Show Your Work 2004

[Kin Kwan]

Hi Charles! I loved the choice of music in your movie! If I'm not mistaking, is it from Infernal Affairs?

Great movie, man!

-KiN

[Jason Hall]

What's up Glenn. Yeah, that was me. Sorry for the late reply - been extremely busy lately. And for the record, Vegas is just ok. I went with PPro instead.

Check out the movie and let me know what you think.

[Glen Elliott]

<<<-- And for the record, Vegas is just ok. I went with PPro instead.
lol...that's cool- to each their own.

Check out the movie and let me know what you think. -->>>
Will do man. Meanwhile here's a post with some of my work..and a description of how I achieved some of the shots in Vegas. I'll be posting some wedding related clips soon...

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=28846


Great to hear from you again- hope to see you around.

[Rob Onekea]

I can encode my videos to any format, but what are some of the easier, decent quality suggestions out there? Till now I've been rendering as .wmv files set for 256kbps transfers, with 16 bit, mono audio. They come out ok, but some of the previews I've been looking at here look really good.

[Dennis Hingsberg]

I'm preparing to shoot a short film "Music Box" towards the end of this month. Below is some of the test footage using the mini35/XL1s edited into a one minute piece for your viewing pleasure.

www.starcentral.ca/trailers/MusicBox.mov

Enjoy!

Dennis,


__________________

[Dustin Waits]

Well every year my friends and I have a BMX contest in my friend Jimmy's backyard. We build ramps out of old scrap wood that we find laying around, spraypaint it up and have a big bbq. This year was probably the best yet, we only had the police come out once but when they figured out that we were willing to put up a fight, they left (we had 50 people against them). Anyway, it was a blast. Lots of people just hanging out, drinking, riding, and just having a good ole time. There were a few bad crashes but nobody died, and I was hit a few times while shooting video of the contest. Footage may be a bit shaky because I'm sprinting around the course with my camera to get the shots, with no tripod, and the exposure of the clips may change slightly, thanks to Florida weather (cloudy one second, bright the next) and no time in between to adjust my settings.


Enjoy...

http://www.bmxbums.com/videos/jimjam.mov

[Federico Dib]

Hi,
First of all, the short is in Spanish, so I don´t expect much feedback on the story, but if anyone can watch it, I´d appreciate input on image, editing, etc...

The short was shot with the Canon XM2. It was edited with Vegas 4.
A few cokin filters where used (ND and difussers).
There are also a few shots done with the Sony PDX-10.

I might add subtitles in english if I get requests on this, I just don´t have enough time now to do that and not have at least a few english speaking persons watching it.

www.efedib.com/videos/porqciegos.mov

[Chris L. Gray]

Hi Federico,

I just watched your short, but unfortunately I only know 4 maybe 5 words in Spanish so it was a struggle comprehending. :]

It would be nice to see subtitles, but I can understand how much more work that would be. However you'd probably get more fruitful replies if you did, at least on this board.

* Can you talk a bit more about how you put this together? (mics, lights, editor, etc.)

* Did you shoot this all in a day?

* What other kind of gear did you use indoors and outdoors?

* In the dialogue shots between the two characters sitting at the desk, did you stop down after each person said their line, or did you have the first character do a run through, then repeat the whole scene with the camera on the other person?

It's pretty hard to determine the quality because of the compression, but I understand that posting a better quality version of your short would take up a ton of space and bandwidth.

Could you post a few high res stills?

Thanks!

[Ryan Mattos]

Hey Jason I just watched your short and i hope you wouldnt object to me offering some criticism. I'm by no means a expert, but a few things in the video jump out as being unproffesional. One of the largest and most common problems with amateur films is that people forget to record nat sound. Before you shoot a scene in a given location, record the surroundings for the duration of the scene. This comes in handy for maintaining continuity during cutaways. It makes you very aware that you are watching a movie when you hear a car one moment and the next do not.

