Alpine ida-x305s and non-accessible iPhone

I recently bought a new (to me) Subaru. It still had the factory stereo and 6 disc in-dash changer. The previous owner was using a tape adapter to hook up his iPod. I don’t really listen to CDs much anymore. I’m about 98% iPhone, so this wasn’t going to work. It actually didn’t sound bad. But whenever I turned the stereo up above talking level, the audio would cut out as if it was being overloaded. I thought about moving my Clarion and Infinity system from my old car to my new car. But I also decided to look at the current state of the art in car stereos to see what’s new. Suffice to it say, looking for something that was iPhone-centric, I was very disappointed.

iPod Control

This is the big “new” thing in car stereos, the ability to control an iPod or iPhone. I put new in quotes because when I bought the Clarion unit in 2008, it was a new feature then to. Ok, this is where everyone fails. Apple created one of the best user interfaces the world had ever seen with the click-wheel iPod and then they did it again with the iPhone and iPod Touch. When you hook an iPod or iPhone into the USB port of an Alpine, Clarion or other head unit, it takes over the i-device and no longer lets you use the controls (see pic above). You then have to use the head unit’s controls. This would be fine except for the fact that the layout is NOTHING like the iPod/iPhone.

Clarion has replaced this:

Movies. I’ve spent the last 2 years working on a film called The Art of Flight. I’ve mentioned it a few times on the blog. As an action sports documentary, Flight is unique in it’s release model. It doesn’t take a Theatrical, Rental, DVD Purchase route like a typical Hollywood film. The DVD, Blu-Ray and iTunes download all became available the day after the movie’s premiere in New York. It then went on a worldwide tour where the film is shown in a different city about every other night. It doesn’t get a traditional theatrical release and isn’t available for rent. So the way most people see this movie is through downloads or DVD/Blu-Ray.

The action sports audience is one of the most tech savvy. Which means a high percentage of downloads, and a high percentage of piracy. At $30/copy we have to give people a reason to want to buy the movie instead of pirating it. The prices for iTunes are $8 for the SD version and $10 for 720p. As much as we like people buying the downloads, we also want to give them a reason to purchase a physical copy. How?

So we decided to do 4 things:

One: Bonus Material. This is something that we’ve been doing for awhile with the action sports movies I’ve worked on. We load the DVD/Blu-Ray with lots of extras. Hollywood movies do this too. They will create rental discs that are bare bones and then save the extras for their for sale discs. As a Netflix/Redbox consumer, I don’t like this model, but I understand why it’s done.

Two: We bundled the Blu-Ray and DVD in a single package. We didn’t want people to have to purchase the movie twice if they have a DVD player now and get a Blu-Ray player later. This is the OPPOSITE of what Hollywood does. They will do anything to sell you the same content a few times over. We kept the purchase price the same as if we were just doing a single disc, and eat the few bucks it costs us to bundle them together. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on this, so I’m glad we did it.

Three: Dolby TrueHD. We partnered up with Dolby and created a 7.1 mix of the movie at Skywalker Sound outside San Francisco. The mix is really incredible and has one of the most active surround-scapes I’ve ever heard. Many movies shy away from putting too much information in the surround channels, but we took full advantage. Due to technical constraints, you can only get the 7.1 mix on the Blu-Ray (it’s too much data for DVD or iTunes movies to handle). This is another reason why we bundled the DVD and Blu-Ray together.

Four: A Book. This was the big revelation for me. Brain Farm’s previous movie, That’s It That’s All, was available as a limited edition DVD that included a 40 page booklet of photos from the making of the movie. It was well received, so we decided to go one step further and created a 200+ page coffee table book for The Art of Flight. The print quality of this book is amazing and took my breath away the first time I saw it. While I was home on vacation I showed the book to friends and family and they were blown away. The book also includes Blu-Ray and DVD copies of the movie. For me, the book was great because I can give this really cool thing to my friends and family, that they can then show off to their friends and family. What’s Eric been up to, you ask? Here’s his latest movie!

The takeaway: By doing these 4 things, we created a huge value for the physical product. By settling for just a download or pirating the movie, the consumer only gets a fraction of the experience. I predict that future sales of physical media will fall, but those products will become more valuable as producers try to create incentives to purchase, as we did.

As an additional note, I was really disappointed with the quality of the 720p download from iTunes. We put a lot of effort into the visual quality of this film, and a lot of that was lost in the compression. Not too much we can do about that though as it’s just the nature of the format. To get the visual and aural experience that we intended, the Blu-Ray really is the only way to go. If you can make it to one of the tour stops, even better. All tour stops are using Dolby Cinema servers, the same that are used commercial digital theaters.

Photos. My sister-in-law has been bitten by the photography bug. Hard. Every few weeks I’ll get an email from Snapfish to see her latest photos. She’s big into photo albums and scrapbooking. She and my mom created really cool scrapbooks of our trip to Germany a few years ago. But, she stopped printing her photos long ago. Instead, she now does seasonal or event photobooks through Snapfish. Similar services are available through iPhoto, Adoramapix and many others. While I was home, she showed me the one she did for this summer. It was a really cool layout and much more polished than a typical photo album. I think she said it was $20. She leaves the latest photobook out on display in their home so visitors can flip through. These photobooks serve 2 purposes. 1, they reduce the number of photos to the few best ones, which makes the experience better for the reader, and 2, it’s still something physical you can hold, and not a photo slideshow on the internet. There’s still a lot of value in having something physical.

So I’m not sure if this answers the question for me, but it definitely leaves me with some things to think about.

For more information on The Art of Flight: www.artofflightmovie.com

If you’d like to purchase The Art of Flight or check out the book, click here

Check out Brain Farm Digital Cinema: www.brainfarmcinema.com

In case you’re wondering where I’ve been all summer, check out this teaser. At Brain Farm, we’re all buried in post getting this movie done. I did the color correction on this teaser. Look for The Art of FLIGHT on DVD, Blu-Ray and iTunes Extras download on Sept 8th.

For you post production geeks, the post pipeline I devised for this movie is fairly unique. Director Curt Morgan built an edit and recording suite at his home so he could work on the movie at off-hours and spend more time with his family. Thousands of hours of footage have been shot for this movie, and early on we decided to cut at ProRes Proxy and online at ProRes HQ. Even at Proxy, we still had over 30TB of footage for the entire project. So in addition to our 56TB ethernet SAN at our main office, we built a 2 Mac SAN at Curt’s house with 42TB of storage. We have 2 copies of the footage – Curt works on the movie at his house, while the rest of us work on DVD Extras, commercials and teasers at the office. But our office SAN isn’t big enough to keep the ProResHQ files online. So we’ve begun the onlining process – 1. Curt media manages a nearly locked segment and gives me the drive, 2. we take the drive and bring the ProResHQ and camera raw files back from LTO-4 tapes (our current LTO-4 archive is roughly 200TB), 3. we reconnect his media managed timeline to the new ProResHQ files and compile the camera raw files to be reassembled during the color correction session which will go down at Spypost in San Francisco in a few weeks. We also use a few other tricks to keep our different systems in sync, but that’s a post for another time. Lots of long days right now but the movie looks insane. I can’t wait for the premiere!

www.artofflightmovie.com

Flickr User: Brooks Elliott, Creative Commons

As you probably know, I live in a very small town, with limited resources, in the middle of nowhere. When I first moved here, I could get my film processed at quite a few locations, many offering B&W and slide processing in addition to negative and all the regular services. Their prices were the same as anywhere else in the country. I bought a Holga camera, which uses medium format (120) film and I was happy. But as digital technology took over, these services started to slip away. B&W and slide processing were the first to go. Then custom printing. At first this was OK, because most of my 120 film was slide that I had cross-processed in C-41 chemistry. I only shot a few rolls of slide a year on my Yashica TLR, and sending those out wasn’t a big deal. But within months pretty much all formats except for 35mm negative were dropped. There was only one place left in the valley that processed 120 film (and only negative). They had a great processing and scanning package that was about $10 a roll. But then they replaced their bulk scanner with a nicer one thats more labor intensive and dramatically raised their scanning prices. And then their film processor broke. I just called them the other day and it’s still broken. It’s been almost a year.

The only film I can still have processed locally is 35mm negative (boring!) at Albertsons. I asked them about cross-processing and the girl at the counter looked at me like my hair was on fire. Which these days is the typical reaction to just about anyone talking about film.

So I now have to send everything out. Because of shipping costs, I try to send film in chunks, but that means even longer before I can see the images, sometimes months later. I really don’t want to ditch film – the images from my Holga, Yashica TLR and night-time B&W on my Olympus XA just can’t be replicated with digital – but I almost feel forced.

Ken Rockwell has made a great argument that film is still cheap for the high end photographer. If you take a typical high-end digital SLR like the Canon 1Ds or Nikon D3x for thousands of dollars, and compare that to a film shooter with a Canon 1v or Nikon F6, the film shooter will come out ahead. But this assumes that the digital photographer is not buzzing off a hundred shots a minute and is replacing their camera every 2-3 years. It only works for slow and methodical photographers – think nature and landscape. For photographers shooting large format film, there’s no digital equivalent. But I don’t think this argument holds for everyday photographers with point and shoots. Or high volume photography like weddings or news. This is about the only way I can justify my film photography right now. I use my 7D mostly for video and time lapses and I shoot film stills on a Canon EOS A2 (EOS 5). But with the $2 Plastic Bullet app on my iPhone, it’s getting harder and harder to justify the film cost of my Holga, even though the Holga just looks so much better.

Film will only continue going down this slope. Less stock will be produced every year and fewer facilities will be able to process it. It will gradually get more expensive to the point that it will only be a small niche of the really rich or really dedicated.

Homebrewing. When I was working at WYOU, the community TV station in Madison, WI, I interviewed Tom Porter of Lake Louie Brewing.He runs a small brewery in a 1000 square foot barn in Southeast Wisconsin. It’s just big enough to supply tap lines at a few local bars, and sell growlers in a few liquor stores in Madison. Back then he was running at capacity and I’m pretty sure he still is (it’s really good beer!). During the interview, he told me that he first got into homebrewing because he was building his home with his friends’ help and he was going through a lot of beer. So he thought making his own would save him some money. If you’ve ever made your own beer, you know this isn’t entirely true. The initial equipment investment is a few hundred dollars, and the ingredients needed for the batches roughly works out to be the same as if you bought cheap beer. But you can make microbrew-quality beer for the same price as Schlitz, and that’s the draw for many people. Many homebrewers stay at this level and are perfectly happy, but Tom really got into it and wanted to expand and jump into sales. But homebrew systems don’t scale up. Professional brewing equipment is really expensive. Just running a line from the fermenter to the break tank with the proper clamps and valves can cost almost $1000. And that’s just a pipe! So Tom became quick friends with the owner of the local dump and the owner of a welding shop. So he went through scrap metal and made as much of his equipment as he could. He still had to buy the majority of his equipment at retail, but a few of the pieces he was able to do himself. He actually found his mash tun at the dump! Only in Wisconsin…

Music. I’ve been playing music off and on since I was young, mostly guitar and drums. I’ve been in a few bands and right now I’m a member of the Deadlocks as a drummer. A goal many small musicians have is to make their hobby pay its way. If you can justify your purchase of a new $2500 Les Paul Standard by playing a bunch of gigs with it, awesome! Most musicians aren’t in it for the money. But if it’s at least paying for itself, then you’re covered. It’s another reason why I’ve always thought that you’re not a real musician if you don’t play live.

Bring it back a few notches. Trent over at the Simple Dollar addresses this in his post Making Expensive Hobbies More Financially Manageable. Using golf as an example, he talks about the arms race his friends have over their drivers. As a former golfer, I totally get this. He decided the difference between his old driver and his buddy’s new driver was that he would need to use his 3 iron on the next shot instead of a 4 iron. So not that big of a deal in the long run.

The only funny part of Caddyshack 2:

Robert Stack: “You’ve got a driver and a putter, how can you play with just two clubs?”

Randy Quaid: “How many do you need?”

Some ways to bring the costs down. With photography, videography and music, I’ve noticed that equipment costs are on an exponential price spectrum. If you look at a Sony EX3 at $10k, and a Panasonic Varicam 3700 at $40k, would you say that the Varicam is 4 times better? No. Some would say its a bit better, some might say 2x better. Spend the minimum you need to achieve the results you want. Refer to my article What’s On Screen Is The Only Thing That Matters for more on this. Are you good enough to notice or be able to handle the difference? I thought about this when I was looking at electric guitars many years ago. I ended up buying an Epiphone Les Paul instead of a Gibson because as a beginner, I wouldn’t have noticed the difference. I was just learning how to play. There’s a joke in the guitar industry – there’s only 2 kinds of people that own Paul Reed Smith guitars: professional musicians and doctors. Only a real professional guitarist can make a PRS guitar really sing, and only a doctor can afford one. If you’re not playing professionally at a high level, skip the PRS.

Do you have too much equipment already? Do you really need all those guitars? A Les Paul for rock, a Strat for clean and twang, an archtop for jazz, etc. How about a 335 with split coil humbuckers and you get all 3 of these instruments in one. Do you need all those amps and effects units? I’m currently selling all my amps and most of my effects to replace them with a small Roland practice amp. I would use the Roland more anyway because its less cumbersome to hook up and play. I bought all this equipment to use at live gigs that never happened. I need to be realistic with myself and just sell it all since it never gets used.

I’m a huge gear-head, at least in the production realm. I get caught up in bitrates, lens speeds, sensor sensitivity, etc. When I started playing drums again, I didn’t want to fall into the gear trap. It’s part of the reason why I quit many years ago. I ended up buying a used 6 piece Gretsch kit with a complete cymbal package from another member of the band. I put off buying the set for as long as I could because I just didn’t want to deal with more gear, let alone building something myself. I started looking at different ride cymbals and I just got overwhelmed by the options. I realized if the audience can’t hear the difference, then it’s not worth it. Would they notice if I dropped $300 on a new ride? Probably not. But what if I bought a $20 cowbell. Oh yeah, now you’re talking. There’s only a few more pieces I’d like to get for the set, maybe $200 total, and then I will consider it complete. I have no desire to replace the whole thing for a “better” one. See where you can spend your money most effectively.

