Post Fifth Pictures

Why I Love Clip Colors

ClipColor I love the clip colors feature in Avid Media Composer. It is so helpful. If you haven’t ever used it to its advantage, check it out.

From the hamburger menu in the bottom left corner of the timeline, select clip color. You have several options. The ones I use the most are HD/SD and offline.

I have this sample project open. It’s an SD project so I changed the settings to 1080 (HD) and then I turn on the HD/SD setting in the clip color. I can now see all of the titles stay one color and the clips become highlighted in yellow.

Sneak on the Lot

Our friends over at ISM FILMS have created a great new site called Sneak On. It’s a new site and is in the early stages of developing, but will be launching March 3, 2010. I’ve been lucky enough to take a sneak peek. In fact, if you visit the site you can now register for free. In the future, the site will cost $5.95. However, it should be noted that the site will offer over 30,000 royalty free songs and 100s of 1000s of free sound effects. It is totally worth it.

One of the reasons I am so excited about it now is that if you register and start it out, take a walk around the lot (like my Stormtrooper avatar here pictured), you can invite your friends to join. For every friend that joins, you extend your membership for a month for free. There isn’t a limit on this and so act quickly. It’s a great time to build your contacts on the site and prolong free membership.

Shots I’d Use: The Killers Live at the Royal Albert Hall

In the off chance that a DP asks me before he goes off to a shoot what kind of footage I would like, I always answer lots of coverage and points of view that I wouldn’t be able to see with my own eyes. I think this is the difference between a DP that can bring quality to your video and one that can’t. It’s easy to shoot what we can see with our own eyes, but the ones that can find something else, something we don’t see or normally notice, those are the ones I love to work with.

An example I will use is from The Killers new Blu-Ray/DVD from the 2nd track “This is Your Life.” The video is directed by Dick Carruthers, who has a great background of live concert DVDs. It is a fantastic live concert, I’d highly recommend in for your HDTV setup and Blu Ray collection. Some of the shots are a tad fast for me, I end up wanting more. That may be because I’ve been to a couple of The Killers shows though.

Business + Twitter

We launched a division of our company devoted to growing social media in the Utah and Southern California areas in which we work. If you are interested about any aspect of our business in regards to video, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WordPress, please shoot us an e-mail.

Please be patient while the front page of our PDF loads below. Click on it to download the whole 13 MB file.

Growing Up Hockey

I was the associate producer and editor of a new documentary, Growing Up Hockey. Garrett Smith, our awesome motion graphics artist, gave it a great look. Our premier sound designer and sweetener Nathan Hoffman touched it up as well.

The documentary goes through several factors in the hockey world such as getting over criticism from coaches, parents and others, making the cut, getting to the next level, adding mental toughness and more. It features interviews from Olympians, NHL All Stars, Stanley Cup Champions, NCAA championship coaches, NHL psychologists and NHL broadcasters.

Interview: Darren Holmes, A.C.E.

Darren Holmes, A.C.E. is an editor that has been around feature films, television and animation editing. In this respect I think he is a rather unique editor to have come in contact with. There are not many walls keeping him stuck into one genre because of his experiences.

Interview: Darren Holmes, A.C.E.

His resume includes;

Freelance or Full-Time? One of many questions.

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The Vendor/Client Relationship

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An Experience with Final Cut Pro, After Effects and Gamma Issues

I’ve put off writing this entry for about three weeks because it was such an awful experience for me. I just finished a documentary and for the SEO sake of it I will refer to it as Hockey Doc. Overall it was a great experience. I finished the edit, locked picture and sent it off to Technicolor to get colored. It comes back, looks great and I plug in the newly colored version into my sequence. While editing the project I created these left or right third graphics that gave biographic information on each of the players, coaches and the others interviewed. So I took the raw file (before color correction mind you) from Final Cut Pro, exported the 7-10 second clip, imported it into After Effects, animated the clip in and out (see the example below) and then spit it back into my Final Cut Pro project.

It all seemed to work really well. That wasn’t the case though.

I got my colored version back, spit the new color corrected versions back into my After Effects compositions and then exported again. I rendered for DVD output using compressor. I burned a master DVD of the project in DVD Studio Pro. It should have just worked, right? Well it didn’t. The color of the After Effects clips would change slightly, becoming a little darker. The graphics also did not slide smoothly across the screen either way. Now normally I would spend a lot more time trying to fix the problem, but I had a deadline. This was on a Tuesday and it needed to be back in Valencia, California on a Thursday morning at the latest. I ended up staying awake until 4 AM trying to figure the issues. Here are a few steps I tried.