Christmas

Holiday time is here and as much as we want to get things rolling - our filming partner is away over seas and we are awfully swamped with festivities.  Here's wishing everyone....

MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Soon we will be filming in full swing with storylines and everything - though we are still not settled on an into clip yet.  WE are getting excited.  Are you?

Test Titles

Hooray!  Today we uploaded two test videos for title screens.  You know - the little screens at the start of a video that lets the whole world know who made it.

The one with flames, Test 1, took a whole 1 and a half hours to render.  Wow!   For 10 seconds worth of video.   The other was much faster, so we can only take it to mean that the slowdown was caused by the use of Trapcode Form.  That's quite a powerful piece of plugin and it's going to take quite a while to learn all of the ins and outs of it.

Glowing Fireball Test :- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2uek0sl6Ak
Optical Flares and SOUND Test :- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCycQyU77SM

Export Formats

Ah, so what a lot of fun that was. A good important lesson in how to set up the rendering / export of video files from After Effects.  Trying to render as WMV was not turning out well and resulted in a lot of juttering and even damage to the video file.  Really unwatchable.  Experiments with the other file extensions turned out the same.  In the end, we saved as LOSSLESS which resulted in a 7 second clip being 1.2G in size.  Clearly this is NOT an option, especially once we move into proper production.

In the end, we figured out how to set up H.264 which saves as an MP4 with SMOOTH playback.  Huzzah!

Now we can do things properly.

We're also quite along with a title clip to put at the start of our videos.  Quite atmospheric, but we're still not happy with it.  It's missing something, but not sure what yet.

Slow beginnings

Wow, who would've thought it'd be so hard to make a great title screen.  So many effects and ideas to play around with - all the while learning the ins and outs of After Effects.  It really is quite a challenge.  Big props to all those who have made some really awesome ones - hopefully we will soon be joining you.

So, what's going on, you ask?  Well, apart from working on the title screen - we are experimenting with various effects as well as discussing ideas on storylines and things to film.  There is so much potential, it's staggering.  Proper filming of any actual stories or episodes (your choice on vocabulary) will not be beginning until sometime in January after all the festivities and everything.  This gives us plenty of time to play around with the software. There are other reasons of personal natures, but that's not something really for public release.

In progress

Well, about 1 day after we uploaded our first little experiment video.  Ok, so it was nothing grand... but hey!  We have 26 hits already, and it's not even showing up in search yet.  Hooray for the power of social media.  Wonder how many people watched it from this blog?  We don't exactly have a lot of readers yet.

So we finally have decided on a working logo and are quite pleased with it for starters.  Now we begin work on our title screen.  Something simple but not too flashy.  This of course is a slow process and it's going to take some time to get it all ready.  Concepts ahoy!

Add a comment below to let us know what you think of the logo.  We'd love to hear from you.

Our First Experiment

So today we edited our footage of a gas stove lighting.  Ok, so it's nothing overly epic - but was a little trial to test out slowing things down.  The video quality itself was a lot more grainy than expected, considering our previous experience with the GoPro.  Of course, this was a low light environment, not the full sunshine provided when driving down the freeway.

See the video at :: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jVmK4GhWik

It was a fun little experiment.  Was easy enough to do, though I'm sure we could make it look a lot more epic with some better footage and some proper cinematic direction.

For those who may ask, our settings on the GoPro (Hero2) were 720p @ 60fps.  Edited in Adobe After Effects.

As for a title clip for our videos - we're still working on finalising our logo.  The one currently used in YouTube is only a temporary one and it will, of course, look much grander when we're done.

Delays

Ok, so... while we filmed our first (read: lame) thing for slow-mo, it turns out that we made one slight oversight.  Video editing, even little videos, appreciates having room on the hard disk.  Well, of course, we're pretty much out - so a run down to the store nabbed us a nice little 1TB portable unit which is now being filled up with ... 1TB of stuff.  Who could've known we were full up?  Ah well, delays are a part of life - and soon we will be on the path to virtual fame. Maybe.

There are lots of things we're thinking of doing for our viewers - the slow-mo is just a starter, and a little excuse to start practicing our video editing skills. Yes, we're noobs - but everyone was once.... so bring on the challenge.