I’ll be 35 in 1.5 months. God, I am old. Good news is, I’ve been thinking of a present (I got nothing for my name day and Christmas), but I can’t decide as to which one to get.

The first idea is to get a 35mm adapter for my HV20. I was hot on the idea of getting a cheap one from TwoNeil and be done with it, but JBQ wants me to use his EOS lenses, so we are now thinking of getting a vibrating adapter from my co-moderator at HV20.com Worley. I just want some background blur damn it. Using HV20’s manual focus is an exercise in patience, while masking on post is a major pain in the butt (like I did below), especially because Vegas Pro has no automatic tracking like After Effects does (and Vegas Platinum doesn’t even have masking). Plus, it looks unnatural, or “green screen’ed” at best.

The second idea is to get a special Vegas keyboard from Bella. It’s the only affordable keyboard that has a Jog/Shuttle Controller and that’s a cool idea, although such a keyboard won’t really change much the speed of which I edit. Truth is, I am concerned about the quality of their drivers. They still don’t have 64bit driver support, not even Vista support! This is usually a good indication of sucky XP drivers too and not enough attention to detail. None of their marketing/PR emails work anymore either.

Taylor Gillespie posted a number of very artistic videos on Vimeo. He uses a Kodak V1253 12MP digicam to capture his 720p videos (review). These Kodak cameras are not very good in quality and they offer zero control (not even exposure compensation or white balance). But you know, a person with a vision can deliver.

Others, will tweak their most expensive hardware to death, but that doesn’t guarantee worthwhile video. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Mark Wisniowski posted an amazingly beautiful travel video. HD version and download here. It’s been a while (at least a month) since I saw a really worthwhile video at Vimeo.

Some enthusiast videographers buy cameras in order to shoot music videos for local indie bands (and I am one of them). One thing to realize though is that professionally-looking music videos need a special kind of shooting. You can’t just set your HV20 to PF24 and expect the “music video” look.

Check this video here, recorded in 25p with a Canon HV30 at a live performance. And then check this video clip here, which is a proper music video, also recorded at 25p with a Canon HV20.

You will immediately notice how different the *motion* is between the two clips, even if they were recorded at similar shutter speeds and frame rate. The first video looks like “video”, and the second one looks like a proper video like the ones you watch on MTV or VH1. No, the “film look” has nothing to do with this, neither the shutter speed does.

Instead, there was a trick that was used during the recording to give it that look. They first burnt a CD with the song in question, but sped it up during its audio encoding to about 25%-33%. Then, they have the band perform the song at this sped-up rate (lip-syncing of course, as they hear it from the portable CD player that usually sits close to the drummer, who guides the rest of the band in terms of beat).

Then, on post production, you slow-down the band shots as much as needed in order for the lip-syncing to sync with the non-sped-up song version. This way, you get this kinda slow-motion look that you see on pretty much 95% of music video clips since the ’80s. Because this trick is used so much on music clips and because it’s only slightly unnatural, most people don’t realize that this is not the way it looks in real life or even how it was recorded. Here’s how you carry out this trick.

There are other ways to have the same effect, as long as your video editor supports it, but if its algorithm is even just a bit nuts, you won’t be able to get the same synced result, so the speed-up audio way remains the most fool-proof way. A discussion about this can be found here.

While this gives an otherworldly feeling to the viewer, it certainly changes fashion and likings. Most people now dislike normally-shot versions of songs. They just don’t feel right, even if THESE are the ones that are actually “right”. Sign ‘o’ the times.

The idea is to get a still picture and animate it, make it look alive & interesting, through a 3D montage. This is a trick that’s used on many documentaries on History and Discovery TV channels when they show old pictures during narration. You probably have seen it if you like documentaries like I do. So, I took a picture and used Paint Shop Pro and Vegas to do the same effect, and you can see the result below. Here’s a cooler YouTube example.

I also created a .vf Vegas project for you to follow the tutorial. So download it to follow the guidelines (1.3 MB). Read the included Readme.txt for more info on how to make this Vegas project file work on your PC too. To create such an effect it requires some intermediate graphics application knowledge, not just video editing.

1. Select the picture you want to animate. Not all pictures are good for the job, as the picture needs to have some a composition that has things in front of other things, in addition to a pretty uniformed background. Like the picture I used below, which has the butterfly, the flower on the left, the flower at the center, and the green background, almost layered onto each other.

Picture by Sashertootie, licensed under the CC-BY.

2. Make a copy of the picture you want to work with, and load that copy in the graphics application of your choice, be it Photoshop, Gimp or Paint Shop Pro. I personally used the latter. You have to “cut out” each element using the freehand tool in the “smart mode” (if your gfx app has that mode) with some feather and/or anti-aliasing. You must precisely select (it will take a lot of attention to make sure your selection is good) each element you want to animate in the picture (e.g. the butterfly, or the flowers), and you paste that selection as a new picture, with a transparent background.

3. Once you have cut-out all the elements , you use the equivalent of the “Clone Brush” on your gfx app to remove these elements from the original background image. For example, in my tutorial, check bg.png, and you will see that I have clone-painted above the flowers and the butterfly some green leaves. This way, the main background picture only shows the background element and not the rest of the objects that I cut out earlier.

4. If an element (now showing only in its own picture) was cut-off by another element in the picture (e.g. the left flower doesn’t show up completely in the original picture because the center flower is in front of it), you have to paint it out to make a complete picture. Same thing if a dog is in front of a human, you will have to fake (by painting it out) the parts of the human’s legs that the dog was covering in the original picture. You usually use clone-brush for this too rather than painting it pixel by pixel.

5. Then, change the canvas size for all the elements pictures (not the background picture) to the same size as the original picture. Remember, “canvas size” is not the same resize/rescale: it adds whitespace around your element to make the dimensions of the picture bigger, but it does not rescale the actual element. Then, you “resize/rescale” all the pictures (including the background image) to the right Vegas project size. For example, if you are going for an HD output, you might want to resize at 1440×1080 with aspect ratio 1.000. For the purposes of this tutorial I actually made the files 1024×768. Make sure though that no matter what you do to the element pictures, their backgrounds must remain transparent.

6. Bring all the pictures in to Vegas and set the project properties to “match” the picture sizes (as long as you only have pictures in that project, that is, otherwise always match your videos instead). Place the picture that serves as a background on the bottom video track, and each of its elements on the video tracks above it.

7. Then, you use the pan/crop tool for each picture to place it into its own place of the main screen and you use the keyframe timeline at the bottom of the pan/crop window to create a new keyframe at the end of the keyframe timeline. The first keyframe shows where the elements will show up on the first frame of the animation, and the last keyframe where they will “fly” towards at the last frame of the animation. You can also zoom in the background this way, so it gives the illusion of motion.

That’s it! Enjoy!

Stu “ProLost”, wrote a nice article about dynamic range and color correction last month. He posted a picture as captured from the RED ONE camera, and also posted his graded version, using a LUT that emulates the Kodak 3383 print film (that’s what you would usually use if you shot digitally but you want to transfer to film for a theatrical release). Naturally, I tried to reproduce the look by using only Vegas’ own tools (no Magic Bullet), but failed miserably. So I asked JBQ for a hand, and he spent almost an hour today working on it.

JBQ was able to get very close to the Kodak film look by using Vegas’ Curves, Color Corrector and the histogram as a guide (note: Vegas Platinum does not have a histogram, only Vegas Pro does). Please note though that Stu had the original 4k RAW frame to work with, while we only have a 720p rescaled JPEG. This means that the picture we had to work with had JPEG artifacts and far less visual information than the version Stu worked on, which is why we could recover far less information in the overexposed window. And yet, JBQ came very close to that look.

If you want the same film look on your films with a Canon consumer camera like the HV20 (you will have to slightly tweak the plugin values per scene, of course), you have to do the following:
1. Shoot in 24p with Cinemode. Cinemode’s look is dull for a reason.
2. Select “Neutral” on your camera’s color options. Remember, the more dull a picture is shot, the better it behaves when color graded. Over-saturated, sharpened, constrasty pictures (which is how consumer cameras shoot as by default) don’t color grade at all.
3. Get a good contrast filter. I would go for the Tiffen HDTV FX 52mm one, costs $200.
4. Lights, lights, lights and a light reflector. Buy some.
5. Use a gray card to set the custom white balance (never let the camera guess), and help the camera expose correctly.

That setup should give you a dull enough, bright enough, low-contrast enough, image to be able to work properly afterwards during color grading and get closer to the film look.

Update: And here’s the “Live Free or Die Hard” blue-green look:

ProLost, the author of the DV Rebel Guide, wrote After Effects and FCS tutorials on how to preserve natural skin tones when the rest of the scene has an extreme blue color grading. This blue tint color is what’s in fashion lately for movies. Yes, there is color fashion for films too, which is one of the reasons movies from 10 years ago look different than today’s films.

So, I am providing below a way to get the same look, using Sony Vegas. Because I like my tutorials to be accessible also to users that don’t have the Pro version of Vegas, I will not use the “Color Corrector Secondary” plugin, which is the normal way of doing these kinds of things. Another thing to remember is that each scene is different and it requires changes on the values of the plugins. You can’t just copy/paste the values throughout a film and expect to have a constantly good-looking image.

1. Download, install and load Aav6cc to your timeline clip (free download. On Vista you might have to install it as “Run as Administrator”).
On it put the saturations of Red, Blue, Cyan to 80. All other colors’ saturation to -90. Cyan’s Hue to -16. Lightness of Blue and Cyan on -64.

2. Load the “Color Corrector” plugin on your clip (not “Secondary”, comes with Vegas).
All three Angles to 315. All three Magnitudes to 0.330. Saturation 1.000, Gamma 0.900.

The above settings had the following results, but as I said, you need the right moody footage and the right modified settings each time to get this working for all your clips.

Picture by chaparral, licensed under the CC-BY.

Picture by romainguy, licensed under the CC-BY-SA.

Update: Wow, what a small world this is! So I made a search on FlickR for CC-BY pictures of “rainy days” for the purpose of this tutorial, and I decided to use the above one from “romainguy”. Ten minutes later my husband said “Romain takes nice pictures, I will have to talk to him about photography”. And I replied sarcastically “why, you know him? :P”. And he said “yes, he sits three cubes down from my desk at Google!”. Holy crap.

Update 2: If you have Magic Bullet installed, load the Aav6cc plugin and modify the saturation of Red to 90, Yellow to 50. And then use the Magic Bullet template “Berlin”, but change its “Do post: contrast” to 20.

On my walk yesterday I grabbed some random shots with the Kodak V1233 HD digicam. Because the camera is not really that worthwhile, I color graded the shots aggressively using four different commercial Vegas plugins: NewBlue Metallic MSP, Magic Bullet Look Suite, Pixelan CE BlurPro, Pixelan CE Posterwise, and Vegas’ own “Brightness & Contrast” and “Color Corrector”. Took 4 hours to render these 2 minutes of video. HD version here.

Stefan Sargent is a veteran cameraman/director/editor with untold years of experience. And in his latest article he takes on the legacy of 24p. As I too suggest: stay away from 24p. It’s overrated. The “film look” is not 24p, it’s a combination of at least 10 different things. Especially now that we have a TV at home that “smooths out” 24p movies to the point that you think that they are 30p or higher, it makes no longer sense to me seeing people shooting at 24fps, which is a frame rate that we are stuck since 1924 for technical reasons rather than aesthetical reasons. Anyways, read his article and take his advice on stop shooting 24p with your HV20 without understanding why you are doing so.

Update: Hollywood director James Cameron agrees.

I re-cut my old Stanford video today (different clip arrangement, a few new scenes, new color grading) and re-uploaded it. Unfortunately, the HD version is unusable on my 3Ghz hyperthreaded P4 now because Vimeo upgraded their Flash HD re-encoding to 30fps from their previous 24fps cap. The HD video plays very choppy. If they don’t fix this somehow, I will have to leave Vimeo and go with Blip.TV. I have no plans to buy a new PC. SD version below:

Additionally, Vimeo removed the ability to get high quality re-encoding out of 480p video, it’s now 720p, 1080p or nothing. As of right now, uploading 1440×1080 won’t give you the high quality re-encoding either (I filed a bug report with them).

Update: Not even my husband’s 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo Macbook Pro can’t playback the 30fps HD Vimeo version perfectly smoothly (every few seconds there are jumps). This is a feature that Vimeo should lay off for 2 more years and send a letter to Adobe to sit their asses down to optimize Flash more (the Flash player is single-threaded). Yes, the latest version of Flash is faster than the previous ones, but my husband is not allowed to install such software on his Google laptop so he still runs an older version. Basically, to be able to playback very smoothly the new Vimeo HD 30fps videos, you need Core2Duo 2 Ghz and above with the newest Flash version installed. These are very steep requirements. The old 24fps cap videos were playing back fine on 3.5 year old PCs, now you need a 1.5 year old PC or newer.

Update 2: Dalas from Vimeo re-encoded the video, I think it’s back at 24fps now, not sure, but it’s smoother now. Hopefully, users will be able to select if they want a 24fps or 30fps re-encoding so I don’t have to ask them each time…