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Browsing Category Compositing

Solidworks “Inventor Child”

December 19, 2011 · by bcleggtv

In the editing world, sometimes there are those projects that you just need to get through and then there are those that serve as a great example of why you do what you do. In 2010, Solidworks provided me with a project that provided such an example.

It is common practice, especially in the world of corporate video, to get bogged down by messaging and stats that we sometimes forget that video is one of the great tools to entertain and evoke emotions. A lot of marketers forget that if you focus on entertainment and emotion, those two things along can be the best tools to sell. Remember that Google commercial from the Super Bowl? It was the one everyone was talking about the next day at the office. It wasn’t funny, or had any sort of special effects, but it was clever and, most importantly, entertaining and evoked some sort of emotion. And everyone refereed to it as the Google Ad, not the commercial that went over the analytics of how many users use Google to search over their competition.

With this project, the goal of the video was to try and tap into the inner workings of CAD designers. If you can picture a stereotypical CAD designer, they were probably the ones who, growing up, were always tinkering with things. In short, they probably had the best tree house in the neighborhood. Well these same brilliant minds who made a dumbwaiter in that same clubhouse have also gone on to create some of the engineering marvels you see all around you everyday. Solidworks wanted to see the journey of such a person. The reason being, these were their main user base.

Mark Biasotti, Product Manager at Solidworks, and his team came up with the concept of the “Inventor Child,” someone who took their engineering passion and helped change the world. The term he kept using, which as you can see is very appropriate, was the concept of the emotional payoff. At each step of the protagonists engineering life, his ingenuity is helping those around him, but in the end it comes full circle and helps him. What I love about this video is that it sells a product without ever mentioning the product. It is only selling the idea.

This project was also a great example of what happens with great teamwork. Mark Biasotti was the creative lead on the client side, as well as acting as the After Effects compositor. It was directed by Bob Pascarella and Rich Sturchio. The video was shoot at 1080p/23.976fps on the Sony F900 by Robert Magro. Kerry Healey and Mark DiTondo were the lead producers on the project with Brian Iacobucci doing the final sound mix.

This project was shared heavily off-site from the edit suite, with the team at Sabertooth Productions out of California designing and compositing the 3D mechanics (the bunk bed lift, the lab scene as well as the mechanical hand.) We handled this with a pretty basic workflow, me making HD QuickTimes and sharing them over FTP with both Mark and Sabertooth. We worked natively at 1080p/23.976fps so that we were dealing with pull-down in the compositing stage.

We went though about 8 or 10 versions of this. The great thing about that was, unlike normal when each version just gets a little different, with this case each version got a little different and BETTER! It can be frustrating going back and forth on many different versions and you never feel that the project is getting any better. Luckily with “Inventor Child,” we were not dealing with that. Probably a good equation for success:

great concept + impeccable teamwork = fantastic end product

Boston College: During My Years

December 11, 2011 · by bcleggtv

The Boston College Eagles football team is a Division 1 FCS team that plays in the ACC, a conference which includes perennial powerhouse programs such as Florida State, Miami, Clemson and Virginia Tech. Since their entry into the ACC in 2003, Boston College football has been more prevalent on the national stage, which means more TV time. Each year each school is given the opportunity to air a spot advertising their school on national TV, free of charge. Basically, it boils down to when ESPN is airing the BC vs. Florida State game, they are making money off of that so each school gets one free :30 spot.

This is the spot from the 2010 season titled “During My Years.” As you can see from the spot, you can tell why it is titled that. This spot was shot on the Sony F900 at 1080p/23.976fps. Like with any spot airing on TV, the deliverable has to be at 1080i/59.94fps. The footage was digitized using the Sony JH-3 with the 3:2 pull-down setting on, that way the footage was being digitized in the Avid Symphony at 1080i/59.94fps at Avid DNxHD 220Mbps 10-bit. There was also quite a bit of footage that was not shot by Cramer, specifically:

The hockey team celebration (ESPN – DVCPro HD)

Church interior with the candles (Boston College – XDCAM)

Mark Herzlich (ESPN – DVCPro HD)

Ballet Dancer (Boston College – HDV)

Torch Ceremony (Boston College – XDCAM)

As you can see, about 66% of the spot is from outside acquisitions. The Boston College footage was XDCAM and HDV at 1080i/59.94fps. I used the Avid 3:2 cadence to give it the 24P look. The ESPN footage came in on DVCPro HD 720. If memory serves me correctly that footage was sent out to Video Express and transfered to HDCAM. At the time we didn’t own a DVCPro deck and it was cheaper to have a quick dub made than to rent a deck for what turned out to be about 5 seconds of footage.

All the VO’s in the spot are actual Boston College students and are being read on-site with a boom mic. Normally VOs are done in a booth with a Pro Tools engineer, but given the fact the spot was shot at the campus and we had 12 separate lines of copy all read by different students, logistically it was easier to record them on-site. Things you may not know about the spot, the first shot of the chapel the sky is secondary color correction using Avid Symphony. The original shot was shot on a sunny day, but was done midday, so the sky still had a flatness to it. Not so much grey, but the blue was so light and de-saturated that I thought it could use a punch. The same was done on the last shot with the Eagle statue, but not as much.

The lasers in the physics lab were all done in post. They tried to shot them on set, but the laser was so light that the camera just wasn’t picking it up. I used After Effects and just drew a couple white lines with a blue and white glow added to them.

On the church interior with the candle lighting ceremony, I put a fairly heavy vignette on the color correction to draw the viewers attention to the candles, as well as added a hint of GenArts Sapphire Glare to them. The original shot was done with only the light from the candles and was extremely orange. I drew a couple masks with Avid Animatte to be able to keep the blue in the stained glass in the background and only apply the glare to the candles.

Boston College: Sports

December 11, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Disclaimer: I am NOT a Boston College sports fan. In 2002 I graduated from the prestigious University of Massachusetts at Amherst. But, having worked more closely to Boston than Amherst, Boston College provides more content for sports and, while I hate to admit it, they are the premiere college in New England for sports, except UCONN for men’s and women’s basketball.

Two sports projects I have been involved with are football and hockey, two sports that are main objectives in Chestnut Hill. Hockey in particular has been a powerhouse for years, having won 3 national championships in the last decade. Each year Cramer works on projects for each of these programs. The football recruiting video, which is an NFL Films style video that highlights the year for the team and acts as a recruiting tool for new players. In fact, up until his passing in 2009 Harry Kalas was used as the voice over talent. Since then, Joe Giotta has been lending his voice and picking up where Kalas left off.

This the open for the 2009 video. The main piece was edited by Vincent Higgins and written and directed by David Trainor. I used Avid to cut the footage and brought it into After Effects to do the composite. What I did was create a canvas at 1920 x 1080 and put the SD video on that 5 times. Video CoPilot’s Riot Gear was used to create the background and the grunge vignette. Since I had an HD canvas and an SD output, I used that to create the swish pans you see. I just moved it between the 5 continuous streams to create the swish pans. You can see what the 5 streams look like around 1:24 in the video.

Above is the 2010 Pike’s Peak Hockey video. At the end of each hockey season they hold a banquet for all the players, coaches, parents and supporter’s of the program. As you can tell, the video is ridiculously long (total running time of 10:30.) While something like this should really run at no more than say 5 minutes, just remember who the audience is for this. It is specifically for the team, so almost every goal and good save from the season is used. The video is broken up into 3 specific sections. The first is the Foo Fighters song which is the regular season. The Muse song is from the Beanpot (the mid-season Boston hockey tournament between BC, BU, Northeastern and Harvard.) The last being the Lupe Fiasco song which is the Hockey East tournament. I used Avid to do this entire video except for the logo open and the BC logo transition, which I made in After Effects but did an overlay with GenArts Sapphire Layer effect.

Jordan’s Furniture

December 4, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Whenever someone asks me on the street what I do for a living, I always say I am a video editor. In theory, I could say “film editor” since I have edited many films, but in reality they have all been shot on video, not film. After I say video, most times the next question is “what is that?” Jordan’s Furniture has always been my example to illustrate what I do for those not in the know. Jordan’s Furniture has been a staple of local business in Eastern Massachusetts for a number of years. Their TV spots have changed over the years, but they have always been a cornerstone of their brand.

There are many things that I enjoy about editing Jordan’s Furniture spots. For one, they are always a quick turnaround so they don’t drag on for days. A typical schedule would be shoot on Monday, digitize and edit Tuesday, make final revisions and traffic Wednesday. Sometimes there is another day added onto that, but if it does there are probably at least 4 or 5 spots going to air. There are even times we are trafficking on day 2.

