Archives: Technology Park

Everything is now file based.  Take your typical TV show for example, its available to you in HD in prime time. Hours later there are highlight clips on the network’s website, and the next day its also available on a web site like Hulu, three days later you can watch the same show on your smart phone and months later its available for you on DVD.

That one show will change video formats about twenty times. You will need a way to transcode your program to all these different formats. The best way to do this with no impact on your editing deadlines is to use a network transcoder.

When I see a post house get started they will do the transcoding over night on something like Sorenson Squeeze® or Apple’s Compressor®.  People tend to not transcode files during the day because of the performance hit the editing will take.  They will get less streams of playback and the
editing interface will start to get sluggish.

To get around this, people will chose to do their transcoding over-night.  But what happens when over night transcoding fails?  You come in the next morning and you have no deliverable for your customer, and even if you wanted to re-transcode you cant because it will take your editing down for the day.

This is the all too common nightmare scenario that tips people toward getting a network transcoder.  Network transcoders do all the transcoding work that you shouldn’t be slowing your editing down with.

The first thing you will need to get a network transcoder is to have an editing environment that is networked so you are sharing your media through an Avid ISIS®, Facilis TerraBlock®, Rorke SAN.

In a basic setup you create a workspace on your networked storage that your network transcoder has write access to.  You then need to give the transcoder read access to the rest of your media because the transcoder needs to see the media it’s going to transcode. This is especially true if you are working with Quicktime reference files or any other wrapper file format. You then set up a watch folder (or as some people call it a “hot” folder).  You export the file from your editor to the partition with write access.

What your typical transcoder will do is watch the hot folder for a file to appear and then it will apply a transcode of your choosing.   So for the most basic transcode lets take the following scenario….

We output a Quicktime file from our NLE (Media Composer, FCP, Premiere) and we need to change it to a Flash file for web delivery.  From our NLE we export a Quicktime to the watch folder, our network encoder will see the file and automatically do the transcode to Flash and then post it to that same partition.   Your network encoder does all the processing, so your NLE isn’t taken out for the day because you need some files transcoded.

Some of the products that will do background network transcoding are Telestream’s Vantage, Digital Rapids’ Transcode Manager, and Sorenson Squeeze Server.

There are also different ways that you implement these transcoders into your facility. Some of them will install onto a basic PC on your network, some will install onto a dedicated server, or some will even work on the cloud.

Some of the leading network transcoders are from Digital Rapids and Telestream.

The Digital Rapids Transcode Manager® enterprise-class transcoding software combines outstanding quality, intelligent automation and exceptional performance for transforming high volumes of media between dozens of acquisition, production, archive and distribution formats. Transcode Manager seamlessly scales from small transcoding ‘farms’ to large-scale, geographically distributed operations with hundreds of transcoding nodes. Transcoding tens of thousands of clips daily for many of the world’s largest media enterprises, Digital Rapids Transcode Manager streamlines and automates your transcoding operations, optimizing quality and delivering faster than real time performance while simplifying management and reducing effort and costs.

Transcode Manager supports a comprehensive range of compression and container formats for any application, from post production and archive to multi-screen distribution including adaptive bit rate delivery. Deeply configurable output parameters enable precise optimization for target devices and applications, while best-of-breed codec implementations deliver superior quality and exceptional performance. A Transcode Manager Server works in conjunction with multiple transcoding engines (nodes), intelligently allocating jobs for optimal throughput and resource usage.

What load balancing does is assign the jobs evenly across your servers. So if you get 10requests, 5 requests will be assigned to oneserver and 5 requests will be assigned to the other server. This is not only a feature of Vantage, but it’s also a feature that Digital Rapids’ Transcode Manager does as well. An incredible feature if your facility grows. Transcode Manager and Vantage will also do what is known as “intelligent load balancing” where if you have multiple encoders, it will choose the right encoder to do your transcode best.
A cloud-based transcoder also fi ts many post houses needs. Sorenson Squeeze Server can be deployed in your facility or on the cloud. Ever post a video to YouTube? That is a prime example of a cloud-based transcode. YouTube takes your video file and transcodes it to a nice lower bandwidth that will play in real time for you. Sorenson offers monthly plans based on how much transcoding you do. Think of it as something like your data plan for your smart phone.
So whether you get a dedicated machine to do your transcoding or if you send it up to the cloud, there are many ways to take the work of transcoding   files off of your editing systems giving you more time to be creative.

