Picture this!
I’d like to say something on the subject of picture quality.
Fuck picture quality.
Alright… Not really, really but, y’know, a little bit. Fuck it a little bit. More like who-gives-a-fuck? it.
Listen, I’m just tired. I’ve been researching video editing software and the peripherals inherent therein and it’s just terribly tedious. I so don’t care about 4:4:4 vs 4:3:3 or 4:2:2 or whatever! And I have like 20-10 vision and can paint a colour wheel by smell. Picture quality is such a scam - with the notable exception perhaps of nature documentaries…
Darren Aronofsky’s Pi was black and white with like 6 shades of grey and it was captivating; Blair Witch was total crap and it scared me silly (shut up, you loved it); and lets not forget a hundred classics and even more movies we all watched on cruddy old TVs before HD. All I’m saying is, talent trumps technology and I am so through trying to optimize every freaking pixel of screen real estate. There are ten times more codecs out there then there are colours in the entire Prismacolor and Faber-Castell pencil collections combined and - seriously - we’re going through all of this to make Transformers look good? The king isn’t wearing any clothes!
I’m done with it. The Great Big Emptiness or Refrain (like it?) or whatever the hell I’m going to call this thing is going to look like crap. I’ve decided. And you’re going to like it, damn it!
Sound quality on the other hand…
April 4th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
“All I’m saying is, talent trumps technology”
I like the way you think.
In the end, no matter how much one tries to polish the quality of a production, someone’s going to complain about something with it. In the end, its the innards of a project, not a shiny veneer that counts.
Besides, when one’s on a budget, there’s not exactly that wide a variety of quality settings to be able to attain ^.^;
April 4th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Boy, I really had a bee in my bonnet the day of this post didn’t I?
I’d just like to underscore that I’m not referring to framing, or cinematography when ranting about picture quality. A well-plotted shot is a thing of beauty and something I’ll always strive for but whether it’s shot in hi-def or on a handy-cam is beyond my capacity for caring!
April 7th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
I agree. A person can spend all their time trying to keep up with the latest technology, etc, etc, and forget to actually put the time into the project itself. And pretty much anything most filmmakers have at home these days, even the poorest indie ones, out-performs what professionals had not that long ago anyway.
The tecnology ladder never stops growing, but at some point I think you just pick a rung and work with it (hmmm, not sure what kind of mixed metaphor that is).