trailer for short, shot with hd10

[Erik Rangel]

First off i'd like to thank this forum and everyone on it, you've all been a lot of help. i bought the hd10 to make movies and thought i'd try a short first. turned out to be a forty minute short.
I'm still in the process of scoring the damn thing but the trailer was to get my actors off my back for a little bit longer. we shot it in a month. we wrapped shooting the beginning of november and i've been editing since, using aspect hd and premiere6.5. cant wait for the pro version. anyhoo, it'll take a while to download if anyone wants to watch it. if any one has any suggestions on the best way to compress it for the web please let me know. Go easy on me here, I'm still just learning.

Thanks all
E

http://www.inthemind.com/gaunt/preview.html

[David Newman]

I'm downloading your movie write now! It is cool that you used Aspect HD for this, and I wanted to inform you that Aspect HD for Premiere Pro is now available (see www.cineform.com).

As for imbedding video in web pages, that is always a pain. Media savvy customers will have Real or Quicktime or WindowMEdia support, it the everyone else that has problems. If have found in the past that Quicktime embeds the easiest, but has fewer installed players. Hard choice.

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Hey Eric, I am also downloading the trailer now. It's taking forever! My suggestion on exporting is to make sure you've checked the "web streaming" option. It depends on where you export, but usually it says something like that - I know that Quicktime Player Pro has the option. It's not really "streaming" unless you have a the proper server, but it does "stream" in a pseudo way.

Also, 30+ megs is pretty big even for broadband users. But, in my opinion - if you're going to have a "large" version - you might as well go all way and make it the version you want people to see. (watch your bandwidth allocation - you don't want to get stiffed on your allowance)

Murph

[Erik Rangel]

the server that is hosting it is pretty old. i'll try a little something different later tonight. thanks for being patient. and i'll probably try to get aspect pro tonight as well.
thanks guys.
E.

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Bloody Great Erik!

You did an excellent job - looks like a lot of time invested in your project. I think everything looks great, but I'm going to give my constructive criticism....good and bad specifics.

- The opening logo looks good - very classy.

- The crane shot looks awesome! Got any more like that? What did you use??

- The cuts are a little fast in certain areas, although the effect is there...just hold a shot or two longer in the spots where we're suppose to pickup on the blood. I had to watch 2 times to make sure I caught all the little shots - which is ok for me, but the average movie goer wants to get it the first time.

- A little dark in certain areas, although I think you might have been going for that style. It's just that the faces are so dark you can't see expressions - which it looks like they are giving for us to see.

- Audio is loud enough to hear what everyone is saying, but I would try and equilize them - meaning, make them the same volume whenever possible. It's dropping down a little and coming back up - although, it might be the source audio that's causing it. If you can - try and tighten or fatten the sound up as much as possible. There is a thread on here about "fattening" up audio that was recorded a little thin.

- The over the body shot is cool! Hold that for longer - it's a great shot! You have him sitting over her on the lawn - it's just a cool shot. If you have some padding...consider holding it.

- The smoke shot following the previous mentioned overhead is cool too. I'd consider holding that if you have padding there too...or slo-mo it. That smoke adds a nice feel..

- Nice gun shots! But, cut away from the running right before just a little sooner...just to tighen up the whole thing. Very nice editing during the shooting...it works!

- The music is pretty good, but can I suggest something that builds up to a climax? The shooting scene would be a great place for a climactic ending to a music score. Consider getting a composer to really make the whole thing shine...and if you did the music on it, I'm sorry! It's cool as is..just my 2 cents.

- Overall, lots of nice wide shots...close ups, overheads and down belows...all over the place and it makes it interesting. Just enough handheld, but not to much...tripod when prudent.

- Great use of darkness, I'm a sucker for filmmaking that uses day and night.

I hope you don't mind my review and critic? You've finally provided this forum with a great HD10u piece and I wanted to give back and help make it even better. Overall, I think it's awesome! But, I am a filmmaker too...so, I'm just giving my humble opinion!

Murph

[Erik Rangel]

thanks for the kind words Christopher. and constructive criticism is always nice to hear from someone who is also making movies. i do agree with you on the audio and music, i kinda rushed through it, and was hoping no one would notice. heh, awe well. i'll still tweak it a bit here and there, i liked your suggestions. There are a few more crane shots in the movie itself. as far as the crane goes my dad built it "ghetto-stylie" and cheaply. thrown together with a very old industrial strength tripod and some pipes. i love my crane and plan on using it for all my movies.

I had just gotten the camera a couple of weeks before the shoot, so i didn't get a whole lot of time to experiment. So this short kinda turned into that "experimenting". thank god and cineform for the real time color correcting because i forgot to white balance during the first couple of scenes.
thanks again,
E.

[Carlos Salcedo]

What software did you use to compress the trailer???

The trailer looks great. I have been using Media Cleaner 6 and they still don't look that good.

[Erik Rangel]

i just used premiere 6.5 with aspect HD.
exported as quicktime mpeg4. do you think I should try another program for compression? i like the quality of it though.

[Carlos Salcedo]

I think it looks great...I checked your bitrate (325KB/sec) and I am going to try to duplicate that quality. I think Media Cleaner is a Mac only app (but I could be wrong) and I have been using it mostly with Sorenson 3 encoder but know I may have to try the mpeg4 encoder to see how good it looks.

Once again, the trailer looks great....

[Erik Rangel]

thanks carlos.

[Paul St. Denis]

Media Cleaner 5 is available for Mac and PC, the names split in the next version and now there is Cleaner XL for the PC and Media Cleaner 6 for the Mac. I loved Cleaner 5, but 6 is a real disapointment. You can't encode the latest WIndows Media format and you have to run the program in OS 9 (If you machine even supports it) in order to encode RealPlayer. It's been over a year and there is still no major upgrade. I fear that they will force users to buy 7 when it comes out for the features that should have been avaiilable in 6.

XL is nicer in that you can encode into Quicktime, RealPlayer and Windows Media 9 without a problem.

Nice trailer Erik, I also like the look of Evil and Dog on your website

[Ben Gurvich]

Story looks interesting, acting is good, but you gotta filmmlook it!

Chekout Marty Martins? film GOT MILK, it is filmed with the same camera, and he has filmlooked it and looks great.

Apart from that, great Stuff.

Cheers
Ben Gurvich

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Ben, I just did a search on here...and Google. I can't find anything about "Marty Martins" or "GOT MILK" anywhere?

Can you point me in the right direction? I'd like to buy the movie to see what the HD10u can do..or checkout whatever he has available online.

EDIT: I found it - here it is:

http://imagenfilms.omegahed.com/

Looks great for an XL1s!

Murph

[Chris Hurd]

He's talking about this thread, although it was in fact shot with the Canon XL1S, not the JVC HD. Hope this helps,

[Erik Rangel]

Thanks Paul, Evil and Dog was a online Comic strip that i did for about a year.
Ben I also would like to know about Filmmlook. Where and such.
thanks
E.