February 2012
9 posts
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7 Tips for HD Color Correction and DSLR Color... →
Order of Operations
Remove artifacts and de-noise.
Balance your shots by adjusting BLACKS/MIDS/WHITES, SATURATION and WHITE BALANCE.
Relight within a shot using power windows or masks.
Add gradients, diffusion and other lens filters.
Add vignettes.
Grade your images.
Simulate a film stock of your choice.
Resize and sharpen.
Color Correction/Grading is my new favorite playground.
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Blockbuster Designs: The Creative Content that... →
Despite the details & the craft, I generally don’t like these “Hollywood” posters. :-/
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Hollywood by the Numbers →
Although [theaters] make up less than 20% of gross, their importance is disproportionate due to the signal they send other markets about the popularity of a movie. In other words, a movie must first be proven in a US theater before its value is priced by the other channels.
However, this essential theatrical release has changed in one fundamental way. Releases are now geared for larger initial...
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Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings →
Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments.
Check.
“Audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the...
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Avid Studio for iPad →
Easily access all the media on your device—or external devices via the iPad Camera Connection Kit. Capture video and photos from within the app. Enjoy the most precise control—from frame-by-frame trimming and flexible audio editing, to customizing motion graphics and picture-in-picture effects. And if you want to go even further, you can export your projects to Avid Studio for the PC and...
If You Build it (film infrastructure), Hollywood... →
No incentives means no Hollywood. It is literally that simple.
Unlike building factories, the film productions can move to wherever the industry people can go, and be creative.
Canadian-designed film incentives cause runaway production by attempting to erode the comparative advantages the U.S. has from its concentrated industry clusters in California and New York. These clusters are the...
“For what’s different to seem different, there has to be a...”
January 2012
12 posts
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WatchAdobe Photoshop + After Effects + Premiere = FTW
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Is The New York Film Academy Worth The Money? A... →
Why would you ever pay for a 35mm Panavision camera package – and then cut corners in your budget for what goes in front of the lens?? Remember: there’s a reason that Locations is the first department hired after accounting on major movies shooting in New York City.
Location is as hard as casting.
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The DI Difference of HAYWIRE →
michaelcioni:
First, you are seeing a high resolution camera only sampling about 75% of it’s pixels. That has an affect on the overall “precision” of the picture. Secondly, the anamorphic glass means we have to de-squeeze the picture and stretch it from 1.33 to (essentially) 1.77. Once we do that, we end up with a scope picture that literally takes square pixels from the sensor and makes them...
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THR's Producer Roundtable →
Kennedy: You never say no. You always give a choice. It’s actually a really interesting rule that I use all the time. It’s not going to do any good to say no if you don’t have a solution. I love the process of trying to figure it out: “OK, what am I going to offer up?” I don’t want to say, “You can’t do this.” If there’s a good...
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THR's Writer Roundtable →
Sorkin: My very first movie was A Few Good Men, which was an adaptation of my play. There was an executive on the movie who gave me a note: “If Tom Cruise and Demi Moore aren’t going to sleep with each other, why is Demi Moore a woman?” I said the obvious answer: Women have purposes other than to sleep with Tom Cruise.
That is hilarious.
Almodovar: When I’m not...
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THR's Animation Roundtable →
Gore Verbinski: The biggest difference for me was there are no gifts. In live action, you orchestrate chaos and you’re poised with a butterfly net, and you’re looking for some moment of truth — like something where the actor didn’t anticipate that reaction or something — and you catch it as it’s done. In animation, we have to fabricate that… It’s actually a more pure form...
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George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits →
If the fanboys had become like the studio to Lucas, then Lucas, to the fanboys, had become the man who breaks the bad news about adulthood.
But now we’re talking about science rather than emotions, and the Lucas magic is lost.
I still can’t forgive what Mr. Lucas did to recent Blu-ray release of classic Star Wars movies, but I still have high hopes for his creative endeavors like Red...
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Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users by Clay... →
There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.
All your viewers/readers are NOT customers.
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Interview: David Fincher Discusses Having Final... →
Final cut just means that, at a certain point, you have the ability to end the discussion. You have the ability to say: “I understand. I see what you are saying. I don’t think it is a better version of this. This is what I believe in. This is what I want to put my name on.” And there’s nothing that you can put in a contract that’s going to make people like it...
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
4 posts
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WatchI edited the latter half of the show in one day for next day turnaround, in order to launch the show during the New York Comedy Festival 2011 week. It was a bit of ironic, to me at least, having my name on the credit after all the other projects I’ve cut this year.
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Watch
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fxguide to Canon & Red announcements →
Great coverage from both events’ floors & explanations of why new Canon EOS C300 can only output 1080p and why people are calling new RED Scarlet an “Epic Fail” Haha.
