Well, welcome everybody. Thanks for coming. I am pleased to welcome you to Session 732, New Directions of Branded Entertainment, American Express Case Study. I am very pleased to announce that, well, let me explain who I am. Amy Nugent, Product Line Manager at Apple for Core Media Technologies. And I'm very pleased to introduce Evan Schechtman. About 1998, he started Outpost Digital in his apartment, and consequently it was acquired by Radical Media, which he currently is a CTO. And he's been very involved with the American Express Superman webisodes, which you might have seen. This is a very interesting project, blended entertainment and advertising together. And Evan's going to talk us through some of the challenges of that project, how we implemented it on the Mac platform, and hopefully inspire you guys and help walk through some of the issues you might find and end up with a great project. So, again, please welcome Evan Schechtman.

Thanks. Okay. Well, one of the first challenges that we had on this project was actually nothing technical. It's kind of, in our business in post-production over the past few years, it's been somewhat of a changing of the guard. You know, the business that I got into, I got into right about when After Effects was coming out and Adobe Premiere and those kinds of things, and everyone labeled it desktop post-production, which at the time it was against a lot of the big, the big million-dollar rooms that we were competing against. Um, We don't call it desktop post-production anymore. It's post-production, because everyone in every part of our industry is using a desktop computer. So most people thought that these things were toys. And as we say now, that if you don't see ahead of the curve, you get hit by the car, which is what's been happening. The kind of professionals that are in my business now, it was a very rigid business for a long time. We had our offline editors. We had our online editors. We had colorists. We had graphics people and compositors. There really was very little spillover between the different disciplines.

The kind of people that we're able to hire now have had access to all the tools all the time for one price. People who get Final Cut Pro or get a copy of Flash, and these are the tools they have access to. And so we're able to turn drastically different results in a fraction of the time. And I call them consolidated media professionals because what happens is we have the same person who does the offline edit, do their own conform, do their own online and color correction in most cases. Because unlike the traditional business, when people only had access to one portion of the tools, we get access to everything all the time. So we have really, in our business now, there's a mix of seasoned professionals and young, talented stars, and there's an information exchange that goes back and forth. Thank you.

People are still telling us that we can't do it this way as we opened our fourth office, which is kind of funny. I would think at this point it's more of a, the revolution is over, now it's an evolution in our business. But that's totally fine, we're going to do it this way. So a couple of challenges that we had.

The first one is that we were the first company outside of Warner Brothers to ever be able to animate Superman. And we weren't going to do it in traditional style animation because it takes forever and it's really costly. You do the drawings here, you edit them in, You send it overseas for inking, and then they change a cut, and you have to send it back. So we did a couple things. Budget, it's always shrinking on commercial work. That's why we did webisodes to begin with. I'll explain that. The other thing is that time.

They want it done very, very quickly because everyone boasts how fast we can do things, and that comes back to bite us. So we said, we'll animate Superman in Flash, which I don't think had ever been done before. Now, how many people use Flash? I don't know if I'm talking to content people or most of the people. How many people edit in Final Cut?

And how many people do compositing or other? OK, so it's a mix of everybody. Thanks. So we wanted to animate in Flash. So there we were sitting. It was a bunch of-- really kind of felt like we were in detention or something, because it was a bunch of young people on one side of the table and then a bunch of industry leaders from Warner Brothers and from DC and from the agency sitting on the other. Then we said, OK, we'll offline a Final Cut Pro. We'll online a Final Cut Pro. We'll do our color correction there. We're going to shoot it in DV. shot it on an XL1 with a lens package called an Enzo lens package. This is a 35mm lens adapter that goes on this DV camera. Take the birthday party look off of DV. Everyone loves to shoot DV for a few reasons.

Generally, inexpensive, high quality, inconspicuous acquisition, but it looks like you shot a birthday party. So the other part of what we do is trying to make video look less like video. So this Enzo lens package helped that. So we said So we're going to shoot it on DV, we're going to do animation in Flash, and we're going to do compositing in Shake. Now the advertising people only knew terms like Flame and Inferno, and Shake is equally a weird name for a product, but they didn't understand what any of this stuff was. And of course Final Cut Pro is a toy, according to a lot of people in our business still.

although they're coming around. So we had a couple of different arguments with them. They just didn't understand how we were going to do it. Thankfully, the company that I work for, Radical Media, is able to hold people's hands and help them take the leap. So what I'll do first is show it instead of talking about it. I'll show one of the webisodes, and I'll do a little talking and show you how we did some of this stuff. Oh, I've got to make sure there's volume. Is there volume from this computer, the middle one? I can't touch anything. I swear. No sound? Oh, it's real funny. Should I just go? Oh, okay. It's running off a Windows box.

