raw images - still and video
 

What's up gang!

After much time on these boards I finally have some stuff to show you all. This is taken from a beautiful day out with the wife and soon to be child. It was beautiful sunny, breezy day. My wife and I went to the park and I played with my XL2's settings and got this. The mpg video that I have up doesn't do the raw video justice, but check it out anyway and tell me what you guys think! (The credits at the end are me just being goofy, so don't take it serious guys!)

Soon, I'll have some footage of the music video I've been working on up for you guys to see.

Anyway, keep in mind that these images and the video is all raw, unedited footage. No CC, no Level adustment, No Color Balance, no NADA!

Here's the Video link (25.5MB...sorry):

http://www.randrent.net/videos/playing_with_camera.mpg
(Right click>Save as...)

and here is the link to the images:

http://www.randrent.net/images/frames/

Tell me what you guys think! I'd love to hear your comments.

Stuff looks great, and congrats bout the "soon to be child". If it were me I would only change one thing. If you have the saturation turned up all the way then you need to turn it down a bit. Turning up the saturation will turn up the saturation in all the colors except the tan areas. That color is controled in the skin tone menu. So colors like green and orange will look neon but peoples skin will look normal. Other then that, looks great.

Roger, the slo-mo stuff looked nice. What did you use to do that?

I beg to differ, Alan. The Skin Detail does not do anything to the color rendition of the skin. It has adjustments to let you select just the skin tones within the image (like a photomask) and then apply a softening effect just to that area. This is to hide skin blemishes without softening the whole image like a diffusion filter would.

-gb-

Alan,

I have the Color Gain, Green Gain and Blue gain turned all the way up (6) intentionally. I left the red gain at 0, but I don't quite understand why you say I should turn down the saturation?

It's not affecting the skin tones, it's only giving me real rich, bright green grass and blue skies. It's actually the look I was going for. Maybe I missed it, but are colors bleeding? I'm a bit confused why you think I should turn down the sat.? Taste possibly?

Regardless, thanks for the feedback Alan, I really appreciate it.

Thanks! I'm really excited.

Steve, thanks. I used After Effects to achieve the slo-mo effect. Basicly separeted the even and odd fields to make whole frames, thus extending the number of frames to 60 full frames, rather than 60 half frames. I used this guide:

http://rarevision.com/articles/slow_motion.php

great read and depending on your source, you can either get GREAT looking slow motion footage, subpar or just plain bad slow mo footage. I've acheived better slow-mo than this. I actually think this came out "so-so". Thanks again Steve, and have fun experimenting.

Roger, I loved it. Great shots of you wife and soon to be. I liked the saturated color. I also shoot like that when the subject has lots of b1right colors. Question, the shirt your wife was wearing, was that a true color or was it more reddish? Bob

Bob,

Thanks! The shirt is true color, it's not red at all.

Thanks again! I too like the Sat. color, but only for certain occasions.

Would you mind posting your presets for these shots. I would love to dial them in. Bob

I also agree that the saturation looked fine and all in all I think it looked really good. Also congrats on new Rosales on the way. I've got some footage I shot the other day I want to post. What do you think the best size and codec would be to use for viewing on a site such as this one? I am using FCP.

Not at all Bob. Here you go:

Gamma: Cine
Color Matrix: Cine
Knee: High
Black: Press
Noise Reduction: Low
V. Detail: Normal
Color Gain: 6
Color Phase: 0
Red Gain: 0
Green Gain: 6
Blue Gain: 6
Sharpness: -2
Coring: 6
Setup Level: -2
Master Ped: 0

I haven't tried these settings indoors, but this setup was done specifically for a bright sunny day outdoor. I'd like to see what you shoot with it and whatever tweaks you make.

Thank you Mike!

As for showing your work, I'm not too sure since you have a Mac, I'm not familiar with encoding programs for the Mac. I used a program called TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.net) I've seen some very high quality, small sized .mov files, but I believe you need to buy Quicktime Pro. As for hosting, I have my own webspace, but this site has a max. file size of 4mb (I think) for mov files.

Don't know what else to tell you, good luck posting your stuff! I'd like to see it.

I use quicktime pro on my mac. I haven't compressed enough video to claim that I have mastered the correct compression settings though. I'm still looking for the right combonation.

Hi Mike - have you tried using Sorenson Squeeze - superb compression software, available for both Mac & Windows.

http://www.sorensonmedia.com/products/?pageID=2

I put a lot of video to webservers and have found this the most effective compression software.
Plus, and here's the cracker for me - it's REAL simple to use, bit like me really!

Cheers

Andy

Hey thanks Andrew. Ive heard a couple people mention it but hadn't really had a chance to check it out. I definitely will if I cant find the right H.264 combination by this weekend. Thanks again.

Mike