My first ever fashion video. I put this together for my sister inlaw for her Butterfly Dream collection. The first part of the video was shot at Oatley Park and the last part was shot at La Perouse. The shooting went on for pretty much the whole day, unlike a music video that can easily be done in aa couple of hours. The models had to change clothes, the photographer had to set up her shots correctly and so on.

I was basically just shooting whatever I could and getting as many shots as a could where the reflector was being used. Since I don’t use any assistants myself for any of my videos, it was nice to have someone else’s assistant ensure the models were well lit For a lot of the shots I used my slider, and it worked a treat.

For the music I used Sony Acid. These days I always find it the quickest program to use when I want to get a track recorded quickly. Previously I’d put together another track for this video, but my wife told me it was too funky. That’s never usually a problem, but I’m glad I did end up scrapping that track, because this one is a lot better.

The video was edited in Vegas as always using Color Curves once again for most of the colour grading. For a quite a few of the shots I also tracked a lens flare to simulate a bit of extra sunlight. That worked quite well too. A few clips of video were reversed too, so those parts play forwards and backwards. You might be able to spot those towards the end of the video. This was done to make the video fit the music. I could have let the parts play longer to fit, but wasn’t happy with what the camera was doing in those longer parts.

A bit slow posting this. I completed this video last year for the Small Time Hustlers (Tycotic & Jacquie). I just did the editing, compositing and colouring on this one. They shot the whole video themselves. All the outdoor footage they shot on location in Mauritious during a trip there. The rest they shot on greenscreen. All shot using a JVC HD7 HDV camera. They sent me the files from the camera on a bunch of DVDs. The files were in some weird format. But thankfully I could convert them using Cineform Neo HD.

For the greenscreen shots I used the Boris BCC7 keyer. It worked really nicely. All the smoke footage I used for the backgrounds I already had on my hard drive. Most of which were Detonation Films clips I’d downloaded from their website. Just the tiny Flash preview shots they have on their which I converted to avi. Don’t tell them though These were easy enough to enlarge without losing too much detail, and Neat Video came in handy cleaning up all the final shots. Of course I use that on every video I do. Even when the footage already looks good, it still makes a difference.

For the colour grading I used Vegas’ Color Curves plugin. I have a basic cross process look that I set up based on this tutorial. From there I’ll make a few tweaks until I get the look I’m after. In a way, using curves is actually simpler than using other colour correction plugins. I used to use Magic Bullet’s Mojo plugin, but haven’t used it for a long time now. Not just because it doesn’t work with 64-bit Vegas, but also because I never felt that it gave me enough control. I still use the AAV Color Lab plugin a lot, but didn’t use it on this video.

A video I shot and edited for Kerser in 2011. As I write this, the video has already over 150,000 plays on YouTube, on Kerser’s and my channel combined. The track was produced by Nebs who also appears in the video. I picked up the guys early in the morning and we started shooting at McQuarie Fields station. From there we caught a train to Campbelltown, shot a bunch of shots along the way and then caught the train back again. I never realised how well known Kerser really is until a guy at Campbelltown station recognised him and later asked to get a photo with him.

Kerser ‘Watch Me Get Em’ ft. Nebs

Whilst at Campbelltown station, I also got in trouble there shooting the take where the horn blows with the guys looking out over the train at the back. Of course I’d shot this on the tiny Canon S95, so I can’t see how it would have looked suspicious, but the lady collecting tickets stopped me afterwards I asked me what I was taking a photo of. This caught me by surprise and I just said “The train”? Apparently you’re not allowed to take photos of the trains. I don’t know what that’s all about?

Following on from there we went to a deserted house that Nebs knew about. I thought it would be pretty disgusting with squatters and a strong urine smell, but it was quite tidy actually. Apart from a few holes in the walls etc. It was there I decided to shoot the double speed shots. A simple technique where you have the music playing at half the speed. It was a popular technique 10 or so years ago in a lot of music videos for artists such as Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot, and even people such as Tori Amos for one of her videos.

Syncing everything up in Vegas wasn’t too difficult. Even the double speed parts which I would just time compress to match the original speed. With this video I actually had a lot more footage than I could fit in. A lot of the double speed parts I would use because they looked the best, but using those meant less space for everything else. You’ll notice some parts like the shot of a security camera that only play for a fraction of a second. In earlier edits some of the other main takes played for longer, but I had to trim those back also. Still, I’m happy with how it turned out, and all those additional edits and cuts do help.

For colouring the video in Vegas, I used Color Curves, and may have used the Boris BCC7 Film Process plugin also. Oh, and I also used the AAV Color Lab plugin too. That was used to brighten and remove some of the red from their faces in a number of the shots around the house. It worked nicely. For anyone trying to use that plugin in Vegas 64 bit, be sure to use the 64 bit version of the plugin. I’ve heard of people having trouble using that plugin, but have never had any issues at all with it myself.

Below are a few before and after shots.

In this first one, you can see how much the original looks like video. Mostly due to the colours.

