Expelled & Fair Use

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One of those things you pick up pretty quickly working in commercial filmmaking is that you are never, ever, ever, nerver, never, ever allowed to use music in your work without getting permission, and generally paying through the nose for it. Producers also generally tell you not to have any visible brands, artwork, or any copyrightable material without getting permission from the proper authorities first. Basically that means people in movies don’t live in the real world, because that stuff is everywhere. But that message didn’t reach the producers of Expelled, the documentary about the so-called Intelligent Design theory and its allegedly unfair treatment by the scientific establishment (unsurprising given the theory’s lack of… science). The producers of Expelled actually used 15 seconds of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” without paying for it, and expected to get away with it.

AND THEY DID!!!!! This seemed to me like an open-and-shut case of copyright infringement. Yoko and John Lennon’s sons (owners of the publishing rights) sued. But the judge in the case decided yesterday that the filmmakers were commenting on the content of the music, and refused to grant an injuction. I’ve read the decision, and it makes a lot of good points. The film is directly commenting on the lyrics and general message of “Imagine” and in order to make that point, you need to play some of the song. Just as you generally need to quote a portion of a book in order to write about it. Why shouldn’t filmmakers have the same ability to discuss works of art?

This story seems destined to grow more complicated. EMI owns the master license to the song and they’re still waiting to hear from the courts. I think it’s very important, and it’s unfortunate that I’m finding myself starting to agree with the makers of Expelled. Then again, the last big fair use case I remember involved 2 Live Crew and lyrics like “All that hair, it ain’t legit / ‘Cause you look like Cousin It.” Just because it’s crude doesn’t mean it’s not legal.

IMDb Theaters

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I got an email last night from Withoutabox, a fantastic service for people submitting to film festivals. For some reason I got bored with submitting to film festivals right around the time video on the web started getting popular. Maybe it’s because I can get my short film seen by thousands and thousands of people without paying any money, while a film festival can show my short to dozens or half-dozens of people for a $35 submission fee. So I haven’t used Withoutabox in a few years.

The email I got was about Withoutabox’s new deal with IMDb. They were purchased by the IMDb/Amazon conglomerate earlier this year, and their first visible joint initiative is something they’re calling “IMDb Theaters.” Supposedly any film you have in the Withoutabox database that matches an IMDb entry is eligible. In my case, only one of four seems to be eligible at the moment, probably because they have a length limit. I would like to upload a clip or a trailer for the other three that exceed the length limit, but I don’t have the option yet.

I did upload all of Getting Laid Tonight. It’s great seeing the thumbnail on the actual IMDb page.

Editing La Commedia – Part 1

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I’m in Amsterdam for 5 weeks editing an opera + movie. It’s not a movie of an opera and it’s not a movie with opera music. It’s an opera that also has a movie component that will be projected during the performance. There will be performers on the stage who are also in the movie. The movie consists of one giant screen projected in 1080p25 and 4 smaller screens projected in SD PAL anamorphic. The whole extravaganza is directed by Hal Hartley and the music is written by Louis Andriessen.

The movie portion was shot before I arrived on a Sony HDW-750P which shoots 25psf; basically putting the same frame in both fields of a 50i video stream, which is functionally the same as 25p, but not technically the same. It also looks a lot like 24p, with none of the weird motion that I usually see when I watch PAL video. Although there are definite judder effects when people move too much from frame to frame in front of high contrast backgrounds. I didn’t see things like that in Fay Grim, but I’m not sure what accounts for the difference. It’s HDCAM, so it’s 1920×1080 8-bit video. For the first time in my career we’re actually editing at 1080p using Apple’s ProRes HQ in FCP 6. We captured from an HDCAM deck using a Kona LHe card. Everything goes to an Xsan which so far has been able to fairly reliably play back 5 streams of ProRes HQ.

That’s important because in order to simulate the effect of 5 screens, we’ve broken our canvas up into 5 sections. There’s one large picture in the middle for the big screen and one 25% sized picture in each corner. In the theater, some of the screens will actually be perpendicular to the proscenium, but this is a good-enough approximation until we get our 3D holographic monitors going. I’ve set up 10 tracks in our timeline, one for video and one for graphics and other overlays for each screen. I’ve set up 5 motion path favorites in FCP and assigned them to the numbers 1 through 5 on the keyboard. As soon as I cut a clip into the timeline I select it and type the number of the screen it’s assigned to and it moves to the appropriate position. We aren’t doing any rendering at all. This stuff is getting indistinguishable from magic.

A word about ProRes HQ. It looks really amazing. At first I couldn’t see any difference between it and the HDCAM originals, but every once in a while now I’m seeing a small amount of aliasing on high contrast diagonal lines. The kind of thing that is always really tough for digital video. I’m willing to let that slide though, because otherwise it’s fantastic. EDIT: Those problems are entirely an artifact of monitoring through the Kona card in 8-bit mode. In 10-bit, I don’t see any problems with the picture. We’re monitoring on a Sony LMD-2450W 24-inch LCD screen and everything looks incredibly sharp. I am now officially spoiled by HD.

YouTube Gets Better

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The mystery is over. YouTube, in another in a long series of overdue moves, has revealed some real information about how people find your YouTube videos. In my case, it turns out that my most popular videos happen to be declared “related” to some other, more popular videos. I’ve never questioned the success of the “Bad Webcam Sex” video, which is naturally connected to all kinds of filth that people are mistakenly looking for on YouTube instead of the entire rest of the Internet. What really surprised me was the sudden and unexpected rise of viewers for Two Night Stand. I’ve now learned that nearly 50% of the traffic comes from being “related” to a video called “Fake Wife Swap” which was made for one of those 24-hour film festival challenges. 90% of Two Night Stand viewers come from related videos.

The other big change—which still hasn’t quite worked itself out yet—is the so-called “high quality” option for YouTube videos. On certain videos (the criteria isn’t at all clear to me) you can add &fmt=6 to the URL and get a significantly better video. Unfortunately I don’t know what you have to upload in order to get the higher quality. Is it a higher resolution, or a higher bitrate that I should be going for? Adding &fmt=6 to most videos gets you the usual blender-set-on-purée look. Some guidance from YouTube would be nice.

UPDATE: Brian Gary has an article at kenstone.net explaining the best settings to use to take advantage of YouTube’s higher quality options.

It’s Not Called Final Cut Pro HD

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I read a lot of job postings on Craigslist and Mandy. I have RSS feeds for any “editor” jobs that pop up.  Amazingly enough, I’ve ended up with a handful of great contacts from jobs I got through Craigslist. For some reason, among the many misspellings (trailor) and inaccuracies, the one that bugs me the most is requests for editors who can work with “Final Cut Pro HD.” Version 4.5—and only version 4.5—of Final Cut Pro was known as Final Cut Pro HD. It was a mistake to call it that at the time, and it’s just led to confusion. Anybody who is working in Final Cut Pro HD should upgrade. FCP 6 is much better.

My other pet peeve is the people looking for free work who try to make me feel guilty for wanting money for my time and extremely specialized skills. They’re always variations on the theme of “don’t apply to this job if you just got into this business to make money.” Well, you know what, I’ve worked for free on movies when I thought it would be worth my time, and I’ve asked people to work for me for free as well, but anyone with that attitude is not going to be fun to work with. You know who goes into a business hoping to lose money? People with complicated tax schemes, that’s who. Whenever you ask for someone’s time and effort, you need to compensate them. It doesn’t have to be money, but credit and a copy of the finished film are not compensation, they are an obligation. A positive experience is compensation.

Vuze Trouble

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I use Azureus quite a bit when I want to download something quickly thanks to the bandwidth of thousands of my friends. In an effort to become legitimate, Azureus has launched a streaming service called Vuze that encourages distribution of HD content. I don’t have any HD content to share right now, but on the web, 640×480 is pretty high-res. So I decided to upload a few things and try it out. I started with Getting Laid Tonight. Everything happens very quickly. Upload is as fast as you can make it, and the download is too. But the audio was a few seconds out of sync. I’ve had trouble with Getting Laid Tonight in the past because the fully cropped video is a non-standard size. That might have been the problem. So I tried the Brad Wood music video. The sync was fine, but the compression destroyed the music quality. Everything sounds over-modulated. I’ve removed both videos from the “content network” but I’ll try out a few other things. I’m mainly interested in this for the distribution of my animated series. I’m going to create it in HD, so this could be a good way to distribute the HD video.

Avid Xpress Pro: Good Riddance

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Ever since Media Composer was released as a software-only option (no longer requiring expensive Avid hardware) I’ve had a hard time understanding why it cost so much more than Xpress Pro, considering the complete compatibility between them, and the large overlap in features. I didn’t see much need to upgrade to Media Composer myself. Well, apparently Avid is done with Xpress Pro, and they’re slashing the price of Media Composer. I think this is a great move. It puts Media Composer much closer to the price of Final Cut Studio, and removes the vestigial Xpress Pro line. It’s getting so cheap, I might even buy a Mojo some day.

Uncle Gary Breaks The Burro

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Every once in a while I go through the various unlabeled and ambiguously labeled DV tapes I’ve been collecting since college, mostly in the hope that I’ll find the long-lost rehearsal tape that I shot with Jennie Tarr before we started shooting Camera Noise. I remember it being quite good. But I also think I taped over it.

Luckily, I found this little gem. Uncle Gary Breaks The Burro is a 4-minute story that my uncle told me for a class called “Life Stories.” This was the warm-up for my later project The Life Story of Kyle Gilman as Told to Him by His Mother Mary.