[Todd Terry]

Ah… yeah. The shutter speed is definitely your issue. What you are seeing is exactly as if you were shooting at 25fps, but with a shutter speed of 1/100th.

Stop the footage on any of the action and look at a still frame, as you’ll see there is very little (if any) motion blur in the frame, much less than 25fps footage shot at 1/50th would have had. Your brain needs that motion blur to interpret it as smooth motion, without it you get that staccato look.

And sadly that’s really one of those things you can’t do much about. If it had been something like a constant pan you might could judiciously add some directional blur that might help… but in this scene you have all kinds of things going in all kinds of directions (and some things like people’s faces not moving much), so you can’t do it that way… you’d have to do hours and hours of painstaking rotoscoping to add appropriate blur.

MAYBE there is some kind of high-end voodoo that has the ability to mesh the two frames (remember you are only seeing half of the frames) and interpolate what the motion should like like (sort of a “reverse Twixtor”), but I’ve never heard of such a thing. Maybe it exists, but if so I don’t know about it.

Unfortunately shutter speed is pretty much a “baked in” setting… once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Is it possible for you to post a clip so we can see exactly what it looks like?

You say that it “almost like it was shot at a very high shutter speed.” So it has the strobby “narrow shutter” look?

Well… you have to remember that it was shot at a much-higher-than-normal shutter speed compared to a “regular” fps setting. So… it looks like a higher shutter speed because it is a higher shutter speed.

Let’s say I usually shoot at 24fps, which here in the colonies, I do. At that rate, my “normal” shutter speed that I’d usually choose would be 1/48th of a second (“normal” being one over twice the frame rate, emulating a 180° shutter in a film camera). Then, I shoot some overcranked footage for slow-motion work, at, say 60fps. For that footage my shutter speed would be 1/120th. The slow-mo footage would look great. But lets say I want to present this footage at “normal” speed, not slow-mo. I can easily do that, yes. BUT, even though the footage now has the framerate appearance of being shot at 24fps rather than 60fps, the shutter speed is still 1/120th. Ergo, there is much less motion blur than if I had shot the footage at 24p, and we have that strobby staccato look… the “narrow shutter look” (i.e., “Gladiator” or “Saving Private Ryan”).

I’m not saying that this is what you did, but I’ve heard numerous people in the past say “I might want to slow-mo some of this footage so I’ll shoot everything at a faster framerate, because I can always return it to normal speed in post.” Bad BAD idea, because you are always locked in to footage with the higher shutter speed, no matter what the framerate is. These days in post we can do almost any kind of image manipulation imaginable, but shutter speed is one of the things that you are locked into and can’t change… once it’s shot.

It’s a much better idea to always shoot at whatever fps your project is (24p, 25p, 30p, whatever), and only overcrank just for the shots you want to slow-mo. You’ll get infinitely better results that way.

OR… your issue could be something completely different and I’m talking out of my ear. If we could see a sample that might clear things up.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Hi Michael…

You might get lucky and someone in here has the instant and correct answer for you… I hope they do…

BUT… I don’t want you waiting around for advice that might never come, so I’ll note that virtually everyone in here does continuous lighting for video/cine use, etc… I can’t even remember the last time anyone has said the words “flash” or “strobe” in here… if ever.

So as I said you might get lucky and run across a forum member who also is into that and can help, but you will probably have much better luck if you hit up one of the still photography forums, where strobes are more the norm.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I’d really never try to get a 4×4 to cover more than one person. Maybe two, if they are having a close conversation.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

These are, yes, as you guessed… tracking spikes.

When compositing, replacing a background, etc., they allow compositing so that the replaced elements can track the camera moves and allow the pieces to stay realistically locked with the background.

You can see a couple of them in the behind-the-scenes pic from a commercial I directed here…

https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/news031.html

In this instance they were needed because the camera was moving… having the spikes on the greenscreen allowed us to lock the American flag background with the camera move. In this case After Effects used the marks to “learn” what the move was, and have the matted-in background follow the action. If it had been a locked-down camera shot, no marks would have been needed.

If you Google or YouTube search “After Effects tracking” you’ll probably get tons of responses and tutorials.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “But if you are not the broadcaster selling the time, why would you ever entertain giving the agency a discount?”

Well you shouldn’t.

A manufactured reason might be the same one the broadcasters use. Broadcasters give agency rates because in theory the ad buys are easier, less problematic, and require less of their resources (i.e., an account executive’s time)… the agency just places the insertion order and should be good to go (I said in theory, because often agencies are just as much work for broadcasters as an individual client).

The other reason is volume. An agency might rep numerous clients that are advertising, and the broadcaster wants to keep them happy to keep getting all those buys from bunches of clients rather than the single mom-n-pop advertiser, thus it behooves them to give an agency rate to keep them in business and keep them buying. I could make the same argument for our own agency clients, since we usually do work for many of their clients, I could offer them an agency rate just to keep them coming back, since the volume of their work is much higher than our individual clients.

But we don’t. Same rate for everyone.

And that’s probably because, frankly, for us agencies are more trouble than individual clients. They seem to micromanage projects much more than the individual clients we work for. That’s probably because although most of them predominately do print and web stuff as their in-house work, they are still “in advertising” so they “know all about how to do TV.” Even when they don’t. The individual clients are much more trusting of our ability to know what we are doing and make the right TV-savvy decisions for them, and frankly the result of that is that the work that we do for individuals is usually far superior to what we do for agencies, as a general rule.

Actually, our best work is usually for the very smallest ad agencies, because they handle all the wrangling-with-the-clients voodoo, yet leave us to do the creative and concepting side as well as just the physical production. It’s the bigger agencies who just hand us a script or a storyboard and say “do this” that often get the poorest results… because while many of them are great print agencies, they really don’t know how to concept or write for television, or know how to do it efficiently. But they think they do.

Unusually enough, our three biggest clients (a hospital system, a credit union, and an automotive association) do not have ad agencies, but they all still get agency rates from broadcasters. They are big enough and their buys are large enough that the broadcasters consider their marketing departments sort of like “in house agencies” and give them the better rates. Those three are actually our ideal clients because like non-agency clients they let us handle all of the concepting and creative side, but they still have agency-sized production budgets which are usually a great deal larger than the average individual client. Best of both worlds, but it’s rare.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I do have a couple of ad agencies that I’ve considered establishing “agency rates” for.

Except in those cases, they would be higher than our usual rate. Sort of an “aggravation tax.”

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

That’d probably work.

If I were shooting this, I’d probably worry about diffusing only on closeups, and then not a full diffusion… I have this translucent material that I’d use rather than a full silk… it still gives the full-sun look but still cuts down on the harsh shadows.

And I definitely wouldn’t bother flying a 20×20… as I’d only use diffusion for mid- to extreme closeups (even a 10x is a major deal, and anything bigger just gets exponentially more complicated/expensive/difficult and time consuming). A 4×4 in a Hollywood frame would probably more than cover it if it’s just a single guy.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

You said “small” space, but we didn’t really get an idea of how small is small… that’s important because the smaller the space, the more likely walls and ceiling will be an issue due to bounced or reflected light.

Personally… I prefer all black stages (walls and ceiling) with a gray floor (although that’s not what I live in every day, unfortunately I do have a white ceiling). But as long as you have some depth/space between your subjects and your surfaces you should be ok as long as they are a neutral color (make sure the gray is true gray, doesn’t have any hint of an actual color to it).

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

It may not be as jarring as you think.

Watch almost any movie that has the same lighting situation… they cut back and forth from silked closeups to non-diffused extreme wide shots all the time, without it causing too much heartburn for the viewers (it’s much like when you see scenes that are sunny, then cut to a reverse, and then back to the master shot which is now cloudy… it happens all the time).

The first time I ever noticed that was years ago in the movie “City Slickers,” and now my brain sees these changing degrees of diffusion constantly. Remember that most people don’t, though.

BUT… you might not want your dad’s lighting to look too diffused, not so much so that his lighting doesn’t fit in with the situation.

And you can always pray for a cloudy-bright day.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com