[Mark Suszko]

The first thing I’d ask them to do is download an app like Filmic Pro, and let them use it to set up recording settings, rather than using the default iphone video recording app. For the ones with money and aptitude, ask them to also connect an external mic to the iPhone for better sound capture.

Codec wise I think you will end up standardizing on mpeg4 or h.264. H.265 is skinnier, but not as well deployed and understood by a wide user base. Ask them to use Filmic pro’s controls to set for h.264 for 2K resolution at 100 megabits per second. Those with more advanced iPhones could try for 4 K but I’d try to meet everyone in the middle. if the choice is between rsolution and bit rate, favor higher bit rate at lower resolution, is my take.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m guessing the new healing brush tool or the sensei-powered AI blemish remover or similar tool. Which is an easy way out but we were assuming you demanded to do everything inside of seven.

[Mark Suszko]

No, it does not. You want to contact each news outlet and get their permission as well as their rate card for the usage. Don’t be scared to ask; it occasionally gets them to cut you a better deal because you’re approaching them on the up-and-up. Not always, but sometimes.

Anyway, fair use is not a free ticket to steal footage someone created commercially. Fair use is the defense you give the judge -after – you’ve been hauled into court in a very time-consuming, expensive litigation process, found guity of the appropriation (which is evident and not contestable) and then you’re throwing yourself on the mercy of the judge saying this was okay in this case because it had educational value or was an critique or etc. And your particular usage doesn’t fit any of the accepted excuses. if you go ahead and appropriate the imagery and try to monetize it you are going to get slapped hard. The AI used by the copyright owners will find you… it is very good at that.

Moreover, you asked this in a public internet forum which is searchable by the copyright owners’ legal team during discovery, so you’re already on record for a potential lawsuit. From here on out you’re committed to doing it by the book or not at all.

If you wanna do something for money, buy stock footage for it or shoot your own.

[Mark Suszko]

I was as die-hard for seven as anyone but yeah, if your machine can run it, no reason not to get the free version of Resolve because it is enough like Seven you will like like it was a the version eight that never happened.

Getting copies of seven now involves dealing with perhaps (terms blocked by site filters) so don’t do that.

[Mark Suszko]

Just curious if you couldn’t model this situation in Sketch-Up? It will work with real-world dimensions, and doesn’t require artistic skills. If the point is to show the client the situation, that kind of visual example is going to do it for you faster and easier than showing them calculations. You could even place real world photos in the sketch up space to help them visualize.

A more expensive version of Sketch-up than the free version, is made to be used for story-boarding and pre-viz, and will simulate the actual frame appearance based on lens setting you input, and could show your FOV for green screens that way.

And I know you know this, but unless the actor is moving around a lot, – walking or jumping or whatever – you only need about an inch more screen than they can reach out with their hands because everything else gets garbage matted or roto’ed anyway.

[Mark Suszko]

Another way to skin this cat is in Apple Motion by making each box a dropbox. Drop-boxes contain additional sub-controls in the Inspector that allow you to adjust the source scale and position inside the dropbox.

What would make your project easier and more efficient, is to build it all in Apple Motion. Create the first drop-box, then copy>paste it to make your array. Drag each source into one drop-box and then adjust the scaling and keyframe the positioning to keep each dancer centered. While that may seem tedious, there is a fast way to get it done: you keyframe the first, last, and middle keyframes. Then pick a spot midway between those two keyframes, check it and adjust it. Then again find a mid-point between established keyframes and rinse/repeat. You’ll generally find this covers 90 percent of your needs with only a relatively few manually set keyframes. You want to make the machine do as much of the work as possible for you.

Advice if you’re going this route: pre-prepare every clip to align with the first note of music, or a shared synch event BEFORE you start working with these tracks in Motion. Import only the pre-aligned tracks.

You might also look at the earlier threads in this forum and maybe the Motion forum about “Virtual Band Concert”… there were a lot of helpful tips submitted there that can be applied to what you’re trying to do.

[Mark Suszko]

Okay, this IS doable, because I’ve done something like it that uses the same underpinning effects.

My application is a little different: it’s putting a speaker in a cropped box and moving that box to the side of the screen so another source of graphics like a powerpoint slide can be seen next to them. I use a 3-d effect plug-in in final cut to turn these two image panes in 2-d space, and align them like a partly-opened book, so they fit a 16×9 frame better and retain readability of the slide. The same effects I use for that, you can use in your problem, because that 3-d effect plug-in allows you to independently move and keyframe the centering of the source footage, inside the rotated box. I used that feature with a speaker that constantly wandered a foot or two to the left and right during a long locked-off shot. The keyframing only took a few clicks to do but kept the speaker smoothly centered in my box as if tracked by a live camear. Now, I couldn’t automate that, but if your grid of dancers is only 3×3 it’s not going to take forever to keyframe them to stay centered.

The 3-d plug in, I got from a search on FCPX.io …. I think maybe it was made by Alex3d. There are a couple of free 3-d effect plug-ins for FCPX like this. I’m not going to hunt them down for you though, but now you know about them I think you can find them on your own.

[Mark Suszko]

Welcome to the FCPX forum, Ty…

Do you mean they are minimized or just rendered muted by highlighting them and pressing the V key?

[Mark Suszko]

Mmm, tough… the way to have done this would have been to have each dancer on blue or green screen. If they are wearing light colored leotards, you might see what luminance keying could do for you. But you’ve pretty much committed yourself to rotoscoping and motion tracking with the shots you describe.

[Mark Suszko]

Seems to be an echo in here 🙂