[David Lawrence]

[Michael Horton] “At the SuperMeet we intend to cover this very specific thing. How do you get people to look where you want them to look?”

Our research (as well as various articles I’ve seen lately) point to two promising techniques:

1) Directed sound – Spatialized audio tells the viewer when something interesting is happening outside their field of view and what direction to turn to.

2) Directed movement – Viewers naturally lock onto and follow intentional movement around the 360 space. This suggests a choreographed type of direction ala the “oner” for the 360 space may be useful.

The more we experiment, the more we’ll learn.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

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[David Lawrence]

[Steve Connor] “I’d love you to be wrong about this, It’s been a while since we had a new way to tell stories”

I don’t think it really works for the kinds of stories we tell as filmmakers. It’s for something different we’re still figuring out. It’s for stuff that wouldn’t work as film.

My favorite examples for Google Cardboard are:

Squarepusher – Stor Eiglass:
iTunes – https://itunes.apple.com/app/id990583315
Google Play – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.warprecords.squarepusherstoreiglass&hl=en

I love Squarepusher’s music so I’m biased but this one is pure fun in Cardboard. Everyone I’ve shown it to has a big grin on their face by the end.

Chris Milk/Vice – Million’s March
https://vrse.com/watch/id/31/

You can watch this in a web browser but when you watch in Cardboard, it’s like you’re there, standing in the middle of it. You really feel it, it’s different then watching a documentary.

Nonny de la Peña – Kiya
This piece is available in the Sundance collection on the NYTVR app.
https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/nytvr/
https://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=54eceae3-6ae7-4a6e-bd90-64de8ae2d689
https://www.ted.com/talks/nonny_de_la_pena_the_future_of_news_virtual_reality?language=en

Nonny de la Peña’s been experimenting with VR as a journalistic medium for years. I think it’s interesting stuff.

These and many other examples appearing every day give us a taste of something I think is genuinely new. I don’t think it’s the next Hollywood scale industry, but I also don’t think it’s a fad. Have you had a chance to play with it? Curious what you think.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

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[David Lawrence]

There’s a ton of hype and a ton of money being invested in VR right now. We’re talking many billions of dollars being spent and in projected returns. It’s a total frenzy, one of those rare moments in tech that comes along every couple decades or so. (Blame Facebook for buying Oculus for $2Billion. Crazy.)

I spent the fall deeply immersed in this stuff working with one of the big players in the scene and am still involved. My personal observations:

This is a whole new medium. It’s real and it’s not a flash in the pan.

It’s way over hyped and won’t make nearly as much money as people think. ($21Billion? Nope!)

It’s not a storytelling medium like filmmaking. It’s something completely different.

Some techniques that work with filmmaking work in VR and some totally don’t. We need a lot more benchmarking and experimentation.

[Oliver Peters] “My thoughts are that it’s a cool trick and will have a niche market, just like stereo 3D. But it won’t become the next great mainstream storytelling method. The main hindrence is that it requires the glasses, like 3D.”

I agree the glasses are a huge barrier. It’ll never be like going to a theater enjoying a film with your friends (or watching together at home). VR is a highly personal experience that can’t be shared the way we share movies. I think it’s much more like reading a book.

I really dislike the term “Virtual Reality”. I think it sets the bar for reality way too low. For 360 filmmaking, I prefer the term “immersive filmmaking”. It’s about creating a sense of presence, not about trying to make the Holodeck. Chris Milk’s documentaries on VRSE are good current examples.

Nobody knows what they’re doing. Anyone who claims to is either bluffing or doesn’t know what they don’t know 😉 It’s the wild west and the field’s wide open.

There’s no better time to experiment and try weird new stuff. It’s a fun and exciting time!

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

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[David Lawrence]

[Shawn Miller] “Maybe you could distribute through RedGiant like Trapcode does? It’s an excellent plugin, something every FCPX user should be interested in. :-)”

And if you’re game Simon, I think a lot of Premiere Pro users would be interested as well!

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

linkedIn: https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
vimeo: vimeo.com/album/2271696
web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl

[David Lawrence]

Wait, how can there possibly be a plug-in for something that DOESN’T EXIST???

Seriously though, great work Simon! 🙂

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

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web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl

[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “maybe a viable solution to a problem that cannot be solved from disconnected desktop computers alone.”

Absolutely. Not only does it look interesting, it’s a great example of a solution that is truly cloud-based, and in fact wouldn’t make much sense without the cloud.

If Adobe offered this kind of cloud functionality with CC (as opposed to using internet connectivity as a toll gate for regular desktop software), CC would be much more true to its marketing language.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

linkedIn: https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
vimeo: vimeo.com/album/2271696
web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl

[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I often, on audio only dissolves in music, have to change the curve to +3 to get it to “sound right” and keep the levels through the transition.”

Just don’t make it asymmetrical! 😉

_______________________
David Lawrence
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linkedIn: https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
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facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl

[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “In general, a compositor is designed to move frame-based media into an uncompressed RGB 4:4:4 progressive buffer, regardless of the original codec. This is difficult to do in real-time. OTOH, an NLE is designed to deal with movie streams, usually in a native or compatible codec. An NLE is often dependent on an underlying media engine to handle part of the actual movie file playback, a la QT and FCP7. As a result, real-time playback is easier, but compositing might not be quite as good.”

Yes. Thank you for more precisely articulating what I meant by this:

[David Lawrence] “Compositors by design prioritize calculating the correct value for every pixel of the frame, based on the media and processing pipeline in the composite stack. NLE do this too, but by design, playback seems to be the first priority.”

[Oliver Peters] “IOW, regardless of the interface design, there are still real-world engineering differences under-the-hood. What do you think?”

Absolutely. I think that’s why we see various different data models and UI approaches to working with time-based media.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

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vimeo: vimeo.com/album/2271696
web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl

[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “I would say that transitions pose a special challenge — they require some in-track compositing that could break the rest of the render pipeline. How do you handle the alpha in a transition between two non-output-sized objects?”

Simon, et al – Walter and I got deep into this issue in this thread in the After Effect forum:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/1067127

As I learned in this thread, transitions that are trivial in an NLE present special challenges in a compositor. This becomes interesting in the context of round tripping between applications. In my case it was via Adobe dynamic linking. Dynamic linking is great, but I was surprised by the transition problem. It’s important to understand that some things don’t exactly translate. Now that I know how it works, in the future I’ll set up my Premiere transitions differently if I plan to go into AE.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

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web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl

[David Lawrence]

[Simon Ubsdell] “while I agree with the third part … are we really saying that we can’t think it can’t be done? I’d be fascinated to hear your reasons.”

This will probably come as no surprise to you – for me, it all comes down to fundamental differences in the timeline architecture and interaction model for a NLE vs a layer-based compositor.

Layers and tracks both represent time horizontally, and both (for the most part) composite from top to bottom, but they’re very different in how they represent media.

A single layer can only hold a single instance of a media object. A single track can hold an unlimited number of media objects. This key difference becomes critical depending on the task at hand.

Generally speaking, compositing is shot focused, which is where the debate between nodal and layer-based compositors comes into play. Both have their pluses and minuses deepending on the task.

NLEs on the other hand, are optimized for cutting.

Consider the most basic possible NLE operation – the cut. In any NLE, it’s absolutely trivial to cut, copy, paste and move media clips in time.

Now consider that same operation in the layer-based world of After Effects. Not so trivial anymore, is it? In fact, the most basic editorial timeline would likely become a huge mess in layers very quickly.

Then there’s playback. It’s only been recently that real-time playback in AE is something we might even consider. Compositors by design prioritize calculating the correct value for every pixel of the frame, based on the media and processing pipeline in the composite stack. NLE do this too, but by design, playback seems to be the first priority.

Even if AE could do full, realtime playback of a timeline, I’m not sure that would be enough to make up for the differences in the timeline models as far as editorial uses go.

I think one of the reasons FCP Legend became popular is because at least for me, it was the first NLE to find the sweet spot between editing and compositing. Legend had non-modal editorial tools that were very mac-like and easy to learn compared to Avid. Compositing was also very mac-like and easy to use. Just stack layers of media on tracks and apply the filters or keyframes. At the time, there was nothing like this. Sure, the compositing wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as what you could do in AE, but for things like simple, key-framed animatics, it was wonderful.

I don’t think it would be impossible for a future AE to have the editorial flexibility of a NLE, but in my mind, doing so would require that layers become much more like tracks, with the ability to hold more than one media object. And at that point, wouldn’t they essential become tracks? I’m not sure that’s possible or even desirable.

Anyway that’s my thinking. Curious about yours.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

linkedIn: https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
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facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl