So

[lierdumoa]

I had this wicked cool plan (scheme?) to figure out a color scheme (plan?) for one of my sculptures in photoshop before painting it. So I took pictures. But my digital camera is old as dust and I couldn't find a card reader that reads it's obolete memory card at the nearby CompUSA.

I found an all in one card reader online and ordered it. It arrived yesterday. YAY!

Then I couldn't figure out how to install it. So I called fashes

fashes: Just stick it in your USB port.
lierdumoa: No, it, like, needs to install internally.
fashes: Did you RTFM?
lierdumoa: I'm unfamiliar with that acronym.
fashes: Read The Frickin' Manual
lierdumoa: That's what I thought you meant. It didn't come with one!
fashes: I can't help you with this over the phone. Perhaps you should get another card reader that doesn't need to install internally.
lierdumoa: But that will take time to order and I need these photos, like, soonish.
fashes: My brother has a card reader you can use. It would only require that you arrange a time to meet him, travel an hour and a half getting to him, another ten or fifteen minutes transferring the photos, and another hour and a half going back to your house!
lierdumoa: ...but.
fashes: That's what you get, procratinath0r.
lierdumoa: ...fine.

::later that evening::

lierdumoa: ::performs brain surgery on computer::
lierdumoa: ::really incompetent brain surgery::
lierdumoa: ::by some fluke manages to successfully install card reader::
lierdumoa: ::calls fashes:: GUESS WHAT I JUST DID?!?
fashes: ::pat, pat:: Good job, dear.
fashes: Don't call me when your computer dies.

This reminds me of that time I was four and took a scissors to my dad's greencard. Cause it was so shiny, you know. I made my very own homemade confetti! I was so proud!

Uhm.


Fannishly:

I'm desperate for vid talk. People should talk about vids to me. What's your current work in progress? Your vidding philosopy? What are your thoughts on music editing? How did you do that thing with the lens flare and the talking anus? Questions are also welcome. I'm always happy to talk about me. Maybe you want to know how I did that thing with the lens flare and the talking anus.

I talked to amothea for like an hour today about this instrumental piece she's working on and then she had to go, like, do her job or something. And my appetite was all whet for vidding discourse.

Comments

[amalthia]

work blows, but it pays the bills....I had a blast talking about vidding with you. :) I'll probably have a lot more to say by the end of this project. :)

And good luck with computer! I'm surprised you couldn't find info online about how to install it. :(

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I did find info online!

...in my second attempt at brain surgery.

[amalthia]

rofl...that sounds like something I'd do. :)

[jmtorres.livejournal.com]

I am vidding for Club Vivid right now. I'm making a Once a Thief vid to OK Go's "A Million Ways (to be cruel)," which was originally intended to be a vid about how the Director tweaks all her agents, but what I've discovered on rewatch is how she particularly likes to badtouch Mac. I have many, many notes on 'Director bites Mac's ear,' 'Director plays with Macs lip,' 'Director feeds Mac an olive,' 'Director climbs in Mac's lap.' And I haven't even gotten up the episode where she climbs in his bed.

I have been grumbling continually about the green cast on all this footage that I'm going to have to correct for my sanity and I suddenly realized today why. They shot Fuji! My film classes tell me: Kodak leans reddish and favors the white complexion, Fuji leans greennish and favors the Asian complexion. I have been watching the names scroll past in these credits, and a lot of the crew, including the director of photography, seem to be of Asian extraction. *imdbs Bill Wong* Yeah, oh yeah. Looks like a lot of work in Hong Kong. Fuji'd be the look he was used to, he probably didn't think twice about ordering it.

So. Yeah. I'm wondering if there's an automatic Fuji --> Kodak conversion filter I can plug in. Probably not, since timing can make your film brand superfluous anyway.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I love how clipping sometimes shows you things about characters you never noticed before. Particularly when those things include lots of badtouching.

Mmmmm ... badtouching.

I know in Premiere you can groupselect clips and paste attributes. I think you can do the same in FCP. You'd still have to do your color correcting the hard way, but you'd only have to do it once! I'm currently poking at this SPN vid where I'm brightening up and saturating everything (I don't know if you're familiar with the show, but pretty much all the footage is darkened and partially desaturated for that whole "horror" feel and it doesn't really gel with the mood of the music I'm using) so I feel your pain.

I wonder if the Kodak film thing is what gets on my nerves when I watch Torchwood. In certain indoor scenes, everyone's skin, particularly Toshiko's, looks too orange. That and I think they use less makeup, so everyone looks supershiny in addition to looking flushed, kinda like how skin looks in a lot of the gay porn I've seen and, you know? Maybe the show is trying to tell me something.

Good luck with your Once a Thief vid!

