Movie Review: Ratatouille
Posted: September 9, 2007 at 1:43 pm, by Isaac

I’ve sat on this review for almost two months now, and even though I’m not completely satisfied with it, it’s time to post it. A friend of mine believes that “Ratatouille” is an allegory of Pixar’s own rise to fame within the Hollywood animation industry, which has degraded since the death of Walt Disney. At first I was skeptical, but there are number of similarities between the Pixar staff’s ambitions and successes and the journey taken by the main character of their latest film. I’m not sure how many of these parallels have been placed there on purpose, but I believe that a much more interesting comparison can be made than a small studio achieving fame and fortune. First, a description of the plot:

The film opens on a televised cooking show which describes the life of Auguste Gusteau, the greatest chef in France, a food-loving visionary who enthusiastically revolutionized french cuisine with his book Anyone Can Cook. Gusteau is also the idol and inspiration of Remy, a rat who is not content just to be a simple scavenger. Watching television and reading cookbooks has opened his eyes to a new world that is not particularly rat-friendly, much to the concern of his father, the patriarch of this rat family.

Sure enough, a human being wakes up to find our hero cooking in her kitchen, and her ensuing fury endangers the whole rat clan. In the face of imminent destruction, Remy’s father orders a full-scale evacuation, but Remy disobeys his father’s instructions and runs back to the kitchen to steal a copy of Anyone Can Cook. He loses his family, and winds up alone and starving on the streets of Paris, where he stumbles across Gusteau’s once five-star restaurant, now greatly diminished in reputation since the great chef’s death.

To make matters worse, Gusteau’s restaurant is now operated by a Michael Eisner-esque successor — an opportunist named Skinner — who uses Gusteau’s legacy to hustle microwave burritos and corn dogs. The kitchen also employs the clumsy and inept Linguini, a mere garbage boy until he and Remy join forces and begin to create culinary masterpieces together. In this film, rats can understand English but not speak it themselves, so a communication system must be devised to allow cooperation.

By hiding under Linguini’s hat, Remy controls his human puppet by tugging different hairs, and can finally prepare the gourmet meals his heart desires, As a newly-discovered wunderkind chef, Linguini gains the respect and admiration of the other cooks. Unfortunately, their sudden combined success fills both them with selfish pride and they begin to fight over all the glory that is due the star of a successful kitchen. Without Linguini’s hat for cover Remy can’t cook in the open, and without the guidance of Remy, Linguini can’t cook at all, so their squabbling threatens the success of the entire restaurant, just as the Paris food critics have begun to take an interest in it again.

Meanwhile, the jealous Skinner has begun to suspect that Linguini is not all that he seems, and is desperate eliminate this threat to his superiority in the kitchen. Further complications arise as the appallingly unambitious Linguini falls in love with one of the other cooks, and Remy is discovered by his family, who have been looking for him. Remy’s father wants him to rejoin the clan, and is horrified that his son is working with humans. Conflicts continue to mount until the climax of the film, which I found to be exciting, but a little unsatisfying.

Throughout the film, the audiences is taught about the intricacies of gourmet cooking, the workings of the Michelin star system that governs French restaurants (sort of), and the hierarchy of professional kitchens — all without stopping the story or boring the audience. Complex supporting characters are introduced and described effortlessly, and the sort of exposition that usually bogs a film down with dry explanation is handled with great skill and woven carefully into the structure of the plot. However, the cheap trick of using an inner monologue weakens the overall film, and it is this over-reliance on voice-over that is the main weakness of the ending.

In every technical way this film excels. The animation is truly superior, containing some of the best human animation Pixar has produced to date, and the rats are expressive, flexible, and fun to watch. The fur, hair and cloth effects are excellent, and although they are far more complex simulations than we saw in “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles,” they are not much more impressive. The great technical breakthrough of this film is in the rendering of the food; the delicate translucency of onions and celery, the fluid layers of oil and vinegar dressing, and the mixing of thick sauces and creamy batters. It is truly amazing… but perhaps only to other computer animators, like myself.

The lighting is also a new high point for a Pixar film, and the camera work is stunning. Brad Bird’s direction, composition, and pacing has only improved since “The Incredibles.” The sound design is excellent, Michael Giacchino’s second Pixar score is fanciful and lively, and the voice acting is mostly wonderful. A highlight is Peter O’Toole’s role as the most interesting and ominous food critic ever shown on film, who is possibly meant as a little dig at movie critics as well.

However, with the exception of last year’s “Cars,” I thought this was Pixar’s weakest film. The plot’s external elements and minor characters are handled with brilliance and great originality, but its heart is a rancid cliche.

Films that revolve around a son or daughter’s desire to escape from overbearing parental authority and are merely seeking independence are a dime a dozen. Films that feature the single-minded pursuit of a selfish dream for that dream’s own sake as a moral theme are extremely overdone. Films that create either tension or comedy by incessant bickering between parents and children are currently the norm.

Remy the rat doesn’t experience much character growth in this film; after a few adventures, we find that his environment and family have just arbitrarily changed to suit him. He doesn’t have to work or even apply himself to achieve his inexplicable cooking skills.

Ratatouille’s preparation, seasoning, garnish, and presentation are almost flawless. Unfortunately it has been made from sub-par ingredients, which is, sadly, becoming a trend in Pixar’s recent releases. This film was started by Jan Pinkava, apparently based on Richard Lawson’s Ben and Me and Eve Titus’s Anatole, but then changed hands mid-production to the leadership of Brad Bird, which may account for most of its inconsistencies and would explain how such a substandard story structure could be brought to the screen so artfully.

