D Setup

[Darren Kitchen]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenkitchen/145358918/

[Technologique]

.. The Technolust is strong with this one :D

Nice setup D

[BraytonAK]

Great Jumpin' Jigawatts! The walls are a bit sterile, but it sure must be nice to be surrounded by so many toys.

Your photography shots are great!

[sentinel]

niiice!

great tagging! :)

[TheZ]

I am going to com eout with my setup as soon as i can find a digital camera.... :oops:

[Darren Kitchen]

Walls are a bit blank right now as I'm redoing them for season2. need fresh inspiration. new season, new surroundings. i hope you guys like the new sets too. we'll be flickring the development of Hak5 set 2.0

[spektormax]

hey darren, is sony vegus any good, I've never used it but you sound all liek ober pro... and stuff, and like you pwon noobs in it...and stuff

[Darren Kitchen]

aside form the noob pwning, Sony Vegas ROCKS. It's the most intuitive and powerful video editing system I've ever used. Some may argue that Avid or Premiere or Final Cut Pro are more powerful, but by how much? And does 10% really matter when a mortal can actually learn Vegas without a 700 page manual anyway? Plus it's less expensive to boot. I give Vegas 11 out of 10 stars.

(Though FCP is my second choice)

[VaKo]

How does vegas compare to After Effects? I know its more of a composition thing, I've used After Effects for the majority of my video editing, just seems to work damn well.

[Darren Kitchen]

Cant comment on after effects as i've never used it. from what i hear its a badass tool for doing special effects. what's your take on it?

OT: I'm in need of a compositing tool that will allow me to add gunshots to digital.

[metatron]

I’ve used both and I like Vegas more, it’s faster and easer to use.

[T8y8]

I'm a fan of Vegas as well. Pro isn't bad once you play with it, but Vegas has just got a spark in it.

[armadaender]

Darren - Nice pictures on your flickr account, you're quite the photographer.

[VaKo]

Cant comment on after effects as i've never used it. from what i hear its a badass tool for doing special effects. what's your take on it?

OT: I'm in need of a compositing tool that will allow me to add gunshots to digital.

From what I've seen, After Effects is more like photoshop for video. Never done a video longer than 15 mins with it though. For putting together shots that don't don't need much tweaking its probally overkill though.

But if you want to radically alter the footage (ie make blacks black) its so much easyer to use. Although the new rounded mac-style interface to version 7 is pants... Would rock on a multimonitor setup.

As for gun shots, there's always rotoscoping... ;-)

[Darren Kitchen]

rotoscoping. now thats something I'd truly love to try. What was the name of that recent film that was all rotoscoped. Did I miss it? Is it even out yet. Damnit, had some good actors in it too...

The hardest part about the gun shots is keying them with the action. if the camera is panning left and the motorcycle being shot up is driving away the bullets cause sparks which need to both move with the camera and get smaller.

Armadaender, thanks I have a lot of fun with it. Take 100 and keep 10 :)

[VaKo]

A Scanner Darkly Not missed it yet, it was due for a 2005 release but the animation team was far to small & unorganized.

As for gun shots, it depends how much effort you want to put into them. You can use off the shelf stuff like EffectsLab that just draws them. But since a muzzle flare only lasts for a few seconds you could just photoshop them into each frame. Or create them in a 3D modeling program like lightwave and composit them in frame by frame with something like Sapphire Plug-ins. Depends what works faster for you though. What are you going for? Realism or style?

I've always wanted to try making a movie out of 6mp stills, but with people in it. Kinda like the Smashing Pumpkins video for Thirty Three (made by Yelena Yemchuk).

[Darren Kitchen]

turning stills into movies is fun, especially once you get photoshop involved. your imagination is the limit and framerate doesnt matter.

I was actually talking about gun bursts on the ground, walls, other objects. the sparks. we dont have money to do them in RL so they have to be done digitally. as for the muzzle blasts i figure photoshop would work but I also have to account for the lighting on the characters face while the gun blasts. without it the shot looks uber fake.

im going for realism, however if i dont quite make it i'll just say it was my artistic interpretation or something of the sort ;)

[VaKo]

Hmmm... a cheap way would be to mark the impact points, (with a dot of marker or white-out), and then track that point across the scene (frame by frame, then generate a path from it). Then parent the composite impact animation to that tracking point and manually tweak the depth/distance from the camera. Then just blend the compsosite image in with a bit of rotoscoping on each frame for a perfect finish. Time consuming, yes.

[metatron]

There’s properly something like REALVIZ MatchMover that will do that quickly.

[Darren Kitchen]

Agreed thats the way to do it and I don't mind spending the time keyframing, I'm just wondering what FX programs would do the job best. Vegas is a great NLE but AFAIK this is out of the scope.