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Great FCPX Event today in Hollywood!
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In all of this did anyone notice that Panavision had purchased Light Iron?
Tim
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[TImothy Auld] “In all of this did anyone notice that Panavision had purchased Light Iron?”
Until you mentioned it I had forgotten about that. Though there was a thread about it when it happened.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/75741#75741 -
[Andrew Kimery] “Given the ‘pirate’ attitude they talked about I was surprised they shot on Arri (one of the oldest of the old guard) as opposed to, say, RED. And, interesting enough, Gone Girl shot on RED (though I think that was more for the 6K than for Jannard’s attitude). ;)”
The Alexa is hardly old guard.
The Alexa is very easy to use, produces awesome imagery, and has a very easy workflow. Sound familiar? 🙂
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[Jeremy Garchow] “The Alexa is hardly old guard.
The Alexa is very easy to use, produces awesome imagery, and has a very easy workflow. Sound familiar? :)”
Arri has been in the motion picture camera business since the early 1900s. If that doesn’t qualify as old guard, I don’t know what would. 😉
I’d argue a large part of their success in going digital is because they gave post and production a camera and workflow that seems familiar (as opposed to REDs approach of trying to blow the whole thing up).
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[Andrew Kimery] “Arri has been in the motion picture camera business since the early 1900s. If that doesn’t qualify as old guard, I don’t know what would. ;)”
For film cameras, obviously, but hey, Apple has been around since 1976. In tech years, that’s ancient. Certainly longer than Adobe, Avid, Pro Tools, Autodesk, and virtually any company here but the Japanese camera makers among us.
Microsoft is only 1 year older than Apple. HP workstations didn’t come along until the 80s. Olllllld guard.
The point about Alexa NOT being in the old guard is that she was the first digital camera to record to ProRes. At Alexa’s launch, she ONLY recorded to ProRes. Not the case anymore of course, but still. Hardly the behavior of the old guard.
Old guard thinking is sticking to RAW and proprietary formats, and trying to strong-arm manufacturers into supporting it. How many camera companies have done this over the years? Until Alexa, damn near all of them.
New guard thinking is to let customers dictate your corporate strategies — which both Blackmagic and AJA (who of course pioneered hardware encoding to ProRes) learned from Alexa very, very well indeed.
Alexa remains critical to messaging about FCP/FCPX workflows because roughly 90% of episodic shooting is on Alexa, and while I don’t have specific numbers, she dominates feature shooting as well. Not walking hand in hand with Alexa means marginalization, full stop.
NOT because Alexa is old guard, but because she combines the benefits of old guard commitment to imaging, with cutting edge adoption of and adaptation to what customers are actually doing, and want they want to do going forward.
Hence the “late” introduction of Alexa five years AFTER Red, but leaving it in the dust. Red is still trying to force old guard, workaround-laden workflows, and Alexa is way, way ahead of the game.
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[Andrew Kimery] ”
Arri has been in the motion picture camera business since the early 1900s. If that doesn’t qualify as old guard, I don’t know what would. ;)”Arri is an old company with a rich history. Sure.
The Arri Alexa is not an old camera.
I think there’s a big difference. The thought and engineering that went in to the Alexa (and now the Amira) does not represent a company that is relying on the 1900s for inspiration.
The Alexa does borrow what works well on a film workflow, from exposure, to ergonomics, to color science, but adopts fairly easy digital workflows for modern post. It uses Sony SxS cards that can be used in other cameras, it shoots to ProRes, DNxHD, and Raw.
Red, on the other hand, has a different workflow where it puts Raw and pixel size, first and foremost, and all that comes with it.
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Oops. As always, Tim Wilson said it better.
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Tim and Jeremy,
At the Focus event there was lot of rhetoric from the presenters (well, not the Arri presenter) about wanting to rock the boat, wanting to be pirates, not doing their jobs unless they are making people uncomfortable, etc., and that’s what I’m riffing on (though it obviously wouldn’t be apparent if you weren’t at the presentation). It’s the posturing, not the product choices that caught my attention. I mean, when was the last time choosing to shoot a feature film on an Arri camera was a rebellious, radical, middle-finger-to-the-establishment decision?
