Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years.

I bailed on this blog in the middle of last year because I got too busy to think. I really was too busy to think for a while, then I just got lazy. But then Pizzolo busted my balls and said that people actually like this blog, and that I’m easier to deal with when I’m blogging because he doesn’t have to be the outlet for my rants. Speaking of which…

Pizzolo sent me this article. Its not really an article, but a stock tip regarding the Warner Music Group. We don’t trade stocks, nor do we follow the market religiously, but we do pay attention to the fate of media companies, especially when they are kicked so squarely in the balls.

That WMG would receive a downgrade from a wall street analyst is not surprising or novel. The fun here is that the analyst recommends replacing your holdings in WMG with stock from Live Nation, News Corp., and Apple. Basically, throw away the old music business and replace it with a concert promotion company, a diversified media conglomerate, and a lifestyle gadget builder. That pretty much sums up the last ten years of the music business in one convenient stock pick. Goodnight, WMG. Happy new year everybody.

Comic Con San Diego: Perspectives From A Melted Brain

I was warned in advance that my first trip to Comic Con San Diego would melt my brain. It doesn’t happen quickly, like some kind of high concept microwave brain laser. Rather, Comic Con melts the brain slowly, through a massive sensory overload and an unfathomably high degree of human interaction. Halo-8 collectively had a booth on the convention floor, some talent autograph signings, and a panel appearance. It was heavy load for our small staff, but it was all over soon enough. I still haven’t quite recovered, which explains the incoherent ramble below.

Comic Con has long been the place for Hollywood to market big tentpole movies, so I wasn’t surprised to see an aggressive marketing presence from the major studios. But I didn’t realize the degree to which the Studios and TV networks had built Comic Con into a Sundance style film market, with backroom deal brokering all day, and starlet filled invite only parties all night. The surprising part is how little this Hollywood scene has to do with the
convention itself, creating a virtual two tiered caste system between the Hollywood business sector and the droves of comic and pop culture fans that fill the convention floor. The upper class Hollywood caste doesn’t mingle on the convention floor, and the lower classes of the Comic Book caste don’t mingle with starlets at the after parties. This isn’t terribly shocking, — these disparate groups have very different reasons for attending the show. But its fascinating that Comic Con operates with such a dichotomy, and I wonder if one part could survive without the other. Are they symbiotic, or is one of them a parasite?

The two castes eventually do come face to face in the panels where new films are introduced. The studios parade the talent and preview scenes, and the press eats it up. The studios have engineered Comic Con into the most powerful publicity scheme I have ever witnessed, and the coverage is remarkable. The crowds love these panels too, but only a lucky few get to see them. The infamous “Hall H” holds about 5600 people, which is about 5% of the total Comic Con attendance. If a fan wants to preview a highly anticipated project, it means lining up before dawn and devoting the better part of a day to holding a place in line, creating a dream scenario for the studios where only the most dedicated set of fans end up in the screenings. These devotees just waited six plus hours in line for a screening, and their ready to scream and cheer no matter what they see. Virtually every preview gets a glowing review because the vibe is good and the press and bloggers are just happy to be there. I heard several conversations about how Comic Con San Diego didn’t used to be such a mass marketing event, which is probably true to some degree. But 2009 was the 40th anniversary of Comic Con San Diego, and the printed program guide had a retrospective of highlights from the previous four decades. I read there that George Lucas previewed Star Wars in 1977, so the film business has had its hooks in Comic Con from early on.

Halo-8 had a booth at Comic Con, and we value the one on one interaction with the consumers (this is what Pizzolo refers to as “retail politics”), so we were on the convention floor all day. But at night, we hooked up with the Hollywood set and hit the parties and bars. That meant that we never slept, because the parties kept us out until after 3am, and we were up by 7am to ready the booth. After 3.5 hours sleep on Friday night, I walked out of the hotel at sunrise on Saturday morning expecting to find the streets of San Diego’s Gaslamp District deserted. But in fact the neighborhood around the convention center was teeming with activity. After a stroll down to the coffee shop, I realized that I was witnessing a casual intermingling of the most extreme members of the two Comic Con Castes, as the hard partying Hollywood elite stumbled back to their rooms after a night of debauchery, and the hardcore convention enthusiasts were lining up early for seats in the screenings. Each crossed the others path, oblivious in that moment to their respective roles in the largest comic and pop culture celebration in the world, and the most elaborate marketing hustle in the movie business.

