Beta doesn’t mean early release. It never did, and it doesn’t now. It means an unfinished product, with bugs both known and unknown. It means a product that is not quite ready for the general user audience, regardless of how much they might want it to be otherwise. Having products that are kept in a state of perpetual beta to me is a bit of a cop out by the companies that employ such practices, because it exempts them from any legal responsibility to either finish, support, or guarantee anything. The fact that some companies seem to have users who eat this up on the assumption that they’re special because the company gives them access to things they shouldn’t really have doesn’t change the definition of what beta is and why it’s designated as such. Beta is beta. Release is release. The difference to the user may not always be that apparent, but when a company puts a statement on the license agreement that says, in effect, that this is beta code and should not be used in a commercial environment, they’re doing that for a reason. In the case of those who seem to want to redefine what “beta” means, it’s a very self serving reason. Those who want to ignore that can do so, but when a product never even gets to a release version, one should think about why that is.

The emergence of the Red has opened a lot of peoples’ eyes, but it’s also led to what I would refer to as “rampant fanboyism,” a rather debilitating condition under which all logic and reason is thrown out the window in favor of a rather cultish devotion to a single player, and one in which one’s personal investment must seemingly be continually justified by pointing to “real” industry players and noting each and every time the product one has invested in is used by them. The fact is that each show makes its decision based on a number of factors. There is no denying that Red, with its second generation sensor in most of the Red One bodies being used by high end productions, is producing a compelling product that can compete very successfully against more expensive devices on a number of projects. But there are a number of other players with products that are sometimes either more effective, more familiar, or better supported when the production is a network television series. Sometimes the decision comes down to the director of photography’s personal preference, which is often based on prior experience with a particular product, and thus a degree of trust and familiarity that has already been established. A director of photography will often make different choices depending upon the style and likely production circumstances of a particular project, choosing the most appropriate device for the job. Producers, particularly those involved more with post production, will sometimes weigh in with an opinion based on likely post paths for the particular show, including turnaround requirements, likely footage counts, required daily and final deliverables, and capabilities of a particular post facility that they might want to work with. Studios will often  chime in based on archival capabilities of a particular format, and sometimes overall cost. All of these factors weigh heavily on the choice of primary camera system, but contrary to a very popular belief, cost of the camera is usually not a primary determining factor. This may seem a bit counterintuitive to those who have made personal purchases of camera equipment, especially those who are new to the market primarily because of the sudden affordability of equipment capable of high quality images, such as Red. To those working in tightly budgeted music videos, local commercials, or low budget independent features, the lost cost of the equipment is very attractive. But in the world of network television, the average budget for a typical one hour drama is usually upwards of $2 million, and only a small fraction of that is devoted to the cost of the camera equipment. Clearly, there are other reasons for the choices being made. In some cases, as I previously mentioned, it’s often related to the director of photography’s personal preference. But more often than not, it also has to do with specific production or post production needs. If a show is going to be shot in a “run and gun” style – as a lot of fast paced cop dramas are these days – a camera with a form factor that is conducive to that style is very desirable. For some, this would mean an ENG type of form factor, exemplified by things like the Sony XDCam series or the Panasonic 3000 line. For others, a slightly smaller, lighter weight version of that  might be in order, so they might look at the new Arri Alexa. Some shows might involve a lot of dark sets and/or night work, so a lack of low end noise and an ability to see into the shadows a bit better might be a specific need. For those shows, something like the F35 or the M/X based Red would seem to be a good choice. Some DP’s are looking for a more “filmic” look in terms of motion rendition and flesh tones, for them, the Arri D21 has a lot to recommend it. If a show anticipates a lot of day exterior work, or happens to be shooting in a location with unpredictable and rapidly changing weather patterns, the Arri Alexa’s purported ability to handle very hot highlights more gracefully might be an advantage. A show with a tight turnaround might be interested in a camera that lends itself to more rapid ingest into the editing system and a quicker conform at the finishing end, allowing for a faster delivery. For that type of situation, the Arri Alexa’s ability to record directly to ProRes files might be an advantage, or perhaps the XDCam’s ability to quickly deliver proxy files for editing. In some cases, an SR videotape might be the best way to ensure both archivability and nearly universal facility support, allowing for a program to either change facilities or utilize multiple facilities easily. And in still other cases, the ability to use a higher resolution original image, even if it’s highly compressed, allows for more flexibility in terms of framing adjustments in a project that will involve a lot of blowups and repositions. For those, Red clearly has some serious advantages.

All of the players that I’ve mentioned are offering products that can do the job very, very well. The notion that there is a “winner” and a “loser” among them is a rather simplistic one that is driven far more by emotion than by common sense. The choices made by network television productions are not knee jerk decisions. They are based on what is best for that particular production, and those needs differ. There has been some talk over the last few days in the RedUser forum about the new show “Undercovers” having chosen to go with Red as the “A” camera on the series. But there has been no mention of the fact that at least one other show whose pilot was shot primarily on Red (“Detroit 187″) has chosen to go with the Panasonic 3000 for the series. Both made their choices based on the creative needs of the respective productions, not because one thought Red was “cool” and one didn’t. The time will ultimately come when Red and its users don’t have to be so seemingly insecure about their place in the scheme of things. Red is a solid company with a solid product, and will continue to be a player at multiple levels in our industry. It will be chosen for some projects, and not chosen for others, a situation that also applies to the entries from Arri, Sony, Panasonic, Panavision, and who-knows-who-else. And that kind of competition is a very healthy thing for all concerned.

One more thing: The Production Formats page on Postworld is now a bit out of date. I will be revising it over the next few weeks to reflect the new fall season, as well as any continuing series. Sorry for the delay…

Having worked primarily on digitally shot material – primarily for television series – for the last few months, I had forgotten just how well film handles extreme overexposure, how robust it is with regard to things like shadow detail, and perhaps most impressively, how kind it is to human faces. It’s not just about the flesh tones that it is capable of reproducing, it’s about having severely different skin tones in the same frame, under harsh sunlit conditions, and it’s about the softness it applies to the gradations of light playing on those flesh tones. There is a real beauty to those images, and the ease with which a colorist can manipulate them (given the right tools, of course) is really quite remarkable. The digital cameras we have today, particularly devices such as the Red, the F35/Panavision Genesis, and the D21 and Alexa lines from Arri, are all light years beyond what the first generation HD cameras (the F900, for instance) were capable of, but having not dealt with film scans in some time, I had really forgotten just how terrific an imaging medium modern film negative stocks truly are. In the rush to digital origination, many people not in a position to see film under proper DI conditions have either forgotten or never known just how high the imaging bar has been set for all these years. The best of today’s digital cameras still don’t quite reach those heights in areas like dynamic range and highlight handling, a fact I was rather quickly reminded of when I stepped back into the film world for a week. I was also reminded that in many ways, we’re in a kind of technological golden age, in which we have numerous choices for any given project and can select the tools that are most appropriate based on the production conditions, the image characteristics that are desired, and, yes, the budget. And based on my recent experience, I for one am very glad that film is still one of those available choices – and you should be, too.

Some interesting facts about the first six months of Postworld:

To date, there have been over 6400 visits, with over 10,000 page views. 52% of those visits have been “direct,” with the remaining 48% through referrals on other sites (thank you to those, in particular Mike Curtis on Pro Video Coalition) and via search engines, with Google by far the most significant.

54% of visitors are using Safari as their browser. Firefox represents another 31%, Chrome about 7% (and growing), and the rest are using a combination of Internet Explorer, Opera, and various versions of Mozilla. There are also a few visitors using Blackberry’s browser.

38% of visitors are using cable modems, with another 31% using DSL. Only 1% are using dialup connections.

There have been almost 250 visits via mobile devices, with the iPhone being the most widely used (211 of those 250). There have also been visits via Android phones (33), iPod Touch (22), Blackberry, Palm OS devices, and even 9 on the iPad.

Nearly 75% of all visits have come from Macintosh users, with 91% of those being on either OS X 10.6 or 10.5 on Intel based Macs. Another 20% have been on Windows machines, with the remainder being on a combination of Linux and various mobile OS’s as mentioned above.

Worldwide, there have been visits to Postworld from 79 different countries and territories. The vast majority have been from the United States (over 4000), but there have been over 2000 visits from other countries and regions, which is very gratifying to me personally and very indicative of the global community the Internet has spawned. Of those foreign visitors, the largest numbers have come from Canada (over 400), the United Kingdom (almost 300), Australia (over 260), and Germany (almost 150). Others that are well represented include New Zealand, India, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Brazil, China, France, and Italy. In the last 2 months or so, the largest number of foreign visitors has come from Australia, with Canada and the United Kingdom close behind. I find that particularly pleasing because I have some very vivid and fond memories of a visit to Australia as a visual effects supervisor about 10 years ago, and it remains one of my very favorite places in the world.

One of the most popular pages on Postworld has been and remains the Production Formats – Current Shows page. I must confess that I have not updated that list in quite some time, so it is not entirely accurate (although it is reasonably accurate for the most part). As the US network television production season largely begins in July, I will be updating that page with both new and returning shows in the next month or so and will announce when that has happened.

Well, that’s about it. Six months, many thousands of visits, some great comments from many of you, and the ability to share my thoughts with others in and out of our industry around the world. I thank you all for visiting, and I hope you’ll continue to do so. I’ll do my best to try and post a bit more often than I have in the past (no promises, though…. there needs to be something to write about first!) and to try and keep up with a very fast moving industry. The next six months should prove pretty interesting…

In order to better analyze what all of this means, a little history is in order. DaVinci has been the premier vendor – at least in the US – of high end color correction systems for many years now, with most of the major post facilities using DaVinci systems (the basic DaVinci Unified Color Corrector at first, followed by the Renaissance, the Renaissance 888, the 2K, and the 2K Plus) for nearly all television, feature mastering, and commercial work, both in combination with telecines running film live through the DaVinci, and for “tape to tape” color work, common in television series finishing since the late 1980′s. All of the aforementioned devices were basically hardware driven. They had to be, because for many years, running live video in real time demanded that approach. In the last 5-10 years, however, commodity level hardware, combined with sophisticated software, has been able to take over a lot of that burden, minimizing the need for customized hardware to do what the DaVinci devices have done for a long time. DaVinci recognized this a few years ago, and set off to develop a “software DaVinci,” a device that would do what the 2K Plus could do, but in a resolution independent way, and with a minimum of proprietary hardware. They wanted to make the software version familiar enough to the DaVinci user base that colorists would find it simple and comfortable to move from the old platform to the new. This development effort ultimately produced the product now known as Resolve. The product was based on completely new software, running on a Linux platform, and assisted by some specific proprietary hardware to do a number of functions in real time. Some high end facilities – Company 3 perhaps being the most prominent – liked what DaVinci brought to the table, both for its capabilities when compared to the 2K Plus, and for its familiarity, its ability to do things “the DaVinci way.” About a year ago, Blackmagic Design acquired all of DaVinci’s assets and set out to remake the product as a completely software based offering, moving all of the functions done in DaVinci’s proprietary hardware boards to commodity GPU’s. A year later, that transition is now complete, and what Blackmagic was showing is really the first true pure software DaVinci product. The marketing, however, is now likely to be quite different, with Blackmagic clearly wanting to attract individual artists as well as the full facilities into the fold.

I’ve gone through this little bit of history for a reason. During the time that DaVinci was developing what became Resolve, other players came on to the color grading scene in a major way. This was due in part to the rise of digital intermediate work, which by its nature demanded a very full featured, resolution independent, unlimited layer approach in order to be an attractive and successful alternative to traditional photochemical film timing. The 5D Colossus, which eventually became what is known today as Autodesk Lustre, led the way into this new, less limited electronic color grading world. It was followed by systems such as Nucoda (today Digital Vision) Film Master, Quantel iQ with QColor (which led to the more sophisticated color product called Pablo), Filmlight’s Baselight system, and some less costly but quite capable desktop systems, best exemplified by Assimilate Scratch and Iridas Speedgrade. Something that a number of these systems – particularly Nucoda, Quantel, Lustre, and Baselight – have in common is their ability to deal with multiple tracks of video, and conform based on more sophisticated exchange formats like AAF and Final Cut XML files. This is due in part to their development for a market that was already advancing beyond the basic “tape to tape,” single track, no effects world in which the DaVinci product line had been created. While it can certainly be argued that Resolve’s color tool set is as sophisticated and precise as any product out there, it can also be said that unlike the competing high end products, it brings little to the table in terms of enhanced workflow possibilities, at least in its current incarnation. It does not support more than one video track, it cannot conform multitrack projects, and partly as a result of that, does not easily support some of the effects that are common in modern editing approaches. It is, at its heart, a software driven “tape to tape” system. For many, especially highly experienced DaVinci trained colorists, this is a moot point. But for others, especially facilities seeking to modernize and streamline their post workflows to promote more efficiency and ultimately more flexibility, the competing systems have  a lot to recommend them. For the high end facility, it’s imperative that file based post production be facilitated by equipment that has the flexibility to understand more of what the editing systems can do and to deal with that in a more approachable way. I have little doubt that Blackmagic will ultimately move Resolve towards that goal, but in its current form, it’s not always the best fit for some facilities, even at its amazingly lower price. This is borne out by the reaction – or rather, the lack of it – of the competing players to Blackmagic’s pricing moves. While Filmlight did offer a complete entry system at a steep discount from its previous price point, the new price point is still over $90K, a bit higher than the expected total cost of a Linux based DaVinci “starter system” with comparable capabilities, which by my estimate would probably run about $80K (with full hardware comparable to the “base” Baselight). And to my knowledge, no such moves have been made by any of the other players. Perhaps everyone is still getting over the shock, and playing a waiting game for a few months to see the actual impact of Blackmagic’s moves. One thing, however, is certain: the color correction market now has its potentially disruptive product, marketed by a company with a history of such things. The next year or so will be, at the very least, interesting.

That’s enough about me. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog posts, already in progress….

Although both companies are producing camera products that fall under the general category of “digital cinema,” the primary emphasis of each is different. Red has made its reputation and developed its following on the basis of providing high resolution imaging. High resolution has been Red’s mantra from its inception, with its founder Jim Jannard emphasizing the stated purpose of leapfrogging current formats, such as 1920×1080 HDTV and even 2K digital cinema, by going directly to 4K as a base imaging format, and recording a compressed RAW sensor image. This vision has driven most of what Red has done and is doing, with the only notable exception being the proposed 3K Scarlet camera line. This singular vision, while laudable, does lock its users into having to deal with those 4K images whether they need them in their final delivery or not. In other words, you’re always shooting 4K, and you’re always recording compressed RAW images, even if your target is 1920×1080 HD for, say, a television series. Although the files are actually very manageable in terms of size thanks to very effective and efficient compression technology  (they are, in fact, smaller than a number of compressed HD formats), they must be processed in order to yield actual RGB images in formats that can be used in post production. For much of the 3 year history of the Red One, this presented a bottleneck that has caused many established industry players to look elsewhere, to devices that could produce images in the sizes they actually needed, with very high quality, that fit into established work flows without additional processing required. Red addressed this problem very effectively in the last year by releasing a product called the Red Rocket that allows for real time processing of the compressed files into common RGB formats, cutting the time required for this task drastically. This has allowed Red to continue its focus on 4K and above images in a much more efficient manner for its users, albeit at a $5000 cost for the Rocket card. They have also pursued a partnership with different software and hardware companies through the release of a software development kit that allows direct access to the compressed files within host applications. The licensees of the SDK include such major industry players as Filmlight, Quantel, Digital Vision, Avid, Adobe, and a number of others. This has created widespread industry support for Red’s compressed R3d file format, but it has also led to something of a free for all in terms of post work paths, with many different methods of handling the processing, color manipulation, and ultimate deliverable creation for Red originated material.

Arri has a very different set of priorities for its Alexa line. Playing off the general idea that resolution isn’t everything, Arri has concentrated their development on image quality and flexibility, and standardized work flow. They are targeting the general high end imaging market, but a lot of what they have put into the product indicates a particular interest in television production. Rather than jump to 4K with some potential compromises (at least in their view), they have settled on what is basically an oversampled 2K camera system that has extremely high quality, high sensitivity, and a very wide dynamic range. By licensing the ProRes codec from Apple, they have also recognized the need for file based recording in a format that can feed common editing systems directly, without any additional processing, and at a quality level that can serve as an offline editing format for feature work, but a final mastering format for television work. At the same time, they have also provided a way to record RAW sensor information through the use of third party recorders by implementing their T-Link protocol for uncompressed RAW output. This, at least in theory, gives users the best of all worlds. For a television production, you can record in Apple’s ProRes4444 format (Arri supports both ProRes HQ and ProRes4444) directly to SxS cards, allowing direct transport of those files into Final Cut Pro editing systems, and direct use of the files for creation of a final master. You also have the option of recording on HDCam SR tape or uncompressed DPX files by using external recorders and feeding them via the on board dual link HD-SDI interfaces. Or, if you wish, you can record the RAW information on an external recorder by using the HD-SDI connectors as a T-Link interface. And you can make those uncompressed recordings simultaneously with the ProRes files, with the same metadata being fed to each. As with Red, Arri is providing a development kit to make the RAW to RGB conversion task much more efficient and provide basic color conversion control (unlike Red, they are basing the SDK on GPU based video cards, thus obviating the need for a specific hardware solution like the Red Rocket card). For feature work, this really begins to come into play by providing offline editing files directly from the camera, while simultaneously capturing the RAW data for later conform and DI work. While all of this may sound a bit convoluted, it is anything but. Arri is recognizing that television series work does not and likely will not require anything like 4K images or, for the most part, RAW recording. Rather, it is efficiency that is the critical factor, and the primary reason that cameras such as the Genesis, Sony F35, and Arri’s own D21 have come to dominate high end television production by recording to HDCam SR decks to easily fit into existing post infrastructures. The ProRes 4444 codec yields a file that is arguably very close to HDCam SR in quality, far more flexible due to its file based nature, and directly supported on a popular editing system without any digitizing/ingest step. In other words, a “direct to edit” system that eliminates processing bottlenecks. Combine that with Arri’s reputation for quality and reliability, and you’ve got a very attractive product for television series work.

