An up-close and personal look at the places, experiences, and life on the road as a Worldwide Product Evangelist for Adobe’s Dynamic Media products…oh, and some tech tips too!
June 11, 2010
The Blog Has Moved!
Hello, my friends! Well, after several years and many posts and comments later, I've decided to move my blog over to my own site. From now on, I'll be blogging from HERE.
http://boodahjoomusic.com/blog
BoodahJooMusic also happens to be the name of my music publishing company, started about 12 years ago with my friend and collaborator, Fred Fung. In any case, I'm still in the process of styling and doing a bit of clean-up over there, but I'll be back on the 'blog train' very soon.
DSLR Workflow Pt 2 - Keying, Time Remapping & Stills in PPRO CS5
Greetings, my friends. Here's the next video in my continuing DSLR in Premiere Pro CS5 series.
For this piece, we'll take a look at using the new Ultra Keyer in Premiere Pro with some Canon 7D footage. What's great about this is the fact that the green screen was unevenly lit, and with minimal effort, I'm able to pull a rather impressive key, literally in seconds.
Following that, I'll show you the easiest way to time-remap footage (both speeding-up and slowing down) directly inside the timeline. One thing that I neglected to mention was that you can (of course) keyframe time changes (but you'll see a little tool-tip pop-up during the video). Once keyframed, you can adjust the ramp of the speed/duration into the time change as well. Powerful stuff, and very easy to apply.
And lastly, I'll showcase the ease of the new 'Export Frame' option, ideal for taking digital stills from your HD-DSLR video, and lightning fast in CS5 (thanks to the fact that we no longer go thru Media Encoder to process stills; just click 'Export', choose the format/location, and you're done).
Hello, my friends! Well, now that CS5 has officially been announced, launched, and as of last night, available for download and purchase, I figured it was time to blog about one of my favorite features in Premiere Pro...Native DSLR editing.
A few months back, while on Press Tour in Singapore I purchased a Canon 7D. Having only worked with some 5DMKII footage (during our demo-asset creation phase) I was really psyched to 'get my hands dirty' and see what these cameras could do on the video side. And more importantly, really test the power and push the boundaries of the Mercury Playback Engine.
In this brief tutorial, I'll show you (very quickly) how to take your DSLR footage, regardless of frame-size, frame rate or aspect ratio, and start cutting your vision together...in seconds. As with RED R3D, AVC-Intra and XDCAM-EX (among many others), we handle DSLR footage NATIVELY; those H.264 files straight from your Canon or Nikon cameras can be dropped into Premiere Pro, and you just, well, EDIT. No transcoding, no wasting time. And remember: Bridge CS5's 'Photo Downloader' can be used to simply grab the video files from your camera's media card. That's how I do it (but you'll see reading from cards directly too). Adding transitions, Color Correction, Keying, other effects...it all works the same. And the with amazing new 64-bit Mercury Playback Engine, you can work with these effects and playback without rendering.** Check it out...
(I'd recommend making it full-screen, as it was originally captured in 1920x1200; the video here, in VimeoHD, is presented in 720p)
I hope to do a little follow-up in the coming weeks on some additional DSLR workflows. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the power of the Mercury Playback Engine (and the 64-bit capabilities of Premiere Pro) be sure to check out Karl's latest Short & Suite episode.
And if you want to download the trial of CS5 Master Collection, click HERE.
**Mercury by itself is a software engine. As such, even on my MBP laptop (the newest model, 17" COREi7 w/8GB RAM) I'm able to typically add Fast Color Corrector (a 32-bit floating-point color effect), Sharpening and Levels and *still* get real-time playback, without any kind of rendering or GPU acceleration. For more info on leveraging Mercury with GPU-accelerated cards, watch the Short&Suite video above.
More AdobeTV 'Short and Suite' - Finishing the Project
Greetings, my friends! As you now know, we've announced that CS5 is coming! As such, between touring the globe and creating some of the videos for the CS5 Buzz Hub, I've let the blog go...a bit.
However, I'll be moving the blog over to Wordpress (finally ridding myself of the beast that is Moveable Type) and will have a new URL. I'll be sure to post the URL once it's all said and done. Oh, and naturally Greg did my blog conversion/reformat. Should be cool.
In any case, during my time in EMEA and APAC, three new episodes of the continuing Chip Hanna Music Video series have been released. I believe these are the last of the CS4-related episodes that were shot, dealing specifically with creating animated lower-thirds in Photoshop (to be used in the Premiere Pro timeline), 'finishing' the master look of the video (using Magic Bullet plugins) and processing the master remix in Audition 3.01. Here they are: Building Animated Lower Thirds in Photoshop
Finalizing 'the look' with Magic Bullet Looks
Remixing and Mastering of Live Audio Tracks for Video
Stay tuned as I'll be blogging more once we kick-off the official launch of CS5 at NAB on 12 April 2010 at 8am PST.
After Effects Post-Processing and Snaps from the Studio
Hello, my friends! Well, it's raining Short & Suite episodes as of late, and here's Part 2 in the making of Chip Hanna's Just A Cowboy music video. This episode picks up where we left off (having just created the multicam edit in Premiere Pro) where I bring the master clips into After Effects for a little noise reduction, color correction and re-scaling. This is largely based around one of my favourite new plug-ins by Neat Video. Check it out...
I've also included a few snaps from a recent video shoot that we did in San Francisco. Along with fellow colleagues Greg Rewis, Terry White and Julieanne Kost, we were all doing some 'cool stuff' up in the East Bay....but I can't tell you what it is! Not yet, anyway. In any case, here's a few screen grabs from the shoot...and yes, Tommi L., I had them keep the rouge and lipgloss to a minimum...;)
A wide-angle view, on the Green Screen, Bay Area, Feb '10
Close up, with a loosely-tied ponytail. A good make-up artist helps a lot.
So my friends, Greg and I will be hitting the road tomorrow for Singapore. I so-o-o wish I could tell you what we were doing. This will be a fairly lengthy tour, however, so expect to see a few updates whilst I'm abroad.
The views expressed in this blog are those of Jason Levine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated, it's partners or representatives.
