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The Voice Of Jack

Eddie Rex

Eddie Rex

Hello everyone,

Been really busy recently and my latest short The Voice Of Jack is uploaded on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v66LjHk99vQ

You know, when i compare this work to my earlier films i think i have improved quite a bit.

However please check out my film and let me know if you agree, or whatever.

Best regards!

Eddie Rex.
 
:pop: :)

Cool! Might I suggest a few more cut away shots? Initially, I thought that possibly
Jack might have been in his head. Maybe that was what you were going for...

There were a couple of places where I was startled, which is good!


-- spinner :cool:
 
Thank you Spinner. I was trying to show in the cut back scenes that Jack actually was in his head, and giving him nightmares.

Which scenes were startling?
 
Nice short there, Eddie. :cool:

Noticed artifacting of some kind (usually when up close, with motion). Dunno what's causing it. Maybe something to do with interlacing? The zig-zag lines, if you see what I mean.

Definitely spooky & suspenseful. Like it a lot.

Reminded me of something Kenneth Branagh was in, a few years back. Forgot the name of it. Helpful, huh? :blush:
 
Yes, there is definitely a combing effect in the motion shots caused from deinterlacing artifacts. I always try to author in progressive scan (even though shooting interlaced) to avoid problems with deinterlacing elsewhere. I'd rather let Premiere handle the deinterlacing task than run into a poor YouTube encode/decode. As a side note, I have seen this exact same artifacting caused by a bug in graphics drivers. For instance, the Linux drivers posted on ATI's web site produce a very similar artifacting with XVideo in Debian.

Aside from the YouTube technical glitching in the playback, this was an interesting piece.
But if it was all in his head, who shot him? Suicide? Where's the gun? Who wrote the letter? What's with the mask? Was that to hide his identity during the grim task, or is this representative of his alter ego?
But, then, ambiguity is often par for the artistic course. :)
 
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Tons of improvement! That camera's treating you nicely too :) Specific improvements: The audio is nice a clean, image quality is much better than it used to be. You've brought alot of your photographic aesthetic to your images which makes the pictures look wonderfully artistic. Editing is much tighter than when you started. It's amazing when we look back at our first works and see how far we've come.
 
Thank you Knightly and VP Turner.

Yes Knightly the new Canon XM2 is much more professional than the single chip cameras i used to use. Using a manual focus and a white balance on every shot i can see the difference. Tight edits quicken the pace holding the viewers interest (hopefully), and thats really come from practice. Eventually i want my films to match the standard of my photographic work (if that makes any sense).

VP Turner, when you mention deinterlacing are you refering to the stop start footage when hes running through the forest? If so, i'm not sure how to recify that because its on the footage i shot. Maybe i should re shoot that scene? The storyline was about a serial killer with his hit list and hes written a letter to his next victim giving him nightmares. Then hes teleported by supernatural forces into a forest and his voice coming from nowhere starts to haunt him. However theres no escape, no matter how fast you run and hes picked off by the serial killer whose an excellent sniper. The mask the calling card left with every victim.

I think the sound quality was far superior in comparison to my previous films. Using a Sennhesier ME66 you can hardly go wrong!
 
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Eddie Rex said:
....

VP Turner, when you mention deinterlacing are you refering to the stop start footage when hes running through the forest? If so, i'm not sure how to recify that because its on the footage i shot. Maybe i should re shoot that scene? The storyline was about a serial killer with his hit list and hes written a letter to his next victim giving him nightmares. Then hes teleported by supernatural forces into a forest and his voice coming from nowhere starts to haunt him. However theres no escape, no matter how fast you run and hes picked off by the serial killer whose an excellent sniper. The mask the calling card left with every victim.

...
Click to expand...

No, you don't have to reshoot it. You can fix this in post. What software are you using? Try exporting it as a progressive clip.

Below is a capture showing exactly what's happening. "Combing" refers to the look resembling the teeth of a comb that appear along the edges of an object in motion. Interlaced video is just that, two independent fields interlaced together to create one frame, displaying first the odd lines and then the even lines. The fields won't directly line up when the image moves and gets worse the faster something moves. To reduce this artifacting there are several techniques for "deinterlacing". Deinterlacing is stitching together the two fields to create the frame. Standard deinterlacing uses "weave" (better for objects not moving because this is where combing occurs) and "bob" (better for moving objects, but static screens will look "jumpy"). More intelligent algorithms examine the individual fields and what changes from one to the other, interpolating the two and cleaning up the combing effect. Example algorithms are "motion adaptive" and "vector adaptive". When you see in a television's specifications things like "3D comb filter", this is what they're referring to, filtering out the "combing" effect.

VoiceofJack-Artifacts.jpg



Does that help? Or did I just do a flyover? :)
 
Eddie Rex said:
Thank you Spinner. I was trying to show in the cut back scenes that Jack actually was in his head, and giving him nightmares.

Which scenes were startling?
Click to expand...

The scene where:
"Jack" gets him by the throat in the woods.
I thought that was nicely done and
when he is shot at the end, the camera shot is so tight that the reaction from the 'gunshot' is startling.

Not bad :) PM-ing you...

-- spinner :cool:
 
Eddie Rex said:
I'm using premiere pro 1.5.

So if i export the film as a progressive clip that should make it better?
Click to expand...

You could try that using Adobe Media Encoder or you could just try using the "Deinterlace Video Footage" option in the Export Movie Settings.

I use Premiere Pro 2.0, but I would hope 1.5 had these options. To create a progressive clip, in Adobe Media Encoder select "Field Order = None (progressive)". You can choose any number of codecs. Just check the YouTube restrictions on bitrate and preferred formats. I suspect they convert your movies for you and that's what caused the problems with deinterlacing. Do you remember your export settings? If you export to a format that YouTube can natively understand, the chances of them messing it up through conversion go way down.
 
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Hey Eddie. Great job, man! I really like the ambiguity of the story, and the edits work well to keep things moving and keep people guessing. Let us know if you do a re-render of the video to try and reduce the combing/interlacing effect. I'd like to see how it comes out.

Thanks for sharing, and again, great job!
 
Thanks John and VP Turner!

I shall look into the deinterlacing however its something i'm not that familar with.

Initially i exported the film as a wmv file.
 
Just a quick side-note...

"The Trees" by Peter John Ross (aka SonnyBoo) starts playing at 1:23

He's made a bunch of tunes available for free use; just a credit at the end required.

Pop that credit in. :cool:
 
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