[Mark Suszko]

I think it’s a very credible piece of work for a one-man band operation. You do a pretty good job of using edits to move the eye around and give a sense of motion to what are mostly locked-off, static camera shots.

I’m not saying you need to add a bunch of jib and slider moves, but they would make a nice bit of “seasoning” here and there. One thing you might consider, if using 4K cameras, is shooting a little looser framing than normal, then adding synthetic camera moves like pans and crops and even occasional zooms in post, with a 2K final product. This gets you *some* of the effect of the slider-type shots without the expense and bother of the actual gear.

There are a good number of cutaway and b-roll detail shots to not just break up the static narrative, but to emphasize certain points. I was expecting a mirror or gopro XCU detail shot of the under-body weep holes under r the Mercedes, when you talked about them, but you didn’t show any.

I personally like the technique of moving the body of the presenter into and out of frame as a transitioning device, and not just always cutting from one shot with the guy in it, to another shot with the guy in it. See any episode of “Good Eats” for inspiration, because Alton Brown is masterful at this.

Nice work on getting clear audio all around outside and inside the car: many people who do this kind of work don’t do the audio as well as you have. That said, it might benefit from a bit more tweaking in EQ and compression, but this is a subjective observation on my part.

The Bin Laden joke fell a little flat for me.

I think the overall pacing could be sped up just a tad, but again, this is subjective.

Not much you can do with an English sky, shy of sky replacement, but I did see you add what looked like a grad filter effect on one shot and I’d encourage more of that for making the sky less blah.

Overall, looked pretty good to me.

[Mark Suszko]

Don’t keep us in suspense, Jen! How did it go?

[Mark Suszko]

This could be the beginning of a very useful thread, outlining for newbies like myself all the best practices for doing such “reality” projects.

They can’t complain when it’s one person doing a task that is normally 5-person job. The power of a team and shared storage in these kind of productions is that, to an extent, all the sections of the show can be worked on concurrently. There’s an old saying about how can a person eat an elephant – one bite at a time. But five people, all biting at the SAME time, can eat the elephant a lot quicker. This is why you see umpteen hundred names in the credits of a Marvel Movie: there’s too much work for one team, one COMPANY – to do in the allotted time, so the FX work gets divided among a lot of specialized companies, each doing a part they do best, or fastest, or both.

This is not the kind of project that is efficiently done by a single editor – although, the single editor will have a singular, consistent vision and overview of everything. Really, these specific shows are much more of a “team sport”, with one person overseeing the work of the others on their individual segments, to keep them in line with the overall plan.

I look forward to any tips from those who have done productions of this type, especially regarding the organization of the work and division of the tasks.

[Mark Suszko]

oops!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1332617026/wiral-lite-the-easy-cable-cam-for-impossible-film?ref=6kd4tw&utm_source=jellop&ja=z2aimakj&utm_term=3.jellop-ads.com&utm_content=Wiral-RHS-CL6&utm_source=jellop&utm_medium=facebook

[Mark Suszko]

Well, the surest way is to keyframe it by looking at the waveform track, in Motion 5 you go to Window>Audio editor. In Motion 6, It’s Window>Audio Timeline. Use the actual keyframes there, or drop markers at the beginnings of the words, using the waveforms as a visual guide. This is a tedious method but the results will be rock-solid.

I’m trying to think of an easy way to automate the process for you; maybe using a Behavior, connecting audio amplitude to a setting in the crop controls… or, if you have a music keyboard with MIDI, there’s a MIDI behavior, which – and I’m just dreaming out loud here – would let you use the music keys to trigger the text to come in while you “record” the entire pass in the keyframer. The text would have to be all in one file, I think. Like a credit roll or crawl that you pause.

It’s a pretty far reach; trying to do basically an AfterEffects Expression in Motion. There *is* a “custom” behavior template in Motion, but I’ve never tried to use it for something like this.

If you figure out an automated way to do this, please let us know.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m curious about what it was in the 4k footage that was shot and re-scaled to edit with the “A” camera, that “failed QC” multiple times? What specifically did they kick it back for?

[Mark Suszko]

Is it B-stock or “gray”? I.E., it hasn’t got proper paperwork with it for warranty support from the factory, because it was a demo, or refurb?

[Mark Suszko]

Looks nice. Reminds me of one of the first movies to be centered on this technique: “The Kid Stays In The Picture”. Worth a watch. So Grinner, any tips on how you do yours?

[Mark Suszko]

How I would approach this is to shoot the sequence in multiple takes, one take from the front, one from a slight right turn, left, turn, etc. and do morph cuts to make the heart/face combo turn in a realistically 3-d manner. Character animator, as I understand it, works in 2-d flat space. You *could* first record the 3-d item on set and then apply Character Nimator to it, but it will only look 3-d from the front, as soon as the thing turns, the illusion breaks.

So that’s why I say shoot it in a more “old fashioned” way. Multiple takes with the face and the heart locked off and the camera moved. Light it very flat, and introduce shadows later in post to sell it.

[Mark Suszko]

Almost certain that’s it. If you have a hundred frames, the first frame needs to be 001. For a thousand frames, 0001, and so forth.