frustrating meeting with Post houses

[Bob Gundu]

Just got back from a meeting with a major post facility here in Toronto. I was there as the VFX supervisor for a feature film that will be shot next month. The choice of camera was not decided on prior to the meeting but of course I was gunning for the Epic. Well, unfortunately the Alexa won out because of what I felt were misconceptions. I believe these guys were looking for the path of least resistance which means more money for them. They made the claim of the Alexa looks so much more filmic, more latitude, less noise, less cost of storage, blah blah blah. Talked to the colourist and he loves working on the Alexa footage because it's so easy.... Needless to say, I was beaten up and left dejected. At one point the guy there even made a crack about Oakley sunglasses! Quite honestly, these post houses are soon to be dinosaurs... sorry for the rant.... long live RED!

[K. cromwell]

That's side... I feel that people will only go with what best suites them rather than growing and learning a system that in many ways is better.

[Scott Crawley]

The road to extinction is littered with the corpses of the complacent and lazy.

[Lliam Worthington]

Chin up Bob. Take great comfort in that you PJ, Ridley and Soderbergh are of a mind.

[Vadim Bobkovsky]

At one point the guy there even made a crack about Oakley sunglasses!

Well well, we'll see who will have the last laugh. My bet is on Red and the companies which are not afraid of the future. So the next year I'm curious to see if Alexa 2.0 will have 6K -> 4K supersampling to give you pristine moving pictures. Add 2+ more stops of native DR and HDRx is here to stay and help if required. Maybe they're just hardcore ProRes guys such as those I've seen in a local TV field.

[Tim Whitcomb]

I had an even WEIRDER experience. Im renting cameras to a production company in LA (not going to say who but they make a LOT of movies)

and internal policy is NO EPIC OR SCARLET Cameras as "A" cameras... ONLY THE RED ONE! Talked about it until I was blue in the face... because of history of R1 they
feel they need to wait another year to make sure its PROVEN... egad. (yes I mentioned the $2B movies and 14 other arguments.... denied.

how crazy is that?

[Bob Gundu]

What a bunch of monkeys :(
Oh wait... monkeys are actually smarter.

I had an even WEIRDER experience. Im renting cameras to a production company in LA (not going to say who but they make a LOT of movies)

and internal policy is NO EPIC OR SCARLET Cameras as "A" cameras... ONLY THE RED ONE! Talked about it until I was blue in the face... because of history of R1 they
feel they need to wait another year to make sure its PROVEN... egad. (yes I mentioned the $2B movies and 14 other arguments.... denied.

how crazy is that?

[Timur Civan]

Well at least they said R1 is ok......

Production company i work with forbids the epic/scarlet/R1. Alexa, F35, 35mm or F3(444) only.

They dont even want F65... so weird.

[Bob Gundu]

I guess these facilities must be seeing some serious decline in work with smaller margins. Perhaps they are trying to streamline the workflow which best suits their wallets instead of adapting.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Discussing R3D workflow with many "post houses" is almost a lost cause. Most of them are so frickin' cheap and lazy they don't want to take the extra 5 minutes to establish a workflow or pipeline for dealing with RAW. They actually turn away potential clients and work if they are unable to convince people that their established pipeline for 2K/1080p ProRes / DNxHD or whatever is more than good enough. And it's not just anti-RED, many don't like working with ARRI RAW either. Even though it takes far less CPU power as its lower resolution and not wavelet compressed -- they don't like dealing with the storage requirements for uncompressed 3K oddball resolution.

What these guys haven't figured out is that they're about to be cannibalized from the low end of the market. The Reduser 4K competition showed this loud and clear. Indies and small boutiques don't need separate post house facilities to get the results they want and to grade and finish their productions in 4K. Only a matter of time before small boutiques handle all their post in-house. A lot more is going to shift when CS6 drops on the 7th. Just watch... Improved performance and workflow. Newer, faster workstations hitting the market right now, Resolve and SpeedGrade are essentially FREE. Post houses are going to have to find a way to add value to their services. Being complacent and lazy about RAW workflow or handling 4K+ resolutions is not going to help them on the path to success.