Richard Van den boogaard
Forum Replies Created
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@Ryan: if I may answer that 😉
Have you listened to the interview with the producer of House on Philipbloom.net? That pretty much discusses most of the challenges they’ve had…
Good luck.
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
@Michael: Ok, F4 is still quite shallow… however I still prefer the shallowness of F2.8 and up/below.
Also, since it’s a full stop from F2.8, you loose half of the available light, which may be why Ryan had to go up to those higher ISOs to get exposure. A faster lens would have given Ryan more light to play with. Hence, a nicer image with less noise and even shallower DoF.
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
First of all, the 24-105 F4 is not the greatest lens you can get. F4 is already pretty deep focus. Instead, get the 24-70mm + 70-200mm F2.8; that’ll help (if you’re into zooms). Better yet, get those fast F1.2/F1.4 primes; it’s simply better quality glass.
The camera’s sweet spots in terms of ISO seem to be multiples of 160 (320, 640). I rarely go above ISO 1000, as it tends to generate noise.
Instead of stopping down and get deep focus (F5.6 to F22), you should consider using a VariND/FaderND filter in bright light situations so you will not get as much detail in the whole frame (just keep focus on the subject) whilst changing to F2.8 (or whatever your lens can handle).
As for User Profiles – it’s better to shoot flat and then color correct in post afterwards. If you record with a lot of brightness and contrast, you’re likely missing detail and your colors are fixed to the extend that you can’t do much in post anymore.
Hope this helps (and makes sense).
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
Yup, I can confirm that. To solve this, consider getting an ExpoDisc to do manual white balancing (or take a picture of pure white with the dominant light source on it to set it).
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
Hi Eros,
“Shoot Great Video on Canon 7D” by Philip Bloom is an excellent resource! I highly recommend it as it will teach how to set and control the camera.
You might also consider taking the CreativeLive class from Vincent Laforet. Although not specifically for the 7D, it offers a great overview of DSLR cinematography and all the tools you can use to enhance your shoots.
If you like the low light performance of the 7D, you’ll love the image of the 5D mark II and will be amazed by the low light performance of the 1D mark IV. Perhaps you should try those out as well (if you can rent them). Most important thing, however, is to get great glass in front of it – makes all the difference!
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
Thanks to all of you for your responses!
I have decided to give the ExpoDisc a try. Seems to be an ideal and fast solution.
I do wonder what the best procedures are when using the ExpoDisc: do you point the camera at the dominant light source? Or do you point it towards the subject (the way you plan to shoot it afterwards)?
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
Would it also work if you create a couple of subtle grey photo stills in Photoshop, put them on your card and then use those as warming cards against which you WB?
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
Thanks for your honesty, Greg!
Like you, I do not have that many problems with the color grade of the footage coming out of the camera, but after reading a book on video lighting (placing shadows) I was reminded again that white balancing is a necessary step in video production. Occassionally, I have had some green casts in my footage when I switched from fluorescents to mixed daylight/tungsten in a single take, but no white balancing procedure can fix that anyway. Proper gelling of windows beforehand probably does, but that was simply not possible at the time/location.
Like WB on ENG cameras do take pure white as a reference still, or have some available (sun light) mixed in?
Also, would there be a way to import JPEGs made in Photoshop as subtle warming cards and use those to white balance against in order to trick the camera into getting footage to look warmer than it really is? Or should you just shoot flat and solve everything else in post?
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
I totally second that. Magazines just have to get a little creative – e.g. printing several successive frames as a rol of film instead of bitching about the images not being more DPI than 72… duhhh – it was never shot for print purposes.
One word of caution though – make sure that QT is the best image capture program for this purpose as it sometimes tends to wash down the image quality…
To spice things up a bit, you can do some nice CC work with PhotoLooks from Red Giant Software.
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com -
Although CS5 has great playback of native footage due to the Mercury Playback Engine, I continue to use Cineform’s NeoScene. This is a wavelet-based transcoder that is relatively light on HDD usage. Also, their interpolation from 4:2:0 Canon native to 4:2:2 color space seems to give more leeway when doing CC-ing.
But from what I’ve seen/heard ProRes 422 should do the same thing.
What are you more concerned with – the transcoding process or the ability to add metadata to it?
Richard van den Boogaard
cameraman / editor / video marketing consultantBranded Channels
W: http://www.brandedchannels.com