Theo Lipfert

Film, filmmaking and other fun stuff. Now featuring every tutorial I have ever made!

[theolipfert]

How to put a laptop drive in a case to make an external hard drive. Pretty basic stuff!

[theolipfert]

Very quick A/B comparison of some typical office interview sound with Izotope RX2 noise reduction applied. This was not fine-tuned at all - just default settings.

[theolipfert]

Here is a real quick (40 seconds) comparison between an on-board camera mic and a shotgun mic connected to a Zoom H4N. Don't get me started on this ....

[theolipfert]

Evernote is my go-to application to keep all my crap organized. Application deadlines for film festivals are one thing I now have completely dialed-in. Every time I get an email, see a Facebook post or Tweet about a festival I might want to enter (for instance when I get a film finished - like a year [or 5] later), I use the Evernote clipper to grab a screen shot. In Evernote I have a notebook with these festival clippings, forwarded emails, etc. Then I have a master list with The Deadlines (important!) in chronological order, with a link to the original festival post. Sounds complicated, but its not. Once every two weeks I look at the list, and send out my work. I keep the list in place for the next year, and whatever project I have done at that point. Now I (rarely) have that feeling that there was some place to send my work that I vaguely remember seeing an email (or was it FB?) about a deadline that was sometime soon ... ?!

[theolipfert]

More fun working with the Ikonoskop DII. One of the issues with working with RAW files in video is how to edit using standard tools (FCP, Premiere, etc.) while preserving a link back to the original uncompressed files. Most people generate some kind of low-resolution copy which is easy to cut. But then ... when you are done editing, how do you go back to the full-resolution version for final output? This may be a solution:

This process uses Adobe After Effects and Premiere CS6. The trick is using the "link proxy file" function backwards. Rather than link a lo-res proxy, we link back to the CinemaDNG originals.

[theolipfert]

I was showing clips from my movie "Solving for X" in class the other day, and there was a question about one motion graphic technique - where a hand-written name morphs into a chalk outline. For the life of me I could not remember how I had done it. Finally I reconstructed the process (using Illustrator, Flash, and After Effects) and recorded this demo.

[theolipfert]

A tutorial on using Adobe Lightroom as a RAW importer for Cinema DNG files produced with the Ikonoskop DII panchromatic camera. I still don't own this camera, but I love working with these RAW footage files, available here. The workflow can get a little complicated, but is so worth it because the exposure, white balance, etc. is not baked in. You can push and pull the footage really far without it falling apart, like H.264 does.

[dannylaceyfilm-blog]

Are we wasting too much time chasing film festivals to raise exposure and seal that distribution deal? Very interesting video from FilmCourage.com interviewing author of Think Outside The Box Office, Jon Reiss. If you have your film in the can and are now thinking about film festivals, watch this video.