HOLLYN-wood (Norman, that is)

I’ve never worked with the P2 cameras but I am about to embark on a big documentary project, called RIVERS, which will be shot across four continents with the Panasonic HVX-200. I’ll then be editing in in Avid’s Media Composer. As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about P2 workflow.

There’s a great article on Ken Stone’s website by Dan Brockett about his work shooting a television pilot using the same camera which details many of the problems inherent in working with a tapeless workflow (that is, the image doesn’t go onto film or videotape — it goes directly to a computer format on some kind of storage medium, either a hard drive or special cards that insert in the camera for storage).

My interest is, of course, how it worked in post production and Dan was quite good in mentioning some of those issues as well. Paperwork tended to be crucial, because organizing the equivalent of 400 8-GB cards worth of footage would have been nightmarish without it.

The most important element here was that Dan was working with producers who, though they wouldn’t listen to his pleading not to use this camera for this particular shoot, seemed more than willing to let him test everything involved in the workflow. That is crucial even in workflows that are well defined. When I worked in film, I always met with the script supervisors, assistant camera, vendors and more to make sure that everyone was on “the same page” (though no one ever used that expression back then — it’s amazing how fast that one became trite).

Now, with new HD workflows cropping up every time you start a new job, it’s even more crucial. But many producers/companies just can’t afford to test anything. Then, they can’t afford to fix it when the inevitable problems crop up. As Brockett notes, he shot the pilot and never once lost a file and was able to deliver the pilot on time and with the degree of professionalism the studio wanted. And what was one of the lessons that he learned: Preparation Is Essential.

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For those of you who haven’t heard of the Red camera, you might as well click over to the latest Perez Hilton post, because there’s not going to be anything of value here.

Mike Curtis, of the site HD For Indies, has a posting on his blog which reports on a shoot for a NYC based film called OFFHOLLYWOOD BROOKLYN (at least that’s what it’s called on the web gallery from which I got the picture to the left).

For a look at all the production still on Mike’s gallery surf on over to his .mac gallery.

The RED is the new lower budget HD camera that comes from the Oakley sunglasses magnate. People in the indie world have been panting after it for two years. Some felt it would never come, some felt it was late in coming. Nearly everybody liked the concept of it a lot. Now, it’s out in the wild (as of August 31st, according to Red’s web site) and people are using it whose names don’t start with the initial Peter Jackson (who shot a test film for Red, which was shown at their booth at this year’s NAB show). Steve Soderbergh is shooting his new movie with the camera, and Final Cut claims to have native support for their 4K RAW files (look for the menu item “REDCODE”).

It remains to be seen just how easy the post production workflow is using the camera. Here is what RED claims the workflow is:

• Shoot 4K REDCODE RAW @27MB/sec.
• Load footage into REDCINE. Do 1st light correction.
• Export to any number of output options.

Sounds easy, eh?

Whether it is or not will be shaken out over the next several months as more of the promised cameras start to emerge. For now, one of the strongest attractions the camera has is its great image quality at its price. The body, mount, and LCD screen cost $20,450, before you add lenses, power packs, chargers, memory cards and a number of other necessary accessories, which is a total steal compared to any other HD camera out there that records at 4250×2540 pixels. You know all of the buzz about 1080p HD (there are as many flavors of HD as there are flavors at Baskin-Robbins, read this article, from Media Daily News, for some help in decoding them), here is a flavor that is at 2540 resolution.

Obviously, no one is going to really edit at that resolution. Even if you could have all of that information online at any given moment (which may be conceivable given the falling price of hard drives and the length of your project), the sheer amount of information that would need to be input and output for each second would choke even the best processors in the latest machines. That’s why Avid introduced DNX-HD and Final Cut’s got ProRes. But it will be interesting to see just what the issues will be in the editing room with a screen resolution so good. It’s like in the days when I worked, briefly, on a 70mm film. We couldn’t edit at that size, so we got reduction prints on 35mm. But the frame size and orientation was so different that the cuts ended up looking a little different when the film was neg cut and printed at its original 70mm size. It will be really interesting to see just what the translation issues are here.

So that we can get away from geekdom, and back to storytelling.

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Spent 13 hours on the set of one of our Jordan Digital Filmmaking Workshop short films yesterday. The ironic thing is that, here in the middle of the Middle East, at the junture of several continents, the process (craziness and all) seems very familiar to what I’ve experienced on USC Student film sets as well.

Here are a few pictures from the shoot.

Samer (in the yellow shirt) is the director.

I haven’t posted in a long time because of how crazy busy I’ve been. Right now I am in Amman, Jordan teaching with several other teachers, at a workshop for beginning digital filmmakers.

It’s very interesting being here as Israeli airstrikes hit Lebanon and Amman receives tons of refugees. I had a conversation yesterday with a Lebanese television producer who has come here because neither she nor her family feel they can stay in Beirut. Normal middle class people, like you and I, are watching their neighborhoods destroyed. Either the bombing isn’t accurate or there is a plan to target civilian areas. It’s puzzling.

I know that when I was back in LA last week, the news coverage was fairly slanted towards the Israeli side. Luckily, the blogosphere is helpful in showing both sides. If can stomach it, check out this blog entry at itoot.net, which is a blog that culls entries from ten or so other blogs. [ADDED NOTE: This post now seems to have taken down. Perhaps the pictures were too graphic. I've changed the URL to point to the general crisis page at iToot.] Some of the pictures are pretty graphic, but that is precisely the point here. It’s easy to turn the pages of the newspaper, or fast forward on our Tivo’s when everything is soft-pedaled.

There’s also a very personal story from an actress/writer named Najla Said, who writes on Electronic Lebanon about her ordeal in fleeing Lebanon. She contracts it, in a beautiful way, with her father’s recent death, and their attraction to their homeland.

The point for me is this — I have no idea whether this can ever be settled. I’m often convinced by the stories of the people on both sides — many of whom have no desire or need for war. Most are not political people.

But politcal decisions made at the highest levels of many governments don’t care about these people. And, in my discussions here and reading lots of blogs, this is creating anger in Arabs that was not there before. One woman told me that she was a person who demonstrated against Hezbollah for years. Now she is on their side. When you look at pictures like the above, or