Music Video Shot on A7sii - Zeiss Super Speed Lenses

[yawningdog]

Hi.

Here is a music video I directed last week on my Sony A7sii using zeiss super speed lenses via a pl mount adapter. Hope you like it. 

Guy 

 

[richklein]

I do like it, very nice, congrats. The superspeeds render such a beautiful image. Can you please answer a few questions about the workflow? Did you use a monitor/external recorder on set to judge your lighting? What gamma curve was used and where did you place the exposure for the skin tones?  Any noise reduction in the shadows? Any other comments on how to squeeze the most out of the 8 bit file? I just picked up an A7s2 and putting together a collection of Contax lenses and the look you achieved is exactly what I am going for. Thanks for posting this piece.

[yawningdog]

Hi Richlein. Really sorry. I didn't notice your post. I shot with slog3, sgamut3 cine. I actually haven't played around with the profile settings, its too complicated.

I didn't use any noise reduction. All skin tones were exposed 2 x stops over. In my tests, I have managed to expose 4 x stops over without clipping or loss of quality. Anything under 2 x stops over will give noise.

I graded using the various scopes in premiere pro 2015, not just by eye. I feel that I could have done a better job on some of the lighting. I am happy with band-only stuff, it gives enough contrast to darken the shot if necessary.

For the barn dance crowd stuff I set up a load of hanging pendant lights down the center of the set. The other lights were supposed to be mostly prop lights.

But the center bulbs were too weak to dominate the center part. I had too much spill from the string lights. So in the edit, I had to add a mask to dim down the walls.

So, in summary, for this video I needed more lighting contrast for an effective grade. I didn't have it, so I had to mask some shots.

Another observation, I do like to use smoke. But with 8bit slog3, you can see banding in some of the highlights.