Daniel's blog

With Christmas holidays comes time to read. I just finished the book “Reinventing the Bazaar” by John McMillan, and I liked it a lot and felt like recommending it to everyone who happens to read this blog. It’s a refreshingly sober discussion of market mechanisms, showing where they work well as well as where they fail and what might be done in these cases. McMillan is also one of the few individuals who, while being very adept in their particular field, have no false pride about their profession that prevents them from admitting defeat – like his discussion of the failure of the shock introduction of free markets in the 90ies in Russia that was prescribed by western economists. “Reinventing the Bazaar” shines especially where he highlights the failures and shortcomings of market mechanisms, like his chapter on intellectual property titled “The embarrassment of a patent”, but all the time he tries to explain the reasoning behind the introduction and what the original intentions were. His insights, expressed in simple terms, are, in my humble opinion, required reading for anyone remotely interested in economics.

As some of the people who read this blog may know, I study directing at the filmschool filmArche in Berlin. Over the last year I have been asked to colour correct a number of movies since this is one of my favourite steps in filmmaking and I think I have become quite decent at it by now. I love to see my fellow filmmakers faces when I show them how much a shot can be enhanced / altered with subtle changes to the colour of the film.
But the workflow for high quality colour correction is in many cases pretty poor, especially at our school were almost everyone edits on a different system & editing software - some use avid, some final cut pro, and then there is the odd vegas or premiere user in between. I recently described our various setups and the solutions that are available today for solving this in a post to the rebel cafe: my post (the rebel cafe is a forum website for readers of Stu Maschwitz' DV Rebels Guide, a book about very low budget action filmmaking).
I usually had two choices: do the colour correction in the editing software that was used to edit the film, or import the final movie into after effects and do it there.
Working in After Effects is the better option quality wise. It can work in 32bit per channel (not 32bit per pixel!) floating point which means that no matter how many colour operations you stack ontop of each other, you will never loose any detail in your image. You can also make complex selections, use a number of very nice plugins etc. It's not realtime, but if you want the highest possible quality, it's the way to go.
Working in the editing software has some other advantages: one of the biggest is that each cut is still there and you can start grading right away. If you work in after effects, usually the first thing you have to do is split your layer at all edit points so that brightening up at one point in the film because that shot is too dark does not brighten up the whole film, only that shot. In the editing software you have all those edit points and so there is no additional work there. What's also nice is that it is (mostly) realtime. But, as I said, the quality is not the best you can get.
Usually this meant that if there was little time and/or only slight corrections required, I would do the grading in the editing software, and only if I had the time to re-set all the edit points would I go for the whole thing and do it in After Effects.
But, *drumroll* with this new script I just wrote, you can export your movie from your edit software of choice, then export an EDL (Edit Decision List) as well, import the movie into AE and then run my new script to split your layer at all edit points given in the EDL. Nice. If you want to give it a try, download the script here and let me know how it worked for you. 

Once a year, a certain, quite difficult question comes up: What to do on my birthday? Well, this time around it so happened that I participated in a psychological experiment my friend Roman currently conducts. It's all about work overload and trying to teach computers to guess when a human reaches work overload from looking at thigs like EEG and EKG data. Pretty interesting stuff.

Anyhow, the reason I devote a blog post to this is because this is probably the coolest photo ever of me at one of my birthdays. Enjoy :)

I finally finished moving this website to my new server and I used this opportunity to polish this website a little. Some links might have been broken but should work again soon.

My last movie, Coriolis (it will have its own page here soon) is about to get finished. Jeanfrançois Prins, an amazing jazz musician and incredibly friendly person is busy composing the music and I try to polish the visual end of the film. If all goes well we will be able to start sending it to festivals around the end of August.

The shooting of my next film, Go, is approaching frighteningly fast (shooting is scheduled for mid-August at the moment). This film too will soon get it's own page on this site.

I will write more regularly now that the website has finally moved. Check back soon!

The photos of Isys and Andreas' wedding are online. The photos are password protected, so you need to obtain the password from Isy or Andreas to access them.

All photos were taken by Teresa Marenzi and me (Daniel Bachler) - except IsyAndreas-348 and IsyAndrea-349, those two were taken by Isy herself :). If you want to hire us as wedding photographers, feel free to contact us for any details! Our portfolio is available at www.iconoclash.org .

Now, without further ado, please follow this link to get to the photos.