[Tim Wilson]

Always nice to see Desi Arnaz mentioned for the pioneer he was, Todd. Desi invented multicam editing to cut I Love Lucy, with a custom-designed and built 4-headed flatbed called the Moviola Monster. We did a story about multicam editing that included a lengthy sidebar on this, here.

Apologies for the length of this, but it’s one of the most important things we talk about in this forum.

Networks producing shows for each other is quite common. One of the most visible recent examples was House MD on Fox, which included a very gaudy tag animation for NBC at the end, later NBC Universal, which is where it was produced.

So that’s 2 networks.

But, as noted with Worldwide Pants, there are separate production companies that factor in. Bad Robot (JJ Abrams company) produced Lost FOR ABC, and Fringe FOR Fox…but that still makes at least 2 entities.

But using our example of House MD, the production entities included Shore Z and Bad Hat Harry, which also produces the X-Men movies among other things. (Bad Hat Harry is Bryan Singer’s company.)

So for House, in fact, there are FOUR major rights holders, before we get to syndication.

Once it went into syndication, it came under the purview of both 20th Television — NOT the same as Fox, but a customer that just happens to live under the same corporate roof — and NBCUniversal Television Distribution — ditto, a separate entity from the producers. Large piles of money pass between these entities, and they have separate sets of rights.

So that’s six.

And yes, the network that has syndicated it. (USA? I forget.) Their rights will vary — even THEY can’t do just anything with this footage of course — but they’ll have a say if your use of it comes from their airing.

That’s seven.

It has been true for a while, and certainly increasingly the case, but key actors retain the rights to their likenesses being used — which extends to trying to get away with using lookalikes. Nonono.

That’s eight right holders, or more, depending on how many actors have such contracts…but I bet Hugh Laurie is one of them.

The music rights are held by someone else.

That’s nine.

I can keep going, but those are the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM of people who have a say in your use of broadcast material.

Lawyer up, my friends.

BTW, I’ve noted some of the complexities of this before in the relatively simple case of Elvis Presley Enterprises. EPE manages the rights to Elvis, but his music is held by Sony, even when used in films which are held by MGM. EPE wants to use a clip of Elvis singing in a movie? The other rights holders have to be engaged.

Needless to say, they have a longstanding, collegial working relationship that benefits each of them, but these things don’t “just happen” because “we’ve done it before” and “it’s good for all of us.” There are rules, and if the clip is sold on an Elvis DVD or something, there is money to be split in specific ways.

AND THIS IS BEFORE WE GET TO TRADEMARKS.

In fact, copyright is pretty easy, as long as you engage EVERYONE…which is always more people than you think. Trademark is VERY hard, because EVERY use of a trademark affects the ENTIRE value of the trademark.

BTW, you intuit this yourself when your esteem of a song or actor or whatever drops because it’s licensed to something that feels “unworthy.” Now EVERYTHING they do is tainted with that association.

Which is why, mess up a copyright, and you owe the money for THAT USE, plus derivatives, court costs, etc. If you don’t think you can afford YOUR lawyer, think about how much fun it will be to pay THEIR lawyers.

But mess up a trademark, and you can be sued for THE ENTIRE VALUE OF THAT TRADEMARK. Certainly millions. Possibly billions. Plus, uhm, court costs.

Not that they think you’ll be able to pay this kind of money, but because they are REQUIRED BY LAW, as holders of the trademark, to defend against EVERY misuse, or they lose the rights to defend ANY misuse.

Which is why there are so many trademark lawsuits that look ridiculous. Maybe that one IS ridiculous, but it’s also the basis for going after the ones that aren’t. You may not pay billions in damages, but the settlement will be painful. Count on it.

The only thing I’m going to say about cable companies: there’s a reason that Comcast was able to buy the NBC network, USA, Telemundo, Syfy, MSNBC, MCA Records, Universal Studios (both movies and TV), a couple of major theme parks, and much more — it’s bigger than ALL OF THOSE PUT TOGETHER.

