4th of July Weekend
Just to reiterate, I'm only updating this blog on weekdays during my downtime at work, so as to not take away from time I could be spending on "Livelihood".
On Friday evening I helped out Brock Fanning with some post production work on his short film, "Bullet Clowns". Nikc Miller and I acted in this film, and it was fun to see us ham it up in the early cut. We might very well be the two best actors in Baltimore.... or not.
Brock, always the considerate gentleman, brought over dinner, and we sat around and ate and talked music for a while (he's an amazing classical/jazz guitarist). After dinner I gave him a brief primer on After Effects, and then we sat down and brightened, darkened, and tinted various shots from his film.
Brock left at about 9PM, after which I spent about an hour working on "Livelihood".
Other "distractions" this weekend:
-- Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad practice with Nikc on Saturday night. Our CD release party is this Saturday at the Patterson Bowling Alley (come see us - free Pabst Blue Ribbon!), and it seems like the set we're playing is going to be pretty solid (a set which includes my solo rendition of the "Facts of Life" theme song, an overly-dramatic version of "Golden Slumbers", and a death-metal song about a killer unicorn). My drumming is slowly getting better, and at this rate, I might actually not suck in a few months!
-- A late birthday dinner with Dad, Julia, Heather, and Brendan on Sunday evening at John Steven's in Fell's Point.
-- Finally getting to see "Land of the Dead" with Tracey on Sunday afternoon.
-- Fireworks and a cookout with Tracey and her friend Tracey Sunday evening.
I also bought a new editing chair after seeing "Land of the Dead" on Sunday. I stopped into Staples with Tracey, and saw a $200 chair on clearance for $60. My neck and elbows had been hurting lately from sitting too long in the worn out chair I'd been using (which was purchased at Maryland State Surplus about three years ago for $15). I'd been looking for one with padded armrests for a while, but they were always too expensive. Not only does this one have nice padded armrests, but it also has a lumbar support design, and all sorts of fancy adjustment options. Plus, it's dark gray, and it looks vaguely like a chair you'd find on the bridge of a Starfleet ship.
--
I got a lot done this weekend, in spite of the holiday activities. I managed to complete the color correction and special fx work on "Corporate Zombie". Most of the work went pretty smoothly, but there were a few hangups that really slowed me down:
1. There is a scene (scene 10) where the main character's head gets punched off, and he's crawling on the grass looking for it while the other two characters in the scene are yelling at each other. I had originally intended to green-screen this, but realized before shooting the scene that the grass would be too close to the color of the greenscreen fabric, and thus would also key out. So, we just had him crawl around without anything over his head; I assumed that I could key out the back of his black head fairly easily with a luma (brightness) key. This turned out to be an incorrect assumption. In the end, I had to go frame-by-frame and rotoscope out his head, which was extremely tedious.
2. The next scene consisted of some night shots of the main character sneaking back to the house. We actually shot this at night, and as a result, the shots were pretty grainy and slightly underexposed. So I spent a lot of time trying to boost the brightness and clean up the grain without losing any detail in the shots. I've since discovered that given our limited lighting package (i.e., not having huge floods like they do in Hollywood) it is much easier to shoot an outdoor night scene during the day and then make it look like night than it is to actually shoot the scene at night.
3. In the final scene, there was a wide shot of one of the main characters that just looked like crap, mostly because of bad lighting. During editing, I used this shot instead of a better-lit closeup because the camera was on the right side of "the line of action", while in the closeup the camera was on the wrong side. After trying for at least an hour to make the shot look decent, I finally went back to the original edit and tried the closeup again. And, even though it is technically incorrect, it looked fine. So, I just dumped the wide shot and used the closeup.
4. In one of the previous entries, I mentioned some shots in "Rock Zombie" where the background was massively overexposed. As I said, I managed to edit out all but one of them, but the remaining shot could not be taken out and was going to have to be keyed or rotoscoped so that the background could be replaced with some non overexposed background. I went out on Sunday at about 3PM and shot the background, which was basically the parking area in "downtown" Hamilton as seen from the doorway of The Top Floor. After shooting this at various exposures, I went home and began the work of keying out the shot. Unfortunately, all attempts to key out the bright white background also removed parts of one of the actors' foreheads, which was also overexposed. So, once again, I had to go frame-by-frame and rotoscope out the two actors in the shot. This took about three hours, and was extremely frustrating work. But, at least now it looks good.
All of this is currently rendering on my PC at home (as it has been all night). Hopefully it will all look good, and "Corporate Zombie" will be complete. Unfortunately, one of the main problems with "After Effects" is that you can only preview a small amount of your footage in real-time. It basically renders the footage to RAM, so the more RAM you have, the longer your real-time renders will be. I have 1GB of RAM, and can usually get about 10 seconds of full-quality video to play in real-time. There are two problems with this:
1. I can usually only see two or three shot sequences in real-time, depending on the length of the shots. This gets to be a problem when color correcting, because there will often be more than two or three different shots in a row, which makes it hard to match everything up. Even though I can toggle between still frames of each shot, for some reason this sometimes isn't enough; still frames from three or four shots might look great in sequence, but then when the shots play in real-time, something jumps out that just doesn't look right.
I also have the option of rendering to RAM in draft mode, but this reduces the quality by about 1/2, obscuring a lot of the fine details, and making it fairly unreliable (especially considering that this will be shown on a big screen, so that every little detail, and every little mistake, will be much bigger and much more more obvious than it would be on a small TV).
2. It takes just as long to render something to RAM as it does to render it to the hard drive (about 1 hour per minute of video). So it is often completely counterproductive to sit there waiting while a sequence renders to RAM. A lot of times I just get it looking good with single-frame or draft-quality previews, continue on with my work, and then let it render overnight and hope it looks good. Often it doesn't, so I have to make note of what looks bad, go in and fix it, and then render it out again. On complex shots, I often go through three or four renders before it finally looks right.
So, "Corporate Zombie" might or might not be done. If it is, I'll start up on "Mother In-Law Zombie" tonight!
Ryan
On Friday evening I helped out Brock Fanning with some post production work on his short film, "Bullet Clowns". Nikc Miller and I acted in this film, and it was fun to see us ham it up in the early cut. We might very well be the two best actors in Baltimore.... or not.
Brock, always the considerate gentleman, brought over dinner, and we sat around and ate and talked music for a while (he's an amazing classical/jazz guitarist). After dinner I gave him a brief primer on After Effects, and then we sat down and brightened, darkened, and tinted various shots from his film.
Brock left at about 9PM, after which I spent about an hour working on "Livelihood".
Other "distractions" this weekend:
-- Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad practice with Nikc on Saturday night. Our CD release party is this Saturday at the Patterson Bowling Alley (come see us - free Pabst Blue Ribbon!), and it seems like the set we're playing is going to be pretty solid (a set which includes my solo rendition of the "Facts of Life" theme song, an overly-dramatic version of "Golden Slumbers", and a death-metal song about a killer unicorn). My drumming is slowly getting better, and at this rate, I might actually not suck in a few months!
-- A late birthday dinner with Dad, Julia, Heather, and Brendan on Sunday evening at John Steven's in Fell's Point.
-- Finally getting to see "Land of the Dead" with Tracey on Sunday afternoon.
-- Fireworks and a cookout with Tracey and her friend Tracey Sunday evening.
I also bought a new editing chair after seeing "Land of the Dead" on Sunday. I stopped into Staples with Tracey, and saw a $200 chair on clearance for $60. My neck and elbows had been hurting lately from sitting too long in the worn out chair I'd been using (which was purchased at Maryland State Surplus about three years ago for $15). I'd been looking for one with padded armrests for a while, but they were always too expensive. Not only does this one have nice padded armrests, but it also has a lumbar support design, and all sorts of fancy adjustment options. Plus, it's dark gray, and it looks vaguely like a chair you'd find on the bridge of a Starfleet ship.
--
I got a lot done this weekend, in spite of the holiday activities. I managed to complete the color correction and special fx work on "Corporate Zombie". Most of the work went pretty smoothly, but there were a few hangups that really slowed me down:
1. There is a scene (scene 10) where the main character's head gets punched off, and he's crawling on the grass looking for it while the other two characters in the scene are yelling at each other. I had originally intended to green-screen this, but realized before shooting the scene that the grass would be too close to the color of the greenscreen fabric, and thus would also key out. So, we just had him crawl around without anything over his head; I assumed that I could key out the back of his black head fairly easily with a luma (brightness) key. This turned out to be an incorrect assumption. In the end, I had to go frame-by-frame and rotoscope out his head, which was extremely tedious.
2. The next scene consisted of some night shots of the main character sneaking back to the house. We actually shot this at night, and as a result, the shots were pretty grainy and slightly underexposed. So I spent a lot of time trying to boost the brightness and clean up the grain without losing any detail in the shots. I've since discovered that given our limited lighting package (i.e., not having huge floods like they do in Hollywood) it is much easier to shoot an outdoor night scene during the day and then make it look like night than it is to actually shoot the scene at night.
3. In the final scene, there was a wide shot of one of the main characters that just looked like crap, mostly because of bad lighting. During editing, I used this shot instead of a better-lit closeup because the camera was on the right side of "the line of action", while in the closeup the camera was on the wrong side. After trying for at least an hour to make the shot look decent, I finally went back to the original edit and tried the closeup again. And, even though it is technically incorrect, it looked fine. So, I just dumped the wide shot and used the closeup.
4. In one of the previous entries, I mentioned some shots in "Rock Zombie" where the background was massively overexposed. As I said, I managed to edit out all but one of them, but the remaining shot could not be taken out and was going to have to be keyed or rotoscoped so that the background could be replaced with some non overexposed background. I went out on Sunday at about 3PM and shot the background, which was basically the parking area in "downtown" Hamilton as seen from the doorway of The Top Floor. After shooting this at various exposures, I went home and began the work of keying out the shot. Unfortunately, all attempts to key out the bright white background also removed parts of one of the actors' foreheads, which was also overexposed. So, once again, I had to go frame-by-frame and rotoscope out the two actors in the shot. This took about three hours, and was extremely frustrating work. But, at least now it looks good.
All of this is currently rendering on my PC at home (as it has been all night). Hopefully it will all look good, and "Corporate Zombie" will be complete. Unfortunately, one of the main problems with "After Effects" is that you can only preview a small amount of your footage in real-time. It basically renders the footage to RAM, so the more RAM you have, the longer your real-time renders will be. I have 1GB of RAM, and can usually get about 10 seconds of full-quality video to play in real-time. There are two problems with this:
1. I can usually only see two or three shot sequences in real-time, depending on the length of the shots. This gets to be a problem when color correcting, because there will often be more than two or three different shots in a row, which makes it hard to match everything up. Even though I can toggle between still frames of each shot, for some reason this sometimes isn't enough; still frames from three or four shots might look great in sequence, but then when the shots play in real-time, something jumps out that just doesn't look right.
I also have the option of rendering to RAM in draft mode, but this reduces the quality by about 1/2, obscuring a lot of the fine details, and making it fairly unreliable (especially considering that this will be shown on a big screen, so that every little detail, and every little mistake, will be much bigger and much more more obvious than it would be on a small TV).
2. It takes just as long to render something to RAM as it does to render it to the hard drive (about 1 hour per minute of video). So it is often completely counterproductive to sit there waiting while a sequence renders to RAM. A lot of times I just get it looking good with single-frame or draft-quality previews, continue on with my work, and then let it render overnight and hope it looks good. Often it doesn't, so I have to make note of what looks bad, go in and fix it, and then render it out again. On complex shots, I often go through three or four renders before it finally looks right.
So, "Corporate Zombie" might or might not be done. If it is, I'll start up on "Mother In-Law Zombie" tonight!
Ryan
posted by Ryan Graham at 10:27 AM
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