You can now make big budget, Hollywood-style special effects at used car prices. If this is not the beginning of a revolution then I don't know what is. In Adobe's latest release of the Creative Suite product line (known as CS5) they've brought back the Ultra green screen product (which went missing in CS4) and given it so much bang for the buck that I think it could topple a small third-world nation.

To begin with, the green screen product is no longer a stand-alone application, the functionality is now built right into Adobe's Premiere Pro editing package. This gives you, the filmmaker, a crazy amount of control over how your composites integrate into your scenes. For example, you can add any other Premiere effect on top of a composite and see the results instantaneously. In the sample composite I created for this article ("The Big Spider"), I added motion to my keyed layer so that it would match the motion of the layer underneath. I was also able to shrink and grow the dimensions of my keyed layer over the length of the piece (in attempt to hide some lights at the edge of my green screen). I was able to play with each of these effects one at a time, independent of the Ultra key effect, which allowed my project to act like a big special effects sandwich. I could easily open it up, throw in a different flavor and see what the results were. This is a monumental change from Adobe's previous approach which baked the green screen effect into the footage at the outset.

If you've worked in this business for more than a minute you know that there is no such thing as job security. The gigs are short, firings are common and you always have to be on the lookout for your next project. It's really not much of a life. But as Reed Hastings recently told me,"Entertainment is like a drug. When you finally find a good movie it makes you want to go find another one." I think this pretty much sums up the economics of the film business: the products can be so good that people will tolerate an enormous sum of inferior experiences. Reed himself is no stranger to inferior experiences, as dozens of ex-employee postings at GlassDoor.com can attest. Here's a sample post:

Netflix: Culture of Fear

Pros

The pay is above market. Not a lot above market, but a bit above market. The drawback is there are absolutely no benefits to speak of (no health benefits, no training, no daycare) so that above market pay gets eaten up pretty fast by real world needs.

Cons

A total fear of failure permeates the ranks. Netflix basically gives you a warning on your first mistake, and then fires you after your second mistake. This is why the annual turnover rate is well over 20%. Since there is an entirely new set of employees every few years, nobody knows what process to follow, and everything is chaotic. HR solves this by saying "there is no process for anything! Make it up as you go along!" Sure, if I fired all the employees every few years I'd stay away from process too.

The key problem is that with all the firings most employees spend the day simply trying to find cover. The ass covering at Netflix is legendary. Nobody wants to innovate. Nobody wants to reach outside their comfort zone. Netflix has created a culture of fear, and the way in which they manage terminations reinforces the culture of fear (they immediately demonize the terminated employee, and try to make the termination serve as a lesson to others).

The culture of fear is so ingrained in Netflix that many managers only have one tool for managing their directs, and that is to threaten to fire them. There simply is no other process for managing poor performance (remember, there is no process - they will admit this to you if you ask).

And finally, the last thing you should be warned about is their "high performance" culture. Their justification for all the firings is that the fired employees weren't high performers. But since there is no process, no record-keeping, there is no objective measurement of performance. So "high performers" end up being the employees that get along with the boss and keep a low profile. "High performers" at Netflix are not employees that take risks, interact with outside groups, or produce a high volume of work.

Netflix loves to talk about high performance but they have the lowest standard for high performance that I've ever seen. They are completely happy to manage with fear, however. If you put those two insane concepts together you end up with a rather hysterical environment.

Advice to Senior Management

So you guys did one thing well, a long time ago, and you've been marginally improving that business (DVD rental) ever since. Your astoundingly high turnover rate worked in that world, because all the processes were in place. But now you are trying to get into the streaming business, and that business only runs with knowledge workers at the helm. And guess what? Knowledge workers are pretty well-connected. The word is out that Netflix does not value its employees and as a result it's going to be harder and harder to staff your new ventures. You really need to find the groups at Netflix with the highest turnover and keep those managers away from the streaming business. You have some managers that simply do not know how to manage, they only know how to fire and hire. As much as you love to say that firing and hiring is what management is all about, you could not be more wrong. Find the teams with low turnover, they are the teams that work in spite of your chaotic work environment.

And another:

Comcast's long awaited over-the-top video service has finally launched and the results are in.

I finally got my hands on the new Adobe Creative Studio 3 and spent a couple evenings with the Studio's green screen product, which for some reason is called Ultra CS3. (Isn't that a detergent?) After producing a number of green screen clips I can confirm that even though Ultra CS3 delivers a crisp, attractive composite you'll find your sound element mangled so badly that you'll think the Siegfried & Roy tigers got to it.

I think the animation business is in trouble. I just took my son to see "The Tale of Despereaux" and, while charming at times, the final 20 minutes were lifted right out of Orwell's 1984:

"The rat", said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,"although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless."

My son actually had to watch rats tie up a princess and eat her, all the while hearing her painful shrieks. Eventually Despereaux saves the princess by releasing a cat, but at that point the logic of the story had gone so far over the deep end that I felt like the abyss was gazing into me. I don't know that I would call "The Tale of Despereaux" Orwellian torture porn, but it's not a kids' film. If anything it's a perfect example of what the animation glut is doing to the animation business.

I ran the numbers and I'm pretty sure that Sumner Redstone, owner of Paramount Pictures, is hoping that Pixar's 'Up' will dominate the box office when it opens on May 29th. Why is Paramount's head cheerleader rooting for the other team? It's a long and twisted tale, and at the heart of it is a father's love for his daughter. Sumner wants Pixar to succeed at Paramount's expense because his daughter bet the farm on Disney Digital 3D.

