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Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

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Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby Chuck Engels » Mon May 11, 2009 2:22 pm

If you have any additional comments or questions about this years contest entries please post them here :)

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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Comments and Questions

Postby Maxine370 » Wed May 13, 2009 10:09 pm

I must say I am impressed with the entries. There is a lot of talent among this group and a lot of stuff to borrow from. I'm watching them a few times before I post my comments and my ratings. I will get around to commenting on every one and will vote. But my initial reaction is you're all winners.
Happy Editing,

Beth
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Comments and Questions

Postby tiny » Thu May 14, 2009 10:04 am

I said this elsewhere, but I was very impressed with what some people were able to do with PE. I thought I was being creative by applying effects, rendering and applying more effects, but some of the things people did I don't even know where you would start.
I wish I were creative enough to write something witty here.
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Comments and Questions

Postby Bob » Thu May 14, 2009 10:42 am

tiny wrote:...some of the things people did I don't even know where you would start.


Feel free to ask how they did it. Everyone is very willing to share their techniques.
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Comments and Questions

Postby Chuck Engels » Thu May 21, 2009 10:45 am

Those videos are GREAT :yh:
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2. Cybertron PC - Liquid Cooled AMD FX6300, 6 cores, 3.50ghz - 32GB DDR3 - MSI GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 4G, 4GB Video Ram, 1024 Cuda Cores.
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby Wheat King » Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:14 pm

Gonna try something a little different. Rather than asking about specific effects I'm wondering if everyone who entered a video is willing to write a little about their video. I like reading about decisions, challenges and the process that people go through in creating a video. It's interesting.

My video was Shine. I've loved the song for awhile and was needing an excuse to put it to video. With spring in the air and my daughter wanting to learn to ride her bike without training wheels I thought it would be a challenge to convert that to a story.

The song was a challenge itself as it's really a 3:30 second song. I used Audacity to clip a few seconds off the intro and I took one of the middle choruses out. This was tricky but think I did an effective job. I also sped the song up by 4 or 5% to get it under 3:00 min.

For shot selection, I simply tried to get as many different shots as I could; different angles, different movements. I used a trick "dolly" move that Chuck posted here a few months back. To get a smooth shot advancing on the subject you use the front two legs of the tripod and lean the camera towards the subject. It worked kinda but it didn't turn out as smooth as I would have liked... Need a better tripod... Unfortunately, some of the shots at the end were really shaky as I was trying to walk and shoot video. was going to try and reshoot some of this but ran out of time. I also ran into some significant computer problems and ended up buying my new computer that same weekend. Anyway, managed to scramble it together and thanks for the kind comments!

The video was shot with my Canon HV20. Other than some time stretching I didn't put any effects into the video, I tried adding a few things here and there and they just didn't seem to fit so took them out. Anyway will take more comments and also open to criticisms and critiques. OK folks... hope to here some stories about the stories that you created.

Great work everyone!
_| /-\ /\/\ /-\ |_
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby tiny » Thu Jun 04, 2009 11:09 pm

I guess I will join in!

MILK

Was orginally part of a much longer film I made with a digital point and shoot camera, that happened to have excellent widescreen video capabilities. The Panasonic DMC-FX12 cost me a whopping $99 when I bought it on clearance. I have no idea why it was so cheap, as it is a nice camera to this day. I don't have any of the original footage from that film, all I have is the flash file. So I ripped the flash file to mpeg, and then edited it from there. That was an interesting project, since transitions already existed, and there were a few other things that I had to work around or work with.

My goal with this one was tell a slightly different story than the original, with really visual editing effects to make it a little more exciting. My favorite part was how I brought color back into a black and white film.

I also had to slightly speed up the song to make it fit.

Fun fact - That is me, and I filmed almost all this myself, aside from the pool scene, where a friend helped.

Unbreak My Heart

Shot on an old refurbished HV20 in SD mode. :D

Again this is from a longer film, and again, none of the raw footage was used, and so the same challenges existed.

I heard this song by Il Divo and really felt it was perfect for this story. The full length version goes into how it was my roommate who murdered my girlfriend and I find out. This short version lets the viewer fill in a lot of the blanks.

With this I wanted a heavy editing style, without it being overly eye catching like in MILK. So here, all the fancy editing was in the transitions. My favorite is where it zoom/blurs into the girls white jacket. I was very happy when I achieved that burn into white look.

