•postbrooklyn•

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…

As we continue to do work on the PBS pledge special, “Unlocking the Power of Your Brain” (tentative title), we also move forward with some other interesting visual effects capabilities as we’ve moved into the world of Apple Shake, a node based compositing program (best known as the compositor of choice for WETA effects in New Zealand, among other things). The “Brain” project features over 12 hours of green screened interviews and will probably have nearly 30-40 minutes of final composited shots in the final documentary, which is well beyond what we’re used to doing in terms of time. Even crazier than the sheer volume of compositing, though, is the hairpin deadline. I’ll report back on whether the “round trip” functionality of Final Cut to Shake and back really makes the difference in creating a workflow to conquer this particular deadline. Needless to say, after poking around the web and seeing the trial version in action, I’m excited at the sheer possibilities that Shake offers in comparison to After Effects (a program that I am quite happy with for other reasons).

On other notes, I also watched some demo footage from something called “Mocha” which is a 2.5D planar tracker that looks fantastic in terms of its capabilities. I’m strongly considering the purchase of that, as well, as it might be a tool to make our workflow far more robust — many’s the time I wish I could pull out a background image quickly and replace it with the right one, but the camera moves left or right… and a planar tracker seems like it’s possibly the only real way to work with it.

I’m thinking it may come in handy with the visual effects heavy short film that we have slated for post in the winter, but I’ll have to learn more, I think.

Well, we’ve finally gone and done it. We’ve joined the world of 3D here at postbrooklyn. We’re currently designing the open animations for the PBS show “Good Night with the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus,” as well as some of the medical illustrations. We’re also under contract to produce many of the background animations for the upcoming PBS documentary release, “Unlock the Power of Your Brain” (working title), which is also very exciting. Mostly, the possibilities here are moving forward.

We’re also tentatively involved in the pre-viz of the short narrative film, “Dream Thieves,” which is an apocalyptic futuristic drama… more on that as events transpire…