Chris has a show coming up called “Dreams and Wonders”, which is taking place on October 30th at the Pantages Playhouse in Winnipeg. The proceeds for the show are going to the Children’s Rehabilitation Foundation and we are going to be doing a live multi-camera taping of the show, it is going to be a great night!

In preparation for it we’ve been creating some video and graphic animations to make elements that can be used in the promotion of the show around the interwebs.

This video was shot in HDV and captured in Avid Media Composer and then exported to After Effects. In After Effects we used masking, keying with Keylight and particle generation with Trapcode Particular to come up with the final product.

Check out this video to see the progression of the animation that we created, from the original shoot to final product. And please check out Chris’s show, it will be a night of wonders!

It took a lot of work to make that happen. I captured all of the material into Avid, added the generate>timecode effect and then exported out QT References. By doing the export I was able to render all of the sequences at the same time. Rending a timecode effect on 8 hours of footage, even on fast system, is going to take some time. I went to sleep and when I woke up, voila, it was done.

I took those QT reference files and brought them into Sorenson Squeeze to create the MPEG2 files I would need for DVD. Rendering all of those hours of footage into good quality MPEG2′s was going to take a long time as well, so I went away for the weekend and let them finish. When I came home, again, voila, it was done!

Tonight I brought all of these videos into Adobe Encore, let the audio transcode within Encore and burnt one disc per original shoot tape. I thought the burning process would actually take longer but it turned out to be the quickest step of the whole workflow.

Now the DVD’s are burnt, printed on (I use ink jet printable DVD’s, looks slick) and in nice cases, ready for delivery to the client.

She was teaching the students how to have great audition and how casting decisions are made; hint – it’s not always about the acting, sometimes it’s the producers niece that gets the role

Jackie was very precise with the feedback she gave, and worked hard to get the best performance out of people. As usual, I learned a lot just from observing the process, which is one of the benefits from helping at a workshop like this.

What I was doing was taking video of the “auditions” by each performer, playing back the takes onto the HDTV monitor that was set-up and helping with DVD playback. I set-up some lighting and used my green backdrop (which I usually use for green screen chroma keying) to add a nice color to the background.

Over the course of 2 days I shot over 4 hours of footage of 15 different actors. I was using the Sony XDCAM EX-1, a beautiful camera I used a few months ago on another FTM production. The tapeless workflow it uses was perfect for this job.

I am compiling all of the takes of each actor into a DVD that will be given to the  attendees. I wasn’t quite sure what the best workflow would be to achieve this. When I ended up doing was unloading the contents of the SxS cards (the format the EX-1 shoot on) onto my laptop and using the Sony Clip Browser software to convert the clips to the MXF format, which is what Avid Media Composer (my editing software) uses. One they were converted I imported them into the Avid and put all of the takes from each actor onto their own timeline. Up to this point everything is in High-Definition, 720p 24fps.

I am now in the process of exporting QuickTime movies in Standard Definition which I will then import into Sorenson Squeeze to create the MPEG files used for the DVD authoring. From there, the MPEG files are imported into Adobe Encore for DVD authoring.

Wheh! For short projects this doesn’t take so long, but with over 4 hours of material this process does slow down a bit. I’m still experimenting with ways to make this workflow more efficient.

So in a few days (likely early next week) all of these lovely actors will have DVD’s from this session, so they can see the progress they made through 2 days of rigorous training.