Both Arri and Red have done a lot of work to maximize the dynamic range of their new products and push them closer to the current theoretical limits of film capture. They have accomplished this using different technical approaches, but both have done a remarkable job of minimizing noise and maximizing the usable dynamic range of their sensors. Both have taken different approaches to such things as physical design and ergonomics. Both have embraced a “modular” design philosophy, with Red’s being a bit more directly apparent, but Arri’s being almost as flexible in certain areas. Ultimately, the differences between the two companies are as much about philosophy as they are about technology. Red believes that capturing the highest resolution that can be practically captured is itself a worthy pursuit, regardless of the ultimate use of those images. Enough so that it believes its users should be capturing that high resolution all the time, whether it’s immediately required or not. Arri believes that different markets benefit from different solutions, and that the needs of the television market only partially overlap the needs of the feature market. They believe that providing an efficient path to finishing is more valuable, especially to the television market, than images of a significantly higher resolution than the medium demands. And they also feel that in the feature market, the availability of RAW recording from their 3.5K Bayer sensor will result in a 2K image that will be of sufficient quality in a digital intermediate world that is primarily using a 2K format at this point in time.

Both of these companies, and all of their products, will be significant and important in our industry as we move forward into more digital capture. Television, for the most part, is already there, with nearly all pilots and over 60% of current single camera dramas being shot on digital cameras. This percentage will increase over the next year, to the point that by the 2011 fall season – perhaps earlier – it is very unlikely that there will be significant use of film for television production. Features will inevitably follow, although the timetable is considerably less predictable. But these cameras, as well as yet-to-come entries from companies both current (Aaton, Sony, and others) and future, are the beginning of our future as image creators. There will be lots of choices. Be educated and choose appropriately.

Which brings me to the main point of this post. Whenever I travel internationally, I’m constantly reminded of at least two things. First, people are people, far more alike than different all over the world. And second, if everyone would have the opportunity to travel to foreign locales, the world would likely be a much better place. Provincialism is the enemy of knowledge and tolerance. A wider world view opens one up to possibilities they never imagined were there. Humans, left on their own, without the debilitating influence of governments, politicians, and some religious leaders, have far more similarities than differences. Finding common ground is all about respecting each others’ cultures and beliefs, not enforcing one’s own. I’ve spent quite a bit of time abroad over the last 15 years or so, and more than anything else, I think it’s made me a much more aware, much more informed, and perhaps most important, much better person. This week I’ve gotten the opportunity to experience that once again, and for that, I thank my friends at Assimilate, and my hosts here in Mumbai. Thank you for allowing me to experience your country and your culture. I hope some time in the future I can return the favor.

Now, about that 16 1/2 plane flight from Dubai to L.A……..

During the last pilot season (2009), SAG’s refusal to settle led to two major upheavals. First, about 98% of pilots were shot on something other than film. And second, that shift in production medium allowed the studios to put all of the actors on those shows under AFTRA contracts rather than SAG contracts. A little history is in order here. Previous agreements stipulated that SAG had exclusive jurisdiction over projects shot on film. However, SAG and AFTRA share jurisdiction on any projects shot on anything else. Since SAG’s refusal to sign a new agreement created a situation in which a strike action could conceivably be called, the “safe” route for pilot producers was to sign with AFTRA, which already had an agreement in place that had been signed months earlier. This would guarantee that pilots would be completed as scheduled. But it also meant that all such pilots would be shot on mediums other than film, be that traditional video cameras, digital cinema cameras, or anything in between. Since a number of television programs had begun to use digital cameras already, this was not a shocking development. Digital production is generally less costly (not always, but generally), and the quality of digital capture has improved by many orders of magnitude over the last few years. However, if left to its natural course, the movement away from film for television would likely have taken at least another 2 or 3 years. In fact, most of the major post facilities in Los Angeles were planning on that type of timetable. What SAG did accelerated that timetable by at least 2 years. This is borne out by the fact that the current pilot season is seeing a continuation of almost exclusively digital production, and an almost exclusive use of AFTRA representation. The removal of the SAG strike threat has done nothing to change that pattern. Which brings me back to this week’s announcement.

SAG needs television. They need the revenues that television production brings, especially in terms of health and pension plan solvency. A year ago, they essentially cut their own throats and didn’t even seem to notice. While feature films are certainly a major contributor to SAG’s health as a guild, the loss of nearly all television representation is not something they can live with long term. AFTRA, on the other hand, has never been healthier. They have grown more quickly than they ever anticipated thanks to the dysfunction of their “sister” union. It is clear that SAG now recognizes this, and the resistance – not to mention the outright disdain – towards a rapprochement with AFTRA has been pushed aside. Old grudges can easily disappear when survival is at stake.

For the post business, however, it’s not nearly that simple. The major post facilities were designed, built, and grown on the backbone of film transfer. All of the major facilities have vast investments in film equipment, with much of that investment having been made over the last 7 years or so in HD telecine equipment. For a number of these facilities, the sudden loss of daily transfer work due to the almost overnight shift to digital production is devastating. Now, it should be pointed out that film for television is not dead. In fact, over 25 shows this season were still shot on film. But with the handwriting clearly on the wall, the 2 years that the facilities thought they had before their film infrastructures were not able to produce significant revenue represents the loss of a buffer they were counting on. The changes long predicted are now beginning to emerge. Some of the most well established facilities are downsizing, with a number of talented, long term people being laid off. At least one major West Side facility has gotten out of the television business altogether. Another one is about to be sold. And at least one or two more could conceivably shut their doors before the beginning of the next production season in June. Of course, with any major change in which some companies are left out in the cold, others benefit. The movement away from film, and an anticipated subsequent movement away from videotape, has allowed smaller, boutique type companies to participate in a market that they could not possibly have competed in just a few years ago. With much less investment in infrastructure, more efficient use of commodity computing equipment, the advent of very inexpensive storage, and use of networking and more efficient work flows, these companies are poised to be the “major” facilities of the future. The talent being let go by the downsizing of the existing facilities will find their way to the newer ones, allowing for a continuation of relationships and, potentially, an increase in the quality of the work being done thanks to newer, more flexible and powerful software. The same finishing artist who was working on a very expensive Fire system in a major facility can easily be doing the same level of work using Smoke on a Macintosh. And in some cases, that artist can even own the equipment. A colorist who’s been working on a DaVinci 2K for the last 10 years can do even more on a Baselight or Lustre system at a boutique facility. Or he or she could own a Scratch system and accomplish similar level work.

The upheaval of the post business is just that – a serious ripple in a formerly calm pond. Some companies will survive, others won’t. Some people will get hurt, others will reapply their talents by continuing to learn and not giving in to the fear that change can sometimes bring. I’ve been in this business for a long time, but I’ve never stopped learning and changing. Surviving in an industry that is at least partially driven by technology requires a career long commitment to constantly re-educate oneself as that technology moves forward, especially when it moves forward very quickly. The underlying talent is the same – a good editor is still a good editor regardless of whether he or she is working on a Moviola, an Avid, or a Final Cut system. A good colorist is just as good regardless of the system he or she is using, be that a DaVinci 2K, Baselight, Scratch, or even an Apple Color system. And a cinematographer’s talent is what creates his or her art, regardless of whether the device capturing that art is a piece of film, a Sony F35, a Panavision Genesis, or a Red One. But with all of these devices there is a learning curve that must be mastered. Those that somehow expect their current employers to keep them going by training them on the job are likely to end up as those who get hurt. Those who stay ahead of the curve by learning all they can and finding ways of becoming proficient on all new devices, and knowledgeable about all new technologies, are likely to be those who survive. But it is clear that for those in the post business, the time for complacency is over. The only surprise is that it took the actions of an actors union to make it obvious.

Postworld is created using the WordPress platform. WordPress allows the use of Themes to quickly design and modify the appearance of an individual site. Postworld is now using a theme designed by SRS Solutions called Arjuna. I’ve only slightly modified it for my use here. Since Postworld is primarily a blog, and primarily text based, I felt this particular theme allows it to be read a bit easier than the previous design. At any rate, I hope you enjoy the new look and find it a bit easier to get around.