Digital Production Buzz

December 19, 2013

[Transcripts provided by Take1.tv]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Norman Hollyn, Editor and Professor, USC Film School

Dave Basulto, Media Arts & Animation Instructor, San Marino High School

Philip Hodgetts, President, Intelligent Assistance

Sean Mullen, CEO & Lead Creative, Rampant Design Tools

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Voiceover: This Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum at Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution. What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the leading internet podcast covering digital video production, post production and distribution around the world. My name is Larry Jordan and joining us in a pre-holiday mood with a Santa cap jauntily placed on his head, the ever handsome Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hello, Larry and I bet you’re tired.

Larry Jordan: It has been…

Mike Horton: I know I was up ‘til about three and you were probably up longer than that.

Larry Jordan: It was a long day. A lot of exciting news coming out of Apple. We’re going to be talking about that throughout the show today, plus some other very talented guests. The first one, Michael, you may have heard of this gentleman. He’s so famous that he doesn’t talk to most people any more.

Mike Horton: That’s right, he is very hard to book.

Larry Jordan: I tell you, Norman Hollyn, a Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts joins us this week to share his thoughts on teaching editing, creativity and technology and I always enjoy working with Normal as part of our 2 Reel Guys podcast, but what I really like is to listen to him share his thoughts on the process of teaching and teaching creativity.

Larry Jordan: David Basulto is a teacher and inventor. Recently, he funded his latest project – iOgrapher – using Kickstarter. We visit with him tonight to learn what he did to make his Kickstarter campaign successful.

Larry Jordan: And early – early – this morning, Apple released the latest version of Final Cut Pro 10. We thought it was going to go out at midnight. It went out at 12.30, actually…

Mike Horton: Yes, you were just waiting.

Larry Jordan: …12.28 and I’m ready to hit the button and I’m just waiting and just waiting. Oh, my gracious.

Mike Horton: And then it was upgraded. How late were you up last night?

Larry Jordan: Till three o’clock.

Mike Horton: About three o’clock, yes.

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: I was just stealing all your websites and aggregating everything.

Larry Jordan: We had a lot to aggregate, I tell you. Apple released the latest version of Final Cut Pro 10, plus the widely anticipated Mac Pro computer is now available for sale and Philip Hodgetts, the President of Intelligent Assistance, was a beta tester for Final Cut and stops by to share his thoughts on this new version of the hardware. We’re going to talk Mac Pros and Final Cut and upgrading and media management and new features and codecs, because Mike likes that.

Mike Horton: Mhmm.

Larry Jordan: Sean Mullen, the CEO and Lead Creative for Rampant Design Tools joins us to talk about some new visual effects products they launched yesterday. We’ve got a great group of folks coming on.

Larry Jordan: By the way, we’re still offering and continuing throughout the next year to offer text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take1.tv. Now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show, as well as listen to it. Transcripts are located on each show page. You just have to click the ‘Show transcript’ button and thanks, Take1.tv, for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: So what were you doing up until three o’clock?

Mike Horton: I was playing music, listening to Pandora, watching some of your videos. No, I was actually aggregating everything and getting all that stuff onto one page so everybody would have a one page shopping site to go and visit to know everything they can possibly know about Final Cut 10.1. But then I forgot about motion. I forgot about compressor.

Larry Jordan: I haven’t forgotten about either one of those. We’re going to talk a lot about Final Cut, both with Philip Hodgetts and also at the end of the show. Michael has been compiling questions from.

Mike Horton: There is a great deal of feedback. Of course, everything that comes out of Apple is polarizing, as this was too.

Larry Jordan: Be sure, by the way, to keep visiting us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com, we’re on Twitter, @dpbuzz, and subscribe to our weekly show newsletter with digitalproductionbuzz.com. It’s free and has all the latest news on the industry. We’ve got the ever handsome bon viveur world traveler, Mr. Norman Hollyn, coming up right after this.

Larry Jordan: The latest version of Da Vinci Resolve 10 is now shipping from Blackmagic Design. This new version includes innovative tools to speed on-set color grading, support for open effects plug-ins and simplified integration of Final Cut Pro, Avid and Premier Pro projects, allowing timelines to be easily moved in and out of Resolve. You can even tweak your edits inside Resolve without wasting time switching back to your editing software just to make a simple change.

Larry Jordan: New editing features include full multi-track editing with 16 channels of audio per clip and unlimited video and audio tracks in the timeline. Da Vinci Resolve 10 can finish online from the original camera files for dramatically better quality. The latest version of Resolve 10 is a free upgrade to all Resolve users and, if you’re looking for ways to make your pictures look great, download the free version of Da Vinci Resolve 10 from blackmagicdesign.com. That’s blackmagicdesign.com.

Larry Jordan: Norman Hollyn is a teacher, educator, writer and full professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he is head of the editing track and the recent recipient of the Michael Kahn Endowed Chair in Editing…

Mike Horton: Whoohoo!

Larry Jordan: …in honor of Steven Spielberg’s editor. Norman and I also co-host a popular website called 2 Reel Guys and no-one is more real than Norman. Welcome back.

Norman Hollyn: Well, ho-ho-ho to you guys.

Larry Jordan: I tell you, today has been a heck of a day. We’ll talk more about that.

Mike Horton: I’ve got to tell you, the 2 Reel Guys website, the videos that you put on, that is a master acting class.

Norman Hollyn: Well, no-one has ever accused me of being a good actor, so

Mike Horton: Well, I am. You both are very good actors.

Norman Hollyn: Oh, well, thank you, because we’re really not real in real life, right?

Mike Horton: You play a very good version of yourself, Norman.

Norman Hollyn: And that’s what I mean about not acting. Right.

Larry Jordan: See, Norman carries it off with aplomb. It’s just fun to watch. Norman, what do you teach at USC?

Norman Hollyn: I run the editing track there, which means I generally teach editing, although obviously the definition of editing is getting broader and broader as each day goes on, so we do a lot of pre-production, a lot of production, a lost of post production, a lot of web, a lot of new media. I mean, I could go on forever, but that’s because I’m a teacher. So yes, it’s post production editing, yes.

Larry Jordan: Is this an undergraduate course or graduate school? I mean, who are your students?

Norman Hollyn: Well, USC is one of the better known film schools in the US and the world and we have an undergraduate and a graduate program. I’m in one particular division of the school, which is kind of huge, and I’m in what’s called the inaccurately known cinema and television production division and it’s inaccurate because we do a lot more than film and TV.

Larry Jordan: One of the questions I get asked a lot, because I do teaching as well, is what is your goal in teaching? And I want to just sort of take a little bit of time and reflect on that for just a minute, because you and I have slightly different points of view from which we bring that. But when you’re standing in front of a class, what are your goals when you’re working with the kids?

Norman Hollyn: Well, I actually think that your goal and my goal are very much the same in a lot of ways, that’s why we do the 2 Reel Guys. I remember, we talked about 2 Reel Guys when there were tons of podcasts and tutorials out there on how to push the button and very, very few, none at that point when we started, on why you would push the button, so I think that what we both do is we try and have people think like film makers.

Norman Hollyn: That’s my goal, is to help them understand the storytelling aspect of it because it’s too easy to push the buttons but it’s really difficult to understand how to tell a story and why you would do that, no matter what kind of story it is. You know, we have people who graduate and go on to do wedding and event videos as well as feature films as well as television and it’s all storytelling in my mind.

Larry Jordan: Well, you know, one of the challenges I’ve found, because I teach in a different part of USC as well as technical schools, is getting kids to actually – and I define kids to be Mike’s age or less, it’s a broad definition.

Norman Hollyn: There we go. Well, my father is a kid, then, by that definition.

Larry Jordan: Grandfather is a kid by that definition.

Mike Horton: All right.

Larry Jordan: But to get them to actually see what they’re looking at, as opposed to just simply seeing what they think should be there. To get them to see, “Oh, did you realize you’ve got that badly framed?” or “There’s a typo there,” or “Did you really want that bad splotch?” But what I’ve found is the actual act of looking does not involve seeing.

Norman Hollyn: Yes, you know, that’s absolutely right. There are a lot of people out there saying, “How can you teach editing? Isn’t that something that comes from the gut?” and I think you’ve actually touched very much on one of the things that is very helpful from a teaching point of view. It’s something that, when I was coming up as an editor, that was the time when film was out there, remember that?

Larry Jordan: I have read about it in books.

Norman Hollyn: That’s right.

Mike Horton: I actually touched it one time.

Norman Hollyn: It was shortly after the Stone Age, right? That’s when I started, but we had a whole several years of apprenticeships and assistantships where I just stood next to some really amazing editors and looked at how they saw it, observed how they interacted with the producers and directors in the room and a lot of the discussion was about the very thing you just talked about, Larry, which is how to look at what you think you’re looking at, so that may be framing but that also may be a nuance of a performance, that actually what is really being said subtextually in a piece of film, whether it’s narrative, fiction, a documentary or a commercial – and I’ve done them all as editors – they’re all different storytelling genres, so we really need to understand what’s being conveyed in the image.

Norman Hollyn: In fact, I remember we had one set of students who insisted that they needed to shoot a particular scene of some kids watching their house burn down and they needed to go an hour away from campus to drive and capture because it was the perfect location and, in fact, when they went and shot it, these kids were in a medium close-up, they could have shot it actually right behind our building. But they really weren’t looking at what the camera was seeing as opposed to what they were seeing out there and what they thought the camera was seeing and that’s what I think they learn a lot – what’s visible through the frame and what you can add through audio as well, so there’s a lot to learn. I learn every class I teach, frankly.

Larry Jordan: Well, let’s shift the gears. Think about your career. What’s the most important thing that you’ve learned over the years that allows you to be a better teacher?

Norman Hollyn: Not to be a moron to people that you work with. I think that it’s a combination of how to collaborate well and how to observe well. So we’ve already talked about the observation part, but one of the biggest challenges that I think all of us who have strong artistic sensibilities have when they’re working on something is, “I need to have my ideas heard,” and I think it’s especially potent nowadays, when the DIY students – we’re getting so many students who have done it all when they walk in the door and they’re all petrified and not sure how to work on a single story that may not be theirs but still bring their own artistry and story to it – so how to not be a dick with other people, I think, is really important, but also how to communicate ideas outwards and how to receive ideas and criticism inwards.

Norman Hollyn: To me, that’s an amazing arc that I see our students take over the three to four years.

Mike Horton: Talking to editors, like I have over the past several years, one of the mantras is the ability to get along with other people. Not only that, but you wear many hats as an editor. I mean, you’re not only just an editor, you are a mediator, you are an arbitrator, you are a psychologist and you also need to be someone that you can be locked in a room with for 12 hours without killing them.

Norman Hollyn: Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Mike Horton: And that’s a big, big deal and the best ones are always like that, they’re always these wonderfully nice people. I love editors.

Norman Hollyn: I know. It’s so much fun hanging out with them, when we’re not editing. One thing I do say to almost every class, the very first class that I have with them, is more than 50 percent of my job has nothing to do with my editing. It really has to do with making sure that people understand that I’m on the side of the movie, that I’m on their side, I’ve got their back and that we’re going to be working on this wonderful, wonderful experience and project together, so that’s something that they have to be able to learn and one of the advantages of being at a film program as opposed to doing it out in real life is no-one’s cutting your check for this so that you can make mistakes, you can learn from your mistakes, as they all do, and it doesn’t injure someone else’s production in that way.

Larry Jordan: We have the live chat running, Norman, as you know because you’re on it, but Eric is asking a question about whether it’s important for the editor to be involved in pre-production.

Norman Hollyn: Well, let me put it this way. I think it is. I fight to have that happen on every project that I’m on. It doesn’t always happen and you certainly make it work, even if you don’t. But on television, for instance, I will often start the first day of dailies so not a lot of pre-pro there, but most editors who I know, whether they’re involved in features or television or commercials, are involved in pre-pro, whether it’s being involved in storyboards or, frankly, I like to go to the rehearsals and just sit silently and listen and I learn so much about the director’s point of view, the actors’ point of view, just by listening to that.

Norman Hollyn: So yes, I would fight for it every single time, even to the degree that I will start a film going on location scouts and rehearsals, even if I’m not getting paid for it, which is just one step above what we get paid as teachers.

Mike Horton: The best piece of advice I ever got from an editor, and unfortunately I can’t remember his or her name who gave that to me, was when we were talking about learning about editing. They said, “Don’t go to the movies. Go to the theater,” as simple as that and as complex as that, and just let that digest for a second and then wonder about it and, yes indeed, by going to the theater you’ll learn more about editing than you will by going to the movies.

Norman Hollyn: Yes. I also think go to museums too, and one thing that I found very, very helpful to me is I took acting classes as well. I’m a terrible actor, but I learned the language and I learned what was important to the crafting of performance and I think that’s really helped my editing.

Larry Jordan: We’ve had this conversation a lot – how do you balance teaching the technology of editing with the creative craft of editing? Because you cannot teach one without teaching the other.

Norman Hollyn: I leave the teaching of technology to you, Larry. I think you’ve got that nailed. Most any creative person who I know can only learn the technology when they have a need to learn it. We’re not good manual readers, you know, we kind of like figure it out on our own and then maybe later I’ll go back and read the manual and say, “Oh God, there was an easier way of doing that,” so that I think the way that I balance it is to teach the story side and then they have an absolute need to figure out, “Well, how do I make that split edit happen?” or “I really want to do that particular filter so that I can give a real sense of color to this and change something,” and then they will need it, but it grows out of a story need or a project need rather than the other way around.

Larry Jordan: I need you to do this next answer in 30 seconds. Bruce is asking what about the idea of fresh eyes, approaching the project without the bias of seeing it in production or rehearsal?

Norman Hollyn: Mhmm. You’d need to do that, get up and take a look, bring in an audience, bring in people who’ve never seen it before and, when you sit in the middle of them and watch it with them, it’s going to seem like you’re seeing it for the first time. Was that 30 seconds?

Larry Jordan: No, it’s actually 20. I’m stunned. I’m left here breathless, waiting for you to put more into it.

Norman Hollyn: I will talk slower.

Mike Horton: All right, let’s put the music on.

Larry Jordan: So, Norman, for people who want to know what you’re thinking – God knows why – but for people who do, where can they go on the web to learn more?

Norman Hollyn: They can look at my website, which is normanhollyn.com, or I’m Schnittman on Twitter.

Larry Jordan: That’s normanhollyn.com, Professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Norman, take care of yourself.

Norman Hollyn: Thank you.

Mike Horton: Thanks Norman and welcome back.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Norman Hollyn: All right, thanks. Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: David Basulto is the Media Arts and Animation Instructor at San Marino High School in Southern California. However, outside the classroom, David is the inventor of the iOgrapher. Welcome back, David.

Dave Basulto: Hello, guys. It’s great to be back. I love your intro, Larry. It always seems like you’re going to say, “And David is also James Bond.” You use that kind of voice, I love it.

Larry Jordan: Well, you know, I do what I can to make our guests sound warm, welcome and mysterious all at the same time.

Dave Basulto: And you do that well.

Larry Jordan: Thank you. David, what is the iOgrapher? And then I want to focus on this whole Kickstarter program.

Dave Basulto: Well, the iOgrapher is a support case for your iPad Mini and the full size iPad, also the iPhone 5 and 5S and the Air will be coming up very soon, and what it does, it allows you to place the iPad in the case, it has three cold shoes on top so that you can put lighting or professional level audio, you can add lenses to the front of it and you can also put it on a tripod. It also has two handles on each side, so you can go mobile if you like and get steady shots with your iPads or iPhones etcetera.

Dave Basulto: As for Kickstarter, where can I start with that?

Mike Horton: It’s stressful.

Larry Jordan: What did you do with Kickstarter?

Dave Basulto: So I invented this thing, designed it and was pretty much going to use it on my own in my school because my kids were using iPhones and iPads and so I made a 3D print and people started to say, “Hey, can I buy one of those?” and I thought, “God, I don’t want to sell them, this $200 3D print every time. I’m not making any money, first of all, and they’re going to get mad because it’s going to dissolve one day because it’s cheap plastic,” so I thought, “Ok, let’s see how we design this in an injection molding kind of setting,” and so I had a lot of people say, “Why don’t you go on Kickstarter and try and crowd fund it?” and I thought that was a great idea, you know, pre-sell in advance, raise the funds and use that to get that all started, and so I did.

Dave Basulto: I did the Mini first and I think when I was at Michael’s show I was telling everybody that I was completely stressed out for 30 days, my hair turned from dark to white, and it was just an up and down rollercoaster of people pledging money, taking it away, pledging it and, lo and behold, at the end of the day we made our financing goal and we were able to go into production. But it was a crazy time.

Larry Jordan: Well, what made it so hard? And what did you do to build support?

Dave Basulto: Well, I think what we did, starting out, we were able to, I mean, going back now, what I would have done differently was maybe start 30 to 40 days out of starting to get the buzz, so to speak, out there with people and just placing it in different forums and trying to get on shows like this and talking about what I was going to start doing.

Dave Basulto: I really went at it just cold without any real placement of that and also I was just really fortunate that it was a product that people liked, they liked the idea that I was a teacher trying to kind of do good for the community and that caught the attention of forbes.com and Mashable and a lot of the big websites and that really closed my funding at the end of the day. But I didn’t really do enough preparation to do that.

Dave Basulto: Also I would have done, instead of a 30 day campaign which Kickstarter recommends, I really would have gone 45 to 60 days and let it run a little longer. They’re saying if you do it in 30 days it’s better because it put more of an urgency on your project, but.

Larry Jordan: Yes, and it turns your hair white, too.

Dave Basulto: Exactly. I thought if I had 60 days, because when I did it, I started on March 14^th, it was my birthday I started, I went all the away to April 14^th and we’ve just finished NAB, so NAB would have been a great place, we’ve had a lot of great people following me about that at NAB and they loved it, Apple being one of them. I think if I had gone another 30 days after that, we could have even superseded our goals tremendously, so would have totally planned it all differently.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so you’ve completed your Kickstarter campaign, they’ve delivered a whack of cash to you, so what are you doing with it?

Dave Basulto: Well, after I got back from Vegas… no.

Mike Horton: I doubled it.

Dave Basulto: I doubled it, yes, and it was great. Actually, it’s interesting because I was so new to the game, I thought I would raise enough money to cover the injection mold. Well, the injection mold turned out to be, you know, twice as expensive as what I raised, so luckily I was able to get an outside investor, one of the parents of one of my students at school said, “I get what you’re doing and I want to be a part of this. Let me write you a check,” so we were able to get the molds going and get into production.

Dave Basulto: I mean, I literally had to go from, “Hey, I have this idea, I want to sell this to you guys, this is a great way to capture video etcetera, stream live events, whatever,” and I had to learn injection molding, I had to learn marketing, I had to learn fulfillment and it was just like this massive crash course in learning all these things, so we got all the stuff done in late June and we started delivering and literally I was doing it out of the house here and it was just a nightmare.

Dave Basulto: We now have a fulfillment company. It’s so automated, it’s a breeze, I love it. We’re actually getting into opening one in the UK, because we have a huge demand in Europe. They’re really into mobile journalism over there and the BBC bought a bunch of them from us, I think maybe that started things, but if you’re someone in Germany who wants to buy it right now, I mean, you’d have to buy it from California, you have the whole tariff issue, two weeks to get there unless you pay some ridiculous FedEx, so we’re setting up a corporation over in the UK to fulfill all of the EU as well.

Mike Horton: I’m still waiting for the brushed aluminum one.

Dave Basulto: That’s coming for you, don’t worry. I’m working on that.

Mike Horton: Ok, thank you. Hey, by the way, for those of you who don’t know Dave, Dave is not the coolest guy in the world but you have the coolest marketing ever and I know you’re doing a lot of this on your own with the support of the students who say, “That is cool, do that,” but your marketing has been superb. I mean, it’s just been really, really good.

Dave Basulto: You know, I like to think that I know a little bit of design and let the apps do the rest of it. I mean, I take photos of my stuff when my kids used it all and there’s a great app out there called Phoster that allows you to make these really cool posters and you can add text and do all these fun things and I’ve just been throwing them out there any time we had a cool picture and we’re getting a lot of traction on it. I mean, we’re up to almost 5,000 Facebook users now and it was zero about five months ago.

Mike Horton: Yes, marketing can be great but it’s got to be a good product, and you’ve got a good product.

Dave Basulto: Well, thank you, sir, I appreciate that.

Larry Jordan: For film makers that want to use Kickstarter to fund their own projects, as you look back on it, what have you learned? What works? What doesn’t? What should they keep in mind?

Dave Basulto: The big thing is to get something catchy like the video that you’re going to do, that when I start watching the video, it gets to the point right away, especially if you’re a film maker. You want to do a really kick butt trailer or some storyboards or something. Show me what you’re doing. Don’t just be a talking face. I want to see a lot of whatever you’re making, your end product, and what am I going to get out of it? And it’s interesting that you say that, because I was talking with a student about this recently. Ten, 15 years ago, when I was making films, I would have loved to have had Kickstarter – oh my God! You know, it’s such a great platform to raise financing for that and, you know, I would have just done a great little trailer, a little teaser of it, even if it’s just mock-up images that I put together, you know, just to tell the story and then give my game plan, how I plan on distributing it, the casting that I’m trying to get after etcetera, here’s the finished script if you want to read it and then invite people to be extras in the movie, I think that’s a great tie-in. Stuff like that.

Larry Jordan: Dave, where can people go on the web to learn more about iOgrapher?

Dave Basulto: iOgrapher is at iographer.com. We’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter, we’re everywhere and we’re all over the United States.

Larry Jordan: And the person that invented iOgrapher is Dave Basulto and the website is iographer.com. Thank you, Dave. Take good care.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Dave.

Dave Basulto: Thanks, guys. Merry Christmas.

Mike Horton: Merry Christmas.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye. You too.

Larry Jordan: Well, Michael, you may not have known this…

Mike Horton: I knew it.

Larry Jordan: …because you sleep late, but this morning at 12.28, Apple released a new version of Final Cut Pro 10 and maybe you may have noticed that there was a little bit of talking about it on the web and we thought we would go right to the source itself to find out what’s going on. Philip Hodgetts is the CEO of Intelligent Assistance and involved in technology in virtually every area of digital video. He’s also a regular contributor on The Buzz and, as always, Philip, it’s a delight having you back.

Philip Hodgetts: Thank you for having me.

Mike Horton: Actually, you are two of the only guys on the planet who have had this thing for a while, right?

Larry Jordan: Well…

Mike Horton: I mean, how did that happen, Philip?

Philip Hodgetts: Well, at certain times Apple invite people who need advance notice to their applications to have that access so that they can do things like make sure .xml produced by various applications or read by various applications is supported correctly or so that training can be ready when a version is launched, so for strategic reasons, usually for Apple’s strategic reasons, there are people who are invited to see applications ahead of time; and I have to say that that sounds terribly exciting until you actually are in that position where you know for months that this wonderful thing is coming and you can’t talk about it, you can’t even hint at it. You can’t do anything, you’ve just got to keep this secret from everybody around you.

Mike Horton: All right, so, listen. I have Larry here and I have you here and you guys have had this for a while. I have just downloaded it at 5pm today and I haven’t had a chance to look at it. However, I’ve looked at the web and what people are saying and talking about it, but you guys chime in. What do you think? Do you like it?

Philip Hodgetts: I like it. I like it a lot. There was twice I had to go back to 10.0.9 for presentations during the beta process and it was not a comfortable process, to go back and realize that I’d lost some of the performance I was used to, that things were not as well organized. I very much loved the new library structure, even though it makes our application… well, it gives it no useful function going for it, except it’s the best way to upgrade, so we made it free.

Mike Horton: Yes, we need to talk a little bit about more of that, because it does make a lot of sense to use that to upgrade. Larry, what do you feel?

