[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

You can do this easily with Red Giant Particular for AE. You can create the grid of those rhombuses and fall due to gravity.

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

Thanks for elaborate replies on various strategies and ethics in retaining data. All these strategies sound relevant at different situations. Charging is the easiest thing to do. However, as Mark said, you cannot penalize your client for simply being loyal and coming back to you, is an ethics eye opener.

<font face=”inherit” style=”background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>I have surprised a client having done their films for 10 years, made a silver jubilee anniversary audiovisual with all their past footage, that they never envisaged. Some actions don’t translate into money, but creates </font>tremendous<font face=”inherit” style=”background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”> goodwill.</font>

My take away from your replies, as Todd says – “That’s one of the costs of being in this business. It needs to be built into your costs.”

As Jim says – “I see storing their footage as a value added feature of hiring me, and an inducement to hire me again to use the same footage in new or revised projects”

Thanks for all your insights.

Santanu – https://www.santanu.biz

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

If we need to pre-compose anyway, we could apply all the filters to the pre-composed layer from outside. Then there is no difference between adjustment layer and a pre-composed layer. I still did not understand the advantages of adj layer over precomposed layer, expect for not having to go else where to edit. Hence a field/ parameter to avoid the layers to be affected should have been there in an adj layer.

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

Thanks for your suggestion, but the book does not open in the conventional way. There are many flaps that open left, right, top, bottom pivoted. So ONE SIZE FITS ALL templates don’t work for me. I have made my own AE, thats better. Just thought I would get some alternate suggestion than re-inventing the wheel.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

[Peter Antoinetti] “Considering the requirements for me for the festivals above
-What specific output settings I should have?
– If ProRes, DNxHD and 4K footage (Sony M2T format) ok, what specific variations of ProRes, DNxHD, (Sony M2T format) ?
“

Basically, you need a format that is re-editable.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

[Peter Antoinetti] “- – what do you advice / what output settings I should have?”

This depends on where your final deliverables are going. Higher the bitrate, merrier it is. If it’s for broadcast, use uncompressed. But that will consume a huge amount of disk space. But if it is a long-form video, you can go with ProRes or DNxHD.

[Peter Antoinetti] “13 inch ASUS laptop
Windows 10 (1903) do not want to update it further
I had slowness after updating, so I changed it back to 1903)
i7 -6500U
2.50 Ghz 2.59 GHz
8 GB RAM
250GB SSD”

These days I am working on a laptop with similar specs. cannot go to my studio that is hardly a kilometer from my home due to lockdown restrictions.

But then I guess, I am able to render 4K footage (Sony M2T format) easily with similar specs. All I did was kept footage drive separate from OS and Cache. I installed a driver booster software that updates all hardware drivers. Use a common free PC clean up software like Ccleaner that is the light on the system and clears all unnecessary temp files in all nooks and corners of the system. This also clears up the registry. I also have minimum apps on my PC. Removed most startup apps.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

I am already doing this with my team. Mobile videos arent very heavy files. A free google drive 15 GB account is good enough. All team members may have to download the footage locally and work. You all can download google sync to sync all local folders to the drive. Just ensure that teams are not writing on the same files or projects at the same time. Reading the same file is ok.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

Leave aside asking your people to change the resolution setting, I am tired of sending them a comprehensive pictorial video on how to shoot and send videos when shot with a smartphone camera. Despite all that, when I ask them to send landscape videos, they still send me a portrait. For them, its eventually just a damn video. How should it matter if its landscape or portrait? God! Forgive them…

It’s for us filmmakers to fix all that. Ain’t it? I have stopped complaining. I often crop all their video into a small square box and embellish the entire frame with stylish motion design, which is far better than their boring background. It doesn’t matter now if they send a 320×100 video or a 4K. They all get cropped and reframed.

If their sound has background noise I work hard with denoiser and other EQ. Layer it up with a piece of good music.

If they have shot against a light source, I fix the high contrast with luma curves as much as possible and again style them with a fancy LUT, color correction.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

[Richard Garabedain] “that would be cc card dance…card wipe is easier and might be able to do it but card wipe is the true master…Also element 3d could do this very easily if you know how to use element 3d.”

Card Dance would be a fake particle generator. It will not use the same dots. It will break the frame into its own particle matrix. However, if the grid size is too small, it may not be noticed.

If you have Redgiant Particular or Form, those may do a better job.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

[Antoine Dorni] “If the clips are filmed on phones you might have issue with variable framerate (VFR) : https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/wiki/faq/vfr“

That’s true. You may have to modify the frame rates manually to sync the timings. Often with variable frame rates, the audio match but the video goes out of sync.

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs