Friday, April 17, 2009

Animoto Video without Logo!!!!!

Hurray, Animoto, the easiest, fastest and best music video style slide show production tool has just announced that professionals can use the tool to produce videos WITHOUT THE ANIMOTO LOGO!!!

That's cRaZY: Crazy good, for those of us who want to stun our clients with fantastic music video style programs and not tell them how darn easy it was to do; not tell them that they can do it just like us.

Animoto has the whole package, music, link back button at the end, with or without music video credit in front. Really cool. Check it out. (Discount coupon code fqyztwec)

Thanks again, ANIMOTO GUYS!



Gary Brown

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Animoto Workflow

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I have become very happy making videos at Animoto.com, in case you couldn't tell by all the videos showing up here.

I am finding that it pays to create an efficient work flow and to triple check the order of the images before finalizing in Animoto. Animoto is an amazing piece of software, but it doesn't select your images for you, it doesn't get rid of the ones that don't fit in, and it definitely doesn't prepare the artistic elements of the individual images.

So. how do I prepare images, pictures, for Animoto video creation? Here's how I get a set of pictures ready to upload to Animoto. You can use any good image cataloging/editing software. Aperture, ACDSee, and Picasa should all work fine. Here, I describe my Animoto workflow using Lightroom 2, so adjust the instructions to fit your software.

Select
I use Lightroom 2 to import images, select the ones I want to use in the video, and drop them into a Quick Collection. As you're viewing each image, just hit "B" without the quotes to add the image to the Quick Collection, or remove it if it is already in the QC.

Cull
When you have gone through all the images you are considering, open the Quick Collection or wherever your selected images are now residing and cull out the ones that looked good the first time through but don't fit in with rest. In Lightroom 2, you can hit "B" again to remove the image you are viewing from the Quick Collection. As you may see in my videos, the images I wasn't sure should be included, shouldn't have been included.

Sort
Put them in a logical, or creative, or chronological, or some kind of story telling order. It is important to do this before you start doing the processing on the images. You may also find a couple more at this point that don't quite fit anywhere. Unless they are masterpieces, move them out. They will come back to haunt you when you have an Animoto video that you love except for that one darn image you were going to dump.

Make Art
Okay, we have a lean mean selection of images, and they are in the order we want them. Now is the time to begin processing. By that I mean doing whatever it is that distinguishes your art from mine. I have a ton of presets that I use to get repeatable consistent results on various types of images. Make them the way you want and consider how they look next to each other. Look for patterns of style and emphasize or contrast those patterns.

Make Scenes
The Animoto software seems to be aware of consistency over a segment of images and harmonizes them into scenes that give the video the look of an editor slaving over multiple monitors for hours giving each scene a flow that fits with the images. Or, is it my imagination. Doesn't matter, it looks that way to me. Take a look at the rather plain flying butterfly images in my Pismo Environmental. See how Animoto stacked the similar images and how it handled a scene like that? I can almost hear my little Animoto editor saying, "Why in the world did he put these rather plain images in here? I'll just stack 'em up and flip through them."

You may also choose to vary the style of the images that are next to each other to get that bouncing feeling. I did exactly that in the Boarding with Kevin for the car scene at the end. Trees, people, windshield, sepia, B&W, blue, color, hard, glow. Animoto again seemed to know what I was doing, and handled it with artistic dexterity.

Recheck Order and Export
Got sidetracked here, as artists do. After you do your artistic thing on the images, take another look at the order that they are in and if there are any stinkers. Now export them into their own folder as JPEG. I set quality high and 2000 pixels max on each side so that I can get a high resolution video download from Animoto. You can upload up to 5MB files, but what for?

Make Video
Then start Animoto and upload your images. Animoto will create your incredible new music video style art in a few minutes. More on how I use Animoto later.

Remember, while Animoto does automatically handle the editing, it is up to you to handle the image selection, quality and the order of the images. If you focus on those things in your work flow, it will help Animoto help you get the best video you can.

Gary Brown

Monday, January 26, 2009

Animoto Video - Remix



My first Animoto video came out pretty good. But, if you know me, you know it is never finished, and same with this video. Back into Animoto and do a remix. Rearrange slides, new music, emphasize this and that and click the magic Animoto Remix button - PRESTO: an all new remixed Animoto video from the same pictures but with a completely different look and sound. Holly pixel pushers, buddy, this is great.

By the way, I went for the business membership, and it is really worth it. I get unlimited hi-rez downloads of the videos. They look great not just on my 24" monitors, but on the family's 51" HDTV!!! Yup, I downloaded both the .mp4 (about 30MB, runs in Quicktime) and the .iso (DVD image file you can use to burn your own DVD that will play in your DVD/Blu-Ray player).

