“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.”

Most of Fancy Film’s clients have been doing their films with the facility for years. “It’s about building long-term relationships,” Macomber says. Recent projects, in addition to Part-Time Fabulous, include America’s Wildest Refuge, Underwater Universe for the History Channel and the documentary Undefeated.

As the demand for DCPs grows, Fancy Film is now also looking to add QubeMaster Pro Packager, a Windows application, which provides quality control, as well as the ability to create alternate versions of a DCP without having to re-encode the whole file. “It will be the last step in our pipeline, said Macomber. “Along with QC, Packager allows us to offer encryption, as well as the ability to add new soundtracks and subtitle options. It’s a complete DCP workflow.”

QubeMaster Xport is a plug-in, which works within Apple Compressor, simplifying the process of mastering digital cinema content.

“The Qube software is rock solid and the algorithm they use to generate JPEG 2000s is very powerful,” says Macomber. “We’re very happy with the output from QubeMaster Xport and our customers have been delighted.”

“The world of theatrical distribution will evolve radically over the next few years,” says Eric Bergez, Qube Cinema director of sales and marketing for the Americas. “Qube is helping to drive the change by making digital cinema a lot simpler for everyone.”

QubeMaster Xport runs on Mac OS X and is Lion compatible. QubeMaster Xport requires Compressor 3.5, part of the Final Cut Pro Suite, or Compressor 4, which is available as a stand-alone application

http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/node/2690

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!)

http://www.hometheater.com/content/whats-more-important-4k-or-high-frame-rates

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.”

Oh dear!

The view is common – here is another who says it reminded him of 70?s episodes of the BBC’s Dr Who.

This guy had good things to say about the sweeping helicopter shots and landscapes (real landscapes) but it seems that 4K 3D at 48fps is so revealing and clinical that it reveals ‘the gaffer tape holding the set together’ and the makeup on the actors. Such a level of reality is good at reproducing reality but it seems Jackson and Red forget it wasn’t much good for creating fantasy.

“[The] landscape shots are breathtaking. 48fps is the future of nature documentaries. But if it’s the future of narrative cinema I don’t know if that future includes me.”

The big question for me here is – will people acclimatise to the high altitude and get used to accepting ‘the 48p’ look as cinematic (once they forget 70 years of history and Hitchcock) or will the be spewing into their popcorn for a good deal many years to come? How will set design keep up with the advancing resolution and frame rates of cinema cameras? Is the answer to have a 100% CGI based set? I hope not.

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.”

Oh dear!

The view is common – here is another who says it reminded him of 70?s episodes of the BBC’s Dr Who.

This guy had good things to say about the sweeping helicopter shots and landscapes (real landscapes) but it seems that 4K 3D at 48fps is so revealing and clinical that it reveals ‘the gaffer tape holding the set together’ and the makeup on the actors. Such a level of reality is good at reproducing reality but it seems Jackson and Red forget it wasn’t much good for creating fantasy.

“[The] landscape shots are breathtaking. 48fps is the future of nature documentaries. But if it’s the future of narrative cinema I don’t know if that future includes me.”

The big question for me here is – will people acclimatise to the high altitude and get used to accepting ‘the 48p’ look as cinematic (once they forget 70 years of history and Hitchcock) or will the be spewing into their popcorn for a good deal many years to come? How will set design keep up with the advancing resolution and frame rates of cinema cameras? Is the answer to have a 100% CGI based set? I hope not.

It seems filmmaking is becoming a science first, an art second?

As for Red – they have a helluva lot staked on this movie. If it ends up looking as bad as these early viewings suggest then people will squarely pin the blame on the camera company rather than just the filmmaker. This is an unusual situation because the technology has been ‘going steady’ for years so I cannot for the life of me remember when the camera company was blamed rather than the filmmaker for a film’s failure.

I admire their guts for trying such an audacious change but maybe the magic of soft looking 24p is not ready to go quietly into the night.

http://www.eoshd.com/content/7987/advance-press-screenings-of-48fps-the-hobbit-disappoint

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.)

As this moment of transition challenges distributors, exhibitors and even audiences, cinematographers are on the front lines of those responding to the changes. Many of them recognize just what a unique window this particular time presents.

FULL COVERAGE: The Academy Awards

“I think this is a wonderful time for a cinematographer,” said Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot “The Tree of Life” and is a four-time previous nominee. “You can have 65-millimeter, 35, 16 and so on, and then you have all the range of incredible digital cameras that are not like film but allow you to create wonderful images.”

The only vocal anti-digitalist among this year’s nominees is Janusz Kaminski, nominated for Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse.” The Polish-born Kaminski won Oscars for Spielberg’s”Schindler’s List” and”Saving Private Ryan,” and though he recently shot in digital for the first time while working on a commercial, he decried digital as a harbinger of “the death of the cinematographer.” “Generally speaking, I don’t have respect for digital media just yet,” he added.

His concern is that the cinematographer is no longer allowed to fully control the image as other technicians become a larger part of the process and that digital monitors create a laissez-faire attitude on-set toward image-making. “If you see the image on the digital screen I think people become lazy, they get satisfied with just seeing the image, they’re not going for visual panache, not getting the story through metaphors,” he said. “With film there is still mystery.”

In the finale of “War Horse,” a soldier returns home. Shooting outdoors in rural England against a vibrant setting sun with heavy use of filters to create an otherworldly glow that envelopes everyone in the scene, Kaminski suspected that audiences would likely assume the effect was achieved in post-production.

The nominated films have a distinct perspective into the past and cinema itself. “Hugo” deals directly with film preservation in its story line involving the silent filmmaker Georges Méliès. “The Artist” also invokes film history. “Dragon Tattoo” and “Tree of Life” both deal with memories and the ties of the past, while “War Horse” purposefully captures the spirit of classical filmmaking.

“It’s a very intriguing group of nominees,” said Stephen Pizzello, executive editor of American Cinematographer magazine. “These particular filmmakers all show how cinematic thinking can be extended with the help of modern tools, whether that means digital cameras, camera-movement systems such as the Technocrane or Steadicam, or postproduction techniques. The shaping of a solid movie still demands good ‘movie thinking,’ especially in terms of how new technologies are applied to the creative process.”

For the look of “The Artist,” a black-and-white, essentially dialogue-free film, French cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman referred to “the souvenir,” the feeling of watching an old movie more than specifically wanting to directly make a film in an old style. Schiffman shot on color film stock that was timed to black-and-white in post-production because he found that he could get a broader range of gray tones in the image than if he shot on black-and-white stock (a not uncommon technique). He shot at 22 frames-per-second rather than the current standard 24 to lightly evoke the sense of watching older films.

Schiffman had previously worked with writer-director Michel Hazanavicius and star Jean Dujardin on two ’60s-era spy spoofs. The method used to research and prepare those films was similar to the one used to create “The Artist,” paying respect to older films without feeling trapped by them.

“We see a lot of movies, we talk a lot, we try to see the codes,” Schiffman explained of the playful creativity behind their working methods, “the cutting, the lighting, the framing, the acting, and then we get all that in our minds and as soon as we start to really shoot we say, let’s forget about it. We know how it should look and how they should act, let’s find our own way to tell the story.”

In shooting “Hugo” for director Martin Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson — winner of Oscars for “The Aviator” and “JFK” — worked for the first time both with a digital camera and in 3-D. To re-create the films of Méliès in a breathtaking sequence within “Hugo,” Richardson at first tried locking two old-fashioned hand-cranked cameras together, but found the only way to get the desired effect was with current cutting-edge digital systems. Throughout shooting, Richardson found himself particularly taken with how 3-D, often thought of as a tool simply for spectacular action, could be used to vividly express and bring forward emotion and the actor’s performance.

“It’s akin to entering into a new relationship. You don’t know the boundaries,” Richardson said in a professorial air of working with new formats. “It’s vastly more technical than an emotional entrance, but what you find as you tap into the technical you become more accustomed to it. 3-D is in many ways the bastard child, we don’t want to look at it as if it can be an art form. And I think it can be seen as something vastly superior emotionally.”

Jeff Cronenweth stepped onto the set of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” on just a few days notice, answering the call of his frequent collaborator, director David Fincher, to replace Swedish cinematographer Fredrik Bäckar a few weeks into the shoot. Cronenweth, who received an Oscar nomination last year for his work on Fincher’s “The Social Network,” was able to get up to speed quickly by seeing all the previously shot footage online before arriving on location in Sweden.

Cronenweth, son of cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, with whom he has worked on many projects, also worked on seven films with Swedish cameraman Sven Nykvist. Once in Sweden to shoot “Dragon Tattoo,” Cronenweth immediately recognized the soft light conditions that Nykvist had always spoken of. In particular, he found shooting the film’s star, Rooney Mara, in extremely low light levels remarkable as her pale skin popped out of the darkness, an effect heightened by shooting in digital.

“I think that choice is going to go away as film gets harder to get, harder to deal with, more expensive,” Cronenweth said. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge supporter of film and I wish it would never go away. I wish I could shoot everything on film and then project it digital and have the most control and the best of both worlds.”

Lubezki, the charming, Mexican-born cinematographer of “The Tree of Life,” described how director Terrence Malick wanted to be as free as possible while shooting his powerful evocation of family, at once startlingly specific and mystically universal. Usually shooting with only available light, using hand-held cameras and at times allowing the camera to continue to run as scenes take shape are all frequent descriptions of digital productions, but Lubezki still found film the better option overall than digital.

“In a movie like Terry’s it would have been catastrophic,” Lubezki said of shooting only with digital. “We were trying to hold information in the highlights in the brightest clouds close to the sun and in the dark shadows of a dress in the foreground. Digital cannot do that. It will be able to, probably in a couple of years, but it cannot do it right now.”

Forces outside aesthetic considerations of cinematographers likely will make the main decision for them sometime in the next handful of years. Even the issue of digital preservation and migration — having to do in part with the speed at which technologies now become obsolete — has become part of the conversation as the transition is underway.

“It’s going to be less of a debate,” Cronenweth added. “In all fairness, we’re at the infancy stage of digital cinema.”

http://www.theenvelope.latimes.com/awards/oscars/la-ca-oscars-cinematography-20120219,0,7420664.story

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”).

The Oscar Senti-meter — an online tool developed by the L.A. Times, IBM and the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab — analyzes opinions about the Academy Awards race shared in millions of public messages on Twitter. One interesting application of the Senti-meter is examining the effect of celebrity tweets.

INTERACTIVE: Oscar Senti-meter

The Senti-meter combs through a high volume of tweets daily and uses language-recognition technology, developed in collaboration with USC’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab, to gauge positive, negative and neutral opinions shared in the messages. It also tracks the number of tweets.

More than 2,500 users retweeted Crowe’s initial message about Gosling. Crowe continued the Gosling chatter the next day when he wrote, “I note that the australian academy has nominated Fassbender and Gosling for Best International actor,” referring also to “Shame” star Michael Fassbender and the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts International Awards. (Jean Dujardin of “The Artist” would ultimately take home the award.)

Looking at the Senti-meter from Jan. 25 to 26, the tweet count for Gosling and his award prospects rose from 754 to 893, partly powered by Crowe’s tweets, and positive sentiment for Gosling also rose. Gosling’s tweet count continued its climb through Jan. 27, hitting 1,043 total tweets.

Another celebrity who has proved capable of moving the needle is pop starlet Miley Cyrus. On Jan. 23, she tweeted, “‘Midnight in Paris’ makes me want to go back to the most romantic city in the world,” a reference to the Woody Allen film starring Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams.

The sentiment was retweeted more than 6,000 times and prompted replies both positive, such as “@MileyCyrus its like one of the best movies of 2011? #amazing ‘Midnight in Paris’ #MidnightInParis,” and negative, including “@MileyCyrus I was disapointed w ‘Midnight in Paris’– regardless, it still made me mad-jealous of Luke [sic] Wilson.”

Between Jan. 22 and 23, the Senti-meter data shows the tweet count for “Midnight in Paris” rising from 1,723 to 2,404, an increase of nearly 40%. Positive sentiment for the film also shot up on Jan. 23, reaching its highest point. Replies and retweets continued to ripple for days afterward.

Comedian Michael Ian Black racked up 1,274 retweets with a quip about Meryl Streep on Jan. 15, the night Streep won lead actress in a drama at the Golden Globes for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” “The only time Meryl Streep sucks at acting is when she pretends to be surprised when she wins awards,” Black wrote.

His bon mot was part of the massive volume of Streep tweets posted that day: 37,583.

Fellow comedian Chris Rock also offered up some Oscar humor on Twitter. On Jan. 26, he wrote, “I’m at the movies went to see the artist the movie looks great but the sound is [messed] up,” garnering 357 retweets.

Fortunately, Rock doesn’t have to worry about sound problems on Twitter. The Senti-meter is always listening.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/02/oscar-senti-meter-russell-crowe-and-miley-cyrus-pump-up-the-volume.html

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.

Coincidences like that, it may cogently be argued, are in themselves proof that the atheists are wrong.

Speaking of Whom, no recent film believes in the almighty with quite the card-carrying, near-Missionary urgency of Terrence Malick’s latest, The Tree Of Life. It is a spectacular, humbling, overwhelming, emotionally naked film, more to be experienced than watched. It is a staggering work of art, one that works as prayer and parable, and yet, because it happens to be as catatonic as it is cathartic, works significantly lesser as a film. It must be admitted that it is, indeed, a bit of a drag. To speak with the National Geographic symbolism the film pours on indiscriminately and overzealously, The Tree Of Life is a cinematic black hole: so self-seriously heavy that it eventually collapses in unto itself. But what a lovely boom, huzzah.

However, true believers, I believe I might have hit upon the solution of solutions, one that makes up in impact what it lacks in out-and-out originality. An answer so fiendishly simple, in fact, that it pretty much presents itself: Like the man who came up with The Dark Side Of The Rainbow, just add Waters. First name, Roger. Majestic pretension cancels out majestic pretension, or at least so we hope.

http://rajasen.com/2011/09/02/how-to-fix-the-tree-of-life/

Read more…