulletProof has your back at every step. Whether you shoot with DSLR or a GoPro, BulletProof lets you focus on your story and get to the editor fast.

Get it now, and join us on the forum to report bugs, suggest features, and help us make it great!

The public beta is Mac only for now. The Windows version (which was also demoed at NAB) will be released later as a free update.

Ready for more detail on how BulletProof works? Check out this Getting Started video from Simon Walker:

From the App Store:

Veteran storyteller Neal Edelstein has reinvented filmmaking in a way that brings the power of hypnotic, episodic content to the iTunes Store. Viewed exclusively on the iPhone and iPad this frighteningly haunting story is released in sporadic and unexpected ways that will leave you constantly guessing, and constantly engaged.

A horror movie delivered directly to your iPad or iPhone, a little at a time. Push notifications alert you to new chapters. Pay a little for each one or buy a Season Pass.

And it gets even more interesting than that.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Great work Neal!

Download the free app. Haunting Melissa on the web and on Twitter.

The team at Magic Lantern have managed to hack the Canon 5D Mark III to record 14-bit raw 1080p video at 24 frames per second. The results are stunning—the highest-quality video we’ve seen from a DSLR yet, comparing favorably to images from cameras costing much more.

This is a big deal. But maybe not as big a deal as some have made it out to be. Like Ham, the chimpanzee that was launched into space on a Mercury rocket, the Magic Lantern raw hack is less notable for its discrete accomplishment than for what it portends.

How it Works

I was skeptical about the announcement of raw video at 1080p. This wasn’t a sensor crop, this was a full-frame image, somehow downsampled to 1920x1080—yet still being touted as “raw.”

How is this Magic Lantern thing “raw” if it’s scaled down from sensor res to 1080p? Scaling requires debayering. Debayered is not raw.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) May 13, 2013

The answer came back from Magic Lantern themselves:

@5tu it’s not debayered, it’s 14-bit RGGB.

— Magic Lantern (@autoexec_bin) May 13, 2013

@5tu no idea, only Canon knows how the downsampling works. On 5D3 there’s no moire, on 5D2 there is.

— Magic Lantern (@autoexec_bin) May 13, 2013

Put this way, it makes sense—and matches what Magic Lantern said in their original post:

Key ingredients:

• canon has an internal buffer that contains the RAW data

Of course. Canon sparsely samples the sensor (the popular theory is that they skip lines and bin rows) to create their own 1080p bayer image, which they rapidly debayer to create 1080p video frames. It looks like Magic Lantern have found a way to grab this raw buffer and save it directly to the CF card.

Whatever magic Canon worked to eliminate the moiré in the 5D Mark III’s video now benefits Magic Lantern users as well. And whatever downsides there are to this sparse sampling will also affect the raw hack.

What it Takes

Right now, the hack requires quite a bit of work to get up and running, and even more work to derive useable results.

But those usable results are compelling. There are tremendous opportunities afforded by the raw video hack over the compressed H.264 recordings the camera natively makes.

• Post-processing debayering can be much better than the hasty in-camera processing. The much-lamented softness of 5D Mark III video is improved noticeably by handling the debayering (including noise reduction) after the fact. Although I can’t help but wonder if we’d get even better results from a demosaicing algorithm tuned to the specifics of the 5D’s subsampling pattern.
• The 14-bit raw frames contain a great deal of dynamic range that 8-bit, heavily compressed video does not.
• No compression.

But there’s a price to pay for recording 14-bit uncompressed raw. It requires crazy-fast CF cards, and you’ll only get 15 minutes of video on that 128 GB card, according to Cinema 5D, who graciously posted their workflow and samples, “after struggling for a day” to get it all working.

What it Means

Even once the setup process is streamlined, and the raw-to-DNG conversion process is streamlined (or eliminated), uncompressed raw video is probably not the best option for most DSLR shooters. Better would be something like ProRes or DNxHD—but that would require high-quality debayering in the camera, which would seem to require more processing power than the 5D Mark III has to offer. More processing means more heat, which means a very different camera design than an SLR. It’s easy to see why digital cinema cameras start to get expensive.

The 5D Mark III raw hack is cool. It’s important. It’s something we’ll use, and like, and get good results from. But as exciting as it is today, it’s even more significant for what it means for the future of low-cost digital cinema cameras.

Mr. Ham risked his furry life to prove that a primate could flip switches in space. Three months later, a human being took the same trip. By proving that raw video is possible from the 5D Mark III, Magic Lantern have joined the forces pushing the industry in an important new direction.

Five years ago I wrote that large-sensor video had shown “that it’s no longer OK for manufacturers to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally.” Since the industry did such a good job of heeding that advice, my new mandate for the future is this:

It’s no longer OK for cameras not to give us everything they’ve got.

What I love about the new generation of cameras, such as those from Blackmagic, Red, and even GoPro, is that they all give you everything they’ve got. They’ll give you the highest image quality they can, in the smallest package possible. They’ll compress images as much or as little as you want. They’ll max out their resolution at the expense of frame rate, or vise versa—whichever you like. And they’ll pack their best dynamic range into any format they can record.

Compared to this, Canon and Sony’s digital cinema product lines seem cruelly restricted at every tier. The result was palpable at NAB. As I said on stage at the SuperMeet, the show seemed to belong to camera upstarts. To cameras from small booths. From the Phantom Flex4K with its Super35 4K at 1,000 fps, to the Digital Bolex, the exciting cameras at every price point were the ones not charging by the button, feature, or codec, but simply giving you all they could do.

What Magic Lantern have done is show camera makers that if they won’t give us all they’ve got, we’ll just take it anyway. The smart manufacturers will try to beat us there out of the box.

Adobe is a company that makes tools we all love and rely on for our work in video post production. But with their latest announcement – that from here on in, all software will only be available through subscription – a lot of people are upset and feeling betrayed. I want to try to address it all in a balanced way. I’ll ask that you read all the way through because I am going to start with why, about certain things, you’re totally wrong. Then, I’ll move into why you’re also totally right – and have the right to feel angry and demand more.

Aharon’s words stick out like a sore thumb on the internet, because they’re rational, well-considered, researched, and nuanced. Creative Cloud is neither a money grubbing conspiracy designed to seize power, nor is it a deftly-handled modernization of a business model. The truth is somewhere in between, and Aharon has done us all a favor by taking the time to analyze the situation.

And the part about the ruler/stylus guy is priceless.

Adobe fans and haters alike, read it. Adobe employees, print it out and tape it to your wall.

I had the great pleasure of joining Brett Terpstra on his Systematic podcast yesterday. We talked about Slugline, sucking at things, and cocktails. It was a really cool conversation that I think you’ll enjoy.

Also, Brett somehow tricked me into revealing my opinion on FCP X.

Speaking of podcasts, Clint and I were recently on Kanen Flowers’s Scruffy Thinking show, talking about the launch of Slugline.

The promo video for Slugline was a fun opportunity for me to try my hand at (AKA rip off) the “show, don’t sell” style of my hipster pitchman idol Adam Lisagor, as well as a chance to bust out some DV Rebel production tricks, such as stealing shots in plain sight, and approaching cinematography as an informed collaboration between the shoot and the color grade.

The opening shot features a row of typewriters, culminating in a MacBook Air. I shot it at California Typewriter in Berkeley. If an honest-to-goodness typewriter store sounds like a cool thing to you, then this place is your Shangri-La. Father-daughter proprietors Herb and Carmen gave me free run of their shop for an hour before they opened.

Here was my gear:

• Canon 5D Mark III
• Manfrotto tripod
• Glidetrack slider
• Canon 24–70 F2.8L (I love my Mark I of this lens and see no need to upgrade to the Mark II)
• One Nasty Flag for lighting control.

“Lighting control” is a fancy term for my humble request of Carmen to turn off the overhead fluorescents. But the Nasty Flag really did help me kill the fill from a skylight above my first typewriter.

I shot at 29.97 fps, knowing I’d slow the footage down to 23.976 in the cut. Shooting 30-for–24 helped smooth out my hand-operated slider move (a little). I was matching to an animatic with locked VO, so I knew how long my shot had to be—but I had to do a little math to account for the slowdown.

I did my best to stage the shot in a spot with decent lighting, but there was only so much I could do. So I shot flat, made sure not to clip, and started thinking about how I’d finish my job as cinematographer in After Effects CS6, using Magic Bullet Colorista II.

The solution wound up emerging from the visual effects component of the shot. To replace the screen on the MacBook Air, I used the After Effects 3D tracker. The results were solid throughout the shot, so I began experimenting with adding color correction masks in 3D space. Here’s how you do that:

1. Select several points on the plane of the surface you wish to re-light
2. Right-click and select Create Solid
3. Preview and verify that the solid you’ve created “sticks” to the surface
4. If it’s tracking well, enlarge the solid to generously cover the surface, and then sculpt your color correction mask using the After Effects masking tools.
5. You may still have to add keyframes to the mask shape to ensure accuracy, but it should only take a few.
6. Use the result as a Track Matte for an Adjustment Layer containing your color correction.

As you can see, I wound up with 3D masks to control the brightness of the keyboards on two typewriters, the shadowing of the back wall, and, most importantly, the sheen on the MacBook Air. Before I added that gleam to the lower surface of the laptop, the shot was simply not telling the story.

When you are the director, DP, and colorist, the sin of “fix it in post” is no sin at all—as long as you don’t write any checks on the set that you lack the chops to cash in post. Would the shot look better if I’d lit it properly and gotten the look in 100% camera? Of course—but that’s a useless hypothetical. Thanks to the kindness of some strangers, I had an opportunity to get my shot for free, based on the promise that I’d be low-impact and quick. If I’d shown up with a lighting kit, asking to tie into their power and block access to parts of their store, my hosts would, quite rightly, start thinking about charging me a location fee. And there’s no way I’d have been in and out in an hour. So I made use of the resources I had—which included a brief window to shoot in a very cool location, a heck of a lot more time at my computer later, and a personal predilection for elaborate color grading tricks.

I budgeted my hour at the location almost perfectly—which wound up meaning “perfectly wrong.” Just as I was reliably getting good takes, the clock struck noon, and Carmen opened the door to a customer who’d been waiting patiently outside with his busted, beige printer from the late Paleolithic era. Right near the end of my best take, a reflection from the swinging door pinged the shelf in a distracting way. So I fixed that too, by pulling bits of shelf from adjacent frames.

Gosh, you’ve really got some nice toys here.

In the time it took me to pack up my modest gear and put the typewriters back where I’d found them, Carmen had diagnosed the gentleman’s problem. His printer, from 1992, was skipping due to a bad belt. She dug up a replacement and had it working before I left the store.

The whole premise of Slugline is to bring screenwriting away from a software experience and back to a writing one—even a purely typing one. I realized in that moment that I’d truly found the perfect location for my opening shot.

I’ll return to California Typewriter. I’ll let you know which one I buy.

Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty appeared on Scott Kelby’s show The Grid and showed a “technology preview” of Creative Cloud-synced raw photo editing on an iPad.

Sounds familiar!

And although Tom mostly showed visual editing, necessary for a sexy demo, he spent a good deal of time talking about the value of organizational tools such as sorting and reading, which is where I think the real value lies, as I wrote last year:

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

Half the reason I use Lightroom over the other DAM/raw processing tools out there is that I like it better. The other half is that I love the way Adobe engages with the community. You can have a relationship with Adobe, and software is a relationship.

So thanks for the tease Tom! Looks great. Just please dodn’t get so wrapped up in the sexiness of mobile editing that you forget about the incredible value of sorting and tagging on the go.

The latest Red Giant film by director Seth Worley is up, and it is as good as you’d hope. Better even.

How freaking cool is it that Red Giant takes over their whole front page to show you a hilarious film that is only vaguely related to a new product?

Go check it out, and the behind-the-scenes as well.

Great job Seth and Aharon!

You probably saw this coming.

Slugline is an app for writing screenplays. It uses Fountain as its native file format. It brings the power and simplicity of plain text to screenwriting, without sacrificing features that screenwriters need. In fact, Slugline is focused entirely on the writing part of screenwriting. It has annotation, integrated outlining, and Fountain’s ability to omit text without deleting it, all driven by the text you type.

Your files are plain text, editable with any writing software, on any device. But when you print them from Slugline, they appear as a perfect, industry-standard screenplay. Better, in fact, because Slugline optionally lets you use Courier Prime.

Read more at the new Slugline blog, follow SluglineApp on Twitter, or just head on over to the Mac app store, where Slugline is exclusively available for $39.99.

BulletProof is a new app from Red Giant that fills a huge gap in the DSLR shooter’s workflow. You’ve shot this great footage—now what do you do with it?

Large productions with high-end digital cinema cameras tend to be supported by a full DIT (Digital Imaging Technician) cart with customized software and hardware. But where was the DIT tool for indies? Red Giant saw an opportunity to bolster the workflow of one of the most common types of shoot—the DSLR-based, small-but-capable indie crew. So about 18 months ago, we sat in Sean Safreed’s dining room in San Francisco and started sketching ideas for BulletProof.

The Other Half of Your Camera

If you’re a cinematographer hired to create gorgeous images, you have a tough choice to make about how “flat” to shoot your footage. Flatter is better (log is best) for color grading, but your client might not understand why all their footage looks like it got a milk bath. And even if they do, who’s to say that they’ll color correct it anything like what you had in mind? Or maybe, to your horror, they’ll just fall in love with the “flat look,” since that’s what they’ve been looking at in the edit.

Or you could bake in a look into your shots in-camera. The client may love the dailies, but they also may be disappointed with the lack of flexibility you’ve given them down the line.

Now that we have an abundance of cameras that shoot a broad dynamic range, flat or log image, shooters need a way to not only review color-correct dailies on set, but also to begin the creative process of color correction—if only to “set a look” that conveys the cinematographer’s intent.

When I shoot stills or video, I’m already thinking about what kind of color grading I’m going to add later. Lensing the imagery only feels like the first half of the image-making process. That’s why we’re saying BulletProof is the other half of your camera—it’s a safe place to offload, catalog, and prep your footage for the edit. You can add keywords, markers, and other metadata—including Colorista primary color correction and a variety of industry-standard LUTs.

If you’re an indie filmmaker working on a small scale, you still have all the needs of a large production when it comes to managing your precious footage. You need a checksumed, redundant archiving process. You need to check your shots on set. And you might not have a dedicated script supervisor to take notes, so you need a way to mark your good takes, your crummy ones, and even key moments within a take—whether it’s you cutting the footage, or someone else.

BulletProof allows you to add markers and even in/out points to clips. This metadata is included in the clips your export, so your editor sees your Circle Takes, Rejects, and Notes right in their NLE, effortlessly.

Maybe the coolest feature is BulletProof’s Playlists. You can add shots to a playlist and they’ll play back in sequence, respecting the In and Out Points you’ve added to each clip. This makes it fast and easy to create a mini-cut on set, so you can check continuity and move on to the next setup with the confidence that you’ve got your coverage.

Like Red Giant’s Grinder before it, you can easily export all kinds of variations on your footage. You might create H.264 web-friendly movies with color correction and timecode window burn for web review, color-corrected ProRes files for offline edit, and uncorrected ProRes HQ movies for the online. All of this is driven by presets that you customize.

These are all wonderful features, but my favorite feature is that BulletProof is simple to use. I wanted to design something that would be intuitive and easy for a busy and distracted director to use on their own, yet powerful enough for a dedicated DIT to be a hero for their director or DP. The left-to-right “panoramic UI” makes it abundantly clear where your footage is coming from, where it’s going to, and what’s happening in between.

I’m really excited about BulletProof. I know it’s going to change how I shoot, and make my communication with my editors even better. But I know that we can’t do it alone. However much I might shoot, there are those of you out there who shoot more, and under more pressing conditions. So we’re launching BulletProof in a new way for Red Giant—as a free public beta. You can sign up now and help us shape BulletProof into the shooter’s companion app that you’ve always wanted. This summer, the app will ship for $199—a price designed to make BulletProof an easy choice for shooters at every level.

Photo by @donaldberube. Note the tea.

One Froggy Evening

Last night I got to show BulletProof to over 1,000 people at the 13th annual SuperMeet. The crowd was very supportive even though I had almost completely lost my voice! I felt privileged to be representing the hard work of the amazing team at Red Giant who have been bringing BulletProof to life. If you’re at the show and you’ve come by the booth you’ll immediately understand why I love working with this company.

If you’d live to see more great NAB news, including Sean and I talking about BulletProof, check out fxguide’s amazing show coverage. You’ll find Mike Seymour interviewing us at about the 01:26:45 mark in Part 1.

Blackmagic Design announced today what was leaked last night—two new cameras.

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K is a “4K for $4K” update to the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Same not-quite-ideal-but-who-cares form factor, but now with a Super35 4K sensor with a global shutter. It’s priced at $3,995, and is available for pre-order at B&H.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera would easily be mistaken for a Sony NEX5 or Panasonic GH1. It’s tiny, solid, and a joy to hold—even before you realize that it has a 1920x1080 Super-16 sensor with 13 stops of dynamic range, an active MFT mount. Also available for preorder at B&H for the is-there-a-zero-missing price of $995.

I’m told that the reson Blackmagic isn’t touting the dynamic range of the 4K camera is that it’s about a stop less than that of the Pocket. Aparently that’s the cost of the global shutter.

Both cameras shoot Cinema DNG (lossy compressed even, in the case of the 4K model), ProRes (which I bet will be the more popular choice), and are said to ship in July.

Will they ship on time? One has to hope that Blackmagic has learned a lot from their production issues with the original BMC. But even late and in short supply, these cameras will shake up the market.

This makes the subject of my SuperMeet talk tomorrow—Digital Cinematography - What do we do now that we’ve won?—all the more appropriate. I’ll be talking about the origins of BulletProof, and how important it is now that camera manufacturers are finally bending over backwards to build exactly what we need, at a price we can afford.

• Cinema 4D Lite and live 3D pipeline between Cinema 4D and After Effects
• The Refine Edge tool, which adds crazy good soft edge matting to the already amazing Roto Brush.
• Snapping. This doesn’t sound big, but it actually is. Make a cube in seconds rather than minutes.
• Bicubic resampling. Ahem. Finally.

Read more here. And here’s a good rundown of what’s new in Premiere—looks like they focused on solid usability features rather than glitz, which is great to see.

Now, back to After Effects. Cinema 4D Lite will be bundled with this “next” version, and you’ll be able to create a C4D scene right from within AE. You create the 3D animation in C4D, but you can change your view on the scene using the AE camera. Then, when you render your After Effects project, the C4D scene is rendered on-the-fly. This is not just a welcome simplification of the standard render-import-render workflow, it puts powerful 3D features into any After Effects session. Pretty cool.

Creative Cloud subscribers will get these new features as soon as they are released, which, I suspect, will create a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about the whole software-as-a-subscription model.

A big, personal congrats to my friends on the After Effects team. Nice work all!

Sign up for the free public beta at redgiant.com.

Convert, Preview

Highland, the screenplay conversion app from John August and company, is out of beta and available on the Mac App Store for $9.99 until the end of the month, $19.99 after that.

Highland convertes screenplays back and forth among Final Draft’s FDX format, Fountain, and PDF. Not just to PDF, but also from—if you have a PDF screenplay, Highland can “melt” it into an editable file.

That, lemme tell ya, is super handy.

Highland also allows you to edit the raw text of Fountain files, and preview the results in industry-standard screenplay formatting.

Highland joins an ever growing list of Fountain apps that now includes Scrivener too. It’s a party!

And it’s just getting started…

Edit

Last night was a rough one for the Visual Effects community.

I was about to embark down the road of writing up the evening’s events, as if I was some kind of journalist.

But I’m not. I’m a director, and a visual effects artist. I’m a fan of film who fantasized about making movies ever since seeing Star Wars at age five. I’m also a survivor of a VFX company bankruptcy.

So I know what it’s like to be an artist who feels overworked and under appreciated.

And I know what it feels like to start your dream company, and see it collapse.

I also know what it feels like to be a director who can’t afford all the VFX I’d like in my own work.

And here’s what I have to say:

Congratulations.

Congratulations to the visual effects crew of Life of Pi. I am simply blown away by your work. Your tigers and waves and artistry and technical mastery made me laugh and cry and revel in how wonderful movies can be. I know how hard it is to do what you did, and even though I know exactly how you did it, I have no idea how you pulled it off.

Congratulations to Bill Westenhofer, for your amazing work to be sure, but also for the nonobvious gift of being cut off at the exact right moment to make the experience awful enough for all involved that the world took notice. You did the right thing by starting off with proper acknowledgments, and then the right thing again by jumping right into the controversy. You came off as a class act, and as is so often the case with visual effects and cinema, you’ve captivated the world’s attention with what they didn’t get to see.

Congratulations to Claudio Miranda, who I know in my heart appreciates the hell out of the work that shares the frame with his. Although he failed to mention the VFX crew as their images danced behind him on stage, he later acknowledged it to press backstage.

Congratulations to the 400+ VFX artists who demonstrated in a way that got all the right kinds of attention. That’s not easy. As a nation, we suck at it. As a group of nerdy artists, you nailed it.

Congratulations to Ang Lee, for both your talent behind the lens, and also for the gift that awaits you. You’ve put your foot in your mouth twice now about how you wish visual effects could be less expensive, and in doing so, I dare hope that you’ve made it nearly impossible for yourself to continue to ignore the nuances of the situation. A wonderful education awaits you. Please listen to the thoughts and frustrations of the visual effects artists whose work you presided over so masterfully.

Their stories are true.

The dream is alive. If you don’t hear from me for a while, at least you’ll know why.

Newton2, which now features joints, springs, and convex hulls, is available for $249.99 at aescripts.com.

It seems that RØDE Microphones was way ahead of me, as they have since announced two very interesting products, the iXY stereo microphone, and—of much greater interest to filmmakers—the smartLav lavaliere mic. Both attach to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and use the RØDE Rec iOS app.

Are we done? Not even close. There’s ample room for further innovation, but this is a great step. The terrific news is that now, with these hardware devices, RØDE can continue to develop the app and add new features, such as (who knows?) remote monitoring and control, integration with a slate app. And a shotgun model would be a welcome addition to this line.

No pricing or specific release dates (beyond “early 2013”) are available yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

John August has just released Courier Prime, a free typeface designed specifically for screenplays. John calls it “Courier, but better.” I think it’s beautiful.

Screenwriting began in the era of typewriters, and it’s always been served raw. What the screenwriter pulls out of the typewriter isn’t a manuscript to be sent to the publisher — it’s the final product.

Over the years, the tools have changed, with the advent of computers and printers and PDFs. But we still expect scripts to look like they came out of a typewriter.

It was for a typewriter, not a high-fidelity screen or printer, that Courier was designed, as John goes on to explain. I’ve always had a love/hate thing for Courier, and John’s history lesson helps explain why. Give it a read, and give Courier Prime a try.

Have no doubt, manufacturers are going to start pushing 4K (some already are). The thing is, though, you don’t need 4K, because in the home, 4K is stupid.

Morrison goes on to back up this assertion with wonderful facts and math. If you bought a 60” television, you’d have to sit about four feet away from it before you’d perceive the full benefit of 4K over good old 1080p.

My favorite part of the article is this:

A few years ago I did a TV face-off with trained TV reviewers and untrained participants with Pioneer’s Kuro plasma (768p) against several 1080p LCDs and plasmas. Not one person noticed the Kuro wasn’t 1080p. In fact, most lauded it for its detail. Why? Its contrast ratio was so much better than on the other TVs that it appeared to have better resolution. The difference between light and dark is resolution. If that difference is more pronounced, as it is on high-contrast ratio displays, they will have more apparent resolution.

Those same few years ago, I would use charts like this to guide friends shopping for TVs toward a comparatively inexpensive 720p Panasonic plasma, because the deep, rich blacks matter more to our perception of sharpness than pixels too small to resolve at normal seating distances. Those who followed my advice were invariably happy with their choice.

I never doubted that last year’s push of 3D televisions would fall on its face, but I do worry about consumers being tricked into thinking 4K matters, because they were with 1080p. Many friends ignored my advice to go for the crisp plasma blacks of the 720p Kuro and instead opted for a 1080p set, due to the same inability to shake the sense of more-is-always-more that drives consumers to buy increasingly high-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras.

Back when Morrison was conducting his experiments and I was pushing 720p, we were already fighting a losing battle. No one wanted 720p TVs, even if their viewing experience would be better with them. 1080p became a buzzword, a must-have—charts and math be damned. Now you needn’t even check if a TV is 1080p “full HD”—they pretty much all are, because that’s all that would sell.

And today, that’s not such a bad thing, because the contrast levels of 1080p sets are now quite good. There are worse things about modern TVs than their excessive pixel counts.

Is 4K unilaterally worthless in the home? Not if you’ve got a projector, a huge screen, a close seating distance, and perfect eyesight. I’m building a new home theater, so this stuff is on my mind. I’m considering a 134” screen and a seating distance of about 15 feet. That puts me right on the very edge of wishing I had more than 1080 pixels across my screen.

A case can be made for 4K with larger screens at home. At the moment, though, light output limits screen size far more than resolution. For home projectors, let’s just shrug and ask, “OK, why not?”

The answer to that rhetorical question is, of course, that 4K is expensive/unavailable in the home just now. But that will change. Eventually, all big TVs (and projectors) will have more pixels than the bare minimum for 1080p, and eventually this won’t be something you need to pay a premium for, or for which you’ll have to give up other features that matter much more, such as contrast.

In the meantime, buy your TV (or projector) not for its pixel count, but for its black level, and you’ll be happy.

Adobe After Effects is celebrating its 20 year anniversary. I’ve only been using it for 17 of those years, but I’m pretty sure I’ve packed about 100 years of use into that time.

After Effects is my go-to creative tool for almost everything I do, from designing the user interface of Magic Bullet Looks 1.0, to crafting visuals for my films, to creating my Christmas cards. I was delighted to be able to sit down with Adobe’s Michelle Gallina and tell the story of how I came to meet this creative partner that I’ve relied on almost every day since.

The story I didn’t tell is how happy I am to have become friends with so many members of the team that makes After Effects. A heartfelt congrats to the amazing team of Daves and Non-Daves at the plabt. Here’s to another 20 years of me giving you a hard time.

Deadlines are good.

I only had the camera for a week. And for that entire week, there it sat, unused except for a few test shots. I should shoot something nice with it, I kept thinking. Something pretty. Before the day comes that I have to send it back.

And then that day came, and I had a shipping label in my hand, and zero footage. Meanwhile, my wife and her sister—who, as a company of two people, have a less developed procrastination method than my lone enterprise allows—asked if I could take a few behind-the-scenes photos of them testing new scents for their line of handmade candles.

“Sure, but how about we shoot a video too?” I said before I’d thought it through.

I jammed the borrowed Blackmagic Cinema Camera onto my Redrock Micro EyeSpy rig, attached my Canon 50mm f/1.2 L, and got to work.

BMC: Befuddling, Magnificent Camera

As perfectly expressed by Vincent Laforet (the generous loaner of this particular BMC), the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a perplexing mix of unmatched bang-for-the-buck, along with some maddening shortcomings and inscrutable design decisions.

Upon picking up the camera body, I was immediately impressed with its build quality. It’s solid, pleasingly minimal, and made with high-quality metal, rubber, and plastic. What it is not, is light. The body alone weighs 3.75 lbs, and this one had the Wooden Camera BMC Kit (Advanced) grafted on with a sense of permanence that a gracious borrower would balk at challenging, adding nearly three pounds. Slap on a lens and you’re in an awkward zone of too heavy to hold, too small to stop trying.

Hold Me?

The large touch LCD built into the camera body is a big part of why you’ll keep trying to “hold” this camera in your “hands.” The built-in focus peaking is wonderful to use, and major reason why so much of Let’s Cook, the result of my hasty shoot, is in focus. You can also double-tap the display to zoom in for precise focus. But unless you’re on a tripod and operating at CWH (Comfortable Working Height), you will find the touchscreen difficult to use as a viewfinder. Red’s design of a detachable, adjustable Touch LCD may not be pleasingly minimalist or comfortingly DSLR-like, but it’s significantly more useful.

Despite the LCD being precisely where you’d put one on a camera meant for your hands, the BMC is not actually designed to be held. It lacks any kind of hand grip, and its ziggurat shape wants to fall out of your grasp, even as you try to place your thumbs over the buttons that cry out to have thumbs placed over them. The DSLR-esque shape of this camera is, unfortunately, more of an aspiration than a practical design feature.

Identity Crisis

The way I tried to make the BMC behave like an HDSLR was by mounting it to my EyeSpy rig. It fit on with only a few modifications, but the counterweight was not nearly enough to balance out the front-heavy rig. For hand-held work, this camera really wants to be directly over your shoulder, like an Alexa or an Epic, with an EVF or small LCD monitor extended in front. Bear that in mind if you’re considering the BMC as a graduation present from the school of HDSLRs.

I love a good deal, and the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a great one. But the touchscreen would be more usable, and would save BMC customers substantial money on accessories, if it was detachable and/or adjustable to a position that better acknowledges the reality of this camera’s size and weight. Even if the camera had to cost $1,000 more to accommodate this, the net would be a savings to the owner.

Now, about those buttons crying out for your thumbs. On the right is the Focus button, which toggles the super-helpful-on-the-rare-occasion-that-the-touchscreen-is-usable-as-your-EVF focus peaking. It’s really good. I wore myself out hefting my imbalanced rig around just so I could keep using it, and as a result, I did a better job pulling focus on Let’s Cook than I’ve ever done before.

The button on the left is labeled Iris, and it is stupid. Press it and the iris—on a compatible EF-mount lens—is set automatically, according to rules that require a glance at the manual:

When shooting using the Video dynamic range, the exposure will set using an average of scene similar to what you’re used to on a stills camera. However, in Film dynamic range, the IRIS button adjusts your exposure to ensure that nothing in your scene is clipped.

That Dynamic Range setting of Film or Video affects the recorded image when using ProRes, but not, of course, when recording raw. There’s a separate Film/Video setting for the LCD, which toggles a non-destructive Rec 709 LUT for the display. I shot raw, but used the Video setting on the LCD for a nice contrasty image. I wondered why, in raw mode, the Dynamic Range setting remained available—maybe just to control this Iris button behavior?

Anyway, back to this stupid button, that is stupid. Who exposes this way? Not camera people. Did I mention that there’s no display for f-stop?

There’s no display of your f-stop. Yet.

This Canon-mount camera prominently places a single button called “Iris” that allows the camera set your Canon lens stop auto-magically, and then not inform you of its choice.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Blackmagic Design was not able to start shipping the BMC in quantity until they could address this insane shortcoming with a firmware update (pseudo-announced December 18th).

Back to the present: You can set your stop manually. But you won’t figure out how without another trip to the manual:

You can also manually adjust the iris of your lens by using the forward and reverse button on the Transport Control panel.

Of course. You use the (unlabeled) playback buttons to do the single most basic thing about shooting images. And even when making this adjustment manually with these repurposed buttons, you (for now) get no visual confirmation of your setting.

This is Blackmagic Design’s first attempt at making a camera, and the iris control situation is where you’ll notice that.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that you’ll be using EF-mount glass that has a manual iris ring, which renders this limitation meaningless. But a major selling point of this camera is its smart EF mount—yet to use it currently requires abandoning traditional control of the one setting that every cinematographer’s forefingers are born to adjust.

Or maybe you’ll opt for the Micro Four Thirds version of the camera. Certainly this mount makes more sense for the size of the BMC’s sensor. With the Canon mount, you’ll struggle to find fast, wide glass. But with the MFT mount, you might struggle to find glass that allows you to set your stop at all. If you’re a Panasonic shooter (you know you are if you’ve stopped reading long ago to leave a long-winded comment about how much better the GH3 will probably be than the BMC, especially with a firmware hack, ermahgerd), you’ll find that the “dumb” MFT mount won’t control your sealed-up, no-manual-iris-ring lenses. So the MFT BMC will only work with the subset if MFT glass that has a manual iris ring. Or, more likely, you’ll use the MFT mount as a permanent home for a PL-mount adapter. At which point you will be back to selecting among lenses optimized for a larger sensor. Exhausted yet?

