South Park - Creative COW Magazine

Tim: I was struck by your earlier example of following
the degrees of the angles that the camera moves
through during a shot.
Dave: Yes, on a frame-by-frame basis. Because the
visual effects people then have to take whatever pictures
you’ve created at 24 or 29 or 120 frames per second,
put them into a tracker, Boujou or PFTrack or who
knows what, and solve for movements including dolly
and tilt, focus, zoom, boom, swing, track and everything
else that goes into a shot. It’s a horribly complicated
equation to figure out after shooting.
Yet in the grand scheme of things, that’s a minuscule
amount of data to collect while shooting. You only
have to remember to ask, “O’Connor, the next time
you build a pan head, we want it with a plug for a data
recorder.”
Or “Panavision, do you have a GPS set that you
can build into the base plate?”
GPS apparently takes very little real estate because
it’s there in my iPhone sitting on my desk.
[Laughter]
Gary: I look at it from the post side. Cooke Optics has
this little box, the “/i dataLink.” It records focus, zoom
and all that from the lens, and then everything from
the camera too. It records all that to this little SD card.
Now you have the actual data. Instead of having
to recreate it, you can do motion matching and everything
in VFX long before the footage itself actually
gets there. There’s not somebody waiting for the footage,
and then starting to do all this work manually for
weeks and weeks on end.
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Dave: Exactly. This is the classic mistake that studio
bean counters make. “We need to get the budget
down, so let’s beat this guy up for more of his wages.”
Instead, for a shot that used to be a Boujou problem,
you create a sync frame, like the bloop on the
slate. Now comes the rest of the data: here’s the center
shutter open pulse, here’s the pan, tilt, focus, zoom, fstop,
dolly, boom — synchronized with every frame of
the film that you shot.
The artist who would have spent six weeks tracking
this out by hand, and reverse engineering camera
position and focal length anecdotally or from someone’s
handwritten notes, can now simply take the
metadata file, plug it in and start doing the work. The
real work.
This is the way that I love to frame the discussion,
as an invitation to the producers and the studios
who want to save money. You know, we can all stand
around and haggle over 50 cents an hour for every employee
on the staff and you can feel like you’ve saved
some money.
Or we can automate those people’s work, get it
done in a week’s less time or a month’s less time, and
then save some real money.
Everyone asks, well, who’s going to pay for developing
all of this new automated metadata collection?
I say, we already pay for it anyway. How often do you
buy computers and cameras and lenses? We renew and
replenish this stuff on a daily basis. At least ask manufacturers
for what you want in the updates, rather than
just taking what you’re handed.
METAPAPER
Dave: One of the obstructions to automating
the motion picture workplace is
that we don’t have a tradition of metadata
on set. We have a tradition of what I call
“metapaper.”
For example, script supervisors for the
most part take a paper copy of the script,
and note vast quantities of metadata in
real time just by watching the movie being
filmed: script changes, which actors are in
each shot, and so on.
And they notate that using lines and
squiggles and arrows and notes all over
the typed script, with hand written notes
to elaborate. They accumulate vast quantities
of paper that people have to keep in
notebooks.
The first assistant and the second assistant, all
the cameramen, the loader — these people keep vast
amounts of paper notes too. If you want to know what
lens they were shooting with, or if you want to know
what filters were on the camera or what settings they
shot with, you have to dig out that notebook and find
Creative COW Magazine — September / October 2008