Up until this point in time, I have only created one “screencast” video tutorial on this blog. I have really been meaning to create some more of these type of tutorial videos, because they not only help me in my ability to communicate effectively and teach effectively, but they might actually be interesting to some of the few people who read this little weblog.

This post then, we will consider a step in the right direction, but not by any means achievement of this goal. Namely, I mean that this 2nd Rotoscoping Video Tutorial that follows is exceedingly rough, rambly, random, unrehearsed, raw, borderline-reprehensible, and reeking of underflowed thought-speech-buffer. If you have 30 spare minutes of your time, however, you can get a 1st person experience of not only one of the many things that I have been up to of late, but some information about what rotoscoping is, and how a novice student performs one of the things essential to feature film visual effects.

This is a tutorial primarily centered around the rotoscoping features of the software called Silhouette Roto. A couple of notes: For this screen recording I am using iShowU to capture my screen and my system audio, a decent microphone to record myself, and a software called Mouseposé to show you what keys I am pressing, and what mouse buttons I am clicking. When I press a key, or combination of keys, they will pop up in overlay at the bottom of the screen. When I press the left mouse button, the cursor will be outlined in Blue. When I press the middle mouse button, the cursor will be outlined in Yellow. Similarly, the right button is Red. This should let you know what I’m doing without the need to explain everything.

[Edit -- several months later]: You might also note that the technique of rotoscoping that I am employing in this is somewhat of a “straight-ahead” method, using animation terminology. That is, I am refining the roto shape one frame at a time in one direction. A much better method is to use a “nonlinear” approach, in which one places initial keyframes on key points (extremes) of motion, and then refines the shapes iteratively. This is a better technique because it results in less noticeable motion artifacts such as jittering of points and other inconsistencies of motion.

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Last week was Thanksgiving Break week. I was going to not take a break and spend the entire time in my room working. Then I decided that was a bad idea, and went up to see my Mom for a few days. She lives near Friday Harbor on San Juan island. I did not get nothing done while I was there, however. I brought audiovisual documentation equipment consisting of my Canon HV20 HDV camcorder, my Canon 350d digital still camera, my brother’s laptop and Tascam US-122 audio interface, a Rode NT4 stereo microphone that Peter Randlette was kind enough to lend me, and 2 MCA SP1 microphones that my brother also has, for stereophonic recordings of varied stereo width, or to have mono documentation options.

I captured a large amount of moving water textures at dusk on the ferry trip over that will be useful for the 2nd dream. I recorded audio of water lapping at the ocean shore that is a very good approximation of my memory of the 1st dream. I captured photographs of many moist rocks while at said shore that will also be useful to create the environment of the 2nd dream. I also got to direct my mother as a voice actor, while she delivered her lines from the 3rd dream. Most interesting! I also captured some brilliant wind-in-trees ambiance that will be quite useful for sound-design in the 1st dream. Here is a pointless landscape picture.

When I got back, I had a bit of a difficult time getting motivated. I took Thanksgiving off. I started then working through even more tutorials on Nuke and Maya, delving deeper into the ridiculous complexity of these programs. I discovered by happenstance, a new tool which is magically assistive for tasks involving rotoscoping. It is called Motor, and is part of a suite of tools by Imagineer Systems. What is interesting about Motor is that it uses the companies proprietary planar tracking technology to track the motion of objects in footage, and extrapolate the motion of a 2d plane in 3d space from it. This amazingly accurate track can then be applied to the motion of a rotospline. This effectively means that 80% of the roto work is done for you, and all you have to do is provide the fine-tuning keyframes. This is difficult to explain completely. Once I start roto work on all of the pornography for the elements in the 3rd dream, I promise to post a screencast and show what I am using, and how I’m using it to do what I’m doing.

Then I decided that it would be a good idea to stop burying my head in software for awhile, and start work on my project, bringing about a new paradigm of learning software as a necessity to achieve an end-goal of creating something specific! Always a better way to learn, right?

Fortunately, the first scene is not too hard, and I had a plan of how to do it. This plan involved the creation of a wide-angle still image stitched from many tone-mapped HDR exposures. I resorted to this complex plan of image creation because the picture I had remembered from my dream couldn’t really be captured with … my camera, using conventional techniques. I used the PTgui software to do the image stitching, and Photomatix to do the HDR processing and tone-mapping. This is a similar technique to the processes of gigapixel photography, and the specific innovations of these techniques in regard to visual effects, pioneered by Eric Hanson and compatriots, at XRez. I then took the footage into After Effects and did some 3d camera mapping piled on the filters until it looked right. (After Effects is more suited to this type of effects processing than Nuke, although I did play around with Nuke’s 3D system with this footage a bit).

Soundtrack:

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In a previous post, I briefly discussed some of the specific concerns of working with footage from the Canon HV20. In this post, I will talk about these things in a little more depth, and with some example pictures to more fully demonstrate what I’m talking about.

Here is a full resolution frame-capture of a video stream shot with the HV20 (the image is a link to the full resolution image). All of the images posted here are compressed with jpeg 80% quality, and should have most of their original attributes preserved. Note that the pulldown has been removed with After Effects, and that this was originally a frame comprised of two interlaced fields. Note that this picture is HUGE (1920×1080), so if you have a regular sized monitor, expect to scroll around to look at it completely.

If you look closely at the image, you can discern fragments of interlacing artifacts left behind from the pulldown removal. This happens because the mpeg2 compression of the interlaced image results in fields that are imperfect with macroblocks and other imperfections. This confuses After Effects’ algorithms, leaving behind chunks of image that still have interlaced areas. Effectively this just looks like bits of the image have weird blocks of ‘liney’ areas. Below is a 4:1 crop of the above original frame, doubled in size.

You can notice these artifacts on the edge of the finger. In After Effects, there are plugins to process a frame to remove interlacing artifacts. With one of those applied, the image looks a little cleaner.

There are still noticeable artifacts from the mpeg2 compression. You can make out macroblocking and chroma abnormalities on the thumb and surrounding areas. If you were to look at the individual color channels, this would be more noticeable. Usually the compression artifacts are worse in the blue channel. There is a plugin that comes with the Magic Bullet Suite called the “Deartifactor” that takes a whack at removing compression artifacts such at as these.

Deartifacted:

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Sometimes it is hard to see what the deartifactor is doing in areas of detail. Here is another comparison in another less detailed area of the image.

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

There is also a filter in After Effects called Remove Grain that was once sold as Grain Surgery by Visual Infinity, but is now included for free with After Effects. This plugin is quite amazingly good at removing grain while preserving detail in the image. While the compression artifacting is not quite grain, it does do a fair amount to improve the apparent image clarity, and while it does soften the image some, it can be adjusted for good results.

Remove Grain filter applied:

Here is the final processed image, in full resolution.

Most likely the effective qualitative differences in the image when viewed full-resolution are relatively minor. However, when you get into things like doing dramatic color correction or other processing, or attempting to extract a matte from an image using color keying, it is absolutely essential to have the best quality image that you can to work with. Of course it is not really a great idea to try to use HDV for something requiring excellent chroma key matte extraction, but for 800 dollars, this camera produces some amazing images, and you would be hard pressed to find a better solution for less than several thousand. There is also the possibility of capturing 4:2:2 uncompressed video before the MPEG2 compression stage from the HDMI output of this camera, if you have a Black Magic Intensity card, or an equivalent HDMI capture device, which could theoretically be plugged into a laptop. There has been some experimentation in this area, but little noticeable benefit is likely to be achieved.

As free alternatives for the post-processing of HDV, there is a plethora of possibility with AviSynth and various other freeware windows applications. There is quite a bit of activity around the area of using AviSynth for post-processing of HV20 footage.
The Farnsworth plus Sillyman Process
Automated 24p pulldown workflow using DGIndex and VirtualDubMod
Morgan MJPEG2000 as an alternative HD Intermediate Codec
AVISynth and VDub Templates / Code

To end this post, here are some other full-frame image-captures from the HV20, with no processing applied to them other than pulldown removal and deinterlacing.

An indoor image recorded in low light, showing the characteristic of the camera in high-gain mode, which can be avoided if operated properly.

An outdoor image from the camera on a relatively bright day.

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Often I have come across very intense opinions about the superiority of the Mac user interface. While true with “stock” software options, it is my opinion that when bolstered with certain amazing freeware applications, the Windows XP user interface experience can surpass osX in terms of efficiency of operations. Thus, in the style of those lists that have come before me and informed this list, here are a collection of small utilities without which the efficiency and enjoyability of the Windows XP user interface would indeed be nearly as bad as its reputation.

