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February 28 2008
Sep. 16, 2013
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Put Your Photos on TV, Part 1
Pages: 1, 2, 3
I try to avoid too much fancy stuff, because it looks amateurish. Mostly, I go for sweeping images, landscapes, and close-ups of my cats. I will occasionally do three or four close and closer crops, which when dropped into the timeline, give a nice "zoom in" or "zoom out" feel.
(When you get to the editing phase, the default for most video editing programs is that the images will align in the timeline in alphabetical order by file name. Keep this in mind when creating groups, such as increasingly close crops of the same image. Name them something like FlowerClose1.jpg, FlowerClose2.jpg, FlowerClose3.jpg, etc.)
You can also time-compress sections by using the "time" function in your video-editing program and sub-rendering a sequence. I did this with motion video on this YouTube video shot from the car while my wife drove, called Mister Peep's Wild Ride.
Why I Avoided Pan-and-Scan
A few years back, I produced a beautiful, artistic, soft-core fetish/fashion DVD called Living Through Steve Diet Goedde. It features photos by my famous photographer friend Steve Diet Goedde. (Some of the images are unsuitable for minors, so click carefully.) I also did all the music, in Sony Acid.
Steve is one of the top photographers in that realm, and his work is shown in museums around the world. He's one of the few fetish fashion photographers who still shoots on film (medium format), and he's renowned for only taking five or ten photos every shoot — and using all of them — because they're all great. (There are a couple of making-of featurettes on the DVD. Check 'em out.) Most fetish photographers shoot digital, take hundreds of exposures on a shoot, and hope the odds are in their favor that a few will be great.
The Living Through Steve Diet Goedde DVD project involved a lot of graceful, sweeping pan-and-scan camerawork simulated in After Effects. It's a unique and stunning use of the technique. But in general, pan-and-scan is extremely overused.
I also opted not to use any video cross-dissolves, because I think they're the most overused technique in filmmaking. Cross-dissolves are mostly unnecessary and they take time to do. I did do a few dissolves on audio, but they're quicker to do, not as obvious, and the show is more about the audio than the video. I also do short — half-second or so — fade-ups at the beginning of audio sections and short audio fade-outs to make things smoother.
Instead of dissolves, I use the more austere technique of a very few (maybe three or four per half-hour, tops), one- or two-second fades to black, and fades from black. And I only do it for a reason, usually dividing sections or "chapters." I'll sometimes even let a little music play softly through the black to keep a feeling of continuity, so viewers don't feel like the movie's over.
The source imagery of Stink Fight — Radio on TV is mostly still photos of me, my cats, wife, friends, and objects in my house, cropped to different and interesting dimensions. I occasionally put in a few moments of video shot with my Canon PowerShot A460, a $110 digicam that can shoot some tiny video. I have to resize the clips up to 720 x 480 and render the video in my editing program to get the footage into my DV project, but it's a nice change from the stills. Here's a video the wife shot with that camera. It's me singing on a hill, a song for my dear deceased daughter.
Image Sizing
Using relatively large images — around 2,000 x 1,000 pixels — is good. (You can use even larger images, but it will make your rendering times longer.) Even though the video editing program resizes all NTSC-DV images to 720 x 480 pixels on output, you will probably want to do some cropping first to get more creative looks, and close cropping can look awesome, especially if you do a series of several closer crops on the same image. Throwing in a small image, like 300 x 200 pixels, can be a nice effect. It's grainy in a computer-destroyed way that looks cool for an occasional accent.
Fuzzy's brother, Peanut McFluffernutter. We pay them in fish heads.
Due to some computer voodoo that doesn't need a technical explanation to work around, TV screens will stretch still images in video a little from what you see on your computer screen. But it works in people's favor, making them a little skinnier, and who doesn't like that? The change isn't enough to look distorted, so I leave it. If you want to compensate for this, crop your images to 720 x 540, and then uncheck the "constrain proportions" box in Photoshop's resizing dialog (Image > Image Size) and squish to 720 x 480. Then it will look perfect on a TV.
Perform the sequence of events you want to record. Go through the steps in program mode, then name and save so the automation is reusable.
The events I choose for preparing for video are:
- Set Auto Contrast (it's subtle, but makes stuff look more even on the TV screen).
- Apply an NTSC filter.
- Make sure everything is sized to 720 x 480.
The Audio Side
The soundtrack of Stink Fight — Radio On TV is mostly the wife and me talking. (I'll share tips for recording high-quality audio at home in an upcoming article.) Some of the audio came from our "Clone the Homeless" podcast, but I created some of it especially for this show. I throw in bits of music I've made, and some trippy effects — reverb, backwards audio, pitch changes — used very sparingly. Our target demographic is insomniac stoners. I used to be one, so I know how they think, and edit accordingly.
(Even for stoners, too many effects in audio and video are distracting and take the viewer "out of the show." Effects are really fun to play with, but don't put too much pepper in the soup.)
Pay attention to the audio format. CD audio has a 44.1kHz sampling rate. DV audio has a 48kHz sampling rate. (DVD is the same.) If you import audio from a CD into some video-editing programs, they will change the pitch and duration to compensate. This will make the audio sound a little "chipmunky" and also remove any sync you have. (That sync issue won't be much of a problem here, as you probably won't have any video of dialogue. But if you do, it could end up looking like a poorly dubbed karate movie.)
Higher-end editing programs like Avid xPress and Vegas Video will often resample audio without time and pitch changes, but lower end "grandmaware" (my word...like it?) programs may distort the audio or simply crash.
You can resample audio from 44.1kHz to 48kHz in many pro audio editors without changing the pitch and duration. I use Sony Sound Forge (Figure 1). There's also Audacity, a free open-source program that I highly recommend. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Fig. 1: The resample command in Sound Forge lets you change CD audio to DV rate without affecting pitch or duration.
Choosing Background Music
Some types of music work better than others under speech. First of all, music with any vocal sounds (singing, rapping, talking, grunting — anything produced by a human voice) is going to distract from talking on top of it.
