Hi Leigh,

thanks for Your work, it is amazing!


Greets,
Paco.

I'm a big fan of the Vegas series. You'll get a lot of bang for your buck there.

Thanks for the info, I cannot afford or justify the pro stuff but I think that this product has gotten good reviews and it is a linear editor similar mold to Premiere so should be quite intuitive and it is VERY good value for money.

Cheers

Aces

Oh yes. And as you have said the interface has become quite intuitive as well. I started using the series back with Vegas 7, and that was, shall we say, not so intuitive. Powerful, but not intuitive. Since then, the series has improved that greatly while retaining the plethora of functions. I'm sure you'll be very happy with it.

I appreciate your comments, it is always nice to hear from someone who has used a product. I have been using Premier at work for years but I've always heard good things about Vegas, I was suprised to find an entry-level product with so much funtionality and for such a good price. It should come tomorrow in time for the weekend so that I can start working on the movie again.

Cheers

Aces

Good kit but if you need anything else drop me a line, i may have a licence or two available :cool:

Thanks Jim I appreciate it.

Cheers

Leigh

I'm VERY happy with my video editing purchase, you are most certainly right, you do get a lot of "bang for your buck" with it.

Already started capturing new material for the final film.

Cheers

Aces

I would be glad to help, I am buried in work untill the end of November though, after this my schedule looks much better.

Regarding the narrator, there are several aspects that come into play. Yes we speak a different German today, but in the early days all speakers had a theater education, this is what made their voices so distinctive. There is also the factor of the older technology: the microphones had less dynamic, but also important were that the devices by which which the end-user listened to it - the boxes in the movie theaters were crap in comparision to today. The audio guys and also the voice artists at this time took all this into their calculation. This is why the narrators speak the last syllabels of the words very clear and distinct.
If you would really want to add new voice-overs, I would recommend a professional speaker who is able to imitate Giese's "narrative flow". I can sure help you with translating stuff, or even write new stuff which would be fitting, however my voice talent is quite limited - I can only do a mediocre Hitler imitation. :D

I asked an audio engineer what one could to in the post production, as my idea would be to reduce the dynamic of the audio. He told we that I could do it, but only carefully, as we don't want it to sound like a telephone. A tip he gave me, is to use a crappy microphone for recording :) - preferable a dynamic one, in contrast to today's standard for speech recording which would be a condensor type.

I would keep the subtitles in a different channel untill the movie is finished, but for timing reasons it would be neccessary to have them available, as they will determinate the pacing of the editing - or less complicated said: how long the viewer will see the different footage.

I would suggest to keep the 4:3 ratio, as this was the original format of the Wochenschau. Even though the 16:9 format in our television is fairly new, the audience already connects watching 4:3 pictures with "old news", much more true for pics from the 40s. Shame on the BBC for raping the excellent "The World at War"-series by transforming it to 16:9 in the restored version :nope:(and by this, killing one quarter of the picture information)

If you record your game footage in a 4:3 ratio, any good capturing software would record only the depicted graphics, so you would have no pillarbox effect(black bars on the sides - a letterbox are bars on top and bottom :know:). However there is one big advantage if you record it in a widescreen ratio: You can choose the best part of the picture that you want to use - just like the pan & scan guys did. You don't lose any quality, as you certainly will downsize the whole movie to a lower resolution anyways.

So I would go for the highest resolution possible when recording game footage, a resolution that leaves you at least 25 frames/sec, then downsize it. This way you have as many details as possible. What would also be nice, is reducing the depth of field, as I noticed many in-game cams don't do it, or do it in other ways as real life cameras work. When you also use aperture filters or similar stuff that reduces the "sharpness", the result will be that your footage looks much less artificial and it will be harder to distinguish it from real life footage. I noticed for example that the stills in the end of your film are barely to make out as computer game pics.

Cheers and greetings,
Penguin

Hi Penguin,

Thank you for all the great information and advice. Regarding the format I want to keep 4:3 for the historical reasons that you have given and also because 95 or more per cent of the movie is already in this format :). I have been capturing new material at 16:9 and I will use pan and scan in Sony Vegas to frame as I desire. The main thing about using 16:9 is that one cannot frame whilst capturing so one has to visualise the final look.

With regards to the sound and sub-titles. It would be best to start afresh I think the only problem is that I don't have a version without them as my orignal "footage" was spread accross several external hard disks and I tried to re-assemble each "segment" but it pproved virtually impossible to re-locate all the clips using Premier as there are so many. What I'll most probably end up doing is putting black background subtitles rather than transparent over the exisiting ones and adding new ones in the same style.
When the video side of thing is finished then I will think more on narration both the writing of it to match the action and that's where your time and skills would be very appreciaterd and also the voice. I think a voiced actor would be good but I doubt if I could afford one but, first things first.

I did put in some softening already so as to make the film look dated.

Thank you for all your help and ideas, I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Kind regards

Leigh (Aces)