Nice...

Very nice although I thought the road map picture might be a bit complex for that amount of time.
JJK

Good work. Liked it.

Paul.

The quick cuts between the shots with camera movement troubled me. I'd be even more concerned given that this is destined to be shown on a large screen.

Certainly the trend today is to always have the camera moving however it could be much slower. Or, moving in the same direction accross the cut.

Bob.

movie theater preshow commercials for local businesses
I can't imagine that you're going out to Film... So, what is your final delivery size, format, and medium?

I thought the voice was a bit monotonous and would have been moved more by seeing "Technician at Work", Happy Customers, & Hand Shakes captured by Slider-Type Camera moves. Good locale commercial but the 'pacing' of the piece feels a bit 'off' to me.

The voice will be replaced. I use my voice until the client is happy with the script and the flow, then replace it with a hired voice, usually from voicejockeys.com.

The final result will be shown in the movie theater at 1280x720p with the bottom 144 pixels blacked out (so as to fill the screen). The image in the theaters looks really good. I'm not sure if there is some uprezzing going on or not, but the projected image looks great.

The pacing doesn't come across exactly on Vimeo. You can watch it and it will look slightly off, then stop and go back over that same spot and it will be right the second time. In the theater the playback is consistent but on Vimeo there always seems to be a little slop with tight cuts.

In the theater it does come across differently than it does on a computer screen. The tagline at the bottom for instance is quite easy to read. There were a few things I used to worry about like large white spaces looking like flickering lights that I don't worry about any more. I go for pretty close to cRGB colors as the theater tends to wash the colors out a little. Fast cuts look fine to me in the theater. I wouldn't have thought they would but they do.

One thing that really jumps out at you in the theater is focus. If anything is soft focus-wise you can really see it. I think there is some sort of judder removal algorithm in the projectors because judder wise, it always seems to look better on the theater screen than it does on the computer.

I would love to get a good slider. I have a cheap one but it is next to useless. I'd like something like the Pocket Dolly with a wheel and a pully that would give really smooth movement.

Laurence, this looks nice!

I have an off-topic quick question: Did you use Vegas for "Clean the World Volunteers" still image slide show you did? I like the way the same images are layered in the transitions. I have tried to manually do something similar in Vegas but it seems more tedious than it should be for the effect I'm trying to get.

I know you didn't ask for opinions, but I will give mine anyway.

I would have liked to have more time to look at the previous designs. I saw a quick shot that looked like a fossil embedded, but it was gone before I could take it all in.

also, can you use the map without giving legal credit? Just curious.

Dave T2

I used a slideshow program called "Proshow Producer" for the Guatemala slideshow. You could do it in Vegas but it would take hours.

http://www.photodex.com/proshow/producer

>also, can you use the map without giving legal credit? Just curious.

I don't know. This is playing at one local theater so I'm not sure how much it matters. I did find this just now:

http://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines.html

thanks, was just curious.

Dave T2

Thanks for the tip!

I've often thought about Google Maps for the docos I do, and quickly ran away! But GGL have made this a simple process. Laurence thanks for the link to their site.

As to your "short". Less is More.

I would have gotten to a more stylistic approach.

More white space and a simpler 5 Point grab-activator-buyer process:

1 - I see

2 - I want

3 - I want Service

4 - Where R U?

5 - The In-Crowd

More stylistic and Less Clutter.

It's real tuff . . . Rory, on these boards, is great at this stuff. But he's come from a plastic=materials Arts Background, as do I.

The music does move it along, but as a result I didn't get the "Mission".

Look, your guys will love it. However, lots to do here. If you want further input from me . . . . . ?

Toodle pip . .

Crazy-Grazie

Vimeo really does screw up the timing. On more relaxed edits I never really noticed, but on this piece it's really bad. The sync is off just enough between the music and video to make the editing look sort of random and haphazard, not every time I play it, but at least every second time. I'll look at it and it will be off, then I'll rewind and go over it again and it will be perfect. This is the way I send it to the client for approval so it is a big deal. As I look at it, when the timing is right it looks nice and snappy but when it gets off it just looks cluttered and too busy. I tink stop by the client's place and show it to her off my iPad to make sure she is seeing the right timing.

I'm still curious about your deliverables as the only time one of my vids were shown in a theater, we played it via a computer & projector. There was no Feature Film being played afterwards though. I still see Film Canisters being delivered to theaters, so I'm wondering what your local theater does.

Delivery Size = 1280 x 720p
Format = Quicktime, MXF, ProRes, Avi, H264, etc?
Medium = Computer, DVD Player, Media Server, etc... out to projector?

Delivery size: 1280x720x29.97
Format: H264 in mp4 container. I have also used wmv.
Computer: Intel i5 using the integrated graphics card with HDMI going to splitter and then out to projectors. Audio is going through a separate stereo splitter.

This particular movie theater does all digital projectors with the movies being delivered on HD drive. I'm not sure the exact resolution, but it looks every bit as good as film during the features. I believe it is 2k projection during the features.

The preshow ads look good but not as good as the feature. I've been to a number of theaters checking out preshows and they all look about the same. I would love to figure out a way to one up my competition, but so far, we are all doing about the same Blu-ray level production.

Are you limited to 720P? 1080i or 1080p would obviously look a little better.

Dave T2

I think you'd see the interlace with 1080i but I'm not sure. I think 1080p might look slightly better but I haven't tried it.

When I started doing these, movies were shown on film and the preshow was done with a separate projector. The resolution on these projectors was usually 1024 pixels wide, so even 1280 was overshooting it a little. When I took over this theater, all the ads were at 1280 x 720p with 8 pixel masks on the sides and a 144 pixel mask at the bottom. Video done with this mask will exactly fill the screen in the largest theater room, but you can see the mask in the smaller theaters. The projectionist tells me there is no way around this.

Now that theaters are using mostly beyond HD 2k digital projectors it would make sense to use 1920x1080. I believe that the projectors have really nice uprezzers because in the summer they play kids movies off DVDs in the afternoon. The DVDs look great. The ads look really great as well. Surprisingly great really, especially considering how big the screen is and that they are only 720p.

"Now that theaters are using mostly beyond HD 2k digital projectors it would make sense to use 1920x1080"

2K isn't 1920 x1080, it's also 12 bit discrete frames in an MXF container. Google "DCI" for a copy of the specs.
I don't know if exactly matching the specs will help at all and the few places that are authorised to encode the movies seem to charge an arm and a leg. I suspec the difference in the look is due to many factors, most of them expensive :(

I've shown a few movies in cinemas off DV, didn't look too bad when there was enough lumens in the projector BUT there was no other reference to compare it to.


Bob.

I know that when I used to see my ads in film theaters, the secondary preshow projector never looked like it had enough lumens. In the digital projector theaters, it is the same projector for both the preshow and the features and it looks nice and bright. The uprezzing is different as well. I love the way my ads look in the all digital theaters. They really look stunningly good... that is until the trailers start... then you can see how a movie theater image is actually supposed to look...

1080i is not a problem in a theater. I have encoded many videos for visitor center theaters, one which was larger than a normal theater screen and they look fine.

Interlacing is not a problem on a theater projector.


Dave T2

That's good to know. Thanks Dave.