My life is a paradox. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember. On one had I’m cynical and sarcastic; a jaded and calculating realist who thinks the world is out to get me. On the other hand I’m a romantic idealist who firmly believes in the beauty and wonder of the Universe. It is not easy to rectify these two halves of myself. I have often wondered if I am crazy.

Then I started working in entertainment and removed all doubt: I am beyond crazy.

This is a business that attracts the weirdest and screwiest of our population. I’ve given you some examples of these in pervious articles, but they are the loonies in from of the camera. What about the people behind the lens? What about us?

I have already admitted I’m crazy, and given some good reasons for that. Anyone who knows me can likewise testify. In fact, everyone on this website is total wacko. Brian O’Malley, who you know as the owner/operator of A101, is unquestionably off the deep end. Rob Cunningham, fellow contributing writer, is also a few marbles short of a stack. And Kevin Williamson (where the hell did he get that nom de plume?), filmmaker, office supplies genius, celebrity impersonator, and all around good guy is without a doubt bonkers.

Every professional I’ve ever worked with, and some promising amateurs, have all been crazy. I believe it’s actually a two-part mechanism. First, you own inherent wackiness attracts you to the business. You see it as a place where you can be free to express your unique ideas, and get paid for that expression! An environment where you will be surrounded by other chicken neck eating freaks, and you will be comforted by the funny farm of your own design.

Then, once you realize the entertainment industry is far more bizarre then even you can handle, the second mechanism kicks in: self preservation. You become crazy in order to save your sanity. Case in point: I worked with a guy named Martin, and he was an asshole. (Normally I try to avoid such profanity in my columns, but there is no other word to describe Martin. In fact, he was the biggest asshole I have ever had the misfortune to work with.) He slept through his graveyard shifts, disregarded his responsibilities, insulted his fellow employees, and he smelled of baby powder and cheese. Weird. He also liked to wear this pink sweatshirt that boldly advocated, “Don’t just exercise, JAZZERCISE!” A bold move from a man that made lewd remarks about all the women in the department. Our Engineering Manager insisted this scrawny, balding, pointed headed, pathetic man would someday arrive for his shift with a gun under his coat and vent on us by ventilating us. Thus he was nicknamed “The Bullet Headed Postman”, with no offense intended towards our fine readers from the United States Postal Service.

The story going ’round the office was that he used to be THE director for the San Diego Padres a few years back until he was forced to quit. The exact details are clouded by myth and legend, but it seems one of his cameramen tried his hand at vehicular homicide after a game where Martin was particularly offensive. I contend Martin was unable to cope with the madness of the industry and it got to him. Now he’s working in a basement master control dungeon from 11pm to 6am, Wednesday through Sunday. Sucks to be him.

I’ve seen it time and again: you either let the beast get you or you jump on its back and ride the bastard. Well, you could run away from the Biz and ask for your retail job back, or you could take that generous offer from your Uncle to sell used cars on his lot in Palmdale.

Trust me: a bad day in television is better then a good day in retail. ‘Course maybe my perspective is warped. After all, I am certifiable. And my last job in retail was selling crappy coffee beverages to boorish mallrats who never suspected the corporate policy was to re-steam the milk even after it had returned to room temperature while sitting in either a poorly cleaned refrigerator or out in the open exposed to all the microbial life forms that love to eat lactose sugars make people violently ill, but would those slack-jawed mouth breathers listen to me even after I pulled a book off the shelf in the beverage isle plainly stating the dangers of such a dairy policy, but these were the same retards that insisted the undercooked beans in the “Chicken and Black Bean Soup” were perfectly edible even after I had every single bowl returned to me uneaten that day, but what am I to expect from managers that couldn’t understand how I learned the register system just by watching them but didn’t think I’d notice when they took extra long breaks or “borrowed” CDs from stock. But I digress.

It is often said genius and vision are associated with madness. Mozart, Van Gogh, Patton, Edison, the first guy to ever eat an oyster, and countless other masters of their art have walked the fine line between wicked cool and playing poker with a pinochle deck. I’ve never heard a story yet about a movie or television director that didn’t have his or her idiosyncrasies, and unfortunately that sometimes included stories of abuse towards the cast and crew, and there are still a lot of those Martin type assholes out there. Do you really want to work out there, maybe with one of them? Do you belong out here with the rest of us loonies? You’ve got to be nuts to want to work in entertainment; you got to be crazy to actually get a job here; and you have to be off your rocker to survive.

I leave you with a bit of Confucian Wisdom:
“Man who stand on street corner with hands in pockets, he not crazy, he just feel nuts.”

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Miramax is releasing some films on SightSound.com. iFilm.com is holding it’s first “Web-Wide” awards, picking the best online films from sites across the Internet. Microsoft, Apple, and Real are all touting their flavor of streaming video technology as the greatest thing since fork-split muffins. Universities are experimenting with streaming high-definition video over the Internet. And independent filmmakers are hoping the Internet will give them the freedom to distribute their work around the world.

Who’s kidding who?

The movies on SightSound.com can be up to 700MB, are less than VHS quality, contain enough compression artifacts to make them unwatchable, and can only ever be played from one computer. Oh, and they’re charging as much as a rental from the local video store. And to top it all off, these are the crappier- than-normal Miramax movies.

iFilm’s contest is chock full of cutting edge shorts and cartoons, most of them very good. Unfortunately, those of us without a T3 line into our homes are forced to watch them in postage stamp-sized windows. The image updates every two or three seconds and the audio sounds like it was recorded with a coffee can on a string. Then the line gets congested and we have to wait four minutes for the buffer to fill up again, and most of these films are only three minutes long.

Frustrated with my modem, I dropped by Claremont High School and borrowed a connection (thank you Deborah). I downloaded “405″ (a spiffy short that redefines the quality you can get out of PC based video editing) because it was impossible to watch at home. 3 minutes and 3 seconds, over 9 megs, and I was watching it in less than 5 minutes. I was pleased to be able to watch it at full frame rate, and at 240×176 it was way larger then the thumbnail image I got at home, but the size of the video is still unsatisfactory and the time of the download is still longer than the movie itself.

A standard DV stream is 25 million bits per second. My 56k modem usually pulls off 4 thousand bits per second, usually. I’ve seen DSL pull down 100 thousand bits per second, for a moment. None of the current compression techniques used in Media Player, Quicktime, or RealPlayer come close to the detail, clarity, and color of even a lousy VHS signal, much less DV25, or even the 7Mbps of a standard definition MPEG2 DTV broadcast. Is this what we have to deal with?

We acquire on film or DV for maximum image quality, even if Brian is just now discovering the wonders of VHS-C. We edit on all digital, non-linear editors, maybe even spending thousands for Telecine conversion too and from film. We incorporate microphones of all sorts, bribe bands for their music, and meticulously edit in 16bit, 44khz stereo for maximum quality. And now we’re supposed to compress our masterwork to the point where detail is lost and quality is compromised? (OK, maybe we don’t all take that kind of time and effort into our work, and maybe we don’t all have the funds to afford that kind of equipment, but even a project shot with an 8mm Elmo and edited with a razorblade deserves better treatment then what those compression programs will do to it)

The last I heard, Internet2 was still in the experimental stage. Telcoms are stringing up fiber optics as fast as they can be spun in an effort to widen the pipes that feed this marvelous technology into our homes. Stanford, the University of Washington, and Sony have been working on getting a small section of Internet2’s backbone (codenamed “Abilene”) to carry digital video signals identical to the DTV signals now being broadcast across the US (even though only the 12 people with DTV sets can see them). They first tested a 7Mbps stream, and it worked. It redlined that section of Abilene, but it worked. Now they’re trying to get a full 40Mbps HighDef signal fed through the same pipe, and next they’ll try for the 270Mbps Higher Definition. Assuming the fiber doesn’t melt and they pull it off, they will have proven you can send a very good video signal over the next generation Internet. And when Sparky gets done watching his 1920×1080 feed maybe I’ll be able to get my email, because that kind of bandwidth will not be available to everyone at once. When this kind of stream gets switched on no one else will be able to use that pipe. Of course, Internet2 needs to get out of the lab and into commercial usage first.

So where does that leave us Indie filmmakers? Are we doomed to suffer with tiny versions of our work that might be able to get a few pixels larger when the Internet2 is opened up? Are we still going to have to genuflect to the mighty studio bosses in order to get our work distributed?

There are a few bright spots. “George Lucas in Love” got its big break on the net, and now it’s in film festivals and being sold on DVD along with other notable shorts. “The Periwig-Maker” has garnered numerous awards, is up for an Oscar

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I’d like to introduce all of you, my readers, to two of my least favorite people: Crystal and her sister Michelle. They were both producers at my old public access studio in Claremont, and they both drove me crazy. There are many lessons that can be learned for these two, and as you no doubt suspect, I’m going to ram these lessons down your throats.

Michelle was the least annoying of the two sisters. She had a funky freeform program that allowed her to do whatever her spoiled little heart desired. One week it would be an interview show and she’d have on some addle brained pseudo-preacher and they’d talk about something they considered very important. For the life of me I can’t remember even one of these topics to site as an example, which only illustrates how unmemorable they were.

The next week Michelle would float into my office in a cloud of silk and announce that her guest had canceled (read: she’d let it slide till the last minute and the one person she called wouldn’t do it) and she was falling back on her old standby: meditating. Yes, your suspicions are correct: she sat on the stage, played soft music, and meditated in front of the camera for 28:30. Will the excitement never end?

Then there were her field productions, of which the best thing I can say is I didn’t have to shoot or edit them. Michelle had her own Canon Optura, a very nice little miniDV camcorder she took with her on her outings with her super rich husband and pampered little dog. These field productions fell into two categories, the most common being her vacations. The three of them would pile into their camper and tramp off to remote parts of Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico in search of ancient Indian sites. Once there her husband would give lectures about the pile of rocks they traveled three days to find. He’d then explain why it’s important to protect these rocks and show off his .32 caliber pistol he uses to protect Michelle and the dog from the bad guys they might run across in the middle of the desert. That would constitute about half of the program. It might have been considered educational if we could have heard his lectures, except for the wind blowing across the Optura’s pathetic microphone and Michelle, pretending to be a camera operator, panning off of him to her dog walking around the rocks. The rest of the program was panorama shots of the desert and extra shots of the dog doing something Michelle considered cute.

The other field production was her husband showing off how rich and manly he is, for you see, like Paul Newman this guy has his own Formula-1 racecar, complete with trailer, mobile shop, mechanic, pit boss, and crew. These episodes were him once again lecturing about the workings of his car and his adventures on the track. And once again Michelle would pan off of him to get shots of the dog, losing his audio in the process. Then there would be a lot of race footage with pans to the dog thrown in for good measure.

As I said, at least I didn’t have to actually shoot or edit these episodes. Final copy was always supplied to me on a new SVHS tape, but it was always recorded in VHS-EP mode. And now I’d like to move on to her sister, Crystal, who’s very name sends shivers down my spine and threatens to loose my bowels.

Crystal was the first producer I met upon taking the job at CAPT, and she almost made me regret it. Have you ever heard that if you took a Barbie doll and blew he up to life size she’d be a monster? Over six feet tall, huge head, bug eyes, wiry hair, nasty complexion

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The tragedy of 9-11 left me, as I’m sure it did all of you, with an empty feeling inside me (as well as copious amounts of anger and grief). It was at this time that I turned to movies for inspiration and comfort, and of all them, those that I found myself most drawn to are the Star Wars and Star Trek series.

Unfortunately, Lucas has managed to destroy his franchise by injecting massive doses of stupidity into Episode One, so I could only look to the “classics”. Obi-Wan’s words while training Luke on the Falcon are particularly relevant: “I felt a great disturbance in the force…as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” A New Hope gave us these kinds of brilliant moments, and Phantom Menace gave us fart jokes.

That left me with Star Trek. Yes, I am a star Trek fan. I own books, reference materials, models, and Columbia House videos. I do not attend conventions or dress up like my favorite characters, not that I haven’t wanted to. I grew up watching Kirk woo green women, Spock reshape the rules of logic, McCoy cure the incurable, and Scotty fix the unfixable. I lived every episode of The Next Generation for seven years, becoming completely absorbed in the characters and the universe Gene Roddenberry rebirthed. I have always felt that Star Trek represented the very best of humanity: our courage, determination, drive, compassion, and creativity. Given this, I was really looking forward to the premiere of “Enterprise” on the 26th. I wanted, no, needed, the stability of the positive future presented by Star Trek.

Instead I got an annoying cast directed into a story that did anything but reflect the best of humanity. Sure, they saved the Klingon’s life, but they did it by jumping through a series of character inconsistencies and plot holes. The captain (played by Scott Bakula, who I actually like) did not act like a captain. After the scene Captain Archer made in Starfleet medical he’d be luck to be in charge of a garbage scow. Just as the Vulcan oozed sex appeal (by dressing anything but Vulcan) she oozed emotions like distain and contempt, acting in ways Leonard Nimoy never did. And if Starfleet is going to send out their best and only long-range starship into uncharted territory, wouldn’t it make sense to have some ambassadors or diplomats or something along for the trip? Maybe a whole bunch of scientists, too, not only to study the space they were entering, but the performance of this experimental ship? The whole show felt as if it were a parody of Star Trek with parody characters, kind of like Frank Kowal’s Galaxy’s Edge series, only not as good and not as funny.

But I digress

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In my last commentary I made an offhand comment about M. Night Shyamalan and his movie “Unbreakable” before actually seeing it. Shame on me. I actually read reviews from professionals and Joe Blow punters that said the film lacked the edge “6th Sense” had. I am here to tell you “Unbreakable” is just as good, if not better then, “6th Sense”. I originally wrote this piece to point out that you can

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Fear is a big motivating factor in my life. I

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My first experience with editing was on a JVC SVHS cuts only system. It was simple, yet clumsy, and I assembled my first 5 projects on it. Ever since then I have been looking for the perfect editing system. Something so revolutionary it redefines the very concept of editing into an elegant process simple enough for a child to understand, yet sophisticated enough that a real pro could use it to turn average or substandard footage into a brilliant masterwork. This is the chronicle of my journey.

My years in computer retail exposed me to a number of consumer level products. I will not even mention these products - they sucked harder then hooker at a vacuum convention. At that time really powerful software and hardware was available only to the elite few who had wads of money in their pockets and no hair on their heads. I remember one especially fidgety customer who came in to purchase the latest and greatest Macintosh computer in the world. We had to explain to him that the machine of his specifications had to be special ordered. He complained, had a tantrum, and paid on the spot. He claimed he needed it to do effects for Star Trek: The Next Generation. I thought he was a liar, but I took his money anyway. Back then all video editing was done on Macintoshes, with the help of about 5 coprocessor cards, usually from Avid. Rendering took days. I was unsatisfied mostly because I couldn’t afford anything nonlinear and was still stuck on tape.

Years passed and I finally got my hands on Adobe Premiere 4.2. Premiere had been around for a while, but it was considered a toy used by geeks to make toy movies. It was a toy, but a toy with immense potential. It had a terrible audio sync problem, but I found ways around it. The effects I was able to create would have taken me days to achieve on a linear system, so that made me happy. And with Photoshop I was able to create graphics equal to the best an Infinity could do. But the sync problem, speed issues, and effects limitations left me wanting more.

A few years later I help a friend, a local gal with ideas on producing videos for charities, put together a computer out of donated parts. On of those parts was a FAST AVMaster bundled with ULead MediaStudio. I hate them both almost immediately. The card was slow and I couldn’t get it to capture at a rate high enough to eliminate the artifacts, and as a result the video quality is trash. The software [rage builds in me as I write this] is total garbage. Oh, how I hated trying to learn, and then teach that software. Pity the poor fool stuck with an AVMaster with MediaStudio.

Apple introduces it new line of G3 computers, promoting them as the fastest thing in silicon. They put only 3 expansion slots in them and Avid starts building computers out of Wintel systems. I start to think Apple is run by madmen, but then they introduce the iMac DV, and I see their plan: World Domination! This stupid $1400 box can hook to a Firewire equipped camera and edit right out of the box. And then I get to play with one. IMovie has an annoyingly simple interface, but it gets the job done, and done well. It renders in the background, has enough storage for most tasks, and includes some features that you only see in really expansive software.

I like it for it’s simplicity, but I hate it for its lack of control. Too much is done automatically, no customizability, and a very limited number of tracks. And I know there will now be fewer jobs for us pros now that every hack with $2500 worth of camera and computer thinks he’s Quentin Tarantino. We will lose wedding jobs and industrial gigs to bozos that will then ruin the good name of event videographers everywhere.

I’ve also had my hands on a Media 100, Compaq platform. Pros: fast, high quality, totally professional interface. Cons: limited tracks forces the editor to use After Effects or Boris Effects, and way too expensive for my budget.

Right about now I got my hands on Premiere 5.1, and it solved the audio problem, added a whole lot more features, and it made me happy, for a while.

But as I said, because of the iMac I knew where Apple was heading. They wanted to control how movies and videos were made, and they didn’t want to partner with Avid to do it. They wanted total control all to themselves. When the G4 was released with FinalCut Pro I knew the 800lb. Gorilla had arrived. IMovie is for the hacks and FinalCut is for the pros. All bases are covered and Apple thinks it got it made. But the software costs $1000. Screw them.

Now I get my job in Hermosa Beach, and I am exposed to Play’s Trinity. [Anger swells again] I hated that AVMaster, but I want to throw the Trinity off the pier. If Play weren’t bankrupt and sold off I’d mail them a horse head. I hope whoever is responsible for the Trinity suffers a slow and agonizing death and rots in hell for all eternity. This blasphemous piece of crap crashes on me for any and all reasons. For $22,000 it’s slow, painful to use, unstable, hard on the eyes, and the video quality isn’t even that good. It’s not bad as a studio switcher or graphics generator, but the NLE stinks like last week’s fish.

So we’re replacing it. My facility is actually falling behind in its editing tasks because I can’t edit fast enough in that bastard Trinity. My DV300/Adobe Premiere system that cost me less than $3000 to build is faster and more stable than that $22,000 Trinity. So when I called up our video supplier for recommendations I was floored when she suggested a new system from FAST! I told her and her tech guy about my experience with the AVMaster, and I was told that the entire Master line had been canceled and so were the people responsible for it. I was gladdened. Then I was given a demo of the system they wanted to sell me. This new “purple.” is awesome. Similar to the “silver.” in almost every way, it kicks serious ass. It’s even faster than a dual processor G4 FinalCut system, and it costs less!

But I hate it because it’s not mine yet. I mean, it’s not available for me to use in the facility in which I work yet. (In the mean time I’ve become dissatisfied with my own system because I have seen what unbridled speed really is.) When I get the chance to work with it at length, and compare it to a FinalCut system, I’ll tell you all about it. Maybe then I’ll have fallen in love with a nonlinear editor and all this hatred for them will go away.

Then again, maybe I’ll finally get a girlfriend and stop all this emotional attachment towards machines.

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I spent another afternoon catching up on my movie watching. (Read: I paid for one matinee ticket and hopped a little bit.) I saw “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” and “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”. Thus I spent $6 to get in (can you believe a matinee is $6 now?), making $3 per movie, and I feel ripped off.

First, let me dissect “Final Fantasy”. I’m reading the same thing from every profession movie reviewer: What the movie accomplished in CG it lacked in script. Some critics are more generous then others, giving FF a 4 out of 5, while others, like me, are more honest and crack the movie hard. Some parts were laughably st

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I just got home from a rough-cut screening of John Singleton

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A few years back, a friend and I were talking. Since we both fancied ourselves as filmmakers, we were naturally talking about making a film. “So let

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