SFX and some more loose ends

here's a video of the opening title "press start" screen for the project.



also, i made some progress on little things here and there which, at this point, i might as well just wait until the final presentation to show, as they aren't really flashy or centerpiece-like. though, i did get my one neat idea to work making a quick 3D hat to fly in front of the screen as the hip hop character throws it at the end. it will also serve to block the screen when i change clips to the hip hop character bowing and raver falling in distress clips.

extremely tired

i'm really realy tired, having opened the store at work and had class after. plus, i'm nursing a nice head cold... so i'll just make this brief and post some videos of things coming along:




Above is a video showing the Twitch plugin (from Video Copilot) used for a nice transition between the first two scenes. Don't know which one I like more at the moment though...



Above here is the full length video of the end glow trails part. It still needs some tweaking and doesnt have any camera animations, but the motion tracking seems OK. it could definately use some more work, but for the time being, its good enough to move on to the next hand.



And above here, i have a quick re-render of the name titles with some simple sound effects.

Full composite video so far

Here, you can see a video of what the completed project should mostly reflect. I managed to get the overlaying graphics pretty much done, and fine tuned them a bit to fit within the backgrounds. I animated the yellow flashes as well as the arrows and button presses, too. The newest addition though, is that slider at the bottom of the screen. What I like about it is that I learned how to animate using programming-like expressions in After Effects. This one has just a simple Wiggle parameter on the position's x-axis: wiggle(1,20); where it moves 20 pixels randomly once per second, thus giving it some nice random movement for that live-updating feel.

Title images and some photoshop work

I have been incredibly busy with work and have really struggled to make time to work on my projects... That said, I took some time to work on some things and got a decent amount of stuff done. I cleaned up the timing and syncing issues, so everything lines up as it should now. I then took some time to make some of the opening graphics; namely the character selection title, as linked above. It was pretty straight forward; I took some photos of Kristen in each outfit in different poses in front of the green screen and the green was removed and retouched in Photoshop. Made some simple shapes and layers and cropped/masked as necessary. Imported the layers into Premiere and animate them. Job done as far as I'm concerned. I then took some time to clean up the .psd files for some of the other overlay graphics just to make them easier to manage and animate once in Premiere.

One more thing....

I thought I should post a general overall progress video since, out of context, its hard to gather what these bits and pieces contribute to the final product.

Here, I have the general structure of the video as well as some testing here and there for overlay graphics and the after effects light trails. Music syncing jumps off a bit about halfway through, and I'm working on that now. Things are still coming along well, but the AE additions are certainly adding time to an already busy schedule.

Also, as you can see here, the combination of After Effects and Premiere rendering causes quite a strain even on a computer as powerful as this....

old problems, new programs, new solutions

As talked about in the previous entry, I had the problem with glow trails. The tutorial (and its follow up tutorial) proved very, very useful. However, to take advantage of a more streamlined process between Premiere (Pr), Photoshop (Ps), and now After Effects (AE), I had to migrate all my work into the CS4 set of programs. I was a bit aprehensive at first, and it feels like Premiere CS4 doesn't run quite as smoothly as Pro 2 did, but the features added make up for it. It has what's called Adobe Dynamic Link, which will link files between AE and Pr. Basically, all elements from the Pr sequence are accessable in AE, and the composition in AE is accessable as an object in Pr. So I can drag and drop the composition where I need it in Pr, and if I make any changes to it in AE, it will update in real time over in Pr! I think this feature (or something similar) was in the CS3 suite, but I never used anything from CS3 other than Photoshop, so it was all new to me. Adobe.com lists this as an enhanced or updated feature, rather than brand new. So it's probably just a lot better than it was.

Oh, I also forgot to mention that I have never used After Effects before. I've been using Premiere and Maya for quite a while, but never AE. The tutorials I found online proved exceptionally helpful in giving me exactly what I needed, and I hope to be able to use AE a lot more in future projects.

Above are pictures of the new Premiere CS4 interface (top), as well as After Effects CS4 (bottom) showing my test work with making the glowing light trails. Below is a short rendered clip of the test file.

Interesting turn of events...

I was rendering out the final scene files and came across a few interesting dilemas while tidying up some things in Premiere. I worked on getting the video footage lined up for the last segments and found that I apparently recorded wildly incorrectly: I had somehow missed an entire 16-count worth of music. The footage lined up perfectly with an element in the song that happens to occur twice. In the recording process, I goofed and had her stop at the first time it came up, which led to mismatches in lining up the footage to the song. I tried splicing in other footage or duplicating some to lengthen it, but 16 beats is a reletively long time to do that for at ~120bpm. So I ended up just cutting the 8 seconds or so of the music out and now everything lines up perfect.

Dilema #2 comes from a poor choice on my part during filming, for which I should have known better. While dressed as the Raver character, Kristen cracks glowsticks as part of her fanale for her character. They were super-bright "ultras" which are orange and glow extremely bright for a very short period of time (5 minutes, compared to ~8 hours for a standard glowstick). However, the orange color emitted under the lighting conditions at hand and color balancing done by the camera, caused the centers to be alarmingly close to the yellowish-green of the green screen. The result is that when I key out and remove the green screen in my file, the glowstick's light goes with it; leaving empty transparent holes. I tried many different setups for the keying options to try and minimize this effect, but nothing seemed to work at all.

I soon got a great idea though. I could use either Premiere, After Effects, or Maya to just create the light trails of the glowsticks myself! After some vigorous googling, I managed to find quite an excellent tutorial showing me, step by step, how to do exactly what I wanted to do. The tutorial (which can be seen here) is for After Effects and was designed to emulate the iPod nano commercials with people dancing around in the dark leaving the emitted light trails. I should be able to do this in post-processing after all my other edits are done, and it will probably look significantly cooler and a lot more flashy than just recording them live.

Below is an updated picture of the finished club scene. The file's are nearly done being rendered and I have completed a bunch more in Premiere itself. I hope to have some more test videos up soon, but it will have to wait until I finish a paper due tomorrow for another class... >_>