Conquering Cartesian Planes

So, my opening sequence for my videos requires that I show the students the axis they are going to be using for their graph. Since I'm spending a bunch of time in Motion anyhow, I figured I'd learn how to do the following:
- wide shot, showing whole Cartesian plane
- zoom in to horizontal axis, then pan L-R across the label (time)
- zoom out to wide shot again
- tilt camera 90 degrees, and do the same process with the vertical axis label

In order to accomplish this, I needed to have a high quality Cartesian plane that would stand up to me zooming in right next to it. So, I created the grid using vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator (the Illustrator file is here, and the final png is here). Getting vector graphics into Motion proved to be a bit much for me, so I ended up exporting the graph as a png file, with a maxed out ppi at 2400. This seems to be enough resolution that I don't have to care about trying to use vector graphics in Motion (this process took all morning, and had Dave and myself cussing in intervals).

Well, time for some lunch, and then on to learning how to control virtual camera motion in Motion. Fun.

Fixing my overexposure problems...

It seems all my posts are explaining how I'm trying to fix something I screwed up on... ah well, I suppose that's how you learn. A bunch of my shots are being done outdoors, and I'm learning that I really have to pay more attention to the zebra function on the camera. I took a shot that was bubbling over with graphing possibilities, but imported it into FCP only to see how terribly overexposed it was. I really have to learn to fix these things while shooting, instead of trying to do it in post. Anyhow, I went crawling back to Google, and found a really neat way to fix up the overexposed sky using a superimposed gradient. Nifty. I fiddled around with this, and it was an impressive change, but in the end, I gave up and decided to reshoot.

Removing wind noise from a clip

So, I had a perfect situation to shoot some video yesterday. I volunteered for Dunk Tank Duty at our school's SRG fundraiser yesterday, and figured I had to use this as one of my "Graph this situation" examples (see my project proposal if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Anyhow, I got everything set up, and actually got a decent video of the event. The problem, however, was that it was stupid windy yesterday, so there's a bunch of extraneous noise in the audio track. I know, I know: I should have set up some kind of wind break. Lesson learned. As it is, I had to try to figure out how to make the audio at least semi-acceptable. I found a great tutorial here, showing how to remove noise in Soundtrack Pro 2. Though it certainly isn't great audio, it will do for my purposes. Now, off to have a hot drink. That water was ice.

Project Proposal - in process

My project is "Learning mathematical graphing through video stories". I have started working on my project proposal, though it is a work in progress (needs some refining, and I haven't sorted out the schedule yet). Any thought/advise would be great.

Hello world

Just the classic post.