BBC Four Striped Schools Diamond (lame mock)

[cwilliams1976]

One other mistake - the BBC put the cue dot on the left and ITV on the right which is where you had it.

[stupidrubbish]

@cwilliams1976 When I'm doing a mock I'm never that bothered about details like that, as I'm only doing them for my own amusement. If I'm doing a recreation then I'll try to get all those small things right.

[borgduck]

HOW do you people do this?!

[presheaven]

What is the music?

[stupidrubbish]

@presheaven It's by Chris Spedding and it's called Backwoods Theme. I a copy on the Harvest Records sampler "A Breath Of Fresh Air", and thought it would be perfect as diamond music.

[201081hero]

Why say lame mock when so many others including myself could not do any better - have really enjoyed watching these

[AidanLunn]

One mistake - you forgot to "mono"-ise the audio i.e. make exactly the same soundtrack play in both speakers.

[stupidrubbish]

@AidanLunn To be honest, it wasn't a so much a case of forgetting but not wanting to as I love the separation of the drums on the audio. If I had gone for accuracy as well as making the audio mono (as you rightly suggest) I would have made a model in Swift 3D - the diamond should be distorted as well because of the angle of the mirror.

[presheaven]

@stupidrubbish Getting the diamond to look really authentic is very hard indeed. Firstly, as you say, the diamond is usually a bit distorted because of various things like the mirror and the camera lens, so it should be squashed slightly horizontally. Then, there is the effect which means that the diamond never 'blinks' completely out of view, possibly due to light leaking.

[stupidrubbish]

@presheaven I've taken a close look at a number of off airs of diamonds - they vary enormously. Sometimes the stepper motor accelerates and decelerates a bit, sometimes it starts and stops dead and moves at a constant speed. Sometimes, as you say, the diamond does not completely disappear, but on a few occasions it actually does. I've since discovered that I could have got the sort of "liquid" look of analogue keying on this animation by applying the Virtual Dub "Warp Sharp" filter.

[presheaven]

@stupidrubbish I used to use After Effects for that, with a combination of filters to key out the background colour, replacing it with the same colour and blurring things a bit, then using the wiggler to adjust the key randomly but smoothly over time. You have to be careful not to make it too pixelated, which is where the blurring comes in. Unfortunately, it produces the effect vertically as well as horizontally, which didn't happen on the old luma key as far as I can tell.

[stupidrubbish]

@presheaven AfterEffects is something I've always wanted to play with, but I've never had the opportunity. I've just been looking at your BBC West jaws again - it's fabulous.

[presheaven]

@stupidrubbish It's not very good really. There has to be some curvature to the sides apparently. I'm guessing that it was down the way the model was built, so to do it properly I need to use Swift 3D. Check the MHP Chat list for the url to an interesting French blog if you haven't already, it's got some small but good off-screens of some other regional BBC logos.