VIDEO AND EDITING

[Syphon]

Hello all
Of course im new to the forum and saber building as well, so i hope im posting this in the right spot. Anway, in about a years time some friends of mine and I will be doing some videos with our sabers and possibly mini movies. I have just begun to look into this process as a hobby. Ill be getting my drimel in a few days for my birthday so I can start customizing my first saber, and at christmas ill be getting a digital video camera. If anyone can offer some tips on video editing, or saber techniques please post some ideas or any info you can offer. Now on the saber side of things, I have been disecting the techiques used in the movies and cartoons to come up with some styles used, I am a student of Iaido(sword) and have a basis on which to go on, but if anyone has any references they can probide I would very much appreciate it.

[Novastar]

Video editing & fight choreography is a pretty large topic to cover. I'll help a little though...

Select your shots WISELY.

As a film-maker, YOU choose what the audience sees and what it does not. The film audience has absolutely no free will to observe what they want--you control it. Keep that in mind. You can zoom, pan, do whatever you like to get a shot--and cut out what you don't want them to see later. You can have an actor standing on a ladder--UNSEEN by the camera's "eye"... or dancing teddy bears behind you. If the camera doesn't capture it... the audience will never know it was there. Use this to your advantage... be creative... ;) ... you might come up with some nifty ways to do interesting "effects"... with zero or little budget...

Use the fact that 2D media... is 2D!

This means, depth perception is lost on film in the Z-axis. WHAT?!! What the heck did I just say. If you think about it, you'll get the idea, although it is difficult to explain here. The shot angle can make things that don't actually "connect" or "hit"... actually appear VERY MUCH as if they did! Do this well--and your fight actors can have quite a buffer of safety space between one another. Granted--there are times when you don't want to over-use this technique. Which brings me to...

Adopt a stage/film combat system.

Whatever you like best... whatever works for you, the actors, and helps make the work EASIER... not harder. Make distinctions of who is attacking or defending at any given moment (or maybe they are BOTH attacking right then!), and aim for targets 85% of the time or more... not sabers. Although a good "beat attack" now and then adds variance and timing changes to a fight.

"Overlap" the beginning and end of any shot--especially during action shots...

Ok... how to say this. If we pretend numbers are "events" during a capture of footage... ok... here's shot #2:
11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 (those are moments of action, NOT CUTS, such as: 11 he steps fwd, 12 turns around, 13 ignites, 14 attacks here, there, swings, blah blah blah)

Ok... read carefully... Shot #1 should contain the following moments:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12

and shot #6 should contain these moments:

19,20,21,22,23,24,25... etc.

This will ensure that (during your editing)... your continuity will be nearly seamless. Why? Well, as you move from one shot to the next--it is very likely that you may need to re-shoot a scene later. This is a very good idea--to re-shoot a sequence/scene many times... sometimes at differing angles... in order to get "the best" one. Who knows, maybe you needed more out of the shot, or... maybe it just sucked... maybe the actor sort of "tripped" over his words... maybe the sound didn't come out right... maybe the script changed later. I don't know. Your reasons will be BOUNTIFUL.

SO--in post-production... when you chain together July 1st, Scene 1 with September 23rd, Scene 2... you will have the LAST few moments of that FIRST scene... and you can pick the exact moment to cut them together without making it feel like things "start & stop" with each take.

This goes without saying that you should:

Make a detailed shot list.

Try to make it work logically to tell the story. There is so much more to say here, but... it just really comes down to... tell the story, build the drama, use the ability to cut from close to far or whatever to make your "symphony" of visual images.

8)

Hope this all helps. Might be overkill for some of you out there, but... I'm also planning to do a short "fanfilm" battle after I release the live performance of Balance of Power III. It has no scheduled release, but... it will take this kind of planning to get it done! :)

[Syphon]

Thank you for that information it will be most useful. I definately understand the angles and photography part. I guess what I am realy looking for is editing graphics. Such as saber glow, sound effects, almost border line CG. Im doing some research in turning my computer and electronics into somewhat of a production set of some sort, but im not sure where to begin with the hardware and software. If you have ever seen "ART OF THE SABER" by the HO brothers that is what im looking to accomplish.

[Novastar]

Rotoscoping. That would be easy for you to find tutorials regarding this... look up Ryan Wieber's roto tutorials for... I think it's Adobe Premiere.

A free program for sabers (but not super-high qual) is called lsabermaker I believe. There is also the "GIMP" for editing graphics as well.

[Syphon]

Thanks I think this will help nicely

[Tom Starkiller]

Ryan W uses After Effects.

He has a photoshop tutorial, which could be used on a filmstrip. There's plenty of tutorials on youtube and about 95% of them are Ryans method or a variation of.

[defyitall]

I usually lurk a lot in these forums since I don't have a lot to add. But since I work as digital effects animator in Post Production I can help out a bit here.

If you are talking compositing, effects, light saber rotoscoping then After Effects is your friend. It's the only program really available for home use that is affordable. Since it has wide spread use it is also easy to find good tutorials on the web, books at the store or library and DVD instruction sets. In the end, it's not too hard of a program.

Not sure what you meaning was about sound effects but if you are talking about just adding canned sounds to something, you can do that in most editing programs. If you are talking about editing sounds and creating new effects then getting something like ProTools LE is the best way to go. It's a stripped down home-use version of the recording and editing program every pro sound designer and editor uses. It requires an I/O box but there's pretty affordable solutions for that.

I'm not a sound guy, I just live next door to one. So if anyone else knows of good home use sound recording and editing programs, please chime in. I only know ProTools and I realize there's probably easier to use and cheaper solutions out there.

You can do light saber rotoscoping in Photoshop as previously mentioned and the new Photoshop CS3 Extended has more enhanced video features. I believe it imports image sequences as footage and allows you to work frame by frame. We have CS3 at work currently but I havent had time to play around with that. Mainly because I'll just use After Effects.

Not sound like I am a Adobe shill or anything, but if you are looking to start up a home "studio" of sorts then getting the CS3 Production Bundle should have everything you'd need for Post Production. Premiere might not be the best editing program for ease of use compared to stuff like Final Cut Pro. But the newer versions have taken a lot of steps forward.

[Syphon]

ok, great
now as for as filming goes, what type of sabers would work best (such as, dowrods, polycarbon). We plan on customizing some LED sabers but i have already made some practice ones with spray painted boomsticks for blades, or does it even matter.

[defyitall]

Filming sake it's up to whatever you're comfortable with swinging around.

Just make sure you can track the blades in the raw footage. Meaning that they don't blend into the background. This can be accomplished by painting the blades, covering them with tape, in ROTS they covered them with shrink wrap or some kind.

When I did some lightsaber stuff with some friends a few years ago with got a pack of that multi-colored electrical tape: red, yellow, blue, green, etc. We put a band of color at the end of the blade, another at the base, and then spiraled another color down the length of the blade.

Might have been overkill but we were able to tell where the tip, blade, and base were when in motion.

We were using wooden dowels btw.

[Tom Starkiller]

It's also incredibly easy to roto LED sabers.

I'm doing it at the minute. The only problem with that though is if it the colour doesn't look good, you can't change it because of the colour on the the footage showing through.

Using electrical tape is what I use personally, blue is very clear on camera and easy to follow, yellow isn't to bad and orange/red and green are common to use as well.

Depending on the background will depend on the colour prop blade you want, it needs to stand out for roto.

And I wouldn't advice painting the blade as it chips everywhere.

[Ghostbat]

I think one advantage of using an led or el saber is that it casts actual light.

That statement seems incredibly obvious but one thing that makes a lot of saber footage look fishy is that there is no cast light from the blade.

[defyitall]

True. There's "real" and there's "movie real."

You can decide which way you want to go. You could shoot with LED sabers and then roto them to enhance the effect and get cast light on the characters and it'll be pretty sweet.

Or you can shoot with dowels or any kind of static blade and roto them and it'll be like the movies. The only cast light from lightsabers in the movies was in AOTC when Anakin and Dooku are singing sabers around in closeups in the Hanger Duel. The actors were swinging neon tubes I believe. And anything with 3D Yoda. Which always bugged me because nothing else catches light from the sabers but they put it on Yoda. Bad decision making there in my opinion.

[Tom Starkiller]

Rotoing on luxeons is very good looking, the glow of the props adds more depth to the glow and colour of your rotoed saber.

If you wanted to, you could use dowels and add interactive lighting in post, but that's the harder way to do it.

You would find it easyer to decide if you did some tests first.

[Syphon]

Great, I think im going to just do some test runs with the video and different sabers to see what comes out best......For my next big question is what moderately priced digital video camera should I get.....im sure everyone has their own openion, but I would like to hear them all.

[defyitall]

The RED camera. It's only like 20 grand and shoots 4:4:4 4k video!! :wink:

[Ghostbat]

Great, I think im going to just do some test runs with the video and different sabers to see what comes out best......For my next big question is what moderately priced digital video camera should I get.....im sure everyone has their own openion, but I would like to hear them all.

I'm a big fan of repurposed security cameras and old 1980s shoulder vhs monsters, but that may not be anything like the effect you are going for :)

[Tom Starkiller]

If it's in your budget, go HD.

If not, then get the best you can or are willing to spend. Looking in camera shops and asking people who work there may help.

Also, you could e-mail a TV Station such as the BBC or whatever you get, and ask for their opinion.

[Syphon]

thank you all for your advise :wink: . Ill be sure that I put it to good use