The Shape of Days

Have you seen those pictures of the Playboy playmate of the year who’s got the word “respect” tattooed right above her bare-waxed petunia?

Yeah. The irony is not lost on any of us.

In fact, I’m pretty astonished that the tattoo artist was able to finish the job without falling off his little rolly stool and dropping into a catatonic fetal curl at the sheer absurdity of it all.

This one officially takes the lead in the race for the most ridiculous tattoo in the world. The previous front-runner, now relegated to a distant second place, is the girl I saw on the train not long ago who had her own name tramp-stamped right above her ass-crack. The only thing I could figure is that she put it there as a sort of ejaculatory cue card for the endless army of Adderall-tripping frat boys who take turns gaping her pucker. Sort of an orgasmic teleprompter, if you will.

I fucking hate everyone on this worthless, dried-up fewmet we call the Earth.

Everybody and his sister is emailing me about this interview with James Cameron in which the director says he’d rather shoot 2K at 48 frames per second than 4K at 24 frames per second.

This is crazy talk.

Look, I’m no expert, okay? But I’ve been shooting quite a bit lately. I’ve done my share of experimenting with funny frame rates. Most recently, yesterday I did some side-by-side comparisons of a 3D sequence rendered out at 23.976 with pulldown added to the same sequence rendered at 59.94i. See, I was asked to create a DVD downrez of one of my shows for playback on an old-fashioned interlaced projector, and I wanted to be sure I was giving the client the best possible product. So I rendered out a test sequence with pulldown and one at 59.94i to compare the results for myself.

Pardon me while I digress into a little bit of background here.

Movies are older than television. Compared to all the electronic gee-whizzery of television, movies are pure simplicity. You’ve got yourself some kind of lens, a strip of film and a metal half-circle that sits between them. The half-circle — the shutter — spins. Whenever the shutter lets light in, a frame of film gets exposed. Whenever the shutter is blocking the light from the lens, the camera pulls the film down so the next frame can be exposed. If you spin the shutter at 48 revolutions per second and pull the film down 24 times per second, you get a movie.

But for a lot of complicated reasons that I won’t go into here mostly because you can damn well google them yourself if you’re so inclined, television works differently. Specifically, television doesn’t — or rather, didn’t, back in the old days when it was first invented — draw a whole frame all at once. Instead it breaks the frame up into lines, and draws the frame from the top of the screen to the bottom, a line at a time.

Now, this was mostly okay, because old-school televisions worked by exciting a phosphor with an electron beam, and the phosphor continued to glow for a bit after the beam had moved on. But still, by the time the beam got to the bottom of the screen and started its trip back up, the top of the screen would have begun to grow dim.

So televisions that worked that way flickered noticeably. It was annoying.

Movie projectors had the same problem, at first. A movie projector is basically a camera in reverse; instead of letting light in to expose the film, it pushes light out through the film to project an image on a screen. Projectors have a shutter in them too; its job is to block the light coming through while the film is advanced one frame, just like in a camera.

But movie projectors that used a one-twenty-fourth shutter produced a noticeable and objectionable flicker. The light from the projector was being interrupted twenty-four times a second, so it worked like a very fast strobe.

The solution was simplicity itself: Just run the shutter twice (or even three times) as fast. The light from the projector still flickers, but it flickers forty-eight or seventy-two times a second, which your eye can’t really pick up.

Old-fashioned television worked on the same principle. The screen was constantly going from light to dark and back to light again, but by illuminating the even lines now and the odd lines now and then the even lines again, the flicker was reduced to the point where you could hardly notice it.

Of course, the catch is that every frame has to be divided up into fields — sets of odd or even lines — and those fields have to be drawn separately. And not just separately, but one sixtieth of a second apart. Well, almost. Technically the fields are drawn one hundred five-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-fourths of a second apart. Which is precisely why everybody rounds up.

Anyway, back to the point: Television cameras record in essentially the same way televisions display. That is to say, they record first the even-numbered lines of the frame, then a sixtieth of a second later they record the odd-numbered lines. If you look at both sets of lines together, you’ll notice that they’re slightly out of sync. That’s because they were recorded at different times. But that’s okay, because they’re played at slightly different times, too.

Television, in other words, gives you half the vertical resolution twice as fast.

Movies work nothing like this.

And yet they show movies on television all the time. How can this be? Sorcery, I say.

Well, sort of. When movies are shown on television, each frame is converted to a pair of fields, and those fields are recombined in such a way that they turn into 29.97 field-pairs (sort of like frames, but slightly different) per second. This process — of converting 24-frames-per-second material into 29.97-frames-per-second material — is called adding pulldown.

But the sequence I was testing with yesterday didn’t originate in a camera. If it had, I would have had only one option: adding pulldown. Because I shoot everything at 24 frames per second, using a one-forty-eighth shutter, just like in a movie camera. But because I was working with synthetic footage, I could tell my computer either to render out 24 frames per second, or 59.94 fields per second. So I did. I had it generate one of each, then burned them both to DVD and watched them on the only old-fashioned television I could find in the office.

The result? The 59.94 version looked like shit.

Okay, that’s kind of an oversimplification. The truth is, it looked perfect. It looked exactly like it would have looked if I’d shot the scene in real life, using a 59.94-fields-per-second video camera.

But it didn’t look good.

See, material played back at 59.94 frames per second — which is what we’ll call this, since you’re basically getting 59.94 complete but half-resolution images per second — has an entirely different motion quality than material played back at 24 frames per second. And the miracle is, this remains true even if you insert pulldown and play back at 59.94. The fact that the material was recorded at 24 means your eye is interpreting what you see as 24 frames per second, even though those frames are being delivered in a slightly funny way. That’s just how the brain works.

Contrary to what Jim-call-me-James Cameron has to say, a movie shot at 48 frames per second doesn’t look clearer or sharper than a movie shot at 24 frames per second. It looks cheap, because we’re all used to seeing motion pictures played back at 24 and things like game shows and news broadcasts played back at 59.94. A self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe. We’re used to seeing that, so that’s what we expect, and when we see something that conforms more closely to our expectations than it does to the truth, we can’t shake the feeling that something’s not right.

Maybe in a different world, James Cameron would be right. Maybe in a different world, a world where cheap TV shows are shot on film and only the biggest-budget motion pictures are shot on video at a higher frame rate, the situation would be reversed and everybody would be lusting after that 60 Hz look. But that’s not the world we live in. In this world, 24 frames per second looks cinematic because that’s what we all grew up watching in the cinema. And trying to change that now would be a huge uphill battle for no actual payoff, since in the end, they’re all just pictures flickering in the dark.

For a long time I’ve clung to the belief that the best writing in journalism is found on the sports pages. This story from ESPN does nothing to convince me otherwise.

There’s an expression: “to throw good money after bad.” It means to continue to invest — either financially or in a less tangible sense — in something that was an unwise idea in the first place.

Every so often, about once a year on average lately, I’ve had to come face-to-face with the concept of throwing good money after bad, on a personal level. It happened to me a few days ago.

I accepted about myself, when I was in my early 20s, that there are certain people in this world that I’ll just never be friends with. Oh, we can be acquaintances. But actual friends, with trust and honesty and stuff? No. There are certain people with whom I just can’t ever have that, no matter what qualities they might possess that would tempt me into trying.

Okay, that’s a little bit of an understatement. The truth is, the overwhelming majority of people I can never be friends with. People I can actually enter into, achieve and sustain a true friendship with are exceedingly rare. One in a thousand, maybe? Less? If you add up all the people I’ve ever known in my life and divide by the number of people I’m actually friends with now — two — that makes the average pretty damn small.

But here’s the thing: I can’t really tell who I can and who I can’t be friends with just by looking. Sometimes I’ll get an inkling, maybe, but that inkling is almost always wrong.

So I’m left with two choices. Either I can give up on having friends period, end of paragraph. Or I can keep trying, failing most of the time, and hoping to get lucky.

The rational part of me says — screams — to give up. Just stop trying. Ironically, it’s probably all the damn trying that turns most of my friendships into disasters anyway. So screw it. Just give up on the idea of making new friends, and learn to live life as it is, not as I wish it could be.

But for many of the same reasons that I can’t be friends with just anybody, I also can’t seem to let go of wanting to have friends. It’s a damnation fit for one of the Greek gods. One of the vengeful ones, one of the ones with absolutely no sense of proportion. Who was it who fucked with Cassandra? Wasn’t it Apollo? Apollo had the hots for her, so he gave her the power to see the future. But when she cold-shouldered him, he cursed her never to be believed. That’s the kind of sick, twisted idea of justice we’re talking about here. Oh, you want desperately to have friends, and to give of yourself totally and without reservation. But because you annoyed me briefly, I’m going to curse you so that none of your attempts at friendship will ever succeed. That’s the Olympian way, baby.

So anyway, this is all back-story. Me want friends, but me no make friends good. Me screw up, me end up disliked. Sob sob. Whatever.

The point of my little act of authorial self-indulgence tonight is this: If I can’t have friends, and I can’t just give up on friendship, then can’t I at least — please — learn better to recognize the point at which I should stop throwing good money after bad?

It happens to me every time, man. Things go very well for a while. But then they turn sour, and then they suck. And eventually I reach a point where I just have to say “This isn’t going to work, give up on this, try to forget this and move on.” But I always seem to do it about a month after I should have done it in the first place.

It’s not like I pick bad people to try to be friends with. I’m really kind of a snob when it comes to this sort of thing; I think I pick great people to try to be friends with. I just can’t, for reasons that are totally beyond my control but that I take complete responsibility for, be friends. Period. It’s my fault, you know? And I try and I try, but eventually there comes a point beyond which trying just makes it worse, and it’s time to stop. All efforts have failed, all alternatives have been exhausted, pull the plug, throw in the towel, just fucking give up already.

And then I realize I should have done it weeks ago. Then I realize that the point-of-no-return is way, way off in the rear-view, and I’ve been speeding along ever since I passed it with the windows down and the radio on, singing like an idiot at the top of my lungs like I’m actually going somewhere.

But I’m not. I’m just wasting gas. And the longer I drive, the farther I’ll be from home, and the longer, and lonelier, my trip back will be.

So fine. I can’t have friends. And I can’t stop wanting to have friends. Why can’t I at least get better — even just a little better — at realizing when it’s time to give up?

I’ve been trying really hard lately not to take my stress home with me. And for the most part, I’ve been succeeding. Spectacularly, really. I’ve been relaxed without being indifferent, focused without being obsessive, committed without being manic. All the things a well-adjusted human being is supposed to be. I’ve been proud.

But this morning, man … wow. This morning — just a few minutes ago — I woke up from the worst dream I’ve had in a long time. It wasn’t a nightmare; I wasn’t running through molasses and my teeth weren’t falling out. It was a dream about work, and it was just nuts, man. People always talk about waking up screaming, and I think it’s hyperbole. I didn’t actually wake up screaming. But I woke up with adrenaline surging through my veins and a shout in the back of my mouth, all formed and ready to fly.

As dreams go, it was pretty archetypal. It was about control, or more to the point the loss of control. It was about the dissolution of all that I’ve accomplished in the past month or so. And at the end, it was about me losing my shit and yelling at the top of my lungs at a couple of people who just stood there smiling at me smugly as if everything were going according to plan.

I dunno. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just the culmination of the fact that I talked — or at least attempted to talk — three people out of quitting their jobs this week. Maybe that just weighed on me more than I realized.

Or maybe it was just something I ate.

Either way, it’s cloudy this morning, and the forecast calls for rain, and I’ve got new books to read — impulse trip to the bookstore yesterday — and laundry to do, so I’m going to get serious about getting in some intense unwinding today. If … uh … that weren’t such a blatant contradiction in terms.

So a couple weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to help her make — brace yourselves — an audition tape for a reality-television show. For trademark reasons I can’t get into which show we’re talking about exactly, but let me say that it rhymes with … um … “The Machelor.”

The producers, who’ve been courting this friend of mine for a while now, sent over a list of … well, they were more strongly worded than suggestions. Do’s and don’ts, sort of. Don’t underlight. Don’t shoot too close. Do shoot in a colorful setting. Stuff like that.

We shot the show yesterday, and I’m proud to say that I violated every single one of the little guidelines the producers had sent over.

I don’t think my friend was really expecting what I gave her, either. I’d listened as she and some others had bounced ideas around. You know, all the typical stuff. Make it funny. People love funny, right? So make it funny.

Let me tell you something right now: Nobody gives a shit about funny.

Funny is one of the hardest things in the world, not just to pull off but even to get people to agree upon. Except for the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, there’s no single product of human endeavor that everyone agrees is funny. And to make it worse, the same person will find the same thing more or less funny — or not funny at all — at different times. Funny is hard, because it’s so high-contrast. There’s nothing in the middle. There’s no such thing as “a little bit funny.” Something’s either funny, or it’s so very not.

Funny is hard. Almost funny is easy, but almost funny is not funny at all. So funny is hard.

And I’m lazy.

So I went a different way.

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I finished the show at about midnight last night. An hour and a half of raw footage cut down to just a hair under five minutes. I sent my friend a text and said it was done; she wrote back and said she and a couple others were just blocks away, and could they come see? Of course I said yes.

They came in smelling like they’d all showered in bourbon; they’d been at a bar in the Circle. I set up the screening and did what I always do, kinda hovered around the edge of the room for about five minutes, watching the faces of the people rather than the screen. I had every frame memorized anyway, so I didn’t need to see it again. I wanted to see them.

The show’s very quiet, very small. Tight shots, high-contrast light. Slow-motion cutaways that I shot as coverage while we were getting my friend mic’d and make-up’d.

Through the first minute or so, there was a lot of laughter. “Ooooh, so dramatic,” one person said sarcastically. He thought I’d made a parody, and that he was in on the joke.

The wisecracks had stopped by the time the film got to the part about the day my friend’s uncle died. She talks about seeing her cousins at the funeral, and knowing that they didn’t have a father any more, while she was standing there next to hers. I held that shot for a long time. If you look close, you can see my friend’s mouth get tight and one tiny, wet highlight appear in the corner of her left eye. Then it fades to a slow-mo cutaway of an anonymous man — me, as it turns out — moving the hair out of her eyes.

The show wound down, ending with a mood-shattering smash-cut to black after a weightless and ethereal cut cadence based on lots of long dissolves and dips to black. The music faded out, and the end title card came up and then vanished.

And nobody said anything.

And that’s when I knew I’d done something good.

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I don’t want to sound all full of myself here. I’m not great at this stuff. I’m pretty good. Better than average, if your sample includes everybody everywhere. Among people who do this professionally, I’m very much an amateur.

But a few times in my life, I’ve created something that hits just the right note with me. Maybe everybody else thinks it’s dumb, or doesn’t get it. But it gives me chills.

And that’s how this show was for me.

That little moment, over maybe thirty seconds, when the laughter died down and everybody got quiet? And then the show ended and nobody said anything, just stared for a second at a black screen and breathed?

Yeah. That’s why I do this.

Anyway, yesterday was a good day.

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She’s probably going to kill me for doing this, but … here’s a still taken from the show.

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Oh, the technical stuff? Fine. Nerds.

I shot her with a 650W Arri key light that was rigged high to camera right to put the eyelight in her eye just east-northeast of her pupil. I used an Arri 300W backlight to throw insane contrast on her right cheek. I used no fill light, because fill lights are for pussies.

