Shoot w/two FX1's
 

After shooting with two FX1s last tuesday, I finally arrived at a rough cut late Friday night. I directed this, but I come from a film/camera dept. background, so I'm my own D.P. too.

For those who haven't seen my other posts, I'll let you all guess about the slow motion! Also, this is a rough cut. There's some dead spots in the first two sequences that I have to spruce up, so hold your directing commentary please :-)

awesome. that footage looks tight. how about alittle info on the camera settings and lighting/filters used?
i'm guessing the slow mo is %50, achieved by deinterlacing and making each field a frame??

it could easily pass for film. especially at that resolution.. how does the footage hold up when viewed at full res? still as dynamic? or does it get into home video territory?

good stuff.
eric

"I'll let you guess about the slow motion!"

I found the post where he talked about doing slow motion here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38145

Pretty clever. Here's a snippet:

"2-I needed slow motion for this project. I decided to try (and then tested last week) shooting in 30i, and then slowing down and simultaneously downconverting in After Effects. The idea was to treat each HD field like an SD frame, thereby giving 60fps source material to work with."

Nate, give us more info. The slo-mo was great.

Nate, great video!

And the slo-mo trick is amazing! I read how to do it but i have some problem understanding the meaning of the "simultaneous" downconverting procces. Maybe it´s because im still awake... And with some good sleep will get it.

Did you used the mini35? Im sorry to make so low questions... Im really tired. But the prime mission of this post was to congratulate you for your stupendous work and i think is done. Better questions after resting in bed for couple of hours.

Hey, thanks for posting Nate. Great job!

The one comment I have is that the footage overall looks a little dark. Was this on purpose? Was it done in post? How did you light it???

I'm flying out to LA on Friday, so if you're up for a beer let me know!

Thanks again!

Nate Weaver, any chance you could post the video at full rez somewhere?
would love to see it at 1920x1080.
or how about a short m2t file?

Thanks for all the compliments, everybody. It's very cool to hear kind words.

So I shot all the slow motion stuff in 30i, and simultaneously slowed down and downconverted to DV in After Effects. I originally did the slow down by applying time stretch (40%), but AE was having problems doing this for a whole 40 minute tape. In the end I used the conform fps feature in the Interpret Footage dialog (12fps).

My comps in AE were 23.98fps, which I then added pulldown to in the render stage. Going from 60 fields to 24 frames allowed for a 2.5x slowdown.

All band performance was CF30, and was stright downconverted to 29.97 DV. I edited in FCP in DV sequences. All color correction was also in FCP, along with the vignette effect.

The web version is too dark and too saturated...on NTSC it looks much better. This is the first video I've done where I think I'll have to make a custom colored version for web.

I only lit the band for the performance...no lighting for the running/hearse shots. I had 1 1.2K HMI, and 2 4bank Kinos...and my lighting scheme only started to look good as the sun was going down. Instruments like that are no match for mid-day sunlight.

Also, for the one person who asked, there is no HD version of this, mainly because I don't need one. I used the FX1 for the extra resolution after downconvert, and for the field/frame slow motion trick.

Nate, that was a fantastic video. An extremely good example of a simple concept brilliantly executed.

Could you tell us how long it took to shoot? You US guys are so far ahead of the UK for these types of music videos.

Another FX1 music video
 

Hey there neighbor... Cool stuff. Like it! Love the location too. Is that over off of Santa Fe and about 6th st.?

that was sick! man you did a great job. how did you avoid any motion blur? because thats one major setback of the HDR-FX1. i saw none in the video.


joel

<<<-- Originally posted by Simon Wyndham : Nate, that was a fantastic video. An extremely good example of a simple concept brilliantly executed.

Could you tell us how long it took to shoot?-->>>

Thanks. It was a one day shoot, first shot at about 8am and last at about 5:30pm

Re: Another FX1 music video
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Parker : Hey there neighbor... Cool stuff. Like it! Love the location too. Is that over off of Santa Fe and about 6th st.? -->>>

Somewhere around there. I think somebody said we were under the 6th street bridge, on the east side. Somebody else scouted it for me, so I didn't get too familiar.

<<<-- Originally posted by Joel Corral : that was sick! man you did a great job. how did you avoid any motion blur? because thats one major setback of the HDR-FX1. i saw none in the video.


joel -->>>

Well, if anything the way I slowed down the video would have accentuated any MPEG-2 motion blur...you're seeing each field for a longer period of time. I see the MPEG blur, but it's not BAD. Not a show stopper to me, unlike some folks. Or put another way, I prefer to see the glass as half-full.

Anyway, all I did was shoot a 120th shutter on the slow-mo stuff. The idea was to replicate the shutter speed a film camera would have had if you were shooting film at 60fps.

120th thats good to know, your the second guy who has talked about shooting in 120th. i'll try that next time i am shooting some surf footage with my HDR-FX1.


thanks,


joel

<<<-- Originally posted by Joel Corral : 120th thats good to know, your the second guy who has talked about shooting in 120th. i'll try that next time i am shooting some surf footage with my HDR-FX1.
-->>>

No no, don't be shooting normal footage in 120th just to counteract the MPEG motion blur. The 120th shutter will impart a whole 'nother look to it that won't be normal.

That is, unless you're going slo-mo with it.

I had an inexperienced cameraman on Warped tour that shot the whole summer using shutter speed to control exposure. I just about killed him when he got back and I saw the footage, because most of it was handheld and the greater than 1/50th shutter speed made all his stuff very hard to watch in some spots.

nate,


i will be using some slow motion spots but the majority of the time will not be. thanks for the input. if you don't mind in your opinion what should i be shooting surf footage at? i am a little confused on the proper shutter speeds with my FX1. i shot the other day shooting with 1/60th shutter and i had motion blur all over the place. so i am now torn between my GL2 or my FX1 for shooting fast action spots like surfing. is there any site or information that you know of that you can direct me to that could shed some light for me?


joel

Are you sure you were really shooting at 1/60th? If you set the shutter speed by hitting the shutter button, and then it gets pushed again by accident and you happen to be in a low light situation, the camera will then bump it to 1/30th. Then it's smear city.

I find that I CONSTANTLY have to be watching the shutter speed on the camera, because that damn button will get pushed and then all bets are off. The way Sony handles those settings is way way wack.

I suppose you really could be shooting 1/60th and you think it's smeary, but other than the tiny bit of MPEG smear, I think 1/60th looks like every other camera on the planet.

yeah i am sure. i got some footage i'll post later. i never shoot below 1/60th.because of the strobing @ 1/30th.

oh yeah one more thing, if you don't mind. how did you shoot @ 120th? i can only get 1/125th.


joel

Hi Nate !

There are still interlace jaggies on the edges of outlines. It doesn't look like the downconvert and slowdown does a correct job. Good enough to look OK on that resolution, but not right.

I'm going to try to use your same idea and actually seperated the fields into full frame to finally put them together into a slowmo sequence. The methode I'll try to use will gets the clean fields, without jaggies.

I'll create a shake script to do that.

I'll post the result once it's done.

Frank

frank,

i'll bet you that his DV master is way better. remember you are watching a quicktime web version.


joel

I'm almost sure it's not. You wouldn't get that kind of interlace artifacts on the edge. Even with compression.

Frank

Here is the test I did as explained in a few messages earlier on this thread. No interlace artifacts and clean frames.

http://home.comcast.net/~chalbers/slow.wmvx

Download the link and take out the x at the end to play

Frank

frank,

i totaly see what you mean now. so what was your secret? and what was that hacky sac footage shot as?


joel

Way to go Nate!!!!! That is one awesome production there!! Congratulations!

Hello everyone !

So it seems that Nate DID use full clean frames. The footage was just 30 frames footage with 2:3 pulldown of his original 24 frames . That explains the interlace !

Now I feel stupid ! :-)

Frank

The hacky sac footage was HDV 60i footage taken with an FX1 that I found online.

I responded to the same bit on another board, but in the interest of defending my methods, I'll respond here too :-)

Frank, what you're seeing is the 2:3 pulldown applied to the slow motion footage AFTER the initial slowdown. My intent from the beginning was not to slow down the 30i to 30P, but to 24P. That way I get 2.5x slow motion as opposed to just 2x. This is also in line with how the Varicam post processes footage, and also if you shot with a film camera @60fps.

So anyway, I took the captured 29.97 full res Apple Intermediate Codec into After Effects. I brought them into a 720x480, 23.98 comp. I manually sized the clip down to fit. I set the Interpret footage dialog in AE to understand the AIC clips had upper field dominant, and also to conform to 12fps. This slowed down the clips to almost exactly 40%.

I then rendered out the clip, adding the 2:3 pulldown in the output module. I needed a 29.97 DV clip to intercut with the CF30 footage, which was downconverted in AE also, but to a 29.97 comp.

At that point I had all 29.97 DV clips to cut in FCP. The interlacing you see in the web movie is the 2:3 pulldown added in After Effects, and ONLY in the slow motion shots.

Trust me when I say that the only problems with the footage in the end is that there are bad compression blocks that jump around in a few of the shots, assumedly from errors on the HDV tape (but not the 15 frame dropout). Also, there is a little line twitter in places...the downconversion in After Effects is pretty sharp.

Thanks for the explanation !

I did it using a compositing package.

I doubled the amount of frames by changing the speed to 0.5.

frame 1 becomes frame 1 and 2, frame 2 becomes frame 3 and 4 ... etc.

Then I take out the upperfield and downsize it to DV. I do that for frame 1,3,5,7 etc.

I then take out the lower field and resize it to DV. That one I save out as 2,4,6,8, etc.

Off course, all that is not done manually. I use a compositing script in Shake.

That's about it

That looks very nice Nate. I get my camera on Tuesday, the more I see the more excited I get!

by the way, who is the band?

http://home.comcast.net/~chalbers/slow.wmvx

Getting a 404.

I just saw the video again and because of downloading time i just went on with the frame by frame option and i realized som 2 frames of every five looked interlaced and the middle 3 look great. Im still trying to get my head jam mix on CF, does this have anything to do with it?

Sorry of not getting it well, im just trying to improve my knowlegde faster...

EDIT: but then, the band close shoots don´t have this problem... What i read this is the 2:3 pulldown. ok. just got messy...