Film vs. Digital, with Steve Yedlin

I'm going to start out by straight-up quoting John Gruber's post about this in its entirety:

Jim Coudal:

Check Steve Yedlin’s Film vs. Digital Tests, plus this series of tweets from Rian Johnson who is directing SW Episode VIII with Yedlin as DP, and finally this conversation about the matter.

This is a deep rabbit hole for film nerds, but I ate the whole thing up over the weekend.

(and yes, that post itself quotes someone else's post.  Blogception, everybody!)

All three of those links do indeed make for a great rabbit hole to fall into.  It's very interesting seeing such an articulate and well-backed-up take from the Cinematographer of "real" films I admire (particularly Brick and Looper).  Overall, I definitely agree;  while there was still a strong argument to be had back when I was in college, high-end digital acquisition not only caught up to, but in many cases surpassed 35mm film in most technical attributes (ability to resolve detail, dynamic range, low-light sensitivity) a few years ago now.  The prevailing argument since then has mostly been one about the supposedly-innate aesthetic "looks" of each medium, but I think Yedlin makes a very strong case that the malleability of digital image processing makes these sort of argument relatively moot.

That said, I'm still glad he will be shooting Episode VIII on film.  It may not make a lick of difference to the image itself, but the touchy-feely emotional connotations are still real.  (A cynic would call this "marketing," but would still agree...)

My Bizarre Run-In With Content ID

I recently uploaded a Diablo-themed Special effects video to my YouTube channel, continuing the pattern from that earlier Nerf one.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but the story behind it highlights a corner of the copyright-related minefield facing content-creators on the web today.

The video is an original work made by me, starring Bill Lyon, a former-colleague and current-collaborator of mine.  All of the audio in it was either recorded by my own microphone, or came from one of two fully licensed stock libraries:  the included library that comes with Final Cut Pro X, and the "Pro Scores" music collection by Video Copilot.

When I uploaded the video to youtube it was flagged by their Content ID system as matching a track owned by AdRev.  The track they were claiming?  One of the pieces from Pro Scores!

Now it gets crazy, because AdRev isn't even the bad guy in this story...

For anyone unfamiliar with YouTube's Content ID system, it's a fully automated process whereby copyright holders can submit their work (video or audio) to Google, and it is then compared against new videos that are uploaded.  If the software detects a match, it will automatically get flagged.  What happens next depends on what the rights holder has chosen.  They may choose to block the new video entirely, or allow it to remain up.  However the most popular option has been to leave the video, but "monetize" it with advertisements, the revenue from which goes to the original copyright holder.  Naturally, this prevents the uploader of the video from monetizing it themselves.

This system has, for the most part, been an extremely useful and pragmatic Faustian bargain for YouTube and its users.  The ability to monetize infringing works has so far been sufficient to placate rights holders, and prevents the YouTube library from being eviscerated by clamping down on the free-for-all nature that made it popular in the first place. A few of my own videos, like Project Gravity, could not remain on the site without this largesse.

However, every system does have flaws.  As it turns out Video Copilot has been having issues for some time with unscrupulous third parties fraudulantly claiming Pro Scores music as their own, submitting it to Content ID, and monetizing videos that use it.  This doesn't sit well with Video Copilot, since the "infringers" being denied full rights to do what they like with their videos are the company's own customers!  As I learned from their site, Video Copilot was eventually successful in getting YouTube to shut down the fraudulant flags, but without the music "assigned" to someone in the Content ID system, there was currently nothing preventing it from happening again.

The solution?  Video Copilot partnered with AdRev, a company that handles this sort of copyright enforcement on an outsourced basis, and registered the music themselves.  Now, videos that included Pro Scores music would still get immediately flagged, but contacting Video Copilot's customer support would let you put your channel on a whitelist to be excluded from the process.

So, after a confused weekend of sending emails to both Video Copliot and AdRev (just to be safe...) my video is now up for the world to see, with full rights retained by myself.  I wish I could end this post with a grand proposal for how to avoid the headaches I went through, but everyone involved seems to be doing the best they can given the odd constraints of the situation.  (Except of course for the people who claimed the Pro Scores audio as their own.  Not cool.)  Regardless, it remains a great example of just how strange the intellectual property landscape has become.

And if you'd like to see the video in question, here it is!

Foam Dart Shootout!

And just like that, the video I teased in my last post is finished!



This took me so much longer to make than I intended it to.  Christine and I actually went out and filmed the source footage late last summer.  "Life" and other related circumstances led me to not really doing much with it for quite a while after that...

This year though, I resolved to get back into filmmaking in a major way, especially after 2013 was almost entirely devoid of it.  Even then, the visual effects took me a bit longer than expected, but I'm really happy with how it turned out!  (as a side note, if anyone ever hears me say again, "setting up a green screen won't be practical in that location - I can just rotoscope everything..."  please smack me.)

"Work" in Progress

The intermediate stages of things can look... strange.

(More to come later...)

"The Formats Won"

Adam Wilt, writing for ProVideo Coalition about the current state of the film/video post-production world:

A few years back, we were talking about seeing the end of the formats wars.  Remember when we shot interlaced 4x3 SDTV with a specified colorimetry and gamma to a handful of tape formats, and delivered interlaced 4x3 SDTV to an audience using interlaced 4x3 CRTs? Ah, those were the days… we didn’t know how simple we had it.

Now, let’s see, for acquisition, we have AVC-Intra, AVCHD, HDCAM, HDCAM-SR (in three different bitrates), ProRes (in more than three different bitrates, depths, and color resolutions), XDCAM HD and EX variants, DVCPROHD (still out there), ArriRAW, R3D, Codex Digital, Cineform, uncompressed (S.two; DPXes on SR 2.0), and whatever your HDSLR du jour shoots, just to name a few. And that’s just HD. There’s still SD being produced, and 2K and 4K, in gamma-corrected “linear” or log (LogC, S-Log, REDlog); 4x3, 16x9, 2:1, 2.4:1; 8-bit, 10-bit, or 12-bit; 4:2:0 to 4:4:4; full-res, subsampled, or oversampled (both well and poorly).

If you add in the number of deliverables the various presenters were talking about, and consider all the permutations of inputs and outputs, it just boggles the mind.

The format wars are over. The formats won, all of them. May their tribes increase.

Deal with it.

Truer words, never spoken - even in my low-end, behind-the-curve corner of the industry.  I just moved into a new apartment, and glancing over at my newly-reorganized shelf of archival media for video projects from the last couple years, I see:

• MiniDV tapes
• Digital8 Tapes (basically the same as MiniDV, but require a different camera/deck.)
• Video DVD's with some Quicktime masters as a bonus
• Mini-DVD's from a Sony DVD-camcorder (not my choice)
• A couple SDHC cards from my HDSLR, that I still haven't decided on an ideal archival plan for.

But hey - at least we're leaving tape behind!  (I say, having just spent over an hour tonight fighting to get Final Cut to stop complaining of timecode problems while recapturing some interview footage from barely a year and a half ago.  But I digress...)

"I'm Not Bruce" - FCP Tip Blog

Found an interesting blog recently.  "I'm Not Bruce" is simply a place used by some editor (who is not, apparently, "Bruce") to record little tips, links, and reminders to himself about various aspects of editing with Final Cut Pro.  I've found a few useful as well.

HanleyFilms.com - Slowly Coming Together

Summer's winding to an end (I head back to SU on saturday) and the Hanley Films website is finally seeing some life. I still haven't gotten around to putting all the old video online yet, since I'm re-encoding it all after reprocessing it with better deinterlacing.... But! I do have a few other things on there now.

I've set up a home base of sorts for my freelance production work. This is stuff like the LWV segments I put together last year (and am doing again this year). For now the work is still coming slowly, but with a website to point people to now, perhaps that will change. It's all just "learning by doing" and building up a resume.

Speaking of which, I actually have a resume now, in the still-a-work-in-progress About section of the site. I also put up a description of my "Studio," just in case you wanted to know the gear I use. (needless to say, the stuff I used in VPA Film, and now use in Newhouse TRF, is quite a bit better than what I have in my personal aresenal.)

So that's the state of HanleyFilms.com right now. Hopefully I'll get the rest done soon enough. If you want to see my old stuff in the meantime, most of the High School movies are on my old site, HanleyFilms.net. My entry for the Modest Mouse "Missed the Boat" video contest is on YouTube. Unfortunately, Remember the Chase is still not online, as I'm really dragging my heels on the post-production with that one (I'm being really OCD about getting rid of the telecine judder at the edit points), so there's no way to see it at the moment.

As I said earlier, I'm heading back to Syracuse on Saturday, so the next 4 days promise to be very busy. I'm producing to presentation videos for the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh's Good Government awards again this year. (that's a lot of words...) I have two more interviews to tape before I leave, one of them with Senator Jane Orie! So that should add to the frantic-ness of my week.

