It’s hard to believe Stan Winston has left us for the great VFX studio in the sky. What I always loved about his work was the practical element. He created models, masks, and animatronics you could touch, not merely pixels glowing brightly on an LCD display.
If you’ve seen Aliens you know what I mean about models creating the reality. Compare that with the final scene in Species when pure VFX doesn’t really work. ILM may have perfected the elimination of models in Pirates but for me foam latex will always trump the pixel.
One of my side projects is researching the relationships and work experience between film Directors, Editors, and their Assistants. Unfortunately, IMDb (and IMDb Pro) doesn’t have any reporting or data extraction functions to make this easy - everything is a time consuming and manual process.
After much digging on Google I discovered an accurate search phrase and found a few resources. IMDb doesn’t have its own API although developers have found a way around this using HTTP requests. Thanks to Martyr2 at Yahoo Answers.
http://www.imdb.com/interfaces - imdb does provide interfaces for several platforms. These are often in the form of easily parsable text files. Not the ideal solution, but it can work.
Our project is shot in DV PAL which has a frame size of 720×576. However, we’re using the footage in anamorphic aspect ratio and discovering that exporting to other formats has interesting side effects.
FCP handles the anamorphic aspect ratio as easily as clicking a checkbox. When exporting a QuickTime movie it will always have a frame size of 720×576 (the native resolution). If you want to create a QT Movie for viewing in anamorphic (1024×576 display size) the footage must be run through Compressor (or QuickTime Conversion) and specify the larger size. It’s not automatically done for you.
The business of handling anamorphic footage is becoming a problem for our visual effects shots. Some artists request TIFF sequences rather than QuickTime Movies and unfortunately TIFF export will render the image in anamorphic’s 1024×576 frame size which produces unwanted artifacts when scaled back down to 720×576.
After some experimentation I discovered the way to force a TIFF export to the native size is unchecking the Anamorphic setting on the clip. Strangely, this produces an image of 768×576 rather than the desired 720×576. Is this OK? I’m waiting for my VFX Supervisor to tell me.
A related bug with TIFF export is the handling of file names. Although Apple warns against the use of special characters in clip file names (i.e.: /, ?, *, etc.) it does nothing to stop you from using them. I haven’t encountered any issues with forward slashes until I began exporting TIFFs. These special characters must be removed during the TIFF export process but QuickTime Movie files are exported without error.
Although sites like YouTube have democratized filmmaking, it doesn’t mean anyone can make good content. All the fancy tools in the world don’t matter if you’re missing creativity and the aptitude of using those tools.
This video demonstrates how you can re-create the infamous D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach with a few people, compositing software, and talent.
blog/canon_xl2.jpgHere’s a consolidated list of hardware, software, and suggestions on low-budget filmmaking. The key word here is low-cost so the gear isn’t the best or the flashiest but if you don’t have a budget, well then, this will need to do.
Our project is shot in DV PAL which has a frame size of 720×576. However, we’re using the footage in anamorphic aspect ratio and discovering that exporting to other formats has interesting side effects.