Rats & Gassers Stills & Timelines

Going through each interview section and sizing pictures imported to the timeline. These pics were taken with my fairly decent Fuji Film Digital Camera and some will also be used in the Rats & Gassers: Kustom Kulture Takes A Ride Companion Book. Working with high resolution stills is a different process than moving video images.  Obviously the Ken Burns style zoom in / out and pan up / down / left / right movements can be extremely useful and compelling in making still images come to life on the big screen. Finding a balance between moving and still images can take some thought and practice. This is the first step.

James Foster Foundation Charity Cruise

We went out to the James Foster Foundation Charity Cruise and Get Together in Kent to film for a DVD we are doing for the family and to show James how many people came together to show support for this young man. He was brutally beaten into a coma by some thugs and is slowly making a recovery. He has a long way to go and the stress on his family is extreme. KIRO and KING News came out and filmed as well. I will post more stills and clips later. It was so amazing to see Low Riders, Hot Rodders, Bikers and Tuners all coming together to show James and his family their support. Inspiring!

Rats & Gassers Picture Animation

Did some picture adjustment and animations (still picture zooms in or pans up/down)  for the Trevor Robinson interview section of Rats & Gassers: Kustom Kulture Takes A Ride. 

Timelines Done!!!

Finally after weeks of reformatting and small issues with file conversion, I got it all under control for Rats & Gassers: Kustom Kulture Takes A Ride.  The final hurdle was getting a split audio signal from the Panasonic AG-DVX100 footage. The problem was that when I used Cinema Tools to remove pulldown and convert the files to 23.98 fps (shot in 24p) they wouldn't get recognized in the new Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ) timelines. So I created a new intermediate timeline and exported in FCP as a .mov file. This worked excellent, except the new audio files were not split stereo but a mixed stereo (something about default setting). So after a few days of experimentation I found that if I went back to the intermediate timeline files and split the audio tracks apart, panned hard left and right then exported, I would get a new .mov file that had left and right audio channels completely split and not panned center. The reason this is important is because I was using a mic off camera to ask the interviewees questions and if the audio is mixed, I cannot separate points where I may have made mic noise from the answers of the interviewees. Now I can. Finally ready to edit hardcore!

The other issue I was having is that DVShade's Easylooks 2.5 (a great FCP plugin program for instant coloring styles and color correction) would add strange flashing lines to the rendered files. After contacting their Tech Support via e-mail, they explained that I had to set the output render to an 8bit setting. This not only fixed the line issue when using Easylooks, but also made the resized Panasonic AG-DVX100 footage "render free" on the timeline! Two birds with one stone.