A Christening Into The Forest

This was a nice day. The weather was superb, the place of the ceremony in the middle of a dense forest and generally there was a feel-good mood. Shot with Sony FX1 and Canon 550D.

Melina's Christening on Vimeo

[Stephen J. Williams]

Great work Dimitris... I'm so used to watching wedding videos it took me a second to realize who the video was about :-) I loved the black and white shots... What lens(s) were you using on the T2i?

Steve

[Chris Barcellos]

Great job of blending the footage from these two cameras. I have both, too.

How did you set the camera's up ? Frame rates on each ? Did you reserve color correction to the end.

[James Bishop]

Hi Dimitris,

Love this video. Really stunning.

Like Chris, I'd really love to know what settings you use for both cams, and how difficult it was to match them in post. I've currently got a Z1 and am actually thinking about getting a T2i to work along side it

James

[Dimitris Mantalias]

Thanks guys. Stephen, Although I wrongly wrote in a Vimeo reply that we were mainly using an 24-70 (I confused those specs with those from another video :) ) , truth is that we only used a "dark" 18-200. It was a VERY shiny day and the 18-200 were more than enough for the job.

Chris & James, the fact that there was plenty of natural light, made the combination pretty easy. Imagine that I was working with the old FX1 using the ND2 filter so I had the Iris settings from 1.8 to 2.8. Can't recall the dslr settings (mainly because my brother was using it) but the main rule was to keep the ISO low. :) Having that kind of light and shooting from a distance with both cameras helped to have some nice shallow DOF even with the FX1 and that made the combination easier. The CC was done Premiere native tools, Newblue CC tools and Magic Bullet.

[Stu Holmes]

Great video Dimitris.

I got a question : the shot from 2m27s to 2m30secs, i am sure that was on the 550D? Looks to me to be too shallow DOF for it to be the FX1 I would think. I am guessing that was 550D shooting 720/50p ? Was that on a glidecam or just a monopod or Flowpod? I know you said you tend to use just camcorders on the Glidecam rather than SLrs but that slight tracking from right-to-left looks like your Flowpod perhaps. Also just looking at the lady's skin in that shot, it looks to me like you used noise-reduction, was it the NewBlue skin touch-up tool? can you comment on that please.

Thanks in advance

[Dimitris Mantalias]

Stu, you're right. This shot was done with the 550D at 720/50p. In order to have good slow motion from DSLR progressive footage, that's the only way to do it right (and we love slow motion, regardless of recent trends). We had the 550 on a Glidetrack and the movement was done by sliding to the left and turning the camera by hand to the right at the same time. All the FX1 (be it "steadicam" or static) shots were done on a Flowpod. And you're right at the last part too. Noise reducer it is, we were standing very far at that point, with the 18-200 at full zoom which meant we were using some high f numbers at that moment. We use the NeatVideo for CS5 plugin. Hands down the best noise reducer in the market.