My first documentary: Vegas made it happen

MZ wrote on 5/13/2003, 9:51 PM
Well, after dinking around with shorts and wedding videos, I just finished cutting a short subject documentary on hockey promotions, which for us was a big project. By that I mean:

--8 Hours of footage between 3 Cameras

--4 Hours of Sound on MiniDisc from two mics

--Mainly Digital8 footage, some Hi8


This was for a college documentary course, but given that that's really our only tie to the class (we edited all in my basement instead of dinking around with their two Pinnacle/Premiere bays), we want to take it around to any festival that'll take us.


What even made it better was what we could do to it in Vegas 4 -- a 5.1 surround mix and rendering it out as 24p (from all 60i footage). We rendered it out cold to 24p (without deinterlace or disabling resampling) and our jaws dropped when we watched it. We've been told that it looked like it was shot on 16mm. That's a big compliment. We also have been working on doing a 5.1 mix, which has been great considering shooting at a hockey game gives you a lot of ambient sounds you can steer to the surrounds. The thing looks so much better than what people have been trying to do on the Pinnacles or Avid Express' on campus.


We screen our rough cut for final grading tomorrow (in the campus theatre with a Dolby Digital setup so we'll see what we're sounding like so far). We're getting really anxious to see what the reaction is.


But yet again, we could never have done it without Vegas. The crew, who had been so indoctrinated in the Pinnacle/Avids on campus were floored by Vegas when they first used it. A couple wanted to know how to get it. That's a good sign.


Thanks again to everybody who's given me advice over the past months (here or elsewhere). I gave a few of you (Dr. Dropout and Douglas Spotted Eagle, etc.) credit in our "Special Thanks," very deservedly. We also made certain to give SoFo and Vegas all due credit at the end.


We should have a website up soon with clips. Otherwise, watch out for us in the next months as we try to see what kind of life this project may have.


Mark

Comments

kameronj wrote on 5/14/2003, 6:55 AM
Kewlness!!
FuTz wrote on 5/14/2003, 6:58 AM
Put it on Chienworks site! we wanna see it! :D
Grazie wrote on 5/14/2003, 7:38 AM
ME TOO!!! ME TOO!!! ME TOO!!!

Grazie
JonnyMac wrote on 5/14/2003, 8:12 AM
Congrats, Mark, that's really cool. This past weekend I had a team entered in the Dallas Video Association 24-Hour Video Race. The race started at midnight Friday with each team given a theme (the stranger), a prop requirement (umbrella), location requirement (body of water) and a line of dialog ("We must be nuts."). Then we all had just 24 hours to create a 5-minute video.

Thanks to the power and stability of Vegas, my editor (Kent Rhodes) was able to do an fantastic job under unbelievable pressure -- we made the entry deadline by just four minutes (which required me to do a mad sprint across Dealey Plaza, dodging traffic -- on no sleep for over 40 hours!).

Like the others, I hope you'll post your piece on the www.vegasusers.com site. We will post our 24-Hour race video (with the typo "Directed of Photography") on that site on Friday with the results. We screen tonight, the finals are tomorrow.

-- Jon McPhalen
-- Dallas, TX
Grazie wrote on 5/14/2003, 10:54 AM
Jonny - Really looking forward to seeing it at Chienworks Cinema - Or is that Kelly's Kinema! - I've book my seat and ready with me popcorn

**********************

Grazie
MZ wrote on 5/14/2003, 7:55 PM
Well we screened our 24 minute rough cut in a theatre setting. Only gripe about the thing was that they couldn't play our DVD. They just spent millions of dollars to build a new student union with a Dolby/DTS video theatre with Bose amps and stuff, and they didn't get a DVD player that can play DVD+R's! What's up with that?

Well we had a VHS copy to screen, which butchered our 5.1 mix severly, but it went over like gangbusters. You could really notice the difference the 24p conversion made compared to the other projects (largely done on Betacams in either cuts-only or Pinnacle systems). Even on VHS, the thing looked like a decent 16mm print. People were amazed.

I'm trying to get part or all of it on the web somehow. It's 24 minutes so I don't know how I'm going about this, but soon there should be a copy up on VegasUsers.com. I would love to get some opinions on it, from people who weren't familiar with the process under which we made it. We definitely want this thing to have some sort of life beyond the documentary class, and we definitely plan to keep working on it, so hopefully we can get some input.
slacy wrote on 5/14/2003, 10:07 PM
If you render out at 24P in Vegas, will you get a similar look to DVFilm Maker's software?
MZ wrote on 5/14/2003, 10:27 PM
Don't know cause I've never used DVFilm's software, but after screening it in a theatre after three other documentaries posted on Beta, you could definitely tell a difference. A couple people pointed it out too.

There's a bunch of different ways you can render to 24p (messing with Resampling, deinterlace mode, etc.) so it's a matter of testing it out and seeing what works for you I guess.

(Unfortunately you won't be able to see it like we did in the theatre when I upload it to the web)