There is a downside to this, namely that 50p footage is not accepted by most NLEs yet and that for most purposes the deliverables will have to be down converted at some stage. This would also have the nice side effect of giving the footage more of the coveted “film look”. So the problem I was faced with was this: how do you preserve the fantastic image quality of the TM700s 50p mode when converting the footage to 25p?

It is of course possible to simply drop every other frame: Adobe Premiere and After Effects can import the raw MTS files straight from the camera and one can edit them in and render them out from a 25fps timeline – but the results were predictably choppy. Using After Effects’ built in Frame Blending option (which is based on The Foundry’s Kronos engine) and the Advanced Frame Rate Conversion feature in Telestream Episode respectively yielded better results, but I was still not satisfied.

At this stage I was getting rather worried that the stunning visuals of 50p mode could not be preserved for deliverables, but after a bit of research I came across a plugin called Twixtor by RE:Vision Effects, which managed to down convert the footage while retaining the smoothness of 50p mode. It is available for a variety of host applications, I chose the CS5 version to take advantage of the performance and workflow improvements Adobe has been making to its software lately.

The workflow in After Effects is quite simple: drop the footage into a composition set to 25fps, apply the plugin, set the input frame rate in the plugin settings to 50fps and render. For best results I would set “Frame Interpolation” to “Motion Weighted”, but “Blend” also does a good job and takes less time. The “Motion Blur Compensation” works well (set to e.g. 0.5), but is pretty limited and takes awfully long to render. This effect should be applied in a separate pass to the final edit using a more advanced solution such as Reel Smart Motion Blur.

So it was nice to finally have found a solution, but another problem became apparent: this works well on a single clip, but what if one wanted to come home after a day of shooting and batch convert, say, a 100 clips overnight, so that one can start editing straight away the next morning? Neither Premiere nor After Effects have really been designed with batch functionality in mind, so there is no out of the box solution available, but fortunately there is an After Effects script, that, with a bit of fiddling, will do just that. It is called rd: Render Layers.

The workflow is a bit convoluted and it goes like this:

1.) import all your 50p clips into After Effects
2.) drag one of the clips to the “Create a new Composition” icon in the project panel
3.) apply Twixtor to the newly created composition and set “Input: Frame Rate” to 50fps etc. (as explained above)
4.) copy the effect by clicking the “Twixtor” label in the “Effect Controls” panel and hitting “cmd/ctrl c”
5.) select all of the clips and choose “New Composition from Selection” from the “File” menu
6.) in the settings tab that pops up check only “Single Composition” and “Sequence Layers”
7.) change the frame rate to 25 fps in the settings for the new composition
8.) double-click the new composition and hit “cmd/ctrl a” to select all its layers
9.) hit “cmd/ctrl v” to paste the effect
10.) select all the layers of the composition and make sure the composition panel is active
11.) call the script rd_RenderLayers.jsx from the menu
12.) in the panel that pops up choose “Layer In/Out” in the “Layer Range to Render” menu
13.) choose a render template and an output folder
14.) finally, to preserve the original file names leave only “[layerName]” in the “Output Name Template” field

15.) Get some sleep or watch a film.

Intercutting the sound bites from the interview with the footage of the performance for the promo was also an interesting challenge, since I had to coordinate the overall rhythm of the whole video, determined by the interplay of performance and interview footage, with the specific rhythm of each of the songs.

As far as grading was concerned, we wanted to keep things fairly natural. The original footage was rather saturated and had a red tint to it – most apparent in the violinists dress – so the goal was to dial down the saturation while preserving the skin tones.

I enjoyed working on this project a lot, not least because both the members of the trio as well as their music were so inspiring.

You can watch the video here and more of Paolo’s work here.

So the hard drives have been wiped, AVID 4.04 is installed and I’ll be spending Christmas at my desk or in a coffee shop with my shiny new Macbook Pro editing NARKE. Oh, and I’ll also produce a little “making of”, so I’ll have my hands full for the next couple of weeks.

Now the only pending compatibility issue is with AVID Media Composer 4, but that’s not hugely important, since I can work with version 3.5 just as well for the time being.

To steer clear of this pitfall, I’ve spent the past 10 days or so setting up my system and investigating workflows, which will hopefully allow me to concentrate more on editing and grading in the future.

On to the geeky stuff – below a list of issues solved and still unsolved:

- Upgraded to Snow Leopard and the new version of Final Cut Studio, which went largely without problems, but there still are compatibility issues with AVID Media Composer and Telestream Episode (see below).

- Set up a Blu-ray burner to work on OS X with Toast, which was a bit tricky, since compatible blank discs were hard to come by for some reason, and Blu-ray still isn’t supported by Apple. But it worked and we have submitted a Blu-ray version of MR LEWIS to screen at the FALSTAFF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

- Set up the MXO2 Mini to turn my new HDMI enabled Eizo Foris FX2431 into something more or less equivalent to a traditional broadcast monitor in order to gain more certainty, that the color graded image on the monitor will match the actual output across different projection and distribution devices.

- Unsuccessfully tried to upgrade to AVID Media Composer 4.0 in order to take advantage of the new features, among them the ability to mix media with different frame rates in the same timeline. This didn’t work, as the software is not yet compatible with Snow Leopard and refuses to launch, which is rather odd since version 3.5 seems to work just fine.

- Installed an additional 1 Terabyte HD, because I was running out of space.

- Converted both projects shot on the RED camera (JUMP! and MR LEWIS) to the new ProRes 4444 codec in order to achieve a higher image quality.

- Ran into compatibility issues with Telestream Episode and found a workaround using Compressor to prepare the footage before the final encoding process, which will have to do for the time being.

- Still in the works: trying to devise a workflow allowing me to transcode RED footage to AVID DNxHD from within OS X, using VMware Fusion and MetaFuze. I’ve got everything to run, but the encoding speed is currently so slow, that it would take a week to get all the rushes for e.g. MR LEWIS ready for offline editing. Not quite sure what the problem is, but I hope to solve it by using only internal hard disks instead of Firewire.

These technical issues took up most of my time recently and once the outstanding problems are resolved, I hope to be able to concentrate fully on editing and grading, as well as do a bit of blogging about film and related matters. But first I might take a day off, because my head is about to explode.

This is all very exciting, considering the fact that they usually show stuff like The Dark Knight, Pixar’s Up in 3d or James Cameron produced underwater docs there. It’s also a bit daunting for me, since I have no idea what technical demands a screening at the IMAX will entail, but I’m sure the people running it do and I’m always up for a little challenge.

And this is just in: MR LEWIS has been selected for the FALSTAFF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, which will take place the 14th-20th of November in Stratford-upon-Avon. Their website is still under construction, so information is a bit sparse, but they have a pdf file up listing the official selections and the focus of the festival seems to be on short films.

Meanwhile, in lieu of a proper post, I leave you with a list of 1000+ FILMS, combining the titles in my DVD collection and those still on my most wanted list – it’s a rather eclectic mix, which is due to me pretty much fitting DAVID BORDWELL‘s definition of a CINEPHILE. I hope some readers might find this useful, the links all go to the respective IMDb entries for further information.

That’s all for now, I’m off to the screening of our latest short film MR LEWIS at the IMAX.

And while this is great, there is also a bit of a downside to the upgrade for some, courtesy of Matrox: if you have purchased a MXO2 Mini to be able to use your HDMI capable monitor as something equivalent to an analogue broadcast monitor, you are out of luck for the time being, because Matrox doesn’t have updated drivers for Snow Leopard yet. I guess this probably won’t affect all that many people, but those who do use this solution, should wait with the upgrade until Matrox has made new drivers available. Of course, I only became aware of this little caveat after I had upgraded, lol, but such is life.

After I had tinkered for quite a while with various settings, I had almost resigned myself to the perceived fact that the program was great for H264 encoding and such, but that I would have to look elsewhere if I wanted to create high quality M2V files used for DVD streams.

But I came across a solution quite by chance, while encoding a file that I had previously resized to PAL DVD dimensions: working from a 10bit 4:2:2 master (as I do with the RED footage shot for JUMP! and MR LEWIS, but this should work for all HD source material) you can achieve great results if you resize the files to the final DVD resolution before you take them into Episode for the final M2V compression.

So my workflow went like this: I exported the uncompressed file from the Final Cut timeline to Compressor and applied a setting that would only resize the footage to the needed DVD resolution, while all other parameters were set to pass-through. Then I took the resulting file into Episode and encoded it the M2V format. I will still have to test some variations to this workflow, but for the time being this works great and the results are pretty amazing.