Larry Jordan: I like it a lot. I did all of my training – I released training about two minutes after Apple released Final Cut 10 – and I did all of my training on a 2010 iMac and I was blown away, on a three year old computer with no special graphics processing, how fast and smooth the new version of Final Cut was. It launches quickly, it plays quickly, I didn’t get any drop frame errors and I’m sitting there doing lots of work, I mean, we did 15 hours of training to 130 movies covering all the new features.

Mike Horton: So did you fill your little library up to the brim, as they say?

Larry Jordan: No. Let me describe for a second. In the old days, you know, back in the ancient past – yesterday – we had event folders and they stored all of our media and we had projects, which stored all of the edits to our media. Well, the events are dead and the projects are changed and instead they’ve replaced it with a brand new concept called libraries.

Mike Horton: Yes, and nobody can wrap their head around that until, I guess, they open it and start playing with it, because I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t understand what the big…

Larry Jordan: It’s easy, it’s easy and I’ll Philip…

Philip Hodgetts: Kidding? It’s easy.

Larry Jordan: A library holds stuff…

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: …so the library holds your media, library holds your events, a library holds projects, so library’s the big bushel basket that holds everything. Inside the library, you have individual folders, like you do inside any finder, you have a folder. That folder’s called an event. An event can hold media, it can hold projects, so what you’ve got is this big bushel basket container that’s holding everything and instead of having to worry about scratched disks, like we do with Final Cut 7 or where media is stored or whether media’s stored on one event or another event, it’s now put in this one single bushel basket which can be put anywhere.

Mike Horton: Really, it’s that simple?

Larry Jordan: It’s stored anywhere, named anywhere. Oh, it’s amazingly simple.

Philip Hodgetts: Yes it is. You can collect things on your finder, you can collect libraries in a finder folder. For example, I have all of my Enlightened Cook libraries together in a folder, but each library opens independently and it’s a unit of work. It’s very akin to a project in the old Final Cut Pro 7… Premier Pro project which creates apparently one file, but in fact it’s a bundle – there are folders within there and if you open that up, you see that there are still project folders and there are still event folders – and inside that library it looks very similar to what the events and projects did in the past, but there are lots of improvements that aren’t really obvious.

Philip Hodgetts: For example, the merging of events now, when you merge events, they work so much better and, in fact, you can unmerge an event up until the time you close that library. The keywords, when you merge events, keywords are merged much more intelligently, you don’t get duplicate clips, as we once did. So they’ve put a lot of work into that and I think they put a lot of work into the underlying engine.

Philip Hodgetts: I found out today I’ve got a super bonus on my year and a half old MacBook Pro Retina in that Maverick enables this second GPU, the one that I’m not using – this has got a discrete graphics, but it’s got the built in graphics. Maverick’s enabled that so that the second graphics card can be used for open CL processing, or Final Cut Pro 10.1 does take advantage of that, so that’s part of the reason why I’ve seen a performance increase on the exact same computer.

Mike Horton: Yes, I don’t think anybody’s bitching and moaning about performance increase. In fact, a majority of people have said that, for the little time that they’ve worked with it, that the performance increase is huge and we don’t know what it’s going to be like with the Mac Pro, but one can assume it’s going to be very, very good.

Larry Jordan: Now, Philip, unless Apple has loaned you a dozen Mac Pros over the last couple of weeks, you probably haven’t done any Mac Pro testing. But before we shift to the Mac Pro, I was just realizing one of the big challenges that we’ve got with the new version, to go from 10.09 to 10.1, is this concept of upgrading our events and projects, because it’s got to get converted from the old version to the new version and, of all the things that are going to cause confusion, I think that and basic media management are going to be what drive people nuts.

Larry Jordan: Describe for me how that upgrade process works and, more importantly, where does this leave your application, Event Manager 10?

Philip Hodgetts: Right. That’s a very good question, because Apple does have a fairly reasonable default upgrade. It’s reasonable if you have organized everything by drives, so if you have a single drive per client, that will probably upgrade reasonably well because the default is to upgrade everything on a drive into one library. But sadly what happens is that every project goes into an upgraded projects event so that you then have to sort of work out which events go with which projects as you drag things back into your new libraries and reorganize your life again.

Philip Hodgetts: For people like me, who use a RAID with multiple different projects that have been using Event Manager 10 to switch between clients and switch between jobs, that’s not a very good upgrade part and what I realized very early in the time I used it was that, while Event Manager 10 has no future role, it has a perfect role in upgrading because it allows you to activate just the events and projects that relate together, like… if you’ve been using… but you don’t have to, and then do a single upgrade to upgrade that into a library using Final Cut Pro 10’s default mechanism, label that library and then repeat for the rest of your projects and events and you’ve got a reasonable set of libraries.

Philip Hodgetts: It takes very, very little time; the way that Apple upgrade is brilliant and technical and I won’t go into it right now because we need to talk about the Mac Pro.

Larry Jordan: Well, just a really important note – the upgrading only has to be done once. You need to pay attention to what the upgrading is and, Philip, you’ve got a White Paper on upgrading and I’ve got an article on my website. I strongly recommend, before you click the ‘Update all’ button, read Philip’s White Paper, read the White Paper on Apple’s website or read the Media Management paper on my website, because it’s going to keep you out of trouble. Really, it’s important, you need to read it. Philip, where’s the White Paper for you?

Philip Hodgetts: philiphodgetts.com. It’s right at the top of the site.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so we’ve got philiphodgetts.com and your White Paper and Event Manager 10, which I swear by.

Mike Horton: But by this time next week, it’ll be at the bottom of the site because Philip will be writing many more.

Philip Hodgetts: Well, no… a post to the top of my blog, so that’s going to stick there for a little while.

Mike Horton: Oh, ok.

Larry Jordan: I don’t want to scare people, but you do want to read it because it’s important.

Philip Hodgetts: It will make your life so much smoother. It’ll make the transition much more comfortable. I have upgraded whole drives by mistake and I’ve just undone it, re-did it and started over.

Mike Horton: Yes, actually my son, who has been taking an editing class at Santa Monica City College, upgraded to 10.1 in the morning, at two o’clock in the morning or whatever, and he did not read your article, unfortunately. He read it after he upgraded and he had a lot of media on his machine and he just pretty much did it by hand and did a lot of drag and dropping and it worked fine.

Philip Hodgetts: I also should remind people of the consolidate media function in Final Cut Pro if you want to bring media from disparate places back into an event or a library in this case. There is a consolidate media command to do that and I did a little bit of that to make sure I had everything together.

Larry Jordan: I want to work in the Mac Pro, but one quick note that I want to emphasize, is that if you’re in the middle of a project, don’t upgrade to the new version. Finish the project, then update, and just get that out. Just make your life easier. Finish the project, then do the update. Philip, what about the Mac Pro?

Philip Hodgetts: I would love to be able to justify buying one, but I do hope to have my hands on one very shortly to be able to do some testing, but I think it’s going to be a screaming new thing for Final Cut Pro. I think we’ll finally see the reality of comfortable editing of 4K on the desktop. I mean, Final Cut’s always supported 4K, but perhaps we haven’t really and it’s actually performed pretty well on my MacBook Pro. I was running real time Red Draw in a timeline scale for the Digital Cinema Society two weeks ago and it was working fine, but I think what we’ll see is that really working in 10K is – 4k, yes, it’s not 10k already – 4k is…

Mike Horton: Yes, 10k.

Larry Jordan: Is it 10k already?

Philip Hodgetts: …a much more pleasant experience in 10.1 than it was in 10.09, where I probably would have just used Proxy after ingesting, anyway.

Mike Horton: If an editor can’t afford to buy the fully loaded system, and if he can you can buy one for me, but if you can’t, where should you spend the money? Where would you put your dollars?

Philip Hodgetts: I would take the hint from Apple about the constant mentioning of dual GPUs. I would max out my GPUs. I’d either go to 32 gig of RAM for my Apple, which is not unreasonably priced, or I’d think about minimizing my RAM purchase and look at Crucial for that, and I would probably go with the… core processor, simply because…

Mike Horton: The which one? The six core?

Philip Hodgetts: Yes, well, I think it’s eight and 12. I’d actually go with the eight, sorry.

Mike Horton: All right, the eight.

Philip Hodgetts: The eight, yes. The 12 is probably not going to benefit from the sort of apps that we’re using so much and we’re getting a lot more use across Adobe, across Resolve – or at least Premier Pro, anyway. We’re going to get a lot more use of that dual GPU. Adobe Media Encoder already uses the second GPU, if it’s present, to background render. So there’s a lot of support for dual GPUs and so that’s the one place where I would not scrimp. I’d go with the D700 card.

Mike Horton: Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the prices for the eight core, the maxed out eight core, I think it’s under eight or around seven something.

Larry Jordan: Yes, the system I specced was around 66. Philip, I would disagree with you on just a couple of things. I would not get as much RAM, because we can after market that later, so I would max out the GPUs and I would get the eight core – I agree with that – and I’d get about 16 gig of RAM, because it can always be added later.

Larry Jordan: What I would spend the money on is the stuff that can’t be replaced. Also, I would not spend and get the terabyte flash drive unless I’m doing…

Philip Hodgetts: No, I would go with the five core on the flash drive.

Larry Jordan: And I looked at my system and I’m running with less than 200 gigs of storage on mine, so I would either go 256 or 512 on the flash, 16 gigabytes on the RAM and buy the max GPU, because we can’t swap that out once you’ve bought the system.

Mike Horton: Oh, so you’re probably talking less than $6600 to max out the A core. Were you talking about six or 59 or something like.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I think so, because…

Mike Horton: That’s a pretty dang good price.

Philip Hodgetts: It is, and I think the pricing overall is much better than what I’d hoped for and not as much as I’d pessimistically expected. I think if you’re going to work with HD, the 16 gig is probably a good starting point but I do want to note, though, that the GPUs are actually socketed. That’s probably for Apple’s convenience so they can socket in a 500 or a 700 card during the build to order process, and although it’s a… that nobody else uses, it is certainly plausible that in the future we’ll see upgradable GPUs for that device.

Mike Horton: Yes, save all your money for all those externals you’re going to be using to plug into that thing.

Larry Jordan: On the other hand, you know, you don’t want to bet the ranch on something that nobody’s talked about, so be careful on that socketing.

Philip Hodgetts: Yes. Oh no, it’s just that it’s, yes, it is socketed clearly in the images, but that’s probably for Apple’s convenience, not necessarily ours.

Larry Jordan: Let’s just go through one more time, where can people go to learn more about what you’ve got and what they need to pay attention to?

Philip Hodgetts: philiphodgetts.com or intelligentassistance.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s all one word – intelligentassistance.com and philiphodgetts.com – and Philip Hodgetts himself is that cheerful voice at the other end of the telephone. Philip, take care. Thanks so much for joining us.

Philip Hodgetts: Thank you.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: Sean Mullen is the head of Rampant Design Tools. He’s an Emmy award winning visual effects artist with over 60 feature film and television credits, including Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ali McBeal, ER, Nip/Tuck and many others. His company, Rampant Design Tools, specializes in creating original drag and drop visual elements for editors and visual effects artists and, as always, it’s a delight having him back. Hello Sean.

Sean Mullen: Hey, Larry and Mike, my two favorite people on the planet. How are you guys?

Mike Horton: Well, you’re one of ours.

Larry Jordan: You know, just to be able to say it with that much cheerfulness just woke Mike right up. He’s just sitting there in his chair, just looking calm and relaxed and – boom! – he’s got posture again.

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s what I love. I love your introduction when you talk about drag and drop. That’s what I love about Rampant Tools, you just drag and drop. Awesome.

Sean Mullen: That’s great to hear, thanks.

Larry Jordan: So, listen, dude, I understand you’ve launched something new and I have been a bit distracted the last 24 hours. What’s the hot news?

Sean Mullen: Well, I guess the big thing that we’ve launched that’s really new is our new extreme drive. We’re now launching all of our products on customized drives, USB3 drives, and they can go with you wherever you go, so they’re portable, they’re BUS powered and they’re pretty darn fast. You can get the entire library right now for 80 percent off if you buy our extreme drive, so you can walk around with about 650 gigs worth of Rampant drag and drop goodness and take it on set, take it to whatever job you’re working at, and it’s pretty convenient.

