Production Notes: Call the Guy MAD AS HELL!

dveditor1 · #1 03-10-2008, 07:01 PM

Welcome to Stefan's new, rant-filled, online-exclusive edition of his popular "Production Diary" DV magazine column.
If you've not read it yet, go to http://www.dv.com/columns/columns_it...leId=196603851

Jerry_R · #2 03-10-2008, 08:10 PM

Frankly I agree. IMHO "film look" is a pile of crap spewed out but luddite who don't want to learn anything new and feel (rightly) that film is doomed. It is shelved down by folks who lack convection and taste to justify their failures. The Luddite are right there is no film look and film is doomed. I hear a lot of stuff about the HV20 and its a nice cheap camera. The only A/B I have seen (same scene, same angle same lighting, optimized settings etc.) against a Cannon A1 make it look pretty bad.

Its a lot of bang for the buck, but it lacks the image controls of other more worthy cameras.

sarmour · #3 03-11-2008, 06:07 PM

One secret Stefan didn't mention, is bumping things to an Intermediate codec like Cineform HD.

Our Sony V1 output has done very well on it's trip through post by bumping it to 1920x1080 and 10bit color. Doesn't gain anything, but doesn't lose either.

All of what Stefan said is a DITTO here in our experience, especially using the extra ND's to keep the lense's iris wide open as possible for a bit of DOF reduction. You get what you pay for, and $5K doesn't buy us BIG lenses or sensor's with these cams...yet.

For us, the stunning thing is not what you CAN'T do with those little CMOS chips, but what you CAN do if you know how to do the workflow correctly.

It'll never be "big iron quality", but if you're smart and do things right, you can make that little V1 (or equivalent) jump through some pretty nice hoops with it's final output!

sarmour
www.lightinaction.org

jimpatro · #4 03-11-2008, 06:23 PM

Wow! I had to register just to get in on this.

Been in the business for 26 years. Shooting film and video. Various formats of each. I can remember sometime in the mid eighties I was running some video through a TBC. I fiddled with the field/frame control and found that in the frame mode the video looked a lot like film. A whole lot like it. Just at a pretty low resolution. Everybody I showed it to agreed it was pretty cool.

That was a little preview of what 30p would end up looking like. And 24p looks even better. Maybe it seems just too easy a process to really be good. Consider how easy it is to shoot slo-mo on film.
And what wondrous results can be had.

Filters and lighting aren't gonna come close to how effective progressive scanning is to emulating the film look. 24 frames is 24 frames.

Jerry_R · #5 03-11-2008, 06:53 PM

I agree about progressive. The interlaced format was a poor man's workaround for compressing video when a computer room usually held one computer (if the room was big enough).

Marc · #6 03-12-2008, 10:42 AM

There once was a film look. It was created by shooting on film. Once you can attain a "look" it automatically becomes an artifice: something you elect to use. Make it look herky-jerky and scratched like silent movies, tint everything blue to make it goth, dial in a filter for film stock so it looks like home movies from the ‘50s, whatever. These are now effects that are used as a choice. They can add to a project, they can make it worse. Most likely, it date your project to the mid part of the first decade of this century.

The idea that any of these effects unilaterally make a project better or worse for me is a real head-scratcher. Better or worse than what? In what context? I can venture an opinion if the project it successful or not, but no effect makes it "better" in any absolute way.

So here’s a project: Scene opens with real, animatronic and CGI characters in an unknown environment that’s been color corrected to within an inch of its life. These characters are an Indy film crew making a video about the heyday of television. Everything they shoot is hot, hard lit with fresnels, looks like it was shot on Ikigami cameras and all transitions are made with ADO. The television program itself is tribute to the golden age of network TV and features black and white film transfers and kinescopes of four camera shoots on fixed production stages. This golden age production is about Radio networks. The news on the radio network is lookback at vaudeville…….At the end one cave man falls on his butt and another one laughs. Entertainment begins.

Wynn · #7 03-12-2008, 12:15 PM

Oh man, I had forgotten about my Blue Ice experience. And my DayStar Genesis MP computer. UGH - A day of rendering so that I could have something that looked like degraded 16mm film, sorta.

Thanks for the memories - I'm mad as hell all over again.

Radical Raul · #8 03-12-2008, 06:47 PM

I'm mad as hell about hearing what a great camera the HV20 is and how many fricken hipsters are zoned out on HD.

I just finished working on my website, and doing some finish editing, and encoding straight from Media Composer 2.7, (that's right folks I'm using a Avid product on a PC). I am so uncool and out of touch. Lord please send me a iPhone.

Anyways, the footage from DVX100a still continues to impress me, and makes me question how much better HD really is.

Here are some links to my recently encoded clips, the first one is a .wmv at 4600kbps, 170MB, the title got a little crunched, I will look into that. The second one is a .wmv file at 873 kbps, 29MB and the third one is a H.264 .mov at 875kbps, 57MB, and to be quite honest it is very shitty looking (is it all right for me to say that here) compared to the .wmv, and I would like to know what the hell are all these hipsters smoking when they rant and rave about this h.264 codec?

http://raulxgarcia.com/roulettehd.htm

http://raulxgarcia.com/roulette.htm

http://raulxgarcia.com/rouletteQT.htm

The bottom line talent and knowing what the hell you are doing still trumps the technology, and being lucky is being lucky.

I'm still looking for a continuance of that 10% luck factor.

______________________________
Raul X. Garcia
IFC Short Film of the Month Winner

Jerry_R · #9 03-12-2008, 07:20 PM

RR nice work. Luck is a form of genius; wish I had more of that. The techie toys/film look guys hate it when one of us points out that talent, luck and understand your tools are way more important than the tools. OH well.

Radical Raul · #10 03-12-2008, 07:31 PM

The luck factor... ask a tennis or golf player.

Something's going on with the QT H.264 encoding, seems to be bumping up the gamma or brightness, or even maybe pulling the contrast.

Hmm...

Farnsworth · #11 03-20-2008, 08:41 AM

I find this article, frankly, a load of BS.

If you're shooting dramatic material (ie. not reality/documentary), 24P always, always, always looks better than 60i. It may not look like FILM, but at least it doesn't look like a soap opera or 80's sitcom, which is what even the best-lit 60i looks like.

And by the way, cinemode on the HV20 does NOT lock the camera at 0 gain. There are workarounds to get it locked at 0 gain, but cinemode doesn't do it automatically.

Sam_Adj · #12 03-20-2008, 10:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Farnsworth

I find this article, frankly, a load of BS.

Sorry to say, that sounds rude, you can be free to criticise the writer and his POV, or writing your own POV, but claiming that it is BS does not help anything.

OTOH, one day all media no matter what the contents were, will be shot using progressive, that is when interlaced is no more a must and everyone is having progressive TV at home, during that future making an interlaced scene will be just like adding scratches now to simulate old movie days, but as for now, no one is forcing you to use a scan method for shooting, it is up to your taste to choose.

Call it the Freedom of Scan

Jerry_R · #13 03-20-2008, 12:20 PM

I hope interlaced dies quickly but 24p is a gimmicky way for low talent people to get what they immagine is a film look. 30p is the way to go for most delivery.

Farnsworth · #14 03-20-2008, 12:25 PM

I've shot and seen plenty of 30P. It looks better than 60i, to be sure. But it still looks like video. 24P is the only way to shoot dramatic material and have it be taken seriously.

Jerry_R · #15 03-20-2008, 12:47 PM

Statements like that makee me not take you seriously. Frankly 24p does not help the willful suspension of disbelief and when delivered over the Web or on DVD looks much worse than 30p. If you are going for film out there is some point but it is displayed at 48f in the theater.