I’ve learned a lot about the various formats, compressions, codecs, etc. that exist in the video world since graduation. I dedicate my “billable downtime” rendering or transcoding to learning more and reading up on white papers and forums. I’ve come to realize that my university education completely glossed over huge pieces of the post production puzzle. Of course the nitty gritty of post is something you learn from experience, from reading, or wherever, and the classroom is largely for theory most of the time, but at IUPUI we did dig into the technical aspects on a somewhat regular basis. Because I felt like my education had a bigger basis in the technical than most other curriculums, I would have expected to learn a lot more about this stuff…it wasn’t like they told me that these things were things I needed to know and I should figure it out, they didn’t even mention them. I can get over that – I didn’t go to school expecting to learn everything. 

However, this really perturbs me.

Since graduating, I’ve learned a lot about HDV, HD, color spaces, transcoding, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and why all these things matter. I’ve also learned a lot more about the technical side of chroma keying. I’ve learned that DV and HDV really suck for shooting chroma key footage. I learned that these formats throw away a huge chunk of the chroma information that is vital to get a really good key. NOBODY told us this. I took a class where we were required to shoot some chroma key footage and place it somewhat convincingly into an existing movie scene. The only camera we had access to to shoot this with? A GL2. So of course all of our keys sucked, especially ours since we had our subject running back and forth. Interlaced DV with high motion. Worst of all was that our prof harshly judged our keys. She explain that it wasn’t entirely our fault that they sucked. She made it out to be that we were just bad at keying and needed to try harder in the future.

Now I realize that the project was somewhat doomed from the beginning and this prof missed a great teaching moment, so I don’t feel so bad about getting a B- on that assignment. 

I am officially perturbed.