WWDC2004 Session 732

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en well welcome everybody thanks for coming I am pleased to welcome you to session 7:30 to New Directions of branded entertainment American Express case study I am very pleased to announce that well let me explain Who I am aiming product line manager at Apple for cord media technologies and I'm very pleased to introduce Evan Shechtman about 1998 he started out post digital in his apartment and consequently was acquired by radical media which he currently is a CTO and he's been very involved with the American Express Superman webisodes which you might have seen this is very interesting project branded blended entertainment and advertizing together and Evan is going to talk us through some of the challenges of that project how we implemented it on the Mac platform and hopefully inspire you guys and help walk through some of the issues you might find and end up with a great project so again please welcome evan Schekman thanks okay well one of the first challenges that we have in this project was actually nothing technical its kind of in our business and post production over the past few years there's been someone of a changing of the guard you know the business that I got into I got into write about when when After Effects was coming out and Adobe Premiere and those kinds of things and everyone labeled it desktop post-production which at the time it was against a lot of big the big million-dollar rooms that we were competing against we don't call desktop post-production anymore it's post-production because every one in every in every part of our industry is using a desktop computer so most people thought that these things were toys and as we say now that if you don't see ahead of the curve you get hit by the car which is what's been happening the kind of professionals that are in my business now it was a very rigid business for a long time we had our offline at there as we do online editors we had colorist we had graphics people and compositors and really what's very little spillover between the different disciplines the kind of people that were able to hire now have that access to all the tools all the time for one price people who get Final Cut Pro or get a copy of flash and these with tools they have access to and so we're able to turn drastically different results and in a fraction of the time and these are call them consolidated media professionals because what happens is we have the same person who does the offline edit through their own conform to their own online in color correction in most cases because unlike the traditional business when people only had access to one portion of the tools we get access to everything all the time so we have really in our business now there's a mix of seasoned professionals and young talented stars and there's an information exchange that goes back and forth people are still telling us that we can't do it this way as we opened our fourth office which is kind of funny I would think at this point it's more of it's the revolution is over now it's an evolution in in our business but that's totally fine we're going to do it this way so a couple of challenges that we had the first one is that we were the first company outside of Warner Brothers to ever be able to animate Superman and we weren't going to do it in traditional style animation because it takes forever and it's really costly you do the drawings here you edit them in you send it overseas for inking you may change a cut you have to send it back so we had a couple things budget it's always shrinking on commercial work that's why we did webisodes to begin with I'll explain that the other thing is at time they want it done very very quickly because everyone bows how fast we can do things and that comes back to bite us so we said we'll animate Superman in flash which I don't think it ever been done before now everyone how many people use flash from talking to content people or mostly people how many people edit in Final Cut and how many people do compositing or other okay so it's a mix of everybody thanks so we wanted animated flash there we were sitting there's a bunch of really kind of felt like we were in detention or something this is a bunch of young people one silent table and a bunch of industry leaders kind of from Warner Brothers and from DC and from the agency sitting on the other then we said okay we'll all find a Final Cut Pro will online a Final Cut Pro will do our color correction there we're going to shoot it in DV we shot it on an Excel with a lens package called an ENSO lens package this is a 35 moment lens adapter that goes on this DV camera take the birthday-party look off of DV everyone loves to shoot DV for a few reasons generally inexpensive high quality and conspicuous acquisition but it looks like you shot a birthday party so the other part of what we do is trying to make video look less like video so this Enzo lens package helped that so we said we're going to shoot it on DV we're going to do animation in flash and we do compositing and shake now the advertising people only knew terms like flame and inferno and shake is equally is a weird name for a product but they didn't understand what any of this stuff was and of course Final Cut Pro is a toy according to a lot of people in our business still although they're coming around so we had a couple of different arguments with them like they just didn't understand how we were going to do it thankfully the company that I worked for radical media is able to hold people's hands and help them take a leap so what I'll do first to show it instead of talking about it I'll show one of the webisodes I'll do a little talking and show you how we did some of the stuff oh make sure this volume is there volume from this computer the middle one don't touch anything I swear no sound oh it's real funny so just go okay it's running off a Windows box let me switch the built-in on you this I memorized it so I can I can speak over it although it's much funnier to hear I won't try again okay okay well I can talk in the meantime while he does it so why webisodes the advertising budgets are shrinking and the company I work for radical media about four years ago started to say to some of their clients the average budget for 30-second commercials insulting it's $300,000 depends on what side you're on you'll be insulted it's a lot of money for a 30-second spot so what we started to do because of the onslaught of DV and Final Cut Pro truncated workflow we said to our clients for the price of a 30-second spot will sell you a 30 minute TV show so we're the first company to shoot this show for ESPN called the life on TV and do it in Final Cut Pro and get out to air that way and just as a just to buy some time one of the arguments we had which we're fighting less and less these days was an executive from ESPN came in said listen son V V will never do what bethe SP can do and like a hot-headed person I said of course it won't won't cost twice as much to work with the great overtime be harder to enter the system you know all these different things that analog systems do and we did a demonstration of DV versus beta SP [Music] let me try to include despair there we go thank you okay so we kind of stopped fighting that fight the interesting thing about this was that when they came to us to keep the cost down they were already ready to shoot DV so over three years the argument of DVS inferior it's not broadcast quality it has no timecode was kind of out the window and it proved itself over time as a more than lucrative medium so webisodes Seinfeld has a deal with American Express and everyone knows the Seinfeld is right ok we all don't live in a bubble and he's not funny in five minutes he's not funny I mean he's not he's not funny in 30 seconds on TV although I think he is he needs five minutes at 30 minutes so we said well do these short episodes of these webisodes and so we did two five-minute pieces for American Express's website I want to be his famous I have Jerry American Express calm and we did three lifts from those two episodes he's three 15-second teasers that were on tv2 driving towards the web then we did a Today Show appearance where we composited in Superman and Jerry Seinfeld sitting with Matt Lauer well we learned the less than a few years ago when doing some work for advertising we did a bunch of Absolut Vodka spots that were supposed to be emailed to people so with the entire time works quick and dirty because of compression and we're going to email them to people and as soon as we were done the agency liked them enough to say okay blow them up the film and that's what happened that's what I learned my first lesson with the fact that we should always work for a broadcast we should always work at top quality because you never know how someone's going to want to repurpose this so learn that lesson and on the Seinfeld stuff even though was going to end up as a webisode and compressions come a long way too so we really couldn't hide too much we did it for broadcast quality I'll show you one of the pieces now and show you how we did some of the more difficult stuff kind of people have seen these by the way cool to give a reservation Superman I'd be under anesthesia right here looks like why do you what is why the kitchen now help me now they put this much manages a tuna fish expecting please why are you here at all alarm it's not hard to predict agreed and the fact that yellow boy superb you sustained me sue me that's one of you remember me Mary Caskey same with my folks to a symmetry vessel that floors for help terrific Brady who want to reveal I just want to say thanks to yourself not a problem good thank you no I need so you want to help me hook up this DVD how it was like a clean with you is no fun not any wonder this finished up surrounded I always wanted that that's a very examines nuts grounds like some rounds halibut like it's like you there what are you talking about so you go bowling with those people last night now I stay home I watch that rebound would stop with the reality television I can I don't eat you but this was pretty good we shall first guys just got divorced I don't know happen please stop I wanted reality as take the screen out of my TV look through the foot box all whoa we're gonna produce unbelievable oh yes why only see now this is what we should have saved what's wrong with you of course the only place the good one every place of that no that's Joel Siegel custom oh yes we once saw my DVD player what am I not political this would you get over yourself he's getting away operating [Music] Oh hello [Music] give me a month the big point is like good the time when a uniformed men suspect so what happened here guys threw it at me it bounced off at the ground why don't you just catch it do this now if you want the gravel rollin super speaks for every rotation in the earth will go back in time importantly ground click on I don't know don't you think better idea actually I do just duck into this phone phone message that's right short short you may be invulnerable to physical harm but I'm vulnerable the damage that what things bouncing off with heroes within 90 days of purchase I don't like that whole going back in time thinking why not what's the point of anything if you could just go back in time and fix any problem when you get a job you do what you do I'll do it you're this around so not back down it's different than the back of time way the instructions [Music] this was torture this was really torture to shoot okay cool so hey thanks so soup-to-nuts two of these in 12 weeks Warner Brothers said they couldn't do this on budget and they would not be able to do with missus amount of time with ten animators we with ten animators and ten compositors I think was the number they threw at us this the compositing that you saw was done by two people with one assistant on shake out of our Santa Monica office the New York office was responsible for offline and online editing so let's quickly go through the gear that was used can Excel one with an Enzo package two of them the reason why and I you know in retrospect I'm really glad that everyone came around to shoot on DV but to be honest with you a job like this does not belong on DV because of all the keying and compositing that had to happen so I'll discuss with you how with some transcoding and some hardware we got around a lot of the color space issues to pull the keys so that was one so the Excel one great the offline systems were essentially DV the editor Trisha Cooke who had cut the last two Coen Brothers films never cut on on Final Cut before here's where I give my shameless plug for my training video understanding Final Cut Pro 4 so we gave her my training DVD in a book that was written by this woman who Diana Wayne R who has a book called finalists after the avid editor so we gave her a little bit of training which is something that's typical a lot of these seasoned professionals that that are big talent that that can get this kind of work they need to be educated on the way that we work first before they feel comfortable doing it there's a very simple job to off-line the working resolution in our facility regardless it's a film job or digi beta or even DV the working resolution is DV it's a relatively small file size it's relatively high quality and of course with decent Apple hardware and she was on a dual officer g5 you get a lot of real-time effects without additional hardware but you ready know that so offline was on DV we wrote a simple FileMaker database to move the effect shots back and forth just a cow just to keep track of where everything was running off of a next serve in our office along with a bunch of other things we're running off of it and then of course for online in color correction we use sinewave same old Final Cut Pro except we put in a third-party capture card another a few on the market why do we choose sinewave I hear all you ask it's because sinewave has the most real-time you can get the IO the Asia IO card the Asia IO box the Kona card the deck link cards these are great products that all have their place but when we're dealing with advertising customers who've come from an avid world we have to make Final Cut Pro look as beefy as possible and it can depending on how much you want to spend so we threw we threw a Pinnacle sinewave card in with a pro da breakout box and the real-time key so there's very little rendering involved with doing a key or color correction or crop for widescreen map there's no rendering involved and for several layers of color correction so if they don't see rendering and they see the full quality they don't really care what system it is it's our job to make technology transparent to the customer let them just be as creative as they want to be you know a blue hat a green hat a purple hat let's try the blue hat again that's that typical thing with color correction so we use pinnacle sinewave for color correction and for for our on lining and for some transcoding and then sound of course was done in Pro Tools okay let's go through some of the challenges that we had well on the flash shot just as a funny thing we were using two cameras to Enso cameras and they're pretty expensive lens packages one of the cameras broke and so the reason why this was so painful besides for the song that got stuck in your head was that it was seven hours of this because we had to shoot everything twice from one camera the cool thing about shooting this on DV was that because the camera broke the next morning we went to a local reseller B&H photo and bought another X on one and bought a 35mm in London they had on the shelf and finish the job that way so it's kind of cool that you can go to the corner store and buy some of the stuff to do this kind of work I'm a final cut guy I don't really know flash of shape all that much but I have some screen captures of some of the hardest stuff that we did here we're going to take a look at where is the DVD player we're going to take a look at this shot specifically this was a big challenge these were traditionally sell animated hands and we had real cables that we had to somehow animate into there and have it look pretty convincing so the first thing I'll show you see here and I have screenshots that the flash did flash and shape people did for us to take a peek of what we did here flash you know when I first started in post-production during the dot-com boom all I knew of flash is that you use it to make fart cartoons for the internet and part of my French but I soon realized that it's actually more powerful than that we did a few shows for that was a joke everybody by the way just checking with you okay you've been staring at cinema displays all dianna we started to do a lot of broadcast flash animation for MTV and realize that it's a fully viable means of doing all kinds of things so here we brought in basically your background plate with the back of the DVD player a little bit difficult because we were working with Barry Levinson and I'm somewhat timid to work with these kind of people before and so I was the visual effects supervisor on the set and if there was a shot where there was a shadow or he wanted to shoot everything handheld well if you ever done compositing is a nightmare on any format and he didn't really want to listen because he's Barry Levinson so when we were doing stuff like this ago mr. Levinson is a there's a shadow being cast do you think maybe we can you know please maybe take it again and you think about it for a second and everyone's like okay we're taking it again and all these people would start to move and it felt kind of powerful so a little while then over a couple of times but mr. Levinson can we maybe try it again he's like don't push it go sit down so on a shot like this we got our background plate because it was imperative and so we did a very simple key and I'll show you those the plate that we built to key out most of the hand now there was a stand-in this is how crazy some of the mentality was we got a guy who was like big like a football player and we put him in huge shoes and had to wear this blue outfit for two weeks the people from DC said well he's that kind of a gut like ma'am he's going to be composited over a suit man I don't know he's just not like Superman this woman was put on the set to be the keeper of Superman which I respect but you know there was supposed to whistle and bounces ninj suit Mendel does not whistle okay sir Mendelssohn whistle that's fine so here we have the guy with the blue hands actually doing it mostly for eyeline the good news is that a lot of the takes that Levinson picked we had it wait very often we did it without the blue guy like the third time and thankfully those are a lot of tapes that we picked because we had to word aloud everything so here we keyed out a majority of the hands and there are the cables that it was using this is just as a as a rough guide okay so then we put in some of the we've mapped the start and the end point of where the cables actually needed to be notices in flash as much as we could have animated the cables and flash the animators from what they tell me now flash is excellent for creating mattes because we're just working in simple black and white and after we build this matte file of where the cables are going to have to live we're able to export as a PNG sequence into shake for the anak for animating basically fill in the matted area with black so here we're just doing a really kind of a rough mapping of where the cables are supposed to live regardless of what else is in the frame does everyone enjoying this because I could just do a quake demo okay just making sure I want to keep you engaged so we're just mapping start and end point for what the cables should be see what else you did here and then brought in the rough this is a lid animation but I'll show you actually doing the lighting brought in the animation the animation was really done on top of DV plates we just took the DV files caption them send them over there's a company that's part of our little network of companies called unplugged in Canada where they did all the animation and the thing that I couldn't grasp is how the people from DC you've been doing animation for years didn't understand they said well we don't understand you usually take our our drawings and we lay them over a picture and that's how we animate like we're going to do the same thing except it's video we don't understand how you're going to do that which I couldn't understand how they couldn't grasp them it's so simple it's very it is very simple you just take a piece of video and you dray trace over it that's traditional thinking they kind of get their heads around this method of working we taught them a thing or two on this one I think so they were just doing some rough rough tracking of where those points are going to start and end I think we all got that I'm going to scrub through the magic here there we go pretty good job too even just coming up with you the way the cables are supposed to move so that's one of them make sure this is the right one yeah okay I will not pretend to know shake that's why I have screen captures today so there already you can see that the the white mat that we were building in shake is just filled in with black they did a little bit of an edge blur the hands are already colored here for the most part okay so there we take away the animation for a second and there's the big blue hands and they just did a very very rough key to get out the maximum amount of blue so that we can just place the animation over it there was still a bunch of blue area that needed to be masked out and actually see that happening here there we go so there's there's a basic key and then we took a portion of the plate and keyed it over just like that everyone with me so far yeah good let's keep this movement just to show you a quick matte area that we've built then we put the two together we picked one track point the track point we picked was on the top left the DVD player because we have to track the the matted out area with the rest of the plate so it actually acts as a single plate a little bit of blue leftover that's going to get covered by the animation in this case there are wires and black you can barely see them show you the math file and how it was all going to move that is what the flash file look when we got it and all the lighting was done in shake by building additional mass and lights there's a track point for the animation cut a little hole where the RCA cable was going to go there that's the mass that was built to cast the shadow on the hand Shh unbelievable okay there we go just put a little bit of blur on the edge to kind of match and we also had to add a green a defocused layer and a grain layer to kind of match the ground glass that was in the 35 millimeter adapter for the DV it looks too antiseptic the animation versus it and when we did a lot of tests up front we kind of overdid it was like film noir Superman so we kind of backed off the lighting a whole bit and backed off the grain the one bad thing I think we did was actually work too fast that people really kind of took the end of taking for granted how fast we were able to work because only wanted to try a thousand and one things so you know it's not often you walk into a room full of are that can you go slower because it's really starting to cause a problem they wanted to try this that and the other all the time but that's typical of non-linear editing in this whole world you know when I cut on film once once and when I got my sound tighter than not which is when I decided to actually use a computer as my main cutting tool you used to sit and think about the cut you were going to make because if you cut it you didn't like it you were then on your hands and knees on the floor looking for the short end the scotch tape back into your reel with not only your editing you do one cut you save it and then you come and do ten more versions usually in the back at your original cut but everyone wants to try it so many different ways to how fast this stuff is I don't know why I did a screen capture of rendering it I have one other that I'll show you in a minute but I'll come back to the project file I'll show you the finished it's pretty convincing a pretty difficult shot but done with some pretty simple technology so that's in this job there were two non-traditional uses of flash most people who use flash will say that animate Superman's not non-traditional but using it as a tool for creating mass and all of our composites we do all the time these days because it's quick and dirty even some of the people in the office one of the titles in it whereas we like to go to After Effects or different packages they're very comfortable these tools so I want them to be comfortable they're faster that way okay let's go back and I have some other stuff to show you here some of the color correction which we did which was pretty intense to give you an idea that's what we were dealing with so there's our stand in blue galley the good news is that in most cases and you can see some of the and this the next webisode that I'll show you has a lot more drastic color correction but the color correction was done using the three way color corrector in sinewave one of the major issues for a shot like this the over-the-shoulder shot is that in this case we had the blue guy in as a stand-in because we had to composite out the guy in the bottom who ends up getting eaten by the letterbox we had a mat his head out and so a lot of times we have the blue guy there just to find a mat line but when you're actually going to pull the key D V is five to one compressed inherently in as 4/1 one color space looks great when you're playing it but when you're actually going to look at it to pull the key there's not enough information there and color data to really pull a clean key so what we do is not add any information to these DV files but we put them in a different color space so out of Final Cut Pro this is a feature if you have third-party hardware especially this intimate well primarily the sinewave card we're able to take DV footage drop it into a sinewave timeline and it plays out as 10 bit uncompressed for 2 to the transcode happens in real time as you play it in a case like this we would take the file before it gets sent over a point to point t1 networks of the LA office for compositing thank you is we basically take it out of fire Matt the profile export and we export a sin wave 10 bit files that way when the composite artists get it there's not any more information there but they can then work in four to two space it's a little bit easy to pull a key many color information we then add to the file at that point is added in four to two in sinewaves case 16-bit why using color space we're always working for broadcast even though this would predominantly end up on the web but we knew that if they liked it which they did it ended up on NBC and then again on TBS so I'm pretty glad in this case that we worked for for broadcast the entire time the sad part is we work digital we stay as clean as possible it was broadcast off of beta SP because that's where that NBC and PBS want which is a drag because it then looks kind of money when you broadcasted we spent all this time and money on this which is typical of most broadcast there's most MTV work that we do ends up on D - does anyone remember D - is it's a deck that has wheels I swear to god we literally wrote it around the office when we brought it in its composite digital so we spent a company can spend a million dollars doing something at the end we Jam all the signals together and throw it on the tape that was sold I felt my dinosaur and broke my newspaper okay so in this case it was really important when we're doing color correction that we over sample it we take DV out of four one one we put it into four two two that's the way that we do all of our work that's acquired on DV that goes out to broadcast DV excels at offline DV excels at acquisition but a does not excel in its native state at on lining and color correction so in Final Cut Pro with a sinewave hardware you can work in four to two to circumvent all deficiencies of the DV codec some people unfortunately think that's a deficiency of Final Cut Pro that's the DV codec inside so I'll bring up the other webisode I'm going to see there's anything very interesting they don't have any questions over swear didn't do it okay okay I'll bring up the other webisode do you want if I play this Amy okay I get bored you talking tech numbers a rather show the stuff it speaks for itself I hope this is the second one that we did and they're meant to be shown in order it's like a true Seinfeld episode you know kind of pulls on jokes that they create that's an animated suitcase on top of the car somebody for some whore you know do you say so make it look like look at this one it completely filled out there's no sleep at all I have a most ridiculous [Music] look at that is really something in terms of a winner believe you can give me could you take a picture okay you don't want uncle was saved by Green Lantern one returning from a young Russell attract oh no isn't it amazing the way that green ray comes out of the crime did you have a think that just take a picture Green Lantern Midori open the door what's the matter the keys leave you on the car don't education let's start with that if I rush back to get the camera you take a second one second sighs 20 20 thanks for the test what are we going to do that relax I can rip the door off mental off your movement I just finished restoring I can go back and tie Oh going back in time how many times do I have to tell you have any people you annoy back in time place in the final third echelons don't lie there's no flying that was our agreement road trip on the ground no funny wait a second wait hold on dear ratings I don't have to get help no superpowers no Super Stretch hello yes well thank you very much I can't wait till they get here so I can explain to them that it was Superman who lost the keys is a talk that we good will say but if they should inquire perhaps I will drop a subtle hand and say it the two of us it was the fellow who wears his underwear outside his clothes who is responsible [Music] it's just that everything is super that's DV car models for mark and I the other day oh come on you're in a completely different category just kind of takes away a little want to try to do where did you come up with that name Superman anyway market yourself Superman where do they come from somebody seen with a car like over your head call you Superman and you cut out a net load it up on your saying there was this money thing or any other man's you were kicking around like unbelievable person like it's just a name I got a job to do it works well end of story or surprise I god what's wrong with you how about remarkable chat now you are a penny well thanks a lot we were stranded and we didn't need to be you need any more help to slimming it up banks have anymore those do you have have another back went your own bag now I don't want they okay I think I have enough to get sent away by rationing properly well thank you Rick Nana would you mind that second window this little well thank you Superman where are we anyway boy over [Music] [Applause] alright number two thanks we actually caught a lot of flack content-wise on this one because the DC Comics people said we made Superman team effeminate and and we undermined his super nest or something because he locked the keys in the car and there was a big you know the political debate he was opposed to be bouncing his knee and whistling in the car and they wouldn't allow any of that kind of stuff this one I want to show you because of color correction is there internet on this computer do you think worth a shot right get a shot the internet spilling in every corner of this facility I hope there is let's see if my something interesting hope it's still up it is whenever we have I'll jump back to the color question in a second but whenever we have a job that's big with brands this big Seinfeld and Superman the parent company and this is definitely a lesson I learned from them is you kiss the butt of the brand it makes total sense this is what it's all about it's subtle product placement in this case so when anyone from the agency or Jerry or from DC want to login let's see if this is some surprises still active cool even down to branding the approval site with the American Express logo making it look like an American Express card so you can see on the bottom here viewers agency viewers Jerry view is DC Comics viewers clients clients to the least of course the agency has pretty much access to everything and then for internal purposes we have all of it we post the making of this is all driven off the next serve running from our New York office I'll hide that for the time being sues any good nuggets on there some of the color correction was absolutely outstanding let's see if we can find some of it and that was all done in Final Cut Pro by guy named Pete McCool Bri and Pete McCrory was two years at a film school got really good at this the end of color correcting Soderbergh full-frontal on Final Cut Pro know if anyone ever read that and did all of our mastering kind of work on Final Cut Pro he's just good he's just really good at what he does and so after much screaming and yelling that he might be wearing sneakers at the shoes on Todd he's really good at doing your work they gave him a shot at doing this coloring which would normally been done in a film transfer Bay like a DaVinci or a Pogo the other interesting I don't mean to talk too politically about this but that's also part of the challenge is that people didn't really want to take a lot of gear that we had seriously until we put in a film transfer Bay which we use for film mastering work but as soon as we put in a polo Bay with the data cine these two big machines and we tore people around oh you have one of these in one of those yeah but I'm telling you this it all sudden added all kinds of validity to what we were doing on the other side you know you have to have a good cinema display or Herman Miller chair and a nice place for your clients to sit and you're all set you're in business it's all about the chair really is though in many cases alright so there's the original DV file it's not even bad looking to begin with for DV is shot by professionals well then we did a nice we did a nice color package on place some of it so you can see another stand-in poor PA the guy in blue I think was was on a coffee break this was Death Valley you know I know why they call it Death Valley now being from New York so a really nice before and after color correct that was done anyone here in Final Cut know how to use the limit effect in the three way color corrector all right and a few a few of you other than I would like to show you one thing that we did it's pretty ominous coming from back there the truck going by is a perfect example of not leaving well enough alone the truck was purple I think and they said oh well could she can could you make it green and I'll show you how we did no I'm not really not joking around I'm really not joking around she just had to touch every set the original truck was purple I think was absolutely a beautiful shot they wanted a green truck and we did it kind of quick and dirty but I'll show you how we did this they don't care as here we did this alright cool thank you alright so I'll shut this off let's go down to our base layer here I'm just going to make a little easier in myself by adding an edit point and one of g5 the more processes you have obviously the faster they are the more real time they're going to get the cool thing is that in that sinewave system I was talking about this is completely real-time not a DV resolution at uncompressed resolution 10 bit uncompressed no rendering whatsoever in DV we can do this we need to do a final render to get it to full quality and DV of course is not best suited for doing this kind of work you'll see why in one second we'll be actually in black and white will be painfully obvious we're using the color correction of course anything in bold is real-time the color corrector 3-way going to just tear this off so we can look at it and hidden now in the latest version of course is the limit effect all down here we're going to grab the eyedropper we're going to grab some purple I'll just put this back where it belongs and now I can show you what I mean by being a deficient codec when it comes to compositing they're in black and white is trying to show us what our selected area is for affecting it with color it's pretty blocky if you look at it because 4 1 1 is basically in layman's terms that's saying that for every sample of contrast day you have because the eye is not so good at so the eye is good at seeing major differences in contrast there's 1/4 as much color information whereas in 4 to 2 obviously it's a lot better it's a Vista to to one relationship and in film with for 4/4 all all attributes of color and contracts are basically equal which is why it's such a great way to work in this case I'm going to open up the selected range for purple sees gets a little smoother open up the bottom a little bit I'm just shooting in the dark here no pun intended to to get as much of that truck in in one shot as possible obviously if I open to selects the area really big it's going to start to not so much in the case of a purple but it starts to pick up sky in other parts that we don't want to pick up if this was shot in digital and brought in and it's full full range I'd probably be getting a lot more of this information on the first try we're just looking at it on like on a sample basis here and it's not that much I can pull out we're going to come out of this key mode show you a couple things we can do now just the truck is selected there I just kind of small but I pulled it down so you can see it in black and white and of course you can go in Reverse a selected area so in case of this shot now everything is black and white except for the truck these are things you can this is no rendering involved which is pretty it's pretty bad since no matter what system you're on but in this case they just went and they pulled the mids towards the green area and if I wanted to I can sit and finesse this all day long until I catch the rest of the truck there we go hey actually did come back out of that key mode and there's your there's a green truck not bad no tracking involved most people would run immediately to a flame to do this we're trying to tell people with the right hardware and Final Cut Pro and a little bit tiny bit of patience the proper operator we first started doing final cut work at this level you can see actually I think a little green in my sky I would just do a quick math to get that out of there but the Matt's also real time on a sinewave card still no rendering at full quality we first started doing this there were a lot of people who picked up a copy of final except probably all I can do final cut work we'd put in front of the clients and they very often would turn around and say the client oh I can't do what you want me to do because a final touch never there never operator error always the software's fault because it was new and that was kind of the Arab data that it couldn't do with these things we're lucky enough to be able to cultivate talent that's never going to turn around and say the client oh I can't do what you're asked me to do because the software it becomes a talent and talent issue in a training issue so there's a purple truck turn green not bad okay let's see what else can I show you from here without all my media on hand oh yes the other thing I thought was was completely neat was the camera it just built Photoshop and shake pretty a pretty effective I think very very simple even the blur area and the part of the focal area and these the coloring is even a little bit of a halo here and we did shoot with a grad filter one thing we did learn about color correction is that it's not completely a computer side thing a lot of times you actually have to shoot for your own color correction which is something that these new consolidated media professionals are very good at a lot of our colorist now actually go out and shoot because they're the people receiving all the footage and grading it to look like something else we're in a case like this they know how they need it to look when they get it into the bay so they might as well be on set helping the DP or even shooting for themselves