Friday, October 10, 2008

Optical Flow Speed Tutorial For Apple Motion

steve martin | 10/10- 10:09 AM

Steve Martin takes us step by step to changing speeds in Motion

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Avid Gems 6

Steve Hullfish | 10/09- 08:38 PM

Four more Gems - these aren’t sexy but they work!

OK, this won’t be a sexy tips week, but it’ll be useful. Sometimes sexy sells, but in economic times like these, sometimes you’ve got to say “Damn! Workboots, a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans is just what I need today.”

Thursday, October 09, 2008

DVD Studio Pro: Leaving 4x3 behind for good

Scott Bates | 10/09- 09:31 AM

16x9 lovin

With the prevelance of flat screens and digital transition, it’s time to stop worrying about 4x3. That statement might seem a bit lame, as many of us have already migrated to HD work where 4x3 SD really isn’t our concern any more. However, when it comes time to distribute our work, documentaries, shorts, bah’mistzva’s, whatever they may be, the good old DVD is still the most feasible means of distribution. The mandatory AACS fees for Blu-ray will keep legitiamte distribuion on BD out of reach for 95% of us (oh how I miss the, HD-DVD). So until the cost of blank BD media drops into the realm of sanity (likely still 18-24 months away) at which point you could distribute duplicated discs which dont require AACS, you are left bring your HD project back down to an SD world.

It’s happened a number of times now for me in the past year where I’ve had my head in HD and then sit down to design some nice DVD menus for a project and forget all about 4x3 title safe. So I’ve started forcing “16x9, 16x9 Letterbox” only for my DVDSP projects. For the feature this is not a big deal at all, but for menus and subtitles it has an impact.

When a 16x9 project is displayed as native 16x9, the DVD player typically just spits out the 720x480 (or 720x576 for you PAL kids) anamorphic pixels unadultered, and lets your TV stretch out the composited image for so it appears correctly. However, in letterbox mode, the player will vertically squeeze the video by 25% and center it in the 480 frame. The issue arises that this squeeze is done to the video layer, not the composited image, so it happens before any graphics were involved. So if you have button overlays or subtitles, the video underneath them just shifted and thus they no longer line up in the correct position any more.

Monday, October 06, 2008

Creating Custom-shaped Vignettes in Apple Color

Steve Hullfish | 10/06- 10:58 AM

A Video Tutorial from the book “Color Correction for Video”

This video tutorial is one of more than two dozen video tutorials I created for the revised edition of “Color Correction for Video” which I originally wrote with Jaime Fowler back in 2002. The revised edition will be out in December and is almost completely re-written. I’ll be posting one of these tutorials each week.

We’re not really going in any specific order with these tutorials. I did a series of Primary color correction tutorials. This is actually a tutorial about creating custom user shapes in Apple Color to do secondary color correction.

Subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already. And if you have questions or specific video tutorials you’d like to see, let me know. Just add a comment below to the article.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Avid Gems #5

Steve Hullfish | 10/02- 08:33 PM

Avid Power User tips

Many of you know me from various listserves, and hopefully I have a reputation as someone who’s willing to help out people with problems.
 
Today’s Gem #1 is something I learned when I tried to help someone with a problem that I THOUGHT was going to be pretty easy to solve, but it turned out that I needed to learn some new tricks before I could be on any help at all.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Color Correction Video Tutorial

Steve Hullfish | 10/02- 11:05 AM

Setting up a JLCooper Eclipse

The latest in my series of color correction video tutorials is a brief departure from art to get to the nuts and bolts of installing color correction hardware.

If you are doing a lot of grading, there is no way to keep up with the “real” colorists doing work on dedicated systems like da Vinci unless you invest in a “panel” or manual user interface for Color or Color Finesse (or any of the other “software” color correctors).

The main two companies manufacturing units like these are Tangent Devices and JLCooper. They actually have very similar install setups. When I wrote “The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction,” I went around the country and sat in on sessions with the nation’s top colorists. For those sessions, I brought along a Tangent Devices CP-100. That unit was about $25,000. If you’re not quite that flush with cash (and who is today?) then you could try their CP-200BK or various combinations of smaller Tangent Devices boards that are meant to work together. Each of those boards runs about $6000. Tangent is also soon to release their even lower-cost unit, The Wave.

JL Cooper has the Eclipse CX, which is about $7,000 which delivers about the same functionality of the $25,000 CP-100. Originally, I was not a big JLCooper fan. The first versions I tried seemed rough and almost gritty. But the Eclipse I’ve been using for the last few months is a huge improvement over previous versions. The unit is good looking, feels solid and is a pleasure to work on. Also, with the new software it can be configured by the user to get the most efficiency from the way you like to work. I’ll try to get into that user customization of the JLCooper in another tutorial soon. But first, I’d like to show you how easy it is to get set-up and working with a new unit, fresh out of the box. You should be able to have this up and running in about the time it takes to watch this tutorial, especially if you have someone who knows computer networking. If you don’t have someone like that, don’t panic. This video will show you everything you need to know.

This video tutorial is on the upcoming revised edition of “Color Correction for Video” which I originally wrote with Jaime Fowler in 2002. The release will be out in December of this year on Focal Press. Please subscribe to the RSS feed to receive future video tutorials in this series.

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