Editing question

Video editing, format conversion, video file manipulation.

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Darzeth
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Editing question

Post by Darzeth »

Hi all im new here but you all already know this. I have a few questions i want to ask I hope you can answering them. These questions are about ADobe premiere elements and after affects.

1) how do i change the lighting to make it seem like a night scene. The scene is currently fully lighted and bright

2)how do i improve the quality of the video to make it look less pixelated(i understand this harder but it can probally look a bit better)

3)how do i make a scene brighter and so you can see mor eof the actors in it. Its way to dark and we forgot to bring a light with us.

4) lastly this is a camera filming question. We have one good camera we are using to record on but we want to do multi angles and have them all fit together in a single see.

For example some one getting attacked 1 angle in back then to side then a upclose of the cut then a distant shot of being thrown then a close up of actor hitting killer over head. also any other shots you think can workw ith it will help

These are just a few i hope you all can help
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RE: Editing question

Post by rhys »

I suspect ur using adobe premiere, if ur using after effects, it still might apply, im not sure.
1) Use the levels, make it really contasty and dark, then use the color corrector, and make it slightly blue. Depending on how dark u want it, make it darker with the levels.
2) Gaussian sharp? I dont know, its not exactly an editing thing i do.
3) Levels, bring up the white a bit, but dont do it too much (only upto half way) cos it would look dodgy.
4) Film every angle, or buy more cameras. Thats the only answer.
For ur example: Film from the back, do everything. Film from the side, do everything. Film upclose, do everything. Film the distant shot, and do everything. Film close up of actor, act everything.
And by "everything" i just mean stuff thats in shot. If this doesnt help at all, ur expecting too much from our answers.
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Darzeth
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RE: Editing question

Post by Darzeth »

that info really helped me out im gonna try, at the current time we cant afford a new camera but we will try to film every shot from multi angles we just got to make sure we dont have a cat in one shot then re film it and the cats not in it lol. But thx that really helped. Also to add i use adobe premiere elements which is a lesser version of premiere pro. How do i acces color correction in after effects
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RE: Editing question

Post by rhys »

Use premiere, after effects is un-needed.
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RE: Editing question

Post by pwnisher »

for lightening and darkening scenes try brightness and contrast. I like that a lot and for the multi angle you will have to film it once from each angle and then mix them together.
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MasterMike
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Post by MasterMike »

Can I make a point about day-for-night colour grading - please please please, only use it if you HAVE to. If you can film a scene when it's dark and use artificial lighting to illuminate your subjects, then do.

Day-for-night CAN be done well. After some experimentation, I've done it for my most recent film. However, I deliberately used minimal lighting and underexposed the camera so I didn't blow out the white balance. That's the most important thing to worry about with day-for-night : if your whites are blown out, then it's unlikely you'll get a decent result.

Here's a before-and-after picture of the pseudo day-for-night to give you an idea of some lighting conditions that work.

Image

The change was achieved by brightness-contrast adjustment, levels & colour balance, then some solid layers to darken some areas and some creative use of transfer modes.
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Post by rhys »

The bottom one looks blurrier, which makes the knife look less scary.
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Epsilon
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Post by Epsilon »

Night really isn't blue... that's a misconception. What makes a scene appear to be night is harsher lighting from the sides and higher contrasts. Simply making it blue looks like you just made it blue. Night lighting still has a full spectrum of colors.
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Post by MasterMike »

rhys wrote:The bottom one looks blurrier, which makes the knife look less scary.
It's not blurrier at all, but the knife has got part of a black solid layer over it which does dull it slightly. I might rotoscope the highlights on the knife back in, but it's a short shot at the end of a dream sequence so that might not really be neccesary.
Epsilon wrote:Night really isn't blue... that's a misconception. What makes a scene appear to be night is harsher lighting from the sides and higher contrasts. Simply making it blue looks like you just made it blue. Night lighting still has a full spectrum of colors.
Well, yes, it does, BUT our eyes don't pick it up well. At night, your photoreceptor cells are absorbing far fewer photons, and as such, only the receptors that are specially adapted to work in low-level light are efficient in these circumstances. These are rod cells, and they are far more sensitive to light, but are not well-adapted to percieve colour. To see colour properly requires a brighter light source so that the cone cells can become active.

The cone cells are located mainly in the central vision, which is why in low light levels you can actually get a better look at something if you don't look directly at it.

So, as film makers, we have a choice. We can make our image very dark by simply taking the luminosity down, or filming in abject darkness. This would simulate real-world night-time much more effectively than editing in post or creative lighting. But, would your audience appreciate having to squint for details, or, indeed, not looking directly at your image to get an idea of what's going on? Of course not. We do the work that the eye would otherwise do for them, and reduce the saturation of the image to get an approximation of the rod cells of the eye percieving brightness but not colour, and we take the brightness down a couple of notches. If we're good, we also be careful to maintain bright highlights in the image. The blue tint IS a fallacy, yes, but one which is used substantially in film (which is pretty much based around fallacies), because of its association with, for me at least, cold.

I didn't "just make it blue" - I've upped the contrast, and added dark solid layers to make parts of the image disappear into black.
Last edited by MasterMike on Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Epsilon »

Dispite what your eye may actually pick up in darkness, in real life... ask yourself what is more desirable as a viewer? There is far more than simply making an image dark and tinted...

For example, look at this scenes and ask yourself how they might have been done:

http://images.allmoviephoto.com/2002_We ... er_002.jpg
http://images.allmoviephoto.com/2002_We ... er_004.jpg
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Post by MasterMike »

Epsilon wrote:Dispite what your eye may actually pick up in darkness, in real life... ask yourself what is more desirable as a viewer? There is far more than simply making an image dark and tinted...

For example, look at this scenes and ask yourself how they might have been done:

http://images.allmoviephoto.com/2002_We ... er_002.jpg
http://images.allmoviephoto.com/2002_We ... er_004.jpg
Could those be rehosted? I can't get either of them from my connection.
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Post by Epsilon »

Just "Right Click" and select "Save Target As..."
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Post by MasterMike »

After some messing about I finally managed to download those pictures.

Those were both done by quite simply filming in darkness and having some foreground light. Great if you've got the light. Even better if you're recording on film. But, for me personally, it doesn't look natural. Unless the lightsources are explained by actually showing them somewhere in the shot (I haven't personally seen We Were Soldiers, by the way). Looking at it, it does look like they'd be standing next to an artificial light anyway, so the point is moot.

Something else I forgot to mention is that your average miniDV cam, like the one I recorded on in the example I used above, do not work well at all in low-light conditions. Filming darkness tends to get you horrible noise, since your average CCD simply isn't designed to film in those conditions. So, we elected to film while it was fairly dark, underexpose the camera, light it as if it were natural light coming in through a window, and grade in post. The full spectrum of colours is still there, abeit heavily desaturated and colour-balanced towards blue.

You note earlier that you can achieve better night-time light by harsh contrast and side-lighting. In my daytime scenes in the same room, the light is more from above. For the night shots, as you'll notice, we changed our lighting to be much duller and from one side. For this shot, there is a storm going on outside, and there are supposed to be no artificial light sources, just the diffuse light from the moon. It has the occasional really bright lightning illumination too, done with a 500-watt halogen bulb. If we were closer to release time, I'd post some footage (I think it looks really nice in motion) but sadly we're not.

For films with fantastic day-for-night, I'd suggest watching Contact, which has a great scene filmed in broad daylight in the desert which was post-graded to look like dawn / night-time, and Cast Away, which has four or five scenes night-graded and is the best day-for-night I've ever seen. Cast Away's day-for-night is closer to your blue tint than Contact, since the day-for-night stuff done in Contact was supposed to be at about 4 AM in the burning hot desert of New Mexico. Colour temperature is very important.
Last edited by MasterMike on Wed Jan 31, 2007 8:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Epsilon »

Even if you have a lower end camcorder, you can still manually set the exposure. If it's set low enough, you won't tap into unnecessarily raising the Gain, and therefore making it grainy. However, it will require some extra lighting. Cheap industrial work lamps are great for that purpose, but you can't leave them on indefinately or risk burning down the house.

Lighting isn't "duller" at night... not at all. It's the crispness that creates the illusion! Make harsher shadows and limit what you diffuse. A softer look gives the appearance of daylight.
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Post by MasterMike »

Epsilon wrote:Even if you have a lower end camcorder, you can still manually set the exposure. If it's set low enough, you won't tap into unnecessarily raising the Gain, and therefore making it grainy. However, it will require some extra lighting. Cheap industrial work lamps are great for that purpose, but you can't leave them on indefinately or risk burning down the house.

Lighting isn't "duller" at night... not at all. It's the crispness that creates the illusion! Make harsher shadows and limit what you diffuse. A softer look gives the appearance of daylight.
I'm sort of hoping you'll critique the shot I've done :) I've even gone so far as to manually roto some layers of black onto the "finished" grade, which took quite a while.

The light was actually much brighter than it seems in the picture, but I deliberately under-exposed it to get the effect I wanted. It's all depending on how you define "duller", but there's certainly a point at which the human eye fails to create the action potentials to recognise light, and you get pure black. For my shot in particular, the light is diffuse, but I'm not sure how you're defining "dull" here.
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Post by Hangman »

Mastermike you are right about the eye seeing more blue at night, when the moon is full or almost there. But a full moon wouldn't be that blue and the room looks to lit up for the moon to be the light source. Personally I would lighten up the amount of blue and make the scene a little darker.
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Post by MasterMike »

Heh, that was posted months ago - in the intervening time the blue has indeed been toned down slightly, and the overall thing is dimmer. Still brighter than you'd get in a real nighttime situation, but there you go.
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