Commercial "Need Ink?"
 

Hey all,

We recently shot a commercial for a local client spoofing the HP photo frame ad campaign. If you'd like to view it, you can go here:

https://webftp.dreamhost.com/index.p...e=downloadfile

I apologize for the obnoxiously long URL. Our website is in something of a limbo right now and I'm trying to figure out FTP stuff.

I hope you enjoy the commercial.

That's really funny Joshua. Congratulations.

I absolutely love it. Your commercial just gave me an idea for my documentary :-) Great job on that fading ink stuff.

That was a great piece. Nice job.

Ben

I also need to apologize for the splash screen at the end. The client did not get the proper logo, which was much cleaner and legible, to me in time before we went to the presses. So I had to use that rather unfortunate .pdf of the van. Excuses excuses... I really should change it.

I love it too! Very clever,... but I cant understand how it is done. Is it with layers freeze framed or how?

Hahaha! your model made the board work! congrats! its funny!

Dennis,

My initial thought was that there would be a way to do it in After Effects or with Motion or some other program I'm not entirely familiar with. We settled with a rather lo-tech process through CS2. We exported the take as lossless PNGs and extracted a still of her as a layer, and just moved it along with the frame, keeping it attached to the inside corners of the matte with Distort. I'm not entirely happy with this process, as I'm sure there was a much easier, less time-consuming, and more accurate way of doing it.

For those interested, here are some stats.

Camera: JVC HD100u
Lens: Fujinon Th16 x 5.5 at ~15mm, f/2.8
Frame rate: HDV 30p
Scene File: Tim Dashwood's Warm
AE Shift: +2
Lighting: Arri 650 Fresnel through homemade diffusion frame, Arri 300 Fresnel with Chimera Softbox for the 650 jury-rigged on, 2 Arri 150s, and bead board.

Unfortunately, this is all the lighting that was available to me as we're a small outfit and had no budget. Therefore, I ran out of lights and wasn't able to model our actress as I would have liked. I also erroneously took the advice of others on this board and turned the detail down to -7. While it looks great on an HD display, it's far too soft for it's SD broadcast, and the local Comcast channel here in Charleston has horrible standards as it is. I'm sure -7 works great for the higher priced Fujinon lenses and the 35mm adaptors, but not for the stock lens. I'm sure this has been stated before, but I think I need to make the mistake myself to figure it out.

Joshua,

You didn't make a mistake, you did exactly the right thing and have given yourself options. You now have a great looking HD master, and can add sharpening back in very easily for the SD version.

If you are working in FCP, just apply the "unsharp mask" filter to a SD nest of your HD sequence. Make sure you are watching a live downconverted feed to a broadcast monitor or TV. You can adjust it anyway you'd like, but I'd suggest a tolerance of around 10, a radius of about 5, and then adjust the intensity until you are happy.

This is exactly what the sharpen control in the camera's DSP would have done for you, but at least you now have full control over how you want to sharpen the image.

Tim,

You're completely right. That's a solution I never even thought of. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until if and when the client asks for changes to sharpen it up. I can still do this for the web version though. Thanks for your help, Tim.

the problem with sharpening is that it WILL bring out EVERY compression artifact in the image. been there done that. it looks horrendous on a large 16ft screen. it jumps right out bad enough anyone can see it. bad bad bad ! you might get away with it for SD only delivery, but if its going to a large screen, it will not be good.

FWIW, the HD100 is the first camera I have not had the urge to slap a 1/4 black promist on, and I've shot on everything.

also the link doesn't work, it produces an error message in safari.

ditto for firefox.

Also had issued with your website. Dunno whose end its on...

bad link...

Right, I'm sorry guys. I'm having to reupload everything onto our site. I'll let you know as soon as it gets back up.

Back up and running:

http://www.sect1.com/files/act/needink_hi.wmv