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

¿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) ;-)

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

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

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.

Thanks for sharing that!!

V.Short montage avi (XM2 + Adobe NLE)
 

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

:-))))

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.

Sorry, but if you have a 720x576 clip and resize it to 720x400 i bet you it will look better.

One thing that happens when making images smaller is that they get some blur, but that is easily resolve with sharpen filters.

I thought we were talking about upscaling instead of down. You
shouldn't reduce the quality when downscaling indeed. But you
must use a hiqh-quality resample routine for best results...

Whether it looks "better" when sizes down I don't know. You
start to lose detail and resolution and that is not my definition
of better. If you are after a softer look there are other possibilites.

i've heard the pd150 and xl1 rumors as well, and if you watch closely, many of the angles in the cars would have been hard to pull off with a larger cam. =) for the record, one night after watching in a somewhat "altered" state, i emailed jehane and asked what kind of cameras they used. well, i never heard back. =)

put up the bachelor party clips with N.E.R.D.s lapdance song running...

that would be funny...hehehe

Call for scripts
 

Looking for a Director’s Vehicle focused on character development in a 10 to 15 minute Short. Extreme action stories are not desired and we would prefer to work with a small cast. Think of some of the more intense emotional scenes of classic features worked into a 10 to 15 minute Short with all the attributes of a good story. A story with a beginning, middle and a good ending is required. We would prefer not only a good script, but a script that may be commercially viable within the framework of existing distribution channels for Film Shorts.

This is a chance to have your work performed by professional actors under the direction of a superb Director and reviewed by a major Hollywood Star. The entire reason for this production is to show the Hollywood star the film directing capability of this Director whom the star knows quite well.

The Director is a well-known Broadway and Hollywood actor with 22 films to his credit. He also directs stage productions in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the founding Director of an Actor Training Program located in Northern California.

The production will be located in the San Francisco Bay Area

Pre-Production should start no later than July
Production will take about 2 weeks and start the beginning of September.
Release by December.

The rewards will only be credits on the screen in front of the actor, and possibly a share of the proceeds from distribution of the Short, depending on the nature of the script and the market for the finished property.

Send your synopsis or treatment, no scripts please to:
Mike Rehmus
737 Elmwood Avenue
Vallejo, CA 94591
or fax to 707 642-5783,
or email to mike@byvideo.com

Check Out My Short Horror Flick...
 

GETAWAY...another weekend with the old battleaxe

WATCH IT NOW ON IFILM!

exact link...
http://www.ifilm.com/filmdetail?ifilmid=2458249

or goto
www.GetawayTheMovie.com

Let me know what you think,
ENJOY!

SWEET! Very, very nice.

Things I love:

Lighting - the cabin was wicked lit. Love the 200 blue gels pumping inside and outside for the moonlight. Use of practicals was sweet, the candles, the fire. Shadow lights were sweet, think I saw a green in the kitchen background, some cosmetic rouge or indoor match lighting for mood inside. Pepper lights for reflection on the items in the drawer when Beth goes for the knife. Did catch some double shadows off of "Beth" before the random guys comes for help, but I thought it was moody cool too. Escapee on hilltop, was that day for night?

Sound - very nice. Good sound on location helps. The dialogue sweetening was right on, the mix was great with the radio and phone effects as well as the score. A+ for sound.

Shot composition - Excellent work. The doorknob shot was great, I watched it several times for reflections, only saw "Dave". Through the window match shots as well as double-side action for cuts was from what I consider really good spots. Great stuff.

Editing - This where I would give you the highest marks. When the guy comes for help and Beth runs to the cabin the sequence was just perfect. Flashlight arguement in the living room was great. Dead on sweet editing. I didn't catch a slow spot that you didn't mean to be there. The hesitations, action breaks, everything was just where I would have put it. Really, really nice.

Things I thought were okay:

Subject matter - Seen it before, know what I mean? Yours was kick-ass, but you know, I think with your talent we could see something groundbreaking on the next time out.

Acting, sort of - I thought the acting was fine, but I think the "Beth" character was directed to play the "bitch" too hard. We wanted to hate her as if she was the Wicked Queen in Snow White in the first 30 seconds. By the time she's calling the other guy in the car, it's lights out for this character. "Dave" was shallow, but we believe it, he's an average guy on an average mission to reform or kill his girl. Guys are crazy like that. Women are more conflicted. I wanted to love her and feel bad about the whole thing, not just think, "She deserves whatever she gets, kill her Dave!"

Escapee stepping on ammo - that was a weak shot, I think it would be tighter without it.

I really liked it, great job! If you extended it over a weekend's time it would make a cool feature. You would need deeper subplot, maybe an almost fell back in love thing.

Most memerable moments:

When Dave returns the, "Get out, I'm naked!" line.

"F*#! you, we're broken up!".

Keep up the good work...

re:
 

Lamce Barton...

thanks for checkin out...you know your lighting...right down to the pepper lights.

The villian on the hill shot was shot at that perfect moment right before it gets totally dark. we were soooo lucky to grab that. that's exactly how it looked, we didn't tweak the colors at all on that shot.


we are hoping to make it into a feature...starting the night before they leave on the road trip. Also going to give more of a background of the killer.

I did the editing, so thanks for all the compliments. If your interested e-mail me your e-mail address and I'll keep you up to date on what happens. We are just finishing up another short called "Dinner for 2".


Please pass my link around, we've already had over 200 views on ifilm in less than 2 weaks (with just message board advertising)...like to keep that going.


thanks again...

mike@absolutemotionny.com

www.GetawayTheMovie.com

Mike,

I'd love to see it...but I don't have RealPlayer (refuse to use it, actually). Any chance you have a Windows or QuickTime version?

re: John Locke
 

john...

If I'm not mistaken you can change your prefrences on IFILM to view as a quicktime.movi. take a look.


thanks
MIKE

With a name like Mike Meyerson, how could you not make a slasher/horror??? Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)
Anyway....

I loved it. I'm right on with Lamce's comments.
So the concept is nothing new, but what is these days? It was still really good.

One thing I didn't like was the sound. The voices were a little lost over the radio at the start. Nothing wrong with the sound effects, I just don't think the audio quality was that great, but it might have lost something in rendering for web delivery.

And I wasn't big on the ending. Kind of left me hanging. I wanted to see the guy come out ahead, since the chick was such a biznich.

My question:
What camera did you shoot it on, and what types of filters did you use, if any? Looks like an Ikagami on the Steadicam.

Britney Spears Demo shot with XL-1, jib & Steadicam
 

This video demo is a screen test for this very talented young lady of 14 that looks and dances much like Britney! Although the entire song was shot, this demo is only the first 1.20 of the song. The remaining will be cut soon. The actual complete video will be shot in a couple of months complete with location, sets and effects. This demo was shot with an XL-1, jib and Steadicam. It was cut with Premiere 5.1c RT.

"Stronger"

High Speed 500K

http://161.58.78.36/asx/demo/musicvi...RONGER500K.asx

High Speed 1000K

http://161.58.78.36/asx/demo/musicvi...ONGER1000K.asx

Any chance you'll have that available for download instead of
streaming?

Downloadability
 

Rob,
Are you experiencing trouble viewing or do you not have a high speed connection? Which OS are you using?

I'm having trouble viewing.... but that is common here with
Windows streaming media. I'm behind corporate firewall and such
and cannot always do streaming. I can do most other things,
but not that.

So download would be nice. I'm on windows 2000 professional.

I got this error:
"Windows Media Player cannot find the file. The server name, shared directory name, or file name may be incorrect."

Viewing Issues / Error Messages
 

I know that the links work because I have viewed through them. I think any viewing issues are going to be due to regional network/system settings such as firewalls/permissions. I just wish that there could be one good standard because this is frustrating! If you have any extra time, go to my site and see if any of the other files work. They're all on the same server. Can someone let me know if they are able to view the video. Thanks for info.

She's got her work cut out for her if she wants to be the next brittany spears...

Like the cam work

re: Dylan
 

Thanks for checkin it out.

I think the streaming video looses some of the audio quality. The audio in the car was a royal pain in the A$$ though. We screened it at the Tribeca Film center in NYC and the audio sounded fine.

as far as gear...
OK, you got me...it all wasn't all shot on DV. My xl-1 isn't heavy enough to use it on the steadi-cam and jib-arm we used. SO...don't throw me off the board, so most of it was shot on betaSp. But the camera we had has digital chips so it's still DV right????? There was a few shots that came out of my XL-1. We wanted to do it in 16x9 so that's another reason why we used betacam, to get a tru 16X9. We used an Ikagami camera with a stocking over the lense to give it the softer film look.

we did however edit the entire thing on Avid XDV and it was color corrected and mastered onto digi-beta, so I still consider it a DV movie. but some hardcore DV-ites will disagree.

thanks again for checkin it out.

please pass the link around.

MIKE
www.GetawayTheMovie.com

Oh you are SO going to get banned from the forum now... ;)
j/k

Anyway, I bet everyone here is now dying to know...
What parts were shot on the XL1 and what was shot on the Ikagami?

Mike,

Finally saw it...nice job! Yeah...I couldn't get any of the other players to work for some reason. They worked on other films, but not yours. Strange. QT kept showing a broken icon for some reason. Windows Media just wouldn't do anything. Anyway, I downloaded RealPlayer again to see your film and it was worth it. Really nice work.

The comments above cover my thoughts...only one extra thing I'd add. The car conversation didn't seem quite natural since I couldn't hear the "road" sounds. A little ambient noise would've helped. Nice makeup on the lunatic, by the way.

Her goal
 

I don't think that emulating Britney is her goal. She has been dancing since she was 5. I don't know if she's interested in singing or not either. I approached her instructor about producing a demo for me to have to show what I can do production wise and she said she had a student that not only could dance well but looked like Britney. What a combination. I lucked out on this one. She is definitely on her way though. She's performing in some larger programs in Atlanta.

re: dylan
 

dylan...

I'm not telling!!!!

Nature's Candy
 

Adapted from a story written by my friend Tyler Esplen, Nature's Candy is really the Seinfeld of apple stories; it doesn't pretend to make very much sense, but could -- and did -- happen in real life. We tried to give it an eerie 'Apocalypse Now' feel with the lighting/music.

It's about 5 minutes long and in Quicktime.

http://www.alextaylor.org/movies/naturescandy/

Comments are appreciated!

It was an interesting piece... I liked the music and some of the
angles etc. Did you do any color correction afterwarts (besides
the face changing color)?