REC Room

How to Build a Car Roof Camera Rig

2010-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Let it be noted at this point that this is not the original design, but for safety reasons the original can never be seen by human eyes. Check out some snaps from the build process and feel free to make any suggestions or ask questions. All up this build cost me around NZ$25 (US$17).

It’s a pretty simple design really. All you need is a plank of wood from your hardware store, a few bolts, wing nuts and some rope or ties.

Materials:

Wood
Four long bolts (any size)
Five wing nuts
Tripod bolt

Tools:

Drill with a wood bit and various drill bits
Saw

Build Tips

An easy way to get the tripod mounting bolts in the right place is to get a sheet of paper, hold it on the bottom of your camera and push through the two holes. Draw onto the piece of wood through the holes in the paper and you’re set.

Shooting

You can shoot off this type of mount in a whole bunch of different styles. You could show the passage of time or depict traveling with a time-lapse, you could shoot it normally to show movement or use it as a massive dolly!

If you want to achieve a smooth time-lapse effect like In this shot, but don’t have variable frame rates or an interval recording mode then shoot with a very slow shutter speed. When you speed up the shot in post you will get a smooth looking time-lapse. You can also get cool light trails if you shoot like this in traffic at night-time.

Final thoughts

I hope you understand that putting your camera on top of a car and driving is potentially risky. So if you do decide to give it a try, remember you are doing so at your own risk. With that said, if you do build it then post up a link to your rig or your final clips, I’d love to see what you come up with. Happy building!

I have a few ideas for improving the design and even some cool additions that I’ll be sharing with you all soon, I hope to adapt the design for cars without roof racks too. I’ll keep you posted!

Colourized Ink Effect

2010-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

This quick tip is for After Effects, but it can be applied in almost any program that has colour correction tools, like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro.

For starters, make sure you’ve got the footage from last time. You can download it from Green Screen Stock Effects: Fire, Water and Ink. I’ll be using Food Colouring #1 for this tutorial.

Since I’ve already pre-matted the footage for you, this’ll be easy. First up, import the shot you want and create a new composition with the same settings. Add the “Hue/Saturation” effect from the “Colour Correction” drop down in the effects menu.

Now click the small “Colourize” check box. You won’t notice any change but three options should appear below: “Colourize Hue”, “Saturation” and “Lightness”. As you drag the “Lightness” slider up you’ll start to see colour appearing in your footage. From here you can add as much saturation as you want and tinker with the hue to get the colour you want.

You can also increase the input black to add a little contrast for the image using “Levels”. This’ll compensate for the washed-out look generated as you add more lightness.

Now for something a little more advanced. If you want to make your food colouring look a little more fancy you can add a coloured gradient overlay.

To do this you will need to generate or find a coloured gradient that you like, keeping in mind that it should be larger than the size of the footage, in this case 1920x1080 square pixels. Here’s a simple one I made in Photoshop:

Import the gradient into After Effects and add it to your composition underneath the food colouring layer. Change the food colouring layer’s “Blending Mode” (also known as composite or overlay mode) to “Stencil Alpha”. As the name suggests this will stencil the food colouring onto your coloured gradient.

And here we have the final result:

(Music by soundprank.)

For questions, suggestions and other feedback, leave a comment below! We’d love to hear from you.

Green Screen Stock Effects: Fire, Water and Ink

2010-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Check out a preview of the clips below and download the ones you like in full HD for free! It’s encoded using the PNG codec for easy use in your visual effects programs, so enjoy and feel free to show off the creative ways you used it.

All the shots are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, so they’re free to use in any project you like, commercial or otherwise. You don’t have to include attribution, but if you do use them and want to say thanks, post a comment in the section below!

Downloads

All videos are pre-matted, and encoded with the PNG codec in a QuickTime .mov container.

Flamethrower (2 sec, 12mb)
Food Colouring #1 (20 sec, 255mb)
Food Colouring #2 (15 sec, 89mb)
Matches (11 sec, 233mb)
Bubbles (7 sec, 139mb)
Lighter (9 sec, 95mb)

Behind the scenes

Donations

Every month more than 200GB of high-def footage gets downloaded from REC Room. We’ll continue to offer the clips for free, but if you would like to make a donation we recommend $2-$5 to help us cover the costs.

Welcome to the REC Room

2010-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Hey I’m Toby and I’m a video guy. I’ll be posting all sorts of tasty video-related bits and pieces here to help and encourage you to get creating.

When I graduated my first thought was, I have to get into a big production company so I can make money doing what I love, working in the video industry. I soon realised that’s not what I wanted. What I really love is not just working in the industry, but telling interesting stories and exposing people to a different perspective, my perspective, through digital video.

Making a video is a massive process, there are so many steps between pre-production and delivery. People can specialise in so many ways: sound, lighting, filming, editing, visual effects are only a few. If you’re like me you probably have an interest in it all and if I can provide something that will help make it easier for you, be it stock footage or a simple tutorial, I’ll be stoked.

The State of Play

In the past, the video production industry has been like an exclusive club, populated only by the people that could afford the huge investments needed to be taken seriously. If you tried to do it any way other than their own, you were shunned or, worse, sued.

That’s all changing now. Camera and computer technology is getting better and cheaper every day and the internet has made it easier than ever to share your work and find an audience. digital video is on the move. It’s now open to creative independent people like us and online communities are sprouting up everywhere that foster these new digital video artists.

Share and Remix

I think sharing and remixing content is the future of digital video, it will help make the independent video community grow. Why wouldn’t we help each other out? I’d love for you to use or remix any of the content on this blog, after all that’s what it’s here for.