Interface
xplorer2 – The single best file manager I have ever used, and I have used alot. I wish there were anything that remotely approached an equivalent on the osX side of things. (lite version = freeware, more advanced version is shareware)
Launchy / Colibri – Keyboard launching utilities are the single greatest enhancement in interface technology since … (freeware)
TaskSwitchXP – A superior replacement for the Alt-Tab task switcher built into windows
Stickies – Sticky note program, freeware
EssentialPIM – Calendar / ToDo / Personal Organization utility, freeware

MultiMedia
Foobar2000 – Audio player, encoder, ripper, tagger, cataloger, with many more advanced features (freeware)
VLC – Monolithic multimedia player with Matroska support (freeware)
Mediaplayer Classic – DirectShow multimedia player. Best when combined with the Combined Community Codec Pack (freeware)
XnView – Photo viewer / editor (freeware)
wScite / Notepad++ – Text editors for programming and just plain text editing (freeware)

Network
Firefox / Opera – Web browsers (freeware)
Pidgin (formerly Gaim) / Miranda – Instant messaging multi-protocol clients (freeware)
X-Chat 2 – IRC client (freeware)
uTorrent – Torrent client (freeware)
StrongDC++ – Direct Connect client (freeware)
eMule – eDonkey client (freeware)

Security/System
Sygate Personal Firewall Pro – Firewall
NOD32 Antivirus – Antivirus software

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This last Friday, I taught the third After Effects workshop that I have been a part of, for the benefit of a few students from the Mediaworks program. Myself having been in Mediaworks last year, and having attempted to put together a similar workshop for Mediaworks then, it was great to see all of the people interested in AE in this generation of Mediaworks students. Fortunately, I am a bit better at facilitating such a workshop now than I was then.

As a resource for anyone that might be interested, here is a small section about how to teach yourself how to use After Effects.

How to get help and teach yourself
The most effective way to learn After Effects is to experiment with it and learn on your own. In accordance with this goal, here are some useful resources.

• After Effects Help File
• Everything you need to know to operate the program is contained in this well-written, intuitively organized, and easily searchable help file. Just press F1 while running After Effects, or click Help / After Effects Help.
• Online Tutorials
• http://www.creativecow.net/
  CreativeCow.net has a great deal of superb and useful tutorials. This link is to a list of all of their written After Effects Tutorials.
• http://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast/
  CreativeCow’s new series of excellent video podcast After Effects tutorials.
• http://wikivid.com/index.php/After_Effects
  a compilation of links to introductory After Effects video tutorials.
• http://nututorials.com/subtutorials/AfterEffects/23001/1/10/0
  categorized After Effects tutorials.
  
• http://www.stephenschleicher.com/
• http://aftereffects.digitalmedianet.com/
• http://www.editorsguild.com/
  an introductory tour of after effects, fortified with example projects
• http://www.toolfarm.com/
• http://www.xtreme-is-back.com/
• http://www.pixel2life.com/
• http://www.ayatoweb.com/
• http://www.videocopilot.net/
  a very energetic after effects instructional video creator…
• http://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeportal.html
  a portal to all things AE…
• http://media-motion.tv/
  an excellent and well-trafficked After Effects list-serve.

• Total Training/Lynda.com Training Videos
• These are two great software training video resources, containing ridiculously thorough video training in all things After Effects, conducted by articulate professionals. Talk to the computer center about their subscription to Lynda.com available for the use of interested students.

• Books
• There are many books out there about After Effects, but one of the best is Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects – Volume 1: The Essentials by Trish and Chris Meyer. Instead of just telling you how to perform functions in After Effects, it attempts to teach you techniques for being creative inside the program, teaching you in the context of real-world design problems.

Attached to this post is the After Effects tutorial handout that I wrote for the last workshop I did with Ruth Hayes for SOS: Media, which might be of use to anyone looking for a basic text-mediated introductory reference for After Effects.

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These are two short videos that I created for Safe Harbor. The process that was used to create them is an interesting and likely somewhat unique one, so I thought I would write a bit of an explanation here. First, here are the videos for you to experience firsthand.

Suppress Control

All Cocks Plaster

These videos were created in Adobe After Effects 7.0 utilizing the Expressions, which are just a way to control keyframed parameters in After Effects with a script in Javascript. You can create little ‘expressions’ by using a collection of custom ‘variables’ based on elements of the after effects environment, such as timecode, layer values, etc. Often expressions are used as a way of linking values of parameters together, to make something animate in defined relationship with something else. However there are a myriad of creative possibilities for using expressions in After Effects. Here is what I did to bring about “Suppress Control”. (more…)

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Tonight I performed an experiment with chroma keying the circuit board footage as a test to see how much of an arduous process I am in for over the rest of my post production. This is a still from my footage:

As you can see, the chroma screens are underexposed, as are the subjects, and as a result the image is somewhat noisy, which doesn’t help matters with the already artifacted DV source. Also, there are lighting inconsistencies in the chroma screen. Also, like an idiot, I decided it would be a good idea to backlight the subjects with a blue-gel; I thought this would make my planned key more believable. I thought that because the blue light was from a source other than spill from the bluescreen, it would be okay. It’s not okay. Blue is blue! That must be kept in mind in the future.
(more…)

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