PSTMgzn -May2013-Magazine_IMDB

Transcription

S T U D I O
M A N A G E M E N T
Production & Post Production Facilities
TV & Film Production
Recording Studios
S O F T W A R E
Video Game Development
Rental
Graphics
Organize. Manage. Simplify.
Here.
There.
Everywhere.
Studio Suite is the leading studio management software, tracking
and managing contacts, resources, schedules, projects, budgets,
invoices, media assets, labels, equipment and media inventories,
communications, maintenance, and much more… all in one
comprehensive, customizable, cross-platform package.
Studio Suite X features a completely revamped appearance,
access via iPhone and iPad, complete integration with Google
Calendar, QuickBooks Online, push notiﬁcations, and many
additional workﬂow enhancements.
Welcome to the next level of Studio Management Software.
Learn More!
800.450.5740
818.955.9550
studiosuite.com
Post Ad Template May.indd 112
5/3/13 3:28 PM
#3265
SERVING THE INDUSTRY SINCE 1986
VOL 28 · NO. 5
DISCOVERY ACCESS
T R E N D S
UNION EDITORIAL
18
9
BEING GREEN
How big is your carbon footprint?
By Randi Altman
2
EDITOR’S LETTER
How to be better at being green
By Randi Altman
2
POST SCRIPT
Tech and creative collide in New York
By Marc Loftus
4
BITS & PIECES
What’s new in post
9
STOCK NEWS
The latest news from footage providers
12
DIRECTOR’S CHAIR
Danny Boyle — Trance
16
COVER STORY
ILM creates VFX for Star Trek Into
Darkness
By Christine Bunish
38
POSTINGS
A graphic glimpse of some recent work
40
PRODUCTS
The latest in hardware & software
41
PEOPLE
Keeping tabs of the industry’s movers
& shakers
43
REVIEW
Autodesk Smoke on Mac 2013
By Barry Goch
44
REVIEW
GenArts’ Sapphire V.7 for Media
Composer
By Jonathan Moser
48
REVIEW
Lenovo’s E31 SFF workstation
By Dariush Derakhshani
F I L M
22
2D TO 3D CONVERSIONS
More embrace stereo
conversions as the workflow
continues to improve.
By Christine Bunish
18
HEAD OVER HEELS
C A R E E R S
28
TRAINING
Online resources can help pros
expand their skills... from
anywhere.
By Marc Loftus
S O U N D
METRO PCS
32
32
AUDIO FOR ANIMATION
A variety of audio post techniques
for a variety of projects.
By Jennifer Walden
By Iain Blair
ON OUR COVER
DAILY NEWS UPDATES
WEB EXCLUSIVES
TUTORIAL: EDL notching in Avid DS
38
By Igor Ridanovic
This Month In
Industrial Light & Magic (www.ilm.com) has returned as lead VFX
house on the latest J.J. Abrams-directed Star Trek film, Star Trek
Into Darkness. The 12th film in the franchise was shot in 2D and
converted to 3D stereoscopic by Stereo D. In addition, almost
half the film was shot in IMAX, notably exteriors and action
sequences. ILM teams in San Francisco and Singapore handled
work on 500 of the film’s 1,700 VFX shots. While the studio was
able to tap into and update existing assets, ILM made use of the
Arnold renderer this time around. For details, turn to page 16.
•
The hard-core VFX work in Iron Man 3.
•
Students take their technology to the
next level.
•
Epic’s cutting-edge CGI animation.
www.postmagazine.com
Post0513_001-tocRAV5FINALREAD.indd 1
Post • May 2013
1
5/7/13 1:12 PM
editor’s note
Be better at being green
T
he production and post industries have
slowly and steadily been adopting green
practices while doing their business.
Changes can be seen on sets, in studios and in
company parking lots, where charging stations
and bike racks are starting to appear.
By
RANDI
ALTMAN
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
[email protected]
P O S T
This is the fourth year I have spoken to industry
folks who are making real efforts to reduce their
carbon footprint, and once again I am inspired.
Isadora Chesler of LA-based ad agency RPA was
one of those I interviewed this issue (page 18). She
says she always has a Flip and Tumble (www.flipandtumble.com) bag in her purse, which folds up and fits
into the ball of your hand. “I can’t imagine how many
bags I’ve saved by having it handy,” she says. “The nondisposable grocery bags are great if you are in your
car, but if you are on foot these are perfect since
most women have a handbag,” she explains. “To me
it’s a sign of success if I’ve walked away from a shopping trip with no hard paper bags with a company
name printed on it.”
She uses mesh bags (pictured, left), also from Flip
and Tumble, for produce instead of getting plastic
bags for every fruit or vegetable. “They are made
specifically for produce and are meant to go into
your refrigerator.” They are machine washable.
Years ago, Chesler teamed up with executive producer at BKM | Music + Sound MiShawn Williams in
GLASS.org, an initiative
to get single-use plastic
water bottles off sets
and out of post houses.
It was so successful they
were able to disband.
Williams (pictured)
offers her “favorite”
green tip: “It’s one that
always sticks with me,
and I’m always conscious of — rarely do
we ever need our water running at full stream from our
faucets. One of the best and simplest ways to conserve
water is to imagine the size of a pencil. Keep your flow
of water at that size. You’ll find it’s really all you need.”
Film studios and television studios are also more
environmentally conscious. Aaron Rogers, director,
advertising & publicity, at NBC Universal, says, “Within Studio Operations, we’ve developed a subsidiary
line of Mac Tech LED lighting products that consume
30-70 percent less power than typical production
lighting. We are converting to solar/electric golf carts
and working with productions to be more green.
There is an overall company effort to improve the
way we operate our day-to-day business that is better for the environment.”
They’re being green. Are you?
Tech and creativity collide in NYC
By
MARC
LOFTUS
SENIOR EDITOR
[email protected]
2
ext month, The Collider Digital Production Conference (www.colliderevents.
com) will debut in New York City, giving
attendees a chance to check out VFX-, animation- and digital production-themed presentations, panels, master classes and screenings, as
well as a job fair. Collider’s organizer Stephen
Price believes it’s time the East Coast, and
New York in particular, had a productionthemed event that balanced both technology
and creativity.
“All the production events in the world are
very far away from New York,” notes Price.
“There’s NAB, there’s SIGGRAPH, which for
the next four years is going to be on the West
Coast. It’s a West Coast event. That’s what
people here think of it as… and here in New
York, the biggest media market in the world,
we have nothing? From a business point of
view, it seems like a big opportunity to establish a production-oriented show. There’s a very
vibrant community here, but it’s very silo’d. The
interactive people don’t often talk to the
Post • May 2013
Post0513_002-editRAV3finalread.indd 2
RANDI ALTMAN
Editor-in-Chief
(516) 797-0884
[email protected]
MARC LOFTUS
Senior Editor/Director of Web Content
(516) 376-1087
[email protected]
CHRISTINE BUNISH
Film& Video
JENNIFER WALDEN
Audio
BOB PANK
European Correspondent
[email protected]
DANIEL RESTUCCIO
West Coast Bureau
[email protected]
BARRY GOCH
West Coast Blogger/Reporter
IAIN BLAIR
Film
MICHAEL VIGGIANO
Art Director
[email protected]
A DV E RT I S I N G
MARI KOHN
Director of Sales
(818) 291-1153 cell: (818) 472-1491
[email protected]
GARY RHODES
Eastern & Intl Sales Manager
(631) 274-9530 cell (516)410-8638
[email protected]
LISA BLACK
Corporate Sales Executive, Events,
Custom and Integrated Print/Publishing
Services
[email protected]
(818) 660-5828
SUBSCRIPTIONS
(818) 291-1158
S C R I P T
N
EDITORIAL
advertising people, don’t talk to the feature
film people, the gaming people, all these groups.
So one of the things we are hoping to do is
bring those closer together and get them talking. That’s part of Collider’s ‘collision’ concept.”
The event will take place June 9-11 at the
Hotel Pennsylvania. Collider will feature over
40 expert speakers, and Price says the conference hopes to attract as many as 1,000 creative professionals.
June 9th will center on master classes, while
the 10th and 11th will focus on a conference
and job fair. At 6pm on the 10th, Collider will
host a VFX town hall that will be streamed live
to anyone who wants to watch. The Webcast
will address hot topic issues and questions,
such as the need for unions, and will offer
online polling, providing realtime feedback.
“We want to bring together the employers,
the brands and the media of the city,” states
Price. Post readers can save 10 percent off registration by entering the promo code:
COLLPOSTMAG.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
620 West Elk Ave, Glendale, CA 91204
[email protected]
(800) 280 6446
MIKE TABIZON
Account Manager
(818) 291-1180
[email protected]
REPRINTS
Reprints
(781) 255-0625 • (818) 291-1153
LA SALES OFFICE:
620 West Elk Avenue,
Glendale, California 91204
(800) 280-6446
WILLIAM R. RITTWAGE
President / CEO
SEE US ON
Post Magazine is published by Post, LLC, a COP communications company.
Post does not verify any claims or other information appearing in any of the
advertisements contained in the publication, and cannot take any responsibility for
any losses or other damages incurred by readers in reliance on such content.
Post cannot be held responsible for the safekeeping or return of unsolicited
articles, manuscripts, photographs, illustrations or other materials.
Subscriptions: Address all subscription correspondence to Post Magazine, 620
West Elk Ave, Glendale, CA 91204. Subscribers may also contact customer service
at 818-291-1158, or send an email to [email protected] For change of
address please include the old and new address information, and if possible,
include an address label from a recent issue. Subscriptions are available free to
qualified individuals within the United States. Non-qualified 1 year rates: USA
$63.00. Canada & Mexico $94.00. All Other Countries $133.00. Airmail Delivery
is available for an additional $75.00 annually.
Postmaster: Send address changes to Post Magazine, P.O. Box 3551, Northbrook,
IL 60065-3551. Please send customer service inquiries to 620 W. Elk Ave., Glendale, CA 91204
5/3/13 7:22 PM
Apple Final Cut Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro
Avid Media Composer
Blackmagic Media Express
DaVinci Resolve
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Photoshop
The Foundry Nuke
Avid Pro Tools
Sony Vegas Pro
Apple Motion
Telestream Wirecast
The new DeckLink HD Extreme 3D now adds true
full resolution dual stream 3D!
If you have wanted to get into exciting stereoscopic 3D workflows then
DeckLink HD Extreme 3D is the perfect solution because it includes
true full resolution dual stream 3D capture and playback! DeckLink HD
Extreme 3D supports capture and playback on Mac OS X, Windows and
Linux computers for SDI/HD-SDI, HDMI and analog devices, plus includes
the latest technology 3 Gb/s SDI and dual stream video for 4:2:2 and
4:4:4 quality. There’s no better quality!
Advanced 3 Gb/s SDI Technology
With exciting new 3 Gb/s SDI connections, DeckLink
HD Extreme 3D allows twice the SDI data rate of normal
HD-SDI, while also connecting to all your HD-SDI and
SD-SDI equipment. Use 3 Gb/s SDI for 1080p60, single link
4:4:4 or 2K! Imagine editing your latest feature film using real time 2K
2048 x 1556 2K resolution capture and playback!
Works in Mac OS X, Windows and Linux!
Connect to any Deck, Camera or Monitor
DeckLink HD Extreme 3D is the first capture card to
feature Dual Link 3 Gb/s SDI, HDMI 1.4a, component
analog, NTSC, PAL and S-Video for capture and
playback in SD, HD or 2K. Also included is 2 ch XLR
AES/EBU audio and 2 ch balanced XLR analog audio. Connect to HDCAM
SR, HDCAM, Digital Betacam, Betacam SP, HDV cameras, big-screen
TVs and more!
DeckLink HD Extreme 3D is fully compatible with DaVinci
Resolve, Apple Final Cut Pro™, Adobe Premiere Pro™,
Avid Media Composer 6™, Adobe After Effects™, Adobe
Photoshop™ and any DirectShow™ or QuickTime™ based
software. You also get our Media Express frame accurate deck control
software for a complete capture and playback solution on Mac, Windows
and Linux!
Hardware Down Conversion
If you’ve ever wanted to monitor in both HD and
SD while you work, then you’ll love the built in
high quality down converter. Use the Dual Link SDI
outputs as a simultaneous HD and SD output, or you
can switch back to Dual Link 4:4:4 when working in the highest quality
RGB workflows. Select between letterbox, anamorphic 16:9 and even center
cut 4:3 down conversion styles!
DeckLink HD Extreme 3D
995
$
Learn more today at www.blackmagicdesign.com/decklinkhdextreme
5/3/13 2:13 PM
Bits & Pieces
Post Magazine’s
Post Picks from NAB 2013
L
AS VEGAS — Post Magazine had many
post pros walking the halls, scouting out
the latest technology and new products
at the NAB Show, here, last month.The following is a list of products that captured the most
attention and interest of our judges. These
users also voted for the Honorable Mentions.
BLACKMAGIC DESIGN’S
POCKET CINEMA CAMERA
Blackmagic’s (www.blackmagicdesign.
com) Pocket Cinema Camera (below) is a
pocket-sized digital cinema camera that
includes a Super 16mm-sized 1080HD sensor, 13 stops of dynamic range, a built-in SD
card recorder for Apple ProRes, loss-less
compressed CinemaDNG RAW capture,
and an active Micro Four Thirds lens mount.
The camera will be available this summer for
$995. Blackmagic designed the Pocket Cinema Camera for situations where a larger
camera would not be practical. With its standard Super 16 sensor size, the camera is well
suited for use with Super 16 cine lenses via
MFT adapters. The 13 stops of dynamic
range are almost identical to shooting on a
professional Super 16 film camera.
BLACKMAGIC DESIGN’S
DAVINCI RESOLVE 10
Resolve 10 marks a major upgrade to the
color correction tool. Resolve 10 offers
upgraded on-set and editing tools, support
for OpenFX plug-ins, and new tools for delivering final project masters to cinemas.
Timelines can now be moved into and
4
Post • May 2013
Pos0513_004-6,8-BitsMV4.indd 4
out of Resolve and
other edit software,
such as Final Cut Pro,
Avid and Premiere Pro.
The new Resolve Live
feature allows color
grading direct from the
video input live with
full creative power
such as primaries, secondaries, power windows, and custom
curves.
In addition, grades can be stored and then
relinked when the camera files are loaded.
New editing features include full multitrack
editing with 16 channels of audio per clip and
unlimited video and audio tracks in the timeline.
Audio can be synced or trimmed and dragged
independently to the timeline. Other editing
features include extensive ripple, roll, slide and
slip clip trimming support, which display
dynamically on the timeline and viewer.
Resolve 10 will be available in Q3 and will
be a free upgrade for existing customers.
ADOBE ‘NEXT’
Adobe (www.adobe.com) revealed several updates to its Creative Suite at NAB,
though no official version number.The “Next”
release will include Anywhere, a creative
workflow platform that allows pros using
Adobe tools to work together, regardless of
their location, giving them access to centralized media and assets.
A studio would install Anywhere software
on a Windows platform and then users
would be able to collaborate via the company’s Prelude and Premiere Pro applications.
Anywhere takes advantage of the Mercury
streaming engine, which allows users to see
the same assets at the same time, but without having to transfer files.
Next also sees improvement to Premiere
Pro, including the integration of the Speedgrade color engine. Pre-baked looks are
included, which can be easily applied to footage. Also new is Open CL and CUDA support on both Mac and Windows. In addition,
VST3 plug-ins are supported, as are hardware control surfaces.
In the Next release of After Effects, users
will see seamless integration with Maxon’s
Cinema 4D (see picture above). After Effects
now supports .C4D files, and the Cinema 4D
engine is now inside of After Effects. Cinema
4D Lite is included with AE, allowing users to
work with real 3D geometry within the
application. Users never have to render out
of Cinema 4D to get material into After
Effects. In addition, AE users can create new
Cinema 4D files within After Effects.
AVID MEDIA COMPOSER 7
Avid’s theme at NAB was “Avid Everywhere,” underlying its commitment to create an
end-to-end, distributed media production environment. Media Composer 7 will be available in
June at a starting price of $999, and features
accelerated and simplified file-based workflows,
including optimized HD delivery from high-res
source material and automated media opera-
5/3/13 9:47 AM
tions. V.7 (pictured below) also offers Interplay
Sphere for Mac support.
Media linked via Avid Media Access
(AMA) now benefits from the complete
suite of media management tools formerly
reserved for native Avid media. Dynamic
media folders help accelerate and simplify
AMA media management tasks automatically in the background. The FrameFlex tool
and LUT support enables editors to ingest
2K, 4K and 5K media with realtime color
space conversion and deliver content directly to HD. And the Master Audio Fader allows
editors to control overall program volume
and insert plug-ins for compression, equalization, and compliance metering.
A Symphony color correction option provides color tools previously found only in
Symphony. An Interplay Edition ($1,499)
enables creative teams to edit, share, tag, track,
and sync media as it flows through the production process anywhere in the world.
FREEFLY SYSTEMS’ MOVI
Freefly Systems’ (www.freeflysystems.com)
Movi ($14,995) is a handheld three-axis digital
stabilized camera gimbal (pictured, right). At the heart of
the gimbal is Freefly’s proprietary IMU and brushless
direct drive system. The gimbal is 100 percent custom
designed in-house by the
company’s engineering team
and represents their vision of a
next-generation stabilized
camera gimbal. The gimbal
offers a majestic mode, translation compensation, live wireless
tuning and graphing, and is
remote firmware updatable.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
They include the Blackmagic 4K Production Camera, AJA KiPro Quad 4K, Axle Video
Revision 8, Nvidia Grid, Avid Pro Tools 11
and Interplay w/ Sphere, and the DJI Phantom Drone for GoPro.
What Post Readers Are Up To:
right now
MUSIC: “Atoms for Peace, LCD Soundsystem, Capital Cities, Portishead...the list goes on. I listen to music non-stop at work to block
all of the mixed noises out so I can focus.”
WORK: “I am helping create a sponsor reel for the AICP Awards
— this project is a super-creative piece, almost like a short art film.
I love the concept, and visually it’s going to be absolutely stunning.
Everyone involved is really excited about working on this and wants
to produce a piece that is the best as it can possibly be... it’s all
about combining the best talents around each other, utilizing them,
and then killing it.”
Clarice Chin
Art Director
The Mill LA
Sandy, the perfect storm.
Available on 35mm & HD from
StormStock®
The world’s premier storm footage library.
(817) 276-9500
www.stormstock.com
Post • May 2013
5
5/3/13 9:48 AM
Bits & Pieces
Footage.net
offering over
two million clips
Nice Shoes teams with
Red Car for remote grading
N
EW YORK — Nice Shoes, here, has partnered with Red Car Dallas (pictured) to
offer remote color grading. Dallas area clients now have the opportunity to get the same experience they would get coming to the New York studio
without having to leave the city.
The initiative marks Nice Shoes’ second remote
partnership, following a successful two-year relationship with Engine Room Edit in Boston. The set-up
uses a secure HD feed and a display calibrated by
Nice Shoes engineers.
“Nice Shoes has had clients all over the country for
years,” notes managing director Kristen Martini, “but
travelling to New York isn’t always an option, so we’re
excited to offer the high-quality color grading they’ve
come to expect through an equally high-quality set-up
at a partner like Red Car Dallas.”
“Nice Shoes colorists are a great addition to our
offering at Red Car Dallas,” says Red Car Dallas managing director Carrie Callaway. “Our clients are extremely
busy and they love the option to not have to travel and
still get the best color for their projects.”
Clients who work with Red Car Dallas editors
Chris Gipson, Keith James and Patrick Hammond are
now able to work with Nice Shoes colorists Chris
Ryan, Lez Rudge, Lenny Mastrandrea, Ron Sudul and
Gene Gurley.
Hammond, in fact, recently completed one of the
first sessions by the two studios, working with Sudul
for agency Dieste.
N
EW YORK — Footage.net now has
well over two million screening clips
available through its search and
screening platform. The company has partnered with many top footage providers,
including Getty Images, FootageBank, Framepool and CNN ImageSource to bring stock
footage sources together in a single place.
Footage.net’s motion content includes network news, wildlife imagery, adventure sports,
exotic locations, and historical footage. The
site’s user interface and improved search
capabilities provide researchers with tools to
fully use its vast footage database, work with
images, manage results and communicate with
stock providers. For more Stock Footage news
turn to page 9.
Promise shows low-cost SAN
M
ILPITAS, CA — Promise Technology (www.promise.com), a
developer of high-performance RAID storage solutions for
the media and entertainment market, unveiled a low-cost, turnkey,
scale-out SAN storage solution for big data at the NAB show last
month. The VTrak A-Class has features optimized for the storageintensive workflows of post, and enables multiple clients running
Windows, Mac OS X or Linux to access a shared SAN file system
over Fibre Channel.
As an all-in-one SAN solution, the VTrak A-Class eliminates the
need to purchase a separate primary metadata storage server,
6
Post • May 2013
secondary metadata storage server and
metadata storage device/array in order
to create a SAN solution, making it easier to deploy, more energy efficient, and
more cost effective.
The solution offers high-performance
and low latency over a shared SAN optimized for HD resolution, providing over 5,500MB/s sequential
read and 2,400MB/s sequential write performance, per node up to
eight nodes. Collaborative editing is possible right out of the box.
5/3/13 9:48 AM
The best broadcast quality mini converters
now in both regular and heavy duty models!
3 Gb/s SDI Technology
The world’s most popular converters are now available in two families, for the
studio or heavy duty for live outside broadcast! The new heavy duty models
are machined from solid aluminum so they look beautiful and are super tough!
There are 14 models including HDMI, analog, optical fiber, audio embedding/
de-embedding and up, down, cross conversion. Mini Converters are even
available as OpenGear cards for when you need a rack mount solution.
Mini Converters include the latest 3 Gb/s SDI technology, so
you’re always future proofed! 3 Gb/s SDI is also fully compatible
with all your existing standard definition and high definition
SDI equipment.
Broadcast Quality
Auto Switching SD and HD
Mini Converters instantly switch between all SD and HD formats,
including NTSC, PAL, 1080PsF23.98, 1080PsF24, 1080PsF25,
1080i50, 1080i59.94, 1080i60, 720p50, 720p59.94 and 720p60.
Updates can be loaded via USB.
Redundant SDI Input
Mini Converters are built to the highest quality standards
with low SDI jitter, so you get the longest SDI cable lengths
combined with ultra low noise broadcast quality analog video
and audio.
Mini Converter Family
Heavy Duty
Regular
Mini Converters feature a redundant input and loop through
SDI output. Connect a redundant SDI cable to the second
input, and if the main SDI input is lost, Mini Converters will automatically switch
over in an instant. That’s great for mission critical tasks such as live events.
Pro Analog and AES/EBU Audio
Standard 1/4 inch jacks are included for professional
balanced audio that switches between AES/EBU or analog.
Unlike other converters you don’t need expensive custom
audio cables so you’ll save thousands of dollars!
Mini Converter SDI to Analog
$295
Mini Converter H/Duty SDI to Analog $345
Mini Converter Analog to SDI
$295
Mini Converter H/Duty Analog to SDI $345
Mini Converter SDI to HDMI
$295
Mini Converter H/Duty SDI to HDMI
$345
Mini Converter HDMI to SDI
$295
Mini Converter H/Duty HDMI to SDI
$345
Mini Converter Sync Generator
$295
Mini Converter SDI to Audio
$495
Mini Converter Audio to SDI
$495
Mini Converter Optical Fiber
$495
Mini Converter UpDownCross
$495
Mini Converter SDI Distribution
$295
Learn more today at www.blackmagicdesign.com/miniconverters
5/3/13 2:12 PM
Bits & Pieces
Sunny days for post on Sesame Street
By
JESSE AVERNA
Editor
Sesame Street
Sesame Workshop
www.sesameworkshop.org
N
EW YORK — Sesame Street produces a large amount of content
every year, and sooner or later it
all passes through my desk. Every day our
post department is filled with new material,
new challenges and new laughs. I’d like to
walk you through a little of our process and
some of my highlights from the latest season,
our 43rd to be exact.
Our current broadcast show is one hour
and made of several segments. Some are
shot on our live set with the Sesame Street
Muppets and performers, some are shot on
a key, some are delivered from other filmmakers and some are animated.
New to this season is a segment called
“Elmo the Musical” (ETM). Together, Elmo and
the child at home go on a math and musical
adventure in Elmo’s imagination. ETM is originally shot on bluescreen and then the 3D
animated backgrounds are added in post. The
puppeteers perform by looking down at a
monitor to see what the camera sees and
what the scene looks like. Since ETM was shot
on bluescreen, our technical director, Tom
Guadarrama, would add
temporary backgrounds and
elements into the monitors.
It was crucial that the
performers got to see how
the episode was cutting
together, so it was my job in
the control room to live
ingest and quickly piece
together, key and playback
for the performers.
I work in tandem with
John Tierney (and with the
help of my assistant
Meaghan Wilbur). He
works on Avid Media Composer and After Effects; I
work in FCP 7 and After
Effects, but more on that
later. Once the day
wrapped, the segments
were sent to John Tierney
to edit and then to our VFX
team at Magnetic Dreams.
John has been working on
• Footage & text online searching
Sesame Street for a couple
• retrieval & download
• high-deFinition video
decades. Some of our most
complicated pieces will go
[email protected]
to John at Definition 6 and
1-877-426-1121
then come back to me for
hboarchives.com
final QC and delivery.
8
Post • May 2013
Pos0513_004-6,8-BitsRAV5FINALREAD.indd 8
Teamwork is critical to getting
the job done quickly and effectively. For example, this season
John was cutting a new “Super
Grover 2.0” segment on how to
turn a solid into a liquid, while I
was editing our narrative story
where the Sesame Street residents
figure out how to make Snuffy leap
into the air using a pulley system.
Another time, John edited the narrative story with Community’s
Donald Glover about problem
solving, while I worked on a “Word
on the Street” segment with Kristen Bell about the word “splatter.”
Having a partner in editing
allows us to specialize and know
our tools intimately enough to
really be able to focus on story and
craft. I’m currently cutting on Final
Cut 7 at the Workshop, although
my keyboard and shortcuts are
Media Composer mapped, since I
come from an Avid background. I
spend about half my time in FCP7 and half in
After Effects. I use a lot of Red Giant products
as well.
The second half of this season was being
shot at the same time as our next season, 44.
That meant that the shows we were editing
would need to be turned around quickly to
our sound and music teams.
While the season was being shot, I was also
busy building our one-hour show for domestic and international delivery. The one-hour
show also has a 3D animated segment called
“Abby’s Flying Fairy School” as well as pieces
that highlight the letter and number of the day.
Those pieces are often commissioned from
independent filmmakers and companies, QC’d
by me, and added into the show.
Once we’ve locked the segments and they
have gone through their sound mix, it is my job
to QC them for quality. I assemble the onehour show and bring it to PBS’s broadcast spec
and send it on its way to millions of kids
around the world.
In addition to our domestic and international show, Sesame Workshop has many
departments with different needs for our
material, as well as the need for new material outside our show to be generated. I
work on a variety of different reels for
highlighting, licensing and research. Some
notable projects this season were an inter-
Jesse Averna, who was just nominated for an
“Outstanding Achievement In Multiple Camera
Editing” Emmy (his third), hanging with Big Bird.
view with legendary puppeteer and performer of Big Bird and Oscar, Caroll Spinney,
on our Sesame Street Old School Volume 3
DVD; “Share It Maybe,” a spoof on Carly
Rae Jepsen’s song with Cookie Monster;
and a song from the Count, “Counting the
‘You’s in YouTube,” celebrating the one billionth view on Sesame Street’s YouTube
Channel. That’s definitely another favorite
that stands out this season.
The biggest highlight for me, though, was
the opportunity to shadow one of our directors on set. While that visit’s intent was to
develop my directing skills, seeing the process
intimately educated the way I cut and allowed
me to look at it in new ways.
I always tell people that the trick to being
a good editor is “out-caring” everyone else in
the room. If you can care more about the
project you are currently working on, more
than even the writers, directors and producers, then you’ll make something great.
That’s not easy at Sesame Workshop, the
nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, since everyone gives it their all. I’m
proud of the work we’ve done. I have one of
those rare jobs where I feel fortunate every day.
5/3/13 2:39 PM
NEWS
Stock Footage
Pond5 expands with
Pixmac acquisition
B
Discovery Access to add shots
from North America series
S
ILVER SPRING, MD — This month,
Discovery Channel premieres
North America, a seven-part series that
explores the wilderness in what they
call, “the most diverse, deadly environment on Earth.” The series features rare
footage, including a partnership between
the leather bass and a moray eel along
the coral reefs of Central America, as
well as the first successful attempt using
laser technology to pick up the acoustic
vibration of a male jumping spider.
The footage from North America will
be available within the year for licensing
through The Discovery Access online
library (www.discoveryAccess.com),
which houses content from Discovery’s
28 entertainment networks and multi-
platform media brands.
Discovery has been shooting all HD
— DVCProHD and HDCAM — since
1999, and increasingly more content is
being shot on tapeless formats like P2,
XDCAM, Red and Phantom. Clips can
be licensed and downloaded online in
high res in any format 24/7. Comps are
almost instantly available in H.264
QuickTime low-res files as placeholders.
For master elements, they can easily
supply the usual ProRes and DNx files,
but can also do fast turnaround custom
transcodes within a few hours.
While most can find what they need
online without the help of a sales rep,
the archive does have a fully staffed
footage sales and research team.
StormStock’s Website (www.stormstock.com) received a significant upgrade in
April. In addition to featuring all new premium footage, the site is easier to use.
“We’ve improved our footage previews and our search engine, and made the site
more user friendly,” explains StormStock founder/cinematographer, Martin
Lisius. New material produced by StormStock includes exclusive footage of
storms, tornadoes, lightning, blowing dust, stormy skies and Hurricane Sandy
(pictured). The footage provider has also found HD shots of Hurricane Katrina.
ROOKLYN — Pond5 (www.pond5.com), here, is acquiring Czech
Republic-based stock imagery network Pixmac S.R.O. The deal
includes millions of stock photos and illustrations that are distributed in 17
languages and in multiple currencies. With the integration of Pixmac, Pond5’s
selection of stock video footage, audio, images, 3D models and motion
graphics templates will be available globally across the Pixmac network of
more than 20 domains, via a multilanguage, multi-currency platform.
Over 6,000 Pixmac photos and illustrators are expected to join
Pond5, bringing with them millions of images, which will be available via
the Pond5 Website. Pixmac artists will get a substantial raise to match
their Pond5 counterparts, and will earn 50 percent royalties on all sales.
HBO Archives ups vintage
sports and HD world footage
N
EW YORK — HBO Archives (www.hboarchives.com) has added to its collection with HD footage from around the world, as well as vintage sports
shots from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s — footage from the cablenet’s
original programming, the majority of which was sports.
The collection includes basketball, hockey, soccer, gymnastics, boxing, skating,
track and field, swimming and diving, skiing, wrestling, body-building,
bowling, tennis, rodeo, mixed martial arts, and horse and dog shows.
Footage includes basketball Hall of
Famers Magic Johnson and Larry
Bird in their college days, plus
many more sports icons.
HBO Archives’ Matthew Fisher
led the initiative to restore these old 2- and 1-inch reels at Northvale, NJ’s
Deluxe. Many had typical glue problems and had to be ‘baked’ before they could
be transferred. They were sent to Specs Bros.
In addition to the sports collection, HBO Archives’ HD cinematographers
have brought back footage from Egypt, Macau, the Isle of Man, Seoul and Pakistan. “We are also shooting HD in Iceland (pictured) and Croatia,” reports Fisher.
Shooters call on a variety of cameras, including Arri Alexa, Canon 5D and 7D,
Panasonic AF100, and for some action shots, GoPro.
Post0513_009-10-Stock GalleryRAV3FINALREADALMOST.indd 9
Post • May 2013
9
5/2/13 4:16 PM
MammothHD adds high-res
footage to collection
E
VERGREEN, CO — MammothHD (www.mammothhd.com) is currently
expanding its collection with a variety of new material, shot mostly in 4K and
6K with Red cameras. In addition, shooter/producers from around the world are
currently collecting footage that will become part of the MammothHD library.
Also at press time, the majority of Mammoth’s Red shooter/producers are in
the process of upgrading their cameras to the Red Dragon 6K Sensor. “We will
start adding the 6K material as soon as it arrives,” says owner Clark Dunbar. “With
the pending release of Red’s RedRay player and codec, MammothHD will be offering 4K preview on special request for those critical
large format reviews [RedRay Player required]. Tied into RedRay, we
will also be opening a ODEMAX Channel for the MammothHD demo
materials in 4K, along with 4K content.”
The MammothHD Library offers a wide variety of footage, including lifestyle,
sports, aerials, wildlife, nature, natural history, industrial and more. They also have a
vertical library targeting signage and display projects.
Shutterstock
gives away digital
camera package
N
EW YORK — At last month’s NAB show,
Shutterstock (www.shutterstock.com), a
provider of royalty-free digital footage, had a
drawing for a $5,000 digital cinematography
camera package that included a new Canon
5D Mark III DSLR fully outfitted with a range of
digital cinematography accessories, including a
Sachtler Ace M fluid head, a Schneider Optics
4 Filter Holder with Rotating Sunshade, a Litepanels MicroPro on-camera LED light, and a
Petrol Bags Cam ‘n Go backpack.
Ozzie Carrillo’s business card was randomly
pulled out of a bag by Shutterstock’s Brian
Masefield. Carrillo is the production manager at
KVIA-TV in El Paso, TX.
“You’re always editing a project and realize
you have an empty hole in the middle, with no
original footage to fill it,” says Carrillo. “With
Shutterstock’s great search tools, I can look for
a timelapse or scenic shot to fill it in. The fact
that Shutterstock has a lot of high definition
footage was a big selling point to me.”
10
Post • May 2013
Post0513_009-10-Stock GalleryRAV3FINALREADALMOST.indd 10
T3Media targets TV and film producers
D
ENVER — T3Media (www.t3media.com), a provider of cloudbased video management and licensing
services, has grown its library and product offerings, targeting the workflows
and budgets of TV and film producers.
In that vein, the company recently
added the Miss Universe Collection to
its library. This offering features footage
of international pageant delegates and
title holders dating back to the late
1950s, including celebrities and memorable pageant contenders,
T3Media also recently added two
new international sports collections to its repertoire
— Professional Bull Riders (PBR) and US Soccer. The
PBR Collection features thrilling eight-second rides,
nasty wrecks, behind-the-scenes competition footage,
and b-roll of fans from events around the world.
The US Soccer Collection includes full-length broadcasts, fully-produced highlights, behind-the-scenes clips
and footage of the National Team’s current star players
— such as Abby Wambach and Landon Donovan.
Also, in an effor t to help streamline the footage
licensing process, T3Media has introduced Access
Plans for producers working on episodic programing and films where more than just a few stock
clips are needed. The company’s Access Plan
removes the complexities often associated with
footage licensing and allows producers to focus on
the creative rather than make decisions based on
per-clip costs.
Culver City, CA’s Sony Pictures Stock Footage offers feature-quality HD, 35mm and,
soon, 4K digital stock footage shot on Sony’s
new F65 camera. The latest additions
include outtakes from Columbia Pictures’
The Amazing Spider-Man, which includes
police helicopters, scenic NYC aerials and
more. With more than 160,000 clips, the
Sony Pictures Stock collection is available
online at www.sonypicturesstockfootage.
com. The collection is continually expanding
with outtakes from Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures and Screen Gems feature films,
as well as Sony Television productions.
5/2/13 4:16 PM
EED
M
131091_DSC_ACCESS_POST
04/23/13 01:25:33 PM
PUBLICATION: POST 5/1/2013
LIVE: 9.25” X 11.25” • TRIM: 10” X 12” • BLEED: 10.25” X 12.25”
© 2013 Discovery Communications
E
If you’ve always wished you could get that sensational Discovery
footage for your production, now you can.
Follow us on
and
5/3/13 2:12 PM
director’s chair
Danny Boyle — Trance
H
By
IAIN BLAIR
This Alexashot film is a
thriller/dark
comedy.
OLLYWOOD — Visionary director
Danny Boyle, who won the 2009
Oscar for Best Director for Slumdog Millionaire, has always been attracted to
controversial stories and to pushing the cinematic envelope as far as he could, as evidenced by a body of work that includes such
films as Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, The Beach,
A Life Less Ordinary, 28 Days Later, Sunshine
and 127 Hours.
His new film, Trance, continues in that
tradition with its twisty tale of an art thief
(James McAvoy) and his partner-in-crime
(Vincent Cassel), who become part of a love
triangle with a beautiful hypno-therapist
(Rosario Dawson) hired to help the thief
recover from amnesia.
Part psychological thriller, part black comedy, Trance dives head-first into the murky
and Rosario’s character does appear to
behave like a femme fatale, except you find
out that it’s not really like that at all, and that
she has more damage and emotion than you
might expect. So it uses all these different
genres and then defines them a little bit.
“It’s basically about this art auctioneer who
is involved in the robbery of a Goya from his
own auction house, with a criminal gang, who
he then double-crosses, who then punish him.
He then claims amnesia as the reason no one
can find the painting, they torture him, and
realize he really doesn’t remember where he
hid it. So they turn to the mind, and hire this
hypno-therapist to see if they can discover
where he put it. She takes him into a series of
trances, but nothing’s quite what it seems, as
he begins as an apparently reliable narrator
— he looks straight into the camera and
using time in a different way, and the use of
the trances and the whole idea of perception
versus reality all made it quite challenging to
shoot and edit. There’s no difference between
perception and reality at different times,
because of the trances, and that was part of
the appeal for me in making it.”
POST: How long was the shoot and how
tough was it?
BOYLE: “About two months. We shot it all
in East London, and at Three Mills Studios in
the East End, and the biggest issue was that
we were doing the Olympics at the same
time. So we would do two days a week on
that and then shoot four days on this. To be
honest, surprisingly, doing this movie about
insanity kept us all sane. It cheered us up, even
though it’s this dark, devious tale.”
POST: You’ve worked with DP Anthony Dod
Mantle six times now. What does he bring to
the mix?
BOYLE: “We know each other so well that
we can cut so many corners. We can guess
what the other’s thinking, and he’s always
prepared to try something completely new in
the filmmaking process. This was slightly more
classical than Slumdog or 127 Hours, where
Danny Boyle on set: “I love post, and
I actually love the transition from the
shoot to post the most.”
depths of the human subconscious, and,
here, in an exclusive interview, Boyle talks
about making it, his love of post and sound,
and how he juggled the film with also directing his ambitious and acclaimed Opening
ceremonies for the 2012 Summer Olympics
in London.
POST: How would you describe Trance, and
what sort of film did you set out to make?
DANNY BOYLE: “I set out to make a
thriller, but it uses a lot of different genres to
tell the story. It starts off as an art heist, like
The Thomas Crown Affair, but it’s not really a
heist movie or about a stolen painting at all.
It’s actually about stolen memories, which you
find out by the end of the film. It’s also an
amnesia genre, except a character says,
‘Amnesia’s bollocks — everyone knows that.’
“It’s also a femme fatale noir kind of movie,
12
Post • May 2013
Post0513_010,12-directors chairRAV3FINALREAD.indd 12
appears to be your trusted guide — and then
turns into something very different.”
POST: What were the biggest technical challenges making this?
BOYLE: “The story’s nonlinear, so you’re
we used very small, fluid cameras. This was
more set-based. But we used a lot of reflective surfaces to reflect these characters who
are not quite what they seem. So we used a
lot of double and triple images organically, as
5/2/13 4:32 PM
S:9.75”
Choice of 4K cine or
4K UHDTV capture
PL & EF Mount versions
4K/2K RAW
outputs
Super 35mm CMOS sensor with 12-bit
RGB 4:4:4 uncompressed HD or 2K
S:11.75”
Available in both PL and EF mount versions, our flagship EOS C500 Cinema Camera deploys
a Canon-developed Super 35mm 4K CMOS image sensor to originate a choice of HD, 2K
or 4K RAW files. The HD and 2K production formats output as uncompressed 12-bit RGB
4:4:4 video components. Uncompressed 4K RAW files can be selected to conform to the
standardized UHDTV or cinematography production formats.
The EOS C500 delivers RAW HD / 2K / 4K file formats via an SMPTE standardized 3G SDI
serial interface, facilitating streamlined systemization with other equipment that conform to
this standard.
With the capability to interface with a broad choice of solid state digital recorders from
recognized international manufacturers—the EOS C500 offers wide flexibility in workflows
for moviemaking and television production.
Find out more at pro.usa.canon.com
Emmy® Award for Technology
& Engineering for 2012
Improvement to Large Format CMOS
Imagers for Use in High Defi nition
Broadcast Video Cameras
© 2013 Canon U.S.A., Inc. All rights reserved. Canon and EOS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. in the United States and may also be registered trademarks or trademarks in other countries. All other products and brand names are registered trademarks, trademarks or service marks of their
respective owners in the United States and/or other countries. Use of the trademarks and service marks of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (“NATAS”), including the mark EMMY®, requires the prior express written permission of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
5/3/13 2:12 PM
director’s chair
Glenn Freemantle and his
Sound 24 team, are located
in Pinewood. The final
sound mix was done in
the Powell Theatre by rerecording mixer Ian Tapp
on Dolby Atmos, which
Boyle calls “amazing.”
a natural part of the set, which act as a warning to the audience’s subconscious — that
things aren’t quite what they seem.”
POST: Where did you post it, and where
does post rank for you in the whole equation?
BOYLE: “I love post, and I actually love the
transition from the shoot to post the most,
where you moved from this huge crowded set
with hundreds of people to the edit suite with
just two or three of you. I love that change of
tempo. All films are made in the editing room. It
doesn’t matter what you’ve done with the
shooting and sets and acting and set pieces and
so on — it all gets made in the edit, particularly
with a nonlinear film like this, with elements that
are moved around a lot to tell the story. We did
the post at De Lane Lee in London and all the
sound mix at Pinewood with sound designer
Glenn Freemantle.”
POST: You worked with editor Jon Harris on
127 Hours. How was it this time round?
BOYLE: “He’s fantastic, and a great guy.
Here’s the thing about an editor — you’ve
got to be able to share a room with them for
three, four months. You’re like roommates, so
you have to be able to get on well. And he’s
very skillful. He did a rough cut during the
Olympics, and then we put it on ice and
walked away from it for six months.
“So that was a big challenge coming back
to it, as we’d forgotten parts of it. You do
forget, though you never think you will. It gives
you a rare, welcome glimpse of what it’s like
to see it for the first time, like an audience. We
cut on Avid, and once we got back to it, it
went pretty smoothly.”
POST: How many visual effects shots did you
do in the end?
BOYLE: Our VFX supervisor was Adam
14
Post • May 2013
Post0513_010,12-directors chairRAV3FINALREAD.indd 14
Gascoyne, who did Slumdog, 127 Hours and tend to forget just how vital sound is. As a
the Olympics with me. I think we had at least rule, American films are much better on
a few hundred by the end, some of them sound — even with animated films. We actuquite complex, like the scene where Vincent’s ally did a mix on the new Dolby Atmos syshead is half shot away.”
