I have been doing more digitisation of Super-8mm and Standard-8mm movies dating back to 1962. I ran across "Unsharp Mask" in the GIMP manual and I find that Ulead Video Editing software also has this in its video filters. Looking good - on careful inspection results do not have any better detail but they seem to look better. I have found that other sharpeners do bad things with film grain but Unsharp Mask seems to handle graininess well. With "The GIMP", I am using the default settings. With "Ulead" IMO the default settings go too far and I am using relatively gentle settings of "15%, 15%" on the 2 controls provided.
Ref - info with image examples in "The GIMP" online manual:
http://docs.gimp.org/en/plug-in-unsharp-mask.html
"The Unsharp Mask filter (what an odd name!) sharpens edges of the elements without increasing noise or blemish. It is the king of the sharpen filters..."
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Music to my ears NOT
Maybe I am turning into a very old fogey, but does anyone else object to social conversation being made impossible by playing loud music? Bronnie and I got into a film-makers party at "Galatos", (well we are "emerging" film-makers!), and we had a great time meeting interesting people, but that blasting music meant that conversation was conducted by yelling at close quarters. We worked it out that we could escape outside into the street to talk and the street filled up with exiled smokers and talkers with it being a little annoying and a lot funny that the bouncers were obliged to deprive we street people of our drinks. It seems that smoking and intelligent conversation are now the twin evils of society requiring the perpetrators to be put outside. Nice party MIC but next time lose the music, we film-makers are not out-of-it nightclub bunnies requiring music to cover for an inability to communicate - we are actually the articulate ones.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Effects just got easier - DAZ Studio can output PNG
DAZ Studio (www.daz3d.com - basic toolkit free) is the 3D posing and animation software I have been getting interested in recently. In earlier posts I have been writing about adding a bluescreen background in "DAZ Studio" then following that up in the video editor software with compositing. Today I looked for rendering movies to a sequence of .PNG files and I found it. And even better it did what I wanted which is to render no-background as transparent. This is good news because a sequence of .PNGs supporting transparency (alpha values) is going to composite better than any process where a colour needs to be changed to transparency. I don't know if this is new in version 2.2 or whether it was there before and I missed it.
Monday, July 7, 2008
3D Animation Example
Following up the previous entry with a "For Example" - this is from one of my students:
"Victoria at MIT" on Youtube
Ricky has animated Victoria in "DAZ Studio" with a plain "bluescreen" background. "Compositing" with photos and video done in "Ulead MediaStudio Pro 8".
"Victoria at MIT" on Youtube
Ricky has animated Victoria in "DAZ Studio" with a plain "bluescreen" background. "Compositing" with photos and video done in "Ulead MediaStudio Pro 8".
Sunday, June 22, 2008
IAFILM heading for 3D Animation
There's an indie response to "Beowulf" in our future
We the current IAFILM film-makers have decided to adopt the "DAZ3D" 3D computer animation technology with its libraries of ready-made characters and concentrate for our new direction on how far we can push this. Over the last 3 years, we feel we have "cracked" low-budget high-definition greenscreen production with human actors only to hit the social and human problem of not being able to get enough actors interested in staying the course of low budget indie movies even short ones. Other indies are reporting the same experience - cruel when accessible technology finally enables our visions. BUT 3D is doing trickle-down to the likes of us. I had earlier said no to this partly because of what I perceived as the lonely isolated nature of the process. What we are finding now is that we have links to a pool of wonderful voice characterisation actors who we relate to well because many of them are 50+ years old like many of us. We are finding that the voice/sound production for these movies is great fun with most of the tedium and stress of human-actor-filming removed. Risk factors like fights and stunts involving enthusiastic non-professionals (and horses!) are also removed. Kinda radio plays with pix added. We can still get into some acting to give movement guides to the animators but we don't need elaborate setups and costuming. Acting sessions can be very free flowing and we can see rather than a loss of human acting dynamics and experience we may well find a freedom here to create in new ways.
DAZ Animation gives us lots of nice safety nets. An actor suddenly can not make it to filming? We can run with a stand-in and voice-record the missing actor later. Critical actor suddenly going overseas? Haul him/her in front of the mic with those others we can round up to feed lines and we can survive. Or replace much more easily with another actor. Our real people partners can do a Ray Winstone/Beowulf and play impossibly pretty-in-the-Hollywood-way humans and any kind of fantasy creature.
Who are DAZ3D? Refs:
DAZ Website: http://www.daz3d.com
The basic software toolkit "DAZ Studio" is a free download after registration.
It comes with a minimum set of "3D Models" = characters and clothes. You need to buy in extra "actors" and buy "morphs" for them to get a range of characters out of one model. Prices are reasonable, we can "cast" our next 10 minute movie for about US$100 which is well below what we would spend on such a project made by other means. This is not a rave review by any means - this looks to me very much like an emerging technology and at present we often need to tell ourselves to "keep it simple". DAZ Studio works well with bluescreen backgrounds processed later in the video editor and it does the basics of animation very easily - I especially like its "puppeteer" method. With some ingenuity of approach we seem to have here a kit for making the alternative no-budget indie response to "Beowulf".
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAZ3D
We the current IAFILM film-makers have decided to adopt the "DAZ3D" 3D computer animation technology with its libraries of ready-made characters and concentrate for our new direction on how far we can push this. Over the last 3 years, we feel we have "cracked" low-budget high-definition greenscreen production with human actors only to hit the social and human problem of not being able to get enough actors interested in staying the course of low budget indie movies even short ones. Other indies are reporting the same experience - cruel when accessible technology finally enables our visions. BUT 3D is doing trickle-down to the likes of us. I had earlier said no to this partly because of what I perceived as the lonely isolated nature of the process. What we are finding now is that we have links to a pool of wonderful voice characterisation actors who we relate to well because many of them are 50+ years old like many of us. We are finding that the voice/sound production for these movies is great fun with most of the tedium and stress of human-actor-filming removed. Risk factors like fights and stunts involving enthusiastic non-professionals (and horses!) are also removed. Kinda radio plays with pix added. We can still get into some acting to give movement guides to the animators but we don't need elaborate setups and costuming. Acting sessions can be very free flowing and we can see rather than a loss of human acting dynamics and experience we may well find a freedom here to create in new ways.
DAZ Animation gives us lots of nice safety nets. An actor suddenly can not make it to filming? We can run with a stand-in and voice-record the missing actor later. Critical actor suddenly going overseas? Haul him/her in front of the mic with those others we can round up to feed lines and we can survive. Or replace much more easily with another actor. Our real people partners can do a Ray Winstone/Beowulf and play impossibly pretty-in-the-Hollywood-way humans and any kind of fantasy creature.
Who are DAZ3D? Refs:
DAZ Website: http://www.daz3d.com
The basic software toolkit "DAZ Studio" is a free download after registration.
It comes with a minimum set of "3D Models" = characters and clothes. You need to buy in extra "actors" and buy "morphs" for them to get a range of characters out of one model. Prices are reasonable, we can "cast" our next 10 minute movie for about US$100 which is well below what we would spend on such a project made by other means. This is not a rave review by any means - this looks to me very much like an emerging technology and at present we often need to tell ourselves to "keep it simple". DAZ Studio works well with bluescreen backgrounds processed later in the video editor and it does the basics of animation very easily - I especially like its "puppeteer" method. With some ingenuity of approach we seem to have here a kit for making the alternative no-budget indie response to "Beowulf".
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAZ3D
Friday, May 30, 2008
48 Hours
The big film-making activity for this month has been competing in the "48 Hours Furious Film-making Competition" in Auckland NZ.
We drew the genre of "Juvenile Delinquent".
We went the same way as last year doing stop motion animation with modelling clay.
One speed-up technique, we did most speech as close-ups by taking only 4 to 6 photos with various mouth positions then throwing those at our 2 x editors to arrange along the timeline opposite the sound. Gets those editors involved early doing "parallel processing".
Best move for this year was to recruit voice actors from a band I worked with to make video clips. This band, the "Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band" plugged us into a folkie network of actors, comedians, and children's entertainers and they were great. Soundtrack was directed and recorded as a separate operation some 30km away by my co-director who sent it in by internet.
Generally all went well although we were wildly over-ambitious and we feel amazed that we threw together a result that does kinda reflect most of the story but with the rushed final editing showing. I got it across the finish line with 2 min to go.
"How EUROPE got its Name" is based on a story from ancient Greece. Our ancient city of Tyre 1000BC was mostly made out of file boxes. We printed out paper sheets of computer-file brick, wood and stone textures and glued those on the boxes.
We had some modelling clay characters from last year and earlier movies that we remodelled. We were character and set building till Sat 4:55pm when we fired the first of about 700 stop-motion shots.
Our last year's modelling clay entry, "Dancing with the Pollies", similar approach, is on youtube as a tidied up version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD3WkV0sUGg
Reviewer "Godfather" writes:
"How Europe Got Its Name" by MITCIT (Juvenile Delinquent)
These guys always come up with something from left field, and this was no exception.
Where do you find inspiration for a Juvenile Delinquent story? Why, Herodotus, of course! For a claymation musical about a fairly obscure moment in ancient Greek history, this got a huge audience response. B-
We drew the genre of "Juvenile Delinquent".
We went the same way as last year doing stop motion animation with modelling clay.
One speed-up technique, we did most speech as close-ups by taking only 4 to 6 photos with various mouth positions then throwing those at our 2 x editors to arrange along the timeline opposite the sound. Gets those editors involved early doing "parallel processing".
Best move for this year was to recruit voice actors from a band I worked with to make video clips. This band, the "Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band" plugged us into a folkie network of actors, comedians, and children's entertainers and they were great. Soundtrack was directed and recorded as a separate operation some 30km away by my co-director who sent it in by internet.
Generally all went well although we were wildly over-ambitious and we feel amazed that we threw together a result that does kinda reflect most of the story but with the rushed final editing showing. I got it across the finish line with 2 min to go.
"How EUROPE got its Name" is based on a story from ancient Greece. Our ancient city of Tyre 1000BC was mostly made out of file boxes. We printed out paper sheets of computer-file brick, wood and stone textures and glued those on the boxes.
We had some modelling clay characters from last year and earlier movies that we remodelled. We were character and set building till Sat 4:55pm when we fired the first of about 700 stop-motion shots.
Our last year's modelling clay entry, "Dancing with the Pollies", similar approach, is on youtube as a tidied up version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD3WkV0sUGg
Reviewer "Godfather" writes:
"How Europe Got Its Name" by MITCIT (Juvenile Delinquent)
These guys always come up with something from left field, and this was no exception.
Where do you find inspiration for a Juvenile Delinquent story? Why, Herodotus, of course! For a claymation musical about a fairly obscure moment in ancient Greek history, this got a huge audience response. B-
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Concert Video Lessons
The big project this month for many of us has been shooting and editing the 40th reunion party concert of the Frank E. Evans Band. We're mostly into doing indie drama so event video gives us some variety. Overall it worked out well. Notes and Lessons:
Best moves: (1) taking the time and trouble to set up some backlighting. (2) using a home-made camera steadying device for hand-held shooting (ref http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/ ). (3) using 4 cameras. (4) using a high definition Canon HV20 for the master wide shot and getting away with digital blow-ups of half of that image in post.
Main lesson: we had some shots with exposure problems - the classic case of spotlit entertainers against a dark background and cameras reading the background and over-exposing the highlights. Next time we need to give our newbie helpers more training and we need to find and use the "spotlight program" setting on the cameras.
Best moves: (1) taking the time and trouble to set up some backlighting. (2) using a home-made camera steadying device for hand-held shooting (ref http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/ ). (3) using 4 cameras. (4) using a high definition Canon HV20 for the master wide shot and getting away with digital blow-ups of half of that image in post.
Main lesson: we had some shots with exposure problems - the classic case of spotlit entertainers against a dark background and cameras reading the background and over-exposing the highlights. Next time we need to give our newbie helpers more training and we need to find and use the "spotlight program" setting on the cameras.
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