I've started a thread over in the DV For The Masses forum about the teaser trailer for my new feature length movie. The trailer and the movie itself are being edited with Vegas 5. I'd be interested in any comments (though they'd be more relevant in that thread rather than here).

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&postid=248653#post248653

Did you do anything special in Vegas to improve the look of your footage?

Yes. For the trailer I used some of the Magic Bullet looks with adjustments.

For the final movie however I will be going deeper into manually creating the looks. Although I was under time constraint for the trailer as the website address was going out to various magazines. Although I suppose using Magic Bullet to save time is a bit of an irony ;-)

That said it's nice to have all the controls in one interface, and adjustment of the post process and pre-post adjustments can attain drastically different effects that are hard to obtain by simply layering existing Vegas plugins.

I was playing around with the footage in Vegas and applied an alternative bleach bypass look to it, which I like better (on top of what you did already with Magic Bullet).

Render the whole thing onto a new track, and duplicate the new layer.
On the topmost track, apply the following track FX:
Channel Blend- Distribute Red Channel. This turns the red channel into a black and white image, which makes faces pop out more.
Color Curves - Make a point in the center. Drag out the top-right and bottom-left points to make a "S". This increases contrast. ... Then play with the middle point to make it steeper. This will compress/blow out the highlights and shadows more (this is up to your taste).

Set opacity on this track to around 50%.

The track below:
Boost saturation back if you like. You can use "saturation adjust", amount = 1, center = 0, spread = 1. This will just bump the not-very-saturated areas. In the shot with the big blue door on the left side, this setting won't boost back the saturation of the door much (which is probably good, since you don't want the door to be distracting).

2- If you want to get really crazy with color correction, you can use Vegas 5's masking tools to apply corrections to portions of images. For example, the black guy' face in the office (with the blue background) is a little dark (or should be hidden and the backlight enhanced). You can draw an oval around the face, set the feather to ~10%, and use any of Vegas' many filters to boost brightness (sometimes color curves and bezier masks don't play well, so use something else if you see a halo on the edge of the bezier mask).

3- The movie looks great. There's lots of beautiful camera movements and shots, and the fighting looks great.

Hi Glenn,

The bleach bypass look was something that I had in mind when we first started the film. However my co-director isn't keen on having wshed out colours. They work great for the scrapyard scenes, but other scenes such as the park bench sequence with the bright blue sky really need some colour. As much as I can I want it to have a uniform look, although there will need to be some tweaking such as making the grotty apartment look really dull and horrible.

Vimal's (the guy playing the doctor) does have a very dark face. With the XM1 it was so hard to get a good exposure as the lighting in that room was very hard to setup. So thanks for the suggestion, I'll give that a try as I was having difficulty brightening him up without blowing everything else out. Thanks.

A lot of color correction has to do with the artistic goal of the film, so certainly the bleach bypass look isn't right for everything. You could vary the look of the film for various segments to indicate shifts in mood or in setting. In the park bench sequence you could even use masks to apply the bleach bypass look to the guy and his (former) love interest while the rest of the setting has a 'happy'/bright look (high saturation, more diffusion).


Vimal's (the guy playing the doctor) does have a very dark face. With the XM1 it was so hard to get a good exposure as the lighting in that room was very hard to setup.
I would expect getting good exposure of a black guy wearing a white shirt to be difficult!

Next time, you could get him to wear something darker. This would be the same idea as off-white lab coats, which appear white to cameras without being overexposed.

Simon- the page looks cool but I couldn't get any of the versions to play. Maybe it's my machine here at work.

Could be server trouble. I checked the statistics and the page has been receiving a very high hit count.

The files themselves are standard Sorenson 3 Quicktimes.

try these URLs

http://www.the-silencer.co.uk/trailers/trailer_large.mov
http://www.the-silencer.co.uk/trailers/trailer_medium.mov
http://www.the-silencer.co.uk/trailers/trailer_small.mov

GC, great ideas! Though it will have to be a subtle effect.

I'll have to remember the thing about off white colours. Hadn't occured to me that I could fool the camera that way! Thanks!

P.S. Why the apologetic tone when you mention it was edited in Vegas in the other thread? (ie. "But shhhhhhh, I didn't tell you that. It might just be a rumour ;-)")
Sometimes even the users seem to perpetuate the myth that Vegas isn't professional. I'm glad to exclaim Vegas as my tool of choice. Maybe once they see talented people who CHOOSE to use Vegas as their tool the masses will start to get over the stigma.

Hehe, no, I wasn't referring to the editing tool. I was more worried about the connotations of using an XM1. I'm not too keen on that getting out quite yet. Oops, too late!

Oh, I'm sorry- I must have read into it incorrectly. I for one am NOT a fan of the XL-1 (XM-1)...though most of my gripes with it relate to it's use in wedding and event videography. Overall it's a great tool if used in well lit conditions or controlled environments like that of shooting shorts.

It's almost done downloading- I'll let you know what I think when I view it. Thanks for sharing.

Hehe! The XM1 is a bit long in the tooth now, which is why I'm getting a Sony PDW510P.

Let me know what you thought of the trailer, good and bad :-)

So Glen, what did you think?

I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you- I realized my computer at work didn't have quicktime installed. Plus I can't install it- the server proxy blocks "quicktime.com". doh!

Anyway I just watched it now- looks great man. Kind of like a "Hard To Kill" sort of plot. I love action movies! It looks like you and your crew know what your doing. I thought the lighting on the doctor was fine- and the lighting throughout was fantastic. That XM-1 with your sets worked great. Not to mention Magic Bullet, definitly pushing it over the edge towards more of the filmic colors. I loved the look of the last shot. Almost like a bit of black diffusion.

The only shot I thought felt a bit odd was the cu shot of him waking up- maybe it was just me but it looked slightly jovial- almost like he had a smirk on his face. Other than that any further input would simply be nit-picking.

Few questions (if you don't mind):

1) I really liked the subtle truck moves (ie Park Bench Sceen) used a dolly?

2) Some of the sweeping shots (ie Gun fight in the woods) looks like a stabilizer was used? Is this so- or was it a dolly again?

3) Liked the aspect- very cinematic. Was it shot with anamorphic adapter or 4:3 and cropped down?

4) You edited in Vegas but what did you use to encode. I've always wanted to crop my 1:85:1 pan/cropped pieces to be that exact size in WMP (in WMV or MPG1 format) is this possible? Or is the quicktime encoder the only one that allows you to do the crop? Please explain.

5) Filters. You spoke of using MB. Did you use the MB plug-in for Vegas (Magic Bullet Editors)...or the Magic Bullet Suite in conjunction with AE? I really liked the color and filtering used. Definitly added the filmic quality.

6) What kind of a crew?- What kind of a budget? How many shorts/features have you shot? Was it done for fun, profit, or to enter in festivals?


Again great job. Very rarely am I actually interested in viewing the entire movie from shorts or trailers posted around. This one is an acception. It's nice to see some Vegas guys doing this sort of work. I, myself, wanted to shoot shorts when I got into video a few years back but as you may or may not know from my posting of my work here- I got locked into wedding and event videography. Mainly because I found it to be the only avenue in which I can work with videography in a lucrative manner. Thanks for posting!

Hi Glenn,

Glad you liked it!

"The only shot I thought felt a bit odd was the cu shot of him waking up"

Yes, this wasn't the best of shots. I'm probably going to edit quicker on it in the final movie as I'm not too happy with that one.

"1) I really liked the subtle truck moves (ie Park Bench Sceen) used a dolly?"

Yep. We used a Hague tracking dolly with a Manfrotto tripod attached. Worked brilliantly and allows for some very slow and smooth tracks.

"2) Some of the sweeping shots (ie Gun fight in the woods) looks like a stabilizer was used? Is this so- or was it a dolly again?"

Yes. I use a Glidecam 2000 Pro. Basically this movie will probably be my XM1 and Glidecams swansong before I move onto the full size camera and rig.

"3) Liked the aspect- very cinematic. Was it shot with anamorphic adapter or 4:3 and cropped down?"

It was shot using an Optex 16:9 anamorphic adaptor and then cropped down to 2.35:1 using the Vegas crop function. When the footage and project is set to anamorphic within Vegas you will need to create another preset to be able to do this. I can't remember the exact pixel setting offhand, but I used Vegas' 1.85 setting as a basis to be able to make an exact 2.35 crop.

"4) You edited in Vegas but what did you use to encode. I've always wanted to crop my 1:85:1 pan/cropped pieces to be that exact size in WMP (in WMV or MPG1 format) is this possible? Or is the quicktime encoder the only one that allows you to do the crop? Please explain."

This is an odd one as I did it by trial and error. Quicktime seems to allow you to crop to a certain point. Or it maybe that Vegas uses the crop information that the picture is set to and lets you crop down to that point with the Quicktime encoder. I'm not sure. I had to keep adjusting the height of the Quicktime encoding until the borders were clipped off. It took a few goes. Though make sure it's set to square pixel. I used the Sorenson3 codec with the keyframes set to 250.

I'm not sure this kind of cropping can be done with MPEG1. I have yet to experiment much with WMV, but I will probably give it a go as it's a nice codec. I encoded to Quicktime mainly because most PC's have it installed and Mac owners can also view them. The downside being that with Quicktime the files sizes meant we used more than double our allocated monthly bandwidth allowance on the web server in one day!

"5) Filters. You spoke of using MB. Did you use the MB plug-in for Vegas (Magic Bullet Editors)...or the Magic Bullet Suite in conjunction with AE? I really liked the color and filtering used. Definitly added the filmic quality."

I used Magic Bullet Editors. At the moment with limited time I'm just finding it easier to have everything in one filter. I can replicate the looks quite easily without it, but the real power of Editors is it post and pre adjustments which can give drastically different results depending on how they are used and in which order.

"6) What kind of a crew?- What kind of a budget? How many shorts/features have you shot? Was it done for fun, profit, or to enter in festivals?"

We are using a skeleton crew, with a budget that goes up as we go along :-) The movie is made purely for profit. I'm a full time camerman/editor as well as doing fight choreography, and at the moment I really need money (don't we all)! So yeah it's being made purely to appeal to action film junkies. Particularly those who like their action truely Hong Kong flavoured (or rather Sammo Hung flavoured). I've done more shorts than I care to mention, and we just sold our last feature Insiders to be sold in the US via outlets such as Amazon. We made that one a long time ago though and it's nowhere near representative of what we do now.

Simon do you have any links for this dolly you used? Also are you using Magic Bullet Editors for Vegas5?

Also are you using Magic Bullet Editors for Vegas5?
Hey Glen, Simon is using Magic Bullet. Check the first post in this thread.

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : Hey Glen, Simon is using Magic Bullet. Check the first post in this thread. -->>>


You missed the point of the question Glenn, I KNOW he used MB but did he use it through Vegas or through AE?

Yep. I used Magic Bullet Editors from within Vegas 5.