I Gripe Because I Love

It takes a really great camera to earn this kind of criticism from me, and this camera is really great (if you were looking for the five words in this post that no one will read or remember, there they are). That it is available for a mere $3,000 is a miracle—in fact, a miracle that has yet to come true. I have every confidence that Blackmagic Design will work out their production kinks, about which they are being quite candid, and start shipping this thing en masse, soon.

But one has to wonder how many of these cameras, announced at NAB 2012, will be shipped before NAB 2013—an event at which, given the trend, we should expect to see 4K Super 35 digital cinema cameras being 3D-printed on demand from vending machines in hotel lobbies.

Shallowness

I shot Let’s Cook with one lens, the aforementioned Canon 50mm f/1.2 L. A rather telephoto lens on the BMC, but one that allows for shallow focus, even on the smaller sensor. Did I shoot wide open? Who knows? Not only does the camera not tell you its aperture, the DNG files don’t seem to have any EXIF metadata about shutter speed, lens, or f-stop.

By using a long, fast lens, I was able to achieve the shallow depth-of-field look I wanted. But this was only possible because I was willing to limit my focal length choices. If I’d gone to a wider lens, you’d have seen some much deeper focus.

Math

I shot raw. Not much footage, just 20 minutes. But that totaled out to 139 GB on one SSD. Maddeningly, as you shoot, you have no indication of how much room you have left on your SSD. Compare that with the Epic, which offers a remaining-media gauge so legible that I could easily read it when hanging out of a helicopter.

The internal, non-removable battery will also frustrate you with its uncommunicativeness. It offers only four phases: full, not so full, glass-half-full, and living-on-the-edge. Like my 1987 Mazda pickup with its rusted-out gas gauge, this is asking for trouble.

Blackmagic must address these readout issues with a firmware update, but even when they do, you should still think of the internal battery as little more than a convenient backup to avoid a power-down when swapping out external power. This is a camera that needs to be decked out with expensive EVF and V-lock battery solutions, rendering it no more hand-gripable than the Epics you see working in television and film.

The little BMC is trying, but failing, to live the self-contained grab-and-go DSLR lifestyle. But if you recognize it for what it is, a body that needs to be accessorized, this camera can be the core of a still-quite-affordable kit.

Post

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I shot commercials on film, we would transfer our footage to tape in a process called teleciné (a term always sounded backwards to me). In this workflow, the teleciné bay is where color correction is done—before the edit. Some projects are still done this way, but it’s now the exception where it was once the rule.

My teleciné bay for Let’s Cook was Adobe Lightroom 4, where I collected all the Cinema DNG files. This required not only telling Lightroom to import subfolders, so I could drag my one big media folder into the Import module, but also to not skip “duplicates,” as the BMC names all of its frames the same.

That’s right, if you shoot raw with the BMC, every shot will be made of of frame000001.DNG, frame000002.DNG, and so on. It’s the folder names that uniquely identify shots. I’d prefer it if the shot’s unique name was included in each frame’s filename.

So configured, Lightroom happily ingested all 27,772 of my frames, each shot organized as a unique folder. For each shot, I selected at least one “hero” frame by pressing P (to Pflag it). I then made a Smart Collection that filtered in all flagged images. Here I could compare the hero frame(s) of each shot. I picked a nice representative shot and entered the Develop Module.

In Develop, I set the overall white balance and exposure. I wanted a bright, airy look that felt sunny and warm, but without completely blowing out the highlights. This specific goal was what made the Lightroom workflow worth every hoop jumped. Adobe’s Camera Raw engine is a glorious blend of art and science. The Exposure control is now a “do what I mean, not what I say” Exposure—it works in real-world stops, but it tries to avoid clipping highlights as you pump it up. The Whites control can be pulled back to soften the already gentle shoulder of the internal s-curve, for a highly controllable soft rolloff to white.

So far, so good. But then there’s the actual slider called Highlights. Based on HDR tone mapping research, this control must be wielded carefully if you, like me, suffer from an allergy to over-processed HDR photography. But in judicious amounts, the Highlights slider can tame overexposed areas in a way that feels miraculous, but stops short of making your images look like beneficiaries of miracles.

I dialed in my look on the first shot (using my Prolost Presets of course), then synced those settings to the other hero frames. I then adjusted each hero frame individually, with an eye toward getting them all to match. The Quick Develop controls were handy for this. They allow you to nudge the exposure and color balance while still in the grid view, which makes matching shots much easier.

With my hero frames all matched, I then went back to each shot folder and synced the hero frame Develop settings to all the other frames in their respective sequences. The result was 27,772 frames, each with its own color correction metadata.

I then had to export the frames. For a moment, I contemplated the arduous task of creating individual Publish modules for each of the shots, something I thought I’d had to do when experimenting with the Cinema DNG sequences that John Brawley graciously made available from his initial test shoot. But laziness is the mother of invention, and so I figured out a way to export every single frame in one massive Publish module, giving each its rightful unique name. Lightroom’s export settings allow a high degree of filename customization, and one of the variables you can insert is the parent folder name. So my export filename recipe looked like this:

Although I’d be dumping all 27,000 HD JPEG frames into a single folder, each would have a name identifying it as a part of the correct shot. Lightroom’s flexibility allowed me to have my wish of each frame’s filename containing its shot name.

Note that I keep referring to publishing these frames out of Lightroom, not exporting them. In Lightroom, Exporting is a one-time event, but Publishing allows you to set persistent export settings and destinations, and then render the images at the push of a button. Lightroom keeps track of whether you’ve made changes since your last publish, and allows you to easily re-publish the modified photos. This would come in handy if I felt I needed to go back to Lightroom and fine-tune the color correction on some of the shots.

With 27,000 usefully-named 1920x1080 JPEG frames in one folder, I turned to After Effects CS6. Again, for a brief and painful moment, I thought I was going to have to import each sequence individually. I opened the Terminal and dusted off the part of my brain that remembers Unix commands, thinking I’d have an easier time if I moved each sequence into its own folder—but I stopped when I realized that, as much sense as that made, it would break Lightroom’s ability to overwrite the JPEGs with updates later.

Then I realized something wonderful. I don’t even know how I remembered this, but After Effects can automatically recognize multiple image sequences in a single folder. The option is hard to discover though, as it only becomes available when you select files spanning multiple sequences in the Import Dialog. Congratulating myself on my unwavering laziness, I selected all 27,000 files, checked the Multiple Sequences box, and pressed Open. This disk-intensive process and the progress bar that followed provided a nice opportunity to study the rainbow hues of the SBOD, but it worked. Each of my shots was now an individual frame sequence in After Effects.

Time to bust out another one of my favorite AE tricks: I dragged all these sequences straight into the Render Queue. This causes After Effects to set up a properly-configured Comp for each footage item, and add those comps to the Render Queue, using the default Render Settings and Output Module. The key is to make sure these two things are what you want them to be, and also to make sure that the last render file destination was a good one for the multiple Render Queue items you’re about to create. In my case, I rendered HD ProRes LT Quicktime files to my media drive.

Between Lightroom’s ability to name the frames according to their parent folder, and the powerful sequence recognition in After Effects, I was thankful to be using such robust and powerful software. Professional workflow tools really must be exempted from the less-is-more trend of software development inspired by the popularity of iOS. I’m one of this movement’s most vocal proponents—at Red Giant, I am jokingly referred to as “Simple Cop” (I picture Jim Carey in the role)—but on this day, I was grateful to have exactly the complexity I needed.

I edited the piece in Premiere Pro CS6, which handled my ProRes media so well that I was once again struck by how badly Adobe needs to standardize on a production codec.

I did bounce back to Lightroom a few times to update the color on a few shots. Which then caused me to have to re-render some of the ProRes files. Yes, there are simpler ways to post your BMC short. Long-time readers will know that I rarely choose the simplest post path. In this case, I was willing to bend over backwards to process these DNGs in Lightroom, and bend over backwards I did.

When the cut was locked, I imported the timeline into After Effects for finishing. Colorista II made it easy to do final tweaks on color—again, very much like the old teleciné-online workflow. The only challenging color task was matching in the iPhone 5 time lapse shot, achieved using the Time Lapse app and a custom-built LEGO stand. If I used a little negative Pop keyed to skin tones to make Diana and Michelle as beautiful on screen as they are in real life, well, I’d never tell.

There’s also one 5D Mark III shot. Magic Bullet Denoiser and Colorista II were essential in getting it to match with the BMC footage. Can you spot it?

Hey Let’s Talk About the Pictures Why Not

I love the way this little film looks. I couldn’t have done this with my 5D Mark III. The soft, gentle rolloff into overexposed, but not-blown-out highlights. The crisp details. The (I hope) invisible-to-the-viewer color correction work expended to match shots in wildly differing lighting conditions. This was all made possible thanks to the rich, generous bit-depth and spatial resolution of the BMC’s just-right raw files.

You can fairly complain about a lot of things about the BMC, but image quality is not among them.

The Homer Car

What I don’t like about this camera is the form factor. It’s not an HDSLR. You can’t use it like one. That’s fine of course, but then it needn’t and shouldn’t look like one.

I was looking around for images to demonstrate what I think the BMC should have been shaped like, and my Googling took me right back to Prolost, to this page, and this image:

What would the BMC look like if the lens was closer to the operator-left edge, the body was more of a lump than a slab, and the glorious LCD was articulated in such a way that it could hang in front of the operator’s face while the camera rested on her shoulder? Why, the C300. There aren’t a lot of images out there of the C300 with its LCD in this low-slung mode, but now I see it as a brilliant design—especially when you remember that the hand grip on the right is removable. Put it on an extender and you’ve got a decent emulation of the famous Aaton “cat on shoulder” design.

Blackmagic, this is what your camera should look like.

Verdict

The BMC is an important camera. It changes the landscape of digital cinema cameras by stating definitively that it’s no longer OK to charge a premium for image quality. Instead, in much the same way that the Digital Bolex creators believe, it declares that a camera that focuses on bringing home the best quality image can actually be a much simpler affair than the option-rich, color-it-in-the-camera descendants of the broadcast world.

But it’s wise to be wary of a 1.0, and this camera isn’t even quite that. It feels like version 0.9. I’m not trying to be snarky by saying that—it’s just impossible to use this camera and think it’s “done.” Here are some reasons:

• No way of telling how full your media is
• Battery indicator shows only four steps
• No display of lens f-stop
• No thumbnail view of clips in playback mode
• No way to format media
• DNG frames from every shot are named identically
• No EXIF data in DNG frames

And then there are the little things, like turning the camera off. You press and hold the power button to do this. Hold it down log enough, the camera turns off. Hold it down a little too long though, and the camera turns off, then on again. Oops.

The BMC you order today is a purchase of a promise, that future firmware updates will address these issues. This is fine, as long as you feel that you’re getting your money’s worth now—which, of course, is an easy pitch to make when you compare the image quality of this camera with other offerings currently available at much higher prices.

The BMC is the avant garde of the next generation of digital cinema cameras—one that will be defined by uncompromised image quality in affordable packages. But while the avant guard are brave and important, they were also never expected to come home alive. This first expression of the BMC will be remembered for the territory it staked out more than as a lasting achievement in and of itself. Which is a shame, because today, it’s quite simply the best bang for the buck in digital cinema.

My advice? If you’re realistic about what it takes to kit one out, and you can use it a lot before mid–2013, buy one.

For some reason I thought it would be a good time to repost this video interview I did with Rick young of MacVideo back in 2010. (Click on through if my wonky embed doesn’t work.)

See also: Movies at High Frame Rates

On Wednesday, December 5, I’ll be presenting at the SF Bay Area Lightroom User Group. I’ll be showing off my “Develop module workflow,” which means I’ll be dropping the science on making the pretty.

I have a rather crazy methodology of working in Lightroom’s Develop module that uses hundreds of custom-made presets (UPDATE: now available, see below). I’ve been wanting to share it with y’all for a while now, and this seemed like a great way to do it. I hope you can come!

It is. It’s really good.

I agree completely. Even without a retina display, the mini is a thoroughly pleasant device for reading. And dictating script notes via Siri feels enough like living in the future that I barely miss my flying car.

John’s feelings about the inexpensive but unpretty GoodReader app match mine, and my recommendation hasn’t changed since I wrote about reading screenplays on the iPad Maxi: Spend a few extra bucks and get PDF Expert. It syncs with Dropbox, exports annotations as text files, and won’t hurt your eyes. My only complaint is an old one: with no ability to offset page numbering (to account for page 1 of the PDF corresponding to the unnumbered title page of a screenplay), your exported annotations will be off by one page.

Small price to pay for a hundred screenplays in your pocket.

A great (and free to try) way to write your next movie in Fountain.

I love filmmaking. I love shooting. I love everything about the on-set experience.

Except recording audio.

When I’m filmmaking like a grown-up, I have someone else—an expert—handle dialogue recording. But often, it’s just me. Me and my portable audio recorder and expensive microphones and absolutely no frigging idea what I’m doing.

I’m a pretty smart guy. I truly get, in my bones, that poor production audio is the quickest way to sink an indie production. So I’m motivated to learn more about audio. I’ve tried, and tried. But it doesn’t stick.

My shotgun microphone has a little switch on it. That switch has two positions. One is the right one, one is the wrong one. You know what? It would be easier to just re-write this short to have no dialogue.

You’re probably thinking that I’m a lazy idiot. You might be right, but I think there are others like me too. Production audio is one of those fields populated by experts who have long forgotten what it was like to ever not have a complete grasp of hypercardioid patterns, phantom power, and 60Hz hum. To those experts, we who scratch our heads at those terms must seem so thickheaded. But trust me guys, this stuff you know forward and back is actually quite maddeningly opaque from the outside.

Audio is hard. And everyone who understands it seems to have forgotten that. So they suck at explaining it. And so here I sit, recording bad dialogue with many hundreds of dollars in gear, feeling like an idiot.

Or a tremendously underserved market.

The Revolution of Easy

Video is hard too. But people are working like crazy to revolutionize it so that people unable, unwilling, or just plain uninterested in becoming video or photo experts can still make great-looking images. 1080p cameras fit in the palm of your hand—and then employ elaborate stabilization methods to fix the jitter caused by their own weightlessness. Your iPhone merges multiple exposures into a single HDR the moment you press the virtual shutter button. And I, for my part, work hard daily to design color correction tools that make sense to anyone who has ever seen a lens or a ray of light. When I’m at my best, I can make anyone feel like a color correction expert. But I know I can do better. We’re all working really hard on the problem of helping you make the images you want.

Is this happening in audio as well? If it is, I don’t see it. I see evolution, not revolution. I see better tools for experts, not tools designed to make us idiots feel like experts.

Being a video nerd, I know that the imagery from that pocket HD camcorder isn’t stellar, and that the HDR capture from an iPhone isn’t as good as an exposure merge from a DSLR. But I also recognize that these consumer toys are helping people capture much, much better images than the enthusiastic amateur has ever been able to.

There’s a huge, untapped opportunity to do the same for audio.

Abuser Interface

Have you ever navigated the menu of a Zoom H4N? It’s like playing a Chinese knockoff of Tetris on a Gameboy that was run over by a car.

Like every filmmaker I’ve ever met, I own an iPhone. Build your portable audio recorder around that. Make a great app to control it. Sell a kit with a badass shotgun mic in a shockproof mount, one of those furry sock things, and a connector that connects to my iPhone (which you already know how to do).

But don’t just use the iPhone as a better screen for your crappy User Interface. Don’t even think it’s enough to use it as a platform for new, sexier UI. Put that little pocket supercomputer to work to make my life as a filmmaker easier.

Rate the quality of my incoming audio on the screen, live. Warn me when I have a bad echo, or background noise. Suggest fixes. I’ll move the mic around as instructed and watch the quality level change, and then stop moving when it’s great.

Listen for me saying the word “check” and set the audio levels automatically when you recognize that word. Flash an alert on the screen if you detect a hum. Or an airplane flying overhead.

Some Sony cameras have a mode that automatically snaps a photo when the subject smiles. Step up the tech, audio nerds. I know you can do this stuff.

The Wire

A good wireless lavalier kit goes for roughly four times the cost of an iPod touch, and suffers from radio interference and complexity. Build me a lapel mic that wires to an iPhone/iPod in my actor’s pocket and you just saved me endless headaches and hundreds of dollars.

Heck, I’ve never met an actor who didn’t have an iPhone. I’ll install the app on their phone and save a few more bucks. That way I can actually keep their data connection on, and your app can send recording levels and other reports to my phone, so I can monitor and control multiple mics on one touchscreen. Start and stop them all simultaneously with the push of a button (like GoPro already does with their pocket HD cameras). And let my intern log into the same account and tag the incoming audio files with slate info and other useful metadata, like the name of the character being recorded—all while we work.

Know that I have PluralEyes

Post isn’t easy, but it’s much more forgiving than production. You have time to correct your mistakes, and you have some truly magical tools at your disposal, such as PluralEyes. Recently acquired by my friends at Red Giant, this technology aligns sound and picture tracks based on audio waveforms. Which means that you can automatically sync your high-quality production audio with your video and its crummy scratch track from the camera mic.

This would be amazing if it wasn’t already so ubiquitous. The same tech is built-in to Final Cut Pro X. So build your audio tools assuming I have this auto-magical post-syncing capability. I don’t want or need a cable running from the recorders to my camera. Use your awesome tech to keep me nimble.

You could team up with Red Giant and other developers to make that software work even better. Make an iPad slating app that emits a special coded beep that contains the audio equivalent of a QR code. Every beep is a unique timecode signature. Post-production software could recognize that and sync dailies easily.

Or do you even need that? Aren’t all of our devices syncing to the same clock anyway? Aren’t there some amazing affordances possible based on that simple assumption?

Do Better

This is what I cam up with in one evening of pounding keys. But as we’ve established, I’m a lazy idiot. You’re the experts. Come up with stuff that makes my ideas seem trivial and silly.

I have money. I’d love to spend it on audio gear that makes me feel like the expert I’ll never be. I know that, like the vast majority of photographers and videographers, I’ll achieve much better results with revolutionarily easy tools than with expert gear. Democratize the one aspect of filmmaking that a new whiz-bang camera every few weeks can’t touch. The first one to do it will make all the others look like idiots.

I’ll be so happy to hand over the title.

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

Looks like Adobe agrees:

Promising!

We’ve known this was coming for a while. As Final Draft, Inc. was beginning work on this app, they solicited the opinions of screenwriters on what capabilities it must have. To no one’s surprise, we wanted it all—the full Final Draft experience. And faced with a pile of surveys with nearly every box checked, Final Draft, Inc. hunkered down and did exactly what we asked for.

First Impressions

The touch interface for drafting a Scene Heading is nice. And there’s a clever extra with the omnipresent scroll bar—as you drag it, a callout displays not just the page number, but Scene Headings as well. Although I don’t believe in Final Draft’s reliance on Scene Headings as the sole organizational tool for writers, this is still a welcome touch.

The app is full of details like that—details that show this to be a sincere and earnest effort to create a best-in-breed mobile screenwriting tool.

On the negative side, the app’s performance is not so great. Writer promises a perfect match to Final Draft’s industry-standard pagination, revisions management, and scene numbering, as well as some nifty bells and whistles, such as character highlighting and colored rendering of colored pages. All of this would seem to come at the cost of a noticeable lag as you type.

Final Draft Writer supports Dropbox, but in a manual push-and-pull kind of a way. If you are accustomed to apps that sync with Dropbox automatically as you work, Writer’s method will feel antiquated and un-iPad-like.

The Price

John August told Macworld:

“I’m rooting for Final Draft (and Scrivener, and Movie Magic Screenwriter),” August told us, “because I want to make sure there’s always a market for high-end professional screenwriting apps. The race to the bottom in software pricing is dangerous.”

I couldn’t agree more. There’s nothing wrong with Final Draft charging $50 for this app ($20 off until the end of September). Anyone who needs it can afford that. Conversely, if it seems expensive to you, then there are numerous other options.

Numerous Other Options

Of them, I would say that the recently-updated Scripts Pro and the feature-rich Storyist seem to have broken away from the pack as clean and reliable, FDX-compatible screenwriting tools for iOS.

It’s hard to imagine typing a screenplay without relying on buttons like these. Unless you’ve ever seen a typewriter.

But when I look at these apps’ pop-up menus or little rows of buttons for assigning element types, I no longer see the most minimal screenwriting UI I can imagine. With Fountain, the notion of choosing a “container,” and then filling it with text, is obsolete. Instead of constantly reaching for the mouse or touchscreen to declare what you’re about to write, you spend all your time with your hands on the keyboard, just writing it.

A Fountain-format screenplay in Byword for iPad

Screenwriting Without the Tab Key

The innovation of the iPad was that it was a computer that intentionally did less. Like a fixed-gear bicycle or an electric car, it allowed us to more easily do 90% of what we needed to, by saving us from wading through a phalanx of features designed for those occasional 10% requirements. For possibly the smallest imaginable example: the iPad’s touch keyboard lacks something most screenwriters use a thousand times per day: a Tab key.

There’s no “innovation of less” with Final Draft Writer. It ticks every one of the feature checkboxes those surveys reported. The result is impressive, but it feels like 10 pounds of app in a 1.5-pound bag. And like every other iPad screenwriting app I’ve seen, it grafts a Tab key onto the iPad keyboard layout.

On the other hand, if you want to write a screenplay on your iPad without all those annoying screenwriting features getting in your way, consider Fountain, along with a minimal text app such as Byword, Elements, or Writing Kit. Screenwriting without the need of a Tab key is a rather liberating experience.

The name of Final Draft’s iPad app is actually oddly apt—it invites the question: Are you a “Final Draft writer,” or a screenwriter?

Because the days of those notions being synonymous are rapidly fading to black.

The NAB 2012 announcement of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera (which folks are thankfully calling simply “the BMC”) from Blackmagic Design, the company that makes delightful video doohickies and acquired industry giants Da Vinci and Teranex, revealed a few interesting things:

• We are living in the “Chinese curse” age of cameras.
• In other words, disruption is the new norm. I’m not sure if there’s a static “game” to “change” anymore. So maybe we could all agree to stop saying that?
• Prolost is not a “camera blog.”

The so-called Chinese Curse goes “May you live in interesting times,” which certainly describes the landscape of digital cinema offerings available today. Apparently, we self-sufficient film folk now constitute a market worth serving directly. Where once we bent ill-suited cameras to our cinematic purposes (first all-in-one camcorders with tiny sensors and abusive automation, then DSLRs with near-accidental video functionality), now we can’t go a month without another “revolutionary” filmmaking camera competing to offer us something amazing at a previously unimaginably low price.

The question is, will these purpose-built offerings, such as the Kickstarter success Digital Bolex, the Sony FS–700, the 4K-ish Canon 1D C, and the KineRAW-S35 cure the DV Rebel of the urge to repurpose consumer cameras for their filmmaking efforts?

Blackmagic has seemingly (nearly) hit the “3k for 3k” target that many hoped Red would deliver, at a Micro–4/3-ish sensor size wandering between the 2/3” sensor many associated with the notion of a 3K raw camera and the increasingly ubiquitous and affordable Super 35mm size. If that seems like a decent deal, it’s worth noting that every BMC ships with full licenses of Resolve and UltraScope.

I was pretty busy when this camera was announced, but that’s not the only reason I refrained from comment at the time. I’ve gotten a bit weary of writing about unreleased cameras. Red has taught me to comb my writing for phrases like “the camera will have” and replace them with “the camera is said to feature,” and pretty soon I feel like I’m writing about nothing. But late last night, cinematographer John Brawley posted five test shots from a “production model” of the BMC to a brand-new Blackmagic forum. Brawley encouraged us to download the Cinema DNG sequences ourselves and have a play—so I did.

I love big-sensor digital cinema. I love shallow depth-of field. I’m fond of pointing out that sex appeal trumps tech specs every time. The interesting thing about the footage from this not-quite-cinema-sized sensor is that it is sexy. Not because of fetishistically shallow depth-of-field (although Brawley handily demonstrated that focus control is eminently possible with the BMC and some nice glass), but because it’s raw. I graded these shots in Lightroom 4. They came in looking a touch overexposed. I easily recovered the highlights and pushed these shots all over the place, but they never broke. After years of shooting with Canon HDSLRs to massively-compressed codecs, the rich neg offered by this little camera was beyond refreshing.

