thaigor

I just managed to do some little rough cut with some primary grading done (not yet applied the "look" into the film yet). This scene is interesting for me as it was lit with 2 4K HMI light and 3 200Watt LED fresnel lights (200 Watt LED fresnel is equivalent to 1K HMI light), 2 Arri 650 Tunsten lamps  and 1 little daylight LED lamp. The key light is from the torch the dude was holding.

The surrounding was just pure darkness.

This scene has a mixture of Samyang 35mm Cine lens, all 3 canon prime lenses I mentioned before and Canon 70-200 F.28 Lens mixed together.

We tried to keep every detail in the histogram as much as possible and we even have to lower the aperture down to F2.8 with 800 ISO in order to get the shot under this underexposed scene.

Hope it'll give some information on the lenses and how far the Magic Lantern camera can hold up against the underexposed set.

Thank you so much for sharing such valuable information with us Thaigor. Your work is stunning.

Thank you.

Thanks for such an informative post thaigor. Beautiful footage. Did you go to film school in Thailand?

Your welcome, I graduated from Gold Coast, Australia (The same place/year with Tommy Wirkola, the director of Hazel & Gretel : The Witch Hunter). I'm now teaching Film in Thai University apart from directing film.

Great stuff, and are you recording sound in RAW too for auto-sync or doing the old fashioned clapper board sync?

I prefer doing the double system sound recording but I also attach the wireless audio into all the 3 camera as well in case that we might need them somehow.

In post, I normally prefer doing the old fashion clapper board sync. The reason behind this is that we also get the chance to check each and every footage and therefore not skipping any detail on every take. Just help keeping us all in a good habit of going through all the footage all the time rather than checking only the good take one.

Great work, thaigor. Which ISO(s) did you use on this shoot?

We tried to keep it at 400 as it gives the best dynamic range per noise (not grain) ratio. If it's too bright then we'll used the ND to cut down the light but if it's too dark then we'll bring it up to 500, 640 or 800. 

I wouldn't recommend anyone to go beyond 800 as the noise is pretty high above that point even if my lab test said that 1000 is still give a good quality image output though. 

Hello there (Sorry for my bad English)

I'm the director of the film embedded above. To clarify many question talked about in this forum. I would have to explain how we shoot this.

For the equipment, we had 3 5D Mark III with 1.2.3 Magic Lantern firmware installed with 3 Canon Cine Prime Lenses (28, 50 and 85mm.) few L lenses (50 F1.2, 24-70mm F2.8, 28-300 F3.5-5.6 and 70-200 F2.8) and Samyang (Rokinon) Cine 35mm.

In term of optical quality most lenses have pretty good sharpness (to the point that most of the audience will not notice the different unless you are working in this field) as long as you keep the F/T above 4 (and less than 11). If you want to work on 2.8 or 3.5 (less than that are totally not recommended by any chance even you sharpen it up in post. If you want the soft look, it's better to use Black Pro-Mist filter or Fog instead of using lower F/T Stop) then you'll probably see a some different between each lenses. At 1.2-2.0, it'll probably be used only in certain situation and I never recommend anyone using this T/F range as it always hard to focus and the overall sharpness is bad.)

for color rendition, Samyang and Canon Cine are on par with the color representation. We found that 70-200 and 28-300 have less saturation and luminance than the rest. But it's still manageable in Post-Production to get the color to match the rest. I prefer trying best to use the primes one rather than the zoom unless it's for the sake of fast background movement or really soft background.

The good thing about Canon Cine comes to the 300 Degree focus ring which helps a lot in such a complicated shots (like 10-15 focus shift in one shot while dolly back and forth and do a 360 camera turn) Even that (with F3.5), My Focus puller cursed a lot (in Thai) !!

For those who look for a cheaper alternative to Canon, I would suggest you to get Samyang (Rokinon) as it has a full range of lens (with 50mm coming up soon). For my point of view, Canon Cine Prime are mostly for rental companies to own and rent it out (in cheaper price than Ultra Prime/ Cooke i5 or Master Prime) and still give a good optical quality for lower budget type of film.

this should help answering all the question about lenses.

For 5D Mark III with magic lantern. How we lit the scene is that we trying best to lit it in the camera's histogram range. Most of the people I knew of normally didn't do a proper testing to see how far the camera can go in terms of dynamic range and color the sensor can recorded. Everything you see in the frame is designed to take the full advantage of the camera CMOS sensor (blood color, skin mock up, on set smoke to tame the contrast down and bring the dark part up and at the same time lower the highlight down, cloth and set color etc etc.)

Most of the DPs wouldn't go that far to workout with the rest of the crew to bring the best out of camera and therefore don't get what they deserved to after long hard working day shooting it.

and last the Post-Production Workflow. We work on CinemaDNG all the way from the onset DIT to the lab. Using MLRawviewer to check each and every footage after we change the CF card (Sandisk Extreme Pro 128GB, we have 2 of them). Then break the MLV down into CinemaDNG and send it to Davinci at the lab (which required a fast set hardware to work on it at 2K DCI)

We did tried blow it up to 4K and the result is stunning as it still contain all the sharpness. I asked some dude from Canon Thailand to come and see this footage (in 4K) at the lab on the big screen and they were stun of how there little old camera are capable of. I'm pretty happy with the result though (as long as you put a lot of hard work in it to make sure you squeezed every bit of their capabilities out of the camera)

Oh .... we shot our film in Thailand .... it's pretty humid and it's 37-42 degree Celsius most of the time. The camera got heated up to the point that we were worry that we might cooked it for our next meal break, but it didn't get any damage though.


Hope all this information help : )

Hopefully I can post more of the stuff soon. Still 2 more days to go til I finish the film. After the lab work, I'll probably come up with the trailer that I can post once more to see the end result.