The other reason that Jordan’s edits are great is the client I get to work with. It has, over the years, become a true partnership in the edit and I am sure any other editor out there would agree that is a truly great place to be. The days we edit, the client just comes right on in, sits down, we’ll Monday Morning quarterback about the recent New England Patriots win and then get right into it. Usually by this time I have the footage digitized and edited, sans final graphics. Sometimes they go over well, sometimes they don’t, but they are always meet with a mutual agreement that we’ll do whatever is right for the spot, and everyone’s opinion matters. There is a high level of trust in the edit suite and it just makes the whole experience worthwhile.

All the Jordan’s Furniture commercials are shot on a Sony F900 HDCAM at 1080p/23.976fps. Since all broadcast spots need to be delivered at 1080i/59.94fps, the footage is digitized with a Sony JH-3 with the pulldown setting on, so the footage is in the Avid at 1080i/59.94fps, usually at DNxHD 220-10bit. The exception is when chroma key is used, since keying footage that has pulldown on it creates questionable results. When this is the case, the spot is cut 1080i/59.94fps but a 3:2 cadence motion effect is added after that fact. HDCAM really runs at 135MB/sec, but by working in DNxHD 220 10-bit all the graphics can be at that higher bit rate. Also, since most spots are now delivered digitally it gives the compression step the highest possible quality source to make the files from.

One thing you will notice on a lot of Jordan’s Furniture are deals that includes TVs. All graphics that live in those TVs are done in post-production. If the TV always resides in the frame, the Avid 3d Warp tool and 4 points tracking will usually suffice. When the TV comes from off-screen I’ll use Mocha for After Effects since it is a planar tracker. In fact, now I would even say that I will rely mostly on Mocha since it yields good results. One thing I do have to do is do that composite at 1080p/23.976fps and then import that composite at 1080i/59.94. Trying to do tracking shots on footage with pull down will create bumpy tracks. One thing I do with the track is I track in just a solid color (usually red since it makes it easy to see where in lies in relation to the edges) and then do the graphics in a separate sequence or comp. This acts as my master track and is replaced by the sequence or comp with the graphics. I use this workflow whether I am doing the composite in After Effects or Avid. The graphics are usually what change the most during the editing process, so by doing it this way I don’t have to re-track every time there is a logo or text change.

The above spot was actually moved up a day or two so they could do the shoot at Fenway in the snow. Needless to say that, while it definitely helped for the spot, the on-site production crew wouldn’t have objected to a sunnier day!

Casual Male Big and Tall

August 28, 2011 · by bcleggtv

More and more clients are supplying post-houses with their own content. This is a good example of a soup to nuts commercial made completely with client provided imagery. Casual Male was running a special sale throughout the Mid-West and needed a spot with a quick turnaround time. Working with Director Scott Palmer and Senior Producer Leah Romig, Cramer received a folder of high resolution images, logos and a spec PowerPoint file on a Monday. Working with Cramer’s print department to convert the Adobe InDesign images we had a first cut of the spot on Tuesday. After one more day of revisions with Casual Male the spot was trafficked on Wednesday.

Since we had all high-resolution images, we decided to do the spot all in Adobe After Effects. We used Avid Symphony Nitris to basically import the render and lay in the final audio mix and to lay to HDCAM tape for trafficking. The spot is basically broken up into 4 distinct sections. You can tell each section by the background color change. The compositing and animation for each of these sections was done on their own and then I just made sure my 3D camera in After Effects “flew” out of each section to a blank background. There is just a simple dissolve (7 frames) between each section. This worked great because for any revisions I could just go to that section and make a new sub-comp. I had one master comp of the 4 sections that acted as a render comp. Changes were made to sub comps and replaced in the master comp.

The voice over was read by Comcast Sports Net’s Gary Tanguay. Funny side story, the scratch track was read by Senior Audio Engineer Brian Iacobucci, who has been reading scratch tracks for years. After reading scratch track for years, Brian has gained a great voice-over talent himself. When Gary came into see the final spot with the scratch track in it, he actually thought Brian was the final voice-over and that we accidentally played the wrong spot!

For anyone getting into After Effects animations I highly recommend using sub comps/pre comps as much as you can. Be organized too, if you can think about how you can make an organized top down workflow it can really help in fast turnaround times.