These convoluted and fragmented production structures are standard procedure in most Hollywood studios, but Pixar has built its reputation on careful story planning and films that reflect great unity of purpose and solid construction. Getting back to the analogies between Pixar, Disney, and Remy the rat, a few things should be noted. Firstly, Pixar’s top men are not merely the latest acquisition of the massive Walt Disney Corporation — they are the heirs apparent to Walt Disney himself, and careful students of his best work.

In the same way that Walt Disney invented the best techniques and much of the technology of 2D animation, defining and polishing the art of animation into a lucrative industry, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter have built 3D animation’s industry from the ground up with Pixar. In their early days as a division of George Lucas’s effects studio ILM, they built the hardware and software that produced the first computer animation ever put on film. Later, as an independent company, their short films helped sell software, but also captured the imaginations of other animators and laid the foundations for “Toy Story.”

However, like Gusteau’s name in the film, the Walt Disney brand is now used to sell cheap toys, endless direct-to-video sequels, crude television programs, and abysmal music. At the moment, Pixar is poised to either rejuvenate the principles and standards that Disney once represented, or be absorbed and driven down the same path of uninspired and uninspiring films. Like Remy, they have achieved great success, seemingly overnight, and now tend be more arrogant about upcoming projects then they were in their early days, and seem to be spending less time on story development.

With the death of Joe Ranft, Pixar’s story department lost a vital member, and with more films in simultaneous production than before, the remaining team is split between several projects. I believe that they must refocus themselves on making story the main goal and collaborating, like Linguini and Remy, to perfect every scene. With full financial support from Disney Corp. the best software development team in the business, and a deservedly glowing reputation, they are no longer bound by the limitations of budgets, technology, or even audience approval.

They could be excused for resting on their laurels for a film or two, but to continue to create great films in the future, they need to stick together and keep working through story structure. Despite Ratatouille’s weak foundational plot and whiny, unmotivated characters, it contains many high points, including what is probably the best-written and best-executed scene in any Pixar film to date. These flashes of brilliance show that the Pixar team can easily continue to make great films, as long as they can keep from being split up, diluted, or lulled into a false sense of security or accomplishment. If they lose sight of their original strengths, they will lose their potential for truly great storytelling.

If they understand that perfect sauces can’t save an undercooked dish, and focus on the basics, their next films will be excellent; but if they spread themselves too thin and fall into the trap of valuing style over substance, their future projects will slip slowly into mediocrity. As much as I hope they can climb from strength to strength, I am sure that both their successes and failures will be instructive. All filmmakers can and should learn from Pixar’s many different examples, and what they do next should teach a very valuable lesson.

Outside Hollywood Book On Sale
Posted: August 23, 2007 at 11:35 pm, by Isaac

Yesterday, my book, also entitled Outside Hollywood, went on sale! It’s been a few years in the making, but it’s finally here. If you’ve enjoyed reading my articles, here, I suggest you get the book for some more in-depth information on the moral, technical, and artistic aspects of film and the film industry. It’s by no means a complete handbook, but I’ve tried to create a beginners guide to approaching movies, both from an entrepreneurial view and a theological foundation.

The book begins with a description of film as a powerful cultural and religious weapon, and there are chapters on the Training and Qualifications of the beginning filmmaker, some history on How Hollywood Created Itself and How Hollywood Destroyed Itself. This overview of the industry and its history is vital to truly understanding its current position.

There’s a discussion of the prevailing Christian film mindset in the chapter Cowardly Filmmaking, and then alternatives to it in Valiant Writing, and Resourceful Producing, as well as Professional Directing. To that end, there are chapters on The Easy Things to Learn, The Hard Things to Learn, and the Future of Filmmaking Outside Hollywood. You can learn more about the book here.

I also recommend “From Script to Cinema,” a nine-DVD set of lectures from the San Antonio Christian Film Academy, which includes a free video on the making of Men O’ War. And at the moment, you can get them both together for a 25% savings here.

Outside Hollywood System Guide
Posted: July 21, 2007 at 8:42 pm, by Isaac

Our company has recently seen fit to expand our post-production into a second HD edit suite. Rather than purchase a standard workstation from a reseller, we built our own to our own specifications, and we saved quite a bit of money doing so. To get a similarly equipped machine would have been about $2500 from Dell and over $3000 from Apple.* All of our components were purchased from either NewEgg or ZipZoomFly.

*These are only roughly equivalent specs - to get a precise match on either side would mean some very expensive custom modifications. A Dell Precision 490 with 2.3ghz Quad CPU, 2GB RAM, RAID controller, DVD burner and a professional Quadro FX video card is roughly $2,600 with nothing on sale and no discounts. A MacPro with 2.6ghz Quad CPU, 2GB Ram and two 7300 GT video cards is $3,200 with a comparable warranty and no RAID. Neither system’s configuration even offers so many hard drive bays or the two free RAM slots, so as you can see, comparisons are very rough.

In the style of ArsTechnica’s famous system guides, here’s the breakdown of what we built for our latest edit suite, and what we recommend for a basic yet powerful HD edit station. We build this system around a production pipeline that would involve Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects and the Cineform codec. It is designed to hold a lot of data and process that data quickly, and in our extensive tests, we have found that it works extremely well and extremely fast.

