DI Finishing for Act of Valor

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The biggest challenge we faced in the DI finishing process for Act of Valor, was preparing for three different aspect ratios for our deliverable, without sacrificing resolution.  All of our footage was shot 1.78 (16×9) and we were required to deliver 2.39, 178, and 1.33 versions of the film.  The normal way to do this is to letterbox and reposition for finishing in 2.39, and then use that master to make the final 1.78 and 1.33 copies by cropping out the excess on the sides.  The problem is that you lose a nearly half of your image resolution in that process, which we couldn’t afford to do with the 5D source material, if we wanted a crisp looking 16×9 version for Blu-Ray and other 1080p distribution.

Our solution was to do our entire post process on the full 16×9 image, with software letterboxing applied for monitoring.  This allowed us to maintain the full scope of our image throughout the post process, but required some creative project management.  All reframing had to be deferred until after we split out the versions for different aspect ratios.  That meant that all titles had to be applied after that point as well, so they wouldn’t get repositioned out of sight in 2.39.  And any changes we made to the movie after we split into different versions would need to be made to each version, and carefully tracked.
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Visual Effects on Act of Valor

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At Bandito Brothers, we have always prided ourselves in being authentic and real.  This is one of the values that led Scott and Mouse to cast real Navy SEALS for the main roles in Act of Valor, and doing things like using live ammo in certain scenes.  So at first glance, it would seem surprising that we had hundreds of visual effects shots in the movie.  About half of them were in response to issues that resulted from shooting with the 5D, but we also did have to add things like blood hits, and do fixes like painting out crew members.  Additionally, we had a fair bit of motion graphics work, both overlaid graphics for the audience, and screen replacement for briefing information.
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Shooting 4K for HD Delivery

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So this year at NAB, we continue to see more 4K acquisition tools being developed, but nearly all content is distributed and viewed by its audience at 1080p or below, and will be for the foreseeable future.  So do we really need 4K, if we aren’t finishing to a 4K DI?  Having 4K resolution available offers some interesting workflow options, but people need to avoid getting caught up in 4K output aspect.  Almost all 4K cameras are single sensor devices, with a bayer pattern to differentiate colors.  While a good demosaicing algorithm can interpolate the detail at full resolution, it will never be to the same level as a three chip camera.  Instead, if you treat each 4 sensor block as a single pixel, you only end up with half of the resolution on paper, but you end up with the best of both worlds.  You have a camera with a single large sensor, which better simulates the optical response of traditional film, and you have dedicated sensor locations for each color.  This is the principle behind the Canon C300 having a QuadHD sensor, and only recording full color 1080p.  A more ideal solution is to record the RAW single channel QuadHD or 4K, and treat it as half that resolution, like the “1/2Res-Fast” decoding option in Red’s software.  There are ways to encode that data over 3G SDI that involve using the alpha channel space to carry the extra green data, effectively giving you 8:4:4 color in a sense, if measured from that half res perspective.  This workflow has been enabled by Red for a while, but Canon’s new tools force this route.  While it is happening blind to the user, understanding the underlying ideas can allow users to better leverage the capabilities.
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NAB 2012 – Part 2

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So I have had a bit more time to get browse the show, and while I haven’t come across anything that totally amazed me, there are a variety of little things that have caught my attention.  GoPro’s Hero2 now shoots 24p, and has some advanced color profile options, both of which will make it much more suitable for my company to potentially use.  But I think we are pretty satisfied with Canon DSLRs as our lightweight cameras for now.
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NAB 2012 – Part 1

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So NAB is here again.  4K and Thunderbolt seem to be the most popular topics at the show, with 3D hardly being advertised.  There are a lot of new products that have been announced over the last few days.  I have only gotten through the lower South Hall so far, but I will hit the rest of the show over the next couple of days.  (My series of articles on Act of Valor will be continued once NAB is over.)
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Editing Act of Valor

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When we first started out, we had no idea how much footage we would be shooting for the movie, because the 5D lends itself to a different type of shooting style than traditional filmmaking, and we had a lot of cameras available on set.  So preparing for a worst case scenario, we setup our Avid system with a huge 16TB external array.  Since we were using DNxHD36 files for the offline, our nearly 200 hours of source material ended up being less that 3TB of Avid media.  So once we were finished with principal shooting, I replaced that oversized solution with a basic internal array of four 2TB drives, which met our needs for the rest of the project.
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Shooting Act of Valor

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We shot the movie on a wide variety of locations, over about a year.  Scott and Mouse originally intended to utilize the 5D’s unique capabilities to capture the intensity of the combat scenes, and use film for the backround parts of the story.  The style of shooting allowed by the 5D fit very well with their style of filmmaking, so they used it more than originally planned, but we still ended up shooting quite a bit of traditional film as well.
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Preparing for Act of Valor

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When we first started preparing to shoot Act of Valor, over four years ago, we had to decide what cameras to use.  Up to that point all of our work at Bandito Brothers had been shot on HD-Cam, XD-Cam HD, P2, HDV, and Film. Shooting stereoscopic 3D was considered, but dismissed after watching some NFL test footage.  I think Scott Waugh was the first to point out that the level of immersion and intensity we were after would make our audience sick if viewed in 3D.  We needed a light-weight camera system that operated well in low light, since SEALs usually work at night.

Mouse McCoy had long before envisioned someday being able to shoot professional video on a camera with a DSLR form factor.  The Nikon D90 was released in April ’08 and we had purchased one immediately to try it out.  We liked the form factor, and 24p was great, even if it was limited to 720p.  But high motion shots clearly didn’t hold up at all, with the level of compression it used to record to Motion JPEG.  Since everything we shoot is action-packed high-adrenaline footage, this limitation was a deal-breaker.  The D90 was clearly not the fulfillment of McCoy’s vision, but the technology was getting closer.
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Act of Valor

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So Act of Valor, the big project that I have been working on for the last four years, finally was released last month.  It has been pretty exciting to see this project go all the way from an independent film shooting with whatever resources we could scrap together at the time, to #1 at the Box Office our opening weekend.  We essentially used a bunch of Canon DSLRs and a variety of applications on our regular PC workstations to edit and finish the movie.  This was the first feature film that I have played a significant role in creating, as I was involved from workflow design and data management onset, to the final tweaks to the finished 2K online before we printed to Film.
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Two Interesting Developments from Blackmagic-Design

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First off, the long awaited PC version of DaVinci Resolve was released to public beta last week.  Both the full version and the free Resolve-Lite now have PC variants available.  You can bet I will be setting up a high end PC based system to run it on at work, since that is the only step in our workflow that we currently use a Mac for.  The big question is going to be file format and codec support.  We currently use DPX and Cineform MOVs for our system in the office, but eventually using Cineform AVIs would fit more seamlessly into our workflow.
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