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WatchAvid just announced Media Composer 6. COW article is very illuminating. Shane Ross gives it a thumbs up.
October 2011
5 posts
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Walter Murch at the Boston Supermeet
Walter Murch at the Boston Supermeet.
Editing for Walter Murch breaks down into 3 strands:
Plumbing – Which is the means of determining how to get here from there, i.e. how to get your media assets into the right bucket.
Writing – Editing being the final draft of the film, you deal with the more experiential elements.
Performing – The editor is creating. You’re on your feet like a musical...
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Currently Reading: Boomerang
“One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.”
Only a few can weave fascinating & funny financial tales like Michael Lewis does in his latest book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. I picked it up because 2008...
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South Park: the Year of Fan collection →
The big project that consumed my last summer. Edited on Final Cut Pro 7 and comped the interviews with the show footage as the background on After Effects CS 5. It was a trial by fire of learning the intricacies of green screen compositing on After Effects and more. (Now my next challenge is to comp moving cameras, haha…)
Worked many late hours due to rendering HD footages with layers of...
September 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
Hitchcock's PSYCHO subliminal themes by Rob Ager
I obviously missed many subliminal visual cues within this film, especially the wipers in the rain foreshadowing the slashing knife in the infamous shower scene!
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Interview with Sally Menke →
Very informative and engrossing interview with the late Sally Menke.
June 2011
4 posts
I've got 99 hollywood problems and editing ain't... →
When you find yourself saying things like, “I’m not creatively fulfilled,” or whenever you are feeling cocky enough to believe that you can do other people’s jobs better than they can. These sort of thoughts I like to refer to as “Hollywood Problems.”
I’m yet so far away from Hollywood. Haha…
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AFI Life Achievement Award for Morgan Freeman
I edited this series of red carpet videos of honoring the actor Morgan Freeman for AFI Life Achievement Award airing this Sunday on TV Land. Due to its tight deadline, I only had three days over the last weekend to work with minimal time to clean up the picture & the audio. Not my best edits, but this project easily tops as the most numerous celebrity appearances in a minute than...
6 Ways Film Directors Screw Editors →
“A scene does not exist in a vacuum. As the director it is your job to be aware of the scenes place within the film.” Amen.
May 2011
1 post
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WatchI used to be the Colbert Report mashup editor, but haven’t done one in a long time until this one was assigned to me. I wished for more materials related to this mashup when I started but it did come out better than I expected.
April 2011
11 posts
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Seeing History in ‘Mad Men’ →
The best show on TV, period. I aspire to work on a TV show as great as this in my life time.
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The Mad Men Guide to Changing the World with Words →
“By excluding the wrong people, you make the experience more precious for the right people. No, it’s not always pretty, but that’s the way we humans work.” Amen.
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WatchThe last finished piece for 2011 TV Land Awards red carpet videos. Originally the later part of the Cosby Show red carpet video, but the subject warranted itself to be its own video.
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WatchThird finished piece for 2011 TV Land Awards red carpet videos. Too bad Mr. Cosby himself declined to be interviewed on the red carpet while other cast members represented in this video.
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WatchCompilation of Jeff Ross’ funniest moments from the previous Roasts. Nothing fancy, but I’ll remember this segment with the fond memories of juggling so many notes from the higher-ups & the talent side.
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WatchSecond finished piece for 2011 TV Land Awards red carpet videos. Nothing makes an editor happy more than finding right shots-sound bites, to propel the main story forward to end at the right note. (Having veteran TV personalities definitely helps, of course) Because of the sheer number of people appearing in the video, I had to create the lower 3rd because the graphic department was too busy...
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WatchThis is one of the three 2011 TV Land Awards red carpet videos I was tasked to deliver this week. It took me two days to sort through the hours of material from 4 different cameras and I had to finish one of them by end of Wednesday. Very fast edit-once I found the spine of the subject, few audio level adjustments & quick color corrections to match the shots, all done within FCP 7. It was...
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Final Cut Pro X Preview thoughts by Larry Jordan →
“This presentation was almost exactly the same one that I saw six weeks ago in Cupertino… While the slide show was identical to the February meeting, the demo was not.”
“However, I was told later that the build that was demoed was the same build that was shown in February – and that the application has moved significantly forward since that time.”
As a long...
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Apple Final Cut Studio X @ Supermeet
I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t record & publish this keynote presentation on their video podcast, but these will do. Seeing is believing!
Blogging, take 2
After long hiatus, I decided to throw my hat back into the blogging game. After years of using Blogger service, I was planning to roll my own Wordpress blog on my own site, but tumblr became very attractive platform in recent days to restart my blogging effort.
I stopped blogging for long time because I was gainfully employed for number of years in an international media conglomerate, aka Viacom,...