The making of "The Question"

A wedding proposal video? Sign me up!

I've gotten tons of ideas and requests for special video projects and the majority fall through the cracks. Some clients don't realize all the work that goes into the project and will expect me to take the role of director, producer, cameraman, and editor. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as i'm being compensated in some form to handle those roles. That's usually not the case. Another problem is when the idea is not completely fleshed out. That brings a whole new challenge to the table because then you have to make their idea yours, and figure out if you can fill in the blanks with your creativity while still presenting something that fits the clients idea. Why mention this? Well as Hannibal would say, "I love it when a plan comes together!" (Ya'll remember that?... from A-Team?... you know!... nevermind...)

Anyway.

Enter James Darnell, my latest client, interested in creating a spy movie themed trailer. He planned on proposing at The Senator theater in Baltimore, MD. As his girlfriend took her seat he wanted movie trailers to play and then have a special trailer play which would culminate in him entering the theater and proposing. The idea was solid. A storyboard immediately started flowing as the two of us brainstormed ideas and concepts. There wasn't much time to make this work. I was 100% confident that I could edit, render, and process a 4 to 5 minute video in less than 24 hours. If you've watched any of my wedding teasers you'd know it's kinda a thing I do. The main worry I had was the filming. This project was going to need on-location shots. James wanted her future father-in-law as well as sisters-in-law to be a part of the video so scheduling everyone to be at certain locations for filming could have been a nightmare. Then there was the music. I knew I wanted our video to end up on YouTube so I wanted to stay royalty free with everything I used. Did I need to worry? Not at all because James was on top of everything.

During our first meeting, I immediately went to my favorite source of royalty free music, did a basic search and we listened to the first track on the results page. It was perfect! It felt way too easy so we ended up listening to 3 more pages of songs but the first was still the best. Once I had the music in my head then my creative juices began to flow. For the next few days I was binge watching spy and action movies, looking at other movie trailers and grabbing clips that I wanted to use to fill in blanks between what we couldn't film in the time we had. While I was busy with this, James was busy on the script.

With the script finished and promptly received by me, it was time to start filming. My original ideas focused around night scenes but the locations that came to mind were emptier during the day. Day filming turned out not to be a problem as James was able to accommodate. The first scenes we filmed was the garage scenes. James picked me up and we all met at the shooting location. It wasn't long before I had all the shots I needed. That was especially good because as we finished our last take security asked us to leave. Next was the telephone voice work. I guess you can say both sisters auditioned for that role and we had some pretty funny outtakes. Throughout the day I found another royalty free song that fit the theme and James found some excellent title cards and music from an app on his phone. By the end of the day I had 75% of the movie trailer completed. All that was left was a few placeholders for the father-in-law's part as well as a few small scenes i thought up.

The next day filming resumed and things once again was like clockwork. My biggest worry of the day was making sure the father-in-law scenes weren't too dark. We wanted a setting like that and an office was going to be our second option, but it turned out nice. By noon the ball was completely in my court. By that night the trailer was done, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Congrats once again to James and Tina! I'm so glad I could help in making their event a memorable one. Check out the final draft here:



As for technical info:
Camera: Canon HF G10 with shotgun mic
Editing software: Final Cut X with title cards from iMovie (phone version)
Music:
"Evening of Chaos" and "Black Vortex"

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Interesting Apps 5 - AVT ChapterIt

My Problem with Final Cut Pro X

(long story short, I hate using Compressor 4 to make chapters, continue reading for my reasons, or skip down to "The solution" for the app review...)

I have owned Final Cut Pro X since day one. Sure I had some complaints about the new GUI and it'e similarities to iMovie but I was willing to hang in there and give it a chance. The two problems that I could not overlook, though, was the lack of multi cam support, and lack chapter marker creation. Recently a update has added multi cam support but I am still frustrated with the lack of any chapter creation.

Until today the only solution I was able to find was to export my movies to Compressor 4 and create chapter markers there. After that I could encode my movie with Compressor. There is nothing about this process that is straight forward. Here are my common problems;

(Also I should note that I am using a 2.8 Ghz Quad core i7 with 12GB RAM; all programs are up-to-date as of this posting)

Skimming on Compressor is nothing like FCPX. You end up wasting a lot of time trying to fine tune marker placement and Compressor regularly freezes, loses sync with audio, crashes, or stops playing video, thus making proper chapter placement very difficult.


Too many steps for titling chapters and reviewing chapter names. It took me forever the first time to find what I needed to do to even create a marker and if you rely on the mouse you will be moving back and forth repeatedly clicking options just to create a marker, title it, confirm, and then skim to the next marker. The fastest method is to use the shortcut "m" to make a chapter, then "command + e" to open the marker edit screen. Just make sure everything is spelled correctly, because unless you plan on wasting more time reviewing each chapter marker one by one, then the next time you'll see them it will be too late for editing.


Some encoding projects in Compressor take entirely too long! This past weekend I finished a 75 minute movie that needed chapters before being converted into a iPad compatible m4v, as well as a DVD. The estimated time for completion was over 30 hours. In addition, the process was never completed because 6 hours in I received a Quicktime error-50 for one file and a Quicktime error-0 for the other. This morning I decided to give up using Compressor and encoded the movie directly from FCPX (no chapters), using the same settings that Compressor used and my movie was finished in 2 and a half hours.

I'm a little upset at the fact that I had to pay 50 dollars for a program that I only use to create chapters, which ends up slowing down my workflow in the process. Today, however, I have found a solution that I had to share with those that have been suffering with the lack functionality apple has provided us thus far.

The solution...

Available now in the App Store is AVT ChapterIt

There the free version that only supports Quicktime movies and the $2.99 paid version that handles Quicktime, MPEG4, and Matroska (future update).

This has been the easiest (and only) way to add chapters to my movie files, that I have found other than Compressor 4. After dragging a file in the area you have multiple options. "Black Detection," which automatically places chapters at fade outs. "Auto," which places chapters at timed intervals of your choice. Or using the timeline to manually place chapters with single frame precision. You can even import chapters from TEXT or XML files as well as DVD (.ifo) files.

Your chapters and titles are all listed on the side and are easy to review and edit. All you need to do is click "save" and your done!

Made a mistake on previous movie's chapters? Drag them in and edit those chapter points, or create new ones, without having to re-encode or start from scratch.

So far, I can confirm that chapter markers are recognized in iTunes, Quicktime and iMovie, as well as on the iPad. I'm sure that with our support, functionality of this program will grow. I would like to see audio skimming in a future update but it's not a real big concern at the moment.

While I still think Apple should just add chapter creation to FCPX, this is a excellent alternative to spending 50 bucks on a program that you can't get the most out of yet.

My thanks to Stephan Eichhorn and Scirius Development for a fantastic product.

Final Cut X

I recently made the transition from Final Cut 7 to Final Cut X so like everyone else I must add my two cents...

...actually does my two cents even matter? In the end our beloved Mr. Jobs will do whatever he wants and it looks to me like he's more interested in his newer customers than he is the older ones. But I actually think it's more than that. Just look at all the attention that Final Cut X has received in the past month. Negative yes, but i think that negative was the plan. As many of you have probably already read FCPX has a list of missing features that has many professional editors justifiably upset. But what about people that never used earlier versions of FCP? Well, there's no adjustment to be made. The design has been revamped to look a lot like imovie which has many amateur editors less intimidated with a program with "Pro" in its name. The cheaper price helps too.

I do miss some of the features not present in the current version of FCPX but I have no doubts that many of them WILL return. Consider this example.

When the iPhone was originally released it was a pretty solid device with many good features. The main problem though, was that it was AT&T exclusive. What was, in my opinion, a effort to expand the App store sales, Apple then announced a iPhone for people that didn't want AT&T, or a phone. Enter the iPod Touch. Now the first gen iPod Touch had many differences with the iPhone and I wont go into the obvious ones, like phone and speaker parts. Instead lets consider a few simple things like the calendar app. When I first heard about the iPod Touch my first idea was to use it as a PDA right out the box, but that wasn't possible. The "+" button to add memos and appointments was mysteriously absent from it. Instead you had to always sync it with Microsoft Office or the calendar program on a Mac.

This was one of the stupidest omissions I had ever seen! As far as computer code goes it was a matter of changing a "true" statement to "false"! At the time many others felt that this feature "crippled" the possibilities of this device, and it received a lot of attention, but did it stop the iPod Touch from being successful? No. And what happened next? Well, a paid upgrade toted the ability to add calendar entries as a "new" feature. In the end, the device got the attention it needed and Apple got the money they wanted.

Back to the present; FCPX is missing some features that probably wouldn't have added a single hour to the overall production schedule, but Apple needed a cheap way to get the word out that this is the program to bridge the gap between amateur and professional. Let's face it, Apple is going off their brand name to attract new customers. Every negative article compares FCPX to iMovie and that's exactly what Apple wants to impress on new customers.

"Hey, it's a new Final Cut Pro! And people say it's just like iMovie. I know how to use iMovie! It's cheap too! Who cares about all the other stuff people say is missing. I'll probably never use that stuff."

And that, my friends, is how Apple makes money. Class dismissed...


...Oh wait, what about the long time customers! No worries there. Just keep slapping patches and updates on every other month until they stop complaining.

Opinions welcome, see ya next blog!