Mark Christiansen has updated his excellent book for AE7. It now features many more sample projects, including some HD footage provided by Pixel Corps. Still the same great focus on hardcore compositing, and still the same space-filling chapter at the end by some Stu guy.
Creative Workflow Hacks
Creative Workflow Hacks is a new blog about under-the-hood tricks to help you do nifty things in your favorite post-production apps. There's a section specifically about After Effects.
On that subject, if you haven't tried out the scripts from redefinery.com, you may not appreciate just how powerful scripting can be in After Effects. Check it out!
My hope is that, in the future, scripts and other user enhancements to AE will not be ghettoized to a submenu, but actually allowed to be a button or palette or menu item just like a plug-in. Sort of the Maya MEL-button shelf idea.
Commonwealth Club
On March 21st I participated in a panel discussion called “The Digital Revolution: What to Expect from Film’s Second Century” at The Commonwealth Club, a public affairs forum in San Francisco. You can listen to a RealAudio (sorry) stream of it here. Also on the panel was John Knoll, with whom I had the great pleasure of working on several projects during my days at ILM.
SIMILO
Less is more generated some great comments. Keep 'em coming!
There were a couple of mentions of other 35mm lens adaptors, including the Mini35 and the Micro35. I certainly don't want my extolment of the G35 to come at the exclusion of these other options. As I mentioned, I've shot with the Pro35 and had a terrific experience. I'm excited to see so many options created by people who are clearly passionate about accessible cinema.
What specifically entices me about the G35 is that it is small enough that it allows a DV camera to be a DV camera. I could see myself taking it with me wherever I brought my DVX.
The G35 came to my attention after I saw an excellent short film that was shot with an early "beta test" unit on a DVX100a. That film is SIMILO, and it was an entry in the dvxuser.com sci-fest competition (although ultimately it was disqualified).
SIMILO official site (a very high quality H.264 Quicktime here)
Filmmakers Zacharias and Macgregor shot this lovely piece totally guerilla-style. Check out this behind-the-scenes still (more like that on the dvxuser.com forum). Anytime someone reminds me it's possible to make images like those in SIMILO with that kind of minimalist setup, I get excited.
Less is More
In digital cinema, there’s a lot of focus on “more.” More resolution, more sharpness, more data rate, more color fidelity. Even more frames per second.
But cinema is not about more. Cinema is about less.
24 frames per second is just about the bare minimum for viewers to perceive smooth motion on a big screen, and yet when audiences are shown projections of high-def video running at smooth 60fps they boo it off the screen because it looks like a giant, crystal-clear soap opera.
Cinema is not reality. It works better when we view it through a veil of non-reality. Flicker, grain, lens flares, filters, diffusion, smoked sets, artful lighting, nonlinear response curves, restricted framing, subjecting POV, dutching, color correction, vignetting, 180º shutters, and my personal favorite, shallow depth of field.
Some of the most cinematic digital images I’ve seen lately have not been from a Panavision Genesis or a Dalsa Origin, but rather from a Panasonic DVX100a equipped with a device that would have engineers screaming in protest — a lens adapter that allows 35mm SLR lenses to be mounted on a DV camera. The lenses make an image on a VistaVision-sized vibrating groundglass upon which your DVX’s lens is focussed. The result is the kind of shallow depth of field that no DV camera can produce. You get some vignetting. You get some softness. You get some flaring and some haloing. You get cinema.
Check out the G35 at cinemek.com. Watch the demo movies. Most were shot standard def 24p. Some are post-processed using Magic Bullet’s Look Suite.
Yeah, I want an HVX200. I love shooting with the latest and greatest HD beasts. But I’m seeing my trusty DVX100a in a new light these days. It does less and has less, and that is in fact just what we need sometimes.