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... >_>