Compression Artifacts & Pulldown

This started as a quick post about how to gain finer control over the compression settings in the QuickTime dialog. But before we can get there, we first need to talk talk about how 3:2 pulldown works. (Trust me; it all ties together; it was also a good little mystery.)

I recently gave a training session at a local studio, and at the end they were invited to trot out their Barney Stumpers (questions about why something went wrong, how something works, etc.). For one stumper, a user had some footage with 3:2 pulldown, and after pulldown was removed, he noticed that an after-image of the previous frame appeared in the next frame after an edit. Why?

On Artbeats.com: Article on Editing to Sound

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we wrote a piece about spotting hit points in music and dialog, plus a series of pointers on how to place edit points, transitions, and animation keyframes based on these hit points. We strongly believe the tight integration between audio and video is a secret weapon that can be used to raise your productions above the rest; we hope you find this introduction worthwhile.

Click here to download a 333 KB PDF of “Editing to Sound” from Artbeats.com.

While we’re talking about Artbeats, Steve Holmes (formerly of Total Training) also just created for Artbeats a new video tutorial that shows you how to “step through time with an innovative look at the evolution of energy.” You can download the 36+ minute tutorial from Artbeats.com by clicking here.

By the way, if you’d like to share one of your own projects with Artbeats and their customers, email them - if they choose yours, you’ll get $1000 worth of free Artbeats footage of your choice!

Artbeats has a monthly email newsletter which contains links to each of our articles for them as they are released, plus a link for registered users to download a free full-size clip every month. Click here to register.

Motion Quick Tip: Importing Illustrator and Photoshop Files

When working with Motion, you’ll often import content that was created elsewhere. For example, Illustrator and Photoshop are two powerful applications for creating and manipulating images. They both work very well with Motion, but to get the best results, you need to know about setting in Motion that isn’t necessarily obvious or easy to find.

Photoshop Disasters

One of my favorite sites that I like to check out on a regular basis is Photoshop Disasters. The site is a freakshow gallery of Photoshop gone wrong.  The site is driven by user submission and acts as both entertainment and education.  There mission:

“Have you seen a truly awful piece of Photoshop work? Clumsy manipulation, senseless comping, lazy cloning and thoughtless retouching are our bread and butter. And yes, deep down, we love Photoshop.”

Be sure to check the site out, it’ll make you look at things a little differently.

A Distorted View of the World

One of my vices is auto racing; I love to watch it. Which, of course, means that Speed TV (formerly Speedvision) is a requisite part of my satellite or cable TV package. Speed is owned by Fox Sports; you’d think there’d be some budget available, and some standards enforced. But every now and then, they put on a program that makes me wonder just who they’re hiring to do their production. (See my previous blog post Staggering Mistakes for another shining example.)

One recent program - a preview of a Formula 1 event - had me stumped for days trying to figure out just how in the world they managed to mess up the image that much (the result of which is simulated here). Here’s what I think they did:

Rethinking the Music Video

At last year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference, Jakob Trollback - director of the highly innovative motion graphics studio Trollback+Company - gave a talk and showed a sample of a different approach to take for music videos. His idea is that the video could and should be an expression of the song, not an expression of a filmmaker’s high concept, or for that matter the low concept of MTV demographics. The video above realizes this vision with the song Moonlight in Glory by David Byrne and Brian Eno from their groundbreaking album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Trollback isn’t the first to take this approach. Imaginary Forces created a legendy piece honoring film soundtracks for the Oscars which also used abstract graphics apparently motivated by the music, while even earlier Digital Kitchen made a great piece for Sony’s digital theatre sound system which was very similar in flavor to the piece above (if anyne can dig up a link to video of either piece, I’ll add it here). But it’s an interesting, thoughtful approach nonetheless.

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