It’s easy to imagine that Blackmagic chose the smaller sensor to keep the price of the BMC down. It’s easy to get caught up thinking that maybe next, they’ll release a true Super 35 version of this rig. Or that the KineRAW at $6K might be worth the extra cost over the BMC.

But the challenge that befalls camera manufacturers is not to build the “perfect” digital cinema camera. It’s to capture the hearts and minds—and wallets—of filmmakers as much, or even more, as the wrong camera for the job keeps doing.

I think the Blackmagic Cinema Camera might just do that.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is available for pre-order now from B&H.

Director Joe Carnahan (The Grey, The A-Team) revealed yesterday on Twitter that his “idea for a certain retro, red-suited, Serpico-styled superhero went up in smoke.” He was talking about his take on a Daredevil reboot, and you can read the political details of why it’s not happening here. He then did something really cool—he posted two different “sizzle pieces” that he created to pitch Fox on his gritty, 70’s exploitation-style vision of the movie.

This is a rare glimpse at the working product of a director courting a project. There are tons of ways to create dynamic visuals to accompany a pitch, but the “rip reel,” where you build a trailer for your hypothetical movie out of shots ripped from others, is perhaps the most effective.

As you can see, it’s possible to convey a great deal of authorship and directorial intent by mixing and matching pieces stolen from other movies.

A director between projects (or prior to his first) takes a lot of meetings, reads a lot of screenplays, makes a lot of notes—and, every once in a while, goes all-in on a visual presentation to convince a studio to hand them the reins of a movie. In the past two years, I’ve made four of these. Maybe someday I’ll be able to share them as well.

I read a lot of screenplays. None of them are perfect. It’s a big part of my job as an unemployed movie director to evaluate these scripts and suggest improvements.

Almost every script I’ve ever read could have been better if the writer had followed the advice of director and story artist Emma Coats, who famously tweeted a series of “story basics” learned during her tenure at Pixar.

1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

Read them all at The Pixar Touch blog, and follow Emma on Twitter, because she’s still rockin’ the badass thoughtfulness every day.

I found myself so enamored with Emma’s observations that I wanted some way of reminding myself of them while I work. I considered printing them and pinning them to my office wall, or turning them into a text screensaver.

Then Alex Eylar, known on Reddit as ICanLegoThat, worked his lego-illustration magic on a dozen of the “rules.” Perfect.

Alex, I wish you’d do the rest, and make them available as high-res JPEGs.

Then I could finally start writing.

I was particularly gratified to read this (something Elle Schneider had also mentioned in an interview):

At the end of the day, We reached our personal goal of $250k on our kickstarter campaign and sold out of cameras within 36 hours of our launch and, according to Kickstarter reports, we sold more cameras due to Stu’s blogs than any other single external site.

Now Joe and Elle know what I’ve known all along—I may have a smaller audience than some of the other filmmaking blogs out there, but my audience is the real deal. They think for themselves, they actually shoot, and they put their money where their mouths are.

• APS-C 18.0 Megapixel CMOS sensor
• Touch screen (looks like the same UI as the Rebel T4i/650D)
• In fact, it’s basically a T4i at half the weight and half the thickness, thanks to the lack of a mirrorbox
• 1080p 24/25/30 with continuous autofocus
• 720p 50/60
• Works with EF lenses (with adapter that will be included with the body-only kit)
• Ships with an EF-M 22mm ƒ2.0 pancake lens
• The STM lens is said to be smooth and silent when focusing, specifically for video
• $799, ships in October

First in blogger, then in Squarespace (where Prolost is now hosted), I used to write my blog posts right in the blogging engine—in that little “WYSIWYG” window with its buttons for creating links, quoted text, and text formatting.

At some point I became aware of Markdown, the plain-text writing format created by John Gruber. I totally didn’t get it. Why would I want to learn some new “syntax” for formatting text when I have a tool that does it at the push of a button, and shows me exactly what I’ll get?

Even as I was thinking this, I was living through the exact pain that Markdown was designed to address. I’d often find myself battling that little WYSIWYG text window. I’d press Return after some quoted text and it would create another quoted paragraph. I’d press the “quote” button to un-quote the current paragraph, and an extra line would be inserted. I’d try to delete it and now there was no separation between the paragraphs. I’d press “Publish” and the extra line would be back. I’d eventually go into the post HTML and try to remove the offending line break, crossing my fingers that I wasn’t destroying something else in the process. After all this, I’d be afraid to touch the WYSIWYG editor again. A typo or broken link would have to be pretty important for me to risk touching this house of HTML cards I’d created.

I started writing my blog posts out in other tools before moving them over to the blog. I first did this in email drafts. Then Notational Velocity. Then TextEdit. But I didn’t dare write in rich text, because I didn’t trust that my links and italics and bulleted lists would come over to Squarespace correctly.

So I started writing in plain text. If I wanted to create a link, I’d just paste the URL below the paragraph, as a kind of reminder to build a link in Squarespace using the pushbutton tools. If I wanted to style some text, I’d maybe, I don’t know, wrap some *asterisks* around it to remind myself to italicize it.

I proceeded like this for a good year or more, still bizarrely unaware that I was painfully embodying the raison d’être of Markdown. I even filed a bug report with Squarespace, because the simple process of pasting my plain text into their WYSIWYG editor would create extra line breaks and other errors. I was close, but I was still lost.

It was around this time that I started tweeting questions about why any sane person would ever want to use Markdown.

The Funny Thing About People and Stuff

I have a few dear friends who are argumentative pains-in-the-ass of staggering proportions. I’m sure they feel the same about me, because I suffer from a condition I call overemphasitis—I am so obsessed with making my points heard that I often don’t give people time to properly absorb them.

Even smart, open-minded people take time to absorb new ideas. Especially smart, open-minded people.

And here’s the thing: the more worthwhile, the more valuable an idea you present to someone, the harder it will be for them to hear it.

Think of it this way: You’re smart. Your friend is smart. If the concept you’re proposing to them is truly worthwhile, then it falls into a rarified category of being both important, and something they hadn’t already considered—or had considered, but rejected. So there’s obviously something they need to get past in order to embrace this controversial idea of yours.

You should drink less at company parties. You have bad breath. It looks like you might be lactose intolerant. You and your husband don’t seem to like each other very much. You should try writing in plain text.

Having chronic overemphasitis, I would get super annoyed with my friends when they would push back against my carefully considered and inarguably brilliant advice.

But over time, I noticed a pattern. That same friend who rebuffed my ideas upon first hearing them, would often embrace them soon thereafter—and even pitch the ideas back to me as if they were their own.

I can’t believe people still go to Starbucks. Rendering and compositing should be done in linear-light. Of course a real Martini is made with gin. The first Terminator is so much better than the second. A spoon has no role in the making of a cappuccino.

Oh, really? Interesting. I wish I’d mentioned those things to you like a hundred times.

A worthwhile idea challenges us. If it really has value, then it means we may been wrong about something, or failed to realize something. Coming to terms with these possibilities take time.

In my case, I practically had to invent Markdown on my own before I realized how great it was.

Getting Lost in the Neighborhood

I once led a splinter unit in setting up a shot for a famous cinematographer. When he arrived to take over our setup, he didn’t quite love our camera position, which was limited by the geography of the set. It had been quite a puzzle to negotiate our big lens into the cramped space, but he decided to tear down our setup and start fresh. Ten minutes later, he had the camera exactly back where I’d placed it.

There’s a common understanding that in order to truly learn your way around an unfamiliar neighborhood, you have to get lost there a few times. Ideas stick more when you discover them organically—via your own process.

And then they can stick pretty hard. In my case, about a week after I embraced Markdown for my web writing, I began to think about how I could bring the same portability, compatibility, and universality to screenplay writing.

Happily I was not the only one, and now Fountain, the plain-text screenplay format, is growing strong, with new apps announcing support every month.

Take Your Time

The point of this article is simple: Don’t take my word for it that working with plain text is the best thing that ever happened to you. Or this guy’s. Or this guy’s.

The best thing I can do is gently lay out some of the reasons I love it. Go ahead: reject them. Fight back. Argue with me. This is one of those ideas that’s worth it.

Then slowly discover plain text on your own. Get lost in the neighborhood.

This post was gleefully written in Markdown using Byword, and effortlessly pasted into Squarespace as HTML.