Effects in Videos

[absolutedestiny]

Special effects in videos are like MSG - totally useless unless there's a good flavour there to begin with.

However much I like a lot of glutimate in my food I wouldnt eat a plate of MSG. Give me a bag of MSG-loaded cheetos, however, and that bag wont last ten minutes.

Oh and like MSG some people have a problem with effects. Their loss, as it's not actually allergenic :)

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Also, I got to a point in my video yesterday when I realised "God that is so great... you can't get any better than that". Unfortunately this moment is at the halfway point of my video. Hmmm... I'll just have to hope for another awesome moment like that one otherwise it's downlhill from there.

Comments

[ermac318.livejournal.com]

Actually my mother is allergic to MSG - she can't eat anything with it or she her... lower digestive tract gets very upset. She has to avoid all foods with it, which can be very tough considering that in the US if something in the ingredients claims to have "Natural Flavors" that could mean MSG.

But nice analogy =)

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Can she eat tomatoes? Mushrooms? They contain MSG naturally and there's no difference between "natural" and artificial MSG. Saying "artificial" msg is like saying artificial salt. While I don't doubt that she has digestive problems there have been no tests which have proven MSG to be allergenic.

"Numerous studies have examined whether MSG in foods triggers allergic reactions. In 1991, the American College of Allergy and Immunology issued a position paper on the issue. The document concluded that MSG is not an allergen and that severe reactions have nothing to do with this ingredient. FASEB's August 1995 report also stated that MSG is not an allergen."

[luminosity]

Also, I got to a point in my video yesterday when I realised "God that is so great... you can't get any better than that".

Yeah, you kinda want that as the topper, not in the bridge--which is where that thought hits me all the time. The bridge is *fantastic*!! Now what?

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Structurally, however, it can't go anywhere else. It's part of a training montage which logically has to go before the result of their training is realised.

However, I might be able to do something kinda simlar later, so all may not be lost yet :)

[dji.livejournal.com]

hehe MSG...

Yeah there's MSG in my videos... but generally I make an effort to make sure "you can't taste it" =)

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

MSG is so cool. Great analogy. Oh! Cooking with vids!

[trythil.livejournal.com]

So Star Wars is like eating Chinese food from a terrible Chinese restaurant?

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If you are implying that MSG is something only featured in bad chinese restaurants then you're both wrong and misguided.

If you're implying that star wars is only good because of the msg then I don't understand this either because like I said, it cant be good unless there is some goodness underneath :)

[trythil.livejournal.com]

It's not that MSG is exclusively present in bad Chinese restaurants, it's that bad Chinese resturants are infamous for overusing the stuff :P

[actionjbone.livejournal.com]

Whenever I come up with something _so_ awesome _but_ it happens to be stuck in the middle of the video, I twist it a bit and reuse it again later.

[brakusjs.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm not allergic to special effects (or MSG, for that matter). It's just that a lot of stuff that everybody likes has too much MSG in it, and sometimes *that* gives me a headache. I'm surprised the sales of Tylenol and Advil haven't perked up some since last summer.

[daedal-eve.livejournal.com]

I can't make my mind up about effects at all. I'd prefer to never mess with them, because they take your energy and concentration from good editing and shift it over to making effects...
However because there are so many editors not spitting out thousands of cookie cutter type videos, in order to stand out at all you kind of have to have some flashy effects. Yeah there are exceptions... but they arn't the rule.
Editors (who have been at it a while) arn't impressed by effects at all because we all know how to do the stuff. It's just a question of if we really want to take the time to do it. And most of us really don't, knowing we can make soemthing perfectly fine without all that crap.
But the typical viewer is impressed by that stuff. And it's the people that watch these things that decide who is good and who isn't.
But at the same time, I trust the standard viewers opinion more than an editor.

[trythil.livejournal.com]

I'd disagree that effect work is "crap". There's many things you can do once you've gotten the hang of the standard techniques that simply cannot be done to the same degree of effectiveness with edits.

Just one example: re-creation of scenes is something that I've enjoyed doing lately. It's a lot easier to do with animated than live-action material, but the principle is the same (just much more difficult! :P)

Basically, if you can remodel all entities of a scene in 3D, keeping entity properties as similar as possible, you gain so much more power to express what you want to express. I did this in a recent project: I wanted one continuous shot in which the camera slowly panned over a busy background, and there was no such scene in the source footage. So, I modelled the set that I wanted, extracted character animations from the footage, and proceeded to make the scene. The result wasn't quite as seamless as I wanted it to be, but I think it worked, nonetheless.

I suppose I could have done something different that didn't require all that work, but I didn't really want to change what I saw because of something as insignificant (IMO) as perceived technical limitations. Effects, applied properly, give you the tools to overcome those limitations.

Another perspective: we've got all this CPU power, it's a shame to waste it :)

[daedal-eve.livejournal.com]

I've only had to use effects once because I felt it improved a vid(and for the record I don't consider compositing effects, it's compositing). But every other time I've used them it's because it just seemed ike there wasn't enough there. And every time I did, it felt more like WORK than play... so for me, it's CRAP! Complete and total shit.

If I wanted to I could make something that would make people cream themselves. But I don't because to be honest, I would not enjoy any of it.

True power is the ability to do something, but choosing not too. And as is stands I have more power than most, both in idealism and my PC.

[scintilla72.livejournal.com]

Ow! my retinae/stomach lining!

well, someone had to say it