St Trudo church, new ea50 film

[Noa Put]

Never have done so many stairs as today, 100 up and down again so I would have an idea what to film and again 100 up and down dragging all my gear in a very narrow spiral staircase but is was fun. :)
I took a risk and dialed in a new preset (thx to Chris Harding for supplying a link) and it was the AbelCine Range preset because it’s supposed to maximize the full range of the camera which is for the fs100. But since you can dial in exactly the same settings in the ea50 I thought why not give it a try.
So I did and went filming without even testing it first, first impression of what I saw in post (I did some quick pp3 standard and AbelCine Range comparison in church) is that it’s not as flat as pp3 and seems to give enough latitude. I did apply some extra saturation and contrast in post though. This is what the preset looks like:
Black Level: 0
Gamma: CinemaTone1
Black Gamma: Range = High / Level = +7
Knee: Point = 102.5% / Slope = -1
Color Mode: Type = Standard / Level =8
Color Level: -3
Color Phase: +1
Color Depth: R=-2, G=-6, B=-7, C=0, M=+2, Y=+5
WB Shift = All 0
Detail = Level = -3 / Manual Set = Off

Wada ya guys think, does the color look any good to you? From what I can tell the color seems pretty accurate.

I used my Samyang 14,35 and 85mm today, peaking on this camera rocks, it’s so easy to pull focus even with very shallow dof, it’s fun to each time nail that focus when doing focus pulls.
The sound is all from the internal mike, I didn’t bring any other audio recording device with me as I thought there would be nothing to record but then I got lucky when a organ player showed up and the internal mike did a good job capturing the sound, the audio on the camera was in auto mode at that moment. Also in the tower (what you can hear at the end of the video) you had these clocks playing a tune every 30 minutes, because that was so loud I placed the audio setting to manual to prevent clipping and that worked out fine as well.

It was filmed in 1080p 50p so I could slow down some slider movements if necessary, I absolutely hate my slider, as soon as I can spend some more money I’m getting a decent one so that I don’t have to repeat every shot 5 times.

Sint Trudo Kerk Peer / Sint Trudo Church on Vimeo

[James Manford]

Watching the short films you produce with the EA50 puts a big fat smile on my face -- keeps me re-assured I made a good purchase. I'll be dialing in this preset too!

Keep up the good work!

[James Manford]

From 3.00 - 3.07

What lens did you use? and what was the gain level?

It looks good, but I can see the bugs crawling on my screen from noise.

[Chris Harding]

Nice job Noa!!

Those PP's are really nice .. If you are doing outdoor stuff with high contrast I would just lift the Colour Level to +2 so it handles the bright conditions well once you guys hit the Summer months.

It's a very nice indoor, natural light preset though so it was perfect for what you did.

Chris

[Steven Digges]

So cool...outstanding work Noa. The opening rack all the way from the stained glass to the crucifix is awesome!

Steve

[Chris Harding]

Hi Noa

I tried the original PP in a house today and it's definately a bit too saturated and also a bit dark.

Now, to get the exposure up a little do you reduce Black Level to zero and do you also need to reduce the Black Gamma level down to 7 instead of 8 ??? or will bringing colour level into negative also make the image brighter???

The first PP is awesome outdoors but I need one for indoors but wasn't sure about the blacks..do they affect exposure??

Chris

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by James Manford

From 3.00 - 3.07 What lens did you use? and what was the gain level? It looks good, but I can see the bugs crawling on my screen from noise.

I shot most of the film at iso 800 as there was sufficient lights at every level in the church tower, only at the highest level the lights didn't work and I had to apply 2500 iso, the lens was a 85mm at f1.4.
I think I will apply some neatvideo to those shots to get the most grain out.

The opening rack all the way from the stained glass to the crucifix is awesome!

My favorite shot as well :) the difficulty was not the rackfocus because the peaking is like I said outstanding and quite easy to do (I have the peaking in yellow and at max setting) but it was getting a smooth glider shot at the same time. The size of the camera does help in controlling the motion though, it's just the carriage on the slider that often stalls giving jerky motion.
There are actually quite a lot of slider movements with a rack focus at the same time, I kinda beginning to like doing those. Also the fact that 50p slows down so gracefully is a big plus, sometimes helps a lot with slider or steadicam shots.

I tried the original PP in a house today and it's definately a bit too saturated and also a bit dark.

To which preset are you referring to? Regarding finetuning the settings, to be honest, I don't have any experience in that and I rather just use presets that someone else spend weeks on getting right :) That's why I just used an existing one that claimed to preserve latitude. The AbelCine Range preset does already adds some contrast and saturation if I compare with pp3 but it gives the footage a bit more punch with still enough room to colorcorrect in post.

I also have been doing some quick tests in that church between the different standard presets and toke my sony cx730 along to shoot at the same time so I could see which preset matched best. I also did some quick low light test and it seemed that with a f2.8 lens wide open I need to go up to about 5000 iso to match my little sony at 24db and the cx730 is much cleaner at those high gains. That little camera still keeps surprising me.

[James Manford]

Noa

1.10 to 1.11 the quick shift from one stained glass to the other ...

Was that sped up in post? Really liked that effect.

[Noa Put]

That's very simple, first shot I start with the camera fixed at the stained glass and then do a quick pan to the left, next shot of the second stained glass I start with a quick pan to left and stop the pan when I"m at the stained glass. In post I join both clips and put a dissolve directly over the pan motion et voila. :)

[James Manford]

Awesome.

A neat creative trick!