Duely Noted

I wasn't intending for such a long gap between posts but I've been extremely busy.  I'm pretty sure everyone will get to see just how busy after I post the next few articles, there's plenty more to come after this one! 


So the long awaited day came and passed by in a blurry haze of celebrities, martial arts demonstrations, and LOUD speakers (literally).  I got Troy a pass to attend the event with me in Los Gatos where I was to present the video and slide work I had spent the last couple months designing and prepping.

Let me back the progress train up here and start from the beginning.  After getting offered the job back at the end of February to build video reel clips which turned into a whole presentation package for the celebrities that would be attending the event, there was a long process of locating the video resources (dvd, bluray, internet demo reels, etc.) that I would need to build the reels with.  Each reel had to be exactly 1 minute in length with audio. 

This was probably the longest and most time consuming portion of the editing as it was a lot of waiting while DVD's came in the mail, ordered online, or borrowed from friends.  Then even more waiting as I had to use decrypting software (DVDFab) to copy the movie content onto the computer
and then start another lengthy process of trans-coding the videos into a video file that my NLE could edit.




After spending a few hours sifting through the movie files finding locations to extract footage out of for the particular celebrity, it was actually fairly easy to build the reels.  The next portion of the work happened towards the last couple weeks when things really started to pick up.

I had to hunt down a decent presentation software that could handle playing video and images on a secondary screen without showing buttons a cursor or desktop or anything; in other words - an actual presentation  (which is funny considering the amount of difficulty it is to get PowerPoint to do anything of the sort).

Screenshot courtesy of MediaComplete

I managed to find a program by the name of MediaShout.  While primarily marketed (and even developed) toward church and religious functions - as they have lyrics and even bible contents that comes with the program install, the program is actually pretty decent at handling video files.  I installed the demo on my main workstation which has a 2nd screen attached: a 46" HDTV through HDMI.  I built up the presentation on the workstation and would install the demo a week before the event to test it out on that machine.  However just a week before the event I barely got this software setup on the laptop I would be presenting it on.

As the main day approached I also finished designing all the still slides for all those attending as I went back and forth with the client getting updated on who is attending, who's dropping out, and the final order of those being called on stage.

The next step I ended up spending an entire day on.  I had just moved the presentation and all the associated files over to the laptop and began to test it out on a large screen HDTV in another room via the VGA connection.

The first issue I noticed was that when you open up a presentation with no actual script saved all of your media is sorted in numerical/alphabetical order automatically.   I tried several times to save it with the arrangement I put the slides in but every time upon opening it it would automatically arrange them how it wanted to.  My remedy was to rename the files and rebuild the presentation so that every slide (still and video reel) was numbered accordingly.

Secondly, once I got to the first video reel in the presentation, I noticed terrible tearing from a vertical sync issue.  To test this I simply opened up the video file in Windows media player and played it on both the laptop screen and the external display and there was no tearing.  So this apparently is an issue with video playback of MP4 files from within Mediashout 4.5.  

Further frustration ensued at the end of the video reel.  I set automatic transitions to happen when the videos finished playing, to transition to the next slide (a still of the same celebrity).  I would get flawless playback and transitions on my workstation, but on the laptop when the video reel finished it would immediately hang.  The only way to force it to respond (windows still running okay), was to CTRL+ALT+DEL and launch task manager, which caused the screen and program to refresh and it would then glitch straight to the next slide. 

I only have that problem trying to run the presentation software on the laptop and I spent all day the day before the even trying to figure out the source of the problem (which included making sure every other task, process, and service that didn't need to be running, was indeed not running).

My solution regarded working around the known issue I encountered by building an extra 5 seconds at the end of the clips, leaving my fade-out times in-tact in my NLE and just having them run into blank empty video for 5 seconds. I edited all 11 video reel sequences and re-rendered them all out, and then proceeded to re-import and build the presentation again with the proper video reels.  This time I would tell it to automatically transition from the video at a set time: 61 seconds (giving 1 second blank to transition to the slide after).

This still did not solve the problem, still resulted in freezing and hanging before it could transition to the slide.  I tried manually re-timing the slides to 59 seconds and some odd milliseconds, which ended up cutting into the fade-outs I had built into the reels.  THIS finally solved the problem and left me no time to try and see if I could re-do the fade-outs so that I wasn't cutting off the video and audio abruptly.

In the end the event still went smoothly and no one was the wiser as seeing the video reels on a giant projection screen and hearing the audio over a really nice loudspeaker system which was run by DJ Curt turned out really well.

I can only imagine what I had to deal with was but a slight mental discomfort compared to the massive efforts Andrew Fanelli of All-Pro Tae Kwon Do went through to not only put the entire event together, but to get all the celebrities to attend, have all the awards built and designed, get press coverage, news coverage, and video production to film the event.  On top of that Andrew also hosted the event and had special arrangements for a private dinner for all the VIP's after the event as well.  Celebrities even had stations set up for autographs and pictures for all the audience that attended.

The video production will be making a special DVD of the event to sell  later and commemorate the once in a lifetime opportunity to see all these long time martial arts legends together in the same building!  Congratulations Andrew and a job extremely well done!

Andrew Fanelli

So many projects I've done in the last couple weeks. I'll try to wrap up what I can and post articles on them here.  I'd like to cover production tips and troubles I went through to help show just how hectic the business can be especially when dealing with clients who may not know the business.

