Bob Donlon’s Web TV Blog

If anyone’s seen my camera, please let me know, I seem to have lost it. I’m not joking --it’s a Canon Power Shot that’s been scratched up really badly from getting knocked around in my travels. I turned my office upside down yesterday looking for it, and in the process came across a disc with some photos from the CS3 demo asset shoot with UVPH that we did in NYC late last year.

So let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in that photo above. Our actor friend is standing on a treadmill that one of the UVPH guys found on the street. They took the control panel off, and that’s what the guy kneeling on the floor is playing around with. They also painted the treadmill Chromakey Green to match the psyche which is painted the same color. The whole idea is to key all that stuff out so we wind up with a shot of the actor running in “mid air”.

A few takes with the right framing is all we needed. We did lots of scenes like this with several actors, all doing various activities. Have a look.

Pretty neat, huh? Here's how we shot the rock climber:

Some stuff painted green and some imagination is all you need.

A short note – I was interviewed this week for an NBC TV program called Tech Now. It will air this weekend in the following cities and times: Saturday at 6:30 p.m. on KNTV San Jose/San Francisco; Saturday at 5 p.m. on KNSD San Diego; Throughout the week on WNBC Digital (4.4) New York (which is available on most cable systems there).

You can also watch the podcast here no matter where you live.

I’ll be in a story about the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, talking about how anyone can do “Star Wars type effects” themselves using After Effects.

Posted by Bob Donlon at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yep, I'm making up words again. That’s jetlag talking. But through the jetlag I’m going to try and show you how to create a 3d model from a photograph using some new integration we’ve done with Photoshop CS3 Extended and After Effects CS3.

A lot of what we do here at the “factory” is try and take things that would take you hours or even days to do and give you ways to do them in a matter of minutes. Sometimes that takes looking within and seeing what bits of this app could be used to help someone working in that app. The “secret sauce” in this case is something called Vanishing Point Exchange (vpe).

You might be familiar with a feature of Photoshop called Vanishing Point, which is typically used when working with still images to define the perspective of a scene or object. What vpe does is let you take the geometry data generated by Vanishing Point and make use of it in other applications. In Creative Suite 3, you can now export the vpe to After Effects where before your very eyes a 3d scene is automatically created, something that would’ve taken huge buckets of time in the past.

I’m going to be starting with a photo I just snapped here in my SF office:

Thrilling, isn’t it? No, really, we do have a very beautiful office here – it’s just that I wanted to start with something simple for this tutorial – something with good, clear corner perspective.

You need to have Photoshop CS3 Extended to export the vpe, but you can still follow along with the next step, which is to create your planes in Vanishing Point, if you’re using the Standard edition.

With the photo open in Photoshop, select Filter > Vanishing Point. You will start by defining a plane in the photo, and you want to look for the easiest one to define. In my photo, it is the wall on the right side. It’s a matter of clicking on the 4 corners, lining up each edge with the edge of the plane you’re defining, and you’re done. If your plane is red, Photoshop is telling you it can’t get a read on your plane, so try again ‘til you get it (just use the hard edges in your photo as your guide). Once you’ve got a good plane it’ll look like this:

If you look at my cursor, on the right, you can see I am dragging to the right to extend the plane just past the edge of the photo – that’s about where you want to be. You can adjust the first plane after you've drawn it, and do take advantage of that capability because it is imperative to get this first plane right. If you don’t the whole rest of this will be messed up.

The second most important thing is to get the second plane right. For this I’ll use the left-hand wall. Create a new plane by holding down Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (Win) on the left-hand control point on the original plane, and drag a new plane to the left (if your second plane is in a different direction than adjust that instruction accordingly). It is important to add your additional planes in this matter, as the planes need to be connected in order for this to work.

If the plane doesn’t line up right, you’ll need to rotate it. Hover your curser over the same control point you were just using, and hold down Opt (Mac) / Alt (Win) – your curser turns into a little bendy arrow. Use it to adjust the angle of your second plane – a task you can also accomplish in the “Angle” widget at the top of the Vanishing Point UI.

Continue adding and adjusting planes, repeating those steps, until you’ve got your planes all defined. If I weren’t in such a hurry to write this, I would’ve also refined this by adding planes to those brown columns on the left-hand wall, which would add more realism, but you can go ahead and do that on your own time ;-)

Here’s what I wound up with:

Now it’s time for that “secret sauce”. Go up to your fly-out menu (that little triangle-in-a-circle that you see in all Adobe apps) and select Export for After Effects CS3 (.vpe)

Create a new folder somewhere on your hard drive, because Photoshop is going to spit out a bunch of .png image files (one for each plane you drew) and a .vpe which holds all the geometry data. Go ahead and save. Then close out of Vanishing Point and save your PSD, you’re done there.

Now, switch over to After Effects CS3 and select File > Import > Vanishing Point (.vpe)

You’ll see a bunch of new stuff in your Project Panel, including a new Composition. Double-click the Composition and you’ll see that AE has built for you a 3D scene based on the vpe. It has arranged all the exported planes (each of them an individual layer in the .png format) in 3d space.

Select your Orbit Camera tool (letter “C” on your keyboard) and rotate your scene to see the 3d glory. I did a quick animation on my camera and got this:

You can also see that there was a bunch of white space where my Vanishing Point planes extended past the edge of my photo. That's fixed easily by selecting the layer in the AE Project Panel, then selecting Edit > Edit Original which opens that layer in Photoshop.

Then it's generally time to use the Clone Tool, Healing Brush, or whatever tool suits the need. In my case I used the Clone Tool to “fill in the blanks” (here it is “in progress”).

Here it is, cleaned up a bit (not 100% yet, but with 5 min. in Photoshop I was able to get it 95% of the way there – in 15 more minutes it’ll be perfect).

I want to do a users gallery of this kind of stuff, so please send me comments if you’ve done anything cool with this technique.

Posted by Bob Donlon at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you started in video after the mid-90’s there’s a good chance you never used a tape-to-tape, linear, A/B Roll system or a flatbed (I’ve used the former but not the latter, which gives my wife bragging rights in that department). Today, for most people, the definition of “post production hardware” is a computer and maybe some bits and pieces plugged into it, but in the old days you needed a roomful of expensive and complicated gear to get anything done.

Software like Adobe’s DV Rack simulates a lot of the gear you’d find in an old-school edit suite like a broadcast monitor and waveform/vectorscopes.

The first thing you learned in old-school editing school was how to read those scopes --they’re key to making sure your video is broadcast legal. You’ll also find them in Premiere Pro by opening your Reference Monitor (from the Program Monitor’s flyout menu) and selecting the scope you want from its flyout menu (the flyout menu is the little round button with the triangle inside it that’s in the upper-right corner of every panel in Adobe’s video & audio tools).

The YC Waveform Monitor and the Vectorscope in Premiere Pro.

The basic idea is that TV screens, unlike computer screens, display an image comprised of Luma (brighness) and Chroma (color). The three channels that make up a video signal are Y (Luma) Cr (Chroma Red) and Cb (Chroma Blue), also referred to as YUV. Broadcast legal for NTSC video is within the range 7.5 IRE and 100 IRE on the waveform monitor (IRE stands for “Institute of Radio Engineers” for those of you keeping score).

7.5 IRE is black, and 100 IRE is white, and everything else needs to fall in between in order for video to be “broadcast legal” (exception is in Japan where they use NTSC with 0 IRE black). You can see the IRE scale on the right hand side of the YC Waveform Monitor in the image above.

If your video isn’t broadcast legal it will not be aired, and even if it will never be broadcast it will cause many TV sets to produce an annoying “buzz” in the audio.

Now you may be thinking “my videos aren’t for broadcast, they’re not even for a TV set, and I don’t need to worry about this.” Well, one reason you should care is that video looks completely different on a computer screen than it does on a TV screen and if your video is going to be viewed on a computer monitor (e.g. on the web) or a handheld device (e.g. iPod) you should color correct it. Computers display images in terms of RGB or Red (R) Green (G) and Blue (B) so if you want your video to look its best you’ll need to compensate.

In computer land, 0 RGB is black and 255 RGB is white. The problem is that when you convert video black (7.5 IRE) to computer black it actually translates as 16 RGB, not 0 RGB where it should be. Likewise, video white (100 IRE) translates to 235 RGB, not 255. So what you wind up with is less contrast, and blacks & whites that aren’t true. Color correcting your video can fix this and here’s a quick and easy way to do it:

If you’re editing in Premiere Pro, once you’re finished and done apply the Levels effect to your entire sequence. Start by nesting your sequence in a new sequence by clicking the New Item button and selecting Sequence

Accept the default settings in the New Sequence dialog, then drag your existing sequence from the Project Panel into the Video 1 track in your new sequence (this basically flattens all the layers in your original sequence so you can apply the Levels effect to the whole thing at once).

In the Effects panel, type “Levels” in the Contains field, and drag the Levels effect onto your nested sequence in Video 1. Open the Effect Controls panel and twirl down the controls for Levels

Since your video has levels of 16 black and 235 white, change the settings for (RGB) Black Input Level to 16 and (RGB) White Input Level to 235. See the difference?

Your blacks & whites are now where they should be, and you’ve regained the full contrast range in your video.

In After Effects, the same thing can be done by creating an Adjustment Layer, dragging it to the top of the layer stack in the Timeline, and applying the Levels effect to it (using the same settings above).

Remember, if you have graphics, photos, or other elements in your Premiere Pro edit or After Effects comp, you’ll have to take that into account when applying the Levels effect – but for many cases this is a great way to make video look its best on a non-TV viewing medium.

Posted by Bob Donlon at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just returned from a few weeks of filming in several geographically disparate locations (and thus feeding my ever-increasing sense of an airline cabin being my "home away from home"). One of the things I love about my job is that despite the fact that I do Marketing I still get to produce stuff, and this time I got to shoot with some of the new tools that recently came into the Adobe fold. On October 19, when I was on said shoot, we announced that we’d acquired a software company called Serious Magic (read the full press release here). Their two products of main interest to me, and probably most of you, are DV Rack and Ultra. I haven’t had the chance to use Ultra yet, it’s a keying and virtual set technology, but I did use DV Rack extensively the past few weeks both on location and in the studio.

Using DV Rack to monitor camera signal and capture direct to hard disc.

DV Rack has software versions of the scopes & meters that you'd have in a studio (e.g. Waveform and Vectorscopes) and by taking the signal from your camera via FireWire into your computer, you can easily adjust your camera's iris, white balance, etc to get the best possible quality by reading the scopes & meters or using a wizard-like calibration tool. This is good stuff, since it helps improve the quality of what you’re shooting.

DV Rack is also a direct-to-disc DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that captures direct from your camera to hard-drive making for an inexpensive and powerful tapeless workflow. It can capture DV, HDV, DVCPro50 and DVCProHD. On the studio shoot in the photo above, I captured DVCProHD live from an HVX200, which I then opened in After Effects to make sure we had a clean chroma-key. When we were on location, I used DV Rack to grab shots using the video tap from our main camera for use in Premiere Pro (no that wasn’t a typo -- a “video tap” is a signal that comes straight off a film or video camera for on-set monitoring, and in this case simultaneous capture).

And (if you hadn't already noticed in the photo) I did this running Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. Bleeding edge, yessirree. Tapeless workflow, yeeehaaaa!!! I foresee bricks from videotape manufacturers flying through my office window any day now.

You wanna try? Free trial downloads are here.

Speaking of things flying through windows, I want to share one more nugget from the filming. I’m a huge advocate (and practitioner) of guerilla filmmaking, but this looked more to me like a suicide mission.

Our friend from the local crew is about to fly down that zipline at an incredible speed, while holding that camera steady. No budget for a helicopter? No problem! No brakes on that thing? No problem! Were we carrying serious insurance coverage? You betcha!

Okay, so continuing on with the “news of significance that I haven’t blogged about until now” tip, the Soundbooth Public Beta went live 2 weeks ago -- you can download that for free from Adobe Labs right here. Our thinking behind Soundbooth is that video & Flash pros need to work with audio, but don’t necessarily need a full-featured audio app like Audition (which is indeed full-featured and powerful, but comes with a bit of a learning curve). We wanted to put all the audio tools a video or Flash person would need right at the top level of the interface – tools for doing things like basic editing, music & sound effect creation, level normalization, noise reduction, etc. My next posting will be a detailed one on Soundbooth, but in the meantime you should download the beta, read the “getting started” doc, and get movin’.

And finally, we won an Emmy Award yesterday (like how I put that at the bottom of today’s post to show what a blasé New Yorker I am?). Yep, that’s right, we just won the Emmy Award for Streaming Media Architectures and Components for our Flash Video technology. Now the fight begins over whose desk the statue will live on!

Posted by Bob Donlon at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There’s nothing more boring than something just sitting there on a movie or TV screen doing nothing. Think test pattern here – boy, I remember being a 5 year old, sitting in front of the TV at 6 in the morning waiting for that test pattern to go away and for Davey & Goliath or New Zoo Review to come on (if you watched D&G as a kid and haven’t seen Moral Orel on Adult Swim yet, you neeeeeed to go see it right now, don’t ask questions just do it).

Documentary filmmakers have long known this, because they often have more archival photography available on a subject than film or video footage. They use a technique called “pan & scan” (also known as “pan & zoom”) to do camera moves on still images to make them more interesting to the viewer. You’ll often see this referred to as the “Ken Burns Effect,” as his documentaries (the one on Jazz, in particular) use this technique extensively. But it’s been going on for way longer than Mr. Burns has been around. We used to do this with camera stands, which you still find in the odd studio here & there – basically a flat, well-lit surface where you lay the photo with a video camera mounted on a pole, pointing down to the photo. The signal from the camera runs to a tape deck, and the camera is either panned & zoomed manually or mechanically, depending on the sophistication of the particular camera stand. Some of them are pretty tricked-out, with the ability to control the camera’s position & zoom with precision via remote control.

Hardly anybody uses camera stands anymore – it’s much easier to scan the photo and do the pan & scan in software. You get more precision, can experiment more easily, and you don’t have to purchase & maintain the camera stand itself. Of course, if you’ve got a digital photo then this is the only way to go.

You can pan & scan high-resolution photos in both After Effects & Premiere Pro while maintaining their full resolution. This means you can zoom in on details without having the image get all pixilated and cruddy. If you’re editing a piece that involves using stills, then it’s better to do the pan & scan in Premiere Pro. The steps are basically the same whether you do it there or in AE.

First of all, import your photo using the standard File>Import command. Premiere Pro imports photos at a duration of 5 seconds, but you can change this.

The project panel tells me that my photo is 2592 X 1944, which will let me zoom in very close at full resolution.

If you’d like your image to run for a longer or shorter duration, right-mouse click on your image file in the Project Panel, select Speed/Duration, and enter your desired duration.

Then, cut the image into your sequence in the same way you would a video clip. Once it’s in your timeline, click it and then open the Effect Controls Panel (usually docked behind the Source Monitor), and click on the triangle to the left of “Motion” to twirl down the Motion properties.

If you don’t see the Current Time Indicator on the right side of the Effect Controls, click the white button with the 2 left-facing triangles to reveal it.

For this example, we’ll start out zoomed in real close, then zoom out to reveal the entire image. If you want to start zoomed out you can do the next steps in reverse, but before you do anything you need to make sure that the Anchor Point is set on the object you want to zoom out from or zoom in to. When you click on the word “Motion” in the Effect Controls, the Anchor Point (the little circle with the “X” in the middle) appears on the center of your image. To move it over your “object of focus”, click & drag on the Anchor Point values in the Effect Controls until the Anchor Point is centered over your object (or face, or whatever).

Now you’re ready to animate. We’ll begin with a basic camera move, and then you can modify to your taste. Let’s have the image start out still for 1 second, then zoom out over the course of 2 seconds. Move the Current Time Indicator (CTI) in the Effect Controls Panel ahead by 1 second (use the timecode in the lower-left corner as a guide). Then, set initial keyframes for Position, Scale, and Rotation by clicking on the stopwatches to the left of their names. Double-click the Rotation value and set it to -40 degrees, or something similar. This is the starting position of your camera move.

Next, move the CTI ahead by 2 seconds. Set Rotation back to 0, and click-and-drag on the Position and Scale values to “zoom out” to your final camera position. Premiere Pro automatically adds new keyframes at the current CTI position.

Go ahead and roll back in your timeline to the shot right before your panned & scanned image and play back to see how your camera move works in the context of the timing & pacing of your edit. You might want to adjust the duration of the camera move, which can be done simply by moving the keyframes, or you might want a more fluid camera motion. By default, Premiere Pro creates a camera move that starts & stops on a dime – in other words it’s not particularly elegant. Now, if you’re cutting an MTV-style piece with really fast pacing, this might be what you want, but in most cases you’ll want the camera to ease out of its initial position and ease in to a smooth landing. Start by clicking-and-dragging across the initial 3 keyframes to select them all. Then, right-mouse-click on any of them and from the pop-up menu select Temporal Interpolation>Ease Out.

Repeat for the ending keyframes, this time selecting Ease In. Roll back and play your adjusted camera move.

At this point you can treat your image as you would any video clip – e.g. you can add effects and transitions if you wish. With some photos, you might notice a certain degree of “interlace flicker” as the image pans & scans. If that’s the case, increase the amount the Anti-flicker Filter in the Effect Controls and that should make it look much nicer.

Posted by Bob Donlon at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

At some point in the life of a digital video clip, it gets compressed (often several times). The whole idea behind compression is to lower the amount of data in the video in order to make its file size smaller, and/or make the data rate lower. Smaller files take up less storage space, and are easier to move around, while video with a lower data rate can be streamed over the internet, or be played back on a slow computer. If it were not for compression, there would be no way to cram a feature film onto something as small as a DVD, or to record high quality video onto a tape as small as the ubiquitous Mini-DV format.

There are two kinds of video compression -- lossless and lossy. Lossless compression lowers the amount of data in the video without any visible quality loss (although I know quite a few television engineers who will debate this point 'til somebody gets punched). Lossy compression degrades the video to some extent, sometimes noticably sometimes not. It all depends on the Codec used, and the settings of that particular Codec.

Codec stands for Compressor/Decompressor. There are Codecs that are hardware based (like the Codec used in a Digibeta camera) and others software based (like the On2 VP6 Codec used in Flash Video 8). The video on DVDs is compressed with the MPEG-2 Codec, which is also used for satellite and digital cable transmission (you know how the picture falls apart a bit on some of those esoteric channels on your digital cable? That's your old pal MPEG-2 !).

Both Quicktime and Windows Media have many Codecs within them, and knowing which one to use when is a fundamental in digital video postproduction.

Let's take a look at the most common workflow: DV. A Mini-DV camcorder records a compressed video signal to tape with its internal lossy DV Codec. DV compression is 5:1, meaning for every 5 bits of data, it only writes 1 to tape, throwing away the other 4. The resulting loss in quality is not generally noticeable to the untrained eye, but for those of us that do this for a living the loss of color range, digital artifacts, and plain old noise in the compressed video is easy to recognize (and debate until somebody loses a tooth).

When you capture your tape to hard disc using Premiere Pro or other software, the video becomes an AVI (Windows Media) or Quicktime file written with its DV codec.

The AVI Video Compression dialog in After Effects, showing the Microsoft DV Codec selected, within a pulldown menu showing all the AVI Codecs installed on my system.

Essentially, the compressed DV data is copied from video tape to hard drive via a Firewire cable, with no further compression taking place. If all you were to do is edit the video without rendering anything and lay it back to tape, it would never undergo any further compression.

But here's the thing, if you render a DV Codec clip with the DV Codec, it will get compressed again. 5:1 lossy compression. That means you take something where you've already thrown away 4 bits out of 5, and then throw 4 bits out of 5 of that remaining 1 bit away. In other words, you wind up with something that looks like it went through a meat grinder. It's not pretty.

So how to conquer this? Render uncompressed, or even better, to a lossless Codec. As you can see in the figure above, you can select "No Compression" and your rendered video will suffer no quality loss. You will, however, wind up with a huge wonking file, so this method means that you'll need to have plenty of hard drive space if you're doing lots of renders. A better solution is to render using the Animation Codec, which is part of Quicktime.

Quicktime's Animation Codec, set to "Best" quality, which results in lossless compression.

When its Quality slider is set to "Best", the Animation Codec's compression is lossless. The files are much smaller than uncompressed files, but there is no noticeable loss in quality. This is one of the main Codecs used in the After Effects workflow, and is great "intermediate" Codec to use when working with DV material. As long as you render this way, you'll never lose quality -- although if you're going back to Mini-DV tape you're going to have to render your final results to a DV Codec eventually (a good reason to avoid doing this).

There are two Quicktime Codecs you should absolutely, under no circumstances, ever use. Those are Cinepak and Video (ironically). Starting with the latter, the Video Codec is a legacy Codec within Quicktime, dating back to the early ’90’s, and is simply not suitable for Video (although it must have been at some point back in the day). Cinepak is another oldie-but-baddie and was the first Codec used for cramming video onto CD-Roms. Like the Video Codec, it's now obsolete, and is still included in Quicktime for legacy file support, but that's the only reason it's there so like drunk driving just don't do it.

If you’re putting your video on the internet, you want to use Flash Video 8, which compresses and decompresses using the On2 VP6 Codec (a Codec we license from a company called On2). You can encode to Flash Video with Premiere Pro 2.0 by going to File>Export>Adobe Media Encoder. In After Effects 7.0, go to File>Export>Flash Video. You can also use the standalone Flash Video encoder that comes with Macromedia Studio 8, or just do it in Flash Professional 8.

To get your video onto a DVD, encode it to MPEG-2 using the Adobe Media Encoder, or bring it into Encore DVD which can also encode MPEG-2. In either case, it will be compressed with the super high-quality Main Concept MPEG-2 Encoder which is included with both Premiere Pro and Encore DVD.

The iPod uses a proprietary MPEG-4 Codec (by the way, "MPEG" stands for Motion Picture Experts Group), and you can encode your video for iPod by dragging and dropping it into iTunes. Mobile phones use Codecs such as H.263.

I could go on and on, but the main thing is to get to know the Codecs you work with on a daily basis – what their settings are and how to manipulate them to get the best results (although some Codecs, such as DV, don’t have adjustable settings). With lossy Codecs, it’s always a trade-off between quality and file size / data rate. You don’t have to become a Compressionist to get good at this, but if you want to dig deeper there’s some great reading out there. My favorite author/authority on the topic is Ben Waggoner, who explains this somewhat complex topic in an easy-to-understand way in his book Compression for Great Digital Video.

Posted by Bob Donlon at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)