I just realized that my old pages for the TrueColor for the JVC HD-100 were not accessible. Here are the links:
The latest and greatest is on Part 3. Please not that this works only on the HD-100, for the HD-250 you have to use the configuration specific to that camera.
Here is sample of some of my work, spanning from dramatic features shot in HD to interviews with prominent Hollywood cinematographers, to commercials that I designed, shot and composited. Thank you for watching.
Recently I produced a video for United Way of Santa Cruz and Applied Survey Research, sponsored by AT&T. The video is a presentation of 15 years of the “Community Assessment Project”, an initiative that has changed the quality of life in Santa Cruz since it started because it measures hundreds of indicators about health, economy, environment, crime etc. The budget for the video was extremely tight and the expectations, of course, fairly high. The video had to feature several interviews, strung together in a seamless series of fragments that would create a single conversation from many voices. In this way I can keep the interest of the viewer up while at the same time delivering a powerful message.
Here is the link to the video, it’s 10 minutes long:
The schedule allowed for only one day for shooting all the interviews. We had about 8 hours, from 8:30am to 5:30pm, and the local meeting room at the United Way office. The schedule was to interview one or two guests every half hour. I had to transform a bare and stark room into something visually appealing and deal with 18 people who are not professionally trained in doing interviews or talking on camera. There are psychological issues at hand that weight on all this. On top of this I am shooting, lighting, sound recording, basically doing everything except asking the questions. For that task I had, fortunately, the help of local radio professional Deanna Zachary who also pitched in to slate the shots.
It was imperative to have a setup that would work with people of all kind, with all kind of voices, from powerful to faint, and with all kind of heights. And we had no more than 4-5 minutes to adapt the scene for each guest.
Running lavs was out of question and quite frankly I’m not too fond of those. Give me a boom mic any day of the week. Using Green Screen for the background was also eliminated because of the cost involved in doing good chromakey work. A couple of days before the shoot I decide to use a projector connected to my laptop and showing a generic, pleasant background image. I did some tests and I was so pleased with the result that I decided to go for it. It’s more interesting than a draped backdrop and it worked perfectly for our setup. This technique was illustrated brilliantly years ago by the Digital Juice website. Search for it. The only downside of this is the potential noise coming from the projector. Modern devices are much quieter and can be made ever more quiet by some shielding.
With my setup decided I went to the day of shooting with all my equipment, my trusted, calibrated, JVC HD-100 camera and I proceeded to setup the scene as it’s shown in the following pictures:
This side view shows the interviewee sitting, facing the interviewer, the camera is in front, the projector is behind the person interviewed, connected to the laptop and the image is projected far behind, on the wall. I had my HD-100 connected to another laptop running Adobe OnLocation to record all my clips directly to hard disk and to use the great features of OnLocation to check my focus and exposure via the built-in Waveform monitor. For this kind of situations the OnLocation solution is absolutely hard to beat:
Here is another view of the setup:
My lighting solution was very simple but effective. I used a medium softbox by Photoflex positioned at a three-quarter angle in front of the subject, adjustments were simple and fast for each subject. A half-gold reflector disc was placed on the opposite side and a spotlight provided a bit of hairlight/rim light. Here is the result:
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The interviewer was sitting camera left so that the interviewee was naturally facing the camera at a three quarter angle. The idea was to shoot the interview with only the answers, no questions, and to “stitch” together all the answers in a single conversation carried by many voices. See the video for the result. By not having to change microphones I had to simply adjust the height of the chair and the position of the boom. A few seconds to adjust the frame and check focus and exposure in OnLocation, all this while chatting with the new interviewee so that he/she could relax. Do a quick sound check, slate the shot and you’re ready to go.
After the shooting was done I was able to move all the clips from OnLocation to my editing machine, a MacPro with Adobe Master Collection CS3. I imported the RAW m2t clips in Premiere Pro, no conversion necessary, edited, added After Effects comps directly in the timeline and saved hours that I would otherwise have spend in acquiring the footage from the tapes and then convert the clips to QuickTime. Native editing is the way to go.
Final compositing and grading was done in After Effects by simply importing the final Premiere project and adding effect and transitions. One last note. All the 3D text was created in Blender 3D.
This has been a very effective workflow that I’m sure I’m gonna use many times in the future. Keep thing simple, keep the people interviewed relaxed and keep the drama out of the experience. At the end of the day everyone told me how surprised they were on how smoothly the shot went.
I hope you found these few notes useful, leave a comment if you need more details.
Quick follow-up on my tutorial about creating FBMs in Blender. I’m not a fan of Poser, I think that in the last few years DAZ Studio has greatly improved the environment for Poser artists and animator and it’s now more advanced and easier to use than Poser. But, if you prefer Poser here there is a handy script that allows you to apply FBMs in Poser. Given that Poser doesn’t have something like Morph Loader, this is a great addition. Enjoy!
A few weeks ago I added support for .OBJ groups to Blender. Now it’s possible to use Blender as the only tool for creating Poser Full Body Morphs. I made a 17 minutes tutorial that shows the process. Enjoy!
In the past few months I’ve been buried into 3D applications. While I started dealing with 3D modeling 5 years ago, only recently I really dedicated myself to this fascinating art form. Starting today this blog will feature more and more articles about 3D modeling around a few key applications: Blender, DAZ Studio and Carrara. We’ll see techniques for pure 3D modeling, for animation and for integrating 3d with video compositing. If you haven’t tried it before, download Blender, it’s free, and go to Totally Blended for a quick intro to the program.
A couple of days ago I went to see one of my favorite bands, The California Guitar Trio (CGT). CGT is a unique band, 3 ex-disciples of Robert Fripp, using custom-made acoustic guitars tuned using the famed Fripp tuning. CGT plays a wide variety of songs, from original pieces that use a multi-layered approach to melody and rhythm, to covers of Beethoven’s 5th, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody to a wonderful rendition of Pink Floyd’s Echoes. It’s nearly impossible to describe their music and definitely beyond the skills of this humble blogger. But that’s not what I wanted to talked about in this post. I witnessed the wave of change in the music industry during that CGT concert. During the break I approached the table where the band was selling their CDs and merchandise and I was offered to buy that night’s concert on CD. That’s right, the concert that I was actually listening to. The band sells the CD sleeve. 10 minutes after the concert is finished they “dump” the digital stream that they recorded from the sound board and use a multi-disc replication tower to create 10 CDs at the time. In a matter of minutes, while we were talking with the band members, my CD was ready. I love this! Here I am holding a one-of-a-kind recording and the money that I paid for it goes 100% to the band, to the artists who actually make the music that I enjoyed. It’s a wonderful business model that is showing how off-the-shelf technology is liberating the artists and giving them the opportunity to self-publish and being free of the schemes created by the recording labels that most of the times give the artist a pittance from the exorbitant cost of a CD. And while CGT is not in conflict with their label, Discipline Global Mobile, another of Robert Fripp offsprings, this model is a wonderful occasion for artists worldwide to profit from their work and give something unique to their fans.
Well, with Tax time upon us and a bunch of other deadlines tying me up I slowed down the posting here but I’ll resume soon. I’m preparing a quick tutorial about multi-camera synchronization that will be available in a few days and more video tutorials are on the way. I will not be at NAB this year, too many prior commitments in the same period. For those of you who will go, have fun and take many pictures of the new gear.
So, I talked about writing a program to convert Final Cut projects into Premiere projects. While the final program will be more or less accessible for anyone I have a sort of preview and this is only for the geeks among you. If you’re not technically expert, and I mean at the programming level, you are more then encouraged to keep reading this but I just wanted to warn you, it’s gonna start sounding like a gibberish very soon 
Quick announcement to let you know that Lightroom 2.0 beta is out and it’s delicious. Version 2.0 adds the long-awaited dual monitor support and adds the ability to do non-destructive photo retouches right inside Lightroom. The retouches don’t rely on plugins, are completely undoable at any time, unlike Aperture. Lightroom remains very fast and responsive. On my MacBookPro it still run circles around Aperture, even with dual monitor support. Unfortunately the beta doesn’t allow the use of Lightroom 1.x catalogs yet but it’s pretty straightforward to import photos in the new application. In case you didn’t catch the link before, click here to download the new public beta. This are very exciting times for photographers!
