If you're rendering 24p out for viewing, don't use 2-3-3-2 pulldown. Use 2-3 pulldown.

In any case, if you're using Vegas, why not just render a straight 24p WMV? No pulldown worries; just a straight 23.976 fps, and WMV is inherently progressive.

Well, I just typed a lengthy remark and hit something with my palm and now all the text is missing :{ I wish there was a way to incorporate "undo" in the forum. Anyways, I will post back when I am not frustrated!
Thanks for the responses so far. Jeff, as for the FX around 3:18 I used a combo of Quick Blur, HSL Adjust, Sharpen, and Unsharpen Mask.

Remember, this is for 13 year olds and their parents.

j razz

David,

I did not want to encode straight from the veg file to wmv as it would take longer than I wanted, plus I already encoded to 24p avi with the pulldown. I used this file to encode the wmv file like you stated- no pulldowns, just straight from the avi.

Can you explain the reason why I should use 2-3 over 24p advanced? I don't know what the difference is- I watched your tutorial but if you explained the difference or why to use one over the other, I missed it.

j razz

That's funny, I did the exact same thing, I thought I was being too critical, and then oops I accidently posted my comments, so I went in to edit it, fixed a few typos, and thought oh what the heck and posted it anyway.

Great Idea for the kids. They'll love it. I've been posting my HD videos of this season's track meets and I've got quite a following not only with our school, but a lot of local shools. Here's a few comments on your sample:

1. Agree that coach's yelling will make your ears bleed.
2. I liked the sound track, I'm guessing you did that in Acid? There's one bit of vocal that you used over and over. I found it too repetitive, perhaps there's another sound bite of the coach or some of the kids you can throw in there?
3. I too thought the old style film effect seemed out of place. Maybe some selective desaturation would work?
4. I thought the color seemed odd to me...maybe too yellow and over saturated? Was this deliberate?
5. I loved the titles, really creative and professional looking.
6. If you're going to leave the logo at the bottom maybe you should shrink it down so the feathered edge at the bottom isn't cut off.
7. Some of the jump cuts and blips of black were distracting.
8. You've achieved some really neat special effects too. I liked that green dot one on black. What was that? Edge detection?

My two cents. Thanks for sharing.

Jim H.

Track Videos

Jim-
Thanks for the comments.

I will turn down the coach while screaming" Score RIcky, Score Ricky, Score Score Score...along with the other soundbites!

The soundbite of the coach saying "that was a bad call" is deliberately in there a lot as he says that A LOT during the games I have attended.

The soundtrack was done with Cinescore.

Hmm, the old film look- I really liked that and attempted to associate it with the officials. This is the second time I have used it.

The coloring was deliberate as I was playing around with 24p and read some on how film is supposed to look and some of the things to do to make it look more like film (again, this is my first time ever using 24p and I thought I would use this project to try something new). I also added grain for effect along with the saturation.

Titles- done in swishmax and imported- that's the easy part! :)

The logo is not on the 24p avi or that veg file- it is only on the web version.

I guess I missed the blimps of black- can you tell me at what points this is seen at?

Green dot one- that is a group of FX that someone else made called matrix or matrix II. I don't remember who made them, but they were available at the Vasst site a while back- several months. It is a combo of Convolution Kernel, Channel Blend and Levels.

j razz

j razz

Jrazz, you need to really to work on the "live" sound track from the HDV.

I would goto 16:9 and avoid 4:3 for sports. Adjust the bars and video, use the lower bar for statics of the batter, pitcher.... highlight important factors. Use the upper bar for inning and scores, date..... use zoom on special events,(separate track) and overlay with "softedges and cook cutter" on 16:9. I would use your pic veg example with all the teams players, stopping, showing a game, move thru move pics, move clips...

2:3 pulldown was developed to allow 24 fps movies to be shown on 60 Hz televisions. If they tried to just run the film as 24 fps and, say, record it with a television camera, it wouldn't work, because the television camera takes 60 pictures every second, whereas the film is only showing 24 pictures per second. There's a lot of space in between frames which would be picked up by the TV camera, resulting in bad flickering. So, engineers found a way to split up the 24 frames into 60 interlaced fields.

You can't do it just by splitting the frames and showing them as fields, A-B-A-B-A-B, etc; there would only be 48 fields per second if you did it that way, and you need 60. You can't just go on to the next fields, because then the footage would play too fast, 25% too fast. So, you need to get the 12 extra fields per second out of those 24 frames.

