BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky on Netflix, Oct 14th

The cat is finally out of the bag. This is the K-pop documentary feature that I was working on for the last ten months at RadicalMedia.

My official credit for this movie is Lead Assistant Editor. So I wasn’t involved with the creative/editing side of the movie, but responsible for the technical aspects of supporting the editors and delivering the finished movie to Netflix. It was an unpredictable journey with the COVID19 pandemic hitting right in the middle of the post production process, which I will be sharing with you when the movie becomes available next month on Netflix, October 14th.

More than anything, I look forward to see your and #BLINK reactions to this documentary.

“BLACKPINK is the revolution!”

The Best Cinematic Movie Trailer Sound Effects

I wish someone would’ve told me in the beginning of my editing career that I need to build up my sound effects library. This is a solid list to start building your sound library.

Royalty free trailer sound effects for movie trailers and game trailers are the best way to start your sound effects library whether making fan trailers or y...

Grain Ghost - Uncut Gems with Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC

Damien Van Der Cruyssen (colorist): I asked the crew to shoot film on a dark gray background. We pushed that negative, like the rest of the film footage. We had 30-second samples at pushed 2 stops, pushed 1 stop and normal. Most of the grain we used was pushed 1 stop. I created a loop with two minutes of grain to add to the Alexa footage… Yes, the grain is a black and white image, but I can also tint this grain overlay. On some scenes I made the shadows a little cooler. We varied the grain to match the image. I can push that slider and adjust the amount of grain. Sometimes I pushed the contrast of the grain also. We didn’t want it to feel like the same grain overlaid throughout the movie, each scene has its little differences.

Darius Khondji: Remember that I pushed the film negative one or two stops to bring out the natural grain. At the same time, I push 2 stops but I only expose for 1 stop, so I clean up the negative before I put it in the bath where I add 2 stops. I augment the contrast and the grain, so that the grain exists but it’s not too noisy.

Benjamin B: If the bokeh is the personality of the lens, then maybe the grain is the personality of the negative. But it's strange that you can add that personality to your digital images. It's like putting the ghost of the negative into the Alexa images.

Darius Khondji: Extreme beauty is always right next to uglyness.

The whole article is a fascinating look into a collaboration between a DP and a colorist to achieve artistic looks.

Source: https://ascmag.com/blog/the-film-book/grain-ghost-frames2-uncut-gems-with-darius-khondji-asc-afc

The One Frame Trick dive into Youtube + H265 encoding

“That’s essentially two frames now!”

In filmmaking the saying goes, the person who makes the final decision on how your movie will look is the projectionist. On the Internet, apparently it's You...

I doubt editors or producers are aware of this technical issue behind Youtube & H264 encoding. And yet it’ll hardly matter as Youtube is not the main exhibition venue for them.

In the end, people will simply dismiss this as a Youtube/online video thing that no one hardly notices or cares, and Youtube will fix this technical bug one day.