» Posts Tagged ‘postproduction’
DaVinci Resolve Now Available on Windows Thanks to Free Public Beta
Just because the popular color correction software DaVinci Resolve uses a Mac monitor for its press image (at left) doesn’t mean it’s Mac only — any more. Resolve, which has a free version known fittingly as Resolve Lite, now comes in a Windows version for the first time thanks a newly-released Public Beta. If you have already purchased Resolve for Mac, the Windows version comes included, so you now have a Windows license too. More »
Celluloid is expensive. And besides, literally nobody makes film cameras anymore. But it does have a very particular aesthetic, one chief component of which is grain. There is a grit to film that today’s digital cameras lack, and while there are plenty of plugins out there to simulate this grit, there are no substitutes for the real artifacts. The guys at CineGrain took dozens of different film stocks and painstakingly scanned them in, delivering authentic grain, dirt, headers, tails, lens flares, and flash frames on a nice branded hard drive. Film grain isn’t appropriate for every project, but if you want your video to look like grainy 35mm, 16mm, or 8mm — but can’t shoot the real thing — you’ll find CineGrain to be a handy addition to your toolbox of tricks. More »
RED has been cranking out new beta versions of their ingest/grading software REDCINE-X PRO seemingly every week or so, and you can bet it will find a lot of new users thanks to the impending release of their SCARLET-X camera (which is supposed to start shipping this Thursday). REDCINE-X PRO is free — though you need a very expensive piece of hardware to use it — so here is a great tutorial from Dan Kanes, which demonstrates the flexibility of the RAW workflow: More »
I am way late with this, but better late than never — and better free than $500. Wes and Harry Plate, the father-son duo behind Automatic Duck, were recently hired by Adobe. Automatic Duck makes (made) the well-known plugins Pro Import AE, Pro Import FCP, and Pro Export FCP, which allow users to open Final Cut Pro projects in After Effects, as well as enabling some other interoperability. This move by Adobe seems as much to prevent the duo from updating their must-have plugins for Final Cut Pro X, as much as it is to help Adobe with their already admirable integration between Premiere Pro and After Effects, but as a result all of Automatic Duck’s existing plugins — which formery ran $500 apiece — are free. Said Wes and Harry: More »
Magic Bullet Quick Looks Limited: 20 Color Correction Presets Free for NoFilmSchool Readers
Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Looks is an aggressive color correction tool. For a more subtle approach, I recommend Colorista, but for dramatic results very quickly, it’s hard to beat Looks. Quick Looks Limited is, as you can guess from the name, a limited set of twenty presets from Looks — free for NFS readers! Anyone can sign up using the link at the bottom of this post, but this bundle was only available with certain purchases previously. Now it’s gratis for anyone to experiment with: More »
This is simultaneously really impressive and seemingly obvious. The Tube of You has rolled out a new tab that allows you to trim your videos right on the site — in the cloud — instead of doing it locally and (re)uploading. This tab, aptly named “Edit video,” should already be live for all global users and allows for trimming, soundtrack-swapping, camera stabilization (!), and a number of basic post-production effects. As far as I can tell, at present there are no NLE features, but who knows where it’s headed next. Here’s the official word and a brief demo: More »
Adobe's Mac Video Apps Up 45 Percent Thanks to Final Cut Pro X; Buys IRIDAS SpeedGrade
Since Apple introduced the much-maligned Final Cut Pro X, Adobe’s Mac Video apps have reportedly enjoyed a 45% boost in sales. This is in all likelihood partially thanks to Adobe’s offer of 50% off for Final Cut Pro users (Avid editors are also eligible). Perhaps as a result of this newfound confidence, Adobe has also purchased IRIDAS, a company known best for their high-end SpeedGrade color grading software. More »
The Foundry Axes Storm Post-production Software Because of REDCINE-X PRO
In a hypothetical future wherein I start shooting on a RED camera, one of the first things I was planning on doing was getting The Foundry’s Storm post-production (and on-set) software. The RED folks really seemed to love it, as they were quoted on the Storm product page, and at this year’s NAB I was impressed by The Foundry’s numerous demos (some of which took place in RED’s tent). But then RED released REDCINE-X PRO this week — their own version of Storm, in a lot of ways — and now The Foundry has officially killed Storm, at a nascent version 1.04. While Storm was priced very affordably, putting it well within the range of indie filmmakers — $375 — REDCINE-X is free, and you can’t beat that. Via fxguide, here’s the official word: More »
