It's Official People are Idiots

[Craig Parkes]

In the world of film labs of highly trained specialists did your processing.

In the world of red unfortunately, untrained digitizers/assistant editors etc are sometimes handed the task.

That's how transcoded workflows at post houses can get f'd up so badly - labs used to handle QC on the first light - when it's a low cost/low revenue/low creative part of the equation (as digitizing in video terms is) you find the job is left up to the least qualified person.

Post houses SHOULDN'T get this workflow wrong, but then again they generally aren't getting paid the same for transcoding that film labs were either - so it's understandable in a practical sense that the quality control can be less when the supplier is likely under equipped and the customer doesn't want to pay too much.

 

[Mark Toia]

I wouldn't bother coming back to that post house. With such display of incompetence, why give them the business?
As far as camera, that shoots Prores (Alexa), I can't agree, that this camera is for dumb, lazy and uneducated.

Didn't mean it like that.... More about the files being easy to use straight off the cards... you don't have to think about anything, just drop them into a time line a play.. R3D transcoding is still an ART form for alot of peolple.

And seriously.. I'm a huge PRORES fan.

 

[Mark Toia]

Digital cinema is lowering the average cinematography IQ. And I mean that term ambiguously..both Image Quality and Intelligence Quotient.

If you had a 35mm film camera that had a video tap, would you:
1) Judge film exposure off of the video tap?
2) Assume the final print would (and should) look exactly like what you see off the uncalibrated monitor?

If the answer is anything but NO to either of those questions, then I'll shut up and go away.

If you have a digital cinema camera do you:
1) Judge digital exposure off of the video tap?
2) Assume the final graded image would (and should) look exactly like what you see off of the uncalibrated monitor?

The answer should be NO again....but I know what the actual answer is: YES for many.

Also note that I snuck the word "graded" in for digital. I did so to make a point...on film wouldn't you take it as a given that the film post house would color time and develop your film? Oh, I guess the digital cinema camera will do it....

If you put a 35mm film camera in front of people, they work to get the image. Put a digital cinema camera in front of them, and they expect the technology to deliver the image to them. If it doesn't, they blame the camera. And assume that the next model that comes out will make their pictures look prettier.

I need to step off my soap box here, don't I?

I found 35mm a hell of alot easy to use over my EPIC...

 

[Erick von Schulz]

So apparently I am not the only one who was feeling this anger towards people so clueless over the red post process. I thought it could not be easier by today's standards. I think Red has made it as easy as possible for people to work directly with R3d files.

Yet some companies and people are still mystified by this simple process.

I am guessing that much of the early bad press on the Red was made by people who mishandled the media to begin with.

But with Redcine-X and so many programs being able to work directly with R3d files These problems should hopefully diminish over time.

Then everyone can rejoice in the bliss that is Red.

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

I once had an art director explaining to me how the canon 5d was soo much better than the red one....

 

[Mark Britton]

I found 35mm a hell of alot easy to use over my EPIC...

I don't doubt that at all. Don't intend to impugn film.

I'm probably a little off in the head, I want to think that the recording media was chosen because the DoP knew how it behaved and is confident on how to expose for it. And that on set monitors are there as an aid to show framing to more people. Which is nice, but it seems like some people get so glued to their monitor that they don't actually seem to be able to tell if the shot was any good anymore. And maybe seeing someone exposing to monitor when no one has even made an attempt to calibrate it one time too many made me jump up on my soapbox for a bit.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I was called in on a job once to help fix a problem with a RED One shoot and Quicktime files.... Try as they might, they could not figure out how to use the camera-generated QT's. When I arrived on site, I discovered that some "genius" had copied all the .MOV pointer files over and NO R3D SOURCE FILES! This job did not have a happy ending for a few people... Namely the guys doing the editing, who trashed most of the R3D files at some point and had no backups of what they were given. No one else in the production had any backups either. The cinematographer hired for the shoot still had some, but not all, of the footage as this issue was discovered nearly two weeks after the shoot.

