Do it Yourself

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I have a never-ending need to understand the tools I work with, and the new tools that might help me make movies in better and less expensive ways. It’s why I continue to build my own computers and insist on understanding how to run the Mac OS on those computers. It would be a lot easier, and potentially cheaper to just buy a Mac Pro and be done with it, but for me it’s no fun unless I can get under the hood and tinker with it.

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.

How Much Info Should be in a Job Post?

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I have RSS feeds for the Mandy & Craigslist job posts for editors. (http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/tfr?query=editor&format=rss is a good start) They’re almost universally garbage, but I have gotten two good gigs out of Craigslist over the past 5 years, although the last one was 2 years ago. Of course there’s the usual crop of producers who are looking for super-experienced editors who are willing to work for “DVD copy of film & IMDb credit.” First of all, who do you think is going to make those DVD copies? Second of all, I understand that there are good reasons to work on a film without getting paid. I’m doing it on one film now because I was looking for something to keep myself occupied, and a friend had just shot a film. But IMDb credit is not a form of compensation. When I read that it makes me think that the filmmakers’ main goal is getting on IMDb, which is not a good reason to make a movie.

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?

A Big Day for Possible Films

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Hot on the heels of last week’s 4/20 release of Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This, 4/27 brings two new releases from Hal Hartley. Both films are available on DVD from Microcinema and as MP4 downloads on the Possible Films website. First up is PF2: Possible Films vol. 2, the first new material from Hal since Fay Grim way back in 2006. It’s a series of short films made while he was on his European Vacation. Second is the re-release of Surviving Desire. The original release was pretty bad. The sync was soft, there was a bogus 5.1 soundtrack (the film was recorded mono) and the picture was pretty weak. We re-mastered the films a few years ago for some foreign releases, and I authored the DVD myself, so I can vouch for the quality of the films. I also designed the covers, which I’m really happy about.

Film Futures Exchanges

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So this might end up being a moot point if Congress bans them, but I’m seeing a lot of FUD going on about Film Futures Exchanges and not a lot of discussion about what we can reasonably expect to happen with them. As I understand it, traders would be able to purchase contracts with prices that are related to the opening weekend theatrical box office numbers. They would also be able to do short sales, betting that a film will fail to live up to the expectations of the market.

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.

Early Reviews of Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This

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A few Blu-Ray reviews of Hey Watch This are trickling out ahead of the release on 4/20. Most of them mention the lack of an uncompressed audio track. I don’t really know why there wasn’t one included, since I’m a little out of the loop on Blu-Ray production, but I know that the materials were available. Justin Sluss at High Def Disc News suggested that perhaps the audio was compressed in-camera to AC3. However, since the movie was shot by professionals, and not a high school A/V club, I would like to assure everyone that the concert audio was recorded in 14 separate tracks, separate from the picture at 24-bit/48kHz LPCM. I suspect I won’t be able to hear the difference between the AC3 track and the uncompressed I was accustomed to hearing during the mix.

Ian Jane of DVD Talk noticed that “Detail wavers when we go back stage or when the camera turns to the boxed seats, these shots tend to look a fair bit softer than the footage shot on stage, but the overall quality here is not bad at all,” which you might expect when cutting from a $60,000 Panasonic 3700 to a $2500 Canon 5D MK II. And considering that way back then you had to shoot 30.0 fps on the 5D, it’s incredible to me that there’s only a slight difference.

In general people seem to enjoy the film if they’re already fans. Greg Senko at Why So Blu? didn’t think most of it was very funny, and he admitted to rarely enjoying pot humor in general, but again he loved the picture and audio quality. I haven’t seen any reviews from non-techie websites yet, but I’m very curious to see what they think.

Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This is coming out on 4/20!

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In a silly–but wholly appropriate–stunt The Weinstein Company is releasing a movie I edited, Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This on 4/20. I’ve heard a rumor that it might come out in a few theaters as well. There’s no trailer yet, but you can pre-order the Blu-Ray for hardly any money on Amazon. I can assure you that it is a lot of fun.

If you want to see some very similar material (almost exactly the same material in fact) in animated form, check out the trailer for the new animated Cheech & Chong movie which apparently does for Cheech & Chong’s old comedy albums what HBO is doing for Ricky Gervais’ old podcasts.