Dean Sensui
Forum Replies Created
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Let your imagination run wild.
Without knowing the song, it’s hard to guess what visuals would work.
Perhaps: Get some old footage of trains heading directly toward the camera. Cattle stampedes. Tidal waves. Have the group “running away” from this stuff. Give it a funky, campy look. A high-wire scene over old New York with one of the band members balancing precariously over the traffic below. Performing on the moon as Buzz Aldrin tries to plant the American flag.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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Teleporting from within the water?
From what I saw when I was last abducted by aliens, there’s usually cavitation bubbles that form when a pressure differential develops between the water in the pool and the zone of time/space interruption.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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Taking Arie’s suggestion further: Get a piece of art paper that has a fairly good texture or “tooth”. Rub it with a black pencil to the point where it’s almost covered entirely with graphite. Scan the sheet. Then use that along with the stroked reveal. Might end up looking very authentic.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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You don’t have to black the whole tape if you’re doing an assemble edit.
My FCP sequence starts at 58:30 so I set the Betacam to record TC at 58:25 to allow for preroll. I’ll lay down bars for several seconds past 58:30, then “assemble edit” the program, assigning 58:30 as the in-point. The end of the program is the out-point.
FCP will begin the assemble edit at 58:30 and continue writing the proper TC on the rest of the tape, throughout the entire program.
This procedure allows me to have the program start at precisely 1:00:00;00.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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Alex…
Your procedure looks like you’re exporting a ProRes file, then cutting it up again to match the original sequence?
Is this to create a ProRes version of the sequence?
If so, it’s much easier to just use Media Manager and have it output a ProRes version. It’ll save tons of additional labor.
Personally, I keep my sequence in the original camera codec (XDCam EX). I use Media Manager to get rid of the excess footage, then export that version to Color. That way I keep any risk of transcoding errors to a minimum.
After the grading process, it’s rendered to Apple ProRes HQ.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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When I was developing a prepress system for the newspaper I was with, I used to go to every MacWorld seminar on color. This was when desktop color was in its infancy and very few knew anything about it. The best advice was doing things by the numbers to establish a starting point. I still do that for video.
I just made this photo neutral.
As Mark suggested, it can go anywhere from that starting point. A colorist can go warm, cold, drive the blacks further down, blow the highlights for effect, put in a vignette or gradients. And then after that the editor decides to cut the entire scene for the sake of story flow 🙂
With Color, after the basic shots are neutralized. Then secondaries and output modules can be added to achieve the final look. And because it’s modular, that final look can be modified and kept consistent throughout. There are some very cool tools for this stuff!
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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Ask three colorists or prepress techs about what’s right and you’ll get three answers.
Here’s mine: it’s under exposed. I would set the black and white points to get a neutral tone in highlights and shadows. Then bring the white point up.
Open the upper quarter tone a bit. Then lighten the eyes.
I work with Color and might consider a vignette just to lighten the shadowy eyes.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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I have to agree. Better to spend a hundred bucks on a backup than a thousand on recovery services.
It’s the same when I’m out shooting on a boat. I wear a “PLB” or personal locator beacon, and that’s part of my compact lifevest. My brother gave it to me. It’s $550. I’ll probably never have to activate it. But I know of at least one rescue where having it meant getting the Coast Guard to the scene within 90 minutes, instead of searching miles of ocean for days (and maybe never being found).
It pays to be prepared. I always make backups of the projects. And I always have backups of the media.
But I do have a chest-style deep freezer just in case…. 🙂
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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Another suggestion: Try doing the DVE moves in Motion. Although I haven’t used Motion I suspect it has a better rendering engine than FCP.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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Doesn’t matter if the image is 72 PPI or 1000 PPI.
What matters is the total number of pixels across. If you’re working in 1080p30 HD, the miniumum should be 1920 pixels wide. Double that if you’re going to “zoom in” to the photo, and more than 1080 pixels high if you’re going to do any tilting.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing