The Beautiful Lie

[Brendan Sundry]

its still a bit large josh, i think your excluding a lot of your audience.

Make it 60 meg and ill download it.

[Josh Caldwell]

I'm trying to render out in h.264 but it screws up the color and brightness, ruining the look of it, and it takes nearly 4 hours to encode.

If I compress it down to 60 megs, it won't be worth watching. I think some of the people who wanted to see it wanted to see it for the Mini-35 look. Pushed to 60 megs, it looks like crap.

Again, if anyone knows of a good compressor, or know how to fix the h.264 render out (I"m using Avid to do it, don't have Quicktime Pro) so the color and brightness don't blow, I'll do it.

Even though it's a large file, it's fantastic quality. In the meantime though, I'm working on it.

[Joseph Tran]

I dunno how long it took to download -- I just started it and went on to do something else. I've been tinkering with h.264 on my own projects, and I found out that I was able to make the video size larger while keeping the file size smaller.

All technicalities aside, I just saw your short and thought it was wonderfully done. Claire was a very compelling character, and the actress you chose to portray the part was great. I enjoyed the use of brief flashbacks AND the use of color to go back and forth in Clare's memory. It kept me drawn in to the story. I personally also like the extreme close-ups. This is a very intimate piece, and rather than it feeling cramped, I believe the ECU's are definitely necessary. The music was excellent, and it complimented the story very well. This is one of the most cinematic pieces I've seen done with the XL2; and I think that your attention to storyline and production value certainly outweighs all the minor blemishes of the project.

Congrats to your entire cast and crew on a job well done!

[Joseph Tran]

I've had a similar problem with rendering h.264 directly from the NLE. The color correction seems to not keep with the render out. Haven't figured out what is wrong just yet; but I did find a way around it. My projects look fine when I rendered them as an uncompressed AVI, color correction and all. So what I did was open that uncompressed video in the Quicktime Pro player and re-exported it using the player's built in h.264 codec. The color settings are maintained (as I assume it is maintained coming from the uncompressed file), the filesize is smaller, and the render time is faster.

Let me know if you figure out another alternative. Since the codec is new, there's still a lot of tinkering involved. Plus, I know you have to purchase QT Pro; but it's a nominal price and it has served me pretty well.

Aside from that, I was able to watch the large video just fine.

[Josh Caldwell]

Originally Posted by Joseph Tran

All technicalities aside, I just saw your short and thought it was wonderfully done. Claire was a very compelling character, and the actress you chose to portray the part was great. I enjoyed the use of brief flashbacks AND the use of color to go back and forth in Clare's memory. It kept me drawn in to the story. I personally also like the extreme close-ups. This is a very intimate piece, and rather than it feeling cramped, I believe the ECU's are definitely necessary. The music was excellent, and it complimented the story very well. This is one of the most cinematic pieces I've seen done with the XL2; and I think that your attention to storyline and production value certainly outweighs all the minor blemishes of the project.

Congrats to your entire cast and crew on a job well done!

Just wanted to repost this as possible incentive for anyone halting over the large file size. Seems like it could be worth seeing. :-)

[Ernesto Mantaras]

Very good short! Worth the 270 MB I had to put my connection through... ^_^

I just have two things I'd like to point out. First, there seemed to be some noise in the night scenes (just a couple of times, mostly it was alright). I noticed it a lot when she comes back to the apartment and there's a white light hitting her from the right. Now that I think about it, what I saw in the streets at night was some gain used, together with the XL2's noise reduction thingy. Am I right? The colors seemed to look a bit weird (I'm sorry, I don't speak English natively nor am I experienced enough to say more than "weird" about those street colors). Anyway, it wasn't bad at all, it was just me that I think I recognized some colors I had seen on some low light footage from the XL2 (also, it just might be compression).
Anyway, the other thing I noticed (and how not to notice this one!^_^) was the dirty? lens. I think you can kind of hide that a little (or maybe completely) by using After Effects. There are some useful tools for that. But just what caused it? Was it just a dirty lens? It happened to me a few times, there's not much you can do about it, but didn't you ever see that in the dailies or something, or didn't you even clean the lens ('cause the blemish was always in the same place). It's a shame, but it can be fixed.
Now mind you, if these are the only two things I have to criticize (I, nonetheless! ^_^) that means your short, like I said, was great. Good acting, good lighting, very good music, cool DOF, nice script, I loved the editing. That's some quality work right there. Oh, and another personal appreciation: the colors did seem a little flat in the scenes inside the apartment (except the love scene...), but I think that has more to do with the color correction, which is a personal choice. So that's just me again. Keep up the good work!

[Josh Caldwell]

We shot the the outdoor stuff in New York city where I didn't have the luxury of 20ks lighting up the street for me, so, I probably had to pump the gain a little bit. The reason the lights might look a little "weird", which I'm guessing you're talking about the scene where they're walking? After they make love? Is because we shot that under flourescent lighting, and deliberately sought a whitish look to stay in line with the scheme of the film.

The dirty lens. It wasn't the lens actually, but probably something on the ground glass on the mini-35. It's a big pain that wasn't seen until post-production. There's a lesson here. We didn't clear the monitor of all the menu options and numbers when we were setting up. As it so happened, the "24p" on the XL2's display covered up that exact spot, and we never saw it. And we shot this in 3 days so we had no time for dailies.

I'm working on finding a way to hide it, but it hasn't happened yet.

The flatness of the colors and scenes in the apartment were purposeful. We wanted Claire's present day life to seem dull and ordinary, and sterile, compared to the night before when (in claire's mind at least) there was passion and fire and emotion. So, we shot with more depth of field, warmer colors, handheld. The love scene was meant to refer to this, which is why it's warmer, etc.

Glad you liked the film. I had a lot of people who worked hard on it, so they'll be pleased to hear your comments.

[Bruce Meyers]

Hey great job! LOVED THE MUSIC AND THE STORY! AND THE ACTING!

[Josh Caldwell]

Hey Bruce,

Um, not sure what to make of this, but I was sent a notice in the email that had you quoting something else. It said: "Hey great job? You ever hear of talent or story!? You should check them out!! :)"

But, that's not what was posted on the board and it didn't look like you edited it.

Did you write that? Seems weird that I would get this in the mail. Is the post on the board being sarcastic? Cause, from this note it would seem to be.

If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. No need to be malicious.

[Don Donatello]

the short is very good .. excellent production values all around in all dept's.
i also viewed your other trailers - all good and all with very good production value.

i then viewed the fake commercials ??? and i have to ask ? did somebody leave your team ? different DP? art director ? ..
if it is only the "idea" of the commercial you are trying to sale/push then it works BUT if you are trying to sell your company for production then IMO the production value is NOT there compared to your trailers.

spec commercials are suppose to show your BEST. and IMO the spec's are NOT up to par with the trailers. for example the macaroni spot would have MUCH higher value if you would have used selective DOF ( like you did in beautiful lie) .. most of the fake spots have a 2006 date and the trailers are 2001-2005 which is why i ask did somebody leave your team or didn't work on the spots???

looking forward to "Family Will" ...

keep up the excellent work ...

[Barry Gribble]

Hmmm... yeah, I got the same email... it must have been an edit after the original post.

[and I just added this in an edit... I don't think it shows]

[Josh Caldwell]

I was wondering about that. Glad someone else could confirm it. Geez. Who is this guy? This is the only time I've read something like that on these boards. Very insulting...

Hey Barry, did you get a chance to watch the short?

[Barry Gribble]

Josh,

I just got it down, but I won't have time to watch it in full until tonight. I saw the beginning though... very nice look and mood. I'm looking forward to it.

[Josh Caldwell]

Originally Posted by Don Donatello

i then viewed the fake commercials ??? and i have to ask ? did somebody leave your team ? different DP? art director ? ..
if it is only the "idea" of the commercial you are trying to sale/push then it works BUT if you are trying to sell your company for production then IMO the production value is NOT there compared to your trailers.

spec commercials are suppose to show your BEST. and IMO the spec's are NOT up to par with the trailers. for example the macaroni spot would have MUCH higher value if you would have used selective DOF ( like you did in beautiful lie) .. most of the fake spots have a 2006 date and the trailers are 2001-2005 which is why i ask did somebody leave your team or didn't work on the spots???

Hi Don,

Thanks for watching the short. I'm glad you enjoyed it. As for the commercials, no one left or anything like that. They were just all shot with no budget...and I mean literally, no budget. We had some good ideas and wanted to get them out there and we've actually had a very good response to them, with some people saying they're better than the commercials that are really for the company. I agree that the spots could be served by having some higher production values, but we had no money to do that. They were all shot on the XL2 with the 14x manual lens.

So, we've actually had quite a different response from the majority of people, but we do realize that they could have more done with them. We just didn't have the money and really wanted to get the ideas on video.

Production criticism aside, what did you think of the commercials themselves?

[Dmitry Kichenko]

Some beautiful shots. Very warm. Audio seemed a little noisy at times though.
As to the blemish.. I thought it's on my monitor and not on the footage, so at one point I started scratching the surface of the LCD, hehe