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In this Professor Profile, we speak to Mark Bowey who is teaching the MOG 204 – Typography in Title Design course this term. Mark tells us about how he got started, his background in design – including work on the films Die Another Day and The Fifth Element – and we learn about his other life as a nightclub/restaurant investor!

Many members will know Mark from one of the many courses he has taught here at fxphd.

Mike Seymour caught up with Mark for this interview in Sydney recently.

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Both Mike and I really want to thank Mark for his years of great service here at fxphd. In the early days of the site, I probably would have burned out completely were it not for Mark’s help. The level of customer service he set will be a tough act to follow, but we’re confident Ryan is the guy for the job.

Good luck to Mark in his future ventures.

Chad is a member of fxphd. We speak to him about his experiences and a recent challenge submission he made – and won – inside fxphd.

fxg: When did you join fxphd?

I joined fxphd for the first time in October 2011 based on some really positive reviews I’d heard around the internet; and I’ve heard Nick Campbell (greyscalegorilla.com) recommend you guys.

fxg: Where are you?

I’m in the United States, specifically Dallas, Texas.  Although I grew up and attended college 1,000 miles north in Minnesota.

fxg: What courses have you enjoyed @fxphd?

AFX215, BKG222, C4D102, and C4D204.  I will say that wish I had time for the grading class.

fxg: Do you work in the industry?

Yes, I’m an editor (even though I’m in After Effects more than any other program) for Vertigo Post which is production arm of an Advertising Agency called Turnstile Inc.  Our clients are amusement/theme/water parks all across North America.  I wish I could share more of my work but we don’t like to make our clients jealous.  I post my work that’s already been broadcast on my vimeo page: http://www.vimeo.com/chadgilmour and I’m usually posting stills or videos on my twitter: @gilmourmedia

fxg: Has fxphd helped get you to the next level?

Definitely, my bosses and clients have noticed an improvement too!  We had a couple spots we normally would have farmed out to other post-houses, but thanks to these classes I learned enough to handle them myself and keep it all in-house.

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- Watch Chad’s challenge entry

fxg: Was this the 1st time you entered the challenge?

Yes, and it’s the first time I’ve done any type of challenge like this.  The whole time I kept thinking I was putting in way too much time with this, but now that I watch it I just want to keep tweaking keyframes and adjusting the lighting.

fxg: With the challenge, what apps did you use for the particles?

Particular, this plug-in rocks, I use it all the time.  I actually started with a preset and adjusted it to where I thought it looked more natural and less like a preset.  I also used some of the ember footage that was given to us.

fxg: And for the compositing?

After Effects all the way.  I used CS5 in 32bit mode to get a more natural feel with the light and glow effects.

fxg: So no 3d apps?

Oddly enough, no.  The whole reason I joined fxphd was to learn C4D and then I never used it at all on this haha!

fxg: What was the story with the setting of the moon in the background?

It actually started as an after thought on the last shot I was creating because it was a lot easier to plop in.  I had everything set with all my shots and they looked good, but it felt like it was falling a bit short.  I wanted the project to be more than just adding particles to a scene.  My thought process was; it has this “other worldly feel”, it’s outdoors at night, and some of the best night time photography I’ve seen has the moon and stars in it.  The sky fit perfectly for 2 of the shots where the rock wall wasn’t visible, but I had to roto out and manually keyframe part of the rock wall on the wide-shot.

fxg: With your color palette, what made you want to head in a more blue direction?

You mean aside from it being my favorite color?  I figured everyone would be doing fire tones and I always think blue is calming and went naturally with really slow, fluid footage especially with a female figure in every shot.  And if you couldn’t tell, those “streaky” ipod commercials from a few years ago were definitely an influence.  My only regret is that I didn’t spend a little more time pushing the blue color,  I spent the vast majority of my time working on the particles and the light sources.  As Mike pointed out it still competes with the red color a bit too much.

fxg: What was the process and decision behind the anamorphic lens choice for flares.

