tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42163773375777572432024-03-05T08:13:25.931-08:00High Definition and High Resolution Motion ImagingDeveloping concepts on a new mediumTerry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comBlogger96125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-91476330948732634772014-07-27T05:00:00.003-07:002014-07-27T05:08:10.956-07:00Cognitive Capitalism and Cognitive Aesthetics<style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrPFWqNCliLddHtlKtDqjq62PFGn2uSSjg_wsfwhwzMKlu1Qzeif4wegFjSRRX5YpB0ZqVPZq5tkQY2bTZMBW27MJLPrlmfU34043T-ib8f3IVGaR9UysZAMc3rkMcKs6AIKTnyU-KGd9_/s1600/fingerprintearth+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrPFWqNCliLddHtlKtDqjq62PFGn2uSSjg_wsfwhwzMKlu1Qzeif4wegFjSRRX5YpB0ZqVPZq5tkQY2bTZMBW27MJLPrlmfU34043T-ib8f3IVGaR9UysZAMc3rkMcKs6AIKTnyU-KGd9_/s1600/fingerprintearth+copy.jpg" height="165" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The first thing one has to ask when
confronted with the tenants of cognitive capitalism is: can any amount of
theorizing be useful when the underpinnings of those tenants are that
theorization itself is now outmoded?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">This is an apparently overly contentious
question if the reader is brought up or conditioned by the idea that the mind
is the superior tool for examining reality and the minds primary functionality
is the use of logic. But from my gender based position, at least half of the
human race seems to function with logic balanced by something intangible called
intuition. Indeed if one judged logic by its results then absurd situations,
like the Arab/Israeli situation do not speak of the success of logical thought
and, the apparent intangibility of intuition, the questioning of whether it
exists or not, can be applied to the idea of logic itself.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In short Cognitive Capitalism suggests that
we are in the third stage of late capitalism, that the assembly of goods to
produce wealth is an outmoded concept, that in fact true wealth lie in the
assembly of knowledge – or rather the control of the flow of information. That
billions of dollars follow the flow of information exchange – that the
mercantile capitalist is as ever, the middle man. There is an obvious truth to
this, but identifying the obvious is not that useful except for filling up
conferences with academics eager to learn and enjoy new language based
obfuscations of the ordinary in a decadent and decaying show of strength of the
class that seeks to render power unto itself.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There have been recent gestures in academia
to take the role of the academic and change it from passive/aggressive hermit
to active engaged participant. From my position this is to be applauded. But
simply because the idea of the academic is to articulate meaning for the rest
of society no longer means that power and influence should be the end game of
the academic. We all need a career and we all need income – but not at the
expense of the poor.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So it would seem that the project to
develop a set of theories and positions around a post-Fordist, post-Marxist
view of the world is underway, but what of the development of the idea of
aesthetics in this shiny new age of academic relief and joy to be alive? To
establish this study we would have to do exactly what the more politically
motivated have done which is to look at what Cognitive Neuroscience says about
our state, what the human project is and therefore what the context of the
developments of the project of the artist within this mime-soup landscape is.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I jokingly referred to all of this as a
mime-soup: according to materialist archeological and neuro-scientific studies
we came out of the trees two million years ago, we stood up and ran; we then developed
mimetic memory to leap across the boundaries of episodic memory and its simple
scripting of behaviours; we told eachother what we knew and then developed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prosody </i>(a simply singsong exchange)
which gutteralised into staccato communications from which language developed;
we then told eachother mythic stories to narratavise our development and
eventually, in the theoretic age, some of us took power by jargonizing language
so that only we would know what to do and say in specific situations – and this
gave those of us that did it a very good life-style.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">You the scholastics, like the priests and
the warriors, enabled the kings, despots and ruble billionaires to take control
of the governance of the world whilst taking a cut of the action. Logic and
theorizing took the world to it’s current state – topes at the vliff edge of
the destruction of the world. As the Cognitive Neuroscientists propose, in
parallel, the human project was to take all knowledge and excise it from the
human brain and to place it in the environment – mimetic dance, body paint into
cave painting, festishised locations in the environment, the constructed Stonehenges,
the invention of inscription and writing - papyrus scrolls, palimpsests, books,
computers – and today after a 10,000 year velocitised development we have
placed all knowledge into the immaterial – into data.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So the artists innovate new ideas embodied
within artefacts, which feed into galleries museums and is interpreted by
scholars, critics and curators – the cognitive distributive networks thus
explaining the prevalence of museums and galleries supplanting churches and
cathedrals as a place to go to be awed – to share the mimes of the incoming
paradigm – hence my jokey description: A mime soup.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">What is art in the age of the cognitively
enabled? Another commodity – this time aesthetic and immaterial – within which
the currency of value is exchanged.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Is it possible to de-fetishize contemporary
art? No. Are there any other strategies to give art or the human behavior which
proposes the ideal as opposed to the deal? Only if the act or function of art
changes. So how do we change it? I would argue that simply recognising the form
of its transmission, such as this article, is not enough – even though I
believe form should follow function. Things are too loaded and too complex for
simple solutions.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">What we have to do is propagate the
understanding – share it in simple words rather than academic tracts which
obfuscate meaning in grand constructions of difficult words and sentences - that
exchange of ideas in a simple fashion would then allow art and artists to
become something else, to develop new cognitive behaviours. One possibility is
that the age of Cognition is coming to an end. To even identify it is to
announce its demise. The concept of Cognition suggests in-formation and
out-formation. Cognition is a western ideal of profound 100 per cent input 100
per cent output, that utilises intellectual capacity to churn through
information to render understanding. But we need over-standing as much as
in-standing.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The top sustainable running speed of a
human is 24 miles per hour which when transformed into 20<sup>th</sup> century
mechanical cognition/rendition is 24 frames per second film. But biologists
tell us that the eye when sweeping between point a and point b is not a clean
graceful sweep it is in fact a staccato frame grab of the world, which when
analysed provokes the idea that reality is split into about 3.6 million
sections or chronons per second (average saccade angle change rate). The
Buddhists say actually, there are not 3.6 but 48 million segmentations per
second – because the Buddha had counted these (always dead pan humour with
Buddhism). Whichever figure turns out to be right, it would appear that human
consciousness is an amalgam of many moments and that cognition is a much later
response to witnessing reality’s flow/ What if we could un-couple our reading
of experience from our mental abilities and liaise with our sensorial
experience?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">That is the project for artists at the
moment – our sensorial apprehension of reality could also be velocitised if we
stop using the normal analytical filters. These are very good at bringing
experience into the mental realm of experience, but now that we have some
theories about what-it-is-that-we-are and how this comprehension may affect
life-as-it-is-lived so that we have a position that over-stands rather than
understands what is happening between the viewer and the artist, then we now
have a way forward in an age that is post the age of cognitive-capitalism.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Further reading: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Cognitive_Capitalism">http://p2pfoundation.net/Cognitive_Capitalism</a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.academia.edu/7784104/Introduction_The_Early_and_Late_Stages_of_Cognitive_Capitalism)">https://www.academia.edu/7784104/Introduction_The_Early_and_Late_Stages_of_Cognitive_Capitalism)</a></span></div>
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Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-90966239690888548332014-07-12T13:02:00.002-07:002014-07-12T13:02:47.479-07:00Musings on the Nature of Attention, Images and the Advent of the Digital
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRRmrFWSCNDudNyf5_e7oqrjqMHXDvC_IugUVRaqfUj5gOE6pbfhI08EPWyU444Sy8KGPuELMhZcsjHxXJMv8VJBWezQiRxfVZfjKL75zzlOWO5ifhc_HPqYFI5T9Ddj2VeO_zphd5LMsm/s1600/attention.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRRmrFWSCNDudNyf5_e7oqrjqMHXDvC_IugUVRaqfUj5gOE6pbfhI08EPWyU444Sy8KGPuELMhZcsjHxXJMv8VJBWezQiRxfVZfjKL75zzlOWO5ifhc_HPqYFI5T9Ddj2VeO_zphd5LMsm/s1600/attention.jpg" height="145" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">THE BLACK WHOLE</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Images are how we tell eachother what’s
inside of us.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Like a dream the image can represent a
detail or the whole – which of those it is, is open to interpretation.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">What’s inside of us as image is the sum
total – or variously a small detail – of what we know about the world. It is
relative to our conceptual constructional capabilities and what we are focused
on at the time. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Sometimes like radio, within the flow of
images we pick up ideas and our internal representation system creates an image
for us to review the idea we’ve encountered. Sometimes a specific image (often
made by an artist, designer or architect) communicates a new idea that we
experience with a degree of excitement: Fashions are the eddies and surface currents
of this exchange. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Fascination is the state a non-digitally
enabled person, or a non-velocitised person, experiences when the flow is
simply, ‘The Flow’. When a person has negotiated the 360 stream of images, as
with a swimmer who has come to terms with the coldness of the water they are in
and it no longer bothers them, swimming within the flow is the ability gained
by acceptance of temperature and soon the temperature becomes not only
negotiable, but forgettable as a factor.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">New ideas are formed from the artists ceaseless
enquiry into the nature of things. Occasionally there is no enquiry at all –
simply an insight revealed into the nature of what is coming, through an image
in human consciousness.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Moving and still images perform different
tasks in human consciousness. Still images – idee fixee – are apposite and
definitive reflections of adoptable and attractive concepts. The caught and
stolen glance, the desirable car, the palm tree against the blue sky
representing freedom and release, the prison bars that indicate incarceration.
These are ideas of yearning – even the last which is about a yearning not to be
limited, which is where its power lies. Images or ideas like this reflect species
concepts that everyone aspires to or are inspired by. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Aspire, Inspire, Expire – all are developed
from the root word Spire (spi/ray in Latin pronunciation) which means breath.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Potent Iconic images, like a crucifixion
are redolent of more than desire. They are of species intent: martyrdom for
those that are affected by the image to benefit from, the deep spiritual smile
that always says there is more to know and so leads the viewer on to want to know
whatever that smile denotes; the images of people en masse in tears that tell
us this is wrong – or right.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Moving Images perturbate intention, They
utlise the iconic functionality of still images in an onward flow from before
and after the iconic moment. These shift us into and through the moment of most
potent affectation. They functionalise the still iconostasis of the deep idea
and render it into movement. </span><span class="st"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The </span></span><em><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">definition</span></em><span class="st"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> of
an </span></span><em><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">iconostasis</span></em><span class="st"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> is
a screen decorated with icons that divides the sanctuary of a church from other
areas. </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
is the wall of images that is found in very traditional churches to separate
the priests from the lay community. It is the divide which those that engaged
in theoretical behavior – the naming and categorizing of ideas and things
create power for themselves. They know and at a price they will tell us who do
not know. But the priests are gone. We are sufficiently velocitised to change
the rules of the language based game. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">An
Iconostasis was a dividing wall of images – which are themselves insubstantial
and not a wall at all. They can be moved through at speed.</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The theories of the moving image – not
those of film theorists who seek a relationship between their local (in time)
meaning and the performatory qualities of the content and form of moving images
in a material sense<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- but those theories
of the highest practitioners of movement and the frame can speak to us about
the relational function of the moving image. By relational, in this sense I
mean how the stutter of the image says something to us different from the
statically viewed image. Our eyes saccade when we sweep our gaze across a
scene. They fix points like photographs many times a second as they weep yet we
perceive this a flowing gaze.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Investigative Cinematographers (like Conrad
Hall who is now deceased) know that each frame within any shot should be of
photographic quality. If a camera pans across a scene, even the dead space
between the subjects of the front and the end of the shot, should be of
photographic quality – meaning each frame should be capable of being viewed as
a photograph – even if abstract it should be a good abstract, not an unconsidered
one. Cartier Bresson was more prosaic. His ‘definitive moment’ was simply the
editorially precise moment which said most about an event. A skill to be
attained by photographers is clearly obtaining the moment which does this.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Most cinematographers do not know the
photographic moment within cinema. In working with moving images one is simply
practicing seeing at 24 frames per second. The only way you can do that is let
go into the act and trust that your biology is up to the task. Thankfully it is
up to a task far more demanding than that. The eye can detect one photon,
certain Buddhists maintain that consciousness can detect one chronon of time.
That the human species – if not all sentient witnessing creatures - being
composed of biological components made from the matter of time and space will
always be enabled to detect the qualities that go towards their construction.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">24 frames per
second or 24 miles per hour – the first is our preferred frame rate for
receiving a series of images to communicate information within this period of our
development, the second our top speed whilst running. The first is Perceptually/biologically
cognate and also velocitised through eye motion with a maximum saccade of many
divisions of a second. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“The peak angular speed of the eye during a saccade reaches
up to 900°/s in humans; in some monkeys, peak speed can reach 1000°/s. Saccades
to an unexpected stimulus normally take about 200 milliseconds (ms) to
initiate, and then last from about 20–200 ms, depending on their amplitude
(20–30 ms is typical in language reading). Under certain laboratory
circumstances, the latency of, or reaction time to, saccade production can be
cut nearly in half (express saccades). These saccades are generated by a
neuronal mechanism that bypasses time-consuming circuits and activates the eye
muscles more directly”.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Our running speed
is at least 3600 times slower than our attentive gaze when spliced up by the
saccade – so in effect this may be 3,600,000 times slower at it’s greatest
division. Buddhists when asked about the duration of the chronon (the smallest
fragment of time) say the Buddha said it was a 48 millionth of a second - -when
asked how he knew this his monks said ‘he counted the parts’.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So at this point
in our evolution we are being asked to discern the nature of information at
much higher speeds that we’ve experienced until this moment – but from the
biology it would seem we have already the built-in equipment necessary to
absorb that information – but perhaps not read it through being armed with
practice derived from language, writing or reading. Each of these behaviors filters
information through our interpretative centres which require time for
processing for use by higher brain finctions. The Tiger that approaches at 24
frames per second was understandable and interpretable – the approaching cue or
clue that relates to some expressed desire or preference within a world which
is information enabled directly to target YOU, is not interpretable at millionths
per second. It is not interpretable, but it is absorbable to the deeper mind. ‘Absorbable’
in the sense that we can judge the nature of the flow of images and act
appropriately. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So within the rapidity of the flow of
images of the 21<sup>st</sup> century we are enabled to see these one by one –
despite the fear of latter 20<sup>th</sup> century theoreticians such as
Baudrillard, Virillio et al that the image would finally have no meaning at all
– we can distinguish beneath operative consciousness what each image means and
does to and for us because our equipment, our biology is set up to perceive
meaning without end.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">How can this last statement be
substantiated? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Evolutionists surmise that we evolve by
exploit our ability to adapt – we humans above all animals – and it is because
we are an open and not a closed system, this itself is the proof. We know we
learn biologically – and our minds conceptualise reality based upon our ability
to evolve. It’s a virtuous circle, a functionality which all animals have.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Most of the ideas that flow through species
consciousness are relevant to the temporary eddies that play out for each
nation or race. Even the mention of race is problematic because the concept can
be used politically, but actually, in real terms, humans can split up and
categorized into races – just like plants and animals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Species ideas are deeper, more paradigmatic
in either being the rails that guide the train, or points that control the
switches that guide the train into new landscapes. Sometimes ideas deliver us
from metaphor and instead of travelling through a landscape we come up above it
to take in the whole. Given that that idea was expressed in language – it’s a
metaphor – but one can leap off the idea into meaning outside of metaphor,
providing we have experience in the ability to conceptualise outside of
language. If you understand this statement then you can utilize this ability.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So like this paper that you are reading,
all that is perceived is fed through the filter of consciousness which itself
has a set of constructs governing its operation. If you use text you’re
operating through the theoretic centre: the centre of language and dialogue and
so as one resides there we often experience the world as an inner interpretive
dialogue. Art and events in the World are to be interpreted to deliver meaning
and significance to the perceiver. But things have moved along in terms of
their velocity such that single standard acts of interpretation do not alone
deliver a useful grasp of what is happening. Now we need engage a higher
function that can operate at a velocity greater than biological function.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">To interpret you need filter what is
perceived through developed evolutionary functionality: the senses and the
common sense to all the other senses: mind. Mind itself is constructed of a set
of functionalities such as discrimination, intellect, discernment, analytical
powers and many more as yet too subtle to have been described separately. So
far Vedantic Philosophy has made the best study of the separate elements of
mind in its pursuit of the suspension of the interpretive mind, though certain
forms of Buddhism have identified the conundrums of the intellect sufficient to
create humour around the thinking brain or mind. Each of these separate
functionalities developed over time to makes sense of a world by a sentient
creature moving at most at 24 miles per hour. Now not only do we move very much
faster (planes trains and automobiles) but the image flow itself is velocitised
so that we may be standing still but the image flow is rapid (and any combination
thereof).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The functionality of the moving image
itself is developing so that we have higher frame rates of capture and display
– no longer is a film shot at 24 frames per second and played back at that rate
in cinema (significant that our top biological speed is 24 miles per hour which
is an inverse multiple - <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">roughly 3600
times</b> - slower than the frame rate we like to view images within – 24 times
per second). Instead a 200 frame rate of capture can be shown at 200 frames –
or 48 fps capture can be seen at 48 fps delivery. There are now shorter gaps
where there is no image at all. But we’re also developing higher dynamic range
of the image and also higher resolutions. People talk about the better pixel
–the one that contains not just a 15 variations of the colour orange – but 1000.
To our physiological construct there’s a point at which the computational world
is offering us more differentials than can mean anything to us - apparently.
Everything seems to be moving out of our current scale.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">We have constructed touch based interfaces
(the typewriter, the touch screen platform) and also – latterly – environmental
touch based interfaces – such as plants that can now control computer
interactions (and plant based energy supply and also computation). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Our whole sensorium must interface with
things that manipulate the world. Are we therefore lacking because we came from
the trees? No. We used to be ‘at one with plants’ as we moved through them now
we are again having to learn that at-one-ness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Inherent in our sentient design is the
ability to stand each of our intellectual and biological interpretational functionalities
back and allow non-intellectual abilities to take over in complete confidence.
When you drive the car you do not interpret what gear to go into, you have
consigned that ability to below surface consciousness. We are capable of
driving a spacecraft at over 20,000 miles per hour. Providing the context
speaks of the speed (large planets pass slowly past us at massive
accelerations) then we cope. But we also have the functionality to move rapidly
and process rapidly as long as we do not move through interpretable
functionality which of course involves the 24 miles per hour functionality of
the common-sense-mind which unites the various senses. Instead we gaze at
leisure and grasp at leisure what the rapidity of information is telling us
because we have begun to operate the functions that are waking up in us to deal
with speed. An article like this is the begining of the theory of
velocitisation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It’s the same with rapid evolution of
interface and also – importantly – reading the world that is, making sense of
the world at high velocity. Taking it to its extreme, when you’re viewing at
the speed of light, you become the information you have been witnessed to - you
and it are the same.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Our physicists are telling us that
information is the base quality of the construction of the universe.
Information sits at the boundary of every black hole and is NOT annihilated
within the black hole. It is preserved and a function of the annihilation
process at the centre to retain information at the perimeter. The latest
cosmological donut of thought about the shape of the universe is that what we
see is not what is. Out experience of the perimeter of information of the
universe as a whole – this 3D (plus time), 23 mile per hour reality – is us as 4D
- 6D sentient creatures reading the information back into the material 3D state.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Whatever went in to a black hole can be
reconstructed from that trace element of its passing – it is therefore a Black
Whole.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Just like us.</span></div>
Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-77487053316829897702014-05-17T03:03:00.003-07:002014-05-17T03:03:27.274-07:00Bendy FuturesThere are a series of posts you can access by me for 2014 here: <a href="http://www.cmiresearch.org.uk/blog">http://www.cmiresearch.org.uk/blog</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2ocwqxOry1Uj2Xrr2qAeS-MwFEKRiqVmhuZwE1q26QUNLitiJMp9NwSl44dakEQu_cD1jIX1Nj-P6f6-_AIMZUIKd2r9KkZxF5QGg8HRyYoqjIp9yYXlAG0W5WG0KbVsOZ4mbkmhmMYtM/s1600/AppleBracelt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2ocwqxOry1Uj2Xrr2qAeS-MwFEKRiqVmhuZwE1q26QUNLitiJMp9NwSl44dakEQu_cD1jIX1Nj-P6f6-_AIMZUIKd2r9KkZxF5QGg8HRyYoqjIp9yYXlAG0W5WG0KbVsOZ4mbkmhmMYtM/s1600/AppleBracelt.jpg" height="194" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
If bendy display materials now allow designers to finally now go where
Apple and their copyists have been waiting for, then moving images on
surfaces begin a different stage of development of the human use of
moving images per-se.<br /> <br /> The sacred and sanctified space of the
cinema/church begins to wither - not for the form of entertainment that
has sustained it for years - the story - but more as a site of iconic
cognitive distribution, a place where anyone can keep up with ideas
developed and distributed within the current paradigm. So the place
where ideas of the developing paradigm are developed and distributed
must also change.<br /> <br /> The age of technical developments such image
skins for buildings (a 30 story wood skyscraper - in appearance at
least?), invisible tanks and destroyers (camera at the front daylight
display at the back – and on every side of the object you wish to make
invisible) and wearable imaging approaches at speed. Hot on the tail of
recently distributed versions of the accoutrements written about in
scf-fi stories of the twentieth century (like the wrist communicator)
are much more serious developments: transport beams, warp engines based
upon Hawking Drives, hyperspace leaps - it's all coming very shortly -
so it's time we upgraded our imaginations and stopped being so startled
by it all.<br /> <br /> In terms of continuing to theorise the production
and display of moving images - we must first remember that 'to theorise'
is perhaps within the passing paradigm. <br /><span></span><br /><span></span>
The theoretic age arose with a late form of language development, is
language therefore based, bureaucratically organised (catalogued and
indexed) and this behaviour was developed after the rise of prosody
around 500,000 years ago, language 150,000 years ago, to grasp power by
shamans and militarists around 10,000 BC. To be able to barter a
connection between the common person and god, or to deliver a chief a
military victory - delivered a initially power followed by a higher
tribal position and therefore lifestyle to the proponent. No need to
hunt or gather if you can tell people it’ll cost them a months rations
to speak to god. So modern academia also grasps power to deliver
lifestyle and is fundamentally in bed with power. If an academician
rocks the boat they are cast out and liberated from a priveleged
lifestyle – which to provide a smoke screen for, they moan an awful lot
about how much work we have to do. Tell that to a starving person from
the third world – or an Al Quaeda representative who wants to behead
you, because you're part of oppressing their people.<br /><span></span><br /><span></span>
So we have a duty to go beyond the theoretic to help reveal and
articulate the answers that everyone is feeling in their bones. The
corporations can't do it, the politicians certainly aren’t going to do
it and it's fundamentally against our own interest when looked at from
the point of view of the old paradigm. When looked at from the point of
view of the new paradigm it is an absolute necessity to try to
understand what is going on – but t deliver than in a much more
intelligent way than loading sentence with references and citations. We
must begin to think for ourselves.<br /><span></span><br /><span></span>
That’s what the Centre for Moving Images is about – that’s why we
have an interest in the developing technical parameters of the moving
image, it’s history rediscovered and retold, it’s politics, its
aesthetics, it’s site of display – all of that constitutes a gestalt
view, rather than taking the narrow theoretic confines that conspire to
obscure the real issues within the developing moving image paradigm. So
our project is that we’re looking at the world through the lens of
moving image media to discover new knowledge.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-79474016427620387172014-01-02T08:11:00.002-08:002014-01-02T08:15:32.421-08:00High Definition in 2014<style>
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</style><span lang="EN-US">2013 was an eventful year, not only in
terms of the way moving image capture has developed, but also in terms of
opening a new research center in Cinematography at the University of the West
of England. During the year 3D was superseded by 4k as the key buzz phrase –
not that 3D has gone anywhere, in fact with Gravity, in my opinion 3D has come
to something, finally. What I mean by this is that in this film the camera
moves around its subject and the extra level of depth generated by 3D has added
something to the experience.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">With 4k, cinematographers have been working
at that resolution with the Red One since 2008 – though when a term like 4k is
used, arguments break out about what that means – can a compressed signal ever
really represent it’s supposed resolution, when there are so many factors that
represent the true resolution? One of my earlier artworks uses this technology
but the issue with 4k has been how we display the actual image for some while,
but all key manufacturers now make 4k displays and also, now, the manufacture
of the domestic TV screen is getting closer and closer to the quality of the professional
display – so prices are coming down. I intend that the new research centre buys
a 4k display in early in 2014 so that we can then display what we capture. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSEL.html">http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSEL.html</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Earlier this year in collaboration with
University of Bristol and BBC Research and Development I was privileged to lead
several shoots in Higher Dynamic Range which had the intention of being
displayed in HDR as well – this was a world’s first and because of that the
code is still being written though we can display a basic edit of the piece at
8bit with one track spread across the dynamic range of the Dolby 6000 nit
screen. In the eye brain system we have around 14.5 orders of magnitude of
response which at any one time we use 5 orders of that scale - so in going into
a starlit environment we slide down to the bottom of the14.5 order scale and on
entering a desert landscape in bright sun, we slide those 5 orders of
sensitivity up that scale to the top – thus keeping the highlights exposed
properly for viewing. In this scale 1 order of magnitude is vast. So the
difference between the eye brain system and what is displayed is immense. The
screen you are viewing at best displays 2 – 3 orders of magnitude and the HDR
screen we are capturing images for at University of Bristol is 5 orders – the
same as the eye brain pathway. Using the term orders of magnitude means that
the scale is not just arithmetic, but geometric – the highest values of the
scale are millions of times that of the bottom of the scale. The eye/brain
system is truly magnificent in its capacity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Later in 2014 we expect to have combined
the 2 tracks we shot into a truer form of HDR. The most surprising – and
disturbing element of the shoot was in learning that 100 years of
cinematographic law had to be turned on its head: In exposing for 6 stops of
latitude between the two exposures I could only monitor the highest exposure
which was 3 stops above the correct exposure, in the knowledge that the true
exposure was set in virtual space and as with film I had to have ‘faith’ that
the end image would be exposed properly. One track recorded 3 stops over, one
track recorded 3 stops under – therefore I had to knowingly gather an
overexposed image in the hope that somehow the two could be combined and a
decent image delivered. When we finally had the code written for the recombination
I was relieved to find that it had worked. It left me knowing how we’d achieved
the end result, but emotionally I didn’t know how it could be ok when my
experience was of searing over-exposure. Interesting.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Over the year I set about the process of
setting up a research centre that meant presenting to various academic research
committees and with luck by April 2014 we shall be authorized to proceed.
