Events Rewind : User Groups

Adobe After Effects and AVID Marquee reviewed at WNYPPG meeting

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:03:00 GMT

Kurt Murphy, Art Director, Animation Artist, Creative Cow Contributor and owner of Paws for Effect, presented to the Western New York Post Production Group on the fundamental understanding of Adobe After Effects. He demonstrated some of his current work and answered questions about basic and advanced Adobe After Effects techniques. His extensive presentation included the Value Home Center commercial spot “snow globe”, and a video clip of the reenactment of the storming of the Normandy Beach. This video was produced with a cast of 3 members and basic post production software. It really is amazing to see what they did.

Chris Thomas, Senior Editor at WNED presented a basic understanding of the Avid Marquee titling program. He was able to use WNED’s access to ALEX to expand the presentation and tailor it for the participants. You can check out ALEX courses on the web at http://www.avid.com/training/alex.asp.

The next meeting for WNYPPG is on April 22 at WNED-TV. You can get up to the date information about WNYPPG at wnyppg.org.

Steve Audette Best Documentary Nomination!

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:18:00 GMT

The Boston Avid User Group is fortunate to have Steve Audette as one of their members. Steve is a long time Avid customer and advocate. For 15 years Steve has been FRONTLINE's Senior Editor; cutting two documentaries a year for the series.

Steve was just recently nominated by the American Cinema Editors for the best edited Documentary in 2008! He was nominated for his work editing the 4.5 hour documentary, “Bush’s War”. Steve presented at the Boston Avid User Group meeting in November and demonstrated how he created the opening montage for the series using 3,000 photos coming together to create one photo of George Bush. Watch how he did it.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

See all the nominees for the A.C.E. Awards at
http://www.ace-filmeditors.org/newace/eddieNominees.html

Horror film edited on Avid in tapeless environment

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:31:00 GMT

(Please visit the site to view this media)Iain Mitchell, Avid customer and member of the UK Avid user group, has been editing on Avid for over 15 years, with a mixture of film and television work on his resume. He recently took some time out to talk to Avid about his latest film, S.N.U.B.!, which was the first time he had worked on a totally tapeless project.

Avid: What is S.N.U.B.! about?

IM: It’s a horror/thriller about a nuclear attack on London – a group of survivors are trapped in a government bunker cut off from the outside world and they think they’re safe, but it turns out not to be the case….

Avid: How did you get involved in the project?

IM: I had worked with the director, Jonathan Glendening, about eight years ago when I edited his film, Summer Rain, and we kept in touch. When S.N.U.B.! came up he offered me the gig.

It sounded like a real challenge as this was the first film project to use the new Sony EX1 tapeless cameras (shooting HD), and it would certainly be my first all-tapeless film. I was working on a TV project at the time but decided I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I took this on in my spare time.

I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical that the EX1 would be able to cope with shooting for a film – it looked like a DV camera no bigger than a PD150! However, as soon as I saw the first pictures on screen I was proved entirely wrong.

The initial shoot was 12 days, using two of the EX1s and recording to DAT as the cameras were hand-held most of the time. They would shoot one card on each camera in the morning then replace them for the afternoon shoot, and in the meantime the rushes were transferred using Sony’s Transfer Tool to a quicktime .mov onto a hard drive – so I would receive a whole day’s rushes on a hard drive that same evening.

Avid: Was it a collaborative editing process with the director?

IM: Since I’d worked with Jonathan before, he knew he could leave me to get on with it. I would be editing during the day on a paid job, come home and import the day’s rushes then start editing until midnight! It was hard to edit after working all day on a TV programme and to switch editing style. Having no producers or directors for the first assemble made editing much quicker as I was able to get more done and to get a feel for the film. In fact the film changed radically because of this; initially the vision was for a slow-burning, tense thriller but once I had the pictures to work with it was clear that we needed to make it much faster and pacier.

Avid: Which editing tool did you use?

IM: Originally the director wanted to use Final Cut Pro as it was low budget , but I hate it. I’ve worked with Avids for over 15 years - I even used to install them, it’s like a second skin for me. I find FCP has too many ‘whistles and bells’ which properly trained, experienced editors shouldn’t need. I also find the media management tools within Avid are far superior.

I’d been using Avid Xpress Pro (previously Avid Xpress) for years at home and I loved having an industry standard! So I started the edit using that, transferring the material onto my Mac G5, and I finished the first cut and a trailer to take to Cannes where we were trying to sell the film.

