Research by Surreal Road

The Academy Awards are undoubtedly the biggest accolades in the film industry. In fact, the Oscars are huge even outside of the film industry. So much so that when any industry holds a prestigious awards ceremonies they often compare themselves to the Academy Awards (”the oscars of the hair-dressing world” et cetera et cetera).
Some of the awards inherently carry more glamour (best actress) than others (best sound effects editing), but you can bet the recipient of any Oscar will consider it one of the high=points of their career.
Naturally, when I worked in visual effects, I was most interested in the winner of that category. Recently though, like most other Oscar punters I suspect, I’ve become less interested in that category, as it doesn’t really matter to me who wins.
But what I am interested in is the Scientific & Technical (Scit-Tech) awards.

These get very little coverage in the press (in part perhaps because the Sci-Tech ceremony doesn’t coincide with the main event). Surprisingly though, there is also very little coverage even within the post-production community (I’d sooner be aware of the best VFX winner than the Sci-Tech award winners on a given year).

Look at the list of previous winners though, and for many of them, their impact is profound. Dolby, Alias’s Maya, Imax, Avid, and Grass Valley’s Spirit technologies have all been recognized over the years, and even today their impact on modern film-making is profound. Granted, some of the awards are a little esoteric, but where would the entire VFX category be without Maya I wonder?

It’s not just abstract technologies and products that get recognition either. This year’s Oscar winner went to Edwin Catmull. Aside from being the president of Disney and Pixar, he’s personally contributed greatly to the fields of digital film-making. He was principally responsible for algorithms that led to (amongst other things) Catmul-Rom interpolation (which itself is used for resizing digital images and creating curves in 3D). Much of his work went into the creation of Pixar’s RenderMan, which itself has won a Sci-Tech award in 1993. No disrespect to Ms. Winslett, but I’m sure the future of film-making will be more determined by these winners than those of the other Oscars…

My latest book, “Fix It In Post” is available for pre-order now on Amazon.

Thanks to everyone who let me pick their brains over the course of the last few months.

The blurb:

“Finally!  A well-written software agnostic guide to fixing common problems in post ranging from shaky camera to film look!”

—Jerry Hofmann, Apple Certified Trainer; FCP Forum Leader, Creative Cow; Owner, JLH Productions

Fix It In Post provides an array of concise solutions to the wide variety of problems encountered in the post process. With an application-agnostic approach, it gives proven, step-by-step methods to solving the most frequent postproduction problems. Also included is access to a free companion website, featuring application-specific resolutions to the problems presented, with fixes for working in Apple’s Final Cut Studio suite, Avid’s Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as other applications.

Solutions are provided for common audio, video, digital, editorial, color, timing and compositing problems, such as, but not limited to:
* automated dialogue recording, adjusting sync, and creating surround sound
* turning SD into HD (and vice-versa) and restoration of damaged film and video
* removing duplicate frames, reducing noise, and anti-aliasing
* maintaining continuity, creating customized transitions, and troubleshooting timecodes
* removing vignettes, color casts, and lens flare
* speeding shots up, slowing shots down, and getting great-looking timelapse shots
* turning day into night, replacing skies and logos and changing camera motion

Fix It in Post: Solutions for Postproduction Problems

From the release notes of the beta of Mac OS 10.6 (”Snow Leopard”):

Default Gamma Changes

To better meet the needs of digital content producers and consumers, the default display gamma has been changed from 1.8 to 2.2 in Snow Leopard.

This will be a welcome change to anyone who has run into cross-platform issues with gamma.

Some people have requested a copy of the slides used for the Red camera post workflow I was involved in, so I’ve made a PDF version available for download.

Get it here…

This is an application for Mac OS X to convert Media 100 Batch (*.m1b) files to Final Cut Pro Batch List files.

The Applescript source and some documentation is included. This is provided free of charge without any support.

Download it here…