Andrew Male

Canon 7d

Andrew Male — Sat, 29 May 2010 01:01:23 +0000

I got a Canon 7d this evening to use at work and am really excited to use it. The good news is there are a lot of graduation parties that must be attended this weekend, so there are ample opportunities to try it out. I’m planning on using the video option on it a lot. I’ve seen some amazing footage that it’s shot and am excited to try it out for myself. I’ll be posting photos and video clips that I shoot with the camera this weekend in a couple of days.

I’m also going to work on coming up with a video project to produce using this camera to try it in a real project.

Anyone got any ideas?

Upgrades

Andrew Male — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:34:31 +0000

I’ve recently upgraded to Adobe Master Collection CS5, and it’s quite a bit faster. On Mondays I capture and render out New Covenant Bible Church’s Sunday Sermon for different platforms (Web, iPhone, etc.) and yesterday I used Adobe Media Encoder CS5 and it rendered out all of the files I needed in a third of the time that it usually takes. It was absolutely awesome! I’m excited to be able to use this new 64 bit software, and I really think it’s going to make me more productive because it’s just so darn quick.

I also upgraded my AVID from 3gb of RAM to 8gb of RAM! WHOA talk about a boost! It’s great because my editing software (Media Composer and the Adobe Suite) will use every bit of it, and will allow me to just absolutely motor through projects. I’m really excited about that.

I also purchased the entire trapcode suite by Red Giant. It’s going to be really nice to use all of these new tools together to make the best product I possibly can!

The Five Before Logo Build

Andrew Male — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:45:54 +0000

“The Five Before” is an idea from another church, except they call it “The Ten Before”. The Five Before is a pre-service countdown video that has a host that gives the announcements the five minutes before the service starts. At New Covenant Bible Church, we’re going to use this with the youth group on Wednesday nights. I needed a way to open the video up, and made this Logo Build to put at the beginning of the video (I did get the building idea from another site though). So I created the logo in Photoshop and brought the layers into After Effects and built it up. Here it is, and let me know what you think.

The Five Before Logo Build from Andrew Male on Vimeo.

After Effects Countdown Expression

Andrew Male — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:54:53 +0000

Recently I’ve been experimenting with an idea for a countdown video. The first step was to figure out how to make a countdown. Well many guys go in to the timeline, and make text layers that change every second to make it appear to countdown. When you’re talking about a ten minute countdown that can get really tedious, and there was no way I was going to do that. So I came up with an expression to do this. All you have to do is copy and paste it into the “Source Text” expression area and there you go. If you want to change how long the countdown is, go into the expression and change where it says “dur = 10″ near the beginning of the expression, to “dur = (however many minutes you would like it to be)”. Hope this helps!

offset = 0;


i = inPoint + offset; //the in point of the layer
dur = 10; //the duration of the countdown in minutes
dur *= 60; //the duration of the countdown in seconds
seconds = Math.max(dur - Math.max((time - i), 0),0); //the countdown time in total seconds
minutes = Math.floor(seconds / 60); //the countdown time in minutes
seconds = Math.floor(seconds - (minutes * 60)); //the countdown time in seconds (minus minutes)
if(seconds < 10) seconds = '0' + seconds; //add an additional '0' in front of single digit seconds
if(minutes < 10) minutes = '0' + minutes; //add an additional '0' in front of single digit seconds

minutes + ':' + seconds

Testimony Videos – Part 4 – Editing

Andrew Male — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:51:17 +0000

Well it’s been a long couple of weeks working on the video Jennifer’s Story (Click HERE to see final product). The editing process went pretty smoothly.

Once all of the footage was captured (around 3 hours of footage from 2 cameras at 80GB), I lined up the clips from the two cameras on the timeline so that they would match up. The first step in the editing process for me is to go through all of the footage and take out anything that is unusable. This would be things like my voice asking questions, or mistakes that the interviewee makes, and things that could just never make it to the final project. Once I have that done I go through the audio, and get the story laid out. Take out things that aren’t relevant to the story that the final product will share (you need to find this out in your pre-production planning), and get the first rough cut done. Once that is done, I do it again, and once that is done, I do it again. I do this as many times as it takes to get the video down to a shorter version that still tells the story that needs to be conveyed. Once it’s down to around 10 minutes (usually after about 3 rough cuts for me) I bring the person I’m doing the project for in to view it. I make sure that this is the direction that they envisioned the project going, and if it is than I know I’m on target. The client usually has good ideas for things that they don’t think is important to share, so that helps me cut it down even more. Sometimes the client doesn’t like the video. I had this happen with Jennifer’s Story. I got the video down to about 10 minutes and had a viewing for a couple of pastors at New Covenant Bible Church, and they liked the first half of it, but didn’t like that second half at all, and wanted other things from Jennifer’s story in it. They had some good points that I took very seriously, and walked back into my office, put my headphones on (because when my headphones are on, I don’t get distracted with other noises in the office) and I started editing again.

