Bob Speziale

I'm guessing it's just color grading, lightening the image to make the subject's dark skin show up lighter.  In Premiere Pro it's just a slider for brightness/contrast.

I copied a random model portrait from google (top image) and spent about 15 minutes in photo shop to produce the bottom image.

Gaussian blur is one of the digital filters in Photoshop. I use the Adobe CS6 suite that has Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Audition for audio editing, and After Effects. In Elements you may be able to get  a smoothing effect by setting sharpness to a negative number like -100.  

In the days of film there were fairly expensive portrait lenses that gave a slightly blurred image but still in focus. I imagine those were in deference to the subject's vanity. Today there are digital filters on smartphones that smooth out the subjects complexion to eliminate blemishes and wrinkles.

22 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

 

MP4 looks better to me. More shadow detail, less contrast. But VNX may be slightly sharper. But can't be for sure.

 

What I'm looking for is something like TIFF, but for video. With TIFF still photos you can import, work on it and export. Then re-import the TIFF and do more work and export. It stays the same and does not change when exported. What codec is like that for video? 

I just save the changes each time to a different project name, like project-v1, project v2, etc. so if I don't like the way things are coming out I can go back to a previous version, and I can compare still frames of different versions exported with different names. For pics I shoot raw, but save as 16 bit jpg, so the raw files are never changed. For video I work in premiere pro and export as h.264 mp4 at the highest quality available,  and use 20mbps 2pass vbr for HD and 40mbps 2 pass vbr for 4K.

Ultimately my stuff will go on a website for stills or youtube or vimeo for video so it gets viewed on someone's smart phone or laptop or desktop. I try for the best quality but am not fanatic about it because it's not being played in a theater or displayed in a gallery blown up to a large print where the quality would show.

I remember the excitement of first hearing the Beatles and the Stones on AM through a transistor radio, so the magic is in the content. Years later I heard the Yellow Submarine album on CD on a good system in 5.1 surround and I could pick out every individual instrument. It was amazing but didn't change the way the song affected me. These days I listen to music on youtube on $30 plastic computer speakers or $20 headphones or on the oldies cable TV station with 3" speakers on the side of my TV set. So I think most of the enjoyment is in the listener's brain rather than the medium.

I believe that effect can be applied digitally in stills or video with Gaussian blur. It smooths out noise, grain and details.

On 9/11/2019 at 8:42 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

OK, will study my software for options. I have Movavi, hopefully it does it. I wanted to inject some movement into my movies. 

Movavi does have a pan and zoom feature you can use on jpg images. On youtube there are a bunch of tutorials on using pan and zoom in movavi.

7 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Hm, that's odd. I don't see many standard-definition DV files anymore, and the ones I have are 25fps 720x576 4:2:0 PAL-style files, but it works for me in VLC 2.2.4. You generally have to let it play for a few seconds to establish some data.

Oh, edit - I wonder if this is some strangeness with type 1 or type 2 DV-AVI files. There was some oddness with those back in the day but I can't see why it would affect this.

I tried running it on VLC for 4 minutes and then checking the media info, and still no bitrate

data. But to confuse things even more, the Windows explorer shows different info than the  Quicktime Movie Inspector. Quicktime says 640x480 pixels, 57.54 Mbps, Windows Explorer says 720x480 pixels, 29.87 Mbps (29874 Kbps). So who knows what it actually is.

16 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Where were you looking?

Just where you said, VLC, tools, media information on a PC. See the attached screenshot. The VLC tabs don't show the Mbps. The Quicktime Movie Inspector shows 57.54 Mbps.

VHS tapes have held up fine over more than 30 years. However almost all of my casette audio tapes are toast. The humidity has glued the tape together and they are no longer playable. The casette tape was a lot thiner and apparently less stable than the VHS tapes.

I just played an avi file in both VLC and Quicktime. Quicktime showed the kbps data rate, VLC did not.

3 hours ago, Patrick Cooper said:

This might sound like an unusual query. Is there any free downloadable software that could tell me the bitrate of individual clips? The reason I'm asking is that I have a Panasonic G7 that shoots 4k video and when I right-click on Properties - Details within Windows for a clip made with this camera, I get virtually no information at all. It's mostly blank. Certainly no bitrate revealed or hardly anything else. With Shotcut software, I can find out properties of individual clips but there's nothing about bitrate.

