CVTV Documentary Script Act 2

Here is the script outline for the second act of my documentary: 

Investigation Post 11/21

Monday: Checking Out Film Equipment

Tuesday: Viewing and Labeling Footage/Audio

Wednesday: Learning about grain effects on Premiere Pro

Thursday: Learning about grain effects on After Effects

Friday: Checking out film equipment again

Grain

I investigated how to deal with grain this week, because in a fair amount of my footage there is unfortunately a lot of problems I've had with grain. Grain is when you have a bunch of dots going around on a composition or video that sporadically shoot everywhere and makes the quality look worse. Here is an example of what I'm talking about, in it if you full screen you can see a small amount of grain:

Grain Effects

To combat this, I looked into how to remove or at least reduce the grain in my footage.

In Premiere Pro, unfortunately, there is not a direct method to remove grain. In the Effects Panel, there are only effects that add or change up the existing grain. I looked all around, but there is nothing that can remove it, and as it can be seen most of these effects deal with "noise" specifically.

https://filmora.wondershare.com/adobe-premiere/premiere-pro-noise-reduction.html

The difference between noise and grain is minor, and can even be used interchangeably in my opinion. Within these different effects show, you can add more noise/grain, change the color of the noise/grain, and even distort them or make them super saturated and stuff like that. What you actually want to end up doing to reduce grain in your footage is to do everything through After Effects. In this video I watched, they recommend starting in Premiere Pro still. Start by inputting your footage into Premiere, and then going into the footage's settings. After going into its settings by right clicking the footage in the timeline, click on "Replace With After Effects Composition." Selecting this will replace the video of your footage with an After Effects project. In this After Effects project, you can do anything you want with it and it will automatically update within your Premiere Pro project. If for whatever reason things don't work out between the updating in Premiere Pro, you can also just export your After Effects Project and then put that into your Premiere Pro project. Either way, you can then actually use an effect that will get rid of the grain in your footage. Go into the effects for your footage and select Remove

https://www.toolfarm.com/tutorial/indepth_noise/

Grain. Put that Remove Grain on your footage and then you will see a variety of settings for it. Firstly, there's your selection of where you want your removal of grain to be. It's the white box that shows up over your footage, and you can make it bigger or smaller. It doesn't just affect the entirety of your footage since, as the video shows, sometimes footage just has bad grain in certain spots of footage. After messing with how much of your footage is messed with, you can then go on to the noise reduction settings and actually remove the grain to however much you want. The effect in reality doesn't work perfectly. What it will do is essentially smooth over your footage. For that reason, there is a slider for how much you want to remove the grain in your footage. And that's that. Play around with how much you want to smooth over the grain, and then save and your Premiere Pro project will be updated! 

Divorce Production Post

 Status Update

As of now, I will be finishing the rest of my footage by Tuesday of this upcoming week. I have recorded 80% of all footage and audio that I need, but I still need a little bit more to finish. After that, all I need is to edit my footage together, add the score that I'm working on with a couple others, and work with a friend to animate some very basic drawings over some of my footage as a part of my envisioned final product.

Screenshots

Audio

Videos

CVTV Documentary Act 1 Script

 This is my script for Act 1 of my documentary on the CV 9 Academy:

Investigation Post 11/14

 Work Log

Monday: After Effects Introduction

Tuesday: After Effects Tutorial Watching

Wednesday: After Effects Tutorial Watching

Thursday: Experimented with Adobe After Effects

Friday: Experimented with Adobe After Effects

After Effects

During my film, I want to superimpose minor animations over my footage at various points. While Premiere Pro can do this for me, I decided to look into how to use After Effects as a possible alternative. This week, I went through a couple of tutorial videos and the Learning Tab within the application to learn the basics of After Effects. Here are a few of the things I learned.

As well, here is a tutorial video that I found useful followed by a much more in depth walkthrough that really goes into how the basics function within the software.

                    

In this screenshot, I have learned how to start a new composition, how to add assets into my project tab, and how layers work. Starting a new composition is as easy as selecting in the composition tab either starting a new composition from nothing or a new composition from previously produced footage. Adding assets is also easy, as on just needs to double click their Project Tab and add files. And layers work with having one above another makes it in front of those underneath it.

In this image, the timeline is put into focus. I learned about messing with the effects of a given asset within this step. There's position (up and down), scale (size of the asset), rotation, and opacity (how visible/transparent the asset is) in te4rms of basic effect controls of a given asset. Furthermore, I learned how to add keyframes onto them. By clicking the stopwatch icon on an effect, you turn on key frames for the asset. You can see the specific key frame settings on the timeline to the right, where there are those little diamonds.

As a final show of progress within my education for basic use of Adobe After Effects, I put everything I learned together to transition from image A to image B through keyframing. It starts with simply a video with a mirror effect centered on its middle, but a few things happen after it. The logo that is seen at the center of the second image slides up from the bottom of the screen (out of frame) to the center. Then, after the key frames end for the logo, the opacity of the APEAK caption goes from 0% to 100%. Lastly, a fast box blur is keyframed from the beginning to the end of the project to give focus to the APEAK logo and caption. In the end, the Learning Tab was admittedly more helpful than I thought it would turn out to be.

Investigation Post 11/7

 Work Log

Monday: Researched lavalier mics and boom mics
Tuesday: Practiced using a boom mic and zoom audio recorder
Wednesday: Writing
Thursday: Writing

Lavalier Mics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbxy0OupNbA

While I have written about lavalier mics in the past, I now have researched further into the practical usage of them within the filming process. , I learned a couple tricks and where to hide them. One thing I had never heard of until I watched this video (2:58) was that it is a great and common practice to loop the cord by creating a knot with the end of the mic. This will reduce unnecessary noise and interference from the cord by cutting it off with the knot. Also, a common thing for filmmakers to do is to attach gaffer tape (4:09) in a triangle shape to both sides of the lavalier mic (but not on the actual microphone part on the top of the mic). Lastly, it's also important to use gaffer tape to tape down the rest of your cord behind the loop so that there is less interference with a mobile cord.

Furthermore, there were a few places mentioned to hide lavalier mics as well. Remember, the purpose of a lavalier mic is that it is a small mic that is not meant to be seen in the camera's line of view, it can be seen by any angle that isn't in the camera's POV. Here is a list of the most applicable places I saw in a few different videos:

• Simply below and inside the collar of a shirt
• On the side of your hair
• In a hat or beanie
• On props

Boom Mics and Zoom Audio Recorders

With boom mics, there isn't a whole lot to say. What's important is to remember that you need to have the mic out of the camera's frame, the direction your mic is pointing is what direction the audio will mainly pick up, how to set up the boom mic with a zoom recorder, and that you need to loop the cord around the stick as seen in this video below:

With zoom audio recorders, there are also only a couple things to say. This is a list of things you need to do when recording with one:

1. Make sure there are working batteries in it or that it is plugged in
2. Insert SD card
3. Plug in boom microphone into appropriate plugin

   

   https://kino-eye.com/download/Notes-Zoom-H4n-v2.pdf

   
   
4. Plug in headphones into the headphones plugin
5. Turn on the zoom recorder
6. Press record when you want to start listening to your audio, the red ring will be flashing
7. Alter your recording volume that is being picked up so that it averages around -12 dB
8. Press the recording button again to record audio
9.  Press the stop square button to stop the recording

Here is a video on how to use a common zoom recorder: