Sony EX3 Workflow Part 1

This stuff really bamboozles me, but I have to get my head round these data storage issues so I thought I would share this with you. I will be watching this one until I understand it. I think I have to watch the whole series to become a more confident data loader and keeper. Ex 3 is an old Sony camera format but it was widely used around 2009 before the Red and so many folks still have them around.

I hope you stay with this as it will help you in your film making on HD.

Cannes Film Festival 2015 - the Sweet Smell of Success

This year was a very orderly Cannes Film Festival with lots of activity in the under belly of the Marche Du Film (Commerical Film Market) for industry professionals.

I spent most of it down in the bunker where the booths of the worlds most active sales agents and distributors hang out. Having attended over 15 years of Cannes Film Festivals I can almost sense its tone from the smell of the Cannes street when you touch down in La Croisette in the white hot heat of the summer. This year the heat blast, smelt of the usual spicy food, engine oil, sweat and expensive perfume. In the molecules of the sweat that hits your nostrils on the street you can perceive fear or optimism. This year the smell indicated that people were in the mode of optimism that was tinged with a high streak of professionalism. The smell of wine wafting from the cafes was drowned out by strong coffee amid the flavour of the month aftershave and Eau de Cologne. The coffee and perfume said we are up for business despite the recession in the downturn that had had 5 years of dead DVD sales and where TV companies indicated their success by the number of pirated downloads the shows had had rather than the actual numbers of worldwide territorial sales.

One sales agent summed it up when he boosted that he had just purchased the most pirated download on the planet. He was joking, but he was making the point that the public desire had changed to downloading from illegal websites, so the money never reached the sales agent or the producer for that matter. The challenge for film maker is how to recoup in an atmosphere where the current Joe public chooses to download the TV shows and films from pirate sites rather than by purchasing them from legitimate Streaming and Video on Demand Platforms. The knock on effect is that recoup must be arranged  in a way to avoid the pirate's penchant for making film available on downloads before they are officially released.  So secrecy is the name of the game and a short lead in to theatrical releases that are available on all mediums at once, which avoids windows of opportunity for the pirate.

Distributors had grappled with the effect of You Tube and figured out that quality 3 D and 4 D was the way to beat the pirate who just could not replicate this pleasurable viewing experience. Therefore animation was really the safest option and many of the big companies were investing in Animation lead releases. The upshot of that was it was good news for the Independent film makers because hardly any of the Studios were coming out with story lead films with human narrative like for example the historical, action , drama about Bonnie Prince Charlie called The Great Getaway penned by writer Robbie Moffat. Indeed there were very few traditional historical human stories being touted this year, so a gap in the market, and we finally filled it. The good news for The Great Getaway there.

The serious discussions on La Croisette were about maximizing recoup on legitimate download sites and tuning into the new public who streamed a movie from their computer onto their home TV screens.

Already some Film festivals like Toronto have made an adjustment to their programming by accepting that there is a new stream of TV viewing habits that they have to take account of now. For the first time this year they will feature a TV section that reflects the public fan base for watching and downloading whole TV series like Game of Thrones and Outlander straight from downloads on Amazon and or direct from TV website and or ignored pirate sites. This year the Festival professionals had accepted they had to get to grips with it and embrace new viewer habits, which dictate that audiences want complicated human narratives that reflect the challenges of human history and try to grapple with the Universal stories of Love, Passion, Suffering, War, Revenge and Heartache.

Business as usual, then at Cannes 2015, of a no nonsense variety, where if the expensive aftershave was anything to go by most Executives were up for lunch dates.

Enter the Great Getaway then................

Quote from a Russian sales agent ' I love Cannes, the smell of the Red Carpet is the smell of success.

As for the flat shoes debate it was laughed off by the film professionals, who were making the deals, because there was no way they were abandoning their expensive comfortable shoes, which for them marked the sweet smell of success.