By the time we returned Avid had released Media Composer 3.0 software and was phasing out Xpress Pro, so I decided I had to let my trusted friend go and install Media Composer. I made a back-up, expecting the transition to be a nightmare, but to my surprise everything worked perfectly! The interfaces are very similar but the little improvements between v2.8 and v3.0 make a lot of difference – for instance, I can move clips tracks individually now rather than two at a time, and generally everything is much more fluid. Also Avid seems to be much better for the OSX Platform than it has been for some years. With OSX 10.5.5 Avid was close behind with updates and more importantly it’s rock solid!

At this time we also started using version 2 of Sony’s Transfer Tool. Using version 1 had been OK but very slow and laborious as Avid didn’t have a codec that would talk to it. When we came to download the footage from an additional five days of shooting using version 2, it was unbelievably fast – almost instantaneous. I could import clips, go to Avid AAF and there they were in Media Composer, ready to go. This saved an enormous amount of time.

Avid: Did you have any problems working with HD resolution?

IM: Not at all – in fact I was able to cut at full resolution without any loss of power or speed, which was amazing. Drive space is so cheap these days, so I had 2Tb storage with everything uncompressed.

The only thing that was weird and slightly unnerving for me was the lack of tapes on my shelf! I was so diligent (or paranoid!) about backing up - that was a fundamental part of the project. It was also strange for me to present the final cut to the grader as a consolidated sequence at DNX185 on a hard drive – I didn’t have to reconform it, he just put it on a Nitris system and played out of the Nitris onto a Baselight system. It was an absolutely seamless process, not one frame out.

It was a similar story for the visual effects work. I just gave the VFX team uncompressed Quicktime sequences, either on iDisk or a DVD, they would do their stuff and give them back as a Quicktime. There were around 100 CG shots including one blowing up London, this wasn’t small stuff – but the transfers were so easy!

Avid: Were there any particular features in Media Composer that you particularly liked?

IM: I love the colour correction tool – if I had the time and patience I’d love to get into more grading. Jordan Cushing (the DoP) did an amazing job with the lighting so I didn’t have that much to do, except for a rudimentary grade on the trailer to crush the blacks and take the brightness down. There was also one major scene in the bunker that needed a red effect to imitate emergency lighting.

Being able to see the film at full res in Media Composer was great because I could really see what needed to be corrected. I have to say that it was shot beautifully, especially considering the Sony EX1 is such a small camera. I thought there would be gain or it would look crushed but the camera coped remarkably well.

Avid: Were you involved in the audio?

IM: I took on the role of post-production supervisor as well as editor, so I did get involved in the audio. Sound guys always want different takes, so recording to DAT meant that we could give them every DAT for the whole film. The files were transferred seamlessly onto a Pro Tools system at The Sound Design Company, a bespoke sound editing studio in Denham Media Park. The effects editor was Steve Felton, dialogue editor was Rick Dunford and Nicolas Le Messurier at Synxspeed was the re-record mixer. At this point I’ll hand over to Steve to tell you more…

Steve Felton: The Avid/Pro Tools integration was really easy, Iain brought his G5 to the studio and we fiddled about with his tracks to get them how we wanted them, then Iain made an AAF and we transferred it across. He also made us a Quicktime of the picture so we could work to his latest edit. Earlier we had copied all the DAT tapes onto a hard drive, which was great – if we needed an alternative delivery of a line we could just go back to the rushes and choose it. The tracklay took three weeks to complete including a day or two of ADR, and the mix took 3 days. Once we had finished we created a .wav of the 5.1 mix, which we gave to Iain to lay back into the main edit.

The version we have now is a temp mix, which is fine for preview purposes. Once the film is sold we’ll go back and add more sound effects, record more ADR and do a tidy-up for a proper feature film version.

The tapeless method worked well for us, we received what we needed quickly which allowed us to get on with the editing without waiting for copies or digitizing video tapes which is very important on fast-turnaround projects – it was all seamless and very easy.

Avid: What was the biggest challenge on this film?

IM: For me, it was just getting my head round being in a tapeless environment, and remembering to back up all the time.

There were no ‘challenges’ or problems as such, I still can’t quite believe how smooth the whole process was. With new technology you expect that there are going to be some issues or problems, but hand on heart we didn’t have any at all.

My biggest dread was that the picture would have slipped after consolidation but not a single picture was out of frame.

We did have one minor puzzle – when we came to consolidate we couldn’t find the OMF. We were confused for about 10 minutes then realised we should be looking for an AAF…. By the way, AAF is the way forward! I always thought OMFs were great but AAFs are fantastic!

It’s been a great learning experience for me. I did miss the technical side of things a bit - the physical handling of tapes and the processes that go with it – getting my hands dirty and solving problems. But this is a fantastic new way to work and I’d certainly do it again.

S.N.U.B.! is in the process of finalising a distribution deal. S.N.U.B. 2 is already in the pipeline!

DC User Group Meeting at GV Expo

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:58:00 GMT

The DC Avid User Group held a meeting during the GV Expo on December 3^rd. The meeting was held at a function room at the Walter E.Washington Convention Center in DC. They had a good turnout with over 60 people attending. The FCP user group meeting was right next door – the Avid group had more attendees. It started off with a reception with good food, beverage, and conversations. It was great to mingle and network with colleagues and friends before the meeting.

The meeting got underway with Avid’s Bob Russo discussing the RED workflow. This is a hot topic that everyone seems to be interested in these days. But as Bob explained, technology and updates are happening so quickly that everything that he said today could be different tomorrow. Avid is a licensed R3D developer and continually working on improving the workflow and integration. Application Editor, Glen Seaman was also on hand to field questions. To get the step by step technical information on the RED workflow, download the pdf at: http://www.avid.com/RED/REDstepbystep.pdf

Next, Coby Rich from Sorenson Media introduced the crowd to Squeeze 5. It is crucial to be able to deliver your projects in a variety of different formats. All the different file and compression formats can be overwhelming. However, Squeeze 5 makes it seamless and transparent with single preset settings for your audio, video, filters and distribution. The software allows you to deliver the best quality in any format without needing in depth knowledge of compression formats. Coby showed how simply you can get your project from your Avid to DVD and the Web.

Coby then gave a quick overview of Squish® which embeds the power of Sorenson’s Squeeze® into any Web page on your site, allowing you to easily accept user-submitted video. Users can drag-and-drop video files onto the Squish applet or capture video streams from Webcams or camcorders, and have them be automatically encoded and uploaded to any network-accessible host.

Toronto - Best Meeting Ever!

Anonymous — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 04:58:26 GMT

Gordon Thorne, a long standing member of the Toronto Avid User Group, gave his take on the user group meeting on November 27th.

Toronto User Group’s Secrets of Doc Editing panel - “Best Meeting Ever”

How do you top some amazing meetings the Toronto user group has put on? You assemble some of the best, most passionate, most celebrated, documentary editors in town and let them talk about their craft. The November meeting at the Royal Theatre saw a panel discussion entitled, “Secrets of Documentary editing” and the response from the over 100 members who attended was that it was the “best meeting ever”.

Veteran editor Gordon Thorne moderated a five member panel that included: Cathy Gulkin (“The Four Seasons Mosaic”), Craig Webster (“Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the 70's Generation”), Gerry Banning ("For Rent"), Lorenzo Massa ("Mayday") and Michele Hozer (“Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire”). Each editor presented a short clip from their work and then talked about the unique challenges of each. The range was incredible; from arts docs to reality TV to docudramas to feature length “personal journey” and issue docs. The panelists were all incredibly generous with their knowledge and passionate about their work.

Some of the subjects included: tips on structuring in the different genres; advice on the challenges of taking over from another editor; overcoming the dreaded first act; maintaining emotional intensity; and when not to overcut. The panelists even gave their favourite “AVID” tips; using the interface to create and organize. A personal favourite was the “conjoiner bin” in which you place harvested ands, thens and of courses that are used to bridge two dialogue thoughts that might not have been joined. The panelists also stressed the importance of organizing material in the documentary edit and gave examples of how each achieved that.

Thanks again to the staff at the Royal Theatre in downtown Toronto for providing a wonderful venue and projection quality that certainly has to be the best in the city for video playback.

One audience member commented the next day: “I came away from it so inspired. I stayed up half the night thinking (about it).” One of the panel members commented, “It was such a pleasure…that the only thing that would have improved it for me was if it went longer!” It seems that the Toronto Avid Community loves to share their craft.

MultiCam Rocks Florida

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:36:36 GMT

Mitch Jacobson, an Avid editor who specializes in multi-camera productions, presented to the Tampa Avid user Group meeting on October 20^that Osceola Fundamental High School. Mitch, who's productions have been nominated twice for national Emmy Awards™, talked about his work and showed multi-camera clips from the concert film Aerosmith: You Gotta Move. Mitch has over 25 years experience cutting network TV programs and concert films for A&E, PBS, CBS, Discovery and E! He is the author of an upcoming book published by Focal Press entitled: Mastering Multi-Camera Editing. Mitch gave practical advice such as the importance of organizing and clip-naming workflows. He talked about some common ways of syncing cameras such a source timecode and in-points. Imagine trying to organize and edit with 18 different camera views. With Media Composer, you can view and edit multiple cameras in real-time "on-the-fly" or by starting and stopping the action to carefully chose the shots. You can group them together so it's easier to find the exact angle that you want. Working on rock concerts has its own special challenges as Mitch explained. Not only did he have to handle 18 different camera angles but also add in footage from multiple concert nights. The audio might be better on one of the concert evenings while the lighting may be better on another night. Mitch's presentation was captivating and appealed to the students and the professionals in the audience. We especially enjoyed the Steven Tyler impersonations.

On Tuesday, Mitch presented to another group of over 80 students and professionals in Orlando. Full Sail Universisty and Avid hosted a mini workshop featuring Mitch's multicamera workflows. Mitch spoke for over 2 hours and spent extra time fielding questions regarding sync issues, audio and codecs. The group was especially interested in dealing with music concerts and working with inexpensive cameras that are problematic for timecode sync. Sync issues are a staple of Mitch's presentation but, this time he shared some additional ways to sync cameras like: handclaps, flashlights and digital camera flash's. For hard to sync cameras he stressed the use of Lock-It Boxes which send timecode to auxilliary audio tracks or external sync inputs. The Avid can translate audio timecode to SMPTE Timecode for an easy way to group multiple cameras. Because the group was interested in music projects, Mitch shared a preview from his upcoming book Mastering Multi-Camera Editing that deals with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing on PBS Great Performances. The director of the TV program uses the music score as a script for the concert. He puts all of his camera notes directly into the music sheets, notating things such as instrument solos and big composer movements. The score is shared by the assistant director with non-music reading crew members with camera shot sheets. In post, editors and producers refer to "The Book" as a reference to the director's notes to edit the show.

Avid Pride in Korea

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:40:46 GMT

We have added a new user group to our growing list of world wide user groups. Avid Pride is a user group in the Republic of Korea and they have 10,000 members. The group was actually founded in 2004 and has steadily increased in activity and membership. The steering committee consists of June Kim who is President, Churl Kim is the Vice President, and eun kyoung Shin as the Membership Coordinator.

Avid Pride is very active and their mission is to network and educate members on the latest tool and techniques available. They are interested in training and incorporating Avid, Digi Design and SoftImage products together. In addition the group has regular meetings, they hold education meetings for beginners, Issue the Avid Pride E-Magazine, and also have conferences showing their work created on Avid Products. Last May June Kim held a seminar in Seoul at the Korea International Broadcast, Audio & Lighting Equipment Show, KOBA. Enclosed are pictures of the members that participated in the seminar. Churl Kim VP of the group and Avid Certified Instructor was a guest presenter at the Conference.

Washington DC User Group Meeting

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:13:30 GMT

On October 2, 2008 the DC Avid Users Group held a meeting at Future Media Concepts in downtown Washington, DC. We had a little over 20 people in attendance. Our main speaker was Charles Hoff of the DoDEA (The Department of Defense Education Activity). Charles spends a lot of time working in both Media Composer and After Effects. His presentation focused on the fine points of successfully moving a project from the Avid to After Effects and back again. He spent quite a bit of time discussing different color space issues and explaining what you have to do to avoid distorting your colors or your luminance values as you move back and forth. This is an important point to understand as most files (quicktime, etc.) don't contain this metadata, or the data in the file is often inaccurate. Charles also discussed how it is important to keep your files organized so the project can easily be moved to another system or archived for later use. There were many excellent questions from the group, which kept the conversation focused on the real-world problems that our members deal with every day.

Our second presenter was Lindsay Lacher-Katz of MediaSilo. She flew in from Boston to tell us about a service that her company offers. MediaSilo is a low cost subscription service that allows editors and post houses to post video clips on the web for client review. She told us that their most common package is only $99 per month and allows for more or less unlimited use. MediaSilo automatically converts your uploaded clips to Flash and posts them on a page for your client to review. Clients are given a user name and password to access a special web page. Clients can make comments at specific points in the video. Editors and producers can review this feedback and use it to easily make the required changes. Lindsay offered everyone a free MediaSilo account with limited use so we can try it out.

Wilbur Allen took some great pictures during the meeting and he also helped out by selling the raffle tickets. Dave Kristiansen of EFX Media helped people sign-in upon arrival. The raffle was a great success. Brenda Bergin at Avid sent us a bunch of great Avid goodies. My favorites were the hand powered flashlights, which could also run on batteries. The group took in over sixty dollars for our treasury. Thanks to everyone for supporting the group.

The Dynamic Duo

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:52:00 GMT

The Greg and Frank show exploded into Central Florida on Wednesday evening, September 24^th for the Orlando Post Pros User Group meeting. Greg Staten, Senior Product Designer and veteran Avid employee joined Frank Capria, also a Senior Product Designer, for a dynamic presentation.

Tim Bartlett from Adrenaline Films hosted the meeting which started out with a lot of networking and refreshments. Adrenaline Films is a full-service production company providing services to the broadcast, corporate and advertising industries with a specialty in creating compelling images in High Definition, Film and Video.

Greg Staten, Avid Senior Product Designer then presented the newest features and the latest hardware. Greg first went over the Nitris DX I/O hardware for SD and HD and demonstrating the capabilities of the multi-stream 10 bit Avid DNxHD encode and decode.

Greg then demonstrated the newest software features from minor convenience improvements to major features enhancements. He showed off the new HD codec support, native thin raster support, real-time multi-window time code burn in tool, and the new software based real time effect pipeline to name a few.

Frank then gave an interesting perspective on his new position as Senior Product Designer at Avid. Frank came from the industry as an Avid customer. A somewhat critical and vocal one at that. Frank came to Avid with a list of preconceived notions that he, like many others have about the company. He then proceeded to dispel the myths explaining that the employees are in touch with the real world and the competition. The engineers are extremely talented and focused, management is looking at doing the right thing and that Avid doesn’t have its head in the sand or worse. Frank and Greg work great together and unfortunately... for the surrounding engineers, they have cubicles next to each. They can be heard through out the day getting excited about all the features that they want to add to the products. This is extremely disturbing to the engineers in the surrounding cubicles as they see their work load mounting with each casual discussion.

As you see new features and enhancements emerge, I think it fair to say, Thanks Greg and Frank!

BAVUG September Meeting

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:58:42 GMT

The Boston Avid User Group's September meeting was held at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. The meeting started out with some fun networking with some familiar faces. The speaker this month was Len Sitomer from PortalVideo Inc. Len is a leading digital media producer and technology designer. In 1992, he founded PortalVideo, LLC, a media consulting firm that provides new-age video communication tools, technologies and strategies to clients in the private equity industry. The company grew significantly, attracting best-of-class clients in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In 2005, PortalVideo, Inc. was spun out of the original consulting firm to make the PortalVideo software and technology available to producers and editors worldwide.

PortalVideo™ is an internet-based video editing system that dramatically reduces the time and cost of creating interview-based rough cuts. Edit anytime and anywhere you find a broadband connection. Your work process is the same, only easier and faster than before. Choose the right transcript segments and place them in the right order. The PortalVideo system, with patent-pending VideoText® technology, links transcript text to video, and instantly publishes both edited video and script over the internet.

The audience, consisting manly of editors, found it to be an interesting product although they all seemed to have mixed emotions about it. This tool allows the producers to do the grunt work of rough editing the early stages of a project. It can then be exported to an Avid system for final editing. Many editors feel that good about being spared the early work but as service providers they hate to lose this part of their business.

An Interview with Director Alex Houston

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:00:00 GMT

During the Rhode Island International Film Festival, I had the opportunity to see an inspiring film by one of Avid’s customers, Alex Houston. Alex submitted his film, “Swim Lessons: The Nick Irons Story” to the festival. Not only was the film selected to be shown at the festival as one of the 300 out of over 3,000 submitted; it won first place in the Short Documentary category. The 40-minute film, based on the book by Nick Irons, chronicles his 1997 fundraising swim down the length of the Mississippi River to benefit multiple sclerosis research. He swam the river for the sake of his father, who suffers from the disease.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

I had the opportunity to talk to Alex about his experience making the film. Nick and Alex went to Boston College together. When Alex heard about what Nick did, the first thing he said was, ‘Tell me you have footage of this.’ He knew right away that he wanted to make this film. “This is such a compelling story, so much more than just a fundraising event. This is the story of a family, and about sacrifice. It’s a character study in perseverance and love.” says producer/director Houston.

Q: How did it transpire that you directed the Nick Irons story?

A: Nick and I knew each other in college but had fallen out of touch after graduating in 1994. I never watched the news that much, so I was never aware of the swim. Right around our 10-year reunion I found out he was living in the DC area near me and tracked him down, because he was always one of those people I just had a good gut feeling about. When he told me he “swam the Mississippi River,” knowing he was a competitive swimmer in school I asked, “Oh really? Where?” thinking he swam across. “No,” he said, “the length of the Mississippi River.” The next words out of my mouth (after an unprintable expletive), were “Tell me you have footage of this. Dude, we’re making a documentary.” It was a no-brainer that I had to make this film.

Q: How long did it take?

A: After I read his book for background, I started interviewing and logging the footage in earnest in early 2005, and continued cutting whenever I had a free moment from bread-and-butter projects right up until March 2008.

Q: What equipment (hardware/software) did you use to create the film?

A: I shot the interviews on a Panasonic DVX-100B at 24pA with the “Cinelike-D” gamma setting using an anamorphic lens. The home movies were shot on one of the better consumer-grade Sony Hi-8 camcorders available back in 1997 when Nick did the swim, and we had some news source material from BetaSP and DVCPro. We did the editing on an XPressProHD system after converting all the BetaSP to DV with timecode, and onlined and color-corrected on a Media Composer Mojo. Migrating the project from XPressPro to Media Composer was seamless. Copy the project, plug in the drives, and bingo, it’s there. Some of the Indiana Jones-style red-line map animations were created in After Effects, but we also did a lot of the straight photo treatments with the built-in Avid Pan and Zoom filter. The acoustic score was recorded on a Mac/Logic system. It was definitely a cross-platform effort. There’s still lots to be done. I’m hoping when we get distribution we can go to a Symphony and do a surround mix on a ProTools workstation.

Q: What were some of the challenges you had making the film?

A: The biggest overall challenges (apart from working on a shoestring budget) were making an 11-year-old story relevant, getting beyond the superficial “believe-it-or-not” factor, keeping it moving, and going against industry trends.

Nick had plenty of press that summer, even going on Good Morning America a bunch of times, so some people thought it was old news. I actually had a pitch meeting in 2007 with an industry gatekeeper – let’s just say a representative of a major independent film incubator somewhere out west – and this person told me, “So you’ve got a doc about a fundraising event. Big deal.” It was almost impossible to convince jaded industry people that Swim Lessons is a timeless story about a family, not a rehash of a stale news story. I’m so happy the audience and the jury at RIIFF got what the film is all about!

Also I knew the film had to be a short right from the get-go to keep it moving. Editors always talk about “killing babies,” those perfect takes, priceless moments, or interesting scenes that are good in their own right but end up interrupting the flow of the film. Believe me, I killed plenty of babies on this one! For structure, Kendra (my co-producer) and I used the Mississippi River itself as inspiration. Sometimes it doubles back on itself and heads north for a few miles, but it’s always moving down-river. We had to find the places where Nick and his family struggled, and make those the key turning points in the film, then craft the emotional arc around them, an arc which isn’t necessarily chronological. So we did that with the structure of the film; between scenes of Nick on the river, we doubled back to the scenes about the events in his life that led him there.

Finally, there are so many “sky is falling” and “sick people in hospital” advocacy-docs out there it’s starting to define the genre. To me, that’s low-hanging dramatic fruit. You don’t have to go to a critical care ward of a hospital or some war-torn Third-World country to find drama. Swim Lessons stands out because it’s a feel-good story, but still gives the audience that necessary element of struggle. Dramas can have happy endings. Just look at Michael Phelps. Even he had a moment where it looked like he might not make it. I’m really hoping that with my fellow Baltimore native’s Olympic success, interest in swimming will translate to interest in Swim Lessons!

Q: Were there any problems using the original source video?

A: One of the biggest technical challenges was working with 30i/1.33 and 24p/1.78 source material in the same project. I was pretty adamant about it being a 24p project. I wanted it to feel like film, so I shot all the interviews at 24pA/1.78. Converting the footage was pretty crazy and I’m flabbergasted it actually worked. We didn’t have the budget to run the stuff through a realtime frame rate converter, so we had to do it with software. The process was really complicated, and involved several stages of capturing and exporting my selects to end up with Quicktime reference files which we then used After Effects to convert to 24p. The end result has a really warm, grainy, blurry feel, like it was shot on Super-8 film, not Hi-8 video. It worked, but it was a lot of work! I sure wished for the ability to edit multiple frame rates on the same timeline. Some competing products claim to be able to do this but I can’t imagine it would look as good. I really hope this feature will be included in the next release of Media Composer, along with the ability to control the frame blending. I know I’m not the only filmmaker with this issue.

The 1.33/1.78 aspect issue was also a challenge. I shot the retrospective interviews in 1.78 because I wanted there to be a clear indication that these people were thinking back. It was important to the story for the audience to remember that back in 1997, life was different in many ways.

Unfortunately that left me with aspect ratio issues. Blowing up the 1.33 to fill the 1.78 frame was out of the question. I wanted to keep as much of the raster as possible because only 360 NTSC lines would look like garbage projected on a theater screen. We tried everything to make the horizontal fill the frame: A straight stretch, a “smart stretch” (done with the Bezier Warp effect in AE), similar to what you see on many home flat panels these days, a pillarbox with duplicated, stretched video beneath and fuzzy borders, etc., all purely aesthetic treatments.

But the solution was simple once I refocused on what the home movies did for the story. They put the audience on the river, literally looking through his brother Andy’s eyes. I decided it was important to preserve what he saw though the viewfinder without distorting or masking it in any way to give the audience the most authentic experience.

We went with a straight 1.33 pillarbox with about an 18% grey background to mitigate the hard edges when dissolving between 1.33 b-roll and 1.78 present-day interviews. Even though it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing solution, it ended up working for the film. The net effect is a certain sense of claustrophobia, which helps the audience feel the limitations Nick and his family had back in 1997…no widescreen equals no wireless Internet, no GPS-enabled digital cell phones with navigation, no blogs, travel websites, etc. It was the Stone Age compared with how somebody could do the same thing today. It really emphasizes what an amazing feat it was to coordinate all the logistics and swim the length of the Mississippi River, all for his dad.

Rhode Island International Film Forum

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:17:00 GMT

The 7 day, Rhode Island International Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday. They had record attendance and a lot of fun was had by all. There were 300 filmakers there representing their submitted films. The Key to City of Providence was presented to actor, John Ratzenberger (aka Cliff Clavin). On Thursday there was a film forum at Brown University and Avid's Michael Phillips presented on the panel titled "Changing Technologies in Film". Michael, having just finished his own film was a great source of information. He touched on some important key components of filmmaking. His introduction made some of the basic points such as "have a good story", "maybe you don't want to be both Editor and Director", and then there is always the options of good, fast and cheap. It can't always be all three so there are choices to be made. Michael then spoke on the new file based camera technologies. He gave an overview of the Sony, Panasonic and Red Cameras and the pros and cons of each. Michael also discussed the various deliver methods and also some helpful advise on how to get your film seen.

Also presenting on the panel was Mark Almark Altekruse, Director of Sales and Marketing for Abaltat. He demonstrated their music composing software Muse. This neat software will analyze the colors on your video and create the music for you. It provides a wide choice of musical genre and has seamless integration with Apple, Avid, Adobe and Media 100 editing applications. Mike Bell of Embee Studio also presented on Blue-Ray Authoring.

Finishing up the Film festival on Sunday, August 10th, was the awards Brunch where the winning entries to the festival received their awards. Awards were presented in a variety of categories. Avid Technology also presented a copy of Media Composer Software to the winner of the "AVID's Student Filmmaking Achievement Award". This years award went to Zia Anger, Director, Producer; Billy Feldman, Writer, Producer; and Ashley Connor, Cinematographer/DP for the film "Lover Boy".

Synopsis:

For his ninth birthday Myles asks for nothing but wood. With his once vivacious grandmother slowly dying, and his burdened mother struggling for relevance he is constructing the everlasting life he desires. Within this wintry upstate New York world, there are indeed mighty forces at play.

Link: Avid Student Filmaking Achievement Award Winner

Avid to Present at Rhode Island International Film Festival

Anonymous — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:46:00 GMT

Now in its twelfth year, the Rhode Island International Film Festival™, (RIIFF) will take place August 5-10, 2008. This is the largest public film festival in New England and is also an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences qualifying event. RIIFF is designed to foster contact among film directors, producers, distributors, backers and audiences. Filmmakers will have an opportunity to share new film product, test-market films in development, and share the film-making process with industry peers, students, and the general public.

The Festival's goal is to recognize achievement and innovation in a variety of filmmaking and storytelling disciplines while providing an opportunity to secure wider distribution. The Festival also actively supports and encourages film preservation and its restoration, thus ensuring future generations of this unique artistic medium.

On August 7^th at 10:00 AM, Avid’s Michael Phillips will be presenting at the Film forum on the “Changing Technologies in Film”, where you can learn about new technologies available and how you can make it work for your independent films. This will take place at the Brown University's Hunter Auditorium on 89 Waterman Stree in Providence.

Avid will also be hosting a Rhode Island User Group Reception on Saturday, August 9^th, at 5:00PM also at Brown University's MacMillan auditorium on 167 Thayer Street, across the path from the Sciences Library. Avid’s Bob Russo will be on hand to present the tools and techniques for the filmmaker.

Avid will also be presenting an award at the Sunday Awards Brunch to the winner of the AVID's Student Filmmaking Achievement Award!

During the Festival there will be a screening of 297 films selected from a submission of over 3,000. One of films being screened at the Festival was directed by Avid customer Alex Houston. The film, Swim Lessons: The Nick Irons Story, will be screening Wed, August 6, at 5PM at the Columbus Theater in Providence.

For more information on the Film Festival and to purchase tickets go to: RIIFF

Hope to see you there!

BAVUG Summer BBQ

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:34:00 GMT

The Dog Days of summer… a perfect time to take a break from the serious User Group demos and presentations. A perfect time to spend a hot evening with a cold beer and mingle with the friends and colleagues you’ve met throughout the year.

That’s exactly what the Boston Avid User Group did last week. With a small threat of isolated thunder storms, a crowd of about 50 made their way to the Avid Tewksbury headquarters for a BBQ. Yes there was a brief rain shower as we took cover under the tent for about 15 minutes. The rain did make the 90+ degrees a bit cooler. The Boston User Group members were joined by 15 or so Avid employees from various departments… SQA, support, engineering, product marketing, tech pubs, online marketing, field marketing, sales, engineering, operations and manufacturing.

We all enjoyed burgers, hotdogs, caesar salad, pasta salad, corn on the cob etc. while we mingled and discussed future user group meetings, what others were up to, and had the opportunity to discuss the future of products and any issues or concerns with Avid Product Designers and managers.

Several attendees had the opportunity to tour the manufacturing facility. Ed Weingartner, Director of Manufacturing operation, gave the tour.

Ed showed the factory commissioning room – This room was built so we could offer a customer the service of having the opportunity to see their system up and running executing their workflow.

Next were the environmental test chambers where Avid products are put through some very stressful temperature, shock, and vibration testing to be sure we have a solid enterprise product.

Then the on going reliability test area where the Quality group sets up a number of different Avid products and runs them 7 by 24 hours for 30 days.

DC user group, run by Bruce Dixon of EFX Media, held meeting at WUSA Channel 9-TV

Anonymous — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:36:00 GMT

First a tour of the WUSA station was given to attendees by one of the news directors. He showed the newsroom area, assignment desk, master control room, media composer editing rooms for the promotion department and newscutters bays for the producer/reporters. Attendees also had the opportunity to see two studios, one where they are constructing a new kitchen set for their morning show and were ablt to peep in during a live newscast in their main studio.

Pizza and sodas were available and raffle tickets were sold for $1.00 each. The group uses the raffle money to help defray the cost of the food and beverages.

Rob Forman, Avid regional sales manager, and Jason Quast of Digital Video Group gave a presentation highlighting all of the new changes at Avid. Rob covered the new product announcements from NAB, Trends in the market including file-based capabilities in cameras, new pricing on products, All-new real-time HD hardware AVID Nitris DX and Avid Mojo DX, and much more.

Bob Russo then gave a demo on importing P2 media files on Avid Media Composer version 3.0 Beta. He explained that the “Import P2” workflow is a two-step process. First you import the clips, and then optionally, you import the media (which copies it to the Avid Mediafiles folder). One of the reps from DVG commented that that second step is one of the most asked questions from his Avid customers. It seems that it is common for people to import the clips and begin working right away. This works fine until you remove the P2 card or relaunch Media Composer. If you haven’t imported the “Media”, the media will go off-line when you restart or remove the P2 card. When you import the clips, Media Composer creates temporary links to the media. These temporary links are broken as soon as you unmount the P2 card or re-launch Media Composer. So it is important to do the second step and import the media for any clips that you want to continue to work with.

Bob showed the new icons for “Cut” and “Lift”. There was an audible reaction from the group. This seems to have touched an emotional button for many long-time Avid users. Bob showed how Media Composer 3.0 can mix 720p and 1080 footage on the same timeline with no transcoding! He also commented on the irony that the new software is now fully supporting “thin raster” formats at a time when the camera manufacturers are moving toward “full raster” codes which Avid has always supported. The AVCHD from Panasonic was mentioned as a very efficient and fantastic looking codec for HD video. Bob warned of the many shooting formats available from cameras like the Panasonic HVX200. It has 17 different combinations of frame size and frame rate. The “PAL” version has additional combinations.

A question was asked about importing media from a DVD-Video disc. Bob suggested Software to rip video from DVDs:

MPEG Streamclip (free) Windows and Mac
Super conversion (free) Windows only
Mac the Ripper (free) Mac only
Cinematize ($60)
Visual Hub ($32.23)

The next meeting will be next week, May 22nd at 6:30PM.

John Neri from Panasonic will tell us a bit about the P2HD product line and then explain in detail, the workflow and Metadata of P2, which is the power behind a file based workflow. He will demonstrate the making of a metadata file, uploading it to a camera, recording it into the footage and then addressing it afterward. Field workflow strategies will also be discussed, as well as archive ideas. If time allows, there will also be a demonstration showing P2 footage going into the Avid Xpress Pro software used at Mobile Video.

Mobile Video Services, Ltd
1620 I (eye) Street, NW
10th floor
(202) 331-8882

Coming up in DC on June 4th is the Avid New Thinking Tour.