Cats, Tracks, and Hacks

VooCAT is a motion-tracking package which works with Blender. I haven't tried it. It's only a hundred Euros.
The "non-commercial" version is Voodoo Camera Tracker. But to use it with a modern version of Blender you need this import script (the instructions for installing are here).
My goal with the above paragraph was to bore you until you cried. Did it work?

Do you find that sometimes you want to paste onto a specific track in Final Cut Pro? And FCP doesn't want you to do it the way you do? Here's how to tell FCP what track to paste into.
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Allan Mackey reminded us (in the comments below) about Trello. So I'm working in Trello to schedule. I'll tell you how that goes.

My Three Pandora Machineries

Firstly.
So we doubled the amount of RAM in our Mac. It was, for some reason, only 4GB and that kind of sucked. I bought two more 2GB sticks and put them in.
For a while the computer was reading 10GB of RAM but that there were ECC errors on one of the old sticks. Then the computer decided it only has 8GB of RAM with no errors. Which is what I thought it would do. Still. Weird. But it renders a LOT faster now.
Firstwise Part II.
Then I quadrupled the amount of vRAM by installing a new video card.
That project has gone more weirdly. I do not, nor can I, understand video cards, what they do, and how they work. In the fantasy world of computers that my little mind lives in: one video card for each of two monitors should be better and faster. Right? That's how it works. Right?
Anyway, of the three video outputs on the new video card, only one is DVI. The other two are the tiny proprietary connector which costs another $100 I don't want to spend.
I have the old ATI Radeon HD 2600 the computer came with in slot three
I have the new fancier ATI Radeon HD 5700 in slot one
Right away everything seemed to work. But Final Cut Pro will not absolutely will not no way no how use the right-hand monitor (from the 2600) as a "Digital Cinema Display". FCP will gladly use both monitors otherwise though.
So I've set up a custom set of windows where the "Canvas" window is in the right-hand monitor. Which is essentially how we used to work with the "Digital Cinema Display" anyway.
And yeah, the "Digital Cinema Display" will work on the primary (center) monitor -- but when you do that you have no tools or anything because the display takes up the whole screen. This is, apparently, a known issue. But maybe I don't care about it because this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to work.

Editing in Final Cut Pro. That's Virginia Logan on the left/center and Jeff Wills on the right.

Groove to the sickly orange glow of the incandescent lights in my studio.

Thing number two.
I tried Manymoon for project management. It doesn't have task dependencies. I wanted to set up project management so that we could schedule, say, the mixing of an act to be dependent on it being edited first. But Manymoon doesn't work that way. So I'll be doing something... else.

Lastwise.
I'm considering formatting the camera drive for Dragon Girl using ExFAT. The advantage to exFAT is that both (modern) PC's and (modern) Macs can read and write to it using large file sizes. I'll tell you (you'll probably hear me screaming) how that goes.

Today in the Machine

Today is "plot all the post-production out on a calendar" day for Android Insurrection. Which is kind of a pain because so much of the picture edit is dependent on visual effects. Which means we have to do one of two things:

1. Cut the picture and put a text-slug in that says "insert effect of [robots shooting] here" and hope that the timing is right or
2. Pre-build the visual effects so that the editor can cut them into the edit.

We end up doing both of those things and pre-building some effects which have to be changed and inserting effects the picture editor wanted and finding they change the timing of a whole sequence.
And all of that means we keep locking and unlocking the picture. Which is a hassle because it means we can't get started on the audio mix.

A Steve Burg painting. There's a link to his site in the sidebar, right?

One answer to all of this is to deliberately do some sloppy animation. Well, maybe not "deliberately" as much as "incompetently". Essentially that work in the big-budget world is called creating an "animatic". But we're doing animatics only because the least-capable animator (me) is doing the work. In any case, we do some crap-tastic animation and at least we can see how things time out. Then hopefully we can get Maduka in there to make the animations better.
I have a month and a week to finish this picture (by my own self-imposed deadline).
Also, today is the last day of the AFM. Which means that tomorrow I'm sending an email to our sales rep and saying "What kind of movie should we make?"

Rendery Sunday

Automatic Duck. It's free now. We'll be using it... soon.
Looking at spaces, there's this place in Gowanus. I can't figure out anything about them. I guess I'll have to call.
The Brooklyn Artist's Gym and Room 58 all look very cool.
If we wanted to rock-out to really sexy post-production offices then Bitmap NYC would be the place to check out.

We need to vastly increase revenue. And we're in the independent film business. I can just say those two things over and over again and get the same response. So we're waiting for the response from the AFM. Not only about what sales we'll make, but what pictures we ought to make.
I've we're going to make more movies, and I believe we'll have to because that is the key to more revenue, we absolutely must get faster computers. Yup. That's a decision I just made in the last five minutes.
But as for money?
Meh. I'll go into detail over on the Pleasure for the Empire blag.
Dual-boot is not really a problem anymore. You can even build a PC that'll boot Mac OS. But I need a world-destroyer. I need 12 cores because I'd use them. Heck, I'd be getting so much work done I wouldn't be writing this blog post because my renders would be finished.
My one quibble about buying a world-destroying dual hex - core Mac over the same kind of PC is that the Macs for whatever reason top out at 1GB of vRAM on the video cards. I don't know that will make a difference to me. I don't. But it might. Even at only 32 seconds/frame.

Louyi Tang

Louyi Tang is a filmmaker I met a while back and she's making this pretty amazing picture called "Martin, Our Teacher" in China. Dig the Kickstarter page.

Headless Arizona

Project London releasing their beautiful models into Creative Commons is a huge thing for indy sci-fi filmmakers.
It's big. You can make movies with their CG models -- change the colors, even make structural changes.
We needed a secondary robot for Android Insurrection and Ian suggested using his Arizona model.
The robot we need is about human-sized. And the Arizona is over 20 feet tall. So I took off its head to make it scalable as a smaller robot.

More free stuff:
Gimei has free fire and explosion footage.
The first wave of Project London Blender 3D models.
The second wave of Project London Blender 3D CC models.

Nathan Vegdahl on Delivery and Intermediate Formats

You know, if you make features and (bless your little heart) are actually able to sell them, you're going to run into these issues at some point. How the heck do you deliver your movie?

Here's Nathan Vegdahl's notes to me:

"Just read your blog entry here:
http://blog.pandoramachine.com/2011/10/openexr.html

"OpenEXR is great as an intermediate format but it's not really a delivery format. OpenEXR is intended for cases where you are still going to do further image processing on the content (e.g. compositing, color grading, etc.). But as a final delivery format it is quite excessive.

"A closer equivalent to ProRes would be h.264. In fact, if we look at the complete standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVCit supports everything ProRes does and more. If you use only
intra-frame encoding then h.264 is a fine choice even for video editing, and you can do not only 4:2:0 and 4:2:2, but even 4:4:4 (i.e. full color information). In fact, h.264 can even be completely lossless(!).

"Unfortunately, most software only supports subsets of the larger standard, and so advanced features like lossless compression and 4:4:4 chroma are not widely supported (e.g. Apple's h.264 support does not handle lossless compression or 4:4:4 chroma). But even with just the baseline profile (which is supported freakin' everywhere), it can still make a decent delivery format. You just have to know what you're doing with the encoding parameters.

"Anyway, food for thought. If you'd like to know more about my encoding workflow, I would be happy to go more in-depth. I use ffmpeg to do all of my final delivery encoding, because it gives me precise control over the encoding process."

Drew: Boy, I wish h264 supported alpha channels.

Nathan:
"Technically it can, through use of an "auxiliary color channel". But decoders are allowed to ignore it in all of the profiles, so for all intents and purposes it is indeed unsupported.

"But if you really needed to, you could always encode a second video in 4:0:0 (a.k.a. grey-scale, which is also supported by h.264) that represents the alpha channel. Then in any decent compositing app you could re-merge the two streams. However, that's precisely the kind of situation where you would want to use OpenEXR anyway.

"IMO, neither ProRes nor h.264 should be used as intermediary formats for compositing. So I don't think it's a biggie that they don't support alpha channels, since that's not the stage of production they should be used for anyway. ProRes is an NLE codec, h.264 is a delivery format."

Projection Londontown

Project London has a new trailer.

And also, new Creative Commons models!

And Then This

The American Film Market starts today.
Now, I blew it. I made a big mistake. I should have had something of Dragon Girl ready for the AFM. Bah. I really should be where we are now about two months ago. But we were late with the delivery of Earthkiller and that pushed everything back. Nerds.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that  my cash flow is going to somehow suck more because we don't have a new picture at AFM. Because we're not going to get sales of that new picture 'till Cannes anyway. And hopefully we'll get AFM sales of our titles Battle: New York Day 2 and Earthkiller.
But it's personally irking to me because I'd committed to myself to have a new picture for each market.
That being said, in the long-term (or longer-ish-term), we'll have Dragon Girl and Android Insurrection complete and out-the-door by Cannes 2012. Actually, Android Insurrection will be complete on December 15th. So maybe our cash flow won't be terribly impacted. But as it's our goal to do three pictures a year it ain't sayin' I'm doing what I want to be doing.
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And, of course, while this is all happening, the Board of Directors at Theatresouce has given up and is closing the doors of the theater. Which means we have to move our operations.
What sort of options are out there? A whole bunch. Moving into another theater amuses me. But that might be like after breaking up trying to find someone who's just like your ex. Another option is real production offices like at Eastern Effects.
The only "noisy" part of our operation is sound mixing. We could move the booth and my mixing system to my apartment and just get a couple desks at one of the gazillion of funky arty office rental places.

There are merits to all of these ideas. The one thing we know for certain is that nobody but nobody will come and edit in New Jersey. Even if Gowanus is further away and takes longer to get to, they'd rather stay "in New York".
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Lastly, we're re-delivering Earthkiller. I think this is the third time we're delivering it. There's this one shot which drove me nuts at the screening. The framing was terrible. Also, a giant dinobot is chasing after people -- where are the noises of its feet? Well, I at least figured out why I made that mistake -- there were no CG effects in the version of the movie I was looking at while mixing. Oops.
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Also, I need a Cedar DNS 1000. Or I have to be much less lazy about mixing and editing dialog. I'll let you guess which is more likely. I need a Cedar DNS 1000.

With Extra Grooviness

Brian Schiavo's Lifeform is featured in Fangoria. Dig it. Pictures. Everything.

That's Christine Russo with the lovely Virginia Logan and makeup artist Ciara Rose Griffin.

Fangoria, dude!

Where To Move To

Shockingly, band rehearsal studios are cheap and (allegedly) quiet. I'm listing those places over there on the Tyrannosaurus Mouse blog.

http://easterneffects.com/main/officerentals.html
I'm just listing places we can look. A hundred square feet would be fine for us. I would like to see daylight just poking its head in somewhere. It would be nice if it were quiet enough to mix in.
New York City has scads of front-office small spaces and desks. Those tend to be more expensive than what we really need. We're strictly back office. Which is why a small and unusable office in a theater is kind of perfect for us.
It's likely there's going to be a couple months that Pandora Machine will be in my apartment in Jersey City. The editors will hate hate hate that. Unless I provide premium treats for them.
Another option is that we leave all of the sound gear and sound mixing in Jersey City and only do picture editing at an outside office. This idea has merit and is worth considering.

A New Place to Be

The studio is a mess since we had to clear out of deep storage.

What with the Board of Directors of Theatresource deciding to close the place by the end of December, we need to find a new place for our studio.

Yeah, as a stop-gap I could move the studio to Jersey City. That sure would be the cheap option. But would anyone actually take the PATH to Jersey City in order to edit? Maybe once. Twice. 

So I'm looking for either a theater or a post-production house to set up in. 

Right now we're paying $500/month for a windowless back office without HVAC (it's November and we still have a 22" fan blowing air into the studio because it's so hot in there.)

We actually don't quite need the amount of room we have. We're in a (I think) 12' by 13' room. Later today I should double-check. (Update: it's 11' by 12' 6" -- and yeah, those are inside to inside measurements and the world of real estate measures outside to outside but it's not terribly practicable for me to measure that way. Anyway, it's about 120 square feet).

It would be nice if the place were quiet -- at least quiet during some schedulable part of the day in order to mix. Other than that we're all very used to working with headphones. 

I think I'd prefer a theater because it's more fun. Of course Theatresource is/was special, so it was more fun. 

Ram Me

It is beyond my meagre ability to understand why on earth the RAM in your video card should make any difference to your renders. But it does. Big time. I've been getting the "The effect 'Looks' failed to render..." and so I've had to unplug one of the monitors and render in 8-bit.
It's also beyond my understanding how my dual-quad-core Mac has a paltry 256MB of vram in it. Or... wait a minute... why does this computer only have 4GB of regular RAM? Crap. That means something happened. There should be at least 8. I thought I bought 12...
Poopity.
I bet those problems are related.
Here's an article on upgrading the video card on a Mac.

My dual-quad-core Mac is serial number NQ83601AXYK
It has an ATI Radeon HD 2600 with only 256(!) MB of VRAM.
CoconutID says my Mac was built in 2008. But the model identifier says it's a Mac Pro 3,1 which this site claims will not work with the ATI Radeon HD 5870
So the ATI Radeon HD 5770 is it.

The Apple versions of that card are, of course, upwards of twice as expensive as the PC versions. But we can't render out movies in 10-bit with Magic Bullet Looks without a better card. So that's $250 right there.
The other major issue with this dang computer is that I've always had trouble with the RAM. System Scanner tells you what sort of RAM you need.
In my case it's DDR2 PC2-6400 • CL=5 • Fully Buffered • ECC • DDR2-800 • 1.8V • 512Meg x 72
That's another $250 for 8GB of RAM.

Today in the Machine

Dig some still's from Brian Schiavo's Lifeform. Our man David Frey is DP on this feature. I'm digging the contacts.
Our man Will French here at the theater pointed out that you can't actually make a dual-socket computer with the Intel 970/980/990 computers. You have to use Xeon. Which explains the Mac's being built with Xeon processors, don't it?
Today's goal was to have another act of Android Insurrection ready for export so that we (I) could start mixing it. I don't know that I'm going to make my goal. I'll try though. Still have some visual effects to complete...
Also, looking for a new space to be in after the 1st of the year...