V7 for Commercial type promos.. ideas for 3d?

ken c wrote on 9/26/2006, 9:43 AM
Thanks to all who'd given the great idea earlier, about for getting a rotating 3-d matrix style product shot, putting the hero/product on some kind of turntable/barstool/whatever, and rotating that in front of the greenscreen..

Any ideas on how to integrate moving backgrounds if I / talent were in a mid-shot, rotating, with animated background (+ text supers) for a 3-d embedded type high-action/motion shot?

I'm thinking... talent in front of greenscreen, manually spinning on my heels, counterclockwise? and for the background, use a vegas pan track/motion type effect, scrolling it also left-to-right, to give context effect looking right.. then something in the foreground, and animated text... trying to go for a high end production look .. should be cool.. I'll post vids when I get a concept shot done..

(in the meantime, here's my latest 2-minute promo spot, rough at:
http://www.stocktradingsuccess.com/successspyvideo2.htm )


edit on...

-ken

Comments

ken c wrote on 9/26/2006, 1:09 PM
And, speaking of commercial stuff, any idea what's used to render these types of intros?

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2487322


ken
DGates wrote on 9/26/2006, 1:56 PM
Ken, I keep waiting for your videos to get better, based on the feedback that everybody gives you. But you're still placing large text over people's faces.

The attendees are holding a microphone, and yet you can't hear them clearly, as if you're not even using the audio from the handheld mic.

You're too interesred in the bells and whistles. You should ease up and improve your basic videomaking skills. Properly composed shots and clean, crisp audio.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:09 PM
used to make those intros... Maybe NewTek Lightwave or some other 3D app. Don't be fooled though, it's done in an outright 3D software, and by someone trained to do it. then you just need to take the hours and hours it takes to make it :)

Dave
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:37 PM
Gates, I won't argue that the audio quality is hurting, but the overall feeling I got from this footage was that the content was there, but the quality of the footage was lacking some.

Large text over the entire screen? eh, that's not so bad, but it helps if you dim the footage in the bg (or just drop a 50-60% opacity Black gen media over the footage behind the text) when you do put large text over the entire screen so that the viewer knows that they're not supposed to wonder what's going on back there. I would possibly take the audio to a specialist or a "specialist" and just simply pay them to work it out a little. Seemed a little long/dry, but it wasn't necessarily a "commercial" so I don't know what kind of feel you're going for here, I would say if you could improve the audio, put a slight bed under it, and let that bed go all the way through, that would me pay more attention at least, just be carefull not to muddy up the existing sound so bad no-one can hear what's going on.

Dave

Edit: Oh, just to clarify, your so called moderate quality videos have made more money than I have probably made in the last 10 years of working, so although I may have a decent knowledge of what I'm doing, you outpaced my income for a year by at least 10 fold. Just to keep perspective here :)
DGates wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:59 PM
Exactly on the mark, Dave.

Also, the graphic stating that the attendee is "asking a question" while he's asking that question is too obvious.
richard-courtney wrote on 9/26/2006, 7:10 PM
If you spin around yourself you will notice the sides are more blurred then what is
directly in front of you.

What are you going for, background of NYSE trading floor? Can you obtain some
panoramic stills?

I don't think I would go too cutesy on the effect play it somewhat low keyed.
jrazz wrote on 9/26/2006, 7:19 PM
Ken,
I would assume you did not have an audio feed tapped into the soundboard. It does sound like the audio you captured is from the PA system. If you did not get the feed from the soundboard, you might want to see if it was recorded. If I recall correctly, this was something you put on, so I would think that you would have recorded straight from the soundboard to something right?

I also agree with Dave that a darker background would make it look better when you throw text up there- or maybe even cut to a graphic with a text overlay. Just some thoughts.

j razz
richard-courtney wrote on 9/26/2006, 8:01 PM
There are several 3D packages that come to mind....
Maya, Truespace, Lightwave.

They take a fair amount of time to layout and light. It took me a month to learn
enough to use Truespace to create a 6 second DVD opening and rendering
took 9 hours.

I am still playing with motion tracking where the greenscreen video is processed
by a software package to find object edges. This information figures out the
"camera angles". That info is then used in Truespace to move about in the
virtual space.

I am sure are 3D text packages that create fantastic moving 3D text.
fldave wrote on 9/26/2006, 8:52 PM
Ken,

I've seen some of the footage from this product, and it's not bad for a turntable-type 3D app:
http://www.photomodeler.com/

You might need to scale larger for the model, but the concept is pretty clear: static cam, rotating turntable (could be large).

Now, the models they propose are smaller than a person, think about the possibility of having a large turntable with a moveable green screen background opposite the camera.

TeetimeNC wrote on 9/27/2006, 5:07 AM
Ken, I did something similar to this. I had talent rotating in front of green screen. For the background, I created a 360 panorama shot from multiple DSLR shots stitched together with PTGui. I then used pan/crop to pan across the panorama. It took some tweaking to get the speed of the pan to look right with the speed of the rotating talent, but in the end it was pretty convincing. Oh, I also but some gaussian blur on the background, and darkened it a bit to provide separation between the talent and the background.

Jerry
ken c wrote on 9/27/2006, 6:21 AM
hey thanks everyone for the great tips... I'll follow up on those... good points TeeTime re gaussian-blurring the background a bit, I wouldn't have thought of that, great idea, especially during the pan, then it can snap back to non-blurred once all motion's done..

agree 110% DGates re I need to learn basic videography, I just bought all the books that had been recommended to me (thanks!) re how to set up shots and so forth... still working on it... right re audio .. at least at this seminar I had wireless mics for the attendees, in past seminars there was no mics for them... I'm getting better, a bit at a time.. thx to all of you.. appreciated..

from a copywriting standpoint, putting large overlay text is there to "grab" the mind/thinking process of the prospect, the viewer, so that watching isn't so passive an activity, it gets them thinking and involved, which boosts sales response..
Good point Dave re possibly dimming the background, so viewers don't try to "look around" the text, I'll try that... thanks..

j razz, right re audio went straight to a mixer, that went to the dv tape...

and thx re on-topic re the 3d packages for that original effect from abc.. sounds like a lot of work to create/render those.. probably worth learning though, for me at least.. I'll try out the packages.. thanks...

appreciate everyone's thoughts.. I'm trying to get better at all this..!


ken
sitefomercials.com
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etc