SonicBoom 2012 Costume Contest

Here's my share of the Sonic Boom experience. For those of you unfamiliar, Sonic Boom is a newly organized concert/mini convention event to celebrate the Sonic the Hedgehog series. This year it was held concurrently with San Diego Comic Con at the House of Blues, which is a short distance away from the main convention center. They had special guests from Sega and Sonic Team; Crush 40 and CashCash performed live and there was a Q&A and trivia contest with Steve Lycett (SUMO Digital) and Takashi Izuka (Sonic Team).

Finally, in the spirit of Comic con, there was a costume contest! There was a lot of creative work up on stage, and the crowd, as well as the special guests looked and sounded genuinely impressed. Congrats to everyone who participated, especially the one sporting the Mecha Sonic suit!

Anyway, It was quite unplanned to capture this while I was there, so a lot of the footage came out shaky/blurry/grainy. However it proved to be a great test case for post-processing! I mean, the conditions were perfect (and by perfect, I mean the worst you can get); high fstop, no tripod, high iso, changing lighting conditions, etc.

I used the new Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 warp stabilizer to smooth out the jitters and fix rolling shutter distortion. To remove grain, I used the Neat Video plugin, which I was happy to discover was still compatible with CS6, and finally I did some quick color correction to boost the shadows and balance out the yellows. It took quite a while to encode but I think the results were worth the trouble.

It looks a bit wonky at full 1080p resolution, so I would recommend viewing at 720p for the best experience. Enjoy! =]

Also for some stills and additional shots:
http://flic.kr/s/aHsjASjV4m

Music ©SEGA and Sonic Team