I've barely used color correction stuff myself (I have Premiere 6.0 that doesn't have it) so somebody else can likely make more helpful comments. But, the exterior stuff at the very beginning of the Hummer pulling up and with the guys in front of the Hummer just looks like it needs a little something tweaked about it. I think it's because of the flat light from being overcast. Maybe try giving it a bit of a colder look by adding a little blue and then maybe desaturating it a bit, also messing with the contrast could help. I don't have MTV right now, but I have Snoop Dogg's Lay Low video on my computer and it has a bit of a cool blue desaturated look to it that I like. Try playing around with it and see what you can come up with!

I just watched the color correction stuff on the "Seven" DVD and it was amazing to see how fast the guy could switch around scenes and tweak the look of it. Really cool stuff and now I have color correction on the brain.

Cheers,
Brian

Hey, I'd say the same thing...a little more cutting.

A few more thoughts:

Get more shots of the chicks in there. The one wearing the white with the black background is nice. Also, the beach scene is cool...maybe break up the whole thing with some extreme closeups of the girls eyes that dissolve into a sea shell or something? You've got a lot of med to extreme wide shots, so I would just get some closeups to break it up. The turntable thing is a little chessy - if you are going to use it - I'd put a half naked girl in there. Wait, i just re-watched it and there is a girl in it!

Just a little suggestion - videos seem to always be about color. If you can get some random shots of things that are prudent to the video, but have extreme colors - it'll be really good eye candy. Even if you shot a few more girls wear sexy colorful clothes.

I shot a music video one and used aluminum foil in an old storage building - the kind that have all the large pipes exposed inside. We covered all the pipes and weird looking pieces with the foil and pointed red and blue lights everywhere...it made it look industrial. Ironically, we ended up on a beach scene too!

Also, I would stay in 16x9 mode more through everything except the beach scene - the 4x3 doesn't work as well elsewhere. I know why you can't use it on the beach stuff - you'll cut off the guys.

Oh, it's not a mistake that I'm mentioning more girls...cause the girls sell the video not the guys. No one really cares about guys to much - music videos are a place for the guys to go "hey, look who i can get in my videos". Other than that - they're just standing there looking stupid. The girls don't look stupid...they look nice and everyone wants to watch that!

Anyway, get more of the girl in white...I like the way you lit that shot and its to short!

Murph

Christpher, I look at the video and see what you mean. You really think the turn table is cheesy? Maybe I can do something with that part. I do have one problem though, since majority of the girls that came to the shoot were pathetic, I have very limited shots of the good looking ones that actually knew how to dance. What was happening through the night is everytime I started shooting on the dance floor, the ones that didn't know how to dance and had the most cellulite to offer would shove the behind into the lens and make their attempts at gyrating...well, you would not atract anyone with what they had to offer. I'll try though. The colors will be a pain because as you have noticed, it was an overcast day and late summer thus all the leaves were deep green, the limo was black, the park was industrial. I might just do the whole thing in a high contrast, washed-out look.
Thanks for your comments.

Need some colour advice
 

I'm looking for some colouring advice for our Lady X project.
http://www.ladyxfilms.com/theater/e13/episode_13.shtml
The first two minutes of our movie are set in ancient Japan, and I'd like to make it look different than the modern setting, which is the rest of the movie. I use Vegas 4, and have tried the Film Effects filter, which is not what we are looking for. Tried, black and white, but it doesn't really suit it, as I don't want to lose the colour of some of the buildings and forests, which are nice.

Can anyone suggest some looks that I could try? Combinations of Vegas effects/filters? I wanted to do this for the Lady X competition, but never had the time.

Thanks

Have you tried a slightly warm, or golden look? I've used that effect from Magic Bullet for a couple of times when I wanted to show an earlier time.

Also, and this is totally an unsolicited critique, but I think the '2 Days Earlier' super is not necessary. It's clear from the setup (guy by the water) that the castle scene is a flashback and having that much text on the screen so quick to the date introduction really threw me out of the moment.

Otherwise, great fight scene. Looks like you really got some great stunt guys.

John Melon is here
 

I would like to share with you our new trailer for John Melon. The short film will be available in April 2004. Visit the site and enjoy the full experience. You would need Flash and Windows Media to see the clip. There is also QT version (smaller). I would like to hear your feedback.

I used a XL1 with a P.S Techik adapter, for lighting I used some Kinos. I'm very gratefull for the technical advise from this forum. It certainly made my life a little easier.

Thanks


www.nothingmanproductions.com

the trailer
http://www.nothingmanproductions.com...lonpreview.wmv

I liked this one a lot.

I agree that you don't need the 'two days earlier' or the name of the castle title... I think it's fairly obvious it's a flashback.

I wouldn't bring in the initial title so quick or so big either and I think I'd leave out the graphic that sets the modern date. it's also obvious it's modern day although if you want to include the city I'd do it over the shot after the shot out the window.

As to the flashback footage I might give it the 'bleached out' Saving Private Ryan treatment. Or pick a primary color to tint the footage as well as blow out some of the highlight areas.

The action sequences might serve better if they were trimmed a little to take out the hesitations of the actors between strokes.

Qucker cuts might make it more 'tense' as well.

Good variation on the usual Lady X senario. Congrats!

Dylan: see some very detailed descriptions on what I've done
on my Lady X episode in this thread.

Basically I would stay away from the one button magic filters and
work with the color curves and color correction tools. Those can
be very very powerful.

What kind of look do you want? You can desaturate the look
without loosing some vibrant colours (so not go completely
black and white -> I did that on a lot of shots). Also you might
use the secondary colour corrector to adjust only certain things
or leave other bright colours as they are.

If you want shoot me an e-mail with a full size frame with a
description of what you want and I'll see if I can get that for
you on my Vegas 4 installation.

Star Wars Fanfilm
 

This is a Star Wars Fanfilm that I have known about for awhile and a figured I would post it so U guys can check it out. It was made by a guy named Nick Hallam.

The film and the documentaries were all shot with a PD150p.

http://brokenallegiance.net/media/video.html

Outpost_Theta is up on the net
 

Hey all, I've finally got my short, "Outpost_Theta", up on the net. Check it out and let me know what ya think.

watch it at: http://www.brownfish.com/

sound on that piece is fantastic

Interesting where the full film will go to. I didn't like the titlecards
with the red on white though. That didn't look professional to me.

One comment about the web site intro.

Please, PLEASE add a SKIP INTRO button.

Some people don't want to watch an intro or have a slow connection and haev to wait forever. Others may not have flash.

- AR

Besides the sound (effects) I thought it looked great as well,
some nice lighting and such. It was a bit "weird' though, but
that was okay.

Once I create a few dozens o DVDs I' will submit to various festivals. Most likely I will get a few runs at the NYC Film Archives, since I've showed my work there before. I agree on the titles, I think the effect that I was looking for gets a little blurred out. I'm still experimenting. The skip will be added shortly. I used the Swish Flash editor, but the trial time expired, and I didn't have enough time to add the skip button. I'm buying the full version today and that will fix that annoying part. Hey, I don't want to be called the Flash Intro Nazi :)..

Thanks

Two videos I shot with the DVX100...
 

I shot 2 videos for the same band in similar conditions...One in 35mm and one on the DVX100....Endo "Suffer" is 35mm...
Check out Endo "Simple Lies" and Shalim" which are 24p.

http://www.tedlederman.com/work.php

First off, very nice site. It's one of the few Flash sites I can stand, because you know how to use it - good mix of Flash and HTML. And it's not lacking in the aesthetics department either! Awesome colours and navigation, I love those little trails of light moving along the negative. Nice touch.

I'm downloading 'Suffer' and your demo reel as we speak!

Theo, great work! I really like Shalim ... nice feel to it.

Great videos! I have a question for you though, what did you use to stabilize your camera? The shots were very smooth and perfect, was it a crane or dolly or something? Thanks!

Ted, really, really impressing work. I admire your lighting very much. Are all of the projects shot on the DVX100? If so, congratulations, great job.

The only note I would have on the demo reel is that the first band may be a bit intense in their presentation to have such a prominent initial placement. A client who is looking to sell Noxzema might not make it past the guy with the noose around his neck, which would be a shame because you have a lot of strong beauty images later on.

I've just done a major recut of my own DP reel during the process of joining a new agency, an done of the results of that (with feedback from the agents) was a 45 second montage at the beginning of some of my stronger images. It allows the prospective client to see your total range at a glimpse, so they might see exactly what they want and stick around to check the rest. As you know, advertising is an exceptionally fickle business--"thanks for sending your pasta reel, unfortunately we are shooting linguini and you seem to have shot mostly rigatoni..."

Best of luck with everything, really, it looks great.

Hey Charles, thanks for the compliments...I've read quite a few of your posts on dvxuser and it means alot coming from you, as you really know your sh!t...The reel on there is just the first thing I had compressed, and I'm in the process of sorting beauty spots from food spots and car spots and bla bla bla...It's funny you referenced food because I just sent in a reel to do a bunch of table top for a restaurant chain and the clients called the producer with, I loved his reel but I didn't see any fish..."Well did you see the long graphic crane shot of the 20 or so lobsters towards the end of the reel?" Oh we don't serve shellfish...
Best of luck with your overpriced secretaries...uhh, I mean agents j/k and I'd love to see some of your work online...Oh and thanks to all you guys for the praise...Scott, I just used a fischer 11 dolly for 90% of it...

Impressive stuff. Thanks for sharing.

Mickey Stroud

High-Speed Mpeg2 Export/Converter from Raw AVI Footage
 

I'm in a small business venture that's going to involve exporting tons of different videos to DVD's in short amounts of time. That's the quick description of it. Basically we're going to be dumping tons of video into Premiere Pro each week and I'd like to find a program that might be faster in exporting to Mpeg2 for burning to a DVD. Premiere Pro takes awhile, and I know much of the speed issue has to do with the computer you're using but we have Dual Xenon's with Hyper Threading if it will make that much of a difference. I'd just like to find a program that will possibly export faster to Mpeg2 than Premiere Pro would. Any help is GREATLY appreciated.

Tim

are you just sending continuous clip to mpeg .. no chapters /fancy DVD things?

if straight clip to dvd (no chapters /background photo) then just get a HARDWARE device that converts DV avi to mpeg in real time ... any of the home stand alone DVD recorders ( not computer dvd recorder) that have a 1394 i/o should do it .. just export clip from TL to DVD recorder

Yeah, we have a commercial for vendors that just needs to be exported strait to a DVD. I was just hoping to find a program that would convert faster without me having to shell out more for another piece of hardware. Are there any stand-alone encoders that would do the work possibly in less time being that they would be designed specifically for conversion instead of Premiere which I'm thinking might be coded differently than a seperate encoder would be that would allow for faster time.

The only other thing I was thinking we could do is when I dump the tape to the computer is dumping it in Mpeg2 format already, is it possible to edit in this format, therefore significantly reducing the time it takes to render when I got to burn it. That way I could just click burn and it wouldn't envolve encoding.

commercial , how long is it taking to render to mpeg 2?

mpeg2 has more compression then DV.avi .. mpeg 2 looks very good 1st generation when you go from DV avi to mpeg 2 - don't know about premiere but Vegas can edit mpeg2.. if it is all just cuts no problem. the problem is when you apply FX's /transitions to the mpeg file then it has to uncompress it apply Fx's then recompress it back to mpeg 2 and that is where the weakness is in mpeg2 .. it doesn't handle that 2nd generation mpeg2 very well ...

I don't have all the details on the final production of the DVD yet but basically its an hour long "commercial" (or at least we're shooting the commercials but the final dvd's will be an hour with other productions done into it). I'm guessing we'll be doing fades, though that hasn't been figured out yet either. Is Mpeg2 DVD 2ng gen or 1st...I didn't even know there were 2 versions.

I was looking at DVD recorders but I began to think how exactly it would work...it doesn't seem to allow you to go strait from your comptuer to the DVD recorder unit. So you'd spend 60 min dumping to tape, then 60 min dumping to the dvd recorder while it burned real-time. Now that I think about it a nice dual xenon computer would probably be able to do that in the same amount of time. We're still looking at our options and since the first few times we start exporting to DVD we'll be using my existing 2.66Ghz P4 and DVD Burner so we'll get an idea of how long it will take to do this.

The problem is that MPEG2 is a complex compression. Any speed
increases will usually result in a lesser quality image.

With that being said the following standalone recorders are
available for which you can download demo versions. So try them
out and perhaps one will be faster then the current solution,
although I doubt it will be very much faster.

The best way to get a speed increase is to get a dedicated
MPEG encoder board for your PC, get an external MPEG encoder
for your PC (there are a couple) or get a standalone DVD
recorder.

Canopus ProCoder (available in Express version, quite cheap)
TMPGEnc (cheap as well, free version available)
CCE (expensive)

ARENAHOJ PART 1: experimental short movie
 

Hi guys,

The first part of a small fun-experimental movie-project ARENAHOJ about deserted places is finished. You will find it at www.orphic.nl/odm/html/videoprojects.html
The QT compression is not very accurate yet, sorry for that.

