Our short film premiere on October 6

[Manuel]

Well, our Super 8 film "Walk the Walk" premiered at the Sacramento Festival of Cinema on October 6th:

http://www.sacramento.org/film/pcspromo.html

We were very pleased with the results. It took a number of people by surprise that we shot in S8 since all the other entries to our section of the festival were in DV. We shot the film using Kodak Tri-X. Pac-lab in NYC did the processing and Moviestuff in Houston did the transfers for us.

Right now, were are in the process of re-composing and re-mixing a soundtrack, since we ran out of time and had to rush a fast copy to the festival organizers. We hope to have the FINAL final cut done in January at which time we are going to chase the festival market for screenings. You are welcome to view the trailer at:

http://www.zanyinteractive.com.

Small gauge with a big heart...

-Manuel

[MovieStuff]

Hah! Looks fun! Of course, we tried to figure out the plot while doing the transfers but really couldn't make heads or tails of it. I can't wait to see the final product. Your footage looked really great. Absolutely pristine. Good exposure. No scratches and no specs. Amazing. I wish all our customers supplied film that nice. Annette said it was a pleasure transferring your footage. The last really large project with footage that nice was from Aaron (supa8sixteen).

Please send me a miniDV of the final, will you?

Roger

[Paul L.]

That stuff looks great. I'd love to see it full screen... What was your shooting ratio for the film? What equipment did you use?

[Andreas Wideroe]

Awesome!
I'd love to see the whole film!

[Manuel]

That stuff looks great. I'd love to see it full screen... What was your shooting ratio for the film? What equipment did you use?

We used a Beaulieu 1028xl60 that I bought on eBay. Great camera, rock solid...no complaints. We rented a Lowell light kit from a local supplier for the shoots.

Unfortunately we bought our film smack in the middle of Kodak's cartridge problem. Out of the 74 rolls we purchased during the shooting, 15 were so bad they either chattered and dragged through the camera or jammed completely. A lot of our shots had some jitter which we removed using software which Roger at Moviestuff told me about. It worked well, but we lost more resolution in the process - quite regrettable when you're shooting S8.

We also ended up losing about 14 rolls to bad exposure because I foolishly allowed my hand held light meter to knock out of alignment. So we had to reshoot a month later. I will never make that mistake again.

We ended up with about 110 minutes of footage which we cut down into a 10 minute film. So our ratio is roughly 10:1. I was expecting to shoot around 6 or 7:1 but we gobbled film a lot faster than I thought.

The higher shooting ratio, combined with 14 lost rolls and 15 bad cartridges took us WAY over budget. I ended up spending 3 times what I had originally figured. It was tough to scrape the money together but I didn't want to scrap the project. I'm hoping that some good will eventually come out of it.

-Manuel

[crimsonson]

is there a possibility to get a different file format?
I don't want to install QT6 on my system. QT5 don't support MPEG4.

Thanx.

[Paul L.]

Thanks for the info, Manuel... What did you use to reduce jitter and how successful was it? Did it work on panning shots? Did it require user interaction to complete?

[studiocarter]

Yea, all my screen showed was a white frame while the movie played. How about a mpeg?

[mattias]

yeah, i can't use qt 6 either, since it's not fully supported by fcp (i lose options in video capture). a mpeg-1 version would be really nice, or sorenson or whatever...

/matt

[S8 Booster]

The new QT6 (Quicktime Player - updated) free download plays the film on the MACs.

However, I could not run the .avi file you posted a while ago
(OT: a movie i was involved in is online)
on the "new" MAC QT6 player.

R

[mattias]

The new QT6 (Quicktime Player - updated) free download plays the film on the MACs.

yes, that's basically why it sucks that i'm not able to use it... :-)

However, I could not run the .avi file you posted a while ago
(OT: a movie i was involved in is online)
on the "new" MAC QT6 player.

i think you need divx for that. worked fine with 3ivx and divxdoctor on qt5.

/matt

[Manuel]

Sorry for the delayed post, been more than a bit busy.

Thanks for the info, Manuel... What did you use to reduce jitter and how successful was it? Did it work on panning shots? Did it require user interaction to complete?

We used Dynapel SteadyHand.

http://www.dynapel.com

It worked very well on still shots, medium well on zoom in/dolly in shots and poorly on tracking shots or shots with a lot of camera motion. I found that the default settings were not the best for each shot and had to do a lot of tweaking to get them right.

Our opening shot was a tracking shot with some simple camera tilts that jittered severely because of a faulty cartridge. The combination of tracking and tilting sent the software into a bizarre series of overcorrections that twisted, tilted and zoomed the frame in and out! I played with the settings over and over but was unable to get a good-looking, natural image. Because the shot was critical to the film, I ended up importing an AVI of the shot into Corel Photo Paint and correcting the image frame by frame! 600 frames worth. It seemed to take forever but it was worth it.

As far as requests for alternate formats of the trailer is concerned, I'm playing with different exports and hope to post one on the web site soon. That is turning out to be another project in itself...balancing image quality, sound quality and file size with various formats! The QT6 post is the best image we got for a relatively small file size (it weighs in at 1.4MB). The Sorenson CODEC in Quicktime is very good. Even then, we had to tweak the heck out of it to get the right mix. It just takes too much time. The test MPEG I just made topped out at 6 MB! I can't afford that kind of bandwidth.

-Manuel

[Cheezy]

What about some higher res stills? :lol:

[mattias]

Yes, Sorenson can be a pain to try and tweak, but it's actually not thAt hard once you know what to do. Just set quality to highest, keyframe every to 100, add 10% brightness (don't know why, but it gets too dark otherwise) and tweak the quality using frame rate, image size and byterate only. Start by setting the byterate you need for your desired bandwidth or file size, then try 320x240 at 25/30 fps for broadband or 256x192 at 12.5/15 for modem, and decrease those a little if results look to bad...