I used an f/2 with a five-stop ND filter, with an in-camera gain of +3db to blow the highlights on her cheek and a dialed-in color temperature of 5,000 K.

For the slow-mo cutaways, I overcranked to 60 frames per second, which I then played back at 24 in post. I used a ¹⁄₁₂₀ shutter, and I think I had the gain at +6db, but I can’t remember exactly because I didn’t bother to slate that stuff.

I had to send a crewmember — i.e., one of my friend’s roommates who thought it’d be fun to watch the shoot and ended up getting drafted — to CVS to buy a case and some contact-lens solution. Why? Because if at all possible, have your talents take their contacts out. Contact lenses muddy-up the irises and dull the color of the eyes, which are by far the most important things in the shot. And if you’re shooting even medium-tight with a resolution of 1K or higher, you can see the damn things, sitting there like a thin little circle on the sclera. So if you can manage it, shoot your talent without their contacts in.

Especially when you’re shooting women.

Just sayin’.

Everybody who works in production in any capacity — the DP, the sound guy, the producer most especially — has the same nightmare.

We can’t use yesterday’s footage.

Now, let’s put this in perspective before I get into details: The talent didn’t die. The set, overlit, did not catch fire. The world did not end.

But out of seven interview sessions I shot yesterday, and over six hours of footage, I think I lost the sound from about forty minutes of it.

I had the talent mic’d with a lav, running to one of those little digital recorders that are all the rage these days. It’s basically an iPod in reverse; it’s got a little flash-memory card in it, and instead of copying sound from your computer then playing it back, you record sound on it and then copy it to your computer.

Neat idea, certainly. But man, you wanna talk about putting all your eggs in one basket? Here’s between forty minutes and two hours of sound, depending on what kind of memory chip you use. If anything bad happens to that chip, all your sound is just gone. Like it never happened.

I think that’s what bit me yesterday.

Now, I don’t think it’s a total loss. I was using the shotgun mic on the camera to record safety sound, and that’s still on the tape. But the full-bandwidth signal from the talent’s lav mic? I think that’s just gone.

So obviously this morning my thoughts turn to ways of preventing this from happening again. Since I know precious little about sound and sound recording, I’m kind of a blank slate. Does it make sense to split the main mic and send it to a solid-state recorder and the camera, for security? Should I just go ahead and double-mic my talent, and record the two signals separately? Should I stomp my feet and hold my breath until I finally get somebody to run sound during my shoots?

I dunno. I need to think about it.

But hey, I’ve faced my nightmare now. This is pretty much the worst that can happen, practically speaking. We got picture just fine and the producer will surely want to use it. But the sound is no good, and can’t be fixed in post. That’s about the worst possible case.

Well, no. It could still be worse. The talent in question is still, you know, alive. We can always reshoot. It could be much, much worse.

Man. I feel better already.

So I’ve been shooting a lot with a Canon XL H1 high-definition camera lately, and I’ve learned a couple things. It’s still awfully early on, but I think my number-one lesson has been less fucking light.

I want to make this clear right from the start: I am not a professional cinematographer. I’m not even an especially skilled amateur cinematographer. I know the glass part goes toward the subject, but beyond that, I’m strictly a tyro.

I do have a little experience shooting high-definition with a Sony HDW-F900. The F900 was the first real high-definition camera suitable for creative cinematography. We’re going back about eight years here, which should tell you just how out-of-date my experience is. While it looks pretty grim compared to modern cameras like the Panavision Genesis, the F900 was a pretty astonishing piece of kit for its day.

When I first started shooting on the XL H1, the first thing I noticed was that the footage I was getting was almost as good as what I could get out of the F900. There are some real differences, obviously, especially when recording to the H1’s built-in HDV recorder. I would gnaw off my own genitals before I tried pulling a greenscreen key off HDV footage. But if you take a step back and consider the overall quality of the footage, then factor in that the F900 used to sell for about $100,000 without a lens while the H1 debuted for about $10,000 with lens, the results start looking very impressive indeed.

But in actual practice, I found myself struggling with the H1 against footage that was slightly soft, very grainy, and just depressingly flat.

I think I’m starting to find solutions for all those problems, though.

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The H1 lives in a strange no-man’s-land between the cheap-ass camcorders you see at the Try-n-Save and professional cameras suitable for electronic news gathering or low-end digital cinematography. Unlike consumer cameras, the H1 comes with a very good lens, and through the use of some adapters that typically cost about as much as the camera body itself, can be fitted with cinema-grade prime lenses. But unlike professional cameras, the H1 also comes with a variety of “point and shoot” recording modes that, in my experience, make all the wrong choices when it comes to setting the camera’s various parameters.

The ones that matter here are focus, gain, aperture, shutter speed and color temperature.

The H1’s stock lens comes with an autofocus option. We’re all pretty used to autofocus, now that still cameras have pretty much perfected it. But here’s the thing: A still camera has to hold focus for a fraction of a second. A motion-picture camera has to hold focus for an hour. Those are entirely different universes.

When I first started shooting with the H1, I was tempted to just set up my shot with a tripod, engage the autofocus and go. Since I was handling the lights, running the camera and oh by the way also directing the shoot all at the same time, the prospect of having one less thing to worry about was seductive.

I only had to make that mistake once.

