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  • Alex Ricciardi 1:12 pm on March 14, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , gaspar noe, music video   

    SebastiAn’s Love in Motion, directed by Gaspar Noé 

    Endless Picnic recently collaborated with director Gaspar Noé on his latest music video, for SebastiAn’s Love in Motion. Greyshack Films produced the video, and I edited and color corrected it. The excellent After Effects artist Nick Vranizan was also a part of the team.

    And if you know the legendary Argentinian-born French filmmaker Noe’s work, you won’t be surprised to learn that the video has already garnered some controversy. It’s been taken down from YouTube four or five times and prompted some truly heated comments. So see for yourself what the fuss is about, and tell us what you think…if the video hasn’t been taken down again, that is!


    SebastiAn – Love in Motion (Directed by Gaspar… by Flixgr

     

    • Ron Egozi 7:28 pm on March 15, 2012 Permalink

      The video’s an excellent reflection of teen dreams and pop culture that inspires those dreams.

  • Alex Ricciardi 11:55 am on January 11, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , ,   

    Dave’s Thoughts on our 5D Master Class 

    With our next 5D Master Class coming up this weekend, Endless Picnic’s Director of Photography, David Cavallo, has some thoughts on how things have been going so far.

    Our next class is on Saturday, January 14th. Click here for more information or to sign up now!

     

  • Alex Ricciardi 1:52 pm on December 9, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    ‘East of Broadway’ 5D to 35mm Film-out Test: Part Two – Post 

    As Dave’s earlier blog post will tell you, shooting camera tests for a feature film is no easy job. While I was kicking back in the editing suite with a latte and a stack of comic books, Dave & his crew were out beating the streets, putting the 5D through its paces to see if it could survive the demands of shooting a gritty feature film on location in NYC.

    I was very excited to see the results, and I’m sure you are too–so without further ado, take a look at the test shoots. I’ll be going into all of the tests in more detail right below.

    Now, I know there’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s start at the beginning:

    LENS COMPARISON TESTS (More …)

     

    • eco_bach 4:49 pm on December 12, 2011 Permalink

      interesting and thanks for posting. Have you considered also considering Jorgen Escher’s latest Marvel’s CInestyle in your tests? http://colorbyjorg.wordpress.com/

    • Samuel Hurtado 7:10 am on December 13, 2011 Permalink

      “I found that the CineStyle, while protecting the shadows and highlights admirably, desaturated the image to such a point that trying to return the saturation to skin tones resulted in a kind of unpleasant look–as if the footage had been pushed too far”

      Same findings here. And still, I found a way to use CineStyle without suffering all these issues: these are the 3 custom picture styles I carry in my camera:
      * CineStyle, with contrast = 0 and saturation = +3 (sometimes only +1)
      * CineStyle, with contrast = -2 and saturation = +3 (sometimes only +1)
      * CineStyle, with contrast = -4 and saturation = +4 (sometimes only +2)

      Extended dynamic range, but just as much as I need for each shot, and pretty nice colors right out of the camera. Have you tried something similar to this? Did you like it, or you still find issues? (I’m not a pro, my eyes are still not well trained to find every IQ issue)

      much more here:
      http://www.similaar.com/foto/picturestyles/picturestyles.html

    • Alex Ricciardi 1:23 pm on December 13, 2011 Permalink

      @eco_bach – Thanks for the tip! I hadn’t heard of Jorgen’s Marvels Cinestyle, but I’m a big fan of his DSLR Moire removal plugin. I’ll certainly check it out!

    • Alex Ricciardi 1:25 pm on December 13, 2011 Permalink

      @Samuel – To be honest, I hadn’t done really extensive testing with modifying the CineStyle preset. Your post about it is extremely informative, thorough, and clear. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting. We’ll be sure to play around with some of those settings you suggested.

    • Samuel H 6:21 pm on February 15, 2012 Permalink

      wandering around the web, I found this again today, so I thought I could post an update to my thoughts on picture styles: unsatisfied by the noise with CineStyle, and with the difficulty grading Marvels Cine, I ended up creating my own suite of picture styles: Flaat 1 through 4:
      http://www.similaar.com/foto/flaat-picture-styles/index.html

  • Alex Ricciardi 12:14 am on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , compressor, , , eos movie plugin-e1, , , , mpeg streamclip, , , ,   

    Transcoding Showdown: The Best 5D Encoder 


    As all of us who’ve been working with 5D footage for a while know, transcoding your H.264 camera clips to ProRes is one of the necessary evils of the workflow (while you can now edit the native clips in software like Adobe Premiere CS5 or FCPX, I would argue that transcoding is still a requirement before color correction). What you may not know is that not all transcoders are created equally. I decided to test the transcode time, file sizes and quality of a few different programs, and the results may surprise you. (More …)

     

  • Alex Ricciardi 11:17 am on August 18, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , jodorowsky's dune   

    Jodorowsky’s Dune B-Roll Shoot in the Mojave Desert 

    Howdy folks! The Picnic’s resident DP, Dave Cavallo, just sent over these fun shots from his B-Roll shoot in the Mojave Desert for the forthcoming documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune, directed by Frank Pavich. He was pleased to report that the equipment faired admirably through the 107 degree heat and wind over the dunes. Enjoy the photos, and see Mr. Cavallo himself show you around the desert in the video below! (More …)

     

  • Alex Ricciardi 11:19 am on August 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Endless Picnic’s New Color Correction Reel! 

    Hello, everyone!

    I’m happy to announce that we’ve launched our new color correction reel today, and we’d love for you to take a look!

    Download Video: MP4 Ogg

    It’s also up on Vimeo & Youtube — basically everywhere that videos can be seen on the internet.

    So what are you waiting for? Watch it, tell us what you think, and come to Endless Picnic for your next feature, short, or commercial!

     

  • Alex Ricciardi 10:48 am on April 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , ,   

    Managing 5D Media in Final Cut Pro 7 

    When you’re running a 5D rental house, you get asked a lot of questions. Most of these have to do with the gear itself, but the most important question may be “What do I do with the footage after I’ve shot it?” After all, if you can’t import and edit your footage properly, then that sweet 5D is just an expensive, awesome paperweight. (Seriously, it’s really good at keeping your papers from flying away.)

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a Final Cut Pro timeline from someone who shot their project on the 5D and seen this:

    RENDER BARS! Sure, it’s tempting to stick your Compact Flash card in a reader and just start dragging clips to your hard drive, but as many of you know, currently Final Cut cannot natively edit the files 5D generates. What’s more, a haphazard approach to copying files is a good recipe for lost media and, worse yet, general chaos once you’ve reached the edit stage.

    So what’s the solution? (More …)

     

    • Wendy 10:53 am on April 15, 2011 Permalink

      This is the best tutorial I have seen on importing 5D material into FCP. Well done.

    • Jalanda James 1:24 pm on February 2, 2012 Permalink

      Wow! Intense.  Good stuff but a little too complex for me. But you are the real deal;)

      Here’s what I found helpful in my many hours of research.

      Editing Drive
      Raid 0 

      Backup Drive
      Raid 1

      Implementation:
      1. Convert media. I use Mpeg Streamclip. Save these converted files to your Raid 0 drive. 

      2. Save the originals to your Raid 1 drive.

      3. Edit using your Raid 0 drive and editing program of choice. When finished editing send a copy of the project folder to your Raid 1 drive for storing.

      Raid Basics
      Raid can either be configured to share processing power or provide double backup. 

      Raid 0 
      Good for editing because the processing is split between 2 drives. 
      Example
      Working Data ABCDEF
      Drive One Processes  = A,C,E
      Drive Two Processes = B,D,F

      Raid 1
      Mirrors the data from one drive to the next. So you save it once and it’s copied to both drives. 

      Example
      Working Data ABCDEF
      Drive One = ABCDEF
      Drive Two = ABCDEF

      I like Raids as opposed to multiple drives around. I like Glyph Technologies so far because they are made for MAC and are supposedly made for editing. They have great reviews. 

      Good luck. Hope this helps made the editing workflow easier to understand.

  • Alex Ricciardi 5:45 pm on September 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Superdrunk   

    Superdrunk Trailer 

    Hey everyone, this is Alex Ricciardi, the editor & colorist here at Endless Picnic, and I wanted to share with you a trailer I cut & graded (along with the eyes of our Cinematographer, David Cavallo, who also shot the piece).

    It’s for an independent TV pilot called Superdrunk. It’s from 2009, but once we got our swanky HP Dreamcolor monitor, we decided to redo the grade to really make the footage pop.

    Download Video: MP4 Ogg

    It was shot on a Panasonic DVX100B–yes, that’s miniDV, folks!–with a Letus Extreme adapter and some old-school Nikon lenses. We kept the colors punchy & warm, and since it’s a “comedy” about four miserable young men who get high and fight crime, we (with the guidance of the director, Adam Goodman) gave it a grungy “feel-bad” look that we’re real proud of.

     

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