tem, which is amazing.”
POST: The film has some great visuals. Do
POST: Was doing a DI also very important
you like working with VFX?
to you?
BOYLE: “I do. I like working with Adam a
BOYLE: “Yes, and we did it at Technicolor
lot and with all my collaborators, and I like to in London with this amazing colorist, Jeangive them all a lot of freedom. I’m not dictat- Clement Soret, who I’ve worked with before.
ing the shots the whole time. For me, the The DP wasn’t available for the whole of the
secret is to hire good people and let them go grade, but it didn’t really matter as he and
for it. Ultimately, I’m responsible and I shape it Jean-Clement have worked together so many
all, but I like them to be their own masters, times now. Like with all your key collaboraand you get better work like that. Adam runs tors, you expect them to act as though you
a very small but very brilliant VFX house, would been knocked over by a bus — they
Union Visual Effects, which did them all.”
have to carry on and make the film in the way
POST: What was the most difficult effects they know you would want it to be done. I’m
shot in the film?
there for the whole DI as, again, I’m ultimately
BOYLE: “Probably doing Vincent’s partially- responsible for the way it looks, but I like to
decapitated head. It took quite a while to do leave them to it.”
and it was done very carefully, and it turned
POST: You shot this digitally?
out really well.”
BOYLE: “Yes, on Alexa, and there’s no
POST: As usual, the sound and music are question now that film’s dead. All the labs are
also key elements in this film.
closing. It’s weird the way it’s suddenly hapBOYLE: “They’re hugely important to me pened, just overnight. It didn’t seem that digital
as a filmmaker. I actually believe — and we was going to finally take over shooting for a
don’t realize this as an audience — that it’s at long time, even though post and sound went
least 70 percent of a film, if not more. If you digital a decade ago.
“I’m happy to shoot digitally. There’s still
have bad sound, any movie is unwatchable,
and if you turn the sound off on any film, most something special about film, but you can’t be
are also unwatchable.They just don’t work. It’s a luddite about it. It’s a new era, and when you
extraordinary, and sound recordists often get consider the possibilities of what these new
treated so badly on sets, even though the cameras can give you, it’s pretty amazing. Look
audio is so vital. But if you have a film with bad at that Russian meteor that hit earlier this
year. It was totally unexpected, it hit the atmovisual quality, you can get away with it.
In fact, your eye adapts quite
quickly. 28 Days Later, for instance,
was a very rough-looking film deliberately, and it didn’t faze anyone. But
there’s no way around bad sound. If
you can’t hear dialogue and so on,
it’s a disaster.
“The opposite side is just how
effective a film can become when
you have really good use of sound,
and our production sound mixer
Simon Hayes had a very simple brief
— be fanatical about the clarity of all Jon Harris cut Trance on an Avid Media Composer. He
the dialogue, especially what Rosario worked previously with Danny Boyle on 127 Hours.
was saying. We wanted it to be
super-real, almost like it was in your own head, sphere at 44,000mph, and thanks to all the
telling the tale and hypnotizing you. Then all dashboard digital cameras in cars in Russia, we
those tracks got passed on to (supervising have the most images ever of this thing
sound editor/sound designer) Glenn Free- exploding. It’s mind-blowing!”
mantle and his team at Sound 24, and then
POST: Any interest in doing a 3D film?
we added all the music from Rick Smith, and
BOYLE: “None. I like all my films to feel like
that way you get a great soundscape that they’re 3D anyway. I wear glasses, so it’s no fun
lures people into the film.
for me anyway — two pairs of glasses? Forget
“I’ve always been very particular about it (laughs). But I loved Life of Pi. The 3D in that
sound, and I feel that British films sometimes was extraordinary and so beautiful.”
5/2/13 4:32 PM
5/3/13 7:17 PM
cover story
Taking Star Trek Into Darkness
By CHRISTINE
BUNISH
[email protected]
ILM returns as
the lead VFX
house for J.J
Abrams’ latest.
ILM’s Roger Guyett says the
VFX process has become
exponentially faster in the
past four years.
16
S
AN FRANCISCO — After more than
30 years of Star Trek on the big
screen, it must be a challenge to keep
boldly going where no man has gone before,
but director J.J. Abrams is up for the task.
He returns with the 12th installation in the
franchise, Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel to
his 2009 Star Trek film and an imaginative new
look at the young officers on board the USS
Enterprise, who are called home to find a
powerful villain who has attacked Starfleet
and left Earth in chaos.
Industrial Light & Magic (www.ilm.com),
which has a number of Star Trek features to its
credit, led the VFX team, with Roger Guyett as
VFX supervisor and second unit director, the
same roles he filled for Abrams four years ago.
Guyett and his team at ILM earned a visual
effects Oscar nomination for Star Trek.
Four years can seem like a lifetime in terms
of advances in technology, so what’s different
about the VFX in this iteration of Star Trek? “A
lot has changed in four years,” says Guyett.
“The processes have become exponentially
faster. But it’s sort of like your closet: No matter how big you make your closet, you somehow manage to fill it. The same thing with
technology — no matter how quick the process, you invent new ways of testing and
stressing it out so you end up back where you
were. It’s quite a predicament!”
ILM modified its pipeline somewhat for
Star Trek Into Darkness using Solid Angle’s
Arnold renderer instead of RenderMan. Relatively new to ILM’s software arsenal, Arnold
has a ray tracer that enables artists to more
accurately calculate the way a single point of
light reacts — an important capability since
single-source lighting “is very much the style
of Star Trek,” Guyett says. “Audiences may not
necessarily notice the difference, but the process is more scientifically accurate.”
STEREO & IMAX
Star Trek Into Darkness is also a stereo 3D
film, which added to the complexities of the
VFX. “In traditional 2D filmmaking you can
composite an element from another scene,
but in 3D, with the big moving camera shots
that J.J. loves, you expose the real parallax and
depth of the scene, so everything has to fit in
the scene in terms of dimension and depth
— you have to have a spatial match. Any mismatch will literally give viewers a headache.”
The film’s live-action was shot in standard
2D and converted to 3D by Stereo D. But,
since “a tremendous amount of the movie is
Post • May 2013
Post0513_016-17-vfxRAV4FINALREAD.indd 16
invented with VFX, we could generate everything to match the depth correctly,” Guyett
explains. “We rendered with two cameras,
with two eyes for fully-dimensional 3D.”
Close to half the film was shot with IMAX
cameras, he adds. “We decided that any exterior shot or any shot in space would be an
IMAX moment. J.J. was a producer on the last
Optical Company, was formed for the production and worked out of Bad Robot’s
offices on 600 to 700 shots. “They were a
mini-VFX company — J.J. has done that on
just about every production,” says Guyett. “It’s
a very effective way to get a lot of work done,
from clean-ups to quite complicated shots,
including matte paintings and set extensions,
The ILM modeling team that worked on 2009’s Star Trek was able to go back and leverage designs,
like the Enterprise, and upgrade them.
Mission Impossible movie and he came up with
the idea to open out a scene from anamorphic to IMAX, and that format change was
very successful. Now, he wanted to go a step
further, so any exterior or major action shot
is IMAX, which lends itself to showing off the
impressiveness of big vistas.”
THE VISUAL EFFECTS
Guyett’s involvement with Star Trek Into
Darkness began in summer 2011, and shooting commenced the following January at Sony
Pictures, — which housed the bridge of the
Enterprise and more ship interiors than ever
before — and Raleigh Studios at Playa Vista,
where all the big greenscreen and exterior
partial sets were built.
There were about 1,700 VFX shots in the
finished movie, and VFX producer Ron Ames
organized the workload. ILM handled the bulk
of the complex work, with some 500 shots
divided among teams working at the Presidio in
San Francisco and in Singapore. Luke O’Byrne
took on production responsibilities for ILM.
Pixomondo’s Ben Grossmann and Atomic
Fiction’s Kevin Baillie were the VFX supervisors. Another VFX team, called the Kelvin
and to get more bang for your buck.”
Halon, under Brad Alexander’s supervision,
created the previs, then segued to postvis
duties, which helped determine how to fill any
VFX gaps once editorial began stitching
together scenes.
The ILM modeling team that had worked
on Abrams’ Star Trek “was able to go back and
leverage designs, like the Enterprise, and
upgrade them,” says Guyett. Bruce Holcomb
served as digital model supervisor.
Some of the most interesting shots to create
were the scenes on Earth, reports Guyett. “The
previous movie established the Earth aesthetic.
We assume that we’re not so far in the future
that everything has disappeared; aspects of
London and San Francisco are recognizable. We
built out cities and created a vision of the future
to a certain extent in the last movie, but for this
one we expanded those ideas, shooting at as
many real locations as possible, which of course,
had to be heavily augmented.”
Production designer Scott Chambliss set
the tone for the look of London and San Francisco, and co-supervisor Pat Tubach and ILM
art director Yanick Dusseault planned the
cityscapes and filled out the streets. Guyett
5/3/13 2:10 PM
tried to shoot some aerial plates of San Francisco and LA but found that post-9/11 air
space restrictions made it “difficult to capture
any footage that was useful. We couldn’t feel as
if we were in amongst the buildings.” Although
some reference photographs were used, “ultimately we had to create those photoreal cities
— a testament to the skill of our artists.”
3D projection mapping sometimes served
as a starting point for the cityscapes, but
extensive camera moves “made it impossible
not to build a bit more dimensionally,” Guyett
explains. Different lighting set-ups were
required for almost every shot to match the
light of foreground elements.
Guyett went on location at an old Budweiser factory in LA to borrow the mechanical look of pipes and other infrastructure for
some engineering aspects of the Enterprise.
The National Ignition Facility at Livermore
provided more intricate high-end technology
backdrops. “We augmented these locations
digitally, but they provided a tremendous
amount of visible technology and production
value,” he points out.
He also shot some downtown LA streets
as a basis for shots augmented in CG. “J.J.
believes in photographing what you can, then
it’s up to us to futurize the footage without
losing the human aspects of it.”
The exciting sequence that takes place in a
red jungle posed a number of challenges. Initial
discussions about shooting in a real jungle then
digitally manipulating the footage segued to
building a small practical jungle, extending it digitally and adding a volcano and lava.“The lava was
one of the most complex simulations I’ve ever
seen done at ILM,” says Guyett. “Dan Pearson,
Almost half the film was shot with IMAX
cameras. Conversion to 3D was via Stereo D.
simulation and FX supervisor at ILM, created
some amazing processes to control the flow of
the lava and how it reacts to the environment.
Digital environment supervisor Barry Williams
took a tiny set and built a digital extension of it
for huge shots of the tribesmen chasing our
heroes through the jungle. The scene ends with
the Enterprise coming out of the water in a
massive CG water simulation — it took weeks
to run all the elements in that shot.
“What I love about Star Trek is that besides
the cool space shots, you also get to create
amazing planets that behave in seemingly
unnatural ways. It’s a lot of fun!”
The on-set VFX team deployed a computer-controlled NavCam wire rig, loaded with
lighting equipment, to mimic the
motion of a small hovering ship
attacking a building, so that the
spotlights from the ship itself
would match up when the CG
ship was added in post. “This was
a great collaboration between
the various departments involved:
electric, grip, and, of course, the
VFX team. The final result is well
worth the effort and you never
doubt that the lighting is coming
from our CG ship,” says Guyett.
ILM occasionally augmented
the prosthetic make-up on creatures and aliens, and did a considerable amount of digital double
work when even stunt performers couldn’t safely execute certain moves. Animation supervisor
Paul Kavanagh sometimes
stepped in and performed the
roles of key characters.
Although most of the animation
was done with Autodesk’s Maya,
the ILM R&D team heavily supplemented the software toolset with
custom add-ons, proprietary shaders and texture mapping systems.
ILM’s Plume system generated
smoke, atmospheric effects and
realistic pyro. The Foundry’s Katana
was the lighting tool.
Looking back at the enviable
“predicament” ILM faced with
expanded technical capabilities
and boundless imagination, Guyett
says the experience of Star Trek
Into Darkness was “an interesting
dynamic: art meets science.”
Everyone involved “was driven by
the desire to make spectacular
images” and capitalize on “new fire
power to do it.”
Guyett says the lava in the red jungle sequence was one of the most complex
simulations he had ever seen done at ILM.
Post0513_016-17-vfxRAV4FINALREAD.indd 17
Post • May 2013
17
5/3/13 2:10 PM
Union Editorial, which its
takes green initiatives
seriously, finished work
on The Brass Teapot
(poster is pictured).
See page 20 for more.
18
Post • May 2013
Post0513_018-21 Going GreenRAV5FINALREAD.indd 18
5/3/13 11:45 AM
ECOFriendly
Are you doing what you can to reduce
your carbon footprint? By Randi Altman
Increasingly, post and production companies
have made sustainability a large part of their work and private lives. The nonbelievers might call those who have thrown themselves into being green “crunchy
granola” or “tree huggers,” but the truth is those stereotypical labels just don’t fit
anymore. The movement has broadened to the mainstream.
Being environmentally aware has become commonplace for many, even going
beyond reducing use of disposable plastic water bottles or switching to reusable
bags for groceries — both of which are incredibly important and incredibly easy
to introduce into your life
There is much information to share from those who have succeeded
in reducing their carbon footprint.
LOTUS POST
When four-year-old audio post house Lotus Post relocated to the
business district in Santa Monica two years ago, co-owners CEO
Michael Perricone and COO David Marcus used the opportunity to
look at the size of their carbon footprint and design the studio with
sustainability in mind.
The newest iteration of Lotus Post (www.lotuspost.com), a
6,000-square-foot facility, hosting six stages of varying sizes, provides
audio services of all kinds, primarily for independent feature films.
While some might feel daunted by the task of getting green certification, that wasn’t the case with Lotus, since both Marcus and Perricone
were already environmentally responsible in their private lives — Perricone drives a Prius; Marcus bikes to work. In addition, Santa Monica
itself was very environmentally aware; it was through the city that Lotus
found Sustainable Works (www.sustainableworks.org), which is helping
them achieve their certification, something they describe as a “rigorous process.”
The mission of Sustainable Works, according to its Website, is “to ensure
that the concepts of sustainability and the actions associated with living a
sustainable lifestyle are integrated into the daily activities of individuals, institutions and businesses.”
“An official certification involves a whole range of appliances and adjustments
to the facility and how we operate our business, including getting rid of all GMObased foods,” explains Perricone.
“Our mantra is to buy only organic food for our clients,” adds Marcus. “In a
broader sense, this is part of our company mission statement. It speaks to a style
of doing business. It’s not like we are denying clients junk food, but we want to
offer a different approach. We have this organic soda — it’s a Coke alternative,
and it’s every bit as good. Our core clients live in this area and appreciate what
we’ve done. We try to make it fun and keep it light.”
As part of the green certification, Lotus Post switched to recyclable corn-based
cups. This is significant considering the audio world, especially its voiceover talent,
love their bottled water — but those bottles don’t love the environment. Marcus
and Perricone tested a variety of different water delivery systems and realized a
Lotus Post’s Stage One features acoustic insulation made of plant material instead of
fiberglass- or pertroleum-based substances.
five-gallon water container was the best way to go. It’s served in glass pitchers
with the aforementioned corn cups.
Another thing they do is monitor recycling and have dedicated bins for waste
and e-waste. They bought an energy-saving printer and use recycled toner cartridges. They wanted their cleaning products to be less toxic, so they only use
ones that are Green Seal or EcoLogo certified.
In an effort to eliminate paper waste and reduce unwanted junk mail, Lotus
Post • May 2013
19
5/3/13 11:45 AM
ECO-Friendly
RPA’s Isadora Chesler
(inset): EcoSet was hired
to set up water stations,
recycling and more on this
Honda Accord shoot.
20
Post removed its company name from
national databases. While Marcus recognizes
that the audio post business still needs some
paper, they do their best to eliminate what’s
not necessary. “We do print ADR review
sheets; that’s one of the basic tools of our
business, but we determine what is the absolute minimal amount of printing.”
The devil is in the details, as they say, but
there are some bigger things to be done as
well. Marcus points to their large re-recording studio, Stage One, which is 53-feet by
30-feet by 18-feet. Rather than go with traditional acoustic insulation made of fiberglass- or petroleum-based products, the
partners found a product made by Knauf
that is made of plant material. “It actually has
better acoustic properties than the Owens
Corning acoustic treatment,” says Perricone.
“That is in the core of the company, literally
in the walls of the place.”
The last thing they have to do to achieve
their green certification is continue the
process of changing out incandescent
lamps in the studios to LEDs. “We have
over 100 light bulbs in all the studios;
those were 150 watts that we are replacing with 9 watts each; we will be saving a
lot of power,” says Perricone.
Not only are the bulbs sustainable, in
the end it saves the studio money. “We
looked at the cost benefits and deter-
Post • May 2013
ishing house Union Editorial (www.unioneditorial.com) have always been environmentally conscious, but they discovered first hand
what “information is power” means. “We
were always aware of our carbon footprint,
but there were things we weren’t doing
because we didn’t know that we could,”
explains president/executive producer
Michael Raimondi.
He says a wake-up call was when the
studio became one of the sponsors of
GLASS.org, a big LA initiative from about
four or five years ago designed to get the
advertising and production community to
stop using bottled water.
Being part of that opened their eyes to
what else could be done. One of those
things was using corn-based drinking cups
and potato-based forks and spoons. (They
first tried corn-based utensils but quickly
learned they melt.) “I didn’t know that stuff
existed,” says Raimondi.
That is when Union started pushing even
harder to reduce its footprint, but their
efforts could only go so far without cooperation from their building’s management. “We
pushed them and they responded,” he says.
The building began by replacing all the lights
in the bays with energy-efficient bulbs. They
mined our monthly power bill will go down
significantly,” reports Marcus. In an effort to
save electricity they have also added automatic dimmers and timers on lights.
The studio’s sustainability efforts are pervasive. Office equipment is Energy Star
compliant, and they have lowered water
consumption by adjusting commodes and
toilets. Charging stations will soon be added
in the parking lot, since many clients drive
hybrid or electric vehicles. One-third of
Lotus employees bike to
work, including mixer Rick
Ash (Arbitrage, The World
According to Dick Cheney,
Temple Grandin), who pedals 12 miles each way!
Lotus Post is committed
to providing high-end sound
finishing with a conscious
and mindful approach to
the planet. As Marcus points
out, the company name has
a meaning too. “Lotus is a
flower that grows from the
root that plants itself on the Union’s Fred Raimondi says many staffers ride a bike to work.
bottom of the river floor
and grows from that. So Lotus itself is a sus- also stepped up their existing recycling
tainable icon.”
efforts by adding composting and composting disposal to the mix.
UNION EDITORIAL
Raimondi, who is an original member of
Those behind LA/NY-based edit and fin- the West Coast Fireflies, (www.fireflieswest.
com) — a cycling group that rides to raise
money for City of Hope — admits Union’s
transition was probably easier than most
RPA’s Isadora Chesler always has one of these in her handbag in case she has to pick
since the studio’s partners had already made
something up at the store. It’s the Flip & Tumble (www.flipandtumble.com) 24/7 bag. At
environmental awareness part of their cul12-by-14-by-5 inches it’s large enough for three half-gallons of milk and then some. It
ture. “There are five partners in LA and four
folds into a ball that’s 3 inches in diameter. It can hold up to 35lbs, which is strong enough
of us drive a Prius, and have for a really long
for a bowling ball or two. It’s made of ripstop nylon, and a felt patch helps keep it on your
time. No one needed to sell us; it is basically
shoulder. It’s machine washable. Just hang to dry. Oh, according to the company, plastic
what we believe in.”
bags spared by using the Flip & Tumble equals 1,000-plus. Chesler also
He points out that he’s not the only one
loves their reusable produce bag, which comes in a set of five bags. They
who bikes at the company. “There are a lot
are 12-by-14 inches, 100 percent polyester.
of guys here who cycle, and we pushed
each other to commute to work on bike. Of
5/3/13 11:45 AM
the around 35 people here, seven or eight
of us bike to work.
Biking to work means needing a shower,
so Union struck a deal with the gym next
door, and the building added a shower as
well. This has helped encourage clients to
start pedaling to the studio. “It’s funny,” says
Raimondi, “because this stuff is contagious. It
also becomes more than a green initiative,
but a healthy one as well.”
Raimondi has also taken on the scourge
known as the plastic bag. “At post houses,
people hang out for long periods, and they