I’m thinking about getting a road bike and training for a triathlon. I’ve never done anything like that before and I’ve never owned a road bike. Just going into the bike shop is intimidating. Bikes are another huge gear sinkhole. I spoke to my brother who’s done a few triathlons and he told me it just doesn’t matter. He bought his bike for $75 and added some new pedals, shoes, bars and tires and called it good. His bike is a bit heavier than the other riders, but since he’s doing these triathlons for fun and his level of gear isn’t affecting the fun he’s having (or the fitness he’s gaining), theres no reason to spend all that extra cash to get a small percentage performance increase. So ignore all the crap and just focus on what’s important for you.

Make your hobby Pay Its Way. If you’re a photographer, sell your photos. Submit a few to a stock house like iStockPhoto. Join a band and play some gigs. I was visiting a homebrewing friend of mine a few weeks ago and he said that in California, they were looking at passing a law that would make it legal to sell homebrewed beer. Since homebrewing became legal in the 70s, it’s been illegal to sell. You’re only allowed to make enough for personal and family consumption. States make a huge amount of money taxing alcohol. But the spirit of this new law is to allow homebrewers to sell their beer at things like farmer’s markets. That would be really cool and a great way to make homebrewing pay its way. Another option would be to teach your hobby, either on your own or at a community college. For me, I wouldn’t teach drumming or guitar because I still consider myself a novice, but for things like cinematography or editing, I definitely could. Other options are to make training DVDs or publish eBooks. These are 2 things I’m looking into right now. Many of my production contemporaries are doing very well doing these. Read the article on Wise Bread linked below, which has many more ideas. It’s better than me rewriting everything here.

Edit – Ooh, I thought of another one, thanks to Homebrewing friends – own gear as a group/co-op or start a club. Years ago, after I quit homebrewing, I vowed that if I ever got back into it, I would go straight to kegging and skip bottles all together. Washing all those bottles, ugh. That’s what Tom did when he was a homebrewer before starting Lake Louie. But the startup costs for kegging rigs is pretty high compared to bottles, and much of the equipment just sits. This cost is the biggest hurdle to me starting back up again. So some friends of mine back home bought the equipment as a group and shared the costs. If you start a club, or are a member of a club, you could do something similar. Maybe a film processor that many people could use. Bike repair tools and equipment. Cameras, lenses, and accessories like strobes.

Know when to cut it off. With all the articles I found on paying for hobbies, no one addressed this point, but I think you should consider it. This is definitely a hard thing to think about, especially if it’s something you love. But for some people hobbies ebb and flow. Maybe you have too many hobbies and need to cut back. I love Super 8 film. It creates such a great look for things like weddings or other events where there’s a sense of nostalgia. The last thing I shot on Super 8 was a friend’s wedding last summer. Film and processing costs have remained the same for a long time, so that wasn’t an issue. The issue was the transfer to digital. Right now, my telecine is not doing great. I estimate I would need to put about $2k into it to get it to where I would like it as far as stability and focus. This doesn’t include getting a new camera for it, which I really need to do too. It’s also extremely slow to scan the film. Then I have to process it multiple times, do color correction and make other fixes. Compared to sending the film out for a professional transfer, scanning myself is the equivalent of paying myself about $3/hr. That’s just the labor cost and not the equipment or maintenance cost. I just can’t justify that and I’m now looking to sell my telecine equipment. I originally bought it all to learn the process of scanning film, and how to color correct raw film. For that it was a great learning tool, and I can now communicate better with professional colorists and scanners when they’re handling my 16mm and 35mm film. But now that I’ve learned those things, it doesn’t make financial sense to keep the telecine anymore.

So I think I raised more questions than I answered, as I’m struggling with this issue myself. Do you have any suggestions on how to bring the costs of hobbies down? Have you stopped doing any hobbies because they got too expensive?

Additional Reading:

The Simple Dollar – Making Expensive Hobbies More Financially Manageable

Wise Bread – Make You Hobby Pay Its Way

Get Rich Slowly – Making and Doing: The Value of Productive Hobbies

9 mics, ready to go

The Deadlocks are currently recording a few tracks for Matt Herriger’s upcoming film Winter’s Wind. I can say that this is my first official studio recording session on drums. I’ve recorded myself playing guitar a bunch, and the majority of my live performances and rehearsals over the years have been recorded, and I’ve even jammed a few times in different studios, but this was a distinctly different experience. This is the first time where I felt the pressure of recording.

Maybe it’s because all those other experiences were on guitar. I think I felt more pressure this time because I was drumming and had to keep the time. In live performance I make a lot of mistakes, but it doesn’t really matter as long as the overall groove stays intact. But when you’re recording, everything matters. During this session I played the drum kit on a few songs, and my Wavedrum on a few others. On the Wavedrum I used mostly the conga and djembe settings. It records really well. If I recorded a real djembe, then swapped in the Wavedrum, I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference on tape. The Wavedrum is one of the most amazing instruments ever made. I’m surprised they’re not more popular.

