[Nick Peck]

Regarding you question about slowing footage down. Do you have FCP? I have had a lot of fun slowing shots down using Apple Motion and selecting Optical Flow as your method. Here’s a little demo I found
https://www.metacafe.com/watch/1270539/super_slow_motion_optical_flow_retiming/

If you slow the material down to say 5 or 10% you can start to see really weird morphing-type effects that I just love for an avant-garde film I’m making. Two examples of what I have been doing with it here:

https://www.youtube.com/jonfelixfilms#p/u/2/BRWzM6AyBag
look around 2mins 8secs. This was super-8mm footage shot at 24fps and slowed down to 2fps.

and here:
https://www.youtube.com/jonfelixfilms#p/u/1/90rni5WjMcc
original material shot at 2fps, exported out to 24fps (so going way too fast), then slowed via Optical Flow in Motion to 1fps.

[Nick Peck]

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?!’

[Nick Peck]

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.

[Nick Peck]

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.