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title: WWDC2004 Session 722
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-722
---

# WWDC2004 Session 722

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en good morning everybody I'm Glen Bullock on the quick time team thank you for getting up and getting in here there's definitely a worm for these early birds I'd like to remind you all so tomorrow morning at nine o'clock seven to four quick time in the professional media workflow is a tremendous session we've been working on it quite a bit today's session is I designed it so that developers and engineers could get a sense of what's going on in Hollywood in the motion picture industry in post-production and get a sense of sort of the bloom that's happening clearly you know sort of personal computers have done you know I've had significant impact in print and then on their graphics and television but over the last you know six seven eight years they've gone into motion picture creation quite a bit and so we're really lucky to have these two speakers anton is that Technicolor and society so we've decided whether it was video guy or the directional director of technical services there and Scott Simmons runs a company down in Los Angeles as well that's doing some incredible work so we'll hold questions to the end and we'll start immediately so we can get through this material and I hope you enjoy it Anton my name is Anton Linacre I'm the Technical Operations Supervisor at technical or creative services in Hollywood we're going to talk about today is how Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are revolutionising the HD workflow in Hollywood pretty much with this seminar we'll go over how high-definition works what the workflow is for it how to work with a 23 9 8 project basically in the motion picture industry we're talking about high-definition as 24 P or some people call 23 9 8 so that's what we're going to be dealing with with this particular seminar we're going to be talking about how to offline cut your show and then go into an online in Final Cut Pro and how to think differently about high condition what you're not going to learn in this session is how to code anything I'm a video guy I'm sorry so basically a little bit about myself I give seminars at Technicolor to directors producers cinematographers editors talking about how to shoot and edit high-definition footage for eventual film out purposes or for finishing in high definition and in the process of doing these seminars inevitably I talk about the traditional HD workflow and with the traditional HD workflow people have been doing each D for a while and they've been limited to a certain extent by the technologies that have been available high-definition equipment is very expensive people used to use Avid's almost exclusively and they set up their whole workflow based on the film model so that means having standard definition down conversion tapes where you have your high-definition media you because you don't have a d5 deck or an HD deck in your edit suite you will have a facility down convert it for you to a standard definition NTSC cassette and so in that process you take 23 9 8 media and you have to somehow get it to 29.97 ntsc and to do that you actually introduced something called 3/2 which is a where you take the fields of the video and you repeat them in a 3-2 pattern so that you add the 6 frames that are missing between that 24 and 30 I'm going to use the 24 and 30 interchangeably here with the 23 9 n and 29 97 they're in essence the same thing so you have this 3:2 pulldown that's added to your tapes for the standard definition workflow and then they basically take those standard ish the standard definition tapes in either work in 2997 or remove the three two and work in a 2398 workflow and that's a couple of steps in a workflow right there you have ETL at a decision list we'll talk a little bit more about that shortly but you have to somehow get the information from your offline cut what you've basically been editing for four or five months till your feature is finished to the online room the online room is where you do your mastering where you take that standard definition project and make it into a high definition finished master that you can air or broadcast or you can take out the film whatever your project entail and then another thing about standard definition down conversions is that you have a change in aspect ratio you have your high definition tapes are their widescreen they're sixteen by nine yet when you do a down conversion to a standard definition tape you're working in four by three normal television size and you can either work it a couple of ways you can do a squeezed standard definition tape where you have if you look at on a normal monitor people are tall and skinny and then they get unscrews to do a widescreen or you have a center extraction where you only take the center information and cut off the sides or you can do a letterbox extraction where you shrink everything down and you have the black on the top and the bottom these these particular methods have ramifications for when you go to your mastering which we'll talk about shortly so one of the things in talking and giving these seminars and giving you know explaining the traditional workflow for the two hundred and fortieth time something occurred to me is that traditional HD workflow is hard it's unnecessarily so the entire idea that you have that you work at a different time code rate than what your master's tapes are that you have to change this aspect ratio all these particular parts of the workflow make it unnecessarily hard and so I end up having people asking me why do we have to work with these 2997 cassettes when our masters are 23 9 8 why are we dealing with 4 by 3 when it's actually 16 by 9 that we shot and so you then have the EDL yet a decision once that's basically 30 year old technology ironically it's still something we use today and a lot of facilities depend on it because it has been that kind of rosetta stone that we use to talk between editing products but an EDL is just a text file it's a text file that has timecode values for your source states timecode values for your master tape and little descriptions but it's all text and so with Oh actually I can go there pretty limiting because our text file depending on the format that you have you either have two levels of video and four levels of audio that's an example some have two levels of video two levels of audio the titles and effects transitions they're only partially supported they you get a little note saying that you have a dissolve there of a certain type but you don't know if you have an iris dissolve if you have a fade up or something like that that's not actually in there and in motion effects where you take your video you blow it up slightly or you move it around that's not supported at all so if you're working on modern equipment moderate edit systems you have a lot more control you take a Final Cut Pro project for example you have 99 video tracks you have 99 audio tracks if you take a Final Cut Pro project from one system and take it into another all of the special effects the transitions the titles speed changes all of those things come across and so if you're working in a Final Cut Pro environment and you want to make an EDL you actually have to hold yourself back you have to hold yourself back and edit in a way so that the EDL will work nicely that it will play nice with whatever system you end up going to for your online so basically we were there I kind of came to this little conclusion that there should be a better way to do high definition and so with the help of the QuickTime team the final cut pro team and hardware support from AJ and pinnacle we've come up with a different way to do high definition and I think it's actually a better workflow and better for me means simple because I don't want it to be a complicated thing so with this particular workflow is used now at Warner Brothers and twentieth Century Fox and where HD is really prevalent in the independent community it's we have several independent filmmakers that are using it and Showtime is going to be doing three shows starting about two weeks for their next season using this particular system so before I go too much into what the actual system is I'll tell you a little bit about the basics of HD and why this change this paradigm shift is so important with HD pretty much everybody knows the reason why you want to work with HD is that you have great visual quality you are if you have an NTSC signal you're working with 720 by 480 six lines of resolution if you're talking digi beta it's 480 if your DV okay with that you can go up to a high-definition signal where you're 1920 by 1080 so you have drastically more pixels and lines of resolution to work with and the picture is so much nicer but what you also have is that NTSC is an interlaced format and so it draws a single frame with two fields of video that's clocked to our electrical system so we got a 60 Hertz electrical and so we have 60 fields that come together to make the 30 frames of video 2997 that's kind of an old thing but so you have these interlaced fields that come together and so what ends up happening is that you have the first field draw half of the information and then the second field comes in like a zipper and completes the picture for you with High Definition if you're talking about 24 P the piece for progressive and you have a true whole image from top to bottom drawn at once so it's more filming in that regard and so that's the whole appeal of working in 24 PhD that quality comes at a price the price is data rate and so depending on what kind of format you're doing you're talking anywhere from 90 megabytes a second to 160 megabytes a second so that's a lot of data to get in and off your drives and so this is not the type of thing that you can do off of firewire it's not the type of thing that you can do off of a single ID Drive so it our facilities to get a speed like this we use a neck serve rate maxed out 14 drives rated together in a raid 50 to get the data rate fast enough to handle HD and not only that you also have the fact that the data since the data rate is so high you use up a lot of hard drive space very quickly and so you take a look at this difference right here here you have DV it's rounded up but you have DV which is a compressed sd signal the native format as it's recorded on tape then you have SD 10 bit if you take a digi beta tape and you do a 10 bit uncompressed you're working in 27 megabytes a second so when you do the jump to HD you see uncompressed HD actually jumps quite a bit you have 126 megabytes a second for 1080p and then for 1080i 2997 you're talking 160 megabytes a second so you're chowing through hard drive space and so uncompressed HD is not really very useful or practical for offline editing because if you're a traditional feature motion picture in Hollywood you'll Street about 60 hours 70 hours of footage and so at HD uncompressed HD data rates you're talking somewhere on the lines of 60 to 70 terabytes of storage that you need for five six months while your editor and your director is whittling down that 60 hours to an hour and a half and so that's not a practical thing to keep track of it's very expensive because you need to buy X or AIDS or like large scuzzy arrays so working an uncompressed HD is not practical at all so because of that the traditional workflow had this down conversion mentality since working in uncompressed HD isn't practical and there was no other solution available before down conversions was the only way to go but you have all the hang-ups that come along with that standard definition workflow at Technicolor we were thinking that we wanted to state digital we didn't want to go down to a beta SB we didn't want to go down to the DV cam we wanted to give them quicktime movies delivered on firewire and those QuickTime movies are direct descendants from the HD will take d5 HD HD cam and bring it in and transcode it on the fly to an offline format that the company requests that offline format can be photo JPEG which is very good quality but a very low data rate very nice for offline editing particularly if you have a lot of hours of footage we can go to DV and we'll do it at 16 by 9 DB will go DV 50 or since about 2-3 months we can go to dvcpro HD with the new Final Cut 8 Pro HD version and so we'll talk a little bit more about that and show why that's an interest workflow so with the Final Cut Pro HD media we are giving high quality QuickTime movies the timecode that you see in your Final Cut Pro System corresponds exactly to the master tapes and so there's no difference between time codes that you're dealing with and so when you go do your mastering of your movie all the time fields line up and it simplifies things there you don't have to change the lists go through any kind of conversion processes like in cinema tools right now we have something where you can go from a twenty nine nine seven list to a 2398 list you don't need to do any of that so the timecode comes across exactly the data lay that data rate is low and so it can be as low as one fiftieth the original data rate that's in particular with the photo JPEG and it preserves a 16 by 9 aspect ratio what's nice about that is that you see everything that you have on the HD tape you can see if there is a light stand in the shot on this side whereas if you do a four by three extraction you might have missed that you can time things so that they happen properly when someone walks out of frame that you know exactly when they leave whereas if you have a four by three Center extraction they would seem to leave the frame far earlier so the first show that we did this with was a Warner Brothers independent movie called around the bend which is coming out of believe in August and it was shot on 35 millimeter for per- we tell us a needed meaning transferring to high-definition to HD d v we picked D 5 because it's a 10 bit it's a 10 bit media the then we captured it on the fly from the D 5 and we went to half HD res and so the resolution that they were working at was greater than standard definition it was 960 by 540 it was perfect 16 by 9 the average data rate was two megabytes a second so we went from 126 megabytes to 2 and that 2 megabytes is less than DV by the way it's not quite half but it's close they edited the whole show on final cut 4.1 so it is possible to use this workflow in for 4.1 right now we are on for 5 or final cut HD so that's where this was a couple months back and to view their footage they had multiple options when they were editing in Albuquerque they had a DVI projector hooked up to their edit system and so when they looked at their footage they actually went through the DVI and projected onto a 20-foot screen and so they actually edited the movie and it looked like they were in the theater which is very nice they also were able to go out to their 23 inch cinema display which was quite nice high resolution and the look is far better than what people traditionally have worked with on in an offline situation traditionally offline media looks very blocky very low res this was far better they could see focus that very good colors saturation so with that particular project we've now finished it with by the way we also gave them as soon as cinema tools database which has all the key code information of their films so that we're able to do a key code cut list but when we went to online for their preview screenings they did HD preview screenings I don't know if many of you are familiar with Los Angeles there's a fantastic theater at the Grove in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles they had preview screenings in HD to do the preview screenings the editors gave us a FireWire hard drive on that far our hard drive we had a project file which had each of their reels media managed so that all of the excess Media was clipped off and so when we go into digitized as high-definition we're only capturing the stuff that we need the timecode of that media was exactly as it was on the HD tapes so final cut we edited this on a Final Cut HD system with an AJ Conant cart at ten bit uncompressed so it would take in from the d5 s exactly the clips that it needed it then also took in all of these transitions filters color effects speed changes even titles came in perfectly and the titles were exactly spaced where they were or placed in the proper space on the screen so we also did the we also have them give us a quicktime movie of each real and that QuickTime movie had a timecode burn of the original d5 burned into it and we then did a picture-in-picture while we were editing it so you see right here we have one screenshot from the movie where you can see that we have exactly the right spot visually and if anything should go wrong which nothing did by the way but if there was a discrepancy for example you know sometimes we have productions where they shoot and they have to tape ones and they didn't name it differently and so maybe we put in the wrong tape one and digitized from that we would have seen a difference in the top right hand corner and that we would have been able to see okay the timecode that we captured was right but perhaps the tape was wrong and so we be able to go in and address the problem so if we switch to number two I'll show a little example of having the picture in picture and we can have it playing so you can see each and every edit comes in properly this is some San Francisco footage that the QuickTime people gave me and so this is a really nice way to just go through and you know that your edit is proper you can also you can also go through and just step through each shot and just go to the Edit points and you can go back and check so for going through and making sure that each and every edit is correct it's a very nice way to work previously what you would have is you would have a chase cassette and you would have a beta SP very low res that you would run in parallel and watch on two screens to see if everything matched up this was nice because it let us go in and we could see on the Edit machine right away if we had any problems so I'll just advanced a little bit here okay we can go back to slides so in terms of a workflow it was very streamlined they had to hardly ever make tapes when they needed to make a tape it was quite easy they dumped in this case they dumped their media too they they bought no extra hardware by the way they just use the dual g5 and a cinema display they had no extra hardware they did have an extra bread but they had no video cards no nothing so in order to make tapes what they did was they took the photo JPEG sequence dumped it into a DV sequence it resized automatically as a letterbox image they did a render it was a less than less than actually more than real-time render and with final cut for when you play out a 23 9 8 sequence it adds in the 3 2 again as necessary to go out to tape when your DV so they were able to make cassettes for their sound editors for there- cutters all that quite easily so so in terms of this workflow how could we make it better well one thing that's really nice and makes it better is with the introduction of Final Cut Pro HD we have access now to dvcpro HD and DVCPRO HD is really revolutionary in in terms of how we work with HD it's the same impact as d-v had four or five years ago six years ago because before DD was introduced editing video was really hard and you would always have kind of social quality you would have a little capture card with RCA inputs and you capture it in you get your little QuickTime movie and it was low res and all that then DV came along you had firewire you were able to plug that into your computer you didn't need a video card anything like that and you could edit in either iMovie Final Cut Pro Final Cut Express and that changed a lot of things you had now something that looked pretty much like beta SP quality which had been a professional video product and you had easy accessibility to it you could have it on your internal ID drives and all that with BBC pearl HD you have the same thing DVCPRO HD takes it allows you to edit in true HD this is not half resolution HD its true HD but you don't have to hit get hit with the uncompressed HD data rate so basically with 24 P dvcpro HD it runs at five point eight megabytes a second as compared to the uncompressed 10 bit uncompressed which runs at 126 so you see a massive data rate difference between the uncompressed and the dvcpro HD the reason for that is the dvcpro HD is the same format as the camera the dvcpro HD camera rights to tape and the heads on the dvcpro HD camera can't write 126 megabytes a second so they had to find a way to kind of shoehorn it down to a more manageable data rate so in the in their normal state you have this DD 100 where it's a hundred megabits that's what the small beef not the big beef megabits and of that we then only take 24 frames of it it's set for 60 we take 24 so the the other 36 frames get locked off so we save that battery so if you take a look at the chart of the differences between the HD you take a look at the dvcpro HD at 24 P it is only slightly more than DV is now for an offline format to traditionalists having a offline format that's five point eight megabytes is still high okay that's granted because you are going to use still quite a bit of hard drive space but the advantages are so great you're now editing in complete HD res this is not some fake HD it's real HD you have real-time effects you have HD playback through a cinema display or DVI projector okay which if you go back to the computer - I got a little bit of black before this button so what I was showing before was actually the dvcpro HD oops and so with this format I'm actually playing off of a firewire drive a little less II bus powered Drive so it really changes the rules for HD you don't I didn't pull out an excerpt of red it's just a tiny little firewire drive and we can go back to this live again and if you have that ability you can go out with a DVI projector projected on a 20-foot screen edit it perfect HD you can lay back to the new Panasonic 1200 X it has firewire in and so you don't need any special cards video cards or anything you literally plug a firewire 400 into it and you can lay back your tape with the same efficiency as you do DV currently you can use compressor to make standard F DVDs which is very nice there pristine in quality and the minimum system requirement is one power book or iBook that has a gigahertz processor and a gig of ram that's it I was editing HD flying back from NAB at 10,000 feet on Southwest on battery power that's really cool and so that's the future of HD editing now so that's it for me [Applause] can everybody hear me guess so good morning I'm Scott Simmons on the visual effects supervisor for livewire productions we do feature films and large format films as well I'm just going to pull the audience real quick who has heard of the term digital intermediate okay there's a few okay this is war lines with kalahari which is an IMAX feature that we worked on last year it's been released this year and doing very well give you a little bit of a background a giant-screen film produced by National Geographic with acclaimed director Tim liver sage Kindler's edge is a very well known wildlife documentary filmmaker it was shot on location in Botswana that's where the Kalahari is are part of it nine months of post-production that's not all the DI process that's also music and the final part of it and digital work the DI work was done on desktop systems these weren't put through very expensive proprietary black boxes so what is a digital intermediate and as a producer asked me why isn't it called digital advanced well it's an intermediate step it's a middle step before you go to release print so that means that every frame of the picture has been touched by the computer that means things that were used to be done optically or in the lab such as dissolves or color timing and whatnot they're all being done on the computer now and basically what you end up with is a new color negative and that gets output to an answer print you know music gets added obviously previous IMAX pictures everybody's heard of IMAX movies I'm sure we're conversions they weren't done you know from frame 1 to the end credits at a digital intermediate their conversions of other pictures that are finished ahead of time so this is pretty cool because this is the first time that you know something this large has been put through this kind of pipeline so let's talk about the workflow a little bit all this the film was scanned by a Magica a mágico is a large format film service bureau the each frame was 4096 by 31 12 resolution just call it 4k each frame is a 10 bit sitting on log file for those of you that don't know what cine on is cine on is a format that codec developed that basically described the gamut which is the luminance the color range of T so motion picture negative motion picture film has a much deeper and higher range than video does so this formats were important to start with we got those in each frame was 50 megabytes that's each frame so you can imagine by the end I think for a portion of the show there was about 3 terabytes worth of data get that data in the database the scan so we know where they are where they came from you know what the length of the shots are which was really important and now here's the interesting part so we took those really huge files I mean obviously you've got a throughput issue when each frame is 50 megabytes and what we did is convert them to 8-bit log quick time so there is a logarithmic conversion of the 10 bits in eons to QuickTime file format obviously click on file format gives us the ability to scrub through images we can output proxies get things review fairly quickly as opposed to you know a sequence of Simeon frames which you can't really scrub through very easily then we had to look at the frames and clean them and degrade them while getting saddled bit better and then we had examined the shot to see if the pipeline that we're putting them through was actually going to benefit the shots and all but for cases we were using a QuickTime movies so imagine that we're going from you know a file format the QuickTime movie standard it's traditionally used in video or even high-def to something that's much much bigger something that's projected on a 70 by a hundred foot screen without artifacts and we're able to do that with QuickTime because we've used it weather feature films we know were you still working with it we know how to get the best results of it so the QuickTime movie is basically a very good sub sample of those sending on files it's the best of those 10 bits now and ate it after examining it then we had to do color grade and effects we'll get into that a little bit more we'd rendered a FireWire drives and firewire drives would get shuttled off by and to see fi which is the film recording lab and it's now part of Technicolor and we get those back and project them in dailies the dailies would go to an IMAX there you got to see an IMAX movie and an IMAX theater so it looks like and before we really got into doing takes or final shots we did some tests so we would do cine on vs. QuickTime test and we would compare what we are doing to the motion picture to the original scan and we knew right away we were on the right track everything is looking really great so there are a lot of challenges from doing a giant screen picture obviously you're doing with throughput you're doing with file sizes you're dealing with labs possibly that aren't used to working with QuickTime we have to do color grading and color grading is more than you know the tint knob on your television set color grading is fixing the shots that the shots need to be fixed and then creating a look for those shots that makes it look know warm or cool or has something to do with telling the story time of day kind of things then we added a lot of visual effects believe it or not and we'll get into the technology too so challenges on this particular motion picture is the director didn't know was going to be an IMAX feature we thought it might be an IMAX feature and then we started shooting 70-millimeter which is a traditional format for IMAX and then realized man these cameras are heavy these cameras are loud and I can't go within 20 feet of the Lions with a 70 millimeter camera because it just basically don't like it they will move away so he ended up shooting Oh 75 80 percent of the motion picture of 35 millimeter so there's a problem right there how do we get the 35-millimeter to look like the 70 millimeter because it's going to end up in IMAX and he also shot with different film stocks don't ask me what they were he doesn't know and we couldn't figure it out so we had to kind of balance things and make things come to a center and then we have to conform a motion picture that was not necessarily shot for an IMAX screen to the IMAX backs and then because of the filming conditions a lot of what he did was he'd be shooting in the middle of the day in the summer summer and Kalahari can get up to 150 degrees I mean half his film sitting in a cooler basically and he just grabbed whatever he could get and if he's running out of film of TA would go get some more film and he knows what it was and stick it in there so he's not shooting in the best of condition so there's a few cases where we had to do some restoration work because the film had been damaged or you know the three layers the red-green-blue layer of the emulsion is actually starting to separate unfortunately that didn't happen too much so let's get into the challenges 35 millimeter film it's four perforations runs up and down through the projector and let's say that's a thirty-five millimeter still at 70 that's a big difference I like that a lot let's go back that's 16 times the area of 35 millimeter that is a 50 megabyte frame versus a 5 megabyte frame 4 to 5 is usually what 2k is and we have to make that look like that that's a big challenge so how do we do something like that first of all we have to reduce the 35 millimeter drain we have to identify what's grain versus sure we don't want to get rid of grain in all of a sudden the Lions coats or the antelopes coats just disappear you know they don't want it to look like solid Browns you still have to have some texture then LSF preserve edge detail which is the real trick because if you can determine what the edges are then you're you know you're preserving that resolution of the of the image versus noise or graining this in this example so here's an image cut in very very close of one of the shots you can see the grain you can see the red green blue and believe it or not this has been color corrected as a first step and what we had to do is you know determine what the antlers are the antelope clear up that sky because you've got a solid sky I mean you're really going to see the grain and this is what we ended up with it's a much cleaner picture you can see edge detail you can see that there antelope there this one actually is been color corrected and color graded difference between color correction is in this example if we got film that was sort of blue because he was shoot without a color correction filter on the camera we have to bring it to gray and we have to create it what's called a great balanced look so that's important because now we show it to the director and the producers and say okay this is what you shot this is what you saw when you're on location say yes it is then color graded as a second step and color grading it is basically well we want it to help you tell the story so it doesn't look like no mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom necessary we want it to look like a feature film to everything sweetened a little bit conforming is another issue this is a what's called a sacred master the sacred master basically says this is the area you've got to play with within your fill so if you look at this this is a field chart there's two things that area in the red is credit safe so if you imagine going to a movie like next door and you watch the credit you're going up and down or dissolving they're filling the frame you can't do that with an iron act picture because where that plus sign is is the viewing center of viewing it's not the middle it's the center of viewing so the center of viewing in an IMAX picture is about a third of the way up so that's where your eyes are looking and got all this extra space over your head that just makes you feel like you're there just sort of surrounds you but where the audience is looking is about through the way up the credits obviously can't go all the way to the top so we're looking for that sweet but sweet spot in the center like I said before he's not necessarily shooting for that it's not necessarily framing all of the Lions or whatever the action is for that sweet spot so the center of interest in a in a picture on an IMAX or large format pictures not necessarily the center the frame so what do we do here's a couple of examples where on the Left we have the Guinea hands and their focus spot is actually about halfway up and I'm in this shot this helicopter shot obviously the center of interest is way up at the top so what do we do we switch to demo should we play on it there we go so for the guineas we have to lower the shot in the frame and here is where the effects come in and create a digital extension we have to do that a lot same thing for helicopter shot in this case we're completely replacing the sky everything has to be tracked this so it becomes not just a reframing issue or a composition issue it becomes a full-blown effect it's next you know I can stand here restoration we have a lot of dirt and scratches I think you can see a little bit of it up there I'll go ahead and play the movie this is a pretty good example again this is just a little part of it a little part of that image this is much much bigger probably eight times larger than the part that I'm showing you right now like I said you have dust and scratches you've got the emulsion starting to separate we have to correct all of that so we're not just this is part of the digital intermediate process we're just not coloring it we're just not correcting it we're making the frames as perfect as possible because that's what you're going to see it's not happening in any other place it's happening in the computers and it's happening to fix these kinds of things and just for fun when we had the rat party for the crew had a little contest to see who could figure out how many pieces of dirt got cleaned we had a little gift bag of stuff like that the software actually keeps track of that and because sort of masochistic I wanted to know how much pieces of dirt that we cleaned up five hundred and eighty-three thousand pieces of dirt and some of that let's say a hundred thousand well done was removed procedurally procedurally basically means we had a computer and image and sort of fix it not that simple but that that's what we did the rest of it had be done by hand over 400,000 pieces of dirt had to be done by hand and here's the reason for our wires and their software yeah there's some software but it doesn't work like if the human eye does it'll make mistakes if you make a mistake at 4k it's pretty obvious there's just mistakes are going to magnified pretty largely and there's also dust in the shot there's also heat waves as mirages there's distortions going on so you have to use your eye to get rid of that stuff and that was the major production part for us we go back to the other color grading okay part of color grading I put stabilizing in there because I'm not sure where else to put it he's shooting on location in difficult situations not all not every time as the camera lock down and also you've got heat distortion going on in the image so the image is moving around a lot if you flying the helicopter the cameras strapped underneath it with bungee cords sometimes the bungee cords aren't tight enough and you get some jitter going on in the frame so that has to be stabilized because you must a shot to look no absolutely as possible color creakings like I said we're balancing for gray first and then we're creating a look okay here's a good example this is a frame from original scan and it's a little hard to see but it is dark it is green it is muddy and this is what we did to it so we gray balanced it crated the color look for it and now you can tell it's a lioness on her cub we excuse me we also output to film quite a lot and National Geographic come in and see what we're doing they saw the before and afters and just gasped they just thought we can't salvage this there's no way you could do it so what we did the reason we did we started off with the ten bits in eons full range of the film negative and we selected the best part of that to work in QuickTime we also created color boards color panels this is basically what you have to do when you're working in a sequence you have to create a color look that will work from shot to shot you can't work on a single shot and say it looks good and client says yeah and you're signed off on doesn't work like that every shot has to cut to one another so in this case we're trying to preserve the color of the animals more so than the sky the sky is pretty close but you know if you turn around and you look at the sky behind you it's going to be a different color so we have to nail down is what the texture and color of the animals looks like then on top of that we do visual effects shot enhancements you saw a little bit of that before where we just have to create extensions or whatnot and we also did some all CG ish shots the first shot of the movie which was a little disconcerting to us was a complete CG shot of a star-filled so our fields are really hard to do I mean you have the landscape and the stars above and we're tilting down to the Southern Cross stars are hard to do it's really dark in if you're going to see compression at all you would see it in something like that but we worked it out so you don't see see that we did a lot of TG maps and we have a cosmic zoom let's go back to demo please here's another reason you have what Digital Media is great this is an entire sequence but it's one shot dissolving into the next so all the color grading has to work from one shot to the next and here's our cosmic zoom again center of interest is down towards the middle this looks amazing on a hundred-foot screen it feels like you're flying in for landing and speaking of large we had to get satellite imagery for that part of the sequence and we ended up at the texture map those 60,000 pixels wide that's the Okavango we're orienting ourselves with the nice sky look at that nice guy that skies all digital we do a math dissolve into another portion of the satellite image and we fly past the salt hands land right at the watering holes both go back to the slides please here's another special effect if you notice the line is facing right don't know why Lions supposed to be facing left lion wasn't cooperating flop the image life is going to be good but this is right after the opening shot of the stars so this should be done but it's not done should be done so let's combine it with something like that let's put them both together let's go back to demo that's a cool shot I like that one so completely again this is part of color grading and it's an effect that's also public color grading it's all suppose a digital intermediate process you've got a director it says you know I want a shot that I couldn't get you know and so we created it can't go back the slides please so let's talk about technology a little bit some surprising things we learned on this show in particular we've done IMAX feature work before I've even done stereo work before so we weren't really surprised about that QuickTime could hold up and when we've been a slitscan stereo graphic and if you're going to see compression you're going to see the API grid that you see a typical QuickTime compression going to see it in something like that you're going to see it in something like the star field shot but we're surprised by some simple things Apple 17-inch studio displays were subs best monitors we've ever used blew it away don't know why you're better than a cinemas for the displays we're using don't know why but what we saw in those little 17s displays we saw on the IMAX screen so we're looking at 17 inch display they're looking at a 70 foot tall screen and they matched you know we obviously we did a lookup table hardware lookup table for the monitors so that they all stayed consistent and also kudos to ca5 for making things look like they're supposed to and our film outputs were pretty good firewire drives absolutely a necessity we were rendering to the firewire drives and checking them and boom they go out the door go to the lab they get recorded they get filmed out so these large firewire drives are just a godsend because this show was about throughput can do a proc machines software after-effects leave are not combustion there are two other companies that worked on this a magical and Sassoon comb divine magic that use them shake and procedural methods and I can't stress enough how important procedural methods are because procedural methods make you use the tool that you have and come up with a new solution procedural methods are what we use to define what is grain versus texture what is the edge what is an antler stuff like that we have to work outside the tools not just using one tool not just using one layer and I just using want to composition you're using several that are analyzing doing different things to create a whole now can software be written that does this absolutely I'd love to see it advances because love to see a plugin that would do all these steps to find the grain to find edge detail that's that kind of thing but there's always going to be a place where you get to a shot and you see you know like I said before the emulsion starting to separate you you know those are pretty esoteric and bizarre things and you have to use a procedural method to correct them okay the expense obviously we're on a desktop expense wasn't sulfur endeth and that makes it pretty attractive to producers if the client wanted us to do real-time 4k color grading digital intermediate work you're talking about with the cine on files you're talking about terabytes of throughput is it possible yeah actually a couple systems have actually been made that have been able to do that cost for the hardware is around three or four hundred thousand softwares on top of that you start getting a very big bill very quickly and put output is critical so I have to figure out how to move stuff around and work with different file formats and then as I mentioned before understanding the medium if you work smart you can work faster not just dealing with the problem and part of the digital intermediate issue is who is owning it it's before it was different steps it's like labs doing this part color timer is doing this part DP is doing this part DP used to be using traditional chemical methodology and who's really owning it and that's a big question right now because right now di it's just a big shotgun okay we got color if you do not do nothing but color the film create a color look that don't stabilize the shot don't dust but they could but they're real-time 2k usually playback and color correction while the clients their clients not going to sit there and watch you dust bust it's just not going to happen but that's part of it so the current technology that's out there and million dollar suites is only doing a half of what we had to do to create a digital intermediate okay so future what we need obviously large files require a large pipeline you know 4k is becoming a new standard and digital effects work Spiderman was all the effect shots we've done with 4k plates not suitcase and right now the architecture of file throughput is a threaded architecture so that means if you're using Simeon scans if you want to stay with the full range dynamic range of that film you're working with Simeon scans they are sequence of frames they are not a digital video format they are not QuickTime I would like to see it quicktime become threaded which is basically why a sequence of frames is necessary because sequence of frames can be addressed over the network in parallel the more power you throw at it the more real time effects the more throughput that you're getting possibly the new high def standard it is merging with QuickTime seems like it can skip around quite a bit I would love to see it used in production in a parallel pipeline so you really are getting low data rates consumption with high throughput and get multiple effects color grading applied to those things that would be fantastic standards 3d color look-up tables what's a 3d color lookup table a color look-up tables basically says alright this is you know the amount of colors you can use to display an image you know they're software this Hardware look-up tables a 3d color lookup table is saying that all the values are interrelated and that's how film works I mean getting it to a high depth finishing station is great but if you really want to work with the data the way that film works you have to work with a 3d lookup table and it just means the red/green/blue affect each other if you affect the brightness of red in a film 3d lookup table something's happening to green and blue because that's held film emulsion works codec is created 3d lookup table fairly recently but it's only available for codec stocks so there's no 3-2 lookup table that I know for Fuji or other files film stocks also because it's new it's not a standard it's being adopted for a lot of color grading systems yet and then you're faced with arcane chemical technology which is how I started I started off in an optical lab and I know about optical printers and keeping the right temperature of film suits and all of that stuff and there are no direct correlations between traditional color correcting methods in film to digital now some software will say we have printer lights we can match what's going on in the lab that's not necessarily true because traditional color correction if you say you're adding 10 points of red or adding some red to it you're not cranking the red that's not how film works but in most the software that's available now say well the DP wants you to add red will you add red to it that's not correct it's not how some works you're over driving the image you know traditionally in the DPS I want more red much as a neutral density I want you to do this or that and you can add a list of criteria for his recipe and still be the film will hold up it'll still look good but digitally you can seriously overdrive the image if the the look that's being required is pretty severe you can overdrive the image there's a lot of things that need to be correlated film bias you know how do we do that there's many issues so there are a few new technologies those are wrap up here that our desktop systems are not black boxes that just do colors work lustre by the screen it's kind of a black box is proprietary it's a licensed technology they don't really know do they really own it only runs on Windows XP lustre is sort of an all-in-one color grading system you do your color grading and you get the results so you twist the dial and get a result you can't get in backwards and see what the dials were set to final touch is a new programs a couple years old runs on Mac g5 s incredible throughput they're adding more and more tools to it it's a lender's and floating bit processing instead of integer which is really important again you don't want to over drive or clip the image and SpeedGrade which will run on a Mac and it's currently running on PCs speed raids interesting because what does is create a script for what it's color correction just did sensibly that's being used to send out to other SpeedGrade systems so they can go well I can help you render I can help you make the color correction but I think as a real advantage once color standards are set if scripts are written from these color grading applications that can be sent to other applications that do more effects kind of work does a shake and that would be fantastic so if you can that way the effects people or the DP can decide where does this happen do we do effects first and then color grade or vice versa which is really important because you're doing effect shot on something to color grade and made it really spooky and dark well you know you got what you got you know you don't necessarily have tracking points anymore because the image is too dark and I think that's it for me [Applause]