[Joseph Owens]

[John Sackey] “in a couple of the sequences there are a couple of clips that have black on the end instead of the full image. So they start where they should but around four or five frames before the end of the clip the media goes black. “

Frame rate? If they were short clips at 23.98, and might be remapped by absolute frame count on a 29.97 timeline… or a misinterpreted timewarp…?

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Herb Sevush] “nobody thinks the greatest novels ever written were published in the last 40 years, so why do they think that all the best movies were made after 1970?”

I refer the matter to Harlan Ellison “The Glass Teat”…

and I hesitate to mention the name “McLuhan” in case Woody Allen steps out from behind the scenery and lambastes me, as so many richly deserve.
https://blog.moviefone.com/2009/09/20/classic-cameos-marshall-mcluhan-annie-hall/

which, now that I review it, is more relevant than ever, same as Ellison.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “unscripted films with writing credits.”

At the outset, I’m not that fond of credits. Neither is Alan Smithee, a very famous director.

From a technical standpoint, they seem to be the must vulnerable element of any production, being constantly revised for additions, deletions, making logos bigger, smaller, “use the new one”, crazy name spellings and misspellings…. arrrrgghhhhh!!!!! The textbook illustration of Murphy’s Law.

The two henchmen in a feature from 3 years ago: Goon Juan and Goon Two. Not pronounced “2”, pronounced “Twhoa”… so no, Goon Juan is not “Goon One”. Yes, and that is how Raevn spells her name.

Locally, I work with an editor that insists on a writing credit if she edits an unscripted documentary, and shares it with the producer/director who has structured the story arc and written the narration. A couple of years ago, I helped fine-tune a narration, but it never occurred to me to seek any acknowledgement because its not anything I aspire to. AFAIK, that is an editor’s job.

Is there nothing from Charlie Kaufman on the subject? That would be entertaining, because although it was most definitely “written”, ADAPTATION sure felt spontaneous. So the next point is, if the actors are mostly improv-ing… ?

Writer/Editor
Sandy Clay (sometimes)

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Sareesh Sudhakaran] “The first is an encoding format, the second is a color model. Neither are color spaces. The color space you are probably working in is most likely Rec. 709, and there’s nothing you need to do about that. “

That’s a good environment description in a nutshell.

For the web, it might be confusing to introduce a term like sRGB, which is based on Rec709, but the reality is that the de facto streaming standard codec is H264, and you want as compact a file as possible, so the Y’CbCr codecs lend themselves to that right away. Both sRGB and Rec709 use the same primaries and aim for a similar white point, but that is not the whole question as I read it.

If part of your workflow is linking back to the original RED RDM files, or whether you are dealing with ProRes 422 Alexa source media, or 4:4:4, then you are already dealing with the original, non-transcoded, which is a good way to go. Beyond that, however, especially where Final Cut (up to 7) is concerned, then RGB does become an issue — however, unless you really need full bandwidth RGB channels for VFX work, its a waste of drive space and processing efficiency. Once your grade is locked, then a lot of 8-bit is perfectly acceptable for moving forward, especially for web. We do still run into scaling issues (0-1023 vs 64-940) depending on intermediate conversions, and FCP deals very poorly with that.

There are legends around Final Cut dropping to 8-bit for RGB processing, maybe someone else can confirm that… I just don’t use RGB unless forced into it with a dpx flow or dated Animation codec for a graphic that needs an alpha channel that someone has imbedded.

The reality is that that is not necessarily a bad thing as it is a trip wire for problems that will crop up in web compressions. Sorting out whether that’s important or not depends on your monitoring solution and the quality of the preview.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Daniel Christie] “I guess a similar effect could be achieved by caching to a fast SSD.”

Black Magic has some notes on the use of SSDs in their configuration guide relating to “burst rate” versus “sustained” data throughput. May work for very small files, but it doesn’t seem like a general solution.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

You’ve discovered the “outside node”, I presume? Or you flipped the inside/outside priority in the primary window?

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “Writing? Editing?”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5949.The_Conversations

Michael Ondaatje and Walter Murch discuss the topic.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “While I don’t want to bite the “are color bars needed” stick, I can say that audio tone requirements will be going away. Or at least the necessity for their presence will. “

One can only hope that this might work…. my main insecurity with accepting layback files is that without a tone reference or some kind of hard descriptor, it is sometimes very difficult to know what it is that just landed on the timeline –> -12, -20, full scale? Is it being turned around for a streaming upload or going to tape? All different.

I see color bars, use and implementation, as being less understand by the day.

As technical standards and requirements deteriorate in terms of deliverables, QC, and description, because “its digital” becomes a no-brainer mantra, the notion that all you have to ask for is “a Quicktime” is being imbedded in the managerial side. Just give us whatever, somebody will be able to make it work, even though they just laid off most those “somebody”s.

Not long ago, someone remodelled the “make me a quicktime” into “make me a sandwich”. I loved that one — so if someone is nonspecific, I just make them one of my favourites. Black Forest ham with Emmenthal on buttered caraway winnipeg rye, dijon mustard and leaf lettuce, not sprouts, a little bit of mayo. And, you know, if it works for me, it must be good for everybody… [winkie}

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Shane Ross] ” And the TD does the switching.”

In the olden times, before most of the alphabet was invented, we used to call this person a “switcher”.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

So, a couple of things.

First of all, if you go looking at the https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/2588311/davinci_resolve_8.2_supported_codec_list.pdf

you won’t find the Animation codec. It won’t appear on a lot of lists.

Its a bit long in the tooth as a “lossless” codec, its only adavantage now being that it is one of the few that can carry an alpha channel, but then there’s ProRes 444.

Resolve 9 can use alpha channels for matte purposes, but not 8.2. You will have to extract the alpha channel somehow and export that (exact length of the original clip) as a recognized codec and attach it to the source clip as an external matte. You cannot export an alpha out of Resolve.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.