An so begins the next phase — marketing and business development — for Autumn Gem. It’s something we’re both excited and scared about at the same time. On the one hand, we’re happy that we’re able to show a finished product that we’re proud of. On the other hand, there’s the chance that people who see it will not like it! We’ve already experienced a tiny bit of rejection with some of the film festivals to whom we submitted earlier in the year. I like to focus on the positive, however, and that’s the task of showing this film to as many people as possible who are interested in learning about this important heroine from China’s history.

We’ll have photos and a recap from the event after tomorrow!

• Deflicker filter
• Motion blur
• Using Motion to animate the scrolling
• Third-party plugins
• Calculating optimal pixels per second for 30fps and 29.97fps frame rates
• Scrolling a giant, vertical graphic made in Photoshop instead of using Final Cut text generators

Despite my best efforts and hours of render time, the credits never scrolled properly on our MXO-powered 23-inch ADC broadcast monitor or when output to a progressive QuickTime movie. They might start out fine, but every few seconds, the screen would suddenly jerk up a few extra pixels, creating an uncomfortable stutter effect.

At this point, I’ve about given up, and that’s a good thing, because I came up with a simpler solution that looks just as good. Instead of scrolling a 10800-pixel tall Photoshop graphic over seventy-two seconds, we’re cross-dissolving eleven credit screens over that same time. This comes out to about 6 seconds per screen, which is more than enough time for our cast and crew to find themselves.

One day, I’ll figure out the magical formula to getting silky smooth scrolling credits. I’ll leave that task, however, for the next film!

This afternoon, I began switching over to using the Outline Text generator. This has a number of benefits, chief among them the ability to add a stroke around each character, which greatly improves readability. In addition, we’ve changed the font style from italic to plain, which reduce jaggies when displaying the film on lower-resolution monitors or on DVD. Here’s what our subtitles look like now:

I’ve been planning to make this change for many months, but I’ve been procrastinating until now, knowing that it would take me about nine hours to change every text clip in the entire film. Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy way to batch convert from one text generator to another. I did find some shortcuts that helped speed up the process:

1. Create an outline text generator with your default settings for font style, size, and stroke width
2. Place the outline text on your timeline and set the duration to be exactly the length of the text you are replacing
3. Copy the text clip that you are replacing (Command-C)
4. Paste Attributes onto the new outline text clip (Option-V)
5. Double-click on the original text clip
6. Copy the text under the control tab
7. Double-click on the new text clip
8. Paste the new text under the control tab
9. Repeat with the rest of your text clips

One annoying thing is that the placement controls are different between the two text generators. For instance, setting a center position of (0, 345) for an Outline Text clip does not line up in the same place as setting (0, 345) with a standard Text clip. This means I’ve had to manually position a number of text clips, a time-consuming process that I really don’t want to visit again!

So, the decision to go from straight text to outline text, while simple, requires lots of time, patience, and verification. In the end, though, it’s the right move, as our subtitles are much more readable now than before.

For those type-inclined, we used the classic font Helvetica Neue for main subtitle font. Hoefler Text was used as our serif title font, and ST Kaiti was used when displaying Chinese characters.

We’ve completed our ADR recording yesterday at Matt’s house. Preston was the final actor to come in and record his lines. Now, Rae and I are off to make the final picture lock on the film while Matt continues his audio mixing magic. Here are some photos from the past three weeks of ADR work with our actors and actresses from Autumn Gem.

Rae and I have learned quite a bit about using Final Cut to create our documentary, Autumn Gem. Here are some tips that will save you a lot of time when putting together your film.

1. Backup regularly
2. Run Final Cut Pro on a clean system
3. Get out of GOP and embrace ProRes 422
4. Use whole integers with Ken Burns Effect
5. Gaussian blur
6. Avoid JPEGs
7. Set subtitle opacity to 90%
8. Using the Outline Text generator for your subtitles
9. Watch your gamma
10. View your footage on a broadcast monitor

Backup regularly

Make sure you backup your video project on a daily basis and have offsite backups. Disaster can strike anytime to your hard drives, and it behooves you to be prepared for the worst.

In the photo to the right, I am taking recent backups of the documentary, system, and photos hard drives off to an offsite location. I rotate through these offsite backups at least one a month. Read this article for more information on my backup strategy.

