[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “Probably not much, but is this the ACE you are talking about? The organization with FCPX tips on it’s home page?”

A nifty confirmation of my theory first posited here almost exactly 5 years ago, that FCPX would move the needle in ways that FCP did not.

Of course, it has indeed taken almost exactly 5 years. 🙂

But I thank you for providing perhaps the first confirmation that I’ve been right about ANYTHING. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “maybe NSFW”

No Shortage of F Words.

[Tim Wilson]

[Charlie Austin] “This will probably not be as exhaustive as Tim would like. ;-)”

I find your report…..acceptable.

LOL Kidding. I love it. Exactly the kind of detail I was hoping for.

Thanks!

Nothing substantial to add at the moment, but I know you’ve been nervous and I wanted to let you know that you’re safe for now. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Blake Davis] “Do you have any recommendations for how to calculate the equipment overhead (maintenance, etc.) so that I can better estimate my needed pay rate for the contract negotiation?”

Have you calculated your own depreciation schedule for these for tax purposes? If yes, start there. If no, start there. 🙂

That’s the thing, though, either way. Even if you’re not itemizing depreciation, you’ll eventually need to replace everything you’ve got. Nothing tricky about that. Take the amount of money you’ve got into it, divide by the number of months before you need to replace it, and you’ve got at least a ballpark number.

Now go the other way: how much are you gonna need to be making OVER AND ABOVE what it takes you to do your job, pay your bills, and make a profit? Add that to your cost.

Some of these other fellers who are much smarter than I am may well have more thorough and more modern answers. Maybe my business model was ruled by a combination of addition, subtraction, and long division because that’s about the extent of my mathematical abilities.

(Turns out my primary use of multiplication tables is for purposes of division, rather than multiplication per se. Who knew?)

But in any case, the numbers are going to bear some relationship between how much you’ve put into your gear, how much it’ll cost you to replace, and the extent to which you can get away with your clients subsidizing it directly as an expense, rather than having to take it out of your end of the profits. That last part involves finesse, and your understanding of your client’s price sensitivity…but otherwise, the numbers are the numbers. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Mike Warmels] “I meant: “I see the CHARM of FCPX…””

I thought “see the HARM” of it was one the best things I’ve read. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

This is interesting in a number of ways. ACE used to do an annual Equipment Survey of what their members were using every year, and needless to say, Avid cleaned up. In fact, the numbers were so consistent during the latter aughts — Avid FCP at 20%, a couple of projects on Lightworks, and the rest on Avid — that ACE stopped doing the survey. They didn’t feel there was additional insight to be gained.

The most recent year whose results I found is 2009, when there were 350 members — obviously a subset of a subset of the class “Hollywood editors.”(Here’s the link), but I’ll save ya the step: 19% FCP, 4% unspecified “Other” (presumably including some Premiere projects by then), and the rest Avid.

The number that really struck me from that survey was the trajectory of who was making the edit system choice. In 2004, over 60% of the editors surveyed were making their own choice of what to use, but by 2009, it had dropped to 38%.

This led to the creation of the ACE Technical Excellence Award, which was given to Avid Media Composer. A lot of the language appears to be little more than boilerplate.

This distinguished honor hails Avid’s unparalleled innovation, the company’s commitment to working hand-in-hand with editors, and its role in evolving the art of cinematic storytelling. The honorary award will be presented to Avid at the 60th Annual ACE Eddie Awards in February 2010.

Hmmm, part of the honor is for “the company’s commitment to working hand-in-hand with editors.” As opposed to say….who? As the press release continues, they double down. My bold added.

“Editors know that the art of filmmaking is as much about storytelling as it is sharing a mutually-beneficial dialogue with other members in the industry. Avid shares our passion and vision for nurturing the motion picture community and the integral role that editors play in bringing entertainment to life,” said ACE President Randy Roberts, A.C.E. “One of Avid’s unique characteristics is the fact that many of its employees are also experienced artists themselves, and so like us, they are obsessive about solving real challenges that actually make a difference in the editing room. We appreciate the company’s ongoing commitment to talk with us and to understand how we want to improve the way we tell stories. The Board is pleased to distinguish Avid — and Media Composer — with this first-ever mark of distinction.”

To their credit, Variety (no byline) dug deeper. ACE dropped the coy poses, too.

Harry B. Miller III, an ACE board member and head of the org’s technology committee, said Avid “has always had the superior product” among editing software packages, but recently the company has also gone out of its way to solicit feedback from editors and shape the product to their needs.

Apple, by contrast, has been slow to improve Final Cut Pro. Miller said, “Apple and Final Cut Pro doesn’t listen, doesn’t respond, doesn’t solicit our opinion.”

So ACE basically created an award for the specific purposes of saying, “We prefer Avid, and we should be free to choose it.”

Nothing wrong with that. ACE is a membership organization, and it’s the board’s job to spearhead advocacy that represents the largest part of the group. I’m certainly willing to be that the FCP (and “other”) members would prefer to be making choices about their toolset, rather than leaving it in the hands of producers, the studio, etc.

But man o man, has the world changed since 2009!!!

My guess is that the launch of X didn’t do much at all. Hollywood in general is in no hurry to change what’s working. It’s a shame that the values of solidity, reliability, and deep user mastery of the toolset have come to be viewed as perjoratives, but in fact, crafts-person-ship matters, and the ability to deliver without disruption is rewarded.

I’ve always suspected that FCP never really moved the needle because it wasn’t substantially better at anything significant in Avid’s core toolset. There has to have been a REASON to switch, and quite frankly, FCP never made its case.

I said in this very forum 5 years ago that X was much more interesting in this context, because it at least offers a reason to consider switching. There are potentially substantial benefits that FCP never even attempted to offer. I have no doubt that there was a bit of, “HA! I TOLD you that Apple wasn’t committed to pros” with the advent of X….but as it comes time to turn the crank on new systems a few years down the road, X continues to mature, and I think if anything, it has the potential to move the needle in ways that FCP never could have, and certainly never did.

The question is, WILL it? And when? The answer is clearly farther out than “5 years after its launch.”

(I hope I don’t have to remind anyone that I’m speaking strictly about this particular subset of a subset of editors, but I will anyway. I’m NOT talking about the world of editing at large.)

In the time since 2009, I think Adobe Premiere has graduated from membership in “Other.” At least one member of ACE, Kirk Baxter, has been a high-profile user of Premiere for the last couple of Fincher products.

The last thing that struck me is that the percentage of Macs at use among ACE members went up in the 5 years mentioned in the 2009 survey, from 73% in 2005 to 88%. (I’ll note that surveys I was involved in around the 2005 timeframe also confirmed Windows usage around 30% among Hollywood elites, far more than I think is typically assumed around here, if also dramatically less than for the world at large.)

That’s pretty substantial. I wonder how the tardiness of the Mac Pro and its eventual configuration affected things. I know that here in the COW we saw a substantial uptick in Windows adoption, but knowing how much more slowly the ACE ecosystem moves, I wonder.

So the fact is that NOW, I think there’s a lot of insight that could be gained from a new ACE Equipment Survey….although frankly, maybe not. Does anyone really really REALLY expect Avid to have dropped much below 80% On what basis?

And really, it’s only idle curiosity. 350 editors is statistically significant only for its own cohort…but it’s a cohort that’s responsible for editing a disproportionate amount of the content actually viewed by audiences worldwide.

Besides, what else are we gonna argue about around here? LOL

So Charlie, I’m expecting a spectacularly full report from you. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] ” A good workflow is more than the sum of its parts and the trick in each situation is to get the most amount of Pros with the least amount of Cons. To go back to my previous example of the gig I’m doing now. Do I wish PPro was more like Avid in terms of multi-user collaboration? Yes. Do I wish I was working on Avid instead of PPro on this project? No. Looking at it as a whole PPro is a better fit for this gig than Avid.”

It really is a matter of meeting the goals of how you want to work, and not just ticking boxes on a list of features.

I recently wrote what I think is a pretty nifty article about one kind of workflow enabled with an FCPX-centered feature film workflow, specifically designed for the ways that those directors wanted to work.

Andrew, to your point, I remain equally enthralled by the approach that Kirk Baxter elucidated for Gone Girl, and which Fincher’s team is using for House of Cards and other projects.

Tim Miller obviously talked about very much the same kind of thing with Deadpool, but back in the 80s and early 90s, I was totally obsessed with Fincher’s music videos in particular (which I’ve written about here before).

As someone then primarily working in the field of nature and science documentary and TV magazine production, I can’t say how much Fincher necessarily influenced me at the time, but I’m not sure that any filmmaker has ever had me as tightly in his or her grip as Fincher did then. Combined with an affinity for After Effects, I find the issues as laid out around Gone Girl to be the ones that sound the most like how *I* would want to work…

…if I wanted to work for living. LOL Which I emphatically do not. LOL I would much rather talk about working than actually work.

Anyway, here’s that piece, which is worth a speedy re-viewing if you haven’t seen it in a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o6pjd2AU9c

To speak more specifically to Ronny’s epic article….