Mike Horton: Oh man, because I’ve got your library, which fills up an entire shelf…

Sean Mullen: Oh yes. Oh yes.

Mike Horton: …of DVDs and that drive thing is an absolutely brilliant idea.

Sean Mullen: We’ve got to send you a drive because gone are the days of having a client come in and you point to your shelving unit full of all kinds of great stuff. Next to your Digibeta deck you’ve got tons of stock content. That’s all gone and, you know, the great thing about our stuff is we are platform agnostic and deliver everything on QuickTime, but the con of that is it takes up a lot of space so, like I said, if you do have our whole library, you’ll be close to 700 gigs of storage that will be taken up by using our stuff.

Mike Horton: Don’t send it to me. Larry’s going to give it to me for a Christmas present.

Larry Jordan: I’ve already purchased it.

Sean Mullen: Sweet.

Larry Jordan: Wrapped with a red bow around it.

Mike Horton: Exactly.

Sean Mullen: It’s a great stocking stuffer.

Mike Horton: Exactly.

Larry Jordan: Yes, absolutely, and it’s addressed to Mike. It’s got an invoice attached to it, it’s great. You say you’re platform agnostic. What codec are you delivering this? It’s a QuickTime movie with what compression?

Sean Mullen: Right now, up until this point, it’s been a myriad of different codecs, just whatever was right to not only not compromise quality but also be able to get you a relatively quick download. But now that Mavericks is throwing us a slight bit of a curveball, we’re starting to release everything basically in ProRes 422, 444 and 4444.

Mike Horton: Wow.

Larry Jordan: Do we get to specify what the format is, or we get three versions of every file?

Sean Mullen: If you download a product in your list inside our site, it’ll tell you this is the photo .jpeg version or this is the ProRes version. You can download whatever you like. On the drive, we give you everything so you can choose on the fly.

Larry Jordan: Eric in our live chat is asking whether you’ve got plans for more 4k stuff and what do you have that’s 4k now?

Sean Mullen: We have a couple of things that are 4k now. I can’t get into too much but I am going to say this – I’m going to meet and exceed those demands by NAB, this upcoming NAB show. We are going to release something…

Mike Horton: April?

Larry Jordan: April?

Mike Horton: We’ve got to wait? Oh jeez.

Larry Jordan: Sean!

Sean Mullen: We’ve got something so big, it’s going to be amazing. I promise, it’s totally worth the wait. It’s mind-blowing. I just got off the set of one of our fire shoots today and it’s sick.

Larry Jordan: Oh, all right. Well, what have you got that’s high res now?

Sean Mullen: Our only 4k product right now is called Film Effects and it’s light leaks and film grains and things like that, but I can promise you we are going to, because Apple approached us and asked us, “Hey, if you’re going to have 4k content, we’d like to get our hands on it,” and I said, “No problem.” Any time Apple calls you, you go ahead and cater to them, so we’re going to give them a bunch of stuff, but let me just say that 4k is not the highest resolution that we’re developing at this time.

Mike Horton: Wow.

Larry Jordan: Oooh, all right. And we have to wait until April and you’re not going to tell us now?

Sean Mullen: Yes, I can’t say so much because I’ve got a lot of competitors watching and waiting and trying to figure out what we’re doing, so I’ve got to keep a little bit quiet.

Mike Horton: Every time Sean says something about competitors listening and watching, I just go, “Oh gosh.”

Larry Jordan: What cameras are you using to shoot with? Are you using just one camera or are you using a blend?

Sean Mullen: I have different tools for different jobs. We have a Blackmagic 2½k, which is a great little workhorse, and we also have an Epic.

Larry Jordan: And tell me what it’s like to shoot the Blackmagic.

Sean Mullen: I was really surprised when I first opened it. It’s a pretty amazing little camera and the SSD workflow is great. I love working with Resolve. It’s pretty amazing to get basically a raw workflow in such a small little camera. It took a little bit of getting used to – it’s not like any other camera system I’ve ever used.

Larry Jordan: That’s true, it isn’t. It’s not weighted like any other camera system I’ve ever used.

Sean Mullen: That’s true. If it’s a windy day, it’ll definitely hold anything down. But it’s great, I love it.

Mike Horton: Well, you can’t beat the price.

Sean Mullen: No, especially when they dropped it down to 1900 bucks. I was like, “Good gracious, I need to get four of these,” but yes, it’s a great camera.

Mike Horton: And finally the 4k, Graham Petty just uploaded some footage up on the forums and it’s going to now be release, I believe, in January or something like that. I know it’s been way, way late.

Larry Jordan: I saw the footage, I haven’t seen the release date.

Mike Horton: Well, it’s not Raw footage.

Larry Jordan: No, it’s ProRes.

Sean Mullen: Yes, it’s ProRes, right, it’s ProRes, but it looks gorgeous.

Larry Jordan: Are you shooting ProRes or are you shooting Raw with the camera?

Sean Mullen: We do everything in RAW. With the second camera, we use a 5D with a Ninja 2 on it, just to get RealTime playback on set, just to kind of document things. You can play back RealTime on any of the camera systems we have, but we use it just for indexing. But we do everything in DNGs or Red RAW, depending on which camera system we’re using.

Larry Jordan: What have been some of the popular effects? What’s got people excited?

Sean Mullen: Well, I know you don’t like this one, but Monster Effects was a pretty huge hit, but I’ll go onto the other stuff, the light stuff, the not so eerie stuff, like our lens effects and any of our light based elements, people seem to love it. It’s a real hot trend in most commercials and productions you see, so adding a little light leaks and subtle real flares, not digital flares but real lens flares, people seem to really like that.

Larry Jordan: Now, the way people work with your footage is they don’t just simply use your footage as ClipArt. They take their own video and then they overlay your video on top of it so that you’re adding elements on top of somebody’s existing footage. Is that correct?

Sean Mullen: Correct, correct. We typically offer everything where you need to blend it in, so if you have a great shot of an actress or an actor and you want to add a little bit of subtle color or light, you drop it on and, because most of our content is optical, it looks like it was intended for that particular shot.

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s really cool. It’s like brain dead simple.

Larry Jordan: That’s my kind of special effects, because if I have to draw anything, man, I’m in serious trouble.

Mike Horton: He did this for Michael Horton. That’s why everybody loves it.

Larry Jordan: So is this stuff affordable? Or do we need to be Dreamworks to be able to write you a check?

Sean Mullen: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Everything we offer is under $100 per… and we’re always having sales. Like right now, we’ve got a sale that is 60 percent off, or if you buy the drive, the extreme drive, you get everything for 80 percent off, which I think it comes out to $14 of volume, so you really can’t beat that when you’re talking about almost 9,000 clips.

Mike Horton: Now, I’m assuming the drive’s searchable, right? I mean, we’re getting everything in there, so you make it really easy to find the stuff.

Sean Mullen: No, no, I just put everything in one giant folder and just said, you know, “Have at it,” you know? No, no, no. No, everything’s well organized and…

Larry Jordan: You’ve seen Mike’s organization system.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Sean Mullen: Yes, they’re all labeled ‘Untitled Movie 01’, ‘Untitled Movie 02’, you know.

Larry Jordan: Mike has got sticky notes all over his screen saying, ‘Open this folder here’. It’s pretty amazing to watch him work.

 

Mike Horton: Well, I get people to talk about it. It’s a good marketing thing.

Larry Jordan: By the way, what does the hard disk cost? In other words, if I’m buying the entire collection, what am I spending?

Sean Mullen: The entire collection is on sale right now for $999.

Mike Horton: Holy crap!

Larry Jordan: $999? Wow.

Sean Mullen: Mhmm. That’s over 80 products, a little over 9,000 clips and it’s all under a grand.

Mike Horton: That’s amazing, and it’s such good stuff.

Larry Jordan: And for people who want to spend $999 in your direction, what website do you recommend they go see?

Sean Mullen: That would be rampantdesigntools.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s all one word – rampantdesigntools.com. It’s a world of effects software – Rampant Design Tools and Sean Mullen is the CEO and Lead Creative for Rampant Design Tools. Sean, thanks for joining us today.

Sean Mullen: Thanks, guys. Happy holidays.

Larry Jordan: Take care. You too.

Sean Mullen: All right, bye bye.

Larry Jordan: You know, normally at this time, a hush falls over the crowd…

Mike Horton: Should have kept that music playing because I’m starting to tap my toes.

Larry Jordan: …and Michael normally steps up in front of a microphone, but he is just a technology maven. He’s surrounded by computer screens. There’s, like, six glowing four foot screens surrounding him and he’s…

Mike Horton: Pick up my iPhone, do a 120 frames per second movie of me.

Larry Jordan: What’s the world been talking about with the Mac Pro and Final Cut?

Mike Horton: Well, yes, because I know you haven’t slept and you haven’t had any time to actually look at what the world is saying. You know, everything that Apple comes out with, it takes a while to come out so everybody has these hopeful ideas.

Larry Jordan: Are you saying people are filled with opinions?

Mike Horton: Yes. Yes, there are a lot of people that think, “Well, it’s been, what, a year since the last upgrade.”

Larry Jordan: November. It’s exactly a year.

Mike Horton: Yes, exactly a year, and so they were expecting a lot more and they say, “This is what we get?”

Larry Jordan: Well, what did they want, world peace?

Mike Horton: Maybe. One of the biggest issues that people keep talking about and they can’t quite get their head around is sharing.

Larry Jordan: Interesting.

Mike Horton: Now, what was the problem with the old way that everybody could not get their head around? I mean, let’s talk about a guy who’s got a six bay edit system. He’s a post production house.

Larry Jordan: Ok, well, time out, time out, time out.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: Two different things. To export and to share are two different things. To export means to get a file out of the system; share means to export the file and send it somewhere, to YouTube or CNN or Facebook. What he’s asking about is collaboration. If you’ve got media and you need to share that media, move that media between multiple systems.

Mike Horton: Correct.

Larry Jordan: The way that Final Cut 10, all versions, including 10.1, the way that that’s configured is that if the media is stored on a server, then the media can be played by anybody at any time across multiple systems. The old events and projects are stored locally, but media can be shared easily as long as it’s on a centralized server, and Final Cut is optimized to be shared via an XAN network, Where it is not optimized is if machine room one has the media and machine room two needs it and it’s on a local drive on machine one – machine two can’t get access to it and now you have to move files around. But if you’re on a centralized server, you can share media with no problem between systems.

Mike Horton: Well, there’s no difference between 10.1.

Larry Jordan: Correct, in that case there’s no difference.

Mike Horton: Right, so I don’t quite understand this, but a lot of people don’t quite get their head around this thing called sharing. But the biggest bitching and moaning is, as usual, they were expecting more.

Larry Jordan: Well, I’m shocked to hear that.

Mike Horton: Well, speaking of more, were you expecting more, considering the fact that it was a year? However, when Phil Schiller gave his little speech when they introduced the Mac Pro, pretty much said that Final Cut Pro was going to be optimized for these dual processors and nothing more, so that’s what we’ve got.

Larry Jordan: I think there’s a lot of work. I’ve had a chance to chat with some of the people at Apple today to get some additional briefing on both Final Cut and the Mac Pro and there’s a ton of optimization to make the application faster, not just for the Mac Pro but for all Macintoshes. So first, speed; second, taking advantage of Mavericks. I think they finally hit on a winning formula with Media Management. The new library is just vastly superior.

Mike Horton: Yes, it sounds so simple. It was why didn’t you do that in the first place?

Larry Jordan: It’s so clean, so simple, it makes life so much easier.

Mike Horton: Because events and projects were confusing.

Larry Jordan: And the fact that you had to quit out of Final Cut to be able to change an event and quit out of Final Cut to change a project. It was awkward, and that’s being polite. But what I’ve done is, as I was going through and doing my training and totaling up all the different features that are there, there are almost 200 different features from the bill of the C used media to the ability to change re-timing, fit to fill edits, improved trimming, a better razorblade. I mean, the list goes on and it’s some small stuff, but in all cases it just makes it faster to get the editing done. I’m very pleased.

Mike Horton: And, of course, you cover all this on your website, Apple covers it somewhat on their website in depth with a list of all the new features and new shortcuts.

Larry Jordan: Oh, and Eric on our live chat says Compressor is unrecognizable. Compressor now has the same interface as Final Cut and, by this time next week, I’ll have the training finished on Compressor 4.1.

Mike Horton: Yes, we haven’t even talked about Motion 5.1 or Compressor 4.1.

Larry Jordan: There’s just a lot of stuff to talk about.

Mike Horton: Yes, I just saw a screenshot of Compressor. It is unrecognizable, you’re absolutely right, Eric.

Larry Jordan: There’s so much to talk about. Mike, we’re going to have to bring you back next week. Oh, we’ve got such a show next week, the day after Christmas.

Mike Horton: Yes, next week’s Christmas.

Larry Jordan: It’s going to be great.

Mike Horton: Are you having me over for turkey? Have you got me a present yet?

Larry Jordan: No, you’re the turkey.

Mike Horton: Jane’s right over there, she’s just given me a bottle of wine.

Larry Jordan: Just shush, people are talking and that’s me. Anyway, Norman Hollyn I want to thank, he’s a Professor at the USC Film School of Cinematic Arts; David Basulto is the teacher and inventor of the iOgrapher; Philip Hodgetts, the President of Intelligent Assistance; Sean Mullen, the CEO and Lead Creative for Rampant Design Tools. A great group of people.

Mike Horton: Could you get me one of his drives? Really, seriously, it’s only $999.

Larry Jordan: And I can’t think of a better person to give a $999 gift to.

Mike Horton: Is me.

Larry Jordan: Than you. You were the first person that sprung to mind when I thought of spending.

Mike Horton: Yes, we’re so close I can finish your sentences.

Larry Jordan: There’s a lot happening at The Buzz in addition to Mike finishing my sentences. Between shows, visit digitalproductionbuzz.com and click ‘Latest news’. We update it several times a day with all the latest news in our industry. Visit with us on Twitter, @dpbuzz, and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: The music on The Buzz is provided by SmartSound. The Buzz is streamed by wehostmax.com. Our producer, the ever beautiful Cirina Catania; our engineer, Adrian Price. On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz and have a wonderful holiday.

Mike Horton: Merry Christmas, everyone.

Voiceover: This Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries.

Digital Production Buzz

December 12, 2013

[Transcripts provided by Take1.tv]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Thom Calabro, Director, Marketing & Product Development, Fujifilm Optical Division

Lan Bui, Cinematographer, The Bui Brothers

Brian Drewes, Co-Founder, ZEROvfx

Beverley Horne, Head of TV Post, LipSync Post

===

Voiceover: This Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum at Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution. What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the leading internet podcast covering digital video production, post production and distribution around the world. My name is Larry Jordan and joining us across the studio table, Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hello, Larry.

Larry Jordan: It’s good to see you today.

Mike Horton: It’s good to see you.

Larry Jordan: Do you realize Thanksgiving was only a week ago?

Mike Horton: No, it was two weeks ago.

Larry Jordan: Was it two weeks ago?

Mike Horton: Yes, it was two weeks ago.

Larry Jordan: That long ago?

Mike Horton: Do you realize that Christmas is only…

Larry Jordan: Two weeks away?

Mike Horton: …two weeks away?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: Have you gotten me anything?

Larry Jordan: No, are you kidding? I’m the guy that made shopping on Christmas Eve famous. If it’s not in the store on Christmas Eve afternoon, it’s not worth buying.

Mike Horton: I’ll see you in Best Buy on the 24^th.

Larry Jordan: Thinking of best, we’ve got some good guests today. We’re going to start with Thom Calabro. He’s the Director of Marketing and Product Development for Fujifilm Optical Division. He stops by to talk about new camera lenses they’ve just released.

Larry Jordan: Then, oh, about three months ago, Mike, we interviewed cinematographer Lan Bui about his latest film, but now he and his business partner, Aaron Dieppa, have invented a new web-based solution to finding the right cast and crew for independent projects and tonight he explains how this new website works.

Larry Jordan: Brian Drewes is the Co-Founder and Head of Production for Boston-based ZEROvfx and since I can’t think of a more challenging job – with the possible exception of wing walking without a safety net – we invited Brian to chat with us about the current status of the effects industry in Boston.

Larry Jordan: And Beverley Horne is the new Head of TV Post at LipSync Post, which is based on Soho, London. She’s got years of experience shepherding dramatic television shows through editing to final release. She joins us tonight to explain what a post supervisor does and what directors can do to make the job of editing run a whole lot smoother.

Mike Horton: I think she begs for everybody to do their job well and get it done.

Larry Jordan: Well, you know, I think there’s a phrase, herding cats, which is relevant. Earlier today, by the way, Adobe released new versions of Premier Pro CC. Did you see the announcement?

Mike Horton: I did, because it pops up on my screen.

Larry Jordan: And now they upgraded…

Mike Horton: And, yes, I actually read all the fixes and the improvements and everything else. It’s amazing. They’re coming out, like, every month with stuff.

Larry Jordan: Two months. They did one in June, one in July, one in October and one in December.

Mike Horton: Oh, every two months then.

Larry Jordan: Yes, and they upgraded SpeedGrade and Prelude and Adobe Media and…

Mike Horton: And After Effects and…

Larry Jordan: Well, After Effects hasn’t released yet. It’s coming out just…

Mike Horton: Well, I got an update today. I think it was just bug fixes, but that’s what it said.

Larry Jordan: After Effects came out too?

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: You have an honest face.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: I’m going to have to believe you.

Mike Horton: It did. I know more than you do.

Larry Jordan: Which is not that hard.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: By the way, now that we’ve recovered from one holiday and are getting braced for another, we’re back to our live tweeting. Join in the conversation, @buzzlive on Twitter. The ever-handsome and dashingly debonair Patrick is doing all of our tweeting. Also, you can join us on a live chat at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Mike Horton: And you really should do that, folks. Get in the live chat. Just listen to the live show. Click on that thing. It’s up there at the top.

Larry Jordan: It is fun and Eric is in and Grant is in and the Buzz babe is in. There’s a whole bunch, and Madeline – hello Madeline, good to have you with us. Anyway, we got all kinds of people on the live chat. Also, we are offering text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take1.tv. Transcripts are located on each show page and thanks to Take1 for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: We are going to be talking about all kinds of cool stuff about lenses, coming up right after this.

Larry Jordan: The latest version of Da Vinci Resolve 10 is now shipping from Blackmagic Design. This new version includes innovative tools to speed on-set color grading, support for open effects plug-ins and simplified integration of Final Cut Pro, Avid and Premier Pro projects. This allows timelines to be easily moved in and out. You can even tweak your edits inside Resolve without wasting time switching back to your editing software just to make a simple change.

Larry Jordan: New editing features include full multi-track editing with 16 channels of audio per clip and unlimited video and audio tracks in the timeline. Da Vinci Resolve 10 can finish online from the original camera files for dramatically better quality and the latest version of Resolve 10 is a free upgrade to all Resolve users. Plus, if you’re looking for ways to make your pictures look great, download the free version of Da Vinci Resolve 10 from blackmagicdesign.com. That’s blackmagicdesign.com.

Larry Jordan: Thom Calabro holds the Director of Marketing and Product Development title at Fujifilm’s Optical Devices Division. They’re the makers of Fujinon lens products. He’s based at company headquarters in Wayne, New Jersey, and hello Thom.

Thom Calabro: Hello, good evening.

Larry Jordan: You know, now that we are talking to an acknowledged star of stage and screen, having seen all of your training videos, Mike and I are in awe of your performance ability.

Mike Horton: Absolutely.

Thom Calabro: Thank you. Well, I try, I try.

Larry Jordan: We’ll talk more about that in just a minute. You know, I thought Fujifilm just made film. What does your division do?

Thom Calabro: Oh, well, as you said, I work for the Optical Devices Division and we make Fujinon lenses. Until quite recently, the company was known as Fujinon and now we’ve been taken under the wing of the big Fujifilm and so we make lenses for everything from cell phones and copiers all the way up to the lenses for the top blockbuster theatrical releases.

Larry Jordan: Well, we’re going to talk a lot about lenses with you over the next few minutes, but your title describes what you do as optical products. Is that just a fancy word for lenses, or is there more involved than just the lens itself?

Thom Calabro: No, for me it is really just for the lenses, it is lenses. Like I say, we do many different optical devices for cell phones, for copiers, for CCTV, for security. We do binoculars, a wide variety, but my specialty is into the broadcast, the cine business.

Larry Jordan: All right, well I think let’s define a few terms here, because is there a difference between a regular camera lens and a cinema lens? We’re going to talk about different types of lenses, but let’s start with defining where you fit into the spectrum of things.

 

Thom Calabro: Well, there is a difference between a broadcast and a cine lens and it’s just a matter of degrees. The construction is quite similar but, while the broadcast lens, we would really say, is made for the small screen, although today’s screens in the home are rather large, the cinema lens is made for the very large screen. Instead of 50 inches, we’re talking about 50 feet, and so the lenses for theatrical releases have to be much, much more critical as far as resolution, as far as lack of chromatic aberration, uniformity from edge to edge, as far as the light transmission and as far as resolution, for that matter.

Thom Calabro: It’s very important because you can see so much more on the large screen than you can on the small screen.

Larry Jordan: Thom, I’m holding one of your Fujinon lenses in my hand at this very moment. I’m looking through the lens itself and all I see inside is glass. What’s this resolution that you speak of? It’s glass. Where does resolution fit in to going through a piece of glass?

Thom Calabro: Oh, well the lens is a very complex device. Besides the mechanics, there are many different optical elements that are put there in combination to give you the proper image at the exit pupil, which then hits either film or CCD or CMOS device.

Thom Calabro: There are coatings involved, a lot of different processes and technologies that go into this, but resolution basically is a combination of contrast and defining, seeing the difference between a light and dark area and the fine detail and making sure that, when the light passes through those many different optical elements, they pass through in such a manner that the red, green and blue – all the different colors, actually, of the spectrum – fall at the right point in time when it hits the sensor or the piece of film, whatever it may be.

Thom Calabro: So it is very complex, it is an extremely high technology device.

Mike Horton: Have you ever had a chance to actually see them make one of these lenses? It’s a very complex process, but they do have on the internet videos of how they make these lenses and it is incredibly technical and complex and it goes on forever and it’s still hand done.

Thom Calabro: It is very good, very good, and that’s where a lot of the cost comes in.

Mike Horton: Right.

Thom Calabro: These lenses actually have become more expensive as the electronics, the cameras, have become less expensive. You know, when I started out in the business with Ikigami in the days of HL79s and those cameras were 40 and 50 thousand dollars. Today, you can get a 4K F55 for, I think, around $20,000 so a huge, huge difference in quality there between those two products.

Larry Jordan: Eric in our live chat says that it’s all about coatings. Why are coatings so important and what are they coating?

Thom Calabro: Well, they are coating the elements and you coat to improve the light transmittance. I don’t have the exact numbers but an uncoated lens will give you somewhere around, I think it was 94 percent of the light will pass through the lens, maybe 95 percent. You coat the lens and you could get that upwards of closer to 97, 98 percent transmittance. So right there, you’re getting more light through the piece of glass.

Thom Calabro: The other thing that is very important – it will make or break the contrast of the glass, you know, give you those really rich, deep blacks. It will help prevent layers and other bad looking light things coming through the lens and appearing on your finished product. Yes, coatings are extremely important and actually that’s where our real expertise is, in coatings.

Thom Calabro: It started, of course, with film. Film is – what is it? A piece of plastic that has a lot of coating material on it, multi-layers laid down. We’ve taken that technology and moved it from film, we’ve put it onto our lenses, of our electron beam coating. Now we’ve got a high transmittance electron beam coating which gives more light and better blue transmittance through the lens and it even goes a lot further than that.

