MattHawkins Online - Film Making Forum

ok heres a few ideas: http://www.dpxpaint.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=120 next on the agenda is the smoke machine dispute. I recently used a smoke machine for a swat team raid (some of u may have seen a topic a while back about a film called Spent Casings, its n...

and test it first on a piece of steel or somewhere on the car thats hard to see, just in case

try masking it if you have after effects and creating a copy of the layer and gaussion blurring it heavily then just masking out around the edges. should work

dvd+r are more compatible and a 4.7gb DVD holds about 80mins, depends on compression etc

i'm thinking using AE to create a ripple effect in black and white, then importing that into a 3D program as a distortion map and texturing a box to make it look like glass (could also use volumetrics). then get the CG camera at the right angle and save it. overlay in AE and use screen or a similar ...

hmm i suspected as much. thanks for the reply!

try changing the button routing. to do this select your menu (not the button) and then in the properties panel uncheck the box that says Automatically Route Buttons (bottom of the panel). Then in the menu window on the toolbar at the bottom click Show Button Routings (its next to view safe area). Th...

i use seperate sound and video systems and all i use is a clapperboard marked with the scene, shot number and take. works perfectly. and if you do want to use a timecode theres an effect that does it in after effects (much more useful)

hmm i wish people would take into account the effects they want BEFORE they do the shots. anyway the best way to do it would be to make some bullet holes in photoshop and use after effects to overlay them onto the footage. it works quite well (i've done it with car windows before and it looks pefect...

try finding a sound (like a car passing) and using bass boost on it to really get a boomy effect. also try using the equalizer to remove the high and mid range leaving only the bass

use levels (under adjust) and it has a historgram with shadows, midtones and highlight. simply drag the shadow slider to the right and watch the shadows darken

i dont have time to watch the film at the moment, but the shots you have posted look great, especially the second and fourth ones. I take it u got up on a building to film the car shot?

gamma (i think) is under image control (the button that says gamma/pedestal/gain). Also i hope you havent got any shots of the sky coz they might require intensive masking to make look right (depends on the shot though)

look in the folder you created the project in, there'll be a folder called Conformed Audio Files (surprise!). so if you created the project on C drive there will be a folder called C:\Conformed Audio Files\

yeh i've tried shooting the moon with both a standard film camera (still) and a MiniDv camera on still mode. both sets of shots sucked

i know the tutorials you're talking about and the short answer is no. u could try to take a photo of a blade of grass and then mask it and colour it to simulate in growing and then clone that a billion times - but you wouldnt bother. just use max

yeh plus when you're filming on MiniDV its really really hard to get a good key.

you cant do this in premiere but you can in after effects. its called a difference matte. basically you put your actor layer above the background layer and then go into keying > difference matte (with the actor layer selected). then you select the primary layer as the actor and the secondary layer a...

green screening requires a specific colour that can be "keyed" out. this is basically the process of telling the effects program that anything that is bright green is now invisible. masking however requires drawing a shape (the mask) on a layer and making that part invisible. you can use k...

actually it would be very difficult to mask out a moving shot because it would be almost impossible to get a clean background plate that exactly matches the moving footage. more likely (depending on the budget of the film) is that they used a computer controlled camera (often they look like a dolly ...

the moving matte idea isnt bad but its very hard to get looking good. the problem is scale and perspective (depending on the shot it might be almost impossible to get a similar plane shot). the best bet is to try to find a free 3d model of a plane (if you have a 3d program) and animate that. but i d...

while we're on the topic of premiere pro malfunctions, i have a scene from my movie edited in premiere and it refuses to export it. it gets to a certain frame and just freezes. all my other scenes work fine and i've tried multiple export formats (divx, WMV9, huffy UV, quicktime etc) and they all do ...

a black pole is easier to mask out because its not as obvious (depending on the background), therefore it wont be as obvious that its been masked. a green pole on the other hand would have to be perfectly lit to get a good key from, and you would probably find that its impossible to light the pole p...

polarising lenses are very useful (especially when you want to give a scene a happy paradise look - like what they do on ads for tropical islands)

if anyone has the game Mafia, there a hundreds of good sound effects in it (lots of different weapons plus theres about 50 different sounds of bullet casings falling on different surfaces)