[Blaise Douros]

Heat can be an issue, but a bigger issue is that fluorescent lights will make your clients look like cancer patients. The extra green cast that CFLs put out gives a really unhealthy cast to their skin–unless you’re paying the big bucks to get Kino Flo bulbs. Not to mention that CFLs are fragile and don’t put out much light.

LED has challenges as well. Cheap LEDs often control brightness via PWM, which makes your footage flicker and ruins it. They also do not output a full spectrum of light–there are “gaps” in the colors they produce, which means that colors don’t show up the way they should under all but the more expensive LEDs.

So here’s the deal: tungsten lights put out a full spectrum of light, so you don’t have to worry about weird casts to skin. They bring out skin tones beautifully. They don’t flicker at weird rates. They are relatively inexpensive, and put out a LOT more light than the alternatives. They put out some heat, but somehow producers have managed to deal with that over the last 100 years that the tungsten light bulb has been regularly used in production.

Pick up a bunch of these to remove facial oils, and a small makeup kit with a bit of powder to reduce shine.

I use a 1000W tungsten softbox as my key, with several 250s as fills. Yeah, the room gets warm, but we take five minute breaks once in awhile, turn off the lights, get water, re-powder. No client is going to look their best if you’re chaining them to the interview stool for two hours with no breaks.

As for what you need to spend…get the most light that you can afford. Good lighting improves your shot far more than a fancier camera, and if you get a good kit, will last you far longer than any camera body ever will. How much should you spend? That’s up to you. This is a bitchin’ little kit with dimmers, 3000 watts of total power, and included softboxes. It’s not a crazy crazy price, but you would have SO much flexibility with that much power. Plus, you can gel the softboxes to match other light color temperatures.

Somebody else may chime in and disagree with me, and that’s fine–but IMO, LED and CFL are not cheap enough, bright enough, or pretty enough yet to compete with tungsten.

[Blaise Douros]

Ah, gotcha–sorry to tell you what you already know re: shutter.

The ISO thing isn’t a magic fix, for sure–but it really does help, and a couple of years ago before we had digital super-35 cameras like the C300, I know all the local DPs shooting Canon DSLR absolutely swore by the 160 thing.

I think Jonathan was pointing out that in the first shot you posted, the AF seems to be racking back and forth from the foreground to the background–so yes, you are losing some focus. Remember, this sensor is much larger than your EX1, so the depth of field is a lot thinner. Autofocus frankly sucks on DSLR, and I wouldn’t use it. You are smarter than the camera, and much more likely to guess right about what subject you want to be in sharp focus 🙂

One other thing that you might try–I noticed that in a lot of the low-light clips, the white balance seems slightly shifted. Obviously, the foreground is gelled purple, but the tungsten lights in the background are really yellow–and if those are the prevailing white light in the scene, I’d want to be using a tungsten white balance to get them to look whiter.

If you’re shooting in low light, especially, try using one of the white balance presets that is closest in color to the prevailing type of light (fluorescent, tungsten, etc). Sometimes a weird low-light WB makes footage look worse than it is. AWB works great when there’s a lot of light, but in lower light especially, I would set it manually, because otherwise it can’t see well enough to get close. You can try to do some color correction of your existing footage as well–if you can cool off the footage to get your tungsten light to look closer to white, you may find that the image “pops” and looks more clear. I know I have been in situations where a bad white balance has led to muddy-looking footage; a bit of grading can definitely help.

[Blaise Douros]

You’ll need to rotoscope the 2nd character out of his shot, and composite him into the first one. There’s just no way that you will get the two hallways to match up if it was shot without electronic motion control. This may allow you to get away without doing too much keyframing to match the shots, as differences on the individual character may be less noticeable than the whole hallway.

If you don’t know how to use the Rotobrush, do a quick Google search–it’s a powerful, easy-to-use tool, but not super intuitive.

[Blaise Douros]

Sounds like you have Adaptive Resolution turned on. There’s a little menu below your Program monitor on the right hand side. It has several options: Full, 1/2, 1/4, etc. I’d bet that you have it set to 1/2 or 1/4. Premiere uses this setting to save processor power by not drawing footage at its full resolution when previewing. Set it to Full, and your playback may be a bit slower…but it will look like it should. This does not affect your output–it’s a setting for Timeline previews only.

[Blaise Douros]

This looks like offspeed footage viewed on a frame-blended timeline.

You haven’t specified the framerate of the footage, transcode settings, or timeline settings. All of these things could contribute to an artifact like this. For example; if you have frame blending enabled, and you brought in 29.97 footage to a 23.976 timeline, it could look like this. If you transcoded 59.94 to 29.97 or 23.976, it could look like this.

[Blaise Douros]

The Impact stuff usually works, but is really flimsy. It doesn’t take much punishment.

$300 doesn’t get you much. That two-light kit won’t be enough for all the things you want to do with it…mostly because it just isn’t that much light. Two 110-watt equivalent lights will barely be visible. Unfortunately, lighting is one of those areas where there hasn’t been a revolution as there has with cameras and sound gear–it is still going to cost you to get a kit that is even halfway capable.

Are you dead-set on fluorescent? Tungsten, though it’s a different color, will get you more light for your buck. Check out this Impact kit–three lights, a couple modifiers, and 1250 total watts–a LOT more light for your dollar. Plus, you still have about 80 bucks more to pick up extra bulbs (important) or a fourth tungsten light.

[Blaise Douros]

DSLRs are inherently softer than a small-sensor ENG camera like the EX1. However, the footage responds extremely well to sharpening in post, and this can vastly improve the quality of the footage.

First, your ISO–on every single one of these clips, you are using a multiple of 500. Try to use multiples of 160 as much as possible (320, 640, etc) because it crushes out some of the noise. Internally, these ISO settings are reached by taking the next ISO number up and dropping the gain on it, so it results in less noise than the round 500, 2500, etc, that you use in these clips.

I’m not seeing what you’re seeing on the stutter. It looks fine to me. You’re probably used to that 50i look–a little smoother, interlaced. The motion you’re seeing is pretty standard for those of us who work with progressive footage.

I notice that you have not included shutter speed settings in any of your comments. This is a mistake, because shutter speed is just as important as any of the other settings–and when we’re talking about the way the footage moves, it’s the single most important variable behind framerate.

Make sure you’re shooting at a 180 degree shutter (1/50 for 25p footage) and DON’T change that setting. If you want to get rid of stutter, a LOWER shutter speed is going to do that by adding pleasing motion blur. The faster your shutter speed, the less motion blur you get, and your eyes start to see each individual image as separate.

The kit lenses are not good enough for what you are trying to do. They are generally pretty soft, and they don’t hold up when shot wide open. I would recommend picking up one of the higher-quality EF-S lenses, like the 17-55, or one of the L-series zooms (though you’ll lose some wide-angle to the crop on the 24-105 or one of the 24-70s).

At the end of the day, the DSLR is NOT going to match the look of the EX1 no matter what you do–because they’re two different kinds of cameras. DSLRs shine when you need that film look on a budget; progressive framerates, shallow depth of field. The ENG-style EX1 is designed to capture smooth, interlaced motion with a deep depth of field, with auto-focus and integrated audio. They live in two different worlds–and intercutting footage from them is going to be difficult.

[Blaise Douros]

It depends. If you are an experienced shooter, but have never shot a wedding, a DSLR might be okay. But you’ll need additional gear to make sure you can get quality audio, as DSLRs do not record audio internally very well. However, it’s a lot more to manage. If you think you can pull focus manually while monitoring external audio and do it all while following the action, by all means, shoot DSLR. If not, video cameras are MADE to cope with all of those issues.

If you’re a beginner overall, then absolutely get a video camera. Auto focus, internal audio recording, and a host of other features make video cameras ideal for documentary and run-and-gun shooting. Don’t be fooled by the people out there shooting cinematic wedding videos–most of them have multi-person crews and major equipment budgets. A one-or-two-person crew will likely not get great results as beginners, ESPECIALLY when dealing with the complexity required to shoot everything manually on a DSLR.

I am an experienced doc-style shooter, and I recently offered to shoot a wedding ceremony for a couple in my church whose extended family wouldn’t be able to attend. I used two DSLRs and an external audio recorder. It turned out fine, but I still missed stuff, made mistakes, and generally, wouldn’t recommend doing it that way, ever–not without a second shooter, and likely a third camera. Manual focus on large-sensor shallow depth of field images for moving subjects sucks.

Just remember, there are no second takes in wedding video. Do you want to miss the cake-cutting because you were screwing around with focus? Or have no audio for the toasts because you forgot to hit record on your external recorder? I don’t think so.

TL;DR: get a video camera. In fact, get three, and get at least one other person to shoot with you.

[Blaise Douros]

Nope, it’s not stop motion. It’s a series of manual jump cuts on a single long take. There’s no way to automate this, you just need to put your head down and do it.

[Blaise Douros]

The answer is “marketing.” A zoom lens might be 17.5mm, or 18.7mm, or your prime could be 18.2mm. Also, most still lenses “breathe” when focused to different lengths–i.e. the image expands or contracts a bit when the focus is closer or farther away. But how much of a pain in the butt would it be for their marketing departments to distinguish their lens line when the zoom is slightly wider at 17.7mm than your prime at 18.1mm? Or whatever. But that’s the answer–there is small variation that for convenience of marketing purposes, they round to the nearest standard millimeter.