Motherboard: Asus P5B-PLUS Intel P965 - $135
This ATX Intel motherboard supports dual-core or quad-core processors in 32-bit or 64-bit and has a bus speed of 1066mhz. There are four DDR II SDRAM slots that allow a maximum dual channel capacity of 8GB. Plenty of connectivity is available with two FireWire ports, eight USB ports, and built-in Gigabit ethernet. However, the greatest strength of this motherboard for video users are its 2 IDE channels, 8 SATA channels and two onboard RAID controllers (supporting modes 0, 1, 5, and 10) which make it an ideal fast storage machine. There is also a built-in ESATA port and three PCI slots that could support ESATA cards.

A PCIe slot is reserved for the video card, and there is a built-in 7.1 surround sound audio card as well. There’s a little bit of static that comes through a few of the six audio connectors on the back panel, but when we switched to the case’s front panel it went away. Another sales point for this particular motherboard is its overclockability, but we haven’t tried that yet. This is a passively cooled motherboard, which means that it doesn’t need fans to keep the chipset at a low temperature.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - $300
This CPU gives you four 2.4GHz processors with two separate 4MB L2 cache chips. This is the only place where this system guide differs from the computer we just built; at the time we bought our components, a quad core chip would have been twice as much as the $220 dollars we spent for the Core 2 Duo. However, a mere $80 more for double the power makes this an easily justified upgrade today.

RAM: 2GB Crucial Memory - $115
Crucial is a reputable RAM manufacturer, and we ordered two 1gb Ballistix sticks, which are DDR2 800 SDRAM chips that take advantage of our motherboard’s dual channel capabilities, and are classified as “high-performance memory.” Because we still have two empty RAM slots available, we could easily upgrade to 4 or 6 gigabytes or RAM at any time.

Video Card: Gigabyte nVidia 8600 - $140
The top video accelerator manufacturers are ATI and nVidia. For games, the two are almost comparable, but nVidias tend to be better for our work, offering more stability and a few more options. Modern graphics cards are optimized for accelerating 3D video games, but more and more production software titles like Premiere Pro and After Effects can use their processors to accelerate certain video-based functions as well. This version of the 8600 is DX10 capable, has 256mb of GDDR3 video RAM, and is passively cooled, like the motherboard. Unlike many large next-gen video cards, it only takes up one expansion slot.

Case: Rosewill - $55
We selected the R6AR6-BK Rosewill case for its simple black style and the large number of drive bays. With 8 SATA channels on the motherboard, we needed a case that would let us install up to ten drives. We also bought an extra 120mm fan ($10) to install in the front of the case by the drives.

Power Supply: Fortron 400W - $40
Eight hard drives use a lot of power, so at least a 400 watt power supply will be needed. Lower quality PSUs tend to output less power than advertised, so stick to quality brands like Sparkle or Fortron.

DVD Burner: Liteon LH-20A1P-185 - $30
With Blu-Ray drives still running at about $600, we went with this simple 20X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW drive for a mere 1/20th of that. It will burn just about any type of DVD at 20x speed, and Liteon has an excellent track record.

Total: $950
A copy of Windows XP Professional brings the total of our PC to only $950 at the time of this writing (if you already have a license of your OS of choice, you can take off $130 for a grand total of $820). That’s not bad for a very serious Quad-core workstation with 2gb RAM and nVidia’s second-to-best SLI gaming card that in many ways outperforms expensive pre-built workstations. It also leaves us plenty of room to upgrade and expand, and the motherboard has untapped options too, like that built-in RAID controller. Which brings us to hard drives.

Hard drive prices are going down, and capacities are going up. I haven’t included hard drives in the price of the workstation, because in our case hard drives are acquired as part of the project budget and not a hardware budget, and also because everyone’s storage needs are different. At the moment, I suggest you just purchase as many 400GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives as you need. It’s a fast SATA hard drive with a 16MB buffer for only $100, and as they offer the best price-per-gigabyte at the moment (until their terabyte drives get cheap), we have a number of them.

I’ve used Seagate’s Barracuda drives for video storage since 1995, with only one minor drive failure, and they are marginally faster than most of their competitors. Almost all of our internal drives are Seagates. For external drives we tend to get Samsungs, which are a bit slower but run cooler and quieter - better for external enclosures. Maxtors or products that use Maxtor drives are not such a good buy; almost single every one I’ve ever used has had incessant and eventually fatal problems.

Last week Costco had Samsung’s 20″ 1680×1050 widescreen LCDs on sale for $200, and it has turned out to be an excellent performer (and with their 90-day return policy, buying from Costco is very safe). The nVidia powers two hi-res monitors with ease, and we have yet to see any slowdowns. Admittedly, we’ve only installed about 1.4 terabytes worth of drives at this point, but everything is very snappy and we’ll be pushing the new machine into full-time production work this week.

Camera Review: Canon XL H1
Posted: June 29, 2007 at 2:03 am, by Isaac

It was over a year ago that Mike Curtis, Chris Hurd, and Adam Wilt organized the Texas HD Shootout that pitted the JVC GY-HD100, Panasonic AG-HVX200, Sony HVR-Z1 and Canon HL X1 against each other in a battle for ultimate supremacy. Of course each camera had its own strengths and weaknesses, so there was no clear winner, but from all the data collected on the Big Four I decided that Canon’s XL H1 was the most powerful and flexible option for the widest number of uses. Well, for my uses anyway, which are pretty wide.