Lots going on in REDland this week. The news that EPIC-X production had begun is now corroborated by news that the first cameras are headed out the door today. On top of this, RED released REDCINE-X PRO, a new version of their free .R3D processing/grading software. I’m a bit confused — I mean, I thought REDCINE-X was already for pros only and that soccer moms need not apply — but apparently this new version is significantly different enough to justify the new “pro” moniker. After booting it up briefly, I understand the new name — the unified interface is a vast improvement over the old version (and the multi-track timeline builds on its basic editing functions). Here are the new features (and a download link): More »
Vincent Laforet has been up to great things lately with his blog, from shooting with RED EPIC to covering roundtrip editing between FCP 7 and Premiere. Along with Richard Harrington, Vincent has posted an hour-long tutorial on his complete RED and HDSLR workflow in Premiere Pro: More »
When Red Giant Software released a teaser trailer for something called “Plot Device” last night, I mistakenly thought they were getting into script-writing applications. “Plot Device,” as it turns out, is in fact a 9-minute short film made for the purpose of showing off the new Magic Bullet Suite 11. Here’s the film in full, which as you can imagine features a lot of post-production “looks.” While some of these are over-the-top, they do a great job of demonstrating the extremes to which you can manipulate your images using the Suite: More »
Egil Pedersen directed the music video for Ruggged Wilderness & Mountain Man No More’s track “Dropping Feathers,” and uses some clever post-production tricks that tell the story in a very organic way. Shot on a Canon 5D Mark II in Norway, the stark black-and-white aesthetic of the video subtly incorporates excellent After Effects work: More »
This is a guest post by producer/colorist Jay Friesen.
There are a lot of great tools out for grading and finishing. Cineform’s First Light has been out for a while now and Red Giant’s LUT Buddy was just released. Technicolor also released their CineStyle profile for Canon DSLRs and their documentation talks about using the included Look Up Table (LUT) in the post processing of your footage. The new Sony F3 will soon have a firmware upgrade that enables an uncompressed 4:4:4 S-LOG mode that utilizes LUTs. So, what exactly is a LUT? More »
CoreMelt makes post-production plugins for Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, After Effects and Motion. V2 of their extensive plugin bundle ships with 219 GPU-accelerated plugins and costs $399, but they’ve also made 33 of them absolutely free. Here’s a look at the complete V2 product range, from which the 33 free ones are taken: More »
How to Use The Foundry's Storm to Color Correct RED Footage (Free This Week)
The Foundry is best known for high-end compositing tools like Nuke, but they’re set to release their latest application, Storm, on March 1st. Storm is a much-needed low-cost “RED Production Hub,” which will retail for the very reasonable price of $375 — reasonable considering it’s not only designed to help log and process the .R3D camera originals, but it’s also meant to be a post-production solution that will take RED-based edits all the way through final color correction to delivery. If you’re interested in the RAW workflow and want to play around with some .R3D files in Storm, here’s your chance — it’s in free public beta until March 1. And if you don’t have any .R3D files to work with, I’ve got you covered there as well: More »
Which is Better for Noise Reduction, Neat Video or Magic Bullet Denoiser?
When Red Giant Software released their latest Magic Bullet product, Denoiser, I wondered how it would compare to my plugin of choice for noise reduction, Neat Video. Now, thanks to Andrew Reid at EOSHD, I don’t have to do this comparison myself, as he’s just compared the two: More »
Hot on the heels of releasing Colorista II, post-production plugin repository Red Giant Software has announced Magic Bullet Suite 10, which updates all previous Magic Bullet plugins to 64-bit and Adobe CS5 compatibility, now includes Colorista II, and throws in Grinder, PhotoLooks, and Denoiser. Grinder is their recent DSLR-specific transcoding application, PhotoLooks is their still version of Looks, and Denoiser is a brand new product that looks to be a valuable addition to the indie filmmaker’s toolkit. More »
Caleb Pike has posted a video at DSLR Video Shooter for removing horizontal banding artifacts from DSLR footage using Final Cut Pro‘s “Limit Effect” tool. This technique should only come as a last resort, however, as the best offense is a good defense: shoot at 1/50 shutter speed in most European countries (or anywhere 50Hz electricity and/or PAL video is standard), and 1/60 in the US and other NTSC locales, and you should be fine. More »
You too can have inexplicable lens flares in your film
I caught the 7D-shot French short USB Dream at HDSLR Shooter today. Note that its appearance here is not an endorsement of any kind — the fight scenes are laughable and there is a totally gratuitous stairway jump at the end that had me palming my forehead. But as I don’t speak French, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt — maybe the dialogue is amazing? Anyway, the reason I’ve posted the short here at NoFilmSchool is to talk about lens flares — specifically, the software emulation of lens flares. More »
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