The autofocus on the H1 may be very good for its class. It may be the world’s best motion-picture autofocus, for all I know. But it still sucks. It won’t hold focus on a moving subject. And I don’t meant race cars here; I mean a subject sitting in a chair, talking and nodding and, like, breathing and stuff. This setting is more of a challenge than the H1’s autofocus can handle.

Now, I don’t mean the H1 can’t basically hold focus. In a setting like that, it’s not like the picture goes entirely out of focus. It just drifts a little. Which on a standard-definition camera wouldn’t matter, because you’d never even see it. The resolution of the image is too low to notice little changes like that. But when shooting high-definition, even the just-barely high-definition 1440 × 1080 footage that comes off an HDV tape, tiny twitches in the focus ring are highly visible. So the whole image ends up looking soft.

Now, let’s be fair here. The footage I shot that day was technically usable. I wouldn’t have been happy with it if broadcast HD had been my destination format, but since I was distributing on standard-definition DVD, I could have gone with it. I ended up not using it for creative reasons, and boy was I pleased about that.

But I learned my lesson. Do not, under any circumstances, use the autofocus on the H1. It’s just not worth it.

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The other problem the H1 has out of the box is that it tries to handle all the variables that affect your exposure for you. Most everybody knows about aperture and shutter already; the aperture is the size of the hole the light comes through, and the shutter is how long the light is allowed in. But on digital cinema cameras, there’s a third variable: gain. Gain is roughly equivalent to the ISO rating of the film in a film camera. It’s measured in decibels, and it describes how the circuits in the camera either amplify or attenuate the signal coming in. Basically, the higher your gain, the more sensitive your camera is to light.

The first shots I took on the H1 were grainy as hell, and it didn’t take long for me to find out why. The camera was automatically adjusting the grain as I rolled to try to keep my shots exposed.

Fortunately, turning that shit off was just a matter of twisting a knob away from the detent horrifyingly marked “A” for “automatic.” As in “automatically make my footage look terrible, please.”

The H1 has gain settings that go from -3db all the way up to it-doesn’t-matter, because you should never, ever go about +6db and frankly you’d have to threaten me with physical violence to get me above +3db. Higher gain settings mean more grain, and we’re not talking about artistically justifiable film grain here. We’re talking digital grain, pixel-sized specks of blue and green in the shadows that make you want to seal your eyes shut with gaffer tape.

Between -3db and +3db, I can’t really tell much of a difference in overall image quality. Grain is minimal, and not objectionable. At +3db you start to see the beginnings of objectionable noise in shadow areas if you go with the camera’s default settings, but for reasons I’ll get into shortly you shouldn’t be doing that, so that’s okay.

It was when I was messing with the gain settings and shooting tests to see what the limits were that I realized why my shots to date had been so flat, both in terms of color and in terms of depth-of-field. This camera is really sensitive to light. At a gain setting of 0db — meaning the camera neither amplifies nor attenuates the electrical signal coming from the sensor — we’re looking at an ISO equivalence about about 320. That’s comparable to shooting with 320-speed film. Moving the gain to +3db gives us an ISO equivalence of 400. And +6db? That’s equivalent to ISO 800.

For sake of comparison, though there may be one out there, I’ve never heard of a motion-picture film stock with an ISO equivalence of above about 500. That’s what you’d use to shoot on the surface of the sun.

So basically I’ve been overlighting the shit out of all my shots. I’ve been blasting so much light into the camera that I’ve had to stop down to f/4.0 or even smaller to get the right overall exposure, which means with a ⅓-inch sensor, my depth of field is measured in miles. Which, granted, makes the job of pulling focus easier, since everything between six and six thousand feet from the focal plane looks sharp. But it’s not very good for the ol’ creativity.

And on the subject of overlighting, I want to take a little side-trip here to talk about color balance. Color balance is one of those things that, I think, gets over-emphasized when doing a crash course on cinematography for people who just want to shoot their kids’ birthday parties. Yes, there are times when you want your shot to be white-balanced. But those times are less common than you might think.

We’ve gotta talk about film again for a second. This is a gross oversimplification, but in general, motion-picture film comes in two basic varieties: There’s daylight-balanced film, and tungsten-balanced film. If you light a neutral grey object with tungsten lights and shoot it with tungsten film, the grey object will look, well, grey. But if you shoot that same object with daylight film, the object will look really orange, as if the film had been tinted.

That might sound like a bad thing — you want your colors to look right, right? — but it’s more complex than it sounds. A common trick in cinematography is to light slightly warmer than the color balance of your film. If you’re shooting tungsten film and lighting with tungsten lights, maybe you’ll throw an orange gel over your key light to make the shot warmer.

Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to take a system that’s been set up to carefully balance all the colors in the shot and deliberately throw it out of whack?

Because balanced color is boring.

There’s also the fact that properly balanced color makes people’s faces look pretty blotchy. Check yourself out in the mirror sometime. Your face is not an even color. There are lighter areas and darker areas. Maybe the tip of your nose is a little redder than under your eyes, because it gets more sun. Maybe you’re a guy with a five-o’clock shadow. We’re not picture-perfect.

If you shoot people in a balanced setting — where your light is all one color, and your camera is calibrated to see that color as “white” — they’ll end up looking sickly and unattractive.

