I Ran Against Us [COMPLETED]

[ntbullock]

Worked on the last scene a little bit here and there Wednesday and Thursday. There's just a lot to experiment with and a lot to try and clean up. I think the extra time will be worth it. I've been able to sweeten the effects a bit. I've covered a lot of ground on this color grading project in a short amount of time, but I don't want to rush the last scene. I'd like to think we'll be sending out a 95% complete version in the next couple of weeks, but we have to think through the timing of it. November through February can be an odd time to try and get someone's time and attention with something like this. We'll see...

[ntbullock]

I've been bouncing back and forth between FCP and After Effects. I've been manually matting out some elements and it's been awhile since I've done it like this. I wouldn't say it's "fun." It's tedious work and hopefully I'll be at a point where I can move on from this scene tomorrow or the next.

[ntbullock]

More and more is getting done on the end sequence. I'm getting close to being able to move on. The next step here will be to control all the highlights and not lose the impact of the image. I've got a little more until that though. Here's what I've been staring at for days:

IRAU end scene

[ntbullock]

First pass of the movie is complete. I just got done FaceTiming with Jared and the last scene has been nitpicked to the best or our current mortal capacity. At some point time becomes an issue and we really need to get moving on our next project. I'm just glad that this process happened to coincide with a slow work period. Although I'm sure there will be very minor tweaks to the film after watching it in color off of a DVD, I do feel like a damn fine first pass has been completed. For a movie that was never looked at in color while shooting, I think we were pretty fortuitous.

We hope the cast and crew will be pleased with the transformation. It does feel like a different movie in color, in a good way. It'll always be a black and white movie in my head, but the reality that faces most black and white features has allowed us to re-imagine our creative efforts. Interesting process to go through...

[ntbullock]

Got the DVD burned today. Probably heading down to NOLA tomorrow for us to make final notes and work on our upcoming project.

[ntbullock]

We watched it on Jared's flatscreen tv and about 20% of the shots have some visible oddities/artifacting. We're seriously hoping that most of the problems are because of the type of DVD compression I used. I did it on the quickest compression, which is always the worst. Unfortunately some of the images looked terrible, hopefully because of this compression. Today I'm going to look at our color notes from last night and make some of the changes that definitely aren't possibly compression related issues. Then I'll burn another DVD with the best settings and see where we stand.

[ntbullock]

So basically the TV and/or blu ray player was the culprit the other night. I recompressed it with better settings but also played it on a different TV. I still made all the changes on the list that weren't related to the oddities. Today I did a little more matte-ing in After Effects, but after seeing the render I scrapped the hour's worth of work I did. I made the issue worse. Sometimes that happens. Moving on. I'll take another stab at it later.

A previous problem that I'm coming back to is that the project is so big [or some reason] that it won't let me send it to Compressor straight out of FCP, which retains all the chapter and compression markers. It's not necessity, but I'd like to know why.

I'm quickly getting to the point in my mind, and I usually get there when I've got a lot on my "mental plate," where I remember that I could nitpick this thing forever. At some point you gotta "pull the trigger." Or more succinctly, I wanna be done.

[ntbullock]

When I got back from Nola I had family in town, so I'm just now getting back to a regular schedule. I'm burning another DVD right now and backing up data. I'm going to spot check it on my flat-screen. I made one more adjustment in After Effects last night, and today I'm thinking we've got our 95% version. I'm absolutely certain there will be changes, but for all intents and purposes the majority of work has now been done.

[ntbullock]

I made a handful more of adjustments to the news sections again. It looks better now. I burned a new DVD and will spot check that sometime today. Ultimately I'm winding down on it and we'll start sending out soon enough.

[ntbullock]

The spot check on the last DVD I burned looked good. Of course I made three small changes. Whoops. Ok, now we're making a list for send-outs.

[ntbullock]

Jared and I finally got a list together for a first batch of send-outs; nothing fancy... plain discs. I had a little extra time to spot check it, so of course I fixed a small list of minor issues. I'm sure if I watched it ten more times, my list would be ten times longer...

Sending out first batch tomorrow.

[ntbullock]

Finalizing the DVD and graphics for the color release of the film on Amazon.