North America Premieres May 19th, 9|8c

It's been almost a year that I've been working as Edit Assistant at Wild Horizons / Silverback Films. How time flies! Anyway, keeping things short, you can catch the fruits of my (and many, many others') labour on the Discovery Channel tomorrow. North America, a seven part series, kicks off May 19th, 9|8c.

Personal Update

Ok, so I've had some coffee and I think that's it's probably as good a time as any to write a small update on what I'm up to at the moment, if only to reassure people that I'm still working.

Over the past three months, I've been working for Silverback Films as a technical assistant, launching myself into the exciting world of Avid and motion-picture workflows (Silverback Films, previously Wild Horizons,  are best known for their Disney Nature projects, Chimpanzee and African Cats). This is, in general, a fairly familiar experience to my work as a Production Technical Assistant at Icon Films, except that I'm no longer required to look into the logistics of acquiring camera kit, only the technicalities of accommodating various different formats (HDCAM SR, RED RAW, etc). Whilst camera manufacturers all attempt to reassure you that this is a painless process, as I've mentioned in a previous post, the land of formats, codecs and software can be a bit of nightmare, especially when mixing footage from several different formats... so part of my job is ironing out those difficulties and testing workflows.

Additionally, my new role entails 'building' edit suites and establishing connections to shared storage, either via high-speed Fibre-Channel or Ethernet. Despite the on-paper complexity of running and maintaining Avid Media networks, Avid, to their credit, make day-to-day maintenance of such intimidating infrastructures quite simple, and the advantages of shared storage far outweigh those of individual hard-disks.

Of course, it would be wrong of me to say that I've slipped seamlessly into the role, and I'm very appreciative of the patience that my colleagues have had with me whilst I battle the steep learning curve.

Alongside my normal job, I've also been continuing with a few freelance projects, including some web-design of all things. Until very recently, when the expedition came to an end, I built and maintained a website for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Instituion, the results of which can be seen here: http://www.greenlandsfrozencoast.com/. Whilst I don't actively search for work in web-design, I do find all aspects of the Internet rather fascinating, and enjoy the challenge of creating content for it... I'm just a lot more comfortable within the realms of Final Cut Studio (which I haven't forgotten about, of course).

Meanwhile, I continue to experiment with Avid Media Composer and Symphony from a creative perspective, engaging with its nuances and discovering why it has become such a successful industry standard.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough writing about myself for one day. Thanks for reading.

So It's Come to This

...Well, to be honest, maybe that's a bit dramatic. All I'd like to say is that I've begun a rather fascinating transition into Avid. I say 'transition' because, to all extents and purposes, I believe it's safe to say that Final Cut Studio is soon to be dead within the film and TV industry. Those companies that are still clinging onto Final Cut Pro 7 are either having to roll back their new machines to the fading world of OS X Snow Leopard, or embrace change, and I've not heard of anyone jumping to Final Cut Pro X... Sorry about that Apple. That's not to say that there isn't a place for Final Cut Pro X - there's really nothing stopping Apple from polishing it into the jewel that Final Cut Pro 7 developed into, but for the moment everyone's looking to either Avid or Adobe for professional media creation. I have mixed feelings about Avid Media Composer 6. After a week of hard-learning with it, it doesn't seem to present itself as modern or intuitive, but what I am painfully aware of is that it is a powerful and expandable tool, especially when you break into Unity and ISIS systems (if you've got the money). For now, watch this space, and I'll have a more detailed update of what's new in my life shortly.

New 2012 Showreel

It's time for another showreel, this time one that's more focused on my ability as a technical assistant. Whilst I do still edit, all the pieces that I've edited for Icon Films as Marketing and Development Assistant are highly confidential, as they relate to programmes that are still seeking commissions. Enjoy, and drop me a line if you fancy employing me.

Wild Scene Investigation

Another Icon production, and another TX card created by myself. Wild Scene Investigation is going out in the UK on Nat Geo Wild from 12th June. This light-hearted production is particularly significant to me because I covered as the Production Technical Assistant for a while (and suffered the wrath of XDCAM codecs in post production).

New York, New York

Summer in the City
Originally uploaded by charlesdyer

In March of this year I took a trip to New York on my own with a camera. I had no contacts and no plans but to create a portrait of the city from my own perspective. Two months down the line, I've finally uploaded some of them to Flickr. Enjoy!

Secrets of Wild India Finally Comes to the US

On the 29th April, Secrets of Wild India (the first production that I worked on for Icon Films) is being broadcast across the United States. As Marketing and Development Assistant, I've created this TX card to celebrate the occasion.

Final Cut Studio 3 and Mac OS X Lion - Possible but Not Practical

Apple aren't known for their sympathy towards legacy products. When they introduced the first iMac back in 1998, many customers were dismayed to see that they'd neglected to include the option for a floppy disc drive. Years later, and the removal of packaged Apple software from its stores reinforces Apple's stance on what it sees as dated tech; it's over - move on.

Apple have been just as ruthless with their programming as they have with hardware. With the introduction of Mac OS X Lion, Rosetta (a dynamic binary translator that allows you to run applications programmed for PowerPC system architectures) is no more.

When I first heard about this, I was pretty concerned. I've been using Macs now for eight years now, and I've accumulated quite a number of PowerPC applications over that time. What's more concerning from a professional stance, is that Final Cut Studio, a software suite that I've spent many years learning and making a living from, will no longer function under the new Mac OS X environment.

But all is not lost! If, like many people, you have a Snow Leopard install disc, you use it to install Rosetta on Lion, and breathe life back into your old applications.

So you'd assume that that was a problem solved. Chalk one up for old-skool Mac users worldwide. Well, not exactly.

In my current job, I've been trying out how Mac OS X Lion plays with Final Cut Studio 3, and its not always pretty. It all comes down to Lion's apparent improvements in dividing processes between multi-core processors, which solves some problems, but introduces others with general use.

Final Cut Studio was not built with multi-core system architecture in mind. For that reason, you'll find that it's rather infuriatingly inefficient at making the most of your system resources. Slam something into Compressor, and watch in Activity Monitor as your 16-core Intel Mac Pro barely bats an eye-lid at your request. It is possible in this scenario to use the virtual clusters trick to force your Mac to work harder, but this is a bit of a dark art, and can render your entire system unusable if set-up incorrectly.

Lion, however, eats these kind of complicated calculations for breakfast, taking the guess-work out of all of this, carefully allocating processor time to all of the tasks presented to it. Sounds great on paper, but then when you want to edit in Final Cut and transcode in Compressor at the same time, Lion doesn't know which tasks deserves more attention. What you're left with therefore, is a slower, less-responsive and asthmatic editing experience, where every render takes considerably longer.

The problems don't stop there, either. In my experience, Final Cut Pro acts erratically even when you haven't got anything else going on in the background. Recently I was editing together a five-minute piece consisting of nothing but ProRes Proxy QuickTimes and a couple of AIFFs on a ProRes timeline, and consistently found that Final Cut would drop frames on two occasions during playback (anything from about 5-50 frames) before I paused and resumed playback again. All this on a brand-new 17" MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, 1GB of AMD graphics memory and 4GB of RAM - specs that dwarf the listed minimum system requirements of Final Cut Studio.

My advice? Don't upgrade at this time if you're still hanging onto Final Cut Studio 3 and below. Save the £21.99 that you would be spending on Lion and put it towards something useful, like some FCP X, Avid or Adobe Premiere tutorials. Just remember that if you choose to stick it out with Snow Leopard for the long haul, then it won't be long before Apple leave you and your aging system behind to fend for yourself.

River Monsters 3D

On 8th April, an extra special River Monsters will be jumping from screens in jaw-dropping 3D. Filmed in the Okavango Delta, Jeremy Wade hunts down a mystery killer that haunts the inhabitants of the region.

The following TX card was created by myself and distributed via e-mail, social networks and Icon's website.

