Brooklyn, New York
It’s actually 7/23 today, but I want to make a entry for 7/22, so here it is.
I got up and jumped into re-calibrating the Matrox MXO so I could count on the color. As a bonus, I am able to down convert the HD so I can see it on my little JVC NTSC field monitor at the same time. After tweaks and tweaks, the color on these two reference monitors is close-ish, so i feel prepared to move forward with effects and color.
The monitors. On top right is Apple Cinema Display (ACD) and top left is the JVC field monitor, both running off the Matrox MXO.
Notice the difference in color between the (hopefully) accurate top monitors and the laptop screen on the bottom. $1000 well spent!
Now cue the DV Rebel book. I can’t say enough good things about it, however it’s pulled all the wind from my sails.
Here’s a bit of background. There’s offline editing and online editing. Offline means cutting the picture and sound to the point where it’s about right. Mock-ups are used where more complicated motion graphic effects are going to go and there’s some initial color correction. Online is finishing – mixing the sound (often with professional ears to help), finalizing all effects, turbo charging the color correction to get the look desired and then rendering out a master finished movie.
I wrapped my offline in the spring or thereabouts, I found a email to Jonathan who’s doing some 3D FX work for the project that I locked picture on March 21. I had thought that I had done some of the online work as well. I started going for sound lock, recording foley and generally getting ready for the effects work by giving myself a crash course in After Effects. I was also doing my usual editing and production to pay the bills, imagine that.
Fast forward to yesterday. The DV Rebel book has some sage advice about onlining in AE and not FCP to maintain the fidelity of the original footage. I’m trying to figure out if it applies to this project. If so it means a significant retooling effort. I am pretty fluent with FCP as one would expect after 6 years with it. If AE were an airplane and I were attempting a landing, I might not survive. I can fly it sort of but don’t expect me to pull any barnstorming just yet. So the prospect of moving the entire project to AE is a little scary, seeing as I am already 45 years old and DOG has taken up the last two. So I’ve got to think about this more, yes indeed. Specifically my HVX footage was shot direct to disk as Quicktime through FCP and as MXF files to P2 cards. Did FCP ding the image at recording time? Does the codec of my files (DVCPRO HD) get compressed on rendering in FCP?
If you are still reading this, congrats! I am sorting out the geeky issues here because I have to be clear when I post questions to the 4 or 5 on-line communities who deal with this esoterica. It should be clear by now that making a movie is more than having great ideas. It’s work! A frothy soup of diverse disciplines. Persistence. Madness even.
So that was yesterday and a little bit of today. I have framed the questions and now it’s time to find the answers. I just want to get back to the rotoscoping I started monday. With luck I’ll be there this afternoon.