Wonky looking footage!

[Michael Herrick]

This is my second short mountain bike film that i have made with the T2i, and it's the second time that i feel like the footage looks weird.
Here's a link to the video

Kyle Warner Promo PINNED! on Vimeo

Most of the shots in the trees just look terrible, I don't know what it is, but they just look funky, and kinda fuzzy and weird, even though they were shot in 1080p (besides the slomo shots). And it's not something that I am doing wrong in post, because the original files look very similar to the rendered files. I mean just look at the shot starting at :40, It looks likes something that came out of my 5 year old entry level mini dv camera. The bushes and dirt look noisy or something, Is this just the Moire everyone talks about? I just don't know what I am doing wrong. And as a whole, the footage doesn't have that super crisp look like most footage shot by dslr's. I posted about my last video looking weird, and un-dslr like, and people suggested to get more shallow dof shots, but regardless of dof, the footage looks bad. Most dslr footage I've seen, even with shots that don't have shallow dof, look crisper and clearer. There is a few shots in this video that look decent I think, but it still isn't up to par of footage from even the average dslr videographer. I don't know how to describe how this footage looks or whats wrong with it, but take a look and tell me what you think
Thanks a lot!

[Joel Peregrine]

Hi Michael,

What editing app are you using? Is the footage transcoded first?

[John Wiley]

One thing I noticed is that the footage is way too contrasty. What picture proflile are you using? Tryin shooting in Neutral with the contrast right down and the sharpness and saturation down a bit. You can always add these back in in post, and shooting flat will give you more room for adjustment later on.

[Dustin Moore]

It also looks like you had bright sun and wood environments have a lot of ultra-dark shadows.
It is a recipe for high contrast even if you didn't miss-configure the camera. You might try
to film at a different time of day when the sun is coming in at an angle to light up some
of those harsh shadows. Probably a good idea to just take some regular stills in an area
a week or two before and see what it takes to get the exposure you want.

A directory of photography and a truck full of lighting gear would not hurt either.

[Steve Bleasdale]

Originally Posted by John Wiley

One thing I noticed is that the footage is way too contrasty. What picture proflile are you using? Tryin shooting in Neutral with the contrast right down and the sharpness and saturation down a bit. You can always add these back in in post, and shooting flat will give you more room for adjustment later on.

John do you mean sharpness all the way down and contrast and saturation down a bit? As neutral the sharpness is all the way down at default? Steve

[Michael Herrick]

I am using Vegas Pro 10, and I am not transcoding first, I believe the in-camera picture profile was set to neutral, as I usually shoot with neutral, but I am not 100% sure. Another thing i noticed was that when i drop the clip into the vegas timeline, it noticeably adds contrast to it, I don't know why.

[James Donnelly]

Originally Posted by Michael Herrick

I am using Vegas Pro 10, and I am not transcoding first, I believe the in-camera picture profile was set to neutral, as I usually shoot with neutral, but I am not 100% sure. Another thing i noticed was that when i drop the clip into the vegas timeline, it noticeably adds contrast to it, I don't know why.

I would be grateful if someone could correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how I understand the problem.

The Canon clips are 0-255 or computer RGB, whereas some codecs expect studio RGB, or 16-235, and discard values outside this range, which will result in clipped highlights and shadows. It looks like you have a lot of crushed blacks and blown highlights there.

The levels plug-in in Vegas remaps your gamma, and has a Computer RGB -> Studio RGB preset. Might be worth a try.

On a related note, have you considered shooting with the Cinestyle PP and editing with transcoded 10 bit 4:2:2 footage?

I find Cinestyle keeps my options open for fixing issues such as these. Upsampling your footage with a transcode won't add anything to the image, but it will mean less quality loss through processing.

Many people recommend Neoscene, but I use Matrox I-frame because it's free.

[Michael Herrick]

I have thought about shooting with cinestyle, and as far as transcoding goes, I really don't feel like doing it lol
I just find it so much easier to be able to drag stuff straight from my camera and start editing

[Michael Herrick]

Ok, so i tried the levels plug-in and it really seemed to give the footage back some normality, but it looks to flat. What's the best way to add some more pop to it? Curves? Brightness and contrast? add saturation? also, do you think this problem is nle related? I have access to premiere pro cs5, I just always thought vegas was easier, should I make the switch?

[Tom Bostick]

vegas 10 adds contrast right away for whatever reason ,see if you can get vegas 7 ,it does not have that problem
,also in vegas10 adding contrast is the best way to get rid of the washed out look

[Bill Grant]

Micheal,
This was a very difficult environment to shoot in. Alot of the shots have wild exposure ranges from very dark shadows to very bright blown highlights. I agree that it's the environment that you're fighting. Hopefully you're not in auto, and can expose for the subject and not let the camera decide, but this is a VERY challenging environment for the best of cameramen with the best of equipment. Great to hear Rage on the soundtrack though...

[Jon Fairhurst]

If you want to use the MOV files without transcoding in Vegas, there is a trick.

Background: Vegas uses Quicktime for decoding MOVs. The older version of QT would clip. More recent versions don't clip, but they screw up the gamma. Maybe this has changed with Vegas 10. I'm not sure.

Back in the day, one could open the MOV in QT Pro and export it as an AVI. It would re-wrap the file without slow transcoding. It's fast for the computer, but it took a lot of clicks if you had a lot of clips to re-wrap.

That would retain the original 0-255 mapping. You could re-map to 16-235 if you'd like using a Vegas Levels effect.

Personally, I prefer Cineform. On a fast computer, it's faster than real-time. It maps to 64 - 940 (10-bits) and can batch process. Editing is faster with Cineform.

If you shoot long-form stuff where you do little editing, then it makes sense to avoid transcoding. You will have many minutes per clip and few clips, so re-wrapping (if it's even needed anymore) isn't bad. For lots of little clips and heavy editing, Cineform makes a ton of sense.

I shot a 90-minute presentation recently. We ran a cheap AVCHD camcorder wide and I shot tight with the 5D and a 200mm lens. The AVCHD cam was next to the mixing board, so it recorded the audio without gaps. The only edits were to sync up the cams and to cut to the wide cam at the start, the end, and in the gaps. Add titles and we're done.

I ended up transcoding anyway, because I had to wait for the AVCHD content. If time were tighter, it would have been the perfect project for no-transcode.

It was a corner-case project for me though. Almost all my stuff is done with shorter clips and more intensive editing.

[Michael Herrick]

I was in manual exposure, I was trying to adjust exposure to the rider, but as you said, it was hard in that environment.

I transcoded when I first bought the camera because I was using vegas 9 which didn't handle the native footage good, but when I upgraded to vegas 10, I stopped transcoding because it handled native footage much better. I might consider transcoding again though as I am not usually constrained by time, and most of my work is edit-intensive.

Besides the obvious color problems, the footage doesn't have that crisp look like most dslr footage, any clue as to why that is? I tried using the sharpness plug-in in vegas, but that made it look absolutely terrible, even at the lowest setting.

[James Donnelly]

You're right, it's not sharp, and your camera can do better. It's hard to say why. I see a lot of compression noise, and it appears you have quite a shallow depth of field at some points. It's not aliasing or moire you're seeing, the footage is not sharp enough to resolve that :(

Could you tell us more details of the shoot;

- Shutter speed
- Lens
- Aperture
- Filters
- Compression settings
- Anything else you can think of

[Michael Herrick]

Ok I'll see if I can recall all my settings, I was using fairly standard settings i believe
Shutter Speed-Probably 1/50 for 24fps footage and 1/125 or a little bit higher for 60fps footage
Lens- Kit lens and 50mm 1.8
Aperture-Ranged from 2.8 to 5.6 or higher
Filters-Uv filter and nd filter on some shots
Compression settings- I am not sure what you are referring too here