But Officer I Was Framed

I’ve found, over the years, that the most fundamental mistake video people starting out make is incorrect framing of the shot. Good framing gives balance to the image and subtly tells us where to look. Usually that’s at the people talking or the action happening. Film people make the same mistake, in addition to poor exposure and a few other problems I'll talk about sometime.

It’s surprising camera work isn't better though given the number of photos we all take. In Photography we call it composition and it's job is to find that "decisive moment", both in time and space, and capture the shot. Quite frankly that moment is really found later, looking at the negatives, or more currently, going over your images in Aperture or Lightroom (software for the digital photographer who can take 2,000 to 3,000 shots for a project. The number of shots we take now is a significant difference between the film way and the digital way - also something we should talk about later.). You're always trying to get the shot, but, as a photographer, you only know about it, really, later.

In video, it too, is an ongoing task to find the correct composition, but it's continuous and lasts over time. In this situation we call it framing, but we also talk about composition. We know if we have the shot while we're shooting. When we stop shooting we know, right then, if we've got it or have to shoot the scene over again, or with documentary work simply have to keep shooting. True, we may not know if we have all of the shots to tell the story we want to (that's sometimes because the story changes on us), but we can decide if we have this shot done well or not.

With both, we have, right up front during the shooting process, the power to draw the eye and help the viewer focus on what we think is the important part. That is if we frame the shot that way. If the shot is too wide we start to wander around with our eyes checking out what’s in the frame. You know I used to have a floor lamp just like that one in the back and look at those drapes, they’re terrible, wait, what did she just say. Missed it.

Good framing allows us to edit out the extra visual elements that draw attention away from what we’re supposed to follow. Too little information in the image and we start making up things, too much and we’ve got way too much information to process. Yes, it’s a balancing act. (The other tool we use to draw the eye and direct attention is lighting, but that’s still yet another topic for later – hey, how many is that now.)

If you’re shooting with a tripod it’s not going to be that difficult to keep stuff out once you decide on what the frame includes. If you’re shooting on a tripod, turn off auto-focus and set it manually; otherwise the camera starts to “hunt” with the lens and that’s really distracting. You zoom in all the way, focus on the persons eyes, then pull out and adjust the placement of the subject in the frame (with the camera, you don't move the people, well you do move the people, but that's before and that's all about directing and that's, yes, you guessed it, a topic for later.). Think what would make a nice photo for their mother to have. That’s it.

We don’t center a person in the frame, but slide them off slightly to one side or the other giving them empty space to talk into (this is particularly true now with the 16:9 aspect ratio of the frame). The empty space is in front of them, not behind their head. You don’t want someone's nose pressed up against the edge of the frame – that hurts. Slide over to the side to open up empty talking space. Think of a cartoon speech bubble floating in the frame (not above them, but to the side). Is there enough space for their words? Conversely, we don’t want them to feel lonely in a big wide shot that they’re only a little part of. Make the subject the star of the show, an important person, the center of attraction (rather the off-center of attraction).

While you usually don’t want to cut off the top of their heads, the most important element is placing their eyes. They should fall about 2/3rds of the way up the screen and the rest of the face falls where it may. OK, we don’t want to cut off their chin either – watch TV, see how they do it. Watch where the eyes get placed. Finally, TV is good for something after all.

Now here’s the hard part, you want to change the shot occasionally while you’re shooting. What? Well, not while the person is talking, but in between the responses, while you’re asking the questions. Just zoom in a little, but enough so it’s noticeable. It can’t be too little because when we edit those shots together if there isn’t enough difference between the two it looks weird – it jumps instead of cuts. It has to look intensional, not like you bumped the camera.

Generally we start wide and work our way in closer and closer. Then you may want to zoom way out wide again and start over. Remember when we edit this later the answers may not end up back to back in the order the person said them, but in the order that makes the most sense for the story we’re trying to tell. That’s why we edit, to make more sense of reality or at least to improve it. We’re like gods. OK, my therapists says the same thing, but I say filmmakers, gods, what’s the difference.

When you get really good with the camera you could try zooming in while they're talking, but only with a lot of practice. If you feel uncertain about it, don’t do it.