And now that I’ve been using XL H1 cameras for several months on several different types of projects, I thought I’d put together a review on its many features and what I feel are its strengths and weaknesses in production. I’ve been using Canon’s XL cameras for years, and from the XL1 to the XL1s, I never liked them much. Sony’s DSR-300 and 500 were DV cameras that offered much better control and imaging. The XL2, however, was much closer to being a usable camera, and adopted a number of pro features.

Now, with the XL H1, Canon has created something that feels and performs like a real professional camera. Also, it’s black, so it even looks professional.

The Camera Body
The chainsaw shape of the XL cameras has taken some getting used to. The XL1 was a bit too small to be comfortably used as a shoulder camera, but the XL2 worked much better. With a professional v-lock battery and two wireless receivers on the back, it balanced like a proper ENG camera should. The XL H1 is nearly identical in size and shape to the XL2, so all the cases and accessories are usable, but it is considerably heavier. Also some of the controls for newer functions have been moved around a bit, and it might be my imagination, but everything seems more ergonomic and more accessible than on the XL2.

Camera wobbles are much more noticeable in HD than on SD, so it is more vital the camera be held steady. This is another area where JVC and Canon cameras beat their handheld counterparts from Panasonic and Sony. To get the same motion control and stability that you have with a larger, longer, shoulder-mountable camera, handhelds need accessories and attachments. After years of also using very bulky broadcast cameras and looking down on anything less, I never thought I’d be defending a Canon camcorder’s size and stability as superior to other cameras, but in its price range, the XL H1 is one of the most solid and controllable form factors available.

And it’s flexible, too. I’m comfortable holding it on my shoulder, over my head, low to the ground with the carry handle, or, which seems to be the most stable of all, pinned under my arm, with the shoulder pad on my hip and both hands forward at the controls by the lens. I’d like a little more size to it, and more weight, but it really does handle well. On a tripod it is also very balanced, but since the lens is slung so low a riser is probably needed to fit it to a studio teleprompter. With the usual indie film accessories on board, it retains a useable balance, but a heavier battery pack on the back is a big help in offsetting a large matte box.

The Features
And this camera could be a digital cinema powerhouse with its 24F framerate and uncompressed 4:2:2 HD-SDI out. Canon’s 24F took a lot of flack from the indie community at first, and because nothing supported it properly, rumors arose that it was stuttery CineFrame fakery and not true 24fps video at all. It turns out, now that everyone’s NLE seems to support 24F, that it does resolve into true, proper cadence, 24p video, even though it wasn’t captured on a truly progressive CCD array. That means that there is some vertical resolution loss, but not as much as you might think, and since it uses an incredibly sharp 1080 imager to start with, the resulting processed image is still very clear.

Unfortunately, everything not recorded off the uncompressed HD-SDI channel will be compressed onto miniDV tape, using regular DV for the SD shooting modes, and Canon’s own HDV implementation for anything shot in HD. HDV compression is problematic, particularly for moving shots. Below are two frames taken with identical settings. The one on the left was taken from a locked off tripod shot, and the other from a fast trucking shot taken from a car. Same forest, same lighting. Each were recorded at 30f HDV, transcoded to CineForm medium upon capture, and then exported as lossless PNGs. You can see here the same level of vertical softening that 24F would give you.

The first shot is sharp and pretty clear for the amount of detail it contains, but the second has very visible MPEG compression artifacts, particularly within the motion blur. A great deal of fine detail is visible in the distance, where objects are moving slower, but rapid motion kills the quality. That said, Canon’s codec seems to pack far more data into 25mb/s than Sony’s, or at least retains a much better image. Also, the advantage of being able to fit 63 whole minutes of HD onto a tiny, lightweight, and very portable tape that will retain your data long after you’ve captured it and only costs $6 makes HDV much more appealing.

If you don’t need the portability of tape, though, some form of hard drive capturing mechanism for the HD-SDI would provide a far cleaner image. Speaking of HD-SDI, there are a lot of other ports open to users: composite video, BNC video, S-Video, the good old four-pin IEEE-1394 port for DV and HDV Firewire (all of which are in and out ports), component HDMI out, two XLR inputs (line or mic, and phantom power), as well as genlock and time code in/out.

The Image Controls
There’s also more control over the image before and during processing that with previous cameras. One of my favorite features is a simple numeric white balance, which shows up as a preset but allows you to dial in custom color temperatures for your white balance setting. No longer do we need warm cards for a slightly warmer image. I was shooting in Boston last year as the sun went down, and by changing the setting by a few degrees Kelvin every few minutes, I was able to get a fairly constant color balance even as the dusk light changed, without all the variability that auto white balance would have brought, or the hassle that re-white balancing would have been.

The limited data set that compressed video provides imposes limitations on how far color corrections can be pushed. It is vital that the image be tweaked in camera as much as possible before it is compressed. The closer that raw camera image is to the desired final product the better. Even something as simple and mundane as being able to manually affect the white balance temperature is a tremendous help, and Canon has provided plenty of settings to adjust every aspect of the image within the digital signal processor.

I’ve posted a few frames taken with the camera below. Like the frames above, these were transcoded to CineForm medium upon capture, and then exported as lossless PNGs from After Effects. No color correction or adjustment was applied, but since they were recorded at 60i, I did deinterlace them using RE:Vision FieldsKit. All of these shots were taken handheld, using the XL H1’s stock lens. At the time I was still learning about the camera’s settings (and I still am), so I didn’t nail the black levels or remove as much noise as I could have, but they should give you a good idea of what the camera is capable of, even using HDV.

