the fxphd deans blog

We did get to shooting yesterday. We were doing a few things at once yesterday, both testing high speed modes on the RED and shooting material for this upcoming term of fxphd.

We shot at 120 fps, 96 fps and 47 fps. We also tried super sharp shutters, 22fps and a bunch of cool tricks. We tried a couple of audio tricks as well. In this upcoming fxphd we are adding Audio courses, so we figured we’d try a few high speed photography audio tricks ! Not something that may immediately come to mind - but we gave it a shot. Of course sitting here the morning after, I am dying to know if they have worked. But this term we are about creative problem solving and that means trying things that may not always work… but man I hope they do.

We have just come back from lecturing to the Students at the Wuhan, University of GeoSciences, a couple of hours flight out of Beijing. Ahh, you say not the most obvious place in the world for fxphd to be lecturing. True, I grant you it sounds odd, but it turns out it is a big world and there are millions, no billions of people that are not living in the obvious capital cities of the world - and some of them have progressive and interesting film schools. Wuhan is one of those places. The University is building a film school and has some great government support to build up this area. Come to think of it in Sydney the University of Technology had a cool film school when I was just starting out, so maybe film schools have some affinity with technology research centers.
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Our trip through wonderful China continues.

Yesterday we met with local production companies and film effects houses. I was surprised to learn that FCP is so strong here, for all the talk of piracy - that Intel Mac tower makes for one heck of a dongle. One of the companies we visited yesterday specializes in episodic TV - on a grand scale - they have done 19 series and over 700 episodes. Not only do the work exclusively in FCP but they grade in Color. And for anyone worrried about the level of vfx here, we saw a 3.15 mins opening shot yesterday - made up of 6 separate shots, all rolled into one long seamless killer period establishing shot - it was really well done and the local artists here have clearly got what it takes to produce intelligent complex vfx shots.
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With the new Build 16 of the RED camera, we wanted to film something - well interesting - challenging and fun. We picked the Great Wall of China. (Yes that image is from build 16)

With the help of five local crew we went to great lengths to get our RED to the top of the Wall. It is all for next term’s fxphd which launches in a few weeks. The shoot went so well, and we ended the day sleeping on the Great Wall and photographic it again at dawn.

Actually you might like to know the weekend we had when we were told we have the weekend off in Beijing….
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For both Mike and myself, one of the great things about fxphd has been the creation of an incredible worldwide community that has grown from the site. Mike was recently in New Zealand and will be traveling to China for meetings. I made many trips last year, including two weeks flying around Asia doing flame master classes in five countries. Everywhere we have been, fxphd members have been incredibly warm and welcoming — going out of their way to make us feel comfortable and introduce us to their countries and cultures.

I guess I started thinking about this and the global community because one of our longtime profs Tahl Niran recently returned from India where he also experienced this strong support from phd members and other artists. He posted a few short paragraphs about his trip to India in our members forums and with his permission I thought I’d share them with the wider audience. Click through for that and more….
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One thing we’ve wanted to do with the blog is to let members know what is going on in other classes…things they might have missed. The heart of fxphd has always been compositing, and our first ever advanced Nuke course has been a lot of fun. Taught by longtime Nuke artist Sean Devereaux, it’s our first course done in version 5. Devereaux has been using the app for years…he’s done time at DD working on Star Trek: Nemsis, I, Robot, and the recent Speed Racer.

Since it is an advanced course, due to the complexity of a shot, we decided to cover a single shot over multiple classes. It’s an HD resolution greenscreen shot covering matchmoving, keying, object replacement, and environment creation. Deveraux coordinated the generation of assets from other fxphd profs and artists around the world — including tracking data, 3D object creation for projections, and multi-channel open EXR CGI renders. It’s about 1TB of material per course member — that’s a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

On top of the great project-based classes, the last two classes of the term are sure to be hit. We’ve got guest prof Frank Reuter sharing his knowledge, whom many consider to be the worldwide king of nuke tools and customization.

We had a great shoot yesterday at an aircraft hanger. We were shooting for next term and for this term’s DOP course. Over the next two weeks in the DOP course we are covering lighting for drama and coverage for Drama.

Which is timely given that in Background we just started working on our ‘tourist’ edit that lacked coverage (!). Coverage is actually so much more than just overlapping actions in different takes. In fact, we start with the classic “wide and punch in for the closeups”, and produce something that is well OK… we then show how to do real coverage based on subtext, motivation and story point of view.

Our director for this was Alex Davies, who had just come off set on the new Baz film AUSTRALIA where she was acting opposite Hugh Jackman. Her insight into blocking, designing and staging a shot were brilliant. You’ll see Alex in 2 weeks time on the DOP course. She is such a talented actor / director it was a joy to work with her. Actually the whole crew was great - but it is funny filming empty spaces for later vfx work. In this photo we film a blank piece of concrete - on both a RED and a Panavision supplied 35mm BL4, but you’ll be glad to know the concrete gave an oscar winning performance.

We came across a great extension to OpenEXR, OpenSXR which is a stereo extension. This will allow dual images to be stored in the one OpenEXR file, and actually could be used to store more than 2 images if you needed to. This will solve a huge data management problem when working with Stereo images. Having to keep two frames linked throughout post can be a huge pain.

Multiple views of the same scene may sometimes be stored in separate files rather than in a single multi- view file. An OpenEXR file that contains one of multiple views of a scene should identify the stored view using the multiView header attribute. For example, if RGBA data for the left and right views of a scene are stored in two separate files, both files should contain a multiView attribute. In one file the attribute lists only the left view; in the other file only the right view is listed. Each file has four channels, called R, G, B and A.

In talking to one of the authors Matt Welford (Weta) the team also think the extension should be saved as .sxr when storing stereo images. “Currently this is the what several other vendors are using the format (Nuke, Silhouette, RV) and we can do internally with Shake” he said. The OpenEXR extension was proposed by Welford and Peter Hillman.

For sample files - click read more below (more…)