vfx How to get some of these effects

gdgross

gdgross

Hi all - newbie video guy here. I'm a musician trying to make content and music vids for my band on the cheap. I'm proficient "enough" in fcpx, but I often struggle because I don't use it frequently enough to remember all the little tricks I learned the last time I used it. Have never used abobe or davinci.

I dig the look of this video:


I see that it's 24fps, but looks like the actual apparent frame rate is 12fps because every adjacent frame is identical.

That part is easy; I can shoot at double speed and slow the frame rate, or just do in FCPX. Or just shoot slower to begin with. Many ways to achieve that lower frame rate depending on what I'm going for.

The other thing I notice is that it seems like sometimes the light balance, or camera setting changes between frames. I can achieve something like this if I shoot a bunch of pictures in sports mode on my sony a6500. As opposed to "movie" mode where it shoots actual video files, but it seems like a laborious way to shoot a whole music video. I would have to string all the pictures together in an external program. Any idea if there's some kind of plugin that achieves this, or some other shortcut?

I also dig the drawn-in animation. Any idea what programs ppl use to do this? Is animation these days as laborious as I imagine; drawing things in frame by frame?

Thanks all, and apologies if I'm asking the equivalent of how to paint a masterpiece in a day with no practice. lol.
Geoff
 
Last edited:
Sort by date Sort by votes
I do have one note. Over the course of working on this, I ended up listening to your song on repeat for 12 hours, and I'm still not tired of it.

I'm also a music producer, and if those vocal harmonies had been a fraction of a semitone off in one place in the song, I would have noticed, and it would have driven me nuts. But there weren't any mistakes.

You guys should be really proud of what you've accomplished here. This recording may be 3 minutes long, but I can see years of practice and love of music behind that. Genuinely impressive. Best of luck on the release!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Nate North said:
I do have one note. Over the course of working on this, I ended up listening to your song on repeat for 12 hours, and I'm still not tired of it.

I'm also a music producer, and if those vocal harmonies had been a fraction of a semitone off in one place in the song, I would have noticed, and it would have driven me nuts. But there weren't any mistakes.

You guys should be really proud of what you've accomplished here. This recording may be 3 minutes long, but I can see years of practice and love of music behind that. Genuinely impressive. Best of luck on the release!
Click to expand...
Thanks for the kind words Nate. It's a song we wrote and worked hard on, glad you enjoyed it.

I'll probably do a production walkthrough video at some point. Not really something for our target demographic, but fun for the nerdy producer ppl out there. I did one for our last release; hopefully, I'll get better at talking through the tune, haha.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
gdgross said:
Thanks for the kind words Nate. It's a song we wrote and worked hard on, glad you enjoyed it.

I'll probably do a production walkthrough video at some point. Not really something for our target demographic, but fun for the nerdy producer ppl out there. I did one for our last release; hopefully, I'll get better at talking through the tune, haha.
Click to expand...
Sounds cool, I was curious about your signal chain. Like are you using Nectar 3 for vocals? Melodyne? 100% live voice? Mastering is clear and open with strong signal to noise. I'll definitely check it out whenever you post it.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Nate North said:
Sounds cool, I was curious about your signal chain. Like are you using Nectar 3 for vocals? Melodyne? 100% live voice? Mastering is clear and open with strong signal to noise. I'll definitely check it out whenever you post it.
Click to expand...
I actually didn't do the mix on this. I try not to mix my own music, as I think by the time I'm done with the production, I just have zero objectivity left haha. I have a guy in the UK who is fantastic (and gives me a great rate!) but TBH I'm not sure what his signal chain is.

However, I do all the tuning before I send off the multitracks to him. (in Melodyne) And I do tend to do a pretty decent rough mix for him to see where my head is at, which is what I would be going through in that production walkthrough video.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I agree with both of you. It's difficult to see your own work objectively. On my first feature, I climbed this mountain to get a timelapse shot of a city in the valley below. This wasn't a mountain with roads, just a regular one, and it got unexpectedly steep, the grass was getting wet with dew as we ascended around twilight, and at one point about half way up, my foot slipped on the grass, and an $800 lens got broken. We got to the top and took the shot.

Later on I'm editing it all, and the shot actually didn't turn out great, just a slow night in the city I guess, feeble long exposure traffic in dull gradient fog. But I put in like 20 seconds of that shot, because in my head, it was an $800 shot that took 3 hours and required climbing a mountain, and the much more interesting shot that could have been in it's place was some 14 minute setup that cost almost nothing. I was just a total novice at the time, but I've definitely come to recognize how difficult it can be to be objective about one's own work.

Flipside, it is at least partially possible to train your mind to counterbalance this bias, once you know how to spot it. "if this was someone else's film and I had no stake in it, would I want to skip past this part?"

For video people, it's a bit easier to get feedback, because every time you publish a video, you can see exactly where most people stopped watching it, or skipped ahead. That's super valuable when honing your instincts about scene edits.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
When we had a rough cut of my first feature, I showed it to a bunch of people for feedback. One of them was my dad - he wasn't a film guy but he was one of the smartest and most observant people I've ever known, and had long given me screenplay notes.

His best note was that he liked scene A and scene B, but wasn't sure they worked well back to back.
I shared that with my director/editor (I was writer/producer) and we both immediately agreed and she found a better approach.

My point? I guess that the objective eye is so damn useful and you never know who your go-to person for feedback will be.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top