"Summer's Too Short" Should be Done Shortly

I made good progress on "Summer's Too Short" this week. I think I have most of the work out of the way, so I just have some tidy up work to do.

I finished aligning all of the images. That is slow work.

When I took the picture, I tried to always use about the same position. Unfortunately, even slight shifts in position distort the image a little. I think I could use a image distortion tool in Premiere Pro to improve the match. That would add a lot of time, so I decided to stick to shifting up or down, left or right, or by rotation. That still left some mismatch, but I don't think it is a big problem.

When I watched the video, I thought I could see a couple of images that are still out of alignment. I will look into that more next week.

I tried to take the pictures at about the same time of day, but never got that exactly right. The colour tone varied from day to day as well. Some of the images are very blue. I may see if I can do some colour correction to reduce that variability.

I developed a sound track to the movie. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted; a sort of Doppler shift sound effect. I felt it would catch the sense of the rapid passage of summer. I tried to create the sound from scratch in Audacity, but wasn't happy with what I produced. Instead, I found a short clip of a jet fly past at http://www.freesfx.co.uk/. It was a little too short, so I stretched it out a bit in Audacity. I altered the pitch to compensate.

I produced a preliminary video with the images, titles and sound track. I think it looks pretty good. Not that I'm biased or anything. I want to leave it for a few days, then have another go at it. If all goes well, I should have it on-line by the end of the week.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Website Infection Removed

I didn't get far on my projects this week. My wife's health, of course takes precedence over all other things. Besides that, I had to deal with a malware infection on my website.

Website

My website got infected with malware last week.

Nick Wernick, whom I know through my involvement with the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, warned me that WordPress had a bug that scammers had started to exploit. Unfortunately, my site had already been compromised.

The company who hosts my site, Netfirms, had detected the malware and shut down my site. I wasn't sure at first what I had to do, but their support team was helpful. All the same, it took me a couple days to get the site back up.

They do offer a service that protects your website from such attacks, but it is quite expensive. The mid level protection is about the same as I pay for hosting, while the top level is more than five times as much. The low level protection is cheaper, so I may go for that.

"Summer is Too Short"

I had hoped to work on "Summer is Too Short" this week, but didn't manage to get anything done. I did open up the Premiere Pro file and did a little fiddling around, but no real work. Hopefully I'll do better next week.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A Little Work on a "Short" Project

I started to work on "Summer is Too Short" this week. My editing went well and I am hopeful I will get this done soon.

I shot "Summer is Too Short"  last year, but hadn't cut it together yet. It is a time lapse movie. I shot one image a day for about 9 months, which gave me about 280 images.

I didn't have a time lapse video camera, so I used a still camera. About a third of the way through, my still camera stopped working. I borrowed my wife's camera for the rest of the movie.

I hand held the camera, so the images jump around quite a lot. I expected this, but since I had to deal with a similar problem with "Contingency" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sPbUoD9zM), I felt confident that I could work around it.

I use Premiere Pro to edit the movie. I imported all the images and added them to a time line. The process I followed to line up the images was to over lay one image on either the previous or following image. I made the top image semi transparent. I used the motion controls to get the images to line up.

The adjustments were rather tricky, but I got better at it as I did more. I found it more difficult to deal with images that were at a different angle. Again, I have gotten better at  that kind of adjustment.

I am about half way through aligning the images, so I think I'll have that done next week. However, some of the images will need some colour or brightness adjustments once I have them aligned.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Making Noises With "My Most Difficult Case"

I experimented with the sound for "My Most Difficult Case" this week. I was unsure just what to do with the sound and needed to get a better idea of my options.

There are two issues I want to address with the sound.

The first is that I find the voices sound weak to me. I think that may have been a result of the noise reduction I did. I tried a few things to process the sound to see if I could give the voices more body.

The other is the lack of environmental sound. There is no real background sound and there are several places where I think sound effects are needed. An example is when the prosecutor picks up some books and there is no sound. I left this until later.

I use Audacity for my audio work. I'm not sure how it compares to other audio programs, but the price (free) is right. It seems to have all the capabilities that I need.

Compression

My first test was to try out sound compression. Compression reduces the volume of the peaks while leaving the rest of the sound the same. I found this allows me to turn up the volume of the voices, which makes them sound stronger. I tried several different settings, but I couldn't tell the difference, so I just used the default settings.

The compression did increase the background noise, which hadn't been apparent before. The additional noise wasn't acceptable, so I reran the noise reduction and brought it under control, without a noticeable change in the voice quality.

Reverb

I've always though of reverb as something different from echo, but that didn't seem to be the case. I tried some different settings, but didn't learn much from that.

Then I found that the reverb effect had some presets for different types of rooms, such as big room, small room, bright room and dark room. I found that the big room and bright room settings made the voices sound weaker. That was the opposite of what I wanted. The small, dark room setting seemed to give more body to the voices.

Next Steps

To my ear, the combination of the effects I tested does bring me closer to the quality of sound I want. However, the effect isn't as strong as I'd like it to be. I want to see if there is anything else I can try. My copy of Audacity has something like 140 effects, and my copy of Premiere Pro (CS4) has about 80 audio effects. Apparently you can get more if you want them. I'm familiar with maybe a half dozen or so, but I have no idea what most of the rest do.

I'll need to do some more research. I could use some advice.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

"The Barrier" Almost Done. Again?

I remember when I moved from my apartment to my house I went back to the apartment for one last visit to see if I'd left anything. I ended up going back about a half dozen times! Each time I found something I'd forgotten. My experience with "The Barrier" feels almost the same. Every time I'm think I'm done, I find one more thing to do.

I did pass a major milestone this week. I uploaded the movie to YouTube. It took 14 hours to upload! I have it set to private for now while I prepare for the release. I want to do a good write up for the YouTube page and my mail outs.

I decided to create subtitles for the movie, and that took up much of my time. I tried to use the Premiere Pro voice to text system. The file has each word as a separate item, so I decided it would be too much work to reformat it.

I thought YouTube would generate a subtitle file when I uploaded the movie. I thought I use that after I cleaned it up. It turns out that YouTube won't generate a subtitle file for a long video.

I went back to the text file from Premiere Pro and found a way to reformat it into a subtitle file. There were some problems with it. Sometimes I would get some very long subtitles I had to break into two or three. Sometimes the voice to text didn't work very well, and I got subtitles that were vastly different from what the characters said.

I started to review the file manually and make adjustments as I went through it. I am on my second pass through now and I think I will need one more before I am done.

I think I will be done this week, but then I thought the same thing last week.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Closing in on Version 0.4 of "The Barrier"

Work on "The Barrier" this week went faster than I expected, but I'm still not done version 0.4 yet. It shouldn't take very long to get it done. I'll watch it, and if there is nothing I want to change, I will post it to YouTube.

Re-Editing "The Barrier"

The way I have structured my editing is to have three levels of Premiere Pro project files. The first level is for individual scenes. The second level is for sequences, which I build up from individual scenes. Finally, in the third level, I build up the final movie from the sequences.

I finished my revisions to the individual scenes. In most cases the changes were quite minor, so this part took less time than I had expected. What took the most time was how I redid the sections I sped up. Originally I had just used the speed adjustment in Premiere Pro. I was disappointed with the results, since it merged individual frames into one. Instead, I cut out individual frames to achieve the same effect. I think it looks better this way.

For some scenes I had done edits in my sequence files rather than in individual scenes. I decided to redo these as separate scene files so that there was a minimum of editing in the sequence files.

I redid the office back ground sound file. I increased the length from 3 minutes to 6 minutes. I spread out the various sounds so they didn't overlap as much. I added in more people talking in the background. I also adjusted the volume of some of the sounds so they were not as dramatically louder than the other sounds I had.

Finally I redid the sequence project files. I replaced the old scenes with the revised scenes and redid all of the office background noises. While I did that, I found several more problems with individual scenes, so I went back and redid those before adding them to the sequence. I finished 7 of the 9 scenes. The last couple and the full movie shouldn't take long.

More Computer Problems

On a down note: I started to have trouble with the new computer. It crashed Monday and gave some vague error message that suggested there was a hardware problem. However, when I read up on it on-line they said it could be a software problem too. Not very clear.

Later in the week, the new computer started to have the same issue as the old one - the monitor wouldn't display anything. The first couple times, it started to work after a minute or so, but Saturday I had to shut down and reboot before it would work. Again, I have no idea what the problem is, or how to fix it.

I have a suspicion that the problem has to do with the heavy use I make of the graphics card for my video editing. The original crash happened while I was doing some video editing.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Next: Onto Version 0.4 of "The Barrier"

I reviewed version 0.3 of "The Barrier" this week and have now started to work on version 0.4.

I watched version 0.3 of "The Barrier" twice this week. The first time to get a sense of how it looked. The second time I made notes about changes I want to make for version 0.4.

I went through my notes and planned out what I had to do. I identified changes in 27 scenes. There are a total of 60 scenes in the movie, so nearly half need changes. Most of the changes are minor, and if I hadn't been so eager to move on with version 0.3, I would have caught and fixed most of them already.

I set up the Premiere Pro project files for all of the scenes I want to change, but I  only started to work on one so far.

In some scenes I sped up the movie to have the characters walk faster. A couple times I had used the speed control to do the speed up. In others I cut out individual frames to have the same effect. Cutting the individual frames produces a much better look, but takes a long time. I plan to do the frame cutting despite the extra effort.

Another problem I want to fix is the background noise for the office scenes. In most scenes it is too loud. Some sounds in particular are much louder than the rest. I want to fix that.

I'd created my own office noise file from various sounds I had. It runs 3 minutes, which I think was too short now, because the same noises are repeated too often. I plan to extend it to 6 minutes, or maybe longer.

When I did the first version, I used some of my own voice along with lines from the characters in the movie. In version 0.3, I replaced some of the character voices with voices I had recorded for my other films. For version 0.4 I want to do more of that, so I have a greater variety of voices. I want it to seem like there is more than 2 or 3 people in the office. I got permission from everyone except my brother and niece. Since they are family, I didn't think they'd object.

I started to think about promotion of the movie. I'm not sure that many people will want to watch a movie about transportation planning. I'll need to find a way to briefly explain the movie so that people will give it a try. Since it is still a work in progress I think I'll use the approach that I need their help. I will want some feed back before I move onto a final version of the movie.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“The Barrier” - Now onto the First Cut

I added three new scenes this week. One isn’t very long, just a few lines. It is mainly a line I want to add, but I haven’t found a way to tie it into the story. I’ve left it out for now.

I got all of the video files output from Xtranormal, so I have something to work with if I don’t get a chance to rework some of the scenes I would like to.

I began work on the first cut of the movie with Premiere Pro. In keeping with my previous experiences, I have run into trouble with Premiere Pro. Mostly it seems to be issues with the Windows Media files. I think I have that fixed now. I hope so anyway.

It has been a struggle over the last few weeks. A friend of mine said I should name my films with more positive titles, like “That was Easy”, or “Piece of Cake”.

I learned some more tricks in Xtranormal, but since the software will be stop working in 10 days (2013 July 31), that doesn’t help me much. I’ve heard rumours that there might be a way to use Xtranormal after the deadline, but I wouldn’t want to count on that.

I have a little program I set up to convert the Xtranormal State files into a script. I developed it a few weeks ago, but now it doesn’t seem to work properly. I did manage to get a script I could use. It helped me catch a couple problems in the dialogue so far. I had the wrong names for a couple of characters. I thought I had caught and fixed them all.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“Contingency” Video Conversion Challenges

My conversion of Contingency to video moved ahead this week. I have about half of the images converted to video now. I had to overcome a few snags.

The whole film runs a bit over 3,800 frames, but since I already have video of some of the shots, I didn’t need to transfer all of them. It still left me with 2,300 frames to convert. This week I got 1,100 done, or about 48 per cent.

The week before I shot all the frames I wanted on the optical printer. It isn’t too difficult to import them into Premiere Pro and create a video. Unfortunately, I ran into a few problems.

The first was that the images were in RAW format, which I couldn’t import into Premiere Pro. I converted them to jpg’s with Picasa. I started with the same resolution as the raw files (3522 by 2348), but that really slowed down Premiere Pro to the point I couldn’t use it. I changed to 800 by 534, which is still larger than the 720 by 480 video I want to produce. That worked better.

The next snag was image jitter. Apparently the optical printer didn’t align each frame in exactly the same spot. I don’t know if it was a problem with the machine, or with how I loaded it.

Premiere Pro allows you to move the images around in the frame, so it was possible to adjust each frame to remove the jitter. That was easier said than done.

The first show wasn’t too bad because it was a title. I over lay a horizontal line and moved each frame so that the title aligned with the line. It was very finicky work though.

For the next shot, also a title, I overlay one of the frames on top of the other frames, switched it to a negative, which is called invert for some reason I don’t understand, then made it 50 per cent transparent. When I aligned the frame properly, I would get a grey screen. It never fit exactly, but it was easier and faster.

The rest of the shots were not tittles, which was a little harder. I used the same technique, but it turned out that since the camera moved during the shot, the edge of frame would move in and out of view. I had to go back and move every frame up a little so the edge wouldn’t show. I also had to zoom in, which took more time.

After a couple more shots I did a little research and found I could use the paste attributes feature of Premiere pro to save a bit of time.

Eventually I came up with another trick that made a big difference. I put the frame images into a sequence that set up as high definition. When I was done with the HD version, I would set up a standard definition sequence and put the HD version in the time line. Then I could move and zoom the whole shot to give the image I wanted.

That also allowed me to use the frame borders to align the frames. There were always imperfections in the border I could use for alignment.

I had a lot of trouble with Premiere Pro crashes. The process seems to have pushed the system to the limits. It got better as I got more practice.

I know that some video cameras have an image stabilizer function, which should mean that there is a software method to do all the realignment automatically. I wasn’t able to find one. I didn’t look too hard though.

The rest should take a couple of days to do. Then I need to incorporate all the shots into a final video. Some of the shots could use some colour correction. I hope to post the final video by the end of next week.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“Sharkbiter” Update 2012 May 13

After a week or so on other projects, I got back to work on the Sharkbiter video I did with Xtranormal.

When I left off, I had created several versions of the video from different angles. This week I reviewed them in detail. I printed a copy of the script and made notes as I watched.

The first thing I looked for was pronunciation problems. A common problem with artificial voices is that they have trouble with some words. I tried to fix those with changes to the spelling. I wasn’t very successful with that. Other times I rewrote the line to avoid the problem word. Strangely enough, I found that while one voice would have trouble with a word, the other one wouldn’t. In a few cases, I could shift the phrase from one character to the other.

My next goal was to revise the script. I found that it really helped to watch the video. It made it much easier to spot problems with the dialogue. So much so, that I think I’d like to use the program with all my script writing. I’m not sure exactly why it helps. In the past, I’ve found text to voice software was useful when proofreading.

Sometimes I find it difficult to rewrite a script, but this time it was much easier. Often I’m reluctant to make changes. After I watched the video, I think it was easier to decide that the dialogue needed to change.

A third goal was to revise the expressions and gestures. Xtranormal allows you to make the character to express some emotion and make some gestures. There are only six facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise), which does limit you. There are almost 80 gestures, which gives me a little more flexibility.

The facial expressions allow you to change the intensity of the emotion. I found that most of the time I set the intensity too high and needed to dial them back. The gestures don’t allow you to change the intensity, although sometimes I was able to substitute a less intense gesture.

I also found I needed to change the timing of gestures and expressions. This is a bit of a trial and error process. I expect that after more experience I should be able to get it right the first time.

In the previous version, I had one camera angle for the whole video. This time I put in over the shoulder shots and close ups. I had planned to do several versions with different angles, then edit them in Premiere Pro, but I learned a few tricks over the course of the week and decided to go with what I could do in Xtranormal.

I rewrote the script, and then revised the Xtranormal input. Finally, I output a new video. I experimented with different output formats. When I tried before, I couldn’t import the AVI file into Premiere Pro. I still had that problem. I was able to work with the AVI file with Encore, Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker. I found that I could import the WMV files from Xtranormal into Premiere Pro. I used Premiere Pro to add the titles.

Next week I’ll review the new video and make more changes. I’m not sure how many versions I want to make before I decide to go with what I have.

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“My Most Difficult Case” Update 2011 October 9

My progress on My Most Difficult Case has been slow. A while back, I started to think of it as My Most Difficult Film, and it has certainly earned that moniker.

Last March I arranged with someone to do the sound postproduction. Unfortunately, they didn’t deliver, so I’ve had to cancel that agreement. That was a big disappointment for me.

I turned to Pat Aull for help. He helped me earlier with My Next Film. He came over one day and in an hour he taught me enough to do the sound myself. Obviously, you don’t learn to be an expert sound technician so fast, but I only need a competent sound track.

A major problem I had with the sound was that the sync sound recording had a lot of noise. My attempts to clean it up were not very promising. I used Audacity for my sound work. With it, I could remove the sound, but it also changed the voices in ways I didn’t like.

Pat suggested I retransfer the sound from the original tape. I didn’t think that would help, especially since the original recorder, a Sony Walkman modified with Chrystal Sync, was no longer available.

Nevertheless, I went ahead and redid the transfer. Much to my surprise the sound turned out much better. I really should have more faith in Pat. There was still a problem with noise, but I found that in my tests I could remove the sound without adversely affecting the voices.

The only problem with the new transfer was that the speed drifted a bit. Over the length of the 44-minute recording, it shifted about 15 seconds. I did a speed adjustment in Audacity. I found that the drift varied and in some places, it was still up to two frames off. I adjusted that after I replaced the sound in Premiere Pro.

I see what I’ve done so far as an experiment. I will go back and redo the noise removal and time adjustment before I move on to the rest of the sound work.

I see three more steps I want to do before I feel I’m done with the sound.

First, I want to do some adjustments to the voices. I think that if I add some room ambience and adjust the tone a bit, they will sound much better.

Second, I want to add in some background noises. For example, Bryson closes some books, but there is silence. The screech when a chair moves as people stand would add some realism. I could use some noises, like a coughs to emphasize the dialog at appropriate places. I could do the same with bits of music.

Finally, I need to balance out the sounds, so the voices are all the same level. The background noises should be in the Background.

I had hoped to have this film all wrapped in 2011, and I still might do that. However, with two other movies on the go for next years $100 Film Festival, that may be too optimistic.

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