Alan Lloyd
Forum Replies Created
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Just to be a contrarian PITA:
It’s not the tool, it’s the person using it. Thelma Schoonmaker (to name one) could cut something on an old upright Moviola and do a better job of it than 99.99% of any self-styled hotshot “editors” using any computer platform in existence (or yet to be devised).
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Other people have said some of these things – they are right:
Watch good movies (repeatedly) and understand why the editors cut as they did. Ben-Hur, Citizen Kane, Ugetsu, Rules of the Game, just to name a few. Editing is telling a story effectively. These movies do that as well as anyone ever has.
Learn your tools. Edit package, After Effects, your animation program of choice. You may not be doing all of it yourself, but you need to understand them well enough to be able to communicate with others on projects.
Shoot stuff and cut it, even if it’s just for yourself – editing makes people better shooters, shooting makes people better editors.
Don’t forget the importance of sound. Then – cut something so it makes sense without sound. Or graphics.
Learn Photoshop.
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In an earlier life I directed a show usually done entirely in Hmong. No IFB, so I had to communicate through a crew member to the (bilingual/English-speaking0 host to wrap a segment.
It was…interesting…
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He’s talking “Road Rags” – they’re small. 18″ x 24″, I think.
And I do the foil-a-loris a lot. I even have some that I keep as well as I can for some clients who want the same “look” next time, or to match a recording to a live shot.
Whatever works, dude…
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Good advice, plus: If you have access to a laptop with adobe OnLocation or Serious Magic DV Rack (the same program with different labels) use it. Try and get the greenscreen to about 40 IRE – a very good compromise between brightness and saturation. Then light your subject.
And I have to echo the rim light comment – separation is your friend.
I tend to use white silk for my lights on the greenscreen. It spreads the beam out and evens things nicely.
All that said, sometimes I’ve had to do greenscreened interviews in a room where we had the subject 4 feet in front of the backdrop and I was six feet from them. It takes a lot of fiddling under those circumstances, but it can be done.
Good luck with it – keep us posted on how it goes.
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At this point, the discussion has moved some distance. And my comments are/were to those who got on their high horses and started slagging the movie, and sniffing disdainfully at anyone who uses smaller tools and emphasizes the storytelling.
Late to the discussion, true, but there’s some stuff that needed to be said here.
To address the original question, he should buy the format his clients want and need. Less won’t help, more may well be wasteful.
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Well, lots of outright slagging of it having been made on XH-A1 and other HDV cameras. And while I would not try to make Lawrence of Arabia in HDV, and I will in all likelihood not go see Crank, I think the question really should be one of what the audience goes to the movie for, since without them there is really no film business, just film making.
It’s like caring more what brand of wrenches your mechanic uses instead of whether your car gets fixed right.
I’m an audience advocate, and will always be one. They are our customers.
(And to tell you the truth, when it comes to spending these days, my inclination is to let the rental managers have the headaches!)
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While it’s not great art, let’s remember one thing: They didn’t make the movie for us, and most of the audience will not care if it was shot on Canon XH-A1’s or Whoopty-Doopty HyperWiper 3700B/v1.5’s (with the latest firmware update) or whatever.
This is the business forum, right? Imagine that! People made a film for a specific audience! It will likely be briefly successful, certainly make back its negative cost, and then that audience will move on. And a very, very small number of them will pick up a camera and say “I want to do that!”
I worked on a low-budget actioner a while back, we shot it in a week, in SD, for deliberate direct-to-DVD release. Know what? It’ll make money. Not a lot, but it’ll get into the black. And we…made…a…movie. the highest mountain on earth is the half-finished projects out there. We made a movie. And somewhere, there’s an audience for it. They’ll find it, and probably enjoy it. With luck, they’ll want us to make another one.
It’s not about us, guys, it’s about them.
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I believe CS3 (which I’m still running in one place, CS4 at another) has an upper limit of 4000 x 4000 for still images. I’ve never tried to use anything beyond that.
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Stu Maschwitz on less = more in this context:
https://prolost.com/blog/2009/2/24/slumdog-millionaire.html
Slumdog Millionaire winning the Oscar for Cinematography last night is meaningful to me in two nerdy ways.
First, Slumdog was partly shot with a digital cinema camera—the SI 2K Mini from Silicon Imaging. No, not just the game show footage, also some of the wild chases through the slums of Mumbai.
But mostly what I love about Slumdog winning is the clips played all throughout the Academy Awards ceremonies. Of course the awards show highlights only the most emotionally resonant moments of the film (there are so many to choose from, it is a magnificent movie). And those emotional moments, almost without exception, featured key shots captured at 12 frames per second (or less) and double-printed for a staccato, dreamy feel.
That’s right, in order to enhance the emotion, director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle showed less. They showed less and communicated more.
And Stu is also a grading madman. (Stu, if you’re reading this, I mean it in the very best way possible!)