opencut (no, not a post about Amy Winehouse)
For those aspiring to learn the craft of film editing, one of the trickiest aspects of the journey can be finding good footage to practice on. Even more rare is the opportunity to see how other, more experienced editors would treat the same footage. If you'd like to improve your cutting chops, or flex them for all to see, you could try entering the current competition at opencut.org. You'll get about 160GB of footage from a short film called Susannah (shot with the RED One camera), slice it and dice it however you see fit, and enter the results for judging. From the site:
OpenCut is a completely open-source film competition designed to encourage people to take professionally shot material and edit it in their own way. As there is no "one way" to tell a story, so too can stories benefit from being re-edited and re-told from many different vantage points and perspectives.
The winner of OpenCut 1.0 will receive a brand new AJA IO HD from Silverado. They will also be recognized as the "editor-of-record" at IMDB and will have their cut submitted to multiple film festivals.
Entry will cost you US$25. Grab your copy of In the Blink of an Eye (and maybe even the editing chapter of The Guide) and get to work!
UPDATE: Don't ignore (as I nearly did) the other awesome aspect of this—it's a great way to get your hands on some professionally-shot RED One footage to practice your color grading as well! From the looks of it, the contest is not strictly limited to picture cutting—your finished film will apparently be evaluated for polish and creativity in sound, music, and color as well.
UPDATE UPDATE: You'll notice a comment below from Torrey Loomis, Project Director of OpenCut, addressing many of your questions and concerns. Here's a salient snippet:
We've included an Ubernote to the resources section denoting that this project is NOT limited to Mac.
Second, we've changed the upload requirements to h.264 720p or 1080p. ProRes is not required.
This project is open to anyone--PC or Mac, period.
Thanks Torrey for chiming in! I'm sure ProLost readers appreciate your responsiveness. Read the full comment below.
Fix Your Zombie Problem in 10 Days with a Bullet
Filmmaker and frequent co-host of This Week in Media John Flowers has posted a detailed article on his blog about color correcting and entire feature film in only ten days using Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks.
The film is Wasting Away, a zombie comedy that won the Audience Award for Best Film at ScreamFest (beating out 30 Days of Night). It was shot with the Viper camera, and Flowers finished the entire film in Final Cut Pro using the color correction tools I designed for Red Giant Software. As far as I know, this is the first feature film finished using Looks and Colorista, and I feel like a proud pappa.
Frequent readers of ProLost and The Guide will notice two things about the above: First, Flowers finished his film in his NLE, which is something I somewhat notoriously council against whenever I get a chance. Secondly, Flowers chose the Colorista/Looks solution over Apple's Color. I've gone on record stating that I admire Color's feature set and don't consider Colorista or Looks to be in direct competition with it. I've also stated repeatedly that Magic Bullet Looks in itself is not a color corrector—it is designed to create a look
on top of already corrected footage.
Often a company needs its customers to tell them what their product truly is. "Magic Bullet" started as a code name for a frame-rate conversion technology, but the independent filmmakers who couldn't live without it turned that codename into a brand. Users of a next-day package service called "Federal Express" informed the company of its true name: FedEx. Who really designed the user experience of Twitter, the developers or the user community?
So if you read Flowers's excellent article and see his screenshots and ask yourself, "Is Stu listening? Does he realize that filmmakers want powerful and easy-to-use color correction tools that turn their NLE into a proper finishing tool? And that they're already using Magic Bullet for this, despite his intentions?"
Well rest assured, the answer is yes.