sig

Thanks for the compliments/suggestions. The video is at a football game (as you could have guessed) using the XL1 and working with the lighting that the floodlights gave off. These clips are being used in the commercial i was talking about in my first post, and to give it that surreal feel that I was looking for, I used a sepia effect with highlight set to 46 and amount set to 31, with a green-yellow color since our school color is green. I'm kinda new to color correction which is why I choose to forgo the color wheels, but on some shots I took of our equipment (for the commercial) today I dove into the 3 wheel color correction and was very pleased with my results. I'll post stills up of those shots as soon as I can get them uploaded.

Hey, I have a few stills that I shot this weekend that I want you guys to critique. It would be great if you could show me what I'm doing right, wrong, and what I can do to make my shots better. http://www.finalcutproduction.com/sig/waterstill.jpg http://www.finalcutproduction.com/sig/helmetstill.jpg http://www.finalcutproduction.com/sig/runningstill.jpg Any criticism you can provide would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Thanks andrew (darwin). Andrew is another student in my media program, we pride ourselves in keeping up a friendly competition between us, a competition which I almost always win :D Andrew, unless you just watched the lord of the rings behind the scenes stuff tonight and got this insight, I am going to seriously have to hurt you, considering that we were talking about this exact problem earlier today and you mentioned nothing about digital grading. Even though your advice would have been better told in person when I asked you about it, I think your explanation captures what I'm trying to get. I mean Cold Mountain used FCP4 to edit tape that they shot in DV, I have DV cameras, and I have FCP4, what can I do to get my product to look like theres. I know this is WAY too much to ask for, and i don't expect to have nearly as a professional turnout as they did, but I would like to start applying some techniques that will give me a product I can be proud of.

First off thank you for your reply. I have some stills picked out of what I don't like, I'm trying to figure out how I can go about posting them. Unfortunatly I just got a new computer so all I have is tape that I shot in the last 2 weeks so I can't really pick out anything i've shot that has what I'm looking for. As to what I am looking for, I'm not entirely sure. When i review my footage, it looks, in lack of a better term, too real. When I watch professional video, especially studio work, it looks almost surreal, the colors don't scream out, they almost seam like they are dullen a little, instead of being distracting. As for whitebalance, lighting etc, I basically want to know how to go about doing that. The method that I kind of picked up on is that when you walk into a different lighting enviroment, your supposed to point the camera towards something that is a pure white, like a piece of paper, and then press the white balance button. I never noticed too much success with this, it didn't seem like anything changed, although I'm probably not doing it right. As for lighting, the most important I need to know is how to get a better key out of my blue screen. In the studio we probably 20 lights of all shapes and sizes on the ceiling that can move around, and two working ones that can be on the ground. I noticed last time that I ran bluescreen through my computer, even though I'm pretty experienced on keying (i do alot of pre shot video through it) the base footage either made it so it was choppy, not tight enough on the talent, or the spillover was causing it to cut off pieces of the talent. Here is an example from last year of the problems that I have, this is a spoof on the ipod commercials. This one is a video that I didn't do, rather another kid in our class did it with the same blue screen and same lighting that I had. I also did a version of the ipod commercial that turned out a little smoother since he was using FCP3, which doesn't have a few color smoothing tools that FCP4 has and I'm a little better at keying, but the problems that he ran into are the same that I run into. http://www.finalcutproduction.com/FCP%20Po...iPod_frame.html I want to use the screen because I don't have the time to build a real set that would work with my application, but I want to get the best key possible. I hope this gives a more detailed explanation about what i want to know, thank you in advance for your response.

I've been in my high school's video program for the last 3 years. I've been editting with FCP4 for the last year making story packages and a few cool opening sequences here and there. It's my senior year and I'm trying to step it up, specifically in a commercial I'm making to get students to join the sports broadcasting club I made last year. I just finished all of the title work, and it looks great, but now I need to shoot the tape. I don't want to ruin all the work I did to make the titles very professional by getting the same low quality look I have in all of my tape. I shoot DV from a Canon GL2 and XL1 (not S). This commercial is going to involve some up close footage of football I'm going to shoot this friday, and some up close shots of still objects (camera's, equipment, the logo model), and I will be using a blue screen to give me the desired background. If someone can direct me to some threads or give me some advice on lighting, focus, white balance, and all of the other tricks of the trade to make the tape look less like a highschool production and more professional. I'm just now discovering the manual features on the XL1. And I also want to do a couple of shots where the focus moves from the far side of the object to the near side, and am having trouble isolating focus I want. I want a very narrow birth of focus, and would like the out of focus to be as out of focus looking as possible. Right now when I try to do that, the birth is too wide and the whole object ends up in focus. Also if someone can explain to me the diff in 30fps and 24fps, if i can change that, etc. Thanks alot.