Author: CharlieKirby

Stop Motion Animation Magic

Spent a lot of weekend editing a stop motion music video. All I can say is that editing stop motion ain’t easy. It’s a process of cutting one frame at a time and fine tuning each frame by hand – so there’s no such thing as instant gratification at all in this. It gets kinds of frustrating because being deeply absorbed in frames, you get tunnel vision and start to see each single frame only for each single frame, as a static artifact with no context, and not seeing that frame’s part in the entire whole. 

But when you work for hours on end, then you stop, hit rewind, exhale, sip in air slowly, press play and exhale while you watch 1 minute your work unfold in front of you ….. it’s 1 minute of the purest magic.

Jane’s Addiction – NYC show – 29 December 2012

Jane’s Addiction show in NYC was nothing short of pure rock and roll magic and larger than life spectacle of cascading reverbed vocals, swirling wall-of-sound guitar, in your face drums, a bass bump you could dance to, supernatural lyrics with the mystical kitch of an Ouija board, nostalgic tales of love, reminiscence on the triumph of romance, beauty throughout youth to age, and Cirque du Soleil like trapeze artists dancing above the audience wearing costumes and masks lifted from a phantasmorgic mind meld of shamanistic psychedelia and boundary streching surrealism.

Biggest ovation of the evening is when Perry brought 2 NYC firefighters on stage and he announced that 100 percent of profits from tonight’s show would be donated to funds to help victims of Hurricane Sandy. ♥ you Jane’s!

Here is a photo that my friend Zach Lear took at the show.

Janes Addiction NYC December 29th - photo by Zach Lear

Here are two photographs of some paintings that Zach Lear did of Jane’s Addiction.  He has more paintings for sale.  If you’d like to contact him, please check out his blog.

Zach Lear painting of Perry Farrell

Zach Lear painting of Dave Navarro

Vignette in Avid Media Composer

How to create a vignette effect in Avid Media Composer

– Put video on V1
– On V2, make “add edits” on clip borders
– In effect palette, add the following effect:  Image> Paint Effect
– Open the Effect Editor
– Zoom out of image using the zoom tool on the right side of the Composer window

– Choose the Rectangle tool
– Set mode to “solid”
– Draw rectangle over image
– Choose color in Effect Editor (usually black)

– Now you can draw the vignette shape (usually with oval tool), so:
– Choose oval tool and set mode to “erase”
– Draw vignette shape
– Select “feathering” and “bias” to your taste

🙂  Charlie Kirby

Unlocking Avid bins on Unity

I’ve been working as an Assistant Editor/Junior Editor on an awesome TV documentary series.  Our storage workspaces are connected to an Avid Unity Connection Manager.  On Tuesday I worked in room A.  Then on Wednesday we moved to room B.  Since we are working on Avid Unity storage, this should be an easy transition.  However, the bins I created in room A were still locked to the user in room A, so I couldn’t use them in room B.  So here’s what I did to unlock those bins.  

I navigated in Windows to our project partition.  Then I opened our project folder and located the bin I wanted to unlock.  In this case, the locked bin was called “Accused”.  So I located the file named “Accused.lck”   Then I deleted the .lck files.  This is an Avid bin lock file.  (please see photo below).  After doing that, I went back into Avid Media Composer, and the bins were unlocked.  If they aren’t, then right click on each bin in the project and select “unlock bin”, and that should do it for you!  

Avid Bin Lock File

Please note:  DO NOT DELETE YOUR .avb files, as these are Avid bin files.  Just delete the .lck files.  

Went to the gym

Went to the gym.  Did 6 sets of driving around the parking lot looking for a spot close to the door.  5 sets of texting my friends.  11 sets of sitting on a bench and looking at myself in the mirror.  2 sets of adjusting my iPod and earbuds.  After this grueling workout, I rewarded myself with a few minutes in the sauna, then cooled down with an almond chocolate protein shake at the nutrition bar.

Still Specs for Scanning Images to use in Video Editing

Still Specs for Scanning Images to use in Video Editing
– Scan as close to 4000 pixels in either direction, without going over. For example, if you scan an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper, it should be about 2909w x 4000h in total pixel count. This would be a dpi of about 363
– Avid and Final Cut Pro both have difficulty working with image sizes larger than 4000 pixels in any direction. 
– One dpi setting will not be useful for all scanned images. Please adjust your dpi so that is as close to 4000 pixels in either direction without going over. 
 – All images must be saved in RGB, not grayscale, CMYK or any color space other than RGB. Most systems will not be able to work with anything other than RGB color space. 
– File format should be either .tiff (TIFF) or .tga (Targa). 
– Tiff’s should be saved as 8bit, uncompressed, in Mac byte order. 
– Targas should be saved 32bit, uncompressed. 

This will produce and image file that can be used in SD or HD and be enlarged as much as 208% for HD and 555% for SD with out degradation. Also it will offer a format that is useful in, Final Cut Pro After Effects, Avid and a bunch of other software.