project aftermath
Over the last 6 months, I’ve had two really big video projects that I’ve had to take from start to finish. The IgniteOKC presentation videos are now up on YouTube, and as I’ve wrapped that project I’ve been thinking about all the things that went well and that could’ve been done better. Before I go too far, I need to sing the praises of Bart Wells, A/V engineer extraordinaire for the Lyric Theater. His lighting and sound set-up was so conducive to my video project that I really didn’t have to make any major adjustments to the cameras – I was able to shoot most of the night on AF without too much worry. Overall, I’m pleased with the finished product, but there are things that I would have improved if I did not have to compromise with timeliness.
1) SmoothCam Filter on (almost) every shot on Cam 2. I processed a few shots with SmoothCam, and it really makes a difference if your hand was a bit shaky. I hadn’t shot that much hand-held footage in a while, and I’ll readily admit that I was a bit out of practice! SmoothCam is a great filter for smoothing out pans and tilts, but you should be careful using it on shots with a lot of moving subjects. Also, SmoothCam chews up a lot of processor power, and on my MBP it was taking a long time to process fairly short clips. The good news is that SmoothCam runs as a background process, so you can keep editing while it works away. A better alternative would’ve been to use a SteadiCam rig, but I don’t have one for the HVR-Z1U, the school doesn’t have one, and they are expensive!
2) Send all sequences through Apple Color. FCP has some great color correction tools, but color gives you more options. Overall, the color on the video was okay, especially considering this is video for YouTube. But, the contrasting temperatures of the lights on the audience, speaker, and screen gave most presenters a reddish tint. I was able to fix that in most cases with the RGB balancer by knocking down the red highs, and uping the blues a bit. I also relied on the 3-Way Color Corrector for helping boost brightness without losing color in the audience shots. These simple filters in FCP are what I use almost exclusively – but I know I can achieve better results in the Color program. I hope to spend time this year getting more adept at that program.
3) Tweak the Motion introduction of each speaker. Honestly, I really like the effect as it is, but being that I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I see a few changes I would make. First off, I used The Gimp to make a multi-layer .psd file (I can’t afford photoshop!) and imported the layers into Motion to make the 3D effect. My husband Tanner is much more proficient at photoshop than I, so he really helped me get that background looking like the weave of a microphone. The big problem is that the Ignite OKC text is actually an image, and Gimp rasters it, while the rest of the text is vectored. As you see the IgniteOKC logo come by, the aliasing becomes obvious. Ignite OKC is set in a custom font, which I don’t have & didn’t want to pay $26 for. The other thing the intro is missing is audio. That part slipped my mind until I had already uploaded several videos, and considering again the time constraint, I left audio off them all.
So there it is. The three things I would change about this project. I always say that I’m my own worst critic, which is probably true in this case. I would say that the IgniteOKC videos compare favorably to other Ignite videos, and I haven’t heard any complaints (I did accidentally put the wrong name on a video, but that has been fixed). If you’ve seen the videos and want to provide me some feedback, it would be much appreciated and you can do so right here :)
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