According to the G7 manual, shooting in 4K mp4 at 24fps or 30fps is at the bitrate of 100mbps. I don't know why the properties don't show in windows.

20 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

AVI is a wrapper.

MP4 is a compressor AND a wrapper. 

Most of the time AVI is a MPEG variant like .h264 or .h265. 

Both are horrible codecs that only exist for streaming online. 

You really want to work with Pro Res (mac) or DNX (windows) if you care about any quality. 

I just rendered a short 1080P 24fps clip on Premiere Pro in mp4 h.264 and in VNX. I took stills of the same frame and compared the two. While the VNX does seem to show more detail I noticed that it is also more saturated adding a bit more pink to the clip. Do you notice this as well? Do you compensate for it?

Nicely shot and edited. Good work.

It looks really interesting but I couldn't watch it due to the handheld camera movement. 

2 hours ago, Manu Delpech said:

Irony right?

 

Not intended to be. OP said he didn't like the way Vimeo tried to remove the grain. Figured he wanted the grain to show. Thought Youtube might leave it as is.

Did you try Youtube?

Street scenes, people and cars going by. An indoor selfie intro (vlog style). Seems the samples contain a lot of blues. I wonder if they are avoiding the reds?

Around 1989 I was a sys admin and took delivery on a Sun server about the size of a tall refrigerator. It had a hard drive that held 750MBs (3/4 of one GB). The drive cost $100,000, weighed 86 lbs and was a foot square x 36" of metal. It took two of us to slide it into the server rack. Today the 16GB card in my camera costs $10, or 20 times more storage at 1/10,000th the cost and weighs less than 1/10 of an ounce.

I bought an HP Z200 almost four years ago and use it for editing with Premiere Pro. Has an intel i7 870 processor at 2.9Ghz, a 1TB hard drive and a 2GB video card and runs win 10 Pro 64 bit. I got it for $228 on ebay, bought two new 8GB matched RAM cards for it for 16Gb RAM. Total cost was about $300.

It's up to the actor to create the look of fear or lonliness, etc. In this case I see more confusion or shock than lonliness or fear. I don't think changing the focal length or composition would change that.

I only watched the first minute and a half. It was mostly fuzzy and out of focus. Is that intentional, eg. dream sequences or someone who is drugged?

Clicking on your link brings the vimeo video up. I'd say it was well shot and the images are stunning though I would have appreciated some feeling of speed on some of the shots. Perhaps speed them up in post or get closer to the ground to bring more excitement to the viewer.  In some of the shots like the first scene   there's nothing more to see after the first few seconds as the camera slowly moves up the image. On other scenes like the ones with people, I wanted  to get closer and see more.

I don't. My monitor is an 11 year old 20" Viewsonic VA2012wb lcd non reflective monitor with auto white balance. I have seen my youtube videos on my Vizio back lit lcd TV through Roku and they look the same to me. I wouldn't worry too much about it because you have no idea what monitor or TV the viewer is using. The only calibration check I have done on my monitor is to photograph a small American flag and compare it to the flag I am holding in my hand. To me the reds, whites and blues look the same so I guess the auto white balance is working fine on the monitor and I've never calibrated it. It really doesn't matter if what I see as peach is more orange on the monitor. As long as the reds, whites and blues are good who would know that a more orange colored blouse was actually more peach colored in real life?

I watched it full screen and I agree the figures look too small. I think in a music video the personality of the performers is important. I think you would have been better off doing close up shots in several takes and cut them together. The performance is good but I found myself concentrating on who were the clones, so I lost sight of the music.

19 minutes ago, David Mawson said:

This is complete BS.

- He was 60. That's a very long run for a director who started as a young man.

- He'd had a huge run of successful films in the UK (apparently you suffer from America Is The World syndrome - aka Plaid Syndrome from one of the more visible symptoms.) He's one of the directors in this very exclusive list at the BFI

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/17-rare-times-when-director-made-five-or-more-great-films-row

- He left film making because he hated the deal making required of directors in Hollywood and Ealing had closed down.

Honestly, it's no wonder you can't evaluate films objectively - even simple facts seem beyond you.

 

 

Alexander Mackendrick

The six films from 1949-57

Whisky Galore! (1949)
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Mandy (1952)
The Maggie (1954)
The Ladykillers (1955)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

An 8 year run...none of them great by any means in my opinion.