I kept things as simple as possible. As we practiced a few songs, the other guys kept telling me to do less. Do less. The recordings sound sparse as a result, but that’s really good. Recording the drums wasn’t much different than what I have always been told when recording guitars – keep the effects low and simple and preserve the space. By keeping the hits simple with short attack, and not doing things like dragging the sticks on the snare (which sounds great live), we were able to add some delay to the drum kit and get some cool sounds.

The jams were long though, and simple beats are really hard (for me) to hold and keep accurate for long periods of time. I have a harder time keeping a simple boom-chick going than something with fills, double bass and accents. I don’t know if this is just me, or all drummers. This is where my inexperience and general lack of technical skill come into play.

It was so much quieter than our practices! Everyone wore headphones and kept the amps low. That was nice. It made every articulation I did on the drums stand out more without me having to pound the skins into oblivion. For a few songs we played to a click track. Some of the guys didn’t want to do it, but we tried it on one song and the results were great. Everyone just felt more comfortable. It made it easier for me because for those particular songs I was playing the Wavedrum and it’s hard to set a beat for a band without a distinct snare or bass hit for people to follow. With the click track running, I could get a little more creative with the conga sounds and not throw people off. It should also make overdubbing later a lot easier.

Overall, it was an interesting experience, especially coming at it from a drummer’s perspective for the first time.

As I assemble my list of films for the “Movies Every Filmmaker Should Own” series, I’m running into a dilemma. I own a lot of DVDs, but I’ve bought very few in recent years. My movie consumption has consisted of Netflix (by mail and streaming), Hulu, Redbox and the occasional borrowed disc.

I’m sorry major movie studios, but I just don’t buy media anymore.

As a producer, I feel really bad admitting this. Our industry is heavily reliant on media sales. Especially the smaller producers that don’t have distribution or TV deals. Selling their own DVDs is the only way they can make a return on their projects. As I look through my library, I see quite a few of these movies/shows/shorts. I might have one of only 20 existing copies of this particular edit. I have quite a few discs of projects I’ve worked on in various capacities. But really, this is the exception.

Through the power of the internet, you can get almost anything you want if you’re willing to search for it and wait for it to be streamed or shipped to you. In fact, hoarding all this media in the off chance that you might consume it again a few years down the road is almost psychotic.

I think I have about 300 DVDs. Off the top of my head, I would say I could get 80% of them through either Netflix or online streaming. The rest are ones that are unique and would be difficult to find elsewhere. So right there I just figured out that I could sell or give away 240 DVDs, because if I really wanted to watch them again, I could easily get them again. That’s a good amount of shelf space. I’ve already ripped my 600 or so CDs into my iTunes library. I was thinking about doing the same with my movies, but when I realized how much storage space I would need, I stopped. I just doesn’t seem worth when I can re-rent or stream them so easily.

Steve Jobs has argued that the iTunes Store is better than a subscription model because people want to own their media. Well, maybe not all their media.

Magazines. I subscribe to just a few magazines. Many articles are reprinted in their entirety on the magazine’s website. Some may delay the articles by a month, but with most content this doesn’t really matter. Others actually add bonus content to their website. There’s a few mags that don’t put their articles online, but these are few and far between. I know that when I walk by the newsstand at the airport and see a copy of Pop Photo with a great cover article on a facinating new way to shoot things, I can sit down 5 minutes later at the coffee shop and pull up that same article on my laptop for free. Hell, most of the information in magazines is OLD.

But one magazine I have always kept physical copies of is Guitar World. Each month GW includes 4 or 5 song transcriptions. Due to their licensing agreements, these transcriptions can only exist in these magazines and can’t be reprinted online or elsewhere. So I would keep these magazines in huge piles because someday I might sit down and learn Dark Side of the Moon from Speak To Me/Breathe, all the way through Brain Damage. I’ve been saying that for 15 years now. I think it might be time to let the piles go. If and when I really want to learn these songs, I can find transcriptions online that will be close enough.

Music. This is the biggie. Like movies, the only CDs I’ve purchased in the last few years has been from small artists or friends. If I buy anything somewhat mainstream, it’s from iTunes. But mostly, I rely on free Internet Radio and my subscriptions to Pandora and Rhapsody. Now that I’ve ripped all my CDs to iTunes, the discs just sit on shelves or in spindles.

Rumors abound that Apple is using their new server farm in North Carolina to create cloud storage specifically for media streaming. So you can move all your music off your devices and stream from Apple. Many people already do this using services such as Dropbox and Sugarsync. If you use Pandora or Rhapsody, you’re already doing this. Is this the death knell for physical media?

Books. This one is tough. I’m a huge fan of the library. I’m not the type to buy a $25 best seller to read once. I have a very small collection of books, mostly reference stuff related to music, production or the like. But I know many people that are really proud of their huge collection of books and almost brag about it. I’m not excited about the current digital options though. I can go to the library and pick up a recently released best seller, but I can’t do the same if I have an iPad or Kindle. My only option on these devices is to buy. I feel like print media is about 10 years behind music and movies in this regard.

It’s kind of amazing how different we treat these pieces of media and how we consume them. Music – can’t rent, but you can subscribe, stream or buy; Movies – you can rent, buy and stream just about anything; Magazines – you can find articles on their websites, but very few are available electronically; and Books – libraries are good for physical copies, but you can’t rent or borrow a digital one, you can only buy (well, you can borrow with a Kindle, but it’s extremely limited).

As I contemplate all this, the physical media, the cloud, subscriptions vs buying, one thing really bothers me: the quality level of all of these options is crap. I hate that the music I buy from iTunes is so heavily compressed. Have you ever rented or purchased a movie through iTunes? Same thing. In production, we’re pushing for higher and higher resolution, color space and bit depth, yet on the consumption side, quality is being lowered. I’m not going to jump into the vinyl vs. digital debate, but the same arguments are true here. I have a fairly expensive stereo and speakers, and yes I can hear the difference. But I guess convienence is the winner here. I can keep piles upon piles of CDs and a huge aluminum component CD player with Burr Brown D/A converters

or I can just plug in my iPhone.

What do you think? Is keeping and using physical media a thing of the past?

The reason I picked The Abyss for this list is the Special Edition cut and how different it is from the theatrical release.

For the last few years there has been a glut of Unrated or Extended Editions. A movie might have a 3 second shot put back in and the marketing machine takes over calling it the OMG Look Out Boobies! Unrated Edition. When in fact nothing of substance has been added. For the majority of Unrated or Extended Editions, it’s usually things that slowed the pace of the movie down and should have been cut anyway. Any good director or editor would cut these shots or scenes for the sake of the movie. I haven’t seen too many extended editions that I liked. I prefer editing that moves the story along. I’m a huge fan of getting to the second act as quickly as possible. But more on that in another article.

The Abyss Special Edition is different. The original cut of The Abyss was exceedingly long. I want to say in the 3.5 hour range. Cameron states in the commentary that the only way to bring the movie down was to cut entire scenes and subplots, not just trim shots. Because he wanted to progress the story forward, that meant scenes involving Virgil and Lindsey and their backstory. It also meant cutting down some great early scenes with the crew, like when they’re singing Little Feat’s “Willin’”. Cutting scenes like this means pushing the story forward at the expense of the audience forming a bond with the characters.

Losing or trimming those scenes wasn’t destructive to the story, so I can understand them being cut. But the major cut doesn’t happen until Virgil plunges into the depths to dismantle the atomic bomb. Once down with the aliens, it all changes. In the original version, the aliens flash the typed banter between Virgil and Lindsey on the screen. Then they raise the crippled rig to the surface. I’ll admit, it never made much sense to me. It felt like a very rushed third act, but I could never put my finger on why.

In the Special Edition, the aliens flash images and video of war, dictators and human destruction. They show Virgil that they are sick of humans and their destruction and have made the oceans rise up to take out the human race via massive tsunamis. Virgil then defends the human race and convinces the aliens to call back the tsunamis. It completely changes the entire tone of The Abyss and what the movie is about.

After seeing it for the first time, I was shocked and had to watch the movie again. After many viewings, I can see why it was taken out. But at the same time, the theatrical cut of the film seems to be missing something. You could say the theatrical cut was more about Virgil and Lindsey. But having some of their personal scenes missing, you can’t really make that argument. The Special Edition tries to cover so much ground, that you’re not really sure what the director is trying to say. But by cutting too much, the story goes from expansive to muddy, instead of tight.

I chose this movie for this list because of the 2 very different versions presented. As the director or editor, what would you do? The studio has told you to cut, what would you cut? Do you think they made the right decisions? More than anything, the Special Edition shows how much impact editing can have on the story. It’s rare to see multiple versions of a film, and in doing so, we get some great insight to the process and the decisions made by the editor and director.

“Movies Every Filmmaker Should Own” is a regular series on EricHansen.tv. The point of this series is not to say you need to watch The Godfather because it’s the greatest movie ever made. Plenty of film critics have lists like that. It’s to highlight movies that are advancing the craft of filmmaking, whether it’s through the contents of the movies themselves, or in many cases the extras and commentaries that are contained within. These are the movies that inspire me more in their construction, and are great learning tools for different aspects of the craft.

Sony announced the F65, an 8k camera with a Super 35mm-sized sensor. For those keeping score, Sony has confused us even more by naming their new camera F65 because it has 65mm film equivalent resolution (but with a 35mm sensor, not 65mm) to go with their F35 (which has a 35mm-sized sensor but outputs 1080p HD) and their F23 (which has a 2/3″ sensor that also outputs 1080p).

Confusing, but anyway.

Sony has generated a lot of buzz with this camera by leapfrogging RED to 8k. RED Digital Cinema has made chasing resolution into an art form. But will you see it on-screen?

ARRI made waves last year with the Alexa. They created a Super 35mm sensor camera that shoots (only!) 2k, and gets 13.5 stops of latitude (damn!). This was huge because 35mm film gets 13-14 stops and the original RED One sensor could get maybe 8-9 stops on a good day. A Canon DSLR is more like 6 stops using its standard settings. The overall resolution wasn’t nearly as important as the ability to gather light and the demand for the Alexa has proved this. Film has still been a big player because of it’s unmatched light gathering ability. Video just can’t compare.

So as I read the literature about the F65, I just lost interest, which really amazed me at the time because I’m such a technical dork. Just looking at the pipeline required to deal with 8k imagery, and then how most people would view this footage, I just didn’t see the point. The vast majority of digital cinemas are HD or 2k. After that huge investment, it’s going to be quite awhile before the theater owners upgrade to 4k or beyond. Speaking with a few theater owners recently, many are questioning their initial investment into digital and 3D.

As a reader of this blog, I’m sure you’ve owned or used a 35mm adapter. Examples include models by Letus and P+S Technik at the high end, and Jag35 at the low end. These were all the rage because for the first time in history, you could capture the shallow depth of field of 35mm film on a “cheap” video camera. No $100k budget needed. The allure wasn’t the shallow depth of field in and of itself. Remember Citizen Kane? It was a huge hit (to film scholars at least) because it was the first movie to have DEEP depth of field. The appeal is that it was something video shooters couldn’t have. And now they could! But the most amazing thing about shallow depth of field is that you didn’t need a super expensive big screen TV or a multi-thousand dollar surround sound system to view it. You could watch it on the web. Yes, the impact would be greater on a big screen, but the visual aesthetic stayed intact, no matter the medium.

Shallow depth of field was a big deal because you could see it on any screen.

Going back to the Alexa and latitude, this reasoning holds as well. Whether you’re watching a video on the web or on a 60 foot screen, if there’s more detail in the shadows, you’ll see it. If more latitude results in a better color correction, you’ll see that too. More pure resolution doesn’t make the color better or the shadow details visible.

So I’ve devised a simple statement for dealing with the almost ridiculous amount of new technology that gets released:

What’s on screen is the only thing that matters.

This extends to the following questions: Will my audience notice or care? What’s the (cheapest, smallest, lightest, easiest, etc) way to achieve this effect or goal?

When you really start digging into these questions, you can really start to get creative. Here are a few examples from my own experience:

- Instead of paying for an expensive helicopter (or extremely unstable RC helicopter), try a hang glider. Or a really really long lens from across the valley.

- A dolly is too damn big to carry around and rig up. What about a shorter track that goes on top of the tripod, like a Glidetrack? Will you get the same dolly effect on-screen?

- We can’t afford a bank of Kinoflos or softboxes. What about some $20 China balls? Once the lights are set, the viewer won’t be able to tell the difference.

- How about using natural light and bounces instead of recreating the evening news set with 5+ lights that are way too bright? Depending on your camera, a light kit based around a backpack full of 250s, 500s and collapsable bounces might make more sense than a rolling case of 1k’s (or ARRI SUNs for that matter)

- If you’re using a jib, do you really need a motion head to get your shot? With a motion head you need the head, joysticks, monitor, power, etc. Maybe a wider lens and better jib movement planning would suffice? Would the viewer notice?

- Remote controlled cable cam with motorized head, wireless HD, batteries, etc; or a dude hanging from a zip line?

- Do you need a remote Technocrane when a scissor lift or cherry picker with an actual DP holding the camera will result in a better shot anyway? A remote head can be much more jerky than a person holding the camera.

- Does the ability to watch footage, color grade and transcode on-set, result in a better shot? Or is it more gear, power and personnel that just gets in the way?

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. All the technology in the world doesn’t matter if it doesn’t result in noticeable difference on-screen. Go with the smallest, cheapest, lightest, easiest way to get the shot you see in your head. Sony’s F65 might be 8k RGB 4:4:4, but if you’re lighting sucks and your actor misses her cues, you might as well be shooting on your iPhone.

So the rumored Final Cut Pro X has been announced. Like everyone else, I have more questions than Apple gave answers. The additions are pretty slick. I personally am a huge fan of long awaited additions like a true open timeline (but this has been a “feature” since FCP4, so is it really open?) and 64bit. FCP can finally use the computer that I’m installing it on! Some people have been scared off by some of the more consumer additions like Smart Collections, Ken Burns Effect, Match Grade, Automatic Audio Clean Up and Magnetic Timeline, just to name a few. But I look at this list and find that there’s quite a few things that I use 3rd party plug-ins for (ie, Pluraleyes) and it’s nice to see Apple address some of the shortcomings. Yes I admit, I have used iMovie to make slideshows with the Ken Burns effect. Editing wedding videos, you know. Personally, I really dig the darker interface. I’ve been working in Color’s dark gray confines for years and it really is better on the eyes.

