Wow! Excellent work . .do agree with Spot though. Also, the talking "upper-body" head I feel needs to be a tad fuller - looks like "Ken" is talking from his shoulders . . also, have the "Ken" a wee bit over to the right . . a bit to front and centre for me .. only personal tastes here . .try it and you may see it yourself. At the start I'd also like to see more linkage between the "beat" of the uptempo music with your camera/edit work. The visuals tend to hold back the music or the music is really wanting to race the visuals ahead . . bit of a mismatch. Try some more subtle on the beat intercuts - yeah?

Great great stuff . . . for my money? Post here as often as you like, I love watching your growth into this project - really neat!

Grazie

thanks - great comments! will try re unlocking foreground/background, Douglas, and doing better work w/audio linkages ... this is fun... I never heard of vegas before a few weeks ago, got Spot's dvds and here I go - wee!

My only a/v editing experience was in using syntrillium's excellent 'cooledit 2000' audio editor for all my audio stuff during the last few years... I really like how clean vegas is with the editing features... much like my audio editor, so the transition is a snap...

vegas is so easy to use when you see how it works... thx to DSE for the video walkthroughs... it's hard to not get great output after learning how it works and watching his projects... I wish there were more tutorials like that, for all the other stuff I do in life...

ken

P.S. Ambient light provided by this stunning view from my oceanfront Hawaii Kai, Oahu condo:

http://www.kencalhoun.com/hawaiicondo.wmv

(ah well..I'm moving to colorado springs in 2 weeks, I'll miss this... well that's what $2400/month will get ya in hawaii, 1800 sft... trading for a 4K sft house so I can have a basement to turn into a full a/v studio.. )

P.P.S. It's Saturday night and I'm on the computer. What a nerd I've become! I must be married with children lol. sigh. Miss the clubbing days, sometimes.

"Easier to do it post-processing rather than messing with lights for hours I think..."

No chromakey software will take the place of a properly lit setup. Your key although nice, did not separate itself with the backgound enough. The lighting on the key needs to match the ambient light of your background. Even just a rim light around your hair / shoulders will make it look like you're a bit more "in the key". Color seemed a bit purple on you but I know you're tweaking. Looked like you were reading a card below camera but that takes practice too, even with a nice prompter.

Looking better every day. Tweaking will make it even greater.

mike

thanks -- excellent points re lighting, will do..

any other tips for making more realistic keys?

the last thing I want is amateur looking "floating image" or spilled keys... having razor sharp, quick high energy key clips is what I'm after..


ken

Ken, Looks cool.

Here are a few of my comments fwiw

I think in the medium shot of you it appears that you are a bit washed out and blurry to me. I tried looking at it on both of my monitors. One is set for print work mostly and the other is default out of the box so I can check colors primarily for web pages I do. My second "web Monitor" makes it look a little better but I think you might want to play with the sharpnes or the contrast of your image.

I agree about the teleprompter. Get it higher up so you can look in the eye of the camera while you are reading and it will look more natural.

The shot where you are walking In the virtual set that looks like an apartment living room I can see some "junk" around your head, It looks like you keyed out part of your head and it produces artifacts when you move.

In those shots where you are talking but we only hear music it looks like you are "fake talking" This may be nit picky on my part because I have not seen you talk before but I would recommend that when you do those kinds of shots that you have some actual copy to read (or say something from memory) that is specific. We will see you relating more naturally.

So far the keys could be better. I am watching your posts very closely to determine if I should get Ultra. I have gotten actually pretty decent keys with Vegas so I am looking to see something a little better from Ultra. I realize you still have to play around and get familiar with it.

Thanks for posting.

-Tom