Even the best of pro makes mistakes, and in Griffin Hammond's case, he made a number of mistakes in his recent “Hiding a Mic in Plain Sight” YouTube tutorial where he talked about masking out mistakes in your videos. Ironically, in that very video, Hammond had to mask out a lot of mistakes before posting it.
Instead of pretending that those mistakes never happened, Hammond decided to make a whole podcast talking about the mistakes that he made and how he was able to mask them out. Hammond also answered questions about prime lenses, the difference between .M4V and .MOV, and at what decibel level to edit your audio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq0HGgZ2PB4&t=856s
Hammond wanted to go behind the scene of his masking video with Nick Bodmer because he found that “it’s hilarious how that video is correcting for a mistake, like getting a mic in the shot, but in the production of that video I made several mistakes that I had to … then cover up.”
One of the first problems that Hammond ran into happened when he went to put in a static plate shot, meant to cover the microphone in the shot. It worked until the light in Hammond’s living room changed due to cloud movement and the mask was visible. “[The] whole space where the mic was would just be darker,” says Hammond. He had to go into color correction for the masked part of the shot and increase the brightness and change the saturation slightly to make the difference less noticable.
Hammond also made a mistake with the light that he had hanging from above. He later noticed in Final Cut that the light was visible in every shot he took. He ended up cropping the shots. He shot the video in 4K and had to crop about 20 pixels to remove the light. “I’m sure that leads to some quality loss, but I don’t think anyone really can see,” Hammond says.
But one of the biggest mistakes the Hammon made was forgetting the get the clean shot off the wall without the mic in the shot, meaning he didn’t have the area he needed to mask over the mic with. To workaround this major mistake, he went to the beginning of the shoot where he did have a clean plate, but it didn’t match entirely, since it’s framed slightly differently. He had to mess the with zoom, opacity and position of the plate to match up the plate shot with the footage he was masking over.
Hammond made a number of mistakes in his video, but he was able to correct those mistakes with near perfect fixes — and he was nice enough to share those fixes with us.
