Sundown - A Canon 7D Short Film
 

Now showing at
I have also written some comments on my experience of shooting the experimental short with Canon 7D

Nice film
 

Very nice film. I love the time lapses. Is it Singapore? Well done carefully edited and filmed. Regards Jeff

Yup. This is Singapore. I chose the location because of the unique contrasts formed between one of the world's busiest sea port and a recreational park.

Ng,
I love your video; your color grading is spot-on. What are you using for editing? Thanks for sharing. Felipe

Very well done. Your exposures were spot on.

The only suggestion I have is to use a faster lens. There were several shots on the waterfront where the people in the foreground were nicely framed but the background was in focus so the people didn't stand out as much as they could have. Having the background slightly out of focus would have still provided the scale of the harbor and the beauty in the foreground, which is something the 5D/7D does very well.

Obviously this is very subjective, but I thought I would suggest that.

The thing I like about the way you shot and edited this is that it made large industrial place, warm and inviting. Looked like a very pleasant summer evening - with ships...

I use Final Cut Pro (Pro Res) and just do a quick 3 way color correction, mainly to compensate a bit of blacks and highlights when not exposing correctly.

I actually wrote about my experiences of shooting this short at the vimeo page.

It is a 7D I borrowed from my brother and he only has the kit lens. Would be nice to have faster lens. Another reason why the DOF is not shallow in a lot of cases, as I have explained in my comments at vimeo, is that I was shooting from a far distance at full zoom, thus negating any DOF. Singaporeans are generally camera-shy and I am trying to be less obtrusive on the people at the park. Otherwise I was at the lowest aperture where possible...

You did a great job. Have you tried using Color? You could add a little more richness and give the scenes a little more depth.

Thanks for your feedback :)

I guess I could use Color, but it was also a test for myself to try out the new HDSLR workflow and learn about 7D's capabilities. So I wanted to keep the original colors as much as possible. As I said, the only tweaking was in blacks and highlights and even then it is not much, only a little bit here and there to correct some exposures.

Another thing is that I exported to H.264 with compressor and somehow the color saturation was lost. Possibly I was in ProRes 4:2:2 and then I lost colors due to downsampling to H.264's 4:2:0. And of cos, there is another compression at Vimeo to On2 VP6. Certainly, what I see on my FCP edit is more saturated than what we now see at Vimeo. I guess next time I could use a little bit of oversaturation if the intention is upload to Vimeo in order to compensate.

Actually, I screwed up a scene -- the black and white footage of the two kids running with the kite. I was using an old polarizer with some stains and it was making the footage fuzzy. However, I thought the expression on the kids' faces are great and I decided to salvage it by making it black and white with some vignette. And of cos, I quickly removed the polarizer for the rest of the shoot.