Today Apple announced the iPad, and what I like most about what we’ve seen so far is that Apple clearly thinks it’s important that we be able to make things with it. The redesigned iWork apps are impressive experiments in creating stuff using a multitouch display. I liked my iPhone enough when it was just a phone, but I love it now that I have Storyboard Composer (formerly Hitchcock), Screenplay, and Photoshop Mobile, to name just a few.

I also use an app called Air Mouse to control the Mac Mini in my home theater. That, and the many other apps that allow your iPhone or iPod Touch to act as control device for your computer, made me ponder the possibility of using the iPhone’s multitouch screen as a control surface for Magic Bullet Looks. But I never took the idea very far because of the small size of the screen.

Folks doing color correction either know first-hand the value of a dedicated control surface, or avoid finding out for fear of the can’t-live-without-it sensation. An understandable fear, given the cost of these peripherals. Back in 2008 when I wrote about gestural interfaces and hardware devices, I expected to spend a couple grand at the very least for any kind of multitouch control device. Video pros routinely spend much, much more for large, cumbersome, single-purpose color control surfaces. Read any review of them and you’ll see one common thread: once you work a three-way color corrector with a set of trackballs that allow you to adjust multiple parameters at once, you never want to go back.

Imagine the dude above is looking at a stripped-down version of the Magic Bullet Looks interface on his main display. The Tool Chain, Preset and Tool Drawers, and touch-friendly Tool Controls appear on his iPad.

The iPad may seem expensive to people with a laptop, a smartphone, and little room in their life for something in between, but for video and film professionals looking for a general-purpose way to get more touchy-feely with their creations, it’s beyond a bargain.

As long as the software shows up.

So what do you think? Is the image above something that interests you? It’s just a hasty concept—nothing more. But it’s got me thinking about all kinds of ways that an iPad could become a part of the way we make films—not just with dedicated apps, but with companion apps that give us new ways of interacting with our favorite desktop tools.

Update on Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 11:58AM by Stu

I wanted to thank Przemion in the comments and Vrijegeest on Twitter for bringing hexler.net’s TouchOSC iPhone app to my attention. They are doing this now for audio applications, and even have a free desktop application (Mac and Windows) that you can use to design your own control layouts.

 

(click to embiggen)

Apple today announced that the iPhone 3.0 software will add support for external hardware devices. That means that someone could create an HMDI-to-dock connector, which would allow you to use an iPhone/iPod Touch app to monitor your video on-set. Such an app could features scopes, focusing aides, and about a million other amazing things that I haven’t thought of yet.

So, uhm, what are you waiting for, someone?

Apple released Quicktime 7.6 today, which “includes changes that increase reliability, improve compatibility and enhance security.” Sweet. Undocumentedly, it also changes how Quicktime movies made with the Canon 5D Mark II are decoded—for the better.

Above is the same 5D clip I wrote about yesterday, back in Color, with Grade Disabled. The clipping is gone. Unlike yesterday, now the waveform is contained entirely between zero and 100 IRE. You’ll see this as well in Final Cut and any applications that use Quicktime to decode the 5D movies, such as After Effects.

Yay! Problem solved, I guess. This is a scary thing for Apple not to document in an update though, because it will radically change the appearance any 5D clips you’re already working with. So update with caution, especially if you’re in the middle of a project.

I first read about this on the cinema5D.com, a new and already busy forum about making movies with the 5D Mark II. They have a good FAQ-like sticky post.

I was recently accused on Twitter of “liking and using” the 5D Mark II for shooting video, so I feel compelled to remind readers of my post-shoot review:

With 24p and manual exposure control this camera would be of use. Without those adjustments, it’s a tantalizing but ultimately frustrating curiosity to the DV Rebel. The best thing about it is what it portends for the very near future.

I have not yet bought a 5D Mark II. When I do it will be for stills, or because Canon has finally released a firmware update addressing my complaints.

Which I hope they do, now more than ever.

UPDATE: This article contains some out-of-date information. See follow-up here.

In my last post I wrote about the Canon 5D Mark II’s well-known tendency to crush black in-camera, and that “This is a separate issue from the one facing Final Cut Studio Users.” Oops. It’s not. And this is really good news—and really bad news too.

Reader urmel commented on that post:

if you recover the cliped whites and black in Apple’s color you don’t need any custom picture style. Camera Standard with Sat -1 and sharpness set to 2 works fine.

 

And I thought, no, that’s not true.

Then I tried it. Damn it, urmel is right. Well, except for the sharpening part. Definitely don’t turn sharpening up on the 5D when shooting video—the line-skipping used in video mode means the images are already too sharp in a very sizzly way, like scaling down an image in Photoshop using Nearest Neighbor sampling.

Sorry, got distracted. The point is that the clipping seen in Final Cut Pro is also seen in Quicktime, which means its also seen in After Effects. But Apple’s Color, that magnificent bastard, can recover it. The clipping is not in-camera after all!

Here’s a frame from my Stunt People shoot. This is how it looks in Quicktime, in Final Cut, and in After Effects:

Here you see it in Apple Color, with the Grade disabled. Note the values above 100 IRE and below zero. Those don’t always display, but with Disable Grading on (press Control + G [yes, Control, not Command—WTF Apple?]) you can usually see if there’s anything lurking there.

Turn off Disable Grading and lift Primary In Shadows up a bit to bring up the blacks, then lower Highlights to bring the brightest whites down to 100 IRE (as I mentioned, you may not see the out-of-range values in the waveform when doing this, but you’ll see them being brought into range). Here’s the result:

Wow. So there really was extra information lurking there all along. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this is the only way I’ve found to get at it (Final Cut Pro itself could read and rescue these values if it saw 5D clips as YUV, but it forces them to RGB instead).

David Newman of Cineform is blogging about this as well. That’s really good news. David is smart—so smart, in fact, that he’s the only one who understands Cineform’s confusing array of products.

The Canon 5D Mark II still doesn’t shoot 24p or have manual control. That’s the bad news.

Although we no longer seem to have as dire a need for contrast-reducing Picture Styles, it is still a valid and worthwhile thing to set up the 5D to shoot a flat, low-con image. Now that I’ve seen what Color can rescue from this footage, those settings I used in-camera (similar to urmel’s, but based on the Neutral preset with reduced contrast and saturation) seem like they might actually have been flat enough—but I still like the extra control offered by Picture Style Editor.

So in closing, while a custom Picture Style to flatten out and make more post-friendly the movies from the 5D is a good idea, it’s not a dire necesity. The harsh crushed blacks we associate with the 5D’s motion output are a decoding error, not baked into our footage.

I have a 30” Cinema Display attached to my 17” MacBook Pro, and often when I return to the computer after the screensaver has kicked in, I find that my display has reverted to some default ColorSync setting rather than my calibrated, gamma 2.2 profile. The visual effect is that the screen is brighter and bluer than I’d left it.

You can fix this manually by opening the Displays section of System Preferences. This little ritual has gotten quite old though, and it finally occurred to me to do some Googling. I found this helpful blog entry that suggested the following Terminal entries:

cd /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays

sudo chmod 664 *

(Standard disclaimers apply any time you use the terminal, execute the sudo command, and go outside on a sunny day.)

This didn’t work for me until I also changed the permissions on the Displays directory (and the other profiles in the Profiles directory too for good measure):

cd ../

sudo chmod 664 *

So far so good—I appear to be free from the forces that seek to revert me to -blech- gamma 1.8 land.

Whenever I encounter weirdness with Apple OSs or apps, I try to report them at apple.com/feedback. Who knows if it helps, but almost all the issues I reported about my iPhone became fixes in later firmware revisions.

(Oh, and of course I realize that I could just turn the screensaver off, but I tend to leave it on with password verifications for security reasons.)