[Tim Wilson]

Greg, listening to a podcast will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever happen for me. Ever. I can read the transcript of an hour-long podcast in 5 minutes, 10 minutes tops, so anything beyond that is an intolerable imposition on my time. I won’t have it.

Besides, not posting transcripts is just plain rude. Both of my grandmothers were deaf (an odd coincidence, but entirely true), and I don’t have any respect for people who aren’t making accessible content. Closed captioning on broadcasts is a legal requirement. I’m stupefied that anybody would think that it’s okay to have a podcast without a transcript, legal or not.

Podcasts without transcripts really do infuriate me. The height of arrogance, and not a good use of my time by definition. I won’t have anything to do with them.

[Tim Wilson]

I don’t think it’s that nobody is interested, as much as nobody had an answer. I sure don’t have one.

What’s the answer you found? Me, I’m dying to know!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Lisa,

The short answer is, give the dog something to chew on, and try again.

Not to be glib, but the next question is, what software tools do you have? And how good are you at using them? If it’s just what came with your computer, there’s probably nothing there for you, regardless of your skill level. Out of curiosity, do you know the name of the software you used to make the video?

If you have access to audio editing software, you’re still in for some surgery, especially if the dog is barking at the same time somebody is speaking. Any change that you make to the barking would then affect at least part of the speech.

If there are stretches where there’s no overlap between barking and speaking, there may be hope, but again, it depends on the software you have, and your expertise with it.

Even in Hollywood, the first choice is always to reshoot in these circumstances. It’s faster for them, and it will be faster for you.

[Tim Wilson]

Kidding aside, kingdoms will rise, kingdoms will crumble into the sea, the earth will fall into the sun, and the sun will go nova before I listen to a single podcast. I don’t have the emotional ability to sit still and let people yap at me at their own pace. Give me a transcript or give me death.

[Tim Wilson]

So what did you have to say? Nothing personal to those other guys, but I’d rather not wade through them to get to you. What’re you thinking these days?

[Tim Wilson]

When you look at the Tech Specs page for the iPhone 12 Pro Max, it would seem ProRAW applies only to still images, it’s not listed as a video feature.

Ah yes, I was crossing the streams there. I understood this to be a still photography feature, but I think RAW in general is worth discussing. It’s not like uncompressed video, in the sense that uncompressed was considered something of a holy grail…until we got there, and moved very quickly in every possible other direction.

I do know that many here are taking advantage of a variety of RAW codecs, and part of me cringes whenever I hear about new codecs, but most of ’em have worked out okay I guess. LOL

Supporting Dolby Vision would imply that they are seriously considering it’s application beyond the point-and-shoot user.

This is one of the things that most jumped out at me. Is Dolby going to be something that every consumer is going to insist on from their phone manufacturer, or that manufacturers will use to show that they’re all the way state of the art? And now that I think about it, Apple is also pitching their phone screen for watching Dolby-certified content (think Netflix).

I’m sure that Dolby will be happy to take licensing money wherever they can get it, but it makes me wonder what their endgame is in this too. Surely as interested in certifying displays as cameras, no?

[Tim Wilson]

@tonywest2 and @michaelgissing2, you both make great point about audio and related gear. You’re certainly right about Apple’s focus on visuals in these demo videos, including the one by Chivo for the 12 launch. Nice pictures, and not just because of the DP — the picture tech is indeed pretty slick, and some of it will likely filter up from the phone into the camera world, rather than the other way ’round….but other than a science experiment, it really doesn’t make much sense to overstate the value of any phone for actual film making.

That said, scenarios like the one @steveconnor describes — intentionally creating a short to take advantage of the phone’s unique features, because he’s going to get one anyway, and really, why not? — seem pretty likely for a whole lot of people. Great! Bring ’em on!

THAT said, there are definitely scenarios where not having a camera is an advantage. News, some kinds of travel and documentary, etc. where having a camera, even a small one, will stop the project in its tracks. “You there! What are you doing?” But it doesn’t make for great demo footage, and those are typically not A-camera scenarios.

But yeah, Tony, the whole “This is going to change everything” hype has been a little overstated, to say the least.

Now then, I don’t want to be primarily negative, because my overwhelming reaction has been one of being intrigued. “Tell me more”, rather than “Shut up already”, which is my usual reaction to anyone’s phone launch. They can all get kind of ridiculous….but still.

My other big questions are about DolbyVision and ProRAW. One, are you folks feeling pressure for Dolby support just yet?

For ProRAW, I know that we’ll know more when we can look at it, but I saw this at Tom’s Guide:

ProRAW, in a nutshell, will capture RAW images but apply some image processing on top. This includes merging frames from several shots captured by the cameras on the iPhone 12 Pro, using Apple’s Deep Fusion and Smart HDR tech, or applying noise reduction. But it will still leave some room for editing things like color, exposure and contrast in the same depth that can be had with the RAW format.

So ProRAW will take care of the difficult parts of getting an image into shape for more refined editing, and leave finer and artistic tweaks to manual editing. Calling it ProRAW might be a bit of a misnomer as this is more of a tool for people unused or manipulating RAW images.

