So at the moment, FCP X is pretty much a disaster. Lots of people are saying that it will get better, but for now I could never make a movie with it. That’s not being elitist or anything, it’s just a tool that I can’t use. Maybe it will get to a point where we can use FCP X, but for now I’m working under the assumption that FCP 7 is the end of the line for me.

Now, I just upgraded to FCP 7 a couple weeks before the release of FCP X, and I’m feeling pretty clever about that. But it also points out an important thing. We don’t always have to use top-of-the-line software to edit. I tend not to work under crazy deadlines, so things like 32-bit rendering and lack of multicore support are more minor annoyance than workflow killer. If I can bring videos files in, convert them to a nice codec, edit them, and then export in several different ways, including OMF, then I’m very happy.

So I’m not here to complain about FCP X. Maybe it will end up being awesome. At the moment I worry about little things like having to trick it into doing audio and video transitions separately but maybe the world is changing and I won’t be the cool kid who know how all the software works anymore. I’ll be using FCP 7 until it stops being useful to me then I’ll try something else. I want to explore the other options I’ve ignored for so long because FCP was so good.

First up is Avid. Avid has really stepped up its game in the past few years. They’ve put out a ton of releases, and most importantly for me, they’ve started limited support for 3rd party I/O hardware. Cost has always been my biggest problem with Avid. I know it works great, but I just don’t have the money for a $5,000 Mojo DX. I’m using a $200 Blackmagic Intensity Pro right now, and it does absolutely everything I need. Avid doesn’t support any Blackmagic cards, but the $450 Matrox MXO2 Mini they currently support is a fair deal. The great thing about Avid is DNxHD, which is just as wonderfully simple as ProRes, and it’s freely available, which will become important as we look at other options.

I experimented with Adobe Premiere back in college, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It wasn’t quite as confusing as iMovie, but it immediately turned me off. In the meantime, Adobe has totally overhauled the program, and it is by many accounts a great program. I’ve always considered it a bit of a joke, but considering that it already comes with the Production Premium suite, a lot of places I work already own it. And it works with all the same hardware FCP does. I’m anxious to try a small project with it to see how things turn out. It seems like a poor-man’s FCP 7, but a very rich man’s FCP X. It’s written in modern code, and fully takes advantage of the power of our modern computers, but it also looks and feels like a regular editing program. What it doesn’t have is a ProRes or DNxHD. If you already have FCP on your computer, you can use ProRes, but that’s not something we can rely on indefinitely. It seems like DNxHD would be the best choice, since you’ve long been able to install Avid codecs on any computer separately from the Avid software.

The wild card I started thinking about this week is Lightworks. It has a long history, with long-time Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker being the most prominent of the fancy-pants editors who use it. I talked with her assistant about it a couple years ago and he was actually using FCP to do a lot of supplemental work, because Lightworks was missing some of the fancy new HD features FCP could handle at the time. It was recently turned in to open source software, although the full source code hasn’t been released yet. The price of $0 is hard to beat. They plan to update it with a lot of the things that I would like to see in an editing software, including support for the fancy codecs I like so much. I’m going to download it and try it out soon, and I will report back on my impressions. At the moment it only runs on Windows, which is a big scary thing for some people, but I for one would welcome a return to Windows. The only reason I switched to Mac OS was for FCP, but with that out of the picture, all the major programs are available for either platform.

I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson recently, that counting on a single company to supply all of our needs is foolish. I’ve even seen some rumblings online that Apple might abandon the Mac Pro. Without the expansion slots and huge processing power of the Mac Pro, you’re left with the future promise of Thunderbolt, which sounds pretty cool, but leaves out decades of legacy connectors only available through PCI Express slots, like Fiber, SCSI, SAS, etc. and we can’t all just go out and buy new storage solutions every couple years. What we can definitely be flexible about is software. Software is cheap, and the more of it we know, the better off we’ll be.

I haven’t seen a good Nigerian 419 scam letter in a while, I think because Gmail filters them out. But this one was smart enough to target me as a filmmaker and it got through the filters. It’s a pitch for a film called “Bear Beer Dear.”

Dear Sir,

Unique thrilling movie script is the basis, movie Producer and Company need to make a breathtaking production.

