Avene | Video, Beats & Techniques

A bit slow posting this. I completed this video last year for the Small Time Hustlers (Tycotic & Jacquie). I just 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.