White Halo
This test clip experiments for the first time with:
Tracking shot in 2 speeds (1/8" and 1/16" on second half) Pretty good although a bit clunky on my part.
Flying rig removal on moth at end (have to watch my arm shadow & use another kind of support) SO EASY!!!!!
Far landscape seamlessly blended to pond set thanks to Christine's brilliant lighting idea.
Christine animated the moth in the first half, all of the water ripples, and all of the watch works turning.
I used three different layers of textures on the frames:
1. A light smear of Vasoline on the camera UV lens.
2. Jeremy Birn's Barrel Distortion and Chromatic Aberrations Action in PS.
3. White vignetting, addition of grain, and downsized to 990 pixels wide Action in PS.
Ooh! I love the colors, and well, everything. You are a genius!
ReplyDeleteOh Em Effing Gee!!!
ReplyDeleteI LOOOOVE it!!! It sets my Quay meter to quivering... especially that arm shadow. Brilliant!! The watch parts, the water, the butterfly, the camera move - everything is perfect.
Only thing Im wondering about is downsizing to under HD size - I hope that was only for the test and you won't be doing that for the whole movie - I want my Halfland in full HD!!! (Actually I want my Halfland TESTS in full HD too - hey what can I say, I want it all!)
Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteI don't mind the arm shadow at all because it seems to fit in nicely! Havent't seen it the first time watching the film, too.
I like the vignette and the atmosphere! I'm looking forward to have some sound as well… ;)
Thank you, Jessica! Stop motion is way more fun than I thought it would be. Really excited by the possibilities! xoxox
ReplyDeleteOh, Mikeee! You really made me happy with your enthusiastical comment! It was Christine's idea to use the pond set this way, a low tracking shot to reveal the frog. I swear, she's a natural director. It really works!
I hope to improve the water, and my tracking movement, etc.
About HD vs. low res, yes! I will absolutely plan on making 1/2L in the highest quality I can, and perhaps copying a lower res to post on the blog. I say this because I don't understand yet how to make optimally-sized clips for posting to the web.
I'll wager you do so perhaps you'll tell me what I should do with my 7MB sized (49.778" wide x 28"high 72pixel/inch) images straight from the camera.
So far I've been using the free app Time Lapse Assembler to string the frames into a h.264 Codec 1280px wide clip (after I've reduced the frames down in size in my editing/processing to about 990 wide, hmmm. That's not good) that I then upload to Vimeo who then converts to Flash, I believe? Then I've been embedding it over here.
Any tips/advice/info would be most welcome & appreciated! xoxox
Thanks Jessica in Germany! I hope to experiment even further with color and texture and YES! SOUND!!! That will add so much. I'll be able to suggest the Frog's jumping into the water with an off-screen splash!
xoxox
So much happening - so nice! Great butterfly action there.
ReplyDeleteI would keep to standard video sizes if possible. Full HD 1920 x 1080 as a master copy if you can. Maybe go with the lesser HD format, 1280 x 720, for uploading to YouTube or Vimeo. You can compress them with H264 so they aren't too big to upload.
How many pixels wide x high are your original images? Never mind inch sizes, that's only for printing them on paper.
If you want to start playing with a few sound effects, you can get some water sounds for free download here: http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/soundfx/watersounds.shtml There are some called brook, river, and stream.
Yeah, what Nick said - megabites, megapixels, inches, pixels per inch, all have nothing to do with video size - you simply use the dimensions in pixels for that. I would reduce everything to 1920 x 1080 after capturing (full HD) and do all your editing etc on that. immediately save a copy of each shot as you finish them to an external hard drive for safekeeping and keep them at full HD or even bigger if you want, then duplicate the clips to work with in editing - that way you always have the originals to go back to if worse comes to worst.
ReplyDeleteYour final film will be in full HD 1920 x 1080 (aka 1080p) and from that you can create smaller low res copies for uploading on the web etc, and copies for encoding on DVD or blu-ray, whatever you want. Maybe make an H264 version for keeping o your computer just to watch whenever you feel like it. But keep those original files completely uncompressed, and generate copies using the Animation codec with o compression to work with in your editing program.
Thank you Nick and Mike! I will follow this information exactly. It helps how you've both explained it so much!
ReplyDeleteNext time I'll post the highest quality test clip I can at Vimeo.
And when actual scenes are shot, I'll be sure to keep them at full quality, and fully archived as suggested.
Thank you so much.
Fantastic!!
ReplyDelete~Yuji
Yay! Thanks, Dick! And it is all THANKS TO YOU!
ReplyDelete