[Bill Davis] “against the voices arguing that X wasn’t and would never be “pro” enough”

My emphasis added to underscore that “wasn’t” and “would never be” are two different things.

I’m not sure that there’s ever been anyone arguing that it would NEVER be pro enough, at least in the COW. (If I’m wrong, please include a link correcting me.)

But if we can indeed consider that argument vaporized, I hope that we can ALSO officially vaporize any notion that X was ALWAYS “pro” enough. It was, originally, in many cases simply not.

As Patrice told Ronny, “Moving to FCP X was out of the question for us if it didn’t do multicam.”

Of course, Patrice goes on to say, “So we said: Apple seems to be working very hard on this, let’s wait a little bit and see how it evolves.”

But again, originally, “Moving to FCP X was out of the question for us.” It took just shy of 5 years for the twain to meet, a not insignificant interval.

In the meantime, they weren’t haters. They weren’t dinosaurs. Their needs were simply not being met. They were right to wait, but people who could wait no longer for new software were also reasonable to move on. The “not-quite-pro-enough/not-quite-yet”-ness of X was real.

So can we have a deal? Agree to obliterate the notion that X isn’t pro enough NOW, and ALSO also obliterate the notion that X was ALWAYS a viable option?

After all, it’s just a matter of agreeing with Apple, who acknowledged that X originally lacked features that Apple had themselves identified as essential for professional production in versions of FCP dating back to 2005. Hopefully, agreeing with Apple isn’t too much of a stretch.

Let me say again how much I enjoyed this article, though. Ronny Courtens is a god.

Ronny, if you’re reading this, YOU’RE A gOD. (Sorry man, gotta be a small g. LOL)

Congratulations to the big giant brains from around the world who put together what looks to be a remarkable solution.

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[Tim Wilson]

I don’t see that there should be a problem, Bob. I just tried it, and was able to open a reply box.

Maybe try logging out and logging back in?

Let me know if that doesn’t work and I’ll poke at it some more….

Thanks,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Yeah, probably so. LOL

AMAZING story, Ronny!

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “I do think you might be over-egging this. “

I need to add “Over-egging” to my job title somehow. Definitely belongs on my business card.

[Simon Ubsdell] “Cinematic conventions tend to stretch reality rather than as you are suggesting break with it altogether. Perhaps we feel that we are shifting our body position between cuts to accommodate the change of view?”

Perhaps I was over-egging my use of the word “reality.” And I think there’s an extent to which we’re using it in a slightly different way.

I like the tennis match analogy, but I think it also supports my view at least as well as yours.

That is, as executed, reverse shots tend not to be filmed from a single seat at center court, but as if they were from two cameras behind each baseline.

There’s certainly a spectrum of artistic choices to be made, of course. In the context of the Coens, they (and Roger Deakins) do tend to shoot conversations from “inside” the conversation, so to speak, very frequently (most frequently, if I’m remembering correctly) in a position “between” the actors that one might describe as “on the net.”

No OTS, but rather, reversed 1-shots. They may be the only filmmakers for whom Bill’s two-headed camera could work.

Except that their use of short lenses is often combined with long distances, to include big parts of the background. They certainly used it to great effect in Fargo, but just as often use it interior spaces to communicate details about minor characters and settings.

This gets back to the reality of one’s ability to take in both sides of the reverse. We can’t, because the cameras are “really” placed well behind the actor who we’re “apparently” in front of.

That is, the camera appears to be in the couple of feet between the actors, but is actually several feet behind the pair of them.

Which is some of what I meant by saying that no one person could actually experience a reverse shot. Not as it’s shot, and most often, not as it’s viewed.

There’s also the matter of non-dialog reverse shots. Call them reverse establishing shots. You could do something close with a pan of course, but as used in practice, especially by the Coens, I think the point is to take away the idea of “there’s one perspective that encompasses two points of view” and intentionally replace it with “there are two isolated points of view. There is no unified perspective.”

Returning to our tennis analogy, we’re not MEANT to be seated in the stands, swiveling our heads from a single perspective. We’re MEANT to have TWO points of view, and their isolation from each other is critical.

That’s HUGE for the Coens. Sometimes it’s expressed as being trapped (think William H Macy in Fargo), sometimes as separation (think Javier Bardem), but I think they’re stylizing the dis-unity of emotional elements. The further apart, the less reconcilable their perspectives, the better.

I think Tony’s video (which I hope u ppl have watched, so I’ll link it again here) also wisely calls out Paul Greengrass’s approach to conversational reverses in The Bourne Supremacy, where the shot is almost BEHIND the shoulder, starting at around 1:32 in the clip. It’s like we’re hiding behind Joan Allen to eavesdrop on Brian Cox….but then we’re also hiding behind Albert to eavesdrop on Joan. It’s absolutely impossible for one person to be in both of those positions. It simply can’t be done.

These are just the grabs I could grab, and don’t fully express how far behind them I appear to be standing for the shots in motion. That I can go from having Joan Allen blocking half the screen to in an instant now be alllllll the way behind Brian Cox is impossible.

And then we get even CLOSER. You can definitely get more of a sense of how thoroughly “behind” each of the speakers we are, and the extent to which we as viewers are hiding, in two specific, very separate places.

Not to put too fine a point on the nature of reality, but in reality, human eyes don’t work the way this shot works. This shot can ONLY be achieved by a long lens, far away, zoomed in.

As a career documentarian, I think Greengrass is very aware of the extent to which is visual approach is not rooted in “real” reality, but it feels organic in the context of the story. After all, it’s a story about manufactured reality explicitly in contrast with “real” reality.

Over-egging our irreconcilable positions in space and time underscores the irreconcilability of Joan Allen and Brian Cox, and very much supports the idea that both have something to hide, and that Very Bad Things Are Coming Soon.

That’s one of the things that long lenses, far away, zoomed in TELL us. They compress distance. To start the scene with the cameras so far away, but to wind up so much “in their faces” and yet still hiding? Pressure is building! This isn’t sustainable. Something’s gotta give.

For that matter, the Coens RELY on the unreality of Deakins’ short lenses, frequently using it to distort faces, but also to exaggerate camera moves that, again, we as humans, don’t make. Even if we could, we see the world differently than these kinds of shots reflect. We don’t have fixed lens lengths. LOL

In all cases I’ve cited — long lens or short lens, OTS, “behind” the shoulder, isolated singles, conversational shots, establishing shots, so on — the physical unreality of our position and intentional deviations from the way we normally see the world are intentional uses of highly stylized cinematic technique to support storytelling. The glues they rely on to hold these shots together include our ability to abstract a unified worldview from conflicting perspectives, and our essentially human drive to empathy, even with characters we don’t actually empathize with.

But they DON’T include an especially deep commitment to representing a view of the room that any particular human could ever possibly have.

I think it’s worth noting that there’s some evolution at work here. Early cinema’s roots in theater are evident in the relative absence of reverses. Over time, the angles are further and further separated from each other, to the point that, as in Bourne, they are utterly irreconcilable.

Again noting that there’s a spectrum here. There are clearly some parts of the cinematic language that haven’t changed much at all, and some filmmakers use visual language that has been settled for generations. But I think that the language of reverses has changed a lot, and I think approaches that Greengrass and the Coens take would have looked daring to any stylistic innovators who might have been contemporary with, say Barton Fink. Buñuel went pretty far, but he never went this far.

[Simon Ubsdell] ” it’s a cognitive error not to realise that our brains see in snatches rather than in a continuous “recording”. Film cuts work because they emulate the way our brains see”

On that we agree completely.

I’m only aware of one music video that uses a single, unbroken take of a slow zoom, Bruce Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise.” Neither a brilliant song, brilliant video, nor much of a disguise at all, it illustrates how completely unnatural it is to see the world without cuts. He’s sitting in a chair in the kitchen, playing an acoustic guitar, but we WANT to see multiple closeups — fingers on frets, strings plucked, his face — mixed with shots at a variety of distances.

Plus it’s in black and white, and hey, where’s the rest of the band? LOL It’s really a terrible idea. I see you playing AND hear it, so I’m clearly in a world where instruments are playing — where’s everyone else??

I understand why they tried this but I don’t get how they found the result usable. You’re fighting — or at least *I’m* fighting the zoom the whole time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idnJnjV_8rg

Maybe it felt daring to go so far out on a limb.

Of course, Sinead O’Connor went even further out on the limb 3 years later with “Nothing Compares 2 U.” After a brief preamble, the camera rests on a chin-to-no-hairline closeup, no zoom whatsoever. She changes what’s in the frame by the size of her singing, but it feels less artificial because there really is nowhere else to look. We’re not worried about the music, because we’re not in the frame with a musician. We’re in the frame with her soul.

If you haven’t seen this in a while, you only think you remember how bold it was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB1TKw8_b1s

Anyway, if I’m being honest, ever since the part of the conversation where the Englishman mentions tennis, I admit that my internal soundtrack comes from another bit of video, wherein WTF = Why the frogs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2f6-U72Zk

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