CAP Hollywood. It's pretty cool. Currently, in my group, we're almost done filming. We have to shoot a scene or two on a bus and then we're done filming. I've put the first act into Premiere to start the rough cut. I somewhat trimmed the shots to the parts we need and put a basic color grade on all of them. Unfortunately, I recently learned that the 8-bit color depth h.264 codec that Canon DSLRs record in is just bad. When you apply color grading, it lowers the quality a bit. So now I've gone and converted each clip to 10-bit color depth DNxHD, a free file format used by the Avid software. This is what people've said to be the best besides the highly recommended Apple ProRes 422. But, that's made by Apple, so not really usable on a PC. I think I'll end up re-editing each clip, or at least put in the new clips and just copy and paste the previous color grade on. I also used Adobe Dynamic Link to connect my Premiere Pro project to an After Effects composition. This allowed me to make live changes on After Effects to each clip that will directly show up in my Premiere project. I'm using After Effects for post lighting, possibly color grading, and some other plug-in effects. I might end up exporting my Premiere Pro composition to Davinci Resolve and color grade in that program, re-export, and bring it back into Premiere. But that's a hassle. Enough rambling. I'd say one of the biggest challenges is just keeping organized. Yes, we created preproduction folders with a list of shots and what not. But I'm still constant checking that a few times before each shot, thinking if there are any others I missed or could just do on the spot. It's also difficult to keep everybody organized, not just your own shots and what not, but the people involved. I'm not expecting much more because it's a group of teens, but, still a bit of a challenge. I think I like most of our shots so far, a few glidecam shots that are looking nice. After putting together the rough cut, I'll probably find myself wanting to redo a few or missing a few shots. In which case, I probably will. I just got a slider that I might wanna incorporate somehow. Most of our actors and group have a relatively flexible schedule, it shouldn't be too much trouble. I'm not concerned. Onward.
Um. What did I do. Well. I filmed everything last weekend. I started compiling the rough cut and color grading. I've been working on finding a song or two. I've started compiling the neccessary sound effects. Our short doesn't really have much dialogue or any real noise. I didn't even record audio half the time. I'll probably regret that. But we can easily work around it. We don't really need background ambient noise anyway. If so, I can record a few minutes of it and loop it or something, splice it into a few clips here and there.
Let's see. What needs to be done? I'd like to try and get all our shots done by the end of this week. I'd like to continue the rough cut for Act III if I don't have all of Act II finished. Maybe I'll reshoot a scene or two with a slider. I think we should start emailing various artists to see if there's any way we can use their music. Because I just don't feel like searching through hundreds of CC songs to find maybe one or two I like. Yeah. Lazy. Oh well. People are nice. You'd be surprised. I bet a few will say we can use their music because it's for educational purposes. I got a song with three million views used before so. I want to download some sound effects and put them into the project to see how they fit, etc. Oh. and the movie poster. We were practicing how we want it set up with lights and stuff last week. It looks nice. I promise.
That's about it. I'm noticing the importance of lights for sure though. I got a couple. I really want this to turn out excellent. I think I have way too high standard. That's probably a problem...
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