As you know, I help my fellow videographers by writing exporting tutorials for Vimeo/PS3/XBoX360. These are extremely popular, so I keep doing them. Today, I thought: “why don’t I download the trial of Canopus Edius Neo in order to create a tutorial for this fine editor too?”

And so I did. I filled up their long form in order to get access to their trial versions. I had to give up my privacy by filling up my home address (which I later removed because of what is transcribed below). But I did so, in order to serve my readers. And I downloaded and installed it (I told it to not install .NET and DirectX as I am always up to date with such updates through the official channel). I got baffled that it KILLED both my Firefox and Outlook Express while it was installing itself, long before it would ask me if I want to reboot the computer or not. I was in the middle of a 350 MB download when Canopus’ installer brutally killed my Firefox and the download (which was not resumable). But I thought, ok, whatever, I will give it the benefit of the doubt.

So, I used Edius for about 20 minutes, just enough to figure it out and create the tutorial. I even thought it looked cool as it recognized my dual screen setup automatically and arranged itself on it. In fact, I found it so cool-looking, that I even snapped a picture of it.

At some point, I wanted to see if the frame rate of the test.wmv file that I created via Edius was correct, so I load Vegas Platinum 8.0d (while Edius was also loaded). KABOOM. Neither Vegas Platinum or Pro would now load! The error message I would get during load is: “Failed to initialize the common language runtime engine. Please install the .NET Framework (download is available from Windows Update).” and then “Error 0×8013150a (message missing)”.

I have installed a number of things on my XP machine and NOTHING ever broke Vegas. But Edius did! In fact, it has completely messed up my .NET installation! Even after removing Edius from my machine, .NET was broken and Vegas would still not load!

I thought I should just re-install .NET, right? Well, not so fast. I download the .NET 3.5 redistributable, but it fails:
[04/19/08,18:12:39] Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 x86: [2] Error code 1603 for this component means “Fatal error during installation.”
[04/19/08,18:12:39] Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 x86: [2] Setup Failed on component Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 x86
[04/19/08,18:12:39] WapUI: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 x86 is not installed.

So, I go to download v3.0-SP1 which supposedly includes all previous versions. This time I get:
[04/19/08,18:19:15] Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a. MSI returned error code 1603
[04/19/08,18:19:19] WapUI: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a is not installed.

So, I download 2.0-SP1, as the 2.0a version is NOT available anymore! I have no choice! Again, I get this:
[04/19/08,18:12:35] Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a. MSI returned error code 1603
[04/19/08,18:23:40] Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a. MSI returned error code 1603
[04/19/08,18:23:43] WapUI: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a is not installed.

Now, this felt gruesome and very depressing. It seems that I have lost my main machine, my video editing PC. I am one step away from getting ready to call the product manager of Edius on Monday and asking him for a new PC (not that I expect such a thing, but it gets the point across). My various official .NET installations were very healthy for years now, but Edius took it all away in a single afternoon.

Thankfully, I come across this tool. It’s a third party, dangerous tool. But I have no alternative, I have to try it, as my last resort. It completely removes .NET and then let’s you re-install one by one .NET 2.0-SP1, 3.0-SP1, and 3.5 without dependency hell. Thankfully it worked, and I got my machine back: Vegas now loads.

I will never, ever, install a Canopus application again on my PC. And if anyone from that company is listening: I want my account removed from your computers. I don’t want to ever get a single spam from you in the future.

If you are using Canopus Edius Neo/Pro v4 or earlier to edit your HD footage, here’s how to export for Vimeo/PS3/XboX360 in 720p HD.

Reader Marc Hens also sent us a tutorial for Edius 5 too.

Since Vimeo removed the ability to re-encode in its native resolution any video between 848 and 1279 horizontal pixels, people started upresizing their videos to 1280×720 just so the get the 720p Vimeo Flash re-encoding that features more bitrate (hence, better quality). This is a bad idea though for us who would like to watch your videos in our TVs instead of the computer monitor.

Cheating aside (it costs Vimeo money in unnecessary bandwidth usage), sure, those who don’t care about local video downloads, they can do that. But if you care about the originally uploaded video file (I personally have a collection of 14 GBs of Vimeo videos that I like and have downloaded and watch on PS3/HDTV), then upresizing is a bad idea.

Let me explain: the FEWER hoops a video goes through from capture to final playback, the better it will look.

This is what happens when you upresize.
Step 1. Original resolution miniDV widescreen: 720×480
Step 2. Aspect ratio 1.000 resolution (as the video editor sees it): 874×480
Step 3. Upresize exporting: 1280×720
Step 4. Playback on TV resolution: resize to either 1366×768 or 1920×1080

This is what happens when you export in the right resolution:
Step 1. Original resolution miniDV widescreen: 720×480
Step 2. Aspect ratio 1.000 resolution/export: 874×480
Step 3. Playback on TV resolution: either 1366×768 or 1920×1080

And that’s why upresizing is a bad idea. Because it involves one extra step of picture manipulation that dilutes the quality further. In fact, if everyone in the world had a Pioneer TV like mine, which has a “dot by dot” PC viewing mode without extra resizings (most TVs resize regardless you see), it might make sense to export in 1920×1080 directly out of a miniDV SD footage (no matter how crazy this sounds — this would be the equivalent of upconverting, not upresizing). But because the world doesn’t have the same TV as I have, you will have to take the safe approach. And that’s the “export in the native resolution of your footage, at aspect ratio 1.000″ (aspect ratio 1.000 resolutions are preferred because most players and Vimeo don’t “understand” other pixel aspect ratios). Don’t try to fool Vimeo. If you have a problem with the vimeo quality, just email Vimeo to change their policy back, but don’t cheat.

B&H sells Vegas Pro 8 cheaper than ever: just $129. This is a steal for a professional video package. That price is in fact the same as Vegas Platinum’s retail price, which ranks lower in their product line. This CD version of Vegas Pro 8 does not come with a manual, but fear not, the manual is available in PDF here. Also, it doesn’t come with DVD Architect so there are no mpeg2/AC3 exporting options (except if you already have installed DVD Architect/Studio from before), but you can use instead some freeware DVD authoring tools like DVDFlick (get the 1.3.x.x version from the forum instead of the old 1.2.x version). Export to DVDFlick using the Huffyuv lossless codec or a frameserver.

My suggestion is, if you are thinking into buying Vegas at some point, or if you already own the Platinum version but need the extra features, go for it now, cause we don’t know how long the offer will last.

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? ”. 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.

Engadget posted the news that Adobe will port Flash to the iPhone. I replied there:

“Excuse me, but am I missing something here? You see, I am NOT interested in the “Flash Lite 3.0″ standalone application, like the ones found on many cellphones. I am interested in a full Flash plugin FOR the web browser. The LICENSE of the SDK *specifically prohibits* “plugins”. Unless Adobe kisses and makes up with Apple to get special treatment, there CAN’T BE a web browser Flash plugin. Lite or full.”

The reply I got from another user:
“I just adblocked your avatar. If that’s really you, I am very sorry.”

Flash-forward to today. Engadget makes a new story about Adobe and Apple:

“we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it” and “if we see this package pop up in the App Store later this year, we’ll know that at least one company’s been given a free pass to break the rules.”

Ugly or not, I am usually right.

Two-three times a week I stumble either to an email, or to forum posts on several video places online asking: “why my Vegas installation does not accept HDV video? It says that it can’t read it“. My reply always is: “Do you by any chance use the pirated version of Vegas?“.

And somehow, they never reply back. It’s like the internets stop working for them.

Whoa! If all the restrictions were not enough, Apple is now rejecting (aka “indefinitely waitlisting”) potential developers for the iPhone! Not just random individuals, but even corporations with true interest on the SDK. It seems that they want to limit everything, so they can control everything.

Compare this to the open nature of Android development, and Windows Mobile (and even Symbian, if you don’t want to get digitally sign your apps), and see clearly how Apple is conducting business. Apple is STILL scared about allowing binary apps on the iPhone. That much is clear. I can’t wait for future jailbreaks and third party App Stores. Apple needs a good spank in the ass. They seriously need to get a clue and allow open development while at the same time they should FIX their OS to be more secure.