You can search through other posts in this forum, or make a quick stop by Amazon to see I’m not making this up. I’m simplifying it. The rights of rights holders are extending outward, and getting stronger. Courts are extending those rights more quickly than the law itself is moving, which is why these guys are in such a hurry to get to court. They can argue PRECEDENT, even when they can’t argue LAW.

My greatest hope is that this discourages you from doing anything with any of these people. LOL

My second greatest hope is that you not even DREAM of it without consulting a lawyer.

Apologies again for the length of this, and the extent to which it goes to places that the original questions don’t necessarily require.

But no kidding. Get a lawyer.

[Tim Wilson]

This happens when you, your email client, or your ISP bounces back one of our emails as spam. I’m guessing it’s one of the latter two. 🙂 Your account otherwise shows as all clear.

Just reset your email using the “Forgot Password” link at sign-in. You don’t even need to actually reset your password, but this will fire up the connection again.

Please note that this is also a good time to refresh your filters. If you haven’t whitelisted the COW yet, please do. If you already have, try deleting the filter and resetting it.

Thanks for the warning to stay away from cornflakes.

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Are you expecting one? Has there been an announcement? Or is this just general hope? 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “In my humble little opinion, FCPX does a raw workflow right, at least an R3D workflow.”

Absolutely agreed. Its strengths for RAW workflows are one of the BEST reasons I can see for taking FCPX seriously.

There are some insane tools for color as metadata, though, that don’t require RAW. That was my only point about that. I haven’t finished my research, but AJA’s new little LUT box looks cool, but the idea of a CDL, color decision list, that travels with the footage is a profound thing.

Pomfort LiveGrade is an amazing piece of software that I’m seeing more and more of. One workflow that I’ve seen is taking LOG out of the back of an Alexa, sending it through a Blackmagic HDLink, and do first-pass grading on the fly. It creates a CDL, which the colorists open in finish, and BOOM.

That’s just one guy I happen to know personally who’s getting it done this way. But the software is just looking for HD-SDI in. Any camera will do. From there, running ACES workflows on your laptop, even use your iPhone as a remote control. My boy is using Alexa LOG, but it also supports native LOG files for Canon, RED and others.

LiveGrade is under $500, and the pro version is under $900. The FCP and FCPX plug-ins are under $200.

Anyway, enough rambling. I also don’t mean to be pimping a specific product, especially one that’s not yet advertising in the COW. LOL My points being that CDLs offer big advantages over LUTs, and NONE of these advanced color workflows (including ACES) REQUIRE RAW. The tools are there to do it with any HD-SDI output and a piece of affordable software running on a MacBook Pro.

The days of miracles are upon us, friends. RAW is one of ’em, but not the only one, and maybe not even one that’ll help as much as plenty of others.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “For me the value of RAW is being able to play off ISO vs noise reduction in Resolve and color temp tweaks for interesting grading looks. Extra dynamic range is a welcome bonus. “

I don’t mean to sound down on RAW in theory. People want it for good reasons…but some people want it because they think they’re supposed to, or because they’ve heard they should. Many people can get the dynamic range they need from hi-res ProRes and DNxHD.

With obvious exceptions. I’m just saying that there are a lot of workflows being driven by ProRes and DNxHD even out of Alexa. RAW isn’t the only way to get beautiful 4:4:4:4 footage…

…which of course you know. I don’t know why I even brought it up. LOL It just drives me crazy when it’s treated as the Holy Grail for everyone.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Could you please engrave this in stone and set it up where everyone can see it for evermore?”

I actually have it tattooed across my lower back with a male stripper in a martini glass, Elvis, and a pun on REC-601 that I won’t repeat here.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “Just a guess, but with the world moving toward RAW workflows – getting the exposure precisely correct at the camera is perceived as “less” important than it used to be?”

The value of RAW is overstated I think. For a lot of workflows, it creates insurmountable problems.

I think it’s more that shooting is increasingly driven by LUTs that can be applied on set or location, then carried through non-destructively for tweaking in post. They’re the bridge between exposure and grading…which makes them intimately tied to both.

So, it’s not, “It’s okay to get close enough because we’re going to grade in post anyway.” It’s “We’re going to set this up with more details than we’ve ever had access to before, starting with exposure but going well past it.”

As a result, I don’t see exposure as any less important…but it’s no longer THE thing wrt setting up the picture. That is, its NATURE changes, rather than its VALUE does.

[Tim Wilson]

[Shane Ross] ” It’s all about BROADCAST…and that is a narrow niche.”

That was true for many years, and is still true where you were and the people you know. It’s still true for shared storage.

The rest of the lower south, not so much. Flights are cheap, rooms are cheap, admission is free. Tirekickers abound. I’ve worked booths, including Apple’s in 2003, where I’d have killed to talk to more than the occasional pro customers. I’m certain that this is why Apple stopped doing NAB when FCP was at its pro peak. They weren’t reaching enough people in those booths that they weren’t already reaching in the mall. They were doing the real business in the suites, which I’m sure they still are.

You wouldn’t believe how many people came up to me in the Boris FX booth asking what’s a plug-in. And in the Avid booth: “So, what’s Symphony? Is that kind of like Final Cut?” Dude, I heard that all day.

You only really meet these guys at the front of the room, and in booths with big theaters, but there’s also a meaningful number of people who are town for typical Vegas stuff, see the shiny lights, and talk their way into a free pass into the show because it looks cool, kind of like when they saw CES on the news.

Now, once you get away from the lower south, and before you get to the satellite trucks, it’s still a pretty hardcore crowd. But there are definitely people who want to LITERALLY kick the tires of the satellite trucks. “Can I see inside?” The guys working that end of the show have got to go insane.

I don’t think this influx of non- or new pros is either an accident or a bad thing. I’m just saying. Ever since people stopped wearing ties, man. It all went to crap. LOL

re: pros in general, though, there’s not an enormous overlap between FCPX pros and collaborative workflow-shared storage pros, even three years along. X has other appeals and other strengths. I doubt that very few installations that have X on a network were built solely to accommodate their X-centered infrastructure. That’s what it’ll take to get X front and center…

…but to Bob’s point that EVERY shared storage vendor supports X, I’d bet that most of ’em had it on at least one Mac in the booth, right?

[Lance Bachelder] “The only other “NLE” getting any buzz at all was Resolve 11, which I can’t wait to try out…”

I think this is why Bob and others in the shared storage game were getting so many questions about Resolve. It’s got an incredibly compelling collaboration story that’s going to be interesting to see play out. If the editing toolset is even close to what it looks like, it could move the storage sales needle soon.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jason Brown] “Great read, btw…i wasn’t able to go and I enjoyed the article.”

I think Bob’s articles are better than the show. 🙂

I’m glad that we’re dispensing with this angle fairly quickly. Bob was in fact showing X the entire show, when he wasn’t doing his staggering research.

His first draft really didn’t cover NLEs — not that there’s much here. I, as his editor, had asked for his observations precisely because he really doesn’t care. If you want shared storage for the video app on your Blackberry, he’ll figure it out.

But that’s why I said right there in the article that the sidebar was nothing but me putting together some thoughts from his email.

I hope nobody here is shocked that Bob observed that there wasn’t much demand for X shared storage…even though every vendor does in fact support X, and most were ready to show it when requested. Or, more accurately, IF. And there just wasn’t much interest.

This really is a remarkable article, and I look forward to talking about anything in it but this. LOL

EDIT: And yes, not harsh about ANYTHING. My only disappointment in the article as his editor was that I didn’t have to edit out any profanity. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

Ha! You’re awesome. Thanks! Definitely cheered me up. 🙂