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    Home / Blog / Transcript

    DIGITAL CONVERGENCE EPISODE 112: THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

    February 28, 2013 by Patrick

    DGC112640x360

    In this episode of the Digital Convergence Podcast (#112):

    • planet5d.com acquires Cinema5d forums
    • Is there a problem with long record times on the Canon 5D Mark III
    • Do you have what it takes to put yourself out there as a visual artist?
    • Design by committee = beige?
    • Do you have conviction in your artistic decisions?
    • The perils of people watching over your shoulder as you edit
    • Chris Fenwick does a FCP X demo at SFCutters
    • Listener feedback

    Listen along by clicking here (to download right-click and choose “save link as”)

    Click here to subscribe in iTunes.


    CARL00:00 This is The Digital Convergence Podcast, episode number 112. [music] We’d like to welcome you to another edition of The Digital Convergence Podcast, your talk show about photography, video, and post-production. This is episode number 112, “The Road Less Traveled.”

    MITCH 01:41 Hurray!

    CARL 01:42 Now, the digital convergence team is myself, Carl Olson, Digital Film TV. Also, Mr. Chris Fenwick, of Slice Editorial and ChrisFenwick.com, yay!

    MITCH 01:51 Yay!

    CARL 01:55 And Planet Mitch of planet5d, who’s universe has just gotten bigger, doubled in size.

    MITCH 01:59 Hurray! [laughter]

    CARL 02:03 So, gentlemen. What film or TV-show is today’s mystery theme from?

    MITCH 02:09 Mystery Science 3000.

    CHRIS 02:11 I’m going to guess the theme from Route 66.

    CARL 02:15 You are the winner, and you get to remain on the show. I told Chris he would be fired if he didn’t guess this one. [laughter] So, who wrote the song?

    CHRIS 02:26 Oh boy, that’s…

    MITCH 02:27 Henry Mancini.

    CHRIS 02:28 Yeah, probably something like that.

    CARL 02:30 You think so?

    CHRIS 02:32 Those guys were big back then.

    CARL 02:34 How about Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, who do they have in common? Dean Martin…

    CHRIS 02:43 I didn’t know I had to…

    CARL 02:45 You didn’t have to, but this is a bonus,

    CHRIS 02:49 The whole discography.

    CARL 02:50 Nelson Riddle wrote the song.

    CHRIS 02:53 Nelson Riddle and his orchestra.

    CARL 02:55 Yeah, of course.

    MITCH 02:56 I should have known that one.

    CARL 02:58 Route 66 is just one of those shows that…

    CHRIS 03:02 Not to be confused with Nelson Riley, right?

    CARL 03:05 Is it “Root” 66 or Route 66?

    CHRIS 03:08 If you drive the road, it’s root.

    CARL 03:11 Yeah, okay.

    CHRIS 03:12 If you’ve never been on the road, you say route.

    MITCH 03:16 I think I actually say route.

    CHRIS 03:24 Basically, every place that I stop, they say root, root 66.

    CARL 03:28 Which one were you? Were you Todd or Buzz? You did Route 66, right? Excuse me, “Root” 66.

    CHRIS 03:39 I drove Route 66 and I’ve never seen this show, so I couldn’t tell you who I was.

    MITCH 03:43 I drive it a couple of times a week.

    CARL 03:46 Oh, that’s right, it goes through St. Louis?

    MITCH 03:48 Yes, about a mile south of me.

    CHRIS 03:50 What do they say around your neighborhood?

    MITCH 03:55 Manchester road. [laughter]

    CHRIS 04:00 Do you drive over there for the custard?

    MITCH 04:03 We periodically go see Ted Drewes, yeah.

    CHRIS 04:07 Yeah, the custard’s right on Route 66, correct? Or is it nearby?

    MITCH 4:12 It’s nearby, it’s not right on.

    CHRIS 04:15 It’s one of the approved stops on the tour guide when you drive it.

    CARL 04:20 What car did you drive when you did Route 66, Chris?

    CHRIS 04:23 I drove in a Dodge 300.

    CARL 04:28 Wow. Times have changed, because Buzz and Todd were in a Corvette, right?

    CHRIS 04:36 Well, yeah. That would be a much more fun car. There are people that do that, they rent Convertibles. There’s no way in the world I’m gonna drive thirty-five hundred miles in a Convertible, it’s just ridiculous.

    CARL 04:40 I always did wonder where their luggage was.

    CHRIS 04:54 [chuckles] It’s a small trunk. My goal was to not drive an import car, so as not to offend the heartland of America. But that being said —

    MITCH 05:11 [chuckles] Mr. Political.

    CHRIS 05:16 — the Chrysler 300 looked like a spaceship on that road, by comparison to a lot of the places that we went. We’d pull into town, and people would expect you to have antennas out of your head when you got out of the car.

    CARL 05:28 I’ve never driven the entire Route 66. I have been on portions of it, or I’ve seen the remnants of it.

    CHRIS 05:38 Most people drive by it. You can look out and see patches of concrete on the shoulder. In Missouri, where Mitch lives, a lot of it is the frontage road. It toggles back and forth between the north side and south side of highway 40, is it?

    CHRIS 05:58 44, and so it’s frontage road, but it’s a lot more than that. The history of the road is really fascinating. What is it, this week in Road Rage? You can drive various alignments of it, they call it. In the guide books it will say, “If you want to take the 1923 alignment, you drive down this road, through this parking lot and across this park. Then, when you get to the other side of the park, hang a left and go underneath the overpass. Or, if you would like to drive the 1936 alignment, you’ll have to…” blah, blah, blah. It’s very complicated, and if you want to drive the oldest alignment, it’s really challenging. I mean there’s one point, I can’t remember where we were, but it’s drive down here, make a left on this road, go one point five miles, turn on the dirt road, drive between the cornfields for ten miles. It’s literally wow. And that would be driving the earliest alignment, but it’s a fascinating drive. And if you do it, you absolutely have to do it Chicago, headed west. You don’t go the other way.

    MITCH 07:16 Yeah, right.

    CARL 07:17 So some roads change, some roads stay the same.

    CHRIS 07:22 And some roads are the roads less traveled.

    CARL 07:25 Ah, Robert Frost. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

    MITCH 07:30 When you have your own planet. [laughter]

    CARL 07:36 Oh, well. So your world has certainly converged, hasn’t it?

    MITCH 07:43 Yes. It’s exploded in size and I’m ecstatic. [music]

    CARL 07:54 Why are you ecstatic?

    MITCH 07:56 We talked about this last week, didn’t we?

    CARL 07:58 Of course.

    MITCH 08:00 Yes. Well, let’s talk about it every week. [laughter]

    CARL 08:03 But last week it was just a glimmer. It was a plan, but plans can be laid to waste. [laughter]

    MITCH 08:10 This one certainly was.

    CARL 08:11 Things can go horribly wrong. This is why God has a purpose, but man has a plan, because plans fail. [laughter]

    MITCH 08:24 I’ve never heard that one. That’s good. So now, as of yesterday morning at about 9:00, the Cinema5D forums are now included as a free portion of planet5D.com.

    CARL 08:40 Excellent, excellent.

    MITCH 08:41 We had 36 registrations yesterday, 17 so far today, on top of the 28, 700 people already registered, so things are growing like wildfire. I’m a little tired, if you can’t tell. We’ve been having trouble–

    CARL 08:59 Well, you’ve been working on this quite a bit.

    MITCH 09:00 Yeah, and we had plenty of problems. I had to be up at 2:00AM in the morning, and all that kind of stuff. So I’m a little foggy this morning. Anyway, so they have rebranded Cinema5D. If you happen to have an old link that is like Cinema5D forum thread, those things all still work. But if you go to cinema5d.com, it doesn’t just redirect you to the forums, like you would have hoped, which was a whole debate in terms of contracts. Anyway, there is a link on the top of the page on cinema5d.com that says, “Where are the Forums?” You can click on that and get over to me.

    CARL 09:43 Very good.

    CHRIS 09:44 Got you.

    MITCH 09:46 Long-winded explanation.

    CARL 09:50 Good. What’s happening in video and photography?

    MITCH 09:54 Actually, one of the strange things that I have to admit, is that I don’t know everything. And, where’s your earth-shattering sound? I should have cued you in on that one [chuckles]. Yes, I know, it’s true: I don’t know everything. This has actually been happening to people for a while. [sound effect] That doesn’t do it.

    CARL 10:16 That’s all I got.

    MITCH 10:17 Good try. It turns out that some people are having trouble with their 5D Mark III and I didn’t say, two, I said three, freezing right in the middle of recording a video. And apparently, it’s been going on — I’ve seen some reports as far back as August of last year, which somehow I missed. Okay, that’s where I’m saying I don’t know everything. It’s not, apparently, very widespread, but if you’re recording a wedding ceremony, for example, and suddenly the camera freezes and you lose 12 minutes of video or whatever you’ve been recording, that could be a problem.

    CARL 10:56 So, you’re saying it freezes; it totally locks up and–

    MITCH 11:00 Correct. The only way to fix it is to pull the battery. Yeah, and you pull the battery, then it can’t finish writing the file, and therefore that file is corrupted. Now, if you’ve done 24 minutes, the first 12 minutes is still there, but the last 12-minute file won’t be recorded. Now, I’ve posted the blog on planet5D this morning, a petition to Canon that has recently been inaugurated, to try to get them to recognize this problem. One particular gentleman happens to be able to recreate this problem after 15 to 30 seconds, so it’s not just long, long, super-long clips. This guy’s got a camera that freezes pretty much on demand. I have not personally seen it, it hasn’t happened to me, but there are people who are reporting it and signing the petition.

    CHRIS 12:00 Yeah, we record with a 5D III all the time: we do sit-down interviews, they don’t last an hour, but they will last 20 or 30 minutes. And we do span the clips, and stuff, and I don’t believe I’ve heard anybody complaining about ours.

    MITCH 12:16 Have you ever noticed, Chris, any dropped frames in between those two clips, if it spans?

    CHRIS 12:25 Yeah, I think there’s a couple of frames missing.

    MITCH 12:30 I’ve seen some people report that. My first tests, I could not see any drop frames, but I know some people report that there are.

    CARL 12:38 I’m confused. So how does this manifest itself?

    MITCH 12:42 So on the 5D Mark III and the 1DC and the newer cameras, you can record up to 30 minutes– 29 minutes and 59 seconds. But it still records in four gigabyte files. So if you go, relatively speaking, over 12 minutes, it’s going to span into a new clip.

    CARL 13:06 Right, because the compact flash cards are basically FAT32 files.

    MITCH 13:11 Correct.

    CARL 13:13 So there’s that upper limit.

    MITCH 13:15 What happens is they stop writing one file and start writing another. And as Chris says, some people see a couple of dropped frames in between those two clips, or three clips depending upon how long your thing goes. You have to at least be aware that there is a possibility that there may be a couple of frames drop there.

    CARL 13:40 Maybe this is a case of choosing the right tool for long format recording [chuckles]. Clever idea, right?

    MITCH 13:49 Yes. Well, and that’s what some people have said, too, about this freezing problem, is maybe you shouldn’t be using a DSLR to record long clips of weddings, for example. I’m assuming what’s happening in those situations is, that they’re just putting the camera on a tripod and letting it run for the whole ceremony. I had a story this past week about “The Camera Mater,” which I think is a hilarious name.

    CHRIS 14:22 That’s cool.

    CARL 14:23 What going on with the Camera Mater?

    MITCH 14:25 It’s a little device that you attach to your camera that basically creates a little Wi-Fi zone so that you can control your camera via your iPhone, or iPad, or whatever, so you can do it wirelessly. Now, there are devices that you can do it wired, but this one was going to do it wireless, and big tussle between a group of people – and I’m still a little confused after reading [chuckles] comments and e-mails. But anyway, basically, the developer of the hardware and the developer of the software had a fight. And the developer of the software said, “I’m going to pull this from the app store.” So, now the developer of the hardware has a problem, where they can’t sell the thing, because they don’t have an app in the app store to go with it. So, I just found it fascinating, and it’s kind of a warning for people, that if you’re going to be developing some software or something that works with an iPad, you’d better get your ducks in a row.

    CARL 15:37 This is a mistake that a number of software companies make. There’s nothing wrong using freelancers, coders – I think it’s a great way to do it – but you better establish who owns that IP, and you keep control of the IP. One of the things with the app store is, if you let your freelancers own the account, you’re messed up really bad. A while back, I had an iPhone app developed – I did outsource it – but I did all the provisioning on the iTunes store. They had no access to the store. They don’t have any log in information, nothing. They have no access. All they could give me is was the code. Then I compiled it and provisioned it for the store. That’s the only way you can protect yourself on that stuff.

    MITCH 16:28 That’s right, yeah.

    CARL 16:29 But I don’t know the ends and outs of this particular thing, so I don’t know what happened. I don’t know who owns what and who is contracted to do what. It looks really cool.

    MITCH 16:39 It’s the story of buyer beware there, in terms of software.

    CARL 16:45 I hope they sort it out, sounds like a cool idea, though. I always wanted to have a little bit more remote control wireless tethered or whatever, without having to set up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network. It would be cool if I could do that.

    MITCH 17:00 There is a review of a working unit on planet5D if you want to go watch that I will send you the link.

    CARL 17:06 Very good, I will include it in the show notes. [sound effect]. I love talking about CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro. Check it out on Crumplepop.com.

    CHRIS 17:24 I’ve been using CrumplePop all week.

    CARL 17:26 What have you been using in their vast toolkit?

    CHRIS 17:34 I can’t remember what it’s called. [laughter]

    CARL 17:36 It’s okay, what is it’s–

    MITCH 17:38 It’s spreading! It’s spreading!

    CARL 17:39 What does it do?

    CHRIS 17:42 Let me double check something, and then I’ll tell you.

    MITCH 17:48 I’ve been using the split screen plug-in myself.

    CHRIS 17:51 Yes, that’s the one, that’s the word I was thinking for, the split screen. Yes, I’ve been using it.

    CARL 17:56 Oh, that’s cool. So, that’s pretty easy to set up multiple images in one–

    CHRIS 18:02 Yeah, it is. Let me tell you, I always have these little provisional about why I like things. So, being an Apple developer–

    MITCH 18:11 That’s why I like Chris, you always have those, “why I like you” things.

    CHRIS 18:14 …sometimes, can be difficult, because Apple can be very secretive about what they’re doing. Quite often, they don’t tell people about what’s going to change, and sometimes they’ll pull the digital rug right out from underneath a developer. I think this happened with the split screen thing, and when this happened to me, Mitch, your words started ringing around in my head. Because, I think you had made a comment. You had emailed me or maybe you mentioned it on the show once, where you said the split screen doesn’t roll video or something. Did I hear that from you?

    MITCH 18:56 I had a problem with when they first released Final Cut 10.07 or 6?

    CHRIS 19:05 Right. So this is exactly what I am talking about. So Apple changed something fundamentally in the app, and CrumplePop found that their split screen software was not working as well as it was the day before. And apparently, very quickly they found the workaround, and posted an additional tutorial of how to fix it. And I envisioned those guys going crazy in cubicles over there, trying to figure out how to make it work a little bit easier.
    So there was a little bit of a hoop, a little tiny hoop to jump through, but in no time I was able to find the solution to make it work. Basically what happens is, you put clips in it, and the clips don’t roll, it’s a bunch of freeze frames. So what you have to do is you have to nest those clips, and then put them into the split screen, and then it works wonderfully.

    CARL 19:58 Cool. One of the things we’d like to just remind everyone is that you can get 20% off your orders from CrumplePop. Use the coupon code DCP20.

    MITCH 20:12 That’s awesome!

    CARL 20:14 Yeah. So, thanks. Thanks to everyone at CrumplePop.

    CHRIS 20:16 What if I put in DCP100?

    CARL 20:19 I don’t know what would happen. You would probably be banned and put on the TSA’s no-fly watch-lists.

    CHRIS 20:28 Oh, you’re going to go back there. Okay, fine. Brilliant, bring it, Olsen.

    CARL 20:34 Today’s kind of a funky day. And I apologize to our listeners, because I was sick for about three weeks, and I’m so far behind, I’ll never die, you know that one. My wife has this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, and Calvin is just sitting there just snarling and growling and says, “Oh, God put me on this earth to do so many things, and I’m so far behind, I’ll never die.” And that’s the way I feel. I don’t feel like I’ve treated my listeners fairly this week, because I’ve been really struggling to try to come up with some things that I wanted to share with everyone on the show. But one of the things I thought about is more of a mindset type thing, because that’s what I was struggling with. You know, I hate negativity but I can sink into it very quickly, as this show has already shown. But I do hate it. I just absolutely hate it because it just takes– it just saps the energy out of you. And then–

    MITCH 21:36 I can vouch for that.

    CARL 21:37 One of the things I was thinking about, you did this blog post putting yourself out there. Can you do it? Wow. That’s a good question, because how many of us shoot video or edit video but you don’t see yourself there. I mean, do you put yourself on camera? Can you do it? And yet– then you’ll have these people come out of the woodwork and they’ll criticize everything about you. You’re fat, you’re skinny, you’re short, you’re tall, you’re redheaded, you’re blonde, you can’t talk right, you make silly jokes, you’re stupid or you’re–

    MITCH 22:15 You put lame transitions in.

    CARL 22:20 You put lame– I mean, okay. These guys– people that do that, are they willing to put themselves out there? And I think you asked a really good question. You know, putting yourself out there. How many of us as videographers, editors, whatever, in this visual arts industry will put ourselves out front and center? I mean, that’s what I do with this podcast. I’m terrified. I mean, this is 112 episodes and I have to admit, when I first started this, I was terrified and I still am. I still get nervous doing this. But I’m out there. Who else is doing this?

    CHRIS 22:56 You know, I think this topic can be boiled down, in my opinion, to one word and that’s “conviction.” It doesn’t have to be, you know, do you record your voice and share it with, you know, thousands of people every week. It doesn’t have to be, do you put your mug on camera and put it on your website and share it with people every week. This also boils down to, as an artist– and I’ll use that term, but as an artist, we make decisions all the time about what we are going to share. My friend Ted Wagner, who I’ve mentioned in the past, he takes his doodles off of his desk at the end of the day, photographs them and shares them on a website. That’s one of the things where he shares himself, and I tell you, the guy’s a world-class doodler. It’s amazing.[laughter]
    A colorist, when he sits in a suite, if you’re doing anything other than correcting something – Oops, that’s too blue – but if you’re putting any sort of a design or a look onto something, you have to make a decision. You have to be firm in your convictions and say, Nope, this is the way I like it to look, and you have to put that out there. I had an instance just the other day with somebody, and I was doing some stuff in aperture, and they’re over my shoulder going, “Oh, my god, that’s awful! Are you kidding me? Seriously, you’re going to do that?” And I’ll tell you what I did: I stood up, I walked to the door, I opened it, and I said, “You can leave now.”

    MITCH 24:36 Thank you [chuckles]. Perfect.

    CARL 24:38 I don’t want your input. You are more than welcome to leave. Because, ultimately, that person didn’t have the final say, and although I don’t necessarily have the final say, there’s really only one person above me that’s going to say, “No, don’t do that.” I’m not interested in their input at this point, and I could have gone, “Mm, okay.” I don’t want to design by committee. When you design by committee, everything ends up being beige, because beige has never offended anybody.

    MITCH 25:09 [chuckles] That’s so true.

    CARL 25:11 That’s why PCs were beige up until the iMacs – you know, the blue iMac. And so, sometimes you have to have the conviction to open the door, escort people out, and say, “You know what, I don’t care about your input,” because everybody who did something different had to do it first. If you look at Picasso, or Monet, or different artists that broke the norm and set a trend, or Pollack, or something like that, you’re like, “This guy’s not painting, he’s just splattering paint on the floor.” Okay, but now we’re talking about him in 2013, so he was doing something more than just splattering paint on the floor. I don’t really know, I’m not an art expert, but I do know who Jackson Pollack is.

    CARL 26:04 Well, you’re talking about — I think there’s a book called, The Judgment of Paris, which talks about the Impressionists. They just totally upended the whole worldview of what art is. You know, is it a literal replication of what is seen, or is it an interpretation of light, and emotion, and that sort of thing? It was not well received, initially, at least not by the experts. Here’s the thing: it was the experts, the pros, that fought against Impressionism, but it was the people, the audience, that love the Impressionists.

    MITCH 26:45 Yeah, that’s actually so true about this whole story that started this post of mine.

    CHRIS 26:50 I don’t know the story that we’re talking about.

    MITCH 26:53 Should we tell that story briefly?

    CARL 26:54 Yes, give him the back story, Herb.

    MITCH 26:56 All right. So, last Thursday – it was Thursday evening – it was announced that planet5D was going to be acquiring the Cinema5D forums, and it was announced over on Cinema5D, and then, of course, I posted it over on planet5D. The Cinema 5D forums had a minor eruption of people going, “No, no, you can’t do that do us. This is going to suck, Mitch sucks, planet5D sucks, we don’t want to go over there, we like Sebastian who runs Cinema5D,” and that kind of negativity. And of course, I posted a video along with my announcement on the planet5D side, which shows… quite frankly it was quirky and I thought it was showing some of my emotion, my personal excitement over the move of the forums.

    CARL 27:55 You were just being yourself.

    MITCH Yeah. And, oh, people just railed on me about, “Oh, that’s so unprofessional, you should have read from a script,” and “That’s tacky and disgusting,” were words that were thrown out, and I said, “Look guys, that’s just me. I never said I was a professional, I never claimed to be a video pro-shooting video. If you’ve watched any of my videos, you would’ve known. I’m learning just like everybody else is learning, and I’m putting myself out there as opposed to just doing it behind the scenes.” So that’s what the stem of that article was, that I also posted on planet5D this Wednesday. It’s just a– It was an emotional ramp for me, but I also want people to know that you need to put yourself out there somehow. And not everybody is going to be on-screen and doing what I’m doing, right or wrong. And I’ve gotten quite a few compliments from that. But going back to what Carl just said about the experts. So the new forums went live yesterday morning. It’s been a day. [laughter] God, my brain’s not working. And so far, I’ve had one person say – and this just popped in not too long ago, “I miss the gray of the old cinema5D, but the new form seems robust.” I’ve had no negative out-lash from the people actually using the forum so far. They’re not yelling and screaming like they were over on Cinema5d. And maybe they’re just being polite, and just walking with their feet and not coming back. But I think the vast majority of people are gonna be fine with it. Yes, it’s changed, the colors are different, but the content is still there. That’s what’s important isn’t it?

    CHRIS 30:05 I like the art.

    MITCH 30:08 Change is difficult, I know that. I knew people were going to complain at the beginning, there will be additional complaints to come, I don’t mind that. What I did mind was the personal attacks, I thought that was way over the top, but that’s also what sort of happens when you put yourself out there, right?

    CARL 30:33 So, the question is how do you handle that when that happens, when someone attacks, and these are supposedly our professional peers. [laughter]

    MITCH 30:46 Yeah. Well, I think I’d like to believe that I did the right thing, and that was that I didn’t just go well yeah, you’re an idiot, too. I waited a while, like my wife always suggests. Don’t just fly off the handle, take time, breathe, come up with a considered response… and then go with it. And I respectfully answered appropriate questions, I didn’t respond to people who were just being totally negative, because I never do. I will not take myself down to that level. They can say whatever they want to say but, go ahead Chris.

    CHRIS 31:30 I think another way of looking at this, there is the reactionary stuff and the way people have reacted to the fact that the blog, excuse me, the forms have moved over to your website. But I do think that there’s another way, another facet to this story that’s interesting. You know you have made a brand around, partially around your personality, and partially around being a source of gobs of data about this industry. I think in a broader picture, I’m always fascinated when I’m in a room of decision. makers because quite frankly a lot of decisions are being made in an edit suite. But when you’re in a room full of decision makers it’s always fascinating to see the amount of forethought that goes into the tiniest bit of detail that go into a piece.
    I’ve had people have knock-down arguments sitting behind me, about whether one thing is too casual, or is that too staunch, or is that being too stern, or whatever it is, and a whole edit comes to a screeching halt, while people are sitting behind me, trying to decide whether or not we can use a hand-held shot here, and what is the long-term implications of that is. Oh, no, it’s too casual, I think we need to have a… Oh come on, people, it’s just a nice angle. Can we just drop it in and keep going?
    The point being is, a lot of times we make decisions kind of in an ad hoc way, and we look at it, we go, “Well, I like it.” Okay, that’s fine. Now tell me why you like it. Write me a page about why this is the direction you want to go. And sometimes when you think things out, and when you really follow something down to its natural conclusion, you can go, “Yeah, you know what? I haven’t thought about all of those implications.”
    It’s just interesting; I’ve seen some really interesting discussions in our edit suites, with producers and clients and stuff. And when you think about the long-term implications of decisions, that are seemingly very casual and off the cuff, it’s fascinating to think about how people are going to perceive things. I’ve also done edits where I have had to take the most natural of speech – I’m thinking of “Um,” and pauses. Sometimes people will say, “So, now I would like to talk about – oh, can you take the word so out?” Well, why? Why?

    MITCH 34:44 [chuckles] I say it all the time.

    CHRIS 34:46 Yeah, but I’ve had people sit behind me go, “It’s got to go. Figure out how to get it out,” and it’s like, come on, people. You know, he is a human being. He’s not a robot. He’s not, you know– just let the man talk.

    MITCH 35:00 Right.

    CHRIS 35:01 I mean, can I take the word out? Yes. Are you going to hear the edit? Yeah, you will. Why? Because it’s a diphthong and it’s not a good edit and you should really just let it go. And yet– “Well, no, it’s unprofessional.” Okay.

    MITCH 35:16 Well, one of the things you said a minute ago was the “why” part, which is one of the things that I’m really hoping that I can get people to do in the forums. Because, you can come in and you can say “Gosh, Mitch, your video sucked,” and that’s fine, although I don’t care for those words. I would like you to say it a little bit more politely. But I want people to say why it sucked. Nobody can learn from, “Gosh, that video sucked.” You’ve got to have the “why” part of it. And the same thing is true about the positives. I don’t want people just going, “Great movie, Mitch.” I want to know why it’s great.

    CARL 35:53 I believe what my mother said. If you don’t have anything good to say about anybody, don’t say anything at all. So here’s the way I think would be the gentlemanly, of course, that’s being sexist in itself, but the friendly way to do this would be you look at a film, and perhaps Mitch you’ll ask me, do you have any suggestions about this movie?. I might say, “Well since you asked, I really appreciate what you’ve done here. I can see you’ve really put your heart and soul in this, and your enthusiasm comes out. But, there’s this one little glitch I notice, and it happens to me too, but you might want to address that one little glitch, and I bet you’ll take this thing to the next level. But, I really think what you’re doing is exciting, because you’re out there doing it.” You see what I just did? That’s constructive.

    MITCH 36:55 Absolutely.

    CARL 35:56 To go and say, “Oh that video stinks”. Why even bother to say that? I don’t review stuff that I don’t use. If I don’t use it, why should I say anything about it?

    MITCH 37:07 Right.

    CARL 37:08 Just to say something as terrible is not constructive.

    MITCH 37:14 I agree with the statement, if you don’t have anything nice to say, but what you just did in your example was that you did have something negative to say, but you turned it into a learning situation.

    CARL 37:31 Exactly.

    MITCH 37:33 Being negative to be negative is wrong, and that’s what your mother was trying to get you to do.

    CARL 37:37 I see. That’s right.

    MITCH 37:38 But if you can turn it into an educational session – and I had a couple of people write me personal notes and say, “Well, Mitch, if you did this or that.” That’ good. I appreciate that kind of constructive criticism. It’s the negative, just lashing out at somebody because you think you’re better than him, or you’re jealous of him, or whatever reason you’re lashing out, that’s wrong, and I wish people wouldn’t do it. In fact, I had a personal apology from somebody – I won’t give his name, even though–

    CHRIS 38:09 Was it Bob?

    MITCH 38:10 [chuckles] No.

    CHRIS 38:11 Was it Tim?

    MITCH 38:12 No.

    CHRIS 38:13 Was it Fred?

    MITCH 38:14 But, he turned around and he said, “Although I know you didn’t like what I said, what I said was honest and truthful, and I’m going to continue saying it, because that’s the right way to do it.” I was like, “Oh, man, you just lost me. I am not responding to you ever, ever again.” That’s a totally wrong way to try to get somebody to change.

    CARL 38:39 Yeah, so there’s an attitude that people have, is that, “I’m just going to speak my mind, because that’s the way I am.” Well, there’s a lot of unrestraint out there. You elevate yourself, and you elevate your art by restraint.

    MITCH 38:55 Correct. Exactly true.

    CHRIS 38:57 Well, there is another side to this. Sometimes we do ask people for input, Hey, can I get your input on this before I put it live? if I see something that I see as problematic, and maybe it’s more than just, “I don’t really like that color,” but if somebody’s asking you for your opinion, you don’t want to just go, ” Oh, you know, boy that’s a webpage.” Give me your opinion.

    CARL 39:27 I agree.

    CHRIS 39:28 Now, I will say that I have had multiple occasions in my life when somebody has asked my opinion about something, and I’ll say, “Well, really? Okay: this, this, this, and this,” and those people have never spoken to me again.

    CARL 39:44 Well, you can be assured that hasn’t happened on this show, because this show is better. It’s not perfect, but it’s better because Chris has been kind enough to tell me what I needed to hear.

    CHRIS 39:59 Yeah, absolutely. But you do it in the right forum. Offline, without a client in the room. I mean, go back and listen to some of my old episodes of this podcast– they were horrible.

    CHRIS 40:12 Try the ones that I was on–

    CARL 40:14 And even the one that he was on– that’s when it started turning around, right? [laughter] Oh, wait, wait. So that’s a good, “wrap it all back to the beginning,” where I did the Route 66. See, Chris talked about Route 66 on the first episode that he was on.

    MITCH 40:34 Did he really?

    CARL 40:36 Yeah. That’s why I said he was going to be fired if he didn’t recognize that show tune.

    MITCH 40:41 See, I’ve never seen that show going back to the– I’ve never seen that show.

    CARL 40:46 I think what I want to– just wrap this, close out this topic here about, you know, putting yourself out there. See, all of those– everything that we do– I don’t know. There’s a lot of people out there that are perfectionists. I think the so-called or self-proclaimed pros are sometimes the most opinionated lot there is. I mean, come on.

    We’re opinionated too. I mean, that’s what we do. But, you do have to put yourself out there, and sometimes people don’t do anything, perhaps because they’re afraid of what their peers. Because they’re guilty of doing it, they’re guilty of being so critical that they know that the same is going to happen to them if they put their stuff out there. But I tell you what, if I hadn’t started executing, if I hadn’t started the podcast, if I hadn’t started Reach TV, if I hadn’t started shooting video or whatever – you know, if I hadn’t started doing something, I would not be where I am today.

    MITCH 41:46 Yep.

    CARL 41:47 I would not have not been on the road less traveled, I would’ve just been stuck at the fork.

    CHRIS 41:55 In the parking lot.

    CARL 41:5 Yeah, just sitting there, twiddling my thumbs. I look back at what has been accomplished in the last year, the last two years. Two years ago, I never dreamed I’d be doing this. Two years ago, I never dreamed I’d be talking to the people that I get to talk to, that I’d have the success with the business that I have.

    MITCH 42:18 Yeah, same story, bud.

    CARL 42:19 Oh, more than two and a half years, three years.

    CHRIS 42:26 Time marches on.

    CARL 42:27 Yeah. boy, it does fly, doesn’t it?

    MITCH 42:28 The corollary to that is, don’t wait until something is what you think is perfect before you start putting it out there, if you’re going to do it, because then you’ll never get it done, because it’ll never be perfect.

    CARL 42:41 That’s kind of like– my son sent me this story so it’s a little silly but hey, I liked it. So, he said there was once this young man who in his youth professed a desire to become a great writer. When asked to define great, he said, “I want to write stuff that the whole world will read. Stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level.” And I think Planet Mitch can identify with that. “Stuff that will make them scream, cry, wail, howl in pain, desperation and anger.” Well, he now works for Microsoft writing error messages. [laughter]

    MITCH 43:19 That’s good.

    CARL 44:14 Here’s the thing. A lot of people get really been out of shape over business. The other day I heard somebody that’s in the business, just ranting about they hated business and marketing. Well, guess what, that’s the only way that you’re going to make money.

    MITCH 44:28 That’s right.

    CARL 44:30 You got to understand business, and you got to do marketing. Otherwise, you’re not going to get any work, if you’re in business for yourself. If you’re working for somebody, you’re a corporate stooge somewhere, I guess that’s different. A little different, but if you want to make it in your own business, you’re going to have to learn these things. So, if you spent $24 a month, and it raised your profit, your revenues by 20%. I’m not saying it will, because it depends on how you apply it, but let’s say it did. I mean, would it have paid for itself? Certainly.
    Education is a huge part of my budget. I spend probably more on education than I do on hardware. I don’t know about you guys. Do you do that?
    MITCH 45:19 No.

    CARL 45:20 What do you do for education?

    MITCH 45:21 Sadly, not enough.

    CARL 45:23 Well we need to fix that. [chuckle] Well, you’re educating yourself, because you’re curating, so you’re going through a lot of stuff. Anyway, check out Kre8insight.com- $24 a month or $197 a year, it’s a little less, but it’s money that will help you make money, if you apply what’s said there. So anyway, check them out. By the way, they’ve got a great new podcast series that I think’s pretty cool. It’s called The Expert Interrogations. I love that name. I wish I’d thought of it.

    MITCH 45:58 I’m going to be on that.

    CARL 45:59 You’re going to be on Expert Interrogations?

    MITCH 46:02 I am. I don’t know when yet. We haven’t set a date, but those guys are doing some great stuff. I really enjoy it.

    CARL 46:10 They had James Wedmore the other day. He is the YouTube traffic guru. This guy’s really done a great job teaching people how to do YouTube.

    MITCH 46:25 I can go back and listen to those, right?

    CARL 46:27 Yeah. They are all archived, so you can go back and listen to the replay. Of course, it does remind me. I know during that show I was watching it and I was participating in the chat room. There was a guy that came in there and I could tell he is this middle-aged guy because everything– just goes in there and he’s talking about for 30 years– 32 years he did this and that, and then, “This is stupid.” He got booted from the show because that guy was just full of negativity.

    MITCH 46:56 Good for them.

    CARL 46:57 Yeah. But don’t become an angry white man that’s in his 50s. It just is not a pretty picture. It’s not pretty being in your 50s anyway, so don’t– Just don’t scowl, man. Just change. Everybody wants the world to stay the same, and it doesn’t. It changes, and it’s good and it’s fun if you allow it to be that way. Oh well, I went off on a rant there.

    MITCH 47:24 Really?

    CARL 47:25 Did I do that?

    CHRIS 47:26 Don’t be so angry, Carl.

    CARL 47:27 I’m an angry young man, yeah. [music] Speaking of negativity…

    MITCH 47:39 Uh, oh. Somebody write–

    CARL 47:40 Yeah. You know that– I think there’s this famous author by the name of John Grisham?

    MITCH 47:45 Yeah. Yeah.

    CARL 47:46 Yeah. He got upset at our podcast last–

    MITCH 47:50 Did he really? He wrote to us?

    CARL 47:51 Yeah. “Okay, guys. I’ve had it with the constant confusion between me, John Grisham, multi-gazillionaire award-winning author and John Grimpson, national-based video hack. Tired of it, I tell you.” Signed, John Grisham. [laughter]

    MITCH 48:06 Nice of him to write.

    CARL 48:08 Yeah, but John Grimpson was nice enough to write in. He says “Hey, guys. Nice to hear the shout-out on your show. If you ever hit a slow patch for guests, keep me in mind. Love it.” Hey, we might just take you up on that. Grimpson Video on vimeo.com. Oh my goodness. Now, I want– Mitch, take a listen to– hey, Chris, you listen to it too, but use a little restraint, okay?

    CHRIS 48:37 I’m listening.

    CARL 48:38 Just use a little restraint as you hear this, okay?

    CHRIS 48:39 Whatever.

    ERIC 48:41 Alright. Hey, guys. This is Eric with a Cam calling to report that I went to the SF Cutters meeting last night and they had some really good demonstrations, but the best of all was Chris Fenwick’s showing of the Final Cut Pro 10. He did an amazing job. He captivated the whole audience so props to you Chris and Carl, you should be very proud of him. Thanks, bye.”

    MITCH 49:07 Oh, that’s so sweet.

    CARL 49:08 Oh, man. We are proud of Chris. Chris, tell us about this.

    CHRIS 49:12 Actually, it went really well. You know, I will admit– first of all, Eric, you should have come up and said hi. You know, we’ve talked– we’ve talked about you. I’ve said how much I dig your screen name and everything. You should have come up and said hi. I would have liked to have met you. It went really well. I will admit I was nervous going into it because I was doing–

    MITCH 49:30 What?!

    CARL 49:31 I was doing something that you should never do when you’re doing a demo. And I was kind of doing a demo. I wasn’t a paid, you know, Apple representative, but my goal in doing the talk was to basically just have people get off their high horse and give Final Cut 10 another looksee. So, you know, typically when you do a Software demo, you will kind of like a cooking show, you always have as we say, one in the oven. [laughter]
    I’m going to demo how to do something, but I’ve already done it, and I have another file standing by. So, if something were to happen, I could say well, I don’t know what happened, but here, let me show you what it should’ve looked like. Back in the days when Mr. Jobs would be onstage, he always had people back stage with an A, B switch, and they could flick over his computer to a whole other computer that was not crashing. So, if he ever had problems.
    But I think one of the best software demos I’ve ever seen was when Steve Jobs demonstrated iMovie for the first time. Where he took a DV camera, stood up, shot the audience, went back to his computer, plugged it in, captured footage that he had just shot, and dropped it into a timeline, because that’s really putting your foot out there. And back in those days, that was actually kind of hard to do. But what I did is I actually cut a thirty second promotion for SF Cutters and I did it with footage that I had never looked at before.
    Because our friend, Eric Goodfield, who was on the show a few months ago, he actually came with me and shot a bunch of B-roll for me, and as I sat down to do my demo, he handed me the card. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve never looked at this footage. Let’s go.” And I did not have one in the oven, but the thing went really well. I had good feedback that night. The next morning, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine who actually works at Apple, and he said, “Hey, I hear you did a really good job last night. I sent one of my spies to watch you.” Thank you for not telling me ahead of time.[laughter]
    As a result from that – and this is a “I’m going to offer this up to our listeners” – as a result from that, and I think I can say this because he didn’t tell me I couldn’t say this. In a few weeks, when I have some spare time, I’m actually going to go down to Apple, and they have asked me to come in and talk with the Final Cut Ten team.

    MITCH 52:19 Oh, wow.

    CARL 52:20 That is awesome, to give some input on what I think– you know, how I think things are going and I want to offer this out to the DCP listeners. Send me your comments and feedback. I think what I might do– I don’t know how to do that. I think what I might do is I might put a post on my blog, chrisfenwick.com, saying– I’m not going to specifically say Apple has invited me. I’m not going to do that because I don’t want to– more than just our listeners to really know all the details. But it will be– you will know which post it is and I want to open it up to people to send comments in the comment field and say, you know, “I would like to hear– I would like to see something like this in subsequent upcoming versions”. And again, I might–be going completely off the rails by talking about this publicly. Yeah, you’re messed up now. But hey, here’s mine. It’s a very tiny thing, okay? It’s very tiny, you know, and it’s inspired by your sparse disc tutorial.

    CHRIS 53:31 Oh, I have something to say about that too. Go ahead.

    CARL 53:36 Yeah. Well, see, I would– I think Final Cut Pro 10 could really use a tweak on their media management, make it a little bit easier for us so that we don’t have to do the sparse disc, or maybe even encapsulate the projects as we think of projects – not the way they think of projects, but the way we think of projects, which is taking all our assets and our edited media together. I think that would broaden acceptance among a lot more people than it currently does.

    CHRIS 54:04 Yeah. I will say, in the conversations that I can’t say I’ve had, that a whole lot of thought has gone into the way media management is done, and I don’t want to — I will say that Apple does not do anything without a ton of forethought, and I think that the – I’m being very careful to not say the wrong thing – I think that the way things are done is the best for most people. I’m just going to say it like that. That does mean– you know, I have spoken about the concept of the lunatic fringe on many occasions on our show here, and sometimes we find ourselves on the lunatic fringe. And if you haven’t heard me talk about this, it’s the concept of the bell curve.

    CARL 55:12 Yeah.

    CHRIS 55:13 You know, the– 80% of the people are in the middle and you have 10% at the top and 10% at the bottom. And I think professionals are easily in that top 10%. And you have to remember that Apple is a very widely used company. A lot of people use Apple stuff and they don’t design purely for the top 10%, professional.

    CARL 55:37 And I understand that. I get that.

    CHRIS 55:38 Yeah.

    CHRIS 55:39 But I will say– what I’d like to say about the sparse disc is in conversations that I have had, that Apple I think, is very close to officially blessing or sanctioning the workflow of using the sparse disc. What you do have to know about using sparse disc is that it can be very RAM intensive, so if you don’t have a lot of RAM in your machine, you might experience a performance hit.

    MITCH 56:14 That’s a good point.

    CHRIS 56:15 But I will also say that the performance of Final Cut 10 is really spectacular, and so you can actually take a little performance hit, and still have a well-functioning machine. Friends of mine have, and I won’t say who it was, because it would get him in trouble, but one friend of mine described the Final Cut 10 user interface as very slippery. That’s a good comment, when you shuttle through it, it just whips through it, it whips through your media. So he calls that, and he goes, “Oh that’s really slippery”. I thought that was a great term. But anyway, the talk went really well, and a lot of people came up to me and said, “Mm, yeah boy, I had totally written it off, I’m going to give it a try.” I’ve heard multiple comments of people saying, “Yeah, I’m going to give it another try.”

    CARL 57:12 I just saw a tweet by Rodney Charters this morning, he says he’s cutting a project on Final Cut Pro 10.

    CHRIS 57:19 Is he really?

    CARL 57:20 Yeah.

    CARL 57:21 Rodney Charters, Dallas. The Dallas Real Good guy. We may have to reach out to him and ask him about his experience with that.

    MITCH 57:31 Is he still on Dallas? I thought he left.

    CARL 57:32 Oh, I don’t know, I assumed he was…

    CHRIS 57:36 Yeah, so I hope I haven’t said too much, but I will say that Apple is indeed reaching out. I think a lot of times, and I have been very accusatory of them being in a golden palace with high walls, where they never listen to the commoners outside the gates. But they do. They reach out selectively, and I think they seemed interested in hearing what I had to say. And as soon as I get a couple of days off, I’m going to go down and meet with the product manager and some of the other people on the Final Cut Pro 10 team. So I’m looking forward to that. Can I give a cool little tip?

    CARL 58:16 Sure.

    CHRIS 58:17 It’s kind of visual, but it’s a…

    CARL 58:21 I tell you what. Before you do I need to do a sound effect.

    MITCH 58:30 I sent the camera back, by the way, so can’t do the sound effect.

    CHRIS 58:37 I thought we recorded it.

    CARL 58:38 We recorded it. I just didn’t have time to set up the sound. We’re falling apart professionally here

    CARL 59:53 Well, it’s your tip for Final Cut Pro 10.

    CHRIS 59:54 Oh. So it’s kind of a neat look. Sometimes when you’re shooting B roll, you want something to just have a little bit more of a– you know, kind of a smooth look to it. A little bit– you know, you don’t want to go, like, 50% slo-mo but you just want to sort of take the edge off it, you know?
    Somebody’s walking down a path and there’s just a little bit of slo-mo. Even with cameras that don’t shoot, you know, 220 frames per second or 120 frames per second, you can actually– on the 5D3’s, you know, you can record at 30p and you take that into your 20– 23-98 timeline. You drop that clip in. Now, when you do, it’s going to play back very poorly. But under the right-hand side, there’s a little icon in the center bar that looks like a little crescent with an arrow, I think. I don’t have the user interface launched. Maybe I should launch it. And–

    CARL 01:00:57 Yeah but I don’t want you to crush my– you know, crash my whole system here.

    CHRIS 01:00:58 Yeah, but what does it look like? It’s a little crescent with say. Looks like a little knob but anyway, when you pull that thing down, there’s a selection– I think it’s the re-time icon, actually. There’s a menu selection called ‘conform footage’, I think?

    MITCH 01:01:19 Yes.

    CHRIS 01:01:20 Okay. Click on– so you click on your 30 frame per second clip, hit ‘conform footage’ or ‘conform clip’ and what it will do is it will take those 30 frames and stretch it out 80%, and it’ll actually play all of those 30 frames per second but only one per 29 nine– so basically it stretches it out. So you take your 30 frames, you stretch it out to 24 frames and it’s basically like putting an 80% slow Motion or something.
    And it just has a really smooth, kind of slick, sexy look to it. And it’s not like a whole bunch of slo-mo and you don’t have to do a bunch of frame interpolating and frame blending, so it doesn’t slow things down. And it’s just a very cool feature that I figured out the other day. I found a post about it and it’s very cool.

    CARL 01:02:13 I think I detect a new tutorial coming up soon. [chuckle]

    CHRIS 01:02:17 Maybe. Yeah, maybe I should do that while I’m editing.

    CARL 01:02:17 Well, guys, I’m going to have to start wrapping this up, because I’m going to be doing a good bit of traveling this afternoon. I’ve got to go to Noonan, Georgia, and then I’m going to go all the way back up to Atlanta, try to make it to the Atlanta Cutters. I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I can’t believe I’m saying that – I’m going to try. I’m going to try very hard to make it to Atlanta Cutters tonight, but I’ll probably be late.

    CHRIS 01:02:45 I have one little pick of the week type thing that I really want to encourage people to take a look at. There is an app on the iPhone called “Vine”.

    CARL 01:0300 I knew you were going to say that.

    CHRIS 01:03:04 It is– we were talking about putting yourself out there, and don’t wait until everything is perfect, and sometimes you’ve just got to publish, and Vine is a mini filmmaker’s tool. Basically, what you do is you launch the app. I will say you might want to be careful because there is some inappropriate stuff on Vine, if you look hard enough for it, I haven’t seen it yet. But you launch the app, you launch the camera portion of it; it basically takes sort of a little Instagram square aspect ratio video. And what you get is you get six seconds to record video. However, it only records when your finger is on the screen. So you can shoot one six-second shot or you could do six one-second shots.
    But basically, it’ll– if you work at it, you get to tell a whole story that’s going to playback eventually in a little looping gif, I think it is. And so you do your wide-shot. You come in for a two-shot. You do the close-up. You do the reaction shot. And boom, your movie’s over. And it just takes the audio– it’s coming as you’re shooting, so you don’t have continuous audio under your clips. And some of the pieces are…you know Vine, you see some weird stuff. But I was at this event here in Santa Barbara this weekend or this week, and they were having a big Mexican siesta fiesta party of a themed party last night. And I took a whole bunch of these little vines at it and had a whole lot of fun.
    So check it out, it’s a fun way, you have to shoot it, and essentially you’re cutting it while you’re shooting it, because you don’t get to edit it at all, and then the next thing you do is, you click Send or Done. I can’t remember what it’s called, and all of the sudden your little six-second movie is published for the world. So if you’re having a hard time actually completing [laughter] a project, I’d say scale down and try a vine project for…

    MITCH 01:05:13 Six seconds, yeah.

    CARL 01:05:15 Little six second movies.

    MITCH 01:05:16 I can do that.

    CARL 01:05:18 I’ll have to give it a try. I haven’t tried it yet. Mitch, did you have a pick?

    MITCH 01:05:21 Actually I… Something just came into my email during the show, which is rather shocking, isn’t it?

    CARL 01:05:25 Yeah.

    CHRIS 01:05:27 Breaking news.

    MITCH 01:05:28 It’s a brand new little product and it’s called the XD5. It’s fascinating to me, because I’ve never seen something like this. But you know the shell that’s around the GoPro? You know the clear thing? Somebody’s invented that same thing for the iPhone. And, it’s waterproof, drop-proof, you still have access to the screen, so it’s got touch-screen capabilities. And it looks really cool.
    One hundred and twenty-nine dollars. [chuckle] for a case, but it looks pretty impressive. If you want to use the iPhone to make videos and whatever you would use the GoPro for, here is a chance to use the iPhone for.

    CHRIS 01:06:25 Is it waterproof?

    MITCH 01:06:25 Yeah. It’s waterproof down to fifteen feet.

    CARL 01:06:30 Gentlemen, I’ve enjoy chatting with you today despite all of our negativity. Hey, we took it up a notch didn’t we?

    CHRIS 01:06:40 I’m just trying to… never mind.

    CARL 01:06:42 Yeah, yeah, it’s always good to talk with you guys. So you can find Planet Mitch in his universe that has been doubled in size at…

    MITCH 01:06:54 planet5D.com and forums.planet5D.com

    CARL 01:06:58 Excelente. Mr. Chris Fenwick.

    CHRIS 01:07:00 You need to have something about the Planet-fied D black hole where you are sucking in the rest of the universe [laughter]. Chris Fenwick.com. I will post something later the day that which means that it should be up before you get this. But basically, I’d love to hear your Final Cut Pro wish list.

    CARL 01:07:19 Excellent. Very nice.

    CHRIS 01:07:20 That’s what it’ll be called. It’ll be called the Final Cut Pro 10 wish list.

    CARL 01:07:23 Excellent.

    CHRIS 01:07:24 And those things will get inside the loop.

    CARL 01:07:25 Excellent, and you can find me at Digital Film.TV and on Twitter as the Carl Olson. You might see me at Atlanta Cutters if all goes well. I hope I make it there, because it’s been a long time since I’ve been to one. This is a first one for the year.

    MITCH 01:08:28 Amen!

    CARL 01:08:30 Yeah, well double the show, one person at a time, right? Very good. Keep sending in your questions and your feedback. We’ll eventually get to them in a future episode where we do questions, the Question and Answer show. So we’re looking forward to that. Well gentlemen, I think that’s everything. So I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to fire up my powder blue Corvette and take a road trip on Route 66.

    CHRIS 01:08:59 No, you’re not. You don’t live anywhere near Route 66.

    CARL 01:09:06 I’ll have to take a– I’ll just have to get in my car and drive wherever it is.

    MITCH 01:09:11 When you come through St. Louis, stop by my house.

    CARL 01:09:14 Hey, it’s the road less traveled, right?

    Filed Under: FCP 6/7, FCP X Tagged With: Canon, Canon 5d Mk III, Coloring, criticism, Dale Grahn, design, Digital Convergence Podcast, FCPX, Podcast, tips, Transcript, Tricks, Vine

    Digital Convergence Episode 109: Color My World With Dale Grahn

    February 6, 2013 by DConvergence

    DGP109

    Dale Grahn’s resume as a color timer is impressive. He’s worked extensively with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. He must have one of the longest list of films under one name in the IMDB database! Dale talks about the craft of color timing feature films. We get the inside scoop on how he helped develop the bleach bypass look of Saving Private Ryan. Dale is the grand master of color for feature films and broadcast television series. He’s the guy, as Chris Fenwick says, you want to watch over their shoulder as they perform their craft. Dale talks about his new iPad app that helps you learn the basics of color grading. The app has several video tutorials with Dale Grahn explaining how to produce different looks. Then you get the opportunity to try to match what he does. The game-like approach is a great teaching aid.

    Dale was very gracious to talk with us and also very patient. We had the worst Skype related technical issues ever in the history recording the DCP! Yikes! Thanks to Chris’ editing prowess we lobotomized the gremlins.

    Listen along by clicking here (to download right-click and choose “save link as”)
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    CARL 00:12 Today is Wednesday, February 6, 2013. We would like to welcome you to another edition of The Digital Convergence Podcast, the number one talk show about photography, video, and post-production. This is Episode Number 109, “Color My World.” The Digital Convergence Podcast is sponsored by the following: CrumplePop, [sound effect] film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro.

    MITCH 01:31 Yay.

     

    CARL 01:32 It’s pretty cool. I think we’ve come of age. People want to sponsor our podcast and we’re very grateful.

     

    MITCH 01:39 Ah, it’s so nice to be rich.

     

    CARL 01:40 Yeah, right. We define wealth in terms of time and the experiences that we have.

     

    MITCH 01:49 That’s right.

     

    CARL 01:51 Because the dollars sure aren’t coming in. Alright, my name is Carl Olson, I’m with Digital Film TV, and I’m here with my cohorts and colleagues, Mr. Chris Fenwick of Slice Editorial and chrisfenwick.com.

     

    CHRIS 02:02 In the morning to you.

     

    CARL 02:05 Hailing from the west coast. Then the home of the Golden Gateway, is it called the Golden Gateway?

     

    MITCH 02:12 No, Gateway to the West.

     

    CARL 02:13 Gateway to the West. I keep thinking of McDonald’s.

     

    CHRIS 02:16 I’m the guy with the Golden Gate. [laughter]

     

    MITCH 02:20 We’ve only got one arch, not two.

     

    CARL 02:23 They ran out of money. Planet Mitch of planet5D.com.

     

    MITCH 02:28 And soon to be a new football stadium, but that’s a whole other story.

     

    CARL 02:31 Then I have one more guest. Now, I Tweeted a question this morning. I said, “What do the films Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, The Lion King, Die Hard, and The Legend of Bagger Vance all have in common?”

     

    CHRIS 02:47 Dale Grahn.

     

    CARL 02:48 Dale Grahn.

     

    MITCH 02:50 Yeah.

     

    CARL 02:51 Dale, welcome aboard.

     

    DALE 02:53 Hello.

     

    CARL 02:55 We’re glad to have you here. I hope you haven’t started regretting being with us.

     

    CHRIS 03:00 He’s having second thoughts.

     

    DALE 03:02 No, not yet.

     

    CARL 03:04 Seriously, we’re glad to have you here. Dale is going to be talking a lot about color today. Chris and I, earlier, we were looking at the IMDB database

     

    CHRIS 03:17 It’s really a shame you haven’t done more work, Dale.

     

    DALE 03:20 Well, you know, I’m a little lazy.

     

    CARL 03:23 Oh, my word!

     

    CHRIS 03:24 The who’s who of, actually, some of my favorite movies.

     

    CARL 03:27 Like what?

     

    CHRIS 03:39 I think one of my favorite movies, but worse DVDs because they made it wrong, was The American President. But then there’s other ones like A.I., which are so rich visually and Minority Report, which has such a broad spectrum of looks and acts and scenes to it. They are really gorgeous, gorgeous movies.

     

    DALE 03:52 Thank you.

     

    CHRIS 03:55 Then Apocalypse Now, good night!

     

    MITCH 03:59 Hannibal? Miss Congeniality? There’s so many names on this list.

     

    CARL 04:04 Oh, I missed that one. Miss Congeniality? Wow. Sandra Bullock. Coming up in this episode, after the news from Mr. Planet Mitch in just a minute, like I mentioned we’re going to talk about color. What can we learn from the founding fathers of color grading and color timing in today’s digital world? Then we’ll have some product picks. We’ve got some great, short movies we want to talk about today, if time permits, and much, much more.

     

    MITCH 04:36 First, his mouth shut.

     

    CARL 04:44 Everybody know what time it is?

     

    CHRIS 04:47 It’s time for a sound effect.

     

    MITCH 04:48 It’s news time.

     

    CARL 04:49 Yeah, it’s news time.

     

    MITCH 04:51 Time for sound effects? [laughter]

     

    CARL 04:53 From the planet5D news room, what is happening in the world of video and photographer, Mr. Mitch?

     

    MITCH 04:58 I think I have my giggle box on today. That’s bad. One of my sponsors over at planet5D, whom I don’t think I’ve talked about very much, is the good folks at LockCircle. They have announced a new set of…and it’s really sort of hard to describe. They’re not new lenses, they’re old lenses from Zeiss, but they’ve got a package where you can take Zeiss photography lenses, the ZF.2 line, and they mod them. They’ve got one set of mods now for Canon EF mounts. They’ve just announced this new set of mods for Nikon F-Mounts. If you have Zeiss photography lenses, and maybe many of our listeners do, you can now mount those as CineStyle lenses to make movies on your Nikon. Which I think is pretty cool.

     

    CARL 06:01 How much is it?

     

    MITCH 06:03 They didn’t give me a price, they just announced them and they should be available in three or four weeks. They haven’t even updated their website yet, so I don’t have any pricing on that. Basically, you send them your Zeiss ZF.2 lens and they de-click them, they put on some fancy, new focus ring kind of things, they put some new markings on them, and they put a new mount. So, it’s not even an adapter, they actually change the mount on the back of the lens so that it fits your Nikon. That’s pretty cool stuff.

     

    CARL 06:43 You said Nikon, would it also do Canon? Did you mention Canon?

     

    MITCH 06:46 They had previously released a Canon EF mount, same product. But now they’re doing Nikons.

     

    CARL 06:51 Oh, okay. Very nice.

     

    MITCH 06:53 They’ve got all sorts of products over there if you want to check them out over at Lockcircle.com.

    CHRIS 06:58 Somehow the phrase, “void your warranty” comes to mind. [laughter]

     

    MITCH 07:03 Actually, I don’t think they do, because last year at NAB, Lockcircle was actually in the Zeiss booth. I believe they’ve got sort of an arrangement going on there. I don’t know the details, but if it was a fly-by-night thing, you would not…

     

    CHRIS 07:18 I’m not saying it voids your warranty, I’m just saying that phrase comes to mind.

     

    MITCH 07:23 Are you guys hearing that crackle and static?

     

    CARL 07:25 Yeah, I don’t know where that’s coming from.

     

     

    CHRIS 07:27 Am I crackling?

     

    MITCH 07:29 That’s a whole other story. Also, I’m hearing that GH3 from Panasonic is finally showing up in many stores at this point. They’ve been very hard to find, I hope that’s coming of news. I thought this was interesting, we were talking about 4K cameras a couple of weeks ago, and how we don’t know where…consumers won’t be using them.

     

    I found this article over on NoFilm School that actually appeared during the Super Bowl, where CBS was using 4K cameras on many spots of the field, clearly to be able to zoom in on situations like if there was a close call or somebody fumbled. They would take the 4K footage and be able to zoom in and of course, down-res it to 1080 or 720 or whatever they’re broadcasting. But I thought I’d mention that, purely for the fact that it’s one more way of using 4K, and still only putting out what we’re traditionally using as HD.

     

    CHRIS 08:41 That’s amazing that they can do that in a live situation, interesting.

     

    MITCH 08:48 Somebody steps on the sidelines…and they’ve always had kind of fuzzy views, and everybody kind of guessed whether they stepped on the line. Well, if you can zoom in on 4K footage, theoretically you’ll have more resolution and be able to know better.

     

    CARL 09:04 That’s a technique, and I’ve mentioned it before on the show, that I shoot with a Canon 5D and I’m using, a lot of times, just one camera and it’s a talking head. I can do jump cuts and things like that, where I move in closer or back without having to do multiple takes. Because everything I do is at 720p for the Reets.TV product that I do.

     

    CHRIS 09:32 Yeah, we do that all the time, too. We shoot at 1080 and post at 720 so we can reframe.

     

    CARL 09:38 That static sounds like it’s on your side, Chris.

     

    CHRIS 09:41 Really?

     

    CARL 09:43 Yeah, every time you talk.

     

    MITCH 09:45 It wasn’t there in pre-show, so I’m wondering where it came from.

     

    CHRIS 09:48 I’ll be back. You guys keep talking, I’m listening.

     

    CARL 09:53 Alright. What else do you have for us today, Mr. Planet Mitch?

     

    MITCH 09:57 You’re going to have to remind me, did I talk about the SmartLav from Rode last week?

     

    CARL 10:02 You did a little bit, because you had been out at…

     

    MITCH 10:06 I know when we had…

     

    CARL 10:08 …Los Angeles.

     

    MITCH 10:09 …at the show last week, the website was not available. They hadn’t really actually announced the SmartLav yet. Just to let you know that SmartLav.com is the place you can go to find out about that $60 LavMic that plugs right into your iPhone. I’ve been using it on several of my recordings recently, and it’s so simple and easy to use your iPhone to be recording things. I connect with my iPhone to Dropbox, so when I get back to my computer the recordings are there. It’s very simple. If you were curious about it last week, the website’s available now – SmartLav.com.

     

    CARL 10:52 SmartLav.com. Very good. Stu Maschwitz did a blog post on the Rode SmartLav, seems to be a fan.

     

    MITCH 11:03 Yeah, he does.

     

    CHRIS 11:04 I think he might have stirred up a little bit of controversy among some people about this, but I think this is moving in the right direction. The iPhone and the Android devices are just so cool as being tools for film making.

     

    MITCH 11:23 Yep, that’s all I have.

     

    CHRIS 11:24 That was a great news segment, what’s next? [laughter]

     

    CARL 11:30 Wait, wait, wait.

     

    MITCH 11:32 Chris, you got your backup on?

     

    CHRIS 11:34 I recorded all the troubleshooting, are you kidding? I’m going to release this as a special show.

     

    CARL 11:41 Man, that’s blackmail money. I take back all those mean things I said about you, Chris. There is one other news item I wanted to discuss. Did you guys see the new iPad app called Pro Cut X for Final Cut Pro 10?

     

    CHRIS 11:57 I did.

     

    CARL 11:59 What do you think?

     

    CHRIS 12:00 I’m a touch typist so I operate my edit system from my keyboard, and typing or doing something on an iPad where you don’t have the positive reinforcement of the button under your finger, I don’t see that thing as a benefit. Everything it does, I can do from the keyboard anyway. I’m not impressed. It might be neat if you want to lean back and put that thing on your lap.

     

    MITCH 12:33 Edit from a…

     

    CHRIS 12:35 Prone position.

     

    MITCH 12:36 We have photos of you with your feet up on the desk, don’t we?

     

    CHRIS 12:39 Yeah, but my keyboard cable is long enough, I can take it with me.

     

    CARL 12:47 I think that’s some of the complaints on FCP.CO. They have an article on this, that Planet Mitch was kind enough to forward to me this morning. I think basically all this thing does, while it’s very beautiful, it looks like it just sends keyboard shortcuts to the application.

     

    CHRIS 13:06 Yeah, it’s very cool.

     

    CARL 13:07 And so there’s latency with that.

     

    CHRIS 13:09 Yeah, latency is bad.

    CARL 13:12 I like keyboard shortcuts, too, because that speeds things up. So, if there’s going to be latency and I’m going to press a button on that…I don’t want to short circuit this out real soon, because I know these guys have put a lot of work into it. It’s a very beautiful app. I have been intrigued with the idea of having touch surfaces for controls. Hopefully, what we’re going to see, as this becomes more refined, that it becomes a good interface tool. Because there are external hardware tools for editing and color like the TangentWave and so forth.

     

    MITCH 13:48 I don’t see it as something for a high-end person like Chris. My wife has been helping me out and doing some editing recently. She’s not the biggest fan of keyboard shortcuts, which drives me crazy but that’s a whole other story. I can envision somebody who’s just trying to learn Final Cut or somebody who’s not a hardcore keyboard user using this app quite successfully. It may not be for everybody.

     

    CHRIS 14:19 People love their iPads and they love touching that thing, so if it reduces a barrier to make you feel more comfortable with it, then surely it’s a good thing.

    MITCH 14:28 Absolutely.

     

    CHRIS 14:29 I just like my keyboard. I’ve got 88 keys on it or whatever, 102 keys on it and I know what they all do. I am actually quite comfortable with what I have.

     

    CARL 14:40 It’s something worth watching. Very, very, very, very good.

     

    MITCH 14:46 Great news segment. [music]

     

    CARL 14:51 It’s now time to talk about our sponsors and podcast friends at CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro. You can find them at CrumplePop.com. Cool, cool, cool effects. I use them every single day that I edit, when I edit. Does that make sense? So, every time I’m in Final Cut somehow or another, CrumplePop finds its way into my edit.

     

    CHRIS 15:20 And into your heart.

     

    CARL 15:22 They went into my heart a long time ago. I love their stuff. I still have some old, legacy Final Cut Pro 7 projects, and I even use some of their old Final Cut Pro 7 plug-ins like Lower Thirds and that sort of thing, because I am so embedded in that. I love the look, I love the feel and love the support that you get there, they’re very accessible. All our DPC listeners, they can get a 20% discount on all CrumplePop products. All you have to do when you checkout, you pick your favorite plug-ins, load your cart up full, just buy everything, okay? Just put everything in the cart. To start off with something, Retrograde would be a good one to start off with.

     

    CHRIS 16:12   I love Retrograde.

     

    CARL 16:15 It is cool. I like [inaudible] 35. I use that a lot. Anyway, use the coupon code DCP20, 20% discount off already reasonably-priced plug-ins.

     

    MITCH 16:36 I have to say again, the support over there is phenomenal. I don’t know if it’s just because they love me or what, but I had a problem with one of the plug-ins when I was editing 4K footage. They responded with a fix within a day or two.

     

    CARL 16:50 Wow. That’s awesome. Speaking of CrumplePop, that’s how we came to know…[music] Mr. Dale Grahn. [laughter] Hey, Dale. You still with us?

     

    DALE 17:07 Yes, I am.

     

    CARL 17:10 We’ve had a rough Skype-y morning this morning.

     

    MITCH 17:14 Which the users know pretty much nothing about, it’s all edited out.

     

    CHRIS 17:17 We’re going to cut out 12 minutes of troubleshooting.

     

    DALE 17:20 Sounds great.

     

    CARL 17:22 Then we’re going to sell that as premium products. [laughter] Patrick Inhofer in his Tao of Color Newsletter, he said this about the app that CrumplePop and you had collaborated on, I’ll just read it verbatim, “Be a color timer. Dale Grahn Color App, Dale Grahn himself will teach you his techniques and you will be able to practice them by trying to recreate the famous looks of Private Ryan, Gladiator, or Minority Report. You will have 21 invaluable video lessons, in three levels of difficulties based on your experience. The real gem of this app are the included video tutorials by Dale Grahn. All your corrections are limited by the controls of the film timer. No user shapes or HSL selections here, it’s all printer points and density, terrific.” Now, that’s high praise from the Tao of Color.

     

    DALE 18:20 That’s very high praise and I’m very grateful for his kind words. There’s only one thing I would say is we didn’t actually try to recreate any of those looks in the app. I don’t want to mislead anybody to think that’s what we’re teaching them how to do. What we are teaching is the technique of how all of those looks had been created. We’re trying to do that in a beginner, entry-level stage.

     

    CARL 08:57 Very cool. We’ll talk about that a little bit more as we go on, but I think it would nice first to hear about your background. How did you become a color timer? How did you get into the business of film?

     

    DALE 19:10 Actually, I started off at MGM Laboratories as a stock boy pushing raw stock around and delivering it to the printing department. An opening came up for an assistant in the timing department, and I put in for it and I was chosen for it. That’s where I began. MGM Laboratories was one of the only film laboratories that actually had what they call “timing assistants.” It was a great program because you were creating and teaching people how to be timers, as well as helping the color timer himself how to do his job. It was a great learning program. They were one of the only ones who actually used that system. That’s how I learned. I started as an assistant. I was an assistant for about six-and-a-half years. Then I got an opportunity to become a color timer.

     

    CARL 20:18 Did you start out thinking that’s what you wanted to be, a color timer?

     

    DALE 20:23 No. Actually, when I entered into the department, I knew it was an exciting department, but to be perfectly honest I couldn’t actually see what they were doing. The corrections were so small, I wasn’t really aware of what they were looking at, until after a while and a couple of months of being in the department. Because it was all visual, and some of these framer points are very minimal and very difficult to see. You don’t have an immediate reaction. You don’t dial it in, you have to call out a correction and then it has to be printed. Then you can see what happens to the film afterwards. It’s quite different and a lot more time consuming, and a lot more visual.

     

    CARL 21:17 We’ve already thrown out a bunch of terms that I think need some definitions. Let’s go the basics here. What is color timing? What is a color timer?

     

    DALE 21:30 A color time, historically, began in the black-and-white days where he would actually run tests in developing, to try and get the right contrast ratios and such. Then he would also, after doing that…and it was the amount of time that the negative would be in the developers, so that’s why it was called a timer. You would also do the printing process, the answer print process which would be showing the client the work. He would have to adjust the density in black-and-white, perhaps adjust the contrast but hopefully not adjust the contrast, hopefully that’s all done in the developing area, so all the contrast ratios match.

     

    Then it moved from that point to color. When it moved into color, the timer was no longer involved in the developing process, he was only involved in the answer print process in showing the client the work, and actually adjusting the color visually. They used color mattes in the beginning, which they’d have to actually cut and choose different levels of color mattes to print the film with. If that filter didn’t work, they’d put in another filter or a different filter, very labor intensive and very visual again.

     

    CARL 23:04 So that had to be done frame by frame?

     

    DALE 23:07 Not frame-by-frame, it was always done cut-by-cut. There was always a benefit if you had a roll, say a television show, you’re shooting shots with a man and a woman on the same roll, a very good chance that they’re going to print very close to each other.

     

    CARL 23:48 I have absolutely no experience in this space whatsoever.

     

    MITCH 23:34 So, a novice question. Was this done after the edit or before the editor saw the film?

     

    DALE 23:39 No, this was done after the edit. Actually, what happens is they would go through what they call the daily process. They would create what was called a work print. Most often the work prints were not timed because that was more money to have timed dailies. They would cut together the work print and then what you would do, what the timer would do, is he would sit together with the client and run through the work print, and choose what direction they wanted to go in every sequence. Then it was the timer’s job to move the film into that direction and, of course, do all the technical work cleaning up, making cutbacks the same, keeping the density the same, evening out sequences, and just the technical, but then also the aesthetic as well.

     

    CHRIS 24:35 It really almost sounds like…compared to the way most people just sit at a mouse or some sort of a color grading table now, it almost sounds like Fred Flintstone making a movie. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, it’s astonishing to think of the way things used to be. In the 80’s and 90’s, I was just making TV shows…

     

    DALE 25:07 I guess you would call it skill-oriented. In order to the job, you’d have to be able to look at the image and know what’s right and wrong about the image, and make your adjustments based on what you know, what you see, what the image is telling you. You don’t have any tools to tell you what’s wrong with the image. You have to be able to know by looking. Experience, really, is the only way to gain that, knowledge and repetition, over and over and over again.

     

    CHRIS 25:37 Hence, the six-and-a-half years of apprentice-ship as an assistant. Kids nowadays, they think, “God, if I’ve got to watch over this guy’s shoulder for six hours, I’m going to gouge my eyes out.” They just want to jump in and do it. Let’s talk about the apprenticeship and the different levels that you…ways you could get started back then.

     

    DALE 25:59 The only way that you could get started back then would be to go into…to be lucky enough to get into the timing department and then start off as an assistant and learn from there. You had to prove yourself as an assistant. Some assistants never made it timer because they couldn’t do the job. You would also always have to prove yourself at every level in order to advance to the next. There were a number of rankings.

     

    You start off doing very basic stuff. Then you would go maybe 16MM and then you might be doing something important like dailies in 35MM. Then you might move up to television shows. From television shows you move up to features and within features, you move up the ranks there to the higher-profile clients. Only certain timers would get the really high-profile films and clients, because they would not want to put someone in a room with an individual and give them responsibility with a multi-million dollar project unless they were capable of doing it.

     

    CHRIS 27:15 At what point in your career did people start asking for you, as opposed to you getting lucky enough to be assigned the client, do you remember that?

    ,

    DALE 27:29 Actually, I remember it completely. It started right away, immediately. It was very unique. I had been at MGM lab for a long time and they finally were about to go out of business. They actually wrote a letter up and sent me over to Deluxe Labs because they said you’re probably not going to be able to be a timer anymore over here, ever again, just because of seniority. They said if you really want to be a timer and keep going, we’ll send you over to Deluxe. So they did, they sent me over with a reference letter, and I started over there doing trailers. I did a trailer called Predator. I was working at night, and somewhere around midnight Joel Silver walks in and we’re running the trailer. He comes in and says, “Are you my color timer?” I said, “No. I’m just here to show you the trailer.”

     

    He says, “Well, why aren’t you timing my movie, are you not good enough?” I said, “No, sir. You’ve been assigned another timer. He works days, I work nights. You wanted to see the trailer so I worked on the trailer. I do trailers. He said, “I don’t know why I don’t have…” He wanted the timer to be doing the trailer. I said, “Well, if you just sit down, we’ll take a look at the trailer, or you can wait until tomorrow morning when he comes in and you can watch it.” So, we ran the trailer and he stands up and says, “That’s the greatest blank, blank trailer I’ve ever seen in my life. You’re timing my movie.” And I said, “Sir, I can’t time your movie. You’ve already been assigned a timer.” He says, “I’m Joel Silver and you’re timing my movie.” And he walked out. [laughter]

     

    CHRIS 29:33 That’s great. That’s a great story.

     

    DALE 29:35 The next night I got a phone call from the president of the company and he said, “Dale, what did you say to that client last night?” I’m thinking, “Oh, god. That’s it. I’m fired. I’m going to get fired.” I said, “I don’t know, sir. He wanted…he asked for me.” He said, “I understand that, kid. But, he likes you. You’re timing that movie.”

     

    CHRIS 29:58 That’s awesome.

     

    DALE 29:59 I moved from nights to days, and once I did Predator, people started requesting me. And also Field of Dreams, when I did Field of Dreams, people started requesting me after that as well.

     

    CHRIS 30:13 Another really beautiful movie.

     

    DALE 30:17 What I liked about…and that’s really been my whole career, and that’s been people seeing my work and choosing me for my work rather than choosing me for my name or my position, say for being head timer or whatever. I was never head timer and I actually always turned it down, because I wanted people to choose me because of me and my work, not because of who I was positionally or even what movie I had worked on. Look at my work, don’t look at the name or titles. How did they look? Were they good? Is that what you want?

     

    That’s always been my motif, if you want to call it. It’s always worked out that way. That’s how I got to work with Steven Spielberg because of Dracula. J Kaminski saw Dracula. I did not get a screen credit on that, but he saw it and he called up the lab. He had done a film called Huck Finn and he said, “I need to know who the timer was on that film because he knows exactly how to time Huck Finn.” I started a relationship with him and then he brought me Steven with Amistad.

     

    CHRIS 31:38 Very cool.

     

    DALE 31:39 Again, it was all because of seeing my work and wanting to work with me because of that, and that’s really what timing was all about for me.

     

    CARL 31:51 So from that point from being a stock boy to working with Steven Spielberg, how much time had elapsed there? How much time are we talking about?

     

    DALE 32:07 I guess I started working with Steven…I started working with Steven on Amistad, what was that?

     

    DALE 32:12 ’97.

     

    DALE 32:13 ’97, yeah. I had just come back from Pixar. I actually worked at Pixar for six months, went through Pixar University, graduate of Pixar University. That’s another story. John Lasseter hired me to work with him at Pixar because he saw something in me that he wanted in his company. But it didn’t work out because my family just couldn’t move up there. We tried it for six months, but it just didn’t work out. That was one of the best companies I ever worked for. It was great.

     

    CARL 33:00  It had to be hard to say, “You know what? I can’t do this anymore.”

     

    DALE 33:04 Oh, you can’t believe how hard it was then to leave. That was just like a dream come true, working there. But, I went back to Technicolor because I wanted to finish the project I had started there which was Bug’s Life. So, I went back to Technicolor and that’s when I met Steven.

     

    CARL 33:30 I have a real dumb question. Again, I have no insight on how this stuff works. You just mentioned you did Bug’s Life. That was a computer animated movie. What role does a color…I would assume that in the rendering and all that all the color would have just been taken care of in the render. So, what role does a color timer play in a movie like Bug’s Life or Toy Story?

     

    DALE 33:59 In the beginning, that was not the case. In the beginning, they were not as sophisticated. They definitely needed color timing. They actually developed a laser printer, I hope I’m not breaking a contract by telling you this, and then they were able to create their own negatives. When they did that, they were more capable of making the color more exact. But, when you’re creating a negative piece by piece, it has to be timed together. In animation, we had a thing called successive exposure in Disney films like Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, Aladdin. They all went through successive exposure format.

     

    CARL 35:01 What does that mean, successive exposure format?

     

    DALE 35:04 That means they photograph three images of black and white, three records. They’re going back to a YCM and they marry those frames and it creates a hyper…like a more saturated color palette, more beautiful negatives, very expensive though and very time-consuming. It takes about three hours to print each reel.

     

    CARL 35:33 Wow. It’s amazing to think how far along technology has come today. People like me, I got into this because the tools are inexpensive. I can do a lot with inexpensive software. It doesn’t mean I have the craftsmanship that you have in doing this, but it’s amazing how far this has come along.

     

    DALE 35:55 Yeah, there are good advancements, because in our day everything was so expensive to have to do. To try and change contrasting the scene was very, very difficult. Very few people were willing to pay for the process to do it. In fact, I only know of one cameraman that I did it with, I think on three films, and that was Vittorio Storraro. We would actually change the contrast scene to scene by pre-flashing the stock and then running the stock back through developing system to increase the contrast in our system.

     

    CHRIS 36:48 I noticed looking at your IMDB credits, you’re always listed as a color timer, never as color grader or a colorist. Did you ever get involved in the digital tools?

     

    DALE 37:00 No.

     

    CHRIS 37:04 What did you think of them?

     

    DALE 37:05 I never got involved in the sense that I actually did the work. I actually supervised several digital colorist sessions.

     

    CHRIS 37:18 There’s a dream job, to have a guy like you over your shoulder, teaching me the ways of some of the greatest films of the last 20 or 30 years, and talking me through how to use my tool better. With your eye, you’ve got to know that person got the schooling of a lifetime. That would be an honor.

     

    DALE 37:45 Thank you, thank you. It would be great to be able to do that. In fact, when I left I was going to work with eFilm to do just that, to teach them their colors, how to time film, how to become film timers. But, it didn’t work out because I had retired recently and my wife said, “You just retired and now you’re going back again.”

     

    CHRIS 38:22 It’s like working for the Mafia, they always suck you back in.

     

    DALE 38:25 Yeah, so I had to make the decision you’re out or you’re in, so I had to go out. I passed up a lot of good opportunities, but I needed to take a break from the industry.

     

    CARL 38:40 Speaking of breaks, I’d like to take a sponsor break at this point. Dale’s been in the business so long he knows how to create a good Segway there. [laughter] We do have a sponsor I do want to take some time to talk about, and that’s Kre8insights. One of the topics that’s really hot topic on this podcast is the business of filmmaking, really taking your video business to the next level, being profitable. That’s what we all want to do – we want to make money while we practice our art. One of the best resources on how to get jobs, how to prepare your proposals, how to market what you’re doing, is Kre8insights. It’s a special membership site that is just chalk full of practical information on how to turbo charge your video business.

     

    If you want to get on the fast track of video production in the film industry, you need to check out Kre8insights.com. They also have a 30-day membership that’s free and no credit card is required. All you have to do is go to Kre8, that’s K-R-E-8-insider.com/DCP and our listeners will be able to get a 30-day free membership. You’ll have access to just about everything in there. Give it a look. There are forums in it, a number of videos and another thing they just started…they had their first what they call “Expert Interrogation.” They do a spreecast, I think they’re going to do this…oh, my goodness.

     

    MITCH 40:29 Tuesdays and Thursdays.

     

    CARL 40:31 Tuesdays and Thursdays. I believe you’re going to be on one of those, aren’t you Mr. Mitch?

     

    MITCH 40:35 I am. I’m going to be on in March. I had a great talk with Michael Gebben just the other day, and he got me so pumped up, I was revving to go for hours after that phone call.

     

    CARL 40:48 They had Ryan Koral on from EpicMotion yesterday, so they got off to a really good start. They had almost a hundred people there.

     

    MITCH 40:56 Yeah, there were almost a hundred.

     

    CARL 40:59 Yeah, it was really good. Check them out, Kre8insights.com. To get the 30-day membership, go to Kre8, K-R-E-8-insider.com/DCP for your free, 30-day membership. Alright, let’s get back into it, Dale. I got a couple of listener questions, here. Some of our listeners wanted to ask you…for example, we have DC Reels, he says, “Good get, Carl.” So, everybody’s happy that you’re joining us today, despite our Skype issues.

     

    DALE 41:38 Great.

     

    CARL 41:39 So he says, “On your typical gig, how much time are you given to do your job as a color timer?

     

    DALE 41:49 That depends on the schedule and when a film would come in. What it would normally take just for all of the editorial to get done and everything compiled and ready, if you went straight with no hitches, probably three weeks to time the film, maybe three to four passes of color timing.

     

    CARL 42:20 Now that work week, was that three to four weeks your typical 9 to 5, or is that more like 12 to 14 hours?

     

    DALE 42:29 No, usually our shift was a standard 10-hour day, but usually we’d never go home in 10. It would be 12 or 13. But again, it would depend on how many shows we were working on at the time. So, I would usually be working on three to five shows at a time.

     

    CARL 42:53 Three to five shows at a time. I’m trying to visualize how your workspace must have looked.

     

    DALE 43:04 Absolutely a mess, film everywhere, older prints, all kinds of stuff.

     

    CARL 43:15 So, there’s got to be some kind of machinery involved in this. I found this photo that I put in my show notes, just this kind of a reference of a Rank Cintel. I would love to have one of these, because it looks like such a cool gadget. Is this anything type of the kind of gear that you worked on, or is it something different?

     

    DALE 43:32 No, no. The highest technology we had Hazeltine in our world. I think some laboratories used a Telecine machine but we never had one, because it was always at a starting place and the timer would…whenever you got a film, you’d almost take it in another direction, almost always.

     

    CARL 44:04 Do you have any photos or anything like that, of the equipment that you worked on that we could put in the show notes?

     

    DALE 44:11 Unfortunately, no. I don’t think so.

     

    CHRIS 44:15 The lost art.

     

    CARL 44:17 It’s the lost art, man.

     

    DALE 44:18 There are basically two side-by-side projectors, one you hand crank through or power it through, and you would have the clip on side and the film on the other side. Then you would just wind through it. Or you would, in the old days, we actually used to do screen timing which was…we would time the film as it was running in the theater and call out the corrections to the assistant and he would write them down. That was pretty impressive. Very difficult to do.

     

    CHRIS 44:50 Wow.

     

    DALE 44:51 We had to make immediate decisions as you saw it on the screen. It was a good way of doing it, because you were watching the flow of the color and you’re making the decisions instantly.

     

    MITCH 45:02 Do you do that with the sound on?

     

    DALE 45:04 Yeah, you could. It would depend on how much work was necessary. If you were doing your first pass, then probably no sound, but if you were making your final run-through, then you probably want to be watching the film and listening to everything. Because you want to feel everything, because you’re trying to create emotion in the timing, if you’re doing a feature. If you’re doing television, you’re just trying to keep it within their color range. Because each show had its own palette, each television show. I used to do Cagney and Lacey, it had its own palette.

     

    CHRIS 45:51 I have a question for you. I call it the deserted island question. If you were going to be stuck on a deserted island with a magic DVD player that didn’t need electricity and a screen, and you could watch one of your films for the foreseeable future until you got rescued, if you got rescued, what would it be?

     

    DALE 46:14 Oh, golly. What would it be…?

     

     

    CHRIS 46:19 I’ll have you know that if I had to make the same choice, I would actually choose of all films, my choice would be one of yours, but we’ll get to that.

     

    DALE 46:27 Really? Thank you. I suppose Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now Redux or Dracula. Dracula, I think, was a very successful film for me, and I enjoyed thoroughly working on it. It’s hard to choose.

     

    CHRIS 47:03 Yeah, it’s a tough question.

    DALE 47:10 Then, some of my animation was really quite beautiful, I thought. Nightmare Before Christmas was difficult to do but I thought it looked wonderful. I have a lot of favorites.

     

    MITCH 47:26 He didn’t pass the “just one” test, did he?

    CHRIS 47:29 No, it’s a tough call. It’s interesting, though. Because when I look at your filmography here…Saving Private Ryan is referred to so often. It basically made bleach bypass a household term. We already mentioned A.I. I just remember that being a film where you just walk away from it and your head is spinning like, “How do I make something look like that?” Or Minority Report, same thing.

    DALE 48:06 Right, very visual films.

    CHRIS 48:09 They’re like landmark things that people in this business, they talk about all the time.

    DALE 48:18 Janusz Kaminski is brilliant and so is Steven and Michael Kahn. They’re an amazing team. It’s always just the four of us. Whenever we would work together, that was it, it was just the four of us. It reminds me of the first time I met Steven. It was on Amistad, of course, and probably 20 people in thousand dollar suits, sitting and waiting in the theater for Steven to arrive. He walks in, paces back and forth and said, “Can I have your attention, please? I normally only do this with the cinematographer, the color timer, and the editor, so all the rest of you have the day off, so thank you for coming.” [laughter] Silently, everyone walked out the door without saying one word. I would have left if he hadn’t said color timer. That is the experience we had always. It was always the four of us with an occasional assistant of Michael Kahn. Only the four of us, we always decided everything. Every film that we did, it was a combination of all four of us.

    CARL 49:49 Can you tell us a little bit about the thought process say behind, both Chris and you mentioned Saving Private Ryan has a very distinctive look. How did that decision come to be made to make that film look the way it did?

    DALE 50:05 It actually was a mistake. We originally were running the process with…because we did both. We did bleach bypass the negative, and then we also did the ENR process and we were running at 50 on the ENR process. For one day of developing, they reached 100 and those shots were the ones that caught Steven’s eye. I’m over here in America, trying to reproduce the look of those two shots at 50 on the IR rating and I’m not getting anywhere near it. I can’t even match it. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m done. I’m going to be fired from this job because I can’t match that shot that he loves.” I’m looking at it and I’m thinking, “It’s too saturated. I need to go higher.”

    But I, at the time, did not know that we could go to 100 on the ENR process. I only found out from a casual conversation with the shift foremen saying, “If I could just get a little higher.” He said, “Well, I can take it to 100. Give it to me.” As soon as we hit 100 on the IR, the shot matched exactly and I was able to time the rest of the movie. So, it ran at 100 IR rating and the ER rating, plus we bypassed negative.

    CARL 51:48 So, going back to the newbies in the audience, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it, I think I already exposed my ignorance quite a bit. What is this IRE that you’re talking about?

    DALE 52:04 ENR. It was developed by Vittorio Storraro. It’s a process of developing where it retains more silver…the print stock retains more silver and gives higher contrast ratio.

    CARL 52:26 I’m sorry, I dropped Mitch off the call somehow or the other.

    DALE 52:28 Did you get me, though?

    CARL 52:31 Yeah, I got you. That was good.

    DALE 52:37 They increase the contrast ratio. The higher you want, the higher…it also causes desaturation as well.

    CHRIS 52:45 I’m trying to add Mitch back in.

    CARL 52:46 This is going to be the most edited show, ever.

    CHRIS 52:48 Yeah, if we’re lucky we won’t have to color time this audio podcast.

    CARL 52:53 Mitch, you there?

    MITCH 52:54 I’m back.

    CARL 52:55 Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Digital Convergence Podcast.

    MITCH 52:59 I love Skype.

     

    CHRIS 53:02 We have been going quite a while.

     

    CARL 53:05 There’s a couple more questions I’d like to get in, then we need to move on. Dale, we will have to get you back on again. I tell you what, just that discussion you had there about the creative process, how you came up with look for Saving Private Ryan is very intriguing to me. Those are the kinds of things I like to hear there. But, I do have a question from Darren Yomamoto. He says, “What film or TV show would you like a crack at coloring?”

     

    DALE 53:40 I think it…is it CSI that has kind of a hyper-color look to it?

     

    CHRIS 53:47 Which one? Vegas, Miami?

     

    DALE 53:51 I think it’s Miami.

     

    CHRIS 53:53 Miami is the one…I call that one CSI Orange. It’s true. There’s something orange in every single frame.

    DALE 54:02 I think I’d like to try to stabilize that or give it a different kind of look. Basically, anything where I could take it in another direction. Anything that could be manipulated like a period piece or create a time period or look, that would be exciting to me. For instance, it would have been nice to have worked on Lincoln, being a period piece.

     

    CHRIS 54:40 To make it look like it was shot in the 1860’? I’m kidding.

     

    DALE 54:45 Right, there’s so many beautiful things that you can do with the images there to create the feeling of being back then. Not necessarily be saturated or whatever, but really bring you into the frame.

     

    CHRIS 55:00 I had mentioned earlier about what an honor it would be to have somebody like you sitting over your shoulder while you were trying to learn the craft. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the app? Because I’d like to hear your explanation of it, your app that you did with CrumplePop? [sound effect] Sponsor of the show.

     

    DALE 55:23 What we tried to do is we tried to simplify the color board, and also to increment it because a color timer needs increments. He needs to be able to recreate same correction, so he can be technically correct within the film itself, making cutbacks exactly match, putting the exact amounts of color or density or contrast or saturation in and being able to recreate that, so that he’s technically correct. That’s important. We didn’t want to make it too difficult. I didn’t want to make it too difficult for anybody. I wanted them to just have a little bit of difficulty in some of them, so they would have to go over it again and learn by repetition.

     

    But mostly I tried to give the basics of simple contrast, making a normal neutral flush tone, trying to look at an image for what is the image telling you. Is the person wearing warm clothing, are they at the beach? Is it cold outside, is it sunny, should it be? You can tell by looking at the image what you need to do to it, what direction you need to go and/or what direction you can go by understanding the image. Again, color timing is all visual and all learning how to look at an image, whether it’s digital or film.

     

    CARL 57:20 I like the approach because it’s not just video tutorials. There’s an exercise, you try and match. It’s almost like a game, if you will. Try and match what you do and that reinforces the principles and helps you retain what you’ve learned.

     

    DALE 57:39 Hopefully.

     

    CARL 57:40 Yeah, I hope. What are your plans? I got the feeling that you’re just scratching the surface with this. You cover a lot of ground and there’s a lot of opportunity here.

     

    DALE 58:00 My plan would be to stay with CrumplePop and develop new products. There have been a lot of requests for this type of control board to be put into Final Cut Pro as a plug-in. So, if we were to do that it would be a little more elegant and have more tools. It would be based more on principle of color timing and it would be incredibly quick and very efficient, the design.

     

    CARL 58:44 We’ve covered a lot of ground and there’s a lot more we could cover but time is becoming the limiting factor here. We do need to talk about another one of our sponsors here. This is Shutterstock. Shutterstock is where you’ll find over 800,000 stock video clips. You can start your search at Shutterstock.com to find that perfect clip for your website presentation or any other video project. In fact, you can go straight to the video footage at footage.Shutterstock.com. A lot of cool stuff out there. Very easy to use search and here’s a special deal for you guys, for listeners. I know a lot of you like to shoot your own stuff, but sometimes you just need that perfect shot from, I don’t know, say Thailand and you don’t have the budget to travel to Thailand.

     

    Wouldn’t it be nice to just drop video footage from there? You can do it by going to Shutterstock and searching for your footage and you can get 30% off the footage that you select. How do you do it? You just enter this code when you check out: Digital and the number 2, so Digital2 and get 30% off of any package. Shutterstock, where you’ll find over 800,000 stock video clips, Shutterstock.com.

     

    We need to move on. I’d like to talk about…we have some beautiful films but we just don’t have time to talk about them today. I would like to get into product picks or tips of the week, then we’ll wrap up the show. I’m going to put Dale on the spot. Do you have a product…hint, hint…that you would like to recommend to our listeners today?

     

    DALE 01:00:41 I do have the app, of course, that I would like to pitch to everyone. But, I would like to everybody just keep their eye on CrumplePop, and hopefully we’re going to be coming up with some new products, exciting products in the very near future. Keep your eye on CrumplePop.

     

    CARL 01:01:12 That’s a very good pick. Planet Mitch?

     

    MITCH 01:01:15 I’ve got something new in the mail this week that I’m going to be testing shortly called the Aviator Travel Jib, and it’s from the good folks over at Nice Industries. I’m just incredibly impressed with how small this thing is and it’s well built, so keep an eye on pLanet5D. I’ll have a review in a couple of weeks.

     

    CARL 01:01:37 Sounds interesting. Mr. Chris Fenwick?

     

    CHRIS 01:01:38 For the sake of time and lack of preparedness, I’ve got nothing.

     

    CARL 01:01:43 Okay, we like that. [laughter] I’d like to expand our readers’, our listeners’ knowledge base and I just came across a really outstanding book. I’ve just started but it’s called The Facts of Business Life, What Every Business Owner Knows That You Don’t by Bill McBean. I’ll include that in the show notes. Mr. Dale Grahn, thank you so much for putting up with our technical glitches today and thank you for being on the show, we really appreciate it.

     

    DALE 01:02:21 Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

     

    CARL 01:02:25 I’m so glad you feel that way. It’s not typical. [laughter] It really is not and we were so looking forward to…and it has been, We’ve got a lot of good info from you. Where can people find out more about you and follow what you’re doing today?

     

    DALE 01:02:43 Actually, nowhere really. [laughter] You can look to CrumplePop in the future but as far as films, I’m kind of done in that area, so you won’t be seeing any new titles in my IMDB file. Hopefully, the new projects that we’re going to be doing at CrumplePop will be exciting and helpful to the industry. Because, that’s really what we want to do, help the industry not necessarily try to change it, just add what we can to it.

     

    CARL 01:03:26 That’s awesome. You can find out about the app at Dale Grahn Color. That’s G-R-A-H-N, right?

     

    DALE 01:03:36 Yes.

     

    CARL 01:03:37 That’s DaleGrahnColor.com and I’ll include a link to that. We’ll get you kicking and screaming into Twitter here before long, too. [laughter]

     

    DALE 01:03:49 Okay.

     

    CARL 01:03:51 That’s where the community is. We’ve got to get you on there.

     

    DALE 01:03:53 I don’t have an account yet, but apparently I’m going to need to get one.

     

    CARL 01:03:57 Yeah, just do it. Get it out of your system. I know it’s hard. I went through the same thing. I was a late adopter, but I did it. In fact, I did it then I quit it, then I went back. I think that describes a lot of people with it. [laughter] Alright, Mitch?

     

    MITCH 01:04:19 pLanet5D.com, that’s me.

     

    CARL 01:04:23 Alright, Chris?

     

    CHRIS 01:04:24 Chrisfenwick.com and Chris Fenwick on Twitter.

     

    CARL 01:04:27 You can catch me at DigitalFilm.TV and I’m now on Twitter as The Carl Olson.

     

    MITCH 01:04:37 Not A Carl Olson, but “The.”

     

    CARL 01:04:39 Yeah, it’s very pretentious.

     

    CHRIS 01:04:41 It’s a definitive article.

     

    CARL 01:04:42 So, I am The definitive Carl Olson, and the only reason I’m the definitive Carl Olson is because I can’t get…somebody is squatting on Carl Olson and it’s not been used in years. Anyway, that’s branding issues. That’s not your problem, it’s just mine. We do want to thank our show sponsors. CrumplePop, [sound effect] film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro and we’ve got Mr. Dale Grahn here supporting that team as well, so that’s awesome.

     

    Then, Kre8insights.com, helping talented and passionate filmmakers become successful entrepreneurs. Visit their website today for proven strategies that can help you grow your business. Kre8insights.com. That’s K-R-E-8-insights.com. Then Shutterstock.com, where you’ll find over 800,000 stock video clips. Digital and the number 2, Digital2, for your 30% off on your next order. Remember that, okay? Please rate us and leave feedback in iTunes and we really want to thank everyone who has. We certainly appreciate all the feedback, the questions that have come in. We really appreciate that. It’s encouraging to us and helps us to see where we need to go with the shows, because it’s just as much your show as it us sitting here.

     

    We really appreciate that so continue to send it in. In fact, next week’s episode will focus on your questions and I have a few that’s backlogged already but keep sending them in. If there’s something that you would like for us to address, just send it in. You can do it by Twitter. You can do it by voicemail, on my website, email, carrier pigeon, pony express, I don’t care. Just get your questions to me, okay? Gentlemen, it’s been a great show. Thank you so much.

     

    MITCH 01:06:35 Thanks, Dale.

     

    DALE 01:06:36 Thank you.

     

    CHRIS 01:06:37 Thanks, Dale. This was a real pleasure, thank you so much.

     

    MITCH 01:06:39 I really want to have him back. Put that on the list, Carl.

     

    CARL 01:06:42 We’ve got to make it up to him.

     

    MITCH 01:06:46 I’ve still got more questions.

     

    CARL 01:06:47 I do, too. Not enough time in the day.

     

    CHRIS 01:06:53 We’ve now switched over to episode 110.

     

    CARL 01:06:54 Yep, there you go. Get out there and tell a great story, everyone. That’s a wrap. [music]

    Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: Coloring, Dale Grahn, Digital Convergence Podcast, Interview, Podcast, tips, Transcript

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