switching from Vegas 7 to SE

[rbartlett]

I found this page was useful to firm up information I had gleaned from previous but fragmented sources. The page also provides some suitable pre-SpeedEDIT worfklow conjouring tools by dropping the product names in throughout:

http://digitalcontentproducer.com/di/depth/video_desktop_di/

For clarification, many non->8bit non-RGB non-uncompressed formats are forms of DI. Not just MPEG-2 I-frame, wavelet, MJPEG, SonyYUV, SpeedHQ, etc.


A google of "filmout" provides yet more. Thankfully Paul has years of good experience of digital to filmout. The aim is to get the most suitable and elegant workflow that will allow him to finish well inside 2007!

Quality wise I wonder how Vegas' 8bit-R'G'B' and SE's YUV pipelines have a bearing on the overall system capabilities. I realise that Paul isn't looking for a pure science solution. Also that if you cannot see what has been lost, well, it isn't really lost then is it? This is the whole principle of this modern digital world at the point of delivery.

Paul's next step ought to be to "impedance match" what he presents to the filmout center with what suits them best and that possibly allows them to assume certain grading attributes without him needing to sit in for the entire session. That could be achieved with some pantone references for Sandra's paint and a color swatch provided as a sort of painters-color-bars clip. Excluding the differences between how paint material and light is conveyed and how the ambient light interacts the mediums. I don't have a first hand working knowledge of such things but I'd have thought that this could be the order for the day.

Oh, for those following in Paul and Sandra's path - having a good better-than-6bit-DAC flat panel monitor is always a bonus.

 

[paulfierlinger]

I found this page was useful to firm up

Thankfully Paul has years of good experience of digital to filmout.

Unfortunately non whatsoever. I have many years of film experience and about 15 years of CG experience but not a day of the combination of the two until this project.

The aim is to get the most suitable and elegant workflow that will allow him to finish well inside 2007!

Woa, you sound like my producers. It's 2008. We started production last July with 4 minutes of a pilot as a jump start.

I realize that Paul isn't looking for a pure science solution. Also that if you cannot see what has been lost, well, it isn't really lost then is it? This is the whole principle of this modern digital world at the point of delivery.

So true. There is a lot of science involved with digital filmmaking and so is there with film filmmaking, book printing, meal preparation and vacuum cleaning. I am curious about science and biology but long ago I gave up the quest to know it all in depth. Yet I make films, read, raise dogs, keep a clean house and eat without dying of poison and now I'm going to draw a film on a computer that's going to end up on film.

Oh, for those following in Paul and Sandra's path - having a good better-than-6bit-DAC flat panel monitor is always a bonus.

It's nice to have large, flat monitors but my first priority of importance goes to the tablet. The bigger the better applies here. The next is the positioning of the screen. My drawing screen is tilted by having it partially sunk into the table's top and it's bottom rim flush with the tablet's top rim.

There was a day when this was not possible to do because the activity of the tablet interefered with the monitor resulting in pencil stutter and making it impossible for me to draw directly into a computer. Once Wacom fixed that, was the day I became liberated from paper.

 

[radams]

Welcome to your liberated Freedom Paul & Sandra

We are all happy that day has come...and you can let your imagination and pure artistry flow to create paperless...and in a shorter time with more creative options & additional freedoms

I'm looking forward to seeing it in a theater !!! 08 sometime

Happy New Year Paul & Sandra, May it bring you more joy and adventures !!!

Your Friend,

 

[paulfierlinger]

Thanks, Ray.

 

[rbartlett]

Unfortunately non whatsoever. I have many years of film experience and about 15 years of CG experience but not a day of the combination of the two until this project.

My mistake. I'd presumed too much having seen your work on the TV/web, your examples during the Aura, now Mirage years etc. Yes, it does seem like a converged world. Indeed, your producers might do everyone a favor if this film was released to movie theatres but under the digital projection approach. No film. Not that I don't dislike grain, scratches and gate flicker.

Once you get SE, or access to a 15day demo, whichever comes first. Then I'll look forward to reading about what you find and adding my two-penneth to the attributes of Mirage, Vegas and SpeedEDIT for finalising your rapid editing/story-telling productivity.

Before it arrives Paul. Could you go over where Mirage is lacking for cuts/cross-fade work please? If it is the lack of fluidity, I wonder if that can be solved as easily as 1080p can be made fluid in SE. ie - new computer with the latest CPU and high-speed/low-latency memory bandwidth. Your disc storage appears to be plentiful. Or is the audio synchronization a significant factor?

Best wishes for 2007 and for telling this story in 2008.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Indeed, your producers might do everyone a favor if this film was released to movie theatres but under the digital projection approach. No film.

This is up to the distributors, not producers. Who gets to be the distributor depends on the choice of the producers. The way this works is that when an independent film is going into production, the producers usually want to secure a distributor first because it makes raising money and securing stars easier and likelier. The flip side is that the distributors can charge a lot for their part in taking a huge risk with an unknown producer.

Then there's a second choice, which is not to bother with a distributor and raise the money just on the strength of the property (in my case a well known book) and the track record of the filmmaker. The money came together within a few weeks and now my producers have the luxury of putting out our film for bids among the biggest distributors. An interesting note here; there were a couple of stars who turned us down because we didn't have a secured distributor upfront.

Before it arrives Paul. Could you go over where Mirage is lacking for cuts/cross-fade work please?

I don't quite understand this question. All I create in Mirage is the scene. If there is a camera move involved, I create it there. If there are dissolves involved between individual layers, I create them in Mirage. But if I need to make dissolves between scenes, I create these in the NLE. You might be referring to the instance where I had mentioned that some scenes with large camera moves could slow down in Vegas and this seems to be, as I have learned on this forum, due to the properties of the QT codec and that Vegas has a slow time reading the deltas.

Or is the audio synchronization a significant factor?

I have no problems whatsoever with audio, whether in Vegas or Mirage and my film is about 60 or maybe higher percentage filled with lip-synch. What I read in Mirage is what I get in Vegas. I expect the same results in SE of course.

Best wishes for 2007 and for telling this story in 2008.

The slated release date is for early 2008 but I think it will be more like late 2008, and thanks for your wishes. Up until now the work has been truly enjoyable with no hitches. I am progressing a few weeks behind schedule because every scene of the film is done in full animation (animating everything in two's, and just about every scene has at least one dog in it and 80% have humans speaking in lip-synch.) I am determined not to reuse a single background or animation sequence and to keep cycled image sequences down to almost nil. Another factor causing a bit of a slowdown are technical issues such as switching to a brand new, untested (for me) NLE. I also teach a couple of animation courses a week and school related work can cause a hitch. And lastly, since I do not work with a storyboard and have only a very cursory script (both by choice) I often enough find myself discarding entire scenes whenever I come up, belatedly with a much better idea of how to progress with the story. This is cottage industry, free of committees...

 

[mbdavison]

Re:Computer-To-Film

Hello:
Was reading your posts with interest. I started out years ago shooting on film (8mm & 16mm) and then progressed to pro video formats. But began to do animation when the Amiga toaster was available.
Glad you decided to keep your work at the 1080 size, as that is just plain closer to "film" resolution. (Defining film resolution is problematic and I won't go into that, other than it is usually measured in the equivalent of thousands of pixels)
Now I am trying to start up an independant "film" shot on HDV (1080i x 1920) and posted in SE (When my order arrives ;-) ) one crucial difference in the resolution of video vs. film is TIME resolution. It sounds like you are producing your animation at 60 fields a second? Is there any reason you can't produce it at 24 per sec.? I would imagine that it would save on your file sizes & maybe speed up playback? Also here is an EXCELLENT site for information on what is needed in video files for transfere to 35 or 16 film.
http://www.dvfilm.com/ Marcus used to shoot on film "back in the day" and produced his own independant 35 and 16 features, but has developed his own company for doing video to film transferes. (He says they can transfer at 60 fields, so 24 p isnt Demanded, I would just think it might help in your situation. ) ALSO- Does the VT SE do 24p at hdv? Anyone? Anyone?

 

[paulfierlinger]

It sounds like you are producing your animation at 60 fields a second? Is there any reason you can't produce it at 24 per sec.?

Gosh, can you imagine animating in two's and still having to draw 30 pictures?! Where did you get the idea that this is what I'm up to?? No, it's been always :hat: 24 fps for me.

 

[mbdavison]

Re:16x9 vs file size

That sounds OK too, but don't you think that I should have all my clips stored uniformly as BGR.24 1080p ones and resize each in SE with SpeedHQ to a smaller 16:9 size for efficient editing rather than have a mismatch of QT-Animation and BGR.24 clips? .

Just an additional note, 16x9 size is not a file or image size, its just the ratio of width to height. In other words, whether an image is 16 pixels wide, all the way up to 1,920 pixels wide, 16x 9 is the format ratio of the image. Even Fisher price Pixel vision has been transfered to 35mm film, (but it was in 4x3 format, if I remember correctly, if it was in academy widescreen then they probably cropped it to fit.)
16x 9 is usually the preffered width to height ratio for projection on 35mm movie screens- its closer to academy widescreen.
mbd

 

[paulfierlinger]

Well, I thought I was saying the same by saying:

1080p ones and resize each in SE with SpeedHQ to a smaller 16:9 size for efficient editing

by which I was saying resize 1080p to any smaller size while keeping it in a 16:9 ratio. If I had said just a smaller size someone might think I'm asking for a completely different, smaller ratio.