Silent DVD?

I recently completed putting together a DVD of the Appleton Players last show, following some changes I made after review the first version. This time everything looked fine, but there was no sound on the footage of the show!

The extras I had put together had sound, and the previous version I had produced had sound, but for some reason this copy did not.

So, this morning I went back to the project and looked (and listened) to each stage only to find that the sound was not playing back in Adobe Encore. The clip in question was a Premier Pro sequence, included into Encore as a dynamic link. Opening the sequence in Premier Pro revealed that the sound existed there. I started trawling the web for answers and found that there may have been an issue with transferring the data from Premier Pro to Encore, and this is related to the cached files.

I have now spent most of the day clearing caches, reloading assets and reverting transcoded files to originals. Having tried several times, I finally have the sound back in Encore (it is writing to DVD now, hopefully the sounds will be on that too).

Lightsaber Effects

Being a Star Wars fan, one of the first thing I looked at doing when I started editing video was to create some lightsaber effects.

I trawled the internet for some examples and tutorials and found this excellent one from videocopilot.net. I tried it out on a simple animation I was working on at the time and was very impressed. Having got it out of my system, I left well alone and got on with other, more serious, bits of work.

While putting together the DVD for the latest show by my drama group, the Appleton Players, I took the opportunity to recycle some footage of a rehearsal of a sword fight and add the lightsaber effects for the amusement of all.

The clip I used was only just over 30 seconds long, but there was no way I was going to manually track both ends of two swords for the 900+ frames, so I decided to make things a little easier with motion tracking and expressions in after effects.

I followed the tutorial to set up the lightsabers and get the look that I liked, then I set about creating 4 trackers, one to track the tip and base of each sword. This was the time consuming bit. While the motion tracking tool in After Effects is OK, when you have fast moving items or light coloured items against a light coloured background, it has some difficulty. These swords were both fast moving and light against light (sigh). So, after many hours of correcting the motion tracking, I had my points plotted. By using expressions similar to the following I set the start and end position of each of the lightsabers to use these tracked points.

comp("mycomp").layer("clip.m2t").motionTracker("Tracker 1")("Track Point 1").attachPoint


With these expressions plugged in, my effects followed the action in the clip as expected. Unfortunately, I had to manually mask out items as they passed in front of the lightsabers, as shown in the tutorial, however I am hopeful that the new Roto Brush in CS5 will automate this too.


So I have my video, but a lightsaber just isn't right without that sound. So I went trawling again. I found a number of samples of lightsabers (and I already have some myself), but I was after a "clean" sound so that I can modify it as required. Eventually I found this site describing how to create you own sounds in a similar way to the way Ben Burtt did for the original film. While this is a bit too technical and long winded for what I was after, there was a download of a premixed lightsaber hum, so I grabbed that instead.


As I was using two lightsabers, I pitched one up slightly (the green one) and both slowed and pitched down the other (red), so that each had a unique sound.


The final part was to adjust the volume of the lightsaber as the sword was moved on screen so that the faster the blade is moved, the louder the buzz.


After some experimentation and research I created the following expression for the audio level of the lightsaber.


// Use the combined speed of both the tip and base of the lightsaber
totalSpeed = thisComp.layer("Green Saber").effect("Saber_Controls")("Start Position").speed + thisComp.layer("Green Saber").effect("Saber_Controls")("End Position").speed;
// Convert the speed to a volume, maximum volume of 2.5dB
vol = Math.min(totalSpeed * 0.05 - 12, 2.5);
// return the volume for left and right channels
[vol,vol]


My short clip, "Darth Mo", was finally complete.

Adobe CS3 Production Premium

Okay, so one of my interests is film making (not that I've made any yet) and to that end I have just purchased a copy of Adobe CS3 Production Premium (actually I bought it over a week ago, but have been so busy I had done nothing but install it before today). Now I'm no expert, in fact most of this is completely new to me, so here is a beginner experience of video editing in CS3.

I had some video files lying around from my holiday last year, so I thought I'd have a go at editing one of those. It was a video of the dolphins at sea world (aww, cute).

One feature that caught my attention when I was reading about the package was the AutoComposer which you can use to create scores for your video. So, first thing I did was open up Bridge, as this is what pulls every thing together, and clicked on the olive coloured Sb box.

This did not, as I had hoped, open Soundbooth, but a page with information about SoundBooth; including, as luck would have it, a link to a tutorial on using AutoComposer. I clicked the link and while the tutorial opened, I opened up Soundbooth.

The tutorial started and I started along with it.
Choose a score it said. I did.
Click on the score and you will hear a preview it said. I didn't, hear a preview that is. I paused the tutorial and started poking around. I discovered a preview panel under the window menu, I heard the previews. I resumed the tutorial.
There is some explanation on various items on the composer panel.
Select the video file as the reference link it says. I pause it again. I have not yet got my video clip in the application, so I load it up and select it as the reference clip. I continue the tutorial.
It explains about intros and outros and how the score works with keyframes.
It explains how to lower the volume of the score while a person is talking. I lower the volume of my score only to find that no-one is talking when they should be. In fact, my video has no sound at all!!
I paused the tutorial and went on a hunt for an explanation.
After trawling through help and googling, I found a forum post that said the sound in MPEG files is not supported as it is mixed in with the video, or something like that.
Hmmm.
Most of my video files are MPEG. In fact my new camcorder, a JVC Everio, records everything in MPEG.

I am really annoyed that CS3 does not support audio in MPEG files, I have used free video editing tools that do this, surely one I have paid so much for can do it!
Come on Adobe get your act together!!

I tried the video file in Premier Pro (the video editing package), no luck there either. So I googled again and found a freeware app to rip sound from MPEG, this worked... sort of.
The audio file was shorter the the original MPEG.
In Premier Pro I could change the duration, by I was not sure it would sync correctly. I decided that would do for now, I'd try out some other features.

I decided to use After Effects to try out stabilizing my video footage (hand held camcorders get a bit wobbly) and this was great! Load up the file, drop it into the composition, right click and select stabilize. Easy.
I turned on every option, selected 2 points then let it rip. I waited for it to process a few second, then stopped it, applied the results and hit playback. When it played back it was devoid of shakes, but even more impressive, it had sound! It seems After Effects can do what the other apps couldn't and can read sound from an MPEG file.

A plan began to form.

I saved my After Effects project and then tried exporting as a Premier Pro project.
I started up Premier Pro. I opened my new project. It didn't work.
The video data could not be found and the was still no audio.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.

At least I have about 3 seconds of video footage of dolphins that doesn't shake.