Last night while working on some images in Photoshop, I got the dreaded “Your scratch disc is nearly full” message pop up (something that happens way too often). The problem is, I wan everything on my internal hard drive so I have access wherever I am, whenever I want. But I digress.

I figured it was time I did some house cleaning, so started going through every folder on the drive to see what I could get rid of. Eventually I came to a folder containing the Google Chrome cache. I looked at the files and noticed that some of them were up to 30Mb in size. I double clicked on one to see what it was. It opened up in Text Editor but was just mumbo jumbo.

Then I wondered if anything would happen if I added a file extension. Figuring at that size it must be video of some kind, I added the .FLV extension. I could hardly believe it. It opened up in QuickTime and started playing. It was some video I had watched on YouTube a while back. I had finally discovered how to download YouTube videos to my Mac easily.

My brain started ticking over and I opened up the Google Chrome web browser and headed to YouTube. I clicked on the first video I came to and noticed a new file appear in the Cache folder. Once the video was completely downloaded I added the .FLV extension to the file. Again it opened and played the video. This was so much easier than any other ways I’ve tried to download YouTube videos to keep.

So here it is the simple step by step guide on how to download YouTube videos to your mac easily:

Pre Step. I guess I should point out that this technique is for Apple Mac computers running OSX. I have no idea how to do this on a PC running Windows or any other system.

1. You’ll need to be running the Google Chrome web browser. Personally I don’t really like it and only have it for testing web design stuff. But now I’ve figured this out, it just got a whole lot better. So open it up or download it from here.

2. Locate your Cache folder:

“YOUR HARD DRIVE”/Users/“YOUR USERNAME”/Library/Caches/Google/Chrome/Default/Cache/

3. Once located you’ll see a whole bunch of files. The majority of them will be named like“f_00017db” or at least they’ll start with “f_” and then a number. These are the content files. At this stage all you need to do is view the folder in the “List View” and sort by “Date Created”

4. In Google Chrome, goto YouTube.com and play the video you want to save.

5. Head back to the Cache folder you have open in Finder, you’ll notice several new files have been created. One of them will start increasing in size. This is the one to keep an eye on. At this stage I’ll add a label colour to the file so it stands out clearly.

6. Wait for the file to download completely before trying to add any extensions or you'll wreck everything.

7. Once downloaded It’s probably safer to copy the file to a new location first. I’ll assume you know how to do that.

8. Now with the file in the new location, rename the file to anything you like but include “.FLV” extension on the end. This tells the system that it is a Flash Video file.

9. You can now open up the file in any program that plays Flash Video. I use QuickTime as I have the additional plugin required. This also allows me to export the video into any other format.

And that’s it. Simple!

I’ve also used the same trick to rip image files by adding the “.JPG” extension to the end. There is a bit of trial and error involved, which is why it’s best to copy the file to a new location first. I’ve also notice that it works with a lot of other Flash Video players too and not just YouTube.

There are some however that don’t work and, for now at least, I can’t figure them out. The files begin downloading and then for some reason the just disappear from the finder window all together.

Of course copying, ripping and stealing videos without the authors permission, is a bad thing and should not be done. But as a video post-production professional, I know there are many legitimate reasons why you would need to do this and up until now, many of the techniques are clunky, slow and produce inferior quality.

If anyone has any other easy techniques on how to download YouTube videos to a Mac, or knows if the same trick works on a Windows PC, please share them in the comments below, I’d love to hear your ideas.

OK, so I’ve seen this posted around on a number of forums, people asking how to get photos to look like this, where it almost looks like a painting. And I always thought I should maybe write a tutorial on it. And well that time has come.

I really have no idea what the proper term is for this style. it is becoming known as the “Dave Hill Look”. Though this is similar, it is different and gives slightly different results.

Essentially what is happening is you are compressing all light into the exposed range. In the real world there is a lot of visible light. And a lot more non visible. Now just because it is visible doesn’t mean it is all visible at the same time. Especially to a camera. What this means is that when you look at something dark, anything that is bright is over-exposed or blown out and the details cannot be seen. Likewise if you are looking at something bright, you cannot see the details in dark things. There is a range of light that can be seen at any one time.

Eyes, film cameras and digital cameras all work the same way, in that they have an iris that opens and closes to let in or block out light which allows for a certain range of light to be captured. Anything darker than that range will be under-exposed and probably just look black. Anything brighter will be over-exposed and look white (and will probably add glows and halos around its edges along with all manner of other issues I won’t be going into here).

However when an artist paints a scene, very rarely will she or he paint areas under or over exposed. Have you ever seen a painting where the sky is all washed out and white? Ok so now some smart-arse is going to find one and email it to me with an abusive message. I don’t care. And if that’s you “Get a life!”.

What the artist is doing is looking at each area of the scene separately and then painting them with visible colours. And this is what we need to do with the photos.

The first step is to take your photo. If you know you are going to want to apply this look, it really is better to know before you do anything. Ok so not a rule but a suggestion USE A TRIPOD! Now the idea is to capture ALL visible light. Unless you just started reading here you’re probably thinking “didn’t he just say a camera can’t capture all available light…” and you are correct. That is why it is best to take several photos at different exposures. I usually take one at what would be considered the correct exposure and then one 2 f-stops above and below and also 4 f-stops above and below. I’m not here to teach you about f-stops so read your camera manual if you don’t know what they are.

Now this can vary depending on what you are shooting. When the sun is in shot, I’ve had to close my iris right down and increase the shutter speed to 2000th/sec to get it right. But that’s getting too technical. All I’m saying is experiment to get the best results. Once you have done a few you’ll get the idea.

Sometimes it just isn’t possible to take multiple photos. Especially when something in the frame is moving. This is where camera RAW is a wonderful thing. A lot of digital cameras these days can shoot in RAW format and I would recommend always using it. Essentially what it is doing is recording all the data that hits the microchip in the camera whereas the JPEG format will discard a lot of information in its compression. This is ok if all you want to do is take happy-snaps and print them out at your local Kodak self help kiosk. But if you want to manipulate your photos in anyway, the more information you start with the better the end result will be. Even though RAW format still only captures the light the iris allows through, it has a much better range than a JPEG image but nowhere near as much as taking multiple images at different exposures. However sometimes it’s all ya got.

I’ll write the rest of this tutorial based on only one photo being taken in camera RAW format. It should be easy enough to adapt to other scenarios.

Ok I know what you’re thinking… “That’s a whole lotta writing and not many pictures. Isn’t this supposed to be a Photoshop tutorial?”

So let’s start with the original photo. It’s kind of interesting but dull. The sky is blown out although there is a bit of detail there. The dark trees and ground are all kind of murky. I can see detail in the paint but it really doesn’t stand out that much. It’s just a regular photo.

Now because I took this in RAW format there is actually more information than is actually visible. So the first step is to open it up in Adobe Camera RAW which is part of Photoshop. Just open it like you would any other file and Camera RAW should launch automatically.

What we want to do is create several files at different exposure settings to make as much of the light or data captured, visible. In your camera RAW settings all you need to touch is the ‘Exposure” setting. First set it to 0 and then hit the save button. Create a folder to save all these files in and save it as a PSD or Photoshop file with the name and then 0.

Now set the exposure to +2 and save again, this time with +2 and the end of the name. And now repeat once more for -2. This is all I needed for this image but some may need a + and – 4 as well.

Now we have these images we have to group them together into one image with the full range of light data. This is called an HDR image or High Dynamic Range. This can be done inside of Photoshop by opening all your images and going to File menu, Automate, Merge to HDR. This works but not well enough for the next step.

OK so this is the step where everyone will probably hate me. I’m going to step outside of Photoshop.

I know, I know it’s outrageous but it has to be done. Photoshop is good for a lot of things but this aint one of them. I’m going to use a program called Photomatix Pro, which can be found at http://www.hdrsoft.com/ It is specifically designed for creating high quality HDR images and toning them. I’m sure all of this can be done within Photoshop but I prefer this method, as it is a lot simpler.

I open all the images in Photomatix Pro and go to the HDRI menu and select Generate HDR. Then I made sure the ‘Use already opened images’ box was ticked and chose OK. This then takes you to another screen where you’ll see why you included the exposure settings in your file name. Set the Exposure Value to be the same as that stated in your file name. It usually does a pretty good job of this automatically but it’s a good idea to check. Once done press OK.

On the next screen I usually use the default ‘Use standard response curve’ and press OK. But you may want to experiment a little. This will then take a moment to create your HDR image.

and…..

waiting…..

Da daaaaaaa…..

OMG It looks horrible what have you done!

Well of course it looks horrible you didn’t think it was going to be that easy did you?

OK what we have created is an HDR image. Which means there is way more information within it than can actually be seen or shown at any one time. What we now need to do is bring all of that information within a range that it is all visible at once just like a painting. This is called Tone Mapping.

Go back to the HDRI menu and select Tone Mapping. A window will open with a whole new bunch of toys… Err um tools to use. This is where you need to experiment.I’m not going to go into each settingand what it does cause I’ll be typing forthe next six months and then there’ll be a new version with different tools and I’ll have to start again and it’ll all be bad. So have a play and see what happens. But this image shows the settings I used for this image.

Once done click OK and your image will be generated.

Now you can see all the light that the camera took in one visible image. It’s looking better but still doesn’t quite fit the mood that I wanted. Let’s save it by going to the File menu, Save As and I usually save as a TIFF file.

OK Back to Photoshop. I knew you were uncomfortable being away from it for so long. Open your new tone mapped image up. The first thing I do is duplicate the background and label it. I like to label each layer and generally keep my projects organised so I can go back to it any time and know what it is I’ve done. I labelled this layer B&W. I’ll give you one guess why.

We want to make the layer black and white. Make sure the layer is selected and go to Image menu, Adjustments, Desaturate. Ok now duplicate that layer twice and place all three Black and white layers in their own Group by selecting all three and dragging them down on to the folder icon at the bottom of the layers window.

First turn the top two layers off and change the blend mode of the bottom one (which should be called “B&W”) to Overlay. This will make it very rich and dark but don’t panic. With the second layer, labelled “B&W copy” set the blend mode to Screen. I thought this was a touch too bright so I lowered the opacity to about 90%. This has made the image a touch brighter and more contrasty.

With the top layer, better known as “B&W copy 2” I’m going to bring out some of the fine detail by sharpening it. Go to the Filter menu, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask. In the dialogue box that pops open I put the following settings.

This will look way too sharp but that’s ok. I lowered the opacity to about 53% and kept the blend mode as normal.

I should mention that the size of the image I am working on is 3072x2048 pixels roughly a 6.3 Mega pixel image. I say that as sharpen and blur settings can vary depending on the size of image you are working on.

Now that’s beginning to look better. Although the effect of those three layers is probably a bit too strong. This is the beauty of placing objects in groups. Instead of changing the opacity of all three layers I can drop it just for the group layer. I put it at around 62%. Now you should have something looking a little like this.

It was at this point that I noticed the clouds were looking a little sharp so I added a layer mask to “B&W copy 2” so that they would stay soft. There are a million tutorials out there on selections and layer masks, so I wont go into it here.

To my eye there’s still too much colour so I added an adjustment layer and selected Hue/Saturation. In the window that opens I turned the Saturation down to around -35%. Much better.

The idea behind this photo was to draw people’s attention to the car, which you’d probably think I have achieved by the way it takes up most of the frame. But I’m still finding the surrounding trees a little distracting. To fix this I’m going to get rid of most of the colour and leave the blue to stand out.

To maintain the detail of what we’ve done so far I want to copy all the layers into one new layer. You can do this by selecting the top layer, which should be “Hue/Saturation 1” and pressing Command+Option+Shift+E on a Mac or Control+Alt+Shift+E on a PC. You may need two hands for this one. Now rename this new layer to “Tint – Grey”. And you guessed it we’re going to make it black and white again. So head up to the Image menu, Adjustments, Desaturate.

Of course this will make everything greyscale. To get the blue to be visible through it we’ll need to double click on the layer to bring up the Layer Style palette. In the blending options you’ll notice the section called Blend If. What we want to do is see through this layer, wherever there is blue beneath it.

We do this by selecting the blue channel and then adjusting the slider for Underlying Layer. You’ll notice that as you move the slider it creates a hard edge where it is seeing through. To soften this, hold down the Option key for Mac or Alt key for PC and drag one side of the little arrow. You’ll see that it splits into two giving you the ability to select over a range. The settings I have here gave a nice look.

OK now to add that sepia tone. Duplicate the layer “Tint – Grey” and rename it to “Tint – Sepia”. To change it to a sepia colour open up Image menu, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation and apply the following settings.

To adjust the tint slightly I opened up the layer styles palette and changed the Underlying Settings of the Blue channel from 33/232 to 50/235. This is subtle but it makes the sepia blend into the blue slightly.

The finale step for this image was to create a vignette. I did this by creating a new layer and naming it “vignette” then with the circular marquee tool I held the Shift key to constrain the shape and drew a circle a little smaller than the image.

Then filled it with black and deselected. Because the image isn’t aperfectsquare I pressed Command or Control + T to transform the circle and stretched its width out and pressed return to commit.

I then selected Filter menu, Blur, Gaussian Blur and pushed it all the way up to 250. Again this will vary depending on you image size. I then selected the blurred circle by holding down Command or Control and clicking on the thumbnail of the layer. By clicking on the eye next to the thumbnail I hid the layer and then created a new one. I then went to the Select menu, Inverse to invert the selection and then filled with black. I lowered the Opacity to around 70% and hey presto, you’re done!

Written by James Cole

James Cole is a Director, Editor and Visual Effects Producer for Hysteria Productions and has worked on hundreds of projects from short films to feature films and music videos to commercials. You can find out more at http://www.hysteria.com.au

Ok so this is all about one of the most painful experiences I’ve had as an editor in recent times. It should be simple. It should be easy. But it aint! Let me start by getting some whining out of the way. Why oh why can’t competing companies make products that are more compatible. People at Apple know that there will always be people who use Avid and likewise, those at Avid know there will always be people who use Final Cut. There is enough room for both products. Why can’t they make the software talk to each other easier?

Alright so now that I’ve had my two cents worth, on with the real reason you are here. I recently started as the editor on a feature film. I was brought onto the project late in the game and all the footage was logged and captured on an Avid suite. Not being an Avid editor, I wanted to work on what I knew, which is Final Cut Pro. This was so I could focus on the creative side of things rather than constantly having to figure things out.

Not being familiar with the Avid Media Composer or even with a Windows PC, I called in the cavalry, Mr. Uber Micro, Cameron d’Arcy, who also happened to be the post production supervisor and one of the producers on the film. Completing this simple task would turn out to be a mammoth job, taking the two of us hours of scanning the net and finding very little and then trial and error (mostly error). Eventually we figured it out. Well I say we, but really the full credit goes to Cam. So here it is the step by step guide of how to get logged clips from Avid Media Composer to Final Cut Pro, keep all the sound in sync AND retain all the logged information including time codes.

The first part is to get the footage and information out of Media Composer.

Step 1: In Media Composer, select all the clips you want to export and then from the file menu choose ‘Export’ then in the dialogue box, choose ‘Options’. A fairly straight forward start.

Step 2: In the ‘Export As’ button, choose ‘QuickTime Movie’. Next to that are two tick boxes ‘Use Marks’ and ‘Use Enabled Tracks’. Both of these were not ticked. Then under that section ‘Same as Source’ was selected and ‘Use Avid DV Codec’ was not ticked. For this case ‘Video and Audio’ was selected, but this will depend on your project. The video format selected was ‘RGB’ and the ‘Display Aspect Ratio’ was DV (720 x 576) This will change depending on your footage. We were working with PAL DV footage for the offline edit. We then saved these settings as a preset by clicking ‘Save As’ and naming it ‘AVID DV QT’ You could be more creative with the name but by the time we got to this point we couldn’t be bothered.

Something to note is the names of your clips. I found that if they have * or / and probably other characters in them, they didn’t work. However -() seemed to be OK. It’s probably easier to go through and check all of this first. Also make sure there aren’t any duplicate names as this too will cause hours of trouble when it comes time to re-link the media.

Step 3: So now you’re back at the ‘Export As’ dialogue box. All you have to do is select a location for all of your footage to be saved (make sure there is enough room) and click ‘Save’. Go get a cup of coffee, go out for dinner or go to bed, depending on how much footage you have. This could take a while...

Step 4: That’s the footage taken care of, now you need all that logged information. With the bin opened but none of the clips selected, go to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Export’.

Step 5: In the ‘Export Bin As’ menu, choose ‘Avid Log Exchange’. Find somewhere to save the ‘ALE’ file, name it and click ‘Save’. Easy!

Step 6: Eject the hard drive (did I mention to save all that stuff on and external drive that can be booted on Mac and PC... Oops) and plug it into the Mac.

This is where it starts to get fun...

Step 7: Now you may have noticed all of that footage you have just exported has no time-code attached to it. This was by far the hardest step to figure out and yet now it seems so simple. First download some freeware software called ‘Sebsky Tools’.

[Update]

Sebsky Tools was created by Dharma Films who unfortunately are no more.  This little freeby is going to save you hours and hours and probably save you from going completely insane too. As they no longer exist I am providing a download here. I hope that this is ok to do so. If any of the original creators have a problem with this, please contact me and I’ll remove the link immediately.

Click to Download Sebsky Tools

Step 8: Now that you’ve downloaded, installed and opened up Sebsky Tools, click on ‘Batch Add TC’ find and select the ‘ALE’ file you created and in the ‘Use Timecode from column:’ drop down menu, we chose ‘[ALE] Start’. Then click ‘Select’

Step 9: A new dialogue box opens and you need to point to the folder with all of your footage in it. Put a tick in the ‘Overwrite existing Timecode Track’ tick box, and we had the ‘Match QuickTime File names exported from Windows’ tick box not ticked. The ‘Movie file extension:’ menu was on ‘.mov’ but this may vary depending on how you exported the files. Now go get another Coffee cause this could take a few minutes, as it is re-writing the time-code track to each QuickTime file

Step 10: Once Sebsky is done doing its thing, a report will open saying how many clips it has processed and how many (if any) it couldn’t find. Click OK. If there were any files that were skipped there’s a good chance they are either missing or have one of the characters in the name that doesn’t work. Click on the ‘Log’ button and you’ll be able to find the problem files. You may have to go back and change names both in Media Composer and the QuickTime files and then output a new ‘ALE’ file. If everything is good, you may want to open a few of the files in QuickTime and check to make sure the time-code is correct.

Step 11: Now we have to convert that ALE file to an XML file so that Final Cut can read it. Open up ‘Cinema Tools’ which comes as part of the Final Cut Studio package. Select ‘Create a New Database’ and click ‘Continue’.

Step 12: Put all the settings for your film type in. We kept the ‘Film Standard’ on ‘35mm 4p’ and put the other three menus on ’25 FPS’ and select ‘OK’. In the new dialogue box, type a name for the database and find somewhere to keep the file and click on ‘Save’.

Step 13: Now goto the ‘File’ menu, ‘Import’ then ‘Telecine Log...’ In the dialogue box, choose your ALE file and make sure the ‘Append a camera letter’ is not ticked. Click on ‘Open’ then click on ‘OK’ when it’s done.

Step 14: Now goto the ‘File’ menu, ‘Export’ then ‘XML Batch List...’ In the dialogue box Type a name for the XML file and find somewhere to put it and click ‘Save’

Step 15: You may as well close down Sebsky Tools and Cinema Tools, as you no longer need them. Open up Final Cut Pro and start a new project or open up the project you want to import all the files into. Keep in mind though when you import the files, they are all placed in the top level folder, so it may be easier to start a new project and then move them to the required project once you’ve had time to sort them all out.

Step 16: Goto the ‘File’ menu, ‘Import’ then ‘XML...’ and choose the XML file you just created.

Step 17: In the dialogue box that opens, set the ‘Destination:’ to the project you have open. Set the sequence settings if you need to (we didn’t as we were only importing clips). In the ‘Options’ section we had ‘Reconnect to Media Files’ ticked and the other two boxes, not ticked, but this may vary. Click ‘OK’

Step 18: Now if you’re anything like us you’ll notice that the bloody ‘Reconnect to Media Files’ didn’t work. So far we’ve found no way to make this happen easily so let the pain begin... Select all of your clips and goto the ‘File’ menu then ‘Reconnect Media...’.

Step 19: Set the ‘Search Single Location:’ to the folder with all your media files in and then click ‘Search’, this will speed things up a little.

Step 20: Now for some ungodly reason there is a bug in the system so that if you tick ‘Reconnect All Files in Relative Path’, after selecting the first clip, all the other clips disappear. You’re not gonna want to hear this part, but you must reconnect each clip individually. I gave suicide a serious thought when I looked in the folder to find 930 clips. So make sure that ‘Reconnect All Files in Relative Path’ is not ticked and you’ll probably also have to make sure ‘Matched Name and Reel Only’ is not ticked as the QuickTime files do not have the reel number embedded in them and it won’t find them. Find the first clip and select ‘Open’

Step 21: ‘File Attributes Mismatch’ dialogue box will probably open. I found that it worked OK if you just click ‘Continue’ I’m not sure why it does this, but it does.

Step 22: Click on ‘Search’ again. This time it should find the correct clip and will do each time from now on. Click ‘Open’ and keep repeating until you’re all done. If you have a lot of clips, you may want to do this in chunks of 50 or so clips so you can keep saving. Once you get in the rhythm, it’s actually not too bad and only took about an hour for me to connect all 930 clips. However, if anyone knows of a quicker way, please drop me an email and let me know.

Step 23: That’s pretty much it. All done. I did find a few anomalies with odd file names and stuff that needed to be corrected manually, but with a bit of logical and lateral thinking you should be able to figure them out.

There are packages that supposedly do most of this for you like the Automatic Duck FCP Import plugin, but we found that this caused all the sound to go out of sync. Maybe this is because our sound was recorded separately and without any time-code. We couldn’t figure it out for sure. I know that the AE Import plugin that Automatic Duck makes for importing timelines into After Effects, works really well.

The other thing with doing it this way, is that you haven’t spent any extra money on software, whereas the Automatic Duck plugin is over $600. Anyway I hope this helps, as I’m sure there are others out there who need to do the same thing and are having as much trouble finding information as we did.

Happy editing.

James Cole is a Director, Editor and Visual Effects Producer for Hysteria Productions and has worked on hundreds of projects from short films to feature films and music videos to commercials. You can find out more at http://www.hysteria.com.au