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88 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2017 editing, such as "Turnover," "RAID" and "ScriptSynch." While experienced professionals are familiar with these, the definitions make the book ideal as an ancillary classroom text. It is as a learning tool for emerging editors that The Art of the Cut will find its best use. The chapter on documentary editing is a miniature of the book's overall format. Hullfish condenses each of the elements considered for fiction work into one chapter covering different types of documentaries. He crams a variety of non-fiction styles into 25 pages, but interviews only five people, perhaps most interestingly Craig Mellish, ACE, who sheds light into the process of working on a Ken Burns opus. Since documentary editing can include many variations, from following a strict script to shaping 500 hours of digital verite into a story, it might well deserve a volume of its own. Down-to- earth advice about how to break into and move up in the business, along with war stories, are offered in the Miscellaneous Wisdom chapter. This gossipy and reflective section may be the most interesting one for long-time professionals. Kelley Dixon, ACE, shares, "I'd been assisting for way too long! Although, I do admit to having spent a few too many years chasing my Big Feature Assistant dream — which never really happened. So, I got into TV and just stayed there. But the situation has to be right to move up. You have to be with an editor who lets you cut, that is not intimidated by you or your work, that encourages you, that will tell producers you did the work, etc." Oscar-winning editor Pietro Scalia, ACE, speaks for many when he states, "I loved editing. I discovered it while I was doing my documentaries. It was a form of writing…I think that the cutting room is the most intimate environment where you actually make the film." More information, including full transcripts of the interviews, should be available on the companion website to Art of the Cut, www.routledge.com/cw/Hullfish. f CONTINUED FROM PAGE 83 CUT/PRINT quad, disk and cylinder lights that reduces noise in both surface and volumetric lighting. You'll see better results in less time. KEEPING IT SIMPLE 3D rendering can be inherently complex. After all, you're doing no less than simulating the way light behaves in the physical world. However, a good artistic tool should be simple and intuitive. If things get too technical or bewildering, creativity can suffer and precious time and energy is wasted. Good software maintains a balance between complexity and intuition. A main objective of Arnold 5 was ease of use. Clumsy or redundant workflows were simplified (for example, mirror and glossy reflections have been combined into a single "specular" ray type), and installation and deployment are easier, particularly in the cloud. Arnold 5 also includes an extensive set of built-in shaders that minimize the need for third-party libraries. Arnold 5 also comes with a built-in OpenVDB 4 library, again simplifying deployment. An effective lighting technique that 3D artists often employ is Image Based Lighting (IBL), which works by surrounding your scene with a 360-degree 32-bit, HDRI environmental image and extracting the lighting information from it. It also has the benefit of creating realistic reflections on your models. In Arnold 5, IBL is easier and includes built-in visibility flags in the skydome light. NEW AND IMPROVED SHADERS Arnold's improved Standard Surface shader is a very useful, physically based, all-in-one shader that is capable of producing many types of materials and surfaces — whether you are creating iron, vinyl or stone. It includes layers for diffuse color, specular with complex Fresnel for metals, rough specular transmission for glass, subsurface scattering for skin, single scattering for water and ice, a secondary specular coat, and light emission. It also takes advantage of new GI sampling techniques for faster rendering. The new Standard Hair shader is designed to realistically render hair and fur by setting a few simple parameters for the base color, as well as roughness and index of refraction. In addition, realistic colors for human hair can be achieved with controls for two types of melanin. Hair-to-hair multiple scattering is also supported. There are also more than 80 optimized utility shaders built into the Arnold core rendering library. CONCLUSION Arnold is a world-class production renderer that has been updated and optimized in version 5. Things will get even more exciting for individuals and smaller projects when a GPU version is released. However, large facilities will continue to rely on the brute force and large memory capabilities of the CPU version. Either way, if you create images for film and television on projects big and small, Arnold plays a key role in realizing your wildest creative visions. f TECH TIPS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 82 Kelley Dixon is one of the many editors interviewed in Art of the Cut.