Honestly, I just went with what I thought looked the coolest.  I used Video Copilot’s Optical Flares.  I started with a preset and tweaked it ’till I got something that looked like a cool light source.

fxg: Where do you want to be in 5 years time

My dream is to be a lead VFX or Finishing artist at a big post-house. However my current job may transform into that within 5 years anyways.  Even though we are a smaller company we keep taking on bigger and bigger projects that used to be farmed out, which means we have to keep growing and expanding our own abilities to keep up the pace we are setting for ourselves.

fxg: What was your favorite part of the fxphd experience?

Access to instructors that provide immediate responses on the forums.  A number of times I would experiment with something I learned in a class, ran into an issue, posted the question, and the instructors responded quickly with a detailed answer often with a project file as an example.  That’s something you’re not gonna get at other forums or places that only offer training videos.

I’ve been excited about the possibilities of Thunderbolt on the MacBook Pro since it was announced almost a year ago. The problem has been the wait to get these new small portable but fast peripherals. In a recent fxguide rc podcast, Jason and Mike commented about the delays in seeing products actually shipping. Due to various factors, including a lack of controller chips, Thunderbolt devices have taken a while to materialize. But we’re starting to see some cool products come to market that are especially suited to production and post production.

A few of our favorites include the Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter and the LaCie Little Big Disk. These fit in nicely with our needs of nimble production travel for fxguide and fxphd, where we shoot with the RED EPIC, SCARLET, and the 5D.

Why do they fit in nicely? Basically it’s the size/weight and the vast increase in speed.

Our requirements for the job at hand are probably quite different from others’ needs. For our production, we’re already lugging quite a bit of gear around the world, so we don’t want to be bogged down with weighty RAID systems or even desktop-sized external drive enclosures. We have several Promise Thunderbolt RAID enclosures and love them. But the thought of lugging one around in a backpack? Ain’t gonna happen.

So on the road, we prefer smaller and more portable notebook-based external drives such as the OWC Mercury Pro Elite Mini, which has FW800 and ESATA ports. We even steer towards larger capacity drives that spin at 5400RPM vs. smaller capacity at 7200RPM. This is because we’re shooting a lot of content on the EPIC and so we can quickly fill up drives during a week of production. We also stick with the 15″ MacBook Pro, as the 17″ is frankly too large to lug around (Mike and I have both owned 17″ systems in the past). But the 15″ MBP doesn’t have an Express Card slot, so until now we’ve been out of luck using ESATA drives on the road.

The Sonnet Tempo SATA Express Card plugs into the Echo Express Card Adapter

This is why it makes sense that we love the Little Big Disk and the Echo Express Card Adapter. The Little Big Disk gives us 2TB of RAID0 speediness in an enclosure that fits in the palm of your hand. As far as the Echo Express Adapter, it allows us to plug in the Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 and then use the ESATA connection on the RED STATION. This allows us to take advantage of the vastly faster Thunderbolt pipeline as compared to FW800.

How fast? An almost 2.5x speed up from what we were using before. We did some tests trying to mimic a real world situation, so we used:

• OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini 1.5TB drive. This drive already had about 750GB of material on it
• LaCie Little Big Disk 2TB drive, formatted as RAID0. It had about 900GB of material on it
• Sonnet Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter
• Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 Adapter

First, we tested the basic drives utilizing the AJA System Test. Here are the results:

Next, we moved on to transferring footage, testing various combinations of things, including:

• Using the OWC drive as an ESATA drive and as a FW800 drive
• Using R3D Data Manager with MD5 verification
• Is a unix command-line copy faster than the Finder?

The test involved transferring 40.5GB of R3D footage from a REDMAG SSD 128GB. Each test was run twice and both runs were incredibly close to each other (within 5 seconds). See the end of the article for a visual representation as to how the drives were hooked up for the various tests.

Here are the results:

The obvious takeaway was that using the ESATA adapter and the LaCie Thunderbolt drive gave us performance that was close to 2.5 times faster than the FW800 setup we were using at the end of last year. That’s a huge difference when you’re transferring footage overnight after an all day shoot.

Interestingly, using the OWC drive as an ESATA drive in the same setup was also considerably faster. So if you need to use the single drive in a pinch, it’s worth it to use the ESATA connection.

