TRAKTION's first Red Commercial

[John Tissavary]

Actually it's Traktion's first commercial, period, since we're brand new. The client has generously allowed us to post a link to the 60 second spot here in advance of airing.

The spot will air on DiscoveryHD & Speed (HD), as well as several other HD & SD networks soon. I'll post starting dates when I find out more.

Title: American Dream (http://www.crossoverco.com/traktion/bbcad001.html)
Client: Big Bear Chopper
Agency/Production Co.: Traktion
Producer/Colorist: John Tissavary
Director/Editor: Mark Cross
DoP: Evin Grant

Follow THIS LINK (http://www.crossoverco.com/traktion/bbcad001.html). You'll need to download & install the DiVX (http://www.divx.com) & AC-3 (http://www.free-codecs.com/download_soft.php?d=3284&s=12) codecs IF you don't already have them.

cheers,

jt

[Corey Culp]

Great stuff, John! It's cool to finally see the finished product.

[dino g]

great job john, hope the codec i gave you early helped.

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

I watched it 10 times.

That's all I want to say.

:)

[Frank Mirbach]

Nice ! :)

[Robert Mott]

impressive.

[Redfish]

Loved watching this. Can you tell me, what Red kit did you use for this? Would be really interested to know as I need to start thinking about what Red kit/lenses/accessories I need to get (I'm a director, not a cinematographer, so a lot of the technical stuff is beyond me). Also what special effects did you do in post? How easy was it to use FCP and Red material? Sorry I'm asking such basic questions...

[Babu Kantamneni]

Good to see a finished product.
great Evin with focus!

[jaadgy akanni]

Anyone have any idea why my Mac g4 goes birsirk when I play a divx online video and it freezes after a few minutes?
Damn, I wanna see this video.

[BASSAM MSSALATIE]

its amazing ..very good ..:greedy:

[Sam Druckerman]

Hi John,

Looking good. :-)

[Matt Workman]

is it at all possible to post a H264? :ninja:

[John Tissavary]

is it at all possible to post a H264? :ninja:

For me the issue is server bandwidth. An equivalent h.264 quicktime or mp4 will be @ 10-20x larger. Are you having problems viewing divx?

regards,

jt

[John Tissavary]

Hi John,

Looking good. :-)

I neglected to mention that we used Sam's superkickass Red rig on our shoot.

Sam & Evin will be best qualified to describe the setup we used.

regards,

jt

[jbeale]

For me the issue is server bandwidth. An equivalent h.264 quicktime or mp4 will be @ 10-20x larger. Are you having problems viewing divx?
The divx looks fine here. But is it really true that equivalent quality in H.264 would be 10x the size? I can hardly believe that. The comparisons I have seen, like the one below, show H.264 with superior performance to DIVX at the same size, for any given bitrate. http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/mpeg-4_avc_h264_en.html

[Brook Willard]

Loved watching this. Can you tell me, what Red kit did you use for this? Would be really interested to know as I need to start thinking about what Red kit/lenses/accessories I need to get (I'm a director, not a cinematographer, so a lot of the technical stuff is beyond me). Also what special effects did you do in post? How easy was it to use FCP and Red material? Sorry I'm asking such basic questions...

Our primes were Cooke S4s and our zoom [the crane footage] was an Optimo 15-40mm T2.6.

We had a fully outfitted [think just about every accessory] RED kit, a Chrosziel follow focus and an Arri LMB-4 mattebox. For the crane footage, we *were* going to use Arri's LCS remote FIZ, but we ended up being forced to rig an alternative.

Not all of the gear was owned... most of it came from The Camera House.

If you do a search, you'll find a thread we posted on the shoot day.

[John Tissavary]

Loved watching this. Can you tell me, what Red kit did you use for this? Would be really interested to know as I need to start thinking about what Red kit/lenses/accessories I need to get (I'm a director, not a cinematographer, so a lot of the technical stuff is beyond me). Also what special effects did you do in post? How easy was it to use FCP and Red material? Sorry I'm asking such basic questions...


Hi - thanks for the complement! Brooke answered about the Red kit, I can tell you about Post.

Offline was FCP, the QT wrappers were generated on set via Redalert. FCP and Redcode work nicely, though I'm more impressed with Redcode performance in Scratch.

Red footage is great for color correcting and the looks in this spot are very dependent on this process. Though the director & I did plan the locations with lighting in mind, most of what you see is a result of working in Scratch & Magic Bullet Looks/Premiere Pro. Speed ramping was done in Nuke (oflow) and Premier Pro (time remap).

cheers,
jt

[joe12south]

If this is your promo site, I'd humbly suggest that you encode for Flash video. Almost universally available (ala YouTube,) can do high quality, and a lot less likely to crash your client's browser. (As it did mine.)

[John Tissavary]

If this is your promo site, I'd humbly suggest that you encode for Flash video. Almost universally available (ala YouTube,) can do high quality, and a lot less likely to crash your client's browser. (As it did mine.)


I did the best flash encoding I could, but at 1k the quality SUCKED HUGELY.

I tried Premiere Pro C3, Flash media encoder CS3, and even took a crack at Camtasia Studio. They all sucked. I'm sure there's a way to encode flash really well at high datarates, but I've yet to find it.

My delivery platform is not online, so I'm extremely allergic to spending any more money on transcoding software than I already have.

As to browser crashing, sorry 'bout that - hate when that happens.

Still, I've tested the Divx on 7 systems from 6 year old laptop with a hair-trigger gag reflex, to quadcore macs & pcs with workstation graphics and have yet to crash. I did notice stuttering playback on my old laptop, but that's to be expected as the bitrate is high for its old bones.

cheers,

jt

[brandon herman]

Cool spot!

Also, great to see another Premiere Pro user!