frustrating meeting with Post houses

[jake blackstone]

Don't get me wrong, of coarse when I see blown highlights and severely underexposed images I pray for more dynamic range. I just foresee the times, when instead of doing a story-telling grading, we'll spend most of the time on technical grading just correcting exposures.
On the other hand, working with talented DPs even with todays technology gives me a thrill. Many of those DPs prefer doing a lot of the magic in-camera. Limitations of current technology could be one of the reasons. Maintaining some control over the image is another. Either way, I'm just happy to be there for the ride, which may get quite bumpy...

 

[Mark Toia]

Discussing R3D workflow with many "post houses" is almost a lost cause. Most of them are so frickin' cheap and lazy they don't want to take the extra 5 minutes to establish a workflow or pipeline for dealing with RAW. They actually turn away potential clients and work if they are unable to convince people that their established pipeline for 2K/1080p ProRes / DNxHD or whatever is more than good enough. And it's not just anti-RED, many don't like working with ARRI RAW either. Even though it takes far less CPU power as its lower resolution and not wavelet compressed -- they don't like dealing with the storage requirements for uncompressed 3K oddball resolution.

What these guys haven't figured out is that they're about to be cannibalized from the low end of the market. The Reduser 4K competition showed this loud and clear. Indies and small boutiques don't need separate post house facilities to get the results they want and to grade and finish their productions in 4K. Only a matter of time before small boutiques handle all their post in-house. A lot more is going to shift when CS6 drops on the 7th. Just watch... Improved performance and workflow. Newer, faster workstations hitting the market right now, Resolve and SpeedGrade are essentially FREE. Post houses are going to have to find a way to add value to their services. Being complacent and lazy about RAW workflow or handling 4K+ resolutions is not going to help them on the path to success.

Exactly !

 

[Harry Clark]

Man, that's bizarre. At the four or five Post houses I've collaborated with in LA in the last 10 years (mostly Technicolor/Hollywood), we tell the client and DP to make the choice of camera. We don't care, as long as it looks good. We tell them, "shoot whatever you like, but let's do some tests first and make sure the workflow is solid."

Red One, Alexa, Epic, Scarlet, old Sony, new Sony, Canon, even film... in the end, it doesn't matter as long as the filmmakers know what they're doing, they understand the limitations, the lighting is decent, and there's good communication between the DP, the sound department, the post department, and the facility. Choice of camera is not that big a deal. There can be complications, like timecode issues, exposure issues, 3D problems, and so on, but those are not camera-specific.

No post house should ever bad-mouth a camera. To me, all that does is make the client think, "well, the next time I use that camera, I sure won't come here."

I know it's an old thread, but Marc, your post is THE. BEST. EVER. on this topic.
As a cinematographer, I CANNOT tell you how frustrating it is to have the choice of camera dictated by post people. The choice of file? Yes, understandable, and within their rights to request a certain file type to speed their workflow, or help create a better image for the project. Even a VFX person requesting a certain resolution is fine ("It would help us get the project done on time if you shoot 4K HD rather than 5K", or "We'd really like all the reframing or stabilizing space available, so can you shoot full 5K?")
But just as I would not tell an editor to use Final Cut versus Premiere versus Avid, I would not expect an editor to tell me to use a Sony camera versus an Alexa or Epic. I own all three so it's not about the rental, it's about using the right tool for the job. And 99% of the time when a post person DEMANDS a particular camera it is for a rather dumb and selfish reason, as so many posters here have said.
Certainly, they are welcome to weigh in and be part of the discussion; they are part of the project and deserve a voice. And I'm always happy to have more discussion, not less, with the post folks in preproduction. It's the dictator-style tactics that annoy me.
Cheers,
Harry

 

[Harry Clark]

I certainly agree with the sentiment. Unfortunately, it's about to get much, much worse. Thanks to the upcoming cameras with greatly expanded dynamic range, i fully expect people mistake that for a license to not to worry anymore about good exposure and artistic lighting. Hey, now everything can really be fixed in post, right? Even now I get clients immediately asking for 10 windows to fix something, that should had been done on the set. It is usually a music video crowd. And it's always the same, the lower the budget, the less experience, the less quality of produced material and ALWAYS much more demands. That's why I usually turn down the music video work...

Jake, I totally agree with you. That's why I try not to shoot any of those jobs.

1. I won't make very much money.
2. The folks involved are of dubious provenance, and will only ever get me other lousy work.
3. I won't have the time, manpower, or tools to do a great (or even decent) job and people will see the end result and think I'm a lousy cinematographer.
4. Every other aspect of the job is likely to be lousy; the location, the hours, the food, the attitude, the payment schedule, the care with which your gear is treated.

For years, as an AC, when on a crappy low-budget whatever, I had a saying. I would say it with a wink and a nod to a fellow crew member; "SOME jobs just don't deserve to be made at all". Or as an alternate, "Does the world REALLY need this _________ (commercial, music video, movie)???" I fear that with the expanding outlets and tools, there really is no limit to the amount of garbage that "needs" to be produced.
Cheers,
Harry

 

[Rob McDonough]

The road to extinction is littered with the corpses of the complacent and lazy.

Ha. Nice!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

It's funny looking back at this thread, even though it's been active lately, it was started over a year ago. It seems that the complacency of many post houses has fueled their own demise over the past year. However many of these attitudes persist and it is still difficult to talk with many of them. I've had to talk to a few here and there over the past year on behalf of clients. Moving forward, this is no longer the case -- I'm now handling post work, 100%, on anything and everything I shoot. Well, OK, I guess I also have to say that everything I'm shooting now is entirely for my own projects. I guess it's somewhat of a glowing recommendation for a post facility that I have in fact never used, but at this point in time, I don't think I would let anyone other than Light Iron touch my stuff if I were not doing it all in-house. Visual effects is a different matter and a good many of the facilities the product top quality CGI are making the 4K transition just fine.

I just need that REDRAY projector and a few other key pieces of hardware and I'm set to go. If all goes well, I'll need to hire people in the coming months too... No, I'm not opening a post facility, but I'm working toward starting a long-term episodic production. Ooops, beans are spilling, I better shut up now.

 

[Elsie N]

It's funny looking back at this thread, even though it's been active lately, it was started over a year ago. It seems that the complacency of many post houses has fueled their own demise over the past year. However many of these attitudes persist and it is still difficult to talk with many of them. I've had to talk to a few here and there over the past year on behalf of clients. Moving forward, this is no longer the case -- I'm now handling post work, 100%, on anything and everything I shoot. Well, OK, I guess I also have to say that everything I'm shooting now is entirely for my own projects. I guess it's somewhat of a glowing recommendation for a post facility that I have in fact never used, but at this point in time, I don't think I would let anyone other than Light Iron touch my stuff if I were not doing it all in-house. Visual effects is a different matter and a good many of the facilities the product top quality CGI are making the 4K transition just fine.

I just need that REDRAY projector and a few other key pieces of hardware and I'm set to go. If all goes well, I'll need to hire people in the coming months too... No, I'm not opening a post facility, but I'm working toward starting a long-term episodic production. Ooops, beans are spilling, I better shut up now.

Heh, heh... ODEMAX has a lot of us holding our beans close. '-)

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Heh, heh... ODEMAX has a lot of us holding our beans close. '-)

exactly. I knew I shouldn't have said anything. It's been a project that's a long time coming and I would have already started it, even a couple years back, if there were a couple good avenues for distribution. Web distribution just doesn't get it done -- I've been on the producing and business side of that for a few things. iTunes is *finally* starting to open up a bit and we don't need studio backing to get our stuff on iTunes, or at least it's going to start shifting that way. YouTube offering their subscription service, Netflix looking for more original content, now ODEMAX. Yep, pieces are finally coming together.

 

[Mark Pavy]

I'm quite looking forward to what the progressive thinkers on the forum come up with for Odemax distribution!!!!!

 

[Elsie N]

I may change my mind at a later date, but for now I'm thinking I will encode everything (other than family type projects perhaps) to .RED. Subject to change of course... but for now, that is my plan.

 

[Nikhil Kamkolkar]

Ooops, beans are spilling, I better shut up now.

No, no, let 'em spill!!

I agree whole-heartedly that the future is moving towards a niche vertically integrated model at the lower end. Even VFX for some of us. Would love to hear how people are sorting out issues that are sure to arise as you try to club together disparate software packages and hardware components. Its all a moving target...

 

[Vladimir Druts]

But the Alexa does have better latitude, skin tone rendition and easier workflow than the RED. Hard to blame them for wanting to take the path of least resistance which would yield the best results here.. I've been watching films shot on RED and Alexa and it seems each time I see a film shot on the Alexa (before having known it was shot on it) I keep thinking to myself, woah this has to be film; lo and behold it's the Alexa.. It's an incredible camera and although RED makes awesome cameras too they don't really have anything on ARRI in terms of what one might consider to be 'film' like. I suppose Dragon is the next hope.

I of course have the utmost of respect for RED culture, the company and what they stand for.. but they're babys in the game and with each new iteration will only get stronger.

With that said, I think it's important to be objective as much as possible.

IMHO.

 

[Nick Morrison]

But the Alexa does have better latitude, skin tone rendition and easier workflow than the RED. Hard to blame them for wanting to take the path of least resistance which would yield the best results here.. I've been watching films shot on RED and Alexa and it seems each time I see a film shot on the Alexa (before having known it was shot on it) I keep thinking to myself, woah this has to be film; lo and behold it's the Alexa.. It's an incredible camera and although RED makes awesome cameras too they don't really have anything on ARRI in terms of what one might consider to be 'film' like. I suppose Dragon is the next hope.

I of course have the utmost of respect for RED culture, the company and what they stand for.. but they're babys in the game and with each new iteration will only get stronger.

With that said, I think it's important to be objective as much as possible.

IMHO.

Have you seen Beginners? That looks very filmic to me (shot on RED). Problem is, most of the stuff that is shot on Alexa and IMHO looks "great" (ie Game of Thrones, Zero Dark, Downton Abbey, etc) is usually shot on Cooke lenses. Cooke and Alexa seem to be a gorgeous combo.

A lot of the 3D work that's being shot on RED right now often shoots on Ultraprimes (a colder, more clinical look, but very useful lenses for their smaller size). I'm not disagreeing that Alexa looks amazing, but I've had a hard time parsing out if what people are also just responding to is the "Cooke Look" vs the pristineness of Zeiss. Just a thought.

 

[Mike P.]

This isn't to say that Beginners looks bad, however, I remember it being a fairly low-contrast, low-saturated image, which is where most CMOS cameras tend to do better (even Prometheus and Total Recall fit that mould as well). Conversely, a lot of Alexa stuff looks good in any capacity. It tends to be more consistently good looking (read: film like) regardless of the look/cc applied. Bare in mind, I'm basing this off of the studio movies I've seen shot on either camera (that is to say, I'm not comparing someone's backyard RED tests to something like Skyfall).

I would go as far as saying that Our Idiot Brother looked "better" (more traditional film-like) than Beginners, yet is much less referred to as an example of RED-looking-like-filim for some reason. I think arguably the worst footage I've seen that I knew was shot on Alexa was the trailer for 2 Days in New York. Ironically, the final/released movie actually looked fine.

On topic: I'm with Kilgroe -- I see a lot of this stuff getting vertically integrated. If you don't want to play ball, there are capable people lined up out there door willing to take your place. No fuss, no-maste.

 

[Phil Holland]

If all goes well, I'll need to hire people in the coming months too... No, I'm not opening a post facility, but I'm working toward starting a long-term episodic production. Ooops, beans are spilling, I better shut up now.

We're on the same page Jeff. Hope it goes well for ya.

I'm in the infant stages of starting a small production company to work on big and "smaller scale" things. It's something I likely should have done two years ago, but I needed time to think, learn, and prepare for it. I made the decision about a year ago to move forward with it. Lots of meditation and development. Making sure the business plan makes sense and making sure it works out for those who invest in me. Looking back at it now, it's a bit of a no-brainer and it's clearly the next stage of my career.

I've basically put everything else aside in my life to get this up and running. If everything goes according to plan we'll be up and running in 2 months and shooting in 4. Just waiting on Picard to "make it so".

 

[jake blackstone]

But the Alexa does have better latitude, skin tone rendition and easier workflow than the RED. Hard to blame them for wanting to take the path of least resistance which would yield the best results here.. I've been watching films shot on RED and Alexa and it seems each time I see a film shot on the Alexa (before having known it was shot on it) I keep thinking to myself, woah this has to be film; lo and behold it's the Alexa.. It's an incredible camera and although RED makes awesome cameras too they don't really have anything on ARRI in terms of what one might consider to be 'film' like. I suppose Dragon is the next hope.

I of course have the utmost of respect for RED culture, the company and what they stand for.. but they're babys in the game and with each new iteration will only get stronger.

With that said, I think it's important to be objective as much as possible.

IMHO.

