akiesels

Hey all,   We recently finished this music video and wanted to share with you.  Shot mostly on the FS100 with a few pickup shots on the NEX-5n.  One of the biggest challenges and disappointments was how the camera performed in the club scene.  The internal codec falls apart whenever there is a flash of bright color (or rapidly changing color) as there is likely not enough bandwidth to represent the varying information using the inter-frame compression.  Surprisingly, there is very little info on this (we've researched before shooting).  An outboard recorder would have been really beneficial in this case.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video:   http://vimeo.com/66481687   Cheers!   Alex  

Great stuff indeed, Andrew!   One question: what are those harsh blue outlines around the leaves, top of the frame at 1:52?  To me they look like a botched HDR merge or something.  Is that an artifact of the program used to debayer and can be fixed in the future, or a limitation of the camera?   I would have loved using this on my last shoot.  We did a night club scene with lots of high contrast color lighting.  Used the FS100, which was the "low light" king with the "best H.264 implementation."  Well, the codec got obliterated by the irregular flashing lights making 80% of the footage unusable and requiring a lot of After Effects cleaning up in post.   Cheers! Alex

[quote name='Axel' timestamp='1343811098' post='14775'] I don't know. Midday sunlight doesn't make so long shadows. Or allows to film shoulder-height with the sun as backlight as in the shot at 00:17. There may be some shots that were [i]not[/i] filmed in the evening. Much dynamic range I can't detect. I only see midtone definition, typical for shooting with an ND, underexposing slightly and raising the gamma in post. The right thing to do, but no demonstration of the FS100's special fitness for the kind of magic cinematography we are Andrews fans for. [/quote] I watched it again. You are right, long shadows in most shots, but certainly no "magic hour" stuff here. The sax player in the field as well as some of the BTS shots seem to be taken earlier in the afternoon than the rest. I guess my initial reaction was that this was an early afternoon shoot because of how he white balanced it and how bright most of the shots were. Not the aesthetic I personally care for, but it's not easy to make these look good in general, with any camera. [quote name='Axel' timestamp='1343811098' post='14775'] I just checked it with my Heliopan Vari ND. Rotating the whole filter (before the eye) doesn't change the brightness. But things do look different. Must be because an ND fader is two pol filters rotating. [/quote] Interesting. I tried this as well, and it looks like a subtle polarization change does occur when you rotate it, mostly on the sky (as expected). This brings up a question: shouldn't these Fader NDs have another rotating ring to allow for the desired polarization to be achieved? Seems like even having a non-rotating lens front would cause problems, since the angle at which the Fader would lock on the lens would be pretty arbitrary. But I guess the reason Andrew does not like the idea of using these filters on anamorphics is because racking focus during a shot would cause a sky color/glare change. Even inter-cutting two shots with different polarization angle might be difficult.

Looking good, Andrew! Powerful imagery, as always. Bold move to shoot in direct midday sunlight without scrims/bounce cards. Most cameras can't deal with that much dynamic range ;-) Can you elaborate why a rotating lens front poses an issue with the fader? I have been using the new LCW Fader ND Digi-Pro HD with older Nikon zooms (non-G). Unlike Canon, these have manual aperture rings, so no need for an expensive Metabones adapter. But the front on the Nikon zoom rotates and, while this is annoying since you have to feel around for the the fader's dial handle, it does not seem to affect the image quality in any way.