2Duce2 Videography | Nashville TN | Leading Videography Team » Video Stills

Instagram | Why Can’t Coloring Footage Be That Easy?

Eugene — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:26:23 +0000

We recently shot a few fun on-the-spot interviews for a workshop that our good friends Zach & Jody put on here in Nashville, TN. During the shoot we got to interview some really cool cats who attended the workshop! Heather & I are pretty addicted to an app called Instagram for iphones. Basically, it makes normal people like us look like freakin amazing photographers, using only our iphones and a few filters!

Since we didn’t get a chance to Instagram during our shoot the other night, I came home, grabbed a frame from video, and put it up on Instagram! Once I posted it up on Instagram, Heather & I were lookin at it and I said “Hey…wouldn’t it be cool if we could color our footage that easy?” Then I started thinkin How hard would it be to grade some footage to look like one of the Instagram filters.

I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t always do things the proper technical way you should. With that said, here are a few shots of the progress we made on some footage we’re workin on.

Below you see a screen shot from my iphone with what the “Brannan” filter (in Instagram) did to our original pic
(Instagram pic on left :: Original shot of video footage on right)

Below you see a screen shot from my iphone with what the “Brannan” filter (in Instagram) did to our original pic as well as the final graded video footage

(Instagram pic on left :: graded shot of video footage on right)

Below is a quick vid showing the difference between the orignal and graded shots! BAM:)

Now like I said earlier, we don’t always do things the way the books say to do it. We just figure out the look we want, and then have at it until we get what we want. There are a trillion ways to get to the final graded footage that we got, but here are screen shots of the color grading progressions during our grading fun.

…Oh wait…ready for the kicker…We did this in FCPX…gasssp:) Each screen shot you see is a different color correction. There were 10 total, and then a nice signature Instagram vignette at the end:)

I think we got pretty close!! There’s still a lil difference between the two, but we wouldn’t want to make it look exactly like Instagram would we? (Okay, yeah we would, but I got tired and went to bed)

Freeze Frame | Real Estate

Heather — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:00:41 +0000

Below is a freeze frame we pulled from a Real Estate video we’ve been working on. These two were fun to work with & we absolutely loved the home we were shooting in. It’s always refreshing to shoot something different, so we wanted to share this freeze frame with you from something we had fun shooting a few weeks ago

Ryan + Carly | Wedding Teaser

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:00:03 +0000

Ryan & Carly were married last Sunday afternoon with close friends & family in attendance. They are such a gorgeous couple who had such a sweet ceremony! From the moment the slideshow played through their childhood photos to the moment they shared the vows they had written for each other, we’re sure there was not a dry eye in the church. Ryan & Carly chose not to see each other until the ceremony, & Ryan’s face was priceless when he first saw Carly walk through the church doors! Both of their faces were lit up with huge smiles… and a few tears
After the adventures of planning their wedding & even Ryan getting into a car accident just two days before, these two continued with the celebration as if nothing had ever happened. We could not be more excited for Ryan & Carly; & we hope you all enjoy this glimpse into their special day!

Check out a few of our stills below:

Church: Hendersonville Community Church

Reception Venue: Glen Oaks Clubhouse in Hendersonville, TN

Photography: Kristen Weigel Photography

Floral: Vicki of Scentaments

Cake: Home Style Bakery

Did you know | Stills from Video

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:44:16 +0000

Recently, we’ve switched from shooting weddings with our regular video cameras to shooting with Canon’s 7D DSLRs. It’s really interesting hearing all the feedback we get from other videographers as well as photographers about shooting on these cameras! Thats a blog post for another day though:)

We will however, address the biggest question we get…”Why shoot on a DSLR?” Well besides the obvious things like lens options, the crazy depth of field, how they perform in low light situations, and how easy it is to travel around with them versus traveling with our normal video cameras. (Sony HVR-Z7U) One of the coolest things we’re proud to be able to do is pull (good) stills from our videos!

Below is a still we pulled right from video on our 7D a few months ago

Now obviously most of you photographers could make this image look ridiculously good, but we’re not photographers, so don’t rake us over the coals too bad:) haha

For the longest time we’ve wanted to be able to post stills, but stills from regular video cameras look horrible. (unless of course you’re lucky enough to be shooting on a RED) We don’t care how good your video camera is, or how cool the moment was; just because you can freeze a frame in your video doesn’t mean you always should!

With that said though, we’ve found that people spend even more time on our blog posts when we do post images.

So how do we get such good stills?
The way we get our stills from our video is actually pretty simple! The first thing we do is find the clip that has the frame we want to freeze.

Most of you who own a DSLR know that bringing in footage right into an editing program without converting the footage is a nightmare. There are tons of programs out there you can use to convert footage, but our favorite is MPEG STREAMCLIP. You can get a free copy here for your heavenly Mac or ~~your windows machine~~ (We’re just being mean by striking out the windows machine, they do have mpeg streamclip for windows)

So once you’ve downloaded MPEG STREAMCLIP and open it up, you’ll get a window like this.

Awww yeah baby:) The process is simple go to [FILE] and click [OPEN FILES] or press [Apple+O] and locate the video file you want to use. MPEG STREAMCLIP will open up your video clip and you’ll have to scroll to exactly where you want the still to be taken at.

Once you’ve found the perfect spot in your video to capture as a video still Click on [FILE] and select [EXPORT FRAME]

Once we get to this window, we make the following selections
Frame size :: Unscaled (You can resize the image later on in simple photo editing software)
Pixel Aspect :: Computer Graphics
Gamma :: 2.2
There is no need to interlace or deinterlace.
We leave the adjustments alone and tweak stuff in lightroom
Format :: JPEG
Quality :: we go all out and move the slider all the way up:)

Click OK and you’re ready to rock!

If you notice in this particular clip, we shot it way underexposed, and there is also something small in the bride’s hair. After bugging the crap out of our photographer friends we figured out how to bring up the exposure as well as get rid of the white fuzzy in our girls hair.
It’s really that simple!

So now how about the videographers who aren’t shooting on DSLRs? First off don’t be that guy/girl who posts stills that look pixelated and crappy! We’re not saying that only videographers who shoot on DSLRs can get good stills, but in comparison DSLRs smoke other video cameras when it comes to video stills! What we used to do before we had our DSLRs was to actually get ahold of the photographer who shot the wedding with us and ask him/her for a few images we could use for our blog post! Most photographers will be more than happy for you to showcase their work on your blog.

Hopefully this has helped some of our other videographer friends who read our blog!

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Santino & Tryce | Video Stills

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:25:22 +0000

This wedding was soo much fun! We wanted to grab a few stills and post them for you all to see until we get the teaser up! Awww yeah baby:)