Last Stages of Post-Production

I haven't been blogging the past few days because I had been freaking busy with post-production and editing.

Anyway, continuing from where I last left off, we had consultation with Wahidah the following day. We showed her the video. I have one suggestion for Wahidah. Instead of pausing the video every now and then to give feedback, which is a good thing for us because we definitely need the feedback to improve, I feel that she could have watched the entire video once without pausing, and then replay it the second time, this time pausing to give us feedback. However, in not doing so, the epic feel of the music and the consistency could not be captured by her, neither by us when reviewing it and it defeated the whole purpose of us showing off this "epic feel." This was strongly agreed by each of our group members and we were kind of disappointed with that. No offence to Wahidah, but just something that you could take note off =)

The feedback was that at certain parts, the audio was bad, meaning, sometimes the music was so loud till the dialogues could not be heard, and at other parts, the dialugues were really shrilling. Even after noise removal from the dialogues, this is what we faced and I did not know what to do. Wahidah mentioned that it was definitely an improvement from the 2nd interim assessment. THat relaly raised our spirits and I was even more determined to get the audio right.

That day at night, Greg sent me his animated dog sequences in PNG files. Just to digress a little bit, personally, I like to work with PNG and TGA files when it comes to compositing because they preserve the alpha channel really well and I don't have to worry about keying out the white background which leaves ugly, jagged edges around the composite. I really wished I knew how to do multi-pass rendering. I had gone for this talk by Lucasfilm at the animation workshop portfolio at NAFA and they gave a brilliant and useful talk on how to prepare your portfolio. After the talk, there was one to one critique session of the portfolios and I had signed up. When my turn came, I showed the Lucasfilm people my vfx showreel and my latest fluid dynamics R&D. They commented that they could clearly see that I wanted to go towards visual effects for live action films, and thus I had to take care of lighting issues. This could be done through multi-pass rendering in the 3D package, so that during compositing, each channels such as specular, highlights, shadows, reflections, etc could be controlled and colour corrected individually. If only I knew how to use this multi-pass rendering technique, I could have composited my lamp better onto the live action footage. Sadly, there wasn't enough time for R&D, so oh well, best not to complain.

Anyway, back to Greg's animation. It was kind of cute, and I decided to use it. After placing everything in the timeline in Premiere, I started importing the premiere project file into After Effects and worked on each scene separately. I did colour correction to have that epic look and feel. The hardest part in the color correction process was that of Jeremy's shot in the Photography scene where the shot is taken against a mirror. This shot had a lot of noise from the start, but I thought it would not be much of a problem. I did selective colour corrections for this shot. I used masks and colour corrected Jem separately, and then I colour corrected the rest of the background. This added a lot of noise and grain to the entire shot. Thus, I had to remove the noise and grain, which added to the render time.

Original Footage


Phase 1: Selective colour correction of Jem

Phase 2: Noise Removed from Jem's mask

Phase 3: Background noise removed

Phase 4: Overall Colour Correction

I rendered all the scenes individually through After Effects after colour correction and imported them back into Premiere timeline. Now was the time to focus on the audio. I spent at least four to five hours trying to get the audio right. Levels adjustment, audio gain, crossfade, etc. I did this in two phases. Firstly, I edited the audio with headphones to get a clearer sound. Then, I replayed the video through the big speakers and realised that at certain parts, the background music was too low, thus I made the final adjustments. Certain parts were very tedious to handle because in the soundtrack itself, the audio level tend to get very high at some points and very low at other points. I had to equalize the levels so that it would flow with the entire clip. I then played back the whole thing, and I was quite happy with it.

So, audio was done. Left were the map transitions. When Jem creating the map in the earlier stages of pre-production, I had told him to make it a super high resolution version of it. Because the map would have to to be "moving" and the camera would be zooming in and out of it frequently, thus the scale parameter would be varied. If the map were to be low resolution and if we scaled it up really high, it would be pixellated. Thank God to Jeremy, he did make the map really high res. No doubt he would have been very frustrated every time he made any kind of changes in Photoshop, it would take very long to update. Thanks a lot for your patience bro =)

Anyway, I finised the transitions and rendered them out of After Effects and brought them into the Premiere timeline. The entire process from start to rendering probably took 90 minutes or so. I lined up the transitions and everything was good to go for rendering!

AND THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU GOTTA PRAY REALLY HARD!! Luckily, I had pre-rendered all the complex scenes in After Effects already, thus Premiere did not really have to calculate all the colour correction and motion tracks and other things like that. BUT HOWEVER, I face hell lot of issues here. For once, I wanted to get everything done in Premiere, including exporting to tape. Thus, I used this feature that said "Export to tape." Estimated time remaining: 2 hours plus plus. Wow, good time to sleep. When I woke up, it said it was done. But when I checked my tape, NOTHING WAS IN IT. Okay, never mind, at least I have the rendered file which I can import into Windows Movie Maker and export it to tape through there. BUT... where the heck was the rendered file stored?? Or wait.. was it even stored in the first place? Who know what the heck might have happened when I had gone to sleep? I checked my harddisk space. Nope, no change in disk space. It was still the same as what it was a few hours ago before the render. Argh! So it did not get stored in the first place. Fine. Render again. BUT... OOOPSS... DISK IS FULL!! !@#$%!! Rendered to external HDD. After an hour... OOOOPSSS >>> HDD FULL!! WHAT THE !@#$!! Haiz, was really getting frustrated now. I cleared certain things from my laptop's harddisk and rendered again. This time, it was sucessful. The file size was 17.5 GB - uncompressed avi format. Good going to far.

I imported this into Movie Maker and exported to tape through there. Took 40 minutes, but at least it was done... or I THOUGHT it was done. Because when I played back, I found some lip sync issues! The dialogues did not match the video! It was a few frames off. Damn! Crap! I did not want to re-render the footage with the edited sound. Thus, after editing the sound, I just exported the sound as one single wav file and replaced the sound of the rendered video with it in Movie Maker. THANK GOD Movie Maker allowed that, even after it being such a horrible editing software. Also, in my previous export to tape, I found out that a few seconds of the starting was cut off. Thus, I inserted in a black image in front of the movie and made it last for a few seconds so that during export to tape, if it got eaten up, the black image would be cut off and the main video will not be affected. I was right! It worked great.

Awesome! My tape was ready to be screened. SHall blog somemore in the next post.