Not only can you adjust the gamma, knee, and pedestal levels, as is common in other cameras, you can control the overall color matrix, or six individual color matrices for various combination of the three CCD signals. You can also control the phase and gain of the overall signal or each of the RGB channels independently. Not only can you adjust overall sharpness, but you can can set coring values, specify a horizontal detail frequency, and even adjust the balance between horizontal and vertical detail. There are also a number of noise reduction options and skin detail controls.

All the various permutations of these settings can be labeled and saved as custom presets for quick recall. Six are readily available on the camera, and 20 more can be accessed at any time from any SD or MMC card inserted into the reader in the camera’s handgrip, and hundreds can be downloaded from the internet. Canon’sConsole Software offers a computer interface with scopes and diagnostic information to more easily monitor and control all the camera adjustments and manage the custom presets. The power that a user has over the already very good-looking image from this camera is phenomenal. There are a few issues that crop up when it comes to using all that power, however.

The Viewfinder
The viewfinder is one of the most frustrating I have ever used. It’s certainly not the worst I’ve seen, but having such a small, grainy LCD try to display a big, sharp HD image is just bad. Admittedly, it’s not any smaller or grainier than I’ve seen on any other HDV camcorder, and guess I don’t really expect 1440×1080 viewfinders any time soon, but getting manual pin-sharp focus with it is almost impossible. There are two viewfinder modes which are supposed to solve this problem: magnify, which doubles the size of the image, and peaking, which applies an edge-sharpening overlay to better highlight what is in focus.

Unfortunately, magnify can only be used when the tape is not rolling, and the sharpening is so strong that if you don’t have a very shallow DOF, everything is affected by it. However, they do help, and the 2.4″ EVF screen is physically large enough to use comfortably in almost any configuration, and its color is vibrant and accurate enough for adjusting white balance (a toggleable levels or scope overlay would sure be nice, though.) Contrast and brightness are good, and everything is properly adjustable. The real Achilles heel of this screen, however, is the smearing.

Panning horizontally across an image reveals after-image trails from both light and dark objects. It’s not too noticeable until you try to focus on a moving object, and then you discover that the smearing or ghosting is softening your image so that it’s even harder to tell if you are in focus. Using a smaller-than-SD viewfinder to display an HD image is a limiting, but completely understandable, design choice. However, using cheap LCD panels with visible smearing is a genuine fault, one which I hope will be remedied in future versions. Fortunately, the camera’s auto-focus is pretty good… I just don’t like to have to rely on it.

The Lens
I alternately love and hate the stock lens, depending on what I’m shooting - but I certainly love it more often than I hate it. The 5.4-108mm lens offers 20x zoom when used with the 1/3″ imager, and its optical image stabilizer is amazing. Even at full zoom, I can track people walking without a tripod. The shot is better with a tripod, obviously, but the stabilizer smoothes things out immensely. I could be wrong, but it seems to be much more effective than the XL2’s stabilizer. Also, because it is a purely optical stabilizer, there isn’t any of the image degradation intrinsic to digital stabilization.

However, optical image stabilization does come at a cost. Because the lens elements need to move freely on many axis to dampen vibration, they aren’t fixed to the focus and zoom rings as they would be in a regular mechanical or manual lens. The focus and zoom rings merely control the servos than control the lens elements. This means that the controls for an electric lens are in relative or arbitrary position to the lens elements, not absolute position, so there’s no solid way to follow focus by numbers or even remember roughly where marks are on the barrel.

This makes manual focus very tricky and manual zoom fairly irregular. Canon has added the ability to set zoom and focus presets and switch back and forth between them, and the viewfinder shows a numeric readout of focus distance, but these are not perfect solutions. When I’m shooting interviews or standups, I desperately wish I had a manual lens that I could control with precision. The AF system doesn’t always know exactly what I want to be in focus, but the manual control is a bit too sloppy to make minor adjustments. A number of people have purchased the XL2’s manual lens for these situations, and it seems to give fairly good results for a non-HD lens.

When I’m shooting in the field, however, I am extremely grateful for the electric lens. The optical image stabilization is worth its weight in gold for handheld shots, and without an HD viewfinder, the camera’s autofocus is far more accurate than my eyeballed manual focus would be. Plus, an electric lens has another advantage over mechanical lenses; even with AF on, I can still spin the focus ring to tell the camera roughly which plane I want to be in focus. It’s especially useful for racking focus, since it works on the fly while recording. If I get an object even close to sharp (provided that other competing elements are suitably soft) and let go of the focus ring, the lens takes over and zeroes in on my chosen object.

Plus, it really is a stellar lens in terms of optical quality. Canon knows a lot about glass, and this is an excellent piece of work. The lens elements are made of fluorite and high-refraction glass to compensate for chromatic aberration, and have some fancy new coatings to reduce reflections and ghosting. It has a six-leaf iris operating from f1.6 to f16, built-in 1/6 and 1/32 ND filters, and a filter thread diameter of 72mm. In fact, preferences between electric and mechanical controls notwithstanding, it’s probably one of the best HD lenses you can get for anywhere close to $10k, which basically means that you’re getting a great deal on a lens, which comes with a free camera.

Conclusion
And it’s a good camera. In short, the whole package is pretty incredible. It’s really a jack-of-all-trades system that can be used for almost anything. Documentary filmmakers and reporters will make the most of comfortable yet compact form factor, run-and-gun lens, and great battery life. Television producers can run the HD SDI signal directly into a vision mixer and use the genlock and timecode options to sync up several affordable HD studio cameras. Hobbyists can afford a camera with a truly superior image that gives them room to grow.

