Crexels » Post-Production

Sound is Gold

yaniv — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:40:08 +0000

At Crexels, I do a lot of translation and dubbing for different projects. I have to translate the projects fro english to spanish. I can’t change any of the actual video and there is not much creative involved since the graphics have to be exactly the same. The only control that I have is the audio. For that, I take extremely good care that it is perfect.

The infomercials I have done are of course translations from english. There is no way to hide the fact that the audio and the movements of the mouth are different but when the audio is out of sync, when the levels are off and when there is no emotion on the new voices, it not only bothers the viewer but it also destroys all credibility and interest on what it is being said.

Audio is something that is very unconscious, you don’t pay attention when it is done right and that is the key. It makes the video pleasant and it adds so much to the experience.

The best example of how important audio is can be seen in horror movies. Just mute any horror movie and the horror is gone. The audio gives you a push to the edge of the seat.

It is the same with audio translation for infomercials. A show will not be great because people are paying attention to the audio but a show can be destroyed because the sound is bad.

What do you think?

Cine Gear Expo

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:15:35 +0000

This year’s Cine Gear Expo will be next month in the Paramount Studios lot. The event is June 3rd to the 6th. If you are interested in the latest gear, gadget, cameras and any other equipment for your productions or/and post-productions, this is the place to get all the info.

The registration is open until May 28th. See you there….

Here is the link. CINE GEAR EXPO

Santa Monica Video

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:26:48 +0000

When I started to work with DigiBetas a few years ago, I had to figure out a way to capture them or transfer them to my editing system. Purchasing a DigiBeta Deck was out of the question since price and service are very expensive. So I decided to go to a Duplication/Encoding facility to do the work. I stooped by Santa Monica Video and never left.

Well, I did try somebody closer to my studio once, but it was slower and the customer service was not what I wanted or deserved.

In SMV things are completely different, the team there is just amazing, From the people in the front to the guys in the machine room. You walk in feeling welcomed and you know that the quality of the service they provide is the best in the industry. I know that some times I ask too much, there is always a project that is late, but they do their best to help me and ALWAYS they have surprised me with their speed and great atitude.

I thank you for your excellent work and for the amazing service you provide small companies like ours. And special thanks to Theo for all that you do.

Sincerely

The Crexels’ Team

iPad while Recording a VO

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:44:21 +0000

I have been inside a Recording studio for four days and it saddens me to see all the paper that it is wasted. Even though we recycle and use the paper on both sides.

So last time I took a different route and a nicer one. Even the talent was happier. The only problem is that they we very easily distracted.

Winner: Best Short Film

yaniv — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:00:02 +0000

A little short film that I edited recently, which was directed by Peter Meech has been accepted in three festivals already. Kevin Farley and his brother John Farley play the main characters in this short film that was great to edit. I think that Peter did an amazing job in writing and directing the film. I look forward to more festivals and more editing for Peter.

The festivals are:

Quickime X issue?

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:15:44 +0000

We are having a little coffution with QuickTime and hope that it is only something that QuickTime does and not a Final Cut problem. We ussually work with 19 bit uncompressed material and never had any problems exporting uncompressed QuickTime files. But recently I found out that after exporting an uncompressed proyect the info on the file indicates a 640 x 480 file instead of the 720 x 486 correct dimentions.

Our forkflow is at folows:
If the material comes from a DigiBeta, we transfer it at a dub house. If not we captured ourself. All material is captured at 10 bit uncompressed.
We create an uncomprresed 10 bit sequence and work on the proyect normaly. Since the file and the timeline have the same settings, there is no need ti render.

Once the project is finished we export with current settings. This creates a new uncompresed QuickTime file. This is the file that has the wrong dimentions while playing with QuickTime X.

It seems that is only a Quicktime issue because if you bring it back to Final Cut Pro it will show withe right dimentions.

Crexels’ Editing Setup

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:14:39 +0000

I am writing to get an opinion of what I have done. Crexels is a small company. We have two editing systems and a laptop that can edit if needed. All running Final Cut Studio 2.

I wanted to create a server kind of setup where I can edit from any computer without the need to sync material or move material from one place to another.

Since we don’t have the capital to go actual servers and fiber optics, I decided to go ethernet. I upgraded everything to go gigabyte. I got new cables and a new switcher and got a 3 NAS Iomega drives. These drives have two drives inside and are setup as RAID 1 so I have a backup of everything.

I created a couple of folders in the biggest drive. One for Final Cut Projects and the second one for Resources (Inside the resources folders, there are folders for each project). All the rendering is done locally in each machine. I know that sometimes is a pain to render a few times but it is not a big deal for the projects we do. Initially, I try to run uncompress material from the drives but it was impossible, so I made Pro-Ress files from the uncompress originals and put those in the Resources folder and to my surprise it worked perfectly. The timeline in FCP is uncompressed and the Pro-Ress file and the Uncompress have the same name. When is time to output to master, I just reconnect the master file to the uncompressed which is also locally in the large editing system and voila, done.

The total cost of the improvement was about $725
• Netgear JGS516 ProSafe 16-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch
• New Cables: about $125
• 3 Iomega StorCenter ix2 – 1 TB (2 x 500 GB) Network Attached Storage

Now, my question to you is what do you think? Can I improve this setup? and how?