I guess that sounds good? No question that editing RAW is harder than it sounds, and there’s a lot of ungraded, unfinished images out there that people are calling “cinematic” just because they know they paid a lot of money for the cameras and don’t know what to do with the output. Anything that will help is probably good…. right?

So once we filter out the hype and get back into the tech, I’d love to know what you folks are thinking about that too.

[Tim Wilson]

Why do studios continue to use their more expensive cameras if the Komodo has the same great sensor, high data rates and 16 stops of latitude?

I’m a little behind on cameras, so I’ll let other people speak to the specs, but I’m very up on pricing in production, and can speak to the studios question.

They rent. They don’t buy. Film production companies tend to last only as long as it takes to write the last check, so there’s no time to amortize big purchases. They rent everything they possibly can, including computers and NLEs, so that they always have the latest and greatest of everything, can do a real-time straight writeoff of expenses as tax deductions, and not have to worry about a bunch of gear that they need to store or sell at the end.

This also extends to lights, sets, you name it. Hollywood has been an all-rental town since the 40s.

For cameras today, you can get a RED with accessories delivered to your doorstep in LA for a few hundred bucks a day, up to maybe $1000-1500/day, depending on the accessories you need and the specific model. You’d be shocked by the number of dealers who will FedEx gear to you, included in the rental cost, across the country.

(I know this, because I was just googling the price of RED rental, and I myself was shocked by the number of people who include FedEx delivery in the rental price. )

And again, these productions write off rental expenses as tax deductions. If the rental price goes up, that can be a GOOD thing for a production with the budget to accommodate it, because they write off the expenses directly in the same tax year that the expense is incurred. Paying rental fees helps them make money.

Camera companies don’t just price their gear accordingly, they build their whole business around this. ARRI builds Alexa to be rented for a few thousand a week, from a small number of rental houses, NOT bought by individuals. They can support a smaller number of rental houses around the world, each of which has their own technical staff already, much more easily than they could support a much larger group of individuals who need much more help.

Panavision does the same thing with everything from lenses to TechnoCranes. They have individual lenses that would cost millions if you tried to buy them, but can easily recover their costs in rentals over the rental life of the lens, which can go for decades. And even if you could buy a crane for the four shots you need it in your movie, what are you going to do then? Sell it? To whom? Because everybody else in town is renting cranes and deducting the expenses from their taxes.

This is also why “but Final Cut is cheaper” was never a persuasive argument in film production. Productions weren’t buying their Avid seats or the computers running them. They rented them, and wrote off the expenses on their taxes.

Not to go down a rabbit hole here, especially because a lot of people do in fact buy REDs as individuals, but nothing about the economics of gear and studios makes sense until you wrap your head around the profound tax advantages around rental.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Graham,

The MP4 feature described here is just allowing the upload of that file type through the firewall, without having to zip. It’s not a player.

It’s easy to forget that we had not had a built in player in the old COW for years. We’d turned it off in 2011, I think. In those days, we were getting so many takedown notices for videos with unlicensed music (mostly in reels) that it was turning into a full time job for multiple people to try to manage. We hosted over 10,000 reels at the time, I think more than Vimeo at the time (although surely not now), and were sending over 30TB of hosted video every day!

The takedown letters we got were insanely specific too. They’d give us the timecode for the unlicensed music within the videos, sometimes only a few seconds long, but just enough to trigger fees and penalties where only a single clip might represent more money than we’d ever made.

You may remember cases in the Napster era when some teenager would get sued for uploading 16 songs, and the damages were more than the combined GDP of every nation in human history. We were a big and obvious a target, but still a family owned business with a very small team.

Without the staff to vet every video before it went up, or to respond to every legal demand quickly enough, we solved the problem by no longer hosting video at all, and only supporting embedded videos. YouTube and Vimeo have resources to manage rights and payments and takedowns and all the rest.

Our first step here is to support many more embeds than the old COW did. Nowadays, in addition to supporting YT and Vimeo, we also do Dailymotion, Facebook, imgur, Instagram, and nearly two dozen others, automatically embedding when you post the URL of the page with the video. No embed code necessary.

That said, we’re working with our dev team and our lawyers to support multiple dimensions of this. We need to give rights holders more automated ways to submit takedown orders without our having to manually intervene, we need to organize payments into music royalty organizations around the world (the only place we don’t currently have members is Antarctica, but we have before, and surely will again), and we also need to update our player tech from what was considered state of the art 10 years ago. 🙂

The tech aspect of hosting and playing back video is easy enough, and we’re within sight of have a state of the art video playback engine…but hosting the actual video files for playback on a site our size has legal and financial ramifications in a more complicated music rights landscape than 2011 that we are still scoping out.

That may be more of an answer than you were looking for, but that’s the actual answer. We’ll be back in the video hosting business as soon as we’re confident that we can stay in business while hosting video. Or, more specifically, taking on the liability of unlicensed music in those hosted videos.

In the scheme of things, we’d make our lives easier if we forbade audio on video clips that we hosted, but if we were interested in easy lives, we wouldn’t be doing this at all, would we?

We’ll get there as soon as we can, though!

Allllll of that said, drop me an email, and let’s talk about getting your tutorials up!

Thanks again,

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

We’re good to go, John! Thanks again for your help!