Built "Marla"style shoot-thru-SLR camera adapter, can see gg grain!
 

Well, I just completed building a "Marla" (www.marlathemovie.com) style adapter where you shoot a type D focusing screen of a nikon F camera. Nice and sturdy, works well, but the grain of the focusing screen is plainly visible in my video!

I'm using a Sony VX2100 with a 50mm 1.4 lens. I'm thinking of grinding down the focusing screen using 5 1/2 WAO. Any other suggestions?

Ari: I've used 5 micron WAO and it does give a fine grain. However, it is still noticeable (especially on out-of-focus shots or when closing your 35mm lens) so what you can do in addition is to lower your camera's sharpness/detail. I am not sure if this feature is available on the Sony VX2100, though.

Hope this helps!

,Frank

Thanks for the suggestion frank. The guys who filmed Marla didn't seem to have the problem with grain though, that's what I'm confused about... maybe I'll try vibrating the GG...

Ari: I never watched it, but was it a low-res movie? If so, then it would be hard to see the grain. I'd check their site and see if they had any fullsize framegrabs, and see if they did anything to the footage in post.

That's what i'm thinking too - I just compressed a WMV example and it loses the grain as well. You can check it out if you like :

www.kitcar.ca/dollstalk.wmv

I decided to make a short narrative rathar than just do the "focus/not in focus/focus/not in focus" most people do for test clips :)

Ari: I'm on dialup right now, so it would take a while for me to download your clip, but I think to see the grain you would indeed have to examine a fullsized clip of the movie.

Can you post some 720x480 stills of your short? I'd be able to check those out.

Thanks!

,Frank

Its 1.48mb, so even dialup should be able to handle it...

It took me about a half hour to do; its very amateurish, filmed not only freehand but right on my computer desk. But being able to rack focus sure is cool.

I'll work on getting some nice stills tomorrow, time for bed now.

Ari: Oh, I didn't realize it was only 1.48 MB. However, I am at work and I checked out the sample footage and it looks good! I'm on a work computer w/ no sound card, so I don't know what's going on, but it looks like (from the switching views and focus shifts) the stuffed animals are talking to each other.

Yes, it is nice to be able to rack focus!


,Frank

My biggest problem was that the depth of field was too short (1.4 50mm) - I need to get some more lenses :)

<<<-- Originally posted by Ari Shomair : Thanks for the suggestion frank. The guys who filmed Marla didn't seem to have the problem with grain though, that's what I'm confused about... maybe I'll try vibrating the GG... -->>>

In their "Just The Facts" PDF they say that they fixed the grain frame by frame in post.

6. Final tweakings

It’s never really over. We did some more color-correction on the final cut to harmonize the look between the shots. Then we had to clean the stains on the pictures due to the crappy focusing screen we’ve found. That was a huge task, we ended up cleaning scenes frame by frame in a photo editing software. We stopped after about 8000 frames, we looked like vampires with red eyes and were close to a certain degree of madness. Don’t laugh until you try it. We still had some kind of aliasing problems on some scenes, so we upconverted the whole movie to HD 720p (1280x720), applied some smoothing and then went back to PAL SD (720x576). This made the picture look softer, aliasing problems were gone, a step closer to filmlook (but it took about 72 hours to render).
http://www.marlathemovie.com/bonus/justfacts.pdf

Because the grain is static, wouldn't you be able to fix them in post using a mask or adjustment layer based say on a still shot against white? So, for example, you have your white background shot with the scratches, grain and dust, change it to greyscale, then use it as an adjustment layer. Not sure about what you would need in the way of software. Possibly filmgimp AKA cinepaint would be useful. I haven't tried it myself though. It's free too.

About the upconverting, smoothing and rendering. There is a piece of opensource software called avisynth, unfortunately only available for the windows platform, which is what is called a frame server. It allows you to create scripts which serve each frame of a video file through the program, applying filters if you like, and you can convert these scripts using VFAPI Reader Codec (VFAPIConv-EN.exe) into a file that any of your windows programs will think is a standard avi file. Basically this allows you to change frame size and apply filters without having to render the file. It's used alot in DVD ripping.

Do a search for these programs. Hope they come in useful.

Raavin ;)

You also cut the size to 320 x 240.
Try full size, and a bit rate of 4000K bits per sec ( you used 700K )

-Les


<<<-- Originally posted by Ari Shomair : That's what i'm thinking too - I just compressed a WMV example and it loses the grain as well. You can check it out if you like :

www.kitcar.ca/dollstalk.wmv

I decided to make a short narrative rathar than just do the "focus/not in focus/focus/not in focus" most people do for test clips :) -->>>

>I'm using a Sony VX2100 with a 50mm 1.4 lens.

Ari,

Whoah ! How are you using Nikon lenses on your Vx2100 ?
I have a VX2000 and Nikon lenses and would like to use my 50mm f/1.8D .

I'm using my VX2100 to shoot the focusing screen of a Nikon F - technically, I'm not actually using the nikon lens on the camera, but rather and recording the image produced by the nikon lens.