Canon 5d footage transcoding

[Noah Kadner]

I’d suggest the Canon FCP Log and Transfer Plugin or Magic Bullet Grinder-

https://prolost.com/blog/2010/5/27/magic-bullet-grinder.html

-Noah

Check out my book: RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera!
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[Ryan Mast]

To answer your second question…

What kind of footage are you shooting? For the House finale, they shot exactly what’s best for those cameras — organic textures, no sharp straight lines, no smooth gradations, no jittery motion, etc.

Grade in Color, not in Final Cut. I don’t understand color science enough to tell you why, but I don’t notice the banding as much when I grade in Color as when I grade using the 3-way color corrector in Final Cut.

—
Meteor Tower Films
We make music videos, design video for live theater, and build interesting contraptions.

[Robbie Carman]

[Ryan Mast] “I don’t understand color science enough to tell you why, but I don’t notice the banding as much when I grade in Color as when I grade using the 3-way color corrector in Final Cut.”

Part of this issue is that FCP works in Y’CbCr space or generically known as YUV (although technically incorrect) while color works in RGB space.

But one question I have for the original post. You’re trying to enlarge the 5D footage to 2k right? While the blow up isn’t that big its still a blow up. Its to be expected to see some artifacting with that. I’m a colorist (as my day gig!) and I just completed a feature doc that was shot RED and 5D as well. Finished at 2k. While we had pretty good results with Compressor doing the enlargement ultimately what we decided to do was layback the 5D footage to HDCAM SR and then re-ingest using our KONA 3 to 2k. The hardware scaling did a much better job then software. But not sure if you can do something like that in your budget

Robbie Carman
—————-
Colorist and Author
Check out my new Books:
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[Noah Kadner]

[Ryan Mast] ” For the House finale, they shot exactly what’s best for those cameras — organic textures, no sharp straight lines, no smooth gradations, no jittery motion, etc. “

That episode was non-stop sharp lines and jittery motion, etc- that sorta stuff has little to do with how the final look was achieved. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the House episode went through several high end digital restoration & de-noising processes during post-production. Not too mention it was shot by a master DP with a big-budget Hollywood crew and full lighting/grip gear.

That the episode was shot on a 5D M2 is definitely a landmark achievement. But to turn that around and expect similar results out of the box on a stock 5D M2 would be like assuming painting with the same brush used by Van Gogh will somehow automatically produce identical art works. There’s a lot of if’s you have to satisfy along with the equipment involved if you expect similar results.

Noah

Check out my book: RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera!
Unlock the secrets of 24p, HD and Final Cut Studio with Call Box Training. Featuring the Sony EX1 Guidebook, Panasonic HVX200, Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Canon 7D.
Learn DSLR Cinematography.

[Ryan Mast]

[Noah Kadner] “Not too mention it was shot by a master DP with a big-budget Hollywood crew and full lighting/grip gear.”

You hit the nail on the head, good sir. 🙂

—
Meteor Tower Films
We make music videos, design video for live theater, and build interesting contraptions.

[Michael Sacci]

Yeap, most people think the key to hollywood finishing is all in post, but it starts in production which gives them the material to work the magic in post. I’m not a House fan be I want to see that episode.

Also the key reason they went with DSLR is because the look fit the story they were telling. It was not a normal House, they have no plans to make DSLRs the camera of choice for next season. Which is not a knock but it puts it back into the thought that these are just tools, brushes. You need to choice the best brush for the job.

[Uli Plank]

The episode is already online. And I have to second this, it was the obviously the look they wanted for that specific episode. Works very well in the claustrophobic situation under the collapsed building, but in other scenes I found the very shallow DOF a bit distracting, just a tad too much.

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Robbie Carman]

[Uli Plank] “ut in other scenes I found the very shallow DOF a bit distracting, just a tad too much. “

I agree but its funny to me because its not like when they’re shooting normally they’re working with slow lenses and can’t create shallow DOF. Seems like they wanted to push and as you said Uli create that look

Robbie Carman
—————-
Colorist and Author
Check out my new Books:
Video Made on a Mac
Apple Pro Training Series DVDSP
From Still To Motion

[Jef Huey]

Here is a post from the DS Google group by the online editor of House. He describes their post process.

Jef

——

from Derek Herr
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date Fri, May 14, 2010 at 2:43 AM
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We recently finished the season finale of House on DS 10.3 – the episode was shot entirely with the Canon 5D and 7D.

It airs Monday night on Fox here in the U.S.

We finished this season of House in 4:4:4 using the DS and a Nucoda coloring system, using DPX files in-house until we produced the final HDcamSR masters out of the DS. We captured all the h264s from the Canon DSLRs directly into the DS and made dailies “reels” which were then colored by a dailies colorist and synced and downconverted to standard def for offline editorial like a normal film-style show.

After much testing, we used the “legacy graphics” setting in DS to import the Canon files, and we always use the Rec 601/709 settings when importing and exporting DPX.

When shooting video, these cameras only capture 8-bit color, so there are banding artifacts. We added grain to all the footage using the Foundry FurnaceCore plugin set, just enough to obscure the banding and I ran the grain plug-in through a keyer so it was only applied to mid and hi luminance portions of the frame that needed the treatment; this kept the dark areas from looking too grainy and was a better solution than “debanding” plug-ins.

The grain also helps the picture out of the Canons, which is a little soft and tended to look a bit “inky”-we thought it looked a lot like reversal film.

The Canons are challenging for focus pullers, some shots were processed with aggressive sharpening applied to faces.

When we had finished the episode, I asked one of the co-producers if he felt that using the Canon DSLRs had cost less, more, or about the same as the 35mm process they normally use. He said it was about the same.

-Derek

[Bill Davis]

I just think it’s so weird when I read this kind of post.

Someone’s making a “no budget” resume film. Yet they manage somehow to get hold of a RED to shoot on. Somehow, there’s no budget to support HUMAN talent. Yet, there’s ALWAYS somehow enough money to support the EQUIPMENT necessary to take their shot at the big time.

What seems so weird, is that the chances of driving ACTUAL quality higher has virtually NOTHING to do with gear – and EVERYTHING to do with the human talent that surrounds it.

I keep suspecting that if most of these folks grabbed a 1999 era Hi-8 camcorder and spent their life savings on talented PEOPLE to surround themselves with – script help, lighting help, sound help, directing help – that they’d have a FAR greater chance of ending up with worthwhile work in the can – AND they’d be leagues ahead in a real movie career – rather than gaining expertise in operating technology that’s almost sure to be obsolete in a few years.

Weird.