Bill Russell
Forum Replies Created
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> Isn’t Conan’s done live with a still frame?
You’re right. No doubt — Conan banters with the performer and it is all fairly ad-lib. They have the photo fed from a computer probably, or have a camera trained on it (old school) or in a TBC frame grab. The other “mouth” feed is from a camera trained on the performing mouth. They use a production switcher to position, size, garbage matte and key the mouth over the photo — very quick and dirty if you’ve used a switcher.
Like you said, the two “feeds” correspond to two layers in After Effects. Or even in Premiere or FCP, would work just as well for photo and stationary mouth – so many options! 🙂
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P.S. As far as step 3, if your photo is from the web, you might want to enlarge it in photoshop first. PShops’s Bicubic interpolation (choose “smoother”) does a pretty good job of smoothing over jaggies in enlargement. There’s also a jpeg artifacts filter in newer versions. I would save the color matching steps for after effects.
Generally, my approach would be to color correct the photo first until it looks good and strong on video. Then I would color correct the mouth to match. The mouth footage was purple and dark, with a much lower black level for the face shadlows; but lots of tinkering and I got it to match Hillary’s skin pretty precisely. However, of course, for this kind of thing one need not do seemless matching of course, part of what makes it amusing. As a silly YouTube video commentary, even less so 🙂 Cheereo!
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This ridiculous little diddy is like the Conan mouth trick:
Hillary Clinton responding to YouTube absurdity
It’s fairly basic AE process:
1. Filmed mouth “performance” fullish frame. (Diffuse lighting from an open window helped matched face lighting in the footage, sort of, good enough.)
2. Soft edge mask shape around mouth — or mouth and nose in my case. Sized and position the mouth layer to fit over the face.
3. Use color correction tools (levels or curves separate color controls, and HSL) to match black and white levels, mid-range, and skin color.
4. If your “celebrity” is a photo, then you are done. If moving footage, then do two more things: a) Nest the “mouth” comp (pre-compose). b) In the master comp, use motion-tracking to “lock” to the face.
🙂 Good luck and enjoy!
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That’s right, once a clip reference in FCP gets corrupt, there’s no way to repair it. But you can rebuild any part of an edit via an EDL or XML. You would export your audio edit via XML (for instance), bring it back in and reconnect to a similarly rebuilt media clip. If still corrupt, go all the way and do via EDL. I think the internal rebuild is partly what you accomplished by jumping program versions. That’s why I recommend rebuilding the media OUTSIDE of Final Cut (via Quicktime Pro App), as linear in a .mov file or into DV stream first.
Also, make sure the clip name is short and simple with only basic alpha numeric characters, and in a simple path (and all the folders in the path name, and the disk name too, are likewise simple and short alpha-numeric). This will help prevent clip corruption. I find when you lose the name / path of the media in a clip reference (clip corruption), like you have suffered, it correlates with a complex media name and / or path name.
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Doing! Lookie there, a black clip. And it works. I’ve never paid attention to that filter. Thank you, that’s the ticket!
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Yay, a Skeleton fan! We had an American Cinemateque screening for “… Returns Again” just three days ago: https://lostskeletonreturnsagain.com
Yeah, the broadcast filter seems to only pay attention to the top of the levels. Since rendered footage can differ from unrendered, and the broadcast filter assesses unrendered conditions, I have had the broadcast filter fail me before for Q/Cs, even the color mashing “extremely conservative”. Sigh — we need a simple software black clamp option or filter of some kind. Oh well.
Thanks, Richard!
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Three things.
First is the obvious — make sure you are choosing to “delete unused media”. Mentioning just in case 🙂
Second: If you turn off “include media outside this selection” and turn off include affiliate clips, that may help.
Third: Note that media manager does not strip video from sound clips. If you are using only piece of sound taken from a video clip, it will still include both tracks of audio and the video track in the media managed clip. This can add TONS of useless media. One way around this is to break the video and audio into separate sequences, and media manage them separately. Without audio clips you will find that the video sequence MM’s much smaller! Then you can MM the audio sequence, choosing to compress the video to something tiny and inconsequential like 320×240 photo jpeg at lowest quality, while your sound is still full quality. Then you can marry the two halves back together in your MM’d timeline.
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Keep kludging. Try renaming the music audio file, and perhaps putting it on a different disk, and manually reconnecting to it. Still no? Then try this — if it is an mp3, wav, or aiff, try putting it into Quicktime wrapper. Open it in Quicktime Pro, and export as a Quicktime movie, sound settings linear 48k 16-bit (default extension will now be “.mov”) and try reconnecting to that (saying okay to FCP protests about changed attributes).
If none of that works, try exporting an XML of the sequence in question, import that and then try reconnecting to all said permutations above.
Also, make sure your project file is not on the same disk as the media. Weird FCP bug thingy.
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(And that IS slick, I like it)