in certain cases this was supposed to be a low-budget project then Seinfeld got involved of course in DC comics got involved and the agency got involved and then truck started pulling up no joke and then big crews and people with walkie-talkies and it turned into a full-blown a full-blown almost like feature type set closing off the streets and the funny thing to me was having started the company 98 and fighting an uphill battle of doing DV and all these things there I am sitting on the set and everyone's running around they're 2xl ones on these on these little dollies where's a couple years ago not even even a year ago is that you can't do it it's garbage it's amateur time and there was everyone hustling and bustling and checking the gate which was blew my mind I'm like there is no gate it's video just a little dust off and check it on your monitor and you're ready to go but they were treating it like this regular production which I thought was pretty phenomenal and I'll see if there's anything else here I can pull up for you let's see here let's see if the video still lives this is pretty far into it I want to show you with shading tests here we go here is the raw this is how we were delivered files not bad basic motions in and he didn't pretty easily then we did the mid shading which is what we ended up going with and I'll showed the film noir version all right so that's mid and here's the full lighting package that was projected there's a little too harsh they said one last piece that I didn't show before but let that cache in the background was one there is one more thing I'd like to show you and this is something that I got I was blown away by what our artist did was it was it is the details I don't know if anyone caught this and you really kind of have to watch almost a frame at a time to see this but this is the part of it that I definitely think compositing is that the own art lighting is its own art if you look at the I'm going frame by frame you'll see the light kind of go across Superman's face can anyone see can you see that there and then the perfect timing that perfect beat before the light actually goes over Seinfeld's face it's more in the reverse shot it's really it is really subtle and it's all over this piece but this was shot in a diner at night while it was raining and it looks like datanodes no joke and it looks like daytime and that's the one I was looking for it plays like daytime so you can see to like crawl across his face and then wait the proper breath and then hit it Seinfeld in the face I just think it was absolutely awesome I was just buying time was the thing loaded here just takes and we'll be right back after these messages with Jerry Seinfeld and Superman they say that opposites attract while our next two guests may kiss me the next successful Odd Couple get people talking although Superman usually works alone teaming up with Jerry Seinfeld for projecting American Express first of all we're going to thank them both coming back we were scheduled to do this last week we had a little scare someone who cleaned out kryptonite on the plaza luckily it just turned out to have been a piece of moldy y'all anyway we they made the cheese joke I just couldn't believe it subtle things though to make it convincing the shadow or the reflection in a table when he got actually caught by the by the cops not to jump around on you beach ball talk amongst yourselves we'll give you a topic okay I don't know if anyone caught it the first time that's right in front of our office there we go right in the reflection of the window and if anyone caught that getting the right curvature getting the right reflection the right density all those little things they insisted on which we did too for for realism even though he's animated what was your emphasis on well what would a good project in the first place well a little project with mr. Esmond myself that appeared on that the internet on Jerry American Express cob is one running on there now and there's another one coming up way Steven it's a little different for you Jerry told me that it's got good instincts what I like you're really up London and it's a fairly lengthy interview that got cut down there couple of the people that I wish I had him a review site that did voiceovers it was fun to say no to Alec Baldwin no thank you we ended up going with and then there was a couple of the people who tried Theo's the person we went with was someone who had Jerry had chemistry with but if he didn't tell already Superman the voice is played by the guy Kutty from Seinfeld and the funny thing is a bunch of they have chemistry they actually do not get along it was fun to sit there with him and watch Jerry make fun of this guy party to his face and he didn't get it which was really kind of funny the whole whole mechanics of the political side of the business was really interesting to see on this job the good thing was after all was said and done because we did turn results it raised a lot of eyebrows at the at this place cold will be which was the agency they were brave enough to let us try this and of course now that it's a success everyone loves Final Cut Pro and shake in the office because of what I was able to do for them but it was just about having them take a chance it's kind of a dangerous waters to be in because we've almost shot ourselves in the foot several times doing this but as long as you're the right talent and you're trained properly on this I don't I really don't think there's anything the idea can't do my good on time is it no good at fifty more minutes let's do that usually I'm like showing off functions of Final Cut Pro and not really anything that we did per se so I can talk for ages and ages but this is project specific so I'm out of steam thank you very much thank you for coming thank you