SAG and AFTRA: Together Again

Late this past week, announcements were made by SAG and AFTRA that stated their intention to negotiate jointly for their next Film and Primetime Television deal. These negotiations are slated to begin this fall, although the current contracts – signed by AFTRA in 2008 and SAG many months later, in 2009 – don’t expire until June of 2011. These early negotiations were part of the settlement agreed to by SAG when they finally accepted the current contract. The announcement was not unexpected, especially given the upheaval SAG has gone through in the last 2 years, and the stated intentions of their new leadership under their new President, Ken Howard. But make no mistake. SAG is fighting to maintain relevancy, particularly in television, where their antics of the last year and a half have severely reduced their ability to maintain their representation. Read the rest of this entry »

Another Red Day

Yesterday, I attended the Red Day presentation done at Ren-Mar Studios (oops…. I meant Red Studios Hollywood – old habits die hard in this town..). Saw a lot of familiar faces, and met a lot of new ones. I especially enjoyed seeing Assimilate’s use of dual Red Rocket cards to provide live playout of stereoscopic Red material with full debayering in real time. That alone has a lot of potential that I hope to explore.

This morning, a discussion on the CML centered around things Red (and possibly other companies) might be able to do that would be truly revolutionary and useful. It seems to many that most of the talk involving new digital cameras centers around things like improved dynamic range and resolution – important things to be sure, but ones that are really incremental improvements, not revolutionary changes. To be revolutionary, something has to be presented that accomplishes something that cannot currently be accomplished, or at least accomplishes it in a new way that changes the way one looks at the problem. It is very helpful if that change is also useful, in terms of either making a task more efficient, or eliminating costs associated with doing things using the current methods. I’ve got some things to suggest that I think might be revolutionary and useful. All relate to characteristics of the current Red systems that are often criticized, such as its use of a proprietary file and compression format, the need to supply personnel and systems for backing up files at the time of production, the complications involved in maintaining a consistent color path for dailies, the need to constantly transcode camera files, and the lack of a proper archival element. Here are some of them:

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2010: Fearless Forecast

This is the time when you see a lot of reviews of what’s transpired over the last year, but I’m not going to do that. For one thing, 2009 really sucked on almost every level, so why rehash it? But more importantly, I like to look to the future and not dwell on the past. And the future will be, at the very least, well, interesting. And not necessarily in the ways you might expect. So here are some personal prognostications for your profound perusal. And please don’t hold me to any of them – they’re all based on personal opinion with no basis whatsoever in actual fact. That said…

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Collaboration

There seems to be a trend in recent years towards “do it yourself” post production, particularly on lower budgeted projects. The advent of ever cheaper technology – both on the camera side and on the post side – has helped to bring this about. And for many, the mere presence of these things has helped put them in a position to create projects that they could never have considered in years past. The development of high quality but relatively inexpensive cameras, exemplified by devices such as the Red One, the Sony EX1 and EX3, the Panasonic HVX200, and more recently the video enabled digital SLR’s from Canon (in particular the 5D and 7D models) allows individuals with talent and the right skills to create images that can rival those from much more expensive devices in many ways. And the lowering of the cost of entry for professional quality editing, compositing, and color correction systems allows those same people to finish their projects at a reasonable level of quality. Even sound editing and mixing can now be done on desktop computers with excellent results, given sensible room conditions. So the question isn’t can this be done, because obviously, it can. The question is should it be done?

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