Alan Lloyd
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve had to do things like this. Worked for a while with an on-camera talent who was a medium-complected black guy who shaved his head. Had to do things like lighting him in rooms where lots of the room was lighter than his skin tone, and it usually worked out OK.
Large sources are the first thing. You already knew that.
A tiny bit of warming doesn’t hurt. And maybe just a hint of cool in the backlight. Think squeezing your dynamic range, really, and maybe using subtle color shifts for shape. Smaller differences between key and fill, stuff like that.
The wardrobe thing is critical. Darker solid colors are best, of course. Someone showed me a clip of a black guy wearing a white shirt (no jacket) standing in front of a white wall, and someone just decided that pouring more light in on the guy was the way to go – and you could tell the poor guy was cooking.
And if he does shave his head, as my colleague did, have him not shave it on shooting days. Helps with the pings off the pate.
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Get a decent digital SLR and grab several different shots of every nice setting you see if you even think it might make a decent backdrop. Card space is cheap.
And manipulate them in Photoshop so they are not perfectly sharp. Softening them and placing accent lighting with filters does wonders for such things – or stock photos you might use, as suggested above.
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Remember, there will always be a kid who loves every cheesy wipe or move transition in FCP, has a pocketful of plugins and filters, and thus thinks there’s nothing left for him to learn, but you know how to tell a story.
It’s the difference between being an operator and an editor.
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You can duplicate the photo, layer it underneath, make it larger and defocus it some. Or you can make a paint background larger than your frame size and move it slowly underneath the stills, creating some motion that way.
Keep the focus of any layer moving underneath the area of interest soft and the movement subtle.
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[Drew Hudgins] “TWO (BIG topic… sorry if redundant but read through… ) SPLITTING STEREO AUDIO FOR MIXING CONTROL OVER BOTH CHANNELS
In FCP, I often drag a clips to the timeline, select it (especially selecting the stereo audio channels) and using Option-L to split the linking of the two channels of audio.
Great for recording two separate sources (boom on cha. 1 and Room mic on Cha 2) and THEN getting to control the mix of the two.But in Premiere, the best way I’ve hear thus far is to duplicate the stereo track into ANOTHER stereo track, adding the Audio Effects, “FILL RIGHT,” and “FILL LEFT”
– this method loses the linkage of the duplicated track – edits become clunky”Audio effects > channel volume will give you control over the individual left and right channels of a stereo audio track.
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Had you changed anything else? Anything at all?
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What are the expected dimensions of the final output? If I’m exporting a “normal” 4×3 file for WMP, I use 640×480/square pixels. If it’s a widescreen 16×9 I use 640×360/square pixels, either at an appropriate bitrate – normally determined by the client’s needs.
These settings are, of course, for streaming files.
Are you trying to eliminate picture information on the sides or are you looking for a letterboxed final output?
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[Bill Davis] “the speaker who decides it’s more PERSONAL to walk out halfway into the audience where there’s NO LIGHT and hold a LONG conversation”
Or (personal experience here) you’re the handheld guy at the front of the room when the magician performing (???) decides to find the one spot on the stage where he’s lit from his neck to his knees only and stay there as though his shoes were nailed to the floor, and the director is howling in the comms to get the guy to move.
Short of getting up there and moving him physically, which I was not about to do, nothing would have worked.
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Adobe OnLocation might be your friend here. (It’s a part of the PPro bundle.)
You get a scope too! Bonus!
Seriously – record to a file – you don’t want to have to capture the recordings over again.
Either that or hire a TriCaster – which will also record to a file and gives you scopes and a few other niceties in the bargain.
Drives are your friends…
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Something that needs mentioning here as well is that the infrastructure China is investing in is a tremendous wealth multiplier. The real desire here is, as you mention, hoarding cash at the top. If anything, shoving paper around to generate illusory wealth, not based on anything genuinely value-additive has become the order of the day, week, moth, year, decade, and era.
It’s as though the banker-crats have decided amongst themselves that this is our “end time” and that they’re going to go out holding piles of cash while the rest of the world redevelops around us.
I am fortunate to have some (well-connected) friends from China and know some of this a bit more closely than do many Midwestern Americans.