Local Hero is Released

Very Angry Neighbors has just released our latest short "Local Hero." It's part of a series called Fame Us. This is the third installment in the series. I did the color correction and graphics on these as well as shoot them. Andy Zilch did the wonderful editing.

One of the fun things with this short was shooting the planning scenes. We wanted the dramatic caper look of a dark room with a flood light in the center. We achieved this by just turning out all the lights and putting black foil around the ceiling fan light. For available light I thought it looked pretty damn good.

Then there was the circling camera movement. We wanted to make it look like it was shot on a Steadicam, but we didn't have access to one. So I just walked really slow. Again, it didn't look too bad for such low budget effects.

I was also happy with the end result of the TV screen replacement at the beginning and end of the short. It was a simple superimpose of the image onto the screen, but changing the blending mode allowed the glare that was existing on the TV to show through. It made it seem a lot more realistic than just a straight superimposed image.

So check it out as well as the others in the series:

Flare It Up!

Optical flares have been all the rage in the past couple years. J.J. Abrams has been a big offender in overusing them in movies like Star Trek and and Super 8. One of the original tools for creating simple flares was Knoll Light Factory from Red Giant Software. It was a plug in for After Effects that could create optical flares. Then last year, Andrew Kramer from Videocopilot.net came out with a tool called simply "Optical Flares" that was also a plug in for After Effects. It's a very robust tool that allows you to create your own custom optical flares and do some pretty dynamic things with them.

But for people like me who want to use Motion from time to time, you were out of luck...until now. Recently I stumbled upon www.motionvfx.com. It is a site dedicated to providing high quality Motion templates for purchase. They are simply fantastic, and to think they are all done in Motion is a pretty amazing feat. While I was discovering the site, I noticed that the site creator Szymon Masiak had just released mFlares for Motion. It is very similar to Optical Flares for After Effects in that you can use the presets or create your own custom flares. There are tons of options you can apply to the flares to create some amazing results. Plus it's only $89! Unfortunately I don't have a project I need it for immediately but I know I'm going to be using it soon.

Final Cut Pro X First Impressions

As an early adopter I felt it was my duty to rush and purchase Final Cut Pro X when it was released on Tuesday even though I hadn't heard anything about how it worked. Luckily it isn't technically an upgrade. It is a whole new program that can run instead of Final Cut Pro 7 (they cannot be run concurrently). Apple was not secretive in saying that this is a brand new app that was written from the ground up to be innovative and the future of it's Final Cut line. That being said, it is a baby app that cannot be taken seriously yet. It may be the future, but at present it cannot function as a serious editor.

Gripes
First off, you cannot open existing Final Cut Pro projects. There is some talk that they may introduce a conversion utility at some point but currently you cannot open an existing FCP file. So you have to build everything from scratch. Great for learning, but not great for making tweaks to an old project.

Second, none of my purchased filters or transitions work with the app. When you spend hundreds of dollars on 3rd party filters and transitions, you want them to work with your application. FXFactory Pro released an update that works with Final Cut Pro X and that is much appreciated. I am sure all those kinks will be worked out, but it is frustrating.

There are tons of other things that are missing that are supposed to come in updates. Things like multi-cam support (an essential tool when I was working on TRS), output to tape,  marker export, and EDL import export make it pretty much unusable for professional editors. But even semi-pros like me will have a tough time with the first release.

Good Stuff
OK, gripes out of the way, it is a pretty damn cool app. The look and feel of it is great. The responsiveness is fantastic. The magnetic timeline idea is interesting, although I will have to put it through its paces to see if it will really be a game changer.

My first impression was it is a total mind bend. I have been using FCP since version 1 and this is completely different. It may be close to iMove, but I never use iMove so I am not sure about that. First, you have events and projects. Events are where you store all your media (which FCPX will now copy to s single location) and Projects are the timeline (what used to be sequences). Projects and events can be stored in different locations on your computer. And each one creates it's own database of information. I am still wrapping my head around this one. I think I like it though.

The background rendering is AWESOME. I love it. I love that when you are idle, it just starts rendering your sequence. But on top f that, there is not much rendering it needs to do. I haven't tried too many footage types, but so far everything just plays. And the timeline scrubbing takes a little getting used to, but I think I am going to like it.

The only thing that I am a little mixed about is their concept of the main storyline. Instead of having any numer of video and audio tracks, you have the main storyline and everything surrounds that. In theory, this makes sense. You can't see more than one thing at a time so why should there be more than one main track? Well just in terms of assembling your footage, sometimes you don't want everything on the main track right away. But with FCPX you have to put the first item on the main track then the next item can go after it or attach above or below it. For example, it you have some title footage that you want to superimpose and you just want to drag it into the timeline. If you do that before your actual footage, it will be the main storyline and the footage can only be dragged above it. So then you have to spend a few seconds rearranging the order to make it work properly.

So this forces you to rethink HOW you assemble your movie. You have to assemble the main story first, otherwise it will take time to re-organize it later. So far I find this annoying because it is forcing me to do it their way instead of my way. But over time I may get used to it, and it may be a non-issue.

Motion Integration
The way Motion integrates is a little weird. I was used to the round-tripping they used to do where you could embed a Motion project right in the timeline. Now you have to export out your Motion project as footage and import it into FCPX. You can save out your Motion projects as FCPX effects, titles, or generators and they can be used in FCP X. You could sort of do that before, but now it is much tighter with that part of the integration. I think in the long run this will be better but I have to play with it and get used to it.

Wrap Up
This whole transition reminds me of the transition from OS 9 to OS X. Even though there had been years of OS development up until then, since it was a complete rewrite the first version (OS 10.0.0) was severely lacking in features. USB didn't even work at first. But by version 10.1, a lot had been addressed. Then 10.2 was fantastic and it just kept getting better from there. So I am confident that the same will transpire with FCPX. It may take a couple versions for it to surpass the functionality that it had before, but the groundwork has been laid for a paradigm shift in editing. I am hopping on board so that when it is ready, I will be ready with it. Plus....I don't really know any other editing software so I don't have a choice.

Lights, Camera, iPad Screen Capture

At work, we have been developing an iPad app for several months. That in itself has been exciting for me. To have something that I helped develop be available in the iTunes store is sort of a fantasy come true. In addition, we have had to come up with some marketing material for the app. One of which is a feature walkthrough of the application.

The first thing I love about this video is the intro. I created a basic animation for all of our training videos when we first launched our YouTube channel two years ago. Over the past year, I have really wanted to update it. I saw a tutorial on Videocopilot.net and decided to see if that would work with our logo. It worked wonderfully and I am very happy with the result. Then, I transitioned into a 3D camera move onto the app icon and added some intro text. I had this idea that it would be awesome if the lights went out except for on the icon, and then when the lights came back on you would be on the iPad. Then we could pull back to see the whole thing. I tried doing that effect with actual lights in Motion, but it was becoming very cumbersome. I ended up just using gradients to add some texture to the background. Then I turned off everything but the icon and saved that as an image. The purpose of that was to fade into it to give the effect of the lights turning off.

Then I took the screen capture video that I had already completed and made a camera move to zoom into the icon on the iPad. I matched the position with the still that I was using without the background. I also had to keep the still on top of the screen capture video since I zoomed into the video and it looked blurry. I added the camera move to zoom back out to full screen and I was done.

Speaking of the screen capture, that was a challenge. I had purchased a Blackmagic Intensity card years ago to capture from HDMI. I haven't ever used it though. Finally I found a use for it. With the iPad 2's screen mirroring capability, I was able to capture using that card at the 720P 30FPS setting. It still didn't fill the frame  which is weird. I was happy with the result though.

So here is the final result:

The Cat Whisper

I shot and edited a short recently for Very Angry Neighbors. This was an improved sketch with the concept by Amy Jo Steele. This was the first sketch I shot using my new Canon 60D. I have to say that although I love the quality and look, it was not easy to shoot with.

First off, we had to shoot the whole thing twice because the first time we shot it, I didn't record any sound. There is no way to monitor live sound, so you just have to trust that everything is ok. I shot a few test shots and played them back, but once we started recording the actual sketch there was no sound recorded. I have no idea what happened.

The second time we got together, I used a slightly different setup to mix the mics into the camera. This was more successful although still not optimal. I would love to hear what I am recording without having to play it back immediately after the shot.

Cutting it together was rather straight forward. The fun part was the cat paw transitions. The intro graphics were sort of a challenge. To separate out Amy Jo from the background I sent a still over to Photoshop. Photoshop used to have this great plug in called Extract. You could paint around an object and it would extract it from the background. What was nice about the filter is you could paint sections of hair and it would extract a lot of the hair detail. In Photoshop CS5 they have done away with the extract filter, saying that you can do the same thing with the magic wand and other tools. I don't feel like I get the same results which is disappointing. But I was still able to get the same effect, it is just a little rougher around the edges. Maybe there is a better way to do that effect that I am not aware of.

Here is the sketch, I hope you enjoy it:

New Final Cut Studio?

"Jaw-Dropping" was a description used by someone who has seen the next upgrade to Final Cut Pro (Final Cut Studio). There are mumblings of the next version being announced at NAB next week. Although I am always excited about new upgrades, I can't think of what would be "jaw-dropping". 3D modeling built in? No render times? A version of Motion that doesn't crash when you have more than 10 layers?

Or what about a 3D virtual editing space like in Minority Report. That would be jaw-dropping for me. But I can't seem to open my mind to new features that would change the game of non-linear editing. But I am also not the target audience. For the basic editing that I do, the current version works great. But the hard core editors probably have a long list of requests that will help them improve their workflows. But Apple is also the king of creating new features, and then inventing a problem that it solves. I fall for it every time.

Source Article: Apple Final Cut Pro Jaw-Dropping Revamp Coming Next Week?

(photo by Louis Kreusel / Flickr)

Anyone Looking to Buy a Used Camera?

I've decided to cut down on some of my equipment that has been collecting dust lately. One piece in particular is an amazing camera I bought in 2008. I've gotten some great use out of it, but lately I don't need such an amazing camera. For the shoots that I do lately I just need the basics.

So I put the camera up for auction. It is a Sony HVR-Z7U. I am also including all the additional accessories I purchased. It really is a fantastic camera that delivers a great image and is extremely versatile. It has an interchangeable lens system, which attracted me to the camera in the first place. But of course I never used it. I didn't already have lenses, and I wasn't willing to make another large investment. But not to worry because the lens that is included is fantastic.

All the details about the camera are in the auction. But don't wait too long because there isn't much time left!

You can see the auction here on eBay.

Starting My Exercises

So it's a new year and what is the first thing that we all promise ourselves in the new year: that we will exercise more. Well, I've been pretty good on the physical side, but I've been lacking on the mental side. So I'm going to try to exercise my brain a little more. I'm getting started by running through some tutorials. My favorite site that has taught me most of what I know about After Effects is Videocopilot.net. Andrew Kramer is an amazing instructor and creates useful fun tutorials that I'm always excited to try.

I started off with one of the shorter tutorials because I didn't have a lot of time. I went through the Green Smoke Text tutorial. I followed most of it, but deviated a little which is always fun. I thought maybe I could use this for the website TheNuys.com. So here is the result.

Going Retro

In our most recent Very Angry Neighbors project, I was tasked with making the video look like it was from a lost 1980's VHS video tape. Part of that was simply adding the "Bad TV" filter found in Final Cut Pro. But there was a suggestion to add a bumper at the beginning that was sort of like an 80's TV movie intro. I wasn't sure how to achieve this until I found a couple free online tutorials talking about giving your project a "Retro" look. I combined techniques from the two tutorials I found and was pretty stoked with the results. Unfortunately the group didn't feel like it fit well and we removed it from the final video. But I thought I would talk about it here.

I made a majority of the bumper from this tutorial from AETuts.com. I made some deviations from the tutorial to fit what I needed to do, but for the most part what I liked was the echo effect and the tutorial taught me a lot about that. Then I added a grid and some retro flares from this tutorial from Graymachine. The retro flares were especially fun to make. I didn't follow his instructions on creating a grid, but used that as inspiration to create my own which is really simple.

The final thing I wanted to do was add a VHS static transition into the sketch itself. That was a little tricky for me because I wanted it to look real. I almost bought a plugin from Digital Heaven called DH Retro TV which is pretty cool and would have done exactly what I wanted. But I am trying to save money right now so I had to create it myself. I found this written tutorial from REC Room which even included free downloadable static footage.  I didn't have time to do the entire tutorial but I used some static to cover up the cut and distorted the footage underneath to make it feel like a bad VHS edit. I threw in some sound effects including some actual static noise that happened in the recording of the sketch and I felt like I was done.

Here is the result.

3D Camera Tracking for 2D Video

I don't think I have been this excited for a plugin for a long time. For several years now there has been the technique of adding graphic elements into a scene. The most common element is text. So what is the big deal with putting some text into a scene? That is a pretty simple task for static shots, but shots with complex camera movements took very expensive software to accomplish (we're talking $5000 and up!). Well not any more! The Foundry has released a $250 (USD) plugin for After Effects that does 3D camera tracking and does it well! It's called CameraTracker.

This may not be necessary for every day use, but it is fantastic for achieving that effect you see a lot in commercials these days where the text looks like it is part of the scene. Here is an example of the kind of effect you can do with this plugin. I played around with a shot I already had captured. This was just a test so some of the camera settings such as blur are a little off. But this only took me a few minutes where if I had to do this using several 2D trackers it could be hours if possible at all.



Also I should note that after buying CameraTracker I found PFhoe from the Pixel Farm. PFhoe is another tracker that is a separate application and not a plugin. It does pretty much the same thing and has been around for about a year or so. It is also a cheap alternative priced at $199 for the Pro version. PFhoe does the same thing and has a very intuitive interface that makes it pretty easy to get started in camera tracking. I have to admit that I am disappointed I hadn't found this before I bought CameraTracker. PFhoe makes it much easier to export to 3D programs and to After Effects so that you can include 3D elements in your comps. To achieve this in CameraTracker it seems you have to find 3rd party scripts to export the camera data to a 3D program. Oh well, I'll just have to buy both and each will be useful for different situations.