My tutorial for AETuts+ is finally out !!
It covers Time Remapping, Waveform to keyframe conversion, expression, … I got really inspired by watching all those reels from motion designer or filmmaker with music most of the time from Hecq. I was wondering how they did their editing and cuts, so I came up with this idea. I don’t know if it’s the way they did it, but this is my approach.
Since there is no mask in the “Compositing Editor” of Blender yet, I found a simple tricks which could work pretty well especially in case of color grading.
You’ll see nothing really fancy here since the mask can only be square (or pretty close to a square shape though). But if you check out Colorista for instance, the two allowed shapes are ellipse and rectangle.
I just found those 2 videos on vimeo (hopefully there will be some more soon) talking and helping Autodesk Maya Artist willing to use Blender.
I like the idea behind this kind of videos, and since Blender 2.5 will be more customizable with multi-windows, Hot-keys, … it will make it easier to switch from one software to another.
Those videos, especially the first one is for Blender beginners
I wanted to play with Processing the other night. I thought about representing RGB pixels value of a video in a 3D space based on there RGB value, where RGB stand for XYZ.
00:00 : using “Avatar” Trailer 01:07 : using webcam feed
How, why, cool ?
So really basic programming, but I thought it would looks cool. Actually, what was going to be a cool looking animation turn out to become a cool visualisation tool !
I found out that by just showing those pixels in a 3d space based on there RGB values you could see several dimensions at once :
Red value : X axis
Green value : Y axis
Blue value : Z axis
Luma value : is the vector between the black color (0,0,0) -> white color (255,255,255). It means that if the point cloud is closer to the white corner, brighter the picture is (… no kidding )
Saturation value : it is the vector perpendicular to the luma vector. it means if the picture is saturated wider the point cloud would be, and of course more it is desaturated finer the point cloud will be. A black & white picture would only show particles on the luma value.
This one was the less obvious to me (but I’m not really smart :p)
Examples
Saturate picture = wider point cloud
Desaturate = finer point cloud
black&white = point cloud only show as a straight line on the luma vector
brighter = point cloud closer to the white corner
Darker = point cloud will be closer to the black corner
You will have to add a quicktime movie (.mov) in the “data” folder called “vid.mov”
Conclusion :
For sure all this sounds pretty obvious, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people doing this kind of stuff before, but I’m surprised I haven’t seen it in any “video editing” software before (or maybe I miss it).
I think it could be a really helpful tool to have a quick over look on your picture and just in a snap being able to tell if its too saturate, too red, or too blue, too bright or too dark…
Feel free to leave any comments about that or if you know something similar, just drop a line in the comments. By the way, this is my really first complete project with processing, so I probably did things the wrong way, you are welcome to correct me
I’m currently taking a class at Fxphd called “DOP210 -DSLR Cinematography” with Stu Maschwitz (prolost) & Mike Seymour as mentors!
This is an awesome class if you have a Canon 5D or a Nikon D90 and want to make movies with it and post-production/grading as well!
Either if the class is talking about the two cameras, the focus is mainly on the 5D!
Stu had a really nice post on Prolost about setting the 5D called “Flatten Your 5D“. Those settings aim to get a neutral picture (low contrast, low sharpen, low saturation,…) which would give a better control in post-production for grading. Settings which he’s using in his class of course !
Since I own a D90, I thought I would give a try to port his 5D’s settings to the D90!
Here is what I have done :
I also turn off D-Lighting, but I’m not sure it is the right move. I’m not sure it is the best settings yet but it looks close though
I just found those 2 videos on vimeo (hopefully there will be some more soon) talking and helping 
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