hmcindie

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Here's a trailer for a short film I've been working on, called Homecoming. It's a neo-noir revenge film set in the mid-90's recession era Finland.
We shot it on and off during the early spring and late fall of 2016. Originally we were supposed to wrap the whole movie during spring with one flashback scene shot in the summer, but we had continuous trouble with the weather and with the health of several crewmembers. I spent the first week of shoot on a high fever and was functioning on painkillers alone, and later when we were supposed to shoot the finale our lead actor became bedridden with measles and we had to postpone the finale to late fall.
But now it's slowly coming together and it's starting look like an actual movie.
The trailer is NSFW, it contains some extreme violent images.
(Click CC for english subs)
 
We shot the movie 95% on BMCC 2,5K EF, with some shots here and there taken with 5D2 ML RAW and Sony RX10 MK2. I'm using kodachrome LUT as the basis for the post-process, with heavy color separation and high midtone sharpness to give the BMCC footage an 80's film/RED footage kind of pop. A lot of visual cues are taken from Scandinavian/Finnish films from the 80's and 90's.
The movie was mainly shot with Sigma 18-35 1.8, Super-Takumar 50 1.4, Samyang 85 1.4 and Tair 11A 135 2.8, with some special shots shot on Petzval 85 2.2. I often use diffusers and other physical filters but here they're used very sparingly, only on flashback scenes. Instead I went with self-made vignetters to shape bokeh on the daytime scenes to look like brushstrokes or scattered drops. The effect is not very obvious in the trailer as it focuses on nightscenes.
 
If you have any questions about the process or the movie, shoot away!

Haha. I love Red Letter Media.

It seems impossible to get some info on HSS capabilities and some details when using flash. I ask me WHY?
Oops...I hope, this guy is not right:
This guy is aware about some critical situations, where marketing speach would not be enough...Wait and see...

My thought is that we all fall into the roles we decide for ourselves.  If you like playing with camera knobs, you focus on that.  If you'd rather tell a story, you focus on that... and lots of values in between. 
For instance, trying to break away from my established ( read: lazy ) career path is not easy.  Essentially, my time has been spent being a passable craftsperson, but not a terribly impressive creative.  So to switch priorities is difficult.  Having the confidence to actually tell a worthwhile story, develop an interesting cinematic voice, and shape the tone of stories with wise choices is so much more demanding than figuring out colors of skintone, you know? 
Because of that, falling back into thought processes that are a distraction from successful storytelling happens because dabbling with the tech is more comfortable.
( after all, look at my writing here )
So, to be fair, kids doing "content" are often just trying to figure stuff out -- while meanwhile so much of "content" is not exactly narratively creative.  Sort of a double whammy, that.  Those that truly have an itch for telling stories should eventually get there, but you're right, it's easy to go sideways with tech and lose sight of a more interesting career.  That's my anecdotal experience for sure.

Well the big problem about using flash and lights, is that it changes the look of what you are trying to shoot. There is hardly any bar or concert in the world that has the band all lit up when you go see them. Bars are the worse hands down. But if you light it, it looks unnatural as heck.
Hey I am not against lights, and lighting. It does add drama, a scary effect, and compliment people, especially women's faces. But we now live in a new era, where we have cameras that Are good at shooting on low light. We don't always have to do the same stuff people did 50 years ago. They would not have done it always either if they had a Sony A7s then. Think outside of the box.
Plus we can't afford tons of lighting equipment, or the people skilled at using them. Now if you are doing a sit down interview, well yeah, you Need lighting.

wow that was pretty dope! ive definitely seen fight scenes in big time movies that werent as good!
good to know about the cannon connect app over wifi... im always wondering how well things like that actually work

A refreshingly violent camera test that !
I've been using the Camranger system for a few years to set up behind the goal cameras for football matches. The max tripod height you can use is 10cm so its a massive plus to not have to lie on the usually wet ground to frame the shot and it also wirelessly sends the images to the laptop so you don't have to wait till half or full time to retrieve your images and wire them.
I've also been using the Panasonic app this week with the G7 for vlogging stuff  and its a boon for people like me that are too blind to see the fold out screen when they're doing a piece to camera and too vain to wear their glasses on screen. Oh and for setting exposure and all that stuff as well.
The app is good with cameras like FZ1000 with servo zoom as you can control that as well. Panasonic actually do a remote pan/tilt head that can be controlled by it as well for the full PTZ experience but for reasons best known to themselves it only works with a really limited range of their camcorders.
The Osmo Plus is good in that respect as with the zoom it does make a decent little remote system if you stick it on a tripod. Which is a bit arse backwards for a gimbal but there you go.
 

Hi people! Just finished a showreel and thought i'd post it here as it contains some anamorphic stuff, and I like this forum in general :D
 
Let me know what y'all think! 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I saw a film,
swore to myself it was shot on 16mm
nope it was shot on the red dragon.
(Dayveon)
Then I thought it was shot on zeiss ultraspeeds.
Nope it was Canon K35s, which I think are similar to Canon FD glass.
 
I saw another film,
swore to myself it was shot on the alexa,
nope it was shot on the c300 mark i
(motherland)
 
I was sitting 30 rows in the back, in the front, all over the place.
I couldn't tell anything
After all that,
after everything we do, and say,
at the end of the day,
none of us can tell.

5d III RAW

Look's great Matthew19- nice job editing and touching music choice. With a little post sharpening it can be sharp enough for tight and medium shots, which looks like most of your shots. For wides it's still not going to looking like 4K downsampled to 1080p. For YouTube which is watched heavily on mobile devices these days, the in-camera 1080p is detailed enough.
I still have a 5D3 (haven't shot H.264 video with it in a long time) and don't feel that the 1DX II is improved in sharpness/detail over the 5D3 post sharpened (here's a test I did after the 5D3 debate that it was too soft):
For anything serious and short in length I use the 1DX II in 4K and downsample (lately only for 4K 60 paired with the C300 II as the primary camera).
In any case, the 1080p from both cameras is sharp/detailed enough for people/closeups/mid shots and the colors look great out of camera. People have been using diffusion/softening filters (e.g. Black Pro-Mist, nylon stockings) to take the edge off over-sharp cameras for a long time 

Thank you for the kind words. I agree, neo noir is hella cool, I'm a sucker for the genre in general, watched a lot of the staples of the genre back in my childhood and it has stuck with me. Now that you mention it, yeah, there might be a little bit of Blue Velvet in there as well. I've found that large part of my inspirations are often unconcious and become apparent to myself only later.
The movie was pretty much zero budget. Everyone worked for free (we had a crew of 6-8 people, depending on the day), I self-funded everything else, which meant the FX, props etc, and all the running costs like travelling and food. Probably spent around 1500-2000 euros on it. We have a studio and own all our gear so we had free access to lighting equipment, dollies etc, and other things we had already built for other productions like a rain machine we had previously made for a music video. That allowed me to keep the costs very low.
As for the BMCC, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. For the price, it's absolutely the best, most robust image you can get - if you rule out hacks such as ML. I shot the whole thing in RAW, and it's just a priceless asset, and combined with the dynamic range it absolutely gives you the tools to make a truly filmic, beautiful image. I can see where the mini alexa is coming from. But there are downsides. To get the most out of the image you really need to dip deep into the grading process, and often manually separate colors and tweak them individually (whereas ML RAW gives you the same beautiful color separation out of the box), the crop factor is obviously a buzzkill, and the form factor can get very restrictive. It's a bitch of a camera to operate handheld, even rigged. We had a beatdown scene where I wanted to get a really deep low angle view for a few shots, and I was really struggling due to the form factor and the integrated screen.
But, on the other hand, it has kept me firmly employed and in-demand as a freelancer, and I can use it on anything from food videography to documentaries to purely cinematic filming. It's a versatile image and you can get a lot a mileage out of it. Technically it's been rock solid performer, too.
On BMPCC vs. BMCC, I'd go with a BMCC, with an MFT mount to alleviate some of the crop factor with a speed booster. I've used the BMPCC a few times and I'm not a huge fan. The user interface is slower to operate than BMCC (the BMCC touchscreen UI is really nice once you get the hang of it), the screen is somehow worse and I've always found myself preferring the image of the BMCC when shot side-by-side, even with the BMPCC speedboosted. It just feels like it holds more information.
As far as RX10MK2 goes, the trailer has one shot taken with it, the burning corpse. It was only used as a slow-motion camera. I shot with the Cine profile with some tweaks I'd picked online, as since we were mostly shooting at night, there was simply not enough light to go for S-log at 250fps. Hate to say it, but side by side with ML RAW or BMD RAW, or even the BMCC prores flavors, the Sony image often looks just straight up unpleasant. It just lacks the tonality the other two cameras have, and the colors always seem thin and somewhat off. Matching the shots always takes a lot of work. I've noticed using some diffusion alleviates the problem a little, but it still has a very digital look to it, which ML RAW or BMD RAW do not have - unless you intentionally grade them that way. I'm frankly not too fond of the little Sony, but in this production it was the only way to get the slow motion shots I wanted (pyrotech, FX shots).
And as for the troubles - yeah, filmmaking can be gruelling at the best of times. After the principal photography of this I went to DP another movie after only a weekend's rest, and that went on to take 3 weeks with no days off. That one had less production trouble, but it was more cumbersome (3x larger crew) and somehow at worse conditions. Lots of long nights outside in the Finnish winter. Afterwards I jokingly woved to never shoot anything again outside of the studio - but I've found I do that after every movie production. And I always find myself coming back... :D

Love your work, man. Just a ton of fun and everything is always so well done. I actually tested out an a6300 due to one of your previous videos. I loved it but I was looking for a specific type of cam for a current project I'm working on. I've gone full circle and am picking up an a6500 this week. 
Back to your video...
It looks great, a nice clean image and the af is great. Side by side with the a6300 bts footage, I'm unsure the 5d4 is any better? Both lack that magic quality of the 5d3 raw, but both would do for almost any indie film. 
I have finally settled on a similar path... the a6500 for 4K, IBIS and PDAF and a BMPCC for that prores or raw goodness.
Thanks for posting this, it was a blast to watch!!!

This h.265 "same quality for half file size" slogan is just true about ridiculously low bitrates, above 100Mbps you gain nothing over h.264 quality wise. 
Kaby Lake encodes/decodes it with full-hardware acceleration, but we don't know yet how efficient it performs the job compared to doing the same with h.264. and just because hardwares are ready, doesn't mean softwares are also ready to use them to their full potential.  
I think 400Mbps is not enough for 48fps. since its ALL-I, for every frame there is only 1MB room. Its a bit low for a 9 megapixel image. 

You can always go larger: BEAST

**There was some audio distortion in the last upload of the video so I re-uploaded it.**
Hey guys,
Just wanted to share a promo I just made for DKNY with the Sony a7S. This was made as a tribute to my beautiful wife, Kari, whom passed in August 2015 from Cystic Fibrosis - a chronic illness with no known cure. Every shot but the New York B-roll was with the a7S (with the Atomos Ninja Flame external monitor/recorder in 4K), and graded with FilmConvert. I hope you enjoy the video. 
Please let me know what you think!
Best wishes,
Bradley

I have had the same thing in a different industry. It is soul destroying when you end up doing twice as much work as you quoted for. Especially when you do what was agreed and they dont like it, then do it until they like it. Then they say forget that part altogether. That is why I never ever deal with clients anymore, I am too nice and end up being their internet monkey scared to ask for more money to cover my time. Now I trippled my rate and will probably add a third on in spring and there are proper contracts,  with all face to face and calls communcation going through my business partner. Stress is a thing of the past. 

I do a fair amount of music demos and the 1DX II has been amazing on a gimbal. I LOVE the 4K, and the AF isnt just for shallow DOF movement. Big long pushes with deep DOF still benefit from the DPAF. But keep in mind that the sweet touchscreen isn't available on a gimbal, I'm currently testing ways to get it to work with my iphone.

This is a teaser for a Music video, so not synced up or anything :
 

+1 Andrew on the entire article.  I am off the Sony coaster.  After purchasing my 1dx mark Ii, I sold my a6300, a5100,a6000, 80D and C100 Mark ii. 

Are those both using the same filtration? Highlights are beautiful in both, but the skin tones are noticeably warmer in the second screen grab.

Anecdotal, but when I picked up the RX10MK2 after about 8 years of shooting Canon & Blackmagic, the first thing my colleague said was "Sony, eh? Have fun with the menus".
It's not just a Canon shooter thing, Sony's menus and ergonomics in general simply leave a lot to be desired.

Here are 2 videos I shot earlier this summer:
The intro and performance were shot with the 4.6K on this one:
I have 2 other videos done that I can't post yet but here are a couple of frame grabs:
 
 
 

I agree. The build quality is fine. Is it a tank, like the C300/300 mk II? no. But it is sturdy enough and fine. I saw the Camera Store review and, IMO, they were not fair to the camera and presented one of the most biased, and worst reviews I've ever seen from them. I know the XC10 well, and the young guy who did the "review" missed one important point after another--and I'm not sure they had any intention of being fair--or spending enough time to actually learn how to best use the camera and appreciate its virtues.
In response to my criticism of the review I was told they "hated" using the XC10. 
The only way they could say that is to not understand how to best use it to begin with. It's amazing fun to shoot.
And it's image quality, in its range, matches well with the C300 Mk II 4k---especially when you use C-log. That's pretty professional, in my view. Even Andrew mentioned how much he was impressed by the image quality.
Most Camera Store reviews seem good to me insofar as I can judge, but this lame, superficial attempt to "min-review" the XC10 really disappointed me. Basically, I think they just want to sell you the Sony--with it's crappy skin tones, etc.
There are more XC10 reviews than those of the Camera Store. Besides Andrew's review, I really like Carlos Quinteros, Maarten Heilbron, and Jared Polin's reviews--they are much better, more informed, more thorough, and they actually took time to learn how to use the XC10 then be fair in assessing what the XC10 has to offer.
Beautifully said, Andrew. I purchased the XC10 a few months before I saw your review, and I had flipped over everything you talked about...and kept wondering why no one had adequately acknowledged it until your review. Once I read your review I thought maybe I could have a little more confidence in my own judgement.
You know the real value of a given tool by how you feel about using it to accomplish a task at hand. Thinking about shooting with the XC10 makes me frigging happy---and I know any poor result is going to be my own sorry fault--and not the camera; beautiful image, beautiful colors, fantastic grading with C-log, sharp---decent sound, high quality codec--gets the shot with minimum fuss---what's not to love about this camera?

Alright, many members of the forum kept up with the charades that happened with Ebrahim Saawadi (one of the highest contributors on EOSHD) on this link:
It was an extensive mystery case involving a scam that 3 members (myself included) paid for a SLR Magic Rangefinder for a cheap price, from a "trusted" member. He took approximately $250 each from Timotheus and Tomas, and $340 from myself for the item. Long story short, he got away without paying anyone their money back. He eventually sent the rangefinder to Tim and Tom, which turned out to be a test type (that had unusual thread sizes" that wouldn't work on most DSLR's as the original does.

We got scammed. Just a friendly reminder that even "trusted" members can still be criminals trying to rip you off.  Be aware of the many profiles and personas that Ebrahim Saawadi has on this forum, and more importantly, DO NOT TRUST HIM!

Here are two different profiles that I am aware of:
http://www.eoshd.com/comments/profile/33816-ebrahim-saadawi/
 http://www.eoshd.com/comments/profile/20775-ebrahim-saadawi/

Stay alert folks, and learn from my mistake. 

P.S. Thank you all forum members that participated in the most interesting posts I have seen on this forum. Especially those trying to help make things right between those involved.