Back from the dead

Hmm, lets see... many months have passed. During this time, I have
a) hung out with my girlfriend
b) gone to Japan
c) done work on the video
d) worked at my design director day job
e) done a lot of other (paying) work to pay off debt and buy hard drives
f) set up my own homepage at www.boacinema.com

My friends who were supposed to help me out on the visual effects got tied up doing pre-vis and vfx on a couple of indie features - Aeon Flux, Mission: Impossible 3 and Domino. Then they went on holiday to France.

So, we are a litle behind schedule. Recently, though, I got a celebrity email - Mike from www.hdforindies.com emailed me asking about what has happened to my blog - and this has galvanized me. A bit.

So, check back in a year and maybe there will be some really cool stuff here. Until then, use the new Primatte 3 keyer if you are dealing with HDV footage. It is often even better than Keylight plus Magic Bullet.

TECHIE ALERT! I've been asked about my post-processing techniques. At the moment, I am using a light de-interlace that gets rid of the heavy motion interlacing, then using de-artifacting plugins to get rid of any light interlacing and weird edges that remain. This is counter-intuitive, I know. In theory, I should first do a DCT block removal then de-interlace then post-process but so far this the backwards method is getting the best results when I automate it over long chunks of footage. If anyone has had greater success doing things the right way round (or otherwise!), email me!

Here's a 10-minute key (literally 10 minutes!) of HDV footage.

Some people have said that HDV is impossible to key. Not true. It's not as good as film / HDCAM but it's not as bad as DV. Maybe it's because we had a great DP. Maybe it's because we shot in PAL for 24p. Maybe it's the workflow and the post-processing I'm doing. I don't know. But keying is working (for moving shots too!) and we're having fun.

A sample frame from our footage (enhanced from the source using a special process), scaled down (to 900x506) from original HDV resolution (1440x1080) and re-compressed. Not as good as HDCAM or Varicam footage, but definitely way better than DV.

WELCOME!

This page is going to get hot. At the moment, we are still waiting for the edit, so visual effects haven't started in earnest yet. When they do, we are going to push the limit artistically and technically we are going to use every trick in the book. Things should get fun soon.

This is an open project. If you want to join the team, email me, Bruce Allen, at boacinema@gmail.com and I'll get back to you right away.