In part one of our interview with Mike Curtis, published yesterday, we chatted with him about the emergence of HD filmmaking, economics of shooting with HD, HDV, HVX200, archiving in the tapeless future, codecs, open source formats.

One of the interesting things about what you do is that you consult a lot independent productions in post-production which means also pre-production. Because what you do in pre-production will ultimately make the job easier in post. Can you share some of these experiences ? And more importantly what should the filmmaker pay attention to in pre-production? What questions should they be asking so post is not a mess?

Good question. In general, THINK IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH. Not just "Oh, I'm going to shoot on this because it is cheap and the quality is decent." These days, if trying to be clever and cost effective with HD, it is not just what camera are you shooting on? Precisely, what mode are you shooting? What editing system are you planning on using, what is your intended deliverable, and do you plan on doing the final online yourself or on your offline gear, or are you planning on doing your online elsewhere. All matter significantly.

While it is possible to mix and match workflow pieces, there can be significant costs involved. For instance, a client originally priced out getting their SD 24p 16:9 project color corrected on an eQ, because that was the perceived "better" solution - but the bid was for $30K since they had to re-acquire all the footage again, and the eQ doesn't handle the DVX100A's Advanced Pulldown mode, so all the footage had to be recapture and converted via FCP at the facility's rate - AWFUL!

Yeah, in general, think it all the way through, have a KNOWN plan, know what camera, shooting frame size and frame rate and pulldown (if applicable), FCP vs. Avid for editing, and how well is that Avid or FCP rig set up.

Common problems:
 - shooting with DVX100a and shooting 3:2 pulldown rather than Advanced Pulldown (bad/dumb/not recommended if editing FCP)
- capturing your 24p DV at 30i if you want a 24p master (dumb!)
- shooting 30p if wanting a 24p master (ugh!)
- using 24p on the new JVC GY-HD100U and thinking you're editing 24p on Final Cut Pro - think again! Only in the last week or two has software shipped to allow that to work in any vaguely efficient manner (LumiereHD in beta now) - you categorically cannot capture 24p HD100U footage into FCP - you get NOTHING AT ALL, not even 24p on 30i.

Or, shooting HDCAM and thinking you can "FireWire it in like the Varicam, right?" NOOO!! Doesn't work that way. Make sure you have the storage, the throughput, the hardware, the right version of the software, etc.
It is a LOT of double checking to be done, and HD is MUCH more complicated than the golden simple age of SD, where it was "you shootin' NTSC or PAL there, sonny?"

Post is much more integral in the cost equation for HD than it was for SD. The smart play, as I figure it, is to plan your production to be cost effective and have the right camera and tools to capture a suitable image, then double check that the post can be done effectively. Double check your options and alternatives (and there are many) to make sure you are making the best use of the overall budget, not just production and not just post. little addendum to that - if you have open ended time and budget for post, you can do production any which way you want that generates suitable source imagery. But on Planet Reality, budgets count. To assume you can focus on production and post will figure itself out is dangerous.

Now mainly, you are an Apple guy, do you think the integration between products (audio to video to dvd creation) that Apple and Adobe do, is the way to go? Is this what you would recommend, stay within a family of products?

I'd say for smaller, Indie productions, yes, that makes sense. As your budget and/or quality needs climb, you may need to start opening yourself up to other options from other vendors. The convenience of the handoff between the toolsets you mention (Apple & Adobe, as well as Avid's) is a significant timesaver and "maintainer of creative flow" when in the trenches of timeline driven production, as well as a good use of your post production staff's time. But if you need really good MPEG-2 encoding, for instance, use another tool or farm it out to another vendor. The tools in the Adobe or Apple suites are pretty darn nice, but not all of them are best of breed. I'm not an audio guy, but the pro audio guys I know veer aware from using Apple's tools for heavy work.

In the same way that I like Motion, but for heavy stuff, I'm going with After Effects (for motion graphics and some kinds of compositing) or combustion or Shake (for heavier VFX composite shots). I really like using GPU to accelerate composites and stuff, it is way cool.

I love motion, I find myself using it more and more. Does Adobe need a make-over?

