Backstage. What really does that mean? Will we share all of our secrets? Will we offer just a glimpse? Or will it be somewhere in between? I suspect there are certain things that we just cannot tell you about during the run of the show as they might give away secrets that will be revealed. The good news is that I’m more interested in the technical aspects of the production.

There is one important aspect of our production that dictates how we shoot the show. We are shooting this show with all the gear we own. Normally, we would rent whatever we didn’t have but needed such as dollys, flags, lights, etc. Thus, we ran into a very first technical restriction to the show. No one in our group has an array of professional lights. By professional, I’m talking about Mole Richardson and Arri Fresnel lights, or banks of Kino flos. In fact, we only have a single Fresnel light at all. A Lowel 650watt light. What we do have, however is a basic Lowel light kit consisting of two Omni lights and a Tota. When Ted Setla joins our crew or lets us use his kit, we have double the lights.

Our main workhorse lights, are our Lowel Rifa lights. These are ideal lights for the space we are in, and the style of shooting we are doing. The softboxes allow us to cover a large area in soft light, allowing actors to move around the space and stay relatively evenly lit. With the Fresnel and the Omnis, we are able to throw targeted light on the backgrounds.

This is, in fact how we shoot as much of the show as possible. It allows us to set-up quick and gives us a nice look to the series.

I have received a fair number of reviews from colleagues and overwhelmingly they all agreed on one thing: they think the show looks great. With our lighting, we went for the most basic look we could get without looking bad. The lighting though, only highlights the great location that is the Lowry Theater. Take our softbox technique and put it into a white room and you’ll have a completely different result.

I don’t want this to sound like an advertisement for Lowel, but considering their price point and versatility, they are what we are using. I have my eye on some nice Chimera softboxes though.

Thomas A. Koch
Director of Photography
Series Producer
EXIT Stage Left

I gave this movie a 5 out of 5 stars on Netflix, but would give it closer to an 8 on IMDB.

I also watched the movie The Ten. The Ten is a collection of 10 radically strange stories about the ten commandments. This movie is from the people behind “The State” and stars in various roles, each member of The State. The stories themselves range from a story about a man who jumps from a plane and survives, but cannot move from the place he is in to a story about a woman falling in love with a ventriloquist doll.
4 out of 5 stars on Netflix, 7 stars on IMDB.

I didn’t know the F23 has awesome aerodynamics, but it apparently does because it falls right side up and doesn’t spin or waver in air.

This just reminds my just how careful we all need to be on film or video sets. Not just around the camera either. That metal light you see in the corner, might just cost $18,000 to replace.

As for not being a fan of Sony, it’s never been about the quality of their equipment, just the price point. They make fantastic equipment, and they charge what the market will bear.

Thomas A. Koch

There are many different browsers out there such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and many others most of us have never heard of. I use Firefox almost exclusively. Mostly on my mac, but also on my PC. To make a long story not quite as long, I didn’t test my site with Internet Explorer. The web browser 70% of all hits come from.

A user e-mailed me and let me know they could not log into the forum, so I went and checked in firefox and it worked fine, but then I decided to check it in Internet Explorer. The first thing I noticed was that, the front page was displaying all wrong. So, I did some checking and found an entire internet full of IE bugs and fixes. The biggest bug that I found was one, where IE doubled the margin of any element in a float. The float is how I have 3 columns on my page with out using an html table for layout. There were fixes out there, but they didn’t work for some reason. I then finally found a way to tell IE to use a specific sytles heet. A style sheet is an external Cascading Style Sheet file that sets the parameters for elements such as font size, color, areas, blocks, basically everything could be in a CSS document.

Again, I’m making this story way too long. Basically, now if you use Internet Explorer, you get a special style sheet that makes the page appear right. Everyone else get the standards compliant css file. The forum also did not work, so I upgraded to the new forum software, which of course, is completely different design-wise.

So, the next week or so, you will see me trying to get the design back to where I want it to be. Feel free to keep posting and keep searching, but not everything will look right. I hope now more people will post on the site, as it works in Internet Explorer.

-Thomas A. Koch

Interlace has been around in the NTSC standard since the beginning. It was a way to get more information over the limited bandwidth of broadcast television. Basically, Every other line of an image is displayed, 1,3,5,7,9 and then the ray gun returns to the top and displays the even lines, 2,4,6,8,10 etc. By doing this, shots with motion in them appear to split apart when viewed on a progressive monitor. On an interlace monitor or television, they normally look fine, but they have a “REAL LIFE” quality to them. At least that’s the interpretation our brain gives us based on years of watching news as “real” and films as “magic” if you will. It’s conditioning really that has lead us to this stage. The point being, that if you want a film-like image, you need to either shoot progressive, or de-interlace your footage to appear progressive.

