Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This Trailer
I edited the movie, but I would like to emphasize that I did not edit this trailer. This is the so-called “red band” trailer, so put on your headphones if you’re at work.
I edited the movie, but I would like to emphasize that I did not edit this trailer. This is the so-called “red band” trailer, so put on your headphones if you’re at work.
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.
Another fun little project. I edited this for Tom Papa’s new website.
I edited this promo for The Marriage Ref a couple weeks ago. It was shot entirely on the Canon 5D Mark II. It was a really fun experience, and Mr. Seinfeld came in a couple times to work with us. It’s great to see something I edited released so quickly but the quality of the encoded video is pretty low. It’s my understanding that this full version of the story will not be shown on TV.
I was cleaning out my closet yesterday and I found a VHS tape of the original 31-minute version of Camera Noise. It’s currently at a lean 29 minutes, and I was curious if there were any gems in there that I cut just to get the length down. It turns out I was definitely right to cut out everything I did, and of course the whole thing is almost unbearably long. But here’s a fun little bit from what’s still the best scene I ever shot.
At my current gig, I sometimes need to use videos generated by Snapz Pro. We recently ran into a problem where previously-working FCP timelines wouldn’t render and would generate the mysterious message “Codec not found. You may be using a compression type without the corresponding hardware card.” I had already found that capturing videos at 30fps in Snapz generally led to FCP reporting the frame rate as 10fps and resulting in generally unreliable editing. I could never be sure the in-point I chose in the viewer would actually be the in-point in the timeline. It’s important to run Snapz videos through Cinema Tools to conform them to 29.97 or whatever frame rate you’re working at. But the new problem seems to be related to resolution. With Snapz I invariably capture some bizarre resolution with the plan of re-framing it in FCP. These days there has to be a good reason for me to work in a codec other than ProRes, so I’ve been saving the Snapz videos as ProRes. Unfortunately, It seems that although Snapz can save the videos to ProRes, if it’s a weird enough resolution, FCP and Compressor are unable to generate new video. Compressor says “Processing service request error: Codec not installed.” I didn’t have this problem in the summer, so I suspect it’s related to a QuickTime update. Between this summer and now, the computers we’re working with were upgraded to QuickTime 7.6.4. The solution I’ve settled on is saving the Snapz videos in the Animation codec. The Animation codec doesn’t seem to have any resolution restrictions, and it seems well suited to screen captures anyway.
Traditionally, film editing has 3 distinct phases. You cut the picture. Then you cut & mix the sound. Then you “finish” by cutting the negative or doing an online edit. These days a lot of that work is combined. Sometimes your edit is actually at full resolution, so an online isn’t strictly necessary. Sometimes your sound editing can be done with the same software you edited picture in, and by the same person.
But other times you need the special expertise of a sound editor, and the special tools that only specialized audio software like Pro Tools can offer. So today I’m going to talk very specifically about the steps you should go through to prepare a film for hand-off to a sound editor.
Ok, now you’re done. Put all this stuff on an external hard drive and get it to your sound editor. And remember that if you make any changes to the picture you’re going to have to do most of this all over again.
I recently upgraded my editing monitor, since the 13″ Sylvania I bought for $50 in 2002 really wasn’t cutting it anymore. I’d been planning it for years, but since I edit outside of my office so often, I was putting it off until a job came along to will help me pay for it. That never really happened, but I did it anyway. I moved my 37″ 9UK Panasonic professional plasma into my office and mounted it on the wall so it’s not right up in my face and clients can watch it comfortably from the couch. I bought a new 46″ G10 Panasonic consumer plasma for the living room. I only really wanted 42″, but 46″ was barely any more money! It’s huge! It’s also 1080p, and actually has HDMI inputs, so I see a real boost in picture quality for Blu Ray discs. There’s a general consensus around the Internets that the 48hz mode for 24p input causes too much flicker, but I think it looks pretty good on most images. Bright graphics definitely flicker like a PAL CRT though. I’ve only watched a blu ray discs with it turned on, so we’ll see how I feel about it after more testing.
Anyway, the real point of this is that in the course of my research I stumbled across the latest HDMI marketing gimmick known as Deep Color, which uses 12-bit-per-channel color (36-bit total, or 68.7 billion colors). Now I’m certainly a fan of high quality images, but I had never even heard of 12-bit video. I’ve mastered movies in 10-bit color whenever possible, which I thought was great. I’ve worked with plenty of 8-bit source material, and I’ve seen its limitations, but it still looks really good. There are always going to be people who want more though. And I guess 12-bit color is going to deliver it for us.
But what does this mean for content producers? I certainly don’t anticipate finishing a film in 12-bit color any time soon. A cursory search shows no widely available tape formats that can hold 12-bit color. HDCAM SR only goes to 10-bit. The Red One shoots 12-bit color, as do some other digital cameras, so theoretically a fully tapeless workflow could accommodate 12-bits through the whole process. But then how do you deliver it to consumers? I can’t imagine there are any cable/satellite signals even broadcasting 10-bit. The broadcasting trend seems to be going for lower data rates, not higher. Blu Ray in its current incarnation can’t pull it off, but some future form of digitally distributed media could. However, like cable and satellite, the trend is towards more compression and lower bit rates. 12-bit color files will be HUGE. I can see where this could be a good thing, but it seems a little like 240hz LCD screens: a higher number that’s just used to justify increased prices.
This is a collection of YouTube videos that highlight projects I’ve worked on in the past few years, as an editor, trailer editor, assistant editor, post supervisor, title designer, or even boom operator. Enjoy.