» Posts Tagged ‘howto’
Just as digital acquisition hasn’t rendered the light meter obsolete, nor NLE software altered what makes a well-paced scene — digital retouching plays by a lot of the same rules now as it always has. Recently, CreativePro dug up the fantastic-looking book Short Cuts to Photo Retouching, written by photographer Raymond Wardell in 1946. Wardell walks the reader through many techniques that will be familiar to Photoshop users — except he’s quite literally making his artistic alterations onto actual, physical film prints. Despite (or because of) this, the results are downright impressive — especially given the lack of a real-life ‘undo’ command. Click through to check out a few scans from this old gem, from which we can still learn plenty. More »
While H.265 has been approved as the next-gen lossy delivery codec, we’re still watching a vast amount of video in H.264. In fact, even when H.265 sooner or later takes its place, videomakers will still be dealing with many of the same basic compression principles at work. Knowing all the variables of a delivery encoding job can help optimize bit efficiency, ensure the highest possible quality of media, and reduce the visibility of artifacting such as banding. Read on for a look at what drives the quality-to-compression ratio of your lossy-encoded delivery video, and how you can even ‘trick’ it in some cases. More »
Shooting Your Way Around the 180 Degree Rule and an Introduction to Composition Basics
As modern filmmakers, we have the benefit of hindsight in understanding what has been established in cinema, like the basics of scene coverage and shot composition. One of these shooting essentials is the 180 degree rule, which guides our coverage of a conversation between two subjects. Think of how commonly two people hold a conversation in films you’ve seen,
Upcoming B&H Seminar: 'Making a Movie Without a Hollywood Budget and Big Crew'
Beginning in the summer of 2010, filmmaker Gail Mooney and her daughter took a 99-day journey all over the world to create “a film about people who were making a positive difference.” Opening Our Eyes was the result. The partially Kickstarter-funded film follows eleven subjects across six continents, and went on to achieve accolades such as Best Documentary at the 2012 Orlando Film Festival. Considering the scope and scale of the project, and the budget at which it was accomplished, Opening Our Eyes is a startling achievement — and, through an upcoming B&H seminar with Mooney herself, other filmmakers can learn exactly how it was accomplished. More »
Not all glass is created equal. Some is shaped into things you drink out of. Some becomes windows, windshields, and portholes. And some become the tools you use every day to create beautiful images. Something as insanely resolute as 4K (or even 8K) broadcast and stereoscopic 48fps can only look so good with a junk piece of glass placed between the medium and the image — which can also work great if that’s the type of look you’re going for. Given all this, the birds and the bees of how lenses are made — and function, down to the basics — is definitely something many of us take for granted. More »
Tutorials Galore: Dailies in DaVinci Resolve, CinemaDNG to ACES Conversion, Plus What's a LUT?
Ever asked yourself, “What in the f#$% is a LUT?!” Or what a LUT’s relationship is with color space? Or what a color space is? If “yes,” not to worry — these concepts can be fairly confusing. Fortunately, engineering can and will work for you as an artist, so long as your understanding of it covers the fundamentals. And even if you answered “no” to all the above, you should still check out some of outstanding basic-breakdowns of these concepts below — including how to convert CinemaDNG footage into the Academy Color Encoding Spec color space (ACES) in Davinci Resolve, plus how to use that very program to generate dailies (like a boss). More »
DIY Builds: Portable Jib That Doubles as Shoulder Rig, Panoramic Head, Dirt Cheap Steadicam
There’s a variety of rigs out there for pretty much all your mounting needs — Cinevate and of course Kessler are go-to solutions for jibs running the gamut from heavy-duty to collapsible, respectively. The same goes for shoulder rigs, with options ranging from professional solutions to lightweight prefabs all the way down to homebrew kits. Of course, something that can pull double duty as a portable jib and custom shoulder rig — which you can put together yourself for $50, to boot — may be the best of, like, three worlds. Read on to check out some details — plus info on how to build your own 360 degree panoramic head mount, plus some hardcore DIY stabilizers — all geared toward the low-to-no budget but crafty shooter. More »
4 Tutorials to Help You Improve Your Green Screen Skills
We’ve all seen it: mismatched subject and background lighting, dancing edge pixels, and color spill; some of the hallmarks of a bad green screen composite. There are multiple factors to consider for a chroma key shot in preproduction, on set, and in post, and in the following videos Richard Harrington will take you through those factors and show you how to pull a good key and produce a believable composite. More »
There are a good deal of relatively inexpensive rigs out there that can help you achieve a nice dolly shot. For small-scale dollying you might use Cineskates, or for shots that require a greater amount of movement with larger subjects, you might go with Rigwheels. But there might be times when the size of your subject might make these tools — and even a full dolly track setup — inadequate for the job. But with a DSLR, some planning, and a little post work, you can put together a beautiful dolly shot of a tall building: More »
Thanks to the extensible nature of third party interchangeable parts, you can assemble a shoulder rig that balances robustness, accessory accommodation, and price range almost perfectly to what you need, for a price you can afford. You may buy a complete package from a trusted vendor, one on the super-cheap from overseas, or upgrade your older kit with new pads, grips, and weights. You may even eschew the steel altogether and build one yourself, and there’s many a building guide for such a DIY assembly out there — one more recent post breaks down a PVC shouldermount rig for a paltry $10. For this and some other (picture left) dirt-cheap alternatives, check below. More »
Getting Started with Color Correction: Using Waveforms and Scopes with Colorist Steve Hullfish
The colorist’s job has gotten a whole lot easier since chemical baths stepped out of the picture in many cases. Non-destructive color timing is the future in which we now live — that said, the principles at work in creating properly balanced imagery is as important as ever. Each camera we may be shooting on has its own unique implications in chromatic reproduction, and the ability to delicately correct a given color mixture (regardless of its source) is key. Ironically, or not, tools such as waveform monitors and vectorscopes — staples of the bygone analog video world — are as relevant today as ever in filmmaking, if not more so. A recent presentation by noted color correction author Steve Hullfish demonstrates precisely this point, as well as the basics in using your scopes to full advantage. More »
Homebrew Render Farming at Crunch Time with Imminent 'The Underwater Realm,' Plus New Trailer
You may recall when director David M. Reynolds shared a guest post with NoFilmSchool readers, in the midst of what would become a significantly successful Kickstarter campaign — overfunded $40k beyond its $60k goal — for his project The Underwater Realm. Now, a year later, the film is less than two weeks from premiering for free on YouTube. Needless to say, the all-volunteer-multi-talented-hyphenates of Realm Pictures is working tirelessly to get the project finished. On top of this, they’ve shared a seemingly endless amount of insight into their process along the way, via weekly video blogs — including a recent look at their self-implemented render farm-style workflow, the sound design, and a bit earlier, a look at their amazing underwater shooting process. Watch these and a new trailer below. More »
Last month I wrote about the new Adobe After Effects plug-in from Video Copilot: Element 3D. The initial demo videos were pretty amazing, but Andrew Kramer is delving deeper into Element 3D’s functionality in his most recent tutorial videos, covering the creation and manipulation of materials, powerful animation options in the Particle Replicator, environment maps, and 3D Compositing. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a tutorial from Serge Mustu on a Cinema 4D to Element 3D workflow and animating titles: More »
There are a lot of tutorial videos out there about making DIY camera stabilizers/steadicams, but usually the ones I come across are either made for tiny consumer cameras or the test footage looks ok, but doesn’t quite possess that creamy smooth motion that I come to expect from a good stabilizer. Then I came across a video by Studio Amarelo in Vimeo’s Video School channel that demonstrated a highly adjustable rig that could be built from cheap off the shelf parts, and produced some fantastically smooth footage: More »
I’ve posted some ways to remove hot pixels from video footage in Final Cut Pro, Vegas, and Aperture in the past. But you can never have too many options! So for anyone dealing with those pesky stuck/hot/dead pixels that are so prevalent with HDSLRs, here are a couple more ways to remove them in post-production using Final Cut Pro — the old version, that is. More »
This is the first in a series of guest posts by filmmaker Raafi Rivero.
In this series of posts I intend to address a topic which is both critical and sorely overlooked in the current crop of filmmaking blogs: how to, you know, direct. More »
The go-to slow motion plugin in many an editor’s toolbox is RE:Vision Effects’ Twixtor. Twixtor can often stretch a shot originally filmed at 30 or 60 frames per second into Matrix-like levels of slowness. However, the enterprising guys at Crumblepop have come up with a way of achieving this same effect using the Optical Flow filter that ships as part of Apple Motion. Here it is in action: More »
Vimeo has announced a new addition to their site, and it’s a great one: Vimeo Video School. It’s just what you would imagine: a host of good how-to videos organized in one place, free to watch (as is everything on Vimeo). VVS should be a great place to go to learn the basics of shooting and editing; here’s what they’ve got at launch. More »
DP Shane Hurlbut is a treasure trove of useful information about HDSLRs, as few Hollywood DPs have embraced the DSLR revolution with as much fervor (or online presence) as Shane. He will be presenting a free webinar on Tuesday, Dec. 14, at 12 p.m. EST (9 a.m. PST) — yes, it’s short notice, but the workshop may be archived; if it is, I will update this post with the link to the video is here. Here’s Shane talking about his work with The Bandito Brothers on Act of Valor: More »
Dynamic Perception has some interesting-looking micro-dolly/controller combos for sale, and they’ve demonstrated how to create moving, time-lapse, HDR videos using auto exposure bracketing on a Pentax K7. It’s not something you’ll need to do everyday, but if you ever need to create this very specialized shot, here’s how. More »
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