DMA Notes 8 July 2004
More on mics and audio, some camera and
shooting tips (we finished movie production in the afternoon today
also).
DMA 8 July
2004
Digital Storytelling
Studio1 Producations for about $180 makes an XLR to 1/8" mic converter that is superb, can be used on different cameras
- sometimes when you do recording on minidisc as a 2nd recording source
Beachtek costs about the same but are specific
Mics you want to get:
- stereo microphone (wired) - $250 from Audiotechnica (model AT822)
- LAV mic (wired) Radio Shack $40
Canon GL-1 does not have audio level control or an XLR-in
XLR stands for: (X = ground, L = left, R = right)
don't ever rely on just a wireless microphoone, backup with a wired mic
- you never know when you might be in a situation where the wireless doesn't work, has interferences, etc.
most of the time for the work we are doing, the audio is boomed
- LAV mic is easier, but if you don't want to mic to show you boom it
- that is how they do it in Hollywood
Doing voiceovers
- in documentaries, or documentary-style
- go into your closet with clothes in there, the clothese stops the sound from bouncing around
- if you do it in a room like this the sound
- better to use a handheld mic like what people sing into, run it right into the camera, that way you have everything on DV tape and it is timecoded
- you don't have to have a video monitor playing the thing you are recording
- better to write an audio script, read that into your camera
- can have someone outside your audio room monitoring the levels
- make sure you are speaking into the microphone
- talk with your throat open
- better to have it a little "off-access" (not right in front, this will prevent you from recording a lot of artifacts
- do several takes, don't rush it, you can cut and paste it in the editing program
most short shotgun mics sound terrible
- there is a big differnce between the $150 and $700 mic by Senheiser (generally a better company than Audiotechnica)
Hoodman.com makes hoods that you can use to cover your LCD screen, or you can make one
- in bright sunlight it can be hard to see if you are in focus, but that can be the best way to frame a shot in bright light
- remember to set viewfinder "diopter" so your menu words on the camera are as sharp as possible
- LCD projector is great for framing the photo/image
- technology is now migrating upward: professional cameras are not getting color flip-out LCD screens
Camera placement and camera movement
- one of the biggest jobs of the director and cinemetographer is knowing where to put the camera
- so much of how you tell a story visually is where you place the camera
- ask the questions: where are we now? how soon should that be revealed?
-- can be a dramatic way to tell a story
- ask what type of action is going to take place here: can use blocking, have someone move into the frame so you focus initially on their end position
"hit your marks" means in theater and film: start where you are supposed to and go to your final location
- sometimes blue tape is used to indicate an actor's marks
how do you want to portray your characters
- if you want to show their feelings like feeling under stress, pressure, etc: shoot down on them from above
- scale is a great storytelling device, much is dictated by the quality of your camera / lens
- another argument for getting a camera with a good lense
shoot them level with their face or a slight up or down angle, when they are looking a bit away from the camera makes them look appealing, good
how does the scene you are shooting resolve, where does it go?
crossing the line
- really ingrained in people who are in film school, generally it doesn't serve a purpose and can be disorienting for the audience
- means your actor will face the wrong way
- this is done in some films (Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction) but it works because of a rolling camera
video TAP are now available wirelessly
Camera moves
- camera tilts (up and down) and pans (right and left)
- should always be done to serve the story
Tripods: ones we are using here are $100 - $120
- ok for smaller cameras but not very rigid
- professionals like heavy-duty tripods because you don't have to worry about moving the camera when you move the tripod
- new rigid tripods made out of carbon-fiber that are lighter
- you can weigh down your tripod, fill out some water bottles and hang them off the tripod to give them more weight / stability
Bogen / Manfroto make good medium-priced equipment
- professional tripod and the head can cost thousands of dollars
to dolly in or dolly back, means you roll toward the subject instead of zooming
- lots of people will use a shopping cart or wheelchair
a tracking/follow shot
- when someone is walking down the street and you want to follow them
4 main windows in Final Cut Pro
- browser window (keep assets: video and audio clips, graphics)
- viewer window (where you can view your clips)
- canvas is a monitor for showing what the final view will be
browser window can be viewed as icons
- shows first frame of each clip (video usually 30 frames per second)
- list view shows lots of extra information about it
basic sequence of editing
- double click an clip to open in the viewer
- can then set in and out points (different from iMovie, iMovie assumes you don't want other part of the clips -- that is destructive editing)
- then edit your clip into the timeline by dragging it in
- or drag over the edit overlays pallette, and select the
- can also use buttons below the overlays pallette
- also have keyboard shortcuts (this is extremely helpful, frees you up creatively)
start building a sequence out of the clips you like and the parts of the clips you like
timeline is where the probram gets assempled
old days of tape to tape editing, they always had 2 monitors so you could see your source tape and your target tape
- the dual screen view
Premiere is very similar to this
- didn't use to be a double monitor model, but now it is
- this makes it more flexible
Final Cut pro does these things better than Premiere, it is faster, gives you more options
- Premiere or Avid is the equavlaent to FCP
Avid used to be the standard
- Avid machines are very expensive compared to FCP
-- lower end products are just a few hundred dollars more
you can buy 3rd party add ins for Final Cut
Can get a totally hot system for final cut for around 10K for FCP
- comparable system for Avid is around 25K
- there is not going to be a noticable increase in quality
Most high end post houses and commercial editiorial places have been dug in with Avid for a long term, so they keep upgrading their Avid systems instead of going to FCP
- for new shops, most people are going to FCP
- this has been a very recent, quick change in the last few years
Final Cut Pro is becoming more common than Avid
- upgrades with Avid are so expensive
you can work offline with FCP
- can still create an edit on a powerbook and then transfer that project over to a higher end system and it will fall into place
-- costs are significantly cheaper with FCP all the way up and down the line
I know several Avid editors who have gone over to FCP
- doesn't know ANYONE who has started working on FCP and has gone over to Avid
Premiere used to only be on the Mac
- then it went to both Mac and PC
- FCP has become so ubiquitous that Premiere is no longer being made for the Mac (they can't compete on the Mac any longer)
In past tests when Premiere was on the Mac, FCP was more than twice as fast than Premiere
You can import motion JPEG-A and other things
- if your project is set as a DV project and you bring in compressed stuff, it needs to convert it all to DV for you to work for it
- will work with basically any type of video system
DV works at a consistent 3.6 MB/sec (low data rate for video)
- uncompressed system at home is about 21 MB/sec
-- that fills up a gig of space with 5 min of DV, or 30 sec of video with uncompressed system
Advantage of uncompressed is that you can bring in video and not have any image degredation
- no stairstepping, or blocks of color
- DV can do that at some point with dissolves or color degredations
- uncompressed video has more headroom for colors, more of a range
When creating motion graphics, colors are smoother, softer, better looking because it is better for
Green screen and blue screen: you can get a better key out of uncompressed
piece of hardware that can bring in component video (RGB from beta deck)
- uses PCI card that costs about $3000
-- he uses Motion JPEG-A
FCP allows you to escalate your
Digital betacam deck can cost 50K, High Def deck can cost 80K
FCP will probably never work on a Windows machine
DV is a compressed system
- unless you load it up with a ton of effects, your quality going out of the system is the same as it was coming in
- that was a huge breakthrough for DV
Can do the same thing for an uncompressed system, but at a higher level
- uses an Aurora PCI card, series "Igniter", new stuff is pike, the
- also Cona by Aja, is very popular off of firewire instead of PCI (doesn't look as good as Aurora because the CODEC is not as good
http://www.auroratech.com/
Telecina: going from film to video
- have to pay someone to use their very expensive equipment to do that
- it is basically a scanner
- when you get this done, that is the best time to do color corrections
- machine costs about $1.5 million that did this for "Fine Dining," at that time there were just 2 machines that did this, 1 in LA and the other in London
Had planned "Fine Dining" movie for over a year till finally he could work with the footage
Sundance usually doesn't like you to resubmit a movie
Film has a lot of artifacts, it is not completely smooth like DV
24 fps is not smooth like 30 fps is during a pan
"Motvating your shot": directing people's attention to other parts of the screen
- on DVD on a good TV you can see things that you wouldn't have noticed at the screen
on some DVDs they will sometimes close in the box on tope and bottom to hide the boom!
- lots of time remastering for DVDs means hiding mistakes
when movies have 4x3 versions, you have to decide which frame you want to be showing
- some directors plan for that and put masking tape on their monitor to use when composing their shots
full academy apeture: full frame of 35 mm film
- that is why "Fine Dining" comes in
Film isn't wider, but anamorphic film has image compressed but the projector blows it up again
What is the length of a clip that is comfortable to the eye
- our attention spans are definitely different than they were 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago
Slide show presentations: usually do 5 sec with 1 sec dissolve on either end make it 4 sec long (half second on either end)
- that seems to be a comfortable length for a still, if it is less time it seems like you haven't had time to really process it
titles in older silent films held on the screen longer because literacy was at a lower level
- people's attention span / way of digesting the cinematic language
we are quick on the uptake because we are saturated with digital media
- we can read 2 sentences in a second now
we are really becoming digital human beings: we are interfacing with these machines to a much greater
- our thoughts are still faster
on commercial the other day, I counted 3 images per second
- that is the same as 10 frames
movie "Paris, Texas" is extremely slow paced
importing from a DVD?
- compressed with MPEG-2
- final cut isn't capable (yet) of editing MPEG-2, so you would have to convert it to DV
- you can sometimes play it out of the S-video port of a DVD player and bring it into a camera or port
- because the compression is different you tend to get some artifacts, in part because the compression is different
To go from DVD right into FCP, there is some hack software out there that will do that but it is really a compromise
- can archive a project on a DVD (digital files), writing to it like a CD and then you keep your original source project material
Advice for documentaries
- they are not scripted as much as they are planned
- once you get your shots, then you script and put it together
- then you can identify holes, where you need to bridge things with a particular shot
-- that gives you the bridge you need to get from one shot to another
- in the scripting stage, when you are collecting all your assets, research, photos, etc, lay them all out on the floor
-- that long line of stuff can become your timeline
- lot of times, you need to lay out what you have and figure out what you need to get from one spot to another
it is a story that actually happened, but you are formatting it for the medium
- finding the images you need to support it
that is the procedure most people I know who make documentaries follow
friend just shot a music video (opera singer and videographer) at the Montery acquarium (got lens really close to the glass)
Last thing to show: "One Giant Leap"
- the epitome of digital storytelling in terms of the styles and methods it combines (definitely does have a left of center point of view)
- this could really have not been done 10 or 15 years ago
- quality of the DV editing and footage is top-notch, very fluid and amazing
- made really by 2 hippies that decided to make this cool thing
Digital Storytelling
Studio1 Producations for about $180 makes an XLR to 1/8" mic converter that is superb, can be used on different cameras
- sometimes when you do recording on minidisc as a 2nd recording source
Beachtek costs about the same but are specific
Mics you want to get:
- stereo microphone (wired) - $250 from Audiotechnica (model AT822)
- LAV mic (wired) Radio Shack $40
Canon GL-1 does not have audio level control or an XLR-in
XLR stands for: (X = ground, L = left, R = right)
don't ever rely on just a wireless microphoone, backup with a wired mic
- you never know when you might be in a situation where the wireless doesn't work, has interferences, etc.
most of the time for the work we are doing, the audio is boomed
- LAV mic is easier, but if you don't want to mic to show you boom it
- that is how they do it in Hollywood
Doing voiceovers
- in documentaries, or documentary-style
- go into your closet with clothes in there, the clothese stops the sound from bouncing around
- if you do it in a room like this the sound
- better to use a handheld mic like what people sing into, run it right into the camera, that way you have everything on DV tape and it is timecoded
- you don't have to have a video monitor playing the thing you are recording
- better to write an audio script, read that into your camera
- can have someone outside your audio room monitoring the levels
- make sure you are speaking into the microphone
- talk with your throat open
- better to have it a little "off-access" (not right in front, this will prevent you from recording a lot of artifacts
- do several takes, don't rush it, you can cut and paste it in the editing program
most short shotgun mics sound terrible
- there is a big differnce between the $150 and $700 mic by Senheiser (generally a better company than Audiotechnica)
Hoodman.com makes hoods that you can use to cover your LCD screen, or you can make one
- in bright sunlight it can be hard to see if you are in focus, but that can be the best way to frame a shot in bright light
- remember to set viewfinder "diopter" so your menu words on the camera are as sharp as possible
- LCD projector is great for framing the photo/image
- technology is now migrating upward: professional cameras are not getting color flip-out LCD screens
Camera placement and camera movement
- one of the biggest jobs of the director and cinemetographer is knowing where to put the camera
- so much of how you tell a story visually is where you place the camera
- ask the questions: where are we now? how soon should that be revealed?
-- can be a dramatic way to tell a story
- ask what type of action is going to take place here: can use blocking, have someone move into the frame so you focus initially on their end position
"hit your marks" means in theater and film: start where you are supposed to and go to your final location
- sometimes blue tape is used to indicate an actor's marks
how do you want to portray your characters
- if you want to show their feelings like feeling under stress, pressure, etc: shoot down on them from above
- scale is a great storytelling device, much is dictated by the quality of your camera / lens
- another argument for getting a camera with a good lense
shoot them level with their face or a slight up or down angle, when they are looking a bit away from the camera makes them look appealing, good
how does the scene you are shooting resolve, where does it go?
crossing the line
- really ingrained in people who are in film school, generally it doesn't serve a purpose and can be disorienting for the audience
- means your actor will face the wrong way
- this is done in some films (Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction) but it works because of a rolling camera
video TAP are now available wirelessly
Camera moves
- camera tilts (up and down) and pans (right and left)
- should always be done to serve the story
Tripods: ones we are using here are $100 - $120
- ok for smaller cameras but not very rigid
- professionals like heavy-duty tripods because you don't have to worry about moving the camera when you move the tripod
- new rigid tripods made out of carbon-fiber that are lighter
- you can weigh down your tripod, fill out some water bottles and hang them off the tripod to give them more weight / stability
Bogen / Manfroto make good medium-priced equipment
- professional tripod and the head can cost thousands of dollars
to dolly in or dolly back, means you roll toward the subject instead of zooming
- lots of people will use a shopping cart or wheelchair
a tracking/follow shot
- when someone is walking down the street and you want to follow them
4 main windows in Final Cut Pro
- browser window (keep assets: video and audio clips, graphics)
- viewer window (where you can view your clips)
- canvas is a monitor for showing what the final view will be
browser window can be viewed as icons
- shows first frame of each clip (video usually 30 frames per second)
- list view shows lots of extra information about it
basic sequence of editing
- double click an clip to open in the viewer
- can then set in and out points (different from iMovie, iMovie assumes you don't want other part of the clips -- that is destructive editing)
- then edit your clip into the timeline by dragging it in
- or drag over the edit overlays pallette, and select the
- can also use buttons below the overlays pallette
- also have keyboard shortcuts (this is extremely helpful, frees you up creatively)
start building a sequence out of the clips you like and the parts of the clips you like
timeline is where the probram gets assempled
old days of tape to tape editing, they always had 2 monitors so you could see your source tape and your target tape
- the dual screen view
Premiere is very similar to this
- didn't use to be a double monitor model, but now it is
- this makes it more flexible
Final Cut pro does these things better than Premiere, it is faster, gives you more options
- Premiere or Avid is the equavlaent to FCP
Avid used to be the standard
- Avid machines are very expensive compared to FCP
-- lower end products are just a few hundred dollars more
you can buy 3rd party add ins for Final Cut
Can get a totally hot system for final cut for around 10K for FCP
- comparable system for Avid is around 25K
- there is not going to be a noticable increase in quality
Most high end post houses and commercial editiorial places have been dug in with Avid for a long term, so they keep upgrading their Avid systems instead of going to FCP
- for new shops, most people are going to FCP
- this has been a very recent, quick change in the last few years
Final Cut Pro is becoming more common than Avid
- upgrades with Avid are so expensive
you can work offline with FCP
- can still create an edit on a powerbook and then transfer that project over to a higher end system and it will fall into place
-- costs are significantly cheaper with FCP all the way up and down the line
I know several Avid editors who have gone over to FCP
- doesn't know ANYONE who has started working on FCP and has gone over to Avid
Premiere used to only be on the Mac
- then it went to both Mac and PC
- FCP has become so ubiquitous that Premiere is no longer being made for the Mac (they can't compete on the Mac any longer)
In past tests when Premiere was on the Mac, FCP was more than twice as fast than Premiere
You can import motion JPEG-A and other things
- if your project is set as a DV project and you bring in compressed stuff, it needs to convert it all to DV for you to work for it
- will work with basically any type of video system
DV works at a consistent 3.6 MB/sec (low data rate for video)
- uncompressed system at home is about 21 MB/sec
-- that fills up a gig of space with 5 min of DV, or 30 sec of video with uncompressed system
Advantage of uncompressed is that you can bring in video and not have any image degredation
- no stairstepping, or blocks of color
- DV can do that at some point with dissolves or color degredations
- uncompressed video has more headroom for colors, more of a range
When creating motion graphics, colors are smoother, softer, better looking because it is better for
Green screen and blue screen: you can get a better key out of uncompressed
piece of hardware that can bring in component video (RGB from beta deck)
- uses PCI card that costs about $3000
-- he uses Motion JPEG-A
FCP allows you to escalate your
Digital betacam deck can cost 50K, High Def deck can cost 80K
FCP will probably never work on a Windows machine
DV is a compressed system
- unless you load it up with a ton of effects, your quality going out of the system is the same as it was coming in
- that was a huge breakthrough for DV
Can do the same thing for an uncompressed system, but at a higher level
- uses an Aurora PCI card, series "Igniter", new stuff is pike, the
- also Cona by Aja, is very popular off of firewire instead of PCI (doesn't look as good as Aurora because the CODEC is not as good
http://www.auroratech.com/
Telecina: going from film to video
- have to pay someone to use their very expensive equipment to do that
- it is basically a scanner
- when you get this done, that is the best time to do color corrections
- machine costs about $1.5 million that did this for "Fine Dining," at that time there were just 2 machines that did this, 1 in LA and the other in London
Had planned "Fine Dining" movie for over a year till finally he could work with the footage
Sundance usually doesn't like you to resubmit a movie
Film has a lot of artifacts, it is not completely smooth like DV
24 fps is not smooth like 30 fps is during a pan
"Motvating your shot": directing people's attention to other parts of the screen
- on DVD on a good TV you can see things that you wouldn't have noticed at the screen
on some DVDs they will sometimes close in the box on tope and bottom to hide the boom!
- lots of time remastering for DVDs means hiding mistakes
when movies have 4x3 versions, you have to decide which frame you want to be showing
- some directors plan for that and put masking tape on their monitor to use when composing their shots
full academy apeture: full frame of 35 mm film
- that is why "Fine Dining" comes in
Film isn't wider, but anamorphic film has image compressed but the projector blows it up again
What is the length of a clip that is comfortable to the eye
- our attention spans are definitely different than they were 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago
Slide show presentations: usually do 5 sec with 1 sec dissolve on either end make it 4 sec long (half second on either end)
- that seems to be a comfortable length for a still, if it is less time it seems like you haven't had time to really process it
titles in older silent films held on the screen longer because literacy was at a lower level
- people's attention span / way of digesting the cinematic language
we are quick on the uptake because we are saturated with digital media
- we can read 2 sentences in a second now
we are really becoming digital human beings: we are interfacing with these machines to a much greater
- our thoughts are still faster
on commercial the other day, I counted 3 images per second
- that is the same as 10 frames
movie "Paris, Texas" is extremely slow paced
importing from a DVD?
- compressed with MPEG-2
- final cut isn't capable (yet) of editing MPEG-2, so you would have to convert it to DV
- you can sometimes play it out of the S-video port of a DVD player and bring it into a camera or port
- because the compression is different you tend to get some artifacts, in part because the compression is different
To go from DVD right into FCP, there is some hack software out there that will do that but it is really a compromise
- can archive a project on a DVD (digital files), writing to it like a CD and then you keep your original source project material
Advice for documentaries
- they are not scripted as much as they are planned
- once you get your shots, then you script and put it together
- then you can identify holes, where you need to bridge things with a particular shot
-- that gives you the bridge you need to get from one shot to another
- in the scripting stage, when you are collecting all your assets, research, photos, etc, lay them all out on the floor
-- that long line of stuff can become your timeline
- lot of times, you need to lay out what you have and figure out what you need to get from one spot to another
it is a story that actually happened, but you are formatting it for the medium
- finding the images you need to support it
that is the procedure most people I know who make documentaries follow
friend just shot a music video (opera singer and videographer) at the Montery acquarium (got lens really close to the glass)
Last thing to show: "One Giant Leap"
- the epitome of digital storytelling in terms of the styles and methods it combines (definitely does have a left of center point of view)
- this could really have not been done 10 or 15 years ago
- quality of the DV editing and footage is top-notch, very fluid and amazing
- made really by 2 hippies that decided to make this cool thing
Posted: Fri - July 9, 2004 at 12:29 PM
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Total entries in this category: 10
Published On: Jul 11, 2004 11:20 PM
Total entries in this category: 10
Published On: Jul 11, 2004 11:20 PM