But in the after shot, you can see the difference. In their faces especially. Here I’ve used the AAV Color Lab plugin in Vegas to brighten their faces. There’s also the curves plugin and a Neat Video, which are used for the entire video.

Here’s the second ‘before’ example below. Again you can see the bright red in his face. A real video look, even though I used flat image camera settings.

And once again, you can see how much better the ‘after’ shot below looks. I managed to get a slight bit of background blur in this shot too by zooming in.

Here’s the 3rd, one of the train shots. You can see how bland this ‘before’ shot looks. The colours don’t make it look that interesting.

The ‘After’ shot below of course looks better again. More contrast, less noise etc.

And lastly, below I’ve included a screenshot of the project.

My Flickr Pro account just expired recently and rather than paying them another $24.95 to keep my photos on their website for a year more, I’ve been looking at another option. Google’s Picasa.

With Google+, Picasa has become a great option for photos. I’ve always liked the Picasa application, but even more so now that I can easily upload photos there straight from the application at a maximum 2048×2048 resolution. And of course the ability to sync folders and tweak the photos online using Picnik.

The sync part will come in handy for when I’m saving ‘before and after’ video edit pics and screen capture shots from Sony Vegas. If I save those images to a folder that’s synced with PicasaWeb (the photo sharing Picasa site) or Google+, those images will automatically be uploaded without me having to do a thing. Embedding them from PicasaWeb is easier too, and even more so if I’m writing my articles using Blogsy.

I’ve also found a great Picasa gallery WordPress plugin that’s simple to implement. I’ve included an example of it below.

Walk to the city, June 16, 2011

The downsides of using G+ or PicasaWeb for storing photos?

The image quality is still no match for Flickr. If you view the images in the gallery above, you will see the odd compression artefacts, that you would never see on Flickr unless they were in the original uploaded photo.

For convenience though, I’m going to try the Google option for a while and see how I go. G+ is already a great community for photographers.

This video was shot during the Sydney Vivid Light Festival which took place around the middle of June, 2011. Although It’s an annual event now. This year it was around Circular Quay and the Rocks area. Last year, they used historic buildings in Macquarie street. Anyway, we didn’t get to Circular Quay until later in the evening, by which time many of the lights had been switched off. A few of those I managed to shoot a few nights earlier. The rest of the footage was shot around Darling Harbour.

I was really putting my Canon S95 to the test here with many of these locations being quite dark areas which caused the camera to drop the shutter speed to around 1/25 or 1/30. I can’t recall the exact shutter speed, but something close to that. I did take along my portable LED light for some of the shots too. It worked alright, but I found it difficult to match that to the location lighting. I’m not exactly sure what colour temperature those orange coloured lights are. A lot of the time the lights around them don’t match up either.

The edit was a bit trickier than normal due to the long instrumental parts. I didn’t exactly shoot enough footage on the night to cover all those parts, but thankfully I had that footage I’d shot a couple of nights earlier that I ended up using.

Below are a few before and after shots, along with a screenshot of the edit.

Before Image 1

After Image 1

In these shots you can see that there wasn’t as much light available. The camera was most probably forced into shooting at a shutter speed of 1/25 second for a lot of the video.

Before Image 2

After Image 2

With the colour grading, you can see here I’ve used colour curves for the whole video.

Before Image 3

After Image 3

Lastly, below I have included a screenshot of the entire project in Vegas 10.

Konnected as 1 (K1) – ‘Number 1 Spot’ feat. Scrap. Music video by Avene.

Apologies for taking so long to post this video. It was actually completed over a month ago, which shows how slack I’ve been with the blog here! But I’m back now.

This is a video for a Sydney group by the name of Konnected As 1 (K1), with a guest verse by Scrap from a group called Justice Crew who are apparently really well known on tv. A few of the dancers from the group appeared also. To be honest I wasn’t familiar with either group before shooting this video. I remember watching another K1 video a year or two back on YouTube, but since I don’t watch tv, I had no idea who Justice crew were. K1 had shown me a few videos they wanted this to look like. But thankfully it came out looking a lot different.

As always, the video was shot on my Canon S95. It was shot at a studio called Dragon Image. They sell a lot of gear too. While I was there I spotted a nice 2 foot slider which, and then went back a week later and bought one. I was a big studio, but the guys couldn’t afford the overhead lighting so we just ended up using my red head lighting kit (3x 800w halogen lights). Unfortunately this wasn’t enough! In a few of the wider shots in the video featuring the dancers, you’ll see what I’m talking about. We were meant to use a smoke machine too. They had one at the studio there, but with no smoke fluid for it. I got the guys to hire out a couple of ring lights though, which I did my best to use creatively. And I like how those shots turned out.

The video was edited using Sony Vegas 10 64-bit. For the colour tweaks where I have just one colour visible, I used the free AAV Color Lab plugin which worked nicely. All I did was reduce all but the blue and red channels. A few white to transparent gradients were used for a kind of fake fog look, and Neat Video was also used to clean up any video noise. And that’s about it. Below you can see before and after shots. Nothing too extreme here.

Lastly below I’ve included a screenshot of the edit. Quite a few edits as you can see, but not too complex.