1st Project in 7 years! (GRABS)

Kevin Briggs

Kevin Briggs

Well-known member
I finally found some time to finish this music video. I still have some tweaking to do, but it's 95% complete.

http://www.anitabath.com/gallery/album153/Codie_001


I got my DVX in the mail 1 day before I shot this music video. I planned out the shoot 1 week prior and edited the final piece in 2 weeks. My only equipment was the camera a mediocre tripod and a steady hand. Used the light God provided. I made quite a few mistakes because of my inexperience with the camera. Ie: No manual white balance set through the entire shoot...etc. I was fiddling with the camera right before the scenes to get close to the look I needed. I think I even switched between 24pa and 60i a couple of times. Editing has been done solely in Adobe Premiere 6.5. I am doing the second edit in Pro 1.5. I've learned quite a bit on these forums since I shot this piece, so from here on in my stuff will be much better. Please no one line replies... ie: "Damn that girl is hot". I am looking for constructive criticism. These are some of the color correction grabs. Let me know what you think. All of my color correction and the re-edit is being done on Pro 1.5. I should have the finished edit done in a week and I'll post it then. Keep in mind I hadn't touched a camera since high school 7 years ago.

Thanks -Kevin

B/W filter and Gamma correction (Pike place Market Seattle)
contrast.jpg


A little color correction to make it look warmer, and got some great natural light. (SeaTac Airport)
airport2.jpg


Shot early morning, I wish it were more crisp w/o the noise. (Set the bed up in a friends living room for the shot)
bed.jpg




No correction, just +3,000% speed. I had her hold still for 10 minutes while people passed by in downtown Seattle.
city2.jpg


"Ditto"
city.jpg


(Original) Trying to make these next 2 images look kind of like a dream. Is this too extreme? The sun was playing off the trees behind them perfect. (Seattle Science Center)
needle.jpg


This scene was color corrected to the hilt.
needle2.jpg


(Original) Love the angle in this shot. Oh yeah I had a polarize filter i got with the camera on here to see the water better.
Saturated1.jpg


Color corrected. (Pacific Ocean)
Saturated.jpg


main.php
 
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good color correction the first is the best one. um just get a better editing system premire i noticed leaves alot of digital artifacts.
 
first looks great.
the colour correctio really helped the bad whitebalance (or was it preset?).
i would love to see a clip of this 3.000% speedup.
 
i like the images, but in my opinion the saturation is too high. I love the natural light in the the trees. I would do less CC an try to incortprate the natural you so beautifully capltured.
 
First of all, thank you. I've been homesick lately and seeing photos of downtown Seattle brought back alot of memories (I use to live at the corner of 2nd and Pike). Now onto business; The grabs look good. Especially since you only used natural light. I like the fastmotion effect alot. Haven't tried that yet. Care to share how it was done? Is it just sped up 3000% in Premiere? It looks to clean to be done that way. The grab of her in bed looks grainy (did you boost the gain?). Not much you can do about that with CC.

Finally, and most importantly, your colors are all over the place. Maybe create a theme color and use it in most of your shots. It's ok to have a dream sequence that's colored different from the rest of the scenes, or one that's b/w, but when some of your shots are blue, some are skin toned, and some are yellow, it could look like a mistake, not a style choice. I still have a hard time matching colors on all my shots so I'm unable to give any advice on how to technically do this, accept for good old trial and error.

The shots do look good with great composition. Can't wait to see some video. Good luck and say Hello to Seattle for me!
PK
 
Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the feedback.

spidey said:
good color correction the first is the best one. um just get a better editing system premire i noticed leaves alot of digital artifacts.
Click to expand...

What system do you suggest? I'm open to any ideas. I haven’t purchased my NLE system yet. From the research I have done I think it's between Avid, and FCP on a Mac for stability. I read somewhere that the image processing/compression algorithm for Avid was a lot cleaner than the widows based one premiere uses. I also heard that Avid loses more image quality faster over time from generation loss than the more stable less quality windows image. I was always under the impression that digital video didn't lose quality from generation loss. I was kind of bummed when I found out it did. Has anyone else heard these things before? I'd hate to be giving miss-information. The thing I like about Premier is all the other software that adobe makes that is compatible....ie: After Effects, Photoshop etc.

-Kevin
 
Steve_VanHaaster said:
i like the images, but in my opinion the saturation is too high. I love the natural light in the the trees. I would do less CC an try to incortprate the natural you so beautifully capltured.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the compliment Steve. I agree the saturation is really high. I wanted to make the images unrealistically saturated to tell the viewer that this is a memory she is having in her dream. The whole video is a waking dream, but there are two sides to it. The song is about the classic boy/girl break up. The really vivid saturated shots are her memories of the "good times", and the super dark B&W lowered Gamma shot at the beginning is going to be the look of the rest of the video. All the scenes you see her dressed in black still need to have the B&W and the Gamma corrected. The goal was to make it look like she was reliving the good memories right before she throws herself off a building...don't worry she doesn't die...it's all a dream.

-Kevin
 
Seattle Says Hello...

Seattle Says Hello...

isara said:
First of all, thank you. I've been homesick lately and seeing photos of downtown Seattle brought back alot of memories (I use to live at the corner of 2nd and Pike). Now onto business; The grabs look good. Especially since you only used natural light. I like the fastmotion effect alot. Haven't tried that yet. Care to share how it was done? Is it just sped up 3000% in Premiere? It looks to clean to be done that way. The grab of her in bed looks grainy (did you boost the gain?). Not much you can do about that with CC.

Finally, and most importantly, your colors are all over the place. Maybe create a theme color and use it in most of your shots. It's ok to have a dream sequence that's colored different from the rest of the scenes, or one that's b/w, but when some of your shots are blue, some are skin toned, and some are yellow, it could look like a mistake, not a style choice. I still have a hard time matching colors on all my shots so I'm unable to give any advice on how to technically do this, accept for good old trial and error.

The shots do look good with great composition. Can't wait to see some video. Good luck and say Hello to Seattle for me!
PK
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. In premiere if you right click on a clip in the timeline there is an option for: time/duration. In this window I just changed 100% speed to 3000%. The goal in the video was to make it look like she was alone in the world with all the people moving by her at light speed with her unaffected.

For the grab in bed I really don't know what I did. :huh: It was the first shot of the day, and I got the camera in the mail the day before. I had no time to learn how to use it. I'm pretty sure I shot in 24pa though. Knowing what I know now mainly from this forum If I can help it I never want to adjust the gain because of all the noise it brings. I would rather have bad lighting.

I agree about the colors. That was my biggest problem. I never set the white balance, so I am trying to create some color flow in post. I tried applying the exact same CC from the ocean clip to the park clip, but each scene reacts totally different and the color was way off. Just to get these clips the way you see them took about 1 hour each in tweaking.

I will post the finished video as soon as it's done.

Seattle misses you,

-Kevin
 
i use final cut photoshop and after effects. premire is just unstable and like a unfinished and bad clone of NLE systems i say FCP vegas or Avid.
 
Love the first still (would love to see some actual video!)

On the first still you say "B/W filter..", I presume that's a post treatment? My apologies if I sound dense, but I'm just wondering if there was such a thing as an actual lens filter that achieved the B/W look as I'd really like to shoot some black & white stuff with my 100A.

Thanks for the shots.

*I'm in Seattle too, perhaps we'll connect up sometime (Ballard is my neighborhood)

~Shawn
 
spidey said:
i use final cut photoshop and after effects. premire is just unstable and like a unfinished and bad clone of NLE systems i say FCP vegas or Avid.
Click to expand...

LoL....tons of people use Premiere and get no artifacts. Changing your NLE is not going to get rid of these artifacts.
 
ok, I should have done my homework first (there's a standard option in Vegas for achieving the B/W look, and also with the Magic Bullet plugin that came with my DVX, as well as additional contrast and brightness settings to fine tune). Thanks, and my apologies for not doing my homework first, bad Shawn! ;-)
 
You'll need an editing app that supports 24p

You'll need an editing app that supports 24p

You probably captured ur footages using prem 6.5
Some of ur frames appear interlaced because of that tool... When i started off with DVX i used premiere 6.5 for editing which messed up about 3 frames for every 7 or so frames. This happens because 6.5 does not support 2:3 pull down.

So Barry Green suggested Vegas or Prem Pro. Vegas works great for me.

Anyway coming back to ur frames. My favorites are 1st and 3rd.

Can u post the uncorrected.. vanilla frame of the 1st and 3rd??? I'd like to see how they appear. I'm trying to get a similar look like the 3rd for a shot i'm working on.

Overall... everything is good except couple of overly done colors.
 
premire just suck to me. it render time can take way to long. magic bullet cool you got it. but magicbullet plus premire = ultra long render time. vegas and FCP!!!!
 
Hey Kevin-

You have some very nice looks going on there. As previously mentioned, you might want to narrow down your 'look' to fine tune it to a general theme. Though you may already know this...it seems you are in the stage of developing the color aesthetic of your project.

As for my tastes, I love over-saturated shots. I love 9 for example, the last one. I love how the greens and the blues just pop. However, The shots with the trees for a backdrop (numbers 6/7), the uncolor-corrected grab is much more appealing to me. As Steve mentioned, I don't think you want to color correct that too much. The natural gig seems to work really well in that shot.

Rick
 
givemefood said:
You probably captured ur footages using prem 6.5
Some of ur frames appear interlaced because of that tool... When i started off with DVX i used premiere 6.5 for editing which messed up about 3 frames for every 7 or so frames. This happens because 6.5 does not support 2:3 pull down.

So Barry Green suggested Vegas or Prem Pro. Vegas works great for me.
Click to expand...

Wow, thanks a lot. I did use 6.5 for the original capture. I was pretty sure I recorded everything progressive, so this would explain my problem exactly! :thumbsup: I have Pro 1.5 now. I guess I'm going to have to batch capture all my footage again. Oh boy I can't wait. Initially I captured over 140 different segments. It should be 1/4 that now though. Hey gluttony (givemefood) can you briefly explain or post a link about 2:3 pulldown for myself and the other viewers that see this and might be having the same problem?

givemefood said:
Anyway coming back to ur frames. My favorites are 1st and 3rd.

Can u post the uncorrected.. vanilla frame of the 1st and 3rd??? I'd like to see how they appear. I'm trying to get a similar look like the 3rd for a shot i'm working on.

Overall... everything is good except couple of overly done colors.
Click to expand...

No problem. There is no need to post the 3rd grab because what you see is the original image. The shot was done early morning around 7:00 AM with only a little natural light coming in through 1 window 5 feet away in the corner and a sliding glass door on the other side. The window was facing north and the natural light was diffused by the existing horizontal blinds opened partially. You'll have to just mess around with the in camera options and do some tests. I'm pretty sure it was shot in 24pa mode. An hour later the light was totally different, so it just takes time to get what you want.

I really don't know exactly what settings on the camera I used. Under scene file I was messing around with the color temp, gama level and possibly nuetral desity, but I'm not sure Keep in mind also that these grabs were converted to .jpg in photoshop 6.0 and gained a very small amout of noise in the process.

bed2.jpg


Here are two shots showing the light sources:

wide1.jpg


wide2.jpg


Ok here is the original of grab #1. It was in a dark ally with light coming from the south and above creating the shadows on her face. I really dislike the original because it makes her look like rudolf.

The CC grab #1 had a Black and White filter and raised the gain from 10 to 18.
contrast1.jpg


Here is the alley. The clip was shot on the inside of the arched entrance you see half way on the right.

pike.jpg
 
Finally got the video done.

Finally got the video done.

I finally got the video re-edited and I'm satisfied with how it looks. The URL is on the first post at the top. It was for HP/Shockwave Music video contest. No one had access to the bands, so we had to be creative. I didn't win anything, but it was a good learning experience. I am going to change a few things before I put it into my reel. The reworked version is going to have a better storyline and a more convincing suicide scene.

-Kevin
 
That was really nice Kevin. You had some good shots in there. The b&w footage looked the best. Not sure why. Maybe it fit better with the tone of the song. Maybe if you had another scene that used green-screen, the suicide stuff wouldn't jump out as much. Make some of the other shots more unreal/surreal. Not sure.

The photo effect used in the airport was done very well. Good job.

The alley you used near Pike Place Market is a great location. I love the wall with all the posters on it. Why didn't you use that too? Is it still there?

Good luck and congratulations on finishing your project. It's really good stuff.
-pk
 
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