Filmmakers Garage

It’s been a while since my last post.  ATVF has wrapped up for the year, and we have switched into summer maintenance mode.  I’ve been very busy though for the last couple of months.   I’ve been spending almost every free moment that I have away from Sheridan getting up to speed with the iPhone/iPad SDK.  When the iPad was first announced, I had the sense that it was a platform that I could do a lot with.  In the three weeks just before NAB, I started an intense refresher in coding.  I hadn’t done any development in years.  I had also never used Objective-C.  So it was slow going at the start.

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I’m currently attending the Canada 3.0 conference in Stratford, Ontario. This is the 2nd year for this conference which is addressing the future of digital media in Canada. There is a wide assortment of attendees – government, education, and many different industries. I’ll try and post some thoughts about this later in the week.

Red Day 2010

Today was Red Day.  The event was being held at the Tropicana.  I thought I had arrived plenty early, but the line was very long for registration.

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This morning I get a bit of a break.  The Red Day event starts at around 11am at the Tropicana, and I think I will start my day there.  Later this afternoon we have a meeting with Sony.

Yesterdays meeting with Adobe was very interesting.  Adobe continues to impress me with the aggressiveness of their marketing to the education market.  They’ve been to visit us several times in the past year in Oakville.  Yesterday they continued their open approach and I got a chance to give some feedback concerning CS5 to some of the managers and execs that are directly responsible for it.

Early last evening I attended an education reception for Autodesk Smoke for education.  Autodesk is also being extremely aggressive with their approach to education.  I plan to install Smoke with my complimentary educators license when I get back to Oakville next week and give it a try for conforming.

Last night was the annual Educators Dinner hosted by Applied Electronics, and with Tektronix as the sponsor.   This is one of the few chances for representatives from Canadian colleges and universities to compare notes.  I spent a while talking to Scott Doerr, who co-ordinates the VFX course at Fanshawe college.

Early yesterday morning, I started at the back of the South Lower hall.  One of the first booths I came across, at random, was the Opera booth.  Coincidentally, Apple had just approved their iPhone browser app on Monday.  I asked about that and it was obvious that there was a lot of joy there.  It sounded like the timing of the approval had come as a bit of a surprise to them though.   There was a lot less joy later in the day at the meeting with Adobe, when Apple was mentioned.

Later in the afternoon I ran into Joe Kicak, ATVF graduate from a couple of years ago.  He has been down here for the last week getting his Reducation.  We walked around the floor for a while.  I was very interested to hear how his training had gone.   At one point, we stopped at the Arri booth to have a look at the Alexa.  At this point, Joe happened to mention something about Epic and Scarlet.  Several Arri reps overheard and their heads snapped towards us.  It was almost like Joe had uttered a forbidden word.  Very funny at the time as we made our exit.

It’s been another long day. I attended a meeting with Adobe to discuss CS5. I’m shortly attending a session at Autodesk conceding Smoke and education. Afterwards it’s the educator’s dinner hosted by Applied. I probably won’t have a chance to post much until tomorrow.

ATVF Student, Ryan Prouse, gets a shot of the show floor.

At the end of Day 3, I am once again reminded of how massive this trade-show really is.    My legs are tired, and after eight hours of walking, I only managed to see a fraction of the booths.  Here are some highlights (see corresponding photos in the gallery below):

• I started the day at the Sony exhibit.  I think this proved to be a good move because I expect it would have been jammed with people if I had waited until later.  As it was, it was a little crowded trying to get through the 3D broadcast truck.  I was very impressed with the very large LED panel display they had running in 3D just outside the truck.  It looked surprisingly good.  They were playing some of the Masters footage from last week.  They also had two EX3′s in an Element Technica stereo rig.  When I asked the Sony rep manning this display about the 3D Sony camera I posted about yesterday, he didn’t know anything about it.  Apparently it isn’t on public display. Read more…

Today was the second day of the Digital Cinema Summit.

One of the highlights of the day was the announcement of a new Sony 3D stereoscopic camcorder.  This came during the keynote presentation by John Honeycutt, the Chief Media Technology Officer at Discovery.  Apparently Discovery has been working with Sony on the development of the camera.    Details include:

• three 1/2” CMOS sensors per eye
• full 1920×1080 resolution
• interchangeable lenses (prime or vari-focal)
• adjustable interaxial distance (1.5” to 3.5”)
• convergence control via horizontal  lens shift
• full metadata support
• field testing with Discovery scheduled for July 2010

Sony 3D Camera Prototype

Honeycutt showed a clip from an episode of Cake Boss that was recently shot in 3D.  This included a food fight in the Cake Boss kitchen.  He also played the Discovery 3D promo reel.  The final 3D shot (converted from 2D footage) was of the great white shark flying through the air with a seal in its mouth.

Michael Karagosian, President of MKPE Consulting, chaired the group that presented on Digital Cinema Rollout Status.  The statistics presented for 2010 tell a compelling story.  In 2009, there was substantial growth internationally in digital cinema screens.  The total worldwide, is somewhere around 17,000 screens currently.  It seems that much of the growth was driven by the Avatar release.    Oleg Berezin, from Nevafilm in Russia, gave a detailed report on the status of digital cinema in Russia.  Unlike the North American situation, many of the theatre owners in Russia have self-financed the new equipment.  Surprising to me, was that many of these operators are recouping their investment in the gear in about a year.

One of the problems discussed several times over the last couple of days was the problem of the positioning in z-space of subtitles and other graphics.  These elements need to be positioned in such a way that they do not interfere with picture elements.  It seems like we might ultimately be progressing towards a video signal that not only provides colour information for each pixel, it might also provide depth information for each pixel.

The final session of the day addressed the future of 3D, looking ahead 10 years.  Tibor Balogh, CEO and founder of Holografika, gave a presentation on 3D light field displays.  These are 3D displays that do not require glasses.  Dr. Takayuki Ito, Deputy-Director General of NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories gave a presentation on 3D stereoscopic work that has been progressing at NHK.  This is some mind-blowing stuff.  They are working on a massive lens array system.  In their camera, there are currently something like 10,000 individual lenses.  Using a 33 megapixel system, this results in a lens array that is 400×250 lenses.  In future systems, they are hoping to progress to a 16K x 8K camera system that would allow for nearly 300,000 lenses.  This multi-lense system allows for a light field solution, similar to the Holografika displays, that does not require glasses and provides a very realistic 3D experience.

New Sony 3D camera unveiled this morning by Discovery. Photos and commentary will be posted tonight.

Looks like an adaptation of the EX3 body – much like the new Panasonic 3D camera is an adaptation of an HVX body.

Allow me to introduce myself, I’m a current ATVF student, but soon to be graduate.  If you looked at the 3×3 films I directed the Molotov #10.  I am one of about 10 ATVF students who jumped at the chance to take a week off and get the down low on all the news toys and attend some practically free education at the conferences.

Today was day 1 of the Digital Cinema conference, a full day of speakers.  We heard a range of speakers, speaking on topics such as live production by FOX, features, & indie 3D.

The day started off by giving us an overview of 3D terminology and a live demo with a beam splitter rig adjusting the different 3D parameters, such as convergence, divergence and how a OTS doesn’t work so well in 3D.  I found the OTS example interesting because if your convergence is set deep to the other actor, your eye pays attention to the shoulder.  This problem is called “edge violation”, the solution is to include the actor or change the convergence.

When FOX showed its live production reel, I think most were blown away.  We got a much more intimate feeling with the action.  We are used to seeing that high and middle camera to cover most of the action in most live sports.  They found that by getting down on the field and getting low tight created a very interesting shot with lots of depth to the shot.  There was one shot where a camera man was near the end zone in a NFL game and the ball thown in his direction and the player almost took out the camera man, quiet funny if you can image the cameraman with a big 3D rig on his shoulder and a 300lbs football player comes drumming toward him.

On the truck side of live production things FOX said that they brought 2 new positions to the team, stereographer & convergence pullers.  The stereographers sits in the truck talking only to convergence puller’s, they didn’t want to disturb the cameraman from their regular operating.  This is important because you need to have similar convergence when you cut between shots otherwise, it looks weird to the eye and doesn’t cut so well. Also when they prepped the cameras they kept a lense with that camera once they found it was aligned properly.  They commented on how important it is to get the 2 camera’s matching in all aspects and matching a lense to a camera is one of those aspects.

That’s all for day one, stayed tuned for more NAB cool updates.

ATVF student, Cameron Stoltz, in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center

Today was the first day of the Digital Cinema Summit.  I last attended this conference two years ago, and things were somewhat different this time.  Generally, all content presented at sessions today was related to 3D stereoscopic.  In 2008, the recent rebirth of 3D was just beginning.  At that time, Hannah Montana and Beowulf had only been released to theatres a few months earlier.  Now, 3D stereoscopic is a dominating phenomenon at the box office.   The other change this year was the number of attendees.  The room was overflowing.  So much so that they had to bring in extra chairs at the first break in the morning.  I did a rough count of the numbers of chairs and I think there may have been around 800 people in the room.  Obviously there is a lot of interest in 3D stereoscopic currently.

There was some conflict between some of the presenters today.   One of the early presenters made a point of being critical of 3D stereoscopic films that are generated from 2D cinematography in post-production.  This created a bit of tension amongst the next group of presenters, a couple of whom had worked on Clash of the Titans and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Overall, there was a lot of good information.  I particularly enjoyed Mark Shubin’s keynote presentation.  He provided a lot of interesting historical perspective  related to the development of 3D stereoscopic moving images.

One of the displays in the room was the live 3D broadcast from the Masters to a 3D television. I’m not sure if there might have been a problem with the pair of glasses that I was using as there seemed to be a significant ghosting problem whenever there were graphics on the screen.