IRE Ire

Mike Curtis has been furrowing his bloggular brow about highlight clipping issues in his clever Final Cut workflows. I can't solve all his problems, but I can show you how to avoid giving your waveform a buzzcut when using Colorista.

Watch the screencast. You'll see me apply Colorista, which clips off the IRE values greater than 100%. I fix this by first applying Brightness & Contrast (Bezier), and reducing Brightness a bit. From there on out it's all fun and games with Colorista.

The part I didn't show was switching on High Precision YUV processing to make sure I don't lose fidelity in the rendering.

(This is the technique that I would use if for some weird reason I was actually doing color work in FCP—otherwise I'd use the slightly more complex method I outline in The Guide, as it makes for a cleaner export)

Colorista in FCP

I finally put together a little side-by-side demo showing the struggles I used to face with the 3-way color corrector in Final Cut Pro HD that, in part, led me to create Colorista.

DV Rebel Crash Cam

Canon has announced the HV20, a tiny little 1080p24 camcorder with an MSRP of US$1,099.

Dzang!

It has HDMI out, which means you could pair it with a Blackmagic Intensity card ($250) to capture 4:2:2 uncompressed 24p for less than the price of a decent boom mic setup.

The CMOS chip is true 1920x1080.

We'll have to see how fussy the manual controls are, but this camera just may have DV Rebels everywhere contemplating an impulse buy.

Update: More info from HDVinfo.net.

2nd Update: HV20 now available from Amazon.

Be Stu in 1995

I'm eBay-ing my very first ILM crew jacket. It's literally the first item of clothing I bought when I got my job at ILM, fresh out of CalArts with only an Amiga-made demo reel and a seriously embellished resume (oh, sure, I "know Unix." Who doesn't?).

What I like about this jacket is that it reminds me of the pre-computer-graphics days of ILM.

The thing even has my name embroidered onto the front, guaranteeing a nice low selling price! Unless your name is Stu. Then I got ya right where I want ya...

The Most Unlikely Places

I never thought I'd hear the DV Rebel spirit represented on the director's commentary of I, Robot (a $120M film), and yet there it is, during the scene where Will Smith runs from the giant demolition bot through the crumbling mansion (I'm paraphrasing a bit):

We just dumped a whole bunch of stuff from the roof to fall in Will's path, and used long lenses... Often the best sort of film illusion is one that you can achieve on the set quickly...

CG takes many months to get right, and it's a very analytical process, a very sort of scientific process of getting shots and analyzing them and fixing them and constantly improving them.

It's a hell of a lot more fun to sort of wobble the camera around and run around like crazy with a few strobing lights and get something really exciting happening right in front of you.

Director Alex Proyas also describes perfectly why the DV Rebel approach of working backward, not forward is so important and can save you time and money (on DVD chapters 12–13), and how the Hollywood filmmaking machine unwittingly conspires against this wisdom.