Ryan Mast
Forum Replies Created
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Ok, here’s the image from the Britney video I’m using for reference:
And here’s an ungraded still from your video:
Set up a simple parallel node set to do a simple color cast over the whole image, but isolate selected highlights. In the first node, pull the shadows down to green, midtones to cyan to preserve some color differentiation on the floor, and push the highlights up a wee bit to red/magenta:
In the first of these two parallel nodes, pull the shadows down to set black, and adjust midtones to taste. We’re not dealing with the orange highlights yet, just setting overall levels for the image:
For making the orange highlights, I set up a qualifier key and a curves window on a node, and blurred the key and expanded the radius a bit. With the selected area, I pushed up the gamma, lifted the shadows to orange to create a bit of a glow around the window panes, and pushed the highlights even further to orange:
At the end, I’ve also got a node to clamp the saturation to about 50% across the whole image. Not really necessary on this particular shot, but on some of the closeups, this keeps the highlights on skin tone from doing anything too extreme, while still keeping the color I want:
Hope that gets you going in the right direction. In the Britney video you mentioned, they created most of the effect with lighting, but you can fake it to a certain extent in post. I threw this one together pretty quickly, so it’s still Michael Bay-ed pretty hard. Although your reference has its shadows pretty far down to green/cyan, there are a lot of bits of desaturated cyan in the midtones, and they decently preserved the skintones.
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Your graphics card is likely your bottleneck — not much you can do about that.
I second Margus’ recommendation to transcode to ProRes (or DNxHD). Working directly from the H264 files eats the CPU and is a bit flakier than working from ProRes etc, in my experience.
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[ryan loetscher] “My boss’s XL-A1 outperformed my camera!”
It absolutely will. The latitude on the Canon DSLR video is notoriously awful, and you’ll lose a lot of color information in the highlights very quickly.
Try playing with the Technicolor profile — its color reproduction is actually quite good; I’ve been much happier with that than some of the other wonky color profiles out there like Superflat, etc. It doesn’t give much more usable latitude than some of the built-in profiles with the contrast down, but the color is more trustworthy.
I’ve rarely hit the breaking point of the codec on the 5D/7D/T2i, actually — shadow noise, harsh highlights, and moire are usually the first problems I’ll get in an image. I have an old LOMO FOTON zoom that I love using for exterior shots because it produces such a flat, milky image. It’s slow and a little soft, but I can get a touch more latitude out of it, and it naturally softens the image enough to reduce moire issues.
Certain ISOs give you better s/n ratio, too. This explains why.
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Just tried it on a studio shoot this morning. Does a very nice job of reducing some of the shadow noise. I’ve been using the Light Illusion camera profiles for the last few months, but this is a lot more reliable workflow to get an accurate image. I like.
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[Craig Thomas Quinlan] “You can do this in Cinema Tools or After Effects, but if you don’t have them, the ignoreQTrate true in console works perfectly IF you have stripped the audio, as Bouke said. “
Ah — I didn’t strip the audio. Guess that was the problem.
What I ended up doing was transcoding the footage to ProRes and reconforming to 23.976 in Cinema Tools, then using AMA to access it in Avid, since I did still need the audio for reference on a few clips.
Bouke and Craig, thanks so much for taking the time to help me. Finally started editing tonight, and I’m liking the MC interface.
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[Bouke Vahl] “well, editing native H.264 seems impossible now, but we also thought so about long GOP MpegII…”
It’s actually not too bad in Premiere, but I was having trouble getting the timeline to Color or Resolve. There’s occasionally a bit of lag in playback starting, though.
[Bouke Vahl] “Did you transcode after AMA or a ‘real’ import?”
I did a “real” import. Should I do it the other way?
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[Bouke Vahl] “Don’t edit the H264, you’ll go crazy…”
As I suspected… Is there ever any advantage to editing native H.264?
[Bouke Vahl] “For the speed change, open the Console, type IgnoreQTrate 1 or IgnoreQTrate True
Then import the clips.”
Okay, just did that. What I have now is, all of the footage is in the bin, as DNxHD 115 (HD1080p), and it’s showing the Format as HD 1080p/24, and FPS as 24. It plays back at the same speed as before; my goal was to retime it so it plays back at 80% recorded speed. Did I do something wrong?
Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
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More zoom — you need a telephoto? Or wider?
More D.O.F. — add light, stop down. That lens (and the Fujinon 17x) aren’t terribly sharp wide open, anyway.
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