Critique my work please.

shogo wrote on 8/3/2003, 6:24 PM
I have posted two music video's that I have done could you guys let me know what you think. They are for some local rappers here and I wanted to see what other Vegas users thought of them. I have been doing this for only about 6 months so go easy on me ;-) I know I need to work on the flow of things a little more but I think they are pretty good and so did they which made me happy! I just can't say how much I enjoy using vegas it rocks! Bring on version 5 I can't wait to see what they will have next!

PS. the Joe video has some bars on top and bottom which aren't shown on a regular TV but I haven't had time to fix it yet so please disregard those if you can.

ftp://totalsolutions.bz/pub/

Comments

Sr_C wrote on 8/3/2003, 8:11 PM
I couldn't watch the "world's greatest", Windows Media said it was corrupted.


That brick picture wall technique was kick ass! That made for great transitions. Also you are very good at composting, I liked how the foreground of one shot would suddenly become the background of another. Good work there!

My only suggestions would be to:

1. make shorter cuts, have a rule that your longest cut be no more than three seconds. with most of them not even being one second in length. THis seems unnatural but watch any professional music video and time each cut, you will rarely find one longer than three seconds. even if you want the same shot to last five seconds, cut it a couple times and use pan and crop to make it look like a different shot.

2. cut more to the beat. Rap is nice because it has a very solid foundation (the beat) use it to your advantage and cut most of your shots on that beat. THat will make the video flow with the song.


Otherwise...Nice work!
Dwuane wrote on 8/3/2003, 9:16 PM
Awesome. Very nice work. You did all of that in Vegas?

Dwuane
shogo wrote on 8/3/2003, 11:16 PM
Thanks I have been watching alot of videos latley and you are write, definitley more cuts and more to the beat actually Worlds Greatest is alot better about cutting to the beat but it is even worse on how long between cuts it was. I did both videos completley in Vegas except the fire scenes in Worlds Greatest which I created with particle illusion and Photshop for the wall transitions in Joe but I composited it all in Vegas! I am re-uploading Worlds Greatest it was corrupt check it out it has some cool fire effects. Thanks again.
L25 wrote on 8/3/2003, 11:43 PM
awesome stuff, based on the high level these are already at, I am sure you have your own critiques. Some lip syncing was off a bit, but the black and white studio performance was either a live take or spot on. great work!
shogo wrote on 8/4/2003, 12:28 AM
The studio was just synced to the rest of the recorded track, thanks though. Your write about few parts that need to be fixed with lip syncing. Thanks all!
PeterWright wrote on 8/4/2003, 1:28 AM
Nice work Shogo,

Videowise - some great effects - maybe a few more cuts as was suggested, to keep the pace moving.

Music wise - maybe just me, but I thought some sounds were too "tinny" - the subject needed more gutsy sounds to match. (This may have been nothing to do with you, but thought I'd mention anyway!) Similarly the percussion seemed a bit empty ...

Otherwise - pity there wasn't a nearby bathroom for Joe to relieve himself before shooting, then he could have left his dick alone ;)
jeffy82 wrote on 8/4/2003, 4:16 AM
shogo,
Considering that editing a Rap video is probably one of the most daunting, fast-paced, labor intensive, genre's to tackle; you did a very nice job.

Since any judgment is based on the WMP compressed format, some of the criticisms may or may not apply to the DV version.

1. The main thing that caught my eye was the A/V Sync. More specifically, in the Worlds Greatest, nearly the entire Lip-sync was off either ahead or behind. I can't say for sure if this was a technical problem, or if it was the singers vocal inconsistency relative to the beat, but I have a strong feeling it has a lot to do with the later -- mainly because most of the excellent Visual effects work WAS precisely to the beat. Also, the JOE video didn't seem to have the same problem. As a matter of fact, in the Joe video, the lip-sync was pretty much dead-on.

2. I loved the Brick wall transitions!! Very creative and classy. It didn't come across cheesy.

3. As others have mentioned, I would agree that the cuts need occur more frequently -- someone suggested an excellent idea, watch a couple Rap videos of equivalent length & count the cuts. This will at least give you a good target.

Great work so far, keep it up!!
jeffy82@aol.com
shogo wrote on 8/4/2003, 10:22 AM
Yea I learned alot from the Worlds Greatest video which was my first one, on syncing video to music. On the Joe video first thing I did was to put all of the clips on the timeline that I was going to use then sync each one individully to the actual audio track. I can't stress how much time I saved by getting each one synced as close as possible from the very beggining instead of just trimming tracks and dropping them in on the timeline. This may seem obvious to alot of you more experianced people but when you are first learning all these things it isn't at least to me. Worlds Greatest took me about 4 or 5 days excluding special effects and the Joe video took me about 8 hours for all of it but the wall transition effects I did that later on. I am still working on the Joe video we are doing some diffrent locations and replacing some of the more boring shot's and as said before I will definitley do more cuts.