Peter Sieben

Interesting Peter! Looking good. Let us know when part 2 is
available.

Any idea on where I might be able to purchase a external, or internal mpeg encoder (hardware)? That seems like the only other feasible alternative. Even with a computer with fast processors and lots of Ram I think the time improvement will be minimal, maybe even just a minute difference for another $1000 in hardware possibly.

I'll do some run-throughs and time them, then I'll compare the quality to see if its a noticable difference or not. I think in the end we'll stick with using the computer to encode and decode, because we'll be making multiple copies, but if a hardware MPEG encoder could speed that up significantly that might be something we can look into to invest in.

Post your films
 

Hey, everybody it would be cool if you guys can post some of your films.

We have a place to do list where your films are posted. You have to find someplace to host the film though.

Trailer for my documentary on web
 

Hey guys--The trailer for my documentary is online as of about 30 minutes ago and I'd love to get everyone's feedback (and use up the bandwith from our internet service for this month). The web address is:

www.bicoastalfilms.com

Enter the site, click on "investors" and type in the password: bicoastal (password protected so that people who appear in the film don't see trailer before film is done...very touchy subject). You can read more about the story in the "press" section.

Tech specs: Shot with DVX100 over course of about 6 months. We have about 87 hours of footage and are editing on Xpress Pro with G5. No color correction on the trailer. The music is from the Hours so don't tell Phillip Glass or Miramax. The trailer is basically being used to keep those who have invested money in the film happy, and to attract other investors, though we've really aren't spending any more money. We will start submitting to film festivals as soon as the film is done editing (maybe about 4 months) and then see what happens. OK, curious to hear the feedback.

peter

Tried to access it, Peter...but it's attempting to link to a desktop file rather than a file on the server. Please check the link.

Canopus has three products in their line, check this link.

Two internal cards and one external box it seems. Do read
through the specifications thoroughly to make sure it supports
encoding from digital footage in the PC.

AOpen also seems to have a product, check it out here

This forum (DV For The Masses) is where everybody is posting
about movies they have put up somewhere else. So take a look
through this forum to see what everybody is up to. As Mike
points out, this site cannot host the actual movie files for you.

If you are interested you can look at a Global Indie Series
that I'm part of.

Actually it's linking to a movie over the network to another
machine which the internet user doesn't have access too,
ofcourse.

Par-t-Com.net - 1 new feature, and 2 new shorts!
 

Hi everyone, Devin and I have been hard at work here at Ohio University and have a few new things to show for it.

First of all, our feature 15 minute short "10:17" is online. Please go check it out at : http://www.par-t-com.net/1017_feature.html, its been 6 months in the making and we would like some more feedback. Here is a post to leave feedback for "10:17" to: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=20372

Next up is the video production course, 200c, that Devin and I are enrolled in here at Ohio University. This is the bare bones first hands on production course we've been able to take, and our first projects are just now online. For backround, the guidlines to project 1 were: to be a 2 minute narrative with music and video only featuring straight cuts.

Here's Devin's "She Sits So Close" : http://www.par-t-com.net/she_sits.mov
(Right click and save as)

And Spencer's "Redemption" : http://www.par-t-com.net/redemption.mov
(Right click and save as)

We were going for more difficult dramatic pieces, b/c we expect the majority of the class will make slapstick comedies. (You'll notice the use of the mini50s we made in some of the pieces) Please let us know how you think we did!

And as always, the rest of our shorts can be found by clicking here: http://www.par-t-com.net/media.html

Thanks, and enjoy watching,

Spencer Houck
Devin Doyle

I like them both. I've been watching your movies since you started posting links on here, and thought they were so-so. However, the latest two show big improvement. The most pronounced being that both held my attention throughout the entire piece. Its all about finding the right rhythm and sticking to it. Keeping a slow pace like that is sometimes difficult, especially with no dialogue, but you guys did a very good job.
The one shot that really stood out to me was the dolly-in from "She Sits." It added a slow, almost omniscent perspective to the whole scene, similar to the first dinner shot in "American Beauty." Excellent use of camera movement.
I don't quite understand what happened in "She Sits." Was he daydreaming? flashing back? is she just really clumbsy?
"Redemption" is a story that everybody understands, because we've all been there more than once. Even though it was a simple idea, again, you did a great job of setting a pace that defines the mood. I also like that the story progressed in a circle of sorts, referring to the end taking you right back to where you were in the beginning. I like that.

Good job, guys.