But like all Apple presentations, it was more about what they DIDN’T say. Can I still print a tape? What about Color? Will my plug-ins still work?

I heard one rumor swirling around that it’s no longer based on Quicktime. It’s now Core Video. What’s that? And that XML is no longer supported. It’s now SQL Lite. Whaaa?

A shipping date of June and a price of $299 means 2 things to me. One, I will buy it in June! Two, I won’t use it until October at the earliest. I’m sorry. The big shops can’t handle a huge change like this. I need at least 6 months of testing and I need to consult with all my vendors before I consider something like this in a shared environment. Going from one point update to another is one thing. Going from a full version to another is another thing. But this is a completely new app. It’s more akin to completely switching NLE platforms. And come to think of it, if Apple screws this one up, shops will switch to Avid or Premiere.

I’m not at NAB, so I can’t really give a great review. So here are some of the best I’ve come across so far:

FreshDV (Sneek Peek Video)

Larry Jordan writes a great level-headed review, as he was one of the few that got to preview FCPX a few months ago in Cupertino

Walter Biscardi

MacRumors reiterates that what was shown at NAB was a version of FCPX from February, and that in fact, the app “has moved significantly forward since that time”

Gary Adcock

My Twitter feed also exploded with video professionals both excited and scared. The truth is, no one knows at this point. Apple as usual, is tight lipped. I think it comes down to the type of person you are. Are you entrenched in your way of working and you won’t change for anything? Or are you open to new ideas and workflows? I guess we’ll just have to wait until June…

1. It’s damn funny

2. The main camera was an ARRI S 16mm with a few different lenses including a Kinoptik 5.7 – a combo I know all too well. In other words, almost everything done in the movie I could directly apply to the movies I was making at the time.

3. A bunch of friends and non-actors made the movie, and you can feel that, but not in a cheesy way.

4. It took the concept of “lets shoot with what we have” to a whole new level; incorporating a jail, a hotel, a few bars, guns, guitars, a Mexican border town full of extras, a special FX guy and a turtle.

5. It’s edited extremely quickly with little or no establishing shots. It has a multi-camera feel with only one camera constantly changing framing and focal length.

I have used this film quite a bit in the film classes that I’ve taught. It resonates especially well with the younger kids who don’t quite know how to critically watch a movie, as many of them are doing for the first time. Typically, I’ll show the movie one time through on its own – it’s entertaining and violent, great for ADD’d 15 year olds. Then I’ll show it a second time through with just the commentary track.

The commentary is where all the meat is. At the beginning director Robert Rodriguez states that he wrote down his entire commentary in advance so he could get through all the material, and not ramble about nothing with long pauses the way many other directors do during their commentaries. Rodriguez then goes through, almost shot by shot, explaining everything that it took to create the different scenes. He points out that the Mariachi’s guitar case is actually 2 different cases – one with a nice outside and crappy inside, and one with a nice lined inside, but actually tan-colored on the outside – and how he cut between the shots so you never saw a case completely open or close. They couldn’t afford a nice guitar case, so they used what they had. He talks about editing tricks used to make single shot Uzis into multi-shot automatic weapons. Since the ARRI S is a loud camera, he had to shoot film and record audio during separate takes. Since the actors (read: non-actors) would fall out of sync quickly, he had to adjust his editing style to match. This is what gives El Mariachi its frantic pacing. He discusses his shooting style as a product of the editing he was doing in his head – he would zoom and in out and reframe during takes, in an effort to create different shots he could cut between during editing, without actually stopping the camera or the action. That’s 4 of the maybe 100 tips and tricks Rodriguez talks about during the commentary.

There’s a DVD Extra called “10 Minute Film School”, where Rodriguez goes further in-depth on how he created a few of the movie’s more memorable moments. 2 examples are the zip line from the hotel to the school bus, and another on how to make exploding squibs using condoms, fake blood and a weight-lifter’s belt. If you get Desperado, it includes “Another 10 Minute Film School”, which breaks apart the entire shootout in the bar.

I’ve found that more than any other movie, El Mariachi inspires my students to grab a camera and get out there. Mostly because it looks like so much fun!

Even without the commentary or DVD Extras this is a great movie. But the addition of these insights into Rodriguez’s mind makes for a great learning tool for all filmmakers.

“Movies Every Filmmaker Should Own” is a regular series on EricHansen.tv. The point of this series is not to say you need to watch The Godfather because it’s the greatest movie ever made. Plenty of film critics have lists like that. It’s to highlight movies that are advancing the craft of filmmaking, whether it’s through the contents of the movies themselves, or in many cases the extras and commentaries that are contained within. These are the movies that inspire me more in their construction, and are great learning tools for different aspects of the craft.