10 posts tagged “post production”
Sonnyboo's website has free downloads of standard symbols like festival laurels, DVD symbol, FBI warnings, film ratings, etc. That's where I got my festival laurels for my Tooth Fairy website, but I had to process it to make it transparent.
Looks like the interlacing every 4 frames is probably a "3:2 pulldown" problem. Apparently, when you shoot in 24p, you can't avoid interpolation (3:2 pulldown). Basically, your program adds made-up frames to your footage. I thought that because I started from scratch by loading the 24p footage into my editing program in 24 mode, that it would go from native 24 in the camera to 24 in Premier and there would be no interpolation. But what happens is that to display it on just about anything other than in a traditional theatre, the footage needs to be converted. For the computer screen, it's from 24 to 30 frames/sec. Even if I put it on a DVD and show it on a TV, it still needs to be converted.
The bottom line is that it's a pain to process 24 frames/sec. Filmmakers do it because it supposedly looks more film-like while 30 fps looks more like video. Basically, you're reducing the quality of your video to make it look more like the old technology the audience is used to seeing in theatres. TV typically uses 30 fps so the audience is used to associating it with TV shows. Also, if you're ever going to film out and convert your video to film, 24p will match the rate of film. I went out of my way to get cameras that shoot in 24p... but despite what the experts say, I'm beginning to have doubts about the format. Maybe a little experimentation is in order...
Anyway, still trying to figure out what to do about the interlacing problem. It goes all the way back to my original capture in Premier but not for the entire capture, only sections of it. I may need to recapture and do those sections over again... the real bummer is that I rotoscoped some of those sections (not realizing what I was seeing and chalking it up to Premier's on-the-fly rendering which they warn you about)... so many hours wasted on 24p.
If anyone has advice on this, let me know.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Arggg. I'm plagued with technical problems. There's an awesome color scheme that I cooked up that makes Tooth Fairy dreamy and nostalgic. I call it colorize-NormanRockwell. But it looked terrible when rendered so I gave it up a while back. Then I discovered that After Effects defaults to 8-bit color depth. So I tried again in 16-bit mode. Much better but still unacceptable. I tried again in 32-bit mode. Even better but I caught hints of something maybe not quite right.
So I brought in the big guns: Aaron. I may have mentioned that he's a genius but I don't think I've mentioned that he has super-human powers. He can SEE things.
He saw a few things, the most major of them being that there are clips that have what looks to him like an interlacing problem. I couldn't see it so we looked at it frame by frame. Sure enough, once every 4 frames, there's a frame that has lines where there shouldn't be. We backtracked to footage before the color scheme and it's still there so it wasn't the color processing. So what's causing it?!
Ug. This is the not-so-fun part of filmmaking. :-(
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Yet another painful lesson. 1) Never color correct in 8-bit mode (which is the default for After Effects). Go to File > project settings and choose either 16-bit or 32-bit. 2) Never color correct in your editing program (such as Premier or Final Cut) because it will compress your footage; CC in After Effects.
Doing these two things will keep you from pulling out your hair trying to figure out why your beautiful footage now looks like crap.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Okay, that was easy to learn! Here's what I did to stabilize my footage in After Effects CS3 (I don't think this is specific to CS3):
- in the upper right corner, change the "workspace" option to "motion tracking"
- double click your sequence in the timeline so that you get it in the layer panel
- click “stabilize motion” in the tracker controls panel
- pick a high contrast feature in your frame to use as a reference and enclose it in the inner box of “track point 1” that is now on your screen. (I used a dark nail in a light piece of wood) Resize the boxes as needed by dragging the corners. The outer box is the search region which the program will use in future frames to look for your selected feature. The more your footage shakes, the larger the search region should be.
- click “options” in the tracker controls panel. Select your channel depending on how your feature point stands out from the surrounding pixels: RGB (color), luminance or saturation. (I picked RGB since my feature stood out because of its color) Click OK
- click on the "analyze forward" arrow on the tracker controls
- after it's done analyzing, save
- make sure track type is set to "stabilize" and that your "motion source" is the clip you want. Then press "apply".
- an options box will pop up with the default of X & Y. Click OK
That's it! Mine stabilized beautifully. Yay!
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
This is one of the darkest frames in the movie (haven‘t color corrected the movie yet). The kid is sneaking out of his room at night (first photo).
Finally, Aaron, who’s also never used Photoshop, suggested I use a noise filter. Aaron’s a genius. Under filter/noise/reduce noise, there are several slider controls. I tried maximizing “strength”, “preserve details” and “sharpen details”. But that didn’t help. He suggested cranking down “preserve details” because there’s a tradeoff between getting rid of noise and keeping details. So we maximized strength, lowered “preserve details“, raised “reduce color noise” and lowered “sharpen details.” I was surprised at how well it worked (last photo).
It still needs polishing -- Aaron suggested layering the door and using “median” noise filter since that averages out the pixels and smoothes it so it should work pretty well for large, even surfaces like a door.
I’ve gotten attached to this picture now and hope I can turn it into a good postcard. It’s starting to look like a possibility.
I’m talking 3G memory, 750G hard drives, duo-type processor, DVD burner, LightScribe and upgraded graphics card.
The best way to get the most bang for your buck on a computer is to build it yourself. But I know when I’m in over my head so I turned to a computer expert who helped me bring it all together. Thanks Aaron!
Here’s my configuration (black and silver boxes entitled "Geek" in lower left of picture):
HP Pavilion a6000n computer – Fry’s has them for $550 + a $50 rebate. It has a 2.2GHz Athlon (duo-type) processor with 1G memory (expandable to 4G), 250G HD, Vista Premium, DVD burner and LightScribe to burn pretty pictures onto your DVDs.
DDR2 2G internal desktop memory – 800MHz – Fry’s has them for about $100 (buy the memory that’s one piece for each G rather than the 2 memory cards that add up to 1G – remember, you have 4 memory slots total. Also, they’re cheaper if you buy a 2G package rather than each G separately.)
500G external HD – Buy.com has one on sale right now for about $100 after rebate (they also have a 320G HD on sale now for $70). There’s a good chance you don’t even need this since the computer above has a 250G HD. That will hold many, many short films. The longer you wait for the extra HD, the cheaper it’ll get. You can also get an internal drive for faster results. It should cost about the same or cheaper.
EVGA GeForce 7600GS graphics card with its own dedicated memory of 256MB/128 bit – it cost me $100 (why is everything $99.99?) on sale at Fry’s. You can spend more on a graphics card than on a computer. If you ask a gamer, he’ll tell you to buy the most expensive graphics card you can afford. But if you’re using Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects, I’ve read that these programs don’t utilize the high-end graphics card capabilities. So this card works great for me. If this card is no longer on sale, I suggest getting whichever GeForce card is about $100 (not super low end, not super high end) on the day you shop.
Total: $800 (or $700 without the additional HD).
This package does not include a display. I had a display (big black rectangle entitled, "Geek" in picture) that I like so I use that. But if you need a new display, Buy.com has 19-20” LCD displays for about $200. You’ll probably want to get a DVI cable so you can send your work purely digitally to your screen without analog conversions (for better quality pictures). Note: if you don’t get the graphics card, you won’t have anywhere to plug in your DVI cable so don’t bother with DVI in that case.
Also, remember that Final Cut is made by Apple and it only works with Macs and will not work with this or any other PC. Adobe products (Studio, Premier, After Effects) work fine with PCs. The only real downside I've found with the HP is that it has a loud fan but it doesn't bother me.
I’ll put up instructions on how to put it all into your computer in the next few days. Stay tuned!
I learned that it's a great idea to record off-camera crying separately from the rest of the dialogue just as you would any sound effect.
During the shoot of Psychopath, we recorded the mom character, Valerie Weaks, crying along with the dialogue. But during the sound re-recording, I recorded her crying separately. Later in post, I realized that crying, moaning, and other off-camera actor sounds are better separate because you can position the sound exactly where you want it. You can also control the volume of the crying separate from the rest of the dialogue, implying that someone is crying elsewhere in the house even if all the actors are clustered around the mic. When I think of it as a sound effect, it seems obvious. But my brain had classified human sounds as part of dialogue even if it was off-camera. That's lesson #2,067 for me, all from shooting a 2-minute film.
I performed my first rotoscoping in After Effects.
Now you see it.
Now you don’t.
I tried getting rid of the blood by desaturating the red but that didn't work so well. It's amazing how much red is in this frame -- the red in her hair, the red barrette and even some red in her skin tone. So I ended up painting the blood out frame by frame. Since my old Wacom tablet didn't feel like working with my new computer, I used my mouse. Left-handed, of course. :-)
I’m on my way to becoming a wizard!
Okay, that’s a lie.
I’m on my way to becoming an apprentice, though.
This is for the cool DV rebels at the Rebel Cafe (http://rebelsguide.com/forum/index.php) who are helping me out with some effects. Thanks guys!