Meanwhile I began the process of attaching visiting professors and the first
was Emeritus Professor Chris Meigh Andrews of Central Lancashire. Chris is a
professor of electronic and digital art and adds his weight towards
investigating the histories that have been written on the subject (including
his own second edition of ‘A History of Video Art’) plus an investigation of
where we are and where we’re going during the advent of the digital. For my own
summation of that issue you can read a short paper on the Future of the Moving
Image and how it will affect the production of Art at this URL: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="https://www.academia.edu/3807490/The_Future_of_the_Moving_Image">https://www.academia.edu/3807490/The_Future_of_the_Moving_Image</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">On another issue, previously, Arts and
Humanities subjects have utilized the theorization of a subject through various
strategies, such as dialectics, structuralist analysis, semiology and so on.
But now there is a sense within academia that though these have been useful
tools, they are no longer fit for task, due to the constant and rapidly
changing landscape caused by the introduction of the digital era. In the UK,
the Arts and Humanities Research Council has called for new ways of evaluating
subject areas and many researchers have wholeheartedly embraced empirical
principles, a consequence of which is to have embraced cognitive neuroscience
as a primary route for the use of eye tracking devices, fmri scanners and then
combining testing with social science practices of evaluating the data or
‘evidence’. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">One of the issues with this practice is
that truth at best is implied – that a hypothesis is set up, an experimental
test administered and if the cards fall right then the implied truth of the
hypothesis is ‘proved’. It can be argued that deep within the ideological
position taken by empiricism is in a fact a gnosticism argued by many cognitive
neuroscientists, that there is a grand human project to excise it’s entire
knowledge into exograms – or sites of memory outside the person (a book, a
computer, a map, hierloglyphs etc) - and it follows that the final
manifestation of this project is exporting all knowledge into data. A final
outcome of this act is as yet un-theorised by cognitive neuroscientists but I
have proposed the concept of velocitisation to help describe acts on the
internet that express behaviours that speak of human change. With a simple
gesture like the Harlem Shake, one person gestures mimetically that everyone
should ‘do their own thing’ and later in the piece, all then gesture
mimetically that difference. What this describes is a positive response to
change, rather than a dystopian response. But there is not theoretical position
on this behavior and the social sciences have only just begun to take up the
challenge. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Enter Complexity Theory, born of
mathematics and physics and the human response to the multifarious comprehension
of complex behaviours. Complexity theory seeks to theorise the complex and has
a set of strategies to deal with this apparent limitlessness, by limiting it’s
possibilities through rules drawn for the complexity that has been witnessed. Of
course what seems limitless is actually limited and so this is a mathematics
ntended to pick up at the point at which human systems given up on numbering
and categorizing. It is the point at which we might say ‘I saw many starlings
in a murmuration and they seemed to act together as they flew’ or that a
weather system is too complicated to describe but that it worked through a
series of states that derived from prior states – this is where we know that a
system is complex and may do one of several things and science does not yet
know which way it might go and possibly that we will never be able to predict
its exact outcome.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So since the 1940’s when Illya Progogene
began thinking about complexity, we now theorise that a system can be ‘complicated’
but is not necessarily to be described as ‘complex’, where complex does mean
complicated but can go one stage further by being able to enter new states,
through ‘emergence’. A car engine is complicated but will only remain as such.
A storm is both complicated in terms of the many factors that come together to
form it, but it is ‘complex’ because several other states may emerge – a
hurricane for instance. So complexity is about richness – chaos is no longer being
‘chaotic’ because in that chaos lay a set of variables which can result in
ordered states it can become also then become further ordered, or disordered. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But the main point here is that what seems
too much for the human system to ‘count’, but can now be mathematically modeled
and therefore described – at least in some part. Before we described something
as having a number too large to be counted – now we can say we no longer need
to number something in its description – suffice it to say that it is now to be
considered as complex and can act in different ways that could be one of the
following. This too has to have an impact on human consciousness with regard
the introduction of different frame rates, dynamic ranges and resolutions – right
now the young express a preference for higher frame rates but the old prefer
slower frame rates. Why is this? (is it related to higher frame rates in
computer games?) What does this preference say about human evolution? Is it
temporary or indicative of eye brain development? And so on and so forth…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So when the research centre begins its
activity we will look as much toward future technologies as towards the past (a
critical issue will be the re-investigation of how past histories have been
told and hat they have included as ‘important’ in the telling). We will look at
technology as much as at the human system that utilizes that technology, we
will take account of the biology of the human system – the equipment that each
human is endowed with – and we will also look at the cultural systems that
encompass the individual that help create meaning and significance in the
production and consumption of moving images. We will look at the cognitive
systems employed by human species, and the situation the individual finds him
or herself in, with regard the cognitive distribution of information.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-50504737758061188692013-07-30T01:37:00.001-07:002013-08-03T02:48:48.616-07:00The Contemporary Paradigm and Cognitive NeuroscienceHi - sorry for the delay in writing. You know how it is: you have the best of intentions but things come up. So I gave a lecture in Oz on the gnostic ideology underpinning Cognitive Neuroscience. There are papers available, there's also a journal call for this subject which will soon go large. Everyone loves CG and MFRI scanners because they seem to offer proof where before there was only conjecture.<br />
<br />
Eye tracking only tells you where eyes are triggered to move to, which talks about design but not art, it talks about mechanics but not aesthetics. As it stands in the attached paper the researchers are careful to say that CG and MFRI scanners only imp lie certain things - and of course everyone's executed because the medieval latin scholar has access to 'proof' as much as the hard core scientist - but the truth is the proof is circumstantial.<br />
<br />
The Arts and Humanities Research Council has called for the cultural values evaluation project to reveal ideas of the value of culture and art that are more empirical than flowery french prose and at back of that the work of the Frankfurt Group, already criticised as a misdirection by Thomas Crow in 'The Intelligence of Art'.<br />
<br />
But - because society functions in faddist terms (as a friend of mine says: "academics are like cows in a field they hear a loud bang and all look in the same direction" - but you can substitute artists, cinematographers - whatever you like here) then we can be sure that rock and roll currently finds its resting place in Cognitive Neuroscience.<br />
<br />
And then there's the problem of what art is in an age of integration (having superseded convergence). It's said by Emeritus Professors of Cognitive Neuroscience that the Artist is the cognitive formative node that sits within a cognitive distributive network - and that art is what it is to be human, not just a thing that humans do (note the Gnostic position) - so the question arises in an age when everyone has a platform for screeching their individuality (and here I always laugh at the Italian phrase: "Few are called; But many answer"): what is the function of art within a paradigm that few even recognise has superseded an older paradigm that no longer functions?<br />
<br />
I make art work that is cognisant of this set of problems and have two new works that directly deal with the central problem of the role of the artist - one of which I have to premier which has taken a year and is a triptych which feature a reconstruction of Dali's Crucifixion (really). I'm also preparing to do a performance event where I engage with the celebrity Ted lecture stance which is called: 'An Anatomy of Light'. This is a lecture in-the-round which invites the audience to consider how the world is illuminated, how we use light to manifest 'moving images' and what happens when light ceases to operate in the universe (I say moving images but that's a complete fallacy - it is the mind that moves).<br />
<br />
So there it is, that's what I've been thinking about lately - how to deal with a new era of human thought given that contemporarily we're still thinking in old pattens.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-39699162804943812482013-06-12T07:25:00.001-07:002013-06-12T07:29:51.935-07:00Understanding the Digital Realm - On coming to ISEA 2013<style>
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</style><span lang="EN-US">Duchamp must be laughing in his grave as we
go forward towards the future, as we appear to be walking backwards staring
into the past. Duchamp might laugh because he was always strong on pushing the
concept rather than the material – or at least balancing the two. But now we
are having real trouble disentangling the real from the unreal, the material from
the immaterial. Trying to understand the things that flow past us as we walk
backwards – effectively part of the past as soon as we notice them – we reach
for descriptions of these things fashioned with the terms and ideas we
understand so well, from the past. Ideas that once fitted like gloves. But these are of course
inappropriate to grasp the naming of the needs of the new.</span><br />
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forward we would see an unfamiliar landscape and we’d have to invent names for
the things that we see coming towards us, some animate, some inanimate and
sometimes we’d confuse the two. But we’d have a new language that would describe
the form and behaviour of the new things that approached us – or as we approached
them, because it is we that are moving.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">We would have to remember Einstein’s dictum
that everything is relative and what we think we see as we red-shift our way
towards things that in the distance would appear different from the way we see
them close-up, and then differently as they fall behind: we’d
have to realise that they have a changing nature as we apprehend them and lose them from sight.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Right now in walking backwards as we go
forwards we use the nomenclature of things we have become familiar with
from past experience, because of their similarities with the new things we
perceive – but of course there is a moment when our metaphors start to
fail in their description of what we are seeing – and the language is no longer
fit for purpose. But we cling to this language because it has served us until now. It
will be our older selves or even our children who will laugh at the
misconceptions we generate and wonder why we didn’t walk forwards, facing ahead, describing what we once saw, in new language rather than old.</span></div>
Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-48286032948125731682013-02-10T05:24:00.001-08:002013-02-10T05:30:44.549-08:00The Ontology of Digital Cinematography<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">I’ve been reading reports in <i>Senses of Cinema*</i> on recent
international film festivals and came upon this comment on the film <i>Leviathan</i> by Daniel Fairfax and Joshua Sperling during their review of the New York Film
Festival:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">By contrast, <i>Leviathan</i> is pure cinema. The fact that it, too, was
shot on digital does not detract from such a status. Rather, it demonstrates
that there are really two digital aesthetics: the fantasy digital practiced by
the likes of Ang Lee, and the “ontological digital” at work in this film. Or
rather, it demonstrates that the digital/analogue dichotomy is more a question
of aesthetic principles, of philosophies towards filmmaking, than of technology
– and in this case, Castaing-Taylor/Paravel’s work falls squarely on the
analogue side of the divide. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">‘The analogue side of the divide’
is the metaphor used to describe that which entrances by lack of guile –
whereas the digital side of the divide is all guile. It used to be that the
metaphor for the digital was ‘clinical ‘and in some senses the ‘fantasy digital’
has helped move the clinical into the mythic. But here, a documentary helps
create another line of division, where the poetic and the clinical can mix and
transmute the medium into what the authors describe as the ‘ontological digital’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The waterproof prosumer cameras used to extract the extraordinary imagery
of <i>Leviathan</i> are tasked simply with recording the real. They do so to
such a visceral extent that at certain moments – when the masses of dead fish
squirm about as they pile up before the camera – <i>Leviathan</i> can feel like
a horror film, an effect which the Gothic writing on the film’s title card
would suggest is intentional. In a way, it possesses a more truly
three-dimensional quality than the tawdry gimmicks of <i>Pi </i>could ever hope
to attain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">This associative thinking is
reminiscent of much film theory of the French style where over elaborate and
poetic descriptions are used to massage the reader into the belief that they
are reading ‘truth’. But you can’t really blame the French for trying their best
– after all they have a lifestyle to maintain and the rest of the world should celebrate
their largesse, their joie de vivre. Any country that has such a surfeit of
bakeries deserves respect even if it requires agricultural support way beyond others.
The Anglo-Saxon critic owes a great debt to French theory with its twin
polarities of articulation and obfuscation in pursuit of poetic truth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">This last comment really allows
the digital through into cinema as it invokes one of the mythic gods of French
theory to authenticate its position:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Our absorption in the film’s unrelenting diegesis is enhanced not only by
the immersive camerawork, but also by the unsettling surround-sound audio,
which I felt was reminiscent of Philippe Grandrieux’s <i>Un Lac</i>. And, lo! Grandrieux
himself was in the audience for <i>Leviathan</i>’s press screening, having just
embarked on a road-trip with the filmmaking duo, where, as Castaing-Taylor
related, they whiled away the hours by discussing Deleuze.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The fantasy digital’ is actually a
symbolic reference to what is in truth a combined commercial and technical
description. What the digital has enabled in surpassing the capabilities of
film, whilst at the same time finally imitating its ability to invoke ‘cinema’,
is a set of economic benefits. If you wanted to shoot 35mm film at 48 frames
per second – you would need a massive stock budget. With digital you simply
dial up 48fps. Yes it has data ‘costs’ – that is management issues around the
production of large amounts of data, which also has cost implications for
storage – but due to the much-abused Moore’s Law, computational storage becomes
cheaper over time. The issue is that one can dial in a specific enhancement,
3D, higher frame rate, uncompressed recording, higher dynamic range etc, without
the pain of late Victorian industrial style costs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Film grew out of sewing machines
and fake teeth. Stop-start machinery could enable proper exposure and shifting
film in the gate to move on without fogging. Material developed for Victorian
dentists for replacement teeth could be stretched, flattened and made clear – a
medium fit for holding virtual images (until they were developed). Even with
Henry Ford’s intervention, it would still be expensive late into the twentieth
century. The masses would not take up such a clunky modernist medium. With the
advent of analogue, then its chimera digital video, the last gasp of the
struggle for democratic production of images was to be heard, but the ‘industry’,
the protective mechanism of ‘quality’ would see that Digital Cinematography,
raw, progressive imaging, was sufficiently expensive to deter the great mass of
untalented or rather, derivative creativity - as exhibited by user generated
content. Until the great mass receives the education of the intelligentsia the end
product would always be the accidents of a 1000 chimpanzees typing away, with
the odd surprise on Utube.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Beneath this piece of blogging
(unsubstantiated opinionating) is a conviction derived from many years of being
at several ‘coal faces’. These are professional production in the UK TV and
film industries, artistic practice, theorizing as an academic and lastly and
tellingly, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as a socialist. This latter
is about youthful conviction where I believed that the means of production
should be placed in the hands of the populace so that its more varied stories
and perspectives could be spoken aloud. I had that belief whilst being enabled
as a speaker for that demographic – that is, I was a specialist who could
‘help’ the masses. As defined by Buckminster Fuller, E F Schumaker, Edmund
Carpenter, Stafford Beer and their like I could be a ‘competent man’ (this term
coined prior to the advent of feminism really means competent person). This
competence began its like as a specialism, such as drawing, which when abstracted
from the practice could be made universal in creative terms: if you were good
at radio, you could be good at anything if you simply kept your wits about you
and exported a set of taste functions (in most circumstances, ‘this’ is better
than ‘that’, but in specific circumstances remember ‘this’ juxtaposition). But
there was a high romanticism about this which included a belief in ‘great art’
-<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that is some art was better than other
art – and in that belief the socialist ideal fell. And it stands with me now
that I do not believe everyone is as talented as everyone else – and the
training of everyone to be excellent must also mean that everyone has to have a
value system of excellence – which is both tautological and self-defeating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Just look at Ang Lee for instance.
He can certainly make movies, but frankly with his resources (and I include
talent) so can anyone. The Life of Pi in movie form to me is trite and
soporific. It has a confused message which advocates embracing symbolism over
‘reality’. I’m not sure about the book because I haven’t read it – but I
suspect it as a piece of modern fiction as most modern fiction is victim of
‘cut and paste’. But that’s a different argument.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">But back to ‘the fantasy digital’
and ‘the ontological digital’. These are consumerist descriptions as they can
be applied to different cinematic experience on a consumer level. I like the
idea of an ontological digital because I’ve been operating it since I first
took up making experimental motion images – even in analogue form when it was equally
a form of ontological video – and was appropriate in the naming because video
is latin for ‘to see’. And ‘to see’ is important if understood from the vantage
point of cognitive neuroscience where when one speaks of ‘seeing’ one is speaking
of the combined eye/brain pathway. In these terms perceiving and understanding
are a combined activity, the left eye being governed by right brain and vice
versa…. And in this narrative, left-brain is the site of focused attention
which is highly ratiocinatory in nature – or so the neuro-scientific community
would currently have it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Whilst looking through or within
the electronic terms provided by video, I have seen a description of the world
that has been reflective of my internal state. I have made works in this
electronic as opposed to photo-chemical medium that have added meaning to the
world I see in biological terms. Biology here means ontological in a certain
sense – that sense if added to, is more full when combined with the extra
viewpoint enabled by video.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Max Hastings once wrote ‘film is a
long-distance telephone call whereas video is a call from the box round the corner’.
This comment was made at a time when there was a qualitative difference in the
two kinds of call. The distant one sounded so due to interference on the line,
the inferior sound quality, the clicks and bumps and atmospherics. Hastings
wasn’t saying that film was inferior; he was talking of the romanticism of
distance – distant, unknowable lands where information had been brought back by
a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Marco Polo</i>, as an ambassador that
brought back tales of the unknown. Interestingly there are questions about the
authenticity of Polo’s stories – but again, that’s another article. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">It was in fact Hastings intent to
describe something other than the lesser quality of video – that though the displayed
image was lesser in quality it had a greater quality: video was live, it was
here and it was now. Remember that video came along a long time after television,
the parent medium with its ability to disseminate. So the currency of
television was of presenting the world as it is NOW. Video inherited the
connection of representing NOW. The feel of it was and is immediate and Digital
Cinematography, when it became progressively based, shed the sense of the
immediate and became THEN, elsewhen and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>elsewhere. With Digital Cinematography came a
greater possibility of the electronic capture of video as having a developed
capacity for ontological use.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;">So our two authors bring up a
definition of immediacy as if it were a Gothic artefact additional to the
medium that has been introduced successfully as a medium of fantasy. I think
there’s more to it than that description, that delineation of two levels. I
think it has many more levels than two and this current description is unaware
of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">width of the medium. </i>My evidence
for this the developed plasticity of past media, which, when they go past the necessary
period of remediation, always disclose their true nature outside of their
ability to chameleon-like imitate the behaviour of other media. For a
description of what that true nature is, watch this space.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 20.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><i>Note to self, see 'Leviathan'.</i></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><i>*<a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/">http://sensesofcinema.com/</a></i></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-81181459907831311052013-01-29T15:41:00.002-08:002013-01-29T15:43:40.134-08:00The Expanding Horizon of Digital Cinematography<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">Recently I have been working with Faculty of Engineering at University of Bristol
and BBC Research and Development to shoot some tests for the expanding capabilities of Digital Cinematography. My role on this project was to
oversee the cinematography. In essence we have been trying to calibrate Higher Dynamic
Range, Higher Frame Rate and Higher Resolutions to match the eye/brain pathway
to create highest immersion for the viewing experience. The first tests were shot in November 2012 and since then have been ongoing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">In the human optical system we have a sensitivity of 14 orders of
magnitude of which we can always access 5 orders of magnitude. These 5 orders slide
upwards for bright desert sun and downwards to cope with low light levels of
moon and starlight. The University of Bristol has a display that exhibits this
dynamic range.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">Digital Cinematography cameras capture around 12 – 14 stops and 35mm
film captures around 18 stops. Standard displays, TV’s projectors &
computer screens display between 10 and 16 Fstops – that’s between 2 to 3
orders of magnitude of the entire 14 available in the human system,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;"> </span></b>so if
you create a higher dynamic range image of 18 or above stops – it will display <u>beneath</u>
its dynamic range on contemporary displays. The common response from people
seeing this is: “the image looks ‘plastic’”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">The department of Experimental Psychology at Bristol has already undertaken
2D and 3D immersion tests – but these require of 30 minutes of footage. With a
limited budget we decided to shoot the Somerset Carnival because of its high
internal illumination and floats with internal movement. To shoot HDR an Epic
would shoot 50 fps at 4k in HDR mode with a 4 to 6 stop difference giving 18
stops dynamic range. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">We then considered mounting 2 Phantoms to shoot 200 fps at 2k in a 3D
mirror rig, one camera exposing the high stop the other the low. Dr Marc Price &
Alia Skeikh of BBC R&D placed two cameras on a rig at BBC London, but found
that artifacts became evident as the tolerances necessary for HDR alignment are
far higher than 3D because you need pixel accurate registration to eliminate these
artifacts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: JA;">We calculated on Epic we could record 6 mins of
4k, 50 fps HDR (thats 100 fps) that would take 40 minutes to download. We
decided that due to much higher levels of data output on the Phantom, we would
shoot selected floats at the carnival exhibiting high levels of motion. Had
we shot Phantom in a mirror rig at its highest speed you could easily generate
1 terabyte of data per minute and that would take 6 and half hours to download.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">An HDR stop-motion test conducted by Aaron Fang of University of Bristol
Engineering revealed that you need 7 exposures combined to display full higher
dynamic range on the display. So using Red’s strategy of setting a correct
Fstop to build upon for HDR did not exploit the full-potential available.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">The hardest thing to expose in cinematography is a subject that emits
light:<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b>At our first shoot in Burnham on Sea on the Epic I set the ASA
at 320 at 50 fps with a shutter of 100<sup>th</sup>, then used a spotmeter to
calculate a stop. But following this through to display, we discovered that a
full HDR image was not achieved using normal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cinematographic </i>judgment. I realised that the 100 year old maxim of
exposing to protect highlights was no longer a correct rule for HDR. In fact you
had to expose the ‘correct’ stop <u>‘virtually’</u> – What I mean by this is that
if the Fstop should be F5.6 then we would have set the Iris to overexpose three
stops over at F2 plus HDRx highlight protection of three stops under: making 18
stops in total. That might seem obvious now, but on the shoot, sphincters
tightened, because the Epic images looked terribly overexposed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">We had planned a second shoot at Wells and collected material at 2 stops
and 3 stops over and under e-exposed. In HDR terms that’s between 16 to 18
stops respectively. We are about to shoot more footage for immersion testing at
the newly built lab at Bristol University. It should be remembered that the
first tests worldwide with this expanded digital cinematographic form took
place in the South West of the UK.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">From the cinematographers viewpoint, it seems to me that counter-intuitively,
lower lighting levels are where HDR will function with most impact on a photographic
level. Obviously in the highlights colour formation will be held better than in
standard systems, but this is a technical issue, rather than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>specifically</u></i><u> </u>an artistic one.
But this is interesting because it may in fact require a renaissance of
cinematic judgment – someone will need to know that the end result will be
fine. With regard low light, the way we read an image may allow the
cinematographer to offer clues when underscoring plot, story & emotional
cues, in a far more subtle way than with standard dynamic range that the cinematographic
arts have used for decades: that of trying to represent 5 orders of magnitude
in a 2 – 3 orders of magnitude display.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-36911782154338114742012-12-29T05:20:00.003-08:002012-12-29T05:22:16.126-08:00New Technologies of Digital Imaging<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I recently wrote a post on CML asking the following:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">"I saw The Hobbit in 3D at 24 fps at 2k, then walked into the next-door screening which was showing in 3D at 48fps at 2k.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">So the first looked film-like and the second looked like old-style interlaced video - there was even a sensory and hallucinogenic lag in the image, mostly with regard to colour. People who buy 48fps argue that you should try to watch for 10 - 15 minutes to lock-in to the way you perceive the experience before condemning it out of hand.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">Also as far as I understand it, instead of a 96th shutter, Lesnie shot the movie at a 64th shutter to add motion blur - and this didn't do anything to spoil the 24fps 2D filmic looking version when alternate frames were removed (being sharper than a 48th).</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">So my question is: Has anyone seen 48fps at 4k and if so, was the look filmic or video-like?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"> </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">I'm asking that question because it's my guess that 'film-immersion' works at certain 'sweet-spots' of the sensory experience and that because 24fps is one of those, then multiplying the factors could mean that either:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"> </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">a) a sweet-spot is disrupted if it's not a full multiplication of factors (so 3d at 48fps needs to be at 4k minimum to work)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">b) the next sweet-spot is a different multiple (96fps at 8k, or 120fps at 10k, or 192 fps at 16k - or something counter intuitive on an apparently different scale)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">c) after 24 fps the sweet-spot is way, way above those co-ordinates (on the basis that is a harmonic of the original)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">d) our senses film-immerse around 24 fps of image and 24 fps of black, regardless of resolution, and that's just how it is....</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">If there's anyone looking in from the production - you must have done shot some tests and screened variations - any comments? How did you prepare the 48fps and decimate the footage back to 24 fps?"</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Someone wrote in response:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">"I'm rather amazed and befuddled by all of these calculations and speculations as to the effect of framerates and sweet spots. 2D or 3D, the effect is apparent rather quickly, and this is nothing new. Oaklahoma! in Todd-AO (30fps) looks remarkably different to the CinemaScope (24fps) version which was shot along side it (a take with one camera, then a take with the other). When the VariCam first came out I used it to demonstrate the difference between 24p and 30p, 48p and 60p. The difference between 24p and 30p was easy to see for all. You can think of it whatever you wish, but the moment you get to 30p the effect is very "video-esque" in motion, at least to a brain used to 60i American television. There's no magical formula of shutter angle and 3D immersion which will change this. Refresh rate is refresh rate and the mental connotation is, well, whatever the viewer brings to the table. One can give it a try and decide if it is interesting or acceptable, but the effect is th</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">e effect and it's really that simple. There's no "training the audience," no "finding the magic combination," no "filmmakers not using their tools properly." Either it is liked by the audience or it is not.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">And to a great degree, I think this is true of 3D in general".</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal;">I felt I had to reply:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />"Mitch and Mike: we're ok with numbers aren't we? After all that's an aspect of much of what we do.<br />
I didn't know the Hobbit was finished in 2k, so that was worth writing the post in the first place for, as I found something out - it certainly kills the issue of seeing a '4k' version at 48fps.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
'There's no "training the audience," no "finding the magic combination," no "filmmakers not using their tools properly." Either it is liked by the audience or it is not.....And to a great degree, I think this is true of 3D in general'.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
I get it that there should be a resistance to pr style thinking and I wasn't really interested in the 3D issue, as my interest is with audience immersion (we use light and camera movements to underscore dramatic narrative and deepen audience engagement - why not use new capacities in the medium we work in?)<br />
I'm very privileged to be working on higher dynamic range capture and display and when you see this actually working before your eyes there's a sense of seeing three dimensions, which comes through without the tricks of standard stereopsis. The response after seeing this new imaging technology for the first time is: 'It's like looking through a window'. When you see an HDR image in HDR display space, the sense of it being plastic and unreal goes (mainly because up till now HDR images were seen in non-HDR display space and the audience didn't like what they saw). The possibility for really amazing lighting is there, because the display space is approximate to the eye-brain pathway.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
True, up till recently each image has been captured using 7 or more exposures in each frame and so has been still-image or stop-motion - but we're now perfecting moving image HDR streams instead of stepped still images. At the capture stage data bottlenecks are becoming an issue as we're generating huge amounts of data (could be up to 1 terabyte per minute next year as we'll move into high fps hdr - so there'll need to be developments in every part of the chain - that'll explain my OCD interest in numbers then). Most importantly though, we'll be looking at what kind of content works in this new area.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Call me old fashioned or even OCD, but I am interested and curious about what can be done outside of what's currently liked by an audience, and I'd prefer this information to come out through CML, within the community that creates moving image art for a living - not only that but involve members in trying to do this. 'Course, we may not manage to pull it off, but I'm quite happy to go down in flames trying."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />So reader: What do you think?</span>Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-55904038561787747912012-06-30T03:15:00.000-07:002012-12-29T05:22:48.434-08:00Art and Commerce in Cinema and Television<br />
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Years ago when I was a young DP I spent £500 on a single day session to learn how to expose for low light. That was a lot of money then. At that session there were several DP's who are now working at the upper echelons of UK film and TV Drama. By the end of the day I had discovered that the answer to my question was: sure there are technical boundaries, but in the end there is no such thing as the correct exposure - because art is a gesture of the moment. A correct exposure in one moment is not the correct exposure in the next because the art or intention, or colour or texture of the scene.</div>
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The light meter and waveform monitor as used today for digital cinematography (and television back then) are two forms of evaluation, but these are just devices that allow a certain kind of ritual gesture to happen that produce a decision. If you're 'in the flow' when you make your decision, choosing a fat or thin f stop - or placing the exposure on the stop itself - then that decision, if made whilst transcending the form you're working in aligns with what artists do when they make their artistic gesture. That may sound airy-fairy but whether you're a street cleaner or an astronaut, we all operate in the same way - choices in the moment. So there's technical excellence on one hand and on the other, art - and if you're really aligning with 'the flow' or as Taoism would call it, 'The Way', then art can happen within commerce.</div>
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Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-74055519774127507682012-04-22T07:04:00.001-07:002012-04-22T07:05:57.901-07:00ART AND TELEVISION<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 17px;">Lately
analogue video has been in the public psyche because of the analogue switch off
in the UK as we move solely to digital transmission (I believe the last to
switch will be Northern Ireland in October 2012). I have attended a few events in
March and April and noticed the miss-information flowing around the subject
which differs from my experience of my time making ‘video art’.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">What
follows are some discursive notes for a proposal to celebrate through a series
of screenings, Analogue Video and its transition into Digital Video during the
late seventies, the eighties and the early 90’s. This is not meant to be
exhaustive, nor in fact researched – it’s my off the cuff memory at this moment
of writing. I may return to this and actually research it thoroughly and create
an academic and more scholarly work. For the moment though I am involved (as
usual) in making work rather than writing about it, but here, for what it’s
worth are some thoughts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">There are
some video links in here but do let me know of other works online and I'll
connect the dots... So basically this is personal history, told from a personal
perspective that differs sometimes from published histories – and of those I
have to say that the research hasn’t been the best: for instance my own 5 part
series on UK and European Video Art is said to have been selected by myself and
Sean Cubitt. Though Sean was interviewed by myself, he did not select any of
the work. It was selected by Rod Stoneman and Triple Vision together. In a
recent panel event the entire ‘On Video’ series was misattributed to Analogue
Productions – though I like Anna Ridley of Analogue – I draw the line at that
ownership (it was done by a new curator quoting an old history). Here I hope to
address these inconsistencies. But this is currently a partial history and so
there needs to be a thorough and methodical revision of the history as it is
currently told in the published works – there’s a PhD thesis to be done here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">I may have
misremembered some facts and would welcome correction on anything I’ve said
during these notes - also healthy disagreement. Meanwhile however, you are
going to see some details that differ from the books on the subject that have
been published since 1980. There are many incorrect ‘facts’ stated in most of
the UK output in the area because they have been coloured by a remediatory
thinking that this history sets out to redress. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The
question then arises: What else is incorrect in these histories? Also The
further question arises concerning whether or not they leave out much of the
‘intent’ of the period under review and concentrate instead, on a history that
fits a world view that was then dominant. For my money of course, the last
question is its own answer. This history no longer needs to be as dominant as
it was (and to some of us this history is destructive). As a documentarist as
well as artist at the time, I found myself described in one book as a
‘sometimes psychedelic artist’ - a case of being belittled by faint praise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">One more
point, lately (April 2012) there have been public events and conferences set up
to examine the 70’s and 80’s and there has been an air of decay – a sort of
Miss Haversham type feeling around the generation of nostalgia for an area that
might have had import at one time, but has very little import now. But of
course all the excitement generated around developments now will suffer this
same decay – in the 70’s and ‘80’s when the excitement levels were also high –
they were just as important in influencing the developments of the present
time. That’s a little bit tautological but you know what I mean.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">ARGUMENT<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Though the
Seventies and Eighties many makers dealt with the question of ‘ubiquity’ that
analogue video had presented them with by engaging with the television form.
Following on from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay these makers celebrated the fact
that the aura of art could neither adhere to the original nor the replication
of the original. If all were ubiquitous and re-producible where could the aura
of the art object lie? Therefore the strategy became how to adduce value in
other areas - in the aesthetics of the work itself. This was the earliest
gesture toward the digital which itself has no material, only a set of
processes to describe itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Two ideas
that concerned the makers of the time were the realization that Television was
the first form where the means of dissemination preceded the means of
inscription and that all other media were formulate the other way around.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Secondly,
we had better celebrate the fact that the work existed only whilst the
electricity was turned on. No electricity, no work. No electricity, only the
traces of the work in the form of the accouterment of the works: video cameras,
edit machines, monitors etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">From the
beginning makers decided to intervene in the dominant hegemony which was the
central value system of society: Television. Given this, there was an
intellectual allegiance with situationism and its predecessor, dada.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Within this
there were two kinds of makers – those who came to video direct (more or less
like myself though I had used film in the past but importantly was not totally
fascinated by it so that it became my sole medium) and secondly: people who had
come from film in the delight that the image was instant and didn’t need
several weeks before it came to their sight (and these makers of course
remediated the nature of the new media through seeing it in terms of film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Given the
above experiments had gone on in various countries including Stan Vanderbeek’s
extraordinary prescient use of two whole channels to deliver a live video
interruption in 1970 entitled: Violence Sonata. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">But in the
UK, one of the earliest engagements of the recorded image – albeit on 16mm, was
David Hall’s Television Interruptions in 1971. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/tv-interruptions/images/1/"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see Television Interruptions.</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">For me
these were the products of a film understanding and derived from an attitude
evinced from the modernist project of truth to materials and remediated the new
form in the shape of film and its working practices. Hall engages with the TV
set in the sense that he occupies it with elements such as water – however,
like the rest oi television at the time, his interruptions are constructed in
the film medium with sensibilities derived from prior experiments in that
medium).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">In one
intervention he focuses on a tap dripping and eventually the TV set is filled
with another medium. This is reminiscent of Viola’s more spiritual installation
where a camera looks at the drip on the end of a tap as it forms - a Buddhist
statement of impermanence as the image is projected on a wall and the world
comes into being and out of being periodically. The British material reading of
the form at the time was more concerned with the material of the medium itself
- in my opinion, a lesser study. Later taken up by conceptualists like Hirst
and co with their evaporation out of art into concept. True, Viola had a
material concern too - but over-ridden by the act of the artist concerned with
our place in the world as opposed to the artist concerned with his or her
materials.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The
excitement these makers felt was limited as many film practitioners were bound
by a love and loyalty to and of the material of film and therefore their
excitement was derived from the fact that some of videos process were
‘improvements’ on the problems of film. With video you didn’t have to wait for
development and printing; with video you could shoot for longer than a standard
roll of 16 mm which lasted 10 minutes at most and 4 minutes if you used a Bolex
16 mm camera; with video you could erase what was unsatisfactory aesthetically
and marvelously, re-record over that to make a new recording. But these virtues
were not the aesthetics of the new medium, they were simply improvements over
an old medium and therefore constituted a re-mediation of the new medium. The
film-makers were busy re-inventing themselves in their own image.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">What came
next was a new generation of makers that were not bound by the aesthetics of
the material of film or busy with an anti-establishment view on a material
level. However they were intensely political and carried with them
antiestablishment political views.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EARLY ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL MEDIUMS<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Prior to
describing the history of what came between 1976 and 1992, the period where the
exploration and investigation of a set of ideas that amounted to the birth of
the digital age via aesthetic concerns it is important to situate what the
author believes to be the actual condition of the digital realm as it currently
stands. On element that can be identified about the digital is its dependence
on electricity in some form. When the power is turned off, the digital ceases
to exist. Another condition of the digital is its requirement that everything
that enters its continuum is first encoded into some form of data. Also, the
use of a term like ‘continuum’ identifies something about its state and its
material condition - or rather its lack of a material condition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">If the
digital is not a medium, or has no medium then one must describe it in other
terms, that of process. Lev Manovich described this in ‘The Operations’ which
are basically threefold in nature: to gather, to compose, to publish. One
gathers on the net via software; one composes on a ‘site’ like on the computer
via software; then one publish on the net via software. To extrapolate
backwards into a prior art form such as sculpture, one conceives the work, chops
the wood, sculpts the wood, display the wooden sculpture - now substitute any
object of art and its materials. The is a description of various material
mediums via the processes that describe their operations form inception into
materiality. Loosely though, the project is the same: gather, compose, publish.
The difference is the prior conception and origination of the work in the mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The process
begun by Duchamp where he argued that the patron no longer should determine the
nature of art by commission, but the artist should choose what the work should
be. Magritte question notions of representation in a prior representational
medium - ‘ceci n’est pas un pipe’ - the use of text under a picture of a pipe
to demonstrate a loosening of pictorial form in relation to concept. Mid 20th
century art recognised that one could begin with the material (or the process)
such as with Jackson Pollocks' paintings and then eventually came Warhols'
project, that of demonstrating that not only anything in our world is art if
the artist so chooses, but all of us, artist or audience member should open our
eyes to see with this understanding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">With
Digitality we now transcend and end the conceptualists project. Hirsts final
statement about form and value, the platinum skull, demonstrates the end of the
material project and also the end of the artist as selector. An Absurdist
gesture prior to the ubiquitous event of everyone as artist maker which is
demonstrated daily on utube. But again, current Digitality is simply in a moment
of change toward what Digitality will eventually become, so even these
articulations and insights are remediated by what has gone before and do not
fully describe what is truly happening. That will only come when time has
revealed what the birth of Digitality truly was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Where we
currently stand is as ‘flatlanders’, the Victorian 2 dimensional creature that
when witnessing the passage of a sphere through their world, first see it as a
point then an expanding circle which then contracts to a point. They have been
in the presence of three dimensions but not understood its nature. Our state of
understanding is remediated by the past, our historicisations are naturally via
the hindsight of the last understood era, our theories are equally derived from
what has past, so the perception of the present is veiled through the absence
of a language that will develop. The mistake is in trying to label it through
the medium of the Victorian project which is about categorising and indexing
each element into a separate part which of course is analytical and part of the
enlightenment project which does not understand that we now have to develop
theories that are underpinned by a gestalt approach, rather than an analytical
approach.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">THE DIGITAL
AND ANALOGUE IN PERSPECTIVE<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The period
of innovation beginning in 1972 with the first edit that was constituted of a
re-recorded image transposed across portapaks as opposed to that which was
executed by a razor blade and glued together with sticky tape, ended around
1992 - and the world wide web was on the horizon via the early patterns of
encoding of the analogue and now digital video signal. With the advent of
wavelet transforms as opposed to discrete cosign transforms (both originated by
Jean Baptiste Fourier in the early 1800s) a transformative period occurred
during the ’90’s generally referred to by the term ‘convergence’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">This period
was he tail end of a paradigm which began with the descent from the trees of
early anthropoids with their gesture towards standing upright as the essential
use of technicity and other uses of technology eventuating in the use of tools
or implements, the first being the use of flints the last being the use of the
stand alone personal computer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">By 2000 the
modernist project had been superseded by the digital project, which still
leaves many people confused by what it actually is - mostly because they try to
understand it via modernism and its bastard child, post-modernism, a rehash of
the analytical imperative with the bells and whistles of a non-rigorous gung-ho
attitude. But convergence was simply the antecedent of the integrative as
opposed to convergent moment. The integrative is digital, is no longer
concerned with tools and implements to affect the world - the world as we now
know it is digital, is immaterial, is not concerned with tools because the
whole world is both tool and arena of experience: the medium is completely the
message and the message and the medium is the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Integrative
technology is the height of technicity where technology is the ontological
state of being of its inhabitants, where the stand alone computer and its
predecessor the flint tool gives way to a complete 3 dimensional real time
mapping of the world inside the grand computer, where the ideal state is
continuously held and updated waiting for perturbations in its fabric, created
by its inhabitants which it intelligently and virally reacts to. The world is
truly the suitcase, the suitcase is truly the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">To situate
the series of screenings I’m proposing, it is now necessary to elucidate the
history of analogue and digital video with reference to the state of digitality
we find ourselves in. The screenings themselves are intended to lead towards
the propositions I’ve made in a discussion format at the end of the run with
prominent makers (that are still active) from the sector.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">HISTORY<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">It is
important to note that the first gesture towards digitality via the analogue
was accomplished by Frank Zappa using 2 inch video to ‘film’ the feature, 200
motels, in 1972. Here, 2 inch quadraplex machines were taken on site to to the
studio to facilitate the recording of the film in apparently portable mode. The
cameras however were connected to the recording machines via cabling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">In 1972
Hall and Le Grice made their interventions which were undertaken by film makers
who were excited by the specific aspects of the new medium that speeded up the
slower processes of film had coalesced into London Video Arts - this kind of
film remediation of video was to hang around long into the early history of
video. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Other film
makers took an oppositional position and remained engaged with the material of
film and its timeline whilst their colleagues more deeply immersed themselves
into a remediated position with the new video medium. The concerns of that
group and that period were of the academy: a concern with aesthetics of time,
space, location, gaze etc that had developed from the work of the futurists,
Vorticists, Fauves and so on who were a product of the acts of socialism and
marxism at the turn of the 20th century. The influence of Kuleshev, Vertov and
of course Eisenstein could be witnessed daily at the film co-op in the early
seventies as the project continued and the light burned brightly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The first
portapaks entered the UK around 1967 and were instantly celebrated by a group
of creative people distinct from the film based experimental moving image
community located at the Film Co-Op. These however were more interested in ‘the
happening’ than ‘art’. Yet of course, there were others less bashful about
calling random experiments with light and colour by the term art, as was seen
in the symposium on Expanded Cinema in April 2009 at the Tate. Early portapak
video was a playful form which morphed eventually into ‘Community Video’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">As the middle
of the 70’s passed, the community video makers jumped from out of the back of
their vans in the derelict housing estates, they cried, much the same as that
of the workers on an Agit Prop train during the 1917 revolution in Bolshevik
Russia ‘We have the means of production - workers, let the revolution begin’.
As Tony Dowmunt of Albany Video noted some years later: ‘Not many people came
out to join the revolution and if it were raining then we’d be howling into the
wind and rain’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">This
socially active work was more related in some ways to the aesthetics of the
post marxist experiments at the film co-op due to the simple common fact of a
desire to change the society that the makers found themselves in. However,
instead of examining the medium in a structural way as the filmmakers of the
20’s and 30’s had done, the community video makers were pleased that they
finally had the means of production and it somehow echoed their lives. Film had
to be sent away - video stayed right where you put the portapak and played back
when you pressed ‘play’. This was instant and instantly affecting - it was of
the period of now - a time period made popular in the sixties.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">On the
other side of the city however, painterly and sculptural concerns and the
aesthetics that governed the academy and their work as derived from film
practice grew and was sponsored by the Arts Council and became early video art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Throughout
the next three or four years new makers were engaging with the educational
system and the project as espoused by the arts council sponsored video artists
was falling on deaf ears. Punk was beginning but not necessarily in moving
image terms (that was to happen 5 or 6 years later). But the strength of
passion against the old school academy system was breaking down attitudes
towards what video was and how it should be used. An early group thoroughly
engaged in the struggle was Vida, coined from Video, to see. Vida meant, ‘look
at this’. An imperative cry. Vida cut their teeth on late film style
experiments with colour and flashing and actually shooting some film before
abandoning the older language and engaging in the documentary form. By 1980
Vida had given over 250 shows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Nothing was
sacred at that point and whilst working through the ‘veracity of documentary’
Antony Cooper a founding member of Vida declared that ‘the only thing
documentary documents, is the attitude of the maker to their subject at the
time of making’. Hence documentary itself was under suspicion as not being
truthful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Elsewhere
many other experiments were going on via the work of West London Community
Video, Moonshine Community Arts, Fantasy Factory and Oval Video. Their film
equivalents were Four Corner FIlms, Concord Film and Video, Circles Film
Distribution, and the Film Co-op.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">So the
landscape held a series of separate and sometimes antagonistic artistic and
political communities, split by aesthetics and intent. But then, with the
advent of basic computers in the latter part of the 70’s, the new medium of
analogue video was instantly in transformation. Mores Law, that stipulated that
there would be an exponential increase in capacity accompanied by an
exponential decrease in size, was having its effect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">By 1981 a
group of interested parties, including London Video Arts. the Berwick street
film collective, Oval Video, the Film Co-op, gathered around London Video Arts
and formulated the idea that video should have a festival and the First
National Video Festival was held at the film co-op in 1981, the second was at
the ICA in 1982 and a dwindling 3rd festival at South Hill Park in Bracknell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The
altercations between the two media were overcome when the Independent FIlm
Association allowed Video into the hallowed film ranks and the association
became the Independent FIlm and Video Association - mainly because the language
of video spoke to the new CHannel 4 initiative and film production was
struggling both aesthetically, materially and financially with television as a
display and distribution medium. Film sought to engage the video makers as allies
in the cause.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Vida, who
had originated in 1977 were responding to the transformative phase between film
and video, then transmogrified into Triple Vision by 1980. Documentary
experiments were still ongoing but now accompanied by experiments in narrative
and non-narrative work. Some of the members of Vida had joined a commercial
company called Videomakers in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue and the owners turned
a blind eye to the exploits of this small team who then made equipment
available to video artists and documentarists alike and began engaging in
changing industry working practices by employing camera women at a time when
there were only a few professional sound women in the sector.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Many Video
makers had circled around London Video Arts, Oval Community Video, Albany Video
and also Triple Vision who were working within the Framework of the Soho based
company called Video Makers who worked in both the commercial realm and the
arts realm. Videomakers distinguished themselves by engaging camera women and began
to break down traditional working practices directly in the belly of the beast.
Equally Videomakers allowed artists to come and use their equipment such as
George Barber, George Snow and Gorilla Tapes. The Duvet Brothers were working
at Diverse Productions at that time. Founded by Peter Donnebauer who had
eschewed the cause of the Academy and its form of sculptural and painterly arts
practice for the commercial realm. However, Rik Lander as part of the Duvet
Brothers was given access after his working day to high level editing
equipment, which allowed him and Peter Boyd McLean to creative distinctive
forms of editing only glanced upon by traditional avant guarde film making. On
his return form Australia, Jon Dovey who had worked with Oval Video brought back
the australian fast cut form, a kind of montage of attractions on methedrine,
which created a great furore at London’s Cinema Action when shown to a
traditional film making audience. This was an avant garde of the electric
cinema - not photo chemical cinema. The name of this form of editing was
derived from black music experiments: “scratch Video’ named after working with
playing vinyl records in a scratch style.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Whilst with
Triple Vision I unconsciously utilised the form in a work which documented the
arrival of Apple’s Macintosh through being the video crew (with Anthony Coper)
for Apple on Ridley Scott’s famous commercial. I had previously worked with Jon
Dovey on a Ridley Scott Commercial for British Airways. I then ‘stole’ the
footage I shot, which I then used as ‘found footage’ and then scratched this
into “Prisoners’. The act of scratching came about as I had edited this footage
for about 6 or 9 monthds and I wasalways unhappy with the end result. It worked
fine - but not potently enough. One night, about 3 oclock I became angry and
cut the girl hurling the hammer into the television screen against the
skinheads racist talk... I came out of my act and realised that this was how to
cut the whole work. It’s not generally included in scratch anthologies because
it is intensely serious and scratch had a humorous bent to it. C’est las
Guerre.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/prisonersfull.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see Prisoners.</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Meanwhile
due to the advent of Channel 4 and the appointment of Alan Fountain with
Caroline Spry and Rod Stoneman then funded the workshop sector, which was
primarily film based but struggling with the budgets, the sector was engaging
in trying to break down traditional aesthetics, but being mostly film oriented
and having to use video, the struggle became confused because it was primarily
motivated by budgetary concerns. Nevertheless some amazing video works came out
of the cracks of the period. Isaac Julien’s ‘Who Killed Colin Roach’ for
instance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">I and the
other members of Triple Vision then left Video Makers and due to Channel 4
funding managed to operate in a television company form until 1992. This was a
fertile period as television documentaries on various subjects were produced
but long-form narratives such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Bad Sister
(1986) were also made completely on Video as opposed to film - as an artistic
statement and exploration of that mediums suitability in the act of suspension
of disbelief - or its absence due o the effects of the medium. Birmingham Film
and Video Workshop made Out of Order in 1987 for £500,000 - an unheard of
amount in the sector for a video production up until that point. It was also
one of the first ‘films’ produced worldwide on video and then transferred at Moving
Pictures to 35 mm for theatrical release.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">And where
may you ask was the representation of the ‘dominant artistic video’ form backed
by the Arts Council ? Absolutely nowhere. Abroad many of us met up at festivals
and our work, the work that was not celebrated in the UK by the Arts Council,
was being celebrated everywhere but in the UK. Only amongst the film/video
coterie that was in its Ivory Tower was there any sense that that was where the
work was happening. We made many connections abroad, set up projects involving
18 groups through ten countries (the State of Europe which connected RTE, TRBF,
Channel 4 and ZDF), had retrospectives at places like the Mill Valley FIlm
Festival in California (Coppola and Lucas had just moved up there and set up a
festival). I found muself one day outside of a screening three people who were
musing on the change from film to video. As I listened it dawned on me that
they were the directors of the three films that were screeing and they were
smoking and talking nervously. They were called Jean, Jim and David. After a
while I reslised that whilst they kidded me about my interest in video, they
were actually Jean Jacques Bienix (Diva) Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law) and David
Drummond (Defense of the Realm). I had a cigarette and proceeded to go back
into the screning and realised the little funhny bloke next to me was the star
of Down by Law, Roberto Begnini.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Meanwhile,
a branch of the academy, barely recognised but too powerful for the academy to
ignore, was publishing the American revolution in the form of John Wyver’s
Illuminations Ghosts in the Machine commissioned by Channel 4’s arts
commissioning editor Michael Kustow. However, this was not the English Academy,
this was the vital, fast, speeding video that video audiences as far back as
the Air and Acme Gallery shows held in 1980 were used to. The Americans had
access to hardware and the British had a less well-endowed access. Chris Meigh
Andrews, Alex Meigh, Dave Critchley and myself had organised a series of shows
where the early works of Gary Hill and Bill Viola, John Sanborn and Kit
Fitzgerald could be seen. Equally shows of the work of LVA were being seen in
the US by exchange. I always had a principle to not put my own work in these
shows seeing that as a corrupt act. Doh!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">By 1984 the
Americans had matured and Ghosts in the Machine was an 8 part series of mainly
American Video Art. Countering this Triple Vision had been commissioned by Rod
Stoneman and Alan Fountain at Channel 4 to make a series about UK video art
entitled ‘On Video’. This was originally to be done by Luton 33 but somehow it
hadn’t happened, so we received the phone call to come in and talk about it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ONVIDEOTRIPLEVISION.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see On Video 1.</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ONVIDEO2TRIPLEVISION.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see On Video 2</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ONVIDEO3TRIPLEVISION.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see On Video 3 (90 mins)</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ONVIDEO4TRIPLEVISION.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see On Video 4: TV or not TV</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ONVIDEO5TRIPLEVISION.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see On Video 5: Statement of the Art</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Two sixty
minute programmes and one 90 minute programme were initially made and in
contradistinction to Ghosts in the Machine, interviews filled the silence
between video art works. The difference was context. Many artists work was
shown including Jeremy Welsh, Cerith Wyn Evans and John Maybury.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Eventually
by 1987 Channel 4 commissioned two more 90 minute programmes, ‘TV or not TV’
which was ‘On Video 4’ and ‘Statement of the Art’ which was in fact ‘On Video
5’ which also interviewed and showed the work of European Makers such as
Dalibor Martinez and Robert Cahen and his excellent and ground breaking Just le
Temps which rivaled anything Viola or Hill was doing with the aesthetics of
Video.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">At that
time too, there was another television investigation which I directed in
association with John Wyver called ‘In The Belly of the Beast’, which used
Video Positive in Liverpool as a platform to discuss where video might be
going. Ths programme was commissioned by Zanna Northen at Granada.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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here to see 'In The Belly of the Beast'</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">By 1987 I
had developed a good relationship with Complete Video (a high level commercial
house) at a moment when digital media became available. I gained access to some
of the worlds most advanced digital equipment and this allowed me to
investigate the coming digital realm with works such as ‘The World Within Us’
and later when I became Artist in Residence with them, The Inevitability of
Colour (CH4 and ACE) which went on to be premiered at the Bonn Bienalle and win
some international awards (Montbeliard and Locarno) - ironically I had directed
Channel 4’s On Video series and The World Within Us was commissioned by John
Wyver’s, Illuminations for Series 2 of Ghosts of the Machine. Meanwhile Invisible
Television had been made by Gorilla Tapes (or Vulture Video depending on what
they felt that month), and shown on Channel 4.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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here to see The World Within Us</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/inevitabilityofcolour.htm"><span style="color: #42749b; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none;">Click
here to see The Inevitability of Colour</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">There is
much more to say, many details to add but from the earliest experiments by
Fantasy Factory and CAT, Albany Video, West London Community Video, Oval Video,
Vida, Gorilla Tapes, the Duvet Brothers and Triple Vision, an aesthetic of
production grew that was distinct from the academy and film based
understandings of early video artists who’s concerns were those traditionally
evinced in painting and sculpture. Again, there is much to add and as this is
intended to be inclusive of what happened I welcome anyone emailing me to add
to this history - or challenge it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">It is my
contention that the excitement and aesthetics and material experiments of this
time were the seedlings of the digital. We were passing across a boundary.
Through my relationship with Complete video I made the Object of Desire which
was a multi-layered version of Inevitability of Colour - this was deeply
digital in its concepts and constructs and aesthetic. The Americans were
generating works that were slight and lightweight with an aesthetic traceable
to disney on a lot of levels. They were direct and obvious - the UK works were
of a culture that had been around for a long time and one not prepared to be so
simplistic about artistic and aesthetic concerns and therefore not so grabbing
in their visual form - yet, in relation to time passed they stand up more
strongly than the American works, which have of course grabbed the historical
record. On that basis it makes sense to organise screenings of the named works
of the timer against what was going on in the UK to give context and allow the
audience to reflect on just how good the British makers were, who have been
forgotten or written out from history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">These early
investigations were indicative of what was to become digitial media and
embodied concepts that were in contradistinction to the modernist project of
truth to materials and a growing dependence on the concept as being as
important as the material.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px;">ADDENDUM: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 17px;">TURNING
THIS ARGUMENT INTO A SERIES OF SCREENINGS</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Screenings
could run for three weeks and the first block could be the Channel 4 On Video
series, 1, 2 (both 60 mins) and 3 (90 mins) and also On Video 4, ‘ TV or not
TV’ and on Video 5, ‘Statement of the Art’ and a series of discussions with
contemporary curators and artists. Screenings could be in the evenings, but
also with agreement with various colleges during the daytime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">For the
second week of screenings I propose to invite the group that chose the work for
the 1st National Independent Video Festival in 1981 to select work from the
’80’s, plus have a series of discussions with artists who were active at the
time the works were made.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">The last 5
screenings could be in the form of showing a well known international work from
a particular year that may for instance have originated in the United States -
say the Vasulkas The Art of Memory - and then it could be accompanied by
several works that originated in the UK and Europe. The point being that the US
artists had a full blown push from their own culture on why the work should be
seen as world quality work - the British however had none of this due to the
reasons mentioned above, yet I will seek to demonstrate that the UK works are
at least, as good as, if not better than the work that obtained the publicity.
The screenings could be accompanied by discussions with artists of the time and
contemporary artists and curators.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">An
additional fourth week of screenings could seek to demonstrate the nature of
the digital via the works that have been made since 1992 - these works will be
selected by a group formed of those active making work and curating during this
period.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Some names of production companies who enabled motion image art work to be seen on TV:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Illuminations<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Triple Vision<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Analogue Productions<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Fields and Frames<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">Luton 33 (later developing into Gorilla Tapes and Vulture Video)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13pt;">And of course, the entirety of the 1980’s workshop sector who tried in some way to intervene in this are. An early majore gesture was Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey’s shot on video Bad Sister (1983) – and of course Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer’s first ever video feature film made on two inch around 1971. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyViqlFEKUI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyViqlFEKUI</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</div>Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-49640853127947583972012-04-17T01:25:00.000-07:002012-04-17T15:29:12.937-07:00Changing Times<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu7Q8F7W_7UMD6V3fqfEKtrLGniLPyZjfpYL3CT3cNibYRdksvmKIczi6dIrXOiI8jW1CTfJ3ZGhyEExrlo588Sp5UHkeltfdrFWXMtvwF-6DOe1Bhyphenhyphen4riX0h4UNoR1mK1nBL0VeVM_wPl/s1600/blackmagiccinemacamera.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu7Q8F7W_7UMD6V3fqfEKtrLGniLPyZjfpYL3CT3cNibYRdksvmKIczi6dIrXOiI8jW1CTfJ3ZGhyEExrlo588Sp5UHkeltfdrFWXMtvwF-6DOe1Bhyphenhyphen4riX0h4UNoR1mK1nBL0VeVM_wPl/s400/blackmagiccinemacamera.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">I've heard it said in the trade press recently that <i>this is the year of 4k</i>. Well yes, that's what the pros
want (and ever higher resolution) and that's definitely what the trade wants
given the need for continuous churn of products to induce profit. But there's a
substrata of need within education and corporate work and also to there's a
need to make available Digital Cinematography concepts for television work. So
Blackmagic Design, well know for graphics and processing cards and storage
solutions, who then went on to buy Da Vinci Colour Grading software, have now
gone on to creating their first camera. Well known Digital Imaging Technician,
Jonathan Smiles has been quoted as saying that "as soon as light hits the
lens it's all post production", and whilst I reject that quite heartily
because it disables a tier of artistic input (i.e. the cinematographer),
Blackmagic's intervention makes this statement all the more true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">I've always considered that
the job of a good cinematographer is to be the chief quality control clerk of
the production and that they of all the roles should understand completely the
pathway from light into lens through to light emitting from or bouncing off the
screen - so the Blackmagic camera which comes with connectivity through
thunderbolt and then through Da Vinci Resolve management system (including
scopes) takes the whole Digital Cinematography concept one stage further on in
its development from what it once was in the age of photo chemical imaging.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">In Los Angeles the
Global Cinematography Institute understand that everything is changing
and now seek to train the modern cinematographer right across the whole gamut of
roles in the image making process - they call this Expanded Cinematography. Though still regarding lighting as the highest
achievement of human sensibility, akin to the work of a renaissance painter,
they know that the cinematographer has this earlier responsibility that has
been shirked since post and colour grading started to take over in the ‘90’s. Times
are again changing and it would do well for the trainers and pedagogues who
teach the new generation of film-makers to be aware of the way that things are
realigning. Digital Video is dead, long live data cinematography.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-21131969493850507252012-02-13T03:45:00.000-08:002012-02-13T03:55:43.855-08:00Exposing images for digital cinematography<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN79Xlg1DzpFJ92tz46si6GSroiPWW3SCG1UWivnDXYeUZK3A68XVVUv_8HcAO3NiV2df5V9l2KYzgFdNmlW7lvxnkj6oVSFDQ2jGEwAIHbwvNvcM5PR-FbPggqHknoSsA4xddN8fS3UR1/s1600/476493.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN79Xlg1DzpFJ92tz46si6GSroiPWW3SCG1UWivnDXYeUZK3A68XVVUv_8HcAO3NiV2df5V9l2KYzgFdNmlW7lvxnkj6oVSFDQ2jGEwAIHbwvNvcM5PR-FbPggqHknoSsA4xddN8fS3UR1/s1600/476493.jpg" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">The discussion below represents an interesting archive of attitudes prevalent at the beginning of 2012 towards exposure and workflow in exposing the electronic cinema image (specifically in Red Epic and Red One, but branches out into all digital cinematographic issues). There are some rules here that I’ve always worked by but specifically one: that exposure is best viewed with Raw and view all else as metadata that accompanies an image into post and in so doing that one should situate the exposure ‘correctly’ so that you get the most out of the ‘negative’ but also break that rule to derive the most important aesthetically developed image. When I was working in high definition my maxim was: underexpose by at least half a stop - now that idea is defunct.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In reading this information, do note Florian Stadler’s comment which is both interesting and important:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“It is important to process the footage in LOG space (Redlog Film) in the fully tested and implemented workflow I mentioned. You will recapture the RAW images most extent of highlight information by setting the ISO to 320 and the Gamma to Redlog Film”. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In photochemical practice unless you were ‘trying something out’ you always went for a ‘fat negative’, meaning you took the most information into post so that the digital grade could deliver the most information to enable maximum manipulation of the image (I began work with film at the tail end of the change from photo-chemical into telecine - which was then to change into digital intermediate). Previously, before telecine, the medium had very low flexibility for manipulation whilst using printer lights (having said that all the wonderful film looks of around 80 years of cinema were derived from that ‘inflexibility’). If you were ‘trying something out’ you were testing a look and testing is the primary methodology that a DP uses.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This discussion does not cover putting an 80D orange filter over a native raw sensor that is balanced to daylight. I have mentioned this theory on Cinematographers Mailing List and been disagreed with and in other posts been heavily supported - so in all of this, you must come to your own practical and aesthetic decisions - because being a DP is (partly) about being an artist and artists make subjective decisions whereas scientists make objective decisions. You have to choose what you’re going to be.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Note: As usual things got a little fractious so I've removed those particular posts and all personal contact details to protect everyone. Do let me know if anyone objects to what's here. Lastly, as always, Geoff Boyle puts a very apposite comment, this time at the very end.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">CML-DIGITAL-RAW-LOG Digest for Friday, February 10, 2012.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Adam Wilt</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 18:37:46 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 1</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Don't think "shoot at 800, then (using REDCINE-X) bring ISO down to 500". Think "pick an ISO rating that properly trades off highlight protection versus noise". Then "develop" the footage as needed using curves to hold highlight and shadows (or blow them out as you see fit), but probably not fiddling with ISO unless you like the look of 2/3-stop underexposure (grin).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For the purposes of this discussion, let's say that the camera has 12 stops of dynamic range between the level where highlights start clipping and the level where shadow noise becomes intolerable. That 12-stop number itself isn't important; I might say it should be higher, and Art Adams might say it should be lower, because we have different tolerances for noise. I'm just picking a number that keeps the mental math stone-simple. With the M-X sensor, not using HDRx, an ISO rating of 800 means that you'll have six stops above middle gray (e.g., above your incident meter's reading) before your highlights clip, and six stops below middle gray before your shadows get lost in nasty noise. So, if you meter for ISO 800, you'll get a balanced rendition: a tolerable degree of highlight protection, a tolerable (and equal) degree of shadow detail.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now, take that ISO 800 footage into post. If you metered for ISO 800 and set the lens that way, then an ISO 800 rating will put middle gray pretty much where it should be (let's ignore for the moment any variations in where RED thinks middle gray should be and where you think middle gray should be, grin).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You don't like the noise at ISO 800? Set ISO to 500 in REDCINE-X. Yes, the noise is suppressed by 2/3 stop, but the image is darkened 2/3 stop as well. You now have exactly the same thing as if you had shot at ISO 500 and had purposefully underexposed 2/3 of a stop to protect highlights (the only way middle gray will fall where it should with an ISO rating of 500 in RCX is if you metered and exposed for ISO 500 in the camera).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You can counteract that underexposure with a custom curve, pulling the midtones back up. But, in essence, you're just undoing the ISO change as far as the midtones are concerned; you could just as easily leave ISO at 800, and use a custom curve to slightly crush the shadows in the ISO 800 "development" and get much the same result.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The key thing to remember is that the camera has a fixed dynamic range; all you're doing by changing ISO ratings at the time of the shoot is trading off highlights vs noise (have a look at </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/video/mysterium-x_exposed_part_2/">http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/video/mysterium-x_exposed_part_2/</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">where I shoot both the M and M-X sensors at various ISO ratings and grade them "normally", without curves). If you need to protect more highlights, you'll have to stop down when shooting, and in post, once you've pulled your scene midtones back up where they belong, whether via ISO or FLUT or curves, you'll have more noise as a result.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You can shoot at a lower ISO: your images will be cleaner, but you'll give up highlight headroom. Shooting at ISO 200, letting in two more stops of light, means your scene will be two stops cleaner / less noisy, and your noise-limited shadow detail will be 8 stops down instead of 6--but highlights will clip two stops sooner, at only 4 stops over middle gray.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Or you can shoot at a higher ISO: At ISO 3200, you'll stop down two stops. You'll preserve two more stops of highlight headroom (8 stops over middle gray), but you'll have two stops more noise over the entire image, with only 4 stops of shadow detail before the noise becomes intolerable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Which way makes sense? It entirely depends on the scene, what's worth protecting, and your noise tolerance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I normally shoot exteriors on the RED M-X at ISO 800 because I like uncontrolled highlights to have detail and color, and I don't mind a bit of "grain" and some noise in the shadows. Art Adams prefers a cleaner image; he'll rate the camera at ISO 320 or 400, for a 1-1.3 stop advantage in image cleanliness; he'll sacrifice 1 or 1.3 stops of highlight headroom to get that reduction in noise. I'll do the same thing on a greenscreen stage with controlled lighting, where I don't have any excessively bright things in the image that need six stops of headroom; it's nice to have that added cleanliness for keying. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It's all about context; there is no one correct answer. It's simply YOUR tradeoff between highlight protection and noise level. And, of course, with EPIC you have the opportunity to employ HDRx to hold those highlight, too... but that's a whole new topic.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course there is NO substitute for running tests yourself, instead of trusting what some goober like me says on the Internet. :-)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Is this trivial? Have I been living in the dark for years? Have you done anything similar to this, or maybe have something better?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In general, the secret for getting good pix out of the RED (at least as far as the tonal scale is concerned) is judicious use of the curves control. S-curving the raw exposure to gracefully handle highlights and gently roll off the shadows, while keeping decent contrast in the middle, is a Good Thing... bear in mind that the FLUT processing in the newer "color science" processing does some of this for you (unlike the early days when it was entirely up to you).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Trivial to say, perhaps, but the possibilities are endless...</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Adam Wilt</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">technical services, Meets The Eye LLC, San Carlos CA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">tech writer, <a href="http://provideocoalition.com/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">provideocoalition.com</span></a>, Mountain View CA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Florian Stadler</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 18:53:20 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 2</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What I tend to do is the following: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Shoot/expose at 800 for day int/ext and 500/640 for night exterior/interior, making sure nothing falls into noise zone and nothing clips on the sensor (but I let clipping happen in the 800 LUT).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I then "develop" the RAW negative at sensor native 320ISO in REDLOG Film and use a LUT as a starting point in the grade (Arri provides a really good one, great on skintones). This allows me to shoot the sensor at the optimal under/over sweet spot and retrieve all information captured by the RAW sensor. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Florian Stadler, DP LA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.florianstadler.com/">www.florianstadler.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Art Adams</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 20:43:10 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 3</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What Adam said. I couldn't have said it better. You don't get more dynamic range out of the camera by changing the ISO, you just reallocate the bits above and below 18% gray. Slower ISO gives you more room for shadow detail and less for highlights, but crushes noise; higher ISO gives you more noise but better highlights.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tal, the trick you talk about trying is just the long way around. If you like the camera at 800, shoot it at 800; if you like it at 500, shoot at 500. Shooting at 800 and processing for 500 doesn't change a thing, it just makes the workflow more complicated. Fortunately nothing ever goes wrong in post.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You may find yourself on a beach or in a snow storm, at which point ISO 800 makes perfect sense because you don't have any shadow detail that will go noisy and you need lots of highlight retention. You may find yourself shooting a very dark night interior or exterior without highlights, at which point you might consider ISO 200 for rich, clean noise-free shadows.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It does make sense to pick one ISO and stick with it, but I think you also need to be a little flexible and rate the camera properly for the circumstances--especially if they are adverse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I haven't shot anything with an Epic yet but based on what I've seen it might be the first camera I'm willing to rate as fast as 800 for normal use. I've been rating Red One MX's at 400 or 500, and I rate Alexa at a nice solid 400, but until I get my hands on an F65 the Epic seems to be the fastest I've played with so far.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I'm not a big fan of noise. I like clean shadows with lots of detail.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Art Adams | Director of Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco Bay Area</span></div>
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showreel -> <a href="http://www.artadamsdp.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">www.artadamsdp.com</span></a></div>
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trade writing -> <a href="http://art.provideocoalition.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">art.provideocoalition.com</span></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Art Adams</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 20:47:28 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 4</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This allows me to shoot the sensor at the optimal under/over sweet spot and retrieve all information captured by the RAW sensor. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I must be missing something. The same amount of info is present no matter how the image is "processed" later: that is fixed during capture, and all you're doing after that is pushing bits around. Shooting at ISO 800 and "processing" at 320 just shows you a darker image, which you then apply a LUT to in order to make it look normal again. Why not process at 800 and apply your custom LUT to that?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Also--Arri provides a LUT for Red footage?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Art Adams | Director of Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco Bay Area</span></div>
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showreel -> <a href="http://www.artadamsdp.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">www.artadamsdp.com</span></a></div>
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trade writing -> <a href="http://art.provideocoalition.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">art.provideocoalition.com</span></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Florian Stadler</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 22:26:48 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 5</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I must be missing something. The same amount of info is present no matter how the image is "processed" later:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is vital and absolutely matters how you process a RAW image before color correction, are you kidding?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You are missing the concept of a "digital negative" and regard the "LUTed positive" as all you captured. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is important to process the footage in LOG space (Redlog Film) in the fully tested and implemented workflow I mentioned. You will recapture the RAW images most extent of highlight information by setting the ISO to 320 and the Gamma to Redlog Film. And yes, Arri publishes LUT's designed for their cameras to make the transform from LogC space to Rec709 and that LUT happens to be a pretty decent (not as turnkey as an Alexa LogC of course) starting point after said exposure treatment and processing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Florian Stadler, DP, LA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.florianstadler.com/">www.florianstadler.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Dan Hudgins</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 23:22:03 -0800 (PST)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 6</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Quote: [The same amount of info is present no matter how the image is "processed" later:]</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The same amount of information is in the R3D file, but you cannot directly access that information without it going through the RED (tm) SDK code that all programs that process R3D into something else use (except REDROCKET (tm) that deviates from the processing somewhat due to a different processing used for speed, it seems).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because there is no DNG conversion from the wavelet encoded color planes of the sensor, you cannot get at the actual sensor data before white balance (I think they said there was some non-color space option, but that probably also has some deviation from the linear un-clipped non-white balance data sensor data, anyone know? [if it was then no ISO or K adjustment would impact its export]).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So some ISO curve is applied, and some white balance clipping is applied, and those are based on assumptions of where 18% midtone should be (46% as red has said) or in the case of Cineon (tm) code 470/1023 which is not disputed because Kodak (tm) defined that value once and for all time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But even with the Cineon (tm) curve being used, RED's SDK should also apply a ISO curve for soft clip of the 'super-white' values above 90% white level of 685/1023, otherwise there would be no change if you adjust the ISO in REDCINE-X (tm) and green sensor clip would be set to code 1023/1023.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because the sensor may have dynamic range greater than the original Cineon (tm) definition, values above 1023/1023 need to be clipped off as part of the ISO adjustment curve, or soft-clipped UNDER 1023/1023 like the shoulder of a film scan would be if the negative was pull-processed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Its probable that the ISO curves used in the RED SDK/PROGRAMS does have some loss of data for high values of the highlights, you can test that by having a white and gray card and overexposing them at various stop values from +4 to +8 and see where you can no longer see a separation between the two in the processed data, like using a probe to measure the exact code values in a 48bpp full range TIF file. With the softclip working right all three colors would keep some separation up to the point that the green pixels clip, so that would be true NO MATER WHAT ISO is selected in REDCINE-X (tm), you would just see a change in the magnitude of that separation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If rather when you are at 320 you see 0 separation at +4 stops, but you see 400 separation at 3200, then you know that adjusting the ISO in processing does increase the highlight detail. If rather at 320 you see 10 separation and 400 at 3200, then you know that the highlights are having some detail, just more posterization after bit reduction to 10bit and 8bit use formats.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because you have higher bit formats output from REDCINE-X, you may not see the tonal separation on a 8bit or 10bit monitor, in that case another way to see it is to increase the contrast in the highlights or shadows after you make a 48bpp TIF file, then the tonal seperation will be large enough to see on a monitor, along with how much banding you get from the tonal expansion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because the assumptions made in the ISO and K correction BEFORE export to Cineon (tm) Log (film log) DPX files is made, there should be some utility is adjusting the processing ISO before export, and then un-doing that to some degree. I would though caution NOT using 10bit Cineon (tm) files for such yo-yo-ing of the tonal values as 10bits only has one spare bit to make grading adjustments +/- 2x or 0.5x transfer curve slope, if you are going to yo-yo the tones to compensate for the ISO curve used in REDCINE-X before export as Cineon (tm), you should export as 48bpp TIF or DPX, not 10bpc or you may get histogram gaps from the LUT used to convert the Log-C to Rec.709 PLUS any additional grading done to re-center midtone and apply curves.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If REDCINE-X allowed the import of the user ISO curves and had control screens for exact adjustment of the clip points, then you could bypass the ISO values and white balance adjustments altogether and relate the linear sensor data directly to the DPX Cineon (tm) code values, which is how I'm doing things with DNG processing. If you make your own ISO curves from fitting the linear sensor data into the Cineon (tm) range, then you know the exact translation of sensor code value to DPX file code value without guesswork or arguing about what does what or not. In that way you can tailor the highlight detail and shadow noise to the subject matter in each shot, vs the exposure level on the sensor used at the time of shooting. The assumption is that is what was done by RED -for you- as I have noticed comments that such adjustments using native sensor balance are beyond the average camera user, but in place of knowing exactly what is going on with the data,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">you need to try to guess what has been done, not really ever knowing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dan Hudgins</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.DANCAD3D.com/">http://www.DANCAD3D.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco, CA USA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Developer of 'freeish' Software for Digital Cinema, NLE, CC, DI, MIX, de-Bayer (DNG), film scan and recorder, temporal noise reduction etc.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Craig Leffel</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:30:26 -0600 (CST)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 7</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Florian wrote; </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I must be missing something. The same amount of info is present no matter how the image is "processed" later: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is vital and absolutely matters how you process a RAW image before color correction, are you kidding? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You are missing the concept of a "digital negative" and regard the "LUTed positive" as all you captured. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">________________ Snip _______________________ </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This whole conversation is what's wrong with most Dp's understanding of shooting and color correcting Red footage. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is NO reason anyone should be color correcting Red footage from a pre-processed or converted file format. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Most of the REAL color correctors on the market, that are designed to actually do color correction as a professional and </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">all day everyday task can color correct from the native Raw R3D file. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This means the colorist has - </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. The entire dynamic range of the sensor capture to work with. According to Red, that's 15 stops. In my experience, that's bullshit. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">However, having the entire dynamic range of the sensor and the capture at your disposal is important. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. The entire Metadata package of the Red SDK to work with. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This means that I can strip out the ISO settings, the Kelvin settings, and anything else I need to do to reduce noise or recover detail, or bend the picture to fit </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">expectations, consistency, quality of light or matching color balance to other shots from different periods on other cameras. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3. The software is doing the debayer live and from the raw file itself, with the colorist able to make scene by scene decisions about the quality of the debayer. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, as many have said it doesn't really matter what you do on a Red. What's important is what your lighting ratios are in terms of Key to Fill </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and where you place your whites. As long as you don't clip the whites or blacks in the capture, a colorist using the raw file can slide the exposure scale </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">up and down to fit the right spot on a PER SCENE basis. As mentioned earlier, if you expose toward the middle of the dynamic range you are giving yourself </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and the colorist lots of room to slide the entire dynamic range of the exposure up and down by a number of stops. As long as detail has been preserved in the capture </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">there is no limit in terms of what can be done and manipulated. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Given that when color correcting this way the colorist can; </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change ISO </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change white balance </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change Kelvin </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change Flut </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change Colorspace output </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change working colorspace </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change exposure </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change the quality of the Debayer </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change curve </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change exposure range </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">All of this can happen scene by scene in a high grade color corrector. The Red is the only camera on the market where the colorist can recover the entire sensor </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">data and all captured dynamic range from the Raw file. The Alexa is completely incapable of this at this time. The Alexa Raw file is currently severely limited. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For those that enjoy working from a predefined colorspace and a predefined dynamic range, Alexa works ok. Arri still has not figured out how to make a workable Raw file, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and why they bother processing an image at 1920x1080 when that's the same space we broadcast in or display in is beyond me. As a former colorist, I'm not happy at all </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">with the ability to recover the sensor data from an Alexa shoot. It's predefined in a Log-C colorspace. That space has a beginning and an end, and a limited range.... unlike the R3D file. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you're confused as to what Color Correctors I'm referring to, here's a partial list of those that can use R3D files natively and in real time; </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Quantel </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Mystika </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Baselight </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fiilm Master </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Scratch </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I'm not a Red fanboy. I've color corrected for 23 years on as many different cameras, systems and file types as you care to name. There are plenty of things I don't like about Red. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">However, if we're talking about process, it's the only camera on the market doing it even close to right. Arri is still trying to convince people that Prores is fine and that all we need to do </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">is shoot and edit. Nothing could be farther from the truth for high end commercials, TV and Features. Sure, I'll bet some of you will say your work doesn't need to be color corrected. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you can find yourself an honest colorist, they'll disagree with you. I know many of you swear by Alexa. I wish I could show each and every one of you what you are missing from your sensor data, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and what you actually captured - and what could be done with it - if I had the ability to show it to you. Your data and your work are being lost on the Alexa. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The reality of this discussion is to think of exposure as a big ball of data in the middle of a predefined scale. You can place that ball anywhere you want, the scale remains the same, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and the artifacts on either end of the scale remain the same. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Best to all - </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Craig Leffel </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Former Senior Colorist </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Optimus </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Chicago / Santa Monica </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">-- </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Craig Leffel </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Director of Production </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One @ Optimus </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">161 East Grand </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Chicago, IL 60611 </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.oneatoptimus.com/">www.oneatoptimus.com</a></span> </div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Nick Shaw</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:55:24 +0000</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 9</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On 10 Feb 2012, at 06:26, Florian Stadler boundary=Apple-Mail-DF67F580-FABD-4B16-8164-0FAD7F374095 wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And yes, Arri publishes LUT's designed for their cameras to make the transform from LogC space to Rec709 and that LUT happens to be a pretty decent (not as turnkey as an Alexa LogC of course) starting point after said exposure treatment and processing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I know a lot of people use ALEXA LUTs for REDlogFilm media, but don't forget the standard LogC to Rec709 LUTs from the ARRI web app include a colour matrix which is specifically designed to convert ALEXA Wide Gamut into Rec.709 colour space. Since footage from a RED camera is not in this colour space to start with, the matrix is not really appropriate. I would suggest a 1D LUT myself or a 3D LUT with colour space conversion switched off.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I would also say I do not go along with the necessity of developing footage shot at ISO 800 at ISO 320. There was an argument for this with older RED gamma curves, but with REDlogFilm all highlight detail in a clip shot at ISO 800 is preserved when developed at ISO 800.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nick Shaw</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Workflow Consultant</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Antler Post-production Services</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">London, UK</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Dan Hudgins</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:08:50 -0800 (PST)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 10</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Quote: [3. The software is doing the debayer live and from the raw file itself,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">with the colorist able to make scene by scene decisions about the</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">quality of the debayer.]</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I would agree that doing the final render from the original R3D is better than going through the ISO and K corrections then grading after for the most part, that is how my system works with DNG frames, from sensor data direct to final render that way the various filters are 'centered' right on the final grade and not off center where they may do more damage to the perceived results.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So I guess there is no DNG converter for ALEXA? There is for SI-2K (tm) and it seems to be a camera on the market. Last I heard Kinor-2K and Acam were on sale.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My primary criticism of the adjustments to the REDCODE code is that there are too many of them, and how they all interact seems less than obvious, Its like taking 9 prescription drugs at once. Having an alternative interface for translation from the sensor code values to the end use values that shows the exact code translation in a clear way would be an improvement that would clear up some of the fuzzy logic behind various ideas of what works best, as you could KNOW what happened to the sensor data and see both the original and result code values side by side to know the exact exposure levels on the sensor itself (As I can do by measuring a gray and white card without any corrections, is there a way to get a TIF out of REDCINE-X without ANY corrections at all so that the TIF code values are 1:1 correspondence to the sensor code values from the ADC?) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dan Hudgins</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">tempnulbox (at) yahoo (dot) com</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.DANCAD3D.com/">http://www.DANCAD3D.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco, CA USA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Developer of 'freeish' Software for Digital Cinema, NLE, CC, DI, MIX, de-Bayer (DNG), film scan and recorder, temporal noise reduction etc.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Michael Most</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:06:53 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 11</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On Feb 9, 2012, at 11:55 PM, Nick Shaw wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I know a lot of people use ALEXA LUTs for REDlogFilm media, but don't forget the standard LogC to Rec709 LUTs from the ARRI web app include a colour matrix which is specifically designed to convert ALEXA Wide Gamut into Rec.709 colour space. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Arri online LUT builder lets you build a LUT with or without a matrix. Building a LogC to Video LUT with no matrix and extended range yields a LUT that works very well with RedlogFilm footage, just as Florian described.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Mike Most</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Colorist/Technologist</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Level 3 Post</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Burbank, CA.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Nick Shaw</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:20:29 +0000</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 12</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On 10 Feb 2012, at 15:06, Michael Most wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Arri online LUT builder lets you build a LUT with or without a matrix. Building a LogC to Video LUT with no matrix and extended range yields a LUT that works very well with RedlogFilm footage, just as Florian described.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Absolutely.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That is why I said there was a matrix in "the standard LogC to Rec.709 LUT", and recommended "a 1D LUT ∑ or a 3D LUT with colour space conversion switched off." To do this the user needs to understand properly how to use the options in the ARRI LUT generator web app, and I have come across many people who do not fully understand those options, including people who I would expect to know better!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nick Shaw</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Workflow Consultant</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Michael Most</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:30:18 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 13</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On Feb 9, 2012, at 11:30 PM, Craig Leffel wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is NO reason anyone should be color correcting Red footage from a pre-processed or converted file format. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I disagree. If you have a project that consists only of Red originals, with no other cameras involved, no visual effects, no speed effects, and, well, basically only cuts and dissolves, that statement makes sense. But most "real" projects, especially long form projects, don't exist in that kind of a vacuum. There is often a healthy mix of camera originals (from multiple cameras) and visual effects, and the only real way to keep things properly conformed and coherent is to convert to a "standard" container for everything. That way things can be properly maintained and managed by editorial. And the truth is that with sensible settings, there is very little to no difference between doing a "live passthrough" RAW to RGB conversion and doing a transcode, because ultimately you don't correct RAW directly in any case. It must become an RGB image for any further manipulation to take place. Yes, the conversion settings can help optimize that, and yes, it's nice to work that way when you can</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, but that's not always the case. And for all the talk about what's "proper," I know of very few large features shot on Red that have gone through a DI pipeline in their native form. Some, but very few, for the very reasons I mentioned.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, as many have said it doesn't really matter what you do on a Red. What's important is what your lighting ratios are in terms of Key to Fill </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and where you place your whites. As long as you don't clip the whites or blacks in the capture, a colorist using the raw file can slide the exposure scale up and down to fit the right spot on a PER SCENE basis.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That's true, but it's also true that if you use RedlogFilm as the gamma curve and leave the camera metadata alone, you're not likely to clip anything that wasn't clipped in original production, provided the cameraman and/or the DIT knew what they were doing. The range that's maintained by the RedlogFilm conversion is very, very wide, and unlike previous Red gamma curves, it's very unlikely that you're going to see something clipped that wasn't.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Change ISO ..Change white balance ..Change Kelvin ..Change Flut..</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ISO and Flut are the same thing. The only difference is that Flut is scaled for tenths of a stop.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Red is the only camera on the market where the colorist can recover the entire sensor data and all captured dynamic range from the Raw file. The Alexa is completely incapable of this at this time. The Alexa Raw file is currently severely limited. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Please explain this, because I haven't found that to be true at all.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Arri is still trying to convince people that Prores is fine and that all we need to do is shoot and edit. Nothing could be farther from the truth for high end commercials, TV and Featues.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Once again, neither I nor almost anyone I know - all of whom work every day in high end television and features (mostly television) have found that to be the case. LogC Prores files work quite well for television series work when put through a proper color pipeline. I really don't understand what you feel is the problem, unless, as I said earlier, the material is not being competently shot. And I don't think Arri is "trying to convince people" of anything. They provide tools and choices, and those tools and choices are selected by cameramen and production teams. ProRes HD files are one choice. Uncompressed HD is another. ArriRaw is another. Personally, I like the idea of having choices that can be tailored to the needs of the job at hand in terms of resolution, file size, quality, flexibility, budget, and available post time. Obviously Sony likes that approach as well, as they're doing essentially the same thing on the F65. And although I like Red and what they've done, the fact is</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">that Red is the one company that forces you to shoot a format you might or might not really need or even want. So there's two sides to that discussion∑.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Mike Most</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Colorist/Technologist</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Level 3 Post</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Burbank, CA.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: RE: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Daniel Perez</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:01:42 -0500</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 14</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Craig Leffel wrote: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is NO reason anyone should be color correcting Red footage from a pre-processed or converted file format. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Most of the REAL color correctors on the market, that are designed to actually do color correction as a professional and </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">all day everyday task can color correct from the native Raw R3D file. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is important to note though that it is not always clear (to me at least) how the RED SDK fits in the floating point workflow of those professional color correction systems. In particular when a RED ROCKET card is involved.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As far as I understand most color correction systems must use the RED SDK to process the RAW into float RGBfor further color grading (YRGB in Resolve). It is not clear how/when all RED SDK embedded color processingis done: floating point? what precision? ... in the end what does the RED SDK deliver to RGB color engine? Is it afloat framebuffer? ...I've been told it delivers fixed point RGB !!! ... in either 8bits, 10bits, 12bits or 16bits (whenthe systems lets you choose).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">No system actually grades form the "native" R3D. They all grade from the RGB output provided by the RED SDK ...maybe "live" or "real time", but you are not actually grading the RAW Bayer Pattern. The question here is if all those embedded extra color transformations that the RED SDK provides can be considered part of the professional floating point grading system ... or if they should be considered just an input pre-process.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Daniel PerezVFX/DI - WhyOnSet Madrid - Tremendo Films</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Keith Mottram</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:18:07 +0000</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 16</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On 10 Feb 2012, at 16:51, Craig Leffel <<a href="mailto:craig@optimus.com"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">craig@optimus.com</span></a>> wrote this about Arri:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">AND they've decided that getting in bed completely with Apple</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Don't know about anyone else but I'm looking forward to road testing Baselight's FCP plugin... also got to be honest I prefer the look of prores4444 Log than Red. As for the cameras themselves- give me an audi over a hummer any day if the week...</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Keith Mottram</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: David Perrault</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:37:58 -0500</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 17</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">,,,,,The reality of this discussion is to think of exposure as a big</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ball of data in the middle of a predefined scale.,,,,,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Really ?!?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I think that's a bit delusional - that's just not the way photography, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">as an art, is practiced. There is photography and there is scientific </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">imaging - and there is a difference.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Imagine how *The Godfather* would look if exposures were chosen in such </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">a scientific manner?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes things are clipped or squashed for a reason.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">-David Perrault, CSC</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Craig Leffel</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:19:32 -0600</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 18</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On Feb 10, 2012, at 11:37 AM, David Perrault wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Really ?!?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Yes, Really.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I think that's a bit delusional - that's just not the way photography, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">as an art, is practiced. There is photography and there is scientific </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">imaging - and there is a difference.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Not really. Look at the most celebrated still photographers of all time, especially the ones that specialized in </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">making and manipulating negatives. Take Ansel Adams. Known for the widest of latitude in the resultant prints that came from his exposures.</span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He and others pioneered concepts like N-1 development to place highlights on the negative so that they were in a place capable of being reproduced</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">at the intended scale or stop if you will. Placing your exposure within a capture medium you understand is exactly what Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and the Art of Photography is all about. You can't break the rules with any kind of knowledge and consistency if you don't know them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Imagine how *The Godfather* would look if exposures were chosen in such </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">a scientific manner?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Is your point that if the Godfather was captured with a flat neg in a defined space without clipping the capture curve that a timer or colorist couldn't</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">have possibly achieved that look? because I disagree. At that point we're talking about characteristics of certain film stocks, which in this discussion</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">means a camera or a file format. I would argue that the Art you see has as much to do with physical characteristics as it does the way it was printed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The exposure of the capture is secondary. Those early photographers would argue that the Art comes in the darkroom where they purposely decided</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">how to present their images and made version after version of burning and dodging, and chemical bath changes, and differences in time per bath, and</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the kinds of actual developer, stop and fix they used. As well as 2 bath developer. ALL of that contributed to their look. Photomechanical and physical</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">processes after the fact. Composition, framing and exposure have to happen in the camera. The rest is taste and personal opinion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes things are clipped or squashed for a reason.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">True enough... and when it was a time where we projected light through a physical surface and onto a wall, that kind of thinking made sense.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Digging into a film stock was just fine when the person making the exposure knew the intended display medium and format. The sheer fact that light is physically penetrating</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">through a physical object has everything to do with the intended output and the beauty it produces.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We're not living in those times anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">CL</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">_________________________</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Craig Leffel</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Director of Production</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One @ Optimus</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.oneatoptimus.com/">www.oneatoptimus.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Noel Sterrett</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:44:13 -0500</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 19</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Daniel Perez wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The question here is if all those embedded extra color transformations that the RED SDK provides can be considered part of the professional floating point grading system ...</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Any data transformation (color space conversion, debayering, filtering, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">etc.) that cannot be perfectly reversed, involves a loss, however </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">slight, of information. Where multiple transformations are involved, the </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">order of processing can also influence the result. So in a perfect </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">world, it would be preferable to have direct access to the sensor data, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">so that all processing thereafter would be left up to color correction </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">systems rather than hidden by the manufacturer, either in the camera, or </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">their SDK.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But we don't live in a perfect world, and at the moment, very few </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">cameras let you really peek inside the sensor. Imagine what movies would </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">have looked like if Kodak had hidden how film responds to light.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cheers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">-- </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Noel Sterrett</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Admit One Pictures</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Art Adams</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:19:21 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 20</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Is your point that if the Godfather was captured with a flat neg in a defined space without clipping the capture curve that a timer or colorist couldn't have possibly achieved that look?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">No, his point is that a flat negative would give a colorist the option of rendering it just about any other way he or she wanted. This is not desirable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Given that we, as cinematographers, don't process and print our own work and must rely on the expertise of others, it is too easy for a rogue colorist or a meddling producer to come along later and change it all. If we shoot it such that it can really only be graded one way then we protect the integrity of our work and the director's vision.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The concept of "Just shoot a flat negative and we'll do the rest" moves the role of cinematographer from artist to technician. I'm a director of photography, not a director of data capture, and my role is not to simply hand over a bunch of data so that someone else can have all the fun. I shape it first, and I expect it to retain that basic shapeˆwith a bit of buffing around the edgesˆall the way through the post process.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have to admit that I'm a stickler for shooting a solid "negative" which offers a fair bit of leeway in post, but I do that for my own peace of mind rather than to give someone a license to do it their way later.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Art Adams | Director of Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco Bay Area</span></div>
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showreel -> <a href="http://www.artadamsdp.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">www.artadamsdp.com</span></a></div>
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trade writing -> <a href="http://art.provideocoalition.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">art.provideocoalition.com</span></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Keith Mottram</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:41:46 +0000</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 21</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are examples where it is not possible to rebuild the look in post well, how about someone heavily backlit by the sun- in a shot like that i don't want all the detail known to man in the subjects clothes but I want the sun to wrap and burn round the subject in an organic manner. exposing for maximum range in this and others would ruin the shot. Unless the lighting is naturally flat then exposure should be the sweetest part for the end image not the sweetest point for the majority of options- unless there is a specific need for example VFX. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then again when it comes to commercials we're all technicians, if I ever think otherwise I just become depressed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Keith Mottram</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Edit/ Post... but does like to shoot occasionally.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: David Perrault</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:45:06 -0500</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 22</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">,,,,,The exposure of the capture is secondary.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Uhmm... No.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To a scientific objective, yes. But the creative mandate does not</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">support your post-production-centric way of looking at things.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Comparing Ansell Adams prints and neg density to modern production film</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and television productions is just obfuscation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If the creative mandate of the cinematographer is maintained, with</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">collaboration that extends the final image, then there is no denying</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">that capturing the most information possible has merit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But when does that actually happen? Modern production realities often</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">remove a degree of control from the cinematographer in the final image </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">manipulations. And that is putting it nicely.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The choice of exposure, and the inherent manipulation this provides, is</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">one of the ways photographers take the science of imaging into a</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">creative place.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">,,,,,The sheer fact that light is physically penetrating through a</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">physical object has everything to do with the intended output and the</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">beauty it produces.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We're not living in those times anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Thinking that way is pushing the art backwards.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">,,,,,You can't break the rules with any kind of knowledge and</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">consistency if you don't know them.,,,,,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That's being pedantic without allowing for the creative mandate of those </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">that do know the rules.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You need to read up on how *The Godfather* was shot.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">-David Perault, CSC</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Kyle Mallory</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:37:29 -0700</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 23</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My preferred/personal workflow: Since you're shooting RAW. Monitor RAW.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If I don't have enough light to make it work, then turn off RAW </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">monitoring, and tweak ISO/etc to get an idea of what can be recovered in </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">post (or if its even worth trying to recover). But for the 95% of </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">everything... I have to remind myself that monitoring w/ meta (or </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Non-RAW) is a false representation of what the camera is actually recording.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The important thing is that the camera records what the camera records, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">regardless of your meta and how you choose to monitor. Everything else </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">is just pushing bits around *after the fact*. You aren't going to </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">magically create what wasn't there originally. And if you think you </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">are, you are wrong, and in fact you are most likely throwing information </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">away somewhere else.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Kyle Mallory</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Filmmaker Hack</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Salt Lake City, UT</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:29:57 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 24</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Thanks guys,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This discussion took an interesting turn...</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Just to jump back to the original topic - I understand what you are saying about the distribution of dynamic range and rating the camera.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I think that some people are confused since the the term 'native iso' is still being used in this context occasionally. Perhaps this is misleading when discussing the RED camera.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If the 'native iso' of the camera is 320, then shooting 800 is 'underexposing'. switching to 'raw view mode' shows a darker image as you rate the camera higher and so on. I like the dynamic range distribution definition of this better.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So after reading your replies it seems that my original idea is unnecessary. Shoot and develop at the same iso, know your camera and it's abilities at the chosen iso - pretty much what I've been doing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I'm still tempted to create a look for dailies that will be slightly different between day/ext and night/ext and treat it as I would treat two different film stocks used for the same purpose, but this becomes a creative choice more than a technical necessity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tal</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tal Lazar</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Director of Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.Talazar.net/">http://www.Talazar.net</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:24:22 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 25</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Things change. What? You already knew that? My point is that all of us, as</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">artists and technicians, must nimbly navigate the actual issues impacting</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">"authorship" of the image in the here and now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the most basic level, shooting a fat, clean digital "negative" that</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">travels into post with metadata that indicates intent should work a treat.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">IF the DP has enough "juice" to keep their "look" relatively intact through</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">to the finish that's great (if they'll pay you to participate in the grade</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">even better, but we all know how often that happens,-)). If the producers</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">see the DP as more technician than artist (as is typical in spot work),</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">most of us would consider that a poor use of resources, but unless you</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">don't plan to cash their check...</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I know some DP's try to make a "thin" negative that falls apart with heavy</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">grading just to wrest control from their "collaborators". There was a very</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">high profile studio tentpole where the well known DP and the well known</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">colorist ended up in a veritable game of chicken where the DP kept dropping</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">exposure so that when the studio pushed the colorist to lift the levels</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">they would be stymied by the noise floor. WTF. Is this really the road we</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">want to go down?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cameras that shoot in RAW color space with 12+ stops of DR like the RED</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Epic present a different set of opportunities, and risks, than other</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">formats. IMHO it makes it more critical that the DP and the colorist are in</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the loop with the creatives in designing the "look". Insert the usual great</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">power, great responsibility rap here. Bitch and moan all you want but does</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">anyone really expect to get that genie back in the bottle?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Blair S. Paulsen</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">4K Ninja</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">SoCal</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Art Adams</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:39:42 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 26</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If the 'native iso' of the camera is 320, then shooting 800 is 'underexposing'.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Not really. "Native" just means that the signal coming out the A/D converter isn't being boosted any further in the DSP. Native gain means very little because, while it is the "cleanest" signal you'll get out of the camera, the noise level is what really defines how fast it is.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Even though ISO 800 is "underexposed" in relation to the native gain there's nothing wrong with using it if you like the results. There's no law that says you can only use the camera at its native gain. How to rate the camera is a creative decision, not a technical one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I'm still tempted to create a look for dailies that will be slightly different between day/ext and night/ext and treat it as I would treat two different film stocks used for the same purpose, but this becomes a creative choice more than a technical necessity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Exactly. And keep in mind that you can tweak FLUT and get into the RGB gains and contrast settings and tweak the look to your heart's content without affecting the underlying image. It's all reversible as long as you don't clip or push something vital into the noise floor, and post will see the look that you intended when it first comes up on a monitor.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I tend to watch Rec 709 and then toggle into raw occasionally to see if something bad is happening. My understanding is that the traffic lights always look at raw so they can give you a heads-up if something's wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Art Adams | Director of Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco Bay Area</span></div>
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showreel -> <a href="http://www.artadamsdp.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">www.artadamsdp.com</span></a></div>
<div style="color: #1a1aa6; font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
trade writing -> <a href="http://art.provideocoalition.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">art.provideocoalition.com</span></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Art Adams</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:43:41 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 27</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">when the studio pushed the colorist to lift the levels they would be stymied by the noise floor. WTF. Is this really the road we want to go down?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">No, but if the colorist doesn't respect the DP's intentions it's the road that will be traveled. Why would you expect anything less? Most DPs don't get into this business to be technicians. We'll fight for creativity. If someone doesn't like what we're doing then they need to tell us, and then--if things don't change--replace us. Fighting with colorists is not a productive use of anyone's time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">IMHO it makes it more critical that the DP and the colorist are in the loop with the creatives in designing the "look".</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Under ideal circumstances that's exactly what happens. It doesn't always work that way, though.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">-----------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Art Adams | Director of Photography</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">San Francisco Bay Area</span></div>
<div style="color: #1a1aa6; font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
showreel -> <a href="http://www.artadamsdp.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">www.artadamsdp.com</span></a></div>
<div style="color: #1a1aa6; font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
trade writing -> <a href="http://art.provideocoalition.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">art.provideocoalition.com</span></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">---</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">END OF DIGEST</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">CML-DIGITAL-RAW-LOG Digest for Saturday, February 11, 2012.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3. Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">4. Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">5. RE: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Tsassoon</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:22:20 +0530</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 1</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">DNR</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tim Sassoon</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">SFD</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Santa Monica, CA</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sent from my iPhone</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On Feb 11, 2012, at 2:54 AM, Blair Paulsen wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">DP kept dropping exposure so that when the studio pushed the colorist to lift the levels</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Bob Kertesz</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:30:31 -0800</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 2</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was a very high profile studio tentpole where the well known DP and the well known</span></div>
<div style="color: #154fae; font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">colorist ended up in a veritable game of chicken where the DP kept dropping exposure so </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">that when the studio pushed the colorist to lift the levels</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">they would be stymied by the noise floor. WTF. Is this really the road we want to go down?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sounds very much like what was done on the original Godfather.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Bob</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Bob Kertesz</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">DIT and Video Controller extraordinaire.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We sell the portable 12 volt TTR HD-SDI 4x1 router.</span></div>
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For details, visit <a href="http://www.bluescreen.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">http://www.bluescreen.com</span></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: Re: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: Tsassoon</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:29:33 +0530</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 4</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">OTOH, in the real world, working on a movie with multiple VFX vendors and the need to do quite a bit of processing to RED images being used at their highest resolution; removing lens distortions, sharpening, crops, technical or pre-grade, etc., one would no more hand over the RAW footage to work from than one would OCN in a film show for vendors to scan or TK themselves (besides damage or loss).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are reasons production does the scanning in a film show, and there are reasons to pre-process to an approved distribution DPX or EXR in a digital show. Mainly so there's only one movie being made.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Producers are not by nature enthusiastic about paying for the work, but we still manage to sell it :-)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tim Sassoon</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">SFD</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One more day in Mumbai</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sent from my iPhone</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On Feb 11, 2012, at 12:14 AM, Noel Sterrett <<a href="mailto:noel@admitonepictures.com"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">noel@admitonepictures.com</span></a>> wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Any data transformation (color space conversion, debayering, filtering, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">etc.) that cannot be perfectly reversed, involves a loss, however </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">slight, of information.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">----------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Subject: RE: RED Workflow</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From: "Geoff Boyle"</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:04:22 -0000</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">X-Message-Number: 5</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I've been watching this unfold and kept saying to myself "stay out of it"</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">but really!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Guys, there are a million ways to do anything and which one is "right"</span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">varies job by job and facility to facility, client to client and place to</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">place.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">THERE IS NO "RIGHT" WAY!!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There's only the way that works for you on that particular occasion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Right now I'm assembling a 3D piece for a conference I'm speaking at and I</span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">have rushes in SIV, CF mux, CF non mux, DPX, XDCam, NXCam, R3D, GoPro, I'm</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">sure I've missed something.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have SpeedGrade NX, Edius 7, Premiere Pro, RedCineX, Firstlight, Resolve</span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and on and on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I'm transcoding everything to DPX using whichever route works best for that</span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">source.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For CF it's establish a look, but not do any 3D work, in Firstlight, then</span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">output to DPX via Adobe Media Encoder, with R3D it's RedCineX and out to</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">DPX, Edius seems to be best for Sony formats, and on and on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In theory most of the edit software can work with the formats natively, and</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">they do, but I'm finding that there is a "best" route for each format and</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">they are not in the same software.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, I use the best for any individual format and then take the common format</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">of DPX into SG and do any 3D work and final grading there, outputting to DPX</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">to then create a DCP.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Is it the best way?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is for me on this job.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The next time I try this????</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cheers</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Geoff Boyle FBKS</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cinematographer</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">EU Based</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.gboyle.co.uk/">www.gboyle.co.uk</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">---</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">END OF DIGEST</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As I mentioned at the beginning, this is a snapshot of attitudes at the beginning of 2012 and there's a lot of good sense here, but all methods to my mind are also rituals that in the end are there to get you through the day.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Terry Flaxton</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-66671919032023994182012-01-01T06:35:00.000-08:002012-01-01T06:37:35.322-08:00Premediation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNbmowpE1LyfoYzQjl0diX0UDWuFYmPN2hZuJkaZcgUGUjN8zDGxmW0ASkSvnOVrUbZhy52yIlL2s96DtMzO3zDVYTAu5SwCz8mw6zmBKyCALqEehbgLncVaNt6JYvMDBHe63fKLOx_0o/s1600/cliche.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNbmowpE1LyfoYzQjl0diX0UDWuFYmPN2hZuJkaZcgUGUjN8zDGxmW0ASkSvnOVrUbZhy52yIlL2s96DtMzO3zDVYTAu5SwCz8mw6zmBKyCALqEehbgLncVaNt6JYvMDBHe63fKLOx_0o/s320/cliche.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The condition of the photographic image has been worrying me. So much so that I wrote on twitter on January 1st 2012: ‘</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;">In a world where anyone can make an image: Refuse.’</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have been noting the proliferation of commercial images and more, the way that software programmes have taken on a professionalisation of the generation of images. And the public through the lesser programmes, with their lesser tendency to professionalisation is generating near professional images - Another way of saying this is that the public is beginning to know what the hidden tropes of image making are.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A trope is of course not hidden, it’s there for all to see. It’s the cliche in action, the tendency towards order in a sea of chaos. Where we, the one hundred thousand monkeys, press the keys of the typewriters a sufficient number of times to imitate something that was once considered great.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A hidden trope is the mechanics behind the magicians art. It’s the quotidian gestures that put together seem to be magical. Saying that, there are of course photographers and cinematographers, who transcend the tricks and tropes of the form - but only a few.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So if we know how to generate impossibly beautiful images and saturate the world with them, do we then risk desensitising ourselves to the beauty of the image?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course we do, so then we re-invent the form again and again - and this reinvention takes the form of the opposite tendencies to create new tropes and tricks to create something new. The cinematographer or photographer who realises this eternal round of invention and reinvention innovates and creates the new form first.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">'Remediation' is the word used to describe how an incoming media form is met with the thinking of the paradigm conditions by the prior media form - but what word would describe the atrophying of the medium just before the introduction of the new medium" Premediation? And is one of the conditions necessary for the formulation of the new medium its rendition as cliched by overuse?</span></div>Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-64031374324137000142011-12-02T01:22:00.001-08:002011-12-07T10:40:36.284-08:00A Kind of Wonder<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">In the last century the iconic image was more prolific due to the lower level of production of images generally. Now the tsunami of images and the fact that the nature of the iconic has been identified and therefore disempowered by both its own ubiquity and the ubiquity of the image in general, renders the newly iconic almost impossible to produce.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">Cartier-Bressons ‘definitive moment’, that moment that identifies the essential image that characterises the moment that is available to the photographer had she or he the technique to capture it, and Conrad Hall’s confusingly titled ‘photographic moment’, given that he was a cinematographer, are available for all to achieve as technique has been quantised, digitaised and made ready for popular use via an availability through the 'professionalisation' of software. Naturally, when software developers could increase functionality in software, they did and this lead to the software outputting the semblance of the professional with the person addressing the software having very little professionalism - as professionalism is much more that 'the look of a thing'. Training in higher educational institutions took on the need to familiarise their student with 'the look of the qualitative' and utilised these software solutions so that an apparently ‘more professional’ trainee might be produced for the job market place. Equally trainees met this new level of training with enthusiasm and mass technique and mass aspiration to be the single producer of the iconic rose to meet the challenge. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But as the Italians rightly say: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">'</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="hps">Pochi sono chiamati</span><span class="">,</span> <span class="hps">ancora</span> <span class="hps">rispondere a molte' - </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Meaning:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">‘Few are called, yet many answer’.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Conrad Hall maintained that each still frame in a shot should have photographic quality (approaching Cartier's Definitive Moment in certain senses) but mainly in compositional quality, so that between the beginning frame of a shot and its end frame, all frames in between as the cameras eye roams across the scene should have the highest compositional quality, as well as the ‘correct’ play of light and subject activity. Hall was saying that even when the cameras eye roams across what could be called abstract compositions, because the subject cannot always be in frame, if the camera when behind a post for instance then the image produced should be like that of an abstract painter, perfect in all of its attributes.It should follow that the ubiquity and availability of high quality equipment and training to a high skill level makes available to all, this level of awareness of the construction of the image.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If the craft cannot be applied whilst in the act of capture - it’s ok as new functionalities of composition are available in programmes that fix reality. Take 'After Effects' for instance, there’s not much that cannot be rearranged in this programme when aligned and data exchanged with Photoshop, so that what was not achieved in the craft act can be genrated in ‘post’. Post meaning: the situation when one has time to think and dwell on construction of all the elements so that they appear to have been produced in the act of capture. This is of course both tautological and impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">But the world calls us to act when acts are necessary and craft acts need be realised when that moment calls. Post construction of the iconic is false as it is pre-conceived and post-conceived - realised from a position of understanding ubiquity and cliche, yet without the discriminative ability that stops its production. It speaks of what once was iconic and tries to duplicate what others have done before and in its replication in a plastic medium and renders images non-iconic from lack of application of the taste that would be the very thing in the moment of capture that resisted cliche.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">But post analysis is simply that and it is a form of dull and stultifying practice which renders its compositions also dull and that itself stultifies the production of the sense in us that is a response to the observation of the iconic. A kind of wonder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">The ready ability to respond to the world at the moment when the world produces the circumstances for the production of the iconic comes from continuous practice and a conscious awareness and the desire to stand on the verge of excitement at the possibility of its production. This excitement to visit this moment through the medium of realisation is what any craftsperson can utilise to elevate their practice to art.</span></div>Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-14256294072349849442011-10-22T04:37:00.001-07:002011-10-22T04:54:37.420-07:00Midnight<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Impossibly, something absolutely perfect happened yesterday night whist watching Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’.<br />
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For years film and video has been trying to be self-reflexive, to truly encode the fact of the making in relation to the audience. This is about how the subject, the makers and the audience are bound together in a group agreement to suspend disbelief about the act of watching a fiction of some kind, about how the cleverer works encoded this into the subject matter to reveal some deeper truth when you are in the depths of immersion in the fiction of the piece.<br />
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In the middle of the film Gil Peters goes back in time and meets Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Louis Bunuel. <br />
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Gil: I'm Gil, nice to meet you. It's a pretty name. <br />
Bunuel responds: A man in love with a woman from a different era. I see a photograph! <br />
Man Ray: I see a film! <br />
Gil: I see an insurmountable problem! <br />
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At that exact moment the projector in the cinema turned off and the safety lights came up and I was amazed that Woody Allen had arranged for thousands of cinemas across the globe to do this in every performance of the film. We sat for a moment and I mused on the nature of going to see films and engaging in fictions and what immersion and suspension of disbelief means.<br />
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A voice emitted from the projection box that ‘we’ll get the film on as soon as possible’. How amazing that Woody had issued dialogue for the cinemas to speak. Then the sound came up to let us back into the film gently, then the image, then the lights went down. What orchestration. I got back into the film.<br />
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Later I went to the box office and they told me that the electricity in the small city where I live had gone off at that exact moment. <br />
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You couldn’t have planned it...Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-84952565746038759992011-09-08T08:13:00.000-07:002011-09-24T05:54:30.548-07:00The Developing Language of Digital Technologies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On 7th September 2011 in Los Angeles, the Directors Guild of America exhibited the new Sony F65 Camera to the Movie Industry. This is the newest flagship Digital 4k camera with an 8k imaging sensor (where 4K refers to 4000 lines of resolution - this is the gold standard because it comes near to what a 35mm negative can do in terms of resolution and detail). It is only the third 4K camera to have been made after the Red One and the Red Epic. So Why an 8k sensor though? According to the Niquist/Shannon Sampling Theorem, to derive an actual and accurate measurement of (in this case) resolution, you need twice the sampling rate to achieve a true measurement. Therefore an 8K chip delivers 4k resolution. With the F65 Sony is seeking to take the high ground of Digital Cinematography with an act constructed to displace all of its competitors.<br />
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In what follows want I want to examine this growing description of this work, a developing language with accompanying development of ideas that even the most blasé film or media student is to some degree conversant with, though their level of familiarity with the language does not necessarily mean they would understand the subject - especially as a lot of what is said by professionals is said within within metaphor. So to reveal as much of the indicators and referents to true meaning I wish to use some of the flurry of posts on the Cinematographers Mailing list on the day after the presentation of the Sony F65 as a snapshot to examine the attitudes and the developing language of those at the coal face of this developing technology as well as the developing language itself.<br />
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The CML was created by well-respected UK Director of Photography. Geoff Boyle’s respect comes from amongst other things his maxim: ‘test, test, test’ which is itself pure scientific materialist values.
There are various professionally oriented lists online, like the absurdly named but hugely useful (and respected) Creative Cow which deals with most professional software programmes, plus there are many other lists that are full of ‘wannabees’ or students or ex-students who wish themselves to be in professional company. Of course as these people mature then those lists also become more professional. CML however, takes no prisoners and excels at ‘flaming’: there is zero tolerance for professional stupidity - that is, asserting something if you do not know it to be true yourself through having tested the logic, or citing peer-agreed and unquestionable professional reference.<br />
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The professional practitioner has a peer-review process as stringent as the academic model, with the same outcome of loss of respect from your peers if you get this wrong.
In the early days of the groundbreaking company, Red Cameras, Red used the enthusiasm of its early adopter community as a PR space to broadcast its product. CML participants looked on initially, then challenged the claims of the adherents and some would argue that this in itself was to Red’s greatest benefit - because when the CML community itself had tested and then did praise the product, the approval was worth that much more when it did approve because of its initial with-holding of approval.
CML has many different Cinematography lists from lenses to grip gear, from 70mm cameras to Digital Cinematography lists and these are visited daily by people at the very top of the professional sector and who are themselves practicing in the industry, through to people who mostly stay silent to learn - from feature film cinematographers down to second or third level camera assistants or edit assistants.<br />
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In attempting to reveal the meaning within the language of these professionals my intent is to disclose what will become important for theorists and later users of the technology when it filters down to educational or commercial or domestic use. It is becoming clear that the gap between professionals and then on the bell curve, the early adopters, or early users is closing.There is a set of reasons within this function, chief amongst them is the simple fact that mass-production eventually contributed to mass-availability and then mass-demand for higher quality. There’s also Gordon Moore’s Law which states:
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“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer”. Gordon Moore, Electronics Magazine, 19th April 1965.
In 1975 Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years (1975: Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics).<br />
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Theorists seek to sit outside the bell curve of adoption of technology, sometimes between research labs and research initiatives and professionals. Sometimes they create ideas prior to the research labs. Theorists evoke what happens in the world or in a specific domain through the use of language and the issue in this article is language, how it develops, who uses it, whether it informs thought, or whether new ideas generate new language - in a co-dependency of arising, as Noam Chomsky would have it.
So we’re now at a moment in September 2011 where we have larger chips, faster recording mechanisms that handle what data those chips output. But higher resolution isn’t everything (as we’ll see within the comments that I’ll present you with below). Colour bit depth, accuracy of rendition in both capture in photosites and how those photosites are ‘read’ - for instance was the recording 8, 10, 12, 14 or 16 bits of colour - or higher? And frame rate for smoothness of movement plus increased immersion in the display device - but also what the dynamic range of the entire image is. Does it replicate the functions of the eye? If the camera does, does the display device? And so on and so forth.<br />
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LANGUAGE, REFERENCES, NOTES<br />
So there’ll be a degree of jargon in what follows, meta-language and meta-ideas. I’ll not annotate at every moment, but occasionally I will try explain the ideas, plus I’ll summarise at the end. Please pursue the information even if the numbers go beyond your attention span (or will to live) and these will be revealed to be either true, sleight of hand or untrue (due to a distortion of truth). If you can stay with the argument, I shall seek to reveal the discourse between professionals and shine a light on the potential future meaning of the exchange between them.
Please also refer to my online oral history research resource: <a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/indexHDresource.htm">A Verbatim History of the Aesthetics, Technologies and Techniques of Digital CInematography</a>, which catalogues a global view of the developments in this new subject area by asking practitioners, theorists, Cinematographers, Artists and Professionals who use this technology what they think this technology is, what it does and what changes it is causing to happen. It can be found at: http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/indexHDresource.htm
Lastly, I found myself writing extensive notes in the text to make what was written understandable, then I realised that these interrupted the narrative of the professionals musing on what was going on and what would arise from these technological developments. I pulled them out and placed them in the typical footnote position, then as asterisked notes at the end of this article - yet again the interruption was huge.<br />
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So I’ve now reorganised the entire article so that the days exchange is followed by a section called: Preliminary Summation, then a section entitled ‘Technical Notes as an Element of the Argument’ which is followed by a conclusion (or Coda), which itself is a set of parameters, to be read as just as informational or revealing as the rest of the language. I note this all here because I’m seeing the form that I’m writing within, changing before my eyes.<br />
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THE DAYS EXCHANGE BEGINS<br />
On Wednesday, 7th Sep 2011 00:53:38 -0400 (EDT) the strand of exchange of ideas began on the cml-digital-raw-log digest recipients cml-digital-raw-log. Tim Sassoon, a respected professional grader or colorist, begins the exchange by quoting an online mail-out from Bandpro, suppliers of professional equipment:<br />
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"Band Pro is now accepting pre-orders for the new Sony F65 digital cinema camera. With Sony's F65 Introductory Pack you can be one of the first to get their new 4K camera when it starts shipping in January 2012. And, with the full compliment of accessories that are included in the pack price of $85,000 you'll be ready to shoot 16-bit 4K footage out of the box. The Sony F65 camera utilizes an 8K digital sensor..."
Tim comments:
“I gotta say, that's pretty aggressive pricing for Sony. Will Arri step up to the 4K plate? I'd be willing to bet that by 2014, shooting or posting features at 2K will be very passe”.<br />
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So here Tim is predicting the end of 2k by 2014 - and yet for most people who are still shooting at around 1920 x 1080, they’re shooting with equipment using Gop structured pictures (where only some of the data is passed in Groups of Pictures from capture into processing before being falsely recombined into full frames to display - but of course, it may again then be torn apart back into GoP structures for internet streaming before display). So for the more purist data engineer, these are heavily compressed images at the outset and therefore not worthy of use.<br />
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Here Carlos Acosta Date: Tuesday, 6th Sep 2011 22:25:45 -0700 talks about the levels of data this sort of device (the F65) will generate and how we deal with that. He also compliments and chides Sony on being formerly a closed organisation but also compliments Red Cameras on opening Sony up (against their will!). He corrects the comment supposedly from Mike Most:<br />
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“My favorite comment at the event (from, I believe, Mike Most): Jim Jannard
knocked $100,000 off what would have been the price of the F65."
Carlos answers: ‘That was me Bob ;-) What I saw tonight is Sony descending from the clouds looking to join the boots on the ground. It's kind of about face for them to even offer an "open" architecture. Of course we really don't know what the promise of openness really means any more than we know how much time fits on a 1TB data card. Being realistic, if it was totally done, it would be delivering right now. They obviously covered the lack of critical details with slick power point and and funny jokes. Kidding aside, $85k for a system of this caliber ain’t bad at all. The images were really fantastic. I suspect the Mike Most will have his questions about data format and other workflow issues answered. It will generate stunning quantities of data pushing many users to shoot in HD anyway”.<br />
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Within this paragraph is held the information that Sony are now following Red in the development of their cameras. Preciously they used to ‘prove’ the product befoire releasing it. The response from the professional users was often that engineers had designed the camera and consequently professionals had to make all sorts of adjustments to make the equipment fit for use. Here Sony are now releasing beta level equipment as evinced by there being a lack of a complete post-production path, but like Red they’ll now rely on the good offices of the professional community to sort this out. The euphemism one could use here is ‘consulting with the community’ to bring it on side - equally one could criticise both Red and now Sony for releasing equipment into professional usage that doesn’t actually work!<br />
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Michael Most on Tue, 06th September 2011 22:05:36 -0700 quotes Bob Kertesz:
“My favorite comment at the event (from, I believe, Mike Most): Jim Jannard
knocked $100,000 off what would have been the price of the F65." (note: Jim Jannard owns Red Cameras)”.
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Mike Most then responds:
“Actually, I didn't say that. But I agree with it. The economics are changing, no doubt about it. But the nature of the Moore's Law rate of technical advancement has now dictated very different economies of scale with regard to technical devices like modern digital cinema cameras. Since these things are effectively obsoleted in a relatively short time, the purchase price has to be considerably lower to account for the shorter shelf life. I've never really talked to Jim Jannard about that, but despite his "obsolescence obsolete" statement, I think he foresaw this, and one of the reasons he came up with his dramatically lower price points is because he understands it. He has been remarkably generous in his upgrade policies, but I think he understands the implications of faster development creating faster obsolescence very, very well”.<br />
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Another post from Mike Most, Date: Tuesday, 06th September 2011 22:17:56 -0700 quotes Tim Sassoon:
“I seriously hope they don't roll their own de-Bayering accelerator, as threatened at Cinegear and like RED, and instead write to NVidia CUDA engines”.
Most carries on: .”..And BTW, since Sony is claiming that the sensor doesn't actually use a Bayer pattern, we probably shouldn't be calling in debayering in the first place. Maybe we should call it de-rotation debayering. Or maybe de-Hyper Hadding. Or maybe just image reconstruction, although that just sounds so SMPTE....”<br />
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Here Mike Most is reconstructing or inventing language to try to deal with the changes. Debayering is the system used to reconstruct colour information from a Black and White signal (effectively). Color filters are placed over the photosites in a specific pattern and then read back in post and reconstructed into a colour set within a certain colour space. The colour space of a printer, your optical system whist reading this, and a plasma display are all entirely different. So coherent systems that maintain colour throughout the chain are a necessity. Hyper Hading is a reference to early chips that where enabled with hole accumulation iode Sensors - it’s another strategy to turn light into data, into displayed light once more. In fact his reference to image reconstruction, though he jokes about it sounding like the SMPTE organisational way of referring to things, is quite apposite in this instance. It describes what actually happens.<br />
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Sony have always played this kind of game however - in the early days in it’s tussle with Kodak it named it’s Digital Video system: Cine Alta. The use of ‘Cine’ being a direct reference to film to create the beginnings of commercial displacement that would eventually win the commercial electronic corporations war against the photo-chemical corporations.
It’s important to discuss Sony’s camera naming policy as it’s a key component of their commercial strategy to supersede the photochemical corporations by referring back to a film past. The two preceding cameras were the F23 and then the F35. Both these cameras costs hundreds of thousands of dollars - but as you’ll see, the F65 is under $100,000. For years Cinematographers had clamored for a 35mm sized chip so that all the benefits of 35mm could be exploited - after all, that had been the optical proactive in Hollywood since the beginning. 35mm optics automatically gave the kind of cinema we were used too. You know the shot where the two lovers kiss and the background is out of focus thus placing a spotlight and emphasis on the moment? That was due mostly to the physical pathway derived from 35mm optics. Though any Cinematographer could produce that shot on any format film or video (using different techniques to limit depth of focus).<br />
<br />
Up to and including the F23 Sony had been wedded to a smaller chip size (usually half inch but in this case 3 x two thirds of an inch chips) and they’d also been wedded to CCD’s as opposed to CMOS chips. CCD’s discharge line by line and CMOS discharge the whole sensor in one go - there are various physical artifacts related to both processes. When Sony created the F35 they adopted a 35mm sensor CCD sensor - thus coming into line with both Red Cameras and Arriflex with their D21 and latterly the much praised Alexa system in terms of optics. But the F65 changes to a CMOS sensor and also refers to the double size of 35mm which is 70 mm, but abbreviated to 65mm. In industrial film production 70mm was physically slashed into 35mm, then into 16mm, then into 8mm. All of the variants which use the term ‘Super’, simply get rid of one row of perforations and therefore enable the frame size to become larger taking up the space where one row of perforations used to exist - surprisingly this renders an extra 40 per cent imaging area.
However, the confusion employed by Sony is that the F65 is in fact a 35mm sized Sensor.<br />
<br />
There is currently one type of digital cinema camera with a 65 mm sensor, the Phantom 65 made by Vision Research. Paradoxically this has a 34K sensor of 4096 x 2440 pixels and of course this has larger photosites due to the sensor size.<br />
<br />
Mitch Gross on the same listing comments on Alan Lasky’s comment:
On September 7th , 2011, at 1:10 AM, "Alan Lasky" wrote:
“It is good to see Sony loosening up a bit”. “I think the Reason there is not a clear message on post path is that Sony has chosen not to ram one down everyone's throat. Unlike the past, Sony's mission this time is to be very open in how the system can be supported. Yes you can integrate with current SR workflows, but you can also use all of the various 3rd party systems because Sony will provide SDK information for them to ingest the files. This is very much like Phantom CINE files or ARRIRAW, but a bit different than REDRAW because RED makes everyone incorporate their de-Bayering engine to insure that the process is consistent. One other difference with F65 is that it is a different pattern than Bayer mask, so that might take some more math work from the various processing systems out there, but again, Sony will provide the information. It's obvious that they have a way to extract the information beautifully.
The download station has 10G Ethernet. We have an onset download station we built for The Phantom CineStation download dock that can empty a 512G CineMag in under an hour using 10GE. I would expect similar times from the Sony system.
And $85K for the complete camera with the shutter, VF, recorder, a mag and the download station? Yowsa, compare that to the $300K system of the F35 a few years back! Killer deal, Sony”.<br />
<br />
So here in amongst the detail is the debate on the way technology is taking up the call for faster, more qualitative technological response to the demands of the professionals who want better and better images. When Jim Jannard introduced the Red camera, it was as if in an irritated response to corporations like Sony who kept their systems to themselves. Here it becomes clear that these technicians: Cinematographers, colourists, graders, digital imaging technicians and editors truly understand the medium and are completely competent to understand the problems of the designers. It just might be that the cultural production of analogue and digital video, within the Asian market place suffered from the lack of openness of the societies that produced the technology. Equally however, the early European and American versions of that same technology were less user friendly than the Asian - or rather, Japanese, versions. So in the comment above Mitch Gross is discussing both cultural and technological issues - not to mention that both these strands of discussions are in the end in service to the aesthetic delivery of images into our world.<br />
<br />
Michael Brennan a DP from Melbourne and also the editor of High Definition Magazine takes first the cultural and then the technological points up on Wed, 7 Sep 2011 20:56:08 +0100:
“Of course we really don't know what the promise of openness really means any more than we know how much time fits on a 1TB data card
He then quotes from various Sony pdfs;<br />
<br />
“Series S55 cards (capable of 5.5 Gbps) will work at 2k/HD as well as 4k, "non 4k cards" series S25 (2.5 Gbs) will work at 2k and HD but apparently 4k at 23.98psf only.
1TB SR-1TS55 card can store:
59 minutes of f65 raw 16bit 4k 23.98psf
29 minutes of f65 raw (4k x 1k) 16 bit 120fps
572 minutes of HD SR lite 422, 23.98psf
160 minutes of HD SR HQ 444, 23.98psf
In case of 3D recording record time will be halved”.<br />
<br />
This is of course very technical and requires one to have a mathematical bent - but one is listening in to the metalanguage of the technicians - the twitter of the birds - that seek to bring advanced technology to us. He goes on (read this as if concrete poetry):
“So three hours of SR HQ on a card that can be transferred in around 30 minutes. Note that there a two recorders one that does HD/2k the other that does 4K (and maybe HD too??) The SR-R 1000 is a portable 8TB drive with 4 x card slots. Takes 30 minutes to transfer 1 TB, can transfer 4 x cards at a time, looks like a tape deck. The SRPC-5 "transfer station" is a 1U form factor card reader with gigabit ethernet "to compliment existing on set data ingest" and a HDSDI out (if you want to transfer to HDCAM SR deck). Compact card reader is SR-PC4 with one slot and Gbe or optional 10Gbe (third party) and has optional F65 raw monitoring. Can copy direct to Esata drive via optional Esata interface. This is the one of most interest for use in the field, not sure of what the transfer time would be.....”
...and then the characteristic joke to alleviate the compression of attention:
“At last a Dcinema camera with a ND filter wheel :)”<br />
<br />
This is all difficult to read - perhaps like a translator of the early mesopotamian writings, or middle Egyptian, the translator has to find the kinds of meanings the language delivers, And no, this is not deconstruction, this is reconstruction. This is in a sense pure language that cannot deliver all of its meaning when translated. This means something in a certain kind of way to people who speak meta-language.<br />
<br />
Mike Most sends a comment from his iPad (he’s on the move) Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:43:16 -0700 He quotes Alan Lasky who wrote:
“So, I have another question regarding the F65: considering the current state of acquisition, what is the realistic target market vertical for the F65? Features? Television?”
Mike responds: “Yes. Add in commercials and corporate production. Maybe even the military”. And again quotes Lasky:
“My concern is that with current economic conditions being what they are the F65 may be perceived to be "too much dog for the fight" in something like episodic television”.<br />
<br />
Mike Most again: “Not a chance. Television is it's most likely immediate market, IMHO. It's basically being positioned as a superior file based image capture device, using a familiar and respected codec, at what is essentially an Alexa-compatible price point. If you look at it as a substitute for the Alexa in the television market, you can look at recording directly to HD resolution SR files using either S-log or ACES and passing it through a rather straightforward pipeline. Despite Red's protests and despite the 8K/4K nature of the product, that's probably more than enough to get it heavily used this coming pilot season, provided Sony can produce and provided the first units prove to be as reliable as the prototypes seem to be. If anything, it's the requirements of the feature market that are more of a work in progress for the F65, in part because those workflows can be very unique on a per-picture basis, and in part because I'm far from convinced that there will be any simple, economical way to handle that amount of data. Nothing I heard last night changes that view. My feeling is that going forward, Sony will ultimately come up with at least a mathematically lossless compression scheme for the RAW data, perhaps multiple levels of compression a la Red. But I have to agree with my friend Jim Jannard that the uncompressed-only ship has already sailed.
Only my opinion, though. YMMV.”<br />
<br />
He signs: Mike Most, Colorist/Technologist, Level 3 Post, Burbank, CA.
As he says at the beginning of this post: IMHO - “In my humble opinion”, which is a caveat phrase which says : I really know what I’m talking about, I have the experience and the expertise - however, I do accept that sometimes I can be wrong and please let me know if I am. There’s a lot of clues in this post. Sony has missed the uncompressed ship as it sailed three years or more ago when Jim Jannard of Red piloted the boat from the shore. Arriflex with the Alexa has grabbed the high ground because they’ve manufactured a camera more akin to Panasonic’s manufacturing response to Sony’s cameras in a previous era - the Alexa is a camera that delivers good pictures from the outset whereas Red needs work. It’s the difference between a stable mare and an unstable stallion. The other acronym Mike Most uses here is YMMV which means roughly ‘your mileage may vary’ which basically means your experience may be different, better or worse than what is described.<br />
<br />
Here, Most responds to Jim Houston. On Sep 7, 2011, at 9:02 AM, Jim Houston wrote:
“I thought the description of the strategy was very clear. There is no one-size-fits-all workflow. ... Yes, lots of vendors have lots of work to do, but the strategic approach was very clear.
Most responds:
“I think my original statement was a bit stronger than it should have been. I do see that Sony is basically making the data available and also making tools to interpret it available, and bringing in third party partners to do the specific implementations, and that's a strategy I can certainly agree with. I think my only real problem with what's been presented so far is that if one wants to record and preserve the original RAW data, there's nothing currently on the table to do that short of investing in petabytes of storage (an exaggeration, but for certain projects maybe not much of one). No matter how cheap storage is getting, it's still an awful lot of data to ingest, keep track of, and restore. And perhaps I've had too much Kool-Aid in the last 2 years or so, but I no longer see the need to adhere so completely to the "uncompressed is the only way" mantra. Even mathematically lossless compression would cut down those storage requirements by many terabytes on a typical feature project. And that has to be done at the camera/recording level. I still hold out hope that Sony is going to offer such a path, but I didn't hear any evidence of that last night, at least not on the RAW recording”.<br />
<br />
And here he steps up to the mark and begins to comment on the current situation:
“Like it or not, we no longer live in a world where big facilities are the sole province of high end work. And we no longer live in a world where big iron can be the only solution. One of the lessons of both Red and Alexa is that when products are brought to the market that can be handled by both big iron and desktop solutions, the market is widened, acceptance is faster, and products are championed. I think that will likely be the case with F65 recording HD sized SR files, but I'd like to see a similar path for the higher resolution material that the camera can produce, allowing smaller shops and individuals to produce 4K projects with sensible storage requirements. Red has already shown that it can be done. I'd like to see Sony take that ball and run with it a bit.
Competition can be a beautiful thing.”<br />
<br />
Here’s one of the critical issues with the development and availability of uncompressed and RAW technologies: That big iron solutions (i.e. multi-million pound post houses in the worlds capitals) are in parallel with desktop solutions (once only every MAC computers, but now as PC’s have emulated MAC developments they also can be used, as well as Linux and other platforms). Wavelet Transforms have underpinned s called lossless or Raw data and mid-2008 suddenly 4k images could be played back with only three standard hard drives ganged together, in 2006 it had taken me 8 hard drives ganged together to produce the same outcome. Wavelet’s had been available in 2005, but not with this efficacy. We are in the middle of an onward rush, a tsunami of technology.
But this technology, in delivering greater resolution (as well as dynamic range and also frame rates) is alleviating some of the earlier anxieties of the move from film to video to data cinematography.<br />
<br />
Here, Tim Sassoon comments on Mike Mosts earlier point and then brings up a critical point:
In a message dated 9/7/11 11:43:49 AM, Most writes:
“Sony will ultimately come up with at least a mathematically lossless compression scheme for the RAW data”
Sassoon’s response is:
“Remember that the larger the frame, the less significant compression artifacts are, and the more important higher bit depth is”.<br />
<br />
This is a very important comment as it shows that anxiety is a response relative to the conditions of the time. In the early days of HD and 2K the idea of an artifact within the image produced a complete and total adherence to the idea of lossless data amongst the most serious professionals. This was related to the fact that they did have experience of the highest levels of image generation in 35mm and 65mm film. They had a history of dedication to methodologies that avoided any kind of compromise of the image generation, development and display process. This evinces itself latterly for instance, in Christopher Nolan’s adherence to the use of 65mm to generate high quality entertainment features.
But of course lossless data is an impossibility because it is never really achievable: even if one retained all of the data generated (at massive storage cost), the particular criteria adopted defeats the notion of lossless-ness. What I mean here is that the paradigm governing the technical thinking of the time says that data is a costly thing to generate. Not in monetary terms (although high levels of data do generate actual cost) but costly in terms of storage and the ability to manipulate the data for editing, grading compositing etc. Consequently generating 8 bit data with 256 samples (of a data criteria like YUV - so that’s 3 times 256) obviously generates less data than 10 bit (with 1024 samples per channel) - and so on. The real point here is that one would need an infinite bit depth to truly represent the world - but then one would reproduce the world - so what in effect, would be the point?<br />
<br />
Mike Most comments on Tim Sassoon’s point:
“Remember that the larger the frame, the less significant compression artifacts are, and the more important higher bit depth is.
I think you and I are basically saying the same thing (no surprise there ;-D ), with one of us pointing out that even mathematically lossless compression is really not a requirement at these frame sizes.”
Mike Most is saying that with the human optical system there might in fact be a limit far below the infinite horizon of data that the purist originally sought, that will work for the discerning eye.<br />
<br />
PRELIMINARY SUMMATION<br />
So, here we are again at one of those seemingly watershed moments, which actually do not have the power of metaphor associated with a watershed with further inspection. In hindsight it might have seemed very dramatic at the time. With the Sony announcement of the F65, it might have seemed as if a distant horizon has rushed forward towards us and simply looked like they were very near indeed. What looked technically impossible before now looks technically not only achievable but far surpassable.
But here I’d like to step back into film’s past to generate a sense of scale for the present. In his book ‘Using the View Camera: A Creative Guide to Large Format Photography’, Steve Simmons describes the relationship and also advantage between the larger still image film formats of camera over and above 35mm SLR cameras:<br />
<br />
“The film used with the various view-camera formats is much larger than 35mm film. Film for the 2.5 x 3.25 camera is 5 times larger, 4 x 5 film is more than 13 times larger, and 8 x 10 film is 53 times larger. The increased film size produces clean, crisp images with a captivating sharpness. The surface textures of such materials as stone, brick and wood look almost three-dimensional in view-camera prints and transparencies. Large display prints have unblemished clarity and depth because the negative doesn’t have to be over-enlarged.”<br />
<br />
This immediately refers to Tim Sassoon’s point: “Remember that the larger the frame, the less significant compression artifacts are, and the more important higher bit depth is.
Also, if you work through the figures, 8 x 10 film (using the Canon Rebel as a guide) is 53 x 18 megapixels: that’s 954 megapixels! As you’ll guess, I’m being disingenuous and playing somewhat (but even if you used the Red One camera, that would be 440 megapixels). Steve Simmons talks about a ‘captivating sharpness’. ‘unblemished clarity’ and the images of materials look ‘almost three-dimensional’. This is all about increase of verisimilitude as our current technological tendency is about a series of increases in capacities which produce clues that translate as verisimilitude - hence the other phrase Steve Simmons uses ‘looks almost three-dimensional’*(See note at end).<br />
<br />
So for a long time now we’ve had the ability to capture very, very detailed high resolution images. The difference now with Digital Cinematography is that we can fire these off at 24 frames, 25, 30, 48, 60 - in fact the capabilities of frame rate display is continuously increasing. We are effectively enabling still photography rapid fire to allow it to join cinematography, and by being digitally enabled we must append the title to Digital or Data Cinematography. I would conclude from the above that we are in the very early days of what is to become possible. And what eventually arrives will be far outside what we can currently imagine.
This brings to mind some experiments conducted at the University of Bristol where Tom Troscianko in the department of Experimental Psychology has produced data that shows that current 3D techniques only generate 7 per cent more immersion than standard 2D images of the same subject matter. The technique used to measure ‘immersion’ is related to arousal. In fact, increased technological capacities, such as higher frame rates, higher dynamic range capture and display together with increased resolution produce more depth clues and generate a deeper level of engagement than 3D technologies.<br />
<br />
So I myself have been guilty of believing in the digital revolution and given many papers on it - even the idea of the post digital. I’ve ruminated and written on the notion of data as being too closely related with digitality which many signal engineers regard simply as actually an enhanced analogue method. After all, Fourier presciently invented the Wavelet transform in 1807 and the ‘meat-grinder’ Discrete Cosine Transform in 1800 - way before digitality in the middle of the analogue era.
I’ve written before on the idea of data as being pure and unmediated by numerical remediation - after all the data captured within the medium of the hologram is not mathematical, nor mediated (except in the strict sense that it’s held within a medium). But it is quantum and photonic in nature - both appendages or descriptions deny the notion of the mathematical - where mathematics is a telescope or viewing device into the ‘stuff’ of the universe and photons are of the stuff of the universe and light behavior appears to be quantum (in this perceptual realm at least).<br />
<br />
It would seem that the idea of a technological revolution is a human gesture towards a paradigm change. It would seem that the reinvention and use of language is part of the strategy. To call something that’s happening ‘Digital’ when all you’ve know previously is analogue functionality, is very similar as the gesture of naming something ‘High Definition’ - which albeit can be seen to be a PR gesture, might also be an actual necessity for innovation and development (again thinking of Noam Chomsky in relationship to thought and language being two halves of the same coin) It’s the use of language where you aspire to something beyond the now. ‘The Truth’ and the idea of ‘now’ are of course dubious notions, unless you believe in the idea of the direction of entropy and therefore accept the forward notion of ‘Time’s Arrow’, (when there’s always a ‘next’).<br />
<br />
On the same list the day after the F65 was launched, this post arrived from Harry Dawson: Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 10:43:19 -0700
“With film "going away" in a few years, there needs to be a 4K replacement, right? I'm shooting a project where we are doing 4K scans from 35mm. Not doing SFX but spanning three vertical plasma screens. Seems like SFX are going to need a higher resolution answer than Alexa. Here might be an answer, right?”<br />
<br />
Harry is posing the question of ‘next’. In this case I won’t go in to what he’s suggesting technically as I’ll leave that to your own researches. Digitality now sits where ‘the Modern’ used to sit. It’s here right now and it feels good, because it suggests we’re in a period of movement, that we are materially achieving the dreams of our imagineers, science fiction writers beginning somewhere in the 7th century BC with the writer of the Epic of Gilgamesh, who’s original title was “He who saw the Deep”. I’m speaking here of an actual ‘writer’ who used text and of course I do accept that human’s have created forward looking stories from the beginning of language (and in the case of images in the cave paintings of Lascaux - who’s to say these were not imagined bountiful futures rather than ‘movies’ about the past?)<br />
<br />
So in a sense I’m arguing that future imagining, via science fiction writers of the 1950’s and sci-fi television shows like Star Trek that posited warp drive and holodecks were the original acts of scientific theorising, that then created a vision for everyday scientists to work towards; that possibly at this point in time, where the world seems a little out of control, ‘the church of future hope’ is actively proposing that technically we can do anything - and given that our optical system is perhaps the most powerful and overwhelming sensory system - and somehow ontologically characterise what we actually are - then digital imaging is the place where the forward thinking work which seeks to usher in a new paradigm is taking place - it seems to me therefore, that the language and the conversations of those people that truly understand the technology, the possibilities it makes available, the developing practice and the following technical developments is a determinant of what will actually occur.<br />
<br />
TECHNICAL NOTES AS AN ELEMENT OF THE ARGUMENT<br />
I will now outline some of the ideas that may not have been fully described earlier (because I didn’t want to limit the progression of the above narrative). I’m now proposing that though these are informational, that they also or revealing imminent technical, cultural and aesthetic developments.
In the early days of HD where the naming of terminology described the aspiration for something better than what we’d been used to, High Definition simply meant ‘better’ at 1920 x 1080 photosites rather than 768 x 576. In 2007 when I started my Creative Research Fellowship the technology was very clunky, the recording mechanisms seemed incapable of recording the data generated and the idea of recording a truly lossless stream of data seemed impossible.<br />
<br />
Then I became aware of various critical issues which determined the parameters of generating, recording and displaying digital images:
Modular Transfer Function, which describes a chain of delivery from capture to display where resolution is defined by the lowest resolution link in the chain (like plumbing where flow is derived from the thinnest of pipes in the system);
Wavelet Transforms which power everything digital by being that bit cleverer than discrete cosine transforms: the first being linked to the functions of a circle and the second being linked to the square. Clearly the smoothness of a circle as a metaphor is more gradual and gentler than the hard right angles of the square. Therefore reconstructions of data that’s been compressed with the functions of arcs and circles is more delicate than those compressed and uncompressed using the functions of a square wave. Wavelets just seem intuitively more reconstructable.
I’ve used the term photosite rather than pixel as it is a more accurate description of the light receptor that generates a voltage which is then processed into data than the word ‘pixel’ on a CCD or CMOS sensor, (as it is where the basic data for a ‘display pixel’ is generated).<br />
<br />
With regard the denominator ’2K’, HD is often referred to inaccurately as 2K, as 1920 is near to 2 thousand) - HD is 1920 x 1080 photosites, but one of the more true variants of 2K cinema, which uses a 2:1 aspect ratio is 2048 x 1024 photosites. The true 35mm sensor however might better be described as being in the region of 2000 x 1500 photosites because this generates an aspect ratio of around 4:3, which is the original 35mm academy ratio, which can also be expressed - if you divide 4 by to get 1.33 (Academy was actually 1.375).
If you take a 35mm sized sensor that is 2k, then of course it has larger photosites than those on a same-sized 4k sensor - as there have to be 4 times as many packed in to the same space - and as with all things, when you do this sort of thing, there are drawbacks (which is for another article).
The 4K variant using a 35mm sensor is 4096 x 2048 (double the 2k variant which uses a 2:1 aspect ratio). So using the 4K variant that would equate to 8.3 million photosites - so the Red Camera has a sensor (speaking in DSLR terms) which is less than half the recent cheap Canon EOS Rebel, which retails for about $900 and is 18 megapixels.<br />
<br />
You get the point though - and importantly when you shoot in megapixel amounts of photosites this is then multiplied by how many frames per second you can shoot - so whilst Peter Jackson shoots the Hobbit Movie at 48 frames per second - at 4k and in sterographic 3D (i.e. two streams of 4K at 48 fps) the data streams are huge.
Colour bit depth is typically talked about as 8, 10, 12 etc. What this refers to is the amount of samples taken - therefore how subtle the colouration is. 8 bits describes a sample of
2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2
which as a sum equals 256 samples. 10 bits is two more times 2 which equals 1024 (and so on). Incidentally each byte of data is comprised of 8 bits of data.
Colour bit depth sits within a Colour Space (which is the term that describes what the parameters are for the gathering of and display of data). Clearly a printer has an entirely different colour space than either the human eye, or a plasma screen, or the newer Higher Dynamic Range Display technology that you will be seeing shortly.
I could carry on and this ‘argument’ would also seem to transmute into a ‘glossary’. In fact the language and the thought become the same. In time of course these will again separate as we gain distance on the subject area.<br />
<br />
It’s always been a difficult practice to theorise what is happening when it is happening.
We’re now post-digital (so some claim) which I read as meaning: ‘we’re no longer confused about what it is and now we feel comfortable’. This means that people are looking to the horizon as if it’s the present. 4k now - 64k tomorrow - and why not? There’s a changing paradigm to be witnessed here. Digitality requires numerical representations of whatever the digital device is dealing with. Numerical equals mathematical. But there are ways of generating data that are not mathematical - within the hologram for instance. Pure data captured without mediating light through maths.<br />
<br />
CODA<br />
To try to make all of this that little bit more clear, here are what I offer some defining criteria for Digital or Data Cinematography:<br />
<br />
a) The optical pathway is 35mm or above (if you research the reason that 35mm film was set at 35mm, you’ll see it could have been derived from manufacturing techniques for photographic usage - that is what was technically and industrially possible at the time).<br />
b) it generates a progressively based image flow relating to a specific time-base as opposed to an interlaced image flow (one full frame of information at a time rather than a field-based workflow)<br />
c) like one of its predecessors, film, it holds the image in a latent state until an act of development (or rendering) is applied - but unlike film is non-destructive of its prior material state)<br />
d) it’s capture mechanism though generating a nondestructive, non-compressed data pathway from which an image can be reconstructed, is not its sole intent as a medium or method of capture (but is distinguished from digital video who’s sole intent is to generate images in a compressed manner from less than 35mm optical pathways)<br />
e) the latter three qualities are also base characteristics of many developing digital technologies – for instance real time mapping of environments requires a capture of at least 3 infra-red imaging sources (Cameras used as sonar devices) running at 25 fps at a 'reasonable' resolution<br />
<br />
Digital cinematography is more than just capturing images - it's a portal onto the digital landscape so far unexplored due to its apparent function as an image capture medium i.e. remediation.
As a conclusion this short list may be satisfying or unsatisfying. There are many other ideas to work through and many developments coming that will need similar examination as this technology grows and changes.
Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-67964300429552135272011-09-08T05:23:00.000-07:002011-09-08T05:26:53.300-07:00and the point of a DP is?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc_gdGdqWZvPnk93QHMMaCW-yk_ZkS4nDjpAhT3yM6whhqUdpLu9JOKRx7nSZbD71u-f0ob7rOAk0sYpxL-bXvJHNl_annDdYZJwdQvINg0uiiDq-tUR2GA-PFUUNPPMjkZjIYDoEXL47R/s1600/vertov.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 394px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc_gdGdqWZvPnk93QHMMaCW-yk_ZkS4nDjpAhT3yM6whhqUdpLu9JOKRx7nSZbD71u-f0ob7rOAk0sYpxL-bXvJHNl_annDdYZJwdQvINg0uiiDq-tUR2GA-PFUUNPPMjkZjIYDoEXL47R/s400/vertov.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612444522728951586" /></a><i>I wrote this some while back, when Benjamin Button came on our small screens - and then forgot to post - but here it is anyway:</i>
I work with data or digital cinematography, but I'm a film sympathiser, or should I say cinema sympathiser? It's an aesthetic thing and there's some Digital Cinematography footage I see that looks like video in its worst most 'live' state. Benjamin Button for instance. Or maybe it was the re-interlacing it went through to get to TV that did it, but it was painful to watch even though it was lit well.<br /><br />As digital cinematography develops the new HDR function is ok but it's represented in standard viewing space on any normal display and there's the rub. If light in the visible spectrum can be said to be of (say) 15 orders of magnitude and the eyes in the human system are instantly capable of 5 orders of instantaneous magnitude (and this is utilised throughout the 15 orders depending on time of day, levels of luminance and a lot of other factors - like a searchlight of conscious perception sliding up and down the scale) then the average standardly available display is around 2 - 3 orders of magnitude (at best). <br /><br />With new HDRx on Red, If you shoot 5 orders of magnitude then compress it into standard display space, then everything is lost. The HDR display technology that Dolby is working with, is around 5 orders so HDR capture - 10 levels of black and 30 levels of white above normal displays - correctly displays all of the gathered light. This is far better than exhibiting a conjuring trick: 'look no lights to achieve what was only possible by lighting'. If you are looking at a CRT, LCD or Plasma when you view the now famous red barn shot: http://camerarentalz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/hdrx-barn.jpg you'll see that everything that HDR truly is - is missing. <br /><br />In 5 years proper HDR will be available generally (given Moore's law). When you see real HDR Display, that doorway in the shot is hard to look at because it's 2 orders of magnitude higher than what you're looking at in standard display space. People originally got excited about HDRx for the wrong reasons which were to do with an advance in their technique that would be made possible - almost as if the average DP is searching simply for natural light to solve their basic aesthetic problem - and for me that basic problem lay closer to the experiments and work of people like Dziga Vertov than it does to, say, Billy Bitzer. I buy Conrad Hall's assessment of the necessary search of the longtime cinematographer that is to find the photographic moment in every frame of the still - not it's technicalities, but in the aesthetic demand to make every frame as good as every other.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-78267124215284121142011-09-08T05:13:00.000-07:002011-09-08T05:21:46.412-07:00The Human Gaze<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6Ig5WuUn4BIE5L2acm8LsaRuMlMJqsvChL8o_LdxZ73qycMFNJZFTZtReDq7ZTbP5ASnBEWeZnvwVARtxb_l5hBxnUiMOlh71oyPdy08H8q6vFc-EtOtAoLVq4oRSfl9U4ZOsuu3a3bcg/s1600/Hockney.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="119" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6Ig5WuUn4BIE5L2acm8LsaRuMlMJqsvChL8o_LdxZ73qycMFNJZFTZtReDq7ZTbP5ASnBEWeZnvwVARtxb_l5hBxnUiMOlh71oyPdy08H8q6vFc-EtOtAoLVq4oRSfl9U4ZOsuu3a3bcg/s400/Hockney.jpg" /></a></div>
One of the UK’s national treasures, David Hockney, is experimenting with the human gaze by gathering together 9 HD cameras (consumer and therefore heavily compressed) to generate a single shot of the <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38393/?p1=featured">English countryside to produce one very high resolution image</a>. My own experiments with the human gaze also addressed the issue Hockney is addressing by the act of looking, which he sometimes terms as ‘drawing’. This being the language of his enlightenment about making art. The art work itself is a metaphor for seeing. There is a shot of the countryside. There is no cutting. He does in fact use different moments of time from the different cameras and also slightly different angles of view (slightly more zoomed in or out) which in fact refers to his earlier polaroid recombinations of the world which somehow evoke cubist styles of painting and thought as expounded by Braque and Picasso. Hockney says that he idea of drawing is about looking and seeing - you simply have to look if you're going to draw. You have to engage. Meditate. Clear the mind of ratiocination so that there is only perception - and for the artist then give a clear response. Hockney is effectively arguing that art is a mediation between the world and the public. Warhol before him said look at the mundane things in the world around you - they too are art. Koons upped the ante towards kitsch. Hirst said value is the thing (his platinum skull). All along Hockney is saying: 'Beauty'. All of this refutes the idea of ‘interpretation’ as a way of deriving meaning, as espoused by those that critique or theorise the work. This is becoming a time when artist and audience no longer need the high priests, the theorists and the curators to tell them how to respond to art. Digitality and post digitality is enabling ‘entrainment to succeed where interpretation failed. The Artist, the artwork and the audience all become one, from the moment of creation, to the moment of perception - all entrain together. This is an entirely valid way of being, as valid as interpretation was for its time.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-8870851884792025262011-06-09T05:10:00.001-07:002011-06-09T05:14:36.076-07:00By way of a letter to a fellow artist on the subject of the cadaverous nature of HD images<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigIoSk_2D4mwOygbp0eECLDgIzWvdA4_Vd6fPu543Df9DLQOeUGZ32bfnSKwnyIgl-7T3_PFY5XpLM5LFx25HrGAYeOdOazDD92uObkf60AiU5A-1_-jutb5Fs7wkISdNit3r7Gz-oCkan/s1600/Dead.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 309px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigIoSk_2D4mwOygbp0eECLDgIzWvdA4_Vd6fPu543Df9DLQOeUGZ32bfnSKwnyIgl-7T3_PFY5XpLM5LFx25HrGAYeOdOazDD92uObkf60AiU5A-1_-jutb5Fs7wkISdNit3r7Gz-oCkan/s400/Dead.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616191993829520258" /></a>"Hi - glad you got back to me. Just to give you a context, I started using video in 1976 when we actually cut the tape with a razor blade then used sticky tape to join it - the resulting edit was like an explosion as it went past the heads and visually the image fell all over the place....<br /><br />But then over the years as each new development happened things improved. One of my first art pieces was what we now call glitch art as I really liked the mess-upds of the medium - in fact video always offered surprises. All my friends became teachers because we were before the YBA and their use of video - we were doing what people like Gillian Wearing did - but the time was too early. Education or industry offered the only employment. So I decided that I needed to know the medium - like a 14th century painter I wanted to mix my own paints. That meant for me joining the industry, so with one hand I earned money, and threw it away making art with the other. Now as the industry is full of too many people the best place came up as a research fellow in education in my long-time interest of HD which I first came across in its analog form in 1992...<br /><br />In some ways I agree with you but then I guess I have a whole history invested in the fact that the stuff actually works and gets better - however, that doesn't blind me. I'd learned to bring life to the video image often imitating film people who heated up the developer a few degrees so that it made material changes to the way the film looked. At the moment the cadaverous nature of data cinematography is because everyone leaves their footage till post to cast a thin patina of colour on top of the image rather than 'heating up the data' and interfering in the process and perhaps breathing life into the corpse. <br /><br />In fact in 4 years of making HD work I've only managed to bring HD to life a few times as it's a fluttering technology that often goes flat-line on you.You get cast as Dr Frankenstein trying to bring the monster to life. Also the definition of the term HD is a problem. For me it's an industrial and therefore political term, now redundant. Sony needed to defeat Kodak or at least marginalise their photo-chemical Empire, which they're now done. But HD to me is tv driven - even being 16-9 is a reference to the buried desires of all the people that used to shoot 4:3 because glass vacuum technology could only go so big and electron guns with magnets switching them on and off started creating a whiplash effect over a certain size - so as 16:9 is an extrapolation of 4:3 then even the super hi vision 8K system is a complete remediation of an earlier technology - personally I haven't shot HD 16:9 for 3 or 4 years now. I always set to 2:1 and then project to the same aspect - but in my next project I'm turning the camera sideways and projecting 9:16 and a variant will be 1:1.<br /><br />On the subject of remediation - I'm always wary of letting analog/digital and HD remediate what I now call Data cinematography or data imaging because the first three have nothing to do with the last which has more in common with telematics, haptics, mapping of 3D space and all the digital technologies that have been co-opted by pervasive media studies. I think of data imaging as being capable of being an image but also being a lot more. Kinnect spits out infra red pulses from the chip then receives them back again at different rates - like sonar - and maps the environment. It's a kind of image, but shows a little crack in the wall which when it comes down will describe a landscape we know is there but only guess at the content which is : the digital (or post-digital as it's now being called).<br /><br />And on that note, in some ways data imaging is not really about the data. HD was, but what comes next is a window on a new landscape, a trojan horse technology beyond the two dimensional image and all that that entails. I mean I suppose that in offering more than an image within its definition, it then offers 3 dimensions - not in the quotidian way that 3D or stereography describes reality, but more in the Kinnect way. But of course Kinnect is a remediation too. I've seen 3D virtual objects that you can touch and been in environments where you stimulate events in telematically removed spaces which are mapped to the space you are in. Fundamentally it's the Hollo-deck from Star Trek - and yes, at the University of Bristol they have actually teleported a piece of matter from one place to another instantaneously.<br /><br />Then there's 'metaphor' which always takes the eye off the ball. Basically 'HD' is not cadaverous, because it never lived. However I know what you mean - I like the fact that you're responding to it and naming it, describing it.<br /><br />I'm probably already compromised because when I decided to get into the industry to fund myself as an artist rather than teach about what I didn't know (and some of my friends are now as high as it gets in education - and they've never once practiced and stopped making art a long time ago) I probably know too much technically to function as an artist... Having said that I'm about to shoot a new piece (so now I work in education like all the other old fucks but still use the money I earn to make art -:) Last December I showed 18 new works in HD at the P3 Gallery, before that I exhibited one of my HD installations at St. john the divine in new york for 5 months - it got a lot of good response and I think it got over the cadaverous nature you describe... That's sort of what I'm trying to take on".Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-46554341555372242032011-05-27T05:26:00.000-07:002011-05-28T00:48:59.748-07:00Far Horizons, now behind us<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6bnbddvsBRT0xhJFIIpaMLIJbRORwB5tPbYSVQmg89pZ4vVi_pO3Ntf6pcHi6S3ITtZK1XaiSTiOT2f4gs1CQLLhBFBaUcai1_g1pkvChkuHI5TIZlgN3t1sHuSIb6NbsUYdFKCI5wKDR/s1600/horizon.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6bnbddvsBRT0xhJFIIpaMLIJbRORwB5tPbYSVQmg89pZ4vVi_pO3Ntf6pcHi6S3ITtZK1XaiSTiOT2f4gs1CQLLhBFBaUcai1_g1pkvChkuHI5TIZlgN3t1sHuSIb6NbsUYdFKCI5wKDR/s400/horizon.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611374933103365186" /></a>The National Association of Broadcasters event in Las Vegas has just occurred - a very typically American title in that it assumes that all of us, all 6 billion are of that nation and persuasion. The main news here is the innovation of a robust set of Digital Cinematographic pieces of equipment with Sony's F65 as the biggest piece of kit in that as it uses an 8K chip it actually for the first time delivers 4k real resolution (with regard to various theorems and rules of mathematics). F23 means 'two thirds', F35 means a 35 mm sized chip, F65 means a 65mm film sized gate as the size of the chip.<br /><br />Regardless of the paraphernalia and excitement around an event such as this, in the end NAB simply announced that whereas several years ago high resolution data on a par with photo-chemical film was almost impossible to achieve on many different levels (light response and rendition in a filmic way, the ability to record the signal without massively compressing the data - all of that stuff) right now we can surpass the level of <span style="font-style:italic;">quality</span> of film. By that I mean that the resolution is higher in both capture and display and with the advent of High Dynamic Range Capture and Display we can surpass the rendition of what the eye sees with Digital Cinematography in a way that is higher on all counts than with Film. It has helped that finally CMOS chips have caught up with CCD's in development.<br /><br />Forget the arguments about whether film does a different thing (which of course it does): on a technical level the argument is over.<br /><br />That is a big statement - When I came upon HD around the early nineties, that was an impossible thing to imagine.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-18486706075316989092011-05-04T06:42:00.000-07:002011-05-04T07:09:43.266-07:00Invisible when appropriate<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_ljxgdb4ceN4FZtn8PF-aNhEeF49W63tXbO-GVYJP3UHXAaS-ovgQBqS9xK2ohkvjpPp77CHF13vPJCUr6__FpPM9dqo_LFnOiBuidBIgmAL1_QTHaVcnSPWuMUSzLCMc7xxcFKEkDCX/s1600/Royal-visit-to-Canada-006.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_ljxgdb4ceN4FZtn8PF-aNhEeF49W63tXbO-GVYJP3UHXAaS-ovgQBqS9xK2ohkvjpPp77CHF13vPJCUr6__FpPM9dqo_LFnOiBuidBIgmAL1_QTHaVcnSPWuMUSzLCMc7xxcFKEkDCX/s400/Royal-visit-to-Canada-006.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602862883095105138" /></a>I try not to be so on the nose in the title of these posts but last night whilst watching 'Pina' by Wim Wenders (bless his cotton socks) apart from being ecstatic at the content and especially Pina Bausch's choreography for Stravinsky's Right of Spring - the 3D was invisible.<br /><br />And in that it became invisible because the content was appropriate, so 3D came into its own. It took a ‘Wenders’ and a non-commercial subject to use space in a way that was worth doing and hence part of the film-makers palette. Of course Tim Burton et al can use the medium (because their gaze within whatever medium is skilled and talented) but the craggy old German had the simple sense to ask himself what the aesthetics of the medium were capable of then not only use these, but to use them in a way that did not - excuse the pun - stick out.<br /><br />Rather Wenders simply used 'depth' like colour, light, camera movement etc as if it were simply one of the elements of the palette that the film maker has access to.<br /><br />It’s still a pain in the backside to have to wear glasses, but holographic 3D is already being tested in the research labs so we won’t have to wear these 60’s Jetson styled objects for much longer.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-54147509873394909352011-04-23T03:50:00.000-07:002011-04-23T04:03:39.958-07:00Cinematography<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJNQE3dd1gzA6T8roXgssTFP-5qKgjVSs0IxIQ5nwCQ47bGx_gEUppj-GRLSVrh_AxZjq1BJfKaPUlhJgG-W1VWaMmDSdWLgfLil2S75-YgfcrqZwH9OIVkAMsBqif8WL-Ld7oV3rzZjfj/s1600/icon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 319px; height: 263px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJNQE3dd1gzA6T8roXgssTFP-5qKgjVSs0IxIQ5nwCQ47bGx_gEUppj-GRLSVrh_AxZjq1BJfKaPUlhJgG-W1VWaMmDSdWLgfLil2S75-YgfcrqZwH9OIVkAMsBqif8WL-Ld7oV3rzZjfj/s400/icon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5598732851146646866" /></a>At the most recent National Association of Broadcasters event in Los Vegas (NAB 2011), the developments within Digital Cinematography have taken the project over the brow of the hill. For a long while resolution was a central issue and when resolution became discussable in realistic terms (where manufacturers were realistic about the actual resolution as opposed to the hoped for resolution), then the rating of the stock/data in terms of light response and also in terms of tonal and colour response came into play. S now we have resolution equivalent to film (and better projection), the sensors will have a high speed and low noise floor, and the colour and tone response – especially if one uses Higher Dynamic Range imaging principles – then we can begin to develop a true artistic response in this medium.<br /><br />Sony exhibited the F65 camera – a name challenging the film format of 65mm – this camera has an 8k imaging censor and realistically says it is intended to deliver 4k (remembering the Niquist-Shannon sampling theorem where you need twice the sampling to deliver the resolution). Plus there were many, many other developments in 3D and all areas of the subject.<br /><br />So now it’s time for artistic image development that does not simply rely on post to confer a look – now the main project begins; to develop artistry with data.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-6652279897140284702011-04-16T09:33:00.001-07:002011-04-16T09:49:54.711-07:003D is here to stay - and?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz2coIjIYoQDeun3xWMx_spZvjnMnoRSZK37vvA039lH7-anpr8_DEkoj1aThPPNszsHF_jakBJXFEr3ZNSVk71aPliYIMEjwYHsu-5zDFdiqYbuWhfI4WaAhXJyv1z0Sft7OFhll9hlci/s1600/In-and-out-of-traffic-1024x818.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz2coIjIYoQDeun3xWMx_spZvjnMnoRSZK37vvA039lH7-anpr8_DEkoj1aThPPNszsHF_jakBJXFEr3ZNSVk71aPliYIMEjwYHsu-5zDFdiqYbuWhfI4WaAhXJyv1z0Sft7OFhll9hlci/s400/In-and-out-of-traffic-1024x818.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596220877899920434" /></a>I’ve been trying to find out why I don’t particularly like 3D. I enjoy the simple circus attraction of course, but when I put the glasses on it distracts from the basic reason I go to the cinema to see a film, as opposed to watch it in some other way like on a plasma screen. I like to experience the size of the auditorium - most of all it’s that. Within the auditorium space, what works is the sheer size of the image, but more importantly the audio enhances the sense of the space and when accompanied by sight in the right relationship the experience of 'cinema' happens.<br /><br />If I put on glasses I might as well be at home in a small space. Cinema disappears. Something about putting on the glasses cuts off the larger spatial experience and also somehow modifies the sound in a synesthetic canceling out of the larger experience, and pulling off the glasses to witness the blurred overlay of images detracts from whatever visual pleasures do survive visual because you realise that it’s all happening in the eye and brain.<br /><br />There’s a more philistine approach which likens the invention of 3D to the invention of perspective and asks the question: of what use is the invention of perspective to a work of two dimensional abstract expressionism? This is 'argumentum ad - hopelessness (Sorry I don't know the latin for that). However, I shan’t deal with this because it’s a disparaging argument and there are better ones.<br /><br />With the glasses on there is certainly an experience of what freud calls unheimlich - the uncanny - but though there’s a small pleasure in the experience of the 3D evocation of what’s before you, somehow the addition of what 3D gives has an equal measure taken away by the above elements, from the experience. And because expectation is heightened from the offer of an additional experience, its neutralisation is as an addition, disappointing.<br /><br />The indescribable ‘strangeness’ that Freud discussed in his essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ is certainly present in the viewing of a 3D movie but once more it is neutralised by the kind of use it undergoes currently - popcorn 3D movies are the province of 3D and even Tim Burton’s authorial eye in ‘Alice’ is taken towards the chocolate box by its verve and competency of use. If you remember the Third Man and a Touch of Evil, though both are great, Wells use of the dutch angle has so much more power because he’s innovating with it, whereas Karol Reisz’s use is systematised and formulaic. A Touch of Evil evokes the uncanny, the Third Mans uses it to effectively deliver a nice viewing experience. Wells isn’t interested in ‘nice’ and todays use of 3D is all about 'nice'.<br /><br />In seeing the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I had hoped to be disabused of 'nice'. Werner Herzog (Mr 'not-nice') and he who is mostly comprised of uncanniness itself, tries to use 3D ‘properly’ in that he synchronises the use of 3D with a subject that demands its use. All the Lascaux cave paintings are in two dimensions - yet painted on carefully chosen 3Dimensional pieces of rock. Herzog argues that this pre-cinematic use of still-yet moving images is enhanced by the sensation of looking at what we know to be a 2Dimensional form in its first use displayed in a 3 dimensional form. <br /><br />If the early artists used psychedelics to project themselves as flatlanders (using the VIctorian notion of 2 dimensional beings experiencing a 3Dimensional form as a point which grows into a circle and back down to a point) then those psychedelics enabled the earliest artists to create a form that when experienced today is recognisable as such. But of course, Herzog is saying that we’ve lost our wonder at their prescience - so he uses 3D shooting to re-evoke it. But in the end I think I would have preferred to see the film without glasses on and in 2D.<br /><br />I look forward to WIm Wenders use of 3D in 'Pina' in the hope that he will actually make 3D come to something (but Pina Bausch's work is already amazingly wonderful and one might suspect that it shouldn't be messed around with) but my suspicion is that in general yes, 3D is here to stay this time because what it requires technically is present within digital acquisition in a way that it was not within film - but now that it is here to stay it will become ubiquitous and quotidian - some of us will say of course that it was never as good as it was cracked up to be anyway. In essence, 3D is its own worst enemy.<br /><br />Roll on holographic 3D as the next technology and all the rest that are to come - but actually, it’s the art within the use of all technologies which is the important thing - as we all suspect before we formulate a sentence to discuss the issue.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4216377337577757243.post-26306927888779816432011-02-12T09:14:00.000-08:002011-02-12T09:26:03.601-08:00The Look: Digital Cinema Aesthetics and Workflows<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5QL-rVIEE-uC87TtboelalaAosHF9Y2l7HN-p6qAa9GjbdXqKgwIaU4CtSZEh_Hyy9vMfpJlTAlfszYhxSqv0AIKpweykogr4n1NcTbo_V4t_hEbbg46abrfw2dpkkObi3ZenX6ThpuBJ/s1600/bannerblue.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 96px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5QL-rVIEE-uC87TtboelalaAosHF9Y2l7HN-p6qAa9GjbdXqKgwIaU4CtSZEh_Hyy9vMfpJlTAlfszYhxSqv0AIKpweykogr4n1NcTbo_V4t_hEbbg46abrfw2dpkkObi3ZenX6ThpuBJ/s400/bannerblue.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572852879272918482" /></a><a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/KT4.htm">The Look: Digital Cinema Aesthetics and Workflows will take place in Bristol (UK) on 1st April 2011</a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I am placing this post here because the syposium will summate what I'm currently trying to do.</span><br /><br />This one-day symposium will explore, and attempt to demystify, the movement of film and video footage through the digital production process from camera to exhibition. The ‘look’ of a film used to be the domain of the cinematographer. As a result of the various new forms of image manipulation that have appeared in the last decade and a half, new types of collaboration have resulted – for example, between cinematographers, post-production supervisors, visual effects artists, and colourists. Given the multiplicity of ways in which the aesthetics of a film can change after shooting is complete, a key question presents itself: who controls what aspects of a film’s look?<br /><br />This symposium will trace how the ‘look’ of shots changes at each stage of this process, explain some of the technologies that effect these changes, and discuss the decision-making behind these changes. It will also explore the reorganisation of production roles and responsibilities that has resulted from the digitisation of film-making workflows. The symposium will draw from a range of specialisms, bridging theory and practice: invited speakers will include <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0822975/">Oliver Stapleton</a> BSC (The Proposal, The Cider House Rules), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0102240/">Geoff Boyle</a> DoP FBKS (Wallander, Mutant Chronicles), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1211866/">Jonathan Smiles</a> Digital Production Supervisor, (District 9, Green Zone) <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1054717/">Luke Rainey</a> Colourist, (Band of Brothers, Man on a Wire), Professor <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Cinematographer-Duncan-J-Petrie/dp/0851705820">Duncan Petrie</a>, Professor <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=ntt_at_ep_srch?ie=UTF8&search-alias=books&field-author=Sean+Cubitt&sort=relevancerank">Sean Cubitt</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Misek/e/B002PML244">Dr Richard Misek</a>, <a href="http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/cahe/cmd/aboutus/ourstaff/crofts.aspx">Dr Charlotte Crofts</a>. Introduced by Professor Sarah Street. Mark Cosgrove, Director of Programme, Watershed Bristol<br /><br />The day will consist of four sessions: image capture, data management, colour grading, and display; then a final plenary. Each of the four sessions will comprise a presentation by a film industry professional, a presentation by a film academic to open up wider questions, and a dialogue between the two hosted by <a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/">Terry Flaxton </a>AHRC Senior Research Fellow (and DoP). The intention is to introduce the practice of each to the other and of both to the general public, facilitating an open conversation about the aesthetic issues, pressures, technologies, and production roles involved in contemporary film production.<br /><br />TICKETS: £50 With pre-ordered buffet lunch (If not ordered, meals can be purchased in the Watershed Bar, but waiting times may be long), £35 (including only morning and afternoon tea and coffee)<br /><br /><a href="http://www.watershed.co.uk/">To book, Watershed box office +44 (0)117 927 5100</a><br /><br />More information and schedule: <a href="http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/KT4.htm">http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/KT4.htm</a><br />Concessions available. The attendance of industry professionals at this event is contingent on their feature commitments which is clear at the time of writing.Terry Flaxtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17596800075886237802noreply@blogger.com