Time Lapse in Vegas Video

This entry is a little bit of a departure. I spent last week wading through Vegas Video for a personal video project of mine. There were clips that were very boring at normal speed, but when sped up by 400% created a more dynamic shot. It’s easy enough to speed up a clip in Vegas. However, when I rendered this out, the intermediate frames were blended creating this hellish motion blurred mess. The effect I wanted was like a real time lapse shot where every frame can stand on its own and no other flames are blurred into it. After much experimentation, I figured it out.

The Secret
When you render out a clip, the rendering quality plays a big part in the frame blending. I rendered everything out in “preview” quality and it did exactly what I wanted. The image quality of the video remained unaltered, including the text supers I placed into the video. You may run into problems if you have keyframed motion in your Vegas project, and you might have to render the “time lapse” effected clips separately in “preview” quality, and the rest of the project in “good” or “best” quality.

I wished there was an option to separate the rendering quality between keyframed and non-keyframed elements. I was working in Vegas 7.0 which is old, so this feature may already be included.

Good luck.

Looking for a experienced Nuke compositor

From my visual effects side of life…

Serious job offer for an experienced Nuke compositor on stereoscopic feature film.

Telecommute ok.

Email with your job experience and a link to a reel to: nukecomp at hotmail.com

The tradeoff

Working the day job as opposed to working a little less and having more free time to write. That’s the trade-off.

I have accepted some visual effects work that is a little beyond my skill/comfort level. Things are taking me twice as long to do stuff, and I am still getting paid the same amount. This effectively lowers my hourly wage. I’m not sure I like it.

I’ll stick it out for a while and see how it goes. I just hate being taken away from the writing.

Breath of fresh air

I was stuck trying to figure out what kinds of characteristics to give a couple of my characters, in order to make them feel distinct from one another. I tried brainstorming but I was locked.

It was a beautiful day, and I decided to take a walk. Some fresh air, and some exercise was exactly what I needed to unlock my mind and free associate. The ideas came as quickly as my steps, and within about 30 minutes, I had some new ideas to work off of. The voice recorder is still warm. Now the ideas still might not be that great in context, but it’ll allow me to get back into the rewrite. If the ideas suck I’ll know it pretty quickly and likely new ideas will pop up.

Inspiration only comes during the act of writing (and sometimes walking).

Abduction by Shawn Christensen

After a week long bidding war, Lion’s Gate reportedly paid just under $1 million dollars for Shawn Christensen’s high concept screenplay “Abduction”. I read it last night to see what all the fuss was about.

The script is a page turner, I’ll give it that, and if the momentum in the script ends up on screen, the film should do well.

I was a little disappointed in the direction the story took heading into the second act (spies, FBI, CIA, assassins), since we’ve seen so much of that before with all the Jason Bourne films and Eagle Eye. The script does lose a little steam in the third act, but it doesn’t lose all its momentum. The script is perfectly positioned for a sequel, which is a big bonus if the film actually gets made and is a hit.

Last I heard, The Twilight Saga: New Moon star Taylor Lautner was attached for the starring role.

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