The corporate video Nano Power C.M.I is now in the Motion Portfolio.

Although it's a corporate video, it is actually more like a short film. Shot in a comedic, film noir style reminiscent of movies like "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" with Steve Martin.

We made the video a few years back but it is still one of my favorite corporate jobs. I'd like to produce some more in this short film style. You can see the video here.

I stumbled upon this great montage video today that shows a whole bunch of shots from some of the top TV shows, that used green screen visual effects. The interesting thing about most of these shots, is that you would never know about them or pick them. They're just shots you'd think were filmed on location. Some are obviously digital, like the boat on fire from Greys Anatomy. But the only reason you'd know it was digital is because it's kind of obvious that it would cost way too much to actually have a real boat all smashed up and on fire. And of course the space walk on another planet had to be digital because, unless we've had some serious technological advancements in the last twelve months that I'm unaware of, I know we can't just pick up a camera and crew and head off to another world.

Have a look at this awesome video from Stargate Studios.

So why are they using digital compositing on green screen shots on what appear to be simple location shoots in the cities?

Well more often than not it comes down to two factors. Budget and time. Possibly the two biggest influencers of any film project, big or small. Quite often a TV show is not filmed in the city that it is set. It would take up way too much time to actually go and get those shots that take place out on the streets. Also the logistics involved in shooting on location in a city (or almost anywhere these days) is nightmarish. The endless red tape that needs to be sorted through, the officials that need bribing (Oops sorry, I meant location shooting fees that need to be paid...) and then if you have the time, money and patience to push through all of that, you then have to deal with keeping members of the public out of the frame and avoid showing trademarked logos and signs that you don't have permission to use...

Sometimes it's just easier, cheaper and quicker to build a small section of shop fronts, throw up a green screen, get a few extras, shoot the scene in a controlled environment, and then get some digital compositing whizz to throw it all together in post-production. Not to mention when done that way, you have complete control over weather, lighting conditions, the time of day and so on and so on.

So did you ever think that so much planning and work went into seemingly straight forward shots, or were you putting some dinner into your mouth at that moment and missed the shot all together?

Being a visual effects artist is an interesting job that plays havoc on our egos and emotions. At first, it's a great feeling to be a visual effects artist and have your work on display for everyone to see. But then if someone from the audience states "they were some great effects" and then comes up to congratulate us, we know that we've failed. An audience should never be aware that a  great effects shot has just happened right in front of them.

I've been busy over the last few weeks, tweaking the design and functionality of the new web site. I'm still not 1005 happy with it but who's got the time to fiddle with web sites when there are movies to be made...

What I have done though is ad some content to the portfolio section (at last).

I've split the work into two areas 'Motion' and 'Still'.

Motion is where all of our film and video productions will go, such as show reels, movie trailers, commercials, corporate videos, music clips and short films. At the moment I've added our Visual Effects Show Reel, a short little western film that was made for fun but turned into our I.D. tag, the Trailer for the horror film The Gates of Hell (which I edited and produced the visual effects for), and a slideshow of before and after work on a number of my digital art pieces.

Still is where a number of galleries will be, that show off my photography both commercial and for-the-hell-of-it work, artwork, graphic design and other still imagery. Right there now I have a small Commercial Photography gallery, Graphic Design gallery and Movie Posters gallery.

There's a lot more to go up in both areas so stay tuned for that.

Til next time.

J.C.

This is my 2010 visual effects show reel. With new shots from commercials and films including a number from "The Gates of Hell"

For a detailed breakdown of all the visual effects shots, visit the Visual Effects Portfolio page.

Any constructive feedback is welcome. Please leave a comment below.

OK, so I’ve seen this posted around on a number of forums, people
asking how to get photos to look like this, where it almost looks like
a painting. And I always thought I should maybe write a tutorial on it.
And well that time has come.

I really have no idea what the proper term is for this style. it is becoming
known as the “Dave Hill Look”. Though this is similar, it
is different and gives slightly different results.

Essentially what is happening is you are compressing all light into the exposed range. In the real world there is a lot of visible light. And a lot more non visible. Now just because it is visible doesn’t mean it is all visible at the same time. Especially to a camera. What this means is that when you look at something dark, anything that is bright is over-exposed or blown out and the details cannot be seen. Likewise if you are looking at something bright, you cannot see the details in dark things. There is a range of light that can be seen at any one time.

Eyes, film cameras and digital cameras all work the same way, in that they have an iris that opens and closes to let in or block out light which allows for a certain range of light to be captured. Anything darker than that range will be under-exposed and probably just look black. Anything brighter will be over-exposed and look white (and will probably add glows and halos around its edges along with all manner of other issues I won’t be going into here).

However when an artist paints a scene, very rarely will she or he paint areas under or over exposed. Have you ever seen a painting where the sky is all washed out and white? Ok so now some smart-arse is going to find one and email it to me with an abusive message. I don’t care. And if that’s you “Get a life!”.

What the artist is doing is looking at each area of the scene separately and then painting them with visible colours. And this is what we need to do with the photos.

The first step is to take your photo. If you know you are going to want to apply this look, it really is better to know before you do anything. Ok so not a rule but a suggestion USE A TRIPOD! Now the idea is to capture ALL visible light. Unless you just started reading here you’re probably thinking “didn’t he just say a camera can’t capture all available light…” and you are correct. That is why it is best to take several photos at different exposures. I usually take one at what would be considered the correct exposure and then one 2 f-stops above and below and also 4 f-stops above and below. I’m not here to teach you about f-stops so read your camera manual if you don’t know what they are.

Now this can vary depending on what you are shooting. When the sun is in shot, I’ve had to close my iris right down and increase the shutter speed to 2000th/sec to get it right. But that’s getting too technical. All I’m saying is experiment to get the best results. Once you have done a few you’ll get the idea.

Sometimes it just isn’t possible to take multiple photos. Especially when something in the frame is moving. This is where camera RAW is a wonderful thing. A lot of digital cameras these days can shoot in RAW format and I would recommend always using it. Essentially what it is doing is recording all the data that hits the microchip in the camera whereas the JPEG format will discard a lot of information in its compression. This is ok if all you want to do is take happy-snaps and print them out at your local Kodak self help kiosk. But if you want to manipulate your photos in anyway, the more information you start with the better the end result will be. Even though RAW format still only captures the light the iris allows through, it has a much better range than a JPEG image but nowhere near as much as taking multiple images at different exposures. However sometimes it’s all ya got.

I’ll write the rest of this tutorial based on only one photo being taken in camera RAW format. It should be easy enough to adapt to other scenarios.

Ok I know what you’re thinking… “That’s a whole lotta writing and not many pictures. Isn’t this supposed to be a Photoshop tutorial?”

So let’s start with the original photo. It’s kind of interesting but dull. The sky is blown out although there is a bit of detail there. The dark trees and ground are all kind of murky. I can see detail in the paint but it really doesn’t stand out that much. It’s just a regular photo.

Now because I took this in RAW format there is actually more information than is actually visible. So the first step is to open it up in Adobe Camera RAW which is part of Photoshop. Just open it like you would any other file and Camera RAW should launch automatically.

What we want to do is create several files at different exposure settings to make as much of the light or data captured, visible. In your camera RAW settings all you need to touch is the ‘Exposure” setting. First set it to 0 and then hit the save button. Create a folder to save all these files in and save it as a PSD or Photoshop file with the name and then 0.

Now set the exposure to +2 and save again, this time with +2 and the end of the name. And now repeat once more for -2. This is all I needed for this image but some may need a + and – 4 as well.

Now we have these images we have to group them together into one image with the full range of light data. This is called an HDR image or High Dynamic Range. This can be done inside of Photoshop by opening all your images and going to File menu, Automate, Merge to HDR. This works but not well enough for the next step.

OK so this is the step where everyone will probably hate me. I’m going to step outside of Photoshop.

I know, I know it’s outrageous but it has to be done. Photoshop is good for a lot of things but this aint one of them. I’m going to use a program called Photomatix Pro, which can be found at http://www.hdrsoft.com/ It is specifically designed for creating high quality HDR images and toning them. I’m sure all of this can be done within Photoshop but I prefer this method, as it is a lot simpler.

I open all the images in Photomatix Pro and go to the HDRI menu and select Generate HDR. Then I made sure the ‘Use already opened images’ box was ticked and chose OK. This then takes you to another screen where you’ll see why you included the exposure settings in your file name. Set the Exposure Value to be the same as that stated in your file name. It usually does a pretty good job of this automatically but it’s a good idea to check. Once done press OK.

On the next screen I usually use the default ‘Use standard response curve’ and press OK. But you may want to experiment a little. This will then take a moment to create your HDR image.

and…..

waiting…..

Da daaaaaaa…..

OMG It looks horrible what have you done!

Well of course it looks horrible you didn’t think it was going to be that easy did you?

OK what we have created is an HDR image. Which means there is way more information within it than can actually be seen or shown at any one time. What we now need to do is bring all of that information within a range that it is all visible at once just like a painting. This is called Tone Mapping.

Go back to the HDRI menu and select Tone Mapping. A window will open with a whole new bunch of toys… Err um tools to use. This is where you need to experiment.I’m not going to go into each settingand what it does cause I’ll be typing forthe next six months and then there’ll be a new version with different tools and I’ll have to start again and it’ll all be bad. So have a play and see what happens. But this image shows the settings I used for this image.

Once done click OK and your image will be generated.

Now you can see all the light that the camera took in one visible image. It’s looking better but still doesn’t quite fit the mood that I wanted. Let’s save it by going to the File menu, Save As and I usually save as a TIFF file.

OK Back to Photoshop. I knew you were uncomfortable being away from it for so long. Open your new tone mapped image up. The first thing I do is duplicate the background and label it. I like to label each layer and generally keep my projects organised so I can go back to it any time and know what it is I’ve done. I labelled this layer B&W. I’ll give you one guess why.

We want to make the layer black and white. Make sure the layer is selected and go to Image menu, Adjustments, Desaturate. Ok now duplicate that layer twice and place all three Black and white layers in their own Group by selecting all three and dragging them down on to the folder icon at the bottom of the layers window.

First turn the top two layers off and change the blend mode of the bottom one (which should be called “B&W”) to Overlay. This will make it very rich and dark but don’t panic. With the second layer, labelled “B&W copy” set the blend mode to Screen. I thought this was a touch too bright so I lowered the opacity to about 90%. This has made the image a touch brighter and more contrasty.

With the top layer, better known as “B&W copy 2” I’m going to bring out some of the fine detail by sharpening it. Go to the Filter menu, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask. In the dialogue box that pops open I put the following settings.

This will look way too sharp but that’s ok. I lowered the opacity to about 53% and kept the blend mode as normal.

I should mention that the size of the image I am working on is 3072x2048 pixels roughly a 6.3 Mega pixel image. I say that as sharpen and blur settings can vary depending on the size of image you are working on.

Now that’s beginning to look better. Although the effect of those three layers is probably a bit too strong. This is the beauty of placing objects in groups. Instead of changing the opacity of all three layers I can drop it just for the group layer. I put it at around 62%. Now you should have something looking a little like this.

It was at this point that I noticed the clouds were looking a little sharp so I added a layer mask to “B&W copy 2” so that they would stay soft. There are a million tutorials out there on selections and layer masks, so I wont go into it here.

To my eye there’s still too much colour so I added an adjustment layer and selected Hue/Saturation. In the window that opens I turned the Saturation down to around -35%. Much better.

The idea behind this photo was to draw people’s attention to the car, which you’d probably think I have achieved by the way it takes up most of the frame. But I’m still finding the surrounding trees a little distracting. To fix this I’m going to get rid of most of the colour and leave the blue to stand out.

To maintain the detail of what we’ve done so far I want to copy all the layers into one new layer. You can do this by selecting the top layer, which should be “Hue/Saturation 1” and pressing Command+Option+Shift+E on a Mac or Control+Alt+Shift+E on a PC. You may need two hands for this one. Now rename this new layer to “Tint – Grey”. And you guessed it we’re going to make it black and white again. So head up to the Image menu, Adjustments, Desaturate.

Of course this will make everything greyscale. To get the blue to be visible through it we’ll need to double click on the layer to bring up the Layer Style palette. In the blending options you’ll notice the section called Blend If. What we want to do is see through this layer, wherever there is blue beneath it.

We do this by selecting the blue channel and then adjusting the slider for Underlying Layer. You’ll notice that as you move the slider it creates a hard edge where it is seeing through. To soften this, hold down the Option key for Mac or Alt key for PC and drag one side of the little arrow. You’ll see that it splits into two giving you the ability to select over a range. The settings I have here gave a nice look.

OK now to add that sepia tone. Duplicate the layer “Tint – Grey” and rename it to “Tint – Sepia”. To change it to a sepia colour open up Image menu, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation and apply the following settings.

To adjust the tint slightly I opened up the layer styles palette and changed the Underlying Settings of the Blue channel from 33/232 to 50/235. This is subtle but it makes the sepia blend into the blue slightly.

The finale step for this image was to create a vignette. I did this by creating a new layer and naming it “vignette” then with the circular marquee tool I held the Shift key to constrain the shape and drew a circle a little smaller than the image.

Then filled it with black and deselected. Because the image isn’t aperfectsquare I pressed Command or Control + T to transform the circle and stretched its width out and pressed return to commit.

I then selected Filter menu, Blur, Gaussian Blur and pushed it all the way up to 250. Again this will vary depending on you image size. I then selected the blurred circle by holding down Command or Control and clicking on the thumbnail of the layer. By clicking on the eye next to the thumbnail I hid the layer and then created a new one. I then went to the Select menu, Inverse to invert the selection and then filled with black. I lowered the Opacity to around 70% and hey presto, you’re done!

Written by James Cole

James Cole is a Director, Editor and Visual Effects Producer for Hysteria Productions and has worked on hundreds of projects from short films to feature films and music videos to commercials. You can find out more at http://www.hysteria.com.au

Ok so this is all about one of the most painful experiences I’ve had as an editor in recent times. It should be simple. It should be easy. But it aint! Let me start by getting some whining out of the way. Why oh why can’t competing companies make products that are more compatible. People at Apple know that there will always be people who use Avid and likewise, those at Avid know there will always be people who use Final Cut. There is enough room for both products. Why can’t they make the software talk to each other easier?

Alright so now that I’ve had my two cents worth, on with the real reason you are here. I recently started as the editor on a feature film. I was brought onto the project late in the game and all the footage was logged and captured on an Avid suite. Not being an Avid editor, I wanted to work on what I knew, which is Final Cut Pro. This was so I could focus on the creative side of things rather than constantly having to figure things out.

Not being familiar with the Avid Media Composer or even with a Windows PC, I called in the cavalry, Mr. Uber Micro, Cameron d’Arcy, who also happened to be the post production supervisor and one of the producers on the film. Completing this simple task would turn out to be a mammoth job, taking the two of us hours of scanning the net and finding very little and then trial and error (mostly error). Eventually we figured it out. Well I say we, but really the full credit goes to Cam. So here it is the step by step guide of how to get logged clips from Avid Media Composer to Final Cut Pro, keep all the sound in sync AND retain all the logged information including time codes.

The first part is to get the footage and information out of Media Composer.

Step 1: In Media Composer, select all the clips you want to export and then from the file menu choose ‘Export’ then in the dialogue box, choose ‘Options’. A fairly straight forward start.

Step 2: In the ‘Export As’ button, choose ‘QuickTime Movie’. Next to that are two tick boxes ‘Use Marks’ and ‘Use Enabled Tracks’. Both of these were not ticked. Then under that section ‘Same as Source’ was selected and ‘Use Avid DV Codec’ was not ticked. For this case ‘Video and Audio’ was selected, but this will depend on your project. The video format selected was ‘RGB’ and the ‘Display Aspect Ratio’ was DV (720 x 576) This will change depending on your footage. We were working with PAL DV footage for the offline edit. We then saved these settings as a preset by clicking ‘Save As’ and naming it ‘AVID DV QT’ You could be more creative with the name but by the time we got to this point we couldn’t be bothered.

Something to note is the names of your clips. I found that if they have * or / and probably other characters in them, they didn’t work. However -() seemed to be OK. It’s probably easier to go through and check all of this first. Also make sure there aren’t any duplicate names as this too will cause hours of trouble when it comes time to re-link the media.

Step 3: So now you’re back at the ‘Export As’ dialogue box. All you have to do is select a location for all of your footage to be saved (make sure there is enough room) and click ‘Save’. Go get a cup of coffee, go out for dinner or go to bed, depending on how much footage you have. This could take a while...

Step 4: That’s the footage taken care of, now you need all that logged information. With the bin opened but none of the clips selected, go to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Export’.

Step 5: In the ‘Export Bin As’ menu, choose ‘Avid Log Exchange’. Find somewhere to save the ‘ALE’ file, name it and click ‘Save’. Easy!

Step 6: Eject the hard drive (did I mention to save all that stuff on and external drive that can be booted on Mac and PC... Oops) and plug it into the Mac.

This is where it starts to get fun...

Step 7: Now you may have noticed all of that footage you have just exported has no time-code attached to it. This was by far the hardest step to figure out and yet now it seems so simple. First download some freeware software called ‘Sebsky Tools’.

[Update]

Sebsky Tools was created by Dharma Films who unfortunately are no more.  This little freeby is going to save you hours and hours and probably save you from going completely insane too. As they no longer exist I am providing a download here. I hope that this is ok to do so. If any of the original creators have a problem with this, please contact me and I’ll remove the link immediately.

Click to Download Sebsky Tools

Step 8: Now that you’ve downloaded, installed and opened up Sebsky Tools, click on ‘Batch Add TC’ find and select the ‘ALE’ file you created and in the ‘Use Timecode from column:’ drop down menu, we chose ‘[ALE] Start’. Then click ‘Select’

Step 9: A new dialogue box opens and you need to point to the folder with all of your footage in it. Put a tick in the ‘Overwrite existing Timecode Track’ tick box, and we had the ‘Match QuickTime File names exported from Windows’ tick box not ticked. The ‘Movie file extension:’ menu was on ‘.mov’ but this may vary depending on how you exported the files. Now go get another Coffee cause this could take a few minutes, as it is re-writing the time-code track to each QuickTime file

Step 10: Once Sebsky is done doing its thing, a report will open saying how many clips it has processed and how many (if any) it couldn’t find. Click OK. If there were any files that were skipped there’s a good chance they are either missing or have one of the characters in the name that doesn’t work. Click on the ‘Log’ button and you’ll be able to find the problem files. You may have to go back and change names both in Media Composer and the QuickTime files and then output a new ‘ALE’ file. If everything is good, you may want to open a few of the files in QuickTime and check to make sure the time-code is correct.

Step 11: Now we have to convert that ALE file to an XML file so that Final Cut can read it. Open up ‘Cinema Tools’ which comes as part of the Final Cut Studio package. Select ‘Create a New Database’ and click ‘Continue’.

Step 12: Put all the settings for your film type in. We kept the ‘Film Standard’ on ‘35mm 4p’ and put the other three menus on ’25 FPS’ and select ‘OK’. In the new dialogue box, type a name for the database and find somewhere to keep the file and click on ‘Save’.

Step 13: Now goto the ‘File’ menu, ‘Import’ then ‘Telecine Log...’ In the dialogue box, choose your ALE file and make sure the ‘Append a camera letter’ is not ticked. Click on ‘Open’ then click on ‘OK’ when it’s done.

Step 14: Now goto the ‘File’ menu, ‘Export’ then ‘XML Batch List...’ In the dialogue box Type a name for the XML file and find somewhere to put it and click ‘Save’

Step 15: You may as well close down Sebsky Tools and Cinema Tools, as you no longer need them. Open up Final Cut Pro and start a new project or open up the project you want to import all the files into. Keep in mind though when you import the files, they are all placed in the top level folder, so it may be easier to start a new project and then move them to the required project once you’ve had time to sort them all out.

Step 16: Goto the ‘File’ menu, ‘Import’ then ‘XML...’ and choose the XML file you just created.

Step 17: In the dialogue box that opens, set the ‘Destination:’ to the project you have open. Set the sequence settings if you need to (we didn’t as we were only importing clips). In the ‘Options’ section we had ‘Reconnect to Media Files’ ticked and the other two boxes, not ticked, but this may vary. Click ‘OK’

Step 18: Now if you’re anything like us you’ll notice that the bloody ‘Reconnect to Media Files’ didn’t work. So far we’ve found no way to make this happen easily so let the pain begin... Select all of your clips and goto the ‘File’ menu then ‘Reconnect Media...’.

Step 19: Set the ‘Search Single Location:’ to the folder with all your media files in and then click ‘Search’, this will speed things up a little.

Step 20: Now for some ungodly reason there is a bug in the system so that if you tick ‘Reconnect All Files in Relative Path’, after selecting the first clip, all the other clips disappear. You’re not gonna want to hear this part, but you must reconnect each clip individually. I gave suicide a serious thought when I looked in the folder to find 930 clips. So make sure that ‘Reconnect All Files in Relative Path’ is not ticked and you’ll probably also have to make sure ‘Matched Name and Reel Only’ is not ticked as the QuickTime files do not have the reel number embedded in them and it won’t find them. Find the first clip and select ‘Open’

Step 21: ‘File Attributes Mismatch’ dialogue box will probably open. I found that it worked OK if you just click ‘Continue’ I’m not sure why it does this, but it does.

Step 22: Click on ‘Search’ again. This time it should find the correct clip and will do each time from now on. Click ‘Open’ and keep repeating until you’re all done. If you have a lot of clips, you may want to do this in chunks of 50 or so clips so you can keep saving. Once you get in the rhythm, it’s actually not too bad and only took about an hour for me to connect all 930 clips. However, if anyone knows of a quicker way, please drop me an email and let me know.

Step 23: That’s pretty much it. All done. I did find a few anomalies with odd file names and stuff that needed to be corrected manually, but with a bit of logical and lateral thinking you should be able to figure them out.

There are packages that supposedly do most of this for you like the Automatic Duck FCP Import plugin, but we found that this caused all the sound to go out of sync. Maybe this is because our sound was recorded separately and without any time-code. We couldn’t figure it out for sure. I know that the AE Import plugin that Automatic Duck makes for importing timelines into After Effects, works really well.

The other thing with doing it this way, is that you haven’t spent any extra money on software, whereas the Automatic Duck plugin is over $600. Anyway I hope this helps, as I’m sure there are others out there who need to do the same thing and are having as much trouble finding information as we did.

Happy editing.

Written by James Cole

James Cole is a Director, Editor and Visual Effects Producer for Hysteria Productions and has worked on hundreds of projects from short films to feature films and music videos to commercials. You can find out more at http://www.hysteria.com.au

So I thought I'd see how easy it is to post a blog entry from my iPhone. I have to say, it's pretty damn easy. I can see this being useful down the track. I'll be able to post up to the minute details about projects I'm working on, wherever I may be working on them. I wish I had this set up for when I travelled around Australia... Oh well, I guess that's an excuse to do it again...

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After a three day grueling film shoot, I realised I still had the camera for one more day. I couldn't let it go to waste... I came up with this little idea and set off with my co-producer Chris Daniels and Unit manager Brad Armel, to find a place to film it.

Luckily we didn't have to go far. I found a fairly bare looking field with one great looking tree in the middle and a wonky windmill in the background. It couldn't have been more perfect. Brad operated the camera, while Chris and myself got into character.

About two hours later and I was pretty sure we had all the footage I needed.

Unfortunately, post-production wasn't that quick. A number of other jobs got in the way and it was a good six months before I got the project finished.

The was shot on the Sony HVR-Z1 HDV camera. I loved almost everything about the camera except the format. HDV is truly a terrible format if you want to apply visual effects and heavy colour grades to the footage. It just doesn't hold up with all the compression that is on it. Oh well, I managed to save both this and the other project I was shooting at the time.