The hi-resolution video on the HDTV looks good, but it doesn't look like the 1080p I am spoiled with from cable and Blu-Ray. Don't get me wrong, it is fun to watch, especially with the volume up loud enough to make my wife come downstairs and tell me to turn it down. But then she got into it too...

Compare this remixed video to the video I posted yesterday. Notice how the transitions are completely different to match the new music, and how the process seems to recognize images of a similar style and treats them in a similar style. I am impressed.

Gary Brown

Sunday, January 25, 2009

My Animoto Video



This is one of my first videos using Animoto and I am very impressed with the result. Notice the transitions synched to the beat and seem to relate to the subject matter. Early in the video is a shot of several snowboards side by side. The transition in and out echos the graphic nature of the image. Notice how the background is moving most of the time to help the illusion of video even with the still images. It took me much much longer to make artsy images out of snapshots than it took to make the video.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Animoto for great videos

Animoto is an online service that will magically make a super hot video, I mean sexy styles, transitions, multiple images, cut ups, all in sync with jamming music, from your still images in just minutes. Did I mention you can do it for FREE, at least for a 30 second clip in web quality video?

This site is steaming cool, I mean hot, you know what I mean. I have never seen anything like it. Upload some of your pictures, put them in order, add text if you want, pick out some music from their royalty free music library or upload your own - then push the magic movie making button and wait a few minutes.

This program analyzes your video, your music, lets you speed things up, slow them down, and in just a couple of minutes your very professional looking video is done and on the air. It really is hard to believe. Believe me, I have made plenty of slide shows for everything from national class events to family vacations. I have labored for hours learning and trying to use professional tools, and it is a tremendous amount of work to get a decent looking result. Animoto puts it together for you, while you go get a icy cold drink. Have a snack or check your email. Browse that new Canon 5D Mk.II. When you get back, it's done, and it is SUPER. I mean it: SUPER.

Of course, if you're anything like me you will want to upgrade to longer and higher quality videos and you will want to download them. So you could buy an upgrade for each one for $3, but the deal is to buy the personal (non-commercial) pass for $30 for a whole year of long videos. At least that's the price as I write this. I wouldn't expect that price to last very long. You can even download a DVD quality mp4 for just $5.

Okay, so I know that many readers are professionals, and the good news is there is also a commercial license available. If you are just going to show off all the photos you already have into a few videos, go for the $99 for 3 months. You can only sell the DVD download to your individual clients. For reason the license does not let you sell to businesses. I'm still scratching my head on that one, but it covers most of the pros that are shooting portraits, weddings, babies, bar mitzvahs - you get the, uh hem, picture.

Take a look at the people that are using Animoto Business for there publicity: Getty Images? Yikes, if it's good enough for Getty Images, it's good enough for me.

I'm trying out the personal version for now, and I love it. Animoto Business is also available in a yearly subscription for $249. That's probably where you will wind up when you see what this thing can do for your image presentation, not to mention not having to hire a team of video special effects editors, and not having to buy Final Cut and After Effects. Why not make your own professional quality music videos in a few minutes. It's Hot!! It's Cool!!! Oh, you know.

Check back soon. I'm working on one that I can post without a million model releases.

Gary Brown

PS - Click the button to save $5 on the annual or business passes. Or use coupon code at check out.

Discount Animoto Coupon Code: fqyztwec

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Paint object to touch surface

As digital artists we often are called on to move an object into a different setting. This leaves us unable to use our artist's eye to actually observe the details of the things we are painting, because they don't exist in the domains we have chosen for them. So, we have to infer some things that would be visible if we had a real subject to look at. One of these things is shadow. It is shadow that will relate one object to another object or surface if the perspective is otherwise correct.

With that in mind, a demonstration. Put your teacup down and slowly bring your outstretched palm downward toward a flat surface in front of you. Watch carefully how the shadow changes as your hand approaches the surface. Depending on the light and the angle you are viewing from, the cast shadow will grow thinner, sharper and darker until you touch the surface.

Once your palm touches, there is just a thin dark line between your hand and the surface. There also happens to be a softer shadow on the underside of your hand that blends into the cast shadow. It is this dark line of demarcation that implies that the object is touching the surface. Of course, there may be other shadows as well cast by the upper portions of the object, but it is this dark line that lands the object convincingly for the observer, even though most non-artist observers looking at the painting without that shadow would only feel that something is missing, without knowing what.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Embellishing Digital Prints

Many digital artists embellish their prints to add texture and/or color. In my view, this process may be putting their prints at risk. I want to be clear that I have no argument with protecting the print, canvas especially needs some protection. Nor would I discourage an artist from adding to the print for artistic reasons, such as collage or metallic paint. I merely want to share my concerns about this process from a technical standpoint, and then note the reasons for my discomfort with using embellishment solely for the sake of making the print look like an impasto painting: something it is not.

Texture Gels

I like digital prints just the way they come out of my printer. I also like the depth and richness that a protective coating can add to a print. I do not consider the protective coating to be an embellishment. Embellishments to me are things or proceses that are added to a digital print after it is printed for some purpose other than protection or display. I consider texture, collage, and paint to be embellishments.

I do occasionally add embellishments, although I have reservations about some forms of that process. I must confess to adding brush stroke texture at customer request and not to achieve and grand artistic purpose. I still sleep pretty well. I just think that one should consider the possible effects of doing this and perhaps share the risk of those effects with the customer so that a considered decision is made before the embellishments are added.

Personally, I use gels to add texture only after the prints have been stretched or mounted and protected with a coating. I feel this minimizes the risk of cracking the coating or affecting the ink surface with gel. I use Eco Print Shield applied with a brush to the mounted/stretched canvas. I also keep a small canvas trim piece that I coat just as I coat the print in order to test its flexibility after each coat. Using a brush, two coats is usually enough to keep the scrap from cracking. I let this dry at least 24 hours.

If brush stroke texture is going to be added, it should be done only after the protective coating is completely dry. I use Golden brand gels almost exclusively. Soft/thin gels on relatively low contrast areas like skin and sky, and heavy/thick gels where paint would be thicker or in multiple layers as in trees, rocks, waves, hair, and clothing. As an oil painter, I naturally follow the lines and gestures of the work as though it were an oil painting, and let the gel leave brush texture where it will, along lines of definition and contrast. I think it is important to cover the entire print. I then allow the gel to dry completely and cover the gel with another protective coating layer. It is important to follow manufacturer instructions to prevent cracking, especially if the print will be rolled, stretched or remounted.

Here is the technical rub. I wonder whether the gel texture affects the way light strikes the ink surface and might not alter the inevitable fading process in a negative way. How could it not? The varying heights and shapes of the gel are sure to refract the light in varying patterns onto the pigments, and by this affect them in varying and uneven ways.

Paint Embellishments

Much of the acrylic paint I see used to enhance a print is color that compliments what is already in the print. Perhaps a rich cadmium red highlight in an apple, or a splash of ultramarine blue in water or the iris of the eye. Now, let's say I get that color just right, and it looks great. My question is what will it look like a few years from now? Ten years? When the babies we are all painting are getting married? I just have trouble believing that the ink will change color (fade) at the same rate as the paint, no matter how we (and our customers) protect the paintings in the coming years. Will that cad red stick out like a gash across the apple, or the UMB seem like iridescent pollution in the sea a few years from now?

I do make allowance for the metallic paints and pigments that are used for very special purposes, such as the metallics found in the style of Gustav Klimt paintings. If an artist is going to add paint to a print, I would offer that colors that don't depend on surrounding color for their balance may be the best choices. That really does offer an enhancement that is both worthwhile and less likely to become out of balance with the rest of the painting in coming decades even if it does fade at a different rate than the inks in the print. Again I would be sure the painting is protected both before and after the paint, pigment or collage is applied.

Digtal Artist Pride

I suppose my discomfort with pure brush stroke texturing of a print is that it seems like deception, a trick we play on our customers, or they play on their friends and family, to make the paintings look like they are traditional impasto paint. I do it because customers still insist on it. But in meeting their demands, I don't want to give them a little surprise years from now that might ruin a cherished portrait for them.

Call me conservative, but I use the best printers, the best archival pigmented inks, and the best substrates. I mount the works with care and acid free mounting techniques, and I protect them with environmentally friendly U.V. protective coatings. I can't bring myself to paint on them without having more information about the long term result.

As I noted before, I am thrilled by the prints that come out of my printer. I add coating because it both helps preserve, deepen and enrich the print. As a developing art that is making great strides gaining acceptance by both our patrons and our contemporary artists and critics, I do not believe it is in the best interests of our new art to give appearance that our prints, as and of themselves, are wanting anything. In particular, our work is not trying to be an oil painting or acrylic painting, those too are what they are. Ours is the digital print, and it is more than sufficient being just that. We can always make them more, but let us not try to make them something they are not.

Making an effort to change the print to look like an impasto painting may reflect an uncertain self image by the digital artist and send a signal that the artist is not satisfied with the digital print for what it is. It may risk the long term well being of the print, and it is not worth the risk. For my part, I look forward to a time when our digital prints are accepted and valued for just what they are and not because we can make them look like what they aren't.

Gary

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Picasa reviewed

Picasa, a free downloadable photo management tool from Google, works well at locating, organizing, and even doing basic adjustments of photos resources on your computer. The price is certainly right.

Once downloaded and installed, Picasa software scans your computer for pictures and videos. It handles a wide assortment of image formats, including my JPEG, PSD, and CR2, the raw format images that I get from my Canon cameras. The default organization of folders is by time, an interesting approach and probably a very useful one for most people. But if you want the folders displayed in the more customary folder tree layout, just click the button, and presto you have a folder tree.

It was refreshing looking at the folders in chronological order, wherever they might be located on the machine, even among multiple drives. I keep live storage in the 1.5 TB area, so scanning my drives is no small task. It handled it pretty well. Of course, I did go keep the wife company watching TV while Picasa stayed at work finding all my pictures.

By the way, under the Tools Menu you can choose which drives and folders to scan and which drives and folders to hide. This comes in handy when you have folders with things that don't need to be indexed again, like Website development folders with tons of thumbnails, slices of pages, and so forth. Believe me, those are boring to look at!!! Just turn them off. You can change your mind later.

The image manipulation is above average as a fundamental image tool. Cropping and straightening was intuitive and offered 3 common formats to help get proportions right. Would have loved a warp or perspective tool to straighten up some buildings and trees, but what the heck, it's art, right?

Even the, "I feel lucky" tool turned out some pretty predictable results a few times, although there is a difference between feeling lucky and being lucky.

Tuning Tools offer highlight and shadow adjustments, white balance control, as well as slider for fill light to lighten up those darker shadows in otherwise well exposed images. These tools seemed to work better on raw images than JPEG, but were quite a bit slower with raw. I shoot both raw adn JPEG at the same time, and I ended up playing mostly with the JPEG because of the speed. I was impressed that Picasa did seem to recognize changes that I had previously made to raw files in other programs, like Lightroom and ACDSee Pro. Those changes are stored in XML files, and Picasa seemed to get that, although there was a time lag to render and display thumbnails with those modifications.

The special effects tab was interesting. I expect for many users it is a very fun set of filters. More experienced users may be frustrated. It sharpens, but bit too much and there is no way to roll it back part way. You can oversharpen multiple times if you like, though. It felt like many of the tools made too much of an adjustment. If a little sharpening is good, a lot of sharpening should be really good. Right? No.

There were also some effects that had better controls and worked well. There were multiple monotone makers including a black and white conversion that allowed a choice of colors to base the conversion on. Using the little pointer to try different values was easy and rendered the results in real time. No layers and no masks to fine tune things, but a good overall effect.

All in all, Picasa was a happy surprise, as most things made by Google have been for me. It does what it says it will do, and like the swan gliding across the lake, you don't see all of the techy stuff paddling hard beneath the surface of the interface struggling to keep it gliding. Good job.

Gary

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Photoshop Express Online


Just discovered Photoshop Express, a new online photo gallery and online photo editing tool by Adobe. It boasts 2GB of free private or public (or both) gallery space to post your JPEG's for non commercial purposes. (I didn't know non-commercial purposes still existed!!!) It also has online photo editing, also free. From the terms and conditions, I suspect that paid accounts are just around the corner.

Any company that can create a tool like Photoshop deserves a look when it puts an editing tool online and gives it a name that demands such respect, fear even, in photographic, graphic and artistic circles. However, if you already are an intermediate or beyond Photoshop user, I think you will be a little disappointed with the editing tools. While it has some of the right choices of tools, they work in a kind of meat axe way, letting you choose one from a just very few modifications to the original. Unfortunately, most of the choices are are widely different. This leaves you with sort of a which-one-do-I-dislike-least choice/dilemma. I often found myself choosing the original.

All this means to me is that the site is new and that they are trying out the first few steps in what holds great potential. Adobe won my heart a long time ago, and deepened the bond when it first released Lightroom Public Beta!!! So, I remain hopeful that they will also work on providing a bit more useful and user friendly tools.

Does it compare to Picassa? No Photoshop Express is completely online so there is no downloading. The tools have some overlap of purpose but work quite differently online. Photoshop Express does not have any photo organizing of material on your computer. I only took the tools around the block, not on full test drive yet, so I will reserve further discussion on comparisons and detailed reviews of features.

I also notice that Photo Express does not presently handle anything but JPEG images. I really see that as a weakness and kind of shortsighted. More and more cameras in the hands of non-pros are using raw formats, and TIFF's have been common for a while. Adobe argues that raw and TIFF are too large to support. I say they are too useful and widespread not to support. Many of the proprietary software that comes with these cameras are either lacking in usefulness or friendliness, plus you're not always at your handy home computer to handle images. Isn't this a bit of what Photo Express is for? An online tool that would at least convert a raw file for you could be an extremely attractive feature for many people. If you have to convert your photos first with other software, you might as well do the rest of the fixing there too. Why do you need Photo Express?

There is one really nice thing about registering. Your gallery is posted at http//_________.photoshop.com where you get to fill in the blank at the beginning. Pretty cool having a gallery at photoshop.com. In fact, I am now so cool that I can hardly stand it. Yeah, right.

Check out Photoshop Express

Gary Brown

Come visit me at
http://brownfinephoto.com/