In 2002, Panasonic Announced the DVX100 and the SDX900, two low priced video cameras capable of shooting 24 frames per second, Progressive. I was set to direct a feature film in just a few months and really wanted to use these cameras. They were not however due out until wel after our shoot dates. I contacted Jan (Panasonic’s Famous Rep) about getting prototype cameras to shoot my feature film, but she informed me there would not be prototypes available before my shoot date, so we were left with our only budgetary option; shoot on widescreen DVCAM with a Sony D35WS. I could have shot on my XL1, but I wanted widescreen and the best image I could get. The XL1 does not have a true widescreen, and does not have a lot of resolution either.

I knew for a film, I HAD to have widescreen. There was no question about it. If I could have shot progressive as well, that would have been even better, but we were stuck shooting interlace. The Sony F900 and Varicam were not in our price range.

So, in post, I knew I would have to DE-INTERLACE the image, basically throwing out some resolution. But the “LOOK” of the piece would be overall more film-like.

In post, I captured in DV, and used Nattress G Film Effects by Graeme Nattress. (Graeme is now working on the RED codec and software, plus other great plug-ins.)

I choose to de-interlace the image and create a 30P presentation of the movie. As of the last few weeks, I’ve been preparing a final DVD for the distributor and have really been unhappy with the results. Most of the movie looks fine, but there are a few places where the DV compression and the interlace jump out and ruin the picture.

The first thing that caught my attention was the DV Compression. I have recently been editing using an uncompressed codec with an AJA Kona board. So, going back and looking for DV artifacts I found them all over the place. Most notably in this shot.

The pink shirt exacerbates the problem creating blocks of color.

To solve this problem, I decided to re-capture the entire movie as uncompressed using my Decklink HD pro capture card and a DSR-2000 DVCAM deck with SDI out. The strange thing is, the Tape format is DV, yet capturing uncompressed makes a HUGE quality difference. Notice on the shots below of that same image:

Notice just how blocky the shirt is on the DV file to the left and how much less blocky the uncompressed images is on the right.

This is off of the same DVCAM tape. Those people that say editing DV natively over firewire is just like editing uncompressed are wrong. There is a huge difference in quality. Capturing uncompressed solved a lot of my problems with those troubling images. There was still something bothering me about the images. For one thing, which is a whole new can of worms, the Saturation, color, and contrast was a lot better in the uncompressed files. The DV files were washed out in comparison, which of course, means I have to re-color correct the entire movie. This time, I’m going to do it on Color rather than in the Nattress Filter. I think I can achieve the same result and gets me valuable experience with Apple Color. But even though the uncompressed codec was better, it’s still an NTSC codec, which means that it’s interlaced.

This was the strangest part of this process for me. When I de-interlace the images, they look right in Final Cut, but when I export them out either as a stand-alone file through compressor, or directly through compressor, my images had interlace RE-introduced to them. My guess, is that on export, it conforms to the codec you are using. I searched Final Cut for a way to make the coded progressive, but could not find a way to do it, and maintain the NTSC settings. There are ways to do HD using uncompressed and progressive, but not NTSC.

The moving titles int he beginning of the film, really show interlace, and in fact even after de-interlacing them, they still show up as interlaced in Final Cut and they look even worse when exported.

So, my next option was to find a progressive codec. I found this in Apple’s ProRes codec. There is a check box to enable interlace. So duplicated my uncompressed sequence and chose ProRes HQ as the codec. After a render, this resulted in AWESOME looking progressive images.

Notice how the moving title in the lower right corner is completely interlaced as it moves. Also, the static title is not very crisp, even at Uncompressed SD resolution. It does look better on an NTSC monitor rather than the canvas display on a computer.

Here you see the ProRes version, with a lower bit rate, but the titles are crisp and there is no interlace in the actual titles.

Using ProRes throughout the chain to DVD, results in solid images and titles and a really pleasing end product. I have not yet attempted to go through Color, yet to know if it retains the ProRes Codec or reverts each clip back to uncompressed, but I’m bound to find out this week.

