On and off for the last few months I've been working over the
film and have basically done a new version which greatly improves the
original - I've made alot of changes (if I can remember them all here
they are:)
Firstly I started looking at codecs and image quality - I tried
recapturing all the source footage through an analogue capture card
straight into the huffyuv codec - and actually it had a nicer contrast
quality than the dv - but there was a faint reception/interference kind
of effect going on (due to the cable quality I guess) and the quality
is always limited by the fact it was coming off a compressed minidv
tape - had it been an input via the s-video port from a higher quality
original source then the result would have been better than the dv
capture via firewire - but as I couldn't do this - it was kind of
pointless but a good exercise. So anyway I decided to go with the
minidv capture but then render that out to an uncompressed version and
only work with that file which has made a huge difference to the
picture quality, and since the film was short enough I could do this
with out chewing up too much hard drive space.
I dropped the still picture behind the opening titles - it didn't
look good (because it was a still - I wanted a live shot but we didn't
have one that lasted long enough) - and it also gave too much away. I
also changes the style of the credits - in that I've randomly changed
some of the characters to red - which seems to suit it I think
In the opening shot I actually comped out the top left of the
frame where you could see the remnants of our unsucessful shaft - I
just layed over a portion from another frame that had none - if you
look carefully you'll see there's no grain movement in that part of the
frame - but it's so dark it's not noticeable. In this opening scene and
a few others I worked carefully on the looping - we had to do this as
some shots just didn't last long enough unfortunately - so I picked the
cleanest bits to loop so it wouldn't be obvious - and just more
attention to detail here has paid off.
I found a good Virtual dub plug in to remover flicker and ran
that over about 4 of the shots. This was quite sucessful and makes the
shots look alot nicer and fuller. I'm still not sure why we had that
flicker - I'm thinking now it's because it takes the camera a few
secoonds to get up to speed (25 fps) and it's not crystal synched - and
I think this flickering may be a result of the interation between the
wildly varying frmae rate of the camera in those forst few seconds and
the lights which were running off a 50Hz power supply - at any rate I
was able to get rid of about 99% of it and it looks quite good - it
wasn't in all the shots - I'm assuming just ones we used from right
after we started the camera (I'm going to conduct some tests later)
I also did abit of image stabilisation on some of the shots too
I regraded it all
Added in an extra shot of a sunrise - actually taken from In My Image!
Changed the closing credits to roll now - which I think looks alot more professional now
Re-recorded the poem with a different microphone (condensor instead of shotgun) and it sounds better
I changes the end graphic/copyright notice too - just don't like that graphic anymore and ahve put the new one in there!
Over all I think the film looks alot more complete now and I'm
going to be sending it off to some festivals now -- I guess it's all
just experience! - I can't believe I let it go how it was before! - but
as I learn I'm getting better at these things and the film is better
for it:-) Depressing how many post production fixes had to be put in -
but that' something I've learn from!
The compressed wmv version too is something I've looked at - and
that's much better too and at a higher bit rate (about 950k I think).
The final file is almost twice the size (18mb) but it needs to be to do
it justice
I'll change the version that is on the In My Image extras disc too
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