Steve McGrath is a New Media Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, Fox, Versus, ESPN, Reuters, Pentagon, USDA, and many others. You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com

The Storyboard Artist

Giuseppe Christiano
Michael Wiese Productions (2011), 210 pages, profusely illustrated.
$24.95, Available in January 2012
www.mwp.com

The author of this book is a craftsman who’s sketched everybody from Paul Newman to Madonna, who’s been yanked around the world (over the phone and internet and sometimes physically), who commutes from Italy to California and most of Europe, plunged into every kind of moviemaking situation, from music videos to major features.  He’s a freelancer who’s mastered juggling of demanding directors and producers who hunger for previz, who manages his time so adroitly he can work one project while waiting for comments on the second. My kind of guy.

Giuseppe Christiano is an artist and filmmaker who, by his own description always wanted to draw comics and be creative. He sidestepped college, and today he’s living the dream. Now he shares it with us in a new Michael Wiese book all about storyboarding technique. He shares meeting his mentor Moebius, who introduced him to storyboarding on a visit to the master’s studio. He guides us through exercises in anatomy, perspective, composition, lighting, how to show movement of subject and camera.

Storyboards are everywhere in modern media. We learn storyboards aren’t just for storytelling from a script, they are also budgeting tools for costly effects. They are client boards to sell a product campaign, and production boards to guide a shoot, and animatics, which require further sophistication, such as eyes drawn on a separate layer so they can be moved during animation. Boards are even employed in website design.

Giuseppe covers all these examples and more in a lavishly illustrated book Of course my favorite chapter is Storyboard Movies, where he describes the storyboarder as the one of the first people to swing a script into pictorial visualization, usually in session with the director.

His advice on career building is impressive and shows care. If I’d had him as a guide when I was younger, I would have missed out on the editing craft, I would have told him about getting a ream of typing paper with one side mis-mimeoed from my mom’s office work, which I went through on the floor of our living room, storyboarding the complete Disney movie THE SHAGGY DOG—the original, with Fred MacMurray, Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello– from memory, having just seen it. I did so love it. It’s amazing how effectively this teaches basic editing. I was nine years old.

Many artists like Giuseppe started very young. He expands on his and the reader’s development by suggesting ways into the drawing craft—ad agencies are a good entry, the pace is fact, the work can be steady. Build up a portfolio. Learn new techniques in filmmaking, and how zooms, dollies and story flow is indicated—all the nuts and bolts I needed as a nine year old are finally here, collected in one genuinely instructive and revealing volume. Which belongs on any artist’s shelf

CLIPWRAP  2.4.1
$49.00, for PowerPC and Intel Macintosh
Divergent Media, Inc.
www.divergentmedia.com

ClipWrap is one of those amazing utilities you don’t know you need until you come across HDV m2t, m2ts (MPEG-2) files or AVCHD’s MTS (H.264 MPEG Transport Stream) files. These are highly compressed formats in which popular consumer cameras like Canon Vixias and others store their high definition video files, on inexpensive flash cards or discs.

Mac’s QuickTime Player can’t handle raw MTS. It’s basically a file wrapper issue. The data inside the file is perfectly usable, although once rewrapped, you shouldn’t try editing in any of these compressed formats, because they present frame data on the fly rather than give you full-data frames you need for editing. Sometimes MTS is readable and exportable using the VLC Player (an open source media player) but when they’re not, you have a serious bottleneck.

ClipWrap to the rescue. Throw a bunch of MTS files into its clean and simple work window, set a destination, choose whether or not to simply rewrap the files, or also to transcode them, recommended for editing,  into any installed QuickTime formats like the Final Cut Pro’s ProRes flavors, Avid’s three major DNxHD flavors, Panasonic’s DVCPro, Apple Intermediate Codec or even classic DV, for editing, and click Convert. Take a coffee break.

ClipWrap offers a checkbox to convert the compressed AC3 audio accompanying most MTS files into edit-friendly linear PCM format.

ClipWrap automatically handles most spanned clips from these sources, especially when you drag over the entire media folder from the card. ClipWrap knows the structure within each folder and reads spanned clip info therein. In rare cases where a span is missed, you can join them manually for reprocessing.

A free trial download is available which processes only the first minute of each clip.

Some installable codecs such as the Perian.component troubles ClipWrap as it does other applications. The short ClipWrap manual lists some of these; they can be disabled easily.

There are more expensive and fancier utilities out there for this workflow but this is the first one I’ve encountered that zeroes in on exactly what I needed– a one-way trip to QuickTime– with a carefully selected range of popular workflow choices- to copy unreadable MTS files into a Mac editing format. Divergent seems to know its usership pretty well.

I used ClipWrap to re-wrap and simultaneously transcode 20 hours of ACVHD 1080 23.98 fps footage into ProRes422 1080 footage, and although it takes five times the storage space of MTS, it looks and plays great (except for that occasional blown out 109 IRE luminance common to these cameras). I’m happy as a clam who escaped the bake.

Loren Miller writes Tech Edge for IMAGINE, and is
a freelance film editor and producer working coast to coast.
Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com

Google SketchUp and SketchUp Pro 8
for Macintosh and Windows, Pro version: $495.00
www.SketchUp.com

SketchUp and SketchUp Pro has evolved from being primarily an architect’s fast volume rendering tool, into a jack of all trades tool which helps filmmakers needing previsualization, or “previz.” It’s simple to draw with it, once you absorb its patented inference engine – this gives you a kind of spooky ability to trace vectors from your model snap to common points in space, to keep lines straight and surfaces planar with ease.

SketchUp gives you control over global time-of-day lighting and cast shadows, and supports animation walkthroughs which automatically “tween” between scenes. And the “regular” version is now a free download from the website. For those of us who as kids used to entertain friends with puppet shows, this kit is absolute heaven.

The Pro version adds Dynamic Component authoring, such as drawers, doors and windows opening and closing at a click; Solid Tools; which allow you to stamp or intersect shapes for custom forms; professional 2D and 3D import and export formats, such as 3DS, DWG, DXF, FBX, OBJ, VRML, XSI. The Pro version adds two complementary programs. Layout, for accurately dimensioned presentation of 2D mechanicals linked to your 3D models. Style Builder customize line looks to conform to your graphic method.

Originally from @Last Software out of Boulder, Colorado, Google acquired the product to enhance Google Earth and offers an invitation to submit your own local landmark models using SketchUp.

SketchUp is easy entry. Using its patented drawing and inference system, you can build a very nice looking house in minutes, by drawing shapes, pulling and pushing surfaces into blocks, and creasing surfaces. You can even simulate an architect’s rendering of your  sketch– and then walk through it! SketchUp’s Sandbox Tools offers limited mesh editing of contours for more organic shapes. Animation and rendering is “on the fly” using its own engine and your OS graphic services.

I’ve been a frustrated architect for as long as I can remember, and SketchUp satisfies the urge to build. I recently finished an entire synthetic retail store layout for client Mary Canning, intrepid former PBS producer who’s stepped into the retail adventure by opening… a Honey store! “Follow The Honey” is open as of August 2011, and she with daughter, designer Caneen Canning, needed previz to assist in planning layout and presentation.

A picture’s worth a thousand words. After visiting the “set” for measurements and a design briefing with the Cannings, building the model took five days. The actual walkthrough is on YouTube at  http://tinyurl.com/followhoneystore .

Previz movie sets and locales are built exactly the same way, by creating custom forms and adding typical furniture or props. SketchUp Pro offers some intriguing tools to assist.

First, SketchUp offers a vast library of prebuilt components in landscaping, architecture and a Film and Stage library, which allows you to plan production blocking of scenes using realistic articulated equipment, everything from dollies and cranes to cameras, picture cars and people. You haven’t lived until you’ve staged a fatal accident scene in SketchUp!

And you’ll know exactly how much location space will be required for crew, equipment, and props. Many components come with moving joints grouped. For instance, just “explode” a lighting unit to tilt the light head, then regroup to fix it there, if you insist on this kind of detail.

You can also generate a “real” light source with beam control from such objects, from one of several plugin vendors that have sprouted up around SketchUp’s extensible architecture- most of them charge money for these. Not all production equipment is available. For instance, I couldn’t find a classic Worral Geared Head — so I built one for their 3D Warehouse—a free emporium of components. A reasonably fast internet connection (5 – 20 mob/s) makes downloading needed components a breeze. Some of these are huge models—have plenty of RAM available.

You can take photos of actual location surfaces and import them to map them to your model for additional realism. The Shadow tool allows you to assess a scene at any time of day, at anytime of year, based on a location you set up in preferences.

The newest tool is the Advanced Camera Tools package, a free download from the website for Pro users, which gives you control over focal length and range for specific lenses. You can accurately frame up your scenes and see a walkthrough!

Google has not yet updated SketchUp to handle 64-bit processing—this will help in rendering very large and detailed models in the newest OS releases, such as MacOSX Lion and Windows 8. It may also be wise to author new models in the new release as opposed to importing models built in SketchUp 7 or earlier, although in my experience they load correctly.

Video tutorials are available free online and the online manual is excellent. There is also a very good online course for SketchUp Essentials available at Lynda.com— a how-to video library which is the bargain of the century at $25/month for the run of the catalog. Anything in software you want to learn will likely be there, and the SketchUp courses are great.

One of the ultimate previz Cool Tools for all seasons.

Loren S. Miller edits longform feature and documentary for clients coast to coast; produces interesting profiles of designers and builders; and reports for Imagine News and other venues. Reach him anytime at techpress@rcn.com

PhotoCopy
Digital Film Tools, www.digitalfilmtools.com
$195.00, for recent After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Aperture, Photoshop running Intel Macintosh and Windows.

You’ve just been to the Louvre and your head is swimming with the classic paintings on display. You get home; you load your latest project and view the bland head shots for that local museum fundraiser you’re producing.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could enhance the texture of a shot with an uncanny resemblance to Breughel? Or the grain and color of BEN-HUR? Or some arcane canvas process like Gum over Cyanotype after Anderson’s “Skunk?”

Or perhaps you need an appropriate look for that dream sequence that just isn’t making it with a flat blue tint alone?

DFT is known for its subtle filter effects, having developed what has become Tiffen’s Digital Filter Suite. Now we come to PhotoCopy, the next level of sophistication: borrowing the actual grain and chroma look of movies, the brushwork in paintings, emulsion and tone of famous photographs, and the similitude of lithographic processes to enhance your video work in Avid, FCP, After Effects, as well as your stills in applications like Aperture and Photoshop.

You can approximate styles and textures in Photoshop and After Effects with various color and noise mixes, but that’s a time sink. Let’s assume your sink is full. You have found the answer: PhotoCopy. DFT’s plugin filter for stills or video can be applied to imbue any image in the manner described.

What sets this apart from competing products, such as Magic Bullet QuickLooks, are the very sources of inspiration being offered. PhotoCopy analyzes color, grain, emulsion, tone, brush detail and texture in almost a hundred classic films, six dozen paintings, over three dozen famous photographs and thirty processes and canned them for you. (Curiously, Caravaggio and Warhol are absent.)

These are not fixed presets. DFT gives you a usable point of departure, and you can tweak and vignette them to your heart’s content.

A very cool tool to add to your favorite image or editing system.

StoryBoard Quick Studio
www.powerproduction.com
For recent Mac and Windows, $399.00

Martini QuickShot Creator
www.martiniquickshot.com
Plugin for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, $199.00

Both from PowerProduction Software, Inc.
Free 7-day trial versions available.

The StoryBoard series and little brother Martini QuickShot Creator from PowerProduction Software offer high-quality storyboarding for those who don’t even draw. Just select pre-made elements from menus, export and job done. Martini is a Final Cut Pro and Premiere plugin which allows editors to rapidly create placeholder missing shots—no more black slug with bland Scene Missing title! If you wish to do more drawing than selecting, their Storyboard Artist series offers all this plus elaborate drawing and texture tools; a product geared more toward agency animatics.

I needed to create some quick setups for a gag interview with STARWARS’ R2D2, which was shot as B-roll at a Comic-Con convention. I assembled the best shots of the lil robot zipping about, but had black slug for the interviewer’s side of the sequence.

I installed Martini QuickShot, the first such boarding plugin for FCP. I launched it from within Final Cut Pro. It opened in its own window, allowed me to select a likely character from a popup menu, and I was delighted to see a range of choices for his eyeline and camera angle. I could actually “spin” the character to the correct orientation in the frame, and even choose a low angle, shooting up, of interviewer looking down at the robot. Martini QS and its big brother Storyboard Quick offers a large selection of pre-created spin-able characters and a ton of backgrounds, from vague and simple sets to full locations like office boardroom, corridors, lobby, restaurants, elevators, factory floors, bedrooms, hallways, etc.

The Storyboard series of products are standalone applications. Storyboard Quick Studio allows you to customize all elements with a limited set of drawing tools for shapes, lines, and text, including a comic speech balloon. You can also rearrange the frames you generate and caption them. You can export them to popular graphic formats. Its new “QuickShot” technology resembles the capabilities of the Martini QuickShot plugin. The included Print to Sketch function comes from its StoryBoard Artists series, rendering frames in pen and ink style black and white frames. You can import your screenplay into SBQ to create a boarded script, and export your boards to Flash and your pages to HTML for web delivery. Even more elaborate character archetype sets, settings collections, and even a prop collection, four sets for $99.00, available on their website.

Back in Martini, I needed something akin to the walls of the convention center mezzanine where R2D2 was filmed to get across what was required for the insert side.  The mezzanine showed black-draped sections of wall in the background. That would be easy to stage in a reverse-angle insert. I chose a Martini background with a black wall section in it and zoomed in to crop out unneeded detail. A few preset “limbo” backgrounds would be helpful, like black, greenscreen and bluescreen colors, but there are easy workarounds. The supplied backgrounds are like watercolors, impressionistic works which convey a location effectively but without extreme detail—they are not virtual sets by a long shot. They can be flipped to left or right or vertically.

I generated a few different compositions, by simply scaling the character, and/or the background in the frame to indicate new focal lengths. Very flexible. Would not be surprised to see more layering capability and more background manipulation available in a new release. You can certainly make and import your own characters and background collections, including photographs, for custom boarding, a smart feature.

When done it exported all the frames I racked up right into Final Cut Pro as asequence containing the frames appearing in the Browser. I added some voice over to complete the rough cut gag interview (“So, you don’t like being a ringtone?” etc.) and sent the exported sequence off to my director across the country. He got it right away. His cameraman will consult the sequence and know exactly how to frame the interviewer against a vague black background, and then we’ve got the world’s first interview with R2D2, invented in Boston, filmed in Seattle.

Storyboard Quick Studio and Martini are fast fun-to-use previz tools with surprising flexibility. Upgrades to higher level products are reasonably priced.

Loren Miller reports for IMAGINE, edits longform drama, comedy and documentary on both coasts, teaches college-level post software and processes, and develops KeyGuide™ professional placemats, available at www.neotrondesign.com. Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com.

PHYX Stylist

For After Effects, Final Cut Pro or Express, and Motion
$199.00, Noise Industries,
www.noiseindustries.com

Noise Industries is a portal for a huge inventory of talented vendor effects makers, including PHYX, Inc, all regulated by the user through its comprehensive FXFactory Pro interface.

A suite of five useful filters for enhancing images of people and places comes from PHYX, Inc. Phyx is a versatile filter maker specializing in skintone-related effects, as seen in its Cleaner package, reported previously here in Imagine News.

In this Stylist package its Skin Light effect is your virtual reflector. It mimics the light reflector you forgot to bring to your shoot. You can assign any color or tint to the reflector to warm up or cool off a subject or turn a blah day into a sunny day.

Fog Generator offers a neat controllable fog machine effect with controls for brightness, detail, smoothing, which is very effective when animated to cross an image, or when combined with image masking for that “I remember it all as if it were yesterday” effect.

Haze Remover mimics a haze removing filter familiar to photographers. You can vary its resolving power and image warming effect.

Cathode Ray delivers a really cool scanline effect, like a nightscope on a Fox News special, with settings for color, “bad TV”, and electronic scope effects.

Sparkler Star is a virtual star filter, mimicking the star filter you couldn’t afford. You can change the size and color of sparkles and how they’re distributed based upon luminance, and of course, like all the effects, keyframe-animatable.

Truly cool tools!

Data Rescue 3
For Mac or Windows
$99.00, ProSoft Engineering,
www.prosofteng.com

Okay, I admit it, I will – very rarely—accidentally trash a file on my Mac.

It happened just recently. It was a unique video source file I needed as part of an edit. I thought I’d copied it and could safely delete it.  And when I delete, I often empty the trash right away to free up disk space, so I can’t recover it by merely pulling it out and back into its place. It’s gone!

In the old days on Macintosh, I had Norton Utilities for this occasion. I would freeze all activity, make certain I saved nothing to the drive containing the deleted file (because it was still there, only its file table entry was zeroed out). And then I would use the UnDelete component. And voila, the named file would be back from the emptied trash.

Norton gave up on its Utilities line for Mac years ago. So for the first time in over a decade I scrambled to the internet for recommendations, and came up with Data Rescue 3, paid the $99.00 – a bit overpriced for a single group of functions, I thought- and downloaded the product. It installed easily and quickly.

I did a fast read of the manual, and booted the app. I chose Deleted Files Scan from the onscreen list of six available actions. I was treated to a goofy animated screen showing the retrieval of various file formats, none of which related to what was really being retrieved, but that was okay, it was tech-like and entertaining.

I was concerned that Data Rescue could read my RAID pair, since it was made of two separate drives striped together for higher bandwidth. The clock estimated 14 hours to scan the entire RAID drive, so I terminated it early, since the deleted  file was recent. It did not bring back the needed file by name, so I had to go through the list of QuickTime recoveries in the workspace folder and identify it by file content and size (8.65 GB!), but it surely did the job.

Data Rescue must populate a separate drive for its “workspaces” which contains found and recovered files, but also a lot of gobbledygook users don’t really need to see, and most of which programmers usually hide in application support folders, not on a user drive.

This is why I’d like to see Norton bring back the Utilities: a whole suite of tools for Undelete, Speed Disk defragmentation, file allocation table repair, disk Imaging and other functions that were very user friendly, for little more than the price of Data Rescue! The other frowner regarding Data Rescue was a high upgrade price of $65.00. Upgrades rarely cost more than a third of the original price.

But it worked. That was cool, and in this case, critical. So take my grumbling in perspective.

My Story Can Beat Up Your Story:
Ten Ways to Toughen Your Screenplay
By Jeffrey Alan Schechter
$19.95 Michael Wiese productions,
www.mwp.com

Pro screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Schechter shares his wisdom on how to break through the competition when it comes to crafting powerful openings, great characters, and distinctive values which put your story above the rest.

In ten chapters, employing a conversational in-your-face style, he cajoles you to craft a compelling hero, build a better bad guy, how to pitch and plot your show.

The book contains five case study movies broken down in Schechter’s system of four questions: who’s the hero? What’s he trying to accomplish? Who’s trying to stop him? What happens if the hero fails?

He asks you to find hero-like experiences in your own life, those events which you navigated through some need to accomplish, and assess the obstacles in your way and how you accomplished your goal. It reminds me of training in Method acting—for screenwriting!

The book is a fast read which covers the waterfront but is nicely detailed with interesting observations on hero archetypes, of the unity of hero and villain, of movie story structure. It’s quite a tour; a pep talk with all the stimulation of buzz chess.

This belongs on any screenwriter’s shelf.

Loren S. Miller reports for IMAGINE and works as a professional longform editor. He also teaches college-level editing and post, develops KeyGuide™ professional placemats, and occasionally produces short documentaries on subjects which interest him. He can be reached anytime at techpress@mindspring.com .

AJA Free Utilities
www.aja.com/products/software

AJA makes professional video ingest and playout cards and boxes, and adapter hardware. Among software which directly supports their cards, they offer two free mini-tools to assess your system bandwidth responsiveness and to plan for media storage requirements.

The AJA DataRate Calculator (Mac or Windows) is a handy storage calculator which allows you to plug in your desired compression, frame size and rate, audio specs and duration to give you a storage space requirement.

I find myself using Digital Heaven’s (also free) VideoSpace widget for the Mac Dashboard, and available to PC users online, but comparing results from the two I noticed a full 100 MB disparity, so in fairness I investigated with Digital Heaven’s CEO Martin Baker:

“I believe AJA’s figures are wrong.

“Right now VideoSpace uses the old 1024-bytes=1KB calculation (which will give a smaller number) but we will probably switch it over to 1000-bytes=1 KB when Lion (Mac OSX 10.7) gets released, or perhaps be super clever and try to detect what OS is running.

“AJA’s calculator allows you to choose the byte count in its preferences and if you switch to “Binary Bytes” you’ll get closer to VideoSpace.”

Thank you, Martin. (www.digital-heaven.co.uk/)

The utility gives you a choice of how bits are measured, by powers of two, or powers of ten. The AJA default is powers of ten (“Decimal Bytes”) which yields a larger figure for storage space. AJA adds a note below the choice buttons explaining the discrepancy.

The AJA System Test allows you to select one of six disk drive tests to read or write data to your storage disk or RAID array, and to choose a file size for the test. File size turns out to be important because the utility doesn’t test sustained disk bandwidth but rather peak performance. But by choosing a large file size— up to 16 GB – you get a very good estimate of sustained performance from the average result, which you can display as text or graph over time.

Flip4Mac®
For Intel or PowerPC G4 Macs and up.
Telestream
www.telestream.net
Products range from US $29.00 to $179.00

Sturdy little Flip4Mac® has grown in stature over the years, as more and more filmmakers deal with Windows Media on Macintosh systems. Flip4Mac is a series of playback enablers, import and export components for QuickTime on Macs. These are very handy when an editor needs to convert footage from proprietary Windows Media formats to Mac QuickTime formats. On the Microsoft website it’s the only product recommended for Macs.

The Flip4Mac components are also the foundation of four handy WMV Player products, creating a tier of increasingly powerful capabilities, from simple import and play (a free download), to import and file conversion export, to high definition import/export (WMV Studio Pro HD, for $179), any of which can be tried for free during which time files will be watermarked and limited in export length.

There’s a Flip4Mac product for everybody and most every need. Two charts on the Telestream’s Flip4Mac web page, under the Features and Specifications tab, reveal just how capable these products really are. Check out the various supported import and export codecs.

The Flip4Mac components are also used in your Safari browser to play .wma or .wmv Windows Media files.

A fundamental media link between the two major platforms.

Cool tools all!

Voiceovers: Make Money With
Your Voice
Terri Apple
Michael Wiese Productions (2011), $26.95
www.mwp.com

Friends, roaming filmmakers, lend me your ears. Here lies the art, science and business of the voiceover, by a leading actress in the field.

Even the great Orson Welles sat down to do voice work; there’s a famous and very funny MP3 file floating around the internet chronicling one of his sessions for a British food company, but it’s also quite instructive, because his ear was unerring and his criticisms revealing. I miss that voice doing the Paul Masson wine ads. You really believed they’d sell no wine before its time.

Many of the greatest voice artists are screen actors, like Jonathan Winters, armed only with cans of Tab, whose booth time often expands due to wildly divergent takes on current events and characters he’s developed over the years, a free extra for stressed-out producers in need of good laughs. He also does speaking engagements at 40K a shot. And worth every dollar.

Author and actress Terri Apple has done it for thirty years, and they call her the “Queen of Voiceovers.” What she has compiled in print reveals the industry you can’t see.

This is a book for those considering VO work as a career. Terri discusses everything from voice technique, stereotype characters, pressing your demo reel, to handling casting sessions, both physical and online. She supplies lists of coaching workshops, talent agents and a slew of Los Angeles-based recording studios. (We have plenty in the Northeast as well as great voices heard nationally, like John and Helen Lisanti, Will Lyman and several other major talents.)

Here you learn VO work takes great acting chops – secondary to your great voice and ability to read copy. You also get the entire range of voice employment, wisdom about unions, good detail about administrivia in voice employment, and good copy samples to exercise. Voiceovers includes short interviews with practicing casting directors and talent.

I’m giving a shout out to Voiceovers!

Loren S. Miller provides excellent scratch narration and has performed some professional gigs, which developed from his primary skillset in longform documentary and dramatic editing and post. He also teaches graduate level  editing. Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com.

Casting Revealed
Hester Schell
$20.95, 160 pages, illustrated.
Michael Wiese Productions (2011)
www.mwp.com

One of the nicest things about being snow locked: you get to spend time reading a book you’ve put off for a while.

This slim volume was worth it. After a polished script, the most crucial element to production is people, behind and in front of camera. Hester Schell’s book clearly demonstrates they are two different breeds. The folks in front of the camera bring the show to life and imbue it with emotion and behavior to tell the story. Who is right for this part? How is the decision made? How is casting conducted? What administrivia is required? How do you cast family members? How do you reject actors who aren’t right?

These aspects and the rest of the craft are well covered here, and in the tradition of most all Michael Wiese books, it’s effectively demystified. I was especially curious about arranging casting sessions, handling rejection, and avoiding gotcha’s. Hester’s certainly been there, as an acting professor, SAG actress, art director and casting director for professional work coast to coast and overseas. I also learned that careful casting makes a production fly where it could really drag with a cast of just pretty faces. You need to cast for both the role and the production; done right, your cast becomes a powerful ensemble, a performance engine which can be a delight to work with.

The book makes a solid case for casting trained actors. The amount of time saved during rehearsals and shooting pays off. The book provides industry-standard tools a casting associate is expected to handle, like headshot sheets, with tips for ideal compositions for actor photos. Standard acting resume layout is provided. Professional presentation is huge: casting directors know it when they see it. The casting workflow and duties, from script breakdown to auditions, is well covered.