If the Focus teams said they set out to pick the bets tools for the job then that’s one thing, but if you are selling yourself as a rebellious pirate bent on disrupting the status quo then, I’m sorry, you can’t pick the most popular d-cinema camera made by one of the oldest companies in the film biz.haha Just doesn’t fit the mantra. I dunno… maybe I’m just becoming more allergic to BS hyperbole in my old age. 😉
Arri set out too make a great digital camera that could easily slip in to existing production and post workflows where as Apple set out to make a great NLE that would disrupt existing workflows. Sometimes very good products come from relatively young companies, sometimes very good products come from relatively old companies. Sometimes very good products cause disruption and sometimes very good products fit in to place without anyone missing a beat.
For the record, the Arri D-20 (2005) predates the RED One (2007).
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Oops. As always, Tim Wilson said it better.”
Longer, anyway. LOL
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[Andrew Kimery] “For the record, the Arri D-20 (2005) predates the RED One (2007).”
Yes, and D-20 is the quintessential old guard camera. Exactly the kind of camera you’d expect ARRI to produce, exactly the kind of camera that Red could plow under the ground in short order. And did.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect cameras to flip the bird. Which is the camera that did that? Red. Still flipping the bird. Yes, and innovating, with much innovating ahead of it. No disrespect intended. Fincher has been using them to fantastic effect.
(But, uhm, who else? Surely someone, but I can’t think who.)
So I AM making the observation that ARRI flipped the bird to other camera makers with Alexa. Maybe not flipping the bird as much as “throwing down,” an image I’ve always loved. Completely upended the entire approach to customers, including the relationship of camera makers to NLE developers. On the camera front, they forced even the “little guys” to meet them on ground that ARRI defined.
(Although ARRI DID keep the model of RENTAL. That’s why most Alexa customers don’t care what the sale price is. The client rents, not buys, and the client foots the rental bill, not the DP…and the client leases Alexa because it’s cheaper than buying a similarly capable camera. Including Red.)
Maybe it’s because of the difference in our ages — I’m old enough to be your father, so get off my lawn — but I don’t think that disruption requires a middle finger. Which middle finger did Apple flip when they introduced iPhone? None of them.
The other thing to keep in mind is that, until BMD and now AJA, even the “flip your middle finger” smaller cameras all sat in the old guard space — “We pick OUR footage format to cheat in favor of our own imagers. Working with it is YOUR problem.”
I’m conceding that on the whole, cameras don’t lend themselves to flipping the bird. But my point is that there are still baseline requirements for making big-time, big-budget pictures.
The point of X on Focus is NOT that “we can make a guerilla-style run and gun feature with X.” The point of X on Focus is that we can do exactly what we need to do in order for X to be at the heart of big-budget blockbuster filmmaking. And for that, you need grown-up, get off my lawn, images.
After all, Cold Mountain was shot on film. And for that matter, it wasn’t the first feature cut with FCP. Who remembers Roger Avary’s Rules of Attraction? Cut on FCP a full year before Cold Mountain, but it didn’t move the needle. No feature shot on DV was EVER going to move the needle.
For that matter, Apple enthusiast Steven Soderbergh shot Full Frontal on DV at the same time Avary was shooting Rules of Attraction…and DP Soderbergh never asked Director/Producer Soderbergh to shoot DV again. DV was nominally revolutionary, but not in any way practical except for non-mainstream uses.
And the most revolutionary aspects of Cold Mountain and Focus is that they’re mainstream. Big stars, big budgets, large format theaters, the whole thang.
Making the irony that, for maximum revolutionary bang for the NLE, the rest of the project has to flip the fewest birds possible. Or else the use of the NLE is part of the entire story of “this picture doesn’t really matter for changing the game.” That is, you have to PLAY the game to CHANGE the game.
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