For this week’s special report on equipment and gear, SHOOT canvassed select artisans from the production, postproduction and audio sides of the business about their favorite commercialmaking tool—be it equipment or software. SHOOT also asked what they anticipate in terms of new technology, and what would be on their wish list for future toolsets. Below are their responses:
Bill Chesley
Sound Designer
Amber Music, New York
My main piece of gear is Pro Tools, which I have been using since it was in beta (scary) form in 1991. I love Pro Tools. It is my best friend, and usually accounts for eighty percent of the actual creative work done on any job thrown at me. The addition of TDM plug-ins several years ago (as well as the RTAS variety) has made Pro Tools the standard for sound design. Pro Tools is also highly stable, which is a beautiful thing in the mad world of advertising. It rarely, if ever, lets me down. I am currently running 5.1 TDM on a Power Mac G4 667 with 512k of ram. I don’t have every plug-in out—I feel things start to get redundant.
Otherwise, I like cheap gear: bad drum machines, weird hardware processors, stomp boxes, etc. Function follows form with a lot of this stuff—if it looks cool, chances are it does something cool. Shit-looking gear also indicates potential.
I also record tons of stuff to an old Sony TCD5 using Sonic Studios stereo mikes. I’ve brought the little rig all over the world with great results. I would love to see more bizarro TDM/RTAS plug-ins from third-party manufactures. Spinning, whacked, motion-intensive sound manipulation devices—for instance—would be great.
Stephen Dewey
President/creative director/sound designer
Machine Head, Venice, Calif.
Here at Machine Head, there are a variety of tools in use, and it is a combination of these that constitutes our production mechanism. Each individual has a principal software application, fed by tributaries of peripheral applications, hardware and toys. The composers here use Emagic’s Logic, which doubles as a writing tool and a recording environment into which musical performances can be recorded. The jewel in the crown here is our mix room, which sports a Euphonix CS 2000 console and a variety of exotic outboard devices for manicuring final music mixes, both in Surround Sound and in stereo.
Sound designers here all use the ubiquitous Digidesign Pro Tools. Despite its generic nature, Pro Tools is process transparent—in the same way that an Avid does not have a "look." Signature sound tracks are defined by the initial elements and the manipulation thereof, both of which are personal-choice opportunities that define a sound composition. Pro Tools does not make suggestions, there is no auto-create function, but it is a convenient crucible in which the ingredients can be assimilated. The real fun is feeding sounds in and out to be manipulated in other toys, or in the process of layering sounds to change their perceived nature—all of which Pro Tools facilitates agreeably. I love the fact that it is simple enough that I think of the track being created in artistic terms, rather than letting the technicalities define the nature of the sound, even though Pro Tools can get technically deep. The lurking peril is that so much power online diminishes the possibilities of what I consider to be the all-important "ingredient X"—a.k.a. serendipity.
Mobility is my most important wish. At this point we have reached a pretty good state of portability. I would only wish for the fantasy device that would be always unobtrusively in my pocket and always recording, since the acquisition of compelling raw material is my personal priority.
Harry Dorrington
Creative director/director
Rhinoceros Visual Effects and Design, New York
To be honest, my favorite piece of hardware is still a pencil. As a director I’m always going to need it at the beginning of a project. It is cheap, doesn’t "crash" and never needs upgrading. As for software, I suppose the digital version of the pencil would be the Adobe suite—especially After Effects and Photoshop. It is invaluable. Photoshop is great for visualizations; you can achieve filmic style frames that can aid in selling a look and concepts at the bidding stage.
After Effects is an extremely versatile production tool, from type and design animations to high-end 3-D compositing. The new version is capable of importing 3-D camera information, which will allow After Effects to integrate into the CGI production pipeline. It also has a well-supported third-party community adding to the filters. The compositing is very sensitive with the use of the transfer modes. All of this runs on a desktop, even a laptop. I have used After Effects on a Power Mac G3 laptop on set recently to do test composites of live action coming through the video assist. This is where a problem lies—After Effects can be used for such high-end production that the speed of the rendering can be very slow.
Having said this, the most important factor in the success of these programs, and even the pencil, is the talent and skill of the person who is using them.
Billy Gabor
Colorist
Company 3, New York
My favorite commercial-making tool is without a doubt my Spirit DataCine. It is the main piece of equipment/technology that I rely on day in and day out to make beautiful pictures. It is so good because it is almost invisible to the process—and that is what I look for in the future … products/technology/equipment to be more transparent. In that, I mean manufacturers should strive to build products that have a fluid way of working so that the "artisans" can just do what they want without finding limits or snags in the process.
The future generation of products that succeed will be products that are malleable to the artisans’ way of working, and not the other way around. These are the items I am most interested in investigating: Thomson (Philips) Specter, which is mostly being used for feature work right now. I am interested in how it—or a similar technology—can allow us to spend more time concentrating on the scenes we are grading and less time shuttling looking for scenes. This would require a shift in the way telecine time is booked, but everyone would benefit in the end with a system like that.
The other is 5D’s Colossus, which allows some tools that would be very attractive to the telecine environment. It would be nice to grade with a system like da Vinci’s 2K and have that feed into a system like Colossus. You’d have the speed of coloring using a da Vinci, and also have the ability to put multiple passes together in the session rather than send those elements to an Inferno, where they will most likely be assembled without your presence. Also, the ability to track mattes and have infinite layers of manipulation would be a great improvement in the possibilities available. Maybe someone will make that happen, and all in one box, too! Any takers?
This is what I hope is on the horizon, and hopefully these future tools will be tolerant of our idiosyncrasies, rather than the other way around.
Bob Giammarco
Audio mixer
Photomag, New York
In my opinion, the most important tools for the audio post mix are your editor and your dynamics processing. I’ve been using an Avid Audiovision and Pro Tools side by side for a few years now. The Audiovision is older and nearing the end of its useful life (primarily due to the fact that it is restricted to the Mac 9600 platform), but is still, in my opinion, the best editor out there. By using the two systems side by side, I get the best of both worlds: the powerful editing and integrated video of the Audiovision (Pro Tools now has integrated video as well), and the powerful mixing, file support and track density of Pro Tools.
Now that Avid owns both products, Pro Tools’ great mix engine is slowly getting the great edit tools of Audiovision. Avid needs to stay on that path, giving Pro Tools the best of Audiovision. I see myself moving to Pro Tools exclusively some time in the not so distant future.
In audio post for TV in particular, control of dynamic range is one of the most important issues facing a mixer. My favorites for dynamics control are the TC electronics DBMAX and Finalizer, The DBX 160, and the Waves Renaissance plug in for Pro Tools. Every client wants his or her mix to "pop" or be perceived as "loud" on the air. If you’re not properly controlling the dynamics, that won’t happen. The DBMAX is a great tool for that. In the early ’90s when I first transitioned from music to post, no one I knew was using a compressor on the two-mix buss for a TV mix. That struck me as odd, since every record project I’d ever worked on eventually wound up getting some kind of compression later on. Everyone does it now—you have to. I’d rather my clients hear what’s going on in my room than leave it to chance later.
Peter Kagan
Director
Stiefel+Company, Santa Monica
I’m an early adopter.
I’ve always found benefits in working with the latest gear. When Mitsubishi came out with black-and-white video printers back in about ’84, I bought the very first one I could find in New York. What an incredible device. I used those funky prints not only as an organizational tool for editing—covering my studio walls with strips of thermal paper, but also for their own particular image qualities, constructing sequence-montages that were published in Details, Italian Vogue and others. High-tech and low-tech combined … I shot my first national ad, Nike Revolution, with my father’s Super 8.
Today my favorite single tool is my Nikon D1 digital still camera. It’s not only great for scouting and the preparation of shooting spots; I take it everywhere to collect inspiration. I find digital formats creatively liberating. With no film or labs involved, the cost of experimentation is negligible. The results are pictures that I might never have made if the risk of waste had been involved. That ease, combined with Photoshop and the Internet, allows for the manipulation and sharing of images and ideas in a manner that’s spontaneous and unencumbered by cost and other logistical constraints. This where it is all going.
Digital formats also have the significant advantage of having less environmental impact; the film, chemistry, and other lab waste is eliminated. I’ve had governmental and special-interest clients specifically request video for this reason. I’ve done a few projects on DV at this point—sometimes by necessity, as in live broadcasts. I shot over ninety live transmissions for Ford Focus using a Canon Elura, which retailed at the time for $1,299.
Sure, I still rely on the comfort of cozy analog formats—there’s nothing like film. But it all ends up on a computer, anyway. I think that embracing and experimenting with new technologies is good for artists; the formats themselves ultimately become part of the larger cultural dialogue.
Barry Peterson
Director of photography
United Talent Agency (UTA), Beverly Hills, Calif.
I have recently started to utilize a piece of equipment that I feel has really helped in the blocking and pre-visualizing of scenes on TV commercials and movies. The tool is a CPT Video Finder with Panavision and Arriflex lens mounts. The advantage to this finder vs. a standard finder is, not only are you looking through the actual lens you shoot with, and ground glass you film camera frames with, but you can record or transmit a video signal for everyone else to see. A large part of what a cinematographer has to do daily is to help communicate the director’s vision to the rest of the crew. If I can show the key crew people an exact camera move or just simple framing, it helps everybody know what will be seen and not seen. The operator, lighting grip, art, wardrobe and make-up departments can now help refine the frame and everything in it.