Roger is a hard working husband and father but is addicted to alcoholism. What becomes of Douglas, Rogers’s second son who took to his brevity but a singular learnt habit of alcoholism has done him worst in life. Rogers’s companion billy his dog is more than a pet to him, not even his family can come in between him and billy. How many animals must die by barrel? billy saved the life of Rogers’ at the hunting expedition by maneuvering whisky, Rogers’s horse. billy was brilliant to have manipulated Ashley to drive Rogers home and thwarted Trevor’s pilfering plan on Rogers who is drunk to stupor. Georgiana’s manhandle by Rogers. Rogers’ scolded by Douglas at the birthday party of Mabel. Morris manipulated Douglas his friend to play hanky panky love game with Mabel. Trevor make comic of Douglas’s dad as Douglas reply lead to bloody fight at the night club. Ahmed chase of Douglas and Patton over an escaped accident. Roman, Douglas, Mabel and Patton mimic Roger’s their dad who is drunk as Georgiana got provoked. Roman shot. Douglas and Morris hunt the perpetrator to a death. Beer please let Rogers alone!

I like the ingenuity here, and the willingness to do the work to track down people actually involved in film, but nobody would want to even watch that movie, let alone invest in it. It’s hard enough to raise money for movies that aren’t completely incoherent. My advice: pitch classic films that might not be caught by the weak-minded people you’re trying to scam.

Dear Sir,

A unique movie script forms groundwork for your opportunity for riches. Seeking a Producer & production company to storm the gates of Hollywood.

Roger Coleman, his apprentice Douglas Hooker, and they endorsed Joe Huron’s latest swindle them sometime US$11,000, enough for an old Roger thought retiring from grifting. However, they are not aware that the money belongs to extortionist Trevor, whose thugs Roger in revenge killed. Before Roger’s death, he suggested that he contact George, his old friend in Chicago on the art of the great far to learn. Who after he had burned his last big con retired. George decided to assist retirement just to get back at Trevor for Roger’s murder. In the pull of the big con, and Douglas require the assistance of a number George’s old associates, as well as a number of small time grifters. The last group includes Huron, his small part to do in revenge Roger’s death. Beyond Trevor or anyone else to find out about the con, there are many potential obstacles to pull the stinger out as a controlling and overly cautious to things like Trevor his own way to do this, and some people run to George, including a crooked cop, the lower level thugs and a hired hit man. Through the process, George, who saw himself as a dealer Wheeler may have a better deal than that to him by Douglas come.

Special thanks to Google Translate for providing that authentic machine translation feel.

Frankly, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. What’s so special about “Feature Films” anyway? People used to shoot feature films on DV cameras for God’s sake! And depending on the look you’re going for, you might not need a lot of lights. I’m in pre-production on a feature right now that will be shot on a 7D and I have absolutely no qualms about it. This imaginary producer is an idiot, but clearly this is the wrong DP for the job. Maybe they should give Shane Hurlbut a call.

The one that really drove me nuts was a little closer to home. “So, you’re an editor…”

It’s another straw man talking with a professional editor who apparently can’t figure out how to use Final Cut Pro. I’ve certainly never had the problems he describes. This one is upsetting on a couple levels. First, why should anyone expect the average person to understand what an editor does? It’s a specialized and confusing job. I don’t know what middle managers do all day either. And as a lifelong freelancer, I still fundamentally don’t understand how vacation/sick/personal days work. Mocking people who don’t know about editing and don’t need to know about editing is just petty.

Second, of course is the attitude about Final Cut Pro. Like the 7D video, it takes a fear-based approach to things that are outside the comfort zone of the author. Rather than take the time to learn how to use the extremely flexible and powerful Final Cut Pro software, the author calls it a piece of prosumer crap and repeats a bunch of scary myths about how it works. With the 7D the author is on better ground, since all of the things he says about the 7D are true, but they are less of a problem than he makes them out to be.

My point is, I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’m perfectly happy to round you people up to toil in the 7D’s underground sugar caves.

I’ve written before about inexpensive production equipment, but today I’m thinking about something I know a little more about; do-it-yourself post production.

At this point, picture editing is wide open. You can do it any way you want and you don’t have to pay a lot for equipment. To really get the most of your gear though, you should have a good, expandable desktop. iMacs and laptops can hold you back when it comes to finishing a film. Obviously the Mac Pro is the simple choice. I built a system around a quad core Core 2 Duo a few years ago and overclocked it from 2.4 to 3 GHz. It’s served me well, but it’s due for an upgrade. Rendering HD is one of the most processor intensive things you can do, and working on 8 core Nehalems makes me jealous.

The best piece of equipment I have is a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card, which you can get for less than $200. It outputs almost any kind of HD or SD video you could want. I have it attached via component cables to my trusty 37-inch Panasonic 9UK plasma. It will take any video the Intensity throws at it, including 25 fps formats. Blackmagic has also just released a USB 3.0 Intensity Shuttle which will be great if Apple & Intel get on board with USB 3.0. It would allow laptop or iMac-based video outputs. For now, unless you’re editing on Premiere in Windows 7 and have USB 3.0, stick with the card.

I haven’t worked on a tape-based project in at least a year. If a film is shot on a tapeless format I can take the camera originals, convert them to ProRes, edit the picture, and color correct, all without bringing in an outside vendor. Now, I can tell you that the Panasonic plasma is far from a reference monitor. But there’s perfect, and there’s good enough. If the budget allows, I always go to a professional colorist, but if you’re making an indie film for a few grand, you can’t afford perfect. And if you’re doing the color correct yourself, you can futz around all you want for weeks if that’s something you want to spend your time on. The great thing about Color is that even when I go to a professional colorist (who also uses Color) I can still make a tweak here and there if I see something I don’t like a few weeks later.

Now, what about sound? If you’re making anything you plan to distribute beyond YouTube, you better believe you need a 5.1 mix. You can’t do that in FCP, but you can do it in Soundtrack Pro. You’ll need 6 audio outputs. I’m just starting to investigate the “home 5.1 mix” angle, but I like the look of the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra, which is less than $300, has 8 in and 8 out, and works with Pro Tools M-Powered.

Audio is another situation where you want a good room, and the professional mixers with dedicated equipment have a real edge. But in the do-it-yourself “good enough” range, you can run those 6 outputs to a consumer 5.1 receiver and speaker set. Reducing noise in the room becomes crucial here. You don’t want to find yourself in a quiet theater and hear things that were masked by fan noise in your improvised mixing room.

The moral here is not that you necessarily should do any of this stuff. But you can. You’re not required to make a perfect mix or a perfect color correct. If it looks good to you, it looks good to your audience. A lot of dialogue-driven films will be just fine with a 5.1 mix that puts 90% of the audio in the Center speaker. Some films look fine without any post-production color grading beyond a basic legalization process.

In order to pull this off though, you need good source material. You need a well-shot film with well-recorded audio. You can do a lot with these tools, but don’t force yourself to. Make it easy on yourself by getting it right on set.

And of course, you need to know how to operate all this software to get what you want out of it. You might consider hiring someone like me to do that.

Anyway, my real beef with these ads is the lack of information. A common advertisement reads like this: “Feature film shot on the Red camera with name talent & award-winning director seeking editor.” The people who place these ads will be inundated with resumes from all kinds of people who are all wrong for the project. If they gave more information, the responses would be higher quality. Give us the name of the movie, the names of the actors, the name of the director. Maybe a logline or a link to your website. Is there some reason this information should be a secret?

So, let’s put a few things aside first. Yes, this turns an artistic pursuit into a commodity like cattle. I don’t care about that. If you don’t consider filmmaking a business then you should move to Europe. Another big complaint I’m hearing is the possibility of rampant insider trading. Um, sure. If you think you can judge a film’s success on opening weekend just by, you know, watching it, then by all means give that a shot.

I am concerned that the entire market seems to be based on opening weekend box office numbers. I really dislike the rampant fascination with these numbers. And for a futures market, I wonder how they could take into account a slow-rollout theatrical release where you start in one theater in NY on the first weekend but eventually open in a few hundred theaters over several weeks. The obvious answer is that nobody cares about these movies. All the trading will be concentrated on the super-giant films that will dominate the box office by opening on 7000 screens in 4D with ticket prices running $25. And these box office numbers have only a tangential relationship to the money coming back to the producers of the film. The numbers are only reporting the amount of money that theaters charged for admission to the films, with no accounting of the deals they’ve made with the distributor, and what deals the distributor has with the producers. They are big fun numbers for everyone to look at in handy chart form in The USA Today.

