It’s also the first time I produce subtitles, since I found out about Subtitle Composer last week, which is a great and simple subtitling software for KDE. This software was so good that I basically added subtitlesto allCool Cavemen’s video on YouTube over the week-end. BTW, if you want to contribute to this effort and offer us translation of lyrics and subtitles, send me an email and I’ll help you.
I’ll try to produce detailed production notes in an upcoming article. So don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed of that blog to not miss it !
The goal of that project was to illustrate a pre-recorded soundtrack. The latter being to Cool Cavemen what The Ecstasy of Gold is to Metallica: a piece that is played before each show and serve as concert intro.
It’s an original mockup of a radio broadcast, and a tribute to Classic 21 (ex “Radio 21″), the (best) Belgian radio station we used to listen to as teenagers, and still do.
Footage used to produce this video is public domain material found at archive.org. If you’re curious, the detailed list of all sources is available in the credits, at the end of the video.
As for my previous project, I have to warn you that it may not look as funny as for French-speaking audience. That being said, here is the final result:
The challenge of this project was to have video of people speaking in sync with the audio. I suffered a lot trying to make it as convincing as possible. If the final result is far from perfect, I find it to be believable enough for the amount of time I invested in.
As for the tools used to produce this video, I edited it in November with a development version of Kdenlive, under an Ubuntu 11.10. As usual, here is a screenshot of my timeline for reference:
The project is using Kdenlive’s “NTSC 29.97 fps” profile, which produce a 720×486 pixels stream with a pixel aspect ratio of 8/9 and a display aspect ratio of 4/3. I choose this profile as it was the closest to the original videos I downloaded from archive.org.
I composed the credits and title card in Gimp, and tried to mimic the style of that period. This mean approximative composition and abuse of typography:
To enhance the effect, I blurred everything and separated the text blocks in several layers. I then applied to each of them some random movements to add a parallax effect, thus getting closer to the look and feel produced by the imprecise optical process used in the early days of movie making.
Two months ago (October 8th) I shot a video for Cool Cavemen. I haven’t talked about it on this blog yet, let’s fix this right now:
The song is Nichrome, which is a brand new song that will be available on Cool Cavemen’s upcoming album (to be released in 2012). This is the first time Nichrome is made public. The video is only a preview of the song: it only contains the first 2 minutes and the audio track is a demo, not the final studio version.
Demos are used not only for reference, but also for rehearsals when a band member is missing. That’s the case in this video: there is no bass player, but his parts are played in all musician’s headphones. Shooting the video in this playback setup is a huge advantage for me, as it removes all issues related to audio/video synchronizations and tempo deviations.
I shot with my Canon EOS 7D (1080p, 23.976 fps, 1/50s shutter speed) and a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 wide open. I used this lens over my 8mm f/3.5 Fish-Eye to save the distorting effects of the latter for others projects.
Shades of magenta were produced by 2 PAR-56 LED cans (controlled in DMX with QLC). I did not initially planned to bring them, but they were lying in the trunk of my car and I never filmed them, so I took the opportunity. Unfortunately, as you can see in the video, the frequency of the PWM that is driving the LEDs is not high enough and generate ugly flickers.
ISO was set to auto as the lighting conditions were really messy. A quick test in the darkest area of the room showed me that ISOs were pushed too high, increasing the noise too much. I avoided this issue by mounting an HDV-Z96 LED light with its CTO diffuser filter, and carefully set its light level (around 60%):
According EXIF data, ISO did not get over 2500 with this method, and was measured at 5000 in the darkest place. Average seems to be around 600. But take these numbers with a big grain of salt as I have no better sources than the .THM preview files generated by the camera for each .MOV clip.
Meta-data also tells me that the white balance was set to auto at 2900K but I remember having set it manually to keep consist images colors. Always according EXIF, color profile was set to standard.
Finally, I created the title cards in Gimp and edited the video in Kdenlive (on Kubuntu 11.04):
And two weeks after releasing Nichrome’s preview video, I edited another one with all left-overs. Here are the outtakes (which may not be as funny to you as for a French-speaking person, sorry):
All the video material was shot by Tomasito itself, with his Canon PowerShot SX200IS point-and-shoot camera. This camera produce 30fps 720p clips.
He came to me with all these .mov files, and the idea of combining them into a classical split-screen layout. He had no idea how to do this, so I accepted to help him with my technical knowledge.
I fired up my Kdenlive (v0.8 on Kubuntu 11.04) and in a matter of hours, the project was done. With source videos of 720p, I naturally chose 1080p as the final resolution. I kept the 30fps framerate to not alter the original time resolution.
The most boring part of the edit was the first step, in which we synced all clips together with the reference audio track. Here is how the timeline looked, with one track for each instrument:
We had to work around some annoying Kdenlive bugs, as it had some problems handling so much tracks in parallel. Fortunately these bugs were fixed in a matter of days with a new build of MLT.
Next step was to mark out the structure of the song. Tomasito placed blue markers along the timeline, and we cut all tracks following that structure. It resulted in a matrix of clips:
Then for each segment, we choose the 4 clips that we wanted to show and deleted the others:
Then I created 4 special tracks to which I applied a global positioning and scaling effect, to have each track fill one corner of the screen. We moved there all the clips we selected in the previous step, and cleaned up the timeline a bit:
At this stage the project was mostly done. It was just a matter of adding intro, outro and fade in/out to obtain our final video:
Tomasito basically did the whole editing of the project. And I have some evidences:
I just showed him how to manipulate Kdenlive timelines, and cut/move/paste clips, and he was absolutely autonomous in a matter of minutes. I just did the transitions, the title cards integration and the screen splitting. I’m not sure I deserve the title of editor for this project, but he still insisted to add me in the credits…
Of course split-screen is far from new and was donea million times before. But it’s a simple yet effective concept that require absolutely no investment (apart time). This also gave me the opportunity to play again with Kdenlive and assess its user-friendliness and edit capabilities on a real project. But at the end, it was just a great excuse to work with a friend on a little video project !
Here is a collection of all themes I created for the Cool Cavemen website over the years.
Before settling on its current name, the Cool Cavemen project was referred to by its members as The Ultimate Band (talk about rock-star egos…). Here is a screenshot of the theme I did for e107:
In fact the original HTML mockup this theme is based on still exists. It is dated back to November 1st, 2004, which is now the official Cool Cavemen anniversary. The theme above was created two weeks later.
When I created the Cool Cavemen’s site, I choose e107. Back then I perceived it to be the only Open Source PHP-based CMS having the best balance between a clean and a powerful theme engine. That was my opinion before decided to switch to WordPress.
At the end of November ’04, our theme was updated to this:
The header above is based on a photo of a green laser, that was taken by Cool Cavemen’s guitarist.
2005 started with an updated version of the theme, featuring a photo of Cool Cavemen’s first gig. They were only three on stage, our bass player was still drumming at the time:
In February we finally had our official photo featuring all members of the band ! But it was cold outside so we added some fur to keep our website warm:
I spent the next months trying to build my own version of the Holy Grail: a perfect CSS-based 3-columns fluid layout (with a middle column placed in the top of the HTML). This explain Eric Mayer‘s quote in these mockups and the references to the Skidoo Too template:
I never found the Holy Grail, and the tests above remained unseen by the public. Tired by this journey, I never touched the theme again.
Until September 2005 when I updated it to this:
Notice the box in the top of the right column, which was designed to publish a new track every week. The code behind this box is available in another article.
So that was the last major version of the theme. Basically our e107 site looked that way for most of its life.
In November 2005 I attempted to reboot the theme. I made these 3 propositions to the band:
The last one had an interactive header, with tiny sketches showing up on mouse over:
Unfortunately we didn’t found any of these themes matching the Cool Cavemen spirit (whatever that is). If these alternatives were publicly discussed, we decided that no one was going to replace our previous theme.
The final update we made was when our Raw EP was released. We basically applied filters on the header to match Raw’s cover. We also updated our logo to use the one designed for us by QPX:
This version add loads of polishing and is not far from being feature-complete. I think I’m reaching the end of the active development of this plugin. I don’t see the need to add new features.
I also feel this way because last week, I succeeded in moving to WordPress all news and pages from the old e107′s Cool Cavemen website. I now only need to import all forums to definitively get rid of e107 from my life. At that point, I will declare the plugin no longer active. This mean I will no longer update it, but will still integrate code other developers are willing to contribute.
Before that happen, I will of course release one or two revisions of this plugin in the next few months. But expect bug fixes and tiny enhancements, not big new features.
That being said, here is the changelog of the brand new e107 Importer 1.3:
(1080p, 23.976 fps, 1/50s shutter speed) and a 
wide open. I used this lens over my 
to save the distorting effects of the latter for others projects.
with its CTO diffuser filter, and carefully set its light level (around 60%):
