PSYOPS Announced

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Bold Films has picked up PSYOPS, an action thriller from Scott Stewart and Gus Krieger.

Stewart, who is directing the vampire action thriller Priest, came up with the initial story, then developed it with Krieger, who will write the script.

Stuart Maschwitz, who co-founded visual-effects company The Orphanage with Stewart, is attached to make his directorial debut.

PSYOPS revolves around a covert U.S. military unit of psychological operatives who specialize in exploiting their target’s deepest fears. When on a routine mission to the Amazon Basin, they discover something more terrifying than they could have imagined.

Read the full story here.

When he’s not producing my directorial debut, Scott Twitters his adventures from the director’s chair of Priest. Follow him at @robotproof.

There, I got that all typed up without using any exclamation points. How’s that for self-control?

Passing the Linear Torch

Back in the day I blogged a lot about how compositing and rendering computer graphics in “linear light.” a color space in which pixel values equate to light intensities, can produce more realistic results, cure some artifacts, and eliminate the need for clever hacks to emulate natural phenomena. Along with Brendan Bolles, who worked with me at The Orphanage at the time, I created eLin, a system of plug-ins that allowed linear-light compositing in Adobe After Effects 6 (at the mild expense of your sanity). I also created macros for using the eLin color model in Shake and Fusion. Along the way I evangelized an end to the use of the term linear to describe images with a baked-in gamma correction.

Then Adobe released After Effects 7.0, which for the first time featured a 32-bit floating point mode, along with the beginnings of ICC color management, which could be used to semi-automate a linear-light workflow. The process was not exactly self-explanatory though, so I wrote a series of articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on how one might go about it.

Then I rambled endlessly on fxguide about this, and in the processes managed to cast a geek spell on Mike Seymour and John Montgomery, who republished my articles on their fine site with my blessing.

This week Mike interviewed Håkan “MasterZap” Andersson of Mental Images about the state of linear workflows today on that same fxguide podcast.

Which is so very awesome, because I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

It’s just no fun going around telling people “Oh, so you put one layer over another in After Effects? Yeah, you’re doing it wrong.” Or “Oh, you launched your 3D application and rendered a teapot? Yeah, you’re totally doing it wrong.”

You are doing it wrong. And I spent a good few years trying to explain why. But now I don’t have to, because Mike and MasterZap had a great conversation about it, and nailed it, and despite the nice things they said about ProLost you should listen to their chat instead of reading my crusty old posts on the subject.

Because it has gotten much, much simpler since then.

For example, there’s Nuke. Nuke makes it hard to do anything but work in linear color space. Brings a tear to my eye.

And the color management stuff in After Effects has matured to the point that it’s nearly usable by mortal humans.

Since I’ve seen a lot of recent traffic on those crusty old posts, here’s my linear-light swan song: a super brief update on how to do it in AE CS4:

In your Project Settings, select 32 bpc mode, choose sRGB as your color space, and check the Linearize Working Space option:

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When importing video footage, use the Color Management tab in Interpret Footage > Main to assign a color profile of sRGB to your footage:

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Composite your brains out (not pictured).

When rendering to a video-space file, use the Color Management tab in your Output Module Settings to convert to sRGB on render:

That’s the how. For the why, well, those crusty old articles could possibly help with that, especially this one on color correction in linear float, and this one on when not to use linear color space. Part 6 is still pretty much accurate in describing how to extract a linear HDR image from a single raw file using Adobe Camera Raw importer in After Effects, and this article covers the basics fairly well, although you should ignore all the specifics about the Cineon Emulation mode, which never should have existed. This little bit of evangelism is still a good read.

But the ultimate why answer is, and has been for a while now, within the pages of a book you should have anyway: Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques (deep breath). Brendan Bolles guest-authored a chapter on linear light workflow, and not only does he explain it well, he gives many visual examples. And unlike me, Mark keeps his book up-to-date, so Brendan’s evergreen concepts are linked directly to the recent innovations in After Effects’s color manglement.

OK, that’s it. Let us never speak of this again.

Update

on 2009-09-30 21:12 by Stu

I can’t believe I wrote all that without once linking to the official Adobe whitepaper on Color Managed workflows in Adobe After Effects CS4. It’s a great write-up, super detailed, and accurate in every way. Further proof that my work here is done.

7Days

By all indications, the 7D begins shipping next week. Amazon is once again accepting pre-orders. I’ll let you know when I get mine!

Magic Bullet Mojo

If you watched my tutorial on achieving the “Hollywood blockbuster look” using various color correction tools, you probably noticed the consistent theme among the very different example films I showed you how to match—the ubiquitous cool shadows, warm highlights look. Whether the film is bleached of all color (like Terminator Salvation) or super saturated (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), and whether it is overall warm or cool, modern films have zeroed in on a color correction style that tends to preserve skin tones and set them off against a cooler backdrop.

