[Mark Suszko]

Well if you have Final Cut, you likely also have Motion, and frankly that is going to do a lot of things that AE does but much faster, particularly the less complicated things like these slide moves.

Motion has a lot of canned moves in it ready to apply and modify to suit, plus it has a simple interface that lets you just grab an image and drag it across the screen to define the path with no keyframing needed. Yet if there is a need to keyframe, Motion has a window for that too, but normally you wouldn’t need it.

The first thing I ever did in Motion, I never even cracked the instructions, I imported a photoshop file with elements on four layers and Motion *knew* what I wanted to do with it; it was all very intuitive, breaking down each layer to a separate track and letting me easily animate a complex coming together of the pieces into one composition.

The fastest, best tool is the one you know best and are most comfortable with, not necessarily the most powerful. This will be a different choice for each person according to what they know and like. Friday I was building an 3-layer animated composite just using FCP’s tracks and basic motion controls and I got it to do what I wanted after some initial fumbling, but then thought to myself “Self, next time you wanna make that move, throw it into Apple Motion and you’ll likely be faster at it”. Not only that, but in Motion I can make and save the moves and then add different items and save a lot of time as opposed to recreating the composite from scratch every time.

I think AE for this kind of work is swatting a fly with a bazooka. AE can do a marvelous job for you, no question, but how fast can you work in it is what I’d want to know. There are also plug-ins that handle pan and zoom moves specifically. If you’re going to do these a lot, you might want to invest in them as a time saver.

[Mark Suszko]

Bob’s description is right on, I just wanted to add that back in the day this was generally an economic decision because the online rooms charged fabulous costs per hour to do your finished cut. So for any medium or large project, it made sense to do a rough edit first on cheaper equipment you could afford to own or rent, where the taxi meter wasn’t running, then, only when you had everything really locked down to a final version, you took your tapes, log sheets and your “paper edit” EDL into the “big room” to “online” it with the effects only the Big Iron could do.

In one way, this was a good thing. Like composing a haiku poem forces you to be creative within very tight constraints, the offline/online process forced producers and editors to really organize their material and perfect it as much as they could in advance before the final edit happened. The final online then was almost a non-event after that: start the auto-assembly and keep feeding the tapes into the machine when it asked for them, you were mainly a spectator at that point (except for adjusting levels and audio on the fly).

A side effect of this process was that a lot of producers and clients decided the cuts-only umatic offline edits were “good enough” for a lot of low-stakes, lower-budget projects, and skipped the online step, so you had a number of mini-suite boutiques open up where you only edited umatic or VHS or, later, BetaSP footage that didn’t need the “million dollar suite”.

Of course “feature creep” happens everywhere; some guy doing cuts-only on umatic decides he needs to be able to fade to and from black to make things nicer. So he adds a simple switcher. A little later, “hm, maybe a simple keyer and character generator would be nice”…. and so you saw a parallel line of development start in imitation of, then later in competition with, the sophisticated online broadcast suites, bringing in smaller, cheaper switchers and effects devices to match many of the higher functions of a big suite.

Can’t afford an Abekas, ADO or Paintbox? Pinnacle Alladin or the Electrohome Jazz to the rescue. And of course the game-changer, the Video Toaster as well. The clients couldn’t tell the difference in many cases, but the accounting department sure could.

These two tracks of development began to merge in the 80’s and the offline/online distinction began to blur more when NLE systems started to become more commonplace and capable. And prosumer video for academic and industrial use came into a golden age of sorts. When the former “offline” suites gathered enough capability to do what the “Big Rooms” could, but for half the hourly rate, it signaled an economic shift in post production not unlike the rise of small mammals as dinosaurs began to die off. You see this today, I see it in Chicago where it seems one huge, well-respected post outfit of many years is dying off every couple of months due to out of scale costs and competition from small operators and boutiques. Few dinos remain, the market is overrun with mammals driving down prices.

Today, for under five grand (sans decks) you can own a system that does way more than a “million dollar room” in the eighties could, and faster too. So the discipline of the offline/online process has in many cases fallen away because the hourly cost to edit is now really cheap. So you can experiment with footage, noodle around for hours picking a font or a color shade or a filter treatment or a special effect, and follow blind alleys and try things you never could have afforded to play with in the old days. The creative fun is all in that noodling around. You can also afford to be ignorant and learn as you go, instead of leaving the edit to a small priesthood of technically adept machine tenders. Now everybody’s cousin Freddy edits video. It’s a tectonic shift.

[Mark Suszko]

For the frame rate, you could first treat the base video using a shuttter type video filter effect to get it to “stutter” a little. When all the frames have been treated and your result is a frame movie or a file of say, sequential targas, then use a playback speed increase, morphing, frame blending, or apply dissolves between all the images or something like that, to smooth out the motion. Your lip synch should remain okay. I noticed it was pretty far off towards the end of the sample video, but hey, it looked so great it is forgiveable. Or at least easily correctable.

I took the time while waiting for a render to search out a few good links to getting the effect done in photoshop, a couple of the links are to actions that are pre-done, you just load them into photoshop, select a folder of sequential images, and let it rip. The others are easy enough to turn into an action: turn on the record action button in PS while you carefully apply the steps and filters of one of these “recipes” to the first image in the stack; when that one’s done, turn off the record function and save that as a custom action of your own. Export video from your NLE timeline as sequential images ( I like targas but others can work too) to a folder. Make sure the frame names have leading zeros, i.e. ig you have a thousand frames, the first frame can’t be called frame 1, it must be named frame 0001, 0002, etc. or your frames will get out of order. Put all those exported fames in one folder, apply the action to the folder, take a coffee break, come back and admire the hard work you did:-)

Here’s the links, as of today they work, over time some may drop out, but be sure to compare the relative results of each.

https://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/watercolor/index.html

https://psdtuts.com/tutorials-effects/create-cool-watercolor-effects-in-photoshop/

https://www.associatedcontent.com/article/37904/photograph_to_watercolor_in_4_steps.html

https://graphicssoft.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=graphicssoft&cdn=compute&tm=88&gps=279_460_1148_729&f=10&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.teresalunt.com/photoshop-tutorial-1.html

https://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/watercolor-painting/page-3.php

https://www.myjanee.com/tuts/painted2/painted2.htm

https://pwsr.bmcphotoart.com/

https://www.redfieldplugins.com/filterSketchMaster.htm

https://www.designspot.net/creativespot/tutorials/t07-watercolor.php

https://artis.imag.fr/Membres/Adrien.Bousseau/watercolor_tutorial/

https://hubpages.com/hub/Photoshop-Tutorial-photos-to-watercolor

Awesome actions to apply to an image stack: https://www.atncentral.com/download.htm

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve always liked this effect. But as with everything in this business, the software only takes you so far: you still need artistic skill to make it really work.

That said, I think the example was done with a variety of techniques. The back plates and some alpha overlays really are watercolors. The girl and the car are rotoscoped and then you have some choices in what to do.

One is to hand-trace each frame and apply photoshop filters like this one, called BuZZ:

https://www.jeffwignall.com/tutorials/buzzxfiltering.html

but it looks like that company is out of biz for a while. A google search will find you some tutorials on how to apply various photoshop filters as an action to stacks of frames in a folder automatically and get *close*. I did something like that on a project two years ago, it was murder until I learned how to record actions and apply them to folders of stills, then what previously took me three days cranked out in four minutes.

There is another product out there I tried, and you and your girlfriend might like it, when used in combination with a wacom tablet. Its called Synthetik Studio Artist.

https://www.synthetik.com/

And it will apply these kinds of effects to movie files for you, manually or in automated fashion. Its not quite the same as Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” or “Thru a Scanner, Darkly”, (which you should research for more software clues) but you can come pretty close, and the interactive application using a wacom tablet lets you vary the effects and restrict them organically to just the areas you want. I found this to be very fun to play with, and you get to mix styles like pencil, chalk, and charcoal with watercolor and oils and acrylics. Makes stupendous looking stills, the trick is getting those stills into smooth looking motion.

I think a combination of photoshop actions and the Synthetik Studio Artist application can get very close to what the artist did in the example video, but I think in the example they really spent time to roto all the frames and then apply their effects in a compositor like AE or Combustion. That’s my guess, anyway. My experience doing this on my own project was that you want to prepare the footage first by blowing out all but the most basic detail using level controls and also reducing the frame rate and then blending or morphing the frames to get back to the right speed but eliminate much of the flicker and chatter you’d get otherwise. Also shoot the raw footage with as sparse a composition as possible, with high dynamic range, and preferably shoot everything on greenscreen so you can easily isolate elements and avoid roto as much as possible.

I like this efects when it is more rough, the Charles Shwab spots that emulate this technique just creep me out.

[Mark Suszko]

So is there a policy yet about these? Because I was thinking of maybe using one that wasn’t my own face. Or are you going to use the rule I grew up with in Catholic School: “whatever is not forbidden is mandatory” ? 🙂

I use some other sites with avatars in them and they generally look kinda goofy, so I don’t know… I kind of liked the clean, businesslike look without it before, and the mystery of having no face, just text, allows the women to imagine me as handsomer and the men to imagine me as taller, with more hair. I also kind of like that without avatars, your image of the person is based mostly on how they write and not what they look like, not judging by the cover, so to speak.. Different strokes, and all that. Is there a way to make the avatar really tiny on each post until you click on it to expand it? That might solve the white space problem?

Hey, while you’re tweaking the site yet again, Ron, (smile) I just noticed the new alphabetic layout choices for the forums page. I actually found this a little slower to navigate to my favorite haunts as oposed to what I was used to. Is there a way for me to aggregate my own “hot list” of the forums I want to go to most often, and maybe set a cookie to have the page present just those forums to me in one “preferred” or “subscribed” set? I imagine that takes a bit of fancy coding to enable the capability.

[Mark Suszko]

The example of this that sticks in my head, and you can probably Youtube it, was a music video starring David Cassidy, formerly of The Partridge Family, just before he had his big comeback in Vegas. I think the song is called “Lying to Myself”, and has shots like this set in the waiting room of a bus or train station. Catchy tune, good hook and harmony, btw.

The cheap, bootstrap way: your actor that is to move in “normal” time actually moves super-slowly, while you let everything else in the frame move normally. You then just speed up the playback in the timeline. To get anything like a lipsynch for this requires some math to work out the relative frame rates based on the finished duration of the shot and the “speed” you want to get, as it does for real time lapse. As a guide for the actor in the field, you might make an mp3 file for his ipod that counts out the beats before each move, which should help keep the actor on time if he can hear it. Then after every x seconds the ipod gives out a beep or other cue, and he moves his foot 12 inches, etc.

Analog Slow-mo audio of the song he’s supposed to sing likely will be so slow and low-pitched he can’t really make anything out, but you *could* take a regular version of the song, use quicktime pro or an audio editing program to extend the playback and slow it while retaining the pitch, and a pre-recorded guide track of THAT might be enough to go on for the actor as a guide. It will sound like hell, though, at that slow frame rate, much like frame-by- frame audio scrubbing in an NLE timeline.

A variation of the “bootstrap” method is to shoot exactly like that but also add in a camera that has overcrank-undercrank ability, this gives you smoother slo-mo becasue you fewer in-between frames to interpolate and more real actual frames. Those cameras are generally expensive to rent, but Panasonic offers one that maybe can do it relatively cheap, I want to say the HVX-200 is the model, but don’t hold me to it.

If your shot is for example a guy walking down a sidewalk, he’s going to move about as fast in real life as the minute hand of an analog watch. You may have to contend with passers-by reacting to this slow-moving or apparently motionless person, and they may ruin the shot unless you control everybody in the shots.

The more expensive way to do this, but faster and more creatively flexible, is to use a motion-control camera rig and shoot a “plate” shot of the background and people in one pass, then a duplicate pass of just your talent in the same field of view, with no one else in shot. Then rotoscope the single-actor version to remove background and create an alpha channel, (lots of tedious painting and masking there) and now you have two tracks you can match up and apply varying temporal changes to at will. The compositor will help you lock the relative positions pretty well.

