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Film-making


Chris B

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5 minutes ago, chokeout said:

im really not sold on 4K just yet. Like you say huge file sizes but the codecs to cram the info onto SD cards means they are horrible to edit and render and transfer. 

One of the big advantages with 4K is the ability to zoom in and crop the frames without losing resolution. Lots of people film in 4K, so they can export it to 1080p.

Edited by Rey_Piste
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4 minutes ago, Rey_Piste said:

One of the big advantages with 4K is the ability to zoom in and crop the frames without losi

Oh totally. Would still export out in 2k or 1080 after the crop though. We did it with an AGM last month. Set up an extra hardside in 4K, added 4 versions of it onto a timeline and zoomed in on each of the people doing a Q and A and created a fake 4 camera setup from one feed. 

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We do much the same - it works well if you’re in a situation where you don’t have any cutaways to work with (despite working in sport you’d be surprised how common this is for us - often down to rights issues and some briadcasters having external archives that take a while to source things). Take your point though chokeout, it hasn’t taken off in the way I expected it to, especially with social becomming more prevelant.

Speaking of social, I’m getting increasing requests to edit things in a square aspect ratio, i.e 600x600 or 1080x1080 for platforms like Facebook/Instagram. Which makes things especially difficult keeping everything in the frame if your camera crew haven’t gone wide enough or haven’t filmed subjects centrally, etc.

On a similar note for social, subtitling is such a ballache now. Totally get why it’s there (Watching videos on Facebook without sound for instance) but it just eats up so much time.

@Chris B Apologies if I’ve taken this thread off course slightly! Do you have any links your work? Interested to see it especially the challenge stuff.

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My ultimate goal has always been to shoot a bunch of shorts (and eventually, features) that I've written, but it's not financially viable yet. Hopefully the Patreon takes hold eventually to the point I can get some decent equipment, but for now, I've just been tooling around making dumb videos with mostly pre-existing footage. If editing full episodes of Noel's House Party down into 3-minute sub-Lynch ambient horrors categorises me as a film-maker, then yes, I am a film-maker. The greatest film-maker in the world!

Edited by Astro Hollywood
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3 hours ago, Rey_Piste said:

One of the big advantages with 4K is the ability to zoom in and crop the frames without losing resolution. Lots of people film in 4K, so they can export it to 1080p.

Yeah, when the GoPro question was asked earlier, I was wondering about the potential to film on something like a GoPro at 4K and then crop. For something simple and beginner-ish, though, it may be creating more problems to solve. Obviously, depends what you want to do.

3 hours ago, Fatty Facesitter said:

@Chris B Apologies if I’ve taken this thread off course slightly! Do you have any links your work? Interested to see it especially the challenge stuff.

Not taken off-course at all - exactly the kind of conversation I was hoping for. I'm just taking in what I can, because I don't know what I don't know.  I'm mainly pleased I understand a lot more of it than I would have when I started out.

Here's my latest, from a couple of weeks ago. This was for the Streatham Film Festival 48hr film challenge, which was small but fun to do. I was given the criteria of a prop (a hammer), a line of dialogue ("Well, I don't trust anything digital anyway") and a location (Streatham train station), then had to write, shoot, edit and submit it 48 hours later. Filmed using the kit I described in the opening post.

 

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I filmed a short horror a few months ago, it was the first time attempt at a short. However struggled with film editing programmes, being a bit of a computer dunce. Any recommendations for very simple editing programmes for beginners? Something a small step up from Windows Movie Maker...

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57 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I filmed a short horror a few months ago, it was the first time attempt at a short. However struggled with film editing programmes, being a bit of a computer dunce. Any recommendations for very simple editing programmes for beginners? Something a small step up from Windows Movie Maker...

Openshot. It's free and really easy to use.

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If anyone ever has the misfortune of using a programme for live-clipping called Tellyo - be warned. It’s fucking horrendous. My day off today has been completely struck off due to numerous issues with it, plus some awful clips provided by an external company and a rotten FTP server. Jumped through so many hoops I’m in the circus. Very close to throwing my monitor out of the window and into the path of the 93 bus that passes through South London.

Help. 

#LoveMyJob

Edited by Fatty Facesitter
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I did start a thread about editing or similar, a long while back — I regret to admit that I'm still useless and haven't even shot stuff to edit. I am forever hopeful that I'll wake up a different person one day, spend the $20 or so that I need to get a VHS camcorder, and that's the final link in the chain that leads to me shooting scads of footage, and self-teaching Premiere Pro and After Effects, in order to become a real pretentious twat.

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As a real pretentious twat, if you have a recent-ish smartphone, you're already in the game. I'd also really recommend checking for anyone doing film-challenges. The London Documentary Network does semi-regular 'Doc in a day' challenges, and will place you on a team - it's a nice non-pressured way to make a start.

My latest bit of micro-budget purchasing was this - an Ice Light. They're about £15-25, and make for a nice flexible addition. They don't have as many settings as would be ideal (3 cold, 3 warm), but it did the job.

I lacked filters for the lights and wanted a blue night-time look, so I bought a couple of blue plastic transparent document wallets from a newsagent and cut them up. Made a couple of inserts for the small LEDs, and taped the largest piece around the ice light. Worked a treat, although I'd hesitate to use them on anything that generated any real heat.

 

Edited by Chris B
Adding in the bit about the challenges.
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Just got back from 12 days straight of filming and my back is an absolute mess. Send help. 

Can anyone recommend a cheap and decent shoulder mount? It will save me lugging around a massive tripod all the time which I would necessarily need to use as often if that was an option.  

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For those interested, I didn't get the most straightforward criteria for yesterday's 48hr challenge kick-off:

Genre: SPORTS or WESTERN

Character: Norah or Noah Borgen, a Spy.

Prop: A London Souvenir

Dialogue: 'It's like you always said"

 

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Some people seemed interested in the low-budget side of film-making, so I put together some production notes on my most recent short. It was a small horror film, and I went through the kit I used, how I set it up, and what I learned from it. If I do more of these, happy to share more as well, but wary of turning this too much into a shilling thing.

https://medium.com/@ChrisBrosnahan/production-notes-1-flash-c586c8106eb9

 

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I've started trying to get back into writing and filmmaking after too long away. I've bought a Lumix GX80, and a new laptop that can handle 4k editing. I've used Premiere Pro, Vegas and FCP in the past, was never a whizz with any of them. This time, I've downloaded Resolve - not shot anything of note on the camera yet, so just tested the software with some sample 4k clips from the Internet. Outputting at 4k didn't seem to work very well, not sure if it's because it's the free version of Resolve. Outputting at 1080 was fine.

For sound, I'm going to be getting a Zoom H4N, I think. The H2N never worked with my shotgun mic, because the preamps were too low I think.

I'm planning on shooting a short before Christmas, a webseries in Jan/Feb, and a lo-fi feature in New York around WrestleMania time.

Need a shoulder mount.

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