March 28, 2011

Playing with iPad 2's new iMovie

Just bought new iPad 2 last friday when it was released here in Finland and immediately downloaded new iMovie app. I have to say iMovie is much more usable on iPad 2 than on iPhone 4. You can actually edit hours with it. So I uploaded some material from my christmas holiday to iPad and edited short cheesy holiday piece in an hour.


All the material was shot with iPhone 4 and Flip Ultra HD. Nice surprise was that it supported Flip Ultra HD's video natively. Although I had to put video material first to pictures folder in my computer and then sync through iTunes because connecting Flip Ultra HD straight to iPad gave me an error for consuming too much power.

Also now when looking video I actually realize that there seems to be sound glitches in cuts where Flip Ultra HD's video material was used. Strange. Anyway if you shoot with iPhone 4 then iPad 2's new iMovie is absolutely the easiest way to edit short pieces on fly.

March 21, 2011

I color corrected & onlined a 30-minute documentary

I've been mostly working with short form audiovisual production such as trailers, promos, advertisements. So getting a chance to color correct and online a half an hour documentary was a nice opportunity to try something new.

Name of the documentary is 'My brother, the buddhist monk' and it tells about Santeri (26) who decides to become a monk in Thailand and give up everything he has in Finland. His sister and the director of documentary Anja Ahola, wants to understand her brother's great decision to leave behind his possessions, friends and family and to become an ascetic Buddhist monk for the rest of his life.

Anja shot all the video herself. Mostly with Sony HDR-FX1 but also with some cheap HDV camcorders. So I got all the material in HDV format. I decided to master documentary in 720p because I had to reframe, deinterlace and noise reduce many shots so after all the post-processing there wouldn't have been actual resolution up to 1080p.

I onlined documentary inside Final Cut Pro 7. For color correction I used mainly Red Giant's Colorista 2 and Mojo. For deinterlacing shots from cheap HDV camcorders I used Red Giant's Frames. Almost all the products from Red Giant are great but I have to say what really saved some shots is Neatvideo's excellent denoiser. There were some really dark noisy shots with lots of HDV compression and Neatvideo did excellent job getting rid of all the artifacts. I think Neatvideo is one those plugins everyone who shots in not so ideal conditions should own. It really makes your production value higher.

(Click on picture to see it larger.)


And if you're in Finland remember to watch it!
Documentary premieres on April 5th at 8pm on Yle TV1.