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Beauty Box Video smooths out unwanted skin wrinkles so your client appears to have never had them. It’s difficult to show you the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images — since the ‘before’ images never *really* happened. Instead of an image gallery, we have listed the compliments and accolades that Beauty Box Video has gathered. Let us know if you have one to add! (ok, ok… maybe it’s just hard to get talent to be willing to show ‘before’ images. That’s ok, we still love seeing the ‘after’ images and hear the story about how you used Beauty Box!)
With over 20 years of experience as a multimedia producer and musician, Neil Cabana has led a long, incredibly diverse creative life. He taught himself to play guitar at 4, wrote his first song at 12, and started playing in rock bands at 17. Later on in NYC, he learned photography and lighting from well-known fashion photographer Tom Concordia, teaching himself how to use Photoshop and Lightroom to create better images soon after that. As his skills improved, he started designing websites and promotional materials and created an independent label called Pink Lady Records, writing and producing albums for its artists and landing a plethora of music placements on several MTV programs. However, it was after moving to Toronto that Neil started working for global multimedia creative agencies.
In Canada, Cabana quickly became the Co-Creative Director for Fjord Interactive, a part of a huge agency called Cossette Communications, where he took the agency’s biggest client, Bell, under his wings and contributed to several other Fortune 500 brands. That experience, combined with Neils’s passion for photography, video and multimedia content creation, led him to start Dog and King, which is now a thriving creative agency that offers comprehensive music, entertainment, and strategic marketing services. Their entertainment division is a full-scale production company creating broadcast-quality content such as scripted podcasts, docu-series, documentaries, films, music videos, corporate videos, and social media content.
Dog and King also does a fair amount of work in producing music videos for various musicians and bands, creating the kind of content where image and appearance are almost as important as the music. Recently, Neil completed a series of music videos for music artist Lauren Monroe where skin retouching with Beauty Box was an important piece of the final edit. “Lauren Monroe is a dear friend and client who I’ve produced all sorts of content for including music videos and event pieces for her non-profit Raven Drum Foundation with husband Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee Rick Allen. For one video I produced in particular, for a song called ‘Sparrow’ off of her last album “Messages from Aphrodite”, she was self-conscious about a few shots where the natural lighting in some instances, albeit her and the landscape beautiful, were not ideal in her eyes. That’s when I did some research and found Digital Anarchy’s Beauty Box”, explains Cabana.
Skin retouching has always been a challenge in Neil Cabana’s work. “Retouching on fashion models for major publications with Tom Concordia in NYC was challenging, but applying digital makeup in the video was a whole new level”, he explains. In the past Cabana and his team would have to literally retouch the footage frame by frame with image exports: a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive process he was able to avoid by applying Beauty Box video to his entire edited sequence, all at once. “After playing with the demo and seeing the results of what it could do I decided to give it a spin and not only did it reduce the time-consuming process, it looked natural and flawless. It’s so powerful that right away I learned the rule of thumb was to keep it as subtle! You can actually push it far enough to make your footage look like an 80’s soap with characters named Thorn and Ridge!”, Cabana says.
Of course, applying skin smoothing that matches Neil’s celebrity-client’s expectations is still a challenge. “My clients are very sensitive to how they appear in all of their videos. For many of them, their face, their look, their vibe is a big part of their brand”, he explains. Because of that, after dragging and dropping Beauty Box into his timeline, Cabana makes sure the plugin’s auto analysis is carefully adjusted for a more natural look. “For the ‘Sparrow’ video clip, for example, one of the things I found most useful was tracking parts of Lauren’s face so it wasn’t a blur. With the way the plugin is set up you can set thresholds and create multiple masks that can be tracked independently”, says Neil. Tracking independent masks allows for a more precise retouch.
In addition to mask tracking, Beauty Box Video offers a range of presets to make skin smoothing in post-production even easier. Video editors can quickly apply the presets with the option to leave the retouch as is or adjust the settings for a more polished look. For Neil, it’s helpful to go in and adjust the masks where necessary to not give the effect away. He explains that “you don’t necessarily need to take that approach, but if it isn’t great, don’t present it. Measure twice and cut once. And with a Beauty Box you can easily do that”.
To learn more about Neil and his work with Dog and King, please visit www.dogandking.com
To try Beauty Box Video on your next music video, download a FREE demo version of the plugin.
Johnnnyrandom, a professional composer and sound designer, is on a mission to break new ground and show the world the power of found objects, especially within the context of music. In his project “Bespoken”, he documents his creative process behind making music from a bicycle. Johnnyrandom specializes in “Musique Concrète,” an experimental musical composition technique that uses recorded sounds as raw material. He strives to promote awareness of one’s surroundings by tuning into the intrinsic sounds produced by everyday objects and has been combining sound and video to convey his message.
Johnnyrandom produces videos for his projects to surprise his audience with extreme close-ups of the objects he uses to make his music. He feels that filming, producing, and editing videos himself, in addition to playing found objects, comes with many challenges, including managing the lighting, camera, and composition of the shots, not to mention the post-production work on the footage he shoots as a one-man band. In “Bespoken,” Johnnyrandom faced many problems with lighting, hard shadows, and lots of shine on close-ups of his hands and face. The solution was to take advantage of skin retouching and digital makeup to save the footage. “Beauty Box was perfect for masking the skin, reducing shine/shadow, and pulling the red skin tones into a more natural-looking place,” he says.
If you have not watched “Bespoken”, you definitely should! In this teaser , Johnnyrandom breaks down a bicycle’s components and shows the process of making an entire composition from a bike – no traditional instruments added. It is a fantastic combination of his experience riding a bike for the first time, raw sounds, close-ups, and a complex melody that transports the audience into a unique world of beauty and nostalgia. Unlike most of his rough behind-the-scenes video experiments for other projects, “Bespoken” demanded more time planning the shots and making sure the footage looked polished in post.
Everything was shot within a few hours by cinematographer Devin Whetstone on an improvised afternoon, and editing was done with the help of award-winning editor and filmmaker Blake Bogosian. Johnnyrandom used Beauty Box to retouch the hands on the close-ups, which made a massive difference in how the final treatment came out. Retouching hands can be challenging – since Beauty Box does not detect a face, it is usually better to mask the hands manually. See this video tutorial example! However, Johnnyrandom says Beauty Box was very easy to use, and masking the hands to apply and adjust the effects took no time. He explains, “It’s a solid plugin that can get great results quickly.”
Curious about how to get better results retouching hands or any other skin area with Beauty Box? Send us a sample of your footage to cs@digitalanarchy.com and download a demo to see how the plugin works!
Emmy award winner Nisma Zaman has an extensive background in producing reality-based films for a variety of audiences. She specializes in digital content creation and interactive creative technologies and is known for the high quality and great content of her videos. Recently, Zaman was invited to create a short documentary video for ArtBridge’s #7on16th project, an exhibition of murals by seven prominent female and non-binary NYC street artists.
Over the course of five long days, Zaman followed each artist as they created their mural, and then spent a week editing a fun overview of the full installation process. “Producing, directing and editing this piece was both a great pleasure and a challenge. I interviewed all seven artists up in the lifts next to their works (14 feet above street level), where I couldn’t fully control the lighting and interview setups,” explains Zaman.
While filming the progress of the street murals, Zaman knew she would need to retouch her footage slightly so the interviewees could look their best on-screen. “There wasn’t sufficient time, equipment, and/or space to get the lighting perfect or position an interviewee in relation to existing light, so this is what prompted me to use Beauty Box,” Zaman recalls.
Zaman’s main problem with the footage was the distraction caused by skin shine and uncontrolled light. “I used Beauty Box on the founder’s face to remove shine, but also on all of the artist interviews, to smooth their skin. They were in the middle of the mural creation, which required hours of hard work under the sun, and taking breaks to freshen up before the interviews was not an option,” Zaman says.
For ArtBridge and all the other artist profile projects she applied Beauty Box to, Zaman makes sure to reduce the smoothing amount percentages to 20-30% so she can get the most natural look possible. In her opinion, it is also important to always select the dark and light colors for the mask. This allows Beauty Box to identify the range of tones on a subject and adjust the skin smoothing accordingly.
The tips come from 5 years of experience using Beauty Box to perfect artist profile videos and/or overviews on contemporary art exhibitions. Zaman used the plugin for the first time while working at the Guggenheim Museum, where she produced over 160 videos filmed in NYC, Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and Mexico City. “In every project, applying Beauty Box to the footage was a quick and easy process, so I would highly recommend the plugin. It’s a huge time-saver and a great way to make people look more rested, as well as to smooth over any blemishes,” Zaman concludes.
To learn more about Nisma Zaman’s work visit https://nismazaman.com. Ready to try Beauty Box Video? Download a free trial for Windows or Mac.
JB Nuttle, director/editor, records talented musicians doing live performances, and then makes the recordings available to the artist for promotion on sites such as YouTube and Facebook.
Click to watch video | Bettman and Halpin – “Bluestem” NERFA 2017
Click to watch video | David Glaser – “Miner’s Child”
I use Beauty Box and love the results. I often record performers who, shall we say, “are not so young anymore.” Beauty Box really does the trick smoothing out the lines in faces and reducing ages.
We talked to Margarita Monet, lead singer of Edge of Paradise. The band has been taking advantage of visual effects to enrich their music and create unique videos. In this interview, Margarita discusses how visual effects are helping to shape Edge of Paradise’s identity and explains how she has been using Beauty Box Video to improve the image quality of her videos. .
Check out the before and after shots or the high resolution still here.
Click to watch video | Beauty Box: Before and After Music Video
As Margarita says, “It was shot in a recording studio and we had some limitation with lighting. When using 4K cameras, it creates a very high-quality image, and all the details are visible. That’s s a problem if you’ve got poor lighting. Beauty Box worked great to polish up the look! Extremely effective and time efficient.”
The full interview breaking down their entire creative process when shooting their videos, along with the final videos, are on the AnarchyJim Blog!
We always need to make our artists look their best and Beauty Box from Digital Anarchy is the go-to software plug-in for this purpose. It’s an enhancer rather than a replacer and it brings out the natural flesh tones and removes unsightly lighting effects without looking air-brushed.
We always need to make our artists look their best and Beauty Box from Digital
Beauty Box has been very beneficial to our pipeline, and has helped further improve the quality of the work we can provide and the timeframes we can turn shots around in. The Digital Anarchy support team has been fantastic to work with as we got Beauty Box up and running with Nuke and linux.
Jeff Loch, a director/editor/colorist, based in Lyon, France used Beauty Box on music videos for DJs, Pagadixx and Ma2x. On YouTube, the two videos have gotten 6 million views. They’re a couple great examples of how Beauty Box Video is used for retouching music videos with high production values. It’s a very common use even if most stars won’t talk about it.
Click to watch video | Ma2x – Baliser – Music Video
Even when the talent looks great there are still always issues of seeing too much detail in the skin with HD and 4K. Jeff used Beauty Box to apply a bit of digital makeup where the talent didn’t have quite the look they were going for.
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