Gabriel's Day - If - Music Video shot on Varicam
I've finally gotten around to making a new encode of the video clip I directed for Gabriel's Day. I had done one previous which I posted on MVWire and 2-Pop. The previous version had a bit of a gamma shift problem, namely it went too bright and bleached all the detail away.
You can download the clip here - its 63meg or so... and our webserver ain't THAT fast, a 1Mb pipe I believe.
For those interested, it was shot on a Varicam finishing back to 25P. We shot at 30FPS, 40FPS and 60FPS. According to Rexel, who are the local distributed of the Varicam, we had to shoot at a system cycle of 29.97 for variframes to work with FCP. I live in a PAL country, so shooting 29.97 is a bit weird. We captured using the 1200A via firewire, using all the workflow processes which have become standard. It took me a while to get it working, as I had to set the deck to 29.97 for it to playback properly.
After loading the footage, and running frame-rate converter, I found that the Varicam footage was rather noisy - noiser than the SDX900 (a camera which I love - and the light-falls offs rather bandy. On hindsight I think it was because we pushed the 'dynamic range compression' too much (set it to 500%), and gave too much of our bit-budget to the highlights when we should have given them to the shadows. That said, the Varicam may be a 100megabit camera, but it shoots 60 progressive images a second. In effect, it uses 50megabits per frame the same as DV50 but spreads that bit-budget over a 720P image rather than a 480P image... of course its going to be more lossy. Anyway.
I also had plenty of gamma problems. While I did the main edit in DVCPROHD, I finished the video in Blackmagic's 10bit UC codec... and that introduced a bit of a gamma shift. I eventually discovered that I needed to shift the gamma by 1.2 for it to look correct on my production monitor (a properly calibrated 20" Panasonic 800 line beast). All colour correction was done on the DVCProHD timeline, but I added 'tweaks', such as the vignette and letterboxing when I downconverted it to an SD frame. I found I could do frame extractions of around 40%, ie scale by 140%, without noticeable artifiacting. That allowed me to create nice buried zooms, of which I have grown rather fond.
Most significantly, I also had to do the entire edit in a 23.97 timeline and slow down the song to make it work. For those who don't know, I'm in Australia and we broadcast at base 25. I came up with a solution before we even started shooting....
Once the edit was locked off, I exported a TIFF image sequence out of FCP. I then loaded the image sequence in AE as a *25FPS* sequence, not a 24P. That way I got a frame-for-frame matchback, which is what I wanted. Speeding up the footage in FCP from 23.97 to 25P introduced a whole lot of motion artificating, particularly as it had to do 'field blends' to create frames. I lost the whole 'film look' of the progressive scan, which was just stupid. A proper frame-for-frame match is far more preferable. I then just rendered the whole thing into a 10bit Blackmagic UC movie which I dumped back into FCP with the appropriate IDents. Unfortunately, I had to spend some time working out how much to speed up my audio to in order to get sync. You see, I screwed up when I slowed the audio down earlier in the process. I did my maths on the basis that it was being slowed down from 25fps to 24fps, not 25fps to 23.97fps. ARGH! Anyway, it ended up being around 1% faster or something ridiculous.
When it came to outputting to tape, I found I made another mistake. I accidentally rendered the footage into the Blackmagic DV10 codec, which was their variation for digital Voodoo! I couldn't actually run out via SDI. Fucken. I had to re-export the whole thing from AE again. Ah well. Least I got it right eventually.
... and here we are.
The clip itself I'm quite happy with. It was written-produced-and-posted in around 5 weeks. I think it suffers a little from being set all in the one location and my emphasis on narrative rather than eye-candy. I also could have done with moving away from my usual Clara Law inspired coveraged, and used more handheld! In other words, I could have created more of an arc for the visuals and not just the performances... which are actually quite good, given we didn't end up casting the male lead proper until the 1st day of shooting! Gotta love that.
Props to the crew. The next clip is going to be on 2-perf 35mm I think... IN some ways, it'll be much EASIER than dealing with the Varicam. However, it won't be anywhere as cheap, partly because Lemac did us a great deal on the Varicam, sticks, deck and HD-monitor.
UPDATE: In the past, some people have asked me about the 'projector stuff' and how we achieved that look. Pretty simply, actually. We shot the band in front of a 12x12 silk, which was backlight by HMIs (which I was happy to let flicker). Alexis then lit the band with a kino or two and a 1K spot (with 216 diffusion). On the split, the image was pretty... ah... crap. This was a post job, but Alexis knew that and gave me what I needed - good lighting ratios. He even pulled out his light-meter to check em!
In post, I pulled a luma-key on the highlights - removing the white silk. I de-saturated the resulting image, pushed its contrast, then gave it a slight tint. That was then composited on the backplate of the projector which we had shot during the shoot. We shot a range of plates actually, plates are VERY useful.
I stumbled across the idea of the band concurrently in the background when I was doing one of the comps. When editing, I tend to lay down my master tracks - in this case a wide of the band - as the very bottom track then 'build up' my cuts. This allows me to experiment with different coverage combinations easily, as I can just 'enable' and 'disable' certain clips to try different shot combinations. I didn't turn off the master-shot while I was compositing one of the CUs. When I looked at the comp, I thought 'wow that looks wicked'. So that was a happy accident. But the actual idea of the look, however, came to me when I was in a lecture on evidence law and we were examining overheads of grainy photos - I was like 'now *thats an aesthetic'. Pretty easy to imagine how I was going to pull it off too. As I've alluded to earlier, its an important part my creative process to understand my tools to comprehend the entire thing from shooting to post to final product and everything in between.
Any comments most welcome.
Partial Credits List
[Apologies to those I've missed and whose name's I've misspelt]
Gabriel's Day are
Scott Mesiti (Bass/Vocals)
Daniel Simmons (Guitar/Vocals
Linzi Steele (Drums)
Cast:
Jo Briant - Marla
Pete Burges - Steve
... and a bunch of extras [really sorry guys! you were champs, even if I can't remember your names]
Crew:
Producer/Director: Stu Willis
1st AD: Antigone Garner
Director of Photography - Alexis Tarren
Camera Operator: James Fenton
1st AC (briefly): Kim Sargenius
Gaffer: Peter Marsden
Best Boy: Jamie Nimmo
Sparkie: [Some guy who I forget but was really sarcastic the whole shoot]
Art Directors: Julian Hill & Kush Badhwar
Costume Design: Rachael Cassar
Makeup/Hair: Andy Dawe & Shevaun Robertson
Post: Stu Willis
You can download the clip here - its 63meg or so... and our webserver ain't THAT fast, a 1Mb pipe I believe.
For those interested, it was shot on a Varicam finishing back to 25P. We shot at 30FPS, 40FPS and 60FPS. According to Rexel, who are the local distributed of the Varicam, we had to shoot at a system cycle of 29.97 for variframes to work with FCP. I live in a PAL country, so shooting 29.97 is a bit weird. We captured using the 1200A via firewire, using all the workflow processes which have become standard. It took me a while to get it working, as I had to set the deck to 29.97 for it to playback properly.
After loading the footage, and running frame-rate converter, I found that the Varicam footage was rather noisy - noiser than the SDX900 (a camera which I love - and the light-falls offs rather bandy. On hindsight I think it was because we pushed the 'dynamic range compression' too much (set it to 500%), and gave too much of our bit-budget to the highlights when we should have given them to the shadows. That said, the Varicam may be a 100megabit camera, but it shoots 60 progressive images a second. In effect, it uses 50megabits per frame the same as DV50 but spreads that bit-budget over a 720P image rather than a 480P image... of course its going to be more lossy. Anyway.
I also had plenty of gamma problems. While I did the main edit in DVCPROHD, I finished the video in Blackmagic's 10bit UC codec... and that introduced a bit of a gamma shift. I eventually discovered that I needed to shift the gamma by 1.2 for it to look correct on my production monitor (a properly calibrated 20" Panasonic 800 line beast). All colour correction was done on the DVCProHD timeline, but I added 'tweaks', such as the vignette and letterboxing when I downconverted it to an SD frame. I found I could do frame extractions of around 40%, ie scale by 140%, without noticeable artifiacting. That allowed me to create nice buried zooms, of which I have grown rather fond.
Most significantly, I also had to do the entire edit in a 23.97 timeline and slow down the song to make it work. For those who don't know, I'm in Australia and we broadcast at base 25. I came up with a solution before we even started shooting....
Once the edit was locked off, I exported a TIFF image sequence out of FCP. I then loaded the image sequence in AE as a *25FPS* sequence, not a 24P. That way I got a frame-for-frame matchback, which is what I wanted. Speeding up the footage in FCP from 23.97 to 25P introduced a whole lot of motion artificating, particularly as it had to do 'field blends' to create frames. I lost the whole 'film look' of the progressive scan, which was just stupid. A proper frame-for-frame match is far more preferable. I then just rendered the whole thing into a 10bit Blackmagic UC movie which I dumped back into FCP with the appropriate IDents. Unfortunately, I had to spend some time working out how much to speed up my audio to in order to get sync. You see, I screwed up when I slowed the audio down earlier in the process. I did my maths on the basis that it was being slowed down from 25fps to 24fps, not 25fps to 23.97fps. ARGH! Anyway, it ended up being around 1% faster or something ridiculous.
When it came to outputting to tape, I found I made another mistake. I accidentally rendered the footage into the Blackmagic DV10 codec, which was their variation for digital Voodoo! I couldn't actually run out via SDI. Fucken. I had to re-export the whole thing from AE again. Ah well. Least I got it right eventually.
... and here we are.
The clip itself I'm quite happy with. It was written-produced-and-posted in around 5 weeks. I think it suffers a little from being set all in the one location and my emphasis on narrative rather than eye-candy. I also could have done with moving away from my usual Clara Law inspired coveraged, and used more handheld! In other words, I could have created more of an arc for the visuals and not just the performances... which are actually quite good, given we didn't end up casting the male lead proper until the 1st day of shooting! Gotta love that.
Props to the crew. The next clip is going to be on 2-perf 35mm I think... IN some ways, it'll be much EASIER than dealing with the Varicam. However, it won't be anywhere as cheap, partly because Lemac did us a great deal on the Varicam, sticks, deck and HD-monitor.
UPDATE: In the past, some people have asked me about the 'projector stuff' and how we achieved that look. Pretty simply, actually. We shot the band in front of a 12x12 silk, which was backlight by HMIs (which I was happy to let flicker). Alexis then lit the band with a kino or two and a 1K spot (with 216 diffusion). On the split, the image was pretty... ah... crap. This was a post job, but Alexis knew that and gave me what I needed - good lighting ratios. He even pulled out his light-meter to check em!
In post, I pulled a luma-key on the highlights - removing the white silk. I de-saturated the resulting image, pushed its contrast, then gave it a slight tint. That was then composited on the backplate of the projector which we had shot during the shoot. We shot a range of plates actually, plates are VERY useful.
I stumbled across the idea of the band concurrently in the background when I was doing one of the comps. When editing, I tend to lay down my master tracks - in this case a wide of the band - as the very bottom track then 'build up' my cuts. This allows me to experiment with different coverage combinations easily, as I can just 'enable' and 'disable' certain clips to try different shot combinations. I didn't turn off the master-shot while I was compositing one of the CUs. When I looked at the comp, I thought 'wow that looks wicked'. So that was a happy accident. But the actual idea of the look, however, came to me when I was in a lecture on evidence law and we were examining overheads of grainy photos - I was like 'now *thats an aesthetic'. Pretty easy to imagine how I was going to pull it off too. As I've alluded to earlier, its an important part my creative process to understand my tools to comprehend the entire thing from shooting to post to final product and everything in between.
Any comments most welcome.
Partial Credits List
[Apologies to those I've missed and whose name's I've misspelt]
Gabriel's Day are
Scott Mesiti (Bass/Vocals)
Daniel Simmons (Guitar/Vocals
Linzi Steele (Drums)
Cast:
Jo Briant - Marla
Pete Burges - Steve
... and a bunch of extras [really sorry guys! you were champs, even if I can't remember your names]
Crew:
Producer/Director: Stu Willis
1st AD: Antigone Garner
Director of Photography - Alexis Tarren
Camera Operator: James Fenton
1st AC (briefly): Kim Sargenius
Gaffer: Peter Marsden
Best Boy: Jamie Nimmo
Sparkie: [Some guy who I forget but was really sarcastic the whole shoot]
Art Directors: Julian Hill & Kush Badhwar
Costume Design: Rachael Cassar
Makeup/Hair: Andy Dawe & Shevaun Robertson
Post: Stu Willis
posted by stu willis at
6:40 pm
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