Commercial shot with A1
 

Hi,

Just finished an ad here in the UK shot on my new Canon A1 (no firestore or 35mm adaptor yet, though SGpro ordered!). Had to use freeware HDV split and bought TMPEG to convert into QT files, then edited in SD in Premiere then compiled and composited it all at 720p in After Effects from the SD edit. Not ideal, but it worked!

http://www.501tv.com/Debt_Connect_720p_h264.mov

Have to say I'm impressed with the camera so far; I've used the Z1 a couple of times and this is a major improvement both in raw image quality (esp. resolution) and HDV compression artifacts.

Tim, very nice.

Don

WOW!! That was great thanks for sharing and I just dowloaded the encoder trial version and it is great and resonable price.

Really enjoyed it! Great camera angles!
I anything, maybe it has too much detail in some shots overall. I guess it's a great thing.

Awesome! Really making the A1 shine.

Wow Great commercial!!
What settings or preset did you use in cam?

Link doesn't work :(

The file was probably removed for bandwidth reasons.

Bill

Hi!

Thanks for all your comments, really appreciated!!

Chan, the link's working again - I upgraded my account!

Oleg - I agree, especially the wide shot of the model under the tree, there's way too much detail. This is exactly the sort of situation you need a 35mm adaptor for, although we were pressed for time and struggling with the tiny location we had to shoot in. Also the whole sequence is sharpened too much for my liking, but clients are usually slow to be able to see any difference between HD and SD on a laptop (no HD screens were available at the screening), so you have to make it stand out.

Alain, I didn't have as long as I wanted to test the different settings, but here's what I ended up using (the rest are 0):

GAM N / KNE L / BLK M / PED 0 / SET -9 / SHP 3 / HDF M / NR2 L / CMX 2 / CGN 40 / GRM -15

Personally I can't see any use for the cine gamma setting, it's almost the exact reverse of the gamma curve I normally apply to create a more filmic look - I usually put a slight boost in the middle / lower half of the luma curve, which creates a more dramatic fall-off into the shadows and brightens the image, but keeps the highlights about the same, and I usually underexpose by a stop to cater for the grade. The gamma was the only thing I was disappointed by with the camera.

Hey Tim, could you check your link / account again, i don't think it's working ...

Thanks, Mike

Not working for me either.

Me either :(

Lol... His homepage says:

This account has exceeded it's bandwidth quota and has been temporarily disabled.


Ooooppppssss.... : )

Hi,

The link's working again now - until my host decides to suspend my account again, despite it being a 100mb account with only 70mb uploaded...

wow, I'm impressed with the sfx, nice how the 'ribbon' shines through the tree, could you give any hints on how you did it?

Thanks Jeremy! I don't think I got the glow right really but basically all that's happening is that the glow is added after the trees and sky and fx are composited, and it's set to a threshold that only kicks in with the fx and not the sky, but this is before it's graded - the grade flattens it all so the difference between sky and fx isn't as obvious.

Impressive looking clip. The colours look so vibrant. Love the look of those city shots aswell. Just curious, was it difficult to set up lighting for for the outside view of the guy in the window towards the end?

Very nice indeed!good job.

Spectacular.... Really impressive shots... Even did the reflection of the ribbon thing in the windows... Did you just create two cylinders in 3ds max and render out the videos with an alpha layer? Or did you create those objects in After effects?

Wow! great work! I loved the angles and variation on the shots, very nicely composited as well. Great attention to detail. The one thing I would have improved (unless it was the company standard logo) was the company font on the logo seemed a bit ordinary, like Arial or another regular use font.

Very nice production. Very professional shoots!
I'm also curious about the ribbon comming from the tree. Did you key on a blue sky and then replaced it with another sky filmed appart from the original?

Please tell us more !

Hi,

Again, really appreciate all these comments, I didn't expect so many - thank you!

Glenn - shooting from outside the building was just about waiting for the right time after sunset, fortunately we had time to wait! We just used two Kinos lighting the actor from the floor inside the office.

Doug - the ribbon effect was an object created in Max and rendered separately for each shot, then composited in AE - the windows reflection was done partly in Max (a bent plane with ray-traced reflections) and then from a freeze of the windows I created a displacement map in AE, which gave the slight difference between windows.

Nathan - totally agree, the logo text was awful, but that's the logo so we had to stick to it. We offered a re-desgin but they didn't bite!!

Gert - the original (ungraded) sky shot was deep blue, and so it was very easy to key out the tree and put the effect behind it. The blue was then desaturated in the grade (it was a bit too video!).

Thanks for all the feedback!

Hey Tim,

Absolutely fantastic commercial! I love it!!!

May I ask for a little bit of details as to how you were able to export this clip using H.264 with such high quality? Did you use Adobe Media Encoder to export this clip? I'm guessing you are on a windows machine since you are using Premiere Pro. My H.264 encodes have come out absolutely horrible for the most part... very desaturated and washed out. I know there is a 'h.264 bug' of sorts that causes this "gamma-shift" on windows machines, but it seems yours is not having any problems at all.

Any details you could provide to a bit of a lost soul like me with my A1 and PP2.0 and AE7.0 would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank for any help. :)

Hi, I always got that gamma shift problem when I tried to export directly from AE, so I bought QTpro to try and that solved the problem - now I export from AE using PhotoJpeg at near max quality (it looks virtually uncompressed), then open it with QTpro and export h.264 with that. Also, for some bizarre reason, exporting h.264 at the same quality settings produces a much larger file when exported direct from AE, which completely negates the point of it! This was encoded at 65% quality, with no filters or adjustments.

Hey Tim, thanks for the details on your exports. I too tried purchasing QT7 Pro and have been trying that as well, however, my QT7 Pro is producing the same gamma-shift, washed out look as Adobe Encoder does. I just cannot understand what it is that I'm doing wrong. Your video at least gives me hope, since if you can do it, there must be a way for me to do it as well.

I usually export from Premiere Pro my timeline as uncompressed Quicktime, which results in a great looking video. When I open the uncompressed export in QT7Pro, it looks great, as it should, but after encoding the H.264 file, it washes out big time. Any idea on what I might be doing wrong?

And one more quick question... when you export a file for the web, do you encode it using the square (1.0) pixel aspect ratio? Or do you leave the pixel aspect ratio to the native HD anamorphic (1.333)?

Thanks again so much for your time and help. I have been so dissapointed with my exports because of this gamma-shift problem. But you are my lightray of hope.

Link's not working....again....

:-P

me too: link not working...

ULi

"This account has exceeded it's bandwidth quota and has been temporarily disabled."

Any chance of a link somewhere else Tim :-)

no it really doesn't work....

Sorry! Long story, 123-reg are idiots, don't sign up with them!

New link (new, much better, host):

http://www.greeneyefilms.com/Debt_Connect_720p_h264.mov

Deke - I'm exporting square pixels, 1280x720 for 720p, but it's probably better to export 1440x1080 anamorphic for 1080p, as exporting the full 1920x1080 is a waste of bandwidth when the image is really only 1440 wide.

Tim, Great!!

Hey Tim,

Just to make sure I'm getting this all correctly, do you think you could write up a quick step by step summary of all your exporting process... ie:

1. Capture HDVLink
2. Covert mpeg to quicktime .mov in tmpeg
3. Edit .mov in PP2.0
4. Export from PP using Adobe Media Encoder (what format?)
etc, etc?

I am so desperate to figure out why my H.264's are coming out soo washed out. You seem to have a similar setup but are correcting the problem somehow. Thanks for any help.

Hi Deke - sorry for the delay posting, too much work!

I actually converted all the movs into DV format (SD) for the edit, then compiled all the footage manually in 720p in After Effects from the SD edit, as I couldn't edit HDV in the Premiere Pro version I have. But out of After Effects I exported a photo Jpeg set to I think 90%, then opened that with Quicktime Pro and exported it at about 70% quality h.264 - the export settings were:

Adjustments - Alpha Gain: Bottom Pin 0 / Top Pin 255 / Gain 1.0 / Offset 0
Brighness 0 / Contrast 0
HSL / RGB balance all 0
Blur set to least
In Filters, everything set to either thinnest, least or 0.
Sharpen set to least
All effects off

I get the washed out look if I export h.264 direct from After Effects, but it's fine if I export Photo Jpeg. Also exporting h.264 direct from AE produces much larger files than exporting at the same data rate from Quicktime Pro, which is pretty weird!

New link (the other one died again): http://www.eyecatcherfilms.com/Debt_..._720p_h264.mov

Hope this helps!!

AAAAArrrrhhh!!!! Link tinkered with again by outside forces - here it is AGAIN!!

www.eyecatcherfilms.com/DC_720p_h264.mov

Hi Tim,

great work - I've just bought an XH-A1, (mainly to match CG with) so I'm trawling the forums for tips.

Is there any chance of posting a still frame of the unretouched footage?
I'm having a little problem with grain, but your movie looks extremely smooth.

I've turned off the AGC, and tried your settings but my footage does seem a lot grainier than other samples I've seen.

Thanks,

Steve

Steve, here are some caps from the raw HDV footage:

www.eyecatcherfilms.com/Beach_raw.jpg
www.eyecatcherfilms.com/City_raw.jpg
www.eyecatcherfilms.com/Office_close_raw.jpg
www.eyecatcherfilms.com/Office_wide_raw.jpg
www.eyecatcherfilms.com/Park_close_raw.jpg
www.eyecatcherfilms.com/Park_wide_raw.jpg

Notice the blue bias and underexposure in most shots - it didn't look like that on the monitor we used! Also I'm using Grain Surgery on this to reduce the noise - it was shot at -3db but it was still too noisy, especially after grading.

If you haven't bought this camera yet, I'd seriously consider the HVX. I say that as an A1 owner, who has just spent £2.5k on it, so I'd love to be able to say it's the best camera in the world, but to be completely honest I think it has major faults. The main pros and cons for me are:

Pros: High resolution, cheap production costs (i.e., mini DV tapes), good HDV quality (noticably better than previous HDV cameras).

Cons: Undersaturated colour (even at max setting), visible stepping in Frame mode, video-looking flat gamma response (gets worse not better with the Cine settings).

I don't think either camera has the edge noise-wise, from what I've read the HVX is just as noisy. I think that's just what you have to accept in this price range.

For me the HVX was simply too expensive once I'd have bought the P2 cards and storage, etc, so the A1 was the only real option I had. But the visible stepping and lack of colour is a real pain. In all honesty I really think Canon could have done a lot better with this camera.

Thanks Tim,

I'd already bought it when you'd posted, although to be honest I mainly bought it as a (very) expensive toy, that I could use to source footage with. and the Panasonic was a bit too much to justify.

Toy's probably being a bit harsh though, my main work is producing CG, and I've started to have some client interest in matching CG with existing footage, not just locked off shots, but moving shots.

I've been tinkering with a programme called Syntheyes for ages, which reconstructs the camera move from points in the real footage, but DV was quite hard work, hence the Canon to create footage I can cut my teeth on.

To be honest, most of the cons don't worry me that much, as I do a lot of colour correction on my shots, since they usually have CG elements comped in anyway.

I did shoot some footage today with your settings, although since I was moving, the NR1 setting produced noticeable trails (I guess since most of your shots were locked off, it didn't really show on the commercial)

My Gain is set to 0 at the moment, so it's still a little grainy, but not as bad as it was. I'll try taking it down to -3db and see how it looks. Combustion has grain removal tools, but I'm not sure how they compare to Grain Surgery.

Thanks,

Steve