-
Canon 5d footage transcoding
-
First of all, thankyou to everyone for your helpful comments about my questions.
I answered my first question by transcoding the same 7d clip with MPEG Streamclip and Compressor, dropping them into separate ProRes444 timelines in FCP and comparing them. There was NO difference that my (reasonably good) eye could discern. Bits of the waveform changed very slightly – but the pictures themselves looked identical. I have not tried the Canon and Magic Bullet plug-ins yet but I’m gonna guess there will be virtually no difference there either.
Regarding my second question about post treatment of the 5d footage on the ‘House’ I certainly take the point about the advantages of a good DP and a good budget for lighting. Much of my work (also as a British DP of 25 years experience in commercials and features) has been with comparable budgets and has aspired to similar standards of lighting. I may not have that budget on my little film – but I know how to make things look reasonable. Nice pictures are nice even if shot .,, on a camera phone. Certainly that should be the main point here.
Having said that, the article from the on-line editor of the episode was most informative – exactly answers my concerns – thankyou Jef. The banding artifacts caused by 8-bit color was what I was talking about. I knew that they had applied grain – Gale (Tattersall – the ‘House’ DP) had said that when I saw the projection at Paramount – but I did not know how, or that it had been selectively applied to mid and high luminance parts of the picture. I am so going to try that! The huge projection I saw of the clips from the episode looked amazing and even awed Gale and the director who had not seen the stuff projected before.
Finally a point about the depth of field. Gale said you will make enemies of your focus pullers! I know they had to aggressively sharpen certain shots in House to correct for focus errors. I say errors – but just what is the correct focus when your DOF does not even reach from one side of an eyeball to the other! Personally I love that crazy shallow focus look – it suits my film and it suits ‘House’. But along with the ‘reversal film’ quality of the images it’s definitely the Canon’s ‘look’ and would not be suitable for everything.
-
Bill, your response makes a lot of assumptions and is actually insulting. For a start, my film is not a ‘resume film’. With a 35-year career in commercials and features behind me, believe me, at my time of life – I really do not need to make a ‘resume’ film. This is a pet project I started 20 years ago on 35 and 16mm film. You know nothing of what I am doing or how I am doing it – yet you decide that I somehow do not value the human talent. The human involvement has been the key factor in this improvised ‘avant-garde’ film from the very beginning. Actors, dancers, performers of every type, all over the world, have been the driving force of the project. The formats I have shot on were what was available at the time and I have rejoiced in the changing textures of film sizes and video codecs.
Recent footage was shot on the RED because of the generosity of a DP friend. Likewise last month’s Canon footage. There is a dream sequence in the film shot on a phone camera (3gp codec). Pixels the size of postage stamps. I did this because I had no other camera available and the actor – the human talent – was available then and there and the setting was unrepeatable. The results (scaled to 2k) are amazing. If I could scrounge some short-ends and someone lends me a … 435, I’ll shoot on film again. In fact I did shoot film just last week. On Super-8mm with a pre-1999 camera. A lab in Hollywood is processing and scanning this for me because they believe in the ‘art’ of what I am doing.
The general point of your posting is valid and one I would agree with, but if you cannot make such points without being insulting, may I suggest you keep them to yourself.
-
It is also worth noting the grain processing done to “House”. This is a very delicate art that can make digital footage come to life; when done properly (as in, an expert of the same caliber of the DP and focus puller on that particular show). In terms of banding, properly dithering the footage can make a big difference.
Also in terms of house – it is important to realize the amount of post done to get the most out of the files put the budget close to that if they had shot 35mm.
-
Nick, the thing about comparing the native against the transcoded files is not at the start of process but at the end.
You would want to grade, composite, add graphics to a native version and compare the same process to the transcoded version. My guess would be there will be a world of difference.
Watched the House episode last night and totally see why they used it, since I’m not a House fan at all I also watched a normal episode. The entire discussion has be really good and talked about in so many places but the nice thing is from the people that did it there is a level headedness about it all, no, we are dumping film, RED is dead, type of things. Just we saw this tool and we thought it could do what we wanted it to do. And it did.
The other interesting thing is that it did not save them money, cost was the same.
-
Excuse me?
If you have “a 35-year career in commercials and features behind me” and you are NOT paying the people you are working with for ANY reason – isn’t that a bit self-indulgent?
I too have the same years of experience as you. And I know the incredible hours and Hurculean efforts that any worthwhile project in motion pictures requires.
Clearly, from your new description of your project, artistic, unusual, mixed media, multi-format – what you’re actually doing is EXPERIMENTING. And if that’s true, then you’re setting up a situation where ONE person stands to gain exponentially more than others from the success of an effort like this. YOU.
In fact, if you were asking for volunteers for a STRICTLY commercial project in order to bootstrap something like a series, documentary, or other on-going enterprise with a reasonable chance of securing long-term employment for those pitching in – I’d have LESS issue with your approach.
BTW, I mentioned “resume” films because I think that’s the SINGLE category where there is SOME inkling of justification for asking people to “pitch in and help without proper payment” – It PRESUMES someone is building a reputation on a shoestring.
That you are NOT personally in this category makes it more suspect, IMO.
I will suspect that at NO point during a single one of those features and commercials would YOU have accepted working without pay.
And if you’ve had 35 years of career success, YOU SHOULD HAVE SAVED TO PAY FOR YOUR EVENTUAL DREAM PROJECT. Period. End of story. Or not, Perhaps you got wiped out by medical bills, or uninsured mudslides, or whatever. But if so, IMO, this is NOT the time to ask people to volunteer crew for your fancy DREAM shoot on a whim. It’s time for ALL of us to work hard to generate PAID work for everyone in our industry. To shelve the dreams temporarily and concentrate on finding and building PRACTICAL projects. Why? Because everyone is HURTING out there. And one practical project with PAID positions is worth a HUNDRED fancy “maybe someday it’ll pay off” projects.
Right now, in our business, there is a HORRIFIC race to the bottom in terms of valuing the human assets REQUIRED to make films. One can stand WITH the “do it for nothing for me” crowd, or one can stand against them.
If you’re content to stand with the freebee crowd, I have the PERFECT right to point out the discontinuity.
No. I don’t know all your circumstances. Just what you wrote here. And that struck a very OFF note for me.
I acknowledge that I could be TOTALLY wrong in reading the situation and your intent.
HOWEVER – Like all the other long time professionals in this business I’ve watched with sadness as the Craigs list mentality has infected a lot of what otherwise would be life sustaining work.
And I’m tired of it.
Note please, that someone gave my view a 5 star notation, so I’m clearly not the only one who holds this opinion.
Perhaps your project is somehow NOT like the dozens before it – post after post on this board by “producer” after “producer” who want ALL the work for FREE and then want to come here and ask those of us with experience for FURTHER help by handing out our hard won experience, again for FREE.
Sorry, not playing today.
-
Thankyou for you input Michael,
I actually read elsewhere (on Cow I think) that in the case of the 5d files – you should NOT use the original files. These are H.264 files and I believe hard to work with in FCP and you can’t color correct them in COLOR. The post said to transcode them to ProRes 444 for a number of reasons. Do not remember the details. But .. guess what .. I’m going to experiment! I’ll see what I can do with the native H.264 files within my limited post facility.
Of course the point about House spending shed loads of money on post to clean up the 5d files is well made. I have two things to say to that however – one is that I am not sure I can believe that they would spend the same as though they had shot on film. 35mm cameras, film stock, processing, telecine … that costs a LOT!! My other point is that if they did spend that much on post – my thoughts are that they rather wasted their money. Sure the 5d stuff looked nice. To the untrained eye, very similar to 35mm projected. But at the end of the day – 35mm is very superior, and if they spent that much just to reduce the banding artifacts – then that’s a disproportionate amount to spend on a fairly minor defect. My 5d stuff projected looks pretty damn good (albeit with some slight banding now and again) and that’s just with some COLOR work (color correction, sharpening and grain addition). Small costs!
Let’s not be in any doubt here – 35mm film is vastly superior. Not least in it’s latitude. Various people (such as Shane Hurlburt) have said that the 5d is like shooting reversal film – you have to get the exposure and initial color balance close to the what you want in the final images.
As a chap from a lab here in Hollywood said to me – ‘you DP’s have spent years crying out for more and more stops of exposure latitude in the new digital cameras and now you’re all excited by a camera that has very limited 8 bit pictures? What’s going on here?!’
-
The director, Greg Yaitanes, does an interview where he talks at length about the camera choice and their decision. (transcript)
Dan Schanler
NYC
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up