By the way, Syfy opted out of a booth on the convention floor this year. Instead they took over the Hard Rock Cafe across the street and re-branded it into a Syfy venue. If Halo-8 goes back to San Diego in 2010, we’re opening a speakeasy.

Cinematic Color Grading Theory

In my first year in Los Angeles, I spent 7 or 8 months as a Telecine assistant in the Valley. The shop was a really low budget operation without many clients, or much working equipment, and the colorist that trained me was a drunk. Most of what we did was one light dallies for low budget movies, which constituted about two hours of actual work each day. The rest of the day was spent discussing the art and science of cinematic color grading. The colorist would roll in about 10:30 every day. Teaching through his hangover, he imparted to me the basics of cinematic color, in theory and practice.

I subconsciously use that information on a daily basis, but I hadn’t thought about the philosophical and psychological concepts of color grading for some time, until I found this post on Mike Jones blog, Digital Basin. Mike Jones isn’t a drunk like my old mentor, but he’s got a great take on the psychology of cinematic color grading. The post is called “Colour Grading – Concepts and Paradigms.” Firstly, any reference to “Concepts and Paradigms” in regards to post production is automatically intriguing, because post production tends to be myopically workflow oriented, often avoiding the larger philosophical considerations behind the choices that we make in method and technology.

The post neatly packages the basics of video color grading theory, an art form that seems to have gone out the window in the age ofprosumer video production. Access to very powerful color manipulation tools (I use Color Finesse and Colorista pretty regularly) have created a wealth of color styling opportunity, but there’s an inversely proportional dearth of knowledge about how to apply those tools effectively. Mike Jones breaks down the use of these tools into a set of values that allow the intention of the filmmaker to inform color choices. That sounds like a basic concept, but its easy to overlook if you start fiddling with the color corrector before you’ve without a clear aesthetic plan for the project.

Video media players: A map to the last 10 feet

As Pizzolo mentioned a few days ago, the X-box 360 is not just a hot shit game console. Its also a robust media player, useful for playing back a wide array of video files on your TV. What does that mean for you? It means that you can download any number of video files (legally or otherwise,) put them on a USB hard drive, and play them on your TV. For us, it means that the movies in our digital store at Televandalism.com are even easier to view on your TV than the DRM protected movies you might get from Apple or Amazon.

But the X-box isn’t the only way to play your pirated download of “Krull.” There are dozens of these players on the market, and many of them are cheaper and than the X-box, without the format restrictions that Microsoft and Apple are famous for. This isn’t a formal review, or an endorsement of any particular box. Also, this isn’t a thoroughly researched technical synopsis. If I misstate anything, or overlook details, let me know in the comments. I’ll update this list periodically as I find new information and new media players.

WD TV

The WD TV is at once very cool, but slightly bizarre. Its cool because its cheap ($129), it plays HD through HDMI, and its got a slick remote controlled interface. Its bizarre because its made by hard drive manufacture Western Digital, yet its not equipped with a hard drive. I guess its not that bizarre, because Western Digital wants to sell you an external hard drive to go with your new WD TV. Conveniently, the WD TV has a USB port for connection of any external hard drive. It plays just about any media format you’ll come across, but it won’t play DRM protected files from Itunes, Amazon, Cinema Now, etc.

Lacie Multimedia Hard Drives
In his original post, Pizzolo mentioned that the LaCie “rugged” costs $349, but the “LaCinema” series of media players starts at $99 for the driveless model. $149 gets you a 500 gig drive inside. The prices go up to $500 for the DVR model that can record standard definition video and playback HD. That model is also equipped with ethernet and wifi connections for playback of video from other computers on the network. All of the “LaCinema” products are equipped with HDMI for connection to the TV, but only the more expensive models actually play HD video.