Fun fact - The first time I had ever hung out with that girl was to film this movie, and the first scene we shot was at night, in that dark ally way. Pretty funny. Also, again I am the main character. This was mainly shot by another friend, the one who plays the murder.
I wish I were creative enough to write something witty here.
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby Paul LS » Fri Jun 05, 2009 4:20 am

Really liked your short video's Tiny. They are true "mini" stories... bothe were very good.
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby slushparlor1 » Fri Jun 05, 2009 8:42 am

Colin and Friends Summer 2008
When I started using Elements, a goal for me was to use live video in my videos. I had been doing still projects for awhile and really wanted to capture some great video moments. I’ve been using video for a year now and I love it. In the past I have taken pictures of my son and his friends summer events and hung them on a poster board in our kitchen. All my son’s friends could see themselves and loved it. Last year I followed them around with a video camera and they loved watching the video when they would come over. They still ask to see it. The original video was about 15 minutes long and had different songs in it. I really wanted to enter the contest this year to see for myself how far I have come in a year. I always appreciate the comments and they help me to create videos. I’m amazed at all the entries this year — I hope others wouldn’t mind sharing how they did some of their effects. I think the great thing about this contest is no matter who submitted what — the common thread is that we all love our video work and we have found a great forum to share our ideas. That’s the best prize going!

Theresa
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby momoffduty » Fri Jun 05, 2009 10:07 am

Jamal, Shine is a fun piece & a cute kid! Thought it looked smooth during the walking part. Interesting about how you changed the song in Audacity. Now we know who to go to for audio correction...still working for pie & beer? Your daughter is a natural actress. :)

Tiny, really liked Milk and have no idea why. Is milk symbolic of life's despairs? Also like the version with Mad World. Hopw you share a how to on the burn to white in Unbreak, great effect.

Theresa, what a great idea on the poster board! This piece captured a fun, feel good, carefree summer. Guess your son & friends won't mind you tagging along with the cam.
aka Cheryl
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby spressman » Fri Jun 05, 2009 11:49 am

Hi all.

My entry Italy Movie Trailer) started out, as the title suggests, as a longer video -- a 15-minute or so piece about a family vacation to Rome, Pompeii and Tuscany. When I heard about the theme for the contest -- telling stories -- it occurred to me that movie trailers are made to tell a quick story about the movie itself. So with that as the inspiration, I went back to my original Italy video and decided to recast it as a movie trailer. It also turned out to be a great exercise in editing -- that is, figuring out what little bits to keep in and how to keep the pace moving at a much brisker speed in order to shrink the whole thing down to a couple of minutes or so while still (hopefully) conveying the essence of the "story."

I also always try to learn something new whenever I put a new project together. In this case, I had never before projected a video clip onto another clip. I'm always amazed with what is possible with Premiere Elements. Of course, I also enjoy looking at other people's projects for additional inspiration and ideas -- there's never a shortage of either!

best,
steve
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby tiny » Fri Jun 05, 2009 12:29 pm

The projecting thing was wiggy cool. I couldn't believe that was done in PE4 when I saw it. PE4 is full of tricks and surprises. You will have to shed some light on how you did that. :-D
I wish I were creative enough to write something witty here.
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby munickster » Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:01 pm

Nice idea, Jamal! It's really interesting to read people's "behind the scenes" comments about their work, and I thought all of the contest entries were excellent.

My video is "Memories". After my father died, my sister took a huge box full of 8mm film to be digitized, and we ended up with nearly 6 hours of footage. I took all of it and trimmed it down to a couple of hours for a family reunion. (My dad must have had a waterfall fetish - there was easily 30 minutes of just waterfalls in the bunch). After we had watched the video, we all started sharing additional stories about the 20+ years of footage taken while we were growing up - most of which involved me doing something evil - and each story led to another until the wee hours of the morning. When I saw the theme for this year's contest, I knew immediately what I wanted to do.

In the reunion video, I had used After Effects and Fantamorph to create some of the effects. For the contest, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could duplicate the look of those tools using just PSE and PE. It was more difficult than I had anticipated, but two things really helped - Steve's tips on Bezier keyframes and motion took a while to sink in, but once I got the hang of it, I actually liked the result better than what I could have done with After Effects. Plus, I actually understood what I was doing instead of blindly following AE tutorials. The other thing that helped was knowing from Fantamorph how important the eyes were when morphing from one image to another. So, simply making sure the eyes (and glasses) were lined up produced a reasonable facsimile with just PSE.

Pretty much all the other effects and transition ideas came from what I've seen others do here. My wife has commented that my videos have really improved over the last couple of years, and so I owe many thanks to all of you here. And thanks also to Ron for the music and the OK to edit it down to fit the video.

Dick
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby spressman » Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:52 pm

In response to Tiny's question about projecting the video clip onto the building wall in my Italy movie:

The still photo is on video track 1 and the video clip is on track 2. I then applied a four-corner pin to the video clip and adjusted the perspective so that it matched pretty closely the angles of the wall in the still photo. Of course, I also scaled down the size of the video so that it fit onto the wall. Oh, and I reduced the opacity a bit so that some of the texture and color of the wall can be seen through the video. That's about it.

I should add that the true inspiration for this bit was Cinema Paradiso, which includes a marvelous scene where the projectionist moves the film off of the screen in the theater and starts showing it on the side of a building in the town square. One of my alltime favorite movies!

steve
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Re: Muvipix 2009 - Video Contest Comments and Questions

Postby tiny » Fri Jun 05, 2009 2:10 pm

You just gave me a cool idea for doing titles in my next film. :D Thanks!
I wish I were creative enough to write something witty here.
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