A peak of what's to come:

1. Ninjas and Bikers face a crazed high end suit tailor with a sword for the cutting-edge in fashion
2. A special band makes an appearance that can improve your quality of life
3. A behind the scenes real is finally in the works for the ACE rail commercial
4. Troy has been writing a short film script that might get shot by summer's end that i'm helping with pre-production for.
5. A Zombie Apocalypse will be spreading soon... very soon.
6. Just shot video for an event in Oakdale with more details soon to come.
7. Much, much, much more... including a novel; several more behind-the-scenes, custom sound effects catalogs catering to game developers and more!

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.

The Little Engineer That Could

Holy crap what a crazy year it's becoming!  Just thought I'd upload this and share with everyone:

Let me start back last Tuesday when I received two new pieces of gear:

 

The big white box is my brand new Universal Audio 4-710 D and the 2nd is an Art HeadAmp6Pro.  I also got a grip of cables to patch in the new connections. Speaking of patching...

In the rack:

RME Audio Fireface 800

2x DBX Pro 48 point patch bays

Korg DTR-1000 Rack tuner

Radial JD7 Injector

Line 6 Bass POD XT Pro

TC Electronic G-Major 2

Mesa|Boogie Triaxis

Furman Power Conditioner

Monster Powercenter Pro 2500

Running the patch bays into a 

16x4 Livewire stage-box.

The cat on the bench is Xena.

Had to solder the last 4 connections of my stage-box snake to replace the XLR connections with 1/4" TRS.  Good thing my memory served me well from last time,  big thanks to my dad for helping make it quick!

With that done I was able to finish patching in everything properly.  Minus a few extra cables I still need to make all my routing complete.

Recorded 2 guitar tracks. Channels 1+2 are the first recording.  I'm recording the JD7's direct out as well as a mic on the amp.  The same is repeated for the 3+4.

Routing looks like this:

The metal test song was maybe 10-15 minutes of work even with the drums.  Speaking of drums Troy and I also tested out the 4-710 D on a full drum session.  I'll have a seperate post soon with a special little video update I plan on building this week in between all the other projects i've got going on...
Now that I mention it, the work i've been doing for clients has been keeping me EXTREMELY busy!  After finishing the t-shirt logo design I quickly moved on to designing the graphic wrap for a custom arcade box a friend of mine and guitarist from Trials and Memories has been building.

Arcade top design and the box underneath houses the electronics.

I received this project's details and started to do research and finding source material for the original old-school games he wants to have featured.

While I started work on this, it had to take a seat as a bigger project building 11 video reels and prepping video and photos for an upcoming event took front and center of my attention.  In fact, today I just met with the guy who has been putting the event together.  It's going to be HUGE!  I have all 11 reels done rough editing and just have a few key movies left to find to fill out the rest of two reels with.

On top of that I'm also putting together session and product documents for a huge endeavor I'm setting out to start next month - building a sound effects library of my very own!  Starting with impacts and small objects - this was exactly the reason I ordered the UA 4-710 D, the Art HeadAmpPro 6, and purchased the Zoom H4n recorder.  I also picked up a set of contact microphones.  I've got several pages worth of documents I'm putting together not just for sampling sessions but also for designing various music cues.

I've put a ton of research into the project and based on the markets I've seen there are quite a few websites that offer cheap alternatives to the expensive A-list names like Sound Ideas, Sony, Digital Juice, and others that offer the largest collections but at the highest prices.  Let's talk about this for a moment.

Right now video-games and interactive media make for the largest revenue stream topping even the Film industry.  That being said, the video-game market is about to experience an explosion the likes of which it hasn't even yet begun to feel, thanks to a few key ingredients.  Unity, Unreal, and a few other "complete game engines" have poised themselves very well in the development communities touting the ability to instantly and freely download their game developing tools and allowing people to start developing their very own game using their AAA quality game engines, did I mention they're FREE?

Let's start with Unreal Engine.  Epic Games have probably the most attractive property for developing a game as their licensing agreement allows you to freely download, install, and use their UDK tools to build a game using their engine without paying them anything.  Not only that, should you commercially publish your game they don't ask for any percentage of the revenue cut until AFTER your first $50,000 US.  That's pretty enticing to a start-up game developer, an indie DIY group, or even someone like a student or hobbyist who's always dreamed of wanting to make their own game.

Unity offers two versions.  The basic is Free and allows you to start developing right away.  You have the option to upgrade at any time to a paid version, which takes care of licensing for authoring your game on just about any platform you'd dream to have your game on.  Granted there are stipulations like having to buy individual licenses for specific platforms, take a look at their site for more details.

On top of that, Unity has a built in Asset store.  A complete internet based hosting service that not only allows any developer registered and logged in to Unity to buy assets and immediately put them into their game, but also publish anything they create onto the asset store as well.  They take care of hosting and bandwidth and all that complex stuff and split the revenue your content generates 70/30 in your favor.

Unity is quickly becoming the center of quite a bit of attention.  In fact, big-time digital production house Massive Black  was featured in a recent article in 3d world magazine.  The huge expose on them building a complete game demo in just 2 months to show off Unity's capabilities of supporting a AAA title (And Massive Black's amazing digital production prowess) can be found on 3d Artist Issue 36. 

Keep in mind, I've been running this blog for my personal opinions and experiences and sharing my own thoughts, I'm in no way endorsed or backed or even requested by any sort of company to discuss or "sell" these products.  If I've piqued your interest, you really should research these tools BEFORE you commit to anything with them, and make sure for yourself that whatever you pursue will be your best option.

What does this all have to do with sampling sessions and sound effects?  Well, I've got not just one, but possibly two HUGE projects I may be project managing and producing come May.  I can't share much at the moment as I.P. is still being discussed.  But I can promise you all one thing,  should these projects get the green-light.  There's going to be a lot to update on this blog!

As always, I welcome any and all feedback!