Only those using the camera for digital cinema production will be seriously hampered by the automatic lens, crummy viewfinder, and HDV recording, but they should be using a lens adapter, on-set monitor, and hard drive recorder anyway. With it’s state-of-the-art CCD array, totally controllable image processor, removable lens, uncompressed output, and timecode sync, the XL H1 is an extremely capable digital cinema camera head. It is widely available and affordable, and now that it’s been in use for a year, it is battle tested and well supported. I give it a 9.5 out of ten.

First Look at Magic Bullet Looks
Posted: June 28, 2007 at 1:28 am, by Isaac

As we all know, Red Giant Software makes some great tools. Since they first released Magic Bullet in 2002, it has been a ubiquitous part of the low-budget filmmaker’s effort to make video look more like film. There have been some improvements along the way, but the Magic Bullet Suite is getting a major overhaul, and now includes three individual products: Magic Bullet Colorista, Magic Bullet Frames, and Magic Bullet Looks.

When I first heard about Magic Bullet Look’s workflow, how you can apply different effects to the subject, matte box, lens, camera, and post slots, I was a little skeptical. In my mind I pictured either a gimmicky toy for users too inexperienced for regular color correction tools, or a complex optical simulator that would to be tricky to manipulate and time-consuming to render. Fortunately, it’s somewhere in the middle, combining the best features of each extreme.

After watching Stu Maschwitz’s video tour on Studio Daily, it’s now clear how it all works. It’s only logical to apply gradient and diffusion filters to the matte box, faux DOF effects and flares to the lens, and film processing effects to the camera. It’s impossible for amateur colorists to apply effects in the wrong order, and the light calculations behave realistically and are adjustable using real-world controls. Furthermore, it renders like lightning, and all the previews, even with half a dozen stacked effects, are snappy.

I also really like the easy management of custom filters and effects, and the management of combined LUTs. The interface is clean and intuitive, and from within the After Effects effect panel you can see at a glance what the settings are. Another nice touch is the interactive library view; rather than showing a generic picture for each of the stored settings in the library, it calculates a thumbnail of what each preset will do to the footage you have selected. Magic Bullet Looks will run as a plugin for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Vegas, and various Avid NLEs, or as a standalone program.

The Cineform Digital Intermediate Codec
Posted: June 19, 2007 at 9:47 pm, by Isaac

For the past few months, we’ve been running all our HD projects using the CineForm codec rather than native HDV. Obviously, if we are capturing on HDV, converting to another codec doesn’t add any visual quality or extra information to the image, but it makes the editing process much faster, and since CineForm is a true digital intermediate format, any recompression of clips that have had effects or color adjustments applied to them stays much cleaner. There are a number of tests of CineForm that carefully document its impressive quality, and I’m on the road today, so I’ll just stick to the workflow issues.

You can get this “Visually Perfect” Wavelet codec in a number of flavors, each of which has different options, ranging from a simple 720/1080 all the way up to 2k, and colorspace from 8-bit 4:2:2 video to 12-bit 4:4:4 to a full RAW version, designed for camera capture. Also, rumor has it that 2k is by no means the limit of the codec, just the limit of the available products at this time. Obviously, it has abilities far beyond Apple’s new ProRes codec, which is why there will soon be Mac support for the CineForm codec. You can get a beta version to play with here.

But CineForm is more than a codec; it comes with an application called HDLink, which can be used to batch convert video files from one format from another and capture from any HDV camera with full control over the video and codec, with full support for P2 files and Canon’s 24f framerate. It can upscale or downscale on the fly, from 720 or 1080 or back again, adjust for lens adapter flip, deinterlace or remove various pulldowns and change framerates to create true 24p video. It also has one of the most accurate scene detection features I’ve seen for HDV, and an option to capture native M2T transport streams from the camera and CineForm-encoded AVIs side by side.

However, we generally skip that, and take advantage of Aspect HD’s seamless integration with Premiere Pro when capturing, since HDLink does not retain the tape’s timecode data on each clip in the same way that Premiere does. Because our production pipeline requires that we store all the timecode so we can rebuild projects from our server backups, we use HDLink rarely. However, Premiere’s capture options offer most of the same controls through a Cineform control panel.

And within Premiere the difference between CineForm and HDV is incredible. Even without using a RAID array, our Opteron 170-based edit box can simultaneously play back three video streams fading in and out of each other at full res without dropping frames and without rendering. There are also a number of Premiere video effects provided by CineForm that provide render-free color adjustments and image panning/scaling, and several real-time transitions. The performance increase is phenomenal.

This comes at a price of filesize, obviously, but the hit is not too bad. Our 30p 1080 footage, captured at the “medium” quality setting (which I find more than adequate for HDV-originated footage), is only two to three times larger than native 25mbps HDV, depending on scene complexity. We tend to get about 30 gigabytes of data per hour-long tape, in contrast to DV and HDV’s 12GB per hour. In addition to storage concerns, this increased filesize also introduces bus-speed issues.

The projected maximum speed of a SATA 1.5 hard drive is roughly 150 megabytes per second, which theoretically means that you could play back several CineForm video files at the same time. Practically, however, the HDD would need to skip back and forth between the files to read them, and the pre-caching required for more than one or two would cause choking. Hard drives connected using USB 2.0 max out at less than a third of that speed, so CineForm projects will scrub and play far more smoothly when video files are distributed across a number of SATA drives.

This is how we have always worked, particularly on documentary projects where interviews and b-roll can be easily split up, and the advantages of editing CineForm footage far outweigh the few issues introduced by larger filesizes. It has also streamlined our pipeline, since we can export a trimmed project (something impossible with HDV), and import that into After Effects for finishing. After Effects scrubs and previews CineForm files much faster than HDV.

CineForm licenses are sold on a per-machine basis, so until I purchase another license for our online suite, I’m using the free CineForm decoder to view the video clips in AE and apply my effects, and then I move the project file to our edit suite for rendering. This is one of the many, many advantages of having identical Adobe installs and content management systems on multiple computers. The free decoder also means I can preview files across networks (fast networks) or on laptops (fast laptops) without purchasing a full CineForm suite just for previewing or selecting footage. I should also note that CineForm is a standard VFW codec, so it works with almost any program in Windows, from Media Player to MoKey to VirtualDub.

Unfortunately, the software is not without a few bugs, most of which crop up during capturing. I’m not sure whether the fault lies with the camera control, scene detect within the transport stream, integration with Premiere, or just CineForm’s encoding itself. I’m prepared to overlook a few bugs when dealing with HDV, since I know that there are several faults that are just intrinsic to capturing a long-GOP format. CineForm’s staff have a great reputation for providing quick solutions, so as soon as they are spending less time porting everything to OSX and CS3 I’m sure they’ll be a little more reachable than they were last month.

In short, I give the software 9.5 out of 10. After wrapping two projects with it, I can’t imagine working in HD without it… and since it scales so well, I may never have to. With Silicon Imaging making CineForm the native codec of their digital cinema cameras, the Wafian hard drive encoders debuting at such affordable prices, and more and more film labs offering scanning to and recording from CineForm, this is the most powerful digital intermediate codec available to low and medium-budget filmmakers (big budget films can afford to be uncompressed all the time). The possibilities are endless, and its contribution to the easy integration between Premiere and After Effects is perfect for digital rebels and those of us wanting to get the most from our production pipelines.

Writing Script Treatments
Posted: April 24, 2007 at 2:31 am, by Isaac

I’ve been getting some mail from readers who plan to enter the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival’s Treatment Competition, and since there aren’t many resources on treatment writing, I figured I should just put up an article. For this contest you need to show that you understand your story well enough to fit it into three pages and still make it clear and lively to the judges. But what is a treatment?

“A true treatment is something that you would never show anyone! It’s an elaborate plan which describes scene by scene what the characters say and do, and what they’re thinking and feeling. It should be about 80-100 pages long. It’s a tool that the writer uses to build toward the screenplay.”
      –Robert McKee

Pitch treatments, on the other hand, are used to sell a film. The industry standard length is anywhere from two sentences to 90 pages, and the are usually follow a “Concept (or Premise), Theme, Characters, Synopsis” structure, since it’s the logical way to explain a film: “What is the story?” “What’s the story really about?” “Who’s in the story?” and finally, “What exactly happens in the story?” One of the things that’s hotly debated among script and treatment writers is whether to submit a full treatment or just a story synopsis, since studio execs get bored reading through all the nuts and bolts of a treatment and just want a short story.

Now, the trouble with most screenwriting books and screenwriting websites is that they spend most of their time talking about how to deal with studio scriptreaders, how to pitch to studio execs, and work within the studio system. It’s interesting, but not really applicable to the independent filmmaker, or those writing a treatment for this contest. Terry Rossio has written the best article I’ve seen on the subject, and includes three treatments for completed films that he worked on.

The rules of the contest only give you three pages, but they also require a lot of info on the cover page, which is good. If you decide to stick to a concept, theme, characters, synopsis structure, you’ll be adding the first two on the cover page. Since I mentioned The Verdict in my article on theme, I’ll use it as an example.

Working Title: The Verdict Author: David Mamet Copyright Holder: 20th Century Fox Genre: Courtroom Drama Setting: Boston, 1980s Target Audience: Professionals Adults 18-60, particularly Lawyers, Catholics, Doctors Predicted Rating: PG Estimated Production Budget: $4m Premise: A washed-up, deceitful, ambulance-chasing lawyer is the last hope of the down-trodden relatives of a victim of medical malpractice. As he feebly represents them against the invincible trinity of the hospital, the Catholic church, and the city’s top legal firm, he finds new respect for truth and justice, resists the temptation to compromise, and ultimately redeems himself as he rises to powerfully fulfill his responsibilities. Commercial and theological significance of the project: The theme of this film communicates the importance of honesty and responsibility. In a sea of corruption and lies, a flawed man will be forced to overcome his shortcoming and stand up for the truth. The antagonists are represented by people and frustrations that audiences are familiar with, and they will empathize with our hero as he faces these impossible odds and then cheer as he overcomes them through personal character in order to see justice done. How the film will be distinct, fresh, unique, and superior: Careful writing will preserve and reinforce the overarching theme of truth vs. lies, making every villain, challenge, setback, and sin a product of deceit, and every victory the result of the truth being made known. The film will very carefully point out specific corruption within the modern medical infrastructure, Roman Catholic church, and legal system, without slandering all doctors, Christians, and magistrates. The worldview communicated will be one of uncompromising truth and personal responsibility that will not only encourage but inspire those who see it.