One more very imporant thing would be to get a tripod or possibly a steadicam. I also have a gl2 and i know how hard it is to hold a little cam like that steady. This film does not benefit from a documentary style, because the subject matter is rather surreal. It just reminds you once again the action on the screen is being shot with a camera, which is a bad thing in this case.

And lastly, I would reccomend that you take more time in pre production to plan out your story and your shots. Some points just dont make sense, like where the girl stomps on the villain's toe and he is suddenly turned around both physically and emotionally. You undertook a very ambitious project with this story. You could have easily taken these plot points and expanded it into a feature. If you plan to make a shorter film, I would take on less action and add more character development. i know you were trying to tell an exciting story, but we had no idea who these people were or what was going on so the events had no meaning, and were very hard to get interested in. But all these points aside, I commend you for getting out there and making film, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and thats what its all about!

[Federico Dib]

Some stills:
http://www.efedib.com/videos/ciegosstills/
(Jpegs 100% quality)

Ok... a bit more about this:

* Production, it was shot in three half days, 1 for office, 1 for park, and 1 for streets. Not more than 15 hours alltogether.

* Dialog: I let the first character tell the whole long lines on it´s own, and I let him improvised a little, so these where prett long shots.
After that, all dialogs with replies, where done bit by bit, maybe a few lines each. Mostly because the second guy, the one with the laptop, is not an actor, and was a last minute replacement so we had to rehearse almost line by line.
By the way, it works wonders, when you tell that it´s just a rehearse, and don´t let them know you are recording. More than half of the shots of this guy where recorded rehearse.


* Lighting...
- Indoors used two 500w work lights, some blue gels to match sunlight coming from the windows, and some homemade white reflection boards.
- Outdoors... just the white reflection boards.

* Filters..
- Indoors, Cokin diffuser. (0820 I think)..
- Outdoors, Cokin ND 4 plus the one in the camera.

* Audio...
- Azden SGMX2

* Post, it was all done on Vegas 4.
- For the indoors, there was some colour correction done, and a few levels adjustment. But not much.

- For the outdoors, The "blue" And white grainy hard contrast parts, was done using some levels, and the film effect that comes with Vegas...
- Also there was a lot of time playing in Vegas


And that´s about it..

About compression.. well, I´m starting to hate quiktime..
If I ever get to do the subtitles I´ll upload it on WMV, which I appear to get a lot of better result with...

[Rob Lohman]

That's a really tough question to answer and really depends a
lot on personal preference, options available and audience.

Most commonly used format must be QuickTime and then WMV
indeed. Both formats are just place holders where you can use
different codecs. The question is then which codec are you using
and try some different ones to see what they do.

For AVI (and I believe you can use this with WMV as well) DiVX
or MPEG4 is quite popular as well. QuickTime can use it as well,
but most seem to still use a flavor of Sorenson there.

Expirement experiment experiment!

[Rob Lohman]

Regarding QuickTime and your video. You are already wasting
precious bandwidth and thus bits in your file by compressing
the letterbox (black bars). Cut those off for web distribution and
you will already loose 1/3 of your image for compression.

[Federico Dib]

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Regarding QuickTime and your video. You are already wasting
precious bandwidth and thus bits in your file by compressing
the letterbox (black bars). Cut those off for web distribution and
you will already loose 1/3 of your image for compression. -->>>

Mmmmm....
Now, why didn´t think about that?
It´s so obvious thing to do, it makes me feel stupid...
Well... afterall, I might end up doing those subtitles, so I have an extra motive to do that.

Thanx...

[Chris L. Gray]

Federico.. sounds pretty cool. Thanks for posting the stills.

Sorry to hear you're having a problem with quicktime.. I love it and use DiVX when exporting video out from final cut express on my mac. Since you're using other programs and maybe a pc, it might be a bit more challenging though.

[Dave Frank]

Looks like you have some vignetting in some shots.