Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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I think you’re over-complicating this.
Drop your 59.94 clips onto your 25p timeline, without interpreting the footage to 50p. If the camera interpreted your 59.94 shots as 25p, then interpret them back to the speed at which they were shot, i.e. 59.94. Slow them down to 66.6% just like you did with the 50p clips. Premiere will take care of the rest. You’ll probably want to turn on Frame Blending rather than Frame Sampling as the interpolation method, to keep the frame jumps from getting too obvious.
See, you’re confusing a simple time issue with a framerate issue. You need your footage to be 66.6% slower than it was shot regardless of the framerate, because that’s the speed that will sync with the music.
What you really should have done is shoot your footage at 37.5 fps (which is the native 150% speed of 25 fps). Or, speed up the music to 200% and shoot at 50p. That’s how you’d get a lossless framerate conversion. You’ll be getting frame jumps no matter if you shot it at 50p or 59.94p, because you didn’t plan your workflow correctly from the beginning.
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You could always bring in a greenscreen to place behind yourself on-set, shoot it against that so the lighting conditions are identical, and then just composite the result over two background plates that you shoot of the car. Heck, you could even shoot a timelapse, and talk over the process while the sped-up version is happening in the background!
Alternately, make sure there’s a good amount of space between you and the car, and use a splitscreen type effect.
There is absolutely no way you will be able to perfectly reposition the camera so that the frame doesn’t jump, no matter what tools you use to view the images. I suggest leaving it set up in place–maybe shoot that sequence on a B-camera that you can leave set up so that you can still capture the process on your A camera.
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Oh, it IS much harder than that. Syncing the focus, zoom, and camera movement will have you tearing your hair out. As long as your camera is on a stable dolly, you might have a chance. Forget doing it handheld, though!
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You could make do with either. The LEDs will probably need to be placed closer to the subject to make a difference. Conversely, the tungstens, while more powerful, will need to have daylight gel placed over them to match the color temperature of the ambient sunlight coming in the windows…which will reduce their power. It’s a trade-off.
Don’t mix color temperature unless you really know what you’re doing–it can ruin an image really fast. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you need to study up on light color temperature and white balance so you can be educated enough to make some decisions as to what’s going to be more useful to you.
I can’t build this kit for you. I just can’t. You need to learn about the pros and cons of each type of light, and make the choice yourself. Look up color temperature, 3200K vs 5500K, tungsten vs LED, the effects of gelling, the inverse square law (so you know how close you’ll need to place the lights), the types of modifiers you want to use and whether they’re compatible with the lights…
You NEED to know all of this. I know what lights and accessories I use for my day-to-day because I know what my day-to-day requires. You need to make decisions based on your needs.
If you don’t know how to make these decisions, or even how to research it, then you need to get a mentor–a LOCAL mentor. It sounds like you’re too inexperienced to even know what advice to ask for, so you need to find a grip or DP or preditor in your area who can spend half a day teaching you what you need to know before you even start asking questions.
We could spend three weeks going down the rabbit hole as I tell you what you need to know, post by post, but I’m afraid I don’t have time for that, and neither do you. It’s better for you to educate yourself and get your hands on some lights, and preferably have someone to teach you in person.
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When it comes to tungsten, just get as many watts as you can afford! A 1K is usually a good keylight if you’re not trying to illuminate an entire room.
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In FD mount, your pickings are going to be extremely slim if you’re not looking at Canon first-party lenses. You’ll be mostly limited to Vivitars, Tokinas, and maybe Sigmas, and this means that most of your options will suck.
Basically, you will find nothing vintage that is both cheap and good at the ultrawide end. Remember, there WAS no APS-C. Everything was 35mm film, so 17mm, which is only moderately wide on APS-C digital and midrange on M4/3, is RIDICULOUSLY wide. Thus, expensive, specialty, and rare.
Take a look at this article. Alan’s a vintage lens geek, and his opinions are usually pretty good. It gives you some lower-cost options from Tokina and Vivitar; nothing wider than 17mm, though.
You should also note his advice on which adapters may cause the back element of these ultrawides to hit your focal reducer lens; that’s a big consideration, and will ruin your day in a hurry.
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Unfortunately, lighting is one of those areas where there really, truly, no kidding, is no good cheap solution. Want good LEDs? You’re going to pay a lot for something that is bright. Want a 1K tungsten light? Gonna pay for it, too. HMIs? Dolla dolla bills.
That Manfrotto light is going to be fine for a little bit of fill, but will not be enough to be a primary light. You might be better off with something like this: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1030731-REG/bescor_fp500k_dual_color_500w.html
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LEDs aren’t the problem–CHEAP ones are. Cheap LEDs use PWM to modulate brightness instead of voltage, creating the flickering effect. Also, is your shutter speed set high? THat’s a common mistake for newbie DSLR shooters. Your shutter speed should be double your framerate: 1/50 for 24fps, 1/60 for 30 fps. You can sometimes get away with 1/60 at 60fps.
Neither LED or tungsten is inherently better or worse for video; however, cheap LEDs don’t reproduce color well, and often have the flicker issue. Cheap tungsten reproduces the full range of color; it just takes a lot more power to get enough light out of them to be useful.
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It’s probably slightly better to do it in-camera when you’re shooting a low-bitrate h.264 camera like the XA10. Realistically, you will add just as much grain in post, if not more, by trying to lift the exposure–there’s not enough color information in XA10 footage to make a difference. There isn’t less grain, it’s just camouflaged by the fact that your video is underexposed.
The XA10 has a clean enough video preamp that raising the gain by up to 6 or 9 DB shouldn’t make the noise appreciably worse. Once you get higher than that, it will become much more pronounced.
Bottom line: yes, raise your gain. The feature wouldn’t be there on the camera if it wasn’t useful.
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I’m afraid I’m many, many years out of practice with FCP7, and I’m a Premiere guy now, so I can’t help you with X. I replied with the one piece of potentially useful information I had–hopefully it was helpful enough to get you started!
In Premiere, there’s an effect that you can drop on the clips that allow you to see either sequence timecode or clip timecode. I genuinely don’t remember if FCP works the same way.
A quick Google search reveals the following: https://larryjordan.com/articles/fcp-x-display-source-timecode/