are eating all the time, meaning we are grocery shopping every day. Having our runners
bring reusable bags with them is huge. Even
in LA, where they don’t have plastic, the
paper bags aren’t great.”
When Union does send out reels and
screeners they do so in reusable bags, but
that process is becoming a thing of the past.
“We do 90 percent of reels and master
delivery online, which saves a fortune and is
better for the environment,” he says, adding
that their New York studio follows the same
green practices.
Actually, most of what Union does is paperless, including banking, and when they do print
they use recycled paper. For most boards and
treatments they use iPads and look at them
online. “There is no reason to print out a fullcolor 60-page treatment when you can look at
it on your iPad,” he emphasizes.
Raimondi realizes that some studios might
be concerned how clients react to the
changes but assures us that once the clients
get used to it, it all gets easier. “For instance,
the bottled water thing was the hardest part,
because people are so used to going to the
refrigerator and grabbing a bottle of water. A,
the bottled water is bad. B, people take three
sips and put it down. Ninety percent of the
time we were throwing away almost full
bottled water. It’s just so wasteful.”
Union installed a filter system and puts
pitchers in bays. If they do get a request for
a bottle of water, Union has glass bottles of
water to hand out. “We cut our consumption of bottled water by 95 percent,”
reports Raimondi proudly. “Not only does it
makes you feel good, it’s so much more
economical. We used to spend a fortune on
bottled water.” Another thing that saves
money and helps reduce their carbon footprint? Anything that’s battery operated uses
rechargeable batteries.
Union Editorial has been increasing its
work on feature films lately, including The
Brass Teapot, as well as Hateship with Kristin
Wiig, Guy Pearce and Nick Nolte.
GREEN TIP
Avoid paper bills in the mail (along with
the extra junk included with them) by
either paying online each month or automatically linking to a credit card or debit.
You still get the bill online each month to
review. Also, cancel all the catalogs that
come in the mail. If you call them, ask
whom else they are linked with, so you
hit several sources at once. —
Producer/Director/Earth Advocate
Lesley Chilcott
RPA
Isadora Chesler is a senior producer at
LA-based agency Rubin Postear and Associates, best known as RPA (www.rpa.com). She
had worked with RPA as a freelancer for
many years before coming on full time about
a year-and-a-half ago. She always knew the
agency to be environmentally conscious and
was aware they had a well-established “green
team” in place.
“Over the years, RPA has been implementing all sorts of different programs,
continued on page 46
Shared Storage for
Your Long-Term Archive.
Winner of the 2012 Hollywood Post Alliance
Engineering Excellence Award
S Y S T E M S ,
I N C .
S Y S T E M S ,
I N C .
S Y S T E M S ,
I N C .
®
Shared Storage for Your Long-term Archive
StrongBox is a powerful archive solution, purpose-built to keep your files safe, accessible and at your fingertips. Files stored
in this NAS target can be accessed from multiple editing stations or end users – no call to engineering required. Harness the
cost-effectiveness of LTFS, empowering faster, more seamless workflows. Spend more time creating - less time managing data.
Bring On
Your Big Data!
www.getstrongbox.com
5/3/13 1:05 PM
Conver
Venture 3D converted Journey to the West:
Conquering Demons for writer/director
Stephen Chow.For more, turn to page 26.
22
Post • May 2013
Post0513_022-24, 26-stereoRAV4finalread.indd 22
5/2/13 8:09 PM
erts
More are embracing
2D-to-3D conversions
as the workflow
continues to improve.
By Christine Bunish
The 2D-to-3D stereo conversion process
has greatly improved in the last year, and the world market for
converted content has “matured” and grown, notes Todd Cogan,
senior VP of operations at Venture 3D in Culver City, CA.
But overall, conversion is “still a very manual and labor intensive,”
process that strives to deliver artistry via the application of often
proprietary technology. “It requires the skill of good artists,” Cogan
emphasizes. “It’s not a numbers game.”
STEREO D
Twenty years after its release, Jurassic Park has returned in 3D
stereo to deliver the original thrills and chills to audiences but in a
different dimension. The goal is also to get them in the mood for
Jurassic Park IV, which is slated to open in June 2014.
Jurassic Park 3D enjoyed one of the top box office openings for
a 3D rerelease and generated recordbreaking returns in the IMAX format.
Stereo D (www.stereodllc.com), which is
part of the Deluxe suite of post production
services, performed the film’s 2D-to-3D
conversion, following its earlier success with
another blockbuster legacy title, Titanic 3D.
“Any time you work with a filmmaker like
Jim Cameron or Steven Spielberg you get
better — they strive for greatness,” says
Stereo D president William Sherak.
He says Cameron and Spielberg are “so
artist-centric” in their involvement with the
conversion process that they “walk the
floor” with Stereo D’s more than 400 artists
in Burbank, so “the artists get to see their
idols and show how much they love the
project.” Seven hundred artists in Pune, India, are also “visually connected’ to the facility for live review of material. “We’re a one-shot
company in different locations,” Sherak explains.
Stereo D oversaw Jurassic Park 3D from the original 35mm
negative scan to the 4K full restoration and clean up, the stereo 3D
conversion and the preparation of deliverables, including IMAX
and Blu-ray. The first fully-converted sequence that the Stereo D
team showed Spielberg showed the park’s Ford Explorer falling
out of the tree. “Steven hadn’t seen it that way since he shot it
— you really felt as if you were there,” Sherak reports. “That
was the moment we felt we could do this [conversion], and it
would be amazing.”
Stereo also proved tremendously effective for the sequence
with the kids and Velociraptors in the kitchen whose “sense of
danger was heightened exponentially” by 3D. Practical rain was
augmented in 3D in a handful of shots, as were flashlight beams
and some smoke layers.
Quiet scenes also worked well in 3D. “In the scene where Dr.
Ellie Sattler and John Hammond are at the dining room table, you
really feel you are at the table with them,” says Sherak. “Steven
shoots with such depth to begin with that we used all the cues and
lens choices he gave us in the 2D image to make the scene all that
more intimate — it was a huge success.”
Such scenes are a testament to Sherak’s belief that “any storytelling
can be enhanced by stereo conversion. When you look at [conversion] as a creative process with the filmmaker involved, it can be a
success in any genre: There’s something in stereo for every quadrant.”
Stereo D maintains a proprietary asset and pipeline management system for its conversion work, but “we create specific tools
Stereo D oversaw the conversion of Jurassic Park 3D from the original
35mm negative scan to the 4K full restoration and clean up.
for every film tailored to what the film entails,” Sherak explains. The
rotoscoping and depth teams break down each frame of a film and
work with the components contained within; the depth team uses
the company’s proprietary VDX software.
Stereo D not only converts legacy films but also films currently
in production. Sherak believes the future is “fantastic” for 3D stereo
products and the ever-improving conversion process. “Global audiences are gobbling up 3D, and more and more A-list filmmakers
are playing with it. We’re on our second, third and fourth projects
with some of these filmmakers — we’re doing our fourth Marvel
movie now, and each one gets better.”
Post • May 2013
23
5/3/13 2:41 PM
Vision Globale had about a
year to convert the 2D-shot
Upside Down for stereo
release on Blu-ray.
24
VISION GLOBALE
Montreal-based Vision Globale (www.
visionglobale.com) came to stereo 3D conversion from the film restoration side of the
business when it was asked to apply its restoration expertise to some native 3D stereo
features that had shots with image capture or
resolution issues.
“The work involved image treatment or
image processing for problems they needed
to resolve,” says Jean-Pierre Trudel, supervisor of the conversion department. So Vision
Globale’s GeneSys software, created for film
restoration work, was adapted to rectify
geometry and color in stereo 3D movies. For
example, “The color matching we had been
doing with GeneSys was adapted to handle
left eye/right eye problems in stereo,” he
explains. “Most other companies look at 3D
conversion from the VFX side, but we come
from the problem-solving restoration side.”
According to project manager John Montegut, Vision Globale “has made the choice to
develop 100 percent of our technology —
we don’t buy commercial software” for restoration or 3D conversion. “Choosing to
build restoration software ourselves has
given us a lot of latitude, especially when you
need to solve day-to-day problems: We don’t
have to wait for the next release of a piece
of software to fix a problem. The same
applies to 3D conversion.”
Trudel notes that Vision Globale had the
luxury of a long-term project to do R&D
tool development and translate its restoration capabilities to stereo conversion. The
sci-fi romance Upside Down, starring Kirsten
Dunst and Jim Sturgess, was shot in 2D in
Quebec last year and had limited release in
the US. Vision Globale had about a year to
adapt and create tools to convert the film to
stereo 3D for its Blu-ray release.
Most recently, the company converted
The Pee-Wee 3D: The Winter That Changed My
Life, a Quebec-made feature about that great
institution: pee-wee ice hockey. Producers
conceived the film as a native 3D shoot but
Post • May 2013
has 400-500 shots in the snow, which are not
easy to convert. We’ve used a lot of restoration techniques, like dirt removal, combined
with VFX to achieve them.”
Vision Globale sees a bright future for
stereo 3D conversion. “There’s still a lot of
education to do, especially about how to
shoot 2D for 3D conversion when you have
a project in production,” says Trudel. “But a
lot of films will get a second life in stereo 3D.”
quickly realized that shooting on the ice with
a stereo 3D rig would be complex and cumbersome at best and likely impossible some
of the time. They considered a hybrid 2D/
native 3D approach, but after consulting with
Vision Globale they opted to shoot standard VENTURE 3D
2D and do a complete conversion.
With offices in The Culver Studios in Cul“What was important was that they ver City, Venture 3D (www.venture3D.com)
respected the language of 3D in shooting the deploys proprietary software in the depth
film — the lenses they used, the angles they process to help establish the roundness of
shot — and that helped make the conver- characters and offset them with no spatial
sion look great,” says Trudel.
discontinuity in the frame. All of its conver“A common fact in all the conversions sions are performed in Seoul, Korea, which is
we’ve done and something that’s always a linked via secure Internet connections to
surprise is that the best shots are the close-ups Culver City and offers essentially round-theand the very intimate sequences,” notes Mon- clock services. Todd Cogan interfaces with
tegut. “In The Pee-Wee we thought the hockey the client and with artists in Seoul, and
action would be the greatest shots in stereo supervises QC in both venues.
3D, but it’s the close-ups of faces, the dialogue
Cogan has an extensive native stereo
scenes that work best. It’s taking what’s three- background working for more than a decade
dimensional in our
lives and giving it a
second life in stereo
3D. The director of
The Pee-Wee said his
next film would be a
straight drama, and
he’d make it the
same way.”
That said, The
Pee-Wee has its
share of stereo
action on the ice. “I
saw the film in a
theater during the The Art of Flight: Venture 3D took creative license in order to give depth to
NHL lockout and landscapes, such as mountains 25 miles in the distance.
ever yone
was
shouting and cheering like it was a real game,” with both James Cameron and Vince Pace.
laughs Montegut. “There are a few shots, like He believes that conversion is a very viable
a strong slap shot, where the puck is in nega- alternative to native 3D especially for a film
tive parallax to enhance the VFX.”
such as The Art of Flight, an international
Integrating VFX into stereo 3D conversion snowboarding film from Red Bull Media
is a field that Vision Globale plans to tackle. House that he describes as a “prime” candi“Adding VFX to the process, merging con- date for conversion.
version with VFX technology is something
“They originally released it in 2D on
we want to explore now,” says Montegut. “A iTunes and got over 400,000 downloads,” he
science-fiction movie we’re working on now reports. “So they decided to re-release the-
5/3/13 2:41 PM
RED +
Incredible images. Seamless workflow.
Scene from “The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia” - Image courtesy of Local Hero Post.
“The RED + SCRATCH workflow was perfect for this project. The epic and REDgamma3
delivered beautifully vivid images that required far less color-correction. So we were able
to use a single SCRATCH to deliver a full DI plus over 400 VFX shots in only 3 weeks.”
- Leandro Marini, Founder, Local Hero Post
www.assimilateinc.com/products/scratch-red
5/3/13 2:12 PM
VEFXi is in final testing
of its DiamondBlade
3D conversion suite,
a software/hardware
accelerator package.
atrically in 3D. It’s the kind of film that would
have been impossible to shoot in 3D: They
shot on multiple continents in some pretty
incredible conditions with a lot of long lens
work and aerials.”
Nevertheless, The Art of Flight posed some
challenges in the conversion process, particu-
larly the falling snow. “Snow in general is
really difficult,” Cogan says. “Snow was falling
from the sky and flying off equipment. But
you couldn’t shoot in native with a beamsplitter rig. Snow would get on the mirror
and ruin the shot or the mirror would fog up
in the cold and moisture.” Plus, any snow
Jon Landau prefers going native
LOS ANGELES — Producer Jon Landau, whose credits include Avatar and
Titanic, is an advocate of native stereo 3D. “It’s always the best way to go,
except for library titles,” he says.
“If you have a straight, non-VFX film or TV show, the cost of shooting
native 3D in production is minimal…it’s only in the camera department
and finishing costs. But to convert to 3D as a post process takes time,
attention and focus [away] from finishing the project, and it costs more
than the upfront expense. And the best result you’ll get from a conversion is 2 3/4D, because there’s not enough information for 3D.”
He admits, “Stereo D did a phenomenal job” in converting Titanic 3D
and now Jurassic Park 3D. “But, it took them in excess of 10 months to
do each conversion,” a luxury of time that can’t be justified in the
course of standard post schedules, he notes.
Still, the state of the art for converting library titles has “greatly
improved,” Landau believes. “But, the key is getting the filmmaker
involved in the process.”
He says, “One point I want to get across is that conversion is not a technical process: It’s an artistic process
that uses technology. That’s true of filmmaking as a whole and especially of conversion. You can’t do it absent an
artistic point of view. Sure, you need great technicians for conversion, but someone who’s the auteur needs to
make the decisions.” These decisions don’t necessarily shout 3D to the average filmgoer. “I’m not sure how
much 3D adds to big VFX and explosions,” he says.
“The most compelling scene in Titanic 3D was Jack and Rose in the gym — an intimate scene. It made you
feel as if you were there with them; it was almost a voyeuristic experience. It’s exciting for the filmmaker and
very compelling for the audience to feel that in touch with the drama of the moment.”
Landau doubts that Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, where he’s a partner, will make any more films that
aren’t native 3D. “Native 3D is like Dolby 6-track sound 20 years ago. Three out of the last four Oscars for cinematography were all for native 3D films: Avatar, Hugo and Life of Pi,” he notes. “That’s pretty remarkable.”
Landau’s upcoming feature projects with Cameron include two Avatar sequels, Battle Angel and The Informationist, all of which are slated for native 3D production.
captured in native 3D would have had to
deal with polarization issues.
Venture 3D “got to take creative license” to
give depth to landscapes, such as mountains
25 miles in the distance. “A couple of reviews
said the film is one of the best-shot 3D movies
ever, so we pat ourselves on the back about
that,” Cogan smiles. “All 3D has to do with
blocking — the foreground, midground and
background. You can’t just pull something off
the screen if it’s not calling for it.”
In The Art of Flight there are some “tasteful” examples of elements coming off the
screen in negative space, he says, but 3D
tends to be more about “the viewer experience. There’s a lot of breathtaking Phantom
footage and film of places you’re never going
to see in person — like an Alaskan iceberg.
But with 3D you feel you’re there. It’s a neat
way for an arm-chair traveler to see places
they’ll never go to.”
Cogan sees the Chinese market for 3D
“exploding” as audiences clamor for content
in theaters and for numerous 3D television
channels they will soon be able to access.
Venture 3D has already converted the feature Journey to the West: Conquering Demons,
based on a comedic Chinese folk tale, written and directed by Stephen Chow. It’s on
track to be China’s highest-earning domestically-produced feature.
“There were shots that were 1,400-1,600
frames long, so it was like old-time filmmaking and very refreshing,” Cogan says.
IDENTITY FX
North Hollywood’s Identity FX (www.
identityfx.com) launched in 2004 as a visual
effects studio founded by Leo Vezzali and
David Scott Van Woert. Given Vezzali’s background in stereo 3D (RealD, Aliens of the
Deep, U2 3D), and the studio’s visual effects
roots, Identity FX was “primed” for the
rebirth of 3D, says Van Woert. “We began
doing 2D-to-3D conversions on projects like
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader and Green Lantern, and then
added native stereo optimization (Spider-Man,
26
Post • May 2013
5/2/13 8:09 PM
Where Industry
Professionals Meet
2013
Exhibits
Seminars
Film Screenings & Competition
New Products
Networking
Technical Awards
Special Events
Cine Gear Expo, Los Angeles
May 30 - June 2, 2013
Location: The Studios at Paramount, Hollywood, CA, USA
Cine Gear Expo, New York
September 27-28, 2013
Location: The Metropolitan Pavilion, NYC, New York, USA
phone: 310.472.0809
fax: 310.471.8973
email: [email protected]
www.cinegearexpo.com
PostMag.indd 1
3/15/13 10:08 AM
5/3/13 2:12 PM
Training
Online resources can help
pros broaden their skillsets.
By Marc Loftus
T
hese days, pros looking to expand their skillsets need not
travel any further than their computer screens. The Web
has become an incredible resource for those looking to
be trained or build their existing creative muscles on current post tools.
There are lots of free tutorials available online, but those looking
for more in-depth instruction might want to consider any of a number of paid online resources.
Post connected with a handful of training providers, all of whom
offer online components at affordable rates. Whether it’s Final Cut
Larry Jordan teaches Final Cut X as well as Adobe Premiere and Audition.
Pro, Avid, Adobe, Resolve, Smoke or Pro Tools, they’ve got it covered,
with detailed insight into these popular and powerful applications.
Some allow users to download their videos to keep. Others offer
instruction as a streaming services. Updates come regularly from
veterans in the field, so there’s always something new for those looking to broaden their skills.
28
Post • May 2013
Post0513_028-31-trainingRAV5FINALREAD.indd 28
LARRYJORDAN.BIZ
Los Angeles-based instructor Larry Jordan (www.larryjordan.biz)
specializes in training for Apple and Adobe software tools. He offers
several options for those looking to learn Apple Final Cut Pro and
Adobe’s Premiere and Audition, be it on-site and in-person or via his
Website (www.Larryjordan.biz). He also offers downloadable programs, as well as the opportunity to purchase DVDs.
“We have probably thousands of people across the world that
are using my training on Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere and
Adobe Audition,” says Jordan. “I travel around the world doing
seminars on training… as well as corporate and private training. Training is my life.”
He says the post training business has seen significant changes in the past two to three years. “In the past,
all training was done in seminars and classrooms. It’s
getting hard for training companies to make a living
doing classroom training. Training is moving online.”
Jordan’s Final Cut X Complete training is comprised
of 200 downloadable movies that cover all aspects of
this NLE software. His Adobe training includes more
than 70 movies detailing Premiere, and another 50
movies covering Audition.
“The classroom is still viable, and school-based training, whether it’s Full Sail of Video Symphony, is still a
career path for many people,” he says. “But the economy has played such havoc in the industry, and the
budgets have decreased to such an extent that training
dollars that used to be available just aren’t there anymore.The whole training industry has had to cope with
finding new revenue streams.”
Jordan’s subscription plan allows participants to pay $19 per
month, giving them access to all of the company’s online video training. They can also purchase downloadable video instruction or DVDs
that get shipped to them. “My philosophy is: Training is essential, but
not everyone can afford training,” says Jordan, who is an active industry blogger for publications and Website, including Post’s.
5/3/13 2:42 PM
g
Post house owner
Walter Biscardi is now
offering training via
www.walterbiscardi.com.
“Everything that I write is free — all the articles, in-depth technical
stories and blogs. But the video training, I sell.”
Jordan’s YouTube channel offers many free videos for those who
want to check out his instructing style and depth of expertise. “Those
are free to reassure people that I know what I am talking about when
it comes to training.”
The paid products, he explains, walk participants through software
one step at a time, in a calm and relaxed fashion. “I want to do everything I can to get you focused on how the new software works and
get you up to speed in a hurry, so you can stop being in ‘learning
mode’ and start being in ‘productive, revenue-generating mode.’ ”
Jordan is always learning himself. He constantly reads, talks to
manufacturers and attends user groups. “It’s a never-ending process
of feeling that I never know enough.”.
He often finds pros resistant to paid training. The old, “if it ain’t
broke, done fix it” mentality. But that, Jordan believes, makes it
harder to keep up in the long term. He also cautions those who
prefer to self teach. While they might figure out how to reach a goal
using their software, it may not be the most productive and efficient
way to get there.
“Training is an investment in your marketability,” he explains. “Clients
are impressed with buzz words, and there is a need to understand
them and how they fit in. Protecting yourself against not being able to
work in the future is essential, and it’s really useful to get trained by
someone who knows how to train.”
WALTERBISCARDI.COM
Walter Biscardi, Jr., is a producer, editor, graphics artist and colorist. He’s
also the founder of Buford, GA’s Biscardi Creative Media (www.biscardicreative.com), a studio he started from his home and which recently
Post • May 2013
29
5/3/13 11:44 AM
Training
An example of one of Larry
Jordan’s training Webinars.
30
grew into a new 6,000-square-foot facility.
In addition to being a post services provider, Biscardi is venturing into training with
his recently-launched Website, www.walterbiscardi.com.
While the site may be new, his training
experience has great depth. “I’ve always
gravitated toward forums, sharing knowledge
and helping people. And I’ve had a lot of
people come to my shop and ask questions,
especially on the business side,” he says.
He’s created training products, including
the DVD, “Stop Staring, Start Grading With
Apple Color.” His new Website will offer
both paid tutorials as well as free content.
“There are so many people popping up
that are doing the button-pushing [tutorials],
and showing how the software works,” he
notes. “And there are professional trainers
that have never done the work while sitting
in an edit suite with a client hanging over
your shoulder. On WalterBiscardi.com, there
are going to be no professional trainers. They
are all going to be professional artists, showing the art, craft and business of what we do.”
The Website is now live, though pricing
was still being determined at press time in
late April. Visitors can sign up and join the
mailing list. Biscardi was in the process of
posting a new series titled “Post Etiquette,”
which is comprised of four short chapters
— usually under two minutes — that detail
how clients and editors should behave in a
post suite. Topics covered include maintaining
a positive attitude, keeping it clean, and staying calm when things might not be going well.
“I’m doing them on-camera,” says Biscardi of
the series, “not as a voiceover.”
One of the Website’s first large modules
is “The Documentary Walkthrough,” a fivehour training series that covers everything a
Post • May 2013
first-time producer needs to know — from
when the client first contacts them to all the
questions that need consideration before a
contract is signed.
“I’ve got a producer who has produced
national television shows and commercials,” says Biscardi of another planned
series. “She’s going to come in and talk
about planning a shoot and developing a
project. Stuff that people don’t talk about,
including distribution.”
Thirty-year colorist Ron Anderson will
be creating the “Art and Craft of Color”
series. And Biscardi is also bringing in a veteran sound designer for instruction on Pro
Tools and Logic.
“Yes, there are going to be ‘button pushing’ software tutorials, but even with them,
we are going to do it completely differently,”
he explains. “We want to transcend the
tools and talk about the creative. While I
might use Premiere Pro to talk about docu-
Grade and Final Cut Pro. His site will offer a
subscription model for most series. Some
releases will follow a “pay-for-play” model,
where the title will be available to non-subscribers for a set price and to subscribers at
a discounted rate. The “Producer” series, says
Biscardi, could follow this format.
“We are going to offer an introductory
rate, and then change it in six months,” he says
of the subscription. “We are trying to be fair.
Some of the modules might be expensive. I
don’t know anybody else who is sharing information on ‘how to develop a series.’ Nobody
wants to. It’s supposed to be a secret.”
Biscardi has already hosted live workshops at his facility too. Marco Solorio presented a three-day workshop on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, and Patrick Inhofer
was scheduled to visit the studio in May to
present a three-day workshop on color
grading. The workshops are meant for small
groups of 10 or less. Larger classes are also
in the works. Biscardi Creative Media has a
1,400-square-foot studio that can be used
as a 75-student classroom.
RIPPLETRAINING.COM
Steve Martin is the president of Prescott,
AZ-based Ripple Training (www.rippletraining.com), an online resource for those looking to expand their skills on Smoke, Final Cut
Pro, Resolve, After Effects, Photoshop and
Media Composer.
Martin is the resident Apple expert, having worked on Final Cut Pro since its introduction. He also brings a perspective as a
writer, producer and photographer to his
instructional videos. As a long-time user, he
understands the frustration that many Final
Cut users experienced when the app
abruptly jumped from Version 7 to X, but
says the latest version has a lot to offer.
“Apple did a hard turn of the interface,”
Ripple Training offers detailed instruction on Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve.
mentary workflow, the concept and the
organization that I am presenting will translate to any NLE you are using.”
Biscardi has an entire series planned for
Adobe Next, as well as for Resolve, Speed-
says Martin of the Version 10 release. “I personally think it’s the future in terms of what’s
in it and how it handles the media. When it
was announced, it was like, ‘Here it is. Here’s
the way we are going.’ It was more of a hard
5/3/13 11:44 AM
cut than a dissolve. I think that is what people
were up in arms about. It was disconcerting
for some people who are running a business
and have an infrastructure built on a platform
they have been using for a long time.”
He does see brilliance in the new release,
which allows almost anyone to open the app
and get up to speed rather quickly. “Apple
made it very uncluttered and less noisy,”
notes Martin. “When you push the app,
there’s a lot of depth. You just have to know
how to go through the menu and bring it up.
Apple deliberately put that one level down
so you don’t have to deal with it if you didn’t
need to. I kind of appreciate that. It’s probably
the most clean and uncluttered interface I’ve
ever worked with. I think that’s a huge benefit. Other systems seem very noisy to me.
I’m not taking anything away from them, but
I prefer the less-noisy interface.”
Ripple’s training reflects a philosophy that
has moved away from the classroom experience into an online presence. As an Applecertified trainer, Martin has spent time doing
on-site training and hands-on classes. “I discovered that while classroom training is great
and you have access to instructor, there was
not a good retention level. The class’s progress was only going to be as fast as the slowest person in the class. It was not conducive
for getting really in-depth and getting the
information you need. So I developed a training company where I script all of my tutorials
out… and provide the media, and essentially
make a hands-on class where people move
at their own pace. They can watch the video
and go back and re-watch it.That’s something
you can’t do with a class.”
Those who purchase instructional videos
from Ripple Training are sent a link, which,
when clicked, automatically launches iTunes.
All of the training is downloaded in iTunes as
an HD podcast. Users can connect to their
iPad or iPhone, and take it with them. They
own it. “Our model is different than the
Lynda.com model, which is a subscription.
[Our] customers download it and they own
it. They don’t have to keep buying the subscription each month. A subscription works if
you have voluminous amount of content. We
are more of a boutique, with highly-focused,
specialized training.
Ripple’s Final Cut Pro training begins with
the Apple Pro Video Series, which is priced at
just $39 (720p) and includes 40 movies, making up a collective five hours of training. Media
is also included. For $10 more, the company
offers 1080p versions. They also offer Apple
tutorials that focus on “Sound,” “Advanced
Training,” “Media Management,” “Multicam
Editing,” “Compositing” and “Titles.”
Typically, Martin says, each video is between
$29-$49, depending on how much material is
covered in that tutorial. They also offer 8GB
USB memory sticks as an option for those
who prefer not to download the videos.
The company’s Autodesk Smoke on the
Mac tutorials are completely free and include
two hours of training. “Autodesk contacted
us and they pretty much underwrote the
production of that particular title,” Martin
explains. “They like what we are doing and
how we are doing it.”
Ripple instruction for Blackmagic’s DaVinci
Resolve includes 11 hours of training, with
prices starting at $79.99 for the 720p
($89.99/1080p, $99.99/USB).
“At NAB, [Blackmagic] launched Resolve
10, which includes an online editor,” Martin
notes. “There is more editing in Resolve
and they seem to be really beefing up its
editing abilities. Resolve is not a light program that you dabble in. You have to learn
it to get the power of the program. We are
starting to release smaller focused tutorials
called ‘Creative Looks,’ which are how to
create looks in Resolve.”
LA-based Steve Kanter creates the Avid
tutorials, which cover Media Composer 6,
Avid Symphony 6 and NewsCutter 10. “He
knows the Avid very well,” says Martin of
Kanter. “The Avid product is a very deep
program, so our training reflects that.” Ripple’s Avid Core Training is approximately
seven hours long and includes media. Pricing
begins at $79.99.
Martin says Ripple Training works to
release new tutorials each month. The company also spends time developing plug-ins for
Final Cut Pro. They offer motion graphics
templates, transitions and color balance solutions that are low-cost and easy to use. They
offer free tutorials showcasing the releases
on their Website.
Expert Advice: no cost!
LOS ANGELES — Igor Ridanovic is an online/finishing artist as well as an HD and D-Cinema consultant who
offers one-on-one training. In addition, he operates HDhead.com, a Website that serves as a resource for pros who want to learn more about high
definition and digital cinema. The site offers tips, articles and tutorials, as
well as “easily-digestible answers” to many frequently asked questions.
Ridanovic’s insight and expertise is provided for free. There’s no catch.
He’s always been inspired by open source and the idea that information
should be shared. He also feels that, given free stuff, users will find a way to
embellish it. The strategy is a response to his own experiences in the post
field, which date back to the ‘90s. As an apprentice, he could observe
Quantel Henry and Harry artists, but always with a guarded caution from
artists, who were careful not to give up their seats. “They were not forthcoming, and learning was slow,” he recalls. “It’s an outdated model. I decided to let information be free. I’m not afraid of losing my seat, because I
have to learn anyway. I am constantly learning. You have to!”
Ridanovic’s expertise spans a number of tools, including Avid’s DS, which he uses to put the “final icing on the
cake.” The post community, he feels, needs more skilled DS users, and his knowledge can help. Avid shares his
insight on their Website too. To date, he’s produced over six hours of online tutorials, and even a Spanish-language release. He’s also conducted seminars and workshops at conventions like NAB and DV Expo, and has
been a speaker at user groups and small workshops for post supervisors.
“One may ask, ‘What is the benefit of giving out free things?’” he asks. “Certainly there is a benefit to those
who consume my tutorials. There are also benefits to myself, because I expand my reputation as an expert, and
in the tutorial creation process I reach a deeper understanding of the subject matter. I think the knowledge
transfer should be more open because we all benefit from it. It’s a two-way street, where one of the ways
doesn’t need to be paved in money to make it profitable.”
Ridanovic monitors the HDhead Website for searches and feedback to see what the community is looking
for and is able to quickly respond with a focused tutorial. “My tutorials are not as slick and as produced as the
ones that can be purchased online,” he admits. “They are relatively quick to make and I can respond to the
demand fast. HDhead.com is really not a training site, but a general resource page. My tutorials, for the most
part, address niche needs of a limited scope that established training entities don’t tackle. In that sense, I don’t
think that I am eroding anyone else’s business model.”
As a DI colorist and picture-finishing artist at Kappa Studios, Ridanovic has worked on an upcoming theatrical Lionsgate release, as well as on Cartoon Network’s hit, Annoying Orange.
By Marc Loftus www.postmagazine.com
Post • May 2013
31
5/3/13 11:44 AM
Audio
for Animation
A variety of
techniques
for a variety
of projects.
By Jennifer Walden
Often clients will use a list of adjectives to describe how they want a project to sound. So, what
does “sunny” sound like? How about “epic?” Dan Golden, sound designer on Feral, was even asked
to create the sound of dust. That’s really the fun part of the job, isn’t it? Trying to create a sound
for something that doesn’t make one. This is why audio for animation is so much fun, because
you’re building a world of sound for images that don’t make a sound.
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES
Jeff Shiffman is the supervising sound editor on the new animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles, which airs on Nickelodeon. He works for Audio Circus, a division of Warner Bros., and he
and his audio team handle the sound design and mix for the show at the Warner lot in Burbank
(www.wbpostproduction.warnerbros.com). The dialogue editorial is done by Nickelodeon.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise has been around for many years…and in many dif-
For The Total War: Rome II Carthage
trailer, all voices were recorded at
Creative Assembly, where they did the
edit and final stereo mix in Nuendo 4.
For details turn to page 37.
32
Post • May 2013
Post0513_032-37-audioRAV3finalread.indd 32
5/3/13 4:45 PM
ferent forms. Shiffman grew up watching the original series, and having the opportunity to work on TMNT for a new generation is a dream job for him. He and his
team wanted to put their own creative stamp on the show, so they started from
scratch to build up a library of unique sounds for it. Their approach was to embrace
the odd and be experimental with the sounds.
“These weird, off-beat choices somehow are the ones that get stuck in your
head,” says Shiffman. “Think of The Six Million Dollar Man sound. We are going for
that kind of effect that will get ingrained in the audience. From the start, I always
told my editors that we want kids running around with bandanas on their heads,
and cardboard weapons, making our sounds as they’re playing Ninja Turtles. That
is a jackpot for us.”
The show’s executive producers, Ciro Nieli and Peter Laird, are very conscious
of the importance of audio, reports Shiffman. “They realize the power that is has in
the storytelling,” he says.
The producers used adjectives like quirky, weird, funny and hyper-real, to describe
how they wanted the show to sound. Shiffman and his team create that hyper-real
sound by focusing on the detail, from the gritty footsteps of the Turtles on the New
York City streets to the occasional subway car passing by in the distance when the
Turtles are hanging out in their lair. There are also arcade games and a pinball
machine in the lair that are in demo-mode — their blipping, beeping and pinging
sounds can be heard in the background.
Most of those sounds would get lost in the mix, but Shiffman says Nieli and Laird
aren’t afraid of quiet moments that allow those details to poke through. “For me,
designing and ultimately hearing that level of detail for television feels really unprecedented, especially for children’s television.”
Sound design plays a huge role in the show. Donatello, the inventor in the Turtle
group, is always creating new tools to help the group complete their missions.
Those inventions, which are a collection of everyday things assembled to make
cool gadgets, have a homemade sensibility that Shiffman feels kids can relate to.
Jeff Shiffman and team work on the Warner’s lot doing the
sound design and mix for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles series on Nick. They just got an Emmy nomination.
Post • May 2013
33
5/3/13 4:46 PM
Audio for Animation
For the hooves in
Khumba, Goldcrest’s Adrian
Rhodes used the sounds
of real horse hooves in
combination with Foley.
34
“From a kid’s perspective, this is awesome,
because you can imagine making these
things yourself, and anyone can be a hero.
For example, there is a grappling gun that
the producers described as having a pin that
hits a CO2 cartridge that knocks out the
grappling hook that’s on a spool that ratchets. It’s like, ‘Ok, I can work with that.’ It’s a fun
challenge to take those homemade things
and make them really sell.”
Another larger example is the shell-razor,
a vehicle the Turtles drive around in. It’s an
abandoned subway car that has old CRT
monitors, tube TVs and radar screens inside.
Shiffman and his team had fun designing the
sounds those objects would make if they
were all hooked up together.
“We created modem squelches, radio
tuning, weird Soviet-era sounds, radar pings
and weird telemetry. There is that DIY element. If you put it all together, you have this
weird low-fi amalgam that you don’t get to
do in many television shows today. All those
weird and off-beat sensibilities, that’s really
the DNA of the show.”
The show’s sound is a combination of scifi, realism and big actions scenes interspersed
with moments that are completely goofy.
Shiffman has the challenge of making all
those elements fit together seamlessly. “You
can hear the gravel on the sidewalk and their
weapons when they’re moving. It’s a very
realistic approach, but then you have these
emoticons that pop up over their heads. We
have to balance the weight and the reality of
the environments and also sell the big
moments. Finding that balance ultimately
makes the stakes higher, but it also keeps it
really fun and adventurous.”
Shiffman and his team recorded all the
Foley for the show at Warners. They wanted
to create a custom library of sounds from
scratch. For the Turtles’ footsteps, they
recorded large boots wrapped with denim
to create a unique sound that would match
Post • May 2013
the animation. They recorded a whistling
football thrown down a hallway to create
arrow whoosh-bys. For many of the weapon
sounds, they recorded heavy chains and
dowel rods from the hardware store. “We
probably looked like a bunch of crazy people
at the store, dropping things, like heavy gauge
chain, and pipes and dowel rods, and all sorts
of stuff onto the floor, trying to find out what
sounds they would make, and really concentrating hard on it.”
To create the sci-fi sounds, Shiffman does
a lot of design on his iPad. He used a softsynth called Sunrizer by BeepStreet, to create all the spaceship and laser work in the
episodes. “The producers really wanted a
‘50s element to the sci-fi, especially on the
lasers. It’s interesting because we’re using
the tools they used back in the day; it’s just
a modern take on it because we have automation and so on. We basically make the
lasers and spaceships and all the weird
telemetry completely from scratch, just
starting with a waveform and seeing what
comes of it.”
Even though Shiffman and team are only
20 episodes into Season 1, they’ve already
created thousands of original sound elements for the show. With Seasons 2 and 3
already given the green light, the library is
expected to grow substantially. To keep track
of the sounds, and to easily share them
among the team, Shiffman says they absolutely couldn’t work without Soundminer.
“We have a server-based library that was
created for us here specifically to share all
our effects. It’s a really collaborative show, so
we needed a place to be able to do that.
Sorting through that quickly, and having a way
to share that easily is essential.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is mixed in
5.1 at Warner Bros. on an Avid ICON using
Pro Tools 10. Shiffman and his team have
roughly two weeks to work on an episode.
They’re currently finishing up Season 1.
KHUMBA
Adrian Rhodes is a sound supervisor at
Goldcrest Post London (www.goldcrestfilms.
com/post_london). No stranger to audio for
animation, his sound skills can be heard in
films like Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wallace &
Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and
The Gruffalo. His latest sound work is for the
Triggerfish animated film Khumba, which is set
in the Karoo, a vast arid area of South Africa.
For Rhodes, the Karoo is a whole new sound
world and something he didn’t know much
about at first.
Director Anthony Silverston sent Rhodes
a documentary on the Karoo so he could
become familiar with the environment. “The
presenter on the documentary stood in the
middle of this wild, open, stony, rugged place
and said, ‘Listen....’ Nothing. That was the
brief,” explains Rhodes.
Two adjectives to describe the Karoo
were empty and arid. The challenge for
Rhodes, who at press time was still working
on the sound design, was to create an
interesting soundscape that reflects the
drama, while keeping a desert-like quality
to the sound, all without sounding boring.
“If the emotion feels down a bit, I try to
find some howling wind or sounds like that,
just to make things feel sad. We used a lot
of crickets, too.”
Since the Karoo environment is so quiet,
the sound of the footsteps are very noticeable.
The main character, Khumba, is a half-stripped
zebra, and often there are herds of zebras on
screen. Besides zebras, there are also oryx, a
type of antelope, which also have hooves.
Rhodes paid close attention to the detail of
the hooves, varying the textures and dynamics
so the audience could distinguish between different characters. He feels that if he used only
Foley for the hooves then it would all end up
sounding the same. For a more natural sound,
he did field recordings of horses near his home
in rural Kent using a Sennheiser MKH 416
5/3/13 4:46 PM
shotgun mic and a Zoom H4. He used the sounds
of the real horse hooves in combination with the
Foley to achieve the variation he wanted. “You want
to pick out the different characters, the gangly ones,
the young ones, and the old one,” he explains.
The majority of the characters are four legged
and often hang out as a herd, making the footsteps
a labor-intensive endeavor. “I have Foley editor
Julien Pirrie cutting the feet, and I have another
sound editor, Mathias Schuster, fitting them in and
making sure the Foley footsteps and my field
recordings of hooves sit on top of each other
precisely, so there is never any doubling up of the
sounds. It’s all very precise. It’s a lot of work and
one of the biggest challenges.”
Rhodes also did field recordings of wild animals
Dan Golden spent months creating the sound design,
writing the music, and doing the final mix for Feral.
at the Port Lympne zoo. According to Rhodes, the
zookeepers at Port Lympne get very close with
the animals, so he was able to go in the enclosures
with them. “The animals are beautifully isolated so
I can get some good recordings. I used a Sennheiser
416 shotgun mic with a Rycote windshield. The
scary thing is that when you put one of those furry
Rycotes on the mic, and you get up close to a
leopard or an ocelot, you’re not quite sure how
they’re going to react to it. Whether they want to
eat it or what.”
Part of the sound design work was to create
voices for non-verbal characters. In Khumba, there
is a group of rock-rabbits called Dassies who
fanatically worship the Mighty Black Eagle. Rhodes
technicolor.com/HollywoodSound
Technicolor-Tap-Post-JrPage-nobleed.indd 1
Post • May 2013
35 29/04/13
09:59
5/3/13 4:46 PM
Audio for Animation
Feral’s story is
completely reliant on the
visuals, music and sound
design. The only dialogue
is the vocalizations the
main character makes.
36
created their voices by recording himself
talking very slowly, and then speeding up the
sound. In one scene, the Dassies are chanting
and keeping rhythm by striking rocks together. Rhodes, who has a strong musical background, created the chanting as well as the
rhythm track. He went into his backyard and
found the most “musical” rocks he could and
recorded himself hitting them against the
stone threshold to his house. He then loaded
those sounds into a sampler to create a set
of stone bongos.
“The whole scene is quite complex
because all the Dassies are hitting these resonating stones, almost gong-like stones, and it
was about building up the rhythms and voices
and then working with the composer to get it
all to be a homogenous track.” Rhodes also
created the voice of a wise, old praying mantis
that has a Buddhist monk-type personality. His
inspiration came from a 70’s kung-fu style TV
series called The Water Margin.
“I started with that voice from The Water
Margin in my mind, and then I did that voice in
slow motion. I avoided using any real words
and avoided any consonants. There aren’t any
Khumba will be in theaters later this year.
Rhodes will also handle the film’s 5.1 mix.
FERAL
Dan Golden is the supervising sound editor/composer on Feral, a 13- minute animated short film that premiered in the Shorts
Competition program at the Sundance Film
festival and will be in several other animation
film festivals this year.
Golden worked with director Daniel
Sousa on several previous films, including
Windmill and Drift, both of which had an
influence on Feral’s sound. The two have
been good friends since the early ‘90s.
We’ve worked together on all his noncommercial films,” he says.
Feral tells the story of a wild boy who is
found in the woods and brought back to civilization. The boy tries to adapt to his strange
new surroundings by using the same strategies that kept him safe in the forest.
This is the first film that Golden has done
for Sousa that is more than just “a labor of
love,” as he puts it. Sousa, using a grant from
Creative Capital, was able to hire Golden
was easy to see what needed to change,
what didn’t seem to fit, and what sounded
anomalous to the film. I had to stay on top of
that the most.”
The sound design is comprised mainly of
field recordings Golden captured using a
TASCAM DR-100 MKII recorder with an
AKG 414 mic, or sounds created in the studio on his EMS VCS3 vintage analog synthesizer. “I’m a huge fan of the old ‘70s analog
modular synthesizers, so I try to get them in
there somehow, but I had to be very careful
on Feral not to have anything that sounded
dated. The film has a timeless quality to it so
I can’t have overtly electronic sounds.”
Golden also creates his own wind sounds
using a noise generator. “I try to create
much of the sounds, either with gear or
recording them myself. I try not to use
canned sounds, but in some cases I have to.
If there is an animal sound I need that I
couldn’t record myself, typically I’ll use a
library sound in conjunction with other
sounds I created. I like to use layers, so there
is never any one pure sound.”
For Feral, Golden was asked to create the
real words but it sounds like it might be a
Shaolin monk.” Like the Dassies’ vocals, Rhodes
recorded the mantis while speaking slowly,
and then changed the speed and pitch.
Rhodes used the E-mu E4 sampler with a
MIDI keyboard to manipulate the sound of
the mantis and Dassie vocalizations. He also
used the Serato Pitch ‘n Time plug-in, though
he prefers the E4. “I like to be able to control
things with my fingers. I like to play the
sounds and bend them with the wheel and
pitch them. I get a more immediate sense of
the pitch when I play it.” Using the E4 and a
MIDI keyboard, Rhodes was able to experiment with the pitch of other sounds, too.
This, he says, brings a whole new range to
the possibility of the sound. “If you take a
cricket and slow it down, you end up with a
whole new tapestry. A lot of it is just seeing
how far you can go with one sound and
pushing it in all extreme directions.”
full-time to work on the audio. Golden spent
two and a half months creating the sound
design, writing the music, and completing the
final mix. Since Windmill and Drift had the
same look and similar themes as Feral, Golden was able to re-use the environmental
textures he created for those films.
“When Sousa and I start a film, we talk about
the kind of environments we are trying to create, and what the feel of the scenes will be. It
was great to come into Feral with an already
established sound for the environments.”
According to Golden, Feral is very complicated visually. The storytelling is completely
reliant on the visuals, music and sound design.
There is no dialogue, only a few vocalizations
the main character makes. Golden’s biggest
challenge was keeping the soundtrack cohesive while still communicating all the emotion
of the story. Once he started to establish the
different parts of the soundtrack, he says, “It
sound of dust. What does dust sound like?
Golden recorded the light crackly sound of
crumpling paper, and then manipulated the
time and pitch, and finally removed little hits
and transients. The word “tension” was also
used often, Golden says, so he recorded the
sound of slow, stretching leather. He also created a “shimmering” effect for when the main
character touched something. He then used
wind chimes, in combination with other
sounds, to create the shimmer.
“I don’t like the way wind chimes sound
because it’s so obvious that it’s a wind
chime. So, I bought a wind chime and
removed half the chimes, then I recorded
about 15 minutes of that. I spent a couple
of days editing every single chime, moving
them farther and farther apart and switching them around to create this other
worldly shimmery, chimey sound.”
In the film, there is a minute-and-a-half-
Post • May 2013
5/3/13 4:46 PM
long sequence that shows the transition of
the main character as he is taken from the
woods and brought into civilization. Golden
scored this sequence using a blend of acoustic guitar, synth pads, strings and drum hits.
“Typically, Sousa likes to keep the film’s
sound more abstract, and use almost no
music, but for this sequence he wanted to
have a music track that was melodic, and that
had a build and swell and felt like it was going
somewhere.” This music track is also used to
score the film’s trailer.
Golden does most of his recording, editing, and mixing in Logic Pro. He also uses
Cubase, particularly for pitch shifting. He
mixed the film in stereo, because the main
audience will be people viewing the film
online once it’s finished with the film festival
circuits. “We thought about doing 5.1, but in
reality, you’re going to need a good stereo
mix. We went to Sundance and the mix
sounded great in the theater. The stereo mix
just seemed like the way to go.”
HEAD OVER HEELS
Head Over Heels, an Oscar-nominated
short animated film, was created by students
at the National Film and Television School in
Beaconsfield, UK. The stop-motion-style film
tells the story of an old married couple who
occupy the same house but live two separate lives. Freelance sound designer Axle Kith
Cheeng (http://axlesound.blogspot.co.uk/)
created a soundscape that helped tell the
story without any dialogue.
Cheeng structured the sound design in
three parts to mirror the changing mood of
the film. The beginning of the film portrays
the separation of the couple and how they
live together in the same house, but everything is divided. One person lives over the
other. “The sense of loneliness and the staleness of their relationship resonates with
sounds of cold wind and wooden creaks.”
Like the couple, the objects in the house
are old. The chairs squeak, the floors creak,
and the television doesn’t get good reception. “They didn’t make the effort to keep up
their marriage, or the condition of the house,
so it had to feel old. Foley was used extensively to create the sound of the husband’s
chair. That had seven or eight different layers
of sound,” she says.
In Head Over Heels, the house is floating
through the air, and as it changes position,
you hear the wood creaking. Cheeng used a
low-rumbling sound to indicate a looming
change as the house’s position becomes
more precarious, and finally crashes to the
ground. The second part of her sound design
conveys change and uneasiness. The characters, who have been stuck inside for years,
can now venture out into a world that is
strange and inviting. To translate those adjectives into sound, Cheeng says she used a
combination of small birds chirping and the
bizarre call of a distant vulture. The wife
leaves the house and walks along a lakeside.
“The wife’s uneasiness at being away from
home is suggested through the water lapping
and the squishy sound of her footsteps in the
mud; this is a place she does not belong.
When she returns to the house, the atmosphere becomes cozy.The house is no longer
floating, and she has made up her mind to
reunite with her husband.”
The last part of the sound design conveys
the emotions of rekindled love. When the wife
returns home, she picks up a fallen wedding
photo. The glass broke when the picture fell.
The wife notices the ballet shoes she’s wearing
in the photo. They are the same shoes her
husband fixed earlier in the film, but the meaning of his gift was lost on her at that moment.
Realizing their importance, she nails the shoes
to the ceiling, along with all her other shoes, so
that she can walk on the husband’s floor. (She
lives upside down in his world). “There is a
special emphasis on the sounds of the glass
shards rattling inside the wooden frame. Her
feelings here are tender, and these quiet,
detailed sounds help us feel them.”
Cheeng mixed the film in 5.1 on a Euphonix console. “Mixing in surround gave us
more room to play with the precarious position of the house and panning helped with
the position of the characters, since the
characters were living on each other’s ceiling,” she explains. “For example, when Madge
(the wife) is vacuuming her ceiling, I panned
the sound to the left and into the surrounds
to create the sense that it’s on the ceiling.”
TOTAL WAR: ROME II — CARTHAGE TRAILER
Richard Beddow, audio manager at Creative Assembly (www.creative-assembly.com)
has had a long history with the popular Total
War game franchise. The newest addition,
Total War: Rome II, is set for release late in
2013. In anticipation of the game, Creative
Assembly, located in Horsham, West Sussex,
UK, released several game trailers, including
the Total War: Rome II — Carthage Trailer. This
is a combination of in-game graphics and
animation created specifically for the trailer.
The Carthage trailer opens on a scene
of the harbor at sunrise, and fluidly moves
to scenes of soldiers marching through the
city, and then moves back out into the
harbor. Over the animation we hear the
voice of a Roman senator calling for the
destruction of Carthage; another Roman
senator debates the success of an attack.
We hear the reaction of the crowds. After
a fade to black we return to the harbor
outside Carthage, where several boats are
waiting. A commander yells, “Fire!” and a
trebuchet on the ship launches a ball of fire
into the walls around Carthage, signaling
the beginning of the battle.
Total War: Rome II — Carthage has an
“epic” and “cinematic” feel, and to translate
those adjectives into sound Beddow relied
on the performance of the voiceovers, which
run throughout the trailer, to emphasize the
drama. The orchestral-based music, written
by composer Ian Livingstone, adds energy
and rich textures up top and eventually takes
over near the end of the trailer. Beddow
used long cross-fades in the sound design to
create smooth transitions between the
Freelance sound designer
Axle Kith Cheeng created a
soundscape for Head Over
Heels that helps tell the
story without any dialogue.
Post • May 2013
37
5/3/13 4:46 PM
postings
NO JUDGING ZONE
N
EW YORK — Company 3 On-Air Promotion and Trailers (www.
bydeluxe.com) contributed creative editorial, color grading, sound
design and full mixing services for a new PSA presented by USA Network. The “Characters Unite” (www.charactersunite.com) campaign, is
part of an effort to combat bullying, racism, religious intolerance, sexism, homophobia and all other forms of discrimination.
Steve Beal was creative editor on the PSA, which appears in :40,
:30 and :20 versions. Radical Media directed. Co3 used Resolve on
Linux for color grading. The edit was achieved using Avid Symphony.
DRIVING IN DISGUISE
L
OS ANGELES — Gifted Youth, the commercial production division of Funny or Die, teamed up with LA-based post
house Therapy Studios (www.youneedtherapy.tv) to create a new :30 Pepsi Max spot that features NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon, disguised as a car buyer who is talked into test driving a Chevy Camaro by an eager salesman.
Test Drive was conceived by TBWA/Chiat/Day/LA as part of Pepsi Max’s “Zero-Calorie In Disguise”campaign. The
spot was directed by Gifted Youth’s Peter Atencio and began airing in March. Viewers were directed to the Web, where
they could see the three-plus minute video in its entirety.
The shoot took place in North Carolina and came together in just five days after getting the initial concept from the
agency. Fifteen cameras were used on-set, recording to eight different formats. GoPro cameras were used on the road
and mounted onto the car. Panasonic remote cameras were used for the high-and-wides. Charles Papert served as DP.
Doobie White of Therapy Studios edited the piece on an Avid Media Composer. Sound design was performed by
Eddie Kim at Therapy using Avid Pro Tools. Lihi Orback mixed the project in Pro Tools. Therapy’s Wren Waters performed the online and effects using Autodesk Flame. Lustre was used for color correction.
FIGHT CLUB
D
ALLAS — Jeff Bednarz directed a new MetroPCS campaign that provides a window into the lives of champion
UFC fighters Ronda Rousey, Cain Velasquez and Urijah Faber.
The Richards Group conceived the spots, which display the
fighters’ talents and sporting prowess, as well as how
MetroPCS plays a major role in their busy lives, thanks to
packages that offer “talk, text and data” services at “a ridiculous rate.” Bednarz worked closely with Lucky Post (www.
lucky-post.com) editor Sai Selvarajan, designer Seth Olson
and colorist Brian Buongiorno to create a bold look and feel
for Urijah’s World, Ronda’s World, and Cain’s World, integrating the individual narratives with the highlighted brands.
The project was cut in Final Cut Pro and finished in Smoke.
Color correction was performed using SpeedGrade. Adobe’s
Creative Suite was used for graphics and the final surround
mix was performed using Pro Tools|HDX.
BRAIN PROMO
N
EW YORK — BigSmack (www.bigsmack.tv), in New York and Philadelphia, created a promo campaign
for the National Geographic Channel highlighting its new series Brain Games. The studio collaborated
with National Geo’s in-house creative team to complete creative concepting for the project and then wrote,
produced and created extensive CGI and graphics for the launch.
The show, hosted by filmmaker/TED Talks icon Jason Silva, uses illusions, mind games and interactive
experiments to reveal the inner workings of the human brain. BigSmack founder/head creative Andy Hann
shared directing duties with BigSmack’s senior CD Matt Hall. Host Silva added a lot of the material on his
own while they were shooting, so most of the CGI/effects were added in post without a lot of pre-planning. It
was shot in one continuous take using a Canon C300. A specialty “Skater scope” lens was used, allowing the
DP to rotate the lens/image via remote control while a cameraman was shooting with a handheld rig.
Jason Harmon and Rick Malwitz provided design/animation. Dan Hoffman was graphics artist. Mark
Farkas cut the promo, and Janet Falcon was colorist. They used FCP, After Effects, Cinema 4D and DaVinci
color correction on the project. Composer David Baron of Edison Music/NYC created an original score while
composer Bix Sigurdsson created the riff. BigSmack’s Bob Schachner and Mike Taylor mixed the project.
38
Post • May 2013
Post0513_038-postingsRAV4FINALREAD.indd 38
5/3/13 12:39 PM
products
Aspera speeds
file sharing
EMERYVILLE, CA
— Aspera (www.
asperasoft.com)
was at NAB with a
new file tool that
brings together the
best of the company’s Faspex, Shares
and Sync technologies. The single unified platform is
designed for project-based file collaboration and
allows for transfer
and sync of file sets
of any size and any
number with maximum speed at any
distance, with full
access control, privacy and security.
Introduced as
“Aspera Drive” and
“Faspex 4.0,” the
solutions bring
remote file browsing, transfer, synchronization and
package sending
and receiving fully
integrated into desktop, browser and
mobile platforms.
G-Tech’s Thunderbolt drive
for high-res workflows
MTI Film’s dailies tools
S
AN JOSE, CA — G-Technology (www.GTechnology.com) was at the NAB show
with its new G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt, a
compact, desktop external hard drive that
offers SSD-like performance, taking full advantage of the speed and power of Thunderbolt.
The new G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt delivers sustained data transfer rates of up to
480MB/s, which is up to three times faster than
standard 3.5-inch desktop external drives. An
uncompressed 2K digital video format requires
approximately 305MB/s sustained throughput
for smooth editing with no dropped frames, so
it’s suitable for high-resolution workflows.
Dual Thunderbolt ports allow for future external storage expansion and for users to daisy
chain with other Thunderbolt-based devices. It
easily supports compressed 4K and multiple
streams of 2K, HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD,
ProRes 4444 and uncompressed SD workflows.
With up to 4TB capacity, the G-Drive Pro with
Thunderbolt is Mac-formatted and is Apple
Time Machine ready.
A 4TB G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt will be
available this summer for $849.95. A 2TB solution will cost $699.95.
Cedar provides AAX
upgrade path
C
AMBRIDGE, UK — Cedar (www.cedaraudio.com) is offering a number of bundles
and upgrades for its Cedar Studio AAX, which
provides tools for eliminating a wide range of
common sound problems. The announcement
comes in conjunction of the introduction Avid’s
64-bit Pro Tools 11.
Cedar is facilitating upgrades for Pro Tools
users by allowing existing dongles to be
upgraded to the new AAX native versions.
Users will retain RTAS compatibility, enabling
them to move freely between newer AAX systems and older versions of Pro Tools.
Cedar’s DNS One is used for dialogue
noise suppression. Declip allows users to
identify and remove most instances of clipping
in a single pass. The Adaptive Limiter employs
an algorithm to calculate a continuously varying
EQ profile that constrains the peak level of the
output while retaining the integrity of the input.
The Debuzz tool helps eliminates buzzes and
hums, and can also track wandering tones.
JVC debuts affordable HD camcorder
W
AYNE, NJ — JVC (www.pro.jvc.com) introduced the GY-HM70 ProHD shoulder-supported camcorder at NAB, which
delivers 60p full HD images at a price point of $1,599. With a 12 megapixel CMOS imager, the HM70 records
1920x1080 footage in the AVCHD progressive format at 28Mbps to dual solid state memory cards.
The GY-HM70 is equipped with a high-quality 29.5mm wide-angle GT lens that offers smooth
16x dynamic zoom performance. Veteran shooters will appreciate the camera’s manual focus,
iris and shutter controls, as well as manual and automatic white balance. The camera also provides an optical image stabilizer, auto focus and focus assist.
The camera can capture 1080/60p, 1080/60i, or 480/60i (SD) footage at various bit rates to
SDHC/SDXC memory cards. It also allows high-speed video recording for slow
motion footage at 300fps (720x480 res) and captures 12 megapixel still images.
JVC’s hot-swappable dual battery system allows hours of continuous, uninterrupted shooting. For shoulder shooting, the GY-HM70 has a .24-inch LCOS color
viewfinder and a three-inch LCD flip-out touch-screen display for tripod shots
and playback. Audio features include a built-in zoom mic, 3.5mm microphone
input, and 3.5mm headphone jack. The camcorder will be available in May.
40
Post • May 2013
Post0513_040-productsRAV3finalread.indd 40
HOLLYWOOD — At
NAB, MTI Film
(www.mtifilm.com)
showed its-repackaged and expanded
line of Cortex dailies
processing and
transcoding solutions. The company
showed two new
editions of Cortex:
Control Dailies.
The Free Starter
Edition is designed
for users seeking
basic dailies processing features. It
can decode codecs
from Red, Sony,
Arri, Phantom,
Canon C500 RAW,
and QuickTime and
Photo-JPEG at resolutions up to
1920x 1080.
The company
also showed Cortex:
Control Dailies DP, a
low-cost package
that includes the
features of the Starter Edition while adding decoding of
MPEG2, H.264 and
DVCPRO HD, and
encoding to H.264.
A Pro version adds
encoding to DNxHD
and ProRes, while a
Studio version adds
encoding to DPX,
OpenEXR MPEG2
and DVD.
5/2/13 4:29 PM
people
KUBSCH
BRAND
VERA
CHRISTIAN KUBSCH,
DARIN GRANT
Method Studios has named Christian
Kubsch president. He will oversee Method’s
global operations, including the company’s main
base in Los Angeles. Kubsch was most recently
with Prana Studios where he oversaw global
production of visual effects and animation. Prior
to that, he was EVP/GM of ImageMovers Digital,
as well as the first managing director of Lucasfilm Animation, Singapore. He reports to Method’s Stefan Sonnenfeld, who is president of
creative services.
Darin Grant has been named chief technology officer of Method. He comes from Digital
Domain, where he was CTO. Prior to that, he
spent six years as head of production technology
at DreamWorks Animation.
JOEL BRAND
Joel Brand has been named director of video
post operations at SpotGenie Partners in
Atlanta. In his new post, Brand will head a team
responsible for assisting clients with the preparation of their spots for air, including video transcoding, closed captioning, slating, editorial, tagging
and quality control. Brand comes to SpotGenie
after 10 years at Atlanta’s Outback Editorial,
where he was owner/president/editor. He is a
graduate of Georgia State, with a Bachelor of
Fine Arts in Communication
JEANETTE VERA
Jeanette Vera has joined the crew of Emeryville,
CA’s Athena Studios as visual effects artist.
Vera had been freelancing for Athena before
leaving to work at local Base Studio for a year.
While at Base, she made VFX contributions to
the films Captain America, Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Smurfs, The Avengers,
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and, most
recently, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. She left
Base to return to Athena Studios on a full-time
basis. She studied Animation and Visual Effects at
Ex’pression College for Digital Arts
and Campbell Ewald. Albert transitioned to
consultancy and worked with Speedshape as EP
of the 3D conversion of Robert Rodriguez’s Spy
Kids 4 and the Weinstein Company’s Escape
From Planet Earth.
WAN
HURLEY
WALTERS
MIKE ALBERT
Detroit’s Modus Operandi has signed executive producer and 25-year industry vet Mike
Albert to lead the company’s Midwest presence. Over the years he has held positions at Leo
Burnett, DMB&B,Yaffe and Co., Bozell Worldwide
POST MAGAZINE (ISSN 0891-5628) is published monthly by Post,LLC, a COP Communications company, 620 West Elk Avenue,
Glendale, California 91204. Subscription rates: $63 for one year in the United States & Possessions; $94 for one year in Canada
and Mexico; all other countries $133 for one year. For air-expedited service, include an additional $75 per order annually. Single
copies (prepaid only): $16 in the United States; $32 in Canada and Mexico; $47 all other countries. Back issues, if available, are
$32 for the U.S. & Possessions; $63 for Canada and Mexico; $94 for all other countries. Include $8.00 per order plus $3 per
additional copy for U.S. postage and handling. If shipping outside the U.S., include an additional $14 per order plus $5 per
additional copy. Periodicals postage paid at Glendale CA 91205 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send
address changes to POST, P.O. Box 3551, Northbrook, IL 60065-3551. Canadian G.S.T. number: R-124213133RT001. Publica-
OWEN HURLEY
Technicolor has named Owen Hurley creative director of its animation and games group.
He will be based at Technicolor Digital Productions’ animation studio in Bangalore, India,
where he will oversee creative development.
Hurley will lead the creative vision of the Indian
studio and also support the group’s original
content development business. Prior to Technicolor, Hurley was director of animation and
cinematics at Vancouver’s Relic Entertainment,
where he collaborated with game developers,
working on the Company of Heroes and Dawn
of War series.
MATT WALTERS
London’s Codex, makers of digital cinema
recording and workflow solutions, has hired
digital workflow specialist Matt Walters as
chief technology officer. He will head the new
Los Angeles-based technology development
for Codex, focusing on pipeline design and
the development of asset management tools
for production and post. Walters previously
served as CTO/co-founder for 5th Kind, a
developer of Web-based digital asset management applications. Prior to that, he worked
as an independent digital operations and
management specialist, with credits that include
such films as Speed Racer and Superman Returns.
He has degrees in film and physics from the
University of North Texas.
tions Mail Agreement Number 40017597. Printed in the U.S.A. ©Copyright 2013 POST, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including by photocopy,
recording or information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy
items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by is granted by POST, LLC for
libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Dr. Danvers, MA 01923 phone: 978750-8400 fax 978-750-4470; call for copying beyond that permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. For
those not registered with the CCC, send permission request in writing to Permissions Dept. POST, LLC 620 West Elk Avenue,
Glendale, California 91204.
Post0513_041-peopleRAV3FINALREAD.indd 41
CHARLIE WAN
Director/photographer Charlie Wan has
joined the creative collective at CHRLX
Beauty, a boutique division of New York’s
CHRLX. A former art director in the motion
graphics industry, Wan’s credits span a wide
variety of projects, including stage visuals for
The Rolling Stones’ world tour and 2010’s
record-breaking Super Bowl halftime show for
rock legends The Who. His fashion and beauty
clients include L’Oreal Professional, Pinko, Fred
Perry, Oribe Hair Care, Chi, Farouk System and
FacesofNYFW.com.
Post • May 2013
41
5/2/13 4:25 PM
2 D - T O - 3 D
[ Cont.from 26 ] Prometheus) to our service package.
Now our 3D business is about evenly divided between
VFX, optimization and conversion.”
Vezzali explains that productions “often believe that
shooting natively in 3D means that you shoot stereo and
you’re done. But that’s usually not the case. Native 3D still
requires stereoscopic optimization to be at its highest
quality; [Producers] find they need to dedicate eight to 10
weeks to prepare native 3D shot films for audiences.”
Neither native stereo 3D nor 2D-to-3D conversion
is the “be all and end all” for content, says Van Woert.
“Regardless of the technique you use, 3D should add a
layer to the audience experience. It should ebb and flow
much like the film’s music track, enhancing and defining
specific moments.That’s why we advocate evaluating the
needs of each project and
applying a hybrid workflow
— shooting or converting
footage as appropriate.”
He explains that the
company has “a quiver of
tools to select from, and
we customize a pipeline
for each project, using the
appropriate tools for the
job.”
Those tools include a
lot of “off-the-shelf products, from The Foundry’s
Nuke, Imagineer’s Mocha
Pro and Shotgun for shot
tracking and project management to high-end systems like SGO’s Mistika,”
says Van Woert. “We use
them as part of a unique and customized workflow,
often in ways no other studios do.You might say we use
off-the-shelf tools in a proprietary fashion.”
For example, Nuke is the primary tool for the
2D-to-3D conversion pipeline, “which we use in concert with Mistika so we can adjust 3D convergence on
the fly, to properly manage the depth budget on a
sequence or on a complete show,” says Vezzali. “We
use Mistika as a finishing tool for native stereo and
within 2D and 3D pipelines for data management and
editorial QC. It’s an incredibly diverse tool.”
The company does all its design, previs, quality control and finishing at its North Hollywood office and
much of its VFX and stereoscopic precomp work
overseas in Asia and Eastern Europe, where it owns
part of a visual effects collective.
Identity FX recently designed the 3.5-minute opening sequence and all the end credits for Texas Chainsaw
3D, which was shot native 3D. “We came at the job
from a 3D design perspective,” says Vezzali. “We sat
down with the director and talked about what he
wanted to communicate and what would be more
efficient as native capture or conversion.”
The opening features clips from the original 1974
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which were converted to
3D. The end credits were crafted from stills and video
images from the new film, which were given “a dynamic 3D treatment with 3D backgrounds, 2D graphics
42
Post • May 2013
C O N V E R S I O N S
Identity FX uses off-the-shelf tools, such as Nuke and Mistika, in a customized pipeline for
“on-the-fly” 3D convergence on projects like the opening for Texas Chainsaw 3D.
and text in negative space,”
says Vezzali. “This project was
a case of using 3D to tell a
story — combining converted footage with natively-shot
footage to enhance the depth
of the experience for the
audience. Ultimately this is
what 3D is all about. 3D
should no longer be considered a gimmick, but a powerful communications tool.”
In addition to its stereo
3D big-screen film work, Identity FX has developed
“a protocol for the small screen,” Van Woert says.
“We’re poised to enter the 3D device marketplace
— smartphones, tablets, broadcast TVs. By several
estimates there are expected to be two billion 3D
devices by 2017, and this year we have seen several
consumer-ready, glasses-free 3D devices enter the
market. We believe that when this domino falls, there
will be a huge demand for 3D, especially overseas,
and a majority of the content will have to be converted from legacy titles.”
VEFXI: TOOLS AND SERVICES
Headquar tered in Por tland, OR, VEFXi (www.
vefxi.com) is in the final testing phase for its DiamondBlade 3D Conversion Suite, a software/hardware accelerator package that increases productivity and efficiency of 3D stereo post and conversion
via instant rendering. That capability facilitates keyframe editing of the depth scale and adjustment of
depth field in front of or behind the display screen,
for example.
VEFXi “already had the realtime converter for home
theater,” says VP of strategic development Lorenzo
Traina. “Instead of rotoscoping, it instantly creates a 3D
image from a 2D image and makes adjustments to
depth and pop out in realtime via keyframing. It’s a new
way to manipulate 3D.”
CEO Craig Peterson founded VEFXi in late 2010
after 30 years with Intel. The company’s consumer 3D
product “was so far ahead in the industry that studios
started asking for a post production system,” Traina
reports. Developing their depth engine further, VEFXi
is expected to release DiamondBlade 1.0 after six
months of beta testing.
The system, a hardware/software hybrid with a computer control panel interface, can be leased from VEFXi
on an annual basis. It runs on a video server that can be
supplied by VEFXi or obtained in consultation with the
company. “The server needs to support realtime
uncompressed video streams in 2K,” says Peterson.
“DiamondBlade works in full 2K; there’s no de-rezing.”
With its speed, DiamondBlade is targeted to TV
programming as well as film. In a test, a customer converted a one-hour show, with 524 scene cuts (“more
than most movies,” Peterson says) in about eight hours
with one seat of the new product. “Even with reviews
and approvals, you’re looking at a one-week turnaround with one person. DiamondBlade is so fast it
allows you to go through an entire show and add 3D
expression you didn’t have time to do previously.”
In the conversion process Avid, Adobe Premiere
or Apple Final Cut clips and EDLs are loaded into
DiamondBlade, then 3D convergence is applied.
“You hit a button to jump to the next scene cut,
adjusting the convergence in seconds for each
scene,” Peterson explains. “Then we recommend
going back to the beginning to figure out scene by
scene where you want things to pop out or push
back, where you want to add 3D expression. That’s
where you put all the artistry in.”
Traina says right now most of the interest in DiamondBlade stems from China, where audiences are
hungry for 3D. “The number of their cinemas dwarfs
ours, and a 3D movie packs every seat. CCTV has one
3D channel now, but the government has mandated
18 channels by 2015, so they need about 75,000
hours of 3D content quickly and at a quality level
acceptable to the network.”
5/3/13 2:41 PM
review
Autodesk Smoke 2013 for Mac
By BARRY
GOCH
[email protected]
Smoke Editor
Modern Videofilm
www.mvfinc.com
Hollywood
A vet’s fresh look
at a new look.
ConnectFX allows Smoke
users to experience a
node-based compositing
environment, similar to the
one featured in Flame.
The result was Smoke 2013 — all the
power of Smoke 2010 and it’s following
releases in a new wrapper — with even
more compositing power, and at a much
lower price, $3,495. They released the software as an extended public beta shortly
after NAB 2012, providing users the chance
to kick the tires for an extended period
while providing Autodesk with valuable feed-
back. Autodesk released six pre-release beta
versions fixing bugs and adding features. For
example, the first pre-release had no desktop paint, in my opinion one of Smoke’s key
features, which was implemented in a later
pre-release version.
VITAL STATS
A
t last year’s NAB, Smoke 2013 for
Mac was announced with much
fanfare. It really rocked the post
community with its radical user interface
(UI) redesign, the addition of node-based
compositing with ConnectFX, and its much
lower price point.
It seems that the Autodesk Media & Entertainment division was listening to feedback
from the release of its first-ever Mac-based
creative finishing product Smoke 2010.
Smoke Advanced on Linux has been the
finishing tool of choice for many high-end TV
shows, commercials and features for years.
With the introduction of Smoke 2010 on the
Mac, Autodesk hoped to bring the experience
of using a high-end tool to a wider audience.
While the release of Smoke 2010 was very
successfully in expanding the number of seats of
Smoke, it faced headwinds in becoming more
widely adopted because of the price, $15K US,
as well as its steep learning curve. Although the
UI has worked for many years, many new users
could not simply sit down in front of the software and start to get things done.
In addition, some folks had some networking and configuration issues, and Smoke 2010
had steep system requirements. Autodesk
formed an editorial advisory committee and
listened to the feedback of industry leaders in
an attempt to improve the user’s experience
while making the product more affordable.
PRODUCT: Autodesk Smoke 2013
WEBSITE: www.autodesk.com
PRICE: $3,495. A 30-day free-trial &
educational versions are available at:
www.autodesk.com/smoke-trial
· toolset for creative and finishing
· node-based compositing
environment
· elegant new UI
A NEW LOOK
Now that Smoke 2013 is finally shipping,
it’s a good time to sit down and do a formal
review. And what better way to do a review
but with a real project? I produced and shot
an educational “how-to” video. Except for the
talent, this was a one-man-band type of job
— shot in an afternoon on greenscreen and
posted in Smoke 2013. I was keen to try out
the new UI with an edit from start to finish.
So how did it go?
Although I am not new to Smoke, I tried
approaching the software as if it was totally
new to me and review it from that point of
view. I really like the new design. There is
now a tabbed structure to the program to
quickly switch between your main tasks,
Media Hub (media input/output), Conform
(loading sequence from other systems),
Timeline (editing) and Tools (paint and some
other utility type functions).
I also like how the UI can be resized by
dragging on the edges of windows. Also, getting media into the system is a breeze.You can
even drag and drop files from the Finder! The
timeline layout is simple and familiar. Editing is
now easier to get started by color-coding the
editing buttons: yellow for insert, red for overwrite, and blue for replace. You can set in and
out marks with keyboard short cuts and also
by clicking on the grey in and out buttons
underneath the player.
They also have added color-coded actions
when dragging and dropping clips from the
media library directly from the timeline. Adding effects to clips in the timeline can be done
using the menu bar, right clicking or selecting
the effect from the FX Ribbon. The effects can
Post0513_043-Review SmokeRAV3ALMOST FINAL.indd 43
be copied to other clips and saved in the
Library for later use.
Autodesk has added a menu bar across
the top of the application to make it easier to
access many functions throughout the application. They’ve made installing the software
painless compared to before — it installs just
like any other Mac application. They have also
reduced the system requirement in terms of
screen resolution, necessary graphic cards
and added the ability to render and transcode
to a lighter codec (ProRes), rather than
uncompressed DPX frames.
Autodesk has vastly improved the conform
process in Smoke 2013 with the new conform
module. It makes conforming a lot easier and a
visual process. It’s easy to see missing shots and
then find matches. Smoke conforms from EDLs,
AAFs from Avid, and XMLs from FCP 7/X.
REAL-WORLD TESTING
My project got off to a bit of a rocky start,
unfortunately. My camera is a Panasonic GH-2,
which shoots AVC-HD. Although it is a supported video codec, Smoke 2013 was not able
to import the audio from the file as well as
video. I checked the same files in Final Cut Pro
X and Premiere Pro and they both were able
to load the audio and video without a problem.
I later found out that Smoke supports PCM
audio with AVC-HD but not AC-3 audio,
which is recorded by my camera. I transcoded
the footage in FCP 7 to ProRes and that
worked fine in Smoke 2013.
I found editing the program in the new UI
fun once I got the hang of it. It’s easy to work
fast using a combination of keyboard shortcuts
and right clicking. Yes, that’s right, the entire
program is right-click aware, from importing
footage to the deepest level of compositing
inside of Action — a very welcome addition
indeed. It was very easy to get to the cut I
Post • May 2013
43
5/2/13 4:28 PM
review
GenArts Sapphire V.7 for Media Composer
By
JONATHAN
MOSER
[email protected]
Freelance Editor/Producer
FlashCut Productions
New York
An invaluable and
powerful toolset.
EVOLUTIONARY CHANGES
Before I get into the version’s new features
and updates, it’s important to know where Sapphire was before and where it is now. To simply
call Sapphire an effects package is doing it an
injustice. It does so much more than glows or
blurs or film effects. It’s a Swiss Army knife of
image control, and I’d say most editors (myself
included) don’t really know half of its potential
and capabilities, and that’s always been one of its
biggest problems.
The user base for Sapphire has always
been divided between editors and VFX artists,
making Sapphire even more of an enigma,
since it’s not an easily-definable product.
As an editor, I’ll confess that I have always
found navigating the deeper areas of Sapphire
somewhat difficult. Now, with over 250 visual
effects, many of them not readily apparent in
44
Post • May 2013
Post0513_000-Review GenartsRAV3FINALREAD.indd 44
their mode of use, there’s a lot there and now
even more to learn.
Earlier iterations of Sapphire relied on user
intuition and knowledge. It took a lot of time
to get to know the ins and outs of the package. Some didn’t have the time to devote, and
often users were in the dark. As a result, many
VITAL STATS
S
ince 2000, Sapphire, GenArts’ premier filter set for Avid Media Composer, has arguably set the bar for
special effects solely built within the editing
system’s environment. Its relatively high
price has kept Sapphire out of the hands of
many primary users — the freelance editor
— and allowed other lower-priced competitors to permeate the marketplace, but Sapphire’s arsenal is still among the most powerful in the industry.
With Version 7, the ante’s been raised:
there is more attention to speed, many
enhancements to existing filters and exciting
new effects, capabilities and additions, some of
them treading closely on competitors’ turf.
While no single feature can claim to be a
game-changer, there’s enough firepower in V.7
to help bring Sapphire back to its preeminence in the AVX filter world.
IMPROVEMENTS
With V.7, a majority of effects are viewable
in realtime, without rendering. This is a huge
advantage from the old days when you would
spend time rendering only to find the effect
didn’t work or look right. They’ve added GPU
support to take the work away from the
PRODUCT: GenArts Sapphire V.7 for Avid Media
Composer (also available for DS, Nitris, Symphony,
NewsCutter and Xpress DV)
WEBSITE: www.genarts.com
PRICE: New license, $2,800; Upgrade, $849;
Rental, $280/month; floating license $4,200/month
· Most effects now offer realtime rendering
· New “Beauty” filter enhances skin tones
and detail
· Over 2,500 useful presets
Sapphire effects were cookie-cutter adaptations — glows, lens flares and the like —
while many other effects and categories were
wholly unused by editors and used more by
compositors. Other companies introduced
presets, which allowed users to drop on an
effect and see what effect tweaking parameters would have. Only relatively
recently has GenArts followed
suit — and they did so in a big
way thanks to FX Central.
Subscription-based FX Central has bridged the gap, providing a great, visually interactive
presets browser that I’ve found
invaluable while learning how
to make Sapphire work and
how it affects footage. In fact,
there are now over 2,500 presets allowing you to see how
these effects work and customize to your preference.
Also new to this release, all
Sapphire presets are sharable
over different host platforms, making moving
projects (and effects) a snap.
Overall, GenArts has taken the ball and is
providing more tutorials and features to
make mastering this set easier to use, faster,
more user-friendly and accessible to new
and old users alike.
CPU, and the rendering speed increase can
be described as “substantial.”
There is a new Beauty filter that does
amazing work in enhancing skin tones and
details using selective blur. It made dull images
pop and fixed people shots that might otherwise be marginal. In addition, the tremendous
range of control in using “beauty” allowed me
to add subtle glows and color effects that can
paint a mood or feel. Beauty allows you to
add garbage mattes to isolate areas. Beware
though, this is not a simple drag-and-drop
effect. (This may be more in the colorists’
realm than an editor’s, but with trial and error
amazing results can be achieved.)
Beauty is just one benefit of GenArts’
“EdgeAware” technology that achieves greater detail preservation and enhancement by
using selective blurring (a concept that seems
counter intuitive at first but works great.)
Sapphire now offers a new Pan and
Zoom filter light years ahead of Media Composer’s tired and quirky old P&Z. Plus, it adds
newer functionality and features over the
next biggest competitor in this arena: StageTools’ Moving Picture.
It includes 3D rotation, variable motion
blur, vignetting, drop shadows, light sourcing,
and a good degree of image control. I found
the controls completely intuitive and very
smooth. Even with high-pixel images and
image preservation, even at extreme magnification, it was amazing. This is a major, and
5/3/13 9:54 AM
A U D I O
The new Beauty filter has been updated with
GenArts’ EdgeAware for enhanced skin tones.
welcome, new feature.
There are also new transitions like FilmRoll
and CardFlip. The library of cool transitions
continues to grow. FilmRoll is one of those
great, customizable effects that will be quickly
embraced. It convincingly emulates film projection flutter but is, like virtually all Sapphire
effects, changeable in a heartbeat. And this is
where FX Central really shines: a click on “load
presets” takes you there, where you can click
on one of the ever-expanding libraries of presets... as long as you have a Web connection.
CardFlip, another new transition, is a bit
retro for my tastes: it emulates the old ADOstyle dimensional turn or flip from the early
‘80s. I guess what is old is new again!
There is also a new 3D mode for Zap. One
of the coolest effects in Sapphire I’ve never
used. Zap has been reworked and dimensionalized for astounding lightning and particletype effects. It’s spline-controllable and newly
rotatable, and lightning effects have never been
easier to control.
Other changes, big and small, permeate this
latest version: Lens Flare has been gussied up
with new animation and atmospheric implementation; Motion Blur and Vignetting has
