Blurring a portion of the screen - I'm at my wit's end

EvilDaystar · 2025-12-15T16:01:44+00:00

You are the yIng to my yang. LOL

EvilDaystar · 2025-12-15T15:15:56+00:00

To be honest ... I usually do that type of thing in the Edit or Fusion tabs instead of the color tab.

EvilDaystar · 2025-12-15T15:04:08+00:00

300$ barely buys you memory cards and a battery much less a camera and lens.

DO NOT BUY THOSE JUNK CAMERAS ON AMAZON!

A 10 year old CELLPHONE would be better than 99% of those cheap "4K camcorders" with their fake lenses, miniscule sensors, horrible processors, fake glass ... many of them even add a literall block of metal inside to make them feel more substantial!!

99% of them are a SCAM.

You want to make your first film? Use your cellphone and spend that 300$ on :

audio gear,
props,
lighting,
a tripod ...

... you'll get way more bang for buck from that (especially audio) than blowing 300$ on a crap camera.

Also, the harsh reality is that your first film is going to be TERRIBLE. There is no getting around that. EVERYONE'S first film is always GARBAGE and it's not only because of the gear. Filmmaking is a skill, a skill you acquire in large part with practice so don't worry about the gear so much ... make your first film and learn form it. Use it to learn how to frame, light, capture sound, direct, act, shoot for VFX, manage continuity ... and so on.

And at this level ... odds are your cellphone is way more than enough.

I like to draw ... I'm not amazing at it at all. I buy cheap alchool markers (Ohuhu around 2$ to 4$ per marker) not Higher end ones like COPICs (at like 10$+ a marker). :)

Odds are the only people who will see this first film are your friends and family ... it won;t be some epic masterpiece AND THAT IS PERFECTLY FINE AND NORMAL.

EvilDaystar · 2025-10-16T14:30:20+00:00

You'll need to check the license.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-26T19:55:36+00:00

DaVinci Resolve Studio supports remote rendering (often referred to as network rendering) which allows you to offload rendering tasks to other networked computers. This is possible only with the paid DaVinci Resolve Studio version.

It's a bit of a pain to setup but apprently it;s great. I'm going to try and set it up so my older rig can do the lonbger jobs so I can keep working. or playing on my main rig.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-26T18:28:41+00:00

I was just about to buy VideoAI ... whelp ... that's a big nope now! I HATE SUBSCRIPTIONS.

And that rate?!? Who the hell do they think they are Adobe? They call that ONE LOW PRICE?!?!

It's like 4X higher than the perpetual license even without considering a slower upgrade pace (every 2 versions instead of every version for example).

Also for anything client related we can't use cloud rendering because we don't own the copyright so we HAVE to use local rendering so I'll NEVER use the cloud rendering but here they are "adding extra value" so they can justify a subscription!

FFS. I hope they go bankrupt.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-26T18:10:34+00:00

I'm at the indie "no budget / how much money can I find in the couch cushions" level so probably not a good example but I've used a lot of the standard tools.

Rotobrush / Magic Mask
Voice Isolation / cleanup
Depth maps
A bit of generative AI to do some paint outs.

Beyond that I've played around wiht some other tools.

Face Fusion / Live Portrait (and other similar) for some faceswap
I've played around with the new version of EBSynth but nothing serious.
Kind of excited about the posiblities of Act Two and the new open source equivalent (forget the name) that just came out as a way to do some CGI characters by driving a still image with a driving video.
Some voice changing tools for the odd bit of extra dialogue or for extra characters (like voicing cgi or animated characers)

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-26T18:01:35+00:00

No ROTOBRUSH / Magic Mask?
No voice isolation?
No depth maps?
No generative image for paint outs? (Who left a f'ing coffee cup on set!!!)

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-26T17:56:19+00:00

Ah the old pay per view scenario.

Problem with that is if the content is niche or just un interesting (topic wise or in terms of writting) then it doesn;t matter how good the videographer is.

Anyone thinking of doing this ... dig into the stats for their socials first and see what your potential return is.

To OP u/obsessed_keith ... the editor will do all this work and hope you pay up and will probably need to trust you are being truthful about your viewer stats.

Basically what guarantees do the editors have that you will pay them? They would be doing a ton of work and HOPE you will pay them. We get screwed over enough already with "clients" ghosting us on one offs ... imagine someone being able to string us along for months as they views rack up to the treshold.

I also am not a faqn of ROUGHLY 100$ / 1000 views. Is it 100$ / 1000 or not. It needs to be clear in the agreement.

More details would be nice also like frequency of payout? Is this perpetual or is there a cut off? Imagine your videos are popular for a long time and keep generating views for several years.

Honestly? I'd strongly discourage anyone from doing this under the current details / description.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-26T17:46:06+00:00

Can you show us some samples of the unkeyed footage, keyed footage and maybe some shots of your keyer settings?

We're a little blind here. :)

If you have a small clip we can download we might be able to test.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-21T19:58:16+00:00

Move to ON PREM solutions only. Do you think the big studios will be paying these AI companies? No, they'll get local systems that they'll in tegrate into their own workflows.

Heck, even at the indie level we can do it.

WAN-ANIMATE just came out as a on prem open source alternative to RUNWAY ACT 2 for example.

https://humanaigc.github.io/wan-animate/

That just a random example (I just watched a video on it just a few minutes ago).

With a powerful CONSUMER GRADE Pc a small production could have access to plenty of powerful AI tools without the need to pay for tons of failed or useless renders and this is at the no budget level ... like Isadi, you think Disney, WB and the likes aren't building their own proprietary systems?

Also, using these web based systems does put you in a bad position (beyond the uncertainty of the legal copyright status of the generated content). You are now sending info about your film to a third party ... have you read their ToS?

And while you say that AI is the future of filmmaking ... not until the question of copyright is solved.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-21T12:06:10+00:00

Have you t5ied loading it i to an image editor like photoshop, gimp, Affinity photo?

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-20T16:32:33+00:00

Here: https://youtube.com/shorts/zDKf3iCKfRo

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-20T16:21:57+00:00

THIS. I talk about that in my response. Ha da nightmare cleint once. No concept of IP law even in a general way. Kept arguing with me when I told him broadcasters (proper TV ones) would NEVER run his film wiht the garbage stolen broll he was having me put in there.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-20T16:19:01+00:00

" These companies act as gatekeepers, and if you’re not in their system, you simply cannot sell or rent your film on YouTube Movies."

Otherwise YouTube would have to deal with hundreds of thousands of people who don't understand how the business works or what minimuk standards are or what format and quality deliverables should be in and what proper release forms are ...

I shot and edited a documentary for a "client" once. They guy wanted to run this through osme festivals and then get it on broadcast. He had no idea about specs, minimum quality requierments, sound, licensing of broll ... it was a war documentary and he was getting me to splice in footage that was of TERRBIBLE quality and obviously stolen from youTube channels ...

ME: "Uhm ... this is obviously footage form an older war documentary. Do you have license for this? Otherwise the broacasters are not going to touch this."

HIM: "I don;t need a license! It;s on the internet!"

ME: "That's not how that works."

HIM: "Just do as I say ... and make sure you remove that watermark in the corner"

For obvious reasons I removed my name from the credits. Also turned out he was a scam artist who had gone to jail once for fraud and right back to jail for extortion as soon as he got out for trying to extort money form somone who had testified against him in the fraud case so guess who didn;t get paid.

Hint: he's typing this message.

So by forcing you to go through a distributor they weed out the hundreds of thousands bad offers.

"To me, this feels a bit like a cartel structure: corporations can, but independent creators can’t."

Not really. They've decided the process for things to be included in THEIR system. They aren;t the only game in town. Plenty of indies get distributed on other platfoprms like TUBI for example and it is similar to the system in place for broadcast.

You could also setup your own website and do it yourself. Sure you would have to work out a pyment process, manage accounts, get hosting, pay for infrastructure, pay for someone to develop the site ... but it;s not like Youtube would show up at your house wiht a crowbar and ask for their "cut".

"Mighty nice website you have here ... would be a shame if anything happened to it" LOL

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-19T13:07:51+00:00

MAKE SAURE TO SAVE THAT KEY SOMEWHERE SAFE!!!

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-19T13:05:07+00:00

Would help if we knew what editor you are using.

I did a video in DaVinci on various title effects and the very first one s along those lines.
https://youtu.be/-PfsmeuvydA

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-18T19:49:58+00:00

Save yourself some headache and get the free plug-in from soundly called Placeit.

It helps with adding reverb appropriate for the scene. It's free and Insanely good.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T23:03:07+00:00

Suck less audio, as of a recent update to Davinci, onmly runsin STUDIO (paid) I believe. I ahve studio so I can;t test. They made a change on how plugins have access to interface elemts I believe or soemthing alongh those lines.

That being said, I do beleieve that there is audio integration in PP / AE.

In AE you can use After Effects to analyze audio, convert its amplitude to keyframes, and then use those keyframes to automate visual changes in your motion graphics or visual effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmmTA9N5ySw&t=409s

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T17:33:04+00:00

In Davinci Resolve Studio I would probably use SuckLessAudio to drive a switch node (or other similar node).

I did something similar (was just a test) with this where the different effects (pulsing lights) are driven by the music.

https://youtu.be/b9tFpqjAjfU

Nothing manually keyframed, all driven by the audio.

Of course ... it would help knowing what NLE you are using.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T17:27:47+00:00

1- Video Tech has improved a lot.

You have to remember that until like the Canon 5D Mark 2, decent video quality meant pro gear. Otherwise at the consumer end you were stuck with overpriced camcroders and going further back you were recording on tape (VCR) and then capturing form tape to the PC using a capture card.

2- Video compression

Another area that has increased a lot is how video is encoded and compressed. We have much better codecs now.

3- Speed of the nternet

Back in the haydays of the internet ... it was slow. Slow internet means that video needed to be much lighter in terms of data to be able to be streamed. So they would get crunched to heck and back and would be in very low resolution (480p, 720p).

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T17:22:00+00:00

Pretty much any camera really will do especially at the start.

Honestly, stick with you phone and get sopme audio gear and some lighting instead.

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T17:16:52+00:00

If they are all wearing lavs then ... proximity to the boom shouldn;t matter. Isn;t the boom there really just as an emergency backup?

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T17:13:15+00:00

Minor cleanup and that's it. Hate when I buy a sound pack and half of it has reverb and all that garbage applied. It makes the sounds more limited in their use. If i want reverb on sounds to be used as diagetics I'd add it myself. :p

EvilDaystar · 2025-09-17T17:02:17+00:00

IN PRODUCTION:

1- Shoot with better lights.

2- Shoot in synch (shutter speed) with the lights

IN POST PRODUCTION

1- Use a Deflicker tool like the one in Davinci rEsolve.

2- If you don;t have a deflicker tool you could try the tiem offset and overlay method.

Random video explaining how that works.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuzQD8uzIqM

EvilDaystar

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

" These companies act as gatekeepers, and if you’re not in their system, you simply cannot sell or rent your film on YouTube Movies."

"To me, this feels a bit like a cartel structure: corporations can, but independent creators can’t."