You can fake it as well by using chromakey for your “slow guy” and inserting him into the fast-moving scene later using a compositor like AfterEffects or Combustion. One might in fact have a grip or two walk alongside the actor holding a full-size green screen behind him, which reduces the amount of tedious painting out with roto later and replaces it with tedious chromakey tweaking instead:-) One other trick I can think of: shoot everything “normal”, spend hours to roto a mask for the actor, and apply a smearing blur and/or streak filter to the background layer.

One way or another, this is either a lot of work or a bit of money to pull off. Best of luck to you.

[Mark Suszko]

The only “reality” show I watched with any regularity was Bravo’s “Project Runway”. I could barely stand the petty bickering and over-the-top histrionics of the contestants, or the catty judges, but what kept me glued week after week was, watching talented artists and craftspeople actually design and MAKE something with their bare hands from nothing, in a short time, and then show that off in competition. Whatever else you think of the contestants, you have to hand it to them that they all have skills, and judging along at home was always fun. I enjoyed watching them meet the special challenges regarding style or materials. As that show progressed, it too drifted towards soap opera crud and away from what I thought made it great. And Tim Gunn is just a stitch, pun intended.

We used to watch MTV’s Real World, but grew ever more frustrated watching the self-absorbed idiot kids waste all the opportunities the show presented them in favor of faking interpersonal drama.

My wife loved watching “The Osbournes” for a time, so I’d watch that with her, I always played it with the closed-captioning on, so I could make out what the heck Ozzy was saying.

Usually it was something about burritos.

[Mark Suszko]

The part of the conversation that attracted my attention was his using Toast to burn the BD’s.

My application for BluRay will be to make BluRay DVD’s of commecial spots, or archives of hi-def b-roll, so typically my work won’t need a menu, just a slate on the front and a chapter marker to the 2-pop of the spot. How hard is that to do in Toast, after editing P2 HD 720 footage in an FCP timeline?

What is the maximum run time I can burn this way using 720 and simple stereo audio?

What external drives are you guys choosing to burn BluRay with from the mac? Got to make my list to Santa:-)

[Mark Suszko]

While I like “Mythbusters” a lot, I hate that it is really only eight minutes of programming content stretched into an hour or half-hour with the endless use of fillers, teasers, bumpers, and recap/repetition of parts already seen. Show should be sponsored by Hamburger Helper and Xerox.

And yes, I’m bitter and angry that they got the airplane-on-the conveyor-belt thing completely wrong.:-P

“American Chopper” was pretty good when it was the only show like itself, but I feel lazy producers and sponsors of other shows have copied their formula to death and now everything looks too similar to that model.

I know someone who pitched a show to Discovery networks, and this show had plenty of real drama and danger, as well as cool technology but all the network guys wanted was to jam it up with soap opera fluff to be just like “Chopper”. Pick something that works and imitate the heck out of that, instead of coming up with something fresh that’s more risky. “Chopper” was risky when it came out, but somebody gave it a chance. “Dirty Jobs” was risky at first, now that’s next to get imitated and used up.

Now more and more IMO “Chopper” is even less about the bikes and more day in the life “reality” coverage of the faux dysfunctional family. It’s like watching wrestling on TV.

You ever see a current PBS show featuring kid/teen designers in team competition? I don’t recall the name or time slot, it’s on once in a while in the daytime in my region. That is a pretty cool show. I also liked the original British “Robot Wars” where designing for the course’s challenges and using strategy was the point, and “Scrapheap Challenge” back before that show became “Junkyard Wars” and turned into the “what can we modify a car into this week?” contest.

I watch too much Discovery Channel, but due to all the imitations and repetitions and the lack of science/technology programing on it, I’m watching much less of “The Welding Channel” now.

While I’m on a rant, what’s “historic” about running “Ice Road Truckers” on the History channel?

[Mark Suszko]

Big fan of using Sonicfire here, as well as mixing it with GarageBand loops.

Also look at Sounddogs, Digital Juice, and The Music Bakery.