Made a commercial...now I need help.

T

ThinkFeelPictures

Member
I need some guidance with a commercial I have shot. I have scoured the forums, but I have a specific example. I made a commercial for a medical marijuana doctor's office. It was shot dvx100b, 24p, squeeze. The rest of the camera settings were unchanged from factory settings. I edited it with FCP 6.0.

One big issue is the company graphics at the beginning and end of the commercial. It just looked really bad in DV compression. To help alleviate this issue I set the sequence compression to none. I exported it at 1280x720 h.264. The quicktime looks fine when played on my computer. When the video is played on my website it looks bad in firefox, but good in safari. When played in youtube the graphic looks bad until the HD button is pushed. And it looks fine in vimeo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWOF3gNjse8
http://www.vimeo.com/5659546
http://www.tfpictures.com/

Another problem that I had with this commercial and have a lot is with the noise in the image. I can only assume it is from the lack of quality lighting. But I am messing with my camera now and I get the same noise all the time. I am trying to learn all the features more in depth. I just feel like I see other people's DVX footage that looks so much better than mine (even besides the noise). But I am assuming that people will guide me back to the fact that it's the shooter and not the camera where these problems stem from.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave Meador
 
the ad looks fine to me apart from it being underexposed... the graphics look fine on vimeo as u said. just took a quick look (bad headache at the moment). to battle noise in the image...light well...increase detail coring to about +6 and lowerr ur master ped to at least -6. I;d try to look on the ad better...but maybe later when this headache goes. bedtime. later.
 
ThinkFeelPictures said:
I need some guidance with a commercial I have shot. I have scoured the forums, but I have a specific example.

Another problem that I had with this commercial and have a lot is with the noise in the image. I can only assume it is from the lack of quality lighting. But I am messing with my camera now and I get the same noise all the time.
Click to expand...


From looking at the several versions of clips, I 'see' them as being almost equivalent in all cases relative to the 'graphics', and they look ok to me.

On the topic of 'noise'. I don't see 'excessive' noise in the well lit segments. However, a number of shots had pretty much no/low light, and as such, 'noise' will be more observable in the dark areas of the image.

If you see 'noise' in all images, check the gain setting and it should at 0 dB gain.
 
Hey man,

OK, I looked at all of them and I see what you described, BUT....
1. You're are indeed underlit, but not by all that much. Good shot balance by the way.

2. The "graphics thing" - yes, on YouTube at low rez it totally pixeled out and looks bad. Everywhere else it looks good.
It looks like it is a pretty bare bones resterized graphic or something similar. Very basic primary colors and shapes etc...Now I'd point to YouTube as the problem. I don't have any idea what they are doing to the videos on their backend, but I frequently get weird and unpredictable glitches from them too on generated graphics. Perhaps learning some sort of clever optical filter effect application over your graphics will not trigger their conversion software so negatively. Trial and error there.

~DPS
 
Thanks for the responses, I appreciate it!

I don't remember what the gain was set at, but I almost always keep it at L (and now I have M and H at 0 just in case it gets switched). And I am going to mess with the coring and master ped to get some better results.

Yeah I think for my next project I will have a designated DP, this was kind of a free for all.

I might even try to get better results on youtube with just the graphic.

-Dave
 
With all due respect to your vocal talent, I would have gone with a more mature VO. That being said, I think you were wise to use a female for anything health related as they are the primary buyers in the world of health care. Good commercial.
 
Thanks.

Yeah we struggled to find talent because of the subject matter and the lack of compensation. Next time I will definitely get someone that does VO professionally.

And as far as my video noise goes I downloaded the Neat Video demo plug-in for FCP and I am going to give that a shot. I've been searching the posts, and other people seem to really like it. If I like it I might get the pro version.
 
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