Whew!
 

That is an understatement...I'm exhausted! It is 10pm Mountain Time 9/14/2005. I too have just e-mailed Dylan the link to my movie.

What a great experience! Nothing like the fellow who is on a 3500 mile road trip but drove 180 miles to one location in the Big Horn Mountains, 75 to another (my friends house), was lucky enough to have a couple friends there that were very willing to be in this picture. My 3rd actor didn't pan out, so like Dylan, I threw myself into the role. My friend and star got a crash course on the camera and he was 2nd. That was cool.

Was packing around home made equipment that I'd been building for the last 35 days or so. The little truck was jammed...my entire life was in there (half of it is still in there...lol). Dirt and soot was everywhere. Weather was tricky. Had to shoot very early and very late in the mountains. Fortunately, the rains were intermittent. The day we wrapped, the rains came crashing down.

Equiptment used for this shoot:

Thank you Dan Selakovich for the Book: Killer Camera Rigs That you Can Build- I couldn't have got some of these shots without this great book. www.DVcameraRigs.com

A Canon XL1-S that I bought here from a member of DVinfo a few weeks ago
Bogen Tripod
Home made Crane
Home made Dolly
1 Britek 650W Light, 1 gel, 1 barndoor, 1 Britek 300W light
Macintosh Powerbook© and Final Cut Pro HD©
Apple's Garage Band© for writing the opening sequence of music
www.stockmusic.net where I paid $29 for the legal rights to one piece of music that plays in the film (I looked around and this was a good experience for me)
Various props (cameras and film of course)
A carton of cigs...lol
2 cans of chew...lol

and now I must sleep!

Best wishes to all...and to all a a great plight

I am uploaded and completely done. I kept it real simple and had fun. It was a joy to go through the steps of this creative process and see a complete short finished that quickly. Good luck to all!

11:06 pm

We have wrapped principle photography, My co-director/writer/lead actor has begun the rough cut of the movie. I'm writing (or attempting to write) the music. I have no idea if we'll finish in time, but we got out and shot something and learned a whole bunch, well at least I did. I think there should be an extension to the deadline when canon releases a new camera though.

Also strange event, lost a hard drive today. It was a seagate 146 scsi and is still (I believe) under warranty, fortunately we didn't have media on it, unfortunately it delayed some other wise worthwhile editing time. OH well.

good luck all hopefully I won't see you on the wall of shame.

Sean, Give Up Your Secret!!!
 

I need MUSIC!

My kids really came through, but adding a little background music would be nice...

Music
 

Hi Dick,

As mentioned above, I wrote the opening sequence of music on Garage Band© software but was too tired to do it for the rest of the film. Like you, I needed some music for the rest of the piece.

I found www.stockmusic.net and purchased the rights to one song. It was $29 and everything is legal.

Maybe that will help?

www.freeplay.com for free music. i can generally find something there. may not be perfect, but the price is right.

Friends... I just finished and handed in my contribution. Wow.. this was tougher than last time. So now I can sit down, relax, open a beer and ooh... wait! Now comes the time of nail-biting, nervousness... ohh my god.. well, I am looking forward to see all your contributions during the next week! :)

/Fredrik.

I used to use Freeplaymusic.com for a lot of simple stuff. I even downloaded the entire site and put it to DVD.

Now I have another great source. Requires a bit of searching but it's amazing. I'll spill my guts tomorrow about it.

I have another issue now that you guys might be able to help with. This one's legal. I have been advised both directions in this issue. Here goes.

In shooting this little short, I decided it would be perfect to use a bit of dialog from a 1960 Paramount movie and a quick glance by the lead actress to her TV screen where we see a short shot from the film. Overall it's less than 1 minute total of audio and less than 5 seconds of video. Would this be considered incidental, like a coffee canister on a counter top or a car logo if we were shooting out in the street?

Yes, it does help out the idea of the film significantly, at least to me but I could use a lot of clips from almost anything to get this effect. It just happens this clip is right on the money for this.

I actually called Paramount Licensing and left a Voice Mail for the head of the department explaining what I was attempting to do but have not heard anything back. On the Paramount site it says, in effect, they only consider licensing issues for on-air television. That being the case, I could say that they seem to not care about us little film contest entrants and our little productions so they won't even bother with us. The other side is they could be telling us, no way so don't even ask.

Is this a short enough clip and incidental enough to not worry about? At worst, I would have to act it out or a "similar" scene and fake it on the TV, etc. I could do that if time gets too tight.

What do you guys think? Dylan?

Sean

I have heard somewhere that it's okay. I can't verify it legally though. I have an idea where a guy is watching TV and I wondered if I had to pay a lot but I shortly read something afterwards that it was okay legally. It all depends on country of course.

To be safe however you can go to archive.org and download a public domain movie and show that instead. I found a real good Humphrey Bogart movie there.

The big problem there would be, I would need to cross referance all the dialog in a film and be able to search for key words, like "camera". I just happend to know there was a lot of talk of cameras in this particular film. That's why I am trying hard to justify using it here.

The Pelinger Archives are great for finding old stuff. I downloaded some of the stuff on the Atomic Bomb a while back, converted it to MPEG2 and made a DVD for my daughter to take to school for a project. Took a bit of doing and MP4 isn't an archival resource but it looked OK for what it was.

Duck and cover.

Sean

Sean,

If you had given up your great music source, I would say you're okay, good to go, no problemo, but now...

It is obvious copyright infringement and completely WRONG!!!!
:)
Dick

Well everybody I'm finished and it should be getting posted on the web tonight by my good friend by tonight. I am very satisfied with what I got. Although having my friend play the piano worked out okay but he messed up a few times and I wasn't there for the recording, so my music isn't the best sadly :( But it still is pretty good. I look forward to seeing everyone else's work.

Sean, I'm not sure exactly how it works into your film. Just submit it as you see fit, and I'll review it from there. The thing I want to avoid is people using other people's work to make theirs better, like with music. If it doesn't affect the overall strength of your film (like it's in the bacground) then it's cool. Otherwise I'd have to see it.

Okay, it's been a long week. I have spent way too many hours on this. Yes, it's my fault. I decided to go over the top with Tron-type VFX. I kept on getting new ideas and instead of saying "enough," I basically decided I didn't need to sleep.

Well, my movie is finished except for the score. I'll work on that tomorrow, encode, and then post.

My movie is completed!!!
Dylan, I emailed you the details about the movie and the link to this address: thedvchallenge@hotmail.com

Is it OK?

I'm done, but problems posting
 

Humm...

I follow the QuickTime instructions and get a 70M file for my 3.5 minute movie. Real Player gives me a good looking 6M file, and Flash give em a decent 11M file.

Was planning to post to OurMedia, but the 11M file had repeated problems. I did upload the Real player file, but have been unable to view it.

Suggestions appreciated.

I don't know if this is allowed. But rapidshare.de can host any file up to 50 mb with unlimited downloads. The only catch is when you go to the link you ahve a to wait usually about 20 seconds until the download link comes up. Check it out, should work good.

I had so much trouble encoding to Quicktime and getting decent results. I think in the end I went with Unconstrained rather than Basic 50 kb, and got a decently small file size that looked okay.

Hostrocket has free hosting that seems to work pretty good. It's 25 megs of space and 2 gigs of transfer.

Thanks Elvis
 

The unconstrained bitrate produced a smaller QT file. Still, it is twice as big as the Real Media file and doesn't look half as good.

My experience has been WMV >better> RealPlayer >better> Flash >better> Quicktime.

At least for smaller sized files. I suppose it's not quicktime, but the Sorenson codec being measured here.

What makes Quicktime so popular?

They are more universal. People with macs have trouble playing wmv's while both pc's and macs can easily play quicktime.

i think quicktime is so desirable because it works on both mac and pc quite well and i also believe it comes standard on both

Dylan,
First, cool. I'll post it as is. In looking it over in FINISHED (yipee!) form, it isn't so noticable after all. Lends great ambiance however. Also, I know I didn't get your check to you yet, I been busy making a freaking movie here... but seriously, it honestly is on the way. Enough to cover the basics and a bit extra. Buy yourself a bottle of Baileys. That's what I would do.

My QT file, produced from Sorenson 4 comes out to be about 8M+ for a decent looking file. I modified the basic 384K preset for less on audio and more on video quality. I think I may have made it mono also. Still a bit stuttery. I am rendering out a 512K version too. We'll see how big that is in a few minutes. It will take about 7 minutes on the laptop to render.

On the web page I will include a few photos of the setup and some other behind the scenes stuff as well. You will be able to find it at http://www.surgetechservices.com/smchenry/ near midnight.

Dylan, I will e-mail the direct link to the movie or you can pull it from there about the same time, midnight or earlier Ohio time. I'll e-mail you officially in either case.

The verdict is in, the 512K streaming QT file, in 16:9 naturally comes out to be 10.7 Mb. I might just use that one.

Looks like I am going to need to resurect the old Linux Helix server and start hosting these myself again.

So anyway, I'm officially done with editing. Now it's writing the web page and posting the critter. I hope you all like this one. By the way, I changed the name, not just for Dylans sake, but the new name made it more interesting. See if you guys can figure this one out. Now called "Frame 37".

Sean

Posting today...
 

Well, I started with one idea thursday night, had another bigger one friday, then over the weekend all of the folks I was hoping to help, were suddenly unavailable. So Sunday night I wrote another script that used my son and my dad. Since this destroyed my weekend buffer to shoot this, I had to do all filming during the week after work. That was tough. Doing a movie all by myself was a rough experience. Next time, I need to schedule some friends to help... :)

Luckily, I was able to finish something. I pulled an all-nighter last night to edit it. I think I am happy with it, considering it was such a lonely filmmaking adventure.

-Josh

"And I'm spent"
Austin Powers

So, I'M DONE!

Dylan, you should have an official e-mail all about it - if I used the right address this time. The hotmail address, right?

So, who want's pie?

Sean McHenry

Oh my so Dylan I just realized that somehow the kid didnt upload the file to the server right. So I am going to email you a rapidshare hosted link so you can see it properly. The kid uploaded for me so It cuts off early for some reason and jsut crashed the media player. Im not late so I should be good.

Nobody should have to be a lonely filmmaker!! Wish I could share, Josh; I've got five guys over here with hurt feelings because I didn't include them this time. (Why are younger guys such hams? :)

Despite one idiotic mistake after another--like recording over irreplaceable footage, etc.--my little movie is on its way to thedvchallenge@hotmail.com. My Web server, which almost never has a problem, had a big one today so a friend had to bail me out.

I keep telling myself, "These challenges are really fun!!!" (Actually, they really are.) :)

OK, let's get this straight now. You're an attractive woman. (I've been to your site) And you're complaining because you have 5 young men sitting with you that want to do anything you script for them? Is that about right?

OK. I don't get that. Sounds like you won already.

: )

Sean McHenry

LOL!! Sean, as much as I appreciate the compliment (gosh, I really do!!!) I am old enough to be most of these guys' mom. I don't think that's it. :)

But you're right about one thing. Every time we finish one of these and I see my friends laughing at their performances and beaming with pride at their accomplishments I feel like I've won the lottery or something. It's priceless.

If You're Having Problems Encoding
 

Some of you have mentioned in this thread that you are having problems encoding with QuickTime. Here is a link to a post I made that gives my process in great detail. This assumes you have Sorenson Squeeze 4.1 (the software not the codec).

Visit post #8 on this thread: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=47730

All In Really In!
 

Hi All,

Well I have posted my movie, but don't bother looking at it.

Got back late last night from my 3,807 mile road trip! Spent the whole time driving and doing things for others and nothing on the movie. Comittments, comittments, comittments! Carried all that equipment for all those miles and used almost none of it. I threw a movie together so I can stay off of the wall, but it is no prize winner.

Was a last minute trip for a birthday party etc., and a chance to see old friends, but what poor timing, right during the Challenge! I even came back a day early, telling people I had medical a appointment. Actually did have two that I had to reschedule, to keep all happy! Next week, three trips to the hospital!

I look forward to seeing everyones movies and especially Jeffs and Lorindas. I hear the saga continues Jeff? Can't wait!!!

Have a great night all!

Mike

Well done, big guy!
 

Hey Mike,
You deserve a big ol' hug, a glass of milk with a slice o' chocolate cake, and tucked into bed for a good night's sleep.

Your movie will be great--just like last time. :)

Now get some rest!

I actually finished and posted mine before midnight my time! I am exhausted and going to bed.

Lorinda,

Damn, that does sound good! Sure you don't want to move to Florida???? The movie is nothing though, but no wall!

Thanks and Good night all.

Mike

amen jeff, I think i am going to be a victim of the same fate

Thats me well and truely all done. The great thing I found about this challenge was the experience, and did I learn a lot. I had major problems with rendering my file in quicktime though. I use Premiere Pro and set all the settings as mentioned in a thread on this forum but I kept getting a load repetitive load clicking noise over the movie. Any adjustment I made didn`t make any difference. If I rendered a test footage (10 secs) it worked fine but the full thing kept giving this problem. I tried other compresiions, but kept getting the same results. I Ended up rendering to windows media and real player, hope this is okay for everyone, files ended up at 10meg and 1.5meg. Dylan has confirmed he`s seen the movie, so thats good anyway.

One of the things I leanrnt through all this, is it aint over till you`ve rendered it !

A really nice experience during the challenge was laying in the music. I gave the draft copy to a work colleague who returned 24 hours later with the soundtrack. It gave the short a whole new feel to it.

The whole experience was really hard to complete but great fun. I`ve run out of coffee twice, shouted at the computer 78 times (even though it wasn`t the computers fault !), and ended up sending my link in 10 minutes before I had to go to work. This was my last chance to get it in, I cant imagine how I`d have felt if the render didin`t work and I was in the dreaded Wall Of Shame.

I look forward to seeing everyones work very soon and would like to say to Dylan, "DV Challenge #4..........bring it on !!!!". I would actually like to call him a few names for starting this challenge, but then he might not let me play next time ;-)

Whew!!!!
 

Well, I am finished and posted....and again, just under the wire. I haven't had any time this week to follow the posts or check in to the how things were going, but I will include production notes on my site in the next couple of days that detail my real challenge in meeting this deadline - suffice to say it involved three paying gigs and a fried logic board on my mac (yes the one I edit on)

But I still made the deadline and I'm still standing!

Good night everyone - Good job to all. I won't be throwing any eggs at the WOS, but I am sure glad that I'm not on it.
-Jon

Andrew, this might help but I used to be a Premiere guy, since the 4.2 days. I am now almost exclusivly Avid but I have found that a lot of those sort of issues go away if once you finish your project, and before the final render, reboot the machine.

For me at least, and it would seem lots of other folks, there is a seems to be a buffer someplace that gets flogged during editing and holds some errors. Those show up as ticks at transitions in my Avid where I have an audio track with a chunk of sound and then nothing. Sound to other sound doesn't happen as often but sound to empty track space, even if I put a short fade up or out has the same issue. Usually a reboot will clear it out for a while.

Give it a shot. All hypothetical but it seems to help me out. You might also try dumping your renders, reboot and imediatly re-render. Then play it out.

Good luck.

Sean McHenry

See this thread for how I get my music. Pay attetion and be nice to the folks where I am about to send you. Make it easy for us to all use this resource.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=51244

Sean McHenry
Survivor DVC2 and DVC3

Good night all.

Thanks for the advice Sean. I gave the new render a go but it still came out the same with a loud, fast, repetitive clicking/hissing sound. Maybe something is wrong with my codec ?.

Thanks for the advice, might help with other problems I sometimes have.

The rest of the story.....
 

Well I am back an not sleeping. While struggling this week to find a replacement for my Mac and create my short for the DVC, I fell WAY behind on my emails - so I am up and figured I would throw out a few notes about my experiences with this challenge. (The real producton notes will be posted on the site this weekend - this is just some late night rambling.)

I managed to get my movie posted in time, but it ended up being the low-res version. It was a quick file transfer -but most of my scenes were set late at night and I had a hard time pulling resolution out of the low compression on my dial-up version - plus my lighting technique needs some significant improvement.

There are other versions to view, but the next step up with relative clarity is 21 MB and may take a while on slower connections - I think it looks pretty good.

I had two weddings and a corporate video project this week, so I was bustin' at the seams to keep my sanity - but I really wanted the opportunity to test my limits with what I have been learning in this forum - and see if I could produce a piece that I could be proud of even after the first couple of days. For some reason, it turned out to be another gruesome one (even worse than the last one) - I don't know why - because I really am a good natured person - I am a stay-at-home father with a 2 year old daughter - but my wife really insists that our next movie be a lighthearted comedy or folks might think I have real issues. What can I say...once Dylan posts a theme, I run with what comes to mind.

I have been trying to find time to finish installing my Apple Production Suite and start learning Final Cut Pro - but I have not had the time and decided not to try a new application on a deadline, so I produced my movie in iMovie. I think it came out quite good considering, but I would have like a few more controls to tweak the image. I am sure I could have done more with FCP and more quickly as well, but not if I was trying to learn it at the same time - so with the limitations of 1 video track, I am surprised by the results and my wife loves the movie (even though she hates horror flicks - and she plays the victim in this one too- go figure)

For DVC4 I will either finally be using FCP or I will go the other way and produce a short using just QT Pro and the video clips I capture on my cell phone. I like being able to push the limits of a piece of technology so long as the end result isn't total crap.

I have to give two shout outs to the Douglas Spotted Eagle, and Apple - both of whom made it possible for me to produce my short on time and with a result that I am proud of. My logic board fried on Wednesday morning. We were halfway done shooting by then and would resume on Wednesday night - but there was no sense in it if I could not edit the footage - but we had already put 2 hours into scripting - 3 + hours into storyboarding and 5 hours of shooting by that time and I didn't want to give up - so I went to the local Apple Store and laid it all out. My Mac is still has Apple Care, and I have a Pro-Care card, so they ended up giving me a loaner. Granted, I had to put in a credit card, but after I get my repair done, I can bring the loaner back , have it wiped from my credit card, and I won't have to pay a re-stocking fee. Plus, they cloned my drive to the loaner so once I hooked it up, I was back in business with very little downtime. ( I took my daughter to the park rather than stress about it)

DSE has written about SmartSound's Sonicfire Pro. On his recommendation, I recently purchased it. I haven't yet watched the tutorial, but I was able to fire it up and get the music I needed for my short with very little effort. ( I still layered tons of sound effects as I intended but the music is a huge element for me and I was not only pleased with the results - it provided exactly what I was looking for - so far I have to say that as far as 'bang for the buck' it has thus far been the wisest investment I have yet made in production software.

Finally, I have to offer a quick note of thanks to the people of this board - many of whom I have learned from. With the insights, suggestions and critiques of fellow members, I have improved my output by miles. I know that for this challenge I am up against some very seasoned and professional experts who will leave my short in the dust...and that's cool, because I take notes and learn from these competitions.

If I hadn't gotten the advice and insights I gained from DVC2, I wouldn't have tackled what I did for DVC3, which included 85 shots in 5 locations - it may have been a bit much for a 4 minute short - but it is what I had in my head, and I wanted to see if I could do it. With some tips I learned from suggestions from the last go'round, I figured out ways to shave off 2 minutes from my short (it was running over 6 minutes when I thought I couldn't find any more to cut and still keep my story along with the type of imagery I was going for. (Keep in mind - much of my footage is 'pretty out there' as it is supposed to be kind of a horrorific mind trip.

I can't wait to see what the results are from this round's submissions. I am always inspired by the ideas that come from this forum. What I am hoping to learn this time around are some tips on better scripting (the dialogue) as well as some proven techniques for chroma-keying. There isn't any in this short but I have tried it a little in other projects and have much to learn.

Well, it looks like my h.264 version finished rendering, so I am going to check it out and hit the hay.
-Jon