Thom Calabro: Just as an aside, most of the flat screen TVs you see probably have some of our film on the front of them to improve the transmittance, improve the contrast and improve actually the angle of view that you can see the screen or the elements in the screen on; and even going further than that, we actually have a process where we coat the bottom of container ships so they improve the performance through the water so they get better fuel economy.

Larry Jordan: That’s very cool. Well, let’s define a couple more terms. What’s the difference between a T stop and an F stop and do we need to lose sleep if we don’t understand it?

Thom Calabro: No you don’t. Basically, there is a major difference. F stop just tells you how big the opening is in the lens. It’s, you know, F14, F2, F56. That tells you how big the port is in the lens. What it doesn’t tell you is how much light is going through the lens. The T stop actually gives you that figure.

Thom Calabro: So they’re pretty close, but it’s a very important difference because you could have two exact lenses focal length wise, even made by the same company but probably not these days because things are rather even, but let’s say two lenses, same focal length, different companies, they both have the exact same F stop, but the T stop is different and that is mainly due to the construction, the combination of lenses and, probably most importantly, the coating of those elements within the lens.

Larry Jordan: Ok, another question definition. What’s breathing?

Thom Calabro: Breathing is also known as focus pumping, so that when you actually will adjust the focus of the lens – and quite often you see this in dramatic scenes, where you have an actor in the foreground, an actor in the background and you will adjust the focus from the foreground to the background, quite common. What you don’t want to see is the image size change. If you do see that change, that is called breathing or focus pumping.

Larry Jordan: Ok. Now, we’ve got T stops and F stops and we’ve got 800 layers of coating, we’ve got breathing. I want to buy a lens. What specs should I pay attention to the most?

Thom Calabro: Oh, hmm. That is kind of difficult. First, I think you’d have to take your application. What camera are you going to use this on? What is your application for the lens? It is important in the cinema world to know the T stop. It’s very important to know in a zoom lens is the T stop continuous from end to end within the zoom range, because some lenses – not all – but some lenses have what’s called ramping, so you start out at one end on the wide side at the best T stop. As you zoom further and further in the range, that will fall off on some lenses. So that’s very important to know.

Thom Calabro: There are quite a few other parameters and I don’t know if I could answer it in just one or two words.

Larry Jordan: All right, we’ll give you another take at it. There are excellent lenses on the market from Canon and Cooke and Zeiss. Why would somebody consider Fujinon or Fujifilm?

Thom Calabro: Well, for a number of reasons. First of all, again, one of our hallmarks is the contrast in our lenses. It gives you those very deep and rich blacks and the resolution, the construction is very, very high quality.

Thom Calabro: On the other side is service from Fujinon. We have service facilities around the country, which is all very important because sooner or later, whether the lens is going to fail because of wear or you drop it and it has to be serviced, you need something quickly, you need a quick turnaround. So there’s a whole other layer of consideration as to why you would pick a Fujinon lens over somebody else’s, not just the quality of the glass and the construction of the lens, but is it going to be backed up by a good service type of company?

Larry Jordan: We’ve got about two minutes left, so just sort of keep that in the back of your head. If somebody could only afford to buy one lens and they’ve decided on your brand of lenses, what would be a good starter lens for somebody to get?

Thom Calabro: For what type of application? Are you talking about cinema?

Larry Jordan: Independent film making.

Thom Calabro: Film making, yes. Well, certainly our Cabrio line, which was introduced two NABs ago, is very, very versatile. We introduced the 19 to 90, it’s a lightweight zoom, a T29 end to end. We followed that up with the next NAB with an 85 to 300 and then we just introduced the 14 to 35, so you have from 14 millimeters all the way up to 300 millimeters.

Thom Calabro: But what really makes this lens so unique and so versatile is, because we call it the Cabrio, I came up with that name because of a convertible, it has a servo on it just like you would in a typical ENG lens and it can be used in a run and gun situation or, if you want to use wireless controllers, plug them right into our servos. Or if you want to take the servo off and run it as a standard PL cinematic type lens with rods and follow focus and everything else, you can certainly do that and about half of our customers run it that way.

Larry Jordan: And, Thom, where can people go on the web to learn more about your products?

Thom Calabro: Well, at fujinon.com, certainly, is our main menu.

Larry Jordan: That’s fujinon.com and Thom Calabro is the Director of Marketing and Product Development at Fujinon. Thom, thanks for joining us today.

Thom Calabro: Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Larry Jordan: Take care, bye bye.

Mike Horton: Thanks a lot.

Thom Calabro: Take care.

Larry Jordan: Lan Bui is a cinematographer and one of his recent projects is Redemption: The Darkness Descending, which needs a drum beat, actually.

Mike Horton: It needs an echo.

Larry Jordan: Yes, and a bigger voice…

Mike Horton: A reverb.

Larry Jordan: …than mine. However, this week, we’re talking with him about something new he’s created – a better way to find cast and crew. Welcome, Lan.

Lan Bui: Hi. How are you guys doing?

Mike Horton: Great.

Larry Jordan: We are talking to you, we’re doing great.

Lan Bui: Well, thanks for that intro and, yes, Cast and Crew Call, something really exciting that Aaron Dieppa, a partner of mine, and I created to help people find more work and people that are looking to hire people for anything to do with film to go on in a visual directory and find people.

Larry Jordan: Lan, why?

Lan Bui: Well, it kind of started when, on The Darkness Descending, we had one person that we really wanted to replace and being a pretty small staffed film, we didn’t have the manpower or the time to actually find this new person and that, of course, happens all the time where there’s a shoot that comes up and it’s kind of a thing where your normal sound guy or your normal makeup artist just isn’t available and you need to find someone fast and, instead of texting your sound guy for a referral and two days later you finally get a text back and then you go through the whole process of trying to interview this person when all you really want to do is see a couple of pieces of their work and email them, and that’s what we built.

Lan Bui: It’s a visual directory you can go through, complete a search sentence and it lists out all the people that basically you need to hire and you see all their work, you can watch a video. You never leave the search page. That’s kind of a key thing that we wanted to do, was streamline the process of going through and vetting people and getting to be able to contact them. So, you know, there’s a lot of websites where it kind of looks like Craigslist, you don’t see their work, it takes so long to get to a button where you can actually find their phone number or email them and we put it all right on the front page.

Mike Horton: That’s for sure. Good for you, because there are a lot of websites out there that do a sort of similar thing but it is difficult to navigate and it’s difficult to find that right crew that you want, so congratulations for taking a look at all of them and trying to do something better.

Lan Bui: Yes, well, that’s kind of what we needed, was we needed a solution that would help, you know, selfishly, me find cast and crew. I have a shortlist of people, and this in no way replaces that shortlist. This is one for when your shortlist is exhausted, you can’t find somebody. That’s where we’re going to come in. Our ultimate goal is to be used any time anyone makes an independent film, makes a YouTube or Vimeo video. We want you to go to us to find your cast and crew.

Mike Horton: I’m actually surprised you did this, because I figured everybody knows you and everybody wants to work with you, so all you have to do is just say, “Hey, I’m doing a new movie. Call me up.” But good for you. I mean, good for you, this is a really good thing.

Larry Jordan: Lan, do you screen people at all? I mean, is there any, I don’t want to say…

Mike Horton: I hope you do.

Larry Jordan: …guarantee, but is there any assurance that the person that says they’re an audio op actually knows what a microphone looks like?

Lan Bui: Well, right now we actually designed the site to be, we have a free option and anyone can join there and it’s up to you to really vet the people right now. We have planned in the future, in future releases, once we build the community, once we get feedback from our community, some sort of a vetting or a vouching system. So instead of just being a popularity contest, that’s something we’re very passionate about not being because I know plenty of guys that work, get tons of work and keep getting hired even though they’re terrible people because they’re just popular, and we want to avoid that. Right now, you’re going to get hired if you make a profile in Cast and Crew Call because the work that you’re showing is the best.

Lan Bui: Now, if you’re a liar and you put up a can of lies, of course there’s always going to be that chance but, you know, it’s up to you to vet the person, make sure that who you’re talking to knows what they’re talking about. Now, once you get past the free members, if someone’s paying us, we have three options to upgrade your account. The free option is free, you can still get hired off of it, but the paid account gets you some more features that we’ve tried to make really attractive to people and if you’re paying for a further service, chances are you’re a little more serious.

Lan Bui: We didn’t price it so dirt cheap where everyone is just going to get a premium account. We priced it at $30 a month or $200 annually or if you’re just like, “Hey, I am in this for good,” $300 for a lifetime membership. If you’re seeing an account that’s paid, chances are that person right now has been vetted. We do have a verified system where you can submit three letters of recommendation and get your account verified and that puts a little badge on your account saying ‘Hey, this person has been verified.’

Lan Bui: So that’s what we do right now, but in the future we actually have a whole plan. We have a few different versions of a vouching system planned out, but the key to the thing that we’re working on is making sure it works for our members, so we’re not going to build out something and force it on them. We’re going to get people in how the website’s working now and let them kind of guide us in what they need and what they want.

Mike Horton: I know you haven’t been doing this for that long, but how is it going so far?

Lan Bui: Amazing. We’ve been pretty busy since launch. We just, actually two days ago, put an update out to the website and now we’re coming back with a ton of, well, like interviews with you guys – thank you so much for that – a couple of other guys, they really gave us some really good feedback and so we’re going to do just a little bit more talking about it now. We needed to just get it started, get people on there. We have a few hundred users on there already from around the world. For some reason, in Australia there is just this community of people that really like us, so there’s a bunch of Australians on there now too.

Larry Jordan: I want to go back just for a second. Who’s paying the money? Is the person looking to hire paying the money or is the person who’s listing paying the money?

Lan Bui: The person who’s listing is paying.

Larry Jordan: So for a producer, does it cost them money to be able to use your service to find people?

Lan Bui: No, you don’t need an account. You can just go on there and start looking, start hiring people. We wanted it to be a free resource for anyone that just needs to hire people, because that’s where a lot of people are. They’re just in the position of, “Hey, we need to go do this production, we need to hire people,” so for that person, it’s just an open resource that’s just a listing of great people to work with. Now, it’s kind of like you’re buying an ad, to get a listing on the website.

Larry Jordan: Can producers isolate their search to a particular, say, geographic territory – we want somebody just in Australia or New England or something of that sort?

Lan Bui: Oh yes. That’s part of the search sentence, which is the easiest way that we thought that you could do a search. Instead of having it being complicated like we saw out there, you complete this sentence: ‘I’m looking for a…’ and it’s cast or crew member, that’s a drop down, you select what type of cast or crew member you want, ‘in’, and then you can say any location nor you can scroll down and say Australia, anywhere pretty much in the world right now there’s somebody, and then, you know, what do you want to pay them – is this project just a free project? Are you looking for people that could possibly be paid or free? Or are you looking for people that are only going to be paid only? So that kind of narrows it down too. If you’re hiring someone that says, “Hey, I’m a paid only person,” they probably are a little more professional.

Larry Jordan: When did the site launch?

Lan Bui: Oh, I should know the date right off the top of my head.

Larry Jordan: How about the year?

Lan Bui: This year

.

Mike Horton: It was this year? Great.

Larry Jordan: That’s all. Well, this year’s close enough. That’s fine. Lan, where can people go to learn more?

Mike Horton: Larry asks the best questions.

Larry Jordan: Where can people go to learn more?

Lan Bui: Castandcrewcall.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s all one word, castandcrewcall.com and Lan Bui is the Co-Founder. Lan, wish you great success.

Lan Bui: Thank you.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Lan.

Larry Jordan: Brian Drewes is the Co-Founder and Head of Production at the Boston-based company called ZEROvfx. Since this may not be the best time to be running a VFX business, we invited Brian to join us to explain how he attracts new clients to keep the doors open. Welcome, Brian.

Brian Drewes: Hey, how’s it going?

Mike Horton: Yay, Brian, he’s here. He’s here!

Larry Jordan: Hey, it’s good to talk to you.

