video

planning the week ahead

Friday, October 24th, 2008
at 11:18pm

Image by Rakka via Flickr

Next week i’m off college, but i’ve a lot of work to do. I have about 80% of footage and sound to work with so i can begin to put together a ‘final’ demo version of our college video.

At the minute, i have over 300 video files sitting in a folder, 500+ sound effect files and over a hundred images. Over 13 gigs in total of raw material. That’s a hell of a lot of work.

I’ve renamed all those 300 video files and sorted them in to folders as it’s vitally important i’m well organized. You have to be when producing any sort of lenghtly film with loads of footage and effects.

At the minute i have some titles/introduction complete, plus the finale. In total, about 20 seconds of actual video but it probably took me 8/9 hours to do. I also have a custom mp3 made which runs over the introduction.

This week, i’ll need to start cutting up video and using our different camera angles to good effect. I’ll also draw out a timeline of events for myself to keep me on track. The final video will be about 30 minutes in length and i’d imagine i’ll be swapping angles and changing scenes every few seconds to make it look as polished as possible.

I’ve no idea what the final product will look like, but i’ve already got some ‘world class’ stuff in it which will definitely blow people away. Our plan now is to make this in to a dvd with full menu’s and fancy introduction + an actual DVD case & cover to present the dvd in

God help the other groups who are doing similar projects - that’s all i’ll say - they don’t stand a chance

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10 seconds down, 1190 to go

Sunday, October 12th, 2008
at 5:27pm

Image via Wikipedia

Now that i’m beginning to find myself with a bit more ‘free’ time, i can focus more on video editing. I have about 6 weeks to complete a 20 minute production as part of a college project and so far, i have 10 seconds of it complete and what i’d call ‘world class’.

It took me about 5 hours to create those 10 seconds, so this is slow work, but the end product is worth it. I spent those 5 hours messing around in Adobe After Effects today and learning how it works and all the different shortcuts and tricks you can add to get that ‘word class’ look.

The end product is 10 seconds of extremely high quality editing that wouldn’t look out of place in a Blockbuster movie There’s no way i can sustain that level of perfection of course, but the introduction is definitely going to blow people away and you know what people say about first impressions

Once i’m finished this masterpiece, i’ll be creating a fancy introduction and ending to ‘official’ smemon.com videos and you’ll probably see me create more and more videos from now on. It requires patience, artistic flair, technical know how and of course a pretty high end PC.

I won’t reveal the work i’ve done today or most of the work i do from now until the end of this project as i think it’s better if you’re just blown away by the end product rather than bits and pieces of 10-20 second clips scattered all over the place.

Shooting my new movie

Monday, September 29th, 2008
at 9:31pm

Image via Wikipedia

My first ever ’semi-professional’ video was created last March sometime. It was a college trip to microsoft. Although it was by no means ‘professional’ in the ‘polished’ sense of the word, it was professional in that it took hours and hours on end plus a hell of a lot of filtering through rubbish and overlaying tracks to music, getting titles right etc…

I created that using Ulead Video Studio on my 3 year old laptop. 1gig RAM, single core processor etc… so you can imagine the pain i had to go through

This time around, things are different. I’ve got two dual 20″ monitors, high end graphics card, quad core processor, 4 gigs of RAM etc… so things will be much easier for me. I also have Adobe Premier Pro Cs3 & After Effects Cs3 which open up a whole new world to me in terms of video editing.

We’re filming a Dragon’s Den parody as part of a college project and although the main aim of the project is to work in a team, we’ve got other ideas and hope to turn this in to a real masterpiece

I am of course a Dragon’s Den fan along with the others, which makes it all the more interesting for us… it WILL be hilarious - that i guarantee you but a lot of it comes down to the editing and how well i do it. Hopefully i’ll have something to show you guys within a month… an unpolished version… i might ask for some feedback and then react to that as this will be presented in front of a few lecturers and students, possibly more so it’s important we get it right!

It’ll be a lot of work for me in particular…. i’ve no doubt i’ll be the one spending the most amount of time on this but i’ve no problem with that as it’ll help to get used to premier pro & video editing in general. Although some will see it as the worst possible / most demanding role, i’ll enjoy that as i’ll be learning as i go along and picking up some valuable tips and tricks when it comes to video editing. Bring it on

First week back in College

Friday, September 12th, 2008
at 6:41pm

This week was my first week back in college. I started on Tuesday. Although a lot of people are reluctant to be back, i was looking forward to it. I love projects and having things to do each week rather than one big exam at the end of the year - that’s probably the single biggest advantage of this course and the reason i like it.

We’ve already been told we’ve got a group project or two and have to present it to people, but due to the fact there’s only a handful of people in my class we’ve already formed a group and have begun planning a ‘Dragon’s Den’ mock up which we’ll film and edit and then present. I’d hazard a guess the other classes won’t even from groups for another couple of weeks, never mind come up with ideas and choose one

photo credit: unknowndomain

We’ve an excellent impressionist who can pull off just about any character out there. With the right props and script it’ll look fantastic. I’ll be taking on the editing role. Although i’m still a novice editing videos, i’m the best we have. This time, i’ll be using adobe premier pro cs3 and really going for a professional look.

You can bank on it being done right. I love that stability i can offer - even it takes me days and days to do something, it’ll be done My last video took about 11/12 hours in total to complete and i did that pretty much non stop one day. I’ll probably spend more time on this one. Even though it’s a hell of a lot of work, i’d love to be able to come up with something top class. It’d be another feather in my skills cap.

It’ll be invaluable experience if i can do a job on this - it’s not like creating a website or designing… it’s much more difficult imo as you have music, video, text and special effects to deal with and all require loads of thought and testing. Anyway, once i get that done, it’ll be going up on youtube

My modules this semester are;