DVL-Digest 908 - Postings: Index After Effects vs Commotion - (2) DV Questions - (2) Film editing - (2) After Effects vs Commotion - Adam Wilt Is anyone usine Adobe After Effects or Pinnacle Commotion in their NLE > system? Yes, many folks. > Do they both do about the same things? There's overlap, but they have different strengths. After Effects is a compositing program first and foremost: it's designed to take multiple still and moving images, and layer them together with motion, filters, transparency, transfer modes, and other processing. Think of it as Photoshop in motion. Commotion is designed to rotoscope moving images, creating moving mattes and doing things like wire removal and other fix-ups; motion-track objects or entire scenes for matte creation, attaching effects to objects, or image stabilization; and paint on scenes a frame at a time. AE can do a bit of roto and motion tracking, and Commotion can do a bit of compositing, but AE is a more powerful toolkit for compositing and Commotion is better at roto and tracking. Moving upscale you get discreet's Combustion, which is like AE and Commotion rolled into one, plus a bit. Not to be confused with Conniption, which is the fit the editor throws when he sees how much Combustion costs, even if it is worth it! ;-) Cheers, Adam Wilt After Effects vs Commotion - Adam Wilt Is anyone usine Adobe After Effects or Pinnacle Commotion in their NLE > system? Yes, many folks. > Do they both do about the same things? There's overlap, but they have different strengths. After Effects is a compositing program first and foremost: it's designed to take multiple still and moving images, and layer them together with motion, filters, transparency, transfer modes, and other processing. Think of it as Photoshop in motion. Commotion is designed to rotoscope moving images, creating moving mattes and doing things like wire removal and other fix-ups; motion-track objects or entire scenes for matte creation, attaching effects to objects, or image stabilization; and paint on scenes a frame at a time. AE can do a bit of roto and motion tracking, and Commotion can do a bit of compositing, but AE is a more powerful toolkit for compositing and Commotion is better at roto and tracking. Moving upscale you get discreet's Combustion, which is like AE and Commotion rolled into one, plus a bit. Not to be confused with Conniption, which is the fit the editor throws when he sees how much Combustion costs, even if it is worth it! ;-) Cheers, Adam Wilt DV Questions - "Perry" I am communicating with a young man and a PC who is rather too shy to ask his questions direct, so I am doing it for him. He basically doesn't like interlace, so: 1) Can he shoot in progressive mode with a Sony PC-110 2) Can he de-interlace with Ulead Video Studio 4 (but preserve some movement blur) 3) If not, is there a cheap PC tool that can do this On his behalf, this Mac user says thanks for your help. Perry DV Questions - "Perry" I am communicating with a young man and a PC who is rather too shy to ask his questions direct, so I am doing it for him. He basically doesn't like interlace, so: 1) Can he shoot in progressive mode with a Sony PC-110 2) Can he de-interlace with Ulead Video Studio 4 (but preserve some movement blur) 3) If not, is there a cheap PC tool that can do this On his behalf, this Mac user says thanks for your help. Perry Film editing - Adam Wilt I read an article "Format shootout bt Brian Boyl". I read it somewhere > in the Internet, I don=B4t remember where, but it was originally posted > to DV-L in March 1999. It's at http://www.unhollywood.com/appendix.htm > There were some things I didn=B4t understand very well. Could you explain folowing terms: > Inter-positive > Inter-negative > an A/B roll answer print > Check Print The film is shot on camera original film, nowadays almost always a negative stock (in olden time reversal stock was often used, too). A "workprint" is struck from the cam orig, so that you can (a) see a positive image, and (b) cut & recut the workprint and scratch it up without ever damaging the cam orig. Once the workprint is cut, the negative (or reversal, if reversal was shot) camera original is conformed ("negative cutting") so that it's edited to exactly match the workprint. Because film cutting, unlike video editing, is a destructive and not-recoverable process, so the cam orig is only cut once (by strange, obsessed men & women in dark rooms. Neg cutters are a different breed, possessed of great patience and fanatical attention to detail). To perform effects such as dissolves, where two shots are overlapped, the film is cut into "A & B rolls", parallel strands where the overlapping shots are opposite each other. In 16mm especially, where splicing overlaps an adjacent frame, the shots in the film alternate between the A & B rolls, so-called "checkerboarding". The blank slugs between shots on each roll are filled with black leader, an opaque bit of film that lets no light through. The effects are made when the print is made by exposing the print stock to the A roll, then the B roll, and controlling the light passing through the rolls so that (for example) a fade-out on the A roll is supered atop a fade-in on the B-roll, making a cross-dissolve. Where no superimpositions are called for, you'll find that a shot on one roll is opposite black leader on the other, and the printer light can be left on during the black leader as the leader blocks the light (performing a lighting change on the printer requires a programming step, and you pay per programming step as well as per foot!). When the negs are cut, an "answer print" is made as a special, one-time run, to check that all the cuts and effects are correct and proper. If tweaks are needed, they are made, and another answer print is struck, and so on, until everyone is happy. At that point, it's time for mass-production. Because film is a fragile medium, and "the negative is gold", one doesn't wish to strike the hundreds or thousands of release prints (prints sent to theaters) directly from the negative. Also, one doesn't want to use an expensive optical printer or even a programmable contact printer, complete with filter packs and timing changes, to make hundreds of prints one at a time. Instead, an intermediary copy is made to be used as a duplication master; the copy can be thrashed with impunity, and the copy incorporates all the filtering and lighting changes so that copies made of the intermediary can be "one-lights" with no further fancy footwork needed. Indeed, the first intermediary may then be used to make an additionl set of intermediaries from which release prints are made; it all depends on the film and printing processes used and the number of release prints to be made. These intermediaries are the inter-negative or interneg, and the inter-positive or interpos, whether neg or pos depending on whether the image at that step is in negative or positive form. At any of the points a check print can be made as an additional quality checkpoint. Because of the arcane nature of film printing, the internegs and interposes [sic] are quite unwatchable; the neg is of course negative, and the pos, even if positive, is typically lower in contrast and may have an odd color cast to it, designed to compensate for contrast-intensifying and color-distorting process of printing. > and how is negative cutting made? First you do film to video transfer, edit video non-linear, but what do you do after that to have the final movie on the film. In olden times, as I describe above, a workprint was made on film; now as you mention most of the creative cutting is done on tape. When the film-to-tape transfer is made, a log is kept relating the film's footage and frame numbers to video reel and timecode [the film may also be keycoded (a form of frame code or time code for film) or have Aaton CTR (clear time code -- is this still in use?) a form of digital timecode exposed in the sprocket area. These can be used in the log in place of reel # / footage / frame #]. The video also typically has its timecode(or the film's keycode) burned into a window as human-readable numbers. When the video is cut, the source timecode is matched back to the film logs. Some NLEs can perform this automatically with the aid of helper programs, or there is always the old standby of manually matching the numbers (not fun!). Sometimes a film workprint will be cut to the conformed logs, just to prove there were no mistakes (again, cam orig is a "measure twice, cut once" medium!), and then the cam orig is conformed to the logs or to the cut workprint. And the whole process proceeds from there! Hope that helps, Adam "sniffed my share of film cement" Wilt Film editing - Adam Wilt I read an article "Format shootout bt Brian Boyl". I read it somewhere > in the Internet, I don=B4t remember where, but it was originally posted > to DV-L in March 1999. It's at http://www.unhollywood.com/appendix.htm > There were some things I didn=B4t understand very well. Could you explain folowing terms: > Inter-positive > Inter-negative > an A/B roll answer print > Check Print The film is shot on camera original film, nowadays almost always a negative stock (in olden time reversal stock was often used, too). A "workprint" is struck from the cam orig, so that you can (a) see a positive image, and (b) cut & recut the workprint and scratch it up without ever damaging the cam orig. Once the workprint is cut, the negative (or reversal, if reversal was shot) camera original is conformed ("negative cutting") so that it's edited to exactly match the workprint. Because film cutting, unlike video editing, is a destructive and not-recoverable process, so the cam orig is only cut once (by strange, obsessed men & women in dark rooms. Neg cutters are a different breed, possessed of great patience and fanatical attention to detail). To perform effects such as dissolves, where two shots are overlapped, the film is cut into "A & B rolls", parallel strands where the overlapping shots are opposite each other. In 16mm especially, where splicing overlaps an adjacent frame, the shots in the film alternate between the A & B rolls, so-called "checkerboarding". The blank slugs between shots on each roll are filled with black leader, an opaque bit of film that lets no light through. The effects are made when the print is made by exposing the print stock to the A roll, then the B roll, and controlling the light passing through the rolls so that (for example) a fade-out on the A roll is supered atop a fade-in on the B-roll, making a cross-dissolve. Where no superimpositions are called for, you'll find that a shot on one roll is opposite black leader on the other, and the printer light can be left on during the black leader as the leader blocks the light (performing a lighting change on the printer requires a programming step, and you pay per programming step as well as per foot!). When the negs are cut, an "answer print" is made as a special, one-time run, to check that all the cuts and effects are correct and proper. If tweaks are needed, they are made, and another answer print is struck, and so on, until everyone is happy. At that point, it's time for mass-production. Because film is a fragile medium, and "the negative is gold", one doesn't wish to strike the hundreds or thousands of release prints (prints sent to theaters) directly from the negative. Also, one doesn't want to use an expensive optical printer or even a programmable contact printer, complete with filter packs and timing changes, to make hundreds of prints one at a time. Instead, an intermediary copy is made to be used as a duplication master; the copy can be thrashed with impunity, and the copy incorporates all the filtering and lighting changes so that copies made of the intermediary can be "one-lights" with no further fancy footwork needed. Indeed, the first intermediary may then be used to make an additionl set of intermediaries from which release prints are made; it all depends on the film and printing processes used and the number of release prints to be made. These intermediaries are the inter-negative or interneg, and the inter-positive or interpos, whether neg or pos depending on whether the image at that step is in negative or positive form. At any of the points a check print can be made as an additional quality checkpoint. Because of the arcane nature of film printing, the internegs and interposes [sic] are quite unwatchable; the neg is of course negative, and the pos, even if positive, is typically lower in contrast and may have an odd color cast to it, designed to compensate for contrast-intensifying and color-distorting process of printing. > and how is negative cutting made? First you do film to video transfer, edit video non-linear, but what do you do after that to have the final movie on the film. In olden times, as I describe above, a workprint was made on film; now as you mention most of the creative cutting is done on tape. When the film-to-tape transfer is made, a log is kept relating the film's footage and frame numbers to video reel and timecode [the film may also be keycoded (a form of frame code or time code for film) or have Aaton CTR (clear time code -- is this still in use?) a form of digital timecode exposed in the sprocket area. These can be used in the log in place of reel # / footage / frame #]. The video also typically has its timecode(or the film's keycode) burned into a window as human-readable numbers. When the video is cut, the source timecode is matched back to the film logs. Some NLEs can perform this automatically with the aid of helper programs, or there is always the old standby of manually matching the numbers (not fun!). Sometimes a film workprint will be cut to the conformed logs, just to prove there were no mistakes (again, cam orig is a "measure twice, cut once" medium!), and then the cam orig is conformed to the logs or to the cut workprint. And the whole process proceeds from there! Hope that helps, Adam "sniffed my share of film cement" Wilt (diese posts stammen von der DV-L Mailingliste - THX to Adam Wilt and Perry Mitchell :-) [up] |
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