One thing I do when I edit videos is duplicate my timelines after every rough cut. This is wonderful when you have to go back and redo a portion of a project or redo an entire project. It saves a whole lot of time when you need to go back and grab clips that you’ve omitted. So when I went back after the review, I duplicated my timeline and started working on the new one (DRAFT 4) (btw I always type my sequences in all caps so that I can quickly tell the difference between a clip, effect or timeline in my bins). Once my final rough cut is done, and I think the video tells the story needed, I get the audio transitions perfected. The audio in a video is the absolute most important part of the video and if it doesn’t work, then your video probably won’t work either. Sometimes I even turn off the video part and just work with getting the audio sounding good. Once that is done, I render out a timecode burn for the client to view (sometimes they come over to the edit suite for viewing as well). Once they approve the video I can work on making the video look nice.

I use cutting back and forth between a couple of cameras and b-roll to cover up my edits. On Jennifer’s Story, I pulled some of the clips into Adobe After Effects and did some effects on them. I used a couple of masks and adjustments layers to create blurs on the back of her head on camera 2, and some color correction. I’m really happy with the way those clips turned out, and during the process learned that you can really simulate a big focal distance using this technique, and I’ll definitely be doing that again.

Today was really about the edit process on testimony videos and not technique during editing in general. I’ll say one thing about editing in general and leave the rest for another post, and that is that the most important part of editing is organization. You MUST have your clips and bins organized or you could spend a whole lot of time searching for clips that otherwise you’d just be able to grab quickly. I’ll post more about this later.

Jennifer’s Story

Andrew Male — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:28:03 +0000

The Testimony video I’ve been writing about, was shown at New Covenant Bible Church today! I’m so happy to have planned and worked through this project all the way through and kept the original plan in mind while going through the process. I would love to know what you think about it, so check it out…

Jennifer’s Story from New Covenant Bible Church on Vimeo.

Books on iPad

Andrew Male — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:59:47 +0000

So at NCBC we got an iPad and were working with it a little bit. I haven’t been impressed by it at all, and have felt that it’s kind of a waste because my iPhone can do everything that it does and I already have one of those! Well I saw this video on someone’s blog today, and my mind is a little more open to the possibilities that it has compared to the iPhone. It actually made me want to use the iPad, and I’m going to get this app today to try it out. I would read books like this…. (O and I don’t read that often, so that’s saying something)

newcovenantbible.org 2.0

Andrew Male — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:45:55 +0000

For months and months now, I have been working with Austin Spooner at New Covenant Bible Church to create a new website. We have been hard at work with Voracity Solutions to get it designed and working. Voracity designed the website, and got it all set up with NCBC’s database. I worked on the graphics on the site itself, and the video and podcasting pages. Austin and I worked hard to get it to where it is (Austin doing most of the work, I just did graphics and gave input).

Austin and I had a lunch meeting a couple of months ago, and were talking about how to promote the website, and we came up with the idea to use video. So I wrote some things down on my notepad about a couple of the key features we thought were important enough to show in a video. So I sat down to do some planning, and thought how the heck am I going to produce a video about a website? I came up with three options. One was to set up my camera looking at a computer monitor, and I would just record going through the website. The second option was to do a screen capture, and the third was to start from scratch and do the entire thing by animation. Well I didn’t like option two because I didn’t feel like I could get the resolution I needed, and the first option didn’t give me as much control so I opted for option three, to animate the entire project. So I opened up Photoshop, and began to recreate the website, layer by layer (it was nice that I had done all the graphics, because I had all of the files). Once that was complete I imported the psd file into After Effects and began to go to work. I moved all of the layers in 3D space, and built camera moves in on top of a background that I had created from solid layers and expressions. I really like the way it came out, and today I finally get to show you. I finished this project about a month ago after about 20 hours of work, and have been extremely anxious to show everyone, so here it is!

New Covenant Bible Church’s new website will be launched on April 18th so check it out! But since you’re reading my blog, I’ll give you a little tip, it’s going to be launched a few days early so be looking for it. www.newcovenantbible.org

East to West

Andrew Male — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:39:29 +0000

New Covenant Bible Church asked me to create a graphic for their choir cantata that’s on April 18th. This was great because the testimony video I’ve been working on is for the same day. So I created the graphic for them, and then yesterday made an After Effects Clip of the logo coming on to put at the end of the testimony video that I’m trying to get finished up today. I’ve decided to let you see the logo animation and put it out there to download along with the photoshop files of the logo. Feel free to use it as you wish, or change the text and use it another way. Would love to hear how you’re using them, so let me know. Enjoy!

Click Here to Download the PSD Source Files

Click Here to Download the After Effects Source Files

East To West Lens Flare from Andrew Male on Vimeo.

Media Composer 4

Andrew Male — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:39:11 +0000

Yesterday I updated to Avid Media Composer 4! I’m super excited about this! I also installed a new RAID Array to store my files on so that gave me an extra 8 TB of storage which is really nice. I’ve been working on getting everything over to the new AVID so I can continue work on the testimony video that I’ve been blogging about. Once I get everything ready to go (hoping soon) I can get back to finishing up the testimony video, and will be able to tell you all about the editing, rendering, and archiving process that goes into that. Keep checking back for info on that. Until then, I’m going to get this AVID set up and ready to go so I can have even more exciting projects to come. See ya soon!

Picture of new Composer box sitting on my desk taken with my iPhone