Venomocity

Last year I had the great fun of working with the Phoenix-based agency Riester on a series of three anti-smoking spots for the Arizona Bureau of Tobacco Education and Prevention. The finished spots were held up briefly, but finally airing in Arizona. Here are all three—click through to view them in fancy YouTube HD (link is below and to the right of the movie)!

You may notice that some of the footage appears to be hand-cranked. In fact, the entire spot was shot on the Panavision Genesis, a camera that quite prominently lacks a hand crank. So my DP (the brilliant Carlos Veron) and I shot the hand-crank sections at an even 50 fps (the Genesis's max), and then editor Gregory Nussbaum (of Pictures in a Row) and I ran the shots through the very same hand-crank After Effects project that I included in The DV Rebel's Guide.

Of course, some of the hand-cranked shots contain visual effects (supervised by Ryan Tudhope). As I told the crew at the kickoff meeting, it's not a Stu job unless we're doing something annoying with time. Ryan's animators actually worked at 50 fps on the original plate, and then rendered only the frames called for by the hand-crank retiming curve. This allowed them to be as surprised and annoyed by the hand-crank effect as the live action crew!

By shooting at 50 fps, we got smoother 24p results from the hand-crank effect, as it had more frames to pull from. You can do the same if your camera has a 60p or 60i mode (50 for PAL), as most do. All of this is explained in The Guide.

Carlos also shot wide-open much of the time. The combination of Super35 sensor, overcranking, and wide dynamic range (since we'd be shooting outdoors in direct sun) meant that the Genesis was really the only digital camera I felt we could use for this campaign. We almost didn't get one, which would have meant resorting to, gasp, film!

Orphanage colorist Aaron Rhodes graded the spots in Film Master, creating LUTs that the VFX artists used to preview their work with proper color. We used much the same workflow as we did on The Spirit.

These spots have everything I love, performance, cinematography, and a worthwhile message. I'm proud of them and delighted that I can finally share them with you. You can also watch them in their native habitat on the very cool web site developed to anchor the campaign: venomocity.com.

Orphanage Animation Studios

How about some good news? It's business as usual at Orphanage Animation Studios. Led by the singular animation talent Genndy Tartakovsky, OAS is a separate company from The Orphanage, Inc., and is busy working on some amazing stuff.

Thank you all for the amazing comments on The Orphanage's sad announcement. The outpouring of positive feelings is truly overwhelming.

Ten Years of The Orphanage

Today I had the heart-wrenching task of joining my co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart in announcing that The Orphanage will be suspending operations indefinitely. We started the company ten years ago, tripled in size each year for our first three years, and worked on some of the biggest and best effects movies made. We produced shorts and even features, we spawned a commercial division and an animation company, and we hung out in the halls with Frank Miller, Ethan Hawke, and M.C. Hammer. We did DI before it was called DI, we gave birth to Magic Bullet, and we did really, really good work.

But that's not what matters the most.

It's no accident that our company's name described a place for people, people who may be thrown together, but who ultimately create their own destinies. Scott once described his vision of an orphanage as "a hundred success stories waiting to happen," and that is exactly what came to pass inside our offices. We have had the privilege of working with many "Orphans" over the years, and watching them grow and take on new responsibilities has been the single greatest part of coming to work every day.

A message to the visual effects industry: You will never find a better employee than a former Orphan.

And to the Orphans: It has been a privilege and an honor to work with you.

Quicktime 7.6 Fixes 5D Movies

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.

5D Crushing News

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 clipped 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:

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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:

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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.