Brian Drewes: Yes, hello, hello. Sorry about last week.

Larry Jordan: Ah, if it happens again, we take you out back and beat you.

Mike Horton: Exactly, we only give you two shots.

Brian Drewes: Ok. I only need one.

Larry Jordan: So tell us about your background. What do you guys do at ZEROvfx and who are some of your clients?

Brian Drewes: Well, coming up on January 4^th here, we’ll have been open for four years.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Brian Drewes: If you do the math backwards, you’ll realize that that was pretty much the worst time to open a visual effects company and, really, for the greater economy.

Larry Jordan: And I think the fact that you are continuing to run in today’s economy proves that you have zero business planning skills at all, so nice job.

Brian Drewes: Well, thank you very much. That’s being called nimble, I believe.

Mike Horton: I think so, yes.

Brian Drewes: So, you know, I think that because of the time that we started the company and where we are, which is in Boston – not necessarily considered the epicenter of the industry – we’ve really taken some interesting ways at looking at building the business and really examining the fundamentals of what we need to do in order to operate effectively in today’s creative economy and one of those is really looking at not just feature films, but also commercials and really any other image making sort of spectrum to deliver the creative stuff that we do. So we have sourced a lot of commercial clients, a lot of feature clients and some web stuff as well and print, so we work across all of those disciplines.

Mike Horton: Forgive me, but isn’t Boston also pretty much a big time gaming center and there’s a lot of talent there in games?

Brian Drewes: There is, there is, absolutely, and so we end up, you know, really a lot of our staff comes in the door knowing a lot of the basic things about the software that we’re using – Mia and NUKE – but really we fine tune that, especially for the feature film pipeline which is very specialized and one of the things to run very efficiently, so again back to making sure that the lights are on and also making sure that the creative output is something that we’re proud of.

Larry Jordan: Well, you mentioned a very, very good point. Boston is a lovely city but it’s not known as a hotbed for the visual effects industry. Why did you decide to start the company there, besides being too lazy to move somewhere else?

Brian Drewes: Well, you know, I started my career in San Francisco and my business partner, Sean Devereaux, who’s also the Visual Effects Supervisor, spent a ton of time in LA at the large facilities and at some point you make those lifestyle decisions and you say, “This is important for me as a person to live here and let’s make a go of it.” You know, I’ve been here now for ten plus years, really operating in the commercial markets, and Sean came in with a large feature background and so really with that and, of course, the tax incentives that are here in Massachusetts, that certainly draws in and gives us some competitive advantages with the features that are coming into town and also other features that are not incentivized.

Brian Drewes: But, you know, we’re growing the pipeline and we’re very fortunate to have grown the staff and have the personalities that we have here and the capabilities that we have here, with some really talented crew members.

Larry Jordan: Let’s go back to the dim reaches of your past. What got you started in visual effects in the first place?

Brian Drewes: Well, I went to school at a little school called Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, that had…

Mike Horton: Oh my God, I know that place.

Brian Drewes: Oh really?

Mike Horton: Yes, I mean, that was like a hippie college when I was growing up in Seattle.

Brian Drewes: I think it still is. A little time capsule there. But their film equipment was also from the time capsule. I started really getting the bug working on an Oxberry optical printer.

Larry Jordan: Oh yes, I remember those.

Brian Drewes: And, you know, just this huge cast iron beam with all these projectors and all the bipack and the magazine, so, like, straight up film compositing on film and that was not that long ago – ’94, I guess, ’95. So I learned the fundamentals there and really just loved the process overall, so as I got out I decided, you know, this is really an industry that sort of speaks to me as a person and I just have followed that ever since.

Larry Jordan: Well, the visual effects industry even today is still in a world of hurt, with companies closing their doors or moving overseas. From your point of view running your own company, what does it take to be successful in the industry?

Brian Drewes: Well, there are a few things. One, we don’t carry any debt and that’s a very important thing to us, from a very basic business standpoint. When you start having that debt, you end up having to make some decisions that cut down your ability to really respond to what’s going on on the ground. We’ve made some technology decisions – we render all of our images on a cloud, we wrote software called Zinc that allows us to really be able to scale up to hundreds of processors when we need them and none when we don’t, again allowing us to really keep our operational expenses tied to cash flow.

Brian Drewes: And I think overall, you’re seeing the facilities that are 200 to 500 people, really, they’re sort of stuck. They have a really hard time. They have a ton on infrastructure costs and they have to keep that pipeline fed, but I think that studios our size – we have a core of 25 people and we fluctuate up to 40 at our maximum so far, maybe growing past that this year – but I think that is actually growing. I wouldn’t be surprised. I haven’t seen any industry metrics on that, but I do think there’s a really good place for facilities our size to be executing work at a really high level and bringing a lot of creativity and a lot of personal attention to things. There are a lot of difficulties with outsourcing stuff and…

Mike Horton: Yes, but can facilities your size bid on those big budget movies?

Brian Drewes: No. I mean, I think that…

Mike Horton: Or you just don’t bid on them?

Brian Drewes: Well, I mean, I think we bid on pieces of them and I think that you end up seeing a lot of these films get bisected amongst many different shops. There are certain features that obviously only go to very large shops, Island, etc, but there are a ton of films and a lot of work that is able to be achieved by smaller, more nimble facilities at a good price point. But again, this also comes into our other part of our business plan – let’s not just look at the features market, but also at other areas such as commercials and the other things that I’ve mentioned – so really having a very diverse client base only makes sense, you know?

Mike Horton: So even if you do a commercial, you’re not necessarily bidding against the Torontos and the Vancouvers and the Londons?

Brian Drewes: No, no. I mean, we do a lot of national work, but that’s a much different sort of sell cycle and a much different network of people that we have to help sell that piece of our business.

Larry Jordan: Well, let’s take a look at that. Who are some of your clients and what have been some of your recent projects?

Brian Drewes: Well, we started off doing a lot of feature stuff with Here Comes The Boom, we did almost 20 minutes of that film. That was a couple of years ago; and then more recently, we completed a lot of effects for American Hustle, which is coming out in LA and New York tomorrow and wide release next week, so we’re very excited to see that on the big screen. And then we’re on Equalizer right now, which is Denzel Washington, and then we’ve got a couple of other films that we’ve supervised which we haven’t started production with yet. Those will continue into 2014.

Brian Drewes: And then our commercial side do a lot of things for Ocean Spray, Subway and we’re also really fortunate to be in a position where we add key management staff. Sarah Spitz just joined us – she was a Vice President and an EP at Arnold Worldwide, which is quite a large agency, and she’s been there, she’s a well awarded and recognized agency producer, so we’re really excited for 2014 where she’s going to help us get into these other markets as well and continue our growth pattern to really give us that stable base that allows us to continue on both of these trajectories.

Larry Jordan: Eric, who’s listening in on our live chat, asks what hardware and software tools are essential for your work?

Brian Drewes: Well, we run mostly on NUKE, Mia and then we have a couple of Autodesk systems – Smoke on Mac – for the finishing aspect of that, you know, conforms, color corrections and managing the client sessions when clients are coming in and want to look at the product and really tweak stuff a little bit. But really, the heavy comp work happens on NUKE CG Mia and we use V-Ray by and large.

Larry Jordan: Well, those are not tools that are in common play outside the effects industry. How hard is it to find the right effects artists in Boston?

Brian Drewes: Well, it’s certainly a challenge, but the angle we’ve taken on that is really to look to grow a lot of talent, so we’ll get people in and start them with roto packages such as Silhouette or Tracking and just get them into the production pipeline; and then, as they grow and mature, then they start working into NUKE and com pipelines. So really, there’s a lot of on the job training, for sure and…

Mike Horton: Really?

Brian Drewes: …you know, we’re in it for the long haul so…

Mike Horton: I would have thought that Boston would be easy to find these people, just because of its academic institutions. You’ve got MIT, you’ve got Emerson, you got all these wonderful departments there. Oh my God.

Brian Drewes: The generation that’s coming out of college now is amazingly talented and, you know, they’ve been using computers since they were children, so the things that you expect from people, it’s amazing what’s coming out and you really just have to make sure personality wise they’re able to work well in the team and work on a production pipeline where, for film shots, a lot of people, you can get it to 80 percent. But, you know, to get it to that 100 percent, our clients hire us not to get it to 80 percent but 100 percent. That takes a special kind of person and a special kind of training, so we make sure that the people we work with are ready for that challenge.

Larry Jordan: Brian, you mentioned that one of the strengths of your company is your versatility – you’ll do cameras, you’ll do features, you’ll do television. But the question I’ve got is does being versatile help in this industry or does it spread you so thin that clients don’t take you seriously?

Brian Drewes: I don’t think our clients don’t take us seriously. I mean, we’ve been awarded a lot of features and our network of commercials really like to see the fact that we have this experience in other places, and I think it’s just a matter of really balancing those and making sure, again, that the work products, it’s all about what you’re delivering and the experience you’re giving the people that are your clients and making sure that you have the right people interfacing with them and that, you know, the pipelines are extraordinarily different.

Brian Drewes: But there are ways to do it where you can combine those things and not dilute who you are as a company.

Mike Horton: Quickly, because we’ve only got a couple of minutes left and we want to go back to that state of the effects industry as it is today and you in Boston and bidding against other companies, let’s just take LA, for instance. The tax subsidies and the credits, do they give you a leg up on, say, LA bids?

Brian Drewes: You know, we think that for features that are shooting here, for the right kind of feature, it certainly is something that goes into their reckoning. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure all the metrics that studios evaluate the budgetary end of things, but when we worked on American Hustle, we were certainly not the only vendor, though they shot here. They did a lot of work in LA, so I think that there’s definitely change happening. That certainly is the case, but I do see people doing very good work in LA still, but it’s certainly not at the levels that it was, that’s for sure.

Larry Jordan: As you look at the next year, there are two sides to the equation – there’s the business side, which we’ve spent a lot of time talking about, but there’s also the creative side. What trends and effects are you seeing that you’re keeping an eye on for next year?

Brian Drewes: Well, because I’m the business aspect of the company, I really am focused on how people can be more efficient and share files between companies because, as I see a lot of companies participating together, a lot of times you’re seeing a decentralized workflow that is somewhat disorganized and I really see a lot of things like Shotgun and other softwares coming out to really help people manage this workflow in a logical way, to allow people to work more efficiently and be able to have the right facility on the right job.

Brian Drewes: Maybe that’s just because of where I’m coming from, but that is definitely what I see as the thing.

Larry Jordan: For people that have a checkbook in their pocket and they want to hire you to work on their project, where can they go on the web to learn more about you?

Brian Drewes: Www.zerovfx.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s zerovfx.com and Brian Drewes is the Co-Founder and Head of Production at ZEROvfx. Brian, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Drewes: Thanks, guys.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Bye bye.

Brian Drewes: Goodnight.

Larry Jordan: Beverley Horne is the brand new Head of TV Post for LipSync Post, a London-based company. She may be new to LipSync, but she isn’t new to the industry, having been post supervisor at UK broadcaster ITV, where she worked on many dramas including Agatha Christie Poirot, four series of Inspector Lewis, The Prisoner and I’m already envious.

Larry Jordan: In her new role at LipSync Post, she will be responsible for overseeing all the post production work on television dramas. Welcome, Beverley.

Beverley Horne: Hi there.

Larry Jordan: I give up, what does a post supervisor do?

Beverley Horne: A post supervisor is the person that kind of coordinates everything and runs everything once the filming has finished on a drama program, so when the director shouts, “Cut!” and it goes into the post process through the editing and everything like that, it’s the post supervisor’s job to coordinate that, make sure everything comes together on time and on budget so that the finished film is ready to go at the date that it’s supposed to be ready to go.

Larry Jordan: Well, is this more of a management position? Or is it a creative position? How do you fit with the director and the editors and the sound mixers? How does that whole melange work?

