Monitoring

Figuring out and dealing with monitoring HD out of my editing suite has been a real pain. Having received the digitized files from VideoArts, odell and I were anxious to compare them to the Bonolabs files. The Dell 2405FPW arrived, and we were excited to finally get a true idea what the hd files would look like to push the film side of my footage forward.
It didn't look very good, at first..
The Dell monitor is fine for a computer graphics monitor, but it was aweful for displaying video. The color and scaling were terrible, and even worse, every time we tried feeding it a 1080 23.976PsF input, my Blackmagic card hung, and the G5 had to be rebooted. This was true for both the component output, and viewing through a HDlink my dealer let me borrow for testing. (The image was better with the HDlink, but not enough to justify its cost..)
So, today I arranged for the return of the Dell monitor, and purchased a Sony KLV-S26A10 HDTV to use as a monitor. Setup was much simpler, and everything is looking much better.

We still have not received the images from SpyPost yet, but this is the trade-off we currently see with the 2 options for telecine.. the images from Bonolabs are soft. The images coming though HDcam are full of noise. Which is better for downrezing to SD? We're trying to figure it out.

However, dealing with the video footage, the edit is going well. The 2004 part of the film is very different now from how it was in May, and much improved. We are just beginning to work on the 2005 material's incorporation, which is also going well so far. We are on track to have another edit done by Thanksgiving as hoped, due to both odell and I working long long hours.
There will be additional work to do later, as UNHCR has gotten back to me that they are not going to release the footage I asked for until they see the cut we are about to complete, kind of a catch-22. odell will probably need some additional time with the film footage too.

It would be nice to have the film footage online by the next update I write!
David

Odell's First Week

odell has been working with me now for just under a week, and a lot has happened.
We have mostly been working on the first part of the film. Scenes in the first 40 minutes have been added, cut, reordered, and reworked. Generally, everything is getting better and more cohesive. We are doing our best to elimate everything that is unnecessary, as we have so much great material that still can be worked in.

Unfortunately, the S16 material is still in limbo. I got the second file from Bono, which did look a bit sharper than the first, but was mostly the same. I ordered a 24" Dell flat panel to use as a HD monitor with the Blackmagic card, so once that arrives, we should really be able to see what the footage is like through the monitor's component inputs.
On Friday, portions of my Semester at Sea and Hawaii transfers were digitized from their HDcam tapes by VideoArts in San Francisco. (Another 450 GBs of data!) I will get that data on Monday, so we will be able to see what HD looks like on my system from a different source, which will be informative. Some of the Africa shots are also going into the film.
I also have sent another hard drive, along with the test negative, up to SpyPost in San Francisco to perform a side-by-side comparison of the same material. I look forward to seeing that.

David

Blackmagic

A lot has gone on over the past few days as I work like mad to put things in line for odell's arrival in less than 48 hours, so here is a summary..

Bonolabs is sending me a second copy of my test transfer to view, in case there was an unspecified problem with the first one.
They are also shipping back my test negative. Once I get everything back, I will be offloading and viewing the new file. Then I will be shipping a copy of the file and the negative back up to San Francisco to a place called SpyPost. SpyPost purchased the telecine suite (that I had worked on previously) from Retina. SpyPost is going to do side-by-side comparisons of Bono's footage and my negative coming through their system, as I will as well.
I'm also having some of my older Semester at Sea footage, originally telecined to HDcam, digitized at VideoArts in San Francisco and shipped down. This will give me yet another reference point for what I should be seeing.

Speaking of seeing, I'm in the middle of replacing the visual guts of my G5, after having upgraded the i/o to the RAID.
I've ordered a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB VRAM graphics card for the display, which should have a better time displaying the enourmous amount of HD data that will be traveling through it.
I've also installed a Blackmagic Decklink HD Pro Dual-link 4:4:4 card to deal with processing and video bandwidth. Eventually this card will also drive monitoring in Final Cut, but I still need to work that out.
Once we are done cutting Zambian Forge, I'm going to start renting out my editing suite. I've more or less spent the money I had budgeted to do an online at a post house upgrading my own hardware, so maybe I'll become a post house. I'm starting to feel like one.

David

Final Prep for Odell

I know the last month has been kind of quiet from me. Mostly I've been quietly doing log and capture, and other behind the scenes details. I've also been settling in here in Santa Monica, and working some SoCal shoots.

Thing are happening though! I've just finally finished making some arrangements with odell. He will be coming down here to edit on October 17th, just under a week away, and we will be working together for a bit less than a month, so we should be on track to have our second cut finished by Thanksgiving.

I'm down to 3 tapes left for log and capture, which I should finish with ease before odell arrives. I made up a couple of preview DVDs for all of the sports stuff and mailed them to odell, Lawrence, and Geno.
After much waiting for some out of stock components, I've finally got my eSata RAID up and running. I got all Sonnet components, the Tempo-X8 and Fusion400, along with 4 500GB Hitachi drives for a total of 1.8 GBs of storage in a RAID 0 stripe. Should be just about enough to handle the film transfer material..

However, the film transfer isn't going at smoothly as I had hoped. First, I was waiting on the RAID. Then, when my 600 feet of test footage arrived, translated into a 130 GB Quicktime file, it repeatedly crashed my computer. After a few hours, I realized that this was caused by the fact I had not installed the "Blackmagic Codec.component" in /Library/Quicktime/. After doing that, the footage was playing, but didn't look quite like what I expected it to. Tim Bono and I are trying to figure out if this is because I don't have a Blackmagic HD video card in my computer. I might have to get one in the next week! Or it could be something else entirely. We'll see. The long and short of it, however, is that the S16 footage from Zambia won't be loaded when odell gets here. As usual, everything turns out to be harder, longer, and more expensive, than expected!

At least the insurance issue is 95% wrapped up. I have a D70s to replace my D70. I got a check to compensate for the Zeiss lens. Amex sided with me so I don't have to pay the excess baggage charges for the bag my items were stolen from. Now, I am just waiting on a couple of stray items that were out of stock for the D70s package. The least of my thoughts at the moment..

I've also sent my request to UNHCR for some footage from their library. Hopefully I'll be getting that soon.

And I'm sure you will be hearing more from me soon!
David