This was in the days before RED UNDEAD. The editors on this job were a new start-up post / editing / motion graphics company. I don't know if this job did them in, which is quite likely, or if something else was the last straw, but they're no longer around.

The cinematographer / DP who shot the commercial, and I, also decided after this job that we would always archive whatever we shoot for others as long as we felt it made sense to do so. That decision has saved a couple productions over the past couple years. Usually smaller, low-budget stuff. Had one commercial shoot where the director took a drive containing R3D's and transcoded ProRes QT's after the shoot and an identical drive went to the editor. Luckily I retained copies because the drive with the footage was among a few things stolen when someone broke into the director's car while he was having dinner on the way home. That was bad enough, but the drive given to the editor decided to crash while he was copying all the data to his workstation. Shit happens. I had to send out two new drives. That wasn't really a stupid people story, just an appropriate "Murphy's Law" example. I've got a few more of those... Kinda like when I DIT, I almost always bring camera media. I only use it if I have to and there have been a few times I've had to do it to save the production or even my own ass on a production.

 

[Brian Pascale]

I resemble that remark!

 

[Timur Civan]

I was called in on a job once to help fix a problem with a RED One shoot and Quicktime files.... Try as they might, they could not figure out how to use the camera-generated QT's. When I arrived on site, I discovered that some "genius" had copied all the .MOV pointer files over and NO R3D SOURCE FILES! This job did not have a happy ending for a few people... Namely the guys doing the editing, who trashed most of the R3D files at some point and had no backups of what they were given. No one else in the production had any backups either. The cinematographer hired for the shoot still had some, but not all, of the footage as this issue was discovered nearly two weeks after the shoot.

This was in the days before RED UNDEAD. The editors on this job were a new start-up post / editing / motion graphics company. I don't know if this job did them in, which is quite likely, or if something else was the last straw, but they're no longer around.

The cinematographer / DP who shot the commercial, and I, also decided after this job that we would always archive whatever we shoot for others as long as we felt it made sense to do so. That decision has saved a couple productions over the past couple years. Usually smaller, low-budget stuff. Had one commercial shoot where the director took a drive containing R3D's and transcoded ProRes QT's after the shoot and an identical drive went to the editor. Luckily I retained copies because the drive with the footage was among a few things stolen when someone broke into the director's car while he was having dinner on the way home. That was bad enough, but the drive given to the editor decided to crash while he was copying all the data to his workstation. Shit happens. I had to send out two new drives. That wasn't really a stupid people story, just an appropriate "Murphy's Law" example. I've got a few more of those... Kinda like when I DIT, I almost always bring camera media. I only use it if I have to and there have been a few times I've had to do it to save the production or even my own ass on a production.

I feel like I heard about job through the grape vine a few years back. It was cited as an example of how NOT to be a loader.

 

[Erick von Schulz]

I try to keep back up footage for clients as long as possible. But I don't know if I can do that on a big Red project now. With h.264 it was easy. But I guess with 3tb drivees in the $149 range. I can swing it on a the good paying gigs.

 

[Nick Morrison]

I try to keep back up footage for clients as long as possible. But I don't know if I can do that on a big Red project now. With h.264 it was easy. But I guess with 3tb drivees in the $149 range. I can swing it on a the good paying gigs.

That's why we're investing in an LTO deck. So we can backup shoots to "tape". We are swimming in Graid drives right now. And I don't trust those internal drives in a VHS casing. They work pretty well, but bigger facilities are going LTO...so we are intrigued.

 

[Ian Laurie]

I think I have seen just about all of the above. My favourite being a commercial were the grading was done with clients present, only for them the next day to ask me why i made it so much darker than the colorist had. I couldn't figure out what the heck they were talking about and spent a day tweaking settings and trying to figure out what was going on until the producer phoned me and said that the client was complaining that it was really dark on their blackberry. I was dumbfounded.

Since then, I have made a few rules for myself. I must always realize that people that make financial decisions will rarely know why they are making them. That if I want to protect my butt from a post house that doesn't have their crap in order, i need to generate renders from the footage on set to what the DOP likes, so that when they inevitably screw it up, he knows its them and not the camera or me. And finally, take a copy home with me until it airs, or is clearly never going to air.

 

[Nick Morrison]

I think I have seen just about all of the above. My favourite being a commercial were the grading was done with clients present, only for them the next day to ask me why i made it so much darker than the colorist had. I couldn't figure out what the heck they were talking about and spent a day tweaking settings and trying to figure out what was going on until the producer phoned me and said that the client was complaining that it was really dark on their blackberry. I was dumbfounded.

Since then, I have made a few rules for myself. I must always realize that people that make financial decisions will rarely know why they are making them. That if I want to protect my butt from a post house that doesn't have their crap in order, i need to generate renders from the footage on set to what the DOP likes, so that when they inevitably screw it up, he knows its them and not the camera or me. And finally, take a copy home with me until it airs, or is clearly never going to air.

I keep hearing these horror stories about post-houses, which dumfounds me. I work in post, in promo, and most of the post houses we deal with have gone out of business. All the cable networks I deal with have built huge facilites of their own. The few promo shops still alive and kicking (ie the best), are usually VERY SAVY.

I guess in the agency/commercial world this extreme type of bloodletting hasn't happened (as much)? I can't believe some of the stories I'm hearing.

 

[Erick von Schulz]

I love the blackberry story.. Another example of what I was talking about. How can someone judge the quality of an image based on what the see on their phone?

Like I said before I bet this goes on so widespread we can't even begin to comprehend how many others are doing the same. Kind of like the people who judge the Red footage compared to dslr's on youtube. Then make comments about how little resolution the Red has on youtube.

 

[Eric M Hurt]

IMO this issue and secret with a lot of post houses is this: You don't have to be particularly good at editing or FX to call yourself a post house. I've dealt with many post houses that continue to bring in business for one reason; they have a nice looking facility. This is NOT to say that there are not some really great post houses out there, just that there are more fly by night houses that have have a cool looking lobby with fancy glass panels and LED lighting but are paying an intern minimum wage to try and edit commercials. These are the guys I have to hand hold through the transcode process. Alas, this fact holds true for many things in this business, I've seen the title "cinematographer" used quiet loosely on a good number of jobs. I visited one set a few friends of mine were working on right when the "cinematographer" and his "AC" came up in a panic, they couldn't figure out why they were getting flicker during their shot on their brand new EPIC. They were falling all over themselves. I pointed out that they were shooting under Metal Halide lights on a baseball field and they still stood there dumbfounded.

 

[K. cromwell]

I had a similar situation...
A DP director friend of mine meet me for dinner one night, he came directly from a post session, complaining madly... and siad the Flame guy told him his shots were over exposed in the high lights and the images looked soft... On and on he went ranting on how RED images looked like shit... blah blah blah ....

I asked him if he had any of the files with him... Luckily he had a little pocket drive in his bag with all the rushes and his laptop handy. I downloaded RCX onto his computer, opened up his files on his laptop... And swiftly showed him perfectly exposed images (with know blown out highlights at all) and every shot was PIN sharp.
He sat back in his chair saying ! FUCK ! your kidding ! Saying "How and why do these images look so good here, and so crap in the Post house" ... He went back the next morning and made them redo it all. With new files that I transcoded for him over dinner.

He was not a happy camper... but thankfully he still shoots RED to this day.

So at the end of the day... education is the biggest thing. Hence why transcoding is a pain in the arse for people that have no idea.. (including a lot of post houses)
And why Cameras that shoot PRORES or H264's seem to be better choices for the dumb, lazy or uneducated.

Such is life.

That's sad I really hope he learned something that night.