Schoonmaker Talks Craft; Avid, Iridas, 3DMirage and Reality Make Splash

Reflecting the fact that "post" in New York often means "editorial,"
the first NAB Post + show booked three ace editors as keynote speakers.

On Wednesday, Thelma Schoonmaker delivered an
unbearably brief rundown of her years working with Martin Scorsese,
mainly covering scenes from Raging Bull and
GoodFellas. It was like listening to the
commentaries on old Criterion laserdiscs back in film school, only
much, much better. She talked about (her late husband) Michael Powell's
influence on Scorsese and Scorsese's way with music, and also dropped
in some tidbits I hadn't heard before, such as the fact that he cited
the shower scene from Psycho as an influence on the
famously brutal Sugar Ray Robinson v. Jake LaMotta match-up in
Raging Bull. Best quip? When people ask her if she
minds working on such violent movies, she says, she responds by saying,
"It's not violent when I get it. I have to make it
look that way."

Out on the show floor, the mood was fairly upbeat, if decidedly
low-key. And there was some cool gear on display. The 3DMirage (www.3dmirage.com) exhibit, where
you could get a load of 3D imagery displayed on a no-glasses-required
screen mounted in the booth attracted crowds. It feels kind of like
watching a moving version of one of those lenticular 3D postcards that
used to be popular – you wouldn't want to watch a Hitchcock movie on
it, or probably even Chicken Little, but if you want
to turn shoppers or visitors to your corporate HQ into TV-eyed zombies,
it's one heck of an attention-grabber. A free seminar on 3D animation
is being held by 3DMirage's 3D Training Institute and
Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan in January. Check the
3DTI Web
site for more information.
The idea behind Reality, from the Montreal, Canada-based Lanterna Magica (www.lanternamagica.com) seems
promising. This is video-logging software with a twist – it's keyed
especially to the needs of reality TV programming, especially those
shows that have multiple cameras trained on contestants, 24/7.
Basically, you save wear and tear on your editors and producers by
having dedicated videologgers doing the grunt work – entering critical
data relating to scenes in real time, as they leave the cameras. (They
can even rate each clip on a scale of one to five.) Within minutes, the
clips and associated metadata are made available in low-res proxy
versions to any authorized user via Web browser. Previously, you'd go
over all of this footage on your Avid stations in your editorial
suites. CEO Pierre Rinfret said there are shows being produced in
Canada – one of them, Star Acadà©mie, has 39 cameras
capturing footage for a single, daily program – that claim to have
saved as much as 30 percent on production costs when they switched to
Reality. You don't buy the system; you lease it. Check out their Web site for
more.
Solid demos of SpeedGrade DI and SpeedGrade OnSet from Iridas (www.iridas.com) again impressed, one
of those brave companies thinking hard about ways to preserve color
decisions from the shoot (where a DP tweaks still images visually and
saves his work as a ".look" file) all the way into the DI suite (where
the XML-style ".look" file can be loaded in order to make changes to
the actual footage). Iridas prides its system on being
"non-destructive," meaning that color decisions are maintained
throughout the process as metadata, rather than being applied to the
frames as they are made – this preserves quality and conserves disk
space by not requiring multiple versions to be saved. The changes are
only applied to the footage when the final frames are rendered, at the
very end of the workflow. It's a slick-looking package.
Finally, Avid (www.avid) gave a
closer look at Symphony Nitris, which it debuted at NAB in April and
plans to ship in December. This time around, Avid was able to
demonstrate advanced motion-tracking and stabilization features, which
seem rock solid, as well as the new 16-bit SpectraMatte keyer,
including a cool new visualization tool. At first glance, it looks just
like a burst of static in front of a rainbow of colors. In reality, it
shows you exactly which colors are being keyed out in your shot. As you
work on your key, Avid's SpectraGraph gives you visual feedback on
exactly how your adjustments are affecting the quality of your scene.
Once you figure out what you're looking at, it becomes a highly
intuitive way to think about keying.
Talk soon turned to the new Avid DNxHD codec, which the whole company
has gotten behind as a highly efficient, high-quality way to work with
compressed HD video. Responding to questions about whether it's solely
high-end users who are still demanding to work with uncompressed video,
given the apparent quality of DNxHD, the demo artists said some
customers are frustrated by the poor quality of low-bandwidth digital
cable signals, and take that into account. Some of them say, "No, I
don't need uncompressed – do you know how bad this will look by the
time it gets to my cable box?" And others will say, "Of course I need
uncompressed – do you know how bad this will look by the time it gets
to my cable box?" Which proves that "broadcast quality," for the
producer as well as the end user, remains a moving target.