Cool. Love that "you always have to pretend to know what you are doing".... I believe in that statement wholeheartedly!

I guess my biggest surprise is that you are using the little canon elura. Wow... (and I may be doing the elura a disservice) ... but that makes me realize the artist is definitely mightier than the tool here! I have always been incredibly impressed with your work and seeing that you use that camera just increases my level of respect!

Just a question re your in-camera exposure - do you overexpose the model in the camera or do you do that in post? What got me thinking most about this is that you were showing the model what the video was like directly in the camera.. which would make me think you probably do over-expose while capturing? Just a guess. How do you do it?

As always... I love your work... and I am very glad you chose to show us the behind-the-scenes.

Funny you mention the over exposure thing.....Yeah, I USED to expose normally, and then do my over saturations and curves in post. Now I'm going back to my photography roots and thinking...ok, you got a style here by now...why not shoot for that on the day ? ( at the time )

So I overexposed a lot of the shots for Lisa about 1-2 "stops" and got the results I needed right from the dv tape. I loved it.

I find that anytime I put fx, curves, and color balancing on a clip, I notice a mild decrease in quality. My best shots are the clips that are minimally tinkered with. And that was a huge problem for me cause, I love to tinker with my footage as you know...

Does anyone else notice that ? When you add color correction and exposure boosts, that your footage quality is compromised ?

My questions to the forum ...

- is there a way around that ?
- is that minimalized with a 3 chip camera ?
- is it the dv re-re-compression ?
- do these pants make me look fat ?

I'd like to know these things....

Thanks for the kind words ... again. You guys rock.

Stan

1) Yes but rather expensive. I'm suspecting the problem is related to working with 8 bit resolution and 4:1:1 compression. Looking at the book on color correction I'm amazed at how much he's able to pull things back from the brink. I've never been able to come close without having it fall to bits if you know what I mean. But he's working on a Da Vinci at much higher res and bit depth. To give you and example.
Clip I worked on last night, cameraman forgot to switch off ND filter as night fell. So video on scopes is below about 40% max. No matter how I try to pull that up to 100% it looks like c**p. But you can see what's happening on the histogram, the plot starts to get gaps in it. After all in each color channel there's only 256 levels, if the video was recorded using only say 100 possible values and I expand that to 256 something has to give! And that's before you take into account color undersampling etc.
2) Get things as close to what you want in the camera.
3) Sort of
4) Yes, but only in wide shots :)

Bob.

Stan,

Great work! It is really refreshing and inspiring to see the "behind the scenes" stuff. Especially after watching the finished product..Seeing set-ups, lighting, processes really helps me get over the production barrier syndrome: ie the sort of mindset you can fall into whereby taking productions a step further feels like is going to be well beyond my reach. Your behind the scenes vid really puts things into perspective. I should aspire to emulate your kind of setup...Thanks! Ok, now I need the models...*grin*.

Oh, btw, I almost fell off my chair when I heard the intro music! I did a piece with those same samples a few months ago!! Check it out if you like....

http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=359393&T=7989

Must say I love that Spanish guitar loop collection, but there again I live in Spain so it's not really surprising...

What collection is the backround music btw? I thought it sounded good too!

Thanks again!

Paul.

Stan,

I noticed you said you use a light grey background. Is this typical of all your pieces, or do you also use white (or is the gray just overexposed)?

Is this the same color you use to create your keys, or do you use a greenscreen?

Also, the last how-to with Sylvia looked like it was a larger room, was it the same room as you showed?

Come on... keep spilin' the Stonefield secrets!

Thanks,

Ted

Thanks for the nod about the music Paul. Your's is great ! Yes I love the Spanish Guitars...not really appropriate for the piece I think but it was late. The rest of the song is a couple of drum loops but the strings, piano, and flute sounds are actually all me. I'm a bit of a keyboardist as well so anytime I can sneak one of my little songs in there I do. Acid is wonderful for that.

Heh....the Stonefield Secrets....I like that. I really gotta get my BLOG up and running. If JUST for this kind of stuff....

ok...

The light grey background is shooting towards the "side" of the studio...the white background....( Sylvie's BTS vid ) was actually rolled up to accomodate a long roll of canvas to my camera left...you can see it behind me at 1:05. That's the main shooting stage. Hiding in the corner was the 4x8 foot blue foamcore sheet used for keying. There's also an older roll of green paper but it's kinda wrecked so I don't really use it. What I wouldn't give for a proper green/blue wall...right Roddy ?

One thing I didn't mention that you'll see at 1:35 is the second red head light on the floor behind the model. You can see it in the mirror as well. We later turned that light on (1:54) and pointed it up and towards the model which gave her a fantastic edge light. ( note to self, try using colored gels on that one next time )

This was VERY helpful. Thanks again for the feedback.

Ted