Beverley Horne: You’re kind of the go-between between them all, really. You’re the sort of pinpoint that they all come to with their queries and questions and the post supervisor is the person that sort of holds it all together, makes sure that everybody knows what’s going on on any given day so that everything gets done in time and liaises with all the various departments to make sure that everyone’s happy and that everything is done to the best of everybody’s ability so that when you’re doing VFX work on it, you’re doing it on a graded picture so you need to make sure that that’s all been done before you start booking in VFX time, and it’s a juggling act but it’s one that I thoroughly enjoy.

Larry Jordan: It has a great similarity to herding cats, it seems to me.

Beverley Horne: It’s something like that, yes, yes.

Larry Jordan: You know, Beverley, I was just reflecting, ITV I’ve heard about all my life but I’m new to LipSync. Describe the company and the kinds of projects you work on.

Beverley Horne: Well, obviously the company is a well known post production house in Soho in London. It’s a lot smaller than ITV. I mean, obviously, you know, ITV’s a broadcaster, so covers lots of genres and they’ve got a fantastic catalogue of work. Obviously, we’ve got Jamaica Inn that I’m going to be working on in the New Year, we’ve just finished Death Comes to Pemberley, which is a sequel to the Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice novel, so that transmits kind of over Christmas on the BBC here. And we’ve also just done something about the Great Train Robbery, which transmits next week on the BBC, so kind of big productions, you know, the things that I’m used to working on as a freelance post super, so yes, lots of big projects coming up that I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into.

Larry Jordan: Beverley, because ITV is so big, what made you give up the glamorous world of TV for an independent company like LipSync Post?

Beverley Horne: It was an opportunity that I couldn’t turn down, really. I’d kind of had a lot of experience working for ITV as an in-house post supervisor, but I’d not really seen it from the other side, so it’s an opportunity for me to sort of get more involved, work with a lot of people that I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to being at ITV, and just kind of expanding my knowledge and depth of my knowledge of post production in the drama world, really.

Larry Jordan: What is the biggest challenge of being a post supervisor?

Beverley Horne: God, there are so many challenges of being a post supervisor. Just being able to juggle lots of things. You have to be very, very organized, sort of on the ball all the time because anything, you know, if one little thing goes wrong on a drama, it has a tendency to have that domino effect of knocking everything down, so you need to sort of be aware of everything that’s going on at any given time, really.

Larry Jordan: Ok, they’ve just handed you the reins of Head of TV Post for LipSync.

Beverley Horne: Yes.

Larry Jordan: What are you supposed to do now that you’re there?

Beverley Horne: Work very hard, I would think. No, obviously working on the various TV dramas that are already here, managing those from a post point of view, liaising with various independent post supervisors, you know, kind of the job that I used to do, and just sort of building up the business for the TV aspect of LipSync, really.

Larry Jordan: So what projects are you working on?

Beverley Horne: Well, the first one that I’m going to be thrown into kind of looking after is Jamaica Inn, which is an adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel, so that starts in the New Year, so I’m looking forward to kind of really getting my teeth into that and working on that. And then there are other things that are in the pipeline for next year which we can’t talk about but, you know, I’m kind of looking forward to sort of developing and bringing in some stuff for LipSync to work on next year.

Larry Jordan: Put yourself in the role of a post supervisor, which I know is a stretch for you, but we’ll just put you there.

Beverley Horne: Yes.

Larry Jordan: What can directors do to make your job miserable or, on the other side, what can directors do to make your job more useful? In other words, give us some guidance for people that are dealing with a post supervisor for the first time. What should we do or not do?

Beverley Horne: From a post supervisor’s point of view, the director should always keep them in the loop as to what’s going on. I’ve been in situations where directors have gone off and organized things and arranged things without letting me know and it’s very difficult to manage everybody else if you’re not aware of what’s going on. So as long as a director keeps you in the loop from day one and you talk to them almost on a daily basis to make sure that they’re happy with everything that’s going on but also that you’re happy with the way that they’re sort of handling everybody else, then hopefully that makes for a pleasant working environment.

Larry Jordan: So basically communication.

Beverley Horne: Communication is the key with post production. I think as long as everybody talks to everybody and everyone knows what’s going on, then hopefully it’s a fairly smooth process. But the moment that somebody doesn’t do that, then it can turn into a bit of a nightmare.

Mike Horton: I think you’re being polite.

Beverley Horne: Possibly.

Larry Jordan: Where can people go on the web to learn more about what LipSync Post does?

Beverley Horne: Ok, there is a website address. It’s www.lipsyncpost.co.uk.

Larry Jordan: That’s lipsyncpost.co.uk.

Beverley Horne: Yes, that’s it.

Larry Jordan: Because Beverley is London based at LipSync Post and, Beverley, thanks so much for joining us today. She is the Head of TV Post for LipSync Post.

Beverley Horne: Thank you very much.

Larry Jordan: Michael, this morning I was at a conference that was hosted by Axel Media and Adobe Systems…

Mike Horton: Oh, you went to that? I was going to go to that but my tree fell in the back yard and I had to chop wood.

Larry Jordan: It was a conference, but one of the things that I got a chance to see was a live demo of Adobe Anywhere, which reminds me – did you get the news from Adobe this morning?

Mike Horton: I got a pop-up and I clicked on it and it updated and I have no idea what it was, but I think it was bug fixes and other things.

Larry Jordan: Well, you want to put a noun in there? You got a pop-up about what?

Mike Horton: Well, to update my machine.

Larry Jordan: See? That’s what I was waiting for you to say. Adobe announced and released new updates today.

Mike Horton: I know, but it was right on my desktop. It was right on your desktop. I didn’t get a PR, just right on my desktop and it says if you want to know what it is, you click on a little more info and it tells you what it is.

Larry Jordan: You want to know what it is?

Mike Horton: Yes, because I didn’t read it. I just clicked it. I said, “Absolutely, update it.”

Larry Jordan: Adobe today updated Adobe Premier Pro CC, After Effects CC, SpeedGrade, Adobe Media Encoder and Adobe Anywhere. Adobe Premier added open CL performance enhancements, they improved media management, they enhanced editing for even greater workflow efficiency. I don’t know what that means, actually.

Mike Horton: It means efficiency.

Larry Jordan: They probably added a keyboard shortcut, and they delivered a more intuitive voiceover recorder…

Mike Horton: Command F.

Larry Jordan: …which is a good thing, because the old version could use some help. After Effects CC offered customizable output of file name and path templates, improved snapping behavior, enhanced scripting options and the ability to migrate user settings when updating to newer versions.

Mike Horton: Holy cow, I thought it was bug fixes.

Larry Jordan: SpeedGrade added expanded camera format support in DirectLink mode, which means that it supports more of the formats that Premier supports; Adobe Media Encoder now encodes Sony XAVC format…

Mike Horton: Oh, thank God.

Larry Jordan: …which I know is a codec that you’ve been thinking about; and Adobe Anywhere introduced performance improvements and diagnostic tools for monitoring system status. Have you not lost sleep thinking about that?

Mike Horton: That’s great. I mean, I can go home a happy person. Thank you, Larry, for that.

Larry Jordan: Well, you know, the thing that impresses me is that Adobe has updated the Creative Cloud release four times since its released. They released in May, they updated in June, they updated in July, they updated in October and they updated in December. You’ve got to admit, these guys are putting in a lot of money and effort.

Mike Horton: And so where’s that Final Cut Pro 10.1 update?

Larry Jordan: You know, Apple says they’re going to be releasing in December.

Mike Horton: Yes, well, it’s December.

Larry Jordan: And they haven’t released, but they’ve got some month left, so we’ll just have to see what happens.

Mike Horton: Christmas Eve.

Larry Jordan: A Christmas present under our Christmas tree.

 

Mike Horton: There you go.

Larry Jordan: Thinking of Christmas trees, the question I’ve got is do we have a Pick Our Brains question?

Mike Horton: Yes we do, Larry. It’s now time for… Pick Our Brains.

Larry Jordan: Oh boy, what did you do to the reverb there?

Mike Horton: Well, it wasn’t that, it was the high frequency band pass filter.

Larry Jordan: I can do voices, you know that? I used to do that in my old…

Mike Horton: What voice? What voice?

Larry Jordan: …in my acting days.

Mike Horton: Pick one voice.

Larry Jordan: …

Mike Horton: I can do Larry Jordan if I have a lot of wine.

Larry Jordan: And no audience.

Mike Horton: And no audience, yes. I can do it in front of an audience as long as it’s not on stage, which we are right now.

Larry Jordan: We are indeed. So what have you got?

Mike Horton: This is an Adobe Premier Pro question, since we have been talking about Premier Pro, and this fellow says: “I’m shooting in HD on a DSLR camera and wanted to know what were the best export settings,” – export settings – “to get as close to highest quality as I can? Because when I’m exporting my work as .mpegs, I’m noticing a significant quality loss.” Now, he’s specifically asking about online viewing and archiving. Now, I even know this, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Ok, go ahead. What do you know?

Mike Horton: There is no one codec for online viewing and archiving. You have to go, like, a couple of codec, right?

Larry Jordan: You know, there is hope for you.

Mike Horton: Thank you. I learn from you.

Larry Jordan: I am so impressed.

Mike Horton: I actually read your book on codecs. There are 465 pages. It’s just a great read.

Larry Jordan: It took you seven and a half years to finish it…

Mike Horton: Oh my goodness.

Larry Jordan: …because it helps you get to sleep.

Mike Horton: Well, it cured my insomnia, that’s for sure.

Larry Jordan: Are you done?

Mike Horton: Yes. So what’s the answer?

Larry Jordan: Well, the first thing that you should do is you should always back up your camera native format, so he’s shooting DSLR which is an H.264 format.

Mike Horton: Probably.

Larry Jordan: You always want to keep that as a backup so you’ve always got a master to go back to. When you’re distributing for the web, what you want to do is you want to export out of Premier at the highest possible quality and then from that master file create whatever distribution viewing formats you need. Now, if you’re on a Mac, you want to export using ProRes 422 or ProRes 422HQ. I’d recommend ProRes 422. It’s a wonderful codec, it’s a good balance between great quality and small file size.

Mike Horton: This is for online viewing or for archiving?

Larry Jordan: This is for archiving.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: So you’re going to…

Mike Horton: Is this going to be around, though, in 25 years, the ProRes codec, according to your 455 page book?

Larry Jordan: Is BetaSP still around?

Mike Horton: Is it?

Larry Jordan: Yes it is.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: But it’s not in daily use. One of the things that I learned at the conference this morning is we’re in an environment which requires data to migrate, so you want to output at the highest quality. If you’re on a Windows system, two codecs I’d recommend, because ProRes doesn’t work in Windows. You’d want to work with either DNX HD, the high end, either the 100 or the 200 format from Avid; or from GoPro, get Cineform. Both of those are high end codecs that are excellent for archiving. They’re similar to ProRes in terms of quality but they work on both Mac and Windows.

Larry Jordan: For Mac people, ProRes; for Windows, I would recommend Cineform or DNX HD.

Mike Horton: When are we going to start talking about H265? Why don’t we do a Christmas special?

Larry Jordan: We should do a Christmas special. As soon as somebody starts…

Mike Horton: Christmas H.265 special. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Larry Jordan: Nobody’s shipping it yet.

Mike Horton: Oh.

Larry Jordan: As soon as they start shipping, I’ll start talking.

Mike Horton: But it would be fun.

Larry Jordan: But people who are shipping are the guests that we talked to today. I want to thank Thom Calabro, the Director of Product Marketing and Product Development at Fujifilm’s Optical Division; cinematographer Lan Bui with his new castandcrewcall.com website; Brian Drewes, the Co-Founder and…

Mike Horton: …H.265 Christmas.

Larry Jordan: Brian Drewes at ZEROvfx…

Mike Horton: We’ve got to do that. Get Cirina on this.

Larry Jordan: We will get her on it immediately; and Beverley Horne, the new Head of TV Post at LipSync Post in Soho, London. There’s a lot happening at The Buzz. Check us out at digitalproductionbuzz.com or Twitter, @dpbuzz, and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: Music on The Buzz provided by SmartSound. Our producer’s Cirina Catania, our engineer Adrian Price. On behalf of the ever-handsome Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening.

Voiceover: This Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries.