MAX Unawards: Behind the scenes (part 1)
I love playing around with video… and I love playing around with Flash. When you combine the two you can create some really cool stuff. That was my goal when I first started working on the MAX Unawards application. This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I want to give you a bit of insight into how it was created. The challenge was to create something out of nothing–and you can take that literally. As with last year’s widget, I needed (but also wanted) to create the application with an almost nonexistent budget in the shortest possible time with the smallest possible team. Even though some of my experiences are pretty common I hope this series gives you some ideas on how you can save money/time and how Adobe’s tools and the Flash Platform can help you with that.
Green key
Soon after the storyboard for the application was approved I started looking for a green key studio. It is very important to work in a well lit and professional studio if you want to start working with green key footage. A well-lit studio will save you a lot of time and headaches when you start keying your video footage in After Effects. There are plenty of small studio facilities with green key sets around. We shot the footage for the MAX Unawards application in Hilversum in The Netherlands. Hilversum is the heart of the Dutch TV industry, so there is a lot of affordable studio space available.
We shot the footage on a Panasonic P2 in the highest possible quality. By choosing the highest quality and resolution I could play around with the framing a little bit later in post production. We also recorded most shots in both close and wide angle. The P2 saves its files on a memory card and that again saves a lot of time. Instead of having to capture the footage from tape, I could just copy the files from the memory card. The P2 uses its own proprietary format but Premiere Pro CS5 has no problem dealing with these files. It can even play them without having to render them, which is again a huge time-saver (starting to see the pattern here?). After adding all the P2 files to the Premiere project I started skimming through them looking for the best takes. This may sound strange but if you have a project on a budget and time limit, make sure you record as much as you can in your one studio day (or half-day in this case). It’s better to have too much footage than to later realize that you forgot something and that there is no time or budget left to go back to the studio! It’s also a good idea to be well prepared when you go to the studio. The storyboard really helped a lot and I also had a clear idea of what the host was supposed to do and say. The actor, Wim (who is actually a Flash developer and not an actor), added his own flavor to it, which I think worked out nicely for this video/application.
Because of the uniform lighting in the green key studio, keying was pretty straightforward. I keyed one segment in After Effects using the built-in Key Light plugin. Thanks to the uniform lighting I could then just copy the Key Light settings onto the other video segments and with just a few tweaks I was able to key all the footage in record time. In After Effects I also resized the footage to the correct size and used QuickTime’s Animation codec to export it to the QuickTime format. The Animation codec in QuickTime makes the files more manageable while keeping the quality and the alpha channel. Back in Premiere, I stitched all the segments together to create the main video. There are actually two different videos. The host’s dialog changes depending on whether you are male or female.
In the next post (on Monday), I’ll explain how the personalized video segments were done and how I added/matched them to the video track. While you wait for that go and give yourself a MAX Unaward!
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