HanleyFilms.com... It's coming

www.HanleyFilms.com

Yes, I have a "Coming Soon" website for all my film/video work again. But this time, it's different. (promise!) I've given up on the rolls-off-the-tongue-slightly-better .net extension, and joined the rest of the world in .com-land. (Once the site truly goes live, the old hanleyfilms.net will redirect to the new hanleyfilms.com) Before, I'd relied on donated, friend-of-a-friend, or otherwise "free" hosting space, but now I've got all-out paid-for shared hosting from Dreamhost, with effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth. (The only thing they really get ticked off about is CPU time, and I have no intention of running overly convoluted PHP-driven content management systems. HTML, CSS, and a spattering of PHP for menus and such is fine for me)

Now that I've geeked out about my new hosting (it really is rather cool) - what exactly will the new site offer? Before, the "Hanley Films Website" has usually just been a single page with a bunch of links to QuickTime files (see the current HanleyFilms.net)

The new site will be... just a little bit more than that. I'm planning, at the moment:

• All my movies, from the North Hills stuff, to the 16mm short I made in VPA Film last fall, to my entry for the recent Modest Mouse music video contest. (If you really must see that, it's on YouTube). All in higher quality, and more formats than before.
  
• Information on my freelance production work. Seriously. I've already paid for my camera doing this, and I just ordered a $150 microphone to step up my game for a job later this summer. Need a low-budget commercial/music video/help on a student film/etc? Call me.
• Tips, tutorials, and other resources for up-and-coming (or so we wish) wannabes like myself.
• At least one sweet picture of the editing suite setup I've got going in my room. ;)

The video and film stuff is obviously the important part. Before, as I've said, I've put a bunch of QuickTimes on a page - sometimes in various sizes, sometimes not - and left it at that. With the extra space Dreamhost gives me, I can offer more formats than previously - for now, I'm thinking QuickTime 7, Windows Media 9, and DivX should cover most bases.

In addition to more formats, the videos will also be much higher quality. Not just higher bitrate either: Back when I first encoded most of the "masters" for the North Hills Pictures, I didn't know half what I do now about digital video. They were deinterlaced poorly, and went through a lot of unnecessary scaling up and down. This time, wherever possible, I'm going back to the "source" and redoing a lot of that, to preserve as much detail as possible.

How much of a difference can this make? Well... (click image to see full size)


I'd say that's a difference! (Of course, this shot is the most drastic example I could find, but it's still an all-around improvement to one degree or another.)

So that's where the "one, true" Hanley Films website is for now. It should turn out pretty cool, I think.

Now if I could just do something about that day job... :-/

Got My Transferred Film Back!

Before the break, I posted some shots of my final film. The screen shots were achieved using the old trick of pointing my video camera at the Moviola screen. Since then, I have paid to have a real transfer of the film done by the Debenham Media Group in Pittsburgh. I finally got the results back, and they're a pretty impressive improvement! The following shots do my best to mirror the same shots I put up last time.





Unfortunately, there's some issues that keep this transfer from being pristine: Some of my splices were apparently not up to snuff, so on about half the cuts, the picture "jerks" a little right before the cut. Also, there's a few scratches, and quite a bit of dirt. All of this could, of course, be called my fault, not Debenham's. Judging purely on the clarity and sharpness of the images, I'd say they did a fine job. (And it only cost me about $40... it's kinda sad that working in film has made me regard that as cheap, isn't it?)

Hopefully I'll have the video available online somewhere sooner rather than later. I still want to tweak it a bit first.

Switching Majors

Alright, this is the "big thing" coming up that I hinted at on this blog about a month ago. Some people I have already told, but I didn't want to shout it from on high until it was approved and "for sure." Well, I just got the confirmation e-mail (finally!) so here it is:

I'm switching majors from Film (in the School of Visual and Performing Arts) to Television-Radio-Film (in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications).

This is effective, well, now basically. I have an informational meeting monday afternoon, then I'll be frantically rearranging my schedule. (Why didn't they have the meeting earlier than the day before classes start? I have no idea...)

I spent a lot of time thinking over this decision last semester, and while some people (family & high school friends) might not see much difference between the two majors, anyone in VPA or Newhouse definitely does (and probably has some misconceptions about the other, as I did).

Oddly enough, this didn't have as much to do with the Film program's "Sparticus" letter incident as one might think. Rather, it was primarily about me doing some soul-searching about where I wanted to be going, and the ridiculously broad range of my interest in "media". Suffice to say, while both programs obviously have their faults, I'm fairly confident in my decision. (Not 100% confident of course - I'm way too big a worrywart for that to be possible...)

I apologize if this caught you by surprise - I know I didn't tell a whole lot of people at the end of last semester, but as I said, I didn't want to make a huge deal about it until it was definite. (I didn't know it would take this long for it to become definite...)

To my friends in VPA: I'm not dropping off the face of the earth! I'm still at S.U., I'm still friends with you guys. Heck, I'm still in the directing class this semester! (probably going to turn all that time with Deb et. al. into a Theater minor) And if I'm not swamped with my own stuff, I'm still up for helping out on people's shoots. (Heck, since TRF is all video, I might relish a chance to keep working with 16 mm from time to time!)

To my friends in Newhouse: Well, looks like you'll be seeing a bit more of me! (And probably hearing a lot of questions regarding scheduling and whatnot...)

Peeking Out From The Madness

"Busy" is an entirely inadequate word. Between my monster of a final film, two upcoming finals (and a non-final test), trying to bang out "Fur Elise" on the piano, co-writing a script about a priest giving a eulogy at the wrong funeral, and making a final decision on a possible switch of majors (more on that later... hint in the tags), I've got something of a full plate at the moment. Oh, and in less than two weeks the semester will be over and I'll be home for Christmas.

Aaaaah!

Yet, I'm poking my head above the waves for just a second to give a few teaser pics of said monstrous final film. Aren't I nice? Taking time out to give info to the (non-existent) readers of this blog? That's why I'm doing this. For (the non-existent) you. Not because I'm procrastinating at 2:30 in the morning or anything. That would be silly.

The samples, specially chosen to look cool, of course:

Still Alive... Just Busy

I'm not even entirely sure why I felt a need to update this blog now, since most of my friends have abandoned theirs, and I'm fairly certain no one reads it anymore. Not to mention that my experience with webcomics has taught me that a multi-month lapse is a very good way to kill off whatever readers one may have had left.

Whatever. Someday, when I've gotten famous, had my run, and fallen out of fame again, maybe I can just turn this into a book. ;)

In any case, it's been incredibly busy since I got back to SU. Most of this is owing to two things: First, the Crime in U.S. Society class I took because it looked interesting turned out to be a huge pain in the neck... and second, we've started production classes!

I won't deny the coolness of finally being able to say "I've shot film!" Even though it's only 16 mm... and I've only shot about 2.5 minutes of it personally... and most of it was half a stop underexposed... and I left the shutter closed for the entirety of one cool shot... and the movie wasn't that great anyway... it's still cool!

But it's also very time consuming, and the lack of immediate feedback is quite annoying. So far I've made one straight, in-camera, black&white, silent dream project (where have I done that before...), and I'm going into production soon on my final project for this semester. It's a bit of a doozy - my teacher still doesn't understand exactly what I'm talking about when I pitch it. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one. But that's fun, too, right? Right?

As previously stated, things are a wee bit hectic right now, so I'm going to have to cut this haphazard post short here for the time being. I leave you with a horribly transferred frame of the coolest shot in my dream project:


Yes, that's a forced perspective shot. I feel special.

And I'm afraid that's all you're going to see until I get a proper video transfer done (probably in November/December). This shot was captured by pointing my video camera at the screen of a Moviola, then tweaking the resultant image in Photoshop. A lot.

Deleted Scene from "The Vase"

Stumbled across John August's CSS styles for screenplays, and figured I'd add them to my blog's template. (Yes, that John August, the one who wrote Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc. Looks like he's got a geeky side.) Actually, his entire blog should be of interest to anyone interested in movie script writing.

Anyway, in the interest of testing new features, I present the never-before-seen original opening to "The Vase"! I never filmed this because it would have been too hard, logistically, in the time I had. That's why the existing movie starts a little more abruptly than my others.

• FADE IN:
  
• EXT. STREET - DAY
  
• A car comes over a hill and drives towards the camera.
  
• INT. JACK'S CAR - DAY
  
• JACK is driving. He looks a bit nervous. Not scared, just a little uneasy.
  
• JACK
  
• Why is this guy following me?
  
• Out the rear window we see another car. It's black, plain, and inconspicuously official-looking. Jack glances down, flicking the lever for the turn signal.
  
• EXT. JACK'S DRIVEWAY - DAY
  
• Stopping the car, Jack turns around to look out the back. The strange car slows as it passes the house, but continues on down the street.
  
• JACK
  
• (sighing)
  
• That was weird...
  
• INT. JACK'S HOUSE - DAY
  
• Jack enters through the front door carrying a backpack over one shoulder. Worn-out, he moves over to the couch, dropping the backpack carelessly onto the floor.
  
• JACK
  
• Man, I'm exhausted.
  
• He collapses onto the couch and falls asleep as we:
  
• FADE OUT

After that, the movie continues as normal. So there you have it - the mighty "Lost Scene" of The Vase. What? Not impressed? That's OK: This post was really jsut about me playing with the screenplay formatting styles for this blog. They should come in handy next year, when I take my Screenwriting course.