My main interest in this debate is the claim I have seen that a film futures market would increase the money available to film producers. That perked me up. But I’ve never seen a good example of how this will work. Let’s take an imaginary investor who wants to give an indie producer money to make a movie. This investor is dumb. He will never get his money back. He would be better off buying some CDOs from Lehman Brothers. But let’s say he goes ahead anyway for his own reasons. Maybe he likes movies or something. So he invests $1 million in this great little film. And the movie is really great. So he goes to a futures exchange and buys a bunch of contracts. (Would that be legal?) If the movie does really well on its opening weekend, he’ll make a bunch of money. But the odds are this $1 million movie won’t make much money on its opening weekend. He’d be better off shorting the film if he could get some sucker to go to bat for the film (if you’re selling short, somebody else has to go long). Is this what Lionsgate’s chairman means when he says it will “substantially widen the number and breadth of financing sources available to the motion picture industry by lowering the risk inherent in such financing.” This is what’s known as hedging, right? Otherwise it seems like just an additional investment in the success of your film, which is increasing your risk if it doesn’t succeed (or at least make a bunch of money at the box office on its opening weekend).

But let’s say our imaginary investor doesn’t feel comfortable shorting his own film. Wouldn’t he be better off investing additional money in the marketing and distribution of our little indie that could? He’s in this for the long haul. He may be dumb, but I hope he knows nobody makes their money back in the theatrical market. He can make a lot more over the years on DVD, television, the Internet, etc. So given the choice between a one-weekend contract on a product that will last for many years or an increased investment in the film itself, the answer seems obvious.

This is probably not the kind of investor anyone is talking about. They’re probably talking about hedge funds and banks who would invest in slates of films. I suppose the opportunity to mitigate their risk via futures contracts could entice them to invest in more films, but basing their hedging on opening weekend box offices seems even more risky. I would hope that anyone putting up big bucks would know better than that.

UPDATE: The A.K.A. Indie Film Blog gives a much better explanation of the reality of Film Futures Exchanges. It explains how in certain situations an investor might mitigate their risk. What it also explains is that only films opening on a lot of screens are going to be listed on this exchange and as I suspected, small indie films are not going to get anything out of this.

The cost of making movies that look good has been plummeting steadily over the past few years. Way back in the beginning of the century, there was basically just DV, which everyone pretended looked good because there were no viable alternatives. Now we have a plethora of amazing HD options. I am a complete believer in shooting movies with DSLRs. Shane Hurlbut (who you may remember as the “fucking distracting” DP of Terminator: Salvation) brought the Canon 5D to my attention when he suggested using it to shoot portions of the Cheech & Chong concert movie (coming out 4/20 of this year!). At the time they had to do all kinds of crazy things to trick the automatic sensors into making the right exposure, and of course there was the totally boneheaded 30.0 fps. A year later we have full manual control on the 5D, which still has the best sensor around, but what’s exciting me today is the newly-announced $800 Rebel T2i. It seems to have all the video functions of the 7D with a significantly reduced price. Just like the 7D, you can shoot 23.98 fps. Sure, the sensor is smaller on both the 7D and T2i, but the beauty of a real lens is going to go a long way towards making up for the “small” sensor. Of course, you’ll have to get a lens for the thing too. $800 is just for the body.

I’m also a big believer in double-system sound. The sound recording on these DSLRs is suspect, but it’s just always a good idea to have a person on set whose job it is to monitor the machine that records your sound. When it’s going into your camera things start to get crowded. It also limits your camera’s mobility. Something like the Tascam DR-100 is very appealing to me. B&H is selling it for a mere $300! It’s small, portable, and records to the same SD cards the T2i records to. It’s basically the modern version of the DA-P1 DAT recorders I used in film school. And again this is only for the recording device. You’ll need a nice microphone or two.

As exciting as all this cheap gear is (and it is very exciting) you still need something to happen in front of the camera. First off you need a good story. It’s hard to write a good story. If you’ve seen any movies, plays, or read books you know this. Lately I’ve been disillusioned with the quality of films being made on shoestring budgets, but I saw the excellent Humpday recently and it really lifted my spirits. Anyone could make that movie from a technical point of view. It was shot on quite inexpensive HVX-200s. The barrier to making a good movie at this point is talent, and not access to money.

Even with the cost of recording devices heading towards $0, and your own talent being essentially free, you have some costs that aren’t going away. If you know enough people you can probably get a crew to work for free or deferred salaries. If you’re smart about the writing, you can keep the location costs low (access fees, transportation, and art department) but you still have to feed all those people. Lunch is necessary, and breakfast is a good idea to keep people happy. Food can easily be the most expensive part of a micro-budget movie.

And then there’s the big question of what to do with your movie when it’s finished. Yes, feel free to submit it to the big film festivals and hope that somebody picks you. There were 3,724 feature-length films submitted to this year’s Sundance Film Festival, so good luck with that. And even if your film is shown at Sundance, the days of Miramax picking up your film for $10 million are long gone (as is Miramax). You’re very likely to leave Sundance in the same penniless state you were when you started. Do not fall for the myth of “If you build it they will come.” If everyone in the world is building a baseball field in their corn field, heaven runs out of dead baseball players pretty fast.

Your film might be great, but the marketplace for films is terrible. Indie films struggle in theaters, and most people are still locked in a mindset that direct-to-home-video=failure. You certainly can’t make any money by selling downloads on the Internet. I don’t think I have any answers for someone making a movie on their own. It seems like a terrible idea financially. But if you can keep your costs down, you don’t need TWC or IFC Films. The less money you spend, the less money you have to earn back.

I saw A Serious Man last night, and I can’t say I liked it as much as some of the Coens’ other films, but it certainly is a funny and discussion-provoking movie. I’ve seen some reviewers describe the film as Nihilistic, which is a philosophy I believe the Coens explicitly rejected in The Big Lebowski. The Nihilists in that movie are ridiculous crybabies. Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos. I’m not an expert in the philosophic arts, but I think a much more accurate description of the movie—and a term that I don’t see discussed very often these days—is Absurdist. Nihilism rejects the possibility of meaning in the Universe. Absurdism finds it highly unlikely. It’s hard to find humor or drama in an absolute certainty in the meaninglessness of life. In an Absurdist world, the search for meaning behind events is considered absurd, because a person is highly unlikely to find it. That perfectly describes A Serious Man, and pretty much the entire Coen catalog.

Haven’t we as a society become way too sophisticated for this kind of blatant fakery? Maybe you could get away with this in the early 2000s, but this is 2009 Miramax! Ain’t it Cool News posts reviews from nearly any idiot who goes to an early screening of a movie and writes them an email. In this case, it’s someone named McVicker, who as far as I can tell has never previously written in to AICN. Now, we can argue all day about the value and relative merits of professional film critics, but those people develop a body of work that you can use to compare to your own opinions, and you can start to figure out whether you’ll agree with a particular critic based on their past writing. This McVicker fellow gets his name from the principal in Beavis & Butthead. That’s all we know about this guy. And I’m supposed to get excited because a single pseudonym says this movie is his favorite comedy of 2009? And notice that in the ad the quote is attributed to “—Aint (sic) It Cool News,” with no author name. Is it because “—McVickers, Ain’t It Cool News” looks… ridiculous?

In general when you see a quote from AICN, you can assume that the movie is rubbish, because it has about as much meaning as a quote from Earl Dittman, or one of those “CBS-TV” local news people. And if a quote from a more reputable source could be found, they would use that instead. But since it’s a pre-release quote, and because I enjoy Mike Judge’s movies, I’m willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt.

Yes, I know BAM and the Em Dash sounds like a great title for a film, but this post is going to take a break from Obscure Topics in Film Editing and focus on Obscure Topics in Typography.

At least since I’ve lived in Brooklyn—and probably a lot longer—the Brooklyn Academy of Music has used an em dash (—) between dates rather than an en dash (–), which is the correct punctuation to use between dates. Every time I go there—or see one of their posters around the neighborhood—it drives me nuts. Three years ago I took the time to send a complaining e-mail to them. This was their response:

Hi Kyle,
Thanks for taking the time to study our ads in such detail.
We do intentionally use em-dashes even though we realize
that it is not technically grammatically correct.

The en dash is basically only used in ranges, so I guess they’re trying to drop it like an appendix. Apparently they think the em dash looks nicer, even though it clearly does not. It looks like a big ugly hunk of space that shouldn’t be there. Of course the bad kerning in the example above doesn’t help. Kudos to BAM for playing Eyes Wide Shut though!