Space odyssey: the making of Gravity

Great article about the making of Our favourite movie from 2013:
Trevor Hogg talks to production designer Andy Nicholson, production visual effects supervisor Tim Webber, visual effects supervisor Tony Clark, animation supervisor Max Solomon, compositing supervisor Mark Bakowski, compositing sequence lead Theo Groeneboom, and matchmove supervisor Amélie Guyot about getting lost in space with filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón. Beware there are spoilers...

“I first met Alfonso Cuarón [Children of Men] on a Monday in London after receiving an incredible script [co-written with his son Jonas] midday Saturday,” recalls Andy Nicholson.  “Gravity [2013] was to be set almost entirely in low earth orbit and in zero-G. It was unlike anything I had read before and our 30 minute meeting lasted almost two hours.”  A major element of discussion was the research material gathered over the weekend by Nicholson.  “We went through a selection of NASA images that I had sourced online. We talked generally about the project and began discussing what was important about the look, that it had to be photorealistic and how that could be achieved.”  The Mexican filmmaker was impressed with his British colleague.  “Soon after I got the job I met with Alfonso, David Heyman [Producer] and Tim Webber [VFX Supervisor] at the offices of Framestore where we looked at an early ‘techviz’. What I saw was an inspiration. It suggested a way to achieve a complicated zero-G shot by moving lights and camera within a CG set around an almost stationary actor. On-screen the actor would appear to be moving.”

“The ‘techviz’ was a CG animation of a figure sitting on a rig similar to a bicycle seat with separate camera and lighting rigs moving around them and a wireframe image of the set that was also moving, but independently, projected around everything,” explains Andy Nicholson.  This concept would become a backbone approach for establishing much of our shooting methodologies. There would eventually be many other rigs using similar principles, the most elaborate being a ‘12 wire’ rig which we would use for flying Sandra through the ISS [International Space Station].  Simulating the proper movement was tricky.  “When someone is.....continue reading in http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2013/11/space-odyssey-making-of-gravity.html

ASSIMILATE Launches SCRATCH Play

ASSIMILATE Launches SCRATCH Play - a Free, Comprehensive Media Player for Professional and Consumer Formats

 Santa Clara, CA - September 3, 2013 – ASSIMILATE, the industry’s leading provider of Digital Intermediate and dailies digital workflow tools, today announced the launch of SCRATCH Play™, the world’s first truly comprehensive, no-cost media player. SCRATCH Play supports RAW footage from cinematic and DSLR cameras, formats commonly found in VFX and editorial pipelines, and those found across the web. SCRATCH Play also features ASSIMILATE’s unique CONstruct™ media management timeline, versatile color-grading based on the ASC CDL standard, and robust metadata handling capabilities.

 SCRATCH Play supported formats include, but are not limited to:

• Camera RAW - RED, ARRI, Sony, Canon and DSLRs

• Editorial/VFX - MXF, DPX, OpenEXR, and ProRes

• Consumer - QuickTime, WMV, and MP4

 The CONstruct: A Timeline Like No Other

The heartbeat of SCRATCH Play is the CONstruct, also found in ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH® and SCRATCH Lab® professional toolsets. The CONstruct is a visual map to media that starts with a basic timeline, and evolves to resolution and format-agnostic version control. The CONstruct can contain any combination of different formats, resolutions or color spaces, including REC 2020, the new 4K ultra HD color space, all easily framed within a user-defined output resolution. Users can quickly switch between versions, compare with dual-view and wipe capabilities, or use multiple CONstructs to more efficiently manage their media.

 Color Grading and Metadata Handling

SCRATCH Play features a real-time ASC CDL color toolset that allows media professionals to generate LUTs, CDLs or JPEG snapshots for sharing metadata or looks across projects. SCRATCH Play also supports features typically found in pro applications such as camera-specific color and metadata control, and real-time clip rotation, framing, and resizing.

 The Perfect Media Companion - On Set Or In Post

SCRATCH Play is the ideal tool for DPs and DITs to quickly review shots, pull stills, create looks and export CDLs or LUTs - without interrupting DIT cart transcodes. VFX artists can quickly review animations or renders in context: frame-accurately, at full resolution, with full color consistency, and even alpha channels. Even semi-pro shooters and hobbyists now have a free tool that they can use to review the RAW shots from their DSLR cameras.

 “SCRATCH Play has been an awesome tool to use on set,” said Josh Diamond of The Diamond Bros, the New York City based producer-director team. “We use SCRATCH Play to pull stills directly from the RED RAW files, and to move through footage fast without standing at the DIT station. Since we have a specific shot we need to get at every location, we can load the previous day’s shot into SCRATCH Play and use it as a framing guide at the next location. This really helps ensure that we capture the perfect frame. All this power in a free application really boosts our productivity, while also significantly enhancing our creative process.”

 “Our customers have told us they need a single product that can quickly and easily play any popular video and still format - from web content to cinematic cameras, to editorial and VFX media,” said Jeff Edson, CEO of ASSIMILATE. “SCRATCH Play does that. You can double-click or drag and drop an R3D or Arri RAW file and it just plays. But we didn’t stop with just a single-shot player. We added the CONstruct, the industry’s most powerful timeline, to manage multiple shots and versions; and we added world-class grading and CDL tools that anyone can use to create, manage and export looks. SCRATCH Play is the ultimate companion for the media professional, from DSLR shooters up to A-list Hollywood features. And best of all, SCRATCH Play is free. Because it should be.”

 Pricing and Availability

SCRATCH Play is available immediately for MacOS, Windows and Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablets. Download SCRATCH Play atwww.assimilateinc.com/products/scratch-play. An ad-supported version is completely free. SCRATCH Play Premium, also available immediately, offers the same feature-set without the ads, for a price of $5.00 USD.  For more information visit www.assimilateinc.com

 About ASSIMILATE

ASSIMILATE is the premier provider of digital workflow and post-production tools that have proven essential to the successful creation of thousands of studio and independent features, television shows, music videos and corporate video productions. The company’s SCRATCH products, running on Windows and Mac OS X, are the heartbeat of today’s most demanding digital post-production and dailies workflows for 2D and stereo 3D productions. They equip directors, DPs, on-set professionals and artists with the state-of-the-art, intuitive, data-centric solutions they need to meet the continual challenges of increased creativity and productivity amid ever-shrinking budgets. ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH data-centric DI system, is the most comprehensive, end-to-end cinema and broadcast imaging tool for conform, versioning, color grading, playback, compositing and finishing for nearly all popular digital workflows, including, RED, ARRI, Sony F65 and F55, Canon 5D, Phantom, Go Pro and many more. SCRATCH Lab delivers a comprehensive toolset for the review, versioning, color correction, conform and output of on-set or VFX dailies. ASSIMILATE is a privately held company, with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, USA, with offices in London, UK, Groningen, NL and Beijing City, CN and markets its products worldwide via a global reseller network. To learn more, visit www.assimilateinc.com

Sony betting big on 4K, launches Video Unlimited 4K download service

SUMMARY:

Sony today announced a new US-only 4K video download service, Video Unlimited 4K. Sony also introduced two new 4K television models. It is all part of the company’s big bet on 4K technology as a way to stage a big comeback.

Technology is a fickle mistress and no-company knows it better than Sony. There was a time when its television sets were a fixture in every upwardly mobile household. Sony game consoles were on every teenage boy’s Christmas wish-list and many of us grew up plugging into the Sony Walkman. It was a company that at one time was awe inspiring and amazing for even the late Steve Jobs.

Nothing lasts forever, especially when it comes to companies that get complacent and lose their way. Nimbler, hungrier rivals, new technologies and better manufacturing technologies eat away at even the mightiest of them all. And that is what happened to Sony, which lost its pre-eminence to Samsung, Apple, Microsoft and Google.

A dismal future awaited Sony if it didn’t do something drastic, in its case, focusing and betting on its core strengths – especially video technology, thanks to being a big player in television. Of course, what it was notoriously bad at was developing video standards and then getting traction with competitors and/or content creators. Remember Betamax?

For its turnaround, the company is betting on video-visual technology, called 4K Ultra HD. From a consumer standpoint, it is what comes after the HDTVs. The 4K Ultra HD represents an ultra high-definition resolution of 3840 pixels x 2160 lines, and 4K comes from the number of horizontal pixels. (In comparison, for the 1080p HDTVs the number represents the number of vertical pixels.) An increasing number of companies are releasing 4K products (including some at the IFA show being held in Berlin this week.

Sony’s Big Week

It is a big week for Sony too — today the company is unveiling a new video download service, that is the final step in the 4K journey it started way back in 2005 when Sony first introduced 4K cinema projectors. Sony today announced a brand new 4K video download service, Video Unlimited 4K. For now, it is available only in the United States, but Sony has plans to eventually make it available everywhere.

Sony also introduced two new 4K television models (55 inch and 65 inch screens) and lowered the prices on some of its older 4K televisions. The new download service in the early days will have about 70 full-length native 4K Ultra HD feature films and TV shows. By the end of 2013, the number of available movies is going to increase to about 100.

The Video Unlimited 4K service would require a 4K Ultra HD Media Player (FMP-X1) for one to either rent or purchase the content  — thhe cost for TV episodes is $3.99 and feature films start at $7.99 for a 24-hour rental, or $29.99 for a purchase. The media player is one big honking home server that comes with 2 TB of storage and costs a whopping $700 a pop. It does come pre-loaded with 10 bonus feature films.

The $700 dollar home media server isn’t the only expensive component of the 4K ecosystem. Even the lower-range televisions will cost more than $3000 a pop, while the higher-end 4K TVs can set you back more than twice as much. 4K is clearly an early adopter product. Not for long.

It’s the Ecosystem Baby

Sony Electronics President and COO Phil Molyneux in an interview said Sony’s approach was to systematically go after the entire video food chain — from displays to cinemas to professional video cameras to consumer devices. “We now have the whole 4K ecosystem, from production to projection to download service to media servers and televisions,” he boasted.

Sony wants every Sony product — Experia tablets, VAIO laptops, Experia phones, video camcorders — to support 4K, a technology it has nurtured for nearly a decade. Many of its products are already 4K-ready. Sony sees it as a way to overcome its past problems and leapfrog rivals. The new video download service is the last piece of the puzzle. It had to build its own because none of the regular video download services are ready just yet. Since Sony has access to a vast video library, it has been able to make movies and television shows available at 4K.

Still, 70 titles is a drop in the bucket — we are all used to basically getting unlimited access to tens of thousands of videos on Netflix and Amazon. The paucity of content is going to be a challenge for Sony, but Molyneux said Sony has graphics technology built into its devices that can up-convert 1080p images to near-4K, including Blu-ray HD movies. It is hard to judge the quality of the up-converted videos, without spending time looking at those screens.

The Broadband Challenge

The lack of content isn’t the only challenge facing Sony and its download service. 4K movie downloads are big and bulky — about 45-60GB per film. That volume of content is like a whole pig moving through a python. Our broadband networks are puny and imagine the time it will take for a movie to download, not to mention how these downloads are going to impact the bandwidth caps that are being imposed by US broadband providers.

Molyneux acknowledged that, while the fat files are a challenge, new compression technologies such as the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) will help deliver 50 percent more compression (similar quality at half the bit-rate) than the H.264 standard used for video-on-demand. Using a rough yardstick, a 4K movie encoded in H.264 needs about 18-20 Mbps for downloading. HEVC can halve the bandwidth requirement and thus should help with the internet-based distribution of 4K video content, Molyneux said.

Despite, his assurances, for me this is the biggest roadblock for adoption of 4K in the US. Unless Sony figures out a way to work with broadband providers such as Verizon FiOS and Comcast and persuades them to not count the Video Download 4K against customer’s monthly bandwidth caps, the careful planning of Sony will come to a naught.

There are many 4K doubters, especially in Europe. And perhaps that explains why Sony is making a big push in North America.

Sony, which is using compression technology from Palo Alto-based eyeIO, obviously thinks otherwise and believes that it has timed everything right — the bandwidth availability and compression technology are both ready for 4K content and screens. The numbers seems to back Sony — the worldwide shipments of 4K televisions are going to rise from next to nothing this year to over 7 million units over the next three years, according to NPD Display Research.

“People think it is going to take three to four years, but we believe the transition to 4K is going to happen much faster,” said Molyneux. “It is the format for the future.”

It is a bet Sony can’t afford to lose — not again!

Elysium Post Production

Grading and VFX on Elysium - repost from Jonny Elwyn

Personally I really enjoyed District 9, even if I didn’t totally ‘get it’ as a film. (I mean I understood what it was all about, but I wasn’t sure if I totally connected with it.) But I’m incredibly excited to see director Neill Blomkamp’s next effort which looks, in a word, awesome.

Elysium Visual Effects

FXGuide has a fantastically detailed write up on the production and its VFX workflow. The article covers the miniatures, CGI and design work involved in creating the film’s futuristic world both on planet earth and inside the titular Elysium. A brilliant read.

Elysium was shot on RED EPIC cameras by DOP Trent Opaloch using anamorphic lenses (resulting in a resolution of about 3.3K that was then mastered at 4K for release). Filming took place on location in Mexico City and in Vancouver. Interestingly, Muyzers says they used an ACES color pipeline for the production. “Neill could sit in the theater at Image Engine and be confident they would look the same in the theater with an audience. And the same at the DI house – it was a unified color workflow.”

UPDATE: Debra Kaufman has a good interview with VFX house Image Engine and it’s two VFX Supervisors (Associate Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Chapman and overall Production Visual Effects Producer Shawn Walsh) about their work on the film from pre-production to delivering final effects shots.

Walsh points out how this methodology also helped keep Elysium within budget. “Complexity drives cost, and trying to come up with processes that enable a more efficient process or methodology can control costs,” he says. “Using the gray suit actors on set to stand in for droids was similar to what we did in District 9 and Battleship, and it enables us to know a bit more about what the result was going to be. We were able to get buy-in from key parts of the production with the assumption of how we were going to achieve that work, and that enabled us to budget that more aggressively.”

Colour Grading Elysium

The Coloristos have a brilliant hour long audio interview with Andrea Chlebak on how she got started in the business, using Baselight and grading Elysium. It’s a fantastic interview because as colorists they know all the right questions to ask to get into the nitty gritty of working on a visual effects heavy hollywood film.

Below The Line News has a good but short article on Elysium’s colorist Andrea Chlebak and her work on bringing Elyisum to the silver screen with Baselight.

In the final grade, Chlebak used Baselight to create a nuanced color palette between Earth and Elysium. “A lot of the film’s aesthetic was rooted in photography and art direction, so I took cues from those approaches and explored a number of different directions,” Chlebak said. “Using ACES kept all aspects of the production rolling at the same time, allowing us all to really push the process and get a really terrific, seamless result.”

Studio Daily has a much more in depth interview with Andrea and the DI process.

We needed a lot of time because we needed to step away and come back with fresh eyes. Starting early on while they were still cutting, Neill could step away from that environment, where he was looking at dailies color, and come into the DI suite and be in a whole new world where he could take the opportunity to experiment with some looks and further articulate his vision. He called it an honest approach — he wanted the image to feel honest and not like it had been graded. That’s a tricky order. – See more at: http://www.studiodaily.com/2013/07/how-elysiums-4k-di-integrated-editorial-and-vfx/#sthash.Gei335fy.dpuf

XAVC transcoding with Davinci Resolve

nteresting post from hingsberg's blog 
here is the re-post:

Below is a run down on how to use Davinci Resolve to transcode your XAVC footage from the F5 or F55 camera using Davinci Resolve. This might be useful for anyone looking to create “rushes”, dailies, or low res proxy files from the Sony F5 or F55 cameras. (It seems quite odd to call 1080p low res proxy)  :)

Note that you can use the FREE version of Davinci Resolve Lite to open 2k or 4k files with the only limitation being that it can not output higher than HD resolution files. You’d need the full paid version of Davinci Resolve to go higher than HD, but this is still a great option for those looking to wrangle out some files from their Sony MXF files.

Note there are some differences in settings you may like to use depending on the purpose of the output files.

IMPORTING AND CRITICAL SETTINGS

1. Import your MXF files you want to convert in the MEDIA POOL section of Resolve. (Drag from the file explorer area). Once ALL your clips are down below select ALL OF THEM, right click and review the CLIP SETTINGS. Particularly you want to check that the DATA LEVELS are set to 0-1024 instead of AUTOMATIC. Now if these are really only for purpose of DAILIES you can select 64-940. If you shot slog2, 64-940 can remove a bit of that “slog2″ look so directors don’t freak out too much over a “pure” looking slog2 image. If you are GRADING or want to preserve the original slog2 look then definitely chose 0-1024.
2. Click on SETTINGS (lower left) and check that your IMAGE SCALING is setup how you want. If you shot in 4k mode and outputting to HD you will end up with a thin black bar at the top and bottom of your video files if you chose “scale entire image to fit”. For going 4k to HD I usually select “scale full frame with crop” so that the image fills the entire frame. Note however this does chop off some pixels from left and right sides.

1. If you are scaling any footage (ie: 4k to 2k or 4k to HD) under IMAGE SCALING you can select between various filters that will increase/decrease quality or the scale but also increase/decrease rendering times.
2. Also under CAMERA RAW options. If you shot in slog2 + sgamut then select SONY RAW, Decode Quality: Full Resolution, Decode Using: Project, Color Space: sgamut, Gamma:slog2.

OUTPUTING THE FILES

1. Once you are ready to output all your clips select the DELIVERY window in RESOLVE.
2. This took me 532 hours to figure out… to select ALL the CLIPS for your output go down to the timeline and on the timeline BAR right click and select ALL CLIPS. Sadly this took me forever to figure out, and I do mean forever.
3. Now you need to chose your file output settings. For CODEC you might want Quicktime H.264 or Quicktime MPEG which are pretty good and can play on most PC or MAC computers. Otherwise there are various ProRes and Cineform options as well.
4. Note your frame rate setting, compression quality setting, and don’t forget to check the AUDIO box if you want to include SOUND in your output files.
5. IMPORTANT one here: Under “SET TO VIDEO OR DATA LEVEL” you want to select “Normally scaled legal video” if you want 64-940 data levels, or “Uncaled full range data” for 0-1024 levels.
6. If you want all your clips as SEPARATE video files there is a check box for INDIVIDUAL SOURCE CLIPS by the RENDER TIMELINE AS option. For dailies maybe you want one continous file, but I usually keep all of them separate so they can be easily referenced by unique filename if needed.
7.  Select WHERE you want the files to save to. If you don’t pick this you can not start the job.
8. There is a checkbox to keep the original source filename. I recommend this option again so clips can be referenced back to the originals if needed. Also keeping the same file names has benefits if you plan to do any round trip editing wiith 3rd party software and back into Resolve for grading, etc..
9. Once you are done setting up your output job, select ADD JOB.
10. Once you are ready, START the job and wait several minutes to hours to days depending on how many clips you have and how long they are (and how powerful your computer is).