Comments

rvpvideo wrote on 10/8/2004, 8:24 AM
Very nice - subtle and effective. I would have cut down the length of some of the video clips to keep in time with the way you established the picture timimg. But overall - good effort!

Keith
johnmeyer wrote on 10/8/2004, 8:59 AM
I really like the side-by-side picture frame effect. I'm stealing that one for my next photo montage.

You still have a lot of photos with no movement. I generally try to put a little movement in every photo. Sometimes I only zoom in 2-3% from the beginning to the end, so you barely see the movement, but you still "feel" it.

When you shoot video from the back of the church, set your focus and then put it on manual so the picture doesn't pop in and out of focus.

During the ring ceremony, you can make your handheld footage, which was reasonably still to begin with, look almost like it was taken on a tripod, by using Steadyhand (a standalone product from Dynapel) or DeShaker (a VirtualDub plugin).

I had lots of audio glitches when I viewed it, but maybe that was just my connection.
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OK, dualing wedding tributes. Here's my latest, completed yesterday. Even though it is designed to stream, you'll have to wait about 30 seconds for it to start. It assumes you have a broadband connection:

Wedding Tribute (play)

If Windows gives you an Open/Save dialog, click on Open and it will stream directly to your player. If you want to save it to your hard disk first, you will have to click on this link and then save it:

Wedding Tribute (save to disk)
Tom Pauncz wrote on 10/8/2004, 9:23 AM
| never mind .. must have been a firewall issue at work. Home is downloading clip as I type.

Hey John,
Is your site up?
Tks,
Tom
TomG wrote on 10/8/2004, 9:28 AM
Nice job, johnmeyer....

I really liked the zooms with a twist... that is a good effect I have never tried before. How did you get the smoke coming off of the candles????

TomG
apit34356 wrote on 10/8/2004, 9:30 AM
johnmeyer, very nice effects on the stills, music matched flow very well. A side note about movement, I have recently been asked to induct movement, selective movement, in video professionally shot, to appear more natural.(?) HD made to look like hand held video. The world is going upside down for reality TV.
PierreB wrote on 10/8/2004, 10:10 AM
Very nice, Jaime!

I like the b&w slide show (good model for transferring some of my old 35mm to video) and the transformation to colo(u)r.

Johny, I, too, like the "twisty zooms" + everything. Thanks for sharing!


Pierre
johnmeyer wrote on 10/8/2004, 2:30 PM
Hey John,

Just checked, and it's up. As I indicated in the first post, if you click on the first link, to just play the clip, it take about 30-40 seconds to queue up (dont' know why -- I just created a plain vanilla ASX file, which points to the WMV file. If I had more time, I'd try to be more clever).

I really liked the zooms with a twist... that is a good effect I have never tried before. How did you get the smoke coming off of the candles????

The only problem with the zoom with a twist, and with some of the other multiple moves (pan, zoom, rotate) is that the keyframes affect all three motions at the same time in the same way. This leads to "mechanical" style "jerks" that are tought to tune out, even by using the Smooth, Fast, Slow and other settings for each keyframe. I brought this up a week ago, and just recently received a product called Imaginate that is designed specifically to do complex camera moves on still images. It arrive too late for this project, but I hope to use it shortly and will report on the results when I finish.

I placed a real candle on a table. The background was a completely dark room. I filmed the candle burning. I then turned on my video light, so the smoke would be well-lit, reached into frame, and pinched the candle with my fingers (ow!). In Vegas, I used a mask to remove the candle from frame and then used the Chroma Keyer to "key" on black, thus removing all but the white smoke. I did the same trick a year ago on a similar video, only that still cake had multiple candles. I used the same smoke video, offset slightly in time, and it looked like each candle was smoking differently.

The snow was done with a VEG file that I found by searching in this forum for the word "snow." I was astounded at how good it was. Vegas itself actually generated this effect.
jamcas wrote on 10/10/2004, 4:08 PM
thanks for the comments, john, nice slide show too ;-)

regards
jc
amemain wrote on 10/10/2004, 10:05 PM
"I really like the side-by-side picture frame effect. I'm stealing that one for my next photo montage."

Is there by any chance a quick way to shed some light on how this was achieved?

I can figure out how to do one frame but two?

Thanks


johnmeyer wrote on 10/11/2004, 10:01 AM
"I really like the side-by-side picture frame effect. I'm stealing that one for my next photo montage." Is there by any chance a quick way to shed some light on how this was achieved? I can figure out how to do one frame but two?

I didn't do this, but the usual way to have multiple video (or stills) on the frame at the same time is to put each one on a separate track, and then use the "track motion" controls (found in each track's header at the left of the screen) to move and re-size each photo.