Run Final Cut Pro on a clean system

Do not run Final Cut Pro on your normal Mac OS X user account. Create a separate video user account that has as little third-party software or system extensions installed. This will ensure that your system is running as optimally as possible. If you run FCP from your regular user account, you may experience dropped frames and other oddities that will have you questioning your twenty-year faith in Apple products.

Get out of GOP and embrace ProRes 422

No, this is not a political tip. If you shoot in HDV, consider capturing your footage using the ProRes 422 codec and get out of GOP (Group of Pictures) hell. We did not do this when we imported our tapes, but we have Final Cut Pro configured to render in ProRes and export into ProRes. For reasons too long to explain in this post, ProRes 422 is a much better codec to use for editing and color grading than native HDV.

Use whole integers with Ken Burns Effect

If you are creating a Ken Burns effect on a photo, ensure that your start and end keyframes in the Motion tab in the Viewer are set at whole integers (i.e. 0, 1, 50, 196, 250, -500). There have been times when the rendered video is jerky or flickering when these points are not set at whole integers (i.e. -1.12, 0.15, 20.56, 512.445). This tip also applies to the scale and other attributes under the Motion tab.

The past several days, I’ve been going through each and every photo in Autumn Gem and resetting these values. Trust me when I say you don’t want to do this after your film has been edited. Do it from the get-go and save yourself a lot of time!

Gaussian blur

Photos are a stable of many documentaries. At times, a finely detailed photo or an image scanned at a high resolution will exhibit flickering when moving on screen. To resolve this, apply a light gaussian blur filter (I use a setting of 1) to the image. This may seem counter-intuitive to those coming from a photography background (tack sharp!), but remember you’re in the moving picture business now where the rules are different!

Avoid JPEGs

I’ve read reports that say to avoid using JPEGs in Final Cut projects because they lead to the possibility of jittering images in interlaced footage. We’ve been using a combination of JPEGs, PNGs, PSD, and TIFF files. So far after using the two tips above, we haven’t seen any issues with our remaining JPEG files. In the future, however, I think I’ll avoid JPEGs altogether and stick with PNGs and TIFFs.

Set subtitle opacity to 90%

Put an opacity of 90% on your subtitles and captions. This helps avoid any broadcast safe color errors.

Use the Outline Text Generator for your subtitles

Originally, we used the standard Text generator to create our subtitles. Later, we switched to the superior Outline Text generator because it allowed us to have a stroke around each character. This delineates your subtitles more cleanly than just a simple drop shadow. The Outline Text generator also allows you to put a background image behind your text.

Watch your gamma

I touched on this in an earlier post, but you should set your Mac’s display to 1.8 gamma when using Final Cut. FCP adds gamma to the canvas, making it appear like a display with 2.2 gamma. If your monitor is set at 2.2 gamma, Final Cut will happily add additional gamma. When you get around to exporting your project, you’ll be confused when the picture looks all washed out in QuickTime Player or DVD Studio Pro.

Even if you have your gamma settings right, you may still need to add gamma correction in Compressor when sending to DVD Studio Pro or when performing a web export.

View your footage on a broadcast monitor

If you really want to see what your film looks like, make sure you are viewing it on a broadcast monitor or an Apple Cinema Display with a Matrox MXO scan conversion device ($999). With the MXO, I can color grade with confidence, knowing that what I see is eventually what I’ll get when I send this to the post-production house for conversion to HDCAM and DigiBeta¹

Note, if you get an MXO, you’ll want to calibrate the secondary display to 2.2 gamma. This seems to fly in the face of the previous tip, but it’s the correct thing to do when using the MXO. Read more about configuring and using the MXO on Ken Stone’s Final Cut web site.

¹ At least that’s what I’m hoping for, as we are planning to do the transfer to HDCAM next month!

Exports from Final Cut using QuickTime Conversion and the ProRes 422 codec look great on my Mac in QuickTime Player. The same sequence exported using QuickTime Movie looks washed out in QuickTime Player unless I have the Enable Final Cut Studio Color Compatibility preference enabled. When I export the film using Compressor, I have to enter at least 1.24 in the Gamma Correction filter. This is done so the colors on the DVD, burned using DVD Studio Pro, don’t look washed out.

This has got to be a common problem for filmmakers using Apple’s professional products. Trial and error seems to be what most people do to get something acceptable across all broadcast medium.

When the final cut of Autumn Gem is complete next month, I’m sure I’m going to revisit this problem again when we transfer the movie to HDCAM and other festival screening formats.