There are so many creative individuals out there making awesome video content and the internet brings it all to our fingertips. By sharing and remixing content and working with other independent video artists we can create the content we are really passionate about. So hop on the comments, tell me what you love about video and use my resources to make awesome content.

TV Static Stock Video

2010-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Why spend your valuable time trying to make perfect digital TV static when you could just use the real thing?

This freebie pack includes six different TV static shots with two quality options to choose from. Check out the preview above, then either download the 720p Photo Jpeg version or the 1080p Pro Rez version from the links below.

Enjoy!

1080p

All videos encoded with Pro Rez.

Static #1 (15 sec, 126.8mb)
Static #2 (10 sec, 78.1mb)
Looping Static #1 (4 sec, 38.3mb)
Looping Static #2 (6 sec, 78.1mb)
Bad Reception (10 sec, 83.3mb)
TV On/Off (10 sec, 84.4mb)

720p

All videos encoded with Photo Jpeg.

Bad Reception (15 sec, 45.2mb)
Static #1 (10 sec, 85.0mb)
Static #2 (4 sec, 62.3mb)
Looping Static #1 (6 sec, 34.7mb)
Looping Static #2 (10 sec, 39.1mb)
TV On/Off (10 sec, 47.0mb)

Donations

Every month more than 200GB of high-def footage gets downloaded from REC Room. We’ll continue to offer the clips for free, but if you would like to make a donation we recommend $5 to help us cover the costs.

Many thanks to the following donators:

Seth Short, ADi, $50
Oscar Díaz, $10
Nathan Watkins Photography, $5
Douglas Chatham, $5
Tristan Irvine, $5
Alexandre Cardon, $5
eyecircus, $3
Elizabeth Sandoval, $2
David Haguenauer, $2
Sean Moller, $2
Илья Немиро $1

Custom TV Static Video Transition

2010-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Ingredients

After Effects
Final Cut Pro (or any other non-linear video editing application)
Footage - TV Static (download)

Making the Transition

First step is to get some TV static footage.

Import your footage into After Effects and use it to make a new composition.

Tip

You can drag footage straight to the "New Comp" button and it'll automatically make a new composition matching the settings of the clip.

To make this static work as a believable transition, we’re going to make the black areas of the clip transparent; this will make it easier to overlay when we’re done. Let’s do this with an effect called “Shift Channels”.

Now we need to adjust it so that the black areas become an alpha channel. Just click on the “Take Alpha From” menu and select “Luminance”. Make sure you have the transparency grid showing otherwise you won’t notice the effect.

If you want to fine-tune this alpha channel, you can apply a “Levels” effect to the static clip. Make sure it is above the “Shift Channels” effect to make sure that the histogram is affected before the alpha channel is taken from the clip. Play around with the mid-tones slider to see a real-time adjustment of your alpha channel. You can also add a drop shadow to the static to make it stand out.

From here you can either export the clip to use it straight from your non-linear editing application (like Final Cut Pro), or you could import the two shots you want to transition between and do it all in After Effects.

The After Effects Workflow

Once you have imported your shots into After Effects and dropped them into the timeline, line them up and tweak the length to suit your transition.

Tip

To ensure there is no gap between shots, hold down shift when dragging on the end of a clip to make it snap to the next clip or keyframe. Then, trim and position your static clip over the shots. Keep the static nice and short -- it's just a transition!

Check out your handy work with a RAM preview. If your transition is sticking out too much, there are a few things you can do to make it look more natural. For starters, you can adjust the blending mode of the static. I used “Overlay”.

Tip

Make sure you fade the clip in with "Opacity" keyframes, so that it doesn't just appear out of the blue.

If you want to get fancier, you can add the “Displacement Map” effect. This will warp the shots on either side of the static. Once applied to both the clips you want to transition between, select the static layer as the “Displacement Map Layer” and use “Luminance” or “Alpha” for the “Horizontal” and “Vertical Displacement”.

Tip

Set keyframes on the "Max Horizontal" and "Vertical Displacement" in line with the opacity keyframes on the static to fade in the effect. Set your "Edge Behavior" to "Wrap Pixels Around" to preserve the edges of your clip.

Now comes the final touch: sound effects. I’m using a clip from freesound, a great source of Creative Commons-licensed sound effects. Just apply the sound and you’re done. Now you can export this composition and slot it into your video!

The Final Cut Pro Workflow

What happens if you want to play with the transition in Final Cut Pro? If you’re happy with the way your static looks, go ahead and export the composition from After Effects. Here are the settings you need to export with to maintain your alpha channel:

Note

Using these settings will output your video as a QuickTime movie with the "Animation" lossless codec, but there are plenty of other codecs that can have an alpha channel too. Just scan the "Channels" drop down for "RGB + Alpha" too see what's available.

Import your clip into your editing software. Drag it to your timeline or on to the “Canvas” window, then let go over on “Overlay”. Drag the static around till it’s in the right place over your clips.

If you want to do a little more fine-tuining, right-click on the static and change the “Composite Mode” (also known as “Blending Mode”) to “Overlay”. This will blend your static into the clips nicely. Again, make sure you adjust the opacity to avoid getting an abrupt change when the clip begins. Render your sequence and look at the transition.

Parting Words

With a little bit of After Effects magic, you can make your video a little more personal with your very own TV static transition. If you want to experiment more, try using water or cloud footage instead – you can use these techniques to turn any footage into your own unique transition.