Haunting Melissa

From the App Store:

Veteran storyteller Neal Edelstein has reinvented filmmaking in a way that brings the power of hypnotic, episodic content to the iTunes Store. Viewed exclusively on the iPhone and iPad this frighteningly haunting story is released in sporadic and unexpected ways that will leave you constantly guessing, and constantly engaged.

A horror movie delivered directly to your iPad or iPhone, a little at a time. Push notifications alert you to new chapters. Pay a little for each one or buy a Season Pass.

And it gets even more interesting than that.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Great work Neal!

Download the free app. Haunting Melissaon the web and on Twitter.

Update

on 2013-05-17 16:52 by Stu

Watch Neal discussing why this is such a big deal on Bloomberg TV: Is the App Store the New Cinema?

Space Monkeys, Raw Video, and Giving Us All You've Got

The team at Magic Lantern have managed to hack the Canon 5D Mark III to record 14-bit raw 1080p video at 24 frames per second. The results are stunning—the highest-quality video we’ve seen from a DSLR yet, comparing favorably to images from cameras costing much more.

This is a big deal. But maybe not as big a deal as some have made it out to be. Like Ham, the chimpanzee that was launched into space on a Mercury rocket, the Magic Lantern raw hack is less notable for its discrete accomplishment than for what it portends.

How it Works

I was skeptical about the announcement of raw video at 1080p. This wasn’t a sensor crop, this was a full-frame image, somehow downsampled to 1920x1080—yet still being touted as “raw.”

The answer came back from Magic Lantern themselves:

Put this way, it makes sense—and matches what Magic Lantern said in their original post:

Key ingredients:
  • canon has an internal buffer that contains the RAW data

Of course. Canon sparsely samples the sensor (the popular theory is that they skip lines and bin rows) to create their own 1080p bayer image, which they rapidly debayer to create 1080p video frames. It looks like Magic Lantern have found a way to grab this raw buffer and save it directly to the CF card.

Whatever magic Canon worked to eliminate the moiré in the 5D Mark III’s video now benefits Magic Lantern users as well. And whatever downsides there are to this sparse sampling will also affect the raw hack.

What it Takes

Right now, the hack requires quite a bit of work to get up and running, and even more work to derive useable results.

But those usable results are compelling. There are tremendous opportunities afforded by the raw video hack over the compressed H.264 recordings the camera natively makes.

  • Post-processing debayering can be much better than the hasty in-camera processing. The much-lamented softness of 5D Mark III video is improved noticeably by handling the debayering (including noise reduction) after the fact. Although I can’t help but wonder if we’d get even better results from a demosaicing algorithm tuned to the specifics of the 5D’s subsampling pattern.
  • The 14-bit raw frames contain a great deal of dynamic range that 8-bit, heavily compressed video does not.
  • No compression.

But there’s a price to pay for recording 14-bit uncompressed raw. It requires crazy-fast CF cards, and you’ll only get 15 minutes of video on that 128 GB card, according to Cinema 5D, who graciously posted their workflow and samples, “after struggling for a day” to get it all working.

What it Means

Even once the setup process is streamlined, and the raw-to-DNG conversion process is streamlined (or eliminated), uncompressed raw video is probably not the best option for most DSLR shooters. Better would be something like ProRes or DNxHD—but that would require high-quality debayering in the camera, which would seem to require more processing power than the 5D Mark III has to offer. More processing means more heat, which means a very different camera design than an SLR. It’s easy to see why digital cinema cameras start to get expensive.

The 5D Mark III raw hack is cool. It’s important. It’s something we’ll use, and like, and get good results from. But as exciting as it is today, it’s even more significant for what it means for the future of low-cost digital cinema cameras.

Mr. Ham risked his furry life to prove that a primate could flip switches in space. Three months later, a human being took the same trip. By proving that raw video is possible from the 5D Mark III, Magic Lantern have joined the forces pushing the industry in an important new direction.

Five years ago I wrote that large-sensor video had shown “that it’s no longer OK for manufacturers to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally.” Since the industry did such a good job of heeding that advice, my new mandate for the future is this:

It’s no longer OK for cameras not to give us everything they’ve got.

What I love about the new generation of cameras, such as those from Blackmagic, Red, and even GoPro, is that they all give you everything they’ve got. They’ll give you the highest image quality they can, in the smallest package possible. They’ll compress images as much or as little as you want. They’ll max out their resolution at the expense of frame rate, or vise versa—whichever you like. And they’ll pack their best dynamic range into any format they can record.

Compared to this, Canon and Sony’s digital cinema product lines seem cruelly restricted at every tier. The result was palpable at NAB. As I said on stage at the SuperMeet, the show seemed to belong to camera upstarts. To cameras from small booths. From the Phantom Flex4K with its Super35 4K at 1,000 fps, to the Digital Bolex, the exciting cameras at every price point were the ones not charging by the button, feature, or codec, but simply giving you all they could do.

What Magic Lantern have done is show camera makers that if they won’t give us all they’ve got, we’ll just take it anyway. The smart manufacturers will try to beat us there out of the box.

Cutting Through the Cloud

Aharon Rabinowitz posted a wonderful breakdown of why you’re both right and wrong to be bent out of shape by Adobe’s announcement that most of their flagship software will go subscription-only.

Adobe is a company that makes tools we all love and rely on for our work in video post production. But with their latest announcement – that from here on in, all software will only be available through subscription – a lot of people are upset and feeling betrayed. I want to try to address it all in a balanced way. I’ll ask that you read all the way through because I am going to start with why, about certain things, you’re totally wrong. Then, I’ll move into why you’re also totally right – and have the right to feel angry and demand more.

Aharon’s words stick out like a sore thumb on the internet, because they’re rational, well-considered, researched, and nuanced. Creative Cloud is neither a money grubbing conspiracy designed to seize power, nor is it a deftly-handled modernization of a business model. The truth is somewhere in between, and Aharon has done us all a favor by taking the time to analyze the situation.

And the part about the ruler/stylus guy is priceless.

Adobe fans and haters alike, read it. Adobe employees, print it out and tape it to your wall.

Systematic 43

Put my talking in your ear holes!

I had the great pleasure of joining Brett Terpstra on his Systematic podcast yesterday. We talked about Slugline, sucking at things, and cocktails. It was a really cool conversation that I think you’ll enjoy.

Also, Brett somehow tricked me into revealing my opinion on FCP X.

Speaking of podcasts, Clint and I were recently on Kanen Flowers’s Scruffy Thinking show, talking about the launch of Slugline.

Color Correcting Typewriters

The promo video for Slugline was a fun opportunity for me to try my hand at (AKA rip off) the “show, don’t sell” style of my hipster pitchman idol Adam Lisagor, as well as a chance to bust out some DV Rebel production tricks, such as stealing shots in plain sight, and approaching cinematography as an informed collaboration between the shoot and the color grade.

The opening shot features a row of typewriters, culminating in a MacBook Air. I shot it at California Typewriter in Berkeley. If an honest-to-goodness typewriter store sounds like a cool thing to you, then this place is your Shangri-La. Father-daughter proprietors Herb and Carmen gave me free run of their shop for an hour before they opened.

Here was my gear:

“Lighting control” is a fancy term for my humble request of Carmen to turn off the overhead fluorescents. But the Nasty Flag really did help me kill the fill from a skylight above my first typewriter.

I shot at 29.97 fps, knowing I’d slow the footage down to 23.976 in the cut. Shooting 30-for-24 helped smooth out my hand-operated slider move (a little). I was matching to an animatic with locked VO, so I knew how long my shot had to be — but I had to do a little math to account for the slowdown.

I did my best to stage the shot in a spot with decent lighting, but there was only so much I could do. So I shot flat, made sure not to clip, and started thinking about how I’d finish my job as cinematographer in After Effects CS6, using Magic Bullet Colorista II.

The solution wound up emerging from the visual effects component of the shot. To replace the screen on the MacBook Air, I used the After Effects 3D tracker. The results were solid throughout the shot, so I began experimenting with adding color correction masks in 3D space. Here’s how you do that:

  1. Select several points on the plane of the surface you wish to re-light

  2. Right-click and select Create Solid

  3. Preview and verify that the solid you’ve created “sticks” to the surface

  4. If it’s tracking well, enlarge the solid to generously cover the surface, and then sculpt your color correction mask using the After Effects masking tools.

  5. You may still have to add keyframes to the mask shape to ensure accuracy, but it should only take a few.

  6. Use the result as a Track Matte for an Adjustment Layer containing your color correction.

As you can see, I wound up with 3D masks to control the brightness of the keyboards on two typewriters, the shadowing of the back wall, and, most importantly, the sheen on the MacBook Air. Before I added that gleam to the lower surface of the laptop, the shot was simply not telling the story.

When you are the director, DP, and colorist, the sin of “fix it in post” is no sin at all — as long as you don’t write any checks on the set that you lack the chops to cash in post. Would the shot look better if I’d lit it properly and gotten the look in 100% camera? Of course — but that’s a useless hypothetical. Thanks to the kindness of some strangers, I had an opportunity to get my shot for free, based on the promise that I’d be low-impact and quick. If I’d shown up with a lighting kit, asking to tie into their power and block access to parts of their store, my hosts would, quite rightly, start thinking about charging me a location fee. And there’s no way I’d have been in and out in an hour. So I made use of the resources I had — which included a brief window to shoot in a very cool location, a heck of a lot more time at my computer later, and a personal predilection for elaborate color grading tricks.

I budgeted my hour at the location almost perfectly — which wound up meaning “perfectly wrong.” Just as I was reliably getting good takes, the clock struck noon, and Carmen opened the door to a customer who’d been waiting patiently outside with his busted, beige printer from the late Paleolithic era. Right near the end of my best take, a reflection from the swinging door pinged the shelf in a distracting way. So I fixed that too, by pulling bits of shelf from adjacent frames.

Gosh, you’ve really got some nice toys here.

In the time it took me to pack up my modest gear and put the typewriters back where I’d found them, Carmen had diagnosed the gentleman’s problem. His printer, from 1992, was skipping due to a bad belt. She dug up a replacement and had it working before I left the store.

The whole premise of Slugline is to bring screenwriting away from a software experience and back to a writing one — even a purely typing one. As this happy customer left the store with his now-fully-functional dot-matrix printer, I realized that I’d truly found the perfect location for my shoot, in form and in spirit.

I’ll return to California Typewriter. I’ll let you know which one I buy.