•postbrooklyn•

Color is a fantastic tool. But it also works like a broken down wheelbarrow half the time. When it does work, it’s a thing of beauty. Effortless color correction on a desktop mac. When it doesn’t work properly, it sucks time like you wouldn’t believe out of your day. I can color correct an entire act in about 3 hours. But it often takes about 3 hours just to get one or two bugs ironed out and worked-around. I’m currently trying to figure out why it won’t let me render in my original settings for one particular sequence, whereas it would for 2 identically created ones. No real reason is given, it’s usually a problem with some file on your timeline… which you then have to hunt down and find.

In this case, it was a few clips of animation compressed footage that was throwing it off. Simple stuff, but it takes a lot of time to make sure it doesn’t do something crazy.

We’ve got some lovely new hardware upgrades in the edit suite. Most impressively is the client monitor/second monitor in the MacPro suite, which gives a nice 42″ second monitor for graphics and playback for clients in offline. We’re slowly moving everything to all HD and hope to add an HDTV set to the friendly confines to help monitor our programming for the near and far future.

Most importantly for how things work around here, we’ve added some new SATA capacity for both of our suites. So, now we’ve got a 9TB array (which theoretically can read almost 3 streams of HD uncompressed on the MacPro, have yet to see that in action, though I fear that Final Cut will limit its abilities), as well as two small 700GB SD arrays of fast storage. That gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of working between the two suites (all the storage can be swapped to either computer) as well as a lot of speed and storage for taking on longer and more intense HD jobs in the near future… hopefully, we’ll continue to grow as the new year blooms.

Well, it’s official — The Brain Fitness Program is a hit across the country. We’re all very excited here because we poured hours and hours into making it as good a show as possible and to find that audiences are responding to it is exceptionally gratifying. Check out your local listings, and keep apprised of that on the schedule page here.

Well, we’re laying back now. The Brain Fitness Program is almost out the door (finally) after nearly 300 hours of post-production. Actually, I have no idea how many hours of post we’ve ended up doing. But it’s crazy. Between compositing nearly 2/3rds of the show, 3D animating another 8 or 9 minutes and then comping it all together, it’s been a monster of a project.

I’ve already learned several things — Shake, Cinema4D, noise reduction. SG Music created 5 themes of varying length which layer throughout the entire program in the background (always backgrounding) and  all on a dime.

Also interesting was to witness the differences (and similarities) between the F900 and HVX200. Most notably to my mind is the footage shot outdoors on a beautiful fall day in Brooklyn — bright sun, well exposed — shot with the HVX200. Looks great. Then some shots done with it simultaneously with the F900 in a lower light (sunlight, but indoors, probably 4-5.6 without an ND). A little underexposed and when you bring it up with a color corrector and the noise goes crazy. Good to know.

I’ll get to put the HVX through some more paces this weekend when I go to shoot the leaves of Vermont. Kind of excited about this, actually.

We shot a 3 camera shoot with a digibeta, and F900, and an HVX200. All of this gets downconverted to a SD timeline and sent out to digibeta for final release. Why the crazy mix and match formats? Well, two of the cameras the company owns and the third was the best bet for getting a high enough quality image without breaking the bank on a rental. As it turns out, we might’ve been better served shooting it with the HVX. The results were very surprising — I expected the HVX’s downconvert to compare favorably enough, but I was blown away by how well it matched the F900s downconvert (there’s some difference in it, the 900 has way better detail resolution, but going from wide to tight it’s hardly noticeable). What was noticeable, though, was the digibeta intercutting with the F900. The detail was all skewed, the color seemed flat and overall it hardly looked good, let alone matching the 900. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to use an HVX the next time instead, as long as it’s recording to HD…

I searched high and low on the internet for an explanation on how to do this, but found very little of value to my own circumstance, namely — someone who doesn’t know squat about unix shell scripting and is in the position of watching his Qmaster program not function correctly (which seems to be the way it was designed to work…). Anyway, it works fine on the intel mac pro, but on a G5, qmaster is a deadbeat. What to do? Well, the only way to batch render in Shake (something I have to be able to do, or I can pretty much kiss this deadline goodbye) is through qmaster…or a series of exec commands issued from the Apple Terminal. I found that nugget online. Well, I tried it and it gave me a bunch of gobbledygook for error messages. I knew that I was having trouble getting the exact right connection of pathways and whatnot to make it sing and I didn’t have a clue as to what that would be. Enter Qmaster! It appears with a “submit” button grayed out so you can’t use it, but you can select a Shake script to render. And when you do select one in Qmaster — it gives you the exact command line terminology to use. So, you copy and paste a series of these selections together, separated by a semi-colon and then you can paste it into Terminal, hit return… and watch as the unix shell powers your batch render. Kind of a crappy workaround (and I hope to figure out Qmaster’s foibles at some point), but it beats not being able to batch the files (considering I have approximately 80 composites to render out in the next few days)…

I learned how to make an explosion in 3D today. Needless to say this is quite exciting, but I’m sure I’ll abuse it far better than I’ll use it for the next few months.

I’m sure tomorrow will bring some newfound excitement, too.

So, Apple Shake is indeed an incredibly powerful program. I do read, though, that it’s at EOL in terms of development (which is saddening), but seeing what it can do currently is really pretty amazing and I’m not sure what you would want from it that isn’t being handled by some other application. It’s clearly a compositor’s tool — and that’s pretty much it. I’ve been working in After Effects for nearly a decade, so I get compositing — but node based compositing was a totally new idea for me.

It seems highly ironic that I’m starting to compile green screen composites for the show “The Brain Fitness Program” — about neuroplasticity — with a program that I have to struggle to simply understand to begin with. But, that’s the good thing — learning, as I’m now quite aware, is really what you want to keep doing in order to strengthen your brain as you age.

So, I guess it’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing because Shake can handle keying some of these tougher green screen shots far better than After Effects with a simple swap in the metaphor. Plus, it’s integrated with Final Cut, so it makes the whole process a little bit less of a data management nightmare. I think. We’ll see…

We’re rabidly awaiting the (fedex delivery delayed) arrival of the latest addition to the post arsenal around here. It feels like we’ve really been adding capabilities lately, which is a good thing, since the kind of work we’re starting to do has more and more visual effects. And in case you’ve been living under a rock near a repertory moviehouse, you’re also certain to realize that everyone is doing more visual effects. Even the stuff (they call it “invisible”) that doesn’t seem to have visual effects, has a lot of visual effects. We’ve recently added the 3D option (and have already created a few very rough composites with it — soon to be posted on the reel page) and now, we’ll be adding a previously unattainable program that can make those invisible composites come to life — Apple Shake.

Even for someone who’s been using After Effects since before it was owned by Adobe (I did my first compositing in 1995 on a Mac Quadra 840 AV using a little program called CoSA in the service of the PC game for the movie “Eraser,” if you can believe that…), I’m a little excited by the possibilities I glimpsed in a brief trial run of Shake. Of course, I’d heard all of the PR on it — Lord of the Rings, King Kong, blah, blah… but, really, it was the cost of it versus buying a plug-in that would get a better roundtrip key in Final Cut (Automatic Duck for import into After Effects) that finally pushed me over the edge. I like the idea of keeping all the footage in the same application family, largely because every time you start outputting and re-encoding the footage, things start getting a little screwy. As I’ve noticed before, DVCPro HD is a fine acquisition format, but it doesn’t hold up so well as it starts to get rendered and re-rendered… I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do the final composite in Uncompressed HD, but that has yet to be determined…

More info on Shake as we run it through its paces… and run it like a marathoner, I imagine.

Well, we’re into the homestretch on the Good Night sleep program and the ugliness that is HD to SD conversions has reared its awful head once more. As I began to look at the downconverted signal out of our Kona 2, I was thinking it looked relatively soft. I had heard rumors on the internet that the DVCPro HD codec itself had a “soft” look to it. I hadn’t really seen this in a downconversion before and began to worry that all of that “let’s do it in HD and create an SD and HD master from the same material” may have been a pie in the sky ideal.

There’s good and bad news coming out in this process, so first the good news: I don’t have to redigitize everything into standard definition or even uncompressed HD. In fact, it’s quite surprising to realize that there is no visual difference (to the eye, mind you — engineers will undoubtedly balk at such claims) between the downconverted HD that’s been compressed and the source downconverted HD from camera original into SD 4×3. That’s a good thing and saves on both space and time. The bad news? It appears that the Kona’s own DVCPro HD downconversion induces some amount of softness into its resolving of creating the cropped master. That’s bad news — basically, you can’t get quite the same quality out of the card that you can out of the tape. A strange thought to think about since there’s even more circuitry going on between the image and the tape in the convoluted “output at HD res and re-import at SD res from the HDCAM tape.” But, that’s apparently what happens. I’m not sure if the Kona is actually inducing the softness or having difficulty decoding the codec at a high enough resolution in the downconversion, but it’s definitely noticeable, as opposed to the redigitization process.

Fortunately for me, I was already planning on doing this output and re-import process, since there’s no other way to encode the captioning data from an NLE in HD with software (we don’t have the pockets to do the hardware HD captioner). So, making outputs it is…