LITTLE RED! Kickstarter Campaign Video

     This is the second Kickstarter campaign video I have been tasked with production on, but the first to go live. It was also my first extensive use of the Canon EOS C100 in a corporate-like production, and the combination of the built-in tools (waveform, peaking) along with the ability to capture quality audio directly into the camera made this a worry-free production.
     I utilized the Arri Alexa profiles that were matched by Art Adams (see this post) with two 5500k fluorescent softboxes. To get an incredibly shallow look for the interview portion, I used a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. From there I used my Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 (at f/1.8) for the three-shot, and then a Nikkor 24mm f/2.0 for the B-roll footage.
     Post was handled in Premiere CS6 utilizing the native AVCHD footage shot internally. Provided Photoshop elements were animated in After Effects and dynamically linked into the Premiere timeline. Performance was great on my Core 2 Quad workstation, though of course the AE portions work best after rendering, and once the footage itself got bogged down with Curves, Colorista II, and Cosmo plugins, I tended to have to render the entire timeline to get smooth playback at full quality. A few high resolution photographs ground the render outs to a halt with an "out of memory" error, something that required turning off GPU acceleration (added a bit of time to the renders, but not bad). It's not surprising given that my GTX285 only has 1GB of memory, but did impress on me the need to go with the 4GB version of the GTX680 I plan to upgrade to.
     It was a real joy to work with the elements I was provided with. The artwork was excellent, and it was pleasing to see it come to life in After Effects and provide an energy to what could have otherwise been a simple slideshow. This also strikes me as an excellent project for Kickstarter, so if you have an interest in supporting a wonderful idea, be sure to head over there and support it.

EOS C Series and Arri Alexa Color Matching

     Over at Pro Video Coalition, Stunning Good Looks' Art Adams took a DSC Labs Chrome Du Monde color chart and attempted to match a C300 with the Arri Alexa as closely as possible. Obviously, color science in both cams differs enough to prevent an exact match, but he got really close. Thankfully, he provides the settings at the end of the article, allowing anyone with a C300/100 to implement the settings that he used. Granted, since this is primarily for the C300, your end result may vary.
     For those more inclined to simply load up some profiles, they are provided for the C100 series below. I made the choice of Cinema2 for the gamma, since while Adams explains that it's intended for a film out, it seems to also hold highlights a tad better than Cinema1 (from the DSC OneShot article). For serious use as a profile, I would change this to C-Log. Sharpness is turned down completely as well. Also, note that there are two profiles, one for 3200k and one for 5500k.

Art Adam's Arri Alexa Picture Profile for the Canon EOS C100

Color Matching a Canon C300 to an Arri Alexa

CAMERAS: A New Chart for Film-Style Production—The DSC OneShot

C300 (outside) vs Arri Alexa (inside)

AbelCine C100 Scene Files

     AbelCine released a set of some very nice Scene Files for the Canon EOS C300 camera, and they also work on the C500. But for C100 owners, the camera won't accept the files. Thankfully, Texas Media Systems allowed me use of one of their C300 so that I could duplicate the files over by hand. These are exactly the settings of each single one plugged into the same settings on the C100 Custom Picture style list. The only exception was the White Balance G Gain setting, which was always "0" anyway, so I'm pretty confident that these transferred over correctly.
     Of course, any and all differences in processing will result in a slightly different look than what would be seen on the C300, so test them thoroughly before use. Even so, they should be a great starting place for someone looking to play with these Scene Files on their C100.

AbelCine C300 Scene Files for C100

VIDEO: Lacy Lockwood

     This video was originally shot over a year and a half ago, and languished in the post production process until I stumbled across it while doing some data management and decided to finish it. It was originally to be a Final Cut Pro 7 project, including have all of its video assets transcoded to ProRes files via 5DtoRGB, but when I got back to it I decided to trash that entire project and start again from scratch using all the original elements in Adobe Premiere CS6. This turned out to be a good decision because not only did I save space from not having both the original H.264 content as well as ProRes versions of the same footage, but I was able to utilize the Dynamic Link option in Premiere to connect with all the sweetening I did in After Effects, saving file rendering until the very end.
   
     The first thing I did was to take the interview sequence into After Effects and extend the infinite white background to the edges of the frame. The backdrop we used didn't go all the way across, but thankfully nothing in the foreground covered up the background elements, so it was a simple matte across Lacy with some feathering and then a digital white background to finish it out. I also took the time to perform a grade in Colorista II and to throw on an unsharp mask so that the footage would look its best.
   
     Once that was completed, I set up a multi-camera sequence in Premiere so that I could easily select between the two camera angles at any time, and also set it up in such a way that I could easily toggle between the raw footage and the enhanced clips. This saved render time when I was in the draft stage and putting up edit cuts for review.
  
     Once the basic edit was good to go, I proceeded to correct the rest of the footage using a combination of Colorista II and Instant HD, all within Premiere, to remove any unwanted color casts across the footage and to uprez the slow-motion 1280x720 60p footage to full 1080. I was very happy with the quality that Instant HD gave me, even though setting it to "Best" can increase render times.
   
     The final export made use of the HD 1080p 23.976 preset with some additional tweaking. This results in a rather large file given the 24-32Mbps VBR encode, but I feel that it gives the Vimeo encoder a bit of an extra "oompf" when it does its own pass, and it makes for a very high quality download option.

Adobe Anywhere

     At this time, the just announced Adobe Anywhere service seems like it will require a centralized hardware server over a LAN to work. This isn't something that I or a lot of smaller productions houses may want to necessarily utilize. It seems to work best with some "big iron" workstations or servers, something that has seen a decrease in purchasing over more "good enough" stations like iMacs and laptops.

     But that's just where we're at with this announcement. With the Adobe Creative Cloud service, I can easily see where Adobe Anywhere could merge with it, offering a powerful service where footage can be uploaded to the Adobe cloud and then streamed back to the device of choice, thus negating for powerful hardware on the client end. This is a great idea in theory, but for now the lack of fast uploads on all but the most industrial of connections means that uploading any codec of significance and be a frustrating exercise in waiting. If the U.S. infrastructure ever gets significantly improved upload speeds, this could be a very exciting development, and one worth keeping two eyes on.

VIDEO: Stars in Calfornia

     Shooting this music video for artist Drew Kennedy was an amazing experience. We picked up Drew at McCarran International Airport and proceeded on a whirlwind tour through Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas. Traveling for five days straight, we stopped in such diverse and colorful locales like Jasper, Flagstaff, Las Cruces, Marfa, and Marathon. Aside from the diversity of the American West, we were snowed on outside of Flagstaff, a great boon for adding to this story of a musician traveling alone.

     The Grand Canyon was a treat for me, as it was my first time visiting. Outside of the amazing grandeur that was laid out before our lenses, there really was an element of danger considering that one wrong move could have spelled disaster. I know that I certainly become focused in shooting, but the constant nagging in the back of my head to make certain of my footing helped to keep me in a tight circle and avoid stepping off into thin air.

     As for the technical process, we shot on a Canon 60D and a Panasonic GH2 that was hacked with Sedna AQ1. Some of the timelapses (portions of the Grand Canyon and the night timelapse) were done with the 60D in photo mode and the Canon intervalometer. I didn't have one for the GH2, so instead I relied on my "brute force" method and the GH2's ability to span clips for long continuous takes. We had a Canon tilt-shift lens for the 60D, and the GH2 used mostly the Lumix 14-44 zoom and a Nikkor 24mm f/2.0 lens. The moon shot was a combination of the GH2 in ETC mode and a Sigma EOS 70-200 f/2.8 zoom lens.

     The GH2 footage was transcoded into ProRes via 5DtoRGB with the 60D footage receiving the same treatment via Final Cut Pro 7's log and transfer functionality. The final video was edited in Final Cut Pro 7.

Source Filmmaker: 3D Animated Movies by the Masses

     A Bellvue, WA software developer, known as Valve, has been responsible for some iconic moments in PC gaming (Half-Life and its sequels, Team Fortress 1/2, and Left for Dead 1/2) along with developing a system that is akin to iTunes for PC gaming, known as Steam. It always seems like they are looking for ways to extend their brand, and their new release, Source Filmmaker ("Source" is the name of the real-time graphics engine that powers all games that Valve develops), seems to be a play to bring 3D animation to a more general audience.
   
     In days of old, making a 3D animated movie was a complicated process. First, it required the use of a 3D modelling program, an expensive proposition to begin with, then almost everything related to the movie would have to be created from scratch. The models, the animation, the textures, the shading, and a myriad of other elements had to be designed and implemented, none of which was an easy task. Of course, once all the elements were finally put into place, the computer had to generate the scene, frame-by-frame, a process that would take an extraordinary amount of time, dependent on how many server systems you had installed in your "render farm"...and heaven forbid if you tried to do it all from one machine (for comparison, 117 SPARCstation systems were used in the farm to render out Toy Story).
   
     While movies have kept up the pace with technological advancements, PC game titles have jumped leaps and bounds behind, steadily catching up in the level of graphical finesse that can be rendered in real-time, coming very close to the quality one expected to see in a theater only a short time ago. To this end, Valve's release of the Source Filmmaker is notable in that now, with a simple NLE-like front-end, a single workstation can easily develop and render out an impressive 3D animated film (short or long). It's not nearly as simple as pushing a button, but the tools have become much easier to access (Source Filmmaker is free), though there are some barriers. The only supported map and model set is currently from Valve's Team Fortress 2 game, but enterprising filmmakers have already managed to import models from other Valve games into it, and I'm sure it won't be long before its possible to import user-generated material as well.
   
     It's very interesting to see the Internet community take this amazing tool and run with it, and I'm very excited for what the future of this type of medium holds. Below are some examples of content created with the Source Filmmaker application.

Be sure to check in with the official website for updates and even more examples.