Pico (Nano)

Sunday, 13 March 2016

Leaving Video for Friend (Tanya)

Leaving Video for Tanya

At 12:30AM on Friday 14th of March 2016, I finished uploading this video to YouTube. I was off on a school trip (Sailing FOBISIA Championships 2016), but had to stay up to get this video finished as the surprise/assembly was at 7:45AM the same morning. I started at around 8:00PM that night.

I chose the song "Family" by Boyce Avenue as it was an emotional song and went well with the video (high fitness for purpose).

I also included a photo compilation/montage thing. I simply used iPhoto to make this, as I thought it looked nice and was the fastest way to get it done.

Here is the video:

Equipment Appreciation - Canon 700D Unboxing

Equipment Appreciation -

Canon 700D Unboxing

Today I unboxed one of our school's new cameras; a Canon 700D.

Specs:

- 18 Megapixel sensor

- Touch screen LCD

- Canon EF lens mount

- Shoots movies in 1080p @ 30FPS

- Continuous shooting at 5FPS

I mostly compared the 700D with my personal 650D, as the 700D had lots of improvement from it's predecessor.

Camera body: Aesthetics more or less the same (with the exception of the 700D badge, of course).

Camera setup: Because I bought my camera second handed (it was for a really low price, don't judge :p), I didn't have the opportunity to unbox or setup the camera. Here, I learnt the setup process as well as got to set up the video and image formatting, quality, and encoding.

Lenses: The lens that came with the 700D is a newer version of the one that I have. This one has improved autofocusing, as well as a new focus mechanism in which makes video recording much quieter (as in... you can't hear the loud annoying focus motor when using auto focus and recording movies)! The focus ring is mechanism is also new. It allows you to make smaller, more precise adjustments. It's now all electronic and relies on a motor rather than the old mechanical focus. This means that it allows for smoother video recording and sharper images.

Me comparing the two camera's aesthetics.

Trying out the new lenses. Focus mechanism very smooth.

One issue I found was that the card the store gave us for free was a class 4 SD card. This means that the camera will often fail to record video, and the user will receive an error message something along the lines of "Video recording has been stopped automatically". This usually means the onboard memory has filled up and the recording cannot be transferred onto the SD card in time. To solve this, the user should get an SD card rated at LEAST class 10, and preferably higher. Below is a chart I got off the internet explaining the SD card ranking system, ranked from fastest to slowest.

Wednesday, 2 March 2016

Film Opening Day 17: Final Piece - Editing Process

So now that the rough cut is done, we can now need to work towards completing the final piece, to which we have to submit exactly one week after the rough cut.

Below are some screenshots from the editing process.

Final project timeline:

Credits order/transition:

Logos order/transition... very quick, I know:

Sound/background noise order/transition:

Warp stabiliser:

A lot of shots were quite shaky, such as the shot showing the two pairs of shoes. Pooh took that shot very quickly and it turned out to be quite shaky, so I warp stabilised it in order to get a smooth, stable shot. I made sure not to over-stabilise it as the shots would be "wavy" and weird. I figured that for most shots, 10-25% seemed to be the right number.

Audio gain:

For a lot of the audio files, such as Tanya's voiceover, I had to use audio gain, as it was much quieter than files such as the background noise and the music.

I chose to use audio gain over adjusting the levels as this adjusts the volume for the whole clip and not just certain points. There could also be a lot of issues with using levels, for example forgetting to add points at the start and end of a clip and having unequal volume levels throughout the clip.

Some clips however, were too loud.

Brightness:

Some shots we took were a little too bright (such as the credit scenes) so I adjusted the brightness so they they all looked similar, and also to make them dark and underexposed

More transitions:

More audio sequence/placement:

Film Opening Day 16: Final Piece - Rough Cut

Okay, before we go anywhere further with this blog, I just wanted to let you know that I did this and the rough cut on a school laptop because mine broke. It's got issues with the mainboard and basically it's decided it no longer wants to be a laptop and stopped charging completely. Buying a Macbook Pro Retina 13"... smart move. Buying the first generation? Not so smart.

Right, back to the rough cut.

Now that we have this nice footage and all good, it's time to do the final bit of the project; the editing. From this point on, I'll probably be using "I" more than "we" because I did most of the editing; Ten did the planning and the music, and Pooh did a lot of the camera work and some of the planning, and we all the did location and the organising.

Well, when I say all is as planned I mean most things are going well. So far we're missing:
- A scene for the credits scene
- My laptop *cry*
- ALL THE AUDIO
At this point we still don't have any audio, as Ten is finishing the music, and the audio from the footage had issues (I'll explain this later) so our rough cut will most likely be a silent film.

Summary of rough cut.
What went well:
- The footage was good. Most of the shots were as we wanted, and some even better (what didn't look as good in real life, we decided not to use and found/experimented with shots that worked better).
- We finished on time!

What didn't go well:
- Some of the audio had people talking in it and there were words in there which probably shouldn't be in a film opening. This is most likely because there were a group of teenagers hanging out near our filming area... understandable as this was a public area. This was just the background/white noise though... and I remembered filming the area without the actors before we began filming the actual thing, so I could probably use the audio from that.
- I wasn't allowed to have a tripod out so some of the shots weren't as stable as I hoped.

Summary:
- Silent film done
- Good shots
- Generally pleased
- Here it is.

Wednesday, 10 February 2016

Film Opening Day 15: Final Piece - Logos and Names

As I began the editing process, Ten created 3 logos of production companies to which we were to put into the final piece, so that our piece would look professional and authentic. I also had another logo in which we were going to include in our final piece; the "Pico and Pleco Multimedia" logo which I made for my friend Pun and I as we work on a lot of projects together.

Initial, Ten and Pooh wanted to purely use company names and no real names at all, but I argued that using real names looked more professional and showed them each variation of the final piece; they liked the real name version better.

Although I only included one of the 3 designs Ten sent me (due to the 2 minute time limit and the music transition not fitting if we added more), the other two were fairly nice as well. The final ones are a little different to these as we decided to make some changes to the logos for the final piece. Here are the originals:

Mountain Peak Photos (Supposed to be Mountain Peak Pictures):

Corrected:

Mounten Peak and Macken Pictures:

Edition 2:

Square Root 10^-9 studios:

Pico and Pleco Multimedia:

Which isn't a professional company yet... some day though ;)

Sunday, 7 February 2016

Film Opening Day 14: Final Piece - Music

Film Opening Day 14: Music -

Part A

We decided to make our own music, just so our film opening is even more unique. The music was written by Rute, a friend of ours, played by Ten, and recorded and edited/enhanced by George. Overall, we were quite pleased with the piece and went with it.

Initially, Ten and I spent about 10-15 minutes in the school's music department playing the piece on one of the computers, and into 'Garageband' so that we could experiment with instruments effects. Eventually, we decided that just playing it with the piano seemed ideal, as we felt it was more authentic. The following is a sample of the piece.