I’ll be doing a lot more work in ProRes in the future. I do like DVCproHD as a codec, which my camera shoot natively and I can edit on the fly, but ProRes really is a nice codec. It’s the Interlace that really makes images look bad. If you can, shoot progressive. If that is not an option, de-interlace, but find a codec that will be progressive. ProRes is not available on windows, or on mac without a Final Cut Studio Install. There are some great 3rd party codecs out there, such as Cineform, so check those out when you are looking for a codec.

Thomas A. Koch

Download the RED NAB 2008 PDF

5K Epic Camera – Release EARLY 2009
* FULL FRAME S35MM NEW MYSTERIUM X SENSOR
* 1-100 FPS
* UP TO 100 MB/SEC. REDCODE RAW AND RGB RECORDING TO REDFLASH
* FULL SIZE DUAL LINK HD-SDI, 2-XLR AUDIO INPUTS AND HDMI
* WI-FI CONTROL
* FIREWIRE 800 and USB2
* 6 POUND FULLY MACHINED ALUMINUM BODY WITH HYBRID STAINLESS PL MOUNT
* COMPATIBLE WITH MOST RED ONE ACCESSORIES
* FULLY UPGRADABLE SENSOR, BODY, BOARDS AND MOUNT.

SPECIFICATIONS, DELIVERY DATES AND DESIGN ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE… COUNT ON IT.

No announcment on price. But RED ONE Owners can trade in their RED ONE for FULL PRICE ($17,500 credit) I have to say this is on the most unusual announcements. I was thinking they might come out with RED TWO, but not this. Seems to do what we thought the RED ONE would do. We still don’t have all the features we thought we would have on the RED ONE. This is new product and as such will be a different price category, I think.

4K RED RAY – EARLY 2009
* PLAYS 4K, 2K, 1080P, 720P AND SD FROM RED DISC AND RED EXPRESS
* ALSO PLAYS NATIVE RAW R3D FILES FROM COMPACT FLASH

Wow, Red disk. This allows 4K presentation for the masses without the need to go to an expensive TAPE format or to 35mm film. Again, no price on this, but if it follows with RED’s pricing, it should be quite interesting. This could turn independent distribution on it’s head! I can’t wait. RED EXPRESS is the most interesting item, no one seems to be talking about.

3K Scarlet
* NEW 2/3″ MYSTERIUM X SENSOR
* 1-120 FPS (180FPS BURST)
* UP TO 100 MB/SEC REDCODE RAW AND RGB RECORDING TO DUAL COMPACT FLASH
* 4.8″ LCD
* 8X T2.8 RED ZOOM LENS
* FULL AUTO OR FULL MANUAL SHOOTING MODES
* HDMI and HD-SDI
* FIREWIRE 800 and USB2
* STILL MODE
* COMPATIBLE WITH MANY RED ONE ACCESSORIES
* WI-FI CONTROL

SPECIFICATIONS, DELIVERY DATES AND DESIGN ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE… COUNT ON IT.

I’m impressed with everything but the sensor size. Why could they not have made one a bit bigger. This puts is slightly out of the indie film market, and puts it squarely in the Doc market. It also puts it in the studio market which is really cool. I wonder what wi-fi control is. Also the 100mb Redcode is more than the RED ONE can do. I would love an upgrade to the RED ONE firmware.

RED LENSES
* DIGITALLY OPTIMIZED PL MOUNT CINEMA LENSES
* 18-85MM T2.9 ZOOM
* 25MM T1.9
* 35MM T1.9
* 50MM T1.9
* 85MM T1.9
* 100MM T1.9
* 300MM T2.9

COMING IN THE SECOND WAVE…

* 15MM T2.8
* 18MM T1.9

WOW. That’s all I have to say. WOW. I wish I were rich…

Lots more cool stuff at NAB. I’m not there, but reporting from the BAY.

The first obviously is the introduction of “Scarlett”, a pocket sized digital cinema camera. My personal prediction for this camera is that it will be 2K with a super16mm sized sensor capable of taking super16mm PL mount lenses, or an optional Nikon mount with 3rd party support for EOS lenses announced. I think it will record to compact flash in REDCODE RAW format. My personal prediction on price is $8500. I think we’ll see accessories to make it a complete production tool as well.

RED has posted chart images from the 50mm and 85mm prime. I hope this means a street day for the prime lens set. What I’ve seen of the charts indicates a SUPER sharp image with VERY little Chromatic aberration.

Some people are also talking about 4K displays. They have previously stated they plan on producing them, and if they can come out with a 4K monitor to do color correction on, I will be extremely happy. I don’t think I’ll be able to afford one, but still incredible.

for more information check out REDUSER.NET

I have finished my RAID and it’s wonderful. For starters, I moved up to a Mac Pro with PCI Express, so my old RAID card went with the old computer. My first AMS unit came with a PCIe RAID card so I plugged that in, and fired up the enclosure. It didn’t recognize the enclosure. I shouldn’t be surprised. This AMS unit has been nothing but a pain

So I went researching. The last time I spoke with Addonics, they suggested I look into something called, “Infiniband Multilane” so that’s where I started. The Infiniband connector takes the 4 internal SATA connections and converts them into a single cable to connect to another source. At the same time, I started seeing “SAS”, which stands for Serial over SCSI.

At first I was hesitant to look at anything SCSI, because I think SATA drives offer a much better solution that SCSI. SCSI, to me is like SONY saying no one needs 24P but those who buy our $100,000 cinealta cameras. (Sony obviously has changed their position and released some great cameras since they said that). I looked further into it, and found several RAID cards and enclosures that allow from 8 to 16 drives in a single enclosure.

The real beauty of the SAS and Multilane connector is that at the enclosure level, there is no combining of the signals, or the drives. This means, each drive is connected directly to the RAID card. Hence all of my problems with port replication are gone. But it comes down to how good your RAID card is.

I ended up going with a High Point Technologies RocketRAID 2322. This card has 2 Mini-SAS connector RAID CARD that supports RAID 0, RAID 1,RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 50, and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives). This allows me to connect up to 8 drives to this card and put them in a stripped array or an array with redundancy.

The plan, later on, is to get an 8 or 12 bay enclosure and set up a RAID 5, but for now, I’m going back to my Addonics 4 bay enclosure. I went to their web site and ordered the Multilane connector for external devices and swapped it out with the eSATA port replicator. This was the key. I fired it up, loaded the RAID utility software and set up my raid. It was up and running in no time. My Hardware Port Multiplier was broken, something that seems common in my experience.

In all, this new technology of SAS and multilane seems to be the holy grail of low budget RAID storage. The key, though will be making sure you are redundant, because with inexpensive drives, they are subject to failure. Raid 1 is best, but uses half of your storage for a mirror, and raid 5 is OK, but it only give you the benefit if only ONE drive fails. If two fail at once, you’re screwed. There is a variant of RAID 5 that uses 2 redundant drives rather than one. This is called different things by different vendors, so it’s something to really look into. Some call it RAID 6 if you’re looking.

I’m happy with my RAID. It’s fast, but I don’t know how fast. When I get my new Hardware capture card, I can test the speed of the RAID.

Thomas A. Koch

The current issue of Videography has an article about the new Stacey Peralta Film, “Made in America.”

The beginning of the article talks about the need to shoot HD on this project over Super16mm film due to the subject matter. Then a bit further they talk about shooting HD in the streets on a DVX100A, and how they had a guy running tapes back and forth.

I suspect they actually shot on a HVX200 and were running P2 cards back and forth, or they did really shoot on a DVX100A in SD, as that camera does not shoot High Definition.

Later on, they talk about shooting Varicam in a controlled environment, but they specifically call out shooting HD on a DVX100A in the field. Page 26 if you want to look for it.

Further looking at it, the part about shooting HD, is in a quote. I bet that quote is taken from the part about shooting in the controlled environment on the varicam, and just inserted into the field production section.

That said, we will have some special episodes coming up that really take advantage of the video podcast format, such as a sneak peak behind the scenes of the film “Shipping and Handling.”

In addition to the podcast, which I encoded into flash as well as the iTunes compatible .m4v file format. So, if you click on the Episode 2 Video podcast link, it will take you to a page that will play the video in flash format. I’ll have a slight change, with a load image similar to youtube, although that requires a bit more coding than I’m going to do tonight.

I’ll be adding an audio flash player to the forum post as well.

Of course, the most important thing that I worked on was a few scenes from my script, “Pandamonium.” I’ve been making progress on the revisions and yesterday I fixed a major problem scene. I never really like how it was written, as the whole thing was frankly stupid.

It took a lot of thinking, but I managed to fix it. The problem of course is that the scene is important and it HAS to be in the movie. It leads directly to plot point 1. Some might even say it is Plot Point 1, therefor I can’t just cut it out.

I also had an issue with the previous scene. So with this change that I made, it also fixed the previous scene. This one change, granted I re-wrote an entire page, fixed 2 scenes and made them shine. Of course, I have about 30 more troubling scenes to go. I’ll get to those when I get to those.

See you when I see you.

Thomas A. Koch