Until very recently the cost of creating a DCI-compliant Digital Cinema Package was too high for most independent filmmakers. Now companies like Santa Monica-based Fancy Film are beginning to use QubeMaster Xport to generate DCI-compliant Digital Cinema Packages for filmmakers that are more affordable. Fancy Film recently did the color grading, laid-off to tape, and the DCP mastering for the independent movie Part-Time Fabulous. Made by filmmakers Alethea Root and Jule Bruff, the movie has already won several awards at international festivals.

“We’ve been getting more and more inquiries about DCP mastering,” says Bill Macomber, principal and founder of Fancy Film Post Services. “It used to be that the only people who wanted digital cinema were the big Hollywood films who were releasing to at least 500 or 1,000 screens. Now we’re getting calls from people who want to release on just 10 screens, or even just for one film festival. Those filmmakers need a cost-effective solution.”

Macomber started out as a documentary editor in 2000. In 2001 he founded Fancy Film. The facility provides complete postproduction services, including grading, assembly and output, along with editing, and caters to the growing market of independent filmmakers and television production companies.

“We don’t compete with the people who edit their movies in their own garage, but there is a lot of demand for finishing to the correct specs for the various distribution formats,” says Macomber. “There’s no room for error in this business: the deliverables have to work perfectly wherever they are sent. Finishing is a very technical task, and you have to stay in close contact with the different networks and distributors, so that you alway know exactly what they need. I like the engineering side, so this kind of perfectionism appeals to me.”

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At the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention last week, 4K was everywhere—in cameras, displays, and workflow devices—at rapidly falling prices. Many professionals contend that 4K approaches the inherent spatial resolution of film, and it can be displayed on verylarge screens with no visible pixel structure.

However, in a pre-recorded demo in the Christie booth (which I describe here), James Cameron made a compelling argument that increasing the frame rate at which movies are shot and displayed from 24 to 48 or even 60 frames per second does more to sharpen perceived detail—especially in moving objects—than increasing the spatial resolution. In fact, all the demo material was 1920×1080 on a 15-foot-wide screen.

As the demo clearly illustrated, shooting and displaying movies at higher frame rates dramatically sharpens motion detail—so much so that it no longer looks like film, but more like video, which many people object to. So my question to you is, what’s more important, the higher spatial resolution of 4K at film’s traditional 24fps or the greater temporal resolution of higher frame rates at 2K? (BTW, Peter Jackson is hedging all bets by shooting The Hobbit at 48fps, 4K, and 3D!)

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The future is here but it seems nobody checked to see if it looked any good.

Shot with a 3D Red EPIC rig at 48fps, Peter Jackson’s return to the world of JRR Tolkien has been ‘stripped of the magic of cinema’ according to many who saw the advance press screenings by Warner Brothers.

This from Devin Faraci at CinemaCon [reading the full article here is highly recommended]:

“The 48fps footage I saw looked terrible. It looked completely non-cinematic. The sets looked like sets. I’ve been on sets of movies on the scale of The Hobbit, and sets don’t even look like sets when you’re on them live… but these looked like sets. The other comparison I kept coming to, as I was watching the footage, was that it all looked like behind the scenes video. The magical illusion of cinema is stripped away completely.

[The Hobbit] looked like a hi-def version of the 1970s I, Claudius. It is drenched in a TV-like – specifically 70s era BBC – video look. People on Twitter have asked if it has that soap opera look you get from badly calibrated TVs at Best Buy, and the answer is an emphatic YES.”

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Rooney Mara’s pale skin dramatically pops out from the darkness, an effect that Jeff Cronenweth heightened by shooting in digital. (Giles Keyte / Columbia Pictures)

This year’s Oscar nominees for cinematography present a particularly varied cross-section of contemporary filmmaking at a time when the very infrastructure of how movies are made and seen is in transition. Consider: 35-millimeter film prints are being phased out in favor of digital projection. Consumer still cameras can be used to shoot high-definition digital video. Video on demand is becoming a popular viewing option. Even the venerable Eastman Kodak, which produces the film stock on which many movies are made, recently filed for bankruptcy protection.

The Scandinavian-modern “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was shot with digital cameras; the World War I-set”War Horse” was shot on film.”Hugo” was shot in digital 3-D to portray 1931 Paris, while”The Artist” was shot on color film, then transferred to black-and-white to evoke the end of the silent film era in Hollywood.”The Tree of Life” used footage shot both on film and digital and integrates nature photography into its storytelling. (That three-on-film, two-on-digital split is likely an approximation of Hollywood production overall, though changes are evolving rapidly.)

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When Oscar nominations were revealed on Jan. 24, certain snubs — Ryan Gosling, Albert Brooks, Tilda Swinton, “Bridesmaids” — really hit a nerve. Disaffected fans, including some celebrities, expressed their dismay on Twitter.

Australian actor Russell Crowe was among the many people who voiced disappointment when Gosling wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in “The Ides of March” or “Drive.” “Ryan Gosling didn’t get an Academy nomination? There’s some [nonsense] right there,” Crowe tweeted on Jan. 25 (although he used a more colorful word than “nonsense”).

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Art-rock for art’s sake
The best way to watch 1939 gem The Wizard Of Oz, as many of you are doubtless aware, has nothing whatsoever to do with the film’s director, Victor Fleming. The original is a perfectly great film, a superlative piece of vintage movie magic that hits all the right chords in one delicious yellowbrick strum. And yet, classic and immaculate as the film is, it surreally transcends the cinematic experience when watched on mute, with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon providing the audio.

When sync’d just right, the art rock masterpiece occasionally resonates so jawdroppingly with the film’s visuals — that iconic Money cash register cha-chings as soon as Dorothy opens the door, for example, stepping from sepiatoned Kansas into technicolor Oz — that it feels like those architects of psychedelia consciously constructed the album around the film. That, of course, is merely shroom-fueled romanticism, with absolutely no basis in fact. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with that. How far could our legends possibly soar without their apocryphal capes?

And while I’d love to go on about how uncannily the “Black…” exclamation from Us & Them lines up alongside the visual of the Wicked Witch Of The West turning to face our naive heroine, (and do throw a “Whoa, dude” into my imagined voice in your head) the fact remains that this wonderful marriage of movie and music owes lesser to the creators of either work than it does to some ambitious dorm-room twist of fate, where some young feller decided to try and combine two different kinds of genius together and see what happens. In an alchemical explosion — the sort seen when a precursor of this lad slathered jam onto bread after exhausting the last of his peanut butter on slice one — the universe nodded its approval and something stellar came, coincidentally, to be.

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To label The Artist as an homage to the silent era is to undervalue what director Michel Hazanavicius has achieved with this movie. In a time when bigger, louder, and more spectacular is interpreted as being “better,” he has turned the clock back to a time when, although the technology was simpler, the experience was magical. Not only is The Artist an affectionate callback to the early days of cinema, it’s a recreation of the melodramas of the time, with just a hint of a spoof around the edges. Hazanavicius isn’t just making a “silent movie,” he is attempting to enter a time warp and craft something that would fool all but the most studious and scholarly into believing it could have been a lost film from a bygone era. If his tongue is sometimes a little in his cheek, that’s all part of the fun.

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