been added to many other effects; Crop has
been added to Warp Effects; the Sharpen tool
now has more flexibility; plus many more than
we can fit in this space.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Needless to say, this is an invaluable and
powerful toolset. With the introduction of
Pan & Zoom and Beauty, it’s value as a go-to
tool is a no-brainer if you can afford the
price tag. All in all it’s a great release, but any
tool is useless if you don’t know how to use
it. I’d like to see GenAr ts use FX Central
even more as a teaching center so editors
can learn all the tricks this powerhouse has
up its sleeve.
Jonathan Moser recently finished Discover y
ID’s Deadly Sins, Food Network’s 3 Days To
Open With Bobby Flay and Animal Planet’s
Rattlesnake Republic. For more, visit www.
jonathanmoser.com.
[ Cont.from 37 ]
quickly-paced scenes. These aspects
combine to make a trailer that sounds like a movie, and
feels as imposing as the Roman Empire. According to Beddow, “Having captivating vocal performances are crucial to
selling a lot of the drama, and that opening hinged a lot on
those vocal performances.”
Over the past nine months, Beddow has recorded
hundreds of actors for the Total War: Rome II game. All the
voices are recorded in the studio at the Creative Assembly facility, where they have three edit rooms and a large
live room to record everything from musicians to weapons to the dialogue.
Occasionally, Beddow records the game dialogue to picture, much like an ADR session. “We’ve got a lot of scenes
where characters in the game are swinging weapons or
climbing a ladder, and we need to get the proper vocalized
exertion in order for it to sound correct. We play short
movie sequences of those animations, and the actors perform in sync with that action.” After Beddow edits the
voiceover lines, they’re synchronized to the actual game
animation. When it occurs in the game, the sound file
matches perfectly.
When creating the soundtracks for trailers, in-game
movies and tutorials, Beddow and his team use sound elements that were developed for the game specifically.
“When we’re using scenes that are actually part of the
game, they need to have the game sound effects in there
to have that consistency.”
Over the years Beddow has built up a substantial inhouse sound effects library. The sound facilities at Creative Assembly are ideal for recording music, Foley and
other sounds they need. Beddow also does a fair share
of field recordings… from ocean sounds to burning fires
to weapons, he says. As for the historical accuracy of the
weapon sounds, Beddow often tries to incorporate
sounds of the real weapons (or replicas) but finds that
they lack excitement. “They just don’t sound like what
you’re expecting them to sound like. So, ultimately, we’ll
create something that sounds exciting but also has elements of those actual real items, or replicas, as well. We
try to deliver both.”
For Beddow, working in a linear format for the trailer
was a nice change of pace. He wasn’t bound by the technical restraints of implementing the audio into the game,
so he had the freedom, he says, “to be completely creative. We were able to make the experience tighter and
more dynamic.”
He did the edit and final stereo mix for the Carthage
trailer in Nuendo 4. For the mix, Beddow found his biggest
challenge was leaving enough space for all the signature
game sounds to be heard. A lot of the material in the
trailer’s action scenes are actual battle scenes in the game.
Beddow had to make sure those game sounds came
through in the mix.
“There’s a lot of big sounds going on, lots of low frequencies and sometimes that can get muddy. It’s a case of
juggling things around and carving out space for the signature sounds.”
To help control the dynamics in the final mix, Beddow
used the Waves V-Series plug-ins. He found the V-Series
compressor particularly useful. “I think it’s fantastic,” he says.
“I’ve been using that for the mix bus compression to help
knit the mix together. I think it’s a great tool.”
Classifieds
HELP WANTED
ADVERTISING SALES REP.
Ad Sales Rep needed for advertising sales in Post
Magazine and Computer Graphics World. The purpose
of the position is to generate classified advertising sales for
the publications CGW & Post Magazine in the areas of Rapid
Prototyping (3D printing), Camera, Displays/monitors/projectors, Workstations (mobile, desktop), GPUs/CPUs, Input
devices (mice, scanners, etc), Motion-capture, Storage,
Service provider, Education/training, 2D modeling, 3D
modeling, 3D animation, Compositing, Rendering, Lighting, Editing, CAD/CAM/CAE/CAA, AI/VR (including headmounted displays), Game engines, Middleware, Texturing,
Simulation, Plug-ins, Web content tools, Music Libraries,
Stock Footage, Large File Transfer companies , Studios.
Full-time position. Operates from office when not traveling.
Skills/Qualifications: Customer Service, Meeting Sales
Goals, Closing Skills,Prospecting Skills, Negotiation, SelfConfidence, Product Knowledge, Presentation Skills, Client
Relationships, Motivation for Sales.
Send cover letter and resume to:
[email protected].
CSR - CUSTOMER SERVICE REP.
Our local office in Glendale, CA is seeking a Customer
Service Representative to be the first point of contact
with our print customers. Our customer service representatives are passionate, customer-focused professionals
with outstanding people skills and the desire to help us grow
our business through hard work and innovative thinking!
As a customer service professional, your responsibilities
will include:
• Responding to service requests.
• Investigating and resolving customer questions
and concerns efficiently and compassionately.
• Preparing and distributing reports (utilizing various
proprietary systems) on a regular and timely basis.
• Assisting with various administrative duties, such
as filing, data entry, and ensuring SOP
compliance.
• Participating in inside sales activities.
Successful team members also possess the following
qualifications:
• A High School Diploma or equivalent. Preferably a
College Graduate.
• At least 2 years of experience in a customer service or call-center environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong data entry/typing skills.
• The ability to multi-task and prioritize multiple
assignments.
Send cover letter and resume to:
[email protected].
For Advertising Rates & Schedules: POST Magazine, 620 West Elk Ave., Glendale,
CA 91204; Western Region 818-291-1153, Fax: 818-547-4607; Eastern Region
781-255-0625 Fax: 781-255-0431
Post0513_000-Review GenartsRAV3FINALREAD.indd 45
Post • May 2013
45
5/3/13 4:47 PM
E C O - F R I E N D LY
[ Cont.from 21 ] including one that makes sure everyday materials in the kitchen are as eco-friendly as
possible,” explains Chesler. “For example, we have
corn cups, biodegradable cutlery and recycled plates
and bowls. We have recycling bins and signage all over
the agency reminding people of good practices.”
When new RPA employees are hired, they get an
RPA-branded package intended to help them make
the right environmental choices. It includes a reusable
grocery bag and a pint glass, both branded with the
RPA logo. “While biodegradable corn cups are a good
choice, an even better choice is to reuse glass,” explains
Chesler. “They are trying to keep you away from using
all disposable items, even if they are more Earthfriendly than most things. It’s about getting you to think
about a long-term solution that’s non-disposable. So
that is built into the DNA of RPA.”
Why is the agency so involved in promoting green
practices? According to Gary Paticoff, senior executive
VP/executive producer at RPA, “We work in such a
temporary timeframe. It’s important to have the social
responsibility to minimize any negative impact that we
might create during this process. With all that we are
capable of doing, being environmentally conscious
about how we operate doesn’t seem like a difficult
philosophy to embrace.”
Chesler came on board sharing a similar philosophy. Before joining RPA, she helped Mishawn Williams
and her GLASS.org initiative (Union’s Raimondi mentioned this earlier), spreading the word about people’s dependence on plastic water bottles. “Mishawn
was on the vendor side and I was on the agency side,
but we both shared an awareness about what was
going on at the time, which was single-use plastic
World-Cycler by ModusEarth (www.modusearth.com) is a reusable gifting set made to
reduce waste and add value to every gift it
contains. World-Cycler is for all occasions and
includes a gift bag with front pocket, a full
greeting card plus an extra card insert. Each
set is ready to use for two separate gifting
occasions, but it goes on from there. WorldCycler can be used several times over by making a fresh card insert with any 8.5x11 paper
and a simple fold. It costs $10.99 per set.
46
Post • May 2013
Post0513_046-Jump.indd 46
water bottles popping up as a regular thing on sets, in
post houses and in agencies.”
Williams asked Chesler to help her set up the program, gather production companies and elicit a push
from the client side. “We realized the power came
from the client, and if me as the agency client asked
production and post companies to take those things
off of sets, that we’ll pay for non-disposable water
canisters and have a water station, they would do it.
Other agencies and then post houses would contact
me and ask me how they could do it too.”
Then, slowly over the years, success. “There was a shift,
and it became a permanent solution where companies
like Method completely changed thanks to gentle prodding from us,” she explains. “It’s not only environmentally
safe, but it’s a huge cost savings to have a filtered water
system and not rely on these plastic bottles.”
GLASS was so successful in its mission as catalyst,
they were able to step back and let others run with
their philosophy. Companies started to pop up based
on the practices GLASS set forth. One of those was
EcoSet (www.ecosetconsulting.com), run by Kris Barber, which is often called on for RPA shoots.
“They come with a team, in relation to how large
your crew is, who set up water stations and provide
reusable water bottles, and composting, landfill trash
and recycling bins everywhere — by camera, the
video village, by craft services. Everyone sorts their
own trash, and now landfill trash is a small bag
where the composting and recycling bins are the
normal-sized trash cans.”
EcoSet also takes set materials, the wardrobe, props
and donates them to film schools and charities; food
banks get the food. “They move those items for you;
R E V I E W
[ Cont.from 43 ]
wanted using a combination of
insert and overwrite edits, lifts and ripple trims with
drag-and-drop edits automatically adding layers to the
timeline. I figured out how to change audio levels by
adding edits and using the gain effect to boost the volume of the VO.
With the edit locked, I moved forward to the main
dish, compositing the greenscreens. I really wanted to
push the software to see why I would want to use
Smoke rather than another NLE. In fact, I found I got
great results using the AVC-HD footage in FCP X and
Premiere running a key, color corrector and a resize on
the background and this played in realtime in Premiere
but dropped frames in FCP X.
How did Smoke do? Smoke doesn’t have a realtime effects engine so as you add effects, you have to
render as you go. The keyers in the other apps picked
up on the high compression in the source footage
right away and pulled a decent key with little trouble.
Smoke’s Master Keyer, a very deep but older tool,
took a bit to deal with the compression artifacts but
was able to keep up. Where Smoke really shines is in
the ability to add a deep node-based composite to
any clip in the timeline.
For the first time, ConnectFX allows many more
folks to experience what Flame artists have been using
you don’t have to do anything, and at the end they give
you a report about where things have gone,” she says.
“On a Honda shoot last year, one of the set pieces was
a huge semi with carrots on it and there were thousands
and thousands of carrots. If we didn’t have EcoSet, all carrots would go into a trash bin, but instead they went to
an animal rescue place and were fed to the animals. They
make sure everything will be used and appreciated and
have another life instead of heading to a trash bin because
it’s easier for the crew while breaking down. So it’s
evolved way past water bottles.”
Back at RPA, they encourage ride sharing by offering
a huge discount on parking.They also tell employees to
shut down computers, turn off the lights at night, and
as much as possible, print double-sided. “Those things
add up over time,” advises Chesler.
The agency also transitioned to digital prepro
books. “We don’t provide the binder anymore, even to
clients,” she says.
GREEN TIP
“My green tip for
everyday life is reuse!
Recycling is important
but reusing whenever
possible takes recycling to the next level.
— Gary Paticoff,
Senior VP/Executive
Producer, RPA, LA
S M O K E
for years, the node-based compositing environment
(called Batch in Flame), which was recently upgraded
to function in full 16-bit float. For example, I didn’t have
a very stable rig for the overhead shots so there was
a bit of a camera wobble.
Using the ConnectFX pipeline, I was able to stabilize, key, correct layers for lens distortion, color correct
the foreground and background plates, add a light
wrap and a vignette inside of one ConnectFX pipeline.
Even better, once I got the look I wanted, I was able to
drag and drop this set-up to all the shots from the
same camera angle in the sequence.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Autodesk has done a great job of building many
avenues to get started with the software, foremost
among them is the Smoke Learning Channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/SmokeHowTos).
There is also AREA, where you can post your questions (http://area.autodesk.com/smoke).
It really takes a lot of courage to take a successful product and rethink it from the ground up.
Autodesk has rewrapped most of the old tools,
while adding new functionality at a lower price
point. What’s not to like?
5/3/13 11:47 AM
S13_POST.pdf
1
4/19/13
8:38 AM
Your brain will be delighted.
Both sides.
Find yourself among thousands of techno-enthusiasts as
you engage in a dazzling array of mind-expanding programs,
informative sessions, and blockbuster events showcasing
the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.
C
M
Y
Left Brain + Right Brain
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
The 40th International
Conference and Exhibition
on Computer Graphics and
Interactive Techniques
5/3/13 2:12 PM
review
Lenovo’s E31 SFF workstation
W
By DARIUSH
DERAKHSHANI
[email protected]
VFX/CG Supervisor
Adjunct Lecturer, USC
Los Angeles
A lot of power
in a little box.
48
hat do you get when you cram a
full workstation into a tiny space?
The Lenovo E31 SFF (Small Form
Factor) workstation is one serious answer to
that question. “Oh look at that, Koosh,” says
Vicki, as she drops off a phone message for
me. “Are you planning on taking over the
reception desk with that little guy? Plan on
learning Excel?”
“No, I couldn’t do your job. Seriously. Plus,
that’s not what this little guy’s for,” I say pointing to the newly unboxed E31 SFF on my
table. “I’m running a job on it.” “Well, it must
be a small job then,” she says, snorting a guffaw as she flits her way out of my office muttering, “Koosh has a tiny tower, ha!” “I’ll show
you! I’ll show you all!” Can’t be too mad at her.
She still dots the “I” in Dariush with a heart.
WHAT’S IT GOT
As far as specs go, this little 16-pound, 13
¼-inch-x-14½-inch-x-4-inch puppy has the
heart of a wolf, so my expectations are high
for the diminutive workstation. Having
reviewed my fair share of workstation laptops,
I have an appreciation for power in compact
packages. But for a tiny tower, I figured there
have to be some compromises? For example,
laptop CPUs are underpowered compared
to towers, and render times and processing
capacity reflect this in general.
But sporting a Xeon e3-1230v2 3.2GHz
workstation class CPU and 8GB of DDR3
memory, the Lenovo rivals big tower performance. After an initial set up, I was eager to
get it rendering on some work to burn it in
for a solid week before hammering
on it with benchmarks and
more random punishment... turn it on
and let it go on
Post • May 2013
Post0513_048-ReviewLenovoRAV4FINALREAD.indd 48
VRay renders for days on end.
I figured the heat build-up inside this small
case packed with high-grade components
would have the fans sounding like a windstorm inside a telephone booth, at least after
a while, but that never happened. I was very
excited about the E31 SFF being as quiet as it
was; librarians would approve.
Now the small case and 240W power
supply does limit you away from the higherend video cards, but I don’t think that’s where
the charm of this box comes from. Its render
times (which peg the CPU and memory system) handily beat out my last-generation
Sandy Bridge i7-based home-built rig. The
Lenovo was turning in VRay frames about 35
percent faster, which made me quite happy.
This fact, in addition to it’s small size and quiet
nature, made the E31 SFF my favorite deskside attendant. As a secondary system, this
thing absolutely rocks. Taking on render duties
alongside my big rig was a tremendous help
in my workflow, and it stayed completely out
of the way. No more banging my knee on a
second tower jammed under my desk. And
that’s not where the usefulness stopped.
On more than one occasion during my
long-term loan from Lenovo, I needed to pop
open a scene on the E31 SFF to make edits.
This quickly led me to working hours on end
on the Lenovo, sometimes without even realizing that I wasn’t on my monster box. In
comparison, my home-built system sports an
Nvidia Quadro 5000 video card, a serious
monster for 3D. Due to the size limitations,
the E31 SFF houses an Nvidia 600 card,
which, while pales in comparison to the
Quadro 5000, is no slouch in any regard,
especially for this small of a form factor. My
large datasets were very workable on the
Lenovo, which gave me the confidence to
know that this little guy would indeed make
for a great primary machine as well, though I
would strongly suggest 16GB of memory or
more. Students, hobbyists and professionals
would all benefit from the fast responsiveness
packed into the tiny, unobtrusive case.
Plus, the E31 SFF is pretty configurable on
the Lenovo Website. It can accommodate up
to 32GB of DDR3 memory, up to two hard
drives (I recommend SSDs!!), and an optical
drive. The case has easy access USB and audio
ports up front and plenty of ports
in the back, including a Gigabit
Ethernet port, four USB 3.0
and two USB 2.0 ports. While
you won’t be opening the case and
VITAL STATS
PRODUCT: Lenovo’s E31 SFF
workstation
WEBSITE: www.lenovo.com
PRICE: Starts at $679
· small form factor
· includes an Nvidia 600 card
·impressive render times
slamming a ton more gear inside, you have a
lot of upgrade options using USB, though
eSata would have also been a good addition.
However, I’m sure you can add in a half-height
PCI Express card to add functionality.
Even though I didn’t expect the Lenovo
E31 SFF to blow me away in terms of graphics
power, I was very pleasantly surprised by its
rendering capacity and its workability in my
3D scenes. The Quadro 600 inside makes
most scenes easy to work with; making this is
an entry- to mid-level production machine
perfect for reasonably-sized scenes. Adding
SSD drives and an external eSata RAID array
would make this a serious contender for a
good composite workstation as well, though
mine was not equipped that way.
FINAL THOUGHTS
All in all, I was very happy with the E31 SFF
while I had it. And though it wouldn’t replace
my big box and its Quadro 5000 anytime
soon, it was a big help in my overall workflow, allowing me to offload a lot of processing and rendering, and in a good number of
cases, taking on scene management duties as
my primary box.
I would easily recommend the E31 SFF to
anyone looking to add power to his or her
current workflow (just add in more RAM);
it’s small and unobtrusive, quiet and pretty
powerful. I’d even say that I’d rather see the
E31SFF used in my classrooms to replace the
iMacs for the students to use on my unreasonable homework assignments.
5/2/13 4:27 PM
www.aja.com
A Wealth of Options
Maximum software compatibility
Video and audio professionals no longer work with just a single application. Over the course of working on a project an editor may move
between several software programs. At each stage, professional video monitoring is essential to ensuring a high-quality output. With an
incredible list of supported software, your AJA hardware will be with you all the way from start to finish.
Final Cut Pro X
Utilizing Adobe’s advanced Transmit plug-in
architecture, AJA hardware integrates directly
with Adobe applications such as Premiere Pro,
After Effects and now SpeedGrade - allowing
high-quality video monitoring while color
grading your project.
While working in FCP X your AJA hardware can
be used to feed a full-screen video monitor to display
the currently playing clip or skimming action.
This allows your video to be displayed at the proper
frame rate for pristine, 10-bit viewing.
In addition to support for Media Composer,
Symphony and NewsCutter, AJA’s Open I/O
plug-ins for Avid software now support ProTools.
This provides audio engineers with video
monitoring during their sessions, ensuring
perfect synchronization.
B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s .™
Find out more information at www.aja.com
B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s .™
B e c a u s e
i t
m a t t e r s .™
B e c a u s e
i t
m a t t e r s .™
#32658 - Desktop POST.indd 1
12/04/2013 16:19
5/3/13 2:11 PM
need. want. desire.
Whether you need streamlined video production, want expanded content delivery options, or desire the
ultimate production and visual effects environment, there’s a Vegas™ Pro configuration for you. Each member
of the Vegas Pro family of professional video editing and production software is built around new Vegas Pro 12,
and covers the gamut of video editing requirements.
Vegas Pro EDIT: Just editing – powerful and comprehensive; Vegas Pro 12
Vegas Pro: The industry standard – Vegas Pro 12 and DVD Architect™ 6
Vegas Pro SUITE: All of the above, plus visual effects production with HitFilm 2 Ultimate; audio mastering
with Sound Forge™ Pro 10; Production Assistant 2; 100 royalty-free soundtracks, and more!
Learn all about the exciting new features and enhancements, determine which Vegas Pro is for you, and download the free trial at:
www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegas12
Scan to see a full list of Vegas Pro features.
Copyright ©2013. Sony Creative Software Inc. All rights reserved. “SONY” and “make.believe” are trademarks of Sony.
5/3/13 2:11 PM

PSTMgzn -May2013-Magazine_IMDB

Transcription

Similar documents

Bandyke Moving Pictures

Power, Steering Proxes R888 sticks to the track whilst you stick to

Film quiz 12 May 2011

Page 19 - Films - Magazine for the Arts

ULTRASONIC FILM SPLICER MICROFILM EQUIPMENT

REEL-Recovery-Film-Festival - Lifeskills Of South Florida

Printable Version

THE CREATION OF MEANING - Press Kit

THE SOURCE (international)

ROLLEIFLEX 3,5 F ROLLEIFLEX 2,8 F User Guide