Fortunately, 12 is half of 24. So, what they figured out is taking an extra field from every other frame. They took 2 from the first frame, 3 from the next frame, 2 from the frame after that, 3 from the frame after that, and so on. Get it? 2-3, 2-3, 2-3, 2-3. This isn't a perfect reproduction, but it averages out to each frame being onscreen for 1/24th of a second, so the footage, while still retaining the 24 fps film-like cadence, is able to be shown smoothly on a TV.

Every Hollywood movie you've ever watched on a standard TV, whether over the air, over cable, from tape, or from a DVD, has been shown using this 2:3 pulldown. (Sometimes it's called 3:2 pulldown. It means the same thing.)

2:3:3:2 pulldown was developed for a different reason. It wasn't developed to show pictures on a screen; it was developed for efficient extraction of the 24p frames from a 60i stream. When 24p DV cameras hit the market, they had to conform to the NTSC DV standard, which meant they had to record their video as 60i. This wasn't too much of a challenge for simply recording; the 2:3 pulldown scheme had been developed several decades before and was well-proven. But as much as it's good for watching 24 fps footage on a 60 Hz screen, it isn't the best for extracting the 24p frames for editing. So, a new scheme was developed.

It still splits up frames in sets of 2 and 3 fields, but it arranges them in a different order -- it takes 2 from the first frame, 3 from the next, 3 from the frame after that, and 2 from the next frame . . . and then repeats the pattern, so that every four frames are split into 10 fields using that 2-3-3-2 pattern. Repeat this pattern six times, and you've got a second of footage (4 frames x 6 = 24 frames; 10 fields x 6 = 60 fileds).

But then it's easy to extract the original frames. First, combine the 10 fields, in order, into five frames. Take fields 1 and 2, and you get the first frame. Take fields 3 and 4, and you get the second frame. Take fields 7 and 8, and you get the third frame. Take fields 9 and 10, and you get the fourth frame. Fields 5 and 6 form a middle "frame," but if you follow the pattern, field 5 is from frame 2, and field 6 is from frame 3, so it's a mixed frame of two different moments. Just discard this middle frame, and you're left with the original 4 frames. Voila.

The reason this pulldown scheme is not good for watching is precisely because it doesn't follow the 2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3 pattern; it's 2-3-3-2-2-3-3-2-2-3-3-2. Meaning, frames split into three fields are back-to-back, not every other frame. Any frame split into 3 fields is onscreen for 50% longer than a frame split into 2 fields. That's OK if it's every other frame; as I said, it averages out. But in a 2-3-3-2 scheme, the two frames which are onscreen for 50% longer are back-to-back. This produces a perceptible motion stutter which is purely a result of the pulldown scheme, not because of 24p itself. The motion stutter will not be there with the 2:3 pulldown.

So, 2:3:3:2 pulldown for editing; 2:3 pulldown for watching.

Apit- that is a great idea about using the pic veg and replacing the pics with the footage and stopping at certain ones to show clips. I also like the idea of the scores etc at the bottom- the only thing is, so far, most of the footage I have taken has been at games they have lost (3 games) so the scores are not really highlights- they actually got killed!

When you say ...you need to really to work on the "live" sound track from the HDV. are you referring to the sound peaking out when the coach is yelling? Yeah, my other two tapes that was corrected. I bought a new g2 wireless and did not bring my headphones to the first game I filmed. The levels on the g2 were showing different than the levels on the A1u, so I went by the levels on the g2- corrected later. If that is not what you are talking about- clarify please. I am by no means a sound guy!

When you say- ...zoom on special events... what do you mean by special events? If you are meaning like 7th inning stretch shows or giveaways- this is youth league and they don't do those kind of things.

I will play around with the flythrough pic veg and see what kind of damage I can do there. I have also made up some trading cards with an example posted on my site. I could use those for filler. Thanks for the idea. That is why I like this forum :)

j razz

Had a quick look. First impression, it's not personal enough, too clinical and lack the "peoples" aspect to it. Most, if not all, of th eshots are from a wide angle, I think it would benefit from having close up of the face of the players and the emotion they let show troughout a game.

Also, if you had shot of players and parent getting to the field, the players getting their eqipement ready and whatnot, you could start with that; it would tie in with the typical game type of scenario where you already have all the players congratulating each other at the end of the game, and it would be a good way to introduce close up shot of the players mug. Parents would love that and it would bring them "in" the video. Also show the bench and the inevitable "clownery" that goes on, would bring a humoristic side that is sorely lacking now.

