Kevin Caldwell Set The Standard...Now I'm Gonna Break It...

[The_Mad_Hatter]

Man who stand on toilet, high on pot.

Man who stick head in toilet, pot head. ^_^

OY...well I finished most of the clip harvesting yesterday (well up to 25 ep anyway). So then I started work on one of the lip synch segments. Only at some point I got this crazy idea to do something near impossible, nearly scrapped it, but then kept trudging away for 6 hours straight and found that I can actually do it and it looks really cool. Then I slept for 4 hours and now I'm up and ready to have at it again. Wheew...labor intensive and hard, but it is a lot of fun, I think I'll order pizza later on as a treat. ^_^

In case anyone wants to see the work in progress.
http://webpages.charter.net/mad_hatter/test.mpg

Far from finished with it though, there's still like 4 more frame segments that need to be added, plus I'm going to have her mother blink at some point, and I wanna do a sorta ghost like fade in, maybe throw in some kind of sparkle effect to it. Then once that's done I have to go through the finished clip sequence and add lip synching for the line, "I wanna mom to tuck me in at night and chase the monsters away".

The other thing I'll probably do is run a soften filter or .5 gause filter over the arm movement to make it blend better, cause it looks a lil too aliased as it is.

Any new suggestions or ideas?

[Vlad G Pohnert]

watched your sequence, couple of suggestions comments. What program are you using to overlay the characters? It looks like your using photoshop and cutting each frame seperatly.

This kind of effect is best done in After Effects which would make it go much faster as well. But assuming you dont have the program, Photoshop can work as well but will take much more time to look convincing. (I've done it both ways in my videos).

Some of the edges still needs work since they are a big too rough and still contain a few pixels of the background being cut out. best is not to blur the whole image since it will not match the other one even more, but to manually blur just the edges a bit so the the character blends in.

The other big giveway is the different lighting of both characters. This is bar fat the hardest part to make it look convincing but it required otherewise the whole thing still looks like an overlap rather than a natural scene. Try to darken the "Mother" Character to match the more darker bed scene. You'll have to play around with brightness/contrast/saturation and color balance settings to make it work.

The gost ideas will work and would help in making the overlay more convincing. (I used the same concept and it turned out great).

I can simpathize with the amount of time this takes, I did a whole video with 2/3 of the footage being overlays of three characters and that took well over 300+ hours to do. I've now developed faster methods to work with masks that would cut the time down and do something like this sequence in about 2-3 hours.... Keep experimenting and see what you come up with!

Vlad

[Chef]

um...if its generally agreed that kevin caldwell was the best, then wouldnt he not be the standerd but more like the holy grail or something? or am i just stupid?

[The_Mad_Hatter]

um...if its generally agreed that kevin caldwell was the best, then wouldnt he not be the standerd but more like the holy grail or something? or am i just stupid?

LOL, don't take the subject line so seriously, it was sorta meant as a joke and sorta meant to attract harsher critiques.

And I don't really think there is a single defined AMV which is truly the best, because really an AMV is only as good as the meaning it has to an individual. One persons gold is another persons garbage.

I believe that an AMV can be judged as far as quality of capture, sound, editing, originality, and the effort put into it, but emotion isn't math, so precision and accuracy aren't always the most important things.

That's just my opinion. *shrugs*

[Koopiskeva]

yep.. I'm forever stuck in the 'looks cool to me' phase

[The_Mad_Hatter]

watched your sequence, couple of suggestions comments. What program are you using to overlay the characters? It looks like your using photoshop and cutting each frame seperatly.

Yup. Then I'm saving the finished clips and using ACDSee to flip back and forth between frames with the scroll wheel to check for accuracy.

This kind of effect is best done in After Effects which would make it go much faster as well. But assuming you dont have the program, Photoshop can work as well but will take much more time to look convincing. (I've done it both ways in my videos).

I've never actually used After Effects, but I think I should probably check it out sometime.

Some of the edges still needs work since they are a big too rough and still contain a few pixels of the background being cut out. best is not to blur the whole image since it will not match the other one even more, but to manually blur just the edges a bit so the the character blends in.

That's what I did already, but the problem is that the resolution just isn't fine enough to blend it any better using that method. I've found though that if I use the point to point selection tool and just select the general outter edges that look roughest and then use a soften or gause filter they can come together pretty nicely.

The other big giveway is the different lighting of both characters. This is bar fat the hardest part to make it look convincing but it required otherewise the whole thing still looks like an overlap rather than a natural scene. Try to darken the "Mother" Character to match the more darker bed scene. You'll have to play around with brightness/contrast/saturation and color balance settings to make it work.

Nah, I tried that already and she wound up looking real. She's supposed to be more of a dream/ghost which is why it's better that she's brighter than the rest of the scene, that'll be more apparent when I do the sparkle fade in thing. But yeah, given the two different kinds of lighting it makes blending that much harder.

I can simpathize with the amount of time this takes, I did a whole video with 2/3 of the footage being overlays of three characters and that took well over 300+ hours to do. I've now developed faster methods to work with masks that would cut the time down and do something like this sequence in about 2-3 hours.... Keep experimenting and see what you come up with!

Vlad

Did you do lip synching effects along with your overlay stuff? If so I should go and check out yer videos (if ya got em up for download).

[RadicalEd0]

I believe that an AMV can be judged as far as quality of capture, sound, editing, originality, and the effort put into it, but emotion isn't math, so precision and accuracy aren't always the most important things.

This is the reason why I can spend weeks making an amv that is technically perfect from every audio and video standpoint and it'll still suck
damn emotion

[Chef]

I believe that an AMV can be judged as far as quality of capture, sound, editing, originality, and the effort put into it, but emotion isn't math, so precision and accuracy aren't always the most important things.

This is the reason why I can spend weeks making an amv that is technically perfect from every audio and video standpoint and it'll still suck
damn emotion

ditto...just backwards.

well probably not, theyd probably still suck if they looked good.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

Did you do lip synching effects along with your overlay stuff? If so I should go and check out yer videos (if ya got em up for download).

No lip synching, but I did do the "Ghost effect" and lots of overlays. If you want to see the results, here's the link the the video. All overlays are done in After Effects with Masks which make the whole process much more smoother and easier (watch the hair in the overlay shots).
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... php?v=9827

I used photoshop when I did my "Love Hurts" video
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... php?v=1837
and if you watch the edges, they didn't turn out as well since each frame is cutout seperatly.

Vlad

[OmniStrata]

yep.. I'm forever stuck in the 'looks cool to me' phase

That's fine, your opinion for my "Dancing Stars" video has scarred me for life...