Million Dollar Moon Rocks Heist

Tune into Nat Geo on the 4th March 2012 to see the latest piece of entertainment to feature my name at the end - Million Dollar Moon Rocks Heist, produced by Icon Films for National Geographic. I've been looking forward to this one to be broadcast for what seems like an eternity. Official TX card above also designed by myself.

Wild India

Hi again!

When I first joined Icon Films, I was employed to work on a rather elaborate documentary called Secrets of Wild India as a technical production assistant. This basically entailed capturing and transcoding hours and hours of footage from various different sources - tape, flash memory, but also assisting edits and preparing deliverables for National Geographic.

I'm honoured to have been a part of Secrets of Wild India, which was greeted with outstanding viewing figures in various countries across the world. If you live in the US, you've still got it to look forward to, and if you watch very closely, you'll see my name appear on the credits at the end of the third episode, Desert Lions.

You can catch a sneak peek of the first of three episodes here:

Technical Production Assistant

Hi all. I'm pleased to say that I've been granted my first on-screen credit of 'Production Technical Assistant' on Bite of the Living Dead. You'd not believe how happy this makes me.

Bristol Old Vic - Good Clown Bad Clown

I've never really fancied myself as much of a director. That said, a couple of weeks ago I popped down to the Bristol Old Vic on a Saturday to direct an online trailer for Good Clown Bad Clown, a childrens' performance for the winter season. Shot on a Panasonic HDX-900, and then edited by myself in Final Cut Studio with some basic work in Motion, it's 63 seconds of white-faced, red-nosed, horn-sounding fun.

Ship-Shape and Bristol Fashion

Clifton Valley
Originally uploaded by charlesdyer

A week ago I upped roots, vacating my flat in Cheltenham and moving to Bristol in order to better support my job at Icon Films.

Blown Away

Blown Away
Originally uploaded by charlesdyer

My very good friends Jacky and Lyle are getting married next year. Here's a photo that I took for their 'Save the Date' postcard.

Digital Workflows - The Dream and The Nightmare

A long while ago, I wrote an article on here about the advantages of digital workflows, spouting on about the wondrous new range of Sony XDCAM cameras. Of course, at that time, I hadn't really tried out any other digital products on the market, and it was a bit naive to get swept up into the Sony hype that they would revolutionise the digital video industry.

Digital formats are the future, but they're not as simple to use as I initially assumed, and it all comes down to the multitude of compression formats that different brands and types of cameras use. When you're out and about, you want a camera to record and the highest possible quality, whilst taking up the smallest amount of space on your memory cards. This isn't so important when you're in the comfort of a studio, but it is when you're half way around the world, in the middle of a humid jungle in Indonesia.

In just such a situation, you're likely going to end up recycling your cards on a daily basis, and whilst all your data can be backed up with the use of just a laptop, you have to consider the transfer speeds of your media, because these are likely to be a real bottleneck in your workflow. I recently had a plea for help from one of my friends and colleagues, who was on a remote shoot in a foreign country, having to back up sometimes hours of Canon 5D footage from Compact Flash cards at the end of each day. Capturing one card through a USB 2.0 memory card reader would take hours, then he'd have to get up in the middle of the night in order to switch to the next card... and then the next. In order to get around this, I had a Lexar ExpressCard/34 memory card reader sent out to him, which saved a lot of time (and sleep) at his end.

With tape-based media, you can only capture in real-time. Therefore, if you've got 24 hours of footage, you'll need to spend 24 hours playing it back on a deck for a computer to capture all of your rushes (not allowing for all the fussing with swapping cassettes over and inevitable technical hurdles that you're almost bound to encounter). With file-based formats, manufacturers would have you believe that the footage is ready to be sent directly to the edit, but that just isn't the case. If you haven't already (because you live your life on the edge - rock on), you need to backup all that material that you shot. Lets assume that you shot 35GB of footage every day for fourteen days. On a Canon XF305, that's 87mins of footage at full-quality 50mbps and a grand total of 500GB of footage. Based upon LaCie's claimed transfer speeds of 57MB/sec over FireWire 800, it would take you about two hours and twenty minutes to transfer that data from one of their Rugged hard-disks. But then you've STILL got to transcode all your footage into something that's suitable to edit with.

Sony's XDCAM Transfer footage will quite happily mow through all your data and wrap your raw files into playable XDCAM QuickTimes, which are supported by Final Cut Studio, but not ideal. XDCAM is, as I've learnt, a bit of a vile with support that's been shoe-horned into Final Cut. It's fine on it's own, but if you start mixing formats on a timeline, FCP is likely to die on you repeatedly. You'll therefore need to compress the footage into something that's a lot more palatable to Final Cut, such as Apple ProRes 422. Whilst I don't have any official figures to hand, let me assure you that this takes a loooooong time and a lot of drive space. One way to get past this is to encode everything into ProRes Proxies, but this means that you're going to need to conform all of your footage to ProRes 422 or ProRes 422 HQ before you go into an online edit... so that's an extra step in your workflow that I'd generally allow about half a day of work for. If you want to avoid all the hassle of a conform, consider spending considerably more on more hard-disks.

There are ways to use distributed processing to force the very best out of Apple's Compressor in order to transcode footage faster, but my experience of the XDCAM format is that no-matter what you try, Final Cut really doesn't like the stuff. I've had better success with Canon's XF305, which comes with lightweight software and a Final Cut plugin that allows you to use the Log and Transfer window in Final Cut Pro. (Sony state that you can use the Log and Transfer window in Final Cut, but I've yet to see it actually accept any XDCAM footage. Sony's software and plugins are, quite simply, a bit of a mess in my experience).

If you're shooting with a camera that records into H.264 QuickTimes, for instance with the Canon 5D MkII, you're into a whole world of pain because of the heavy compression of the files. Final Cut Pro will spit at you if you try to drop the files directly onto the timeline, and Compressor will become particularly unresponsive if it even so much as smells a batch of more than about ten clips. It's therefore better to use another program like the horrendously useful MPEG Streamclip to batch convert your files.

Just remember to consider how long this is all taking to convert your files. If you do have a catastrophic hard-disk failure on your working drive, you'd best make sure that you have a backup of all your converted files and not just your raw files, otherwise you're going to have to do aaaaaaaaaaaaaall this again and find a remedy to the nervous-breakdown you'll be having.

Once all your conversions are complete, however, you can finally breath a sigh of relief - you're finally ready to start editing. Wasn't that quicker and easier than sticking a few tapes in? Well... maybe not actually.

Bite of the Living Dead - My First On-Screen Credit

My first on-screen credit as a Production Technical Assistant! I'm so very, very proud.

As one of the technical production assistants, my role consisted of a bit of data-wrangling, a bit of work for the deliverables to Animal Planet, and then creating the TX card below was all part of my other role as Marketing and Development Assistant. I should just add that despite preparing the trailer above, nearly all of it is simply lifted from the start of the programme, which comes down to the excellent work of Mr. Barny Revill - director and ruddy nice chap. I just topped, tailed and uploaded it. Be sure to watch it in its full 1080p gloriousness!

To My Beloved Fan(s)...

I have taken up the position of Technical and Production Assistant at the award winning Icon Films in Bristol. It's ace. Thanks for all your help and support so far in my life.

Expect great things!

Cracked

A REALLY short and sweet little animation I put together, experimenting with composites, Maxon Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects and various filters in Final Cut Express. Hopefully I'll work it into my next showreel. Inspiration taken in part from Euro RSCG's fantastic Jaguar advertisements and the title calligraphy from Berlin Calling.

2011 Showreel

It's finally here!



Featuring clips from...
Shallow Water Blackout, Mark Coote series, Waitrose AGM, Lundy, Development Films, The Mercurys 2010, Team Insight, Churchdown School - Aim Higher, Red 10, Elite Swimming Academy, Hee-Hee and She-She and the Blue Sky Event & Media Showreel.