by Jamie Stuart
I recently attended the Final Cut World Tour in New York. While I'm not typically interested in product events, when the initial announcement for it arrived in my Apple RSS folder I signed up, mostly on a whim. I've always maintained that Final Cut Pro was the most significant development in DIY filmmaking because it meant that for the first time filmmakers could inexpensively own both the means to shoot and post their pictures.
Just outside the Grand Hyatt ballroom where the presentation was given, a handful of vendors had setups — the usual suspects like Canon, Panavision and JVC were there (I didn't see Sony), as well as RED. I didn't have a great deal of interest in Canon or JVC, since I'm not currently shooting with their cameras, so I decided to give the Panasonic rep a hard time.
I asked him how Panasonic would respond to Sony's new camera.
"Which one?... The... EX1?..."
"Uh-huh."
He then went into a spiel about how the Sony camera shoots MPEG-2, which he thought was a substandard acquisition format.
"But it shoots 1080," I said.
He then said that shooting 1080p in a camera that small runs into problems, and that he was content with 720p. Ultimately, he conceded that Panasonic was 1-2 years away from launching its own 1080p camcorder.
I made several passes by Ted Schilowitz and his RED ONE setup. It was the day after Steven Soderbergh debuted
Che at Cannes, so we briefly talked about his use of the camera on that film and whether it screened at Cannes in 4k (he said it was downrezzed to a 2k ProRes).
Passing by again later, during a lull in the surrounding crowd, I began inquiring into the camera's use of aspect ratios. The LCD was displaying a shooting boundary of 2:1 within the full sensor image. That struck me as odd, since the only person I know who advocates 2:1 is Vittorio Storaro. Ted then showed me several other aspect ratios from 16:9 to a standard 2.40 -- all of which are created by framing for the desired shape while exposing the entire 4:3 sensor, much like shooting full-negative in 35mm.
Once the presentation got started, it was difficult to tell how many in attendance were working professionals and how many were amateurs (demos of basic features got rounds of applause). It did seem that quite a few were there to see demos of specific programs like Motion or Soundtrack Pro and left right after their respective showings.
Overall, the day went smoothly. The hosts were polished and the demos were all based around actual professional projects, including a Jaguar commercial and 20th Century Fox's FCP workflow. My favorite section dealt with Color and was centered around the aforementioned Jaguar spot.
I've always spent a considerable amount of time color-correcting my work generally with FCP's 3-wheel process. I'll repeatedly scan my films over and over, making ridiculously subtle adjustments to the mids or blacks. In some cases, I've taken footage into Motion or Shake to correct images via compositing. Mostly, though, I'm just applying general gradation to an entire shot, not pinpointing and altering specific elements.
The Jaguar commercial featured an extreme use of color-correction. First, in a video demo of the real job, and subsequently as a live replication, the technician took natural-looking footage of the car in various poses — driving and parked — and proceeded to give the image a super-metallic bleach bypass quality. But this wasn't just a question of boosting the mid-blues then pumping the whites and blacks — this was a ruthlessly detailed alteration.
After the initial gradation was done in the first room (Color works by offering different tools throughout a group of "rooms"), a series of specific areas were targeted in the second. Everything from the grill to the taillights was adjusted in its own way using as many as all eight tabs to create shapes that tracked in correspondence with the shots' motions.
It was an extreme example of what the program was capable of. It's something that commercial and music video production is used to — and it makes complete sense for a slick promo. In the context of DIY, however: Seeing the immense, time-consuming detail that goes into that level of correction (and how seductive it was), it was the first time that for me, as somebody who likes to do just about everything on his shorts, finally found an area that might just be one brick too many. But then again, as good as I like to make my shorts, I've always understood that as they're handmade. They're not supposed to look like Jaguar commercials.
That said, it's only a matter of time before I give it go.
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here .