Let me switch to built-in audio. I memorized it so I can just speak over it, although it's much funnier to hear it. Want to try again? OK. I'll wait. Well, I can talk in the meantime while he does that. So, why webisodes? Advertising budgets are shrinking. In the company I work for, Radical Media, about four years ago, started to say to some of their clients, "The average budget for a 30-second commercial is insulting.

It's $300,000." Depends on what side you're on. You'll be insulted. It's a lot of money for a 30-second spot. So what we started to do, because of the onslaught of DV and Final Cut Pro, truncated workflow, we said to our clients, for the price of a 30-second spot, we'll sell you a 30-minute TV show. So we were the first company to shoot the show for ESPN called The Life on DV and do it in Final Cut Pro and get it out to air that way. And just to buy some time, one of the arguments we had, which we're fighting less and less these days, was an executive from ESPN came in and said, "Listen, son, DV will never do what Beta SP can do." And like a hot-headed person, I said, "Of course it won't. Won't cost twice as much to work with, degrade over time, be harder to enter the system," you know, all these different things that analog systems do. And we did a demonstration of DV versus Beta SP.

trying to look good. --to stay. There we go. Thank you. So we kind of stopped fighting that fight. The interesting thing about this was that when they came to us to keep the cost down, they were already ready to shoot DV. So over three years, the argument of DV is inferior, it's not broadcast quality, it has no time code, was kind of out the window. It had proved itself over time as a more than lucrative medium. So webisodes. Seinfeld has a deal with American Express. And everyone knows who Seinfeld is, right?

We don't live in a bubble. And he's not funny in five minutes. He's not funny in 30 seconds on TV, although I think he is. He needs five minutes of 30 minutes. So we said, we'll do these short episodes of these webisodes. And so we did two five-minute pieces for American Express's website.

I want to be as famous, so I have jerry.americanexpress.com. And we did three lifts from those two webisodes, these three 15-second teasers that were on TV to drive you towards the web. Then we did a Today Show appearance where we composited in Superman and Jerry Seinfeld sitting with Matt Lauer.

Well, we learned a lesson a few years ago when doing some work for advertising. We did a bunch of absolute vodka spots that were supposed to be emailed to people. So the entire time we worked quick and dirty because of compression, and we were going to email them to people. And as soon as we were done, the agency liked them enough to say, okay, blow them up to film. And that's when I learned my first lesson with the fact that we should always work for a broadcast. We should always work at top quality because you never know how someone's going to want to repurpose this. So I learned that lesson, And on the Seinfeld stuff, even though it was going to end up as a webisode-- and compressions come a long way, too, so we really couldn't hide too much-- we did it for broadcast quality. I'll show you one of the pieces now and show you how we did some of the more difficult stuff. How many people have seen these, by the way? Cool. Two. Do you have a reservation? Superman. I don't see anything. Might be under Man of Steel. Man of Steel. Man of Steel. Oh yeah, Man of Steel. Right here. This way. Man of Steel.

Why? It's impervious disdain. Excuse me, Superman? Yes. I don't know if you remember me, Barry Katz. You saved my life once. I was hanging from a train trestle. Yeah, sure, sure, how are you? Terrific, great. I don't want to interrupt your meal. I just wanted to say thanks again. No, not a problem. It's good to see you again, Barry. He's the best. You're good too. Thank you.

No, I stayed home. I watched that rebound at wedding. Oh, stop. With the reality television, I can't. I know, me too. But this one's pretty good. They found 30 guys who just got divorced. I don't know how. Please, stop. If I wanted reality, I'd take the screen out of my TV and look through the wooden box. Oh, boy. Look at these reviews. Unbelievable. Oh, yes, Wyoming. See, now, this is what we should have seen. What's wrong with you? Of course they only put up the good ones. Every play does that. No, that's Joel Segal. I usually trust him. Oh, yes, Wyoming. One song after another. You stole my DVD player! What, am I not here? Unbelievable! How do you miss this? Would you get over yourself? He's getting away. He's not getting away.

So what happened here? A guy threw it at me. It bounced off at the ground. Why didn't you just catch it? I don't do that. I do this. Whatever. If you want, you can go around the world at super speed or reverse the rotation of the Earth. We'll go back in time before it hit the ground. It'll take about 20 minutes. I don't know. It's quite a production, don't you think? You got a better idea? Actually, I do. We just duck into this phone booth. Foam of veterans. That's right, short shorts. You may be invulnerable to physical harm.

Cutting off a superhero's chest within 90 days of purchase. that whole going back in time thing. Why not? What's the point of anything if you can just go back in time and fix any problem? Please, get a job. You do what you do, I'll do what I do.

Warner Brothers said that they couldn't do this on budget and they would not be able to do it in this amount of time with 10 animators. With 10 animators and 10 compositors, I think was the number they threw at us. The compositing that you saw was done by two people with one assistant on Shake out of our Santa Monica office.

The New York office was responsible for offline and online editing. So let's quickly go through the gear that was used. Canon XL1 with an Enzo package, two of them. The reason why, and I, you know, in retrospect, I'm really glad that everyone came around to shoot on DV, but to be honest with you, a job like this does not belong on DV because of all the keying and compositing that had to happen. So I'll discuss with you how, with some transcoding and some hardware, we got around a lot of the color space issues to pull the keys. So that was one. So the XL1, great. The offline systems were essentially DV. The editor, Tricia Cook, who had cut the last two Coen Brothers films, never cut on Final Cut before. Here's where I give my shameless plug for my training video, Understanding Final Cut Pro 4. So we gave her my training DVD and a book that was written by this woman, Diana Wainard, who has a book called Final Cut for the Avid Editor. So we gave her a little bit of training, which is something that's typical. A lot of these seasoned professionals that are big talent, that can get this kind of work, they need to be educated on the way that we work first before they feel comfortable doing it. It was a very simple job to offline. The working resolution in our facility, regardless if it's a film job or digi-beta or even DV, the working resolution is DV. It's a relatively small file size. It's relatively high quality. And, of course, with decent Apple hardware -- and she was on a dual processor G5 -- you get a lot of real-time effects without additional hardware, but you already know that.

So offline was on DV. We wrote a simple FileMaker database to move the effect shots back and forth just to keep track of where everything was, run off of an XServe in our office, along with a bunch of other things we were running off of it. And then, of course, for online and color correction, we used CineWave. Same old Final Cut Pro, except we put in a third-party capture card.

Now, there are a few on the market. Why did we choose CineWave, I hear all of you ask. It's because CineWave has the most real-time you can get. The I/O, the Asia I/O card, the Asia I/O box, the Kona cards, the DeckLink cards, these are great products that all have their place. But when we're dealing with advertising customers who've come from an avid world, we have to make Final Cut Pro look as beefy as possible. And it can, depending on how much you want to spend. So we threw a Pinnacle CineWave card in with a ProDA breakout box and the real-time key. So there's very little rendering involved with doing a key or a color correction or a crop for widescreen matte. there's no rendering involved, and for several layers of color correction. So if they don't see rendering and they see it at full quality, they don't really care what system it is. It's our job to make the technology transparent to the customer, let them just be as creative as they wanna be. You know, a blue hat, a green hat, a purple hat, let's try the blue hat again. That's that typical thing with color correction. So we used Pinnacle CineWave for color correction and for our onlining and for some transcoding. And then sound, of course, was done in Pro Tools. OK. Let's go through some of the challenges that we had.

Well, on this last shot, just as a funny thing, we were using two cameras, two Enzo cameras, and they're pretty expensive lens packages. One of the cameras broke, and so the reason why this was so painful, besides for the song that got stuck in your head, was that it was seven hours of this, because we had to shoot everything twice from one camera. The cool thing about shooting this on DV was that because the camera broke the next morning, we went to a local reseller, B&H Photo, and bought another Exon 1 and bought a 35mm lens adapter they had on the shelf and finished the job that way. So it's kind of cool that you can go to the corner store and buy some of the stuff to do this kind of work. Thank you.

I'm a Final Cut guy. I don't really know Flash or Shake all that much, but I have some screen captures of some of the hardest stuff that we did here. We're going to take a look at-- Where is the DVD player? We're going to take a look at this shot specifically. This was a big challenge. Thank you very much. instructions. These were traditionally cell-animated hands, and we had real cables that we had to somehow animate into there and have it look pretty convincing. So the first thing I'll show you-- let's see here.

And I have screenshots that the flash and shake people did for us. Let's take a peek at what we did here. Thank you. Flash. You know, when I first started in post-production, during the dot-com boom, all I knew of Flash is that you use it to make fart cartoons for the Internet. Pardon my French, but I soon realized that it's actually more powerful than that. We did a few shows for it. That was a joke, everybody, by the way. Just checking with you. Okay. You've been staring at cinema displays all day, I know. We started to do a lot of broadcast Flash animation for MTV and realized that it's a fully viable means of doing all kinds of things. So here we brought in basically your background plate with the back of the DVD player. A little bit difficult because we were working with Barry Levinson, and I'm somewhat timid to work with these kind of people before, and so I was the visual effects supervisor on the set, and if there was a shot where there was a shadow or he wanted to shoot everything handheld, if you've ever done compositing, it's a nightmare on any format, and he didn't really want to listen because he's Barry Levinson. So when we were doing stuff like this, I'd go, oh, Mr. Levinson, there's a shadow being cast. Do you think maybe we can, you know, Please, maybe take it again. And he'd think about it for a second, and every once in a while, he'd be like, okay, we're taking it again. And all these people would start to move, and it felt kind of powerful for a little while. Then there were a couple times, Mr. Levinson, can we maybe try it again? He's like, don't push it. Go sit down. So on a shot like this, we got our background plate because it was imperative. And so we did a very simple key, and I'll show you the plate that we built, to key out most of the hand. Now, there was a stand-in. This is how crazy some of the mentality was. We got a guy who was big, like a football player, And we put him in huge shoes, and he had to wear this blue outfit for two weeks.

The people from DC said, well, he's got kind of a gut. I'm like, man, he's going to be composited over with Superman. I don't know. He's just not like Superman. This woman was put on the set to be the keeper of Superman, which I respect, but he was supposed to whistle and bounce his knee, and Superman does not whistle. Okay, Superman doesn't whistle. That's fine. So here we have the guy with the blue hands actually doing it, mostly for eyeline. The good news is that on a lot of the takes that Barry Levinson picked, We had it wait very often. We did it without the blue guy, like the third time. And thankfully, those were a lot of the takes that we picked because we had to roto out everything. So here we keyed out the majority of the hands, and there are the cables that it was using. This is just as a rough guide.

Okay, so then we put in some of the, we mapped the start and the end point of where the cables actually need to be. Now, this is in Flash. As much as we could have animated the cables in Flash, the animators, from what they tell me, Flash is excellent for creating mats because we're just working in simple black and white, and after we build this mat file of where the cables are going to have to live, we're able to export as a PNG sequence into Shake for animating. We basically fill in the matted area with black. So here we're just doing a really kind of a rough mapping of where the cables are supposed to live regardless of what else is in the frame.

Is everyone enjoying this? Because I could just do a Quake demo. OK. Just making sure. I want to keep you engaged. So we're just mapping start and end point for where the cable should be. Let's see what else he did here. And then brought in the rough-- this is a lit animation. But I'll show you actually doing the lighting. Brought in the animation.

The animation was really done on top of DV plates. We just took the DV files, captioned them, sent them over. There's a company that's part of our little network of companies called Unplugged in Canada where they did all the animation. And the thing that I couldn't grasp is how the people from D.C. who had been doing animation for years didn't understand. They said, well, we don't understand. We usually take our drawings and we lay them over a picture and that's how we animate them. We're going to do the same thing except it's video.

We don't understand how you're going to do that. Which I couldn't understand how they couldn't grasp when it's so simple. It is very simple. You just take a piece of video and you ray trace over it. But that's traditional thinking. They had to get their heads around this method of working. We taught them a thing or two on this one, I think. So they were just doing some rough tracking of where those points are going to start and end. I think we all got that. Let me scrub through, see if there's any magic here. There we go. Pretty good job, too, even just coming up with the way the cables are supposed to move. So that's one of them. Make sure this is the right one.

I will not pretend to know Sheikh. That's why I have screen captures today. So there already you can see that the white matte that we were building in Shake is just filled in with black. They did a little bit of an edge blur. The hands are already colored here for the most part.

Okay, so there we take away the animation for a second, and there's the big blue hands. And they just did a very, very rough key to get out. maximum amount of blue so that we can just place the animation over it. There was still a bunch of blue area that needed to be masked out, and we actually see that happening here. There we go. So there's a basic key, and then we took a portion of the plate and keyed it over just like that. Everyone with me so far? Yeah?

just to show you a quick matte area that we built. And then we put the two together. We picked one track point. The track point we picked was on the top left of the DVD player, 'cause we have to track the matted out area with the rest of the plate so it actually acts as a single plate. There's a little bit of blue leftover that's gonna get covered by the animation in this case. There are wires in black, you can barely see them. Show you the matte file and how it's all gonna move.

That is what the flash file looked like when we got it. And all the lighting was done in Shake by building additional mats and lights. There's our track point for the animation. Cut a little hole where the RCA cable was gonna go. And there, that's the mask that was built to cast the shadow on the hand.

Just put a little bit of blur on the edge to kind of match. And we also had to add a green, a defocus layer and a green layer to kind of match the ground glass that was in the 35 millimeter adapter for the DV. it looks too antiseptic, the animation versus it. And when we did a lot of tests up front, we kind of overdid it. It was like film noir Superman. So we kind of backed off the lighting a whole bit and backed off the grain.

The one bad thing I think we did was actually work too fast. The people really kind of took, they ended up taking for granted how fast we were able to work because then they wanted to try a thousand and one things. So, you know, it's not often you have to walk into a room full of artists and be like, can you go slower? Because it's really starting to cause a problem. They wanted to try this, that, and the other all the time. But that's typical of nonlinear editing in this whole world. You know, I caught on film once, once, and when I got my sound tied in a knot, is when I decided to actually use a computer.

as my main cutting tool, you used to sit and think about the cut you were gonna make, because if you cut it and you didn't like it, you were then on your hands and knees on the floor looking for the short end to scotch tape back into your reel. With nonlinear editing, you do one cut, you save it, and then you come and do 10 more versions. Usually end up back at your original cut, but everyone wants to try it so many different ways because of how fast this stuff is. I don't know why I did a screen capture of rendering it. I have one other that I'll show you in a minute, but I'll come back to the project file and show you the finished.

That's pretty convincing. Pretty difficult shot, but done with some pretty simple technology. In this job, there are two non-traditional uses of Flash. Most people who use Flash will say that animating Superman is not non-traditional, but using it as a tool for creating mats in all of our composites, we do all the time these days because it's quick and dirty.

Some of the people in the office want to do titles in it, whereas we like to go to After Effects or different packages. They're very comfortable with these tools, so I want them to be comfortable. They're faster that way. Okay, let's go back. Now I have some other stuff to show you here. Some of the color correction, which we did, which was pretty intense.

That'll give you an idea. That's what we were dealing with. So there's our stand-in blue guy. The good news is that in most cases, and you can see some of the... And this, the next webisode that I'll show you, has a lot more... drastic color correction. The color correction was done using the three-way color corrector in CineWave. One of the major issues for a shot like this, the over-the-shoulder shot, is that in this case, we had the blue guy in as a stand-in because we had a composite out of the guy in the bottom who ended up getting eaten by the letterbox. We had to mat his head out. A lot of times, we have the blue guy there just to find a mat line, but when you're actually going to pull a key, DV is 5-to-1 compressed inherently in its 4-1-1 color space. It looks great when you're playing But when you're actually going to look at it to pull a key, there's not enough information there in color data to really pull a clean key.

So what we do is not add any information to these DV files, but we put them in a different color space. So out of Final Cut Pro, and this is a feature if you have third-party hardware, especially the CineWave, well, primarily the CineWave card, we're able to take DV footage, drop it into a CineWave timeline, and it plays out as 10-bit uncompressed 422. The transcode happens in real time as you play it. In a case like this, we would take the file before it gets sent over a point-to-point T1 network to the LA office for compositing. Thank you.

is we basically take it out of Final Cut Pro, file export, and we export as CineWave 10-bit files. That way, when the composite artists get it, there's not any more information there, but they can then work in 422 space. It's a little bit easier to pull a key. Any color information we then add to the file at that point is added in 422, in CineWave's case, 16-bit YUV color space. We're always working for broadcast, even though this would predominantly end up on the web.

But we knew that if they liked it, which they did, it ended up on NBC and then again on TBS. So I'm pretty glad in this case that we worked for broadcast the entire time. The sad part is we work digital and we stay as clean as possible, and it was broadcast off of beta SP, because that's the way that NBC and TBS wanted it, which is a drag, because it then looks kind of muddy when you broadcast. We spent all this time and money on this, which is typical of most broadcasters. Most MTV work that we do ends up on D2. Does anyone remember what D2 is? It's a deck that has wheels, I swear to God. We literally wrote it around the office when we brought it in. It's composite digital. So a company can spend a million dollars doing something, and at the end we jam all the signals together and throw it on a tape that was sold. I fell off my dinosaur and broke my newspaper. Okay, so in this case, it was really important when we were doing color correction that we oversample it. We take DV out of 411, we put it into 422, and that's the way that we do all of our work that's acquired on DV that goes out to broadcast. DV excels at offline, DV excels at acquisition, but it does not excel in its native state at onlining and color correction. So in Final Cut Pro with Ascina Wave hardware, you can work in 4.2.2 to circumvent all deficiencies of the DV codec. Some people, unfortunately, think that's a deficiency of Final Cut Pro. That's the DV codec inside. Thank you. So I'll bring up the other webisode. Let me see if there's anything very interesting. Does anyone have any questions? Didn't do it. Okay, cool. Okay, I'll bring up the other webisode.

Do you mind if I play this, Amy? OK. I could just bore you talking tech numbers. I'd rather show the stuff. It speaks for itself, I hope. This is the second one that we did. And they're meant to be shown in order, because it's like a true Seinfeld episode. It kind of pulls on jokes that they create.

That's an animated suitcase on top of the car. - Way to see the country. - Yeah, it's amazing how much you've missed. Super speed. - I don't even know how you figure out where you're going. - That's me. - Did I hit your face? - Sorry. - Well, I am Superman. - Right.

You know, some of these are so hard to get open. Do me a favor. Don't make a mess of the car. Look at this one. It's completely sealed up. There's no seam at all. Glad you got to get your nail in there. Oh! That one was ridiculous. - I don't look at it. - That is really something in terms of everything. - I don't believe it.

You know, my uncle was saved by Green Lantern once. He was hanging from a-- A trestle? A trestle, yeah. the way that green ray comes out of his run. Did you ever see that? - Yeah, I've seen it. Could you just take the picture? Do you know Green Mountain?

Open the door. What's the matter? Nothing. The keys. How could the keys be locked in the car? Who had the keys? Let's start with that. I guess I rushed back to get the camera. You take a second. One second. Insights 2020. Thanks for the tip. What are we going to do now? Relax. I can rip the door off, melt the lock, peel the roof back. I just finished restoring this car.

I could go back in time. No going back in time. How many times do I have to tell you? Do you know how many people you annoyed with the back in time thing? I can just fly the whole thing back to the launch pad. No flying. There's no flying. That was our agreement. Road trip, on the ground, no flying. Wait a second. Wait a second. Hold on to your bathing suit. I know how to get help. No superpowers. No super strength. American Express, we're outside of system. Hello? Yes. Well, thank you very much.

So I can explain to them that it was Superman who locked the keys in the car. Don't do that. We'll see. But if they should inquire, perhaps I will drop a subtle hint and say of the two of us, it was the fellow who wears his underwear outside his clothes who is responsible.

Now that's TV. You're in a completely different category. Just kind of takes away a little from what I'm trying to do. Where did you come up with that name, Superman, anyway? Why are you asking? I'm just curious. Ma and Pa Kent didn't name you that. - Did you name yourself Superman? - Long time ago, I don't remember. - Well, where did it come from? Did somebody see you with a car like over your head and call you Superman and you cut out an S and sewed it up on your thing there? - What's the difference?

We were stranded and we didn't need to be. - You need any more help, just let me know. - What do you have? - I have another bag. Do you want your own bag? - No, I don't want my own bag. - I think I have enough to get to LA if I ration it properly. - Well, I bet you've worked that out. Would you mind cracking the window just a little? - You Superman. Where are we anyway?

Thanks. We actually caught a lot of flack content-wise on this one because the DC Comics people said we made Superman seem effeminate, and we undermined his superness or something because he locked the keys in the car, and there was a big political debate. He was supposed to be bouncing his knee and whistling in the car, and they wouldn't allow any of that kind of stuff. This one I want to show you because of color correction. Is there internet on this computer, do you think? Worth a shot, right? Give it a shot. There's internet spilling in every corner of this facility. I hope there is. Let's see if my, this is something interesting.

Still up, it is. Whenever we have, I'll jump back to the color correction in a second, but whenever we have a job this big, with brands this big, Seinfeld and Superman, the parent company, and this is definitely a lesson I learned from them, is you kiss the butt of the brand. It makes total sense, this is what it's all about. It's subtle product placement in this case. So when anyone from the agency or Jerry or from DC wanted to log in, let's see if this is, I'm surprised this is still active.

even down to branding the approval site with the American Express logo, making it look like an American Express card. So you can see on the bottom here, view as agency, view as Jerry, view as DC Comics, view as clients. Clients see the least, of course. Uh... The agency has pretty much access to everything, and then for internal purposes, we have all of it. We post the making of. This is all driven off of an excerpt running from our New York office. I'll hide that for the time being, see if there's any good nuggets on there. Some of the color correction was absolutely outstanding. Let's see if we can find some of it. And that was all done in Final Cut Pro by a guy named Pete McCoubry. And Pete McCoubry was two years out of film school, got really good at this, and he ended up color correcting Soderbergh's Full Frontal on Final Cut Pro. I don't know if anyone ever read about that. and did all of our mastering kind of work on Final Cut Pro, he's just good. He's just really good at what he does. And so after much screaming and yelling that he might be wearing sneakers with the shoes untied, he's really good at doing your work, they gave him a shot at doing this coloring, which would normally have been done in a film transfer bay like a Da Vinci or a Poggle. The other interesting, I don't mean to talk too politically about this, but that's also part of the challenge, is that people didn't really want to take a lot of the gear that we had seriously until we put in a film transfer bay, which we use for film mastering work. But as soon as we put in a Polo Bay with a DataCine, these two big machines, and we tore people around, oh, you have one of these and one of those.

Yeah, but I'm selling you this. It all of a sudden added all kinds of validity to what we were doing on the other side. You know, you have to have a good cinema display, a Herman Miller chair, and a nice place for your clients to sit. And you're all set, you're in business. It's all about the chair. It really is, though, in many cases. All right, so there's the original DV file. It's not even bad looking to begin with for DV. It was shot by professionals. And then we did a nice color package. I'll play some of it so you can see.

There, another stand-in. Poor PA. The guy in blue, I think, was on a coffee break. This was Death Valley, and I know why they call it Death Valley now, being from New York. - Okay. So a really nice before and after color correct that was done. Anyone here in Final Cut know how to use the limit effect in the three-way color corrector? Thank you. All right, and a few of you, then I would like to show you one thing that we did.

Pretty ominous coming from back there. The truck going by is a perfect example of not leaving well enough alone. The truck was purple, I think. And they said, oh, well, because you can, could you make it green? And I'll show you how we did it. No, I'm really not joking around. I'm really not joking around.

You just had to touch every slit. The original truck was purple. I think it was absolutely a beautiful shot. They wanted a green truck. And we did it kind of quick and dirty, but I'll show you how we did this. Does anyone care to see how we did this? All right, cool, thank you. All right, so I'll shut this off. Go down to our base layer here. I'm just gonna make it a little easier on myself by adding an edit point.

on a G5, the more processors you have obviously and the faster they are, the more real time you're going to get. The cool thing is that in that Sinewave system I was talking about, this is completely real time, not at DV resolution, at uncompressed resolution, 10 bit uncompressed, no rendering whatsoever. In DV we can do this, but we need to do a final render to get it to full quality. And DV of course is not best suited for doing this kind of work. You'll see why in one second. It'll be actually in black and white, it'll be painfully obvious. We're using the color correction, of course, anything in bold is real time, the color correct the three way. Gonna just tear this off so we can look at it.

And hidden now in the latest version, of course, is the limit effect all down here. We're going to grab the eyedropper. We're going to grab some purple. I'll just put this back where it belongs. And now I can show you what I mean by being a deficient codec when it comes to compositing. There in black and white, it's trying to show us what our selected area is for affecting it with color. It's pretty blocky if you look at it. Because 411 is basically, in layman's terms, it's saying that for every sample of contrast data you have-- because the eye is good at seeing major differences in contrast-- one fourth as much color information.

Whereas in 4:2:2, obviously it's a lot better. It's a two to one relationship. And in film, it's 4:4:4. All attributes of color and contrast are basically equal, which is why it's such a great way to work. In this case, I'm gonna open up the selective range for purple, it seems it gets a little smoother.

Open up the bottom a little bit. I'm just shooting in the dark here, no pun intended, to show you to get as much of that truck in in one shot as possible. Obviously, if I open up the selected area really big, it's gonna start to, not so much in the case of purple, but it starts to pick up sky and other parts that we don't wanna pick up.

If this was shot in DigiBeta and brought in in its full range, I'd probably be getting a lot more of this information on the first try. We're just looking at it on a sample basis here, and it's not that much I can pull out. We're gonna come out of this key mode, show you a couple things we can do now.

Just the truck is selected. There I just, it's kind of small, but I pulled it down so you can see it in black and white, and of course you can go in and reverse the selected area. So in the case of this shot, now everything is black and white except for the truck. These are things, and this is no rendering involved, which is pretty bad, no matter what system you're on. But in this case, they just went and they pulled the mids towards the green area. And if I wanted to, I can sit and finesse this all day long until I catch the rest of the truck. Okay.

There we go, yeah, I actually did. Come back out of that key mode, and there's your green truck. Not bad. No tracking involved. Most people would run immediately to a flame to do this. We're trying to tell people to write hardware in Final Cut Pro, and a little bit, a tiny bit of patience. The proper operator. When we first started doing Final Cut work at this level, you can see, actually, I picked up a little green in my sky. I would just do a quick matte to get that out of there, but the matte's also real-time on a CineWave card.

Still no rendering at full quality. When we first started doing this, there were a lot of people who picked up a copy of Final Cut Pro and was like, oh, I can do Final Cut work. We'd put them in front of the client and they very often would turn around and say to the client, oh, I can't do what you want me to do because of Final Cut. Never operator error, always the software's fault because it was new and that was kind of the error about it that it couldn't do with these things. We're lucky enough to be able to cultivate talent that's never going to turn around and say to the client, oh, I can't do what you're asking me to do because the software, it becomes a talent issue and a training issue. So there's a purple truck turned green. Thank you. Not bad. Let's see, what else can I show you from here without all my media on hand? Yes. The other thing I thought was completely neat was the camera, which was built Photoshop and Shake.

Pretty effective, I think. Very, very simple. Even the blur area in the part of the focal area. And the coloring is even a little bit of a halo here. And we did shoot with a grad filter. One thing we did learn about color correction is that it's not completely a computer-side thing. A lot of times you actually have to shoot for your own color correction, which is something that these new consolidated media professionals are very good at. A lot of our colorists now actually go out and shoot because they're the people receiving all the footage and grading it to look like something else, where in a case like this, they know how they need it to look when they get it into the bay, so they might as well be on set helping the DP or even shooting for themselves in certain cases. This was supposed to be a low-budget project. Then Seinfeld got involved, of course. Then DC Comics got involved. Then the agency got involved.

And then trucks started pulling up, no joke. And then big crews and people with walkie-talkies. And it turned into a full-blown, almost like feature-type set closing off the streets. And the funny thing to me was, having started the company in 98 and fighting an uphill battle of doing DV and all these things, there I am sitting on the set, and everyone's running around. There are two XL1s on these little dollies. was a couple years ago, not even a year ago. You can't do it. It's garbage. It's amateur time. And there was everyone hustling and bustling and checking the gate, which just blew my mind. I'm like, there is no gate. It's video. Just a little dust off and check it on your monitor, and you're ready to go. But they were treating it like this regular production, which I thought was pretty phenomenal. And let's see if there's anything else here I can pull up for you.

Let's see if the video still lives. This is pretty far into it. I wanna show you a little bit. with shading tests. Here we go. Here is the raw. This is how we were delivered the files. Not bad, basic motions in, it keyed in pretty easily. And then we did the mid shading, which is what we ended up going with, and I'll show you the film noir version. All right, so that's mid, and here's the full lighting package that was projected. It was a little too harsh, they said. - Super bad.

one last piece that I didn't show before. And we'll be right back after these messages with Jerry Seinfeld and Superman. We'll let that cash in the background. There is one more thing I'd like to show you. And this is something that I was blown away by. What our artist did. It was, it is the details. I don't know if anyone caught this and you really kind of have to watch it almost a frame at a time to see this. But this is the part of it that I definitely think compositing is its own art. Lighting is its own art. If you look at the, I'm going frame by frame, you'll see the light kind of go across Superman's face. Can anyone see, can you see that there? And then the perfect timing, the perfect beat before the light actually goes over Seinfeld's face. It's more in the reverse shot.

It is really subtle, and it's all over this piece. But this was shot in a diner at night while it was raining. And it looks like-- no joke-- and it looks like daytime. And that's the one I was looking for. And it plays like daytime. So you can see the light crawl across his face, and then wait the proper breath, and then hit Seinfeld in the face. I just think it was absolutely awesome. I was just buying time with this thing loaded here. They say that opposites attract, while our next two guests may just be the next successful odd. I'll just take this.

They say that opposites attract, while our next two guests may just be the next successful odd couple to get people talking. Although Superman usually works alone, he's teaming up with Jerry Seinfeld for a project with American Express. First of all, we want to thank them both for coming back. We were scheduled to do this last week, but we had a little scare. Someone claimed to have some kryptonite on the plaza. Luckily, it just turned out to have been a piece of moldy Jarlsberg. Anyway, it was a great task. - They made a cheese joke. I just couldn't believe it.

Subtle things, though, to make it convincing. The shadow or the reflection in the table when he got actually caught by the CUPS. Not to jump around on you. Thank you. Beach ball, talk amongst yourselves, I'll give you a topic. Okay. I don't know if anyone caught it the first time, that's right in front of our office. There we go, right in the reflection of the window. I don't know if anyone caught that. Getting the right curvature, getting the right reflection, the right density. All those little things they insisted on, which we did too for realism, even though he's animated.

with Mr. S and myself. That's going to appear on the internet on jerry.americanexpress.com. There's one running on there now, and then there's another one coming up. The internet? I mean, that's a little different for you. Jerry told me about it. He's got good instincts. Plus, I like the idea of being on the internet. It's even cutting-- you're really up on this. I like it. Not the evidence.

And it's a fairly lengthy interview that got cut down. There are a couple other people that I wish I had on my review site that did voiceovers. It was fun to say no to Alec Baldwin. No, thank you. We ended up going with, and then there was a couple other people who tried VOs. The person we went with was someone who Jerry had chemistry with. And if you didn't tell already, Superman, the voice, is played by the guy Putty from Seinfeld. And the funny thing is, as much as they have chemistry, they actually do not get along. It was fun to sit there with him and watch Jerry make fun of this guy Putty to his face and he didn't get it, which was really kind of funny. The whole mechanics of the political side of the business was really interesting to see on this job. The good thing was, after all was said and done because we did turn results, it raised a lot of eyebrows at this place called Ogilvy, which was the agency. They were brave enough to let us try this and of course, now that it's a success, everyone loves Final Cut Pro and Shake in the office because of what it was able to do for them. But it was just about having them take a chance. It's kind of a dangerous waters to be in because we've almost shot ourselves in the foot several times doing this. But as long as you have the right talent and you're trained properly on this, I really don't think there's anything you can't do. Am I good on time? That's it? No? Good?

I have 50 more minutes. Oh, let's do that. Usually I'm, like, showing off functions of Final Cut Pro and not really anything that we did, per se, so I can talk for ages and ages, but this is project-specific, so I'm out of steam. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you.