The finder can also be in used in conjunction with a junior editing system to check complex blocking issues and eyeline questions. The old adage applies: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Mic Rodgers
Second unit director and stunt coordinator; an inventor of the Mic-Rig
United Talent Agency (UTA), Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Mic-Rig is a self-contained picture-car carrier and camera platform that enables the safe, economic and realistic filming of car chases and driving sequences involving principal actors. The apparatus won a 2002 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award for Technical Achievement.
The concept is simple—take the shell of your picture car and mount it on the extended, low-bed chassis of the Mic-Rig. A professional stunt driver drives the rig while your actor is filmed and recorded behind the wheel of the picture car at a real location, performing "real" driving moves, in real time. It eliminates slow, noisy towing shots and expensive, time-consuming plate work and green screens, for both day and night setups. It’s easy to work on and around while prepping a shot, and has a dedicated on-board generator space for lighting options. Recording clean dialogue is simple, and turn-around time back to number one is exceptionally fast.
Verdi Sevenhuysen
Visual effects artist
R!OT, Santa Monica
The tool I primarily use is Discreet’s Inferno, running on an SGI Onyx2 platform. I also use an iBook running OS X as a support tool, which integrates nicely.
Ideally, I’d like to see software that’s modular and minimally dependant on a particular OS, and a true separation of software and hardware vendors for high-end systems. Currently, most postproduction software pretty much requires dedicated hardware: a dedicated frame-store, a dedicated video card and so forth. I’d like the opportunity to build one’s own super-computer conforming to minimal hardware needs, and many engineers will agree that they can do it at a greatly reduced cost.
One artist can’t be an expert in all available software, and why pay for tools you don’t use? I’d like to be able to work with modular software, with each tool having equal access to all hardware resources. I have a background in animation. I’d like to keep a hand in it, but Inferno has very limited 3-D capabilities. If Discreet had a 3-D-modeling module one could purchase as an add-on, I could do more. For the artist it would be useful if you could pick the features you want, and it ultimately would help to control costs.
Paul Song
Visual effects artist
The Finish Line, Santa Monica
The primary workstations we use at The Finish Line for visual effects and compositing are Discreet’s Inferno and Quantel’s Infinity, both of which are equipped with a full complement of visual effects plug-ins called "sparks." The decision of whether to complete a project on either platform, or use a combination of both, is based on which work station will best achieve the client’s goals and best serve the project. However, I do prefer Inferno for work that is high-end, visual effects oriented.
Additionally, in order to be the best creative resource to my clients, I feel it imperative that I be fluent in the creative tools and technology. This includes Mac equipment with Photoshop, After Effects, Combustion and Final Cut Pro. We not only have these resources at The Finish Line to accommodate client materials, but I consider them so important that I have set up a similar workstation at my home. Our clients use these tools to pre-visualize, experiment, and in some cases pre-build portions of the projects. Because my clients think and create in these platforms, it is vital for me do so as well, to anticipate their needs and to help them realize their visions.
In the future, I would love to see a combination of the best features of Inferno and Infinity … that would be the best of both worlds in editing and creating visual effects.
Stefan Sonnenfeld
President/CEO/colorist
Company 3, Santa Monica
Favorite commercial-crafting tool: Thomson Spirit DataCine and da Vinci 2K color corrector combination. The Spirit and the 2K have enabled me to have confidence for the first time in a telecine bay day-in and day-out. These machines are incredibility stable. I have the luxury of focusing on many projects knowing that my artistic decisions will come back exactly [as I see them].
Recent work has required a scalable system since delivery is on anything from composite standard def video to 2048 x 1556 data files. Both Thomson and da Vinci have kept pace with the tools I require.
I’m starting to use a Specter for nonlinear coloring of large projects at 2K resolution. This is a fantastic way to work! I imagine another revolution coming with server-based coloring.
Brian Ward
3-D animator
SOL designfx, Chicago
Virtually all of our 3-D animation needs have been met by Alias| Wavefront’s Maya—including everything from product replacement to complicated character rigging and animation. The package is extremely powerful and versatile, with robust and flexible tools. From drawing pad to final render, we have had great success with Maya—as a friend of mine once put it, "The deep end of Maya is very deep." Each time we think we’ve thrown too much into a scene, Maya just laughs and wants more.
Maya’s greatest strength lies in Mel, its scripting language. The fact that Maya is almost completely written in Mel means that there is no limit to how deep you can dig in and modify. If you find a problem that Maya can’t handle (we haven’t), you just write a new tool or rewrite a current one. With Maya’s massive user base, chances are it’s already been written. As new advances in dynamics and simulation become available, I expect that Maya’s open-ended platform will prove very accommodating. Note to AW: Bring on the global illumination; we’re ready!