Popcorn Hour
As a sure sign that this an emerging market, the interesting innovations are coming from obscure, but ambitious, hardware manufacturers. The Popcorn Hour C-200 seems to be the ultimate “play anything” pirate machine. It doesn’t have an internal hard drive, but you can add storage via USB, or connect it to wifi and send the video files to the box via network. It plays anything, including a few forms of DRM files (I’m not sure if that means ITunes movies or not), and it also plays streaming flash video from several websites to your TV. You Tube, Hulu, and several other prescribed media outlets are all viewable. But wait! Theres more! The C-200 also has an internal bit torrent application, so you can pirate movies right to your TV. At $299, this all seems too good to be true. But the technology at work here is fairly simple. Any computer, even a $300 netbook, can play back all of these file formats and connect to a wifi network. The video conversion hardware is cheap and easy to implement, so there isn’t much reason for these boxes to cost more than a few hundred bucks unless the manufacturers want to gouge us. The C-200 isn’t available yet, and there’s no date for delivery on the website. We’ll see what happens when it comes out.

Apple IPod
Last, and certainly least, any video capable IPod can send video out to your TV. The catch is that Apple wants $50 for the video adapter cable that sends component video out through the Ipod dock. A quick amazon search reveals cheaper solutions in a variety of configurations, but none seem to offer the magic combination of video output while simultaneously charging the battery, as is found on the Apple cable. This is a must because, in my experience, playing video on the Ipod kills the battery in double time. Furthermore, I’ve heard reports of the Iphone / IPod tough 3.0 software update blocking the use of non-Apple cables. Thanks Mr. Jobs!

Apple extends that restrictive methodology to the video files played by the Ipod. The video has to be scaled and compressed to a fairly strict standard. Videos from the ITunes store and other legal sources are formatted correctly. Most pirated video is not, so anything that isn’t in the correct h.264 codec will have to be converted. ITunes will do this conversion for you, but its slow and you don’t get any control over the compression standards.

There’s no HDMI, or any kind of HD signal, and sound is limited to stereo. I wouldn’t buy an IPod to serve as the hub of a digital home theater, but if you’re wiling to cough up $50 for Apple’s proprietary cable, its a serviceable method to watch movies from a device that many of us already have.

Comic Conned

An interesting viewpoint from Variety’s Brian Lowry regarding the value of the Comic Con crowd as taste makers, and the event as a barometer for box office performance. Lowry calls this the “Comic Con False Positive,” claiming that a positive response from the devoted legions of convention fanboys does not equal automatic success in the mass market. But I don’t think this comes as a surprise to studio executives or producers, as is implied in the article. That’s because the studios appreciate Comic Con for exactly what it is: A massive marketing event. Its not a focus group, or a test screening. For the movie studios, Comic Con operates like a film festival. They spend tons of money and considerable resources to draw worldwide media attention to the convention. They parade the talent, play a series of clips, and the fanboys cheer. Those images blanket the mainstream media, and that buzz fuels the marketing effort until the movie is eventually released.

But movies that cost in excess of $150 million don’t profit because a room full of 6000 fanboys gives a standing ovation. The marketing chatter created by Comic Con is invaluable, but it doesn’t create an instant hit. That kind of income relies on a long term, multi-platform strategy of vertically integrated marketing and distribution whose success has little to do with any kind of core audience reaction. The studios will use the imagery of Comic Con to create buzz and build the perceived value of a title, but the notion of a “core audience” is a myth when a $150 million movie is opening on 4200 screens world wide.

Syfy, why do you have to suck?

Its remarkable how much ill will the Sci Fi channel has garnered over the years. I’ve never seen so much ire directed at a cable channel. I guess they figured there was nothing left to lose when they re-branded the network as “Syfy.” The blogosphere has already eviscerated the branding change, so I won’t elaborate on that mysterious choice.

The channel was doomed to mediocrity from day one because the name “Sci Fi Channel” creates a wide range of expectations across a broad set of demographically diverse viewers. The channel would never be able to please everybody, especially in a class of entertainment that is dominated by high budget production values that a fledgling cable channel wouldn’t have access to. As a result of those early positioning issues, and a recurring theme of poor programming choices, the channel is plagued by the eternal question:

“Syfy, why do you have to suck so bad?”

Despite the goofy handle, Syfy is by no means a total loss. The channel has solid assets in their more recent series like Battlestar and the Stargate spinoffs. Even Eureka is watchable. Better programming decisions can repair the fragile relationship with the audience, and here’s programming fix #1:

LOSE THE WRESTLING.

Every piece of programming on a channel becomes part of the channel’s brand image. The programming itself becomes a statement of purpose for the channel, and you develop a relationship with the audience based on that programming history. There is no scenario where Professional Wrestling makes sense as part of the Syfy brand image. They had to have known this when they programmed ECW, and the audience knows that they know it, so it feels like a slap in the face. Any credibility they have generated with other programming goes out the window with choices like this. Syfy President Dave Howe claims that “ECW has successfully brought new younger viewers to our channel.” Even if that were true, its not a viable longterm strategy. Viewers attracted to a genre of programming that has nothing to do with the mission of the channel are not likely to stay, and any gains will come at the cost of alienating the existing audience. Syfy would gain a temporary ratings bump by showing soft core porn on Saturday nights, but that doesn’t mean its good for the brand.

ACE hates FCP

So the American Cinema Editors like Avid and hate Final Cut Pro, according to this article in Variety. For those not familiar with ACE, here’s the description from their website:

“ACE is an honorary society of motion picture editors founded in 1950. Film editors are voted into membership on the basis of their professional achievements, their dedication to the education of others and their commitment to the craft of editing.”

In other words, ACE is old school, and its membership works on high budget Studio productions. I’ve always thought of ACE as a classy organization, dedicated to education and the furtherance of film editing as an art form, which is why it surprises me to see ACE board members on the record in such a divisive way. The article in Variety starts as praise for Avid, but quickly devolves into a rant against Apple for failing to answer the concerns of professional editors. This appears to stem from the ACE 2008 Equipment Survey, part of which entailed ACE members detailing issues they would like to see addressed in Avid and Final Cut Pro. The issues where compiled into documents and sent to the respective companies. Avid replied within a couple of days. Apple never replied. That apparently prompted ACE to give Avid some kind of honorary award for technological merit while simultaneously launching an anti Apple campaign. The Variety article also mentions that Avid is an active sponsor of ACE events, which means that the ACE is schilling for Avid. If anyone cared about the plight of Cinema Editors and the technology that they used, this would be a scandal. Instead, its just embarrassing.

As I have stated before, Apple is a gadget company. They don’t care about post production, and they aren’t going to respond to the specific concerns of a few users, even if those users represent the cinema elite.

I’ve also written at length about the changing landscape of media production, and the dissolution of the editing middle class. Editing jobs will be more abundant, but the budgets will be smaller and most editors will use widely available prosumer equipment. Apple is positioning itself to support this market of editors, and I suspect that Final Cut Pro will eventually be given away for free with new Mac computers. Avid may be superior in many ways, but its not accessible. The genius of Apple is their ability to market the paradox of accessible software that is hardware dependant (and is therefore not really accessible, hence the paradox.) Once they get a grip on the prosumer market, Apple will be impossible to compete with.

There will always be a market for Studio tentpole entertainment, which is where the ACE membership already works. Considering the history and status of this organization, and the high ground they occupy in the industry, I’m not sure what they stand to gain by publicly railing against a gadget company.

If the ACE membership is in a panic about having to adapt to new workflows and learn new software, then their relevance is certainly on the wane. Post production doesn’t exist in a bubble, and editors are increasely subject to the economic realities associated with rapidly advancing computer technology and shifts in content delivery, all of which has nothing to do with the art of editing. Smart editors will always be ready to adapt their editorial skills to new technology and evolving workflows. Platform wars are for hacks.