Christian music is so much easier to deal with. There are sites that will step you through the licensing and the fees aren't too high. There are often karaoke versions online that make nice beds and sometimes the karaoke versions will be available in several keys if you want to use a singer who can't hit the high notes strongly.

Nice work. Clean. clear and to the point. Well executed. Chroma key nearly flawless. I saw one little glitch along the way but that's nit picking. Nice upload too...looked excellent for Widescreen SD on Vimeo. I imagine they were very happy with the result. I like seeing what folks are doing. This inspired me to try some green screen stuff.

Where did you see the glitch?

Reminds me of those infomercials, so i get skeptical of what you are trying to sell me.

Where did you see the glitch?

2:44 or so. It's not a glitch really --- likely it was an edit you had to make. I watched the whole thing again. Your use of stills is outstanding -- shows what can be done mixing the live talent with background stills -- and the reason that Sony needs to fix 9.0c 64 bit so we can use JPG and PNG with AVCHD. How long to whip this thing together? Did you use some existing materials or shoot everything from scratch for the project? Just curious.

Laurence, I also saw the glitch. It's somewhere in the 2:44/2:46 range.

My one thought when watching this was, how do I know which building is which and where they are in relation to each other? It might make more sense if you are actually there but from hundreds of miles away, I was a little lost in how the positions of the buildings related to each other.

2:44 was an edit. He kind of paused there and I jumped over the pause. Not perfect but it doesn't bother me.

It took me quite a while to do this project. Let me rephrase that. It took me quite a while to figure out how to do it. If I had to do a project like this again I could do it pretty quickly.

I was getting dark and dingy looking footage indoors. That's why I started using stills. When I first shot some stills they looked like lousy point and shoot flash shots with lots of shadows from the flash. I got an external flash that could point upwards to bounce light off the ceiling and immediately things got better.

The Canon SX-1 IS that I used for the stills has a cool panoramic mode where you can see the right-most edge of the previous frame on the left of the next frame, and that comes with software that automatically stitches the photos done in this mode together. I used that for some of the wide panning shots. It only works well in a really big space though. Anything close and the angles in the different photos don't line up.

I did the chroma-key with the New Blue Video Essentials keyer which I really like. I tried saving the cutout guy as an alpha layer with Quicktime PNG compression, but no matter what I tried this gave me a slight black halo around the talent. Overlaying it over a background gave me a clean key with no added halo. The New Blue VE chroma keyer is really nice.

I put a cRGB to sRGB color correction filter on all the stills using the excellent http://aav6cc.blogspot.com/AAV ColorLab[/link] filter. Thanks Glenn Chan for opening my eyes to how important this is when matching the color of stills and video.

I did multiple passes of NR on all the audio lines to get the lines free from background noise. This really helps the dialog pop out over the background music and sound effects bed.

I don't know if it is noticable but I put a little reverb in over all the lines that were supposed to be done in a big room like the sanctuary or the big social center.

For this reverb and the audio limiting I used the incredibly good but free audio http://www.kjaerhusaudio.com/classic-series.phpKjaerhus classic series[/link] plugins. I just love these plugins, especially the reverb and limiter. The limiter is a pure brick wall limiter that sounds really natural.

The SX1-IS only shoots 30p (not 29.97) with cRGB color that looks more like a photograph than video. This was a 24p (23.976) project and I used Neo HD to generate intermediates with a 30p to 23.976 slowdown.

There was some bad video noise on the shot of the contemporary band playing. Neat Video didn't look good but the free dynamic noise reduction plugin from the free http://www.mikecrash.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=13Mike Crash Vegas plugins[/link] is absolutely wonderful on the video noise from this particular camera.

I work with sRGB color on all my projects but do a sort of "sRGB color with 0 blacks" color range for anything that I post on Youtube or Vimeo. For this I use the AAV Colorlab filter and adjust the input levels to 0 for the blacks, 128 for the mids, and 235 for the whites. This gives you sRGB levels from the mids to the whites but stretches the blacks down to 0. I love this preset and use it all the time for both previewing the Vegas timeline and rendering to Internet versions. For DVD or Bluray renders I just bypass this filter. It is always on my master video bus though.

Lately I'm sort of specializing in non-profit and church video. That means of course that budgets are really low. I'm settling into a system where I use my Sony HVR-Z7U and my lighting, greenscreen and audio equipment for all the talking head stuff, but go around shooting backgrounds and b-roll with the Canon SX-1 IS. That thing is just so small and light, I just love it. I see no drop in quality in the places in the video where I use the smaller camera. On the other hand, it doesn't have XLR, phantom power, audio limiters, quick manual controls, all of which I need when doing interviews. The bigger camera and audio and lighting gear also give you a more pro aura when you are doing scheduled interviews.

On the other when I am collecting b-roll I am usually on my own and nobody is really paying me too much attention. I also need both good stills and video. The small Canon absolutely rocks for that sort of thing.

OK, the glitch is gone. Sounds like the name of a blues song.

Very nice video.
I think it will serve its purpose well.

My only observation is more from the 'Planning' stand point.
I would NOT GreenScreen if I have access to the actual location.
- It's weird for me to see the lighting of the scene change but not the lighting on the talent.
- Plus the time it takes to Key & Render when it's not really necessary is a buzz kill for me... starts to eat into the 'Profits'.

Well this was my third chroma key project and I have no doubt that I will do lots more.

As compared to shooting at the actual locations, I really like doing it with chroma key for the following reasons:

1/ You only have to set up your lights and audio gear once.
2/ You can shoot all the lines in one quick session.
3/ Lugging around a teleprompter setup to location sites is a pain.
4/ Who cares which way the sun is pointing in relation to the background you want.
5/ No traffic noise issues.
6/ Air conditioning (I live in Florida).
7/ Shooting a quick shot of an interior location with an external flash pointed up at the ceiling is one heck of a lot easier than lighting a scene.
8/ No worries about windows and in background.
9/ I can shoot the talking head part with my big camera, but when I'm out collecting backgrounds I can use my little Canon SX-1 IS and this tiny Manfrotto tripod:

10/ I can go out for a location background shoot with my little camera and tripod packed in the tail case on the back of my motorcycle. With the bike I can drive right up to where I want to shoot usually without worrying about parking my SUV and lugging stuff to the location from the parking spot.
11/ I just bought this dual suction cup camera mount thingy that should let me mount the camera on the motorcycle windshield. In the future I should be able to just ride up to various locations and get nice stable outdoor background shots incredibly quickly. I also think this will let me get really cool looking sweeping shots if I point it at the building and drive by really slowly on the bike. I haven't tried it yet:

Very nice work!

Assuming this is primarily for the web what was the reasoning to shoot at 24fps? Vimeo recommends 30fps and with the inherent judder already present in most web delivery why add to it? I am on a FIOS 20/5 connection and there was a noticeable judder when the lady raised her head.

Nice to know you're in Florida. I'm in the Tampa Bay area.

I thought 24p would be nice for this project since aside from the skateboard background, there's really no motion. Also, when I was going to shoot video indoors, I thought that 24p would let me squeeze a bit more out of the available light. Also this will be a DVD and 24p DVDs shot with progressive tend to uprez nicely.

The Canon SX-1 IS only shoots at 30p so I did the 30p to 23.976 slowdown when I converted the footage with Cineform. I kind of like the slight slowdown on b-roll.

In the future however I expect I will do more 30p. I really do prefer it to 24p overall, and as you said, 30p does look better on Vimeo.