Platonist (2005)

music video | 04:35 | Watch

Credits

Description

This video was shot during "Teenage Kicks of the Year" in the cold month of January 2004 by don & joe on HI-8 and Digital-8.

How it was done

The HI-8 material was captured with an Elgato EyeTV 200 A/D converter with the highest quality settings (which weren't really that high, but since we were going for that "broken VHS look" in the end anyways, it didn't really matter much)

All the editing was done with Final Cut Pro 5 on a 12" Powerbook. Live material was slowed down to about 90% to sync with studio audio (your mileage may vary... ;)). Frame blending was *not* used to get more of that "film flicker effect" and because there was alot of motion in the footage already (blending made it *too* dreamy).

After editing the video sequence was dumped into AE for deartifacting (the HI-8 footage needed ALOT of that, MB *really* worked wonders here), converting to 25P (Interpret Footage/Field rendering/Off, MB) and adding a "Basic" film look.

The QT file (DV-PAL) was then dumped back into FCP for the wonderful (but *painfullly* slow) Magic Bullet Misfire effect (why there is no Misfire "bundle" (just separate filters) in AE I don't know....). Rendering the 4 min clip took about 10 hours!!! (please let me know if You think this is a glitch in my workflow or something....) Then back into AE where the 1.85 letterbox was added and the video "broadcast specced" (Composite for TV, Component for the Web and elsewhere)

Finally the proceessed video was brought back into FCP, the final mixed audio was added (hence the few seconds of silence in the beginning... ;)), levels adjusted and two DV-PAL QT files exported (one for TV, the other elsewhere). I did also some test exports with Compressor 2 to MPEG-4, Sorenson 3 and H.264 of which (surprisingly!) the H.264 gave the poorest result (in terms of spatial quality per kbit), MPEG-4 was REALLY fast on the Dual G5 (about 100fps). For music videos, check Compressor's compression presets - the "Download" ones are 13 fps which might *not* be what You want...

Magic Bullet

Is without a doubt an awesome tool for an indie video editors to have in their arsenal. The de-artifacting's great, Look Suite looks sweet and you can tweak it like there's no tomorrow. It's not the cheapest plugin out there (about 800 USD for the SD version). The main gripe I have with it right no is still speed - it's SLOW - so be prepared to render...

Equipment