One bombshell I got out of the book, which can be practiced in auditions: don’t tell actors how to feel. Tell them what to do! A competent actor takes that action and from it results the authentic feeling required. This was not obvious to me, but it makes sense. The result will be owned by the actor, and the camera never lies when recording it.

This also harkens directly back to a good script, which ideally describes action and behavior the camera loves to record. Capturing motion as the primary expression of dramatic ideas separates plays from movies. If it’s not in the script it needs to be worked out in rehearsal or on set and the feeling must come from the actor for credibility. In that sense, this book is as much a call for good screenwriting as for casting and performance. (Hester is in fact part of Harvard Square Scriptwriters; the development group started 20 years ago by Laura Bernieri, now conducted by screenwriter and teacher Scott Anderson, www. hssw.info).

Hester also reminds us that good casting and acting serves to make good editing happen. This becomes obvious when the editor grapples with shots and has to match action and performance energy, along with other aspects to a scene join, yet I have never heard this from anyone in performance crafts. It’s good to see this perspective. A good casting director will interview and audition for a performer’s ability to maintain character continuity, which is crucial in an industry where shooting is usually scheduled discontinuously to accommodate the weather or location availability, not the story.

Casting Revealed packs in a lot of info, and reveals a lot more than casting, and effectively relates it to your craft space, whatever it may be. Highly recommended for your bookshelf.

DSC Camera Charts
Various models and prices,
visit website.
CamAlign FrontBox Series HD 12+4 chart discussed:  $398.00.
DSC Laboratories, www.dsclabs.com

Why do you need a camera chart? You can tell if the white values on location have a yellow cast, right? If your eyes are good, you should be able to see if the lens is soft when you zoom out from a close-up, right? Are these things for any but the purists among us?

Well, how much time do you have? An accurate camera chart is for any serious shooter or colorist who doesn’t like to guess with every lighting change. Color charts from DSC allow both shooters and colorists to assure luminance and colors are reproduced accurately. Most models can be used for camera set-up in tandem with a waveform/vectorscope field monitor, and as reference for post work using the same scopes in the editing room. Many have a back-focus star on the back.

I’m looking at the CamAlign FrontBox series HD 12 + 4 chart, the front of which includes various skin tone chips and intermediate colors, an 11-step crossed grayscale, circumscribed within HD and film widescreen reticles, with a star BackFocus test pattern on the reverse. The blacks, grays and white are spectrophotometrically neutral – no color cast, unless indicated.  Some DSC charts are “pocket” models and can be deployed under unusual conditions—their Splash model is for underwater work– to give a shooter exactly the accuracy needed, and fast. Shooting a DSC chart gives your post team the same accurate reference from which to deliver verbatim color or any special look.

DSC charts are not cheap products; they’re mounted on aircraft aluminum frames for highest rigidity and light weight, and laminated for weatherproofing and easy cleaning.  Their color specs are equally rigid, tested 4 times, or the chart is trashed.  Talk about purist—if you look closely you’ll see a “use by” date indicated, after which DSC recommends an upgrade due to possible color change under bright set or sun lighting—or over-long duration under airport x-ray! Very few complain about the glossy surface, as it renders blacks far richer, more accurate, and better protected. DSC also offers several mounting solutions for easy table and light stand mounting.

DSC stands for David and Susan Corley, film producers and environmentalist entrepreneurs in Missisaugua, Ottowa, who since 1962 have offered chart models for all kinds of production environments. They began by producing charts for the CBC and later for NASA and various research clients. Now there are charts for broadcast to prosumer users. For instance in any color-critical shoot with my trusty Sony A1U HDV/DVCAM I’ll capture a short clip of the HD 12 +4 chart to accurately render my footage greyscale and color levels on a small Sony broadcast grade monitor in my studio.

If you intend to shoot for broadcast video finishing or digital intermediates, you’re wise to invest in a DSC chart or two to include as standard workflow: a chip shot for each setup under any new lighting change.

These smart charts are a cool tool for serious production value.

Loren S. Miller edits longform drama and
documentary and TV series for clients in Boston,
LA and Seattle, and teaches college-level post courses.
His FCP7 KeyGuide is currently sold by Focal Press.
He can be reached anytime at techpress@mindspring.com.