The amazingly talented director Rhett Dashwood has just wrapped post production on his video clip “Black Bones”, for a great band called Teenagersintokyo. The video clip looks amazing (it was shot on Vision Research’s Phantom high speed camera), however that’s the not the only reason I’m writing about it here.

Like a lot of low-budget productions – in fact any film production for that matter – this one had a lot of hurdles. For instance:

• A rouge pyro guy let off fireworks without a permit and blew off his hand meaning the council closed down all pyro for the first day of shooting.
• As a result of last years horrific fire season, the production team were worried about total fire bans – however, the day before the scheduled shoot, the weather turned bad and Melbourne had the biggest thunderstorm it has had in ten years!
• The production lost half of its crew due to re-scheduling.
• The director had a baby! (Congratulations Rhett!)
• Only days after shooting, the director found out two of the most important shots in the video clip were in fact corrupt (yes, as you guess, it was the most important explosion shot!).

However, despite all these major problems, the team got through it all… and the clip looks great.

I was personally only involved in the post production stages, and I must say I was tremendously impressed with Rhett’s courage, determination and sheer talent. When he found out that two of the most important shots of the clip were corrupt, and even the expects (i.e. the people who actually make the camera!) couldn’t fix the problem, he still bashed his way through and in the end worked his way around the problem. By actually opening up the CINE files in a HEX editor and manually copying the headers from one working CINE file to the broken CINE file, after a lot of trial and error he eventually got it working. Not bad work considering how many people told him they the clip was broken and couldn’t be fixed. 

The point is, with all film-making ventures you need to think out-side-the-box, and just keep chipping away at problems. Rhett didn’t give up when things go too hard – as each problem presented itself, he and the rest of his talented team found a way around it.

This is why I love film-making… the people. The sheer determination to get things done.

Again, congratulations Rhett (Director), Ari Wegner (Cinematographer), The Butchery (Editing), Digital Pictures (Online/Grade) and Teenagersintokyo. You’ve done a beautiful job!

It seems like ages since I last gave you all a progress report on the blog – and guess what, it has been! The last time I gave you a proper update was in June, and it’s now already November. How times flies!

Well, as per usual, we’ve been busy. Very busy!

On top of all the exciting projects we have in development, we’ve been working with Pocketbonfire Production’s in both the production and post production stages of their short film, “There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake”. Jaime Snyder, who wrote and directed the film is currently “stuck in the edit suite” cutting away.

We’ve also shot a Tropfest short film entry called “One Flew North”, on the Canon 5DMKII, which we are going to start editing within the next few weeks. It was written and directed by Nick Colla. We were lucky enough to score Benjamin Hidalgo on board as director of photography and the footage looks amazing! Stay tuned for more details on this film!

Jacqui Hocking has also been very busy jet-setting around the world capturing amazing footage on her TOPtoTOP adventure. She arrives back in Melbourne on Sunday for a brief period, then she’s off again.

We also recently worked alongside Draught Films to put together an entry for the Melbourne 48hour Film Competition, which was directed by extremely talented Thom Holt. Despite the tight deadline, we are EXTREMELY happy with the results of the film. We shot it on a HVX202. We’ve already made it into the top 12 and will find out whether or not we pick up any awards in the competition before the end of the month.

Both Nick Colla and myself have also been working closely on several other major concepts. More details to follow soon!

So yes, I know this blog post is a bit all over the place. But rest assured, the reason we’ve been a bit slow on update the site is not because we’re lazy – it’s because we’re busy what we do best – making films!

So stay tuned… Lots of exciting things still in store before the end of the year!

Happy film-making!

Best Regards, Chris!

The company I work for (when I’m not busy doing latenite films related work) recently purchased a brand new MacPro. Nothing too fancy, just something that can easily handle offline editing in Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro. Here are the specs:

One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
4GB RAM (4 x 1GB)
640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Card

And so, once it arrived, I open up the box, took out the tower, and hooked it up to some monitors we already had. It booted fine, and loaded Snow Leopard. “Ah, no” I thought to myself, and added a mental note that the first thing I will need to do it get rid of Snow Leopard. But, while it’s up and running, I might as well check out some of the new Snow Leopard features. Then I noticed it. Something was not right. For about half a second every five seconds the computer seemed to “stall”. It would just stop for half a second. It was almost as if it had a faulty heart and was missing a beat every now and again. I’ve never seen this before, so I was a little bit scared that maybe this brand new machine might had serious hardware problems. Either that – or Snow Leopard was causing the poor machine some major, major grief. So first thing I did after a diagnostics test (in which the machine passed all tests), was try and dump Snow Leopard and put on Leopard 10.5. I put in the Retail DVD of Leopard we have, clicked install, and waited for the machine to reboot. Then nothing happened. Ummm… Strange! Why wasn’t it booting? I tried another Retail DVD of Leopard we have. Same problem. Ummm… very strange! Time for Google. I hit my first major stumbling block – you can only install Leopard 10.5.6 or later on these new MacPro’s and all our Retail DVDs are 10.5. With no copy of Leopard 10.5.6 on DVD, and no dealers stocking 10.5.6 on the shelves, it was time to sent it back to the retailer so that they can install 10.5.6 and work out what’s going on with the strange freezing issue. We can always grab another copy of 10.5.6 on DVD from Apple’s discontinued software division later (as we’ll need to install the OS again on other partitions anyway).

And so, the Mac went back to the shop. The weird thing however was that the machine worked perfectly once they received it. No lagging, no freezing – it worked perfectly. So they installed 10.5.6, ran the diagnostics tool, swapped out the RAM as a precaution, and sent it back to us. They did say however that they have come across this issue once before, and put it down to electromagnetic interference in the room it was being used in – putting the machine in another room seemed to fix the problem. Very strange!

I got it back, plugged it in, and the same issue occurred. It would freeze for about half a second every five or so seconds. And so, as a test, I tried it in a different room. It worked fine. Very strange! So I tried it in another room. Same freezing issue. In another room. Same freezing issue. In another room. It worked fine! So it seemed that this silly machine would only work in specific locations, and I had no idea why!

Not convinced that electromagnetic interference would do this, I tried swapping out cables, the keyboard, the mouse, and then finally, I tried different combinations of monitors.

And then I found the solution. For some reason certain monitors connected via the DVI port cause the system to lag (i.e. literally freeze for half a second every five or so seconds) if connected via the DVI or Mini DisplayPort. However, all monitors seem to work fine over VGA using adapters.

I’ve tried every single possible combination of screen resolutions and refresh rates – so that’s not the issue.

I’ve tried Googling similar issues, but apart from finding a whole heap of issues with the 4870 graphics card, I couldn’t seem to find anything like this.

Here is a list of monitors I tried:

Works over DVI, Mini DisplayPort & VGA:

Samsung 205BW 16:9 LCD
Benq G2420 HD (Model: ET-0027-B) 16:9 LCD

Works over VGA:
Kogan X19WB 16:9 LCD
Sony LMD-2030W 16:9 LCD
Sony KLV-325200A 16:9 LCD
Sony KDL-2054000 16:9 LCD

Doesn’t Work over DVI or Mini DisplayPort:
Samsung 940B 4:3 LCD
Benq T2200HD (Model: W2108) 16:9 LCD
Benq G2200W (Model: ET-0016-N) 16:9 LCD

When I get the time, I’ll also try a few other monitors we’ve got lying around including some big old CRTs!

So, to cut a long story short, if you get a new MacPro and it looks like it’s lagging – try a different screen! If anyone has a reason as to why this happens, I’d also love to hear it!

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris !