Sample this!

Just yesterday I completed a "Crowd" recording session with quite an ambitious script.  Even though I only got a small crowd of maybe 6 people, I managed to get all the script necessities I wanted to cover for the Crowd noises and walla to fill in my mixes on the Hoopfighters mini-episodes.

Also on the table right now is the 2nd of 2 songs for Nova. Built 2 mixes for the first song (both Troy & I did our own).  After we finish this song it should be crunch time for Hoopfighters.

Lastly, the wedding footage I shot back in October with Michael Fowler - a very talented photographer, for his clients finally arrived in my possession to begin editing.

Not a whole lot of visuals on this post unfortunately, but lots on the table this last bit of the year.  I'll be taking some time to dive in depth on my sampling process next post because there's some cool things I'd like to discuss, and some questions and issues I've run into with my particular system for working at sample library creation (this being my first major foray  into the domain).  If anyone's got suggestions or tips or links they'd like to share on designing sounds for sample libraries, categorizing, workflows, and best practices; I'd greatly appreciate it!

Too much Film, not enough celluloid

This last week Troy and I have accomplished several large recording sessions for a sound effects catalog project I've been putting together for some time now.  We're still very early in the project, but while I've been working on that I've also managed to finish the 11 video reels to run at this martial arts event in Los Gatos on the 28th that I'll be running a projector and managing all the video and photos for.

Plenty have asked and I have consistently told all that when it comes to video editing Premier really is the easiest to adapt to in terms of a fully featured NLE.  Coming from Sony Vegas, which is a great tool even back in the earlier versions where I spent a lot of my early days editing clips together of video game captures for my friends and I doing Machinima stuff, to moving upward into a package like Premier Pro and After Effects.  After the event is over I'll post again with some depth about working on the project.

This weekend I managed to get the major ground work done designing the Arcade top and the sides.
I sent my client a rough template I had built using the vague description he'd given me.

Keep in mind I'm working the template to this design.  I lined everything up in Illustrator, and the edges can be cut to the shape of the top.

The Logo text is just a placeholder to see if he liked the idea of naming his arcade, and the name could be whatever he wants.

I got my client's feedback and am currently working on updating it to the details he specified.  He decided he wants a much fuller "collage" of characters from all kinds of games to completely cover the top, and to lose the logo idea. 

So now i'm just working on gathering and placing as many characters I can.  I may try to break up the design a bit more with some tech shapes that fill in the middle and give some more lines to work with character orientation and placement now that the logo is gone.

Resuming my old short skit storyboard too.  I'm hoping to have this done by the end of April as I'm just working on it here and there in my free time.  The intended running time for the short should be somewhere around 2-3 minutes.

Setting up a storyboard plot in Photoshop from scratch was fairly easy though getting to the organization took a bit of work:

 Each of those master folders has a folder for each cell or frame.

Each frame folder allows me to contain my elements separately so when I go cropping each frame out individually I can just delete the other frames from the PSD file, and import all the relevant elements into After Effects to build quick pre-viz animations with, and allow me to choose what I want to show in terms of aspect ratio, shot details (orange) , and camera movement (blue), or actor movement (green).

Let's see if anyone can guess what's going on just by looking at the frames below:

I'm hoping to get some friends to help put this together soon.  The paid projects come first so I'm working to get them finished so I can make time for these.  I'll try to keep regular updates coming. though I may start splitting the updates into individual project blogs.  As always, feel free to leave comments, criticism, feedback, tech support, links, hot links, polish sausage and just about anything else you can imagine... gosh, I'm hungry.

Quickly Quixotic

I wasn't intending for a short hiatus on the blog but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything.  In the last few weeks I've been commissioned to do some graphics design work for two jobs.

The first is a T shirt logo design for the Turlock Geo club.  The design iteration was fairly simple, and the design itself is actually pretty straightforward: create a globe with a tree and a magnifying glass focused in on the geographical location of the club's hometown.

The idea is to have the graphic pressed over black shirt cloth.  So I rendered out previews with black background so the client could more accurately review.  With the final draft ready for t-shirt press I can start work on the larger, more creative project which is designing a custom graphic wrap for someone's MAME arcade project.  It's really cool actually.

Somewhere in between the graphics projects and getting all the stuff I'll discuss below going, I managed to have a couple recording sessions for a local artist.

I've got a few major studio projects I'm putting together.  The biggest is starting a sound effects and music cues catalog to market to Indie game developers and interactive media.  I'll start sharing some of that once we launch.  However, I did just recently purchase a brand new Zoom H4N to aid in some field recording tests and options.

Troy and I both have already done a few test sessions which I may have a quick video update coming soon!

Contact mics on my computer...

  
The Zoom is pretty solid and I also acquired some cheap and effective contact microphones!  Should make some interesting tests in the coming days.

Between that and the larger order I placed with Sweetwater which should be arriving soon: Universal Audio 4-710d and Art Headamp7pro; We're getting ready to do some serious sound effects field recordings.  I've been putting together session plans and diagrams for it all.

On top of that, we just started our website which we launched this week:

www.neologicstudios.com

Just barely getting my hands dirty with Wordpress and PHP management in Dreamweaver.  To top it all off, the last week I've been collecting movies and footage for a video editing project I have been commissioned to create for this martial arts event in Los Gatos on the 28th of April.  I'm required to build 1 minute video reels of several major martial artists and big name actors that have an extensive and impress list of credits.

Among them: James Hong, Martin Kove, Cary Tagawa, Bolo Yeung, Jim Kelly, John Saxon, and Bob Wall.  There are going to be a TON more at this event, and I'm going to be running the projection system and managing all the video clips.  As I get more work done on these projects I'll post some updates.

Hopefully I can get these projects done fast enough to allow for some time to update this blog more!

The McClure Sessions

Yep, it's finally here!  We spent quite a while mixing and mastering and editing everything for this 5 song EP and still keep the "Raw" sound the artist wanted.






Troy and I had a lot of fun.  The stress was minimal but it also included more things than just the EP project.  I've been working around the clock on several little things.  This video was one of them, as well as starting our website and getting our services and a pricing map for our business...  Fun times ahead.

I'd love to share more of my business plans with you, but there's some production things I'd like to cut to the chase on.

If one notices carefully in the video, there are the "driving" scenes which is us going to and from our studio location to grab all the gear so that we could set everything up at my place to track drums.  I wanted to 'motion stabilize' those shots but the clips are long.  So, in Premier my first step was rough blocking to get the content on the screen i wanted, and then how i wanted it to fit in the mosaic of video that would be constantly shifting.

My first problem I ran into (probably just lack of experience and not taking the time to hunt around on the web for people's solutions / suggestions / workarounds) was when I would replace the cut I wanted with an After Effects link and go in and motion stabilize it.  If you pay more attention to the opening sequence you'll notice some of the driving shots are super steady and others are not.



In After Effects after creating the After Effects Project File, the footage clips I used are segments of the same video file and they show up in After Effects exactly at the times I have them in Premier.  I only wanted to motion stabilize that clip I wanted to use seeing as how that would cut down render times and playback issues.

However, once you create an AE Linked project, whichever one was newer in the link replaced the older one.  If I were to exit out of Premier Pro and only open the After Effects project, it would show the correct clip.

My next step was trying to render out the motion-stabilized footage using Adobe's Media Encoder tool.  The same problem occurred because it still uses the dynamic link manager as well; which apparently has permanently replaced the link to the original clip segment and only does the latest one.

What gives, Adobe?  Is there a way to create multiple After Effects compositions working on the same video file but still retain their clip-based references from Premier?


The other (and not nearly as perplexing) problem is dealing with OMF Export to work in a DAW with.  I've noticed for a long while now that stereo tracks in Premier Pro, upon importing into a DAW will come in as independent mono left and right tracks.  Note, I've been working exclusively in Sonar for doing my picture audio work, however I have tried the same OMF imports in Pro Tools and the same thing occurs.

Both DAW's are perfectly capable of working with stereo interleaved files, and creating stereo tracks.  I just find it a bit funny this information gets parsed in the export process (or translated as such on import) this way.  Has anyone else noticed or perhaps figured out a fix for this?

If anyone reading this has had similar experiences and even possibly solutions they've found for these things, I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Likewise, I'd love to hear any comments, questions, suggestions, anything at all; about the video, the questions I posed regarding After Effects and Premier Pro; or OMF Exporting.

Keep an eye out for our website launch, and if you don't already; follow me on Twitter, or facebook.  as well as our studio page on Facebook.