Small Time Hustlers – ‘High Grade’ music video (Edited by Avene)

A bit slow posting this. I completed this video last year for the Small Time Hustlers (Tycotic & Jacquie). I did the editing, compositing and colouring on this one. They shot the whole video themselves. All the outdoor footage they shot on location in Mauritious during a trip there. The rest they shot on greenscreen. All shot using a JVC HD7 HDV camera. They sent me the files from the camera on a bunch of DVDs. The files were in some weird format. But thankfully I could convert them using Cineform Neo HD.

For the greenscreen shots I used the Boris BCC7 keyer. It worked really nicely. All the smoke footage I used for the backgrounds I already had on my hard drive. Most of which were Detonation Films clips I’d downloaded from their website. Just the tiny Flash preview shots they have on their which I converted to avi. Don’t tell them though 🙂 These were easy enough to enlarge without losing too much detail, and Neat Video came in handy cleaning up all the final shots. Of course I use that on every video I do. Even when the footage already looks good, it still makes a difference.

For the colour grading I used Vegas’ Color Curves plugin. I have a basic cross process look that I set up based on this tutorial. From there I’ll make a few tweaks until I get the look I’m after. In a way, using curves is actually simpler than using other colour correction plugins. I used to use Magic Bullet’s Mojo plugin, but haven’t used it for a long time now. Not just because it doesn’t work with 64-bit Vegas, but also because I never felt that it gave me enough control. I still use the AAV Color Lab plugin a lot, but didn’t use it on this video.