[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

@Jeremy, Well ProRes 4444 certainly doesn’t seam like an offline codec but allot of people believe than anything less than a 16-bit TIFF stack/sequence is not enough, of course they are talking about film outs but I guess my point about ProRes 4444 is I think its sufficient for a DCP or even a film out. None of my stuff is headed for DCP let alone a film out (yet :D) but in addition to enjoying the artistic aspects of film I love the technical ones. I just hear allot of people questioning whether ProRes is “enough”, I think I actually prefer the idea of cameras recording ProRes and RAW vs RAW only as outlined by Arri’s motto “shoot > edit” its so simple. I think RAW is amazing but feel as though it can encourage lazy habits (ie: “We’ll fix it in post!”) and ProRes 4444 offers the image quality with the bit depth and the chroma rez on par with RAW, Of course I don’t deal with Alexa footage often but I can still dig the concept pretty easy as I remember the dark ages when I was transcoding everything prior to import. BUT I don’t want to get off topic into RAW vs other (although it is a cool topic!)

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

@Bret, Thank you for your response! I know its not like other NLE’s but I guess I just had a bad experience on the early versions of FCP X where I used proxies and ended up having to relink EVERYTHING manually when it somehow lost everything despite the original media being in the proper place and me not messing with it in finder (I learned early on NEVER try and move events or projects in finder! :O). I guess I will have to try the normal proxy workflow on a test project or less important one before I give it a whirl on something big to feel confident with it again. But yes I do love mixing codecs in the timeline, something that when done in Avid was a mess, honestly some of the features in FCP X are like “Duh!” in that they should have been in NLE’s years ago! But none the less I’m very happy to see them now.

BTW I’m very impressed with how my machine and FCP X handle large formats, I’m working on a sort of vintage logo intro thing for my videos in the future and I did it at 5K 2.40:1 and while After Effects CS5.5 choked on it pretty hard I put it in FCP X to add some extra stuff and with no rendering at 5120×2160 its working pretty nicely…I wouldn’t do this on anything more than a <30 second intro but still, the integration is great with Apple software and Hardware.

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

Sweet! As much as I love Premiere Pro’s obvious advantage with dynamic link between Ps, Ae, etc. FCP X is still my main choice and I use After Effects quite a bit so this is nice. Will it work on CS5.5 or CS6? I have CS5.5 and not really looking forward to going for Creative Cloud yet.

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

James, Thanks that answered my questions perfectly…BUT,

Only reason I go with 2K for the offline part is because in FCP X 10.0.9 it offers all the same aspect ratio options of 4K, so If I edit 2K 2:1 I can go to 4K 2:1 or 2K 1.33:1 to 4k 1.33:1…If I’m doing 16:9 then I will definitely use 720p to make life allot easier. I would totally jump on FCP X 10.1 but I have some obscure audio and programming software that will not work on mavericks and it is no longer being developed, I already had to dig high and low for a version to work on Mountain Lion, *Sigh* I wish FCP X 10.1 didn’t REQUIRE Mavericks, I really am not a fan of updating an OS as I swear everytime I do it I loose functionality of at least one program.

As for Resolve…Unfortunately Resolve Lite fails to function on my system, I had a problem with the discrete graphics card and it turned out it was faulty so Apple fixed it…however Resolve Lite still fails to load 50% of the time even after getting everything fixed, making sure CUDA was up to date, etc. Frustrating! Sometimes it gives me a CUDA error but more often it says not enough vRAM which I understand, Ideally if I had some type of real income (LOL) I would be running a 2011 Mac Pro Tower with a GTX 680 (or two), I don’t expect realtime playback what so ever in resolve but its like it won’t even let me in the gates >:( I really like Resolve too so I may have to dig into this later…it sure would make importing Magic Lantern RAW DNG sequences easier than using After Effects. When/If external GPU’s via thunderbolt is fully functional I will likely by something like a GTX 680 or 760, Thunderbolt doesn’t have the bandwidth for the full speed but It works fine if you just want to leverage CUDA cores, its clunky but I’ve seen it work well.

Again thanks for the response.

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

I recently just bought a Fotodiox Nikkor to EOS adapter, its cheap and doesn’t allow electronic control which is fine for what I need. I too am looking to buy some old Nikon glass since (1) my DSLR is used mainly for video and for photos I can deal with manual focus only and (2) The lenses will help create a unique look, important these days when the variables of making your video look unqiue are quickly running out! Also I personally love the look of 80s cinema, and some of this glass with the CineMorph anamorphic filter will create some interesting stuff! Anyways, Basically you don’t get aperture control, which is perfectly fine if you use Nikkor glass that has manual aperture control (aka a ring not electronic) or you can bare shooting wide open or have a cheap Nikon body with your Canon DSLR to attach to the Nikon just to stop down then quickly remove it, but that is painful…Ive done it. With a non electronic adapters like the Fotodiox which I have ($17 and free shipping from amazon!) there really isn’t any interaction, the one thing that is an issue which I am sure you are thinking about is how Canon meters the scene (I’m a bit fuzzy on this so I could likely be wrong, I would google it further) by adjusting the aperture when you begin to depress the shutter but for previewing it keeps the aperture wide open…again not sure this is the case and someone could correct me but if it is the basic way to overcome this would be to simply manually adjust the aperture ring on the manual Nikkor glass when metering. I’ll have to look into this more, I’d do it now but I haven’t any Nikkor glass with me at the moment.

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

I’m surprised this isn’t one of the strange features buried in something like a Canon 7D or something like that. Maybe a request to Magic Lantern for something like this? If your not sure what Magic Lantern is look it up…I could give you suggestions of cameras that do this but like you said they would be over $2,000 and usually more than that from what I’ve seen…also I believe Sandisk make one time use SD and CF cards for this purpose I believe for certain legal work using the write once read only SD cards its enough with the EXIF data but I wouldn’t do that without checking with your Office/Department, I’ve seen the Write once SD/CF cards in use with Law Enforcement Officers on standard Canon and Nikon DSLR’s. Best solution would be for in camera burning of the timecode and not just over HDMI if you really need it to hold up to possible questioning of how it was obtained. I’ll see if I can ask some of the officers I know about this subject. Sorry I can’t be more useful but i thought I would post anyways however….

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

I find the 720p looks very much like 1080p, in fact there are a few workflows showing how the footage contains allot of potential for scaling. The 5D Mk.III can do 1080p native and obviously offers the prime solution for Magic Lantern Canon RAW video though, here’s a video of the 5D Mk.II showing how scaling reveals a fair amount of more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3rAkezM0o&list=FLkETP9q8K2rpHC7MQFYQoFg&index=8

Personally I think it looks good, although there are a few artifacts I would consider a draw back but scaling to >3.5K might not be needed for your particular needs so the artifacts can be limited, also it could just be a mistake in the handling of that particular example I listed and generally speaking Canon RAW video from my t2i exhibits almost no artifacts, the grain structure looks very natural on the RAW, reminds me of some earlier digital cameras that shot uncompressed HD/RAW like the Viper Film stream to me. Very pleasant look, at higher ISO’s its also easier to clean up noise in After Effects than H264. If you can do some tests even on a regular computer monitor no matter how small and limited I think you will be able to see the strengths and differences. Zooming in past 100% will always reveal color artifacts in chroma sub-sampled formats like 4:2:0 while RAW will exhibit less artifacting as its 4:4:4 (or non-chroma sampled).

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

GoPro definitely sucks in low light for film applications…for run and gun documentaries its fine. YOur probably already using 2.8K mode but thats the best mode since for some reason you get the least noise. However if you can light the area where you need it even quarter a**ed it will bump the camera down to lower ISO’s and be clean and the clean look of GoPro footage is beautiful. I think the GoPro3+ has a way to lock the exposure down…I think its an update on the iPhone app or whatever…not sure I have a GoPro3 Black (no plus for me!). Ive found you can definitely get the results you want with a GoPro you just need to put more work in then youd like is all, oh and make sure you are shooting in ProTune mode with CamRAW on so you can set your white balance if needed or leave it untouched to set in post. I mean films like End of Watch utilized the GoPro3 and while they also had several 5D’s, SI-2K’s, etc. they were able to overcome the issues. Ive found that the GoPro can recover blown highlights rather gracefully if you put your work in and I think its dynamic range is pretty impressive, but this all varies on what its ISO is at which is difficult to lock down.

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

Hey guys thanks for some simple advice! I personally prefer to import into After Effects CS5.5 since I know it better, for some reason Resolve refuses to run on my system a good 50% of the time, it runs great when it does but half the time it gives me errors about not having a CUDA card or not having enough vRAM despite having the latest CUDA for my Nvidia card. Anyways one thing that bothers me with Adobe Camera Raw when I import to AE is I can’t seam to figure out how to view past the first frame! I don’t want to import each FRAME ONE BY ONE….that would be insane so I don’t select multiple files and instead select file and it recognizes it as an image sequence…perhaps I’m missing something here but I’d really like to use ACR in AE while I’m doing the edits in my compositions instead of just only on import…Any advice? Maybe I’m blind and just need to freshen up on AE but maybe someone can chime in?

Anyways its amazing the quality you can get, I usually export to ProRes 4444 since its a rock solid 12-bit 4:4:4 Codec, so much adjustments you can make, kind of a pain that FCP X doesn’t really offer a good way to import the image sequences right from the get with good control over the RAW image since I edit in FCP X but I might give Premiere Pro a go for certain projects.

[Nathaniel J opgenorth]

I’ve scaled the 720p RAW footage to 1080p and it looks about 1000x better than scaling compressed 720p to 1080p and at least 10x better than the cameras native 1080p in H264. The card bus speed limit is a huge bummer….my Extreme Pro’s are writing at 60-105MB/s but the Rebels SD Card bus is limited to 30-40MB/s with 25MB/s~ usually being what I find tops out on my t2i. The chroma resolution on the H264 footage is literally 1/4th that of 4:4:4 video so jaggies around colors arent a problem with RAW video, the bit depth with RAW is 14-bit so a ton more room for color grading and no ringing around transitions in lighting or bright areas like a lamp or the sky. Its so much better…now the problems are no sound, lower resolution, etc. But to get around this one thing I like to do is shoot 2.35:1, you can squeeze out slightly more horizontal resolution with 2.35:1, I can get 1600~ lines across vs 1280 when shooting 2.35:1 which might seam small but it helps.

I think it would be good to mix RAW and H264 together depending on the needs even within a project, work really hard to get around the limits of H264 (just like many have both ameutur and professional to the highest level) and when something gets thrown at you use RAW…in the past if shooting 99% on DSLRs and something posed impossible for the in camera codec you had to find another camera, movies like Act of Valor had to use an Arri 435 for high speed scenes and certain scenes where 8-bit just didn’t cut it.

For the H264 parts I would go ahead and set the bit rate on the in camera codec to 1.4x-2.0x via Magic Lantern, it won’t do any miracles but it will give you less compression which is obviously important, it won’t increase the bit rate all that much on still scenes but on motion ones it will allow it more head room….with my Sandisk Extreme Pro’s I can shoot at 1.6x CBR and even 3x for short bursts and 120Mbps H264 vs 50mbps H264 in Canons flavor of the codec helps a ton in high motion scenes…of course this won’t increase the bit depth limit or the chroma subsampling but its better than nothing. I would learn the RAW workflow for Canon RAW though, its not something I would like to jump into like other established RAW workflows like REDCODE. Find what works for you in tests…when I’m not shooting I’m testing! (which is allot these days!)