On my previous post I mentioned something in passing about PC brightness versus Mac brightness. Hache asked if the PC/Mac brightness was a Machinima specific thing (in the comments.)
The PC brightness versus the Mac brightness is a general display difference (at least in the default settings.) I first came across this back in the days of the "Browser Wars". Web pages that looked great on a Mac would be way to dark on a PC.
I still find this to be the case that the PC displays things (with the default monitor settings) much more darkly than the Mac does. This is true on both of my XP boxes, a laptop and a desktop.
CGSD has an article about how to adjust gamma for web images images to look good on both PC and Mac. It also points to a few other resources on gamma and explains why the difference exists.
Interestingly the article implies it is an issue of graphics cards but with Macs moving to Intel, and there being PC/Mac cross compatible graphics cards I wonder if it is more a backwards compatibility reason now. You don't want the gamma on everything to suddenly shift if you are on the same platform.
Obviously you can calibrate the monitors differently but most users are going to go with the default calibration, so it is good to know what the differences are. It would be cool if there was an easy way to set up monitor calibration files for both the "mac" view and the "pc" view and swap between them if you are developing graphics and video for the web so you don't need to test it on two machines.
Actually I would be surprised if information on how to set up the two calibration settings didn't exist, but having never looked extensively into calibration (and not having success on a quick Google) I don't know where one would find the settings (other than creating them yourself.) Anyone out there have experience working with the PC/Mac gamma compatibility?
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
Mac Video and Machinima Pointers
Well last night I have a bit of adventure in video editing, and its cause was something I've run into before but just didn't catch this time. Since the best mistakes to learn from are from other peoeple's mistakes I thought I'd share what happened, how I got there, and how I fixed it.
I'll also share some observations from my first attempt at Machinima (movies made using 3d games or virtual worlds)
So the first part will be Mac specific, the second part more generally applicable.
This was a pretty simple project. Take video of a walking tour, take snippets and make a reasonable short video of the tour. I thought I'd do this in iMovie08 1) because FinalCut Pro isn't on my machine and 2) FinalCut Pro sounded like way overkill.
I imported my .mov files into iMovie08 (after having fiddled with them briefly in iMovieHD). I started editing but soon found that every click and movement of the play head resulted in the machine stopping for a good 5-10 seconds. (Spinning beachball.) With about an hour of screen capture footage that was to be cut down to 5-10 minutes things didn't look good.
I finally gave up, exported the video I had made thus far (to preserve voice overs) so I could import it into FinalCut Pro.
And that was when it all became clear - there was no video on the export. Audio was fine but the video was all blank. The codec that the original video was in was one that iMovie08 doesn't like. The solution is - convert the video to something iMovie does like, like H.264. (There are probably other codecs but I know that one works.)
A bit of converting (using Quicktime) and re-importing and iMovie was all happy.
The way I got here was I used Snapz Pro X to capture the video. The default codec that the version I have choses when encoding video is not one iMovie likes. However, when you go to save the video you can edit the video encoding settings and save as H.264 - and you will save yourself a lot of headache.
(And as an addendum. I just found this awesome blog, Unlocking iMovie '08, with lots of good pointers on iMovie08 - including info on features you might think are missing but aren't.)
As I was editing the video I was reminded how it takes practice to take in a scene and see what the camera sees instead of seeing the filtered scene that your brain presents to you. Our mind does a great job of filtering out noise but that isn't what you want on film. Experienced film makers probably know this all intuitively but for the rest of you I'll share my bloopers.
1) Turn off distracting information - I remembered to turn off the display of HUDs, but I left SL voice on - which since I wasn't actually recording the SL Voice resulted in a unnecessary lovely white dot above my head and in odd places in the scene. Turn off extra displays, look again, and then make sure there isn't anything you missed before going on.
2) Look at your lighting - Most of my scenes were fine, but in one area it was night with minimal external lighting. I adjusted the exposure on that scene, which resulted in blown out colors but otherwise the details of the scene would have been near invisible on a windows PC. I could reshoot but the smarter thing would have been to notice the light and done something about it before shooting the scene (force sunrise/sunset)
3) Lose the pointer arrow - Most of my scenes I did ok with this, but in one scene I have this little arrow moving occasionally on the screen. There are times you can't avoid this but use what tools you have when you can (e.g. camera controls) and don't just randomly leave the mouse pointer in the middle of the screen.
I'm sure I'll learn more with my next machinima, but those are my lessons from this round. I hope they proved helpful for at least a few of you. And if you have pointers for me feel free to leave them in the comments, or drop me an email. (goldiekatsu at gmail)
I'll also share some observations from my first attempt at Machinima (movies made using 3d games or virtual worlds)
So the first part will be Mac specific, the second part more generally applicable.
This was a pretty simple project. Take video of a walking tour, take snippets and make a reasonable short video of the tour. I thought I'd do this in iMovie08 1) because FinalCut Pro isn't on my machine and 2) FinalCut Pro sounded like way overkill.
I imported my .mov files into iMovie08 (after having fiddled with them briefly in iMovieHD). I started editing but soon found that every click and movement of the play head resulted in the machine stopping for a good 5-10 seconds. (Spinning beachball.) With about an hour of screen capture footage that was to be cut down to 5-10 minutes things didn't look good.
I finally gave up, exported the video I had made thus far (to preserve voice overs) so I could import it into FinalCut Pro.
And that was when it all became clear - there was no video on the export. Audio was fine but the video was all blank. The codec that the original video was in was one that iMovie08 doesn't like. The solution is - convert the video to something iMovie does like, like H.264. (There are probably other codecs but I know that one works.)
A bit of converting (using Quicktime) and re-importing and iMovie was all happy.
The way I got here was I used Snapz Pro X to capture the video. The default codec that the version I have choses when encoding video is not one iMovie likes. However, when you go to save the video you can edit the video encoding settings and save as H.264 - and you will save yourself a lot of headache.
(And as an addendum. I just found this awesome blog, Unlocking iMovie '08, with lots of good pointers on iMovie08 - including info on features you might think are missing but aren't.)
As I was editing the video I was reminded how it takes practice to take in a scene and see what the camera sees instead of seeing the filtered scene that your brain presents to you. Our mind does a great job of filtering out noise but that isn't what you want on film. Experienced film makers probably know this all intuitively but for the rest of you I'll share my bloopers.
1) Turn off distracting information - I remembered to turn off the display of HUDs, but I left SL voice on - which since I wasn't actually recording the SL Voice resulted in a unnecessary lovely white dot above my head and in odd places in the scene. Turn off extra displays, look again, and then make sure there isn't anything you missed before going on.
2) Look at your lighting - Most of my scenes were fine, but in one area it was night with minimal external lighting. I adjusted the exposure on that scene, which resulted in blown out colors but otherwise the details of the scene would have been near invisible on a windows PC. I could reshoot but the smarter thing would have been to notice the light and done something about it before shooting the scene (force sunrise/sunset)
3) Lose the pointer arrow - Most of my scenes I did ok with this, but in one scene I have this little arrow moving occasionally on the screen. There are times you can't avoid this but use what tools you have when you can (e.g. camera controls) and don't just randomly leave the mouse pointer in the middle of the screen.
I'm sure I'll learn more with my next machinima, but those are my lessons from this round. I hope they proved helpful for at least a few of you. And if you have pointers for me feel free to leave them in the comments, or drop me an email. (goldiekatsu at gmail)
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