New Music Video shot on FX1e with Kona LH (DVCPRO-HD)
 

Hi Guys, Just completed another video, which again, i shot on my FX1e. This time, i used a Kona LH card, and captured DVCPRO-HD directly from the component outputs on the camera. One reason for this is that we did have to do several Chromakey shots using a greenscreen, and found the HDV format to be unsuitable.

The quality difference between the DVCPRO HD footage, and the native HDV capture's we did prior to the shoot was remarkable, especially, the lack of compression artifacts and blocking. Most noticable for me was the abillity to really push the colors around a great deal in post... this time using shake, to grade the finished video. The DVCPRO-HD format basically had far greater color information, and made this process simpler and more enjoyable, and i think the results are pretty good.

I will get some full resolution stills up as soon as possible for you guys to see.

On another note, please don't email me about making you a 35mm adapter, i get many emails every day requesting this, and this is simply not something I am able to do at the moment, sorry.

Please feel free to ask any questions or leave feedback, I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks, Nick

www.pixelloft.com/akala.htm

Another great one... I think youre one of the guys on this forum that demonstrate how possible it is to create excellent looking stuff with very little cost in terms of gear (talent!). Do you have any details about the shoot in terms of how long production ran? How did you handle post working in DVCPro-HD? Did you offline first?

Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for your kind comments. The shoot lasted 3 days, and i have to say, not having to log clips after the shoot was an incredible bonus for me (someone who hates that stage). I captured with the kona LH card in Final Cut Pro, and edited the DVCPRO-HD files in FCP with no problems. On many occasions, i was playing back 4 layers of video without any playback problems. Any more than that and it had some difficulty. The kona card helps alot with editing, and simple effects, and rotation/scaling didn't require any rendering for playback.

I used Shake for the first time to grade the piece, due to the ease of sending the edit directly too Shake from fcp. I am used to using combustion, so the switch did take a couple of stressfull hours, but once i new where everything was it was no problem. I liked shake a lot, but the fact that the undo doesn't work properly, and a few other simple things, did irk me a bit, especially coming from the elegantly and simplistically designed combustion. Seemed as though they have tried to make shake more complex to use than need be. Loved the node based system though, and found it to be perfect for grading, especially with the thumbnails (very useful)

Did the compositing on my PC in combustion, becuase after some tests, the new diamond keyer in combustion 4 just plain rocks anything else out there.
The greenscreen shots were nice and clean, so this wasn't difficult. (ill try and get some pics on my site of the screen and how it was lit).

After the shoot, we had two weeks to edit and grade it, which was fairly tight, especially given one of the problems we had on day two of the shoot, which rendered a lot of our material useless (not our fault i might add).

Anyway, that just about sums it up i think, hope it is of some use,

Thanks, Nick

loved it. I'm curious how you get such a small file size with such a large window. What settings do you use?

Hey Nicholas,

Yeah, Combustion is great - especially for the price(like almost a 1/4 of shake). I've never got to use shake but I know it handles compositing layers very well for 3d and has some really powerful rendering capabilities when using openEXR files with floating point, etc... who knows.

I have a question though - did you use your 35mm adapter for the green screen or post the DOF? I'd be blown away by your adapter if you kept it on! Also, was looking at some of your other photos - what kind of lights are you using? A mix of 250 to 650 spotlights (didnt notice any fresnels)? It would be awesome if you could get some more pics up on your lighting setups for the AKALA vid - I've got ideas of how you lit it but I really want to see.

Whats up next as well? ;)

Hi Giuseppe, thanks, i'm glad you liked it. Im not sure i understand your question, about a large window, but i used 1080i 50 DVCPRO HD to capture the 1080i 50 analog output from the camera. I deinterlaced, and finally output at SD Uncompressed for delivery to the client who transferred to Digi-beta.

Hi Jeremy, Yep, i am a big fan of combustion, and i think i could be a big fan of shake too. They are both very diferent, however, i only had a day to learn, and grade the video in shake, so my experiance with it is fairly limited.
I did indeed use my adapter for the greenscreen shots. The lights we used are as folows.
4 x 2k (Blondes)
4x 850 (Redheads)
1 x (kinoflo) - we didn't use this once
6 x inline dimmers
ND
Diffusion
Flags
etc etc.

I wanted to ensure i had enough power in the lights to use a fast shutter speed (for aesthetic purposes) while keeping the strong key look. The 2k's were excellent, but lead to a blown industrial fuse in the warehouse we were using. (Definatly will need a generater in future) It was a sunday and the shops were closed, so we had to feed the power of the adjacent unit.

Not sure what video i am doing next. I have a couple in the pipeline, but nothing concrete. I am desparate to do a short film as a teaser for a feature, but i'm going to get another few projects under my belt first.

I will be getting some pics of the set and lighting pics on my site over the next couple of weeks so check back.

Thanks Guys

Nick

Very nice indeed.

The lighting is great and it has a very nice rythm, although I didn't like the song.

The blue screen shots are great (the guys on the 'roof') and quite imaginative, all very pro looking.

Oh, and I think Giuseppe was referening to the Quicktime file size against window size. It looks like you used a very good codec.

Loved the video. Great editing and pace... fit the music perfectly


I'm wondering what lenses you used...

and, how did you compress the video? It was only 40mb but was at 640x360

Hi Guys,

Thanks again...
I used all Nikon Glass
20mm f2.8
24mm f2.0
35mm f1.4
50mm f1.4
85mm f2.0

To compress the movie, i used Sorrenson 3, with keyframes every 125frames and limited the datarate to about 1.5mb/s. If you save it using quicktime pro, you can see all the settings on movie info.

hope this helps

Nick