Pirates were in the news this week, seizing their 83rd vessel off the coast of Somalia and the entire Korean DVD market. It might be more accurate to say that pirates have always controlled the DVD market in Korea and this was just the week that Warner Bros. admitted to this and pulled out of the market altogether. Prior to the announcement Warner Bros. was the only major studio still trying to sell $19.98 DVDs in a country where the latest Batman film can be purchased in any subway station for $3 (5,000 Won). Warner now joins the other major studios in wondering if they'll ever see revenue beyond theatrical distribution in that country.

But what Warner should really be worried about is whether or not the situation in Korea is a harbinger of doom for the U.S. DVD market. I think it is.

There's a fundamental theory in economics that if people want your product more when the economy is down your product is "inferior". Or stated in another way, everybody in the entertainment business is getting crazy rich right now. Take a look at yesterday's earning report from Time Warner: profit from the content business is up 14% from last quarter. Another entertainment powerhouse, Activision Blizzard, reported incredible earnings yesterday: revenue more than doubled. The CEO, Bobby Kotick, went on to state that "there's nothing that would suggest to us today that our business isn't going to continue to perform well".

So how can you get a piece of this action?

I don't know if you had your calendar marked, but yesterday might have been the most important date in the history of online video. It was the date that Strike.TV went live. Stike.TV is a video site that offers original content from WGA members. It was dreamt up during the depths of the WGA strike and the results are amazing. The production standards are far higher than anything else on the internet, and it introduces a business model that is going to revolutionize how online video is produced and sold. Though the first day viewership numbers were mild by YouTube standards, I think we just witnessed a launch that changed the world.

I had a chance to interview Michael Tabb, Supervising Producer and Head of Submissions at Strike.TV and here is what he had to say:

Wherever money and art collide, a few crooks are created as a byproduct of the chemical reaction. That's what a few dozen acclaimed filmmakers found out this week when Sundance notified them (via email) that they wouldn't be getting paid from the online distribution deal that Sundance had guided them into. The crooked company in the middle of all of this (as filmmaker Carson Mell told IndieWire) is Mediastile, an online distribution company run by Clive Davis' kid. The company has allegedly been stealing from Sundance filmmakers for years.

A few months back I argued against the sales agent business model that is championed by folks like John Sloss. In a nutshell, these people take on as many clients as possible and try to make a fast sale at Sundance or Cannes. They have very little at stake in the productions they push and use extremely aggressive negotiation tactics to get to a quick close. Just three years ago the New York Times called John Sloss a new power broker and printed John's claim that he 'virtually owns Sundance'. What a difference a few years can make.

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that this year most of John's slate at Sundance went unsold.

This radiant Dark Knight review just came in from guest correspondent Jason Calacanis. Jason writes:

Paramount Pictures is in trouble and I don't see a Federation ship on the horizon that's going to swoop in and save them. You probably already knew that their star player is looking to get into business with an alleged Indian video pirate. Then just yesterday the studio admitted to losing a $450 million film financing deal with Deutsche Bank. Normally I wouldn't raise an eyebrow over a financing deal gone bad, but apparently some of the funds were meant to cover films currently in distribution. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Paramount's outside financing effort was designed to provide production funds for two dozen or more feature films from its upcoming slate, including "Tropic Thunder," produced by DreamWorks

Next week Paramount screens "Tropic Thunder" for the press. The film is in the can, so there shouldn't be any remaining production costs. Did Paramount just lose their ad budget?

Robert Rodriguez has been in the press lately for his marital woes (pictured here with his woes), but I prefer to think of him as the UT film student that shopped a $7,000 feature for the spanish home video market (El Mariachi) all the way to fame and fortune. If you want to know how he went from total obscurity to being represented by Robert Newman at ICM you should read this early interview. The interview took place during Robert's first trip to Sundance and in it he announced "I created my own film school, the Robert Rodriguez Film School."

Though the school only operated for a short time, six years later Robert released a short called Ten Minute Film School that dissected a chase scene from El Mariachi. He's released additional episodes over the years, which together make up a nice primer on low budget filmmaking. The videos are worth a look, but I wouldn't be much of a whaling captain if I could be comforted with just that. After a little digging I was able to find an early class transcript in which Robert promised to teach the students everything they needed to know about film in ten minutes.

For your consideration, here is the original Ten Minute Film School:

If you've ever physically spliced two pieces of film together you know how magical the 24 fps frame cadence is. I don't know if there is a psychometric test that can confirm this, but it seems like the images linger just long enough to make a lasting impression, while maintaining the proper motion of objects. When Sony 24p cameras were first used to shoot a feature it was clear that a new age of cinema was upon us. In today's article I am going to detail a low cost workflow that will allow you to shoot high definition video at 24 fps.

This workflow employs the tools detailed in my previous workflow article. To recap, it relies on a low cost HDV camera (the Canon HV20) and a low cost post production environment (Adobe Creative Suite 3). There are two reasons why HDV was selected for the video format: camera cost and disk space requirement. When it comes to cost per pixel, HDV cameras cannot be beat. HDV is considered a consumer format and as a result the cameras are a fraction of the cost of DVCPro HD gear. In regard to disk space, you'll find that the 25 Mbps data rate of HDV allows you to squeeze 5,000 minutes of footage onto an entry level PC with a terabyte of storage. The DVCPro HD format, on the other hand, eats up to four times the disk space and also requires greater disk throughput (which means your disk subsystem needs to be gold plated). Don't get me wrong, we're not against professional gear here at Free Film School, we just want to define an affordable option for filmmakers that aren't sitting on a big pile of cash.

Let's begin with your camera set-up.