I actually often add a little zoom-in to a shot in the edit room to give it a more intimate, personal feel, but only by 10%. Beyond that much the image starts to fall apart, with that much it adds a layer of emotion to the ending of a shot; like you're leaning in to hear what they're saying. In Final Cut you do it in the Motion Tab under Scale. Set a keyframe 15 seconds before the end of the cut for 100%, then jump to the end of the cut, make a keyframe and set the Scale to 110%. Play it back and the image zooms in slightly just before the end of the cut and adds a little “oomph” to the feel. Cool.

Because we may find ourselves with the dilemma of having to use shots that don’t actually cut together well due to a mismatch in size or framing or whatever, we’d also like to shoot cutaways or cut-ins to cover over those jump cuts if we have to. Maybe a really wide shot of the room, or a shot of a hand on the chair, or some action illustrating what’s being talked about.

Same for audio. We need “room tone”. That’s just the ambient sound in the room with no one talking. We need it. Just have everyone stand still for 30 seconds and record nothing. Do it right after you finish shooting, but don’t let people leave, that changes the sound of the room. Later in the edit we’ll use that sound to cover over any audio edits we do that might not be perfect. Isn't it always perfect? Well, no, it's seldom that. Editing is trying to move us closer to that.

So like all of production, or all of life for that matter, it’s just about practice. The more you do it the easier it gets. Then there’s the lighting. (And that growing list of things to talk about later.)

gunther (5)

Making A Movie

I go back and forth about whether we’re making a film or a movie. Sometimes people are actually talking about film with sprocket holes in it, other times it’s just something projected on a screen. The words are no longer as descriptive about what we’re doing. Just as some of the best music performances I’ve ever seen were open mic nights in a bar (I once saw a drunk homeless guy play a 12-string guitar that was a jaw-dropping performance); college level independent short films can be the best of class productions, but is it a film, is it a movie, is it something else – who knows?

In the old days (5 or 6 years ago) every project was a big production. You bought tapes, planed things out, maybe rehearsed, got the equipment, lugged it to the location, set everything up, shot the footage, packed everything up, took it all back, logged the tapes, captured the shots you wanted, and started to edit.

Now the equipment side is much easier to deal with in number of items, weight, complexity, and cost. You go some place, pull out your camera, shoot, then put it away. Later you capture the footage and cut it up. It’s more relaxed, more inviting – just easier.

However, one part is just as hard - really hasn’t changed – is telling the story. What is your story? Where does it start? Most stories can begin at different times in the unfolding of events. Some times you have a long lead in, other times you’re quickly in the middle of the action. They each have different effects on the audience and thereby different outcomes.

The usual rule of thumb is you join a scene (cut into it) as late as possible and you leave it as soon as possible (but not always); you string all of those scenes together to make the film. The effect is that it moves along. If it’s confusing cutting from one scene to another you add a transition of some kind to help it flow, to make it work. You frame the beginning with enough information to make it just understandable and you end with enough ambiguity to keep us thinking.

Needless to say there are a lot of variables all of which can be fine tuned for various effects. Consistency of look and tone allows the work to feel like a single experience, one cohesive whole, but with both the feel of inevitability and, at the same time, surprise. There’s the really hard work - surprising inevitability.

Just as in music, the story needs dynamics of scale, emotion and complexity. Most of that comes from how you arrange the footage (pacing comes from the cutting, not the action), but the catch is you can only work with the footage you have. Often we find that we’re actually short on footage of one kind or another and have to go back out and shoot it. The film can only be made from footage that you have on your hard drive, not what’s in your head, not what’s written in the script, not from wishes. You sometimes even have to give up on the script and make what you can with what you have. Now it’s a different film, but that’s OK. It’s what it takes.

For most narrative work you end up using one camera and doing multiple takes, but for documentary films it may be expedient to use more cameras since it’s a one time event and you might want several angles to select from later in the edit. That used to be a big problem for us, but it’s a little easier now with an inexpensive camera like the Flip. A couple of Flip cameras placed in strategic locations can give you a lot of coverage that’s really handy to have later. It makes it seem like a more “produced” movie. You end up with a more polished higher end feel. Cool. (The Flips are nice because there are so small it’s easy to carry a couple of them in your pocket. Having two of the same camera also makes it easier to have the look of the shots match up in the edit. And yes, they’re inexpensive, too.)

Similarly, getting good audio is a little easier on a narrative shoot. You know where everyone is and where they’re going to go. No so with documentary. You may need the “reach” of a shot gun mic because you can’t actually get close to what you want to record. You can “place” mics in the scene either by using a wireless lavaliere microphone on a person wandering in a crowd or use flashcard based Wave recorders, like the Edirol, placed as close as you can get. Later in the edit you “sync up” these loose audio tracks with the video you shot and cut it all together. (There’s even software now that makes that syncing up of audio and video really easy: PluralEyes. That’s what an editor’s assistant used to do, now it’s software – remember that.)

We’re shooting to get footage that describes, illustrates and contextualizes the story we’re trying to tell. That usually translates into a wide establishing shot (where are we), closeups (shows us some elements, parts, examples), action (what’s happening, unfolding, ongoing, changing and reactions, too), and good old beauty shots (people, things, events, places).

If you can’t record an explanatory shot that tells us or shows us what’s going on you’ll have to tell us about it later as a voice over in the edit room. A lot of people, particularly in college, think that’s a cop out and we should only use what the footage shows – for it’s purity. My view is if I can’t figure out what going on, I’m no longer interested in watching. I don’t have the time to struggle through a film that’s incomprehensible even if it’s arty – sorry. So help me understand. Talk to me.

Another false presumption is having a strong point of view, but not showing it. Letting the viewer decide what the point is or who’s right or wrong may be a nice liberal sentiment, but it makes for dull movies. If you don’t believe in your own point of view and tell me what it is I, again, don’t have time for your dull (slow) film. Stand up for what you believe in. Tell it. Show it. Make a point. I don’t have to agree, but it’s usually much more interesting to hear what you really think. That’s why I want to watch your film in the first place, to learn what you think.

After all the shooting is over, annotating the footage is both a lot of work and really worth while. It’s a chance to see it all over again more dispassionately and take notes about what your really have. I’m a firm believer in making subclips from your footage. In Final Cut (that’s the editing software), in the Browser (that's the area where all of your footage shows up), double click on a clip to load it in the Viewer (that's where we watch the footage). Then mark an In and Out point (start here, end here) to describe a “shot” (a unit of footage). Press Command + U and you get a subclip of that master clip sent back into the Browser, highlighted for you to enter a new file name. It’s a little awkward at first and you might be tempted to not do it, but this is the most powerful way to edit effectively - particularly with long form work. Go through all of your footage, break it up into shots that you name; then you can sort those clips into bins (folders) to make it all more orderly and understandable. If you can’t find a shot, your can’t use it.


I think of subclips as being able to see all of the elements I have to work with laid out to sort through. Not to use subclips is as if you were building a house and kept all of the lumber stacked on the truck that delivered it. Each time you wanted a 2x4 you would have to re-stack all of the lumber to find one. Painful. With subclips you unload all of the lumber, stack it up by size, or color, or shape, or reference number making it much easier to find anything, everything. The effort in unloading it all is greatly made up in the ease of finding it later.

One of the most exciting aspects of working in Final Cut is the ability to have multiple versions of the work. You can cut a sequence, duplicate it and then go wacky with changes and not have to worry about fixing it back to the way it originally was. What an opportunity.

Work in sections. Often what we thought would be a great ending we discover is really a great opening. We can pick sections up and plop them down anywhere we want in another master sequence and, yes, have different versions of that, too.

Work as quickly as you can and don’t bother to fix problems along the way. Do that much later after you’ve seen the whole thing from beginning to end. Most of the time we change things so much that any work we would have done fixing things gets thrown out anyway, so it would just be a waste of time. Save fixes until you know what’s actually in the film. It’s often on the second or third pass that we start taking the time to fix things.

Usually on a first past (rough cut) I cut only for audio. I don’t even have the video window visible. It’s really fast to look at the audio waveform (it's wonderful to be able to see audio) and see when a sentence starts or ends. Mark your In and Out point, do the edit and move on. The most important thing to discover is what the film is really about and you’ll only know that by playing it back. Then you start all over again with that information in mind and make it work – better.

I eventually change most of my edits into L-cuts. That is I lead with the audio track and after a beat or two I bring in the video track. (That’s why it’s easy to cut for audio first. That's also why it's smart to shoot a little long at the end of a scene. It gives you more time to hold on the out point of a clip. End of action, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, cut.) That smooths out the feel of the editing and makes it more flowing, more invisible. We’re drawn into the next shot by first hearing the audio, then seeing the image.

At some point we start adding graphics and music. If you have a montage section drop in some music to cut against for pacing and rhythm. You can change it later, easily. Musics job is to unify separate picture elements and make them seem more connected. An audio track under a bunch of image cuts makes the whole thing seem locked together. You delete the ambient sound from each cut and edit in a continuous audio track that covers the entire length of the edits. Now it's all happening in one place instead of many.

I’ve always found it useful to cut a "trailer" (preview) in the early stages of the process to act as a device to help figure out what the piece is about or to verify that I have the footage to tell the story I think I’m telling. A good trailer, even for a documentary, can help you clarify what the story line is and the tone of the work. Pull out some still images and make a poster too. It’s inspirational, well at least it allows us to be hopeful. See, it could work, it’s on the wall – coming this summer.

After it’s all over you need to make copies to hand out. For all our pretense of living in an HD world, good old standard definition DVDs are still what people want. Make Reference Movies and drop them into iDVD. Pull still images out and use them as the background for the menu. The more sophisticated the DVD menu the better the setup to your film. Really. Wouldn’t you prefer to have someone dressed up nice coming to your showing instead of arriving in their pajamas?

See, it’s all so easy.

gunther

Just Back From New York

I arrived home last night at 3AM from a long, yet fun, trip to the big Gotham for an alumni film and video event. John Bruner drove a van of ten Hampshire students and myself down and back - a 14 hour day. I had thought it would be a grim trip stuck in such a small enclosure, but the students had a good time talking, telling stories, comparing favorite films and just chatting the entire time. They were great.

Every year alums send us a short clip of what they're currently working on, I cut them all together, try and match the audio levels and burn it all onto a DVD that the Alumni Relations people travel with and use as an event promotion tool. It's fun. I get to see great work, send hasty e-mails asking for a different codec, or what's the password for your download again, and be pleasantly reminded that students do turn into pros out in the world and continue to get better and better. Cool.

The current students that we brought down did a good job of smoozing with the older crowd. One of the first alums in the door was Anna who plopped down on a bar stool and told them all of the amazing things she's doing: working for whom, working with whom. They seemed a little taken aback by the fact she's just been out of school for two years and she's got a list of what she's doing and where she's going a half mile long. I was impressed.

The place was packed this year which always makes it seem more exciting, but also makes it harder to move around and mingle. There were also a lot of parents there reminding me who their student is and the previous conversations we had way back at the beginning of the year. My memory finally clicks in and I say, oh yes I remember you. I think it's nice that parents are interested and want to feel involved with their students progress and thankfully no one is over doing it. Just enough.

The alums were really the center of the show, fun to see again, hug, laugh, talk a little and move on to the next. That's both fun and emotionally taxing for me. Remember my passport says "shy, quiet guy" or something like that.

Larry Blume talked this year and showed some of his work both recent and a little older. It was nice to see clips and hear him speak. He mentioned briefly the inevitable demise of film as a production medium and the equally inevitable rise of HD digital cinematography (not using exactly that phrase) as a replacement. It's nice to hear a pro with real perspective say the same thing I keep saying back at school. Those old days are over and we need to run fast to either jump on the new cinematography bandwagon or build still yet a newer one ourselves.

My biggest complaint at these events, which in the cosmic realm of things is quite small, but in the more practical part of my day has an effect, is that I usually miss all of the food. OK, I get a little here off the tray, then some cheese, here she comes again with that tray, then a beer, what's that on the tray now - no thanks, another beer, she was just here with that tray again, but she didn't see me. Then I have to go set up some equipment, restart a computer, run the audio cables, etc. I go back and they're all wiping their mouths with napkins and the trays are all empty. Those lamb chops were perfect weren't they - what lamb chops? Story of my life. So I have another beer. Good thing I'm not driving back isn't it.

So in the end it was more fun than I expected. After a cell phone call to round up missing students and a cold walk down the street, we got the van out of the parking lot, started up the GPS and headed off back home.

Finally back at Hampshire, Bruner dropped all the students off at their different mods on campus (nice guy) and we returned to the parking lot behind the library to find that he has a flat tire on his car. It's 5 degrees and we're beat, so I drive him home to Easthampton in my car. I get home at 3AM and to bed after briefly talking to our befuddled cats who wonder what the heck I'm doing outside at that time. Where's he been anyway?

The photo at top is from Dan Epstein. That's Larry Blume on the left in the white shirt and the guy with the bald spot is me. One year, after returning from Paris, I was going through our photos and found this useless image of an old, bald, fat guy looking at a wall. I asked my wife why she had wasted a shot on someone we didn't even know. She paused a moment, smiled and said, "That's you." We all need a photo of ourselves that way at times.

gunther

Technology Changes - Again

Sometimes tech stuff is a long slow process of incremental change and sometimes it's just a big jump from one technology to another - over night. Apple seems to be doing a combo of both right now. There's a new version of Final Cut Pro soon to be released. It's supposed to be a big jump over the current version, but only a handful of people have actually seen it and all current speculation is just hot air. The blogs say it maybe more of an iMovie-like interface, but only the insiders really know and because of those non-disclosure agreements they can't say. I guess we're all waiting for NAB to find out. Tick, tick, tick.

In addition there's a new kid on the block for data transfer: Thunderbolt. I've been feeling left out of the rise of USB 3 and it's dramatically faster data rate over FireWire. BlackMagic Design has a video capture device that uses USB 3 that I've been coveting, but alas Apple has not chosen to add USB 3 ports to their computers. In the past I've used eSATA connections to external RAID drives for size and speed, but you need a card in a tower computer to do that and we now have quite a number of iMacs that can't play in that pond. Now that's all changed. Thunderbolt blows all other data connections out of the water. Wow. Of course that's only in new computers, which means all the computers we own now are obsolete. Great. Thanks so much.

Finally in OS-land people are starting to talk about Lion. Who knows what the heck that brings. Maybe this one is more the slow evolving process than the big jump. The problem always is what's it do now and what does it no longer do that we weren't even thinking about. Ouch.

So, it's always a reminder that change is the landscape that we all live in (on) and much like weather and climate, change moves at differing rates as well. Welcome to yesterday.

gunther

The New Hunting Season

The cycle has come around again and tour groups are massing on the horizon. It's sort of like an academic hunting season. I love to talk to tour groups of prospective students and their parents. They're all people with high hopes and the best of dreams for the future and their family. Promise and excitement flow all around them. They're a fun group, interested and eager to listen and learn, though often a little fearful or reluctant to speak out.

My only problem with the number of them is in repeating myself over and over. I feel like an idiot. Two groups in a row isn't so bad, but after three I start forgetting what I've said, lose my train of thought and head off in tangents. OK, I usually head off in tangents anyway; it's really my style. It takes much longer to approach a topic obliquely, but once you finally arrive you've got more background and depth of understanding - it builds contextualization. Well, at least I try to convince myself that's true.

This last Monday I finally gave up talking about the film/photo program to the fourth group and said, hey, let's talk about education. "Where do you think learning comes from", I asked a mother. She stammered, "you're asking me?" "Yes, what's your idea of that." She thought a moment and said, "asking questions." Bingo! Wow, that's just the answer I wanted. Yes, it's all about asking questions - back and forth much like a ping pong game.

The ball is the question or answer, the table is the range of topics appropriate to the discussion and the net is to judge the clarity of the question or response. It's the exchange that's the most beneficial - a flow of talking back and forth. Sure you could hit the ball off the table with a wild question, but then the exchange stops and after a few of those in a row no one wants to play with you. You're off topic, too erratic or seem incoherent.

So to play the game to learn you need to know the topic area - what's the appropriate range of discussion. That comes from doing the reading that's assigned and maybe a bit more than that too. It's also useful to know the history of the topic or even the history of the discussion of the topic. That, again, comes from doing the reading, but for sure this time reading more broadly than just what was assigned.

Finally and more personally you need to be self examining about your own clarity of understanding. Do you get it? Or maybe not so much. I often find that what I thought I knew well, when I go to explain it to someone else it's much foggier in my mind than I realized. I don't really understand it after all, though I thought I did. That social or public opportunity to talk allowed me to find out just how well I grasped the topic or surprisingly didn't.

We're all so clever in our own minds, but much less so once those thoughts get "published" and can be examined by others or even, by developing professional distance, hear ourselves talk.

I always tell students it's important to show work in class. Not because the other students are going to give you good advise. They may, but usually they're no better a filmmaker than you are. The real reason to show work is to discover how you feel about it when you show it publicly. Often we find that what we thought was so hot yesterday in the edit room makes no sense on the big screen after all and we cringe and slide down in our seat mumbling, what was I thinking of, gotta change that fast. That's what's helpful.

So thanks mom for the great answer. You do know a lot about education and you were brave enough to speak up. That's one of the debilitating problems at the start of any inquiry - fear. Managing fear, professionally, is a fundamental part of the learning process. At the beginning we all feel lost and unsure of what questions we even have, let alone how to ask them. With a little time and knowledge under our belt that passes. We discover the lay of the land, grasp what we've come to know and become equally aware of what we still don't know. This all falls, I think, under the heading of learning to learn, maybe the most valuable skill of all.

gunther

Better Off TEDing

So what's it take to do a TED? No, not me presenting, but a bunch of real research people and hip academics. I just participated in a large "group-think" Future Search workshop on Friday and one of the best proposals was for Hampshire to put on a TED. I thought, wow, what a great idea and I started shouting TED, TED. It's just the kind of internal communication that we all would love to see. It would show us, in a fun and easily understandable form, what people, both faculty and students, on campus are really working on and have produced.

However. It's really hard work to get a presentation into such a compact and polished form. It's a little alien to the standard academic presentation no matter how hot the professor. It's a rehearsed intersection of content and performance, with enough popping exotic visuals to pull the thing along and develop as many "ah-hah" moments as possible and still keep it to 15 minutes. As I said, it's hard work, though it would "up-the-game" for everyone and that's always a good thing.

OK, maybe it's possible you don't know what TED is. Really? It's a conference of smart people, started in Long Beach (I actually thought it was in Malibu), but now in several places, too, that presents insightful, cutting-edge research work in quite a broad range of disciplines. It stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design - all my favorite topics. How could you go wrong? Here's their blurb about them. Their web site has tons of past presentations on-line to watch. It's a great way to spend a little time - you're well rewarded. All it costs is 15 minutes of your time.

Now all we have to do is set up guidelines, ask for presenters, audition them, cherry pick the best, re-tool the worst and try it. One of the side benefits of all of this would be that everyone notices, or gets told, their level of sophistication in "presentation-land"; something that makes any class or lecture more enjoyable regardless of the level of content. Even that part, all by its self, would be a benefit to the community. What could go wrong? TED, TED, TED, TED...

gunther

A Reasoned Approach part 1

With this much time behind us we should stop, turn around, and look back at our rush to embrace the HDSLR concept (more useful here). Where did it come from, what was pushing it, where will it go and is it a big deal or not - or what.

In the recent past (the time of the miniDV camcorders) we were all thrilled that semi-good-looking footage was finally possible in an equally semi-robust format that didn’t cost an arm and a leg and another leg. We did, however, still envy the film folk for, well, their filminess. Many were the tirades about how great film was and that video could never (that’s never) equal that quality - yack, yack, yack. The video people would all sigh and walk away, thinking, you know, that’s a bunch of crap, but video did look like video.

Then somehow that vague future-concept high definition thing kind of oozed out of the woodwork behind us and suddenly there was a new format on the block. Mostly the new students showed up with those HD camcorders and we all went, whoa, what’s that. The image was really big and crisp and well - big and crisp. I had seen HD way back in the 1980’s at an NAB trade show and it was great, but amazingly expensive and not really on the market. Now it was and it didn’t cost any more than the miniDV camcorders we were still buying.

You’ve got to remember that miniDV replaced Hi8mm and that Hi8mm replaced regular 8mm, and regular 8mm replaced 3/4” and that had replaced 1/2” and that had replaced both 1” and quad (really 2” tape) and, oh yes, somewhere in there was VHS and S-VHS, but the common thread here is tape. It’s always going to be on tape, right?

Oops. Then HD (I’m not ever going to talk about HDV - just forget it) got really clever and you could record to tape, or a little hard drive, or a DVD-ish disk, or a flash card (a really, really expensive flash card: P2), and then a cheap flash card and wow, here we are. (Hey, are you going to eat the rest of that sandwich? This is making me hungry.)

So that’s just the history of the people who hold the cameras. On the other side, the manufacturers loved all the "Ezekiel begot Herinedies" upgrades and thought - man are we on the gravy train or what. Then HD hit them and they lost their nerve and all the ideas they ever had. (That and the fact that Broadcasting is going down the tube or rather over to the tubes.) It went dark on the factory floor. No one was buying equipment. We were just waiting to see what would happen and where it would all go. We all said, “I’m going to sit this one out.”

Then came Red.

OK, you either love or hate Red, but you do have to admit it was a game changer. People who made sunglasses are now going to design and build high-end digital cinematography cameras and what’s digital cinematography anyway - never heard of it. Once you stopped laughing and thought about it and then finally saw some footage - hey, that looks really, really good and that’s video?

Then we all did the math. Sure it’s 10 times the cost of a good miniDV camera, but look at those women, and the color, and the grain, and OMG look at the background all soft and well - filmy. So people bought them like VW’s (That’s Volkswagens to you young folks, you know like a car - the people’s car. OK, forget it.)

So we spent a whole year looking at footage online and checking the updates at Red’s web site trying to figure out if you really need rods and a matt box or more specialty cables. We kept track of how many shows were shot with a Red this month and what’s their workflow. Ah, the workflow.

Then one day a photographer posts some footage he’s shot with a Canon still camera. Yea, so what, my little still camera shoots video too. It’s great for the web. Want to see some party shots I took over the weekend? This dog is so amazing, you’ve gotta see it.

Then we all finally looked at the clips. Say, that’s nice. Wait a minute, that looks like the Red footage. Hey, come here and look at this. This is shot on a goddamn Canon still camera - WTF.

You’d look at the “milkgirls” footage from Red, then back to Vincent Laforet’s video, then back again and pause and think - gosh, this is shot on a $2,500 still camera. Whoa - the buzzer goes off - game changer. Red stops production and re-tools.

Then 6 months of looking at Canon movies online and yes, you can shoot with a Nikon (hmm, not as nice) or look over there, Panasonic has one too (OK, a little different). Now, do I really need a matt box and rods on this thing?

If you get your hands on one it’s quite a surprise that you can’t see a *&$# thing on the LCD screen outside in the sun. So now you absolutely need a clip-on viewer and magnifier for the screen.

No, I don’t have any Zeiss-Vistavision lens in my bag to pop on for those razor sharp, zero depth of field shots, but I do have an old Nikon lens so I guess I need a lens adaptor for that.

OK, now I can finally shoot. Hey, focusing sucks. Maybe I do need one of those matt boxes with the follow focus knobs (so cool), so then, yea, I do need the rods. Now what does that all price out at? Ouch!

Oh no, wait, I forgot about the audio. Camera audio is lousy so I’ll get a Zoom (save a little money over the Edirol hah, hah, ha). etc, etc. Notice no one is talking tape in audio land. Wearing a Nagra around your neck was like wearing a lunch basket. No more, no more. It all fits in your pocket, but we are back to the start line again shooting with dual system sound. Forward into the past.

So here we are: the big hand on February and the little hand on 2011.

End of part 1.

Hmm, I wonder, do I really, really need those rods?

Are you going to eat that sandwich or not?

gunther