This Is Sanlitun (Teaser Trailer)

Tianjin Scene Shot and on to the last day (THIS IS SANLITUN)

We're in the final stages of editing, the first rough cut is done. We finally shot our "long awaited" Tianjin scene yesterday, a scene that takes the film briefly outside of Beijing to the city of Tianjin, we've been delaying that shoot for reasons of laziness, I guess. Today is our final day of pick up shoots, a couple of scenes that will be shot and inserted in to the movie starting with a sunrise scene at 6.30am. When today is over we'll have all the material to make that rough cut start to shape up to a final cut.

Chris and Carlos on the train back to Beijing

Robert being a serious director

Gee / Rushes

Our producer had a small preview screening for us last Saturday, most of the cast and crew showed up to watch 6 selected rough edited scenes from the movie. People enjoyed themselves and the screening party was a nice success.

Now to continue editing and post production which will hopefully result in a finished product sometime before November 2012.

Gee / USA is watching us

The flag counter from our blog broken down into details, is Hollywood (California) really watching us? Or maybe it's just Fresno. We've got some followers in Taiwan as well. And Belgium is probably just Chris on his business trip having nothing better to do than read our blog 160 times. The strange thing here though is the 30 viewers from China, blogger is blocked and you need a VPN to access it (the flag counter would show you're from an anonymous country or a non-Chinese territory). Hmmm... big brother?

*click on the pictures to view larger. 

Gee / The Beast

We call it The Beast:

Gee / Fascinating Tech Stuff (EDITING)

My choice of editing software was basically between two NLE's (non-linear editing software) Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas. Avid was out of the question because I can't stand it and it's cumbersome, buggy and expensive. I've used Avid in my four previous films and that's enough. Adobe Premiere is obviously more expensive than Vegas and supposedly a brilliant piece of software, with all it's effects and serious "film geek" stuff added to it ... we'll, I'm not making a 3D music video and most of all I wanted all the audio and video files synced together with one click of a button. So, even though I tried Adobe Premiere out, the fact that it wasn't handling Pluraleyes too well made me switch over to Sony Vegas (it's also much cheaper) where Pluraleyes managed to sync everything we shot with just that one click of a button. I don't know why Pluraleyes didn't work with Premiere but it crashed every single time I tried to run the program, something it didn't do when running with Sony Vegas. Pluraleyes is a little piece of software that allows you to sync audio recorded seperately to the audio that the camera records, thus basically doing away with clapping scenes. In the end I chose Sony Vegas and although a very unfasionable NLE it's the one that seems to have no serious problems so far in the process of editing a quite basic no special effects feature film. Another strange thing that this "inferior" NLE has that Adobe doesn't have is real time vector scopes, that's pretty cool :) . I think the only feature film edited on Vegas so far has been Paranormal Activites and now GEE (working title).

CUDA issues, one of the main reasons to go for either Adobe Premiere or Vegas these day's is that they both take advantage of Nvidia's CUDA engine, which allows you to use the GPU to render footage at much higher speeds than before. Although not important right now during the editing it will be nice to have those features available once rendering out sequences for various other creatives like composers or sound designers is needed. But of course Sony being slow on updates the GPU availability is not picked up on my graphics card which is the latest and greatest Nvidia GeForce 680, therefore rendering that feature pretty useless so far. I'm hoping by the time I need it that they'll both have gotten their heads together and updated the drivers or software for this card to be used to it's full potential, now I might as well get the card from my old pc and see if that allows GPU acceleration.

System:

Windows 7 64bit, Intel i7 3960X, 32GB RAM Corsair, Nvidia GeForce 680, 3TB Drive,