Category: flix

I don’t have my laptop for the next few days; I feel so naked.

I’m currently editing Alan Dunkel’s music video for “The Waiting Game,” and the Hella Fresh feature film “Devious, Inc.” (A Samantha Sullivan Production directed by xuxE). Both are shot in HD on Sony XDCAM EX media.

So I’m rendering both down… initially rendering Devious on the G5 was going to take 6 days. That means I wouldn’t be able to edit this weekend; it would be ready to edit late Tuesday night. I moved it to render on my laptop, taking a paltry 3 days. So it’s sitting at home. Sad.

UStream is pretty awesome, the “youtube of streaming video.”

Most of the streams are just cute girls sitting in front of their computers chatting with their viewers. This doesn’t help me so much. I want to broadcast my movies and concerts I’ve recorded!

So, I pieced together what one needs to do, to broadcast pre-recorded video on the Mac (I’m on OS X, “Leopard”).

• start Quicktime and load up your video
• move the your video to a corner of your desktop, preferably not near your dock nor the menu bar
• install and use CamTwist to capture a part of your desktop
  • some people use CamTwist to put effects into their webcam signal
  • use the “desktop” selector and make a box around your Quicktime movie
  • use the Preview function to line it up correctly
• install SoundFlower
  • open your System Preferences and select the Sound panel
  • you should see SoundFlower there listed as a speaker selection. Pick that!
• NOW start ustream and start a broadcast
  • select CamTwist as your video source
  • select SoundFlower as your audio source

Now be careful, because all sound generated by your computer (for example the “you’ve got mail!” sound) will be in the stream! I shut down all my applications that make noise while I’m broadcasting.

When I’m broadcasting, I am at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/bu-yao-xi-shou-jian

Diane and Brian made a short commercial for a contest for “The Watchmen,” a movie based on the bestselling comic book by Alan Moore. The movie in question will be released in 2009, and the winning entry will appear in the background of the movie!

The catch: the entry has to be voted in. So we’re counting on our friends and fans to help make this a reality!

To watch and vote for our movie,

• go to http://www.youtube.com/user/watchmenmovie
• click on “Vote” in the purple area
• in the “Search for the video” box type “briandoom” (or click on “next video” until you see it)
• the name of the video is “Nostalgia by Veidt (30s ver…”
• When you see our video, click the little “thumbs up” sign

Thanks for your support!

I’m down to about 10 rendering errors on The Templetons; soon I’ll be done and then I can start sound mastering.

I’m meeting Jeromey on Saturday to do the final sound mix. I have about a day to scare up sound effects!

I’ve seen so many “travelling matte” settings it feels like Fraggle Rock. I never got that joke as a kid, which I guess is not too surprising. Uncle Travelling Matt.

gah it’s midnight!

Analysis of music video cuts:

• Watching a lot of music videos…
• then watching them again, on mute
• Then watching them again, in slow motion, with slowed sound
• Then cutting them up on all the cuts, showing the audio, to sync the measure beginnings with the cuts

Music video is all about jumpcuts. Watch the new Vanessa Hudgens video which is very fast…

• when are the cuts on the beat?
• what instrument are the cuts following?
• when are the cuts at the beginning of the phrase?
• cut to the singer at key moments

To really properly analyze one of these jumpy videos, I would really:

• cut all the clips apart
• sort them all by setup/location – this will show how short the takes need to be, and in the case of pop videos, what kind of motions are most effective for the actor/singer
• back on the audio track, replace all cuts with a frame of white, and then blank black. This will call attention to where in the music the cuts are

When I was writing/directing/editing (at the same time) the 15 second commercial we did for the Watchmen contest, I realized I’d never tried to convey something in only 15 seconds before.

15 seconds is barely enough time to establish a rhythm, and not really enough to establish more than one rhythm. Especially for a product promotion, if you include an establishing shot and the product shot, you basically have only 10 seconds left at the most.

In a 15 second spot, the audience uses the duration of the establishing shot to acclimate themselves to the new setting of your film. So shorten that or drop that at the risk of losing the attention of the audience!

Can’t do too many jump cuts in a 15 second spot– there will be barely any cooldown period of slow shots afterwards, and there isn’t enough time to make the audience care about the subject to endure jumpcuts, nor to refer to previously-established images.

Maybe I’ll make some more of these.

In between rendering the “1923 remix” of The Artist and continuing work on The Templetons, Diane and I shot a quick entry for a contest related to the upcoming movie adaptation of The Watchmen, due for release summer 2009.