Here’s a screenshot from the Mac OS X Activity Monitor showing all eight cores on our Mac Pro working hard to encode Autumn Gem into a DVD. Our documentary is about 60 minutes long, and it takes roughly two hours to perform a 2-pass MPEG-2 encode.

As of today, we’ve created five different cuts of the film, each one leaner and more representative of the final cut. We’ll soon be calling picture lock on the film, which means no more edits. At that point, the audio will be sent for final mixing and I’ll complete my color grading. We still need to ADR a few scenes, which we plan to record over the next few weeks.

Then, we’ll move onto the next phase, which is figuring out how (and how much it will cost) to get the documentary transferred onto a format suitable for exhibition. Last night, we watched the latest cut on our HDTV, with video piped in from my MacBook Pro. The footage looked fantastic, and I really hope that we can get the picture to look like this on DVD and on HDCAM and DigiBeta (the preferred film festival exhibition formats these days). With the last few DVDs that we’ve produced, I’ve noticed that the colors are more washed out when compared to the Final Cut version. As a result, I’m experimenting with different settings in Compressor, raising the bitrate and dialing in some gamma correction. Eventually, the right combination of settings will come to me!

I’m pretty happy that we’ve been able to stay close to our original project schedule. Six months of pre-production, six months of production, and another six months of post-production. Next year, we’ll be shifting our focus more towards marketing, business development, and screenings. We can’t wait to start screening the film to the general public!

In the film, however, we’re not always looking to have a neutral color tone throughout our scenes. Getting neutral-looking footage, however, makes it easier to color correct — or color grade, as it’s called in the film industry — afterwards. I’ve been using a combination of Final Cut’s Three-Way Color Corrector filter and Apple’s Color application to perform various color grading tasks.

Here are screenshots of a before and after scene from Autumn Gem. The photo on the below is what was recorded by the the camera. As you can see, there is still a slight cast to the photo, even when using the SpectraSnap. I suspect that’s because the lights we used to light the background versus the foreground were different.

The original look of the serving tea scene.

The next photo is the same scene that was corrected using Color. I set up a number of Secondary Rooms to apply color corrections to only specific parts of the scene such as the walls or Qiu Jin’s outfit.

The serving tea scene that has been color corrected using Apple Color.

Once we have picture lock on the film, I’ll continue to color grade certain scenes from the film. Not all scenes require such work, and for those, the built-in Three-Way Color Corrector in Final Cut does as admirable job. For more complex scenes, however, Color is a powerful tool for getting the look that we want out of the film.

¹ Phoxle is run by Chris Pedersen, a friend of mine whom I know from my Camera Owners of the Bay Area user group meetings.

How time flies! A year ago this time, we were planning our trailer shoot and preparing for our trip to China. The film has been built out in six month increments. Rae started pre-production work around July of last year. We started filming in January, wrapping things up around the middle of June. The past six months have been spent in our home office, slaving away at Final Cut day in, day out.

A little over a month after completing our first rough cut, Rae and I are putting the finishing touches on the third cut of the film. Though the running time difference between the first and third cuts comprise just a few minutes, there’s been some substantial changes in the pacing. It’s amazing how trimming a half a second here and there can improve a scene so much! We’ve also moved some scenes around to improve the narrative structure.

I’ve been spending the past several days color correcting the film, trimming edits, and adjusting the captions and subtitles. Every day, we’re getting closer to completing the film, but there always seems to be more things to be added to the task list! Fortunately, the light at the end of the tunnel is just ahead.

We’ll try to post more frequently to the blog from this point forward. Writing is kinda like brushing and flossing your teeth every night; you just have to get in the habit!

It took me 22 hours to go from picture lock to burning the first DVD; the long delay was a result of my supreme struggle to get Final Cut to export the movie without crashing. I searched long and hard for a solution on the Creative Cow Final Cut forum, Ken Stone’s site, Google, and on Apple’s own forums. I eventually settled on using the instructions on Ken’s web site using the Export using Quicktime Conversion command in Final Cut to export the HDV timeline to Apple ProRes 422. To get around the “out of memory” errors, I had to break up the export into several pieces.

From there, I brought the video into Compressor, where I could now export a version for DVD and iPhone. That took a number of hours even with an 8-core Mac Pro! After that, I popped the video into DVD Studio Pro and quickly pumped out a DVD.

With the rough cut complete, we can now show the documentary to our crew, potential donors, family, friends, and other interested parties.