Define makeover- their suite or the company, or what?

Their suite, it feels so unnatural sometimes using their products. Especially, After Effects.

Interesting you single that one out - AE is my favorite user interface of all time, I spent 6-8 years with that as my primary tool for income. I do think they have shoved a variety of packages together that came from different sources, and have done a pretty good job of making them work together, especially the After Effects/Premiere Pro copy/paste integration. But the audio tools are not as well included, I think, in part because they were recent acquisitions and additions. It takes a few version upgrades to get things smoothly integrated.

What do you think Apple should do in both hardware and software that can 1) further solidify their role in independent film industry and 2) make our jobs more easier?

To further solidify their role in indie stuff, I think they are generally on the right track. I think they could improve their toolsets for media management, for working long form (I think Avid does well in these departments) for synchronizing dual source sound, and on the higher end, for GOD'S SAKE, get support for 10 bit RGB all the way through the pipeline! The Shake/FCP integration is a good step, I'd like to see it get better. Further advancements with CoreVideo should pay off, when Motion turns into a practice run for Shake to really kick butt.

I'd really like to see mixed codecs and sizes (and possibly framerates) all on the same timeline with RT performance - I'm hoping that more CoreVideo GPU horsepower will enable that in the next version of FCP, but I have no solid data to support that.

I'm also kinda miffed about the usual Apple secrecy that has led us to a point of no SATA cards for PCIe Macs for months to come.

Is there a product (software or hardware) that we should be paying more attention to?

Well, I'm so big on Final Touch HD that I'm starting a business around it. It isn't affordable for everybody, but it really rocks.

It is intended for high end users & needs, and will present a learning curve to the Photoshop/ Final Cut Pro/ After Effects trained crowd. But the realtime performance is amazing, and the ability to integrate with FCP is an enormous timesaver - that $30K job on eQ? Without knowing the details, I'd guess we'd be doing that job for $5,000 to $10,000 on Final Touch HD. The ability to do primary color correction and up to 8 secondary color corrections with realtime performance is just out of the ballpark of what has been possible in the past.

Final Cut Pro takes some quickie math shortcuts to generate realtime performance, and the results are good but not fantastic. But as soon as you add a secondary color correction, like "make the green grass greener, but only in this soft selection area over here" you are into some serious render time, and the process slows to be highly non-iterative, non-realtime, and can hinder creative flow. You really don't want the client sitting there waiting for that stuff. Not the case with FTHD. I have a quad G5 on order to fix some speed issues when working with HD footage for realtime performance, and then there really won't be much that clients can complain about relative to working with a daVinci in terms of speed and quality of results. Add in Omar, our 23 year veteran daVinci colorist, and it is a pretty damned impressive capability.

I like some of the clever plugins out there that help with image quality, like those from Graeme Nattress (Nattress plugins), or of course the longtime standard Magic Bullet stuff. And there are tons of little specialty widgets, like Digital Heaven's, or I dunno, lots of them hardware to pay attention to: AJA Kona LH is an amazingly versatile capture/output card - it'll do analog and digital in and out, SD and HD in and out - the only deck it CAN'T work with is HDCAM SR in RGB mode. A really, really nice card.

The new lower price points on BlackMagic's cards are also great - HD starting at $600 or so, digital input/output for HD with SD/HD component monitoring for only $1000, RGB 4:4:4 support for $1500.

The Multibridge Extreme and MultiBridge Studio devices (they aren't cards) from BlackMagic Designs are also very interesting - all the "guts" are in the outboard breakout box, and you just get a cheapie little interface card to go in your PCI-X or PCIe based Mac or PC. If you want those capabilities available on multiple boxes, you just by more PCIe or PCI-X "stubs" for cheap and put them in multiple boxes, and cable them up on the fly as you need the capabilities on that box. Way way cool, I have one on order for myself (and it also does all flavors of SD & HD, digital and analog, in and out, as well as RGB 4:4:4 HD).

SATA RAIDs and SATA cards - no PCIe cards yet, but the Sonnet and Firmtek cards are good deals for the money (I have a slight preference for Sonnet due to freedom from worrying about which model hard drives are used), and external cases from MacGurus (the Burly Box) aren't necessarily the most beautiful enclosures but are extremely cost effective and reliable so far in my experience. Native SATA RAID is the biggest "foot in the door" advantage for those wanting to get into uncompressed HD - you can build your own 2TB SATA RAID 0 for under $2000. Deal-o-rama.

Oh! One other piece of hardware to watch - JVC (and others') studio HD monitors that support NTSC/PAL/720pHD/1080p/1080iHD and 24p all for about $2500 is pretty awesome.

What can you say on the future of HD? Something we can go "ooooh" and "aaah" over?

For me, near term, 10 bit RGB properly handled all the way through FCP. OK, that's too geeky for most to care about. But definitely the ability to mix and match SD 24p, 720p, and 1080p all on one timeline in realtime will come within a year and a half on FCP, and is already possible on some other platforms (like Axio and higher end Avids). THAT will be a big "oooOOooh" for those who understand.

I'd like to see support for 2K 10 bit log scans in FCP, but that's way down the road (I'd guess, if ever). Better native support for hardware codecs will be a big deal. I'd love to see, but seriously doubt, that Sony will "uncork" the HDCAM codec and make it available to anyone else but themselves (it is presently supported on a Sony editing product but nothing else). Cheaper/faster storage will be significant.

Though i love Blu-Ray, I am afraid of Sony's paranoid closed-formats, and drm issues.

Both HD DVD and Blu-Ray are doing paranoia extreme approaches, like requiring HDCP enabled HDMI connections otherwise you're watching standard def on your HDTV. Crazy, isn't it? I'm in favor of Blu-Ray mostly for capacity reasons. with XBox 360 NOT coming with HD DVD, I think that tips in favor of Blu-Ray. But Blu Ray will have to yield on supporting "mandatory managed copy" mode for home theater PC support from Intel and Microsoft. And next year from Apple, once they switch to Intel based systems, begins offering Viiv platform home entertainment PCs (witness iPod Video and new iMacs as a start in that direction).

HD VD and Blu Ray - in brief, I think the industry is at risk of minimizing these formats with their DRM and competing standards. It could be the same thing as SACD vs DVD-A. What're those, you say? Exactly! Those are the competing high def audio formats that nobody much cares about, since regular audio is good enough, and there are two competing standards with not much content on them and not much push to get the format adopted in the market. If the two high def DVD groups continue on their current pace, I think we are heading into LaserDisc 2.0 territory - only the super techies will have the financial and technical resouces to buy into it, and most everybody else won't care and keep buying their regular DVD's. Which is a total shame - I think high def DVDs are going to be super cool, and push the home theater experience further, and offer huge opportunities for indie filmmakers to compete "at the level."

What should we expect from HD for Indies in the near future?

Starting with this color correction business, called Color Cafe, I'm going to be rolling out a series of services for Indie filmmakers. Addressing issues of high quality and low cost compared to the alternatives in the market, so that the quality is "up there" and the rates are viable for these types of users. It will be as digital and lossless as possible, and be savvy to the latest in high quality/low cost post production workflows. For instance, videotape will play as small a role as possible, and sometimes never, in our range of services.

As for the website itself, I'm planning on a redesign so that there will be a professional services page at hdforindies.com, and in time the blog will migrate to hdforindies.com/blog or somesuch, but keeping the free assets out there, and keeping the news coming.

I'm also planning on offering some training materials as DVDs (standard and high def) that will be proof-is-in-the-pudding examples of the technology. For instance, if talking about shooting 50i and converting to 24p from HDV for compression on high def DVD using Apple tools, that is what I will have done, and that is what you'll be looking at on the screen (just computers for now until HD DVD and Blu Ray get rolling).

I will continue to respond to virtually all mail sent, and am available for consulting at very indie viable rates. As a matter of fact, search/peruse the over 1600 articles on HDforIndies.com for coverage of a huge range of topics, and check the FAQ for, well, your most common HD post questions.

HD For Indies gets 2000-3000 unique visitors a day, about 3000-4000 pageviews per day. Thanks again to Mike Curtis for all the knowledge, his time and energy.