[jmtorres.livejournal.com]

Ah, but Torchwood's not shot on film, it's shot on HD. They actually use more make-up, they have a sprayer application to put it on smooth enough that it's not visible to the cameras, because HD will pick up pores if you let it.

I have little direct viewing experience with gay porn but I'm willing to bet if you're seeing similarities, it's shot on video, not film.

I am planning to make a "favorite" filter once I get my green-fixer set. I have a feeling I'm going to have to nudge it a lot, though--stuff differs set to set etc.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Huh. I KEEP LEARNING NEW THINGS EVERY TIME YOU COMMENT. Perhaps the too-smoothness leads to the over-reflectiveness.

Nudging is always a pain. In my last vid I did a lot of tweaking of contrast/saturation to compensate for the color loss in xvid source vs. straight from DVD source. I usually end up doing a ton of nudging even when there's not something inherently off with the source, just to unify the color palette among various scenes.

[jmtorres.livejournal.com]

Torchwood s1 dvd extra Captain's Log--they show the airbrushing makeup with Burn Gorman for a couple of minutes starting at 6:40. That log is revealing of many very silly things, such as Barrowman's apparent ability to make everyone dance at his command.

I tend to follow the progress of HD with avid interest since DP'ing is my area of study and I firmly believe HD is the future. There's nothing you can do to/with film footage that you can't do to/with HD, and some things you can do with HD that you can't with film--for instance, HD cameras are smaller, so they can get in tighter corners. In a few years, there won't even be a resolution difference for the big screen--highest resolution you get off film is 4K (ie, the height of a frame is 4,000 pixels) because that's the highest resolution for film to digital transfer, and everything's edited digitally now; HD is already up to 1080 and is going to get higher. Have you seen 1080 footage at full quality? My god, it's fucking gorgeous. The detail you get. Just. My god.

RTD's attitude towards HD kind of hacks me off; he's allowed Torchwood to be shot in it but "protected" Doctor Who from being switched over yet, because he feels that HD makes everything more complicated and difficult and is just not as pretty as film. Part of that is a personal preference: some people do prefer to look of film. They don't like the my god, the detail. Film gets you a slightly softer look because the movement of the film through the camera is never completely stilled; even in sharp focus, film images have a slight motion blur. And film also show grain--depending on your film stock, you can see the granularity of the photochemicals. Also considered an artistic effect. But you know, you can take pristine HD footage and put film grain filters and infinitesimal blurs on it in post; I've gotten into huge arguments with people about my god why would you ever but people do. (And sometimes there's actually a legit reason, or instance, being able to cut HD and film footage together. Numb3rs, for instance, shoots both.) But a lot of RTD's complaint of it's so complicated blah blah blah strikes me as sir, you or your people or both do not know how to use your new tools. FUCKING LEARN.

Ahem.

Color correction in editing is something I've never actually poked at in detail (I know a fucking lot about how to do it in-camera; hi, 85s and 80s). I mean, I can use the fairly simple filter controls provided in FCP but I always feel like a hack. I know there's actually a fine art to timing that I do not know. Tell me your secrets!

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Well, if you're a hack, so am I, because pretty much all the color correction I do, and actually most of what I do in vidding, period, comes down to eyeballing and winging it. I poke at it till it looks right. Then poke a little more. The more I tweak clips, the more I see to tweak, visually or timing-wise. Whenever I'm don't know what to do for a new section of a vid, I sublimate my frustration by going back to an old section and making tiny, mostly unnecessary adjustments.

As to the fine art of timing. Hm. Sometimes I think vidders are always trying to figure out what good timing boils down to and I'm that weirdo off to the side yelling, "Stop boiling! I like my eggs raw!"

I think a lot of the time vidders rely too much on cutting to the beat. If timing were grammar, cutting to the beat would be the Microsoft Word automated grammar-check. All cuts should feel on beat, of course (I say feel because the ear is faster than the eye and cuts usually look better if they come three or so frames before the beat), but when it comes to pacing, cutting is only a small part of the picture. wistful_fever made a Numb3rs vid once where the focal point kept jumping from one side of the screen to the other from clip to clip, forcing the eye to jump, and it made the whole sequence feel faster even though the individual clips were fairly static and the cutting wasn't that fast relative to the music. She also used a lot of oversaturation and high contrast to make the static images pop. Conversely, reducing saturation puts more emphasis on less obvious internal motion (s'why so many carnivores in nature are color blind - yay, science!). In my last vid I used low saturation and blacked out the background in one shot so the viewer would focus more on the small motions of Dean working his throat and clenching his jaw (which were also cut to the beat).

Which is to say, everything influences the pace of a vid, from content to cutting to color. And if you can notice the efffect an element has, you can manipulate the effect that element has.