Also, I think there's way way too much special effect in there. I understand the appeal and coolness factor when you're putting something together (a "look what I can do type of thing"), but it's distracting and even disturbing for casual viewer so I would ease off of that. I would just choose one, carefully and use it once in the video for emphasis. Or even better, don't use any at all, it really is not a requirement.

[edit]
When you say- ...zoom on special events... what do you mean by special events? If you are meaning like 7th inning stretch shows or giveaways- this is youth league and they don't do those kind of things.

I can't speak for him, but I think he meant things like close up on, for instance, the ball hitting the catcher glove, close up of glove touching the runner on base, close up on the face of the player that just been taken out at bat, that sort of thing. It really help to bring the viewer in the action and by thus, in your video. Keep the viewer interested.

...I think there's way way too much special effect in there.

That is funny that you should comment on that. All I ever do is weddings (up til now) and I do not use any special effects in the wedding video b/c I find them cheesey and lame. I want to tell a story with the footage I filmed.

With this highlight thing, I wanted to branch out a little and play with some of the FX as I don't use them and I thought I would challenge myself to use some and see what happens.

...it's not personal enough...

I am going to a practice where the coach is going to have them in uniform. That is where I will get the closeups and be on the field right by the batter as he bats and right by the pitcher as he pitches and right by the outfielder as he catches a fake fly ball... etc, etc. Remember, all I have so far is 1 tape of footage that I am working with and 2 more that I need to capture and any other games I want to film after that, plus the practice.

...show the bench and the inevitable "clownery" that goes on...

Believe me, I got some good shots of this on the third game tape- 2 boys dancing when a teamate slid into home. One boy rapping something while doing the cabbage patch- cabbage patch, is that still around? I thought that was out in the early 90's? What do I know.
Thanks for the input.

j razz

Jrazz, "special events" are like exceptal performance by player(s), the second base steal, a double play, etc...... the ideal is to highlight the team's moments of glory. I was suggesting that an unique scene inside the 16:9 would would be enlarged and highlighted( like a playback) over the continuing game( all sports have a lot deadtime for editing between plays).

If scoring is a problem, put positive staticals on each player, last game, average year catches,... current catches.... things that parents and team like to know/hear,(even the kid's age, years experience...).

Sometimes symbols( tempory displayed, stating new player, years playing...) are useful( by players), but simple highlighting a player works too.

You should feel free to borrow sound from your other tapes and replace any recording that the sound is un-useable. Usually, the edited sound tracks make everyone sound better and more professional,( even parent coaches).

Its interesting about have a cartoon short that would be an optional choice on the dvd.

Nice video so far, I'm sure the kids will love it.

Other suggestions were good too, and I'll make one. I think that what I call the "camera clicking" effect would be good for this video, where you freeze-frame a shot for a second or two and make it look like a photo was taken.

It's not hard to do and you could highlight someone hitting a ball, stealing a base, or whatever...

Here's a little example I did if you want to check it out:

Camera Clicking effect

dibbkd,

Do you still have a copy of the photo click sound? As for the effect, I assume you use a hard flash and then do a frame grab and turn it to b&w? Is this correct?
Thanks for the idea.

j razz

I believe I do have a copy of the photo click, I can email it to you if you want, or I think I found it on FindSounds and search for camera, photo, or something like that...

and yes, just do a frame grab, then bring it into your favorite photo editing software (FireWorks, PhotoShop, etc) and reduce the saturation to how you like it. Then put that JPG/PNG into the timeline right after you froze it. It took me a couple of tries to get it just right but then it's real easy.

I got the idea myself from someone's video example they posted at

VegasUsers.com

Lots of great examples there!

dibbkd,

I found a flash sound that I like. I will see about incorporating that into the video. Thanks for the "FindSounds" website.

j razz

I have some high school kids sports vids that they are using for promos to universities. How do I put a link so they can be seen in this (or any) forum?

Jeff

If you have a website- upload the files to that; if not, you have youtube or google video or some other free file host sites (google for them) and then add a link here or elsewhere.

Type: >a href ="your link here and keep the quotes"< Type here whatever you want to be seen highlighted in blue with a line under it- (also remove the space between href and the = sign and turn these > < around to look like this < >. Then add this >/a< at the end but turn the symbols around.

j razz

jrazz had it right, but it is hard to explain because if you type it just perfect as an example, it shows up as the link. This is the best example I could do: (and just don't have any spaces between the brackets:

< a href=http://www.yourwebsite.com/folder/videofile.wmv>Click Here</a >

will look like this:

Click Here

(btw - and that link is a fake link just as an example)

It's HTML code, so you can google for "learn HTML" for a bunch of good examples.