Sacha Baron Cohen the legend that was once Borat is back with his new film - Bruno. Released in Cinemas on the 10th of July 2009 - that’s tomorrow! The extremly flamboyant austrian takes his show to America in good old Sacha Baron style.
Let us know if you’ve seen the film and what you think of it on our forums.
Check out http://www.cgtextures.com
If your interested in video editing, motion graphics or 3D modelling then CGtextures is the ultimate source for amazing textures to help boost some life into your work.
You can use textures for a number of things, backgrounds for DVD menus, title sequences, lower third captions or using the patterns in the textures to generate your own unique effects. For example the top texture of the cracked ground could be used to create a vein like pattern on the face of a 3D character. The possibilities are endless. All textures are completly free to download at CGtextures but it’s worth checking the “about us” page for the license information to find out more on using the textures in your work depending on how you plan to show off your work.
A few weeks ago we launched a new competition with our key objective to increase the ammount of members in the forum. Whilst Edit Crunch is young and without large amounts of financial backing to promote the website, we need your help so that we can grow and continue to provide film making information, videos and top tips. If you’ve found anything useful from Edit Crunch and would like to be apart of a community with huge potential then we could reward you with up to £300 cash for simply telling you’re friends about Edit Crunch. Please read the rules and competition guidelines.
From forum post:
Edit Crunch Forums - Membership Drive & Posting Contest!
We are giving away £300 in CASH prizes!
The Edit Crunch Film & Video Forums have been developed for two reasons. Firstly to share industry techniques and information that we’ve picked up over the years and secondly to learn even more by listening to others. I think we all want a positive and productive place to learn, grow, discuss interesting issues and support each other. Here you will receive positive solutions, extra knowledge and most importantly respect from members.
We hope you all will come to contribute, hang out and enjoy the ambiance!
This is YOUR forum and growing this forum will take a “team effort!” So we want to share with you my short term goal for the forum and if we meet it, some of you can win some cash. By August 20th, Edit Crunch aim to have at least 60-70 members and at least 200-300 posts - not counting EC admin. So if we REACH THE TEAM GOAL, we will be giving away cash by Paypal to one person from each category below. That’s £300 in cash prizes for showing up, participating and referring others!
CONTEST DETAILS:
Date - August 20th 2009.
Who Can Win? Any Edit Crunch forum members! Guests are encouraged to follow but unfortunately can’t win.
If you are from a company / film project and you would like to advertise, we are offering free site and forum advertising for the duration of this competition.
£100 Prize - Top referrer - Must refer between 10-15 forum members that make at least one post to qualify. They MUST post your name in a PM to mrcrunch for your count to tally. (eg, Hi, I’m new to the forum, I was refered by: _ _ _ _ _)
£100 Prize - Best Joke - Ok, to break the ice and to get into the spirit of things, give us your best joke!
£100 Prize - The Secret Number Post - EC have already picked a number. Whoever posts that number of times, they win. (Exclusions - 1 liners, spam posts. If one of these is the lucky post #, the prize will be awarded to the next post that qualifies.)
FYI, as of today, June 7th we have 11 members and 60 posts, but 97% are ours! Whilst Edit Crunch is a relatively new website, all the EC staff strongly believe in the potential of this community and rewards available from learning and sharing on Edit Crunch. But we can’t do it without your help!
RULES:
Multiple forum registrations by the same person are tracked so don’t waste your time.
We must meet the team goal above for any of the prizes to be awarded.
Referer’s must have their names posted by new members in a PM to mrcrunch to quality as a referral.
TIPS:
Will your friends have any real need to re-visit Edit Crunch?
Tell them about the Best Joke award!
Join today and tell your friends. The only way anyone wins is if we reach the goal together!
Happy posting.
Ex-Pro 5 -in- 1 Photographic Light Reflector - 32″ Silver, Gold, Black, White & Translucent. £17.99.
It’s amazing just how much using a reflector can help improve the quality of your films. Although it helps to have an extra pair of hands, whilst you’re busy getting the shot, using a reflector is a great way to involve others such as passers by or clients. It’s a fun thing to do relatively simple to re-direct the sunlight onto the subject, and interesting for anybody to watch. Using a reflector adds a greater vibe to the production, especially to on lookers or impressing the client. It doesn’t have to be just for interviews, depending on the reflect screen being used, they can help to light whole scenes, enhance lighting on products or for displaying dramatic shadows or light streaks onto walls and backgrounds.
Click on the pictures above to purchase.
He’s a very quick video to show you just how easy it is to do.
Don’t forget to watch in HD!
Having owned larger, more expensive camera’s in the past – buying the HV20 wasn’t, at first, an easy decision.
I work full time as a Video Producer for a Kent based film production company, so looks and first impressions are very important when shooting for or with a client. I’ve seen camera crews turn up on a shoot in a vinyl branded van or lorry unravelling case after case of production gear, but when it comes down to the filming, they’ve only used their standard kit. Camera, tripod legs, mic/boom a reflector and monitor. Was the van and the red carpet really needed? Perhaps.
So why am I mentioning all this, well the Canon HV20, for those in the industry worried about impressions, probably isn’t going to tickle your fancy. It’s the size of a small bag of sugar, and it’s sleak silvery shiney surface will help you blend in with the amateur’s and tourists. Maybe that’s what you’re after? Although this unique little camera can be used like lego to add mic’s,lights,lenses,dof adapters,rail supports and more, I use this camera at home, for personal projects, so I have nobody to impress only impressions to be made from my finished work.
The HV20 has two menus. The first is accessed from a rear joystick to monitor manual exposure and sound levels. The second hosts controls such as shutter speed - and aperture-priority, cine and scene modes, along with image effects, white balance presets and still-image mode. Alongside CineMode the HV20 shoots 24p for those looking to imitate film. To a professional in the field, they’d question the quality compared to real film, but to others none the wiser this little gem really is the icing on the cake.
I use manual focus for all of my filming, but one thing I’ve found when testing out the Instant Auto Focus mode, especially in low light is that the camera sometimes struggles to keep it’s focus. Fortunately the Instant AF uses a special sensor on the front of the tape compartment that measures the distance to your subject, so if it does lose focus, it’s able to rescan the focus very quickly.
The HV20 boasts a 3-megapixel, 1/2.7-inch CMOS sensor just behind the lens of the camera to record in HDV at 1,920 horizontal and 1,080 vertical pixels. You also have the option to shoot still images and SD material, but the camera will downscale this material to as low as 2.07 megapixels for 1920×1080 16:9 still images.
The life of one BP-2L13 battery is about 65 minutes, so I would highly recommend purchasing some spares if your planning any long shoots or holidays. This is where I buy my spare batteries from: HV20/HV30 Batteries.
At 69mm the LCD screen is moderately sized displaying a 211 pixel resolution. With it’s playback options on the bottom of the screen I do find myself pinching the buttons a bit too hard and I worry about damaging the screen, it would be nice to see the playback functions on the top of the camera out of the way of the LCD.
RESULTS:
To anyone looking to enter the HD world, at under £600 this is an excellent introduction to film making and the results speak for themselves.
Take a look at some videos shot with the HV20.
Shot by Sim Warren: Twoneil DOF adapter: Canon HV20
Shot by Sim Warren - With DIY Track & Dolly. Track & dolly article here.
Basic Colour Correction - By Si Cox
Introduction
There is alot to know about colour correcting your film, but over a series of lectures, I’m going to go through some of my techniques, workflows and tools I use on a day to day basis.
In the following steps I’m going to be concentrating on adjusting an image to increase the contrast. This is usually one of the first steps you’ll take when starting out on your colour correction. I’ll be making my correction using Apple Color, but many NLE’s have similar tools to do the same job. As you do more and more colour correction you might find other ways to do the same task, which is fine, its all about finding a workflow which is best suited to you.
An image is broken down into 3 tonal ranges. Shadows, Midtones & Highlights. We will be adjusting each one to adjust our contrast, starting with the shadows (or blacks, pedestal, lift - various names, same meaning), then working on the highlights (whites, gain) then finally the midtones (gamma, mids).
In your chosen application, either navigate to the controls or add a 3 way color corrector to your footage. You should now see 3 coloured wheels, each coupled with a brightness control either around the edge or along side. This is what you’ll be using to make your corrections.
Once you have you image to be corrected open and ready, start by looking at the waveform monitor and have it set to Luminance.
At the bottom of the waveform, is 0. This is black. At the top is 100 and this is white. What we are going to do is make sure that the darkest areas of our images (the shadows) sit on or near 0, and that the brightest parts of our image (the highlights) are on or near 100 and the rest of the image is nicely in between. Now is a good time to note that going over or below these values will send your image out of Broadcast Safe areas, which will cause you problems later down the pipeline, so its good to get in the practice of getting your image between 0-100. I’ll do another one of these on that later though..
So looking at this image (Im using an image courtesy of www.redrelay.com I believe - a very good resource for RED footage), you can see by looking at it that it looks somewhat flat. You can double check this now by looking at the waveform monitor.
As you see, the dark areas of the image are sitting up and around 11, the midtones are sub 50 and the highlights are ranging from 80 upward to 100. Starting with the shadow control start lowering them until the very bottom of the image starts touching 0. Be careful not to crush them, otherwise you’ll begin to lose detail you might need. If your going for a crushed black look, you can do this later, but for now we’re concentrating on balancing the image.
Shadow Adjustment
So now you’ll see that your image has got a whole lot darker, dont worry, we’ll fix this. When adjusting each tonal range, they also effect the other tonal ranges, so you need to work them against each other, which is why control surfaces are a better way to do such corrections, as you can adjust all 3 at once, rather than one at a time and having to keep going back and forth. Ayway, now your blacks are sorted, next we’ll pull the highlights up toward 100. Keeping an eye between the waveform and the monitor, raise your highlights til the brightest areas are touching 100.
Highlight Adjustment
A little better, but not there yet. Have a look back at your shadows, they will have raised slightly, so you need to go back and lower back to where they were. So now we have our shadows and highlights sorted, the image still looks a bit darker, so turn your attention to the midtones. For the purpose of this example, we’re gonna be raising the midtones. So using your midtones control, raise the mids until they sit roughly between 30 and 70.
Midtone Adjustment
Almost there. Again, your shadows and highlights will have been adjusted follwoing that correction, so go back and fix those until your image looks good to you. I personally like to keep images rich, so never go to high with midtone adjustments, but its a personal taste thing.
Final Image
So now if you go back and forth between the orginal image and the corrected image, you’ll see we have nice deep shadows, rich midtones and bright whites.. Checking this with the waveform monitor you can see just how much we stretched out the image to give it some life.
And thats pretty much the first thing i do when getting an image. First eyeball it, then check what your seeing against the waveform and start correcting. Within a short amount of time this process will take you little time at all, and even quicker if you work off a control surface.
Thanks for reading. Any questions please ask.
Si Cox
Jamin Winans - The short film from Jamin Winans about a mysterious DJ who is sent to a busy city block to mend a series of tragic events that occur in our everyday lives. Winner of over 40 film festival awards worldwide.
Did you know just how much our cameras struggle to do a simple task like make a white bit of paper look white?
Video camera’s read light in one way only. They dont adapt like our eyes do, cameras need to be programmed to know what it right and what is wrong. If you look through the viewfinder of a camera indoors a white object in the shot will appear an orangey colour due to the surrounding tungsten lights we use in our houses. White objects under the sunlight outdoors will show up a bluey colour. So we need to program our camera so that it can understand the the correct colours in the shot based on the surrounding light sources. The best colour to use for this is white. Hence - White Balance.
A white peice of paper indoors will appear yellowy orange until you’ve told the camera that white shouldn’t look yellow, it should look white! You do this by going to your manual white balance settings and you’ll find a manual one push button setting which you need to press and you’ll instantly see the change.
White balance is measured in K after Kelvin so on some video cameras you might have a 3200k display setting for example. You dont really need to worry about the number of Kelvin you have unless perhaps you’re filming a multi camera shoot, in which case you might need to discuss with the other camera operator the Kelvin reading they got.
Alternatively you have a series of white balance presets that work brilliantly, but are never going to be exactly correct unless you manually white balance for your surroundings. If you move from one room in a house to another you might need to re-white balance. For example a bedroom into a kitchen. The lighting will most likely be different. If you move from indoors to outdoors or vice versa you will certainly need to white balance. Unless you’re lazy and you use the presets.
The blue coloured photo on the left is an example of not having set the white balance to read white in outdoor light. Before I took this shot the camera was still set to white under tungsten light (indoors), so whilst outside, I pointed the camera at something white (A white van that drove past) pressed the one push preset button and blamo. The results are in the photo on the right.
There’s a glitch in the system! Apple have not been able to create a cure for this annoying problem with the H.264 codec. The problem is that when you export films using the H.264 codec you will/may notice a gamma blow out look. The colours will be faded and less rich. Whilst we don’t have a fix, we have a great work around. Using Quicktime or your editing software export tools, you need to choose the Brightness mode from the Filter tab and decrease the brightness to -7. This will balance out the gamma loss and ensure that visually your films are not lacking in colour. We’ll update everybody when we find a fix.
