Critique this....:)
 

I'm hoping people will give some feedback to some of the shots in this short montage of Kitchener, Ontario.

http://www.vimeo.com/861744

Everything shot on the XHA1 and edited in Vegas. Magic Bullet looks were not fully intended to add any particular artistic value but were included to test them a bit and match them up to some of the footage for further ideas.

Critisism most welcome and appreciated.!

James Hooey

Nice shots... composed well, although some were too long in my opinion... but that music didn't do it for me for this kind of thing. Too "minorish" sounding. Makes me not wanna visit for fear of something lurking in the shadows. :)

Looks great! How did you achieve the speed effects? In camera or post?

Bob, the A1 can't over/under crank so it's post or nada :)

Sure enough Bob, done in post in Vegas. Speed up about 900% if I remember correctly.

Spooky isn't it :) just kidding.

Music is done in Cinescore and I agree, I like it for the opening shots but the park/fountain shots don't work as well with the music.

Looks good. Some shots too long. The last shot I was expecting a rack focus or something and not just a 100% OOF shot the whole duration.

MB Looks?
 

You used Magic Bullet Looks for this? How does the original black level compare to the nice saturated blacks we see here? I LOVE this look, even if it is a bit "cold" for "tourist-y"...

The original footage is shot with the straight default preset for the A1. I do all my colour correction generally in post and usually with the colour corrector or colour curves filters within Vegas. In this particular case I think I was just slapping on some Magic Bullet effects to see how each one tweaked the image. There is a pretty wide difference in the blacks between the raw footage and after it has gone through Magic Bullets, depending on your choice of look from MB. The raw footage generally looks like the blacks have a slightly grey film to them until after I do whatever colour correction I want to deepen them. The scopes in Vegas are my key way to tell how much I could/should bring down the blacks to get more saturation and help the colours pop. Magic Bullet seems to on average drop the IRE of the blacks by about 8-10 IRE and slightly crush them (compress them), but again it all depends on the particular Bullet effect you are applying.

Hope my convoluted information answers your question!

I will see if I can create a few before MB/after MB screen grabs if you like which will visually show the differences.

All the best,
James Hooey