Show Your Work 2003

[Dominik Chrzan]

No no, Miguel. Please don’t take offense to this, as I did not intend it this way. If I understood more Spanish all would be well. But only picking up a word here and there, after a while, led my attention span astray. That’s all. = )

But let me assure you, at 7:07 I was completely blown away!

Again, wonderfully done.

Kind Regards,

Dom

[Miguel Lopez]

¿you mean the satellite view? Yeap, the result was nice. THe first is 3D, but the 2nd and 3º are pictures with 3D rotation in after effects.
But it was the first one which took most time, (and also many 3d passes) ;-)

[Tom Perrone]

Good first short Michael,

Although I shoot sports video not weddings, I will take a shot at making a few suggestions/comments:

1) The wedding is the 2nd biggest event in a young lady's life, position yourself to take more facial shots of her. Your opening shot would have been much better facing the two.

2) Too much of his face, and not enough of her face in several shots

3) Great ending shot will the candle

4) Like the background music

5) Why did you encode at 96kbps? Suggest you go to 300kbps to 350kbps. It will clear up your picture a lot more. 96 is to fast for dail-up, but 300 to 350 should work just fine for DSL/Cable users.

6) Recommend you zoom in on the kiss from the mother/mother-in-law

7) Sit down with your buddy and his new bride and ask for their opinion. It will give you a better perspective on what a client would be looking for if you do it again.

All-in-All a good first time out. Since I didn't have a forum like this several years ago when I got started, the best thing to do is tape numerous such events where you don't plan to deliver any product to anybody. This will allow you to experiment with different angles/zooms, etc. This is really something that only gets better with experience. I still see a number of things I can do to improve a shoot, everytime I go out!

Since turnabout is fair play, here are a few links to some of my works. I do all my encoding with Windows Media Player 9 (latest version). To me this provides the best in a quality picture for the net, but it does exclude some individuals such as MAC users, Windows NT users, etc. We also go high speed at 1000kpbs because they are action shots. We down encode for a progressive download, which allows dial-up users the ability to download the file to view it.

http://visualstudios.org/gymnastics/sectional1/paragonbars.wmv

http://visualstudios.org//gymnastics/sectional1/paragonbeam.wmv

http://insidecarolina.org/commits/03/kedra/kedtack1.wmv

http://insidecarolina.org/commits/03/cangelosi/cangtd3.wmv

[K. Forman]

It was very nice, what I saw before my machine froze up. I would, however, like to point you to another current thread that you should read:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7832

[Michael S Scott]

Thank you for the feedback.

I shot an hour of before/after/during the wedding so I have a lot of material.

This was just something I threw together for them while I do the wedding proper (and to give me the practice to do the wedding properly).

I didn't shoot the wedding as a commercial job but as the groom's best friend. I was originally supposed to be one of the groom's party but when I heard nobody was shooting video..well I did instead. :)

I will try to work some more shots of the new bride into the music video.

But your right about my positioning, I wanted shots of my friend more than the bride (at least during the wedding). And there were a limited number of places to film in the chapel. If I had gone to the center and zoomed in, there wouldn't be as much depth, and the position would have been less elevated.

I tried to do my best as a guy in the audience and not distract.

One of the hardest things though was the light. The Canon ZR40 I use is the worst camera in low light. But if you notice, the colors are bright and for the most part it looks allright. It took me 10 minutes to set the camera up to balance all that out.

The tripod I have wasn't as smooth as I'd like either. That's why it looks like someone bumped the camera in a few shots. It's got a fluid bearing head and I don't know how to oil it.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Tom, about your video's

The encoding was really clean was the first thing I noticed. I had to download a new codec to see the video but there was no audio. I'm not sure if you didn't encode the audio to save bandwidth or not. I use Media Player 7 (9 caused me too many problems) for my web stuff.

The gymnastics video's were well positioned and captured the action pretty accurately. You could use another camera (or some quick zooms) to cut in closeups showing the grace of their arms and legs and they spin and twirl.

The football video was pretty good. I liked how you changed up the shots with a camera up high and down in the action. It made the video more interesting to me. I used to photograph our high school games for my journalism class and I found I got the best shots slightly elevated from the ground level.

If you are right there on the field, then people get in the way when you try to get good shots. If you are up in the stands it removes the camera from the action a bit. But if you get 1 or 2 rows up so your barely elevated it keeps you in the action and gives a clearer angle on the players than being down in it.


And Keith you touched on something I had already looked into. I can legally use the music for these purposes. It would be the same as if I were filming the reception and caught the DJ's music on tape. It's a private video for friends and family. I could never air commercially, even if I made no money from the performance, unless I got express written permission from the copyright holder.

A good tip for amateur films...If you want to go low budget and still have music, go with classical music. Lots of good stuff for drama, comedy, etc in opera music as well.

[Rob Lohman]

Thanks for sharing that!!

[Hilary Cam]

Hi guys n gals, I haven't checked this board for a fair while; feeling quite content and confident with my 2 month old XM-2 (PAL ver of GL2).

Was going through some clips of various scenic shots I had taken recently and just started fiddling around with one in particular that grabbed my attention. It seemed fitting considering the many current world conflicts to use a shot I took from a slow moving car of a servicemen's graveyard in South Australia during a recent trip.

It's not too special, as I'm still young and new to DV, so don't expect much.

Running time: a mere 28seconds
Size: a decent 7.6 mb (divx 5 format guys, I assume you'll all have that)
Format: 720x400 high quality compression - 16:9 widescreen

http://members.optushome.com.au/drla...yard_intro.avi
(Right click... Save as...)

ITS NOT MUCH... BUT PLEASE GIVE ME ANY FEEDBACK AT ALL.

Thanks fellas. :)

Divx 5 is a small and usefull freeware video codec and can be gotten here...
http://download.divxmovies.com/DivX503Bundle.exe

-----

If your at all interested the clip was put together in a few hours, after a lot of tweaking and painfully long rendering times.

Software used:

Adobe Premiere
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Photoshop
Flash MX

Music/Sound:

Nine Inch Nails - A Warm Place
& Bird sounds from the actual shoot

[Benjamin Taft]

I like it alot! The birds combined with the music really set the right atmosphere.

What did you spend most time with tinkering with in AE/PS? Did you use Flash MX for the intro text?

Oh ya, it played fine on my Mac and Quicktime with the Divx plugin.

[Hans Henrik Bang]

Hi Hilary.

I liked it too. Great ambience. Being fairly new to DV myself I will still offer a few ideas....

I noticed that the horizon is not horizontal. The right is noticably lower than the left. Was this on purpose to give it a look of "speed"?

In the middle credits saying "A fluid canvas production" you are doing a straight cut from footage to the credits and then back to the footage. Personally I think I would prefer doing a fast fade to black from the footage, fade the credits in, fade to black, and then fade the footage back in. You have similar fades in the other parts so I think it would streamline it a bit.

Just my 2 cents.

Hans Henrik

[Hilary Cam]

Thanks Ben and Hans,

I have since changed it slightly to incorporate the fades Hans suggested and I tinkered a little with the sound (made birds quieter, albeit a bit too quiet...).

Hans;

Yes I too noticed the horizon off balance, it's a pitty; not for any effect, just poor camera-work that I didnt notice on the 2" LCD at the time.

Ben;

The first title sequence I had done some time ago In the days before my understanding of flash, so i made about 80 individual bmp images for that simple scrolling down of canvas. :-/
The light that comes on is just two different bmps (one with no light one with) that then cross-fade in premiere.

Flash MX should have been used to create this. I did use flash to create the second simple sequence, which was very fast to do with motion tweens (easing in), just exporting to avi.

I used Adobe premiere to edit and change the basic colous of it (both 'Invert' [In Phase Chrominance] to de-saturate, saturate and alter colours and 'Levels' to get the right brightness/contrast).

Lastly and notably, I used Adobe After Effects to add a nice little postmodern pinky-red glow effect to the sky. This 'glow' filter found under the STYLEISE folder can, if used minimally, give your work a really nice deep warm (if not magical) filmic look if used in moderation.

My use of filters and colour altering was a bit over the top; the tell tale signs of an amateur. Filters are great... if used sparingly for subtle improvement. <- a lesson I am still learning.

PS/ Also had to use 20% Brightness Increase in AE for the entire clip that was exported to avi. Annoyingly the Computer quality is much darker and inferior to the actual TV playback.

Software brightening/gamma is not ideal and reduces quality, do you know of any other methods of making computer playback produce closer image reproduction of that on a TV ??

- geez that was long.

Thanks for the feedback again.
Happy filming.

[Zac Stein]

wow i looked at it, and i thought you composited (the titles) in After effects using masks, which would have taken around 2 minutes to do (then i read the thread). But i enjoyed it, the music really made it interesting, almost the start of a "the entire world is dead" movie.

Good work, keep it coming.

Zac

[Miguel Lopez]

Hey!!! What do you say? i think it looks amazing!

I read your message from the other post and i dont see the pixels anywhere. THe quality is very good. it almost looks like a movie!

How did you get that "vanilla sky"?
You said something about that images where too dark... ummm, thats intersting because xl1 (i havent use xm2 but i think it will be the same on this) tends to overexpose images in automatic modes. The AE shift must be always around -1.0 for me.

Another thing. In order to achieving more image quality, it is better to record in 4:3 and then cropping tom 16:9. For some reasons, pixels get more blurred in 16:9.

And it doesnt matter which software you use if it is good enought. Queality will be the same.

Anyway, i like it a lot!

[Hilary Cam]

Thanks Miguel,

I think that is part of the problem. It wasnt cropped, but simply resized (squashed) from 4:3 to 16:9, causing slight pixelation.

The process for creating the vanilla sky is mentioned in my previous post.

Look foward to using your 1/6th shutter + 4xSpeed technique.

Look even more foward to seeing more of your work, very inspirational to see people using typical consumer hardware/software to create a professional looking piece.

Just before I bought my XM2 I dreamed of getting a Pana DVX100, but the extra cost ruled it out. You've got a great cam there.

[Miguel Lopez]

Well. A couple of things...

When you resize there should not be any pixelation. Instead, you "increase" quality.

I love vegas. But one of the things i do no like from the software is that is too slow in rendering, compared with ulead video editor and others.

I have not recieve the panasonic yet. I expect it today or tomorrow.

:-))))

[Rob Lohman]

When you resize you will not "increase" your quality but "decrease"
it. This happens because you are trying to create more information
from something that is not there. Ofcourse the loss in quality
doesn't have to be apparent, depending on what you do.
Pixelation will occur if you resize high enough.