And now that you’ve communicated the details of your premise and theme, you’ve still got three whole pages for characters and plot. You may not need to give the characters their own section if it’s clear from your story synopsis who they are, but if you have to cut some character exposition from your Act I to fit in all the story points, the reader would probably find it helpful to read brief introductions to the main characters before you dive into the action.

As Mr. Rossio points out, it can be very dangerous to give studio executives a pitch script for many reasons, mainly because most studio guys don’t know how to read a treatment. Nevertheless, they are a vital tool for the writer, and it can even be helpful to condense a script to a short pitch treatment because it will force you to evaluate the priority elements in your story. With a treatment you need to be very economical since, in this contest anyway, you only have three pages. You need to be brief in order to fit everything in and keep the reader from being bored - not because he’s a studio exec, but because he’s a judge who’s read fifty treatments already.

Screenwriting: Theme
Posted: April 23, 2007 at 6:49 pm, by Isaac

In February I posted about story structure. The structure of a film is important because it is the foundation of the story and the framework upon which plot can be built and characters can work. Strong plots and good characters can be weakened by poor structure. They can also be fragmented by a poor theme.

Theme is the real heart of good screenwriting, in the same way that structure is it’s skeleton. The theme of a film is what it is really about. It’s the main message and purpose of the story. The Hustler is a movie about pool players, but it’s theme is one of personal character. In the film, Jackie Gleason plays an aging pool champ. The young Paul Newman is a better player, but he still can’t defeat Gleason because Newman lacks the character, discipline, and self-mastery of the older man. When he obtains it later in the film, Gleason recognizes the fact that now Newman is unbeatable. It’s a clear illustration of the importance of character.

The film City Hall is on the surface a pretty basic political drama, but it shows how mayor Al Pacino loses everything because of small compromises made early in his political career. Its theme is based on integrity, and shows how small sins, no matter how carefully concealed, will lead to large-scale ruin. This theme of integrity is also crucial to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but in a different way, as Jimmy Stewart’s battle against corruption more specifically shows how our hero’s good name and personal integrity are his greatest strengths.

Scripts can have multiple themes, or characters who are not related to the ultimate theme, but this will weaken your film. Two excellent examples of scripts with strong, unified, over-arching themes are those for Rain Man and The Verdict. Neither of their structures are perfect, but both are good examples of careful handling of character arc, plot, and theme.

Rain Man’s theme is familial or brotherly love. Charlie Babbitt childishly kidnaps Raymond, his severely autistic brother, in a desperate bid to contest the father’s will and extort some payments for himself from the executor. Charlie’s girlfriend leaves him in disgust, partly a plot device to force Charlie and Raymond to be alone together, but mostly to prevent a romantic love plotline from distracting from the theme of brotherly love. Raymond loves Charlie, but his autism prevents him from showing it. Charlie loves his brother, but his immaturity prevents him from even realizing it. Nevertheless, when constantly torn between his own needs and those of his brother, Charlie repeatedly dies to himself to serve Raymond.

He does so begrudgingly at first, but gradually he becomes aware of the film’s theme. When he does so, he experiences true character growth. He matures, and becomes more of a hero than an anti-hero. In fact, he grows so much that his desires change. His want (money) and his need (loving his brother) are different, and his new, Act III want is to live with his brother. This type of inconsistency could be a weakness to the story, but the script handles it well.

Charlie still requires the money in order to keep his business running, but now he does not greedily desire it. Because of this understanding, the audience still wants him to get the money, thus fulfilling his first, main goal without compromising his newfound character. He then realizes his brother is better off in a clinic, and his love for him is so great that he lets him go back. The audience applauds his selflessness. This is a strong, universal theme, which easily supports a complicated script because it is the primary emotion that drives the characters. There are no other competing messages to dilute the power of the film. Even the initial kidnapping is motivated more by Charlie’s need for fatherly recognition than by greed.

A better example of this is in The Verdict, where the theme is truth; namely that the truth is important, even all-important, and worthy of professional and personal sacrifice to preserve. Everything in the script­–every action and reaction–­has to do with truth. Every obstacle in the film is the result of a lie, and every mystery revolves around finding out if a person is honest or if a statement is correct. Even the backstories of the main characters revolve around proofs and perjuries. In the end, the hero abandons the love interest because he knows she is dishonest. This is a tough ending to sell to an audience, but it works, partly on the strength of the characters themselves, but mostly because the theme is so powerful. If the audience understands the point of the film, they know our hero can’t compromise anywhere. Associating with liars is just not an option after he has grown.

In fact, the hero’s own character growth is very simple; he just comes to realize what the theme of the film is, and in The Verdict, its simplicity is its strength. At the beginning of the film, our hero is a disreputable, opportunistic, pragmatic lawyer with no clients and a serious drinking problem (which is incidental to his character­–the film doesn’t distract from the theme by adding a temperance sermon). His journey is the ongoing discovery that truth is important. His redemption comes when this truth comes out and sets him free. He also follows the want/need dichotomy that makes up solid cinema character; he wants to win a court case; he needs to tell the truth.

The strong theme infuses the entire film, from top to bottom, and makes the plot deeper and the characters more vibrant. What could have been a boring made-for-tv movie about a routine medical malpractice suit becomes a powerful morality tale with stakes far higher than a mere cash settlement. A film that could have been divided between multiple messages about alcoholism, medical responsibility, or judicial bribery remains laser-focused on a single theme that saturates all aspects of the film and makes it a more powerful whole. Good films are true to their themes.

This post is largely an except from Chapter 7 of Outside Hollywood.

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