What does this have to do with the experience of shooting the XL H1? The little fucker is set, by default, to auto-white-balance. Which means it takes whatever light is coming in, says “Well, this must be neutral!” and goes with it.

And we just got through talking about how you rarely want your lighting to actually be neutral.

Well, fortunately the H1 also has an easy, readily accessible way to dial in your color balance manually. You can set the color temperature that you want to be neutral white by twisting a dial. If you’re shooting under tungsten lights, which have a color temperature of 3,200K, you might dial in a white balance temperature of 5,000K to make the shot look a little warm, to give it a little glow. If you’re shooting under sunlight, which has a color temperature of about 5,600K, you can ramp the white balance of the camera all the way up to 12,000K to get just the tone you want.

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Oh, one more thing. So far, I’ve been talking about stuff that’s fairly easy to deal with: Turn the gain knob from “A” (shudder) to +0db or whatever you want to set your ISO equivalence. Turn the white-balance knob to “K” and dial in your desired balance temperature. You have to (a) know how to do this stuff and (b) be willing to screw with all the little settings every time you shoot, but in general, it’s not hard.

There’s one setting on the H1 that’s more difficult to change, but that’s just as vital if you want your shots to look good without color-correction. It has to do with the gamma curve.

Describing what gamma means is beyond the scope of this blog post — mostly because I only have a basic, intuitive understanding of it myself, and can’t explain it well. But basically it’s a matter of whether the camera is going to record an image that responds linearly to the light coming in, or whether it’s going to compress or expand one area or another of the tonal range.

The human eye is capable of discriminating between many more levels of brightness — what the nerds call “luminance” — than a camera is. If you take a picture in which the brightness curve is a straight line from pure black to pure white, that picture will end up looking really flat, because there’s so much less information there than what we can see with our eyes. In order to make the picture more visually pleasing, we make the picture look more contrasty by compressing the tonal range in the highlights and the shadows. This is often referred to as blowing out the whites and crushing the blacks.

Unfortunately, the H1 comes out of the box set to reproduce a fairly inoffensive luminance curve. As a result, until you get in there and screw with the presets, footage from the H1 will look very flat, and will need to have its contrast boosted in post. This isn’t optimal, because (a) who wants to take the time to color-correct every damn shot, and (b) stretching the contrast in post gives poorer results than getting good contrast in-camera anyway.

I don’t want to go into all the details of how to manipulate the H1’s custom presets here; a whole book could be written on that topic. But there are two settings that are relevant to this discussion: knee and black. The H1 lets you set the knee — “knee” here being a technical term that refers to the contrast in the highlights — to high, middle or low. Basically, don’t set it to low. Depending on your setup and what look you’re going for, setting the knee to either high or middle will give you a high-key image with nicely blown whites.

Black is easier; black should always be set to press. There is no reason why you should set black to stretch, unless you like washed-out, flat-looking footage.

Yes, there’s a conventional wisdom out there that you should set your luminance curve to be as flat as possible in-camera so you have as much exposure latitude as possible in post. If we were shooting 4:4:4 — or hell, even 4:2:2 — that might make sense. But this is HDV, man, and it’s 4:2:0, and looking for exposure latitude here is like looking for change in your couch to pay your mortgage. Yes, you might find a little if you’re lucky, but it won’t be as much as you need. Trying to capture a flat image in-camera and then boost the contrast in post will result in your running with footage that looks like shit because it’s too flat, or footage that looks like shit because it’s too grainy in the mids.

Anyway, when shooting HDV on the H1, blow out your whites and crush your blacks using the camera’s preset feature. You’ll be happier.

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So the good news about the XL H1 is that it’s capable of capturing footage that rivals what you can get out of a digital cinema camera that costs more per day to rent than the H1 does to buy. The bad news is that out of the box, the H1 produces powerfully awful pictures. But the rebuttal witness for the good news points out that once you get the H1 away from all the factory-default settings, understand what all the settings do and take manual control of them each time you shoot, you can get strikingly awesome footage.

Here’s a still from some test footage I shot yesterday. This was under tungsten light from two desk lamps, but I had the color balance temperature in-camera set to 5,000K to make the images pleasantly warm. I was shooting with +3db gain for an ISO equivalence of 400, with the lens zoomed all the way in to a focal length of 108mm and the aperture wide open, giving me a depth of field measured in inches. The knee was set to middle to give me blown-out but not ridiculous highlights, and the black was, as always, set to press to really crush the shadows and draw out all the detail possible from the midtones. This was shot in 1080/24p, with a ¹⁄₄₈ shutter. I scaled the still down from 1920×1080, obviously.

Postscript

I got an email about managing white and black levels for broadcast-safe recording. First of all, yes, the still I posted here is taken straight from the raw footage in Final Cut Pro: recorded on the tape in HDV format, captured over Firewire, and exported as a still image. I didn’t do any post on it at all.

And yes, the dynamic range of this image is way outside the broadcast-safe limit. Broadcast-safe television images should never drop below an RGB black of 16, 16, 16, or blow up past an RGB white of 235, 235, 235. Or somewhere around there, depending on about a jillion factors.

But here’s the thing: Fuck broadcast-safe. Okay? If you absolutely have to clamp your footage to within broadcast-safe limits — say, for broadcast, for instance — then you can worry about broadcast-safe. Nest your sequence and throw on a broadcast-safe color-correction filter as your last step before output.

But before that, right up to that point, fuck broadcast-safe. Make your blacks black. Make your whites white. Make your footage look as good as it possibly can on your master timeline before worrying about mandated changes that depend on your output format.

Why? Because you never know. Maybe you’re shooting for broadcast, yes, but later you’ll want to do a film transfer for a cinema screening. Or maybe you’ll want to cut an Internet trailer; on the Internet, black is 0, 0, 0, not 16, 16, 16, and distributing broadcast-safe footage on the Web is a great way to make your show look muddy and flat.

Maybe this is crazy; maybe it’s even flat-out wrong. But in my head, there’s a high wall between the cinematographer and the engineer. The cinematographer is driven and passionate and wants to make the best show he possibly can. The engineer is the asshole who says “no” all the time. I don’t let these guys talk until the last possible minute, when they have to in order to finish the job.

But maybe that’s just me.

Final Cut Pro 6 — also known as Final Cut Studio 2; thanks, Apple marketing, for confusing things up over here — is a huge and fantastic upgrade over Final Cut Pro 5. While the core functions are exactly the same, there are a couple of nearly hidden improvements that take Final Cut Pro from being a good editing platform to a great one.

The first is what’s called an open-format timeline, and the second is ProRes 422.

They’re actually related, in a way that I’ll explain in a minute. But for now, let me talk about just what, exactly, an open-format timeline is.

Let’s say you’re doing a show. All your footage has been shot on HDV, using a Canon XL H1 camera. The show’s going to be simplicity itself: Production logo, opening titles, thirty minutes of edited footage, closing credits. Easy.

Your production logo is a 20-second clip that comes out of After Effects as a QuickTime movie in the lossless Animation codec; this is usually how motion graphics come out. You’re going to do your opening titles in Motion, and they’ll also be rendered out with the Animation codec. Same with your closing titles.

But the footage on your tapes is all in HDV. So right off the bat, we have a format mismatch. The logo and titles are lossless, while the footage is HDV (which is actually a specific form of MPEG-2 with MP3 audio).

Can we mix-and-match these in Final Cut? If you were still using Final Cut Pro 5, the answer would be no. You can’t mix-and-match these formats on the same timeline, at least not without rendering one of the formats into the other format. You’d either have to run your logo and titles through Compressor and convert them to HDV first (which would make them look awful), or you’d have to run all your HDV footage through and convert it to the Animation codec, which would make it impractically huge. In real life, you probably would have settled on a compromise, converting both sets of footage to some intermediate, lossy-but-not-too-lossy format so you could cut them together with as few visible compromises as possible.

In Final Cut Pro 6, it’s not like that. In Final Cut Pro 6, you just throw all that crap onto your timeline and go.

But there’s still a catch. You can edit with multiple formats in Final Cut Pro 6, but when you’re done and it’s time to export your reference movie for Compressor, Final Cut will render everything into the format of your timeline. So it’s really the same set of steps as before; either the graphics will get converted to HDV, or the HDV footage will get converted to Animation, or both will get converted to something else.

The difference is that you don’t have to decide up front what your output format will be. At any point in the editorial process, you can hit ⌘-0 to bring up your timeline settings and change the codec to something else. (You can’t change everything, though; your editing timebase is locked as soon as you make your first edit. Also, changing your frame size or pixel aspect ratio will make you want to kill yourself, as every clip’s Motion-tab settings will have to be reset. By hand. So don’t do that.)

So let’s revisit our example. You start your project by capturing the footage off your camera. To do this, you first select an appropriate Easy Setup — say, HDV 1080p24. You capture and capture, until finally all your footage is on your framestore and you can start doing your first assembly edit.

At this point, Final Cut will assume, since you’re cutting HDV footage in 1080p24 format, that you want an HDV timeline at 23.98 frames per second. When you start your assembly edit, that’s the kind of timeline you’ll be cutting into.

Later, when you’ve locked picture and you put on your logo and titles, you’ll just drop the Animation-encoded clips onto your timeline, and Final Cut will play them. No muss, no fuss.

But when you’re truly finished and you export your reference movie, Final Cut will convert all your graphics to HDV for you.

Now, this might be exactly what you want. If you’re going back to HDV tape, for instance, obviously you want your whole show to be in HDV format. But seriously, who the hell ever goes back to HDV? It just never happens. So what’s the point of mastering in HDV?

There’s only one situation in which you’d ever want to master in HDV format: When you’re cutting nothing but HDV footage.

It’s hard to imagine a production scenario in which that’d happen, but in fact I ran into a non-production scenario just like that last Tuesday. I’d done a location shoot on Monday, and shot a metric assload of B-roll, spread across several tapes. Because HDV footage is so small, only about 20 Mbps at 24 frames per second, I decided to capture all the B-roll, do a quick assemble edit and store the resulting QuickTime file on my server. That way, going back to it will be faster than pulling tapes out of the vault and re-capturing.

I was literally cutting nothing but HDV footage. So I just threw my footage into an HDV timeline and exported what’s called a “self-contained” movie. That is, Final Cut wrote out all the movie data to a fresh file on my framestore. It didn’t recompress anything; it just wrote the existing HDV data. I was then able to copy the whole shebang to the server and forget about it, and send the tapes to the vault.

But you’re never going to do that when you’re cutting a show. Shows always have chyrons, or effects, or color correction, or hell, even just titles or a slate. There’s always something that has to get mixed in with your source footage.

So you need a mastering format.

This is where ProRes 422 comes in.

The ins and outs of ProRes 422 is a subject for another day. The difference between the 140 Mbps and the 220 Mbps codecs, the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit rendering … that’s all fine, but it’s off the point right now. The point is, with Final Cut Pro 6’s open-format timeline, we can use ProRes 422 as our mastering format without having to go through the incredibly time-consuming process of converting all our footage before we can start editing.

It works like this: Create a ProRes 422 timeline, 1920×1080, 23.98 frames per second. Start assembling your HDV footage into it. Oops! The first time you try to do an edit, Final Cut will throw up a dialog box: “For best performance your sequence and External Video should be set to the format of the clips you are editing. Change sequence settings to match the clip settings?”

See, what Final Cut Pro is doing here is noticing that you’re trying to edit HDV footage into a ProRes 422 timeline, and double-checking that that’s what you really mean to do. Wouldn’t you rather edit HDV footage into an HDV timeline like a sane person? It’s nice of Final Cut to ask, but in this case, no, we really want to put our HDV footage into a ProRes 422 timeline. Seriously. (If you mess with your preferences, you can tell Final Cut not to ask any more, and just let you edit whatever into whatever. I don’t do this. I like being reminded that my sequence is set up differently from my footage, just in case that’s the one time I don’t want that.)

Anyway, tell Final Cut “No thanks, I really mean to do this,” and start editing. Notice something interesting: You don’t have to render anything. You can play back HDV footage on a ProRes 422 timeline without rendering. Even without turning Unlimited RT on. And it plays perfectly, at full resolution, without dropping a single frame. Hell, you can even do this on a MacBook. Not even a MacBook Pro; a plain old MacBook can pull off this trick. It can scale and distort HDV footage (which has a native 1440×1080 frame size and a non-square pixel aspect ration) into a 1920×1080 timeline with no trouble whatsoever. It’s awesome.

So what happens when you lock picture and decide to put on your logo and credits? Same thing. You just edit them in. Final Cut doesn’t care. It’ll just play the footage back when you mash play.

But when you go to export, that’s when the magic happens. On export, Final Cut will convert your whole show to the format of your timeline. It’ll render out all those scale-and-distorts, and encode the whole show into ProRes 422, writing it out to your framestore.

The good news is that encoding ProRes 422 is incredibly fast, and it’s optimized for multiple processors. So a decent editing workstation will be able to write the movie out to disk as fast as your framestore can keep up. Which means on your laptop it’ll take for-freakin’-ever. But hey, that’s what you get for trying to finish a show on your laptop.

Now, I’ll be the first person to say here that it’d be nice if Final Cut were a little more clever about writing out reference movies from mixed timelines. It’d be great if the reference movie of our hypothetical show here consisted of a minute of Animation footage and half an hour of HDV footage and three more minutes of Animation footage. That’d be fantastic. But it doesn’t work that way. Exporting a movie from Final Cut gives you a movie in the format of your timeline, not just a reference movie that points to movies in different formats on your framestore. Maybe that’s a limitation of QuickTime, I dunno. But the point is, it doesn’t quite work like that.

But what it does do is move all the processing time from the front end of the editing process to the back end. You don’t have to convert all your footage to your mastering format before you can start editing, or live with the horror of having to render every damn slip and roll on your timeline. You can just pick a mastering format with your Easy Setup, then get to work. Only when you’re done and it’s time to export will Final Cut have to run all your footage through processing. And even then, it only processes the frames you actually used in your show. You aren’t converting six hours of raw footage to your mastering format; you’re only converting the thirty minutes you actually used in your final edit.

So it’s definitely a workflow improvement, and a big one. It’s not magic, but it’s still pretty amazing.

One last note about ProRes 422: Traditionally, motion graphics are always, repeat always, rendered out to an uncompressed or lossless format. Either to an image sequence or a QuickTime movie with no lossy compression on it. That’s because graphics, much more so than live footage, suffer mightily with each compression hit.

But it seems to me that if you’re mastering in ProRes 422 anyway, and all your uncompressed graphics will be converted to ProRes 422 by Final Cut Pro during the export process when you’re finished with your show, then why not skip the intermediate step and render your graphics right out to ProRes 422? That’s what I’ve been doing for a while now, including some pretty intricate full-screen sequences in 1080p24. The results have been visually perfect, which is all anybody can ask for. And the resulting ProRes 422 sequences play back without rendering in my timeline, and are written out during export without any processing, saving me both time and storage space.

Skinny jeans. Seriously. Can there really be that many young women who don’t own mirrors?

People who stand still on escalators. Do they also stand still on stairs? I suppose not. If they did, they’d all still be there instead of being in my freakin’ way.

The girl in the black stockings who hiked up her skirt to fix her shoe, thereby showing the entire world all she had. Is she really that proud of it? Lady, come on. It’s just like everybody else’s. You’re not impressing anyone.

The sudden apparent tendency of the universe to cut me some freakin’ slack. Where did this come from? Did I achieve some kind of karma credit or something? Why this sudden change of luck?