John,

Nice work. I saw your Heartstrings film at the SAICFF. Great job! God is really using you guys.

Quick question: do most high end footage, like the frames that you just showed, come out over exposed? I shot a short piece in HD and when I compressed it to put on the web, it was washed out and pixelated. Is that because I didn't color correct?

Thanks for the help and keep up the great work.
Matthew B. | Homepage | 08.01.08 - 12:29 am | #

Matthew, thank you so much for the feedback!

Most footage off of professional cameras will look a little washed out, but color correction quickly fixes that.

These images I posted here are dramatically overexposed, and the RAW data makes it appear as though they're washed out, though they're not really.

May I ask what camera you were using?
Also, what format were you compressing to for the web?

The pixelization probably comes from the compression. Web compression is very finicky, and not easily mastered. The best tool out there for easy compression is Quicktime Pro.

~ In Christ, John.
John R. Moore | 08.01.08 - 1:01 am | #

John,

1) I'm using the Sony A1 camera.

2) I'm using Final Cut Pro 2's Compressor. Within that program I'm using QuickTime 7 compatible H.264 800Kbps.

If you want to take a look at the clip I was talking about you can check it out at www.vimeo.com/1305442.

Thanks for the quick response.

God Bless,
Matthew
Matthew B. | Homepage | 08.01.08 - 9:32 am | #

Hey John, it's looking really good! That color correction is quite amazing.

So are you editing this movie on Adobe programs or Apple?

John-Clay
John-Clay | Homepage | 08.04.08 - 4:04 pm | #

John-Clay: Thanks!!

We're editing on Adobe Premiere, which the Cineform codec was designed for. It allows us to stream several streams of HDV with several layers of color correction at once; in perfect quality. It's absolutely astounding...


The way the system works, David opens the R3d files in RedCine, converts them to 10-bit DPX files, then compressed those 10-bit DPX sequences to Cineform AVI files using After Effects. He also adds in the audio track at that point.

We then do a rough edit in premiere, to see what we might want or need for pickup shots, and make sure all the footage is there.

Then, when we have all the footage from the second shoot, we edit it all together roughly, make sure it's all together, shoot our pickups, and turn it over to the final editor.

That's the theory, anyway.

~ In Christ, John.
John R. Moore | 08.04.08 - 4:48 pm | #