ProLost TV

By the way, those blip.tv videos below are available via RSS. In other words, ProLost now has a video Podcast.*

For now, please subscribe manually in the manner most befitting your RSS deally bob—but I'll have more varied feed options up soon. For iTunes, click here for a 1-click subscription (launches iTunes).

* Damn.

Rebel CC

The response so far on my upcoming book has been wonderful, so I wanted to give you more than a tease of what’s to come. I’m working on my last chapter right now (!), and it’s all about mastering or onlining your film. It probably won’t surprise you that I advocate doing this in After Effects rather than your NLE software. The power and control AE offers is just too much to ignore. But for all that power, there’s one big piece of the puzzle missing, and that’s a simple, elegant, telecine-style color-correction tool for coloring or grading your movie.

Enter Rebel CC. Although not as awesome as a real plug-in, this Animation Preset uses color swatches to drive a Levels effect using rather deep expressions.

You start by eyedropering your blacks, whites, and grays to optimize the image. These steps are optional—you can do them or not, or you can do only one or two of them if you don’t need to do all three. The eyedropper method is a nice fast way to perform the first stage in color grading: grading for consistency.

You perform the next step, grading for look, by using the color picker as a makeshift color wheel. Not as fast or interactive as one might like, but the control is there. You can set colors for shadows, midtones, and highlights, and you can even recover color information that may have gotten lost when you sampled your black and white points.

But why read about Rebel CC when you can watch about it? I made this quick video to show it off:

play

Download Rebel CC and place it in your Presets folder (in your After Effects application folder).

Music: Colour in My Mind by The Youngbloods

(Updated 061022 1:00pm PST to fix a compatibility bug)

See also: Colorista Free

Book Report 2: Guns are Fun

The DV Rebel's Guide is not going to be one of those books that suggests that guns have no place in indie films. On the contrary. In fact, I have such a pet peeve about badly-comped muzzle flashes that I am including a monster After Effects template project with the book. It works a lot like the old muzzle flash Fusion macro I made for DF4, in that all you have to do is paint some soft blobs in the rough areas where you want a muzzle flash and the comp does the rest. You have sliders to control the color, brightness, and heat distortion effects.

Plus, there's a full 3D particle system for the emission of spent shells. This is all rigged up with expressions so all you have to do is position a gun layer in After Effects 3D space and dial in the velocity, wind, and other settings.

All this for 25 bucks? Pre-order now so I get even more panicked calls from my publisher asking where my latest chapter is!

Book Report

My book is almost done. You may notice a slight remodeling of the blog to reflect this.

One of the things I've focussed on is achieving professional camera moves without big, expensive cranes and dollies. From Chapter 5:

I am mildly obsessed with small, lightweight, and above all inexpensive ways to move my DV camera smoothly and cinematically. Even as I sit in my director’s chair on a big commercial, designing a shot with a 30-foot techno crane, I can’t help but ponder how one might build such a thing out of PVC pipe and zip ties.

In addition to sharing some handy tips for creating camera movements with found and inexpensive hardware, I also include plans for building the GhettoCam. I'm really excited about the GhettoCam—my brother and I built it last month and it's been a great little camera stabilizer. And in the spirit of the $14 Steadycam, it's cheap and easy to build.

No, the picture above is not the GhettoCam—but I will be posting some more info about it soon, before the book comes out!