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  • CDL 101

    Posted on July 1st, 2014 Mike No comments

    The ASC CDL is something a lot of people have heard of. A lot of people use them. Very few people seem to really understand how the format came to be, or how it’s generally used in the industry. Nor do they understand its importance in the production and post pipeline. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Trendspotting

    Posted on May 18th, 2012 Mike 1 comment

    The recently concluded NAB Convention was, as always, interesting at the very least. Like most NAB’s, this one saw new products, updates of existing products, a lot of flash, some new faces, and a lot of old familiar ones. One can go to NAB and other trade shows and look at products, both existing and future, talk to manufacturers, form some opinions, and think about what products best suit their needs. And while that’s valuable, I prefer to look for trends, not specifics.  Read the rest of this entry »

  • Fearless Forecast 2012: Part 2

    Posted on March 4th, 2012 Mike 1 comment

    So, continuing along with this year’s Fearless Forecast, let’s look at the 4 major categories I spelled out in part 1. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Better Late Than Never: Fearless Forecast 2012 Pt 1, A Look Back

    Posted on March 4th, 2012 Mike No comments

    Well, first I have to cop to being a bad boy and remaining absent from the blog for far too long. Haven’t really had a lot to say that I haven’t already said in various posts in various places, but I didn’t mean to stay away quite this long. And that said, the first order of business in these forecasts is to examine how I did last time. And as always, I got a few things right, a number of things wrong, and a number of things that were so far off the mark it’s not even funny. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Pilot Season – A Survival Guide

    Posted on May 15th, 2011 Mike 4 comments

    With the 2011 pilot season now completed (network pickup and schedule announcements will happen this week), it seems a fitting time to talk a bit about television pilot season, how it works, how it doesn’t work, how things have changed in the last few years, and how those of us who are involved get through it.

    Read the rest of this entry »

  • All About ACES

    Posted on March 14th, 2011 Mike 7 comments

    There has been a good deal of talk about the IIF/ACES system, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding as to exactly what it is. A lot of the early talk centered around the proposed file format to contain ACES information, but the file format is only a very small part of what the system is intended to be, and one of the least significant.

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  • Fearless Forecast v2.0 – 2011 Edition, Part 2

    Posted on January 8th, 2011 Mike 4 comments

    In Part 1 of this year’s forecast, we looked at cameras and production trends. In Part 2, we’ll concentrate on post production, distribution, and technology.

    In 2010, the appearance of Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve on the Mac at an unheard of price point was probably the single most significant event in a year that also saw Autodesk release a Mac based version of their Smoke finishing software at a very attractive price point. In some ways, both releases were attempts by their manufacturers to determine exactly where the market sweet spot was going to be for the customer base they were attempting to create and attract. In Blackmagic’s case, they clearly felt that the growing popularity of Red, and perhaps to a lesser degree the Canon DSLR’s as video cameras, was potentially opening up something of a mass market for a category of software that had previously only appealed to the professional end of the post production market. By almost giving the software away (in the professional world, $1000 for a program that formerly cost 100 times that is essentially giving it away), they were attempting to corner a market that they had no proof actually existed. To date, I think the results of that gamble have been mixed. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Fearless Forecast v2.0 – 2011 Edition, Part 1

    Posted on January 1st, 2011 Mike 3 comments

    In doing another Fearless Forecast for the coming year, I re-read my previous forecast (posted exactly a year ago) just to see how I did. In a nutshell, not bad. Here are some things I predicted and how they actually turned out:

    Read the rest of this entry »

  • Grading the Graders: The Long Awaited Part 2

    Posted on November 12th, 2010 Mike 12 comments

    In reviewing Part 1 of this article, I did notice that I left out one of the more important “pros” of the Baselight system, and that is its directly integrated support for the Truelight color management system. Truelight, like Baselight, is a Filmlight product, and  Baselight is designed around the use of that technology for all color management functions, a great advantage. Now…..

    Continuing right along where we left off…..

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  • Grading The Graders, Part 1

    Posted on October 31st, 2010 Mike 8 comments

    There seems to be a lot of talk these days about color grading, and a lot of it seems to revolve around what system represents the best solution given a particular set of circumstances. In a lot of these discussions, there seems to be a lot of attention paid to using general purpose platforms, such as nonlinear editors like Final Cut, Avid Media Composer, and Premiere Pro, for this purpose, or using software written for the purpose of file format conversion, like Red’s Redcine-X, for final creative color grading. And while for some this may present a very inexpensive (i.e., essentially free) solution on certain personal projects, in the professional world it is generally not practical or desirable. And it is not pricing that determines these things, rather, it is a combination of factors that together fulfill the practical needs of a professional colorist. Read the rest of this entry »