Just watched Side Effects. Even that I knew Steven Soderbergh directed the movie, which automatically meant, that the movie was shot on Red, I didn't need to know this information. The movie clearly had an unmistakable "Red look"- clean, clinical and devoid of any kind of grit. I have to admit, that strange grading of the movie affected my overall perception a bit. I felt, that while grading it, whoever was making creative decisions was just flipping the color dice and choosing whatever color it landed on. Every scene had different color for no dramatic reason whatsoever. Sometimes it even happened in the same scene!:shocked:
But discounting all that, still kinda disappointed with the overall look of the movie...

 

[Nick Morrison]

The movie clearly had an unmistakable "Red look"- clean, clinical and devoid of any kind of grit.

This is where we differ. Yes, RED is clean. If you want to add grit, then add filtration, or old glass, or whatever you need todo to get it to where you want. You can make it look like anything. But if you WANT IT CLEAN, then throw on incredibly clean glass and then BLAMO...that's possible too.

Why blame the camera?

Why not crique the technique?

Side Effects was a low budget movie which Soderbergh DP'd himself, and presumably used as an opportunity to experiment. Why hold the camera responsible for his bold choices?

I personally love Soderbergh's inventiveness, but not sure what it has todo with RED.

 

[jake blackstone]

This is where we differ. Yes, RED is clean. If you want to add grit, then add filtration, or old glass, or whatever you need todo to get it to where you want. You can make it look like anything. But if you WANT IT CLEAN, then throw on incredibly clean glass and then BLAMO...that's possible too.

Why blame the camera?

Why not crique the technique?

Side Effects was a low budget movie which Soderbergh DP'd himself, and presumably used as an opportunity to experiment. Why hold the camera responsible for his bold choices?

I personally love Soderbergh's inventiveness, but not sure what it has todo with RED.

Well, that's where we definetely differ. i don't feel, that Red can be made to look like anything. Red can't easily be made to look like film, unlike Alexa. Sometimes it's a good thing, but sometimes, like in this film, it's not. Have you seen the film? It's sterile, cold and missing any kind of conviction. That's why I felt, that this experiment with random colors in every scene was invented out of necessity to compensate for the visual shortcomings, that's in the end, in my opinion, went totally awry. Soderberg's work is synonymous with Red and that's why I had to mention Red in my post. For the most part I liked the movie. Can't say the same for the visuals.

 

[M Most]

Why blame the camera?

I don't think this is a matter of "blame." It's just a statement that all digital cameras have a "signature", a set of look characteristics that make their images a bit different than other cameras, just like film stocks. Cinematographers choose their tools based at least in part on those characteristics, just like they chose film stocks for the same reason. It seems that for a lot of people here, there is only one choice, but for most "higher end" cinematographers, the choice is not based in ownership, affordability, or even resolution. It's based on the images produced by the camera, and each one is a bit different, regardless of how much people here want to believe that anything can look like anything else. They choose their tools for each new project based on what's most appropriate in their eyes for the particular story they're about to tell.

 

[Mike P.]

I don't disagree, but what I'm seeing is that Alexa has a more diverse "look-range" while still looking consistently good (or like the film standard) compared to MX. Although that could (and probably is) because of the budgets (and crews) those movies are working with are larger/experienced. I've seen $20k RED features... I haven't seen any $20k Alexa features. The fact that there are examples -- Gondry's new movie, Rust & Bone, Winter's Bone, Our Idiot Brother, Prommy, etc. -- that look so good, you can't say that RED can't look every bit as great, it'd just require a boatload more work (lighting, grading, post-massaging, etc.)

The thing about any look - good or bad -- is that the filmmakers (cinematographers, colourists, etc.) responsible will say it was a stylistic choice. For Side Effects specifically, a movie about pharmaceuticals and altered states should look clean, clinical, lifeless, and have random 'tripping out' colours.... Or at least that's what I'd tell anyone who criticized its appearance if I were responsible for it.

In the end, it's all bullshit; if the story stands up, how it looks takes the back seat (and that goes for resolution too). It's only if the movie sucks that the audience will start to say the filmmaking sucks (or the camera sucks, or what-not)... Unless it's really bad, like Public Enemies' audio...

On topic, it's absurd that someone would turn away business unless they have a ton of "Alexa Jobs" lined up out the door and just can't afford the time that it would take them to get up to speed on RED footage. But even then, I don't see how bad-mouthing the camera would help them. A simple, "we're too busy to take on RED work" would suffice. Bad mouthing the camera, to me, seems like they're trying to get you to change camera systems so that you'll use them in the future with whatever camera they're used to working with... But it'd have the opposite effect. And you know what, if it's really a problem, I'm sure Light Iron (Offhollywood?) would be glad to take your business.