the funklab

We’ve gone and updated the promo for the Sons of Korah LIVE DVD. I really think its a huge improvement. Adding in some soundbites of Matt’s interview really enhances the experience and using the footage from the DVD (Psalm 137) polishes it up.

Check it out on vimeo or youtube

A little progress report on the Heaven and Hell Production. We’re currently two thirds of the way through editing. We’ve colour corrected the first third and are debating on using Matts in the second third (Matts are used to hide a certain bit of image. We’re using them to help us out with adding mood to a shot).

Next challenge comming up is the getting the actors to jump in the recording studio, as we had problems with our on set sound setup.

Things are finally comming together.

So, it has finally finished.

The NTSC version has been seent out to be replicated and will be distributed there soon.

Working on this project has been one of the most stretching and rewarding experiences.

There are some productions that you totally immerse yourself in. Day and night, it’s all you think about. Going through each day, you mentally cut shots, move edits, and play the whole thing in your mind. It churns inside your head, simmering like a great bolognese sauce, each flavour adding to the other. The music and vision get into your soul and meld together.

Then you sit behind the computer. Its all easy then. You cut what you’ve seen in your mind.

It’s funny how when you create something, its like a little piece of you is in there.

I love making life.

Back sometime in 2004, the mustard crew banded together and put on a whole series of shows down the east coast of Australia. It was the release of Brethrens new album Beyond Underground. Hoodsta and Playdough came along. Playdough is a great artist from the states, and one of the things that we did was make a music vid clip for him.

saddle up, by playdough

We picked some great locations (This is it in richmond and Giant in west melbourne) and shot it all on my PD 150. Editing was abit messy, as it was a bit of a transition from doing the cutting in premiere and colour correction, vfx in after effects on a pc to using after effects on a mac. In hindsite, it would have been heaps easier if we kept everything in Final cut, and just sent the shots which needed vfx to after effects.

A little messy

But it is now finished

For an indepth update, check out my coconspirator and good friend djp72’s blog.

Well, we’ve worked hard, and all the editing for the DVD is finished. What we are up to now is Color Correcting. We tweak each shot to give it the feel and mood that we’re trying to get for the song. You can view an example of the difference here.

For all you wondering how to go about post production of such a large project (full length live band DVD), here is a little overview of the process.

We shot the concert with 4 Sony HDV Z1’s on the DVCAM setting. The camera is capable of shooting in HDV, but there were a few reasons we decided against that route. First, although HDV records in a higher definition than DV, it is compressed with an mpeg codec. I wasn’t sure about how it would hold up to doing frame-accurate editing. Also, it hogs up alot of rescources while editng, and so with my puny iMac G5 I needed to be as tight as I could be.

The cameras, however took some beautiful shots in SD DVCAM.

We cheated a little bit, and made the band perform 4 times, and only once in front of a crowd. For the crowd shoot, or the ‘live’ night, we turned all the cameras around and did alot of shots showing the band with the audience. The three other performances were when we got all the tight CUs and solos of the guys on stage.

This meant that we were editing a 16 camera live performance. We weren’t really trying to go for total continuity, or the “Carols by candlelight” look. Instead we wanted to treat each song like its own music video, get a certain mood and feel for each one. This is also why we didn’t live video mix on the live shoot.

With 16 cameras, we had plenty of shots to play around with. I ingested each song separately from my own Sony PD 150 to a Maxtor 300 gig via firewire, and that worked reasonably well. I aslo ended up using Final Cut Pro to edit it.

I received a copy of the audio master of the concert from the band and synced each camera up to the corresponding song in its own sequence. As we were using different performances, of course the song was played faster or slower each time, but we just dealt with that as we edited it. If a clip was out when we needed to use it, we just synced it back up. In hindsight, getting the band to use a click track would been the right idea.

Here is a bit of an idea of the desktop. The shots are color corrected, so that’s why they look pretty dope.

I’ll post more about the DVD authoring processes when we are up to it.

Well, its been really busy here at the funklab. We’re trudging through the Sons of Korah DVD, with only about 5 songs left, plus all the DVD authoring. A whole lotta fun editing, but boy, what a lotta work. Soon I will be able to see my wife again.

Right now, djp and I have just finished colour correcting psalm 137 [babylon]. We’re onto ingesting psalm 148 and are havin a laugh listening to the latest diggnation.
Kevin and Alex. Funny guys.

On a geekier note. I’m finding that doing the colour correction in Final Cut much easier than I thought. Previously when I would use premiere I would output to After Effects and do all my colour correction there.

Now, on a mac with FCP the color correction tools are vastly superior and produce (IMHO) a better looking picture. Using this workflow has increased our productivity immensly. We just churned out a song and finished correcting each shot in about an hour.

Check out the finished promo for the Sons of Korah Tour in the USA on their website.

Enjoy

Alright, a special treat for you kiddies. Here’s a rare look behind the curtain of what editing a promo looks like. The program is After effects 6.5. The computer is an 20” Apple iMac 2.1.
You need a bit of patience to do this sort of thing, as you make a change, wait for a render preview, make a change, wait for a render preview, etc.

But the product looks great at the end.