One of the characters, Adrian Veidt, “the smartest man in the world”, was once a costumed hero but now is a captain of enterprise. He has many businesses, and one of them is a scent called “Nostalgia.” The producers of The Watchmen provided a number of assets (including green-screened product shots) for a bunch of different products, including shoes, the Veidt airline, and the Nostalgia perfume. The contestants post onto YouTube and a few entries will appear in the background of the movie.

So here’s ours. Be sure to vote for us here on their YouTube channel between June 2nd and June 20th!

15 second version:

30 second version:

Guh.

I have spent 25 of the last 30 hours editing two new shorts I’m turning in to Scary Cow Round 5, to be screened June 1st at at 3pm at the Victoria Theater. Tickets are available for sale here for $5.

A couple notes on the headaches:

Workflow for Sagar:

• Shot on HD DV
• imported and edited into Final Cut Pro (FCS2) (rendering up to 20 minutes for a single section, an hour for the whole thing)
• written out to Quicktime 720p30 intermediate with all the “hints” for the renderer(2 hours per render!)
• sent to Compressor to convert to MPEG-2 (another 90+ minutes)
• burned to DVD-R with DVD Studio Pro (FCS2) (another… while… to compress. Burning was fast though!)

The painful part was for about 6 hours there I was getting video that was ever so slightly slower than the audio… by the end it was over a full second late. This is BAD mmmkay… The solution was to go to this QuickTime intermediate, which has hints in it (there’s a dialog that talks about “markers”) to keep the audio in sync with the video.

Workflow for The Templetons trailer:

• Shot on miniDV
• imported and edited into Final Cut Pro (FCS2) (rendering typically 5 minutes tops)
• written out to Quicktime intermediate with all the “hints” for the renderer (10 minutes per render)
• sent to Compressor to convert to MPEG-2 (~20 minutes)
• burned to DVD-R with DVD Studio Pro (FCS2) (Like 10 minutes tops)

These were projects that were roughly the same length! Ghastly. I’m going to need a faster system if I’m going to be editing any more HD.

The thing that made the Templetons render so slowly (for miniDV) is the crazy effects I came up with to make them look like drawn comic book characters. Originally I had a workflow that included filters in Shake, and also using Adobe Bridge as a renderer with Illustrator… that would have sucked, because I would have had to separate every single clip out of the project for rendering, and re-assembled them afterwards…

Anyway, now it’s entirely in Final Cut Pro, but still uses a whole pile of video filters, typically 4 layers of video for a simple shot with around a dozen filters.

More notes, buncha Ken Stone:

• Cutting To The Beat with FCP
• Using Compressor to encode MPEG-2 Files
• Compression and Chapter Markers

I’ve been running into a lot of people in independent film who are so incompetent that they are completely oblivious to their own incompetence.

There are a bunch of things a director can say that make the editing process for a 4 minute short take hundreds of hours. Unfortunately this is not a hypothetical situation.

“I know you said you needed us to use a slate, but the shoot was really crazy and we just didn’t have time”

“We didn’t (ever) white balance because there wasn’t enough time.”

“I couldn’t make a shotlist because I don’t have any editing equipment”

“I can’t tell you which is a good take because I have to see it and I don’t have any editing equipment”

“I couldn’t make a storyboard because I need jump cuts and they are too fast to write down”

“I know the actor’s face is completely dark there, but you can fix it in post and add some more colors”

“There’s a hair on the lens in this shot, but you can fix it in post”

“I know you said to get a tape cleaner last time because the camera wouldn’t sample our footage, but I heard it’s bad for the heads to run a cleaner on them”

“Just make this shot we filmed at sundown less grainy, ok?”

One shot had the actress standing against the crashing waves of the ocean. Her direction was to turn and consider the ocean, and then walk into the waves. The cameraman’s direction was to execute a slow and constant zoom. What he did instead was zoom in about 20%, wait 2 seconds, zoom another 10%, wait another second, and then zoom the rest of the way. The waves are in the shot the entire time. DIRECTOR: “Can you change the time so the zoom is constant?”

This last weekend I shot a short called “Cursed” with writer/director Digant Kasundra. I was “DP,” although given the guerrilla nature of the shoot I was basically just running the camera and setting up some minimal lighting.

All things considered, the shoot went very well. We started at 5pm and ran until 2am, Saturday and Sunday. Despite the late hour, the actors did not lose energy, which was very impressive.

The story is about 3 slackers who think an avenging force (a stalker) is coming to kill them, because of all the rotten things they’ve done in the recent past. It’s a very funny script…

Three roommates review the foul sins of their lives while investigating the root cause of mysterious events on an otherwise peaceful night

The summary doesn’t really do justice to the writing, which is completely hysterical.

Another note was we used a SAG actress on the shoot. She was very good, and the forms weren’t so bad. We were at “Student,” so I still have to see the forms for the next level up, “Ultra-low budget.”