Produxion

I’ve had the chance to play with a new filter in FCP called SmoothCam. It’s great, and creates delicious results.

It’s basically a camera stabilisation filter which has been ported from Shake. It processes your footage to create a vector map of all of the objects and movements, then using that data to manipulate the original footage to create smooth camera motion.

Since I recently posted on a great method for encoding for Vimeo using Compressor resets, I’m currently adopting that workflow for all of the work I’ve been doing this past month or so. It may well be that I’m losing a certain amount of quality by using this technique, but I’m happy that it’s good enough for online distribution.

What I’ve done, is created a set of Compressor Droplets, which live on my desktop and allow me to just drag-and-drop files for encoding. The one-click dialog box which appears feels a lot cleaner and more efficient than having to launch compressor and fiddle with settings and sources etc.

I stumbled across this great video tutorial which explains how to easily set up a preset for compressing HD video for Vimeo. It’s clear, concise, and straight to the point.

Until now, I’ve been using VisualHub presets to encode video for online distribution, but this looks like it could be an alternative solution (particularly since the developer of VisualHub has pulled the plug on the software).

Oops.

After I finished writing my last post on interlacing, I realised that I missed out one important aspect of the whole de-interlacing discussion, and more specifically, another very good reason why you would want to use de-interlacing: creating a film-look for your video.

When you watch most soap opera or current affairs programmes on TV, you’ll notice that they have a much sharper and crisper look than the picture of a drama or film you watch on the same TV. It has a distinctly “video” look to it, which creates a very immediate and “real” image.

Part of that is down to the way images are captured on most video cameras, and the way in which the signal is processed. There are video formats which create a softer, richer image, such as digi-beta. But for those of us who work with cheaper, less-cumbersome formats (such as DV, HDV, XDCAM etc) there remains the issue of how to change that “video” look to one which looks more like film.

Well, there are three basic things I do which create that magical film-look.

Having done a fair amount of video editing which involves working with, or converting to different resolutions, I’ve stumbled across a lot of problems in the past which are caused by interlacing. In a recent post, I wrote about my workflow for down-converting from HDV to SD, which included a step for de-interlacing footage to (…)

I love Nattress Film Effects. I bought this set of Final Cut plugins last year for use on a kookie little DV film project, and they created a really great film look for footage which as shot on a rally cheap Canon camera. What’s so super-duper about them? Well, there are ways to create a (…)

I’ve never used Qmaster before. I’d never gotten around to poking around to see how it worked, and what benefits it might bring. And after the last installation I had on a G5 refused to function under Leopard, I just left well alone. Qmaster is, quite simply, a way to create a cluster for video (…)

Things got so busy recently that it became time to expand the number of workstations in the office. The G5 Mac I’ve been running for the past few years has been chugging along reliably, but it was causing a bottleneck in our workflow as the only machine which could handle any serious rendering jobs. Plus, (…)

I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches to 8 minutes and 43 seconds of documentary goodness, which has the working (and possibly final) title of “Raptors”. It was shot at the start of the Summer, and was intended as an entry to a Channel 4 “3 Minute Wonder” competition. Plans for that were slightly scuppered (…)

I remember the first time I was able to experience the magic of Final Cut and real-time HDV editing.  It was like a revelation; an epiphany in my editing life.  I didn’t have to think about working in a different way from DV – it just worked the same: same disk usage, same real-time effects (…)