It took me FOREVER to find what IRE stood for. I could not remember for the life of me. I knew it had something to do with Radio Engineers, but the “I”… After Google failed miserably, I turned to the FCP manual. And there it was:

IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers)  - Also refers to an analog video signal unit of
measurement for luma, established by the Institute of Radio Engineers.

The IRE level is indicated on the waveform monitor.

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Holy crap - we’re nominated for a Webby! I know, I can’t believe it either. We found out today that our December 20, 2007 Wallstrip show HAHA is nominated for a Webby in the Best Editing Category. This project was a total collaboration on among the entire office and its amazing to be nominated!

Beyond HAHA, Wallstrip has two shows in the “Honoree” category. CALM and U.S. Dollar. While these two shows aren’t able to win awards, they noted as in the 15% or better of all enteries submitted. The Shop here could not be more excited about this recognition for our work in web video. Winners are announced May 6th.

There is a “People’s Choice” award, and I would love it if you guys would vote for HAHA. I’ll be sure to post the results as we know them!

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A coworker a mine sent me a link to Kanye West’s “Homecoming” video and asked if I could recreate this effect and how easy is it to do. Its nothing complicated and seemed pretty easy. So I pulled open Final Cut and started hackin’ away at footage from a music video shoot here in our studio. All the footage was shot DVCPro HD on the HVX-200 against a green screen.

I keyed out the green, dropped a color matte behind the footage and applied a luma travel matte to the studio footage. This didn’t get me too far. I swapped the two tracks and applied the travel matte to the footage this time…. and Whallla! I was seeing the above track matted by the keyed footage below it. However, only the lightest areas of the footage were showing through. I changed to a alpha travel matte. While this completely matted the image based on the outline of the keyed footage, I still wasn’t getting any depth like in Kanye’s video.

Knowing that a luma travel matte working on the idea of brightness (or amount of white) in an image, I decided to add a 3-way color corrector to the studio footage. I then boosted the whites and mids most of the way up. I turned to blacks up slightly as well. Sure enough, there it was. I could throw anything on that top track, set its composite mode to “Travel Matte - Luma” and I’d have the effect. I moved both tracks to V2 and V3 and put another color matte on V1 to recreate the background.

I looked at this composition closely and realized…. I just created the iPod commercial effect. Has apple really been using a technique that was this simple. Granted when Apple does it, they have flying partials, moving cameras and a host of other elements to control, but the base effect was this? Awesome! While the effect can only properly be done by the post people working with Apple, I thought it was pretty sweet to mimic the effect in shop here.

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