Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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DJI Ronin and golf cart. Seriously!
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Wow, the stream-of-consciousness thing. Exhausting.
First: You need to find reliable crew. Are you paying? If you’re not, then that would probably be why your crew isn’t reliable. If you’re paying, and your DPs are disappearing, then maybe you should consider whether there’s something you’re doing that is driving them away?
The guy who has a full stable of equipment, the one guy qualified to help you, is hard to work with, huh? Sounds like an opportunity to develop a better relationship. Pay him his rate, plus his gear-rental fee, and I guarantee it will be cheaper than buying any kind of decent stabilization.
Second, because I do see your problem, I’m going to give you the short-term solution, should you continue to struggle. This will work for a sub-8 lb camera: https://www.lensrentals.com/rent/dji-ronin-s-3-axis-gimbal-stabilizer
Heavier than that, and you need one of these: https://www.lensrentals.com/rent/dji-ronin-2-3-axis-handheld-stabilizer
Rent one of those, as well as a golf cart. It will cost you less than buying it, and with a 7-day rental, that’s plenty of time to schedule a practice day.
But for real, your DP should be working with you from day 1 on storyboards and plans. If not, then that may be why they’re quitting on you–I would not return to a DP gig that required I use the producer’s gear and lighting choices.
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You need to hire, or at least consult with, your cinematographer first. What equipment they need is up to them, if you want them to contribute in a meaningful way. It’s disrespectful to your DP for you to make this kind of decision without their involvement. Your DP is one of the most important crew members to your production–you CANNOT make plans without them, because they need to tell YOU what they need to accomplish a scene.
You haven’t specified your camera choice, which will make a big difference as to the final choice for camera rigging. Again–you NEED to get your DP involved now. A good DP will be more qualified than you to make these decisions.
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Your other option is to add some additional rim lighting around the edges of your scene. You could do it without it looking too artificial. Not sure what your budget is, but a couple of small daylight-colored LED panels would go a long way, here.
Ultimately, the color of the clothing is the real problem. It’s such a dark black that in order to get detail, you need to do one of two things: add light to your foreground and/or rim, or bump up your exposure.
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The A7sIII has not been announced yet, and Sony typically doesn’t give out details in advance, though I do know secondhand that prototypes are in the field (a friend of a friend is a beta tester). But given that USB-C is NOT standard for any kind of video production hardware, my guess would be that the answer is likely no. But your guess is as good as mine!
If you want to give up Sony for Blackmagic, you may be in for some unpleasant surprises vis-a-vis timely availability of hardware, as well as stable functionality prior to firmware version 2.0.
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The cards should be plenty fast for that–even in XAVC-I, the data rate for that format is 300 Mbps, so it *shouldn’t* be a write error. But of course, it could be.
When you delete data from these cards, are you formatting them in the camera, or just deleting it from the computer? I’ve found with some cameras that can cause issues if you haven’t formatted the cards in-camera.
And of course, that firmware update may help. Any other situations where this happens regularly? A certain time into shooting?
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You may be overthinking this. Your method sounds like it works fine! The “best/most efficient way of achieving the result [you] want” is the way that works the first time, with minimal effort, without adding unnecessary complexity and/or render time. There’s not always a Platonic Ideal way to achieve results in AE–writing some magical expression isn’t the “purest” way of doing things.
That said, you could also experiment with the Wiggle expression. It also works fine!
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Try it both ways–it won’t cost you that much more time. Stabilize the footage in a 60p sequence, render out the result, then interpret the rendered file. Then do a version where you interpret, then stabilize. If the camera shake is slow enough in the interpreted sequence, it may not be detected by the stabilization software as well as it might at full speed, but then, it may not need as much stabilization in order to look acceptable after it’s interpreted. Without seeing your footage, there’s really no good way to tell–let us know what you find!
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For half a second, I thought “A black spot AND vertical tearing? Bummer of a glitch.” An then I figured it out…
Can you post a little more info? What mode are you in, what codec, framerate, and resolution? What’s the bitrate of the G-series cards you’re using?
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…Just use the built-in effects. There’s one called Shatter–it’s been in After Effects since version, I don’t know, 5 or 6, back in the late ’90s. It does exactly what you want to do. There are tutorials on it all over the internet. Just Google “After Effects Shatter Tutorial.”