If you use R3D Data Manager to ensure the integrity of your transferred data, the results using the full on Thunderbolt system were fairly close to our “original” FW800 to FW800 Finder copy setup. It’s also more than twice as fast than if you were using R3D Data Manager with the FW800 to FW800 connection.

A couple of hopefully helpful tips in operation:

• We did find that occasionally we’d unmount the Thunderbolt attached drives (both the LaCie and the RED STATION) and couldn’t get them to mount again without rebooting. Unmounting and detaching and then re-attaching the Thunderbolt cables seemed to cause the swaps to be more stable.
• The Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 doesn’t solidly click into the Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter. Be careful as you don’t want to disconnect the drives during a copy. If you do, you’ll most likely need to reboot to get all the drives to be recognized again.
• The ReTrack Esata Adapter is a nice, compact ESATA adapter that winds and unwinds the cables. We find this to be a better solution than the incredibly rigid (and short) ESATA cables you find that are common.

All in all we’re really excited about this first batch of portable Thunderbolt products to hit the market.

Faster drives on the road equals more sleep (instead of staying up babysitting EPIC transfers), – or time for a few more pints of amber ale after the shoot.

Visual summary of the test setups:

Test setup and connections (click for full size image)

- John Montgomery fxphd.

“So if you are a really keen young Camera operator and you see EXTENDED range – you’re going to pick it – I mean who wouldn’t? Normal and Extended – you’re 26 – you’re going to pick Extended,” joked Charles Poynton as part of his lecture at fxphd last week.

What Charles was talking about was the Extended range on the ARRI Alexa, but the same discussion could be had about the Marvels Cine Profile for the 5D vs the Technicolor Cine profile.

The theory is that in many cameras there is a set of levels. Let’s say for the purposes of this article ONLY – that they are between 0 to 100. Now imagine that you discovered that your camera had values mapped for black to white that only went from 5 to 95. In other words, you film with the lens cap on and it would internally store that number at 5. And if you way way overexposed, the best you could do is an internal number of 95. Of course, on your screen or in the cinema it would be black and white respectively – but in effect you have mapped all the range of light levels from black to white just between 5 and 95 – and in theory there is no way to get below 5 and or above 95. It would seem like a waste perhaps? You might even look for the button that says EXTENDED – that did not do that. Why not map between 0 and 100 if that is black and white?

Marvels Cine Picture Style is an option for the 5D. I am sure it works for some people, but I was alarmed when I read their web page. Here is a quote from the Marvel Cine Profile web page, which highlights the problem and reads as if the Technicolor Cinestyle would be inferior. This is frankly at best odd, and at worst, simply inaccurate:

Warning to all users of the Technicolor Cinema-style flat-profile! Using the Technicolor style will severely limit your dynamic range! Blacks are lifted and whites are crushed! With only 255 values between black and white for each color, snooping 10% off at both sides is simple “DR theft”! You remove another 10% of DR when using the Technicolor LUT (via LutBuddy); that’s probably two stops total!

There are many things wrong with this statement.

First it reads like a warning, which is inflammatory. I mean, we are all on the side of getting the best out of our next shoot aren’t we? No need for the drama. But, perhaps, that is just me.

Second, it says the whites are crushed and the blacks lifted. Yes, the blacks are lifted, but the whites are not crushed. Crushed implies that data is clipped off. It is not the whites that are clipped – or even crushed – as long as they are adjusted along with everything to fit into a more restricted range.

Then there is that “theft” remark. Well now, you really need to start discounting the marketing hype ! Why is it not theft? Why is EXTENDED range or using the full range not such a great idea?

For a start, ARRI — one of the most respected camera companies in the world — does not make this ‘theft’ mode normal. It is not the default. Technicolor represents some of the best technical minds in the industry, they have no incentive other than image quality to get this right. Note that Technicolor gave away Cinestyle for free. I will leave that for you to interrupt motives.

But again – why isn’t it theft? The answer is simply noise.

Imagine we only focus on noise in the blacks. That is a sensible thing to do…after all if you have 10 units of noise over a very small dark signal of say 20 units, the noise is half the signal. Man, will I notice that. And yet if I have the same 10 units of noise over a signal up at 70 units (say 70% up the light scale) then 10 over 70 is not half, it is 14% (10/70). That is why we record signal to noise ratios (normally in dB). The same amount of noise in the blacks as in the whites looks worse as there is a higher signal to noise ratio.

One more point before I prove my noise ‘anti-theft’ theory. Not withstanding my point above, you might argue there is actually more noise in the blacks due to heat. Good point. In a sensor, photons come in and they get collected in little conceptual ‘wells’ and the photons cause electrons. Every frame, we read out the number of electrons and bingo we have the light level for that pixel for that frame. But heat also causes electrons, this is the dark body noise; the noise the actual silicon makes given it is hot (and yes it does rise as the camera is on filming longer).

But the clever guys at your camera company know how much we hate noise so they make some sensor ‘pixel’ on the CMOS chip – some normal ‘wells’ or ‘pixels” and then cover them with aluminum, they block them off completely to light. This gives a great idea as to the noise the other active ‘wells’ are getting that have nothing to do with light. Imagine your camera only had 2 pixels – the real one and this dummy one (the one covered over). The main ‘pixel’ well reads 92 photons and the covered over one reads 7 photons. But, of course, the covered one is locked shut so it is really reading 7 photons of noise. By subtracting the dummy reading from the active reading (92 minus 7), we effectively take out the noise in our one and only pixel image. This makes it reasonable to assume that the other active pixel is really only reading 85.

However, noise is not constant. So that one active pixel might have actually had 6 or 8 fake photons of noise. We don’t know. But we all agree if we take out most of the noise it is a lot better off. Even if a small amount of noise remains, most of it is gone.

So how does this relate to our extended range or ‘theft’ remark?

Well, of course our cameras have a lot more than one pixel, but the principle is the same. We sample a set of blocked off dummy pixels, work out the average (this is important), and subtract the average from the active pixels. This gets most but not all of the noise out. Sometimes the average we subtract was not enough; some times too much. And don’t forget there are SO many pixels or sensor points on a CMOS chip that the math is really valid.

To illustrate, I am going to imagine that there are only 10 active pixels and, as above, keep the math simple and use some dummy numbers to illustrate the point. Here are our 10 pixels and the numbers on those pixels when the sensor thinks it is seeing black:

6, 7, 6 ,3, 9, 15, 6, 5, 10, 3

The covered over dummy sensor ‘pixels/wells’ read an average of 7. So lets subtract out the 7 to get:

-1, 0, -1, -4, 2, 8, -1, -2, 3, -4

Note the average of these numbers is zero. Add them up yourself. The average is zero. We took out the noise…and sure, some pixels are up some are down, but on average there is NO average noise.

Now imagine you stored these numbers without any offset. In other words, we store these numbers as per Marvels Cine profile. We set zero to zero and only store positive numbers… we get

0,0,0,0,2,8,0,0,3,0

The average noise is now … 1.3 – it went up, the image is, on average, now noisier !

If we had some room at the bottom and did not cut off zero at zero and saved the file with zero lifted up, yes, the BLACK LEVEL lifted… we would have less noise. If we just saved some of those negative numbers then as we moved into post, we’d have less noise. No signal processing – no tricks – just simple maths.

but this goes to 11

Personally I will stay with Technicolor, for two reasons:

1. I like it and I hate noise.
2. Technicolor worked directly with Canon and got access to the chip further up stream in the image processing pipeline that ever before, Canon worked with Technicolor.

But that’s just me.

Re the ARRI Alexa: Let me just quote from Nick Shaw, Workflow Consultant London, UK, who’s opinion I trust.

I have seen a lot of problems caused by people not understanding the difference between “legal” and “full/extended range” signals. If in doubt, stick to “legal”. You may have slightly fewer code values to play with, but you do not risk your image data getting clipped at some
point in your workflow.

As for Charles Poynton – I thank him for his work with us last week. The great news is that he is teaching all of this at fxphd this term in his advanced level course, DCT301 – Camera Tech and Colour Science.

By Mike Seymour