[Mark Suszko]

You’re saying what exactly about my editing now?:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I have had some success adding virtual lighting to a scene using Boris FX. In my case, it was a noontime outdoor shoot that had been shot with no fill, and I used a light inBoris to brighten up the face… it worked surprisingly well, and was not obvious.

If you are trying to color-correct these shots so all the CK greens match, that’s not necessary, or even desirable. I would key the actor first in each scene, then play with color-correcting his skin tones once he’s in an alpha channel layer.

If you mean you are taking the pre-keyed actors and trying to make them look like they were lit from the same sun angle as the fake replacement background… well, they should have lit them that way in the first place, but sometimes that can’t be helped.

I’d look into the trick I did with Boris for that, using whatever compositor you have. I’m not familiar with ColorFinesse, so I don’t know if it has similar controls in it. If nothing else, you can double-up and layer the video tracks, increase the brightness on one, then use a soft wipe or other matte to control where the revealed hotspot falls to simulate a keylight at the proper angle.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Let us know how you eventually solved it.

[Mark Suszko]

I like my music cut fairly straight-ahead. I like to feature each artist as he or she does their best part of the song. If performance is what you want to show, then less is more. About as far as I would take it is to lay some half-dissolve doubles, where the same person is shown in facial close-up and wide shot. But these don’t always look good unless there was a lot of dark blank space in one or both shots. To generate those if they weren;t originally shot that way may be more trouble than it is worth.

Now, you *could* go for something kitchy if every band is covering the exact same song. It would help if they are all in the same key at least, but yes, juxtaposing them all in the course of one identical tune might be fun to watch, depends on the song. It should be something light and up-tempo, I’m thinking. You could multi-box them simultaneously on the screen, then fly them into closeup as they alternate, kind of Woodstock-1 like… or maybe you composite them into an old TV which is channel-surfing to make the cuts.
Or at some point skip the bands altogether, just use the audio, and show someone listening to it, and their clothes, makeup, and action change as the versions of the song change.

There was a music video on imovie for some band, the theme was they are in everyday dress and go vinyl shopping at a used record shop. They find their band’s section in the bins, and in there are like 20 albums faked up by the art department, going back what looks like 20 years and covering about every major music/pop culture trend in album cover art and band costumes, mocking a few very well known covers like the Beatles, Kingston Trio, Police, etc.. They cut away to the bands “live” in the various time periods for tiny samples of the same song performed in the multi styles. The song was not memorable, but the visuals were fun.

Wish I could remember a title for you…

[Mark Suszko]

Best of luck, and please promise to come back and recount how it finally resolved, so we can all learn something from it.

[Mark Suszko]

Rich is right. Let it go, it can’t do you any real harm and might do you good later. Just take better precautions with protecting your work from here on out.

[Mark Suszko]

Go to a museum, any museum, but an art exhibit is particularly good. Spend 30 minutes trying to make as many different things with a can of playdough or stack of sugar cubes as possible. Take out a box of crayons or colored pencils and try to sketch something. Go to the B&K bookstore magazine rack, grab a huge stack of magazines you never have read before (particularly in the arts section, but really any genre) and flip thru them rapidly, getting fast little impressions. Visit sites like Veer, Computer Arts, graphis, HOW, MAKE, etc. Worth1000 is always a hoot. Haunt the library book stacks, pull out random things and scan thru them.

Do random google image searches using obscure and esoteric keyword combinations.
Play some music you have not listened to for years. Find new ones using some of the itunes or amazon “if you like this, you might also like” features.

Take a walk downtown and look at random things using a little cardboard frame or 35mm slide frame. Or walk downtown with a digital camera and a fat, empty memory card, and randomly hit the shutter on the beat while listening to some music on headphones, without ever looking in the viewfinder. Examine the results later. Take the best five examples into photoshop and start randomly applying every filter you’ve got to the results. Keep a notepad or save out occasional serendipitous results.

Take your public transportation bus line or train all the way to the end of some line and back, take it to places you’ve never been before. Just because. Go browsing in foreign ethnic stores in various neighborhoods. Sit in some public place like a park or terminal, spend an hour watching the people and making up their life stories in your head based just on what you see.

In other words, play with chaos every once in a while.:-)

[Mark Suszko]

By cost-effective, I only mean that you can save the cost of attaching and paying for or renting the add-on DVE or scaling equipment if all that work was done in post, and the vertical-ized monitor just needs a simple playback from a standard deck, hard disk box, DVD, etc. If it’s for a 3-day auto show display, or something, you have many choices. If it’s for inexpensive long-term digital signage/art in a retail setting or museum type setting, then pre-comping the video to be vertical makes more sense to me in the long run. If it needs repeated updateing in a short time frame or you are going to use it live, like they do on some news/interview programs, then you don’t have time to pre-render, so you use a DVE or other product as Thomas has mentioned.

[Mark Suszko]

Thomas, I think we were saying the same thing; only you were more precise and detailed articulating the differences.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, this is what I was saying before and what I’d try first,if the job was a simple one, but you can also shoot in HD with the camera in normal position, then do the rotation in post to wind up wih an acceptable version output vertically in portrait mode in SD. You’re using the extra resolution of the HD in the initial aquisition to make up for the resolution given up during the rotation and scaling process on output. Just in this instance, you would be right if you used the improper nomenclature: “pan down”.:-)

Or you leave it all up to an expensive and sophisticated outboard DVE/ scaler box, like a Stumpfl or something, which makes shooting and post a non-issue, but adds a lot of cost and possibilities for failure to the playback side. For a long-term installation, might not be cost-effective.

[Mark Suszko]

Extreme close up. For terms and acronymns, you can google or wiki search and get a faster answer. IMDB.com also has a glossary of terms that may help.