The 24p firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II is live on Canon’s site.

September 17, 2008, the day of the 5D Mark II’s announcement, when we first learned of its 30p movie mode:

Remember how I said how stunning it was that Nikon chose 24 fps for the D90’s D-Movies? How it could have so easily been anything else? How if Canon came out with a movie-shooting DSLR that shot 30p I’d be less than thrilled?

Well it’s worse than that. Because a 5D that shot 24p at full HD resolution would have been a very important camera. For Canon to have come so close and botched that one detail is almost unbearable.

Maybe we can get Canon to offer a 24 fps mode in a future firmware update.

Yep, maybe.

For as long as I’ve had my 5D Mark II, I’ve avoided using it for any projects that I could not shoot 30-for-24, i.e. slowing down the footage to 23.976 fps, using every frame. My 5D has been a gentle overcrank-only camera. There are plenty of occasions to shoot 30 frames for 24 frame playback—we do it all the time in commercials to give things a little “float,” or to “take the edge off” some motion. I still do this often with my 7D. Whatever frame rate I shoot—24, 30, 50 or 60, I play it back at 24. Just like film.

Folks ask me about 30p conversions often. Twixtor from RE:Vision Effects is a popular tool for this, as is Apple’s Compressor. Adobe After Effects has The Foundry’s well-regarded Kronos retiming technology built-in. All of these solutions are variations on optical flow algorithms, which track areas within the frame, try to identify segments of the image that are traveling discretely (you and I would call these “objects”), and interpolate new frames based on estimating the motion that happened between the existing ones.

This sounds impressive, and it is. Both The Foundry and RE:Vision Effects deservedly won Technical Achievement Academy Awards for their efforts in this area in 2007. And yet, as Mike and I discuss, this science is imperfect.

In August of 2009 I wrote:

I’m not saying that you won’t occasionally see results from 30-to-24p conversions that look good. The technology is amazing. But while it can work often, it will fail often. And that’s not a workflow. It’s finger-crossing.

On a more subtle note, I don’t think it’s acceptable that every frame of a film should be a computer’s best guess. The magic of filmmaking comes in part from capturing and revealing a narrow, selective slice of something resonant that happened in front of the lens. When you use these motion-interpolated frame rate conversions, you invite a clever computer algorithm to replace your artfully crafted sliver of reality with a best-guess. This artificiality accumulates to create a feeling of unphotographic plasticness.

Of course, it’s often much worse than a subtle sense that something’s not right. Quite often, stuff happens in between frames that no algorithm could ever guess. Here’s a sequence of consecutive 30p frames:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resNothing fancy, just a guy running up some stairs. But his hand is moving fast enough that it looks quite different from one frame to the next.

Here’s that same motion, converted to 24p using The Foundry’s Kronos:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resBlech.

Again, don’t get me wrong—these technologies are great, and can be extremely useful (seriously, how amazing is it that the rest of the frame looks as good as it does?). But they work best with a lot of hand-holding and artistry, rather than as unattended conversion processes.

(And they can take their sweet time to render too.)

I’m so glad we’re getting the real thing.

This 50mm f/1.2 cappuccino cup is in response to the fabulous coffee mug that looks like a 70–200mm lens, which Canon was giving out at the Winter Olympics to people who had better watch their back when I’m around.

By the way, there’s a new version of the popular zoom lens that I want almost more than I want another cappuccino. Pre-order it now and I get a little closer. To the cappuccino.

Canon 70–200mm f/2.8L IS EF II USM lens available for pre-order at Amazon.

Readers of ProLost, pat yourself on the back.

In the 18 months since Canon announced the Canon 5D Mark II, you’ve written, you’ve called, you’ve left comments here and on Vincent Laforet’s blog. You politely but firmly harrassed Canon personel at trade shows. Perhaps most significantly, you put your money where your mouth is and bought 7Ds, showing Canon that 24p is even better than Bokake.

It delights me to no end to read these words in a Canon press release:

Developed following feedback from photographers and cinematographers, Firmware 2.0.3 further enhances the EOS 5D Mark II’s excellent video performance. The addition of new frame rates expands the camera’s video potential, providing filmmakers with the ability to shoot 1080p Full HD footage at 24fps (actual 23.976fps)—the optimum frame rate for cinematic video. 25fps support at both 1920x1080 and 640x480 resolutions will allow users to film at the frame rate required for the PAL broadcast standard, while the new firmware will also change the 30fps option to the NTSC video standard of 29.97fps.

I underlined a couple bits in there. Do they sound familiar? The wording is almost directly lifted from ProLost posts and my other communications with Canon.

Does it seem like I’m patting myself on the back? Well I am. But you should too. I know that, at best, I played maybe a tiny role in this. But this is a very cool thing that has happened here—we spoke, and Canon listened.

Read the full press release at dpreview.com.

Take a trip down memory lane and view all ProLost posts tagged Canon 5D Mark II.

And heck, buy a 5D Mark II from Amazon and support this site. I love mine, and I’m about to love it even more.

Magic Bullet Mojo is $99 on its own, or available as a part of the Magic Bullet Suite.

In many of my writings about color correction, both here on ProLost and in The Guide, I’ve talked about the balance between an aggressive “look” that helps tell your story through the use of a pervasive palette, tone, style, and feel; and the preservation of appealing skin tones. When grading a scene, you can push your look much further if you don’t lose track of appealing skin tones. Or, if you so desire, you can make a strong visual statement by choosing to allow your skin tones to get subsumed by your look.

The truth is, skin tones are just one of a small handful of what I call “memory colors.” Memory colors are colors that are, in the minds of your audience, inseparable from certain common objects or events. For example, the sky is so associated with blue that you might feel that you see those two words together as often as you see them individually. The same goes for green and grass.

The most basic idea of color correcting is that you are making colors correct, which is to say that you are making objects on the screen appear to be the colors that we know them to be.

The funny thing about this seemingly simple task is that it can be quite difficult. And it’s difficult for exactly the reason that it’s important.

The human brain is so tied in to our eyesight that we internally auto-correct for certain colors. This is the very definition of a memory color. For example, if you grew up in the United States, you know that a stop sign is red—so you tend to see an image of one as being red even if the color is way out of whack. In the shot below, we recognize the bald head as that of a Caucasian male, even though the white balance is incorrect.

We see his head as skin-colored, even though empirically it is actually almost perfectly gray! You might not believe me, so here’s a crop of the back of his neck to prove it:

This a variation of a common optical illusion called the Same Color Illusion. We “know” that square A and B are different shades of gray “in real life,” and that knowledge prevents us from seeing that they are in fact the exact same shade in the image (click the image to see proof).

UPDATE: Aaron points out below that the Color Constancy Illusion may be a better model of the problem.

Back to the head. Even though they “know” what color it is, your audience will respond more favorably to a memory color object if their knowledge of it matches their experience, rather than fights it. And so it falls to the colorist to correct the color of the head, to make it head-colored rather than gray.

In 2008 I pointed out an example of this from the trailer for The Incredible Hulk (Steve Bowen, colorist). Edward Norton’s face appears the same color whether in a cool scene or a warm scene.

Preserving skin tones is important, but so is preserving other memory colors. Here’s a shot from Jumper (Steven J. Scott, colorist). Sam Jackson is about to walk through a crowd of people. His and their skin tones are accurate, even though their world is a faded, monochrome olive drab.

But back up a few seconds in the same shot and notice that in this faded world, brake lights are perfect, vivid red, and New York taxis read as the correct yellow-orange. This is an establishing shot, and if the grade abused the hue of the taxis too harshly, we might not read “New York” as readily.

Here’s a very short list of memory colors I try to keep in mind when coloring:

• People are pink/orange (a color I like to call porange)
• Grass and summer trees are green
• Water and skies are blue
• Fire engines, stop signs, and blood are red

You could also add just about any food to that list. Unless you’re deliberately trying to make something look unappetizing, it’s probably good to render food as accurately as possible—as I’ll show you in a moment.

I welcome your suggestions of other memory colors. And bear in mind that memory colors might vary from film to film and even scene to scene. In Stomp the Yard, there’s a scene at the beginning where almost nothing is red. Later, there’s a red jacket color so important to the story that it leaps out of every scene in which it appears.

So what’s the big deal? Objects have colors, and the colorist makes sure those things stay those colors. Easy, right?

Not necessarily. To achieve the look of that Jumper shot—where key colors pop but unimportant ones blend into a complimentary shade of blue-green—requires practice, skill, and taste. It’s hard enough under the best of circumstances, but lighting, atmosphere, bounce light, flare, camera settings, and a hundred other factors can conspire to force objects to render on-screen in colors quite unlike their real-world hues.

The good colorist first picks the memory colors important to the scene, and then ensures that they stay consistent, often combating these factors to do so.

Here’s a very simple example. I bought some espresso beans today from my favorite local roaster, Blue Bottle coffee. As I was transferring them to an air-tight container, my 7D was right there, so I popped off a quick 720p60 shot of the process—because who doesn’t like seeing coffee beans tumble in slow motion?

When looking at the footage on my computer, I noticed a funny thing. The beans, which in life have a vivid, sumptuous brown tone, appeared gray-black on my screen. I almost didn’t notice, because I know they are brown, but on close inspection it was clear that I had been fooled by my brain into seeing what I knew rather than what was actually there. The cool color temperature of the indirect sun lighting the shot was reflecting off the beans and cooling their color down to near neutral.

There’s nothing unnatural or wrong about this, except that the audience for my espresso epic doesn’t know about the cool light source outside of the frame. They don’t even necessarily know what the falling objects are. I have to communicate that visually, so I need to preserve—or, in this case, recreate—the memory color of perfectly roasted coffee beans.

Here’s the shot with a Colorista Power Mask for just the beans:

And here’s that same shot with an overall look applied after the bean color fix.

To really see the importance of the local correction, look at the shot with the look, but without the bean fix:

Not only do the beans look more appetizing with the fix, they also survive the subsequent look adjustment better. In fact, since the look cools down the shot a bit, the warm color of the beans stands out all the more. Without the bean fix, the look utterly clobbers the brown beans. As a bonus, in the corrected version, the metal canister and the corner of the grinder on the right take on a steely blue color, better matching the viewer’s idea of what color metal should be.

If you pick your memory colors for a scene, and preserve and enhance them through your look, you’ll wind up with shots that pop without looking clobbered by a heavy-handed “preset” look.

Want to learn more? Check out some great books on color correction at the ProLost Store, or find more ProLost posts tagged with Color.

Canon today announced the Rebel T2i, AKA the 550D. It’s an 18 megapixel entry-level DSLR for $800. It features all of the video modes of the Canon 7D and 1D Mark IV: 29.97, 23.976, and 25 fps at 1080p, along with 50 and 60 fps at 720p.

I haven’t seen any samples of the video yet, although I’m sure we’ll soon be buried by them. [UPDATE: Did I say soon? Here you go (also embedded below)—thanks Jay]

I’m sure we’ll also be treated to many loving comparisons of how image quality, noise, compression, etc., stand up to Canon’s other offerings.

I would not expect the Rebel to represent any progress on the HDSLR shortcomings of rolling shutter and aliasing/moiré.

Two years ago I called the Canon HV20 the no-more-excuses DV Rebel camera. It was an HD camcorder the size of a soda can that recorded 24p with limited manual control, for under $1,000. Filmmaker Ayz Waraich made a beautiful short film with it called White Red Panic.

Folks can spend a lot of energy writing about cameras and filmmaking, about how this or that forthcoming tool will be a “game changer” or revolutionize the blah blah blah. Ayz’s film reminded us (and I include myself in that “us”) that filmmaking beats bellyaching every time.

Then along came the HDSLRs, and speaking only for myself, I thought there was some important stuff to bellyache about. Some potential that could be realized if only a few niggling details were addressed. The year that followed the introduction of the 5D Mark II was equal parts frustration and reward, as Canon and others took pot-shots at the target, always missing, but sometimes in ways that produced useable cameras.

I marked the Canon 7D as the real arrival of HDSLR cinema. The price, the frame rates, and sensor size all made great sense, and video finally earned it’s own button, more or less. There are still big problems with it of course, but they can be worked around. I’d hate to be working around them with a paying client over my shoulder, but for my personal work, I don’t mind. And if I get really stuck, I do have an actual video camera lying around here somewhere.

It seemed to me that no sooner had the HV20 come out that it was rendered obsolete by subsequent models, and its priced dropped from affordable to ridiculous. We went from “no more excuses” to “seriously, what more do you want” in a matter of months.

With the Rebel, HDSLRs just hit that point. If you have any interest in what they can do, there’s now a camera that you can buy for less than the cost of a decent tripod.