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The same shot before Mojo

It’s more than possible to achieve this look with Colorista or Magic Bullet Looks (check out the Blockbuster preset—it’s been there since day one). But sometimes you just want to spruce up your footage quickly and easily, without a hundred presets to peruse or a powerful colorist’s interface to manipulate.

Sometimes you just want to take your footage that already looks pretty darn good, and give it a little bit of… Mojo.

Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software is the pocket-sized screwdriver to Magic Bullet Looks’s cordless driver drill. It does one thing, and does it quickly and easily. It gives you that Mojo thang with just a few simple sliders to adjust, and ships with presets for popular looks.

Unlike Looks and Colorista, Mojo is a bit of a one-trick pony. It’s simple and easy and priced to be an impulse-buy at $99 US. One license allows you to use it in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Avid, After Effects, and Apple Motion [UPDATE: Now Sony Vegas as well!]. Mojo is also now a part of the Magic Bullet Suite.

Mojo has some cool new features that you’ll recognize from the tutorial video. Since it’s all about skin tones, Mojo has simple sliders for emphasizing, cleaning up, and adjusting skin coloration. It even features a helpful overlay that gives you the same kind of skin-tone guidance for which expert colorists rely on their vectorscopes.

Here are some preemptive answers to questions you might have about Mojo:

Q: Isn’t this look just a cheap gimmick? Just a trend that could pass in a few days/weeks months?

A: Maybe, but in another way it’s an evolution of practices many years old in color correction suites around the world. Is it overused? Sure, but that’s because it works. Personally, I love the way it looks, when done tastefully. We provide the tools, you provide the taste. Try turning the Mojo slider down instead of up when you first apply it.

Q: I applied Mojo but my skin tones aren’t popping.

A: Your faces might be underexposed a bit. Try reducing Mojo Balance—it’s the control that determines what’s a shadow and what’s a highlight. Skin tones tend to fall right in between.

Q: I tried the demo and Mojo makes my footage look terrible.

A: Mojo is designed to work with footage that’s pretty solid to begin with. If what you need is color correction, then reach for Colorista. If you love the way your footage looks before Mojo, try the “Mojito” preset—it’s just a little bit of Mojo.

Q: Why do the sliders have more range in FCP than in After Effects?

A: Actually, they have the same ranges, but in After Effects we can have the slider min/max be different from the absolute min/max. I wish FCP would let us do that too, because the ranges we show in AE represent a “sweet spot,” and the values outside those ranges are kind of pushing things into the red a little.

Q: I already have Magic Bullet Looks, why do I need Mojo?

A: Because you don’t open a walnut with a jackhammer. In my own experience, Magic Bullet Looks is occasionally a bit to much overhead for a quick-turnaround project. Mojo is so quick and easy that I reach for it all the time, saving Looks for those occasions when I want to invest some time into my color grading.

Q: Will you tell my clients I’m using it?

A: No. It’ll be our little secret.

Dublin's People

Two days ago I wrote of the Canon 7D that “there is no Reverie video to erase all doubts about its capabilities.” Philip Bloom has changed that with Dublin’s People.

Yes, it’s a camera test more than a short. You could even call it Bokake. But it looks freaking great and should be enough to convince folks that you can have your DOF cake and eat it too with an APS-C sensor, as long as you’re willing to invest in fast glass.

Philip did everything right, including sticking to a 180 degree shutter (1/50 at 24p and 1/100 at 50p) and thinking of the frame rates other than 24 fps as opportunities to overcrank for 24p playback.

I took the Canon 7d, Zacuto Tactical rig, Z-Finder V2 and one lone lens, a Canon 35mm f1.4, which becomes more like a 50mm lens on the 7d…

Image wise, it’s very similar to the 5dmkII. Sure it isn’t as sexy image wise, but it is pretty close. It is a tad less sensitive than the 5dmkII but only just. This is as expected due to the smaller sensor. Also I would say it is a little bit noisier image wise than the 5dmk2. But not too much.

For me the thing i love most about the camera is the different frame rates. I can shoot full HD 24p, 25p and of course 30p BUT really excitingly I can shoot 720p 50p and 60p which although when played back at normal speed locks horrible and video like to me it means you can easily tell your editing system to play it back at 24p or 25p or 30p and get a lovely in camera slow motion. I have missed slow motion since using the 5dmk2 so much.

More here.

Log in to Vimeo and download the 1080p24 original and watch it big. The 7D is gonna do just fine, flaws and all.