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.