Justin M Miller.com

While attending the open video conference I have decided to do a series of short blogs about the event. I would typically do this on my Penn State space, however, I was able to borrow an iPad for this conference and I wanted to attempt to do all of my blogging and work directly from the iPad without using a laptop. Moveable type was not working with the iPad so I am working from this space.

Earlier this summer the Digital Commons was approached about helping produce and create a video for an Alternate Reality Game (referred to as ARG) for the Penn State University Libraries open house. The video entailed among other things making a stuffed lion located in the library disappear, We had to do this on video with out being able to physically touch or move the lion. The initial problem that we faced with this shot was that in front of the lion sat a large glass window that had multiple reflections on it.

We recently decided to get a mac pro in the office in order to speed up our render times, rendering can be one of our most timely processes and our current MacBook Pro's were no longer getting the job done, causing us to have to leave render jobs run over the weekend. Unfortunately Final Cut Pro 6's underlying code is becoming quite aged and is no optimized to use multiple core macs at all, I expect this to change when FCP 7 is released soon, however when rendering video using compressor 3 we can take advantage of all 8 cores on our Mac pro.

With all of the techniques and skills that I find interesting and wish to learn I always find the reason for my wanting to learn these techniques is to improve upon my own film/video making. I've been finding a lot of success with compositing as a method to increase the production value of projects that I work. In this post I would like to talk about the "I am Moving" Music video that I worked on for Donny Goines, while I've used compositing many times in the past it is easy for me to illustrate where I used it in "I am Moving."

At its most basics, to composite is to combine multiple images or elements into a single image. This is commonly used in graphic design with applications like photoshop.

In October 2008 I travelled to New York City to collaborate on a music video with Donny Goines, Don Hankins, and Aaron Miles. Donny Goines is an up and coming hip hop artist in NYC, Don Hankins and I co-directed this music video and Aaron Miles produced the Music Video. We shot this video on a Panasonic HVX-200 with no money, no lights, or any other equipment. With resources being low we decided to turn our otherwise weakness into a strength shooting in places of New York that we would never have been able to gain access too with addtional equipment, including Time Square at night.