In fact, depending on how it performs, the Rebel may just be the new sweet spot. In the same way that the 1D Mark IV’s $5,000 price tag accounts for a bunch of pro stills features that don’t net much for the filmmaker, the shortcomings that put the Rebel at half the 7D’s price are most likely all in the stills department as well. If video is your primry interest in a DSLR, the Rebel could well represent the most bang for the buck.

Although the MSRP for the body is $799, Amazon seems to want to cash in on early enthusiasm for this rig—their pre-order price is currently listed at $899.

UPDATE: Less than six hours later, Amazon has amended the pre-order price to $799.

I’ve created a Rebel Starter Kit page on the ProLost store for those looking to take the plunge on the cheap.

Today Apple announced the iPad, and what I like most about what we’ve seen so far is that Apple clearly thinks it’s important that we be able to make things with it. The redesigned iWork apps are impressive experiments in creating stuff using a multitouch display. I liked my iPhone enough when it was just a phone, but I love it now that I have Storyboard Composer (formerly Hitchcock), Screenplay, and Photoshop Mobile, to name just a few.

I also use an app called Air Mouse to control the Mac Mini in my home theater. That, and the many other apps that allow your iPhone or iPod Touch to act as control device for your computer, made me ponder the possibility of using the iPhone’s multitouch screen as a control surface for Magic Bullet Looks. But I never took the idea very far because of the small size of the screen.

Folks doing color correction either know first-hand the value of a dedicated control surface, or avoid finding out for fear of the can’t-live-without-it sensation. An understandable fear, given the cost of these peripherals. Back in 2008 when I wrote about gestural interfaces and hardware devices, I expected to spend a couple grand at the very least for any kind of multitouch control device. Video pros routinely spend much, much more for large, cumbersome, single-purpose color control surfaces. Read any review of them and you’ll see one common thread: once you work a three-way color corrector with a set of trackballs that allow you to adjust multiple parameters at once, you never want to go back.

Imagine the dude above is looking at a stripped-down version of the Magic Bullet Looks interface on his main display. The Tool Chain, Preset and Tool Drawers, and touch-friendly Tool Controls appear on his iPad.

The iPad may seem expensive to people with a laptop, a smartphone, and little room in their life for something in between, but for video and film professionals looking for a general-purpose way to get more touchy-feely with their creations, it’s beyond a bargain.

As long as the software shows up.

So what do you think? Is the image above something that interests you? It’s just a hasty concept—nothing more. But it’s got me thinking about all kinds of ways that an iPad could become a part of the way we make films—not just with dedicated apps, but with companion apps that give us new ways of interacting with our favorite desktop tools.

A frequent concern about shooting to a heavily-compressed digital format—something the DV Rebel often finds herself doing—is the degree to which the footage will be “color correctable.” Will the shots fall apart when subjected to software color grading? Or will you be able to work with the footage as fluidly as you tweak your raw stills in Lightroom?

It’s a valid concern. The movies that the current crop of HDSLRs shoot are highly compressed. This compression is perceptual, meaning that it takes advantage of visually similar colors and shapes, and represents those regions with less accuracy than the detailed and varied parts of the image. This makes perfect sense, but often in color grading one seeks to enhance color contrasts—to make a face pop off a similarly-colored background for example—and so you may well create high contrasts between colors that were once nearly identical, and as such were given short shrift by the camera’s compression.

You might have noticed a similar phenomenon in audio. An low-bit-rate MP3 that sounds decent enough can suddently sound awful after even a tiny amount of EQ. Another case of perceptual compression limiting your options.

While you will never find as much data and detail in your HDSLR video as you do in that same camera’s raw stills, the H.264 movies created by the Canon 7D, 5D and 1D Mark IV will withstand some massaging in post. Here are some tips (similar to those found in greater detail in The DV Rebel’s Guide) to help you get the best results.

• Shoot flat. If you read Flatten your 5D, you know that I am a proponent of setting up a “flat” Picture Style using the camera’s built-in controls. The same settings I specced out for the 5D Mark II apply to the 7D and 1D Mark IV as well, although with the 7D I’m less likely to use Highlight Tone Priority, as this setting can increase shadow noise, and the 7D is not as noise-free as the other Canon HDSLRs.
• Chose WB wisely. Use a white balance preset that gives you as nuetral an image as possible. Shooting with an incorrect white balance reduces your dynamic range, because you wind up with an image that’s prematurely blown-out in one color channel, dark and noisy in others.
• Expose to the right. Make the brightest image you can without clipping something important. A rule-of-thumb considered gospel by many photographers, but our reasoning is a bit different. Yes, we, like the stills guys, wish to avoid excess noise in the shadows, but that’s not our main concern. Remember that term perceptual compression. Dark areas of an image get less bits. If you underexpose, you’ll have to brighten the image in color correction, and you’ll reveal all kinds of nastiness the camera thought you’d never see.
• Do denoise. It doesn’t really matter what denoising software you use, but use it. When you carefully and subtly denoise your footage, you rebuild your pixels anew, which is especially nice when you follow the next tip:
• Work at high bit-depths. If you start with an 8-bit image and do a gentle de-noise, you’re blending pixels values together to create new colors. Although there’s no such thing as something for nothing, doing this at a higher bit-depth means those new colors have massivly more gradations than the original image. Your subsequent color work will hold up much better.
• Sharpen last. Your flat Picture Style removed the camera’s built-in sharpening. Add your own at the very last step. The amount you use will vary depending on the output medium, so test test test.

By folllowing these guidelines you can make good-looking shots even better with color correction. But what about a shot that isn’t so great to start with? Turns out there’s hope. Below is a 7D shot that I grabbed in an uncontrolled situation. In my haste, I underexposed, and used the “cloudy” white balance when I probably should have used tungsten. But with a little denoising, careful analysis of the colors in the image, and a Colorista Power Mask, I was able to rescue this shot.

Yes, you can color correct your HDSLR footage, and you should. Color correction can make a good shot great, and in a pinch, put an unusable shot back in the game.

Nothing profound here, just some fun new gear mixing well with some trusty old gear into what for me is a “where have you been all my life” rig.

Pictured here is the Canon 7D with the venerable Canon 50mm f/1.4. It’s sitting on the skeleton of the Redrock Micro “Captain Stubling” rig, handles removed, and slipped into Redrock’s tripod platform plate. That’s sitting on a crusty old Bogen fluid head that I had lying around (the current equivalent in size would probably be the popular Manfrotto 701HDV).

That’s mounted to my new slider rig from Glidetrack. It’s the Glidetrack HD to be specific, and I chose the 1M length, which feels like the right balance of utility and portability for me. I’m more likely to use it for push-ins than for side-to-side motions, and when you’re using it for the “slow creep,” there’s only so long a slider can be before it shows up in your shot. There are a number of terrific options out there for slider rigs, but the Glidetrack was the right choice for me because of its minimal weight and mechanical simplicity.

Hovering above it all on the Noga arm is the Ikan V5600, which is a comparatively inexpensive, lightweight HDMI monitor. It doesn’t have quite the full 720p resolution the peaking features of the Marshall V-LCD70P, [CORRECTION, Mitch below pointed out that the Marshal is not 720p—in fact it has a lower resolution than the Ikan!], but it’s still quite usable for focus. The photo above lies in its streamlined simplicity—the power and HDMI cables for the monitor make it quite a bit messier in practice.

Speaking of focus, the Redrock Micro whip makes that a little easier when back-panning on the slider. The whips come in sets of three — shown below is the shortest of the bunch. The build quality on the Redrock whips is very good.

What’s missing obviously is a good set of sticks, or possibly two, to properly support the Glidetrack. I’m still shopping and open to suggestions.

Gear porn shots like these requires bokake, here courtesy of the Canon 50mm f/1.2L on my 5D Mark II, the price of which was recently lowered.

Disclaimer: I contributed to the design of the Redrock Micro Captain Stubling rig, which recently received a glowing review on episode 53 of the always awesome Red Centre podcast.

As always, I am grateful if you shop through any of the above links, or at the ProLost store 7D Cine page!

Canon has proudly placed Nocturne on their website, echoing the up-down-up pattern Reverie experienced last year.

Astute ProLost readers will have noted that Nocturne has always been viewable on my YouTube account, since Canon never asked me to take it down, just Vincent.

As you will recall, Nocturne is a short film shot entirely in available light using two pre-release Canon 1D Mark IV HDSLRs.

Vincent Laforet wrote about the film here and here, and has a fresh update here, along with a behind-the-scenes video edited by Joseph Linaschke.

My making-of post is here.

The 1D Mark IV is starting to show up in peoples’ hands and looks to be a rockin’ solid action SLR with the autofocus that Canon shooters have long wished for. As I wrote here, it is undoubtedly $5,000 worth of stills camera. It’s probably not $5,000 worth of HD video camera, unless you very specifically need the unmatched low-light performance.

Which you very well might. It’s obviously awesome.

Just remember that the Mark IV has no ergonomic concessions to video shooting—not even a dedicated video start-stop like the 7D has. And while it has greatly reduced rolling shutter skew (Nocturne is ample evidence of this), the video aliasing/moiré is no better than that of the 5D Mark II (something you can also see in Nocturne).

Man, it’s been quite a year. Let’s buy some stuff.

I know you have this friend: “Yeah, I just got this new (insert name of entry-level DSLR). I really like it. I haven’t really had much time to learn to use it though. I mostly leave it on auto.” When they say “I really like it,” they sound like a coffee shop employee describing the vegan chocolate cookie as “delicious,” i.e. lying. They hold up their camera and sure enough, it has the kit lens. Flimsy and slow, not even worth the $120 it added to the price of the camera, it is the reason your friend is not as excited by their DSLR purchase as they thought they’d be.

Rock their world with a fast fifty—a 50mm prime with a large maximum aperture. For Canon, there’s the no-excuses 50mm f/1.8 II ($100), and the best deal going 50mm f/1.4 ($360). Or show ‘em you really love ‘em with the crazy 50mm f/1.2 L ($1600). For Nikon, there’s the 50mm f/1.8D ($125), and if you want to go big I recommend the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX ($500).

All of these are available on the ProLost Store Fast 50s page.

You also have this friend, or more likely a family member: They have a Canon PowerShot that’s never done them wrong over the several years they’ve owned it. It has a tiny little LCD screen and uses its flash in anything less than searing sunlight. They have no idea how things have improved since they spent $400 on that little beast. A new Canon Powershot that beats this oldie-but-goodie in every way can be theirs for only $150 or so: the Canon PowerShot SD1200IS. It even comes in fun colors.

What’s nice is that Canon has not changed their menu interface much over the years, so there’s not much new to learn with a new PowerShot.

For the director in your life, here’s a weird but amazing gift idea: A green laser pointer. I use these on set for everything from placing background talent to describing the height of a light, or the cut of a shadow. The green ones are visible in broad daylight, and of course demand cautious handling, as they could damage human eyesight if abused. Once you spend a day on the set with one of these in your pocket, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without one.

(There are many cheap laser pointers out there, but they are most likely lower-power lasers being overdriven. Don’t skimp.)

Another great gift for anyone who spends time on a film set is a Gerber 22-41545 Multi-Plier ($52). You can schnick out the pliers with one hand, which was something I first saw on a shoot, and it was such a profound sight that I threw my Leatherman into the ocean.

Do you still know someone who doesn’t have The DV Rebel’s Guide? If so, buy one and bludgeon them about the head and shoulders with it.

Blu-ray is the best way for a movie fan to enjoy their favorite films, and the players are not only getting more affordable, they are also starting to be as good at Blu-ray playback as the Playstation 3. The Sony BDP-N460 ($200 or less) not only plays back Blu-ray disks with the speed and slick interface of the PS3, it also streams Netflix and Amazon on-demand movies via a wired internet connection. Want to use it wirelessly? Pick up the Linksys WET610N Wireless-N Ethernet Bridge ($80).

You’ll want some good Blu-rays to play of course. I recommend a few recent sci-fi classic remasterings: Close Encounters of the Third Kind ($32) (because Spielberg films are film school every time you watch them), The Terminator ($10) (because Jim Cameron was a DV Rebel before there was DV, making this movie for $6 million, roughly the bottled water budget of Avatar), and Galaxy Quest ($17) (because damn it’s funny, and my name’s in the credits).

Lastly, something from the jaw-dropping inspiration department: Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows. From 1945 to 1950, Stanley Kubrick was a photojournalist for Look magazine. Will it shock you to learn that his photos are stunning? Even though he was a teenager at the time? I didn’t think so. This book is a reminder that every photo you make can be a step down the road to becoming a better filmmaker.

Happy holidays from ProLost!

Ever since I’ve had a computer, I’ve had long render times. Whether it was ray-traced checkerboard spheres on my Amiga 1000 or The Last Birthday Card on my blue G3 tower, I’ve always managed to find ways to keep my computer busy while I’m off pursuing other hobbies, such as sleeping, long walks on the beach, or (most likely) staring at the screen chanting “faster, faster!”

On those rare occasions that I decide to leave the computer alone with its thoughts, I sometimes wish I had a way to check in on the render progress from afar. Adobe After Effects ships with a handy script called “Render and Email” that can send you a simple email to announce the completion of a render. If you have push email on your phone, or know how to send emails that arrive as text messages (here’s how), this can be a suave way to leave your render cooking with the confidence that you’ll know precisely when to return from your three martini lunch.

But that’s not quite the same as an actual visual confirmation of a successful render. In a world of iPhones, augmented reality, and non-fat yogurt that actually tastes good, we deserve more.

I recently figured out a couple of nifty ways to get remote, visual updates on my epic After Effects renders, thanks to the insanely useful and free service known as Dropbox, AKA What Apple’s iDisk Should Have Been. Dropbox is a directory on your hard drive that is constantly syncing in the background to a remote server. You can share subfolders with specific people or groups of people (whether they be on Mac, Windows, or Linux), and these folders truly are shared in the sense that anyone to whom you grant access can add, remove, or edit files therein. I use it to collaborate with other writers, with my post-production crews, and even to remotely add photos to the screen saver loop on my parent’s iMac.

Did I mention that all of this is free, for up to 2GB of storage?

Dropbox also offers a free iPhone client [iTunes link] that allows browsing your Dropbox folders and limited file viewing. Two of the file types that can be viewed on the iPhone screen are JPEG and Quicktime.

You can set up After Effects to render to your Dropbox, and view the results on your iPhone.

Of course, it’s not exactly that simple. There’s a limit to the size of file that can be viewed on the iPhone, and you wouldn’t want to be pulling 2K DPX files across AT&T’s network even if you could do something with them once you got them. So there are a couple of things you can do to streamline the process. Unfortunately it’s a bit of work to set up.

The simplest thing to do is to configure your Render Queue item to have two Output Modules: the one you were planning on rendering anyway, and a second one set up as a JPEG sequence with the “Stretch” option enabled to scale the images down to an iPhone-friendly size. It’s this second Output Module that you’ll render to your Dropbox folder. Every time a frame completes, an iPhone-optimized JPEG of it will be automatically uploaded to your secure Dropbox storage.

The result is that every time you open the Dropbox app on your iPhone, you not only see how many frames have been rendered, but you can visually flip through the frames themselves. Sweet!

Of course, what you can’t do is view the animation at speed, so that’s where the second option comes into play. You can create a third Output Module that writes out a small (not more than 480 pixels wide or 360 pixels tall) H.264 Quicktime movie.

Now you can both check your frames as they finish, and watch the end result at speed.

If you configure that Render and Email script and use it to launch your render, you’ll also have a push notification that the render is complete.

It’s not quite the same thing as full administering your render from your phone, but it’s still pretty cool.

10 frames of a 7D resolution chart, shown here cropped 1:1, courtesy of Paul Lundahl of eMotion Studios (click the image to visit)

This article over at DVXuser caused quite a stir. Which is strange to me, because I’ve been telling you about this problem for a while now. Apparently a detailed, well-researched article with great visuals and clear explanations is more convincing than pithy quips and offhanded remarks. I’ll have to remember that.

The article by Barry Green is about the oft-reported “aliasing” artifacts in video from the Canon HDSLRs (5D Mark II, 7D, 1D Mark IV). Barry does a great job of backing up a few steps and defining the term aliasing.

Aliasing occurs when you observe, or sample, something infrequently enough that you create an impression of something that wasn’t there. Imagine a blinking light in a room with a door. You must open the door to check the status of the light. If you open the door often enough, you get a pretty good picture of the status of the light, maybe something like on, on on, off off off, on on on, etc. Your samples are frequent enough to accurately represent the light’s activity.

But imagine that you just happen to relax your light-checking to a frequency at which you see nothing but on. The light flashes once per second and you check on it once per second. As far as you know, the light is always on. Your infrequent samples give you a completely bogus picture of what the light is doing.

That’s temporal aliasing, because the insufficient sampling takes place over time. The classic cinematic example of this is the wagon wheel that seems to spin in reverse. Aliasing can also happen in spatial samples. For example, if you looked through venetian blinds at a zebra standing on his head, your partial sampling might reveal a white horse, or a black horse, depending on how the stripes lined up with the blinds.

So what does this have to do with Canon HDSLRs? The same thing it has to do with every digital camera. Every camera that uses photosites to create pixels has to deal with this venetian blind problem. There’s space between those photosites, and in that space you can miss out on important information about what was happening in front of the lens.

This is nothing new. We’ve long known that we shouldn’t wear detailed patterns or fine horizontal stripes when appearing on video. This despite the camera manufacturers’ inclusion of an Optical Low Pass Filter (OLPF), a very fancy term for a simple layer of diffusion atop the sensor designed to scatter the light a bit, so that the zebra stripe that might have slipped through the cracks will actually be spread to the pixels on either side of said crack. OLPFs work, but if they work too well the camera gets dinged by pixel-peepers as being too soft, so every camera company makes a judgment call about how much sharpness they’re willing to give up for less sizzling when a zebra does a headstand in a field of blowing grass.

The current crop of HDSLRs cheat in a big way to make video. Their sensors are not designed to blast an entire, full-resolution image out every 30th of a second. So Canon’s engineers (and Nikon’s and even Panasonics to some degree according to Barry) did what stills camera makers have always done with the “good enough” video modes on point-and-shoot cameras; they grab something less than every photosite. They look at the blinking light less often, and as a result they can pull off a whole picture at a rate speedy enough to make video.

But this picture is full of holes. And while the OLPF was designed to spread light between adjacent pixels, we’ve now dropped entire rows of pixels, so suddenly it’s insufficient by a huge margin.

What’s great about Barry’s article is that he shows you how this problem manifests itself on test charts (you know how I feel about those) and in practical use. But what’s even more shocking is that he reveals the actual resolution of these cameras. Thanks to the aliasing, it’s shockingly low. Yet the images appear crisp — and that’s Barry’s most artfully elucidated point: It’s precisely this infernal aliasing that makes the images seem sharp. If you fitted a 7D with an aggressive enough OLPF, the aliasing would disappear — along with any illusion that the 7D is a “full HD” video camera.

Some aliasing makes zebras appear stripeless. Some makes wagon wheels seem to spin in reverse. And some makes low-resolution images appear sharper than they really are.

So every HDSLR user needs to be aware of this and make a decision: Is that OK? Is the “fake detail,” as Barry repeatedly calls it, good enough for you?

For many, the answer is yes. As I have pointed out, the sex appeal of filmic DOF often wins out over technical shortcomings in shooters’ hearts, if not their minds.

Still, I have tried to warn you. I tweeted not long before Barry’s article that anyone pointing a 5D or 7D at a resolution chart is in for a nasty surprise. I also made mention of the Canon SLR’s low resolution in this post, which confused commenters, who responded that 1920x1080 was plenty. Of course it would be, but I was referring to the actual resolving power of the poorly-sampled images, which is much, much lower, as Barry empirically shows.

I even blogged this, over a year ago:

Let’s get something straight. The video from the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D MkII is not of good quality. It’s over compressed, over-processed, over-sharpened, and lacks professional control. It skews and shears and shuts off in the middle of a take. It sucks.

I was really trying to warn you guys about this.

But you didn’t listen. It took Barry’s awesome article to drive the point home. Maybe it was his facts and figures. Maybe it was his patient explanations. Or maybe it was because he did not end his article with anything like what I usually say after decrying the downsides of these cameras. Stuff like:

What the D90 and 5D2 have done is show us that it’s no longer OK for video camera manufacturers, whether they be Sony or Canon or RED, to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally. Buttons and features and resolution charts just had their ass handed to them by sex appeal.

That Barry didn’t wrap up with something gushy like that led many readers to accuse him of anti HDSLR-bias, but I think those people are wrong. Barry is a 7D owner, and challenged one aspiring HDSLR-hater with this comment:

I’ve shot some (what I consider) really, really good looking stuff on a 7D. It’s capable of great results. And I’ve shot some trash on it too, and found it very frustrating for anything wide/deep focus. But it’s $1700! You’ve got to cut it a lot of slack for that!

All I’m doing is pointing out exactly how these things work. It’s up to you to decide whether your scenarios would work within their limitations. If you’re shooting faces, they can excel. The more that you