Nice and interesting movie. I also liked your often funny additional text comments.

You might want to have a look at http://www.vimeo.com - the video quality there is nothing to compare with youtube. They even support HD video.

Cheers, Oliver

Quite entertaining, Henry! As Oliver mentioned, your comments added the right touch of humor that made this such a fun piece. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Light in Action - "Creation" trailer
 

We have a new website up with our new "Creation" production trailer (still English only):

http://www.lightinaction.org

We output the trailers as 1920x1080p Cineformed masters and down-scaled them as progressive-load Flash movies into several sizes.

The "HD" version really isn't HD quality...(we need to change that button), but at least is large enough to watch on a decent large computer monitor.

BTW, we did NOT use H.264, but re-wrapped the fullscale CF AVI masters as MOV's using CF's HDLink to convert, then downscaled them directly to flv's using Adobe Flash CS3 video encoder. Works great and the resulting flvs are very small, yet look good.

Comments?

Since this is "CF Showcase" can I "showcase" something?
 

We have a new website up with our new "Creation" production trailer (English only for few more days):

http://www.lightinaction.org

We output the trailers as 1920x1080p Cineformed masters and down-scaled them as progressive-load Flash movies into several sizes.

The "HD" version really isn't HD quality...(we need to change that button!), but at least is large enough to watch on a decent large computer monitor.

BTW, we did NOT use H.264, but re-wrapped the fullscale CF AVI masters as MOV's using CF's HDLink to convert, then downscaled them directly to flv's using Adobe Flash CS3 video encoder. Works great and the resulting flvs are very small, yet look good.

Here's the final file sizes for the three flash versions: 13MB, 21MB, and 43MB

Comments? Anyone think we could do better by using H.264, or MOV's?

Underwater Youtube Site
 

I decided to make a youtube like site but have cranked the quality up abit more so they look abit better but still should play realtime for most viewers.

It's only for underwater clips so if you have some, sign up and load up.

www.hdvundersea.com

Cheers
Paul Wags

I think it's EXCELLENT work.
 

How many different people were involved in the Creation trailer?
Did you/your shop shoot all the footage yourself, or did you use anything stock?
As a 1-man shop, I doubt I'll EVER be able to anything as good as that.

Thanks Denis, if I were a one-man shop, I'd be thrilled with what you said! But I can't take credit where no credit is due. I'm the producer/director and we have a 6 person team, (including the main talent).

We all actually wear many hats, as I am the main editor/sound man too. The main cameraman is also our AE FX guru, color finalizer, and crane operator. The "b"-cameraman is our Dreamweaver guru, and second editor. Both guys fly the Sony V1 on our little Merlin (at rare occasions when we actually use it) and both double as dolly/track crew/cameramen.

Our main talent (Cynthia) is also main scriptwriter, but the whole team evaluate scripts. Our main researcher (Stefanie) is also the one ferreting out our stills (most were stock material) and helps with location choices. We also have two others that check our Portuguese scripts (Cynthia is bilingual, as are all on the team)

We do not normally use "stock video" as it is expensive and usually not what we're looking for, however we like and use some of the more recent music (Stacktraxx) from Digital Juice and a few of their transitions/revealers/Jumpbacks (mostly just for this trailer). They can pay me later for this free plug... :)

If we were doing ad's or something similiar as shorts, we'd use a LOT of DJ's material. But for long productions, it is not as useful...except the music.

Two areas we are hurting, is with outdoor lighting and better cams. The little V1 has HUGE bang for the buck, but we need better lenses/control and would like to go to a RAW workflow using CF. That would give us much more control for the outdoor environments we normally use with these productions.

So, unless you have a few years to spend on your productions, you'd be hard pressed to match a team approach. That's why JollyWood stuff looks so good...

Remake of Vanessa Carlton video
 

This is the Remake of Vanessa Carlton video. I did this video in 2006 for a university project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3jdVLmenXY

Stephen, very nicely done! Thanks for sharing your work with all of us. We're proud to have played our small role in your efforts....

That is an incredibly good Flash video encode (the 720p version). How did you do it?

Thanks to both David and Laurence for your good words! David, we look good because YOU guys gave us some of the tools for that to happen!

Laurence, the Flash encode does looks good, but does fail a bit in the transitions. Where there is not a lot of movement or abrupt scene changes and the video is stable, it really is very nice for the size.

Encode was simple: from our full size master (to 1920 progressive), we just re-wrapped them to same-sized large MOVs, then directly downscaled them in Flash encoder CS3 to 1280x720 at "high" (700Kbps-using On2 VP6 and Flash 8) quality. I may have bumped the audio quality up a bit, can't remember. Easy workflow, fast and good results. If you have CF material and CS3, you have all the tools you need for nice web output.

On a personal note, I just finished reading "The Language of God" by Frances S. Collins.

http://books.google.com/books?id=JcMCmBnpHGsC

It is a Christian book but one with quite a different point of view. I recommend it highly.

Looks really good! My only question is: why does Adam have a tanline?

Ha ha ha! You should have seen him with zits on his back! In fact, if you look really close you'll see a zit up near his neck we forgot to get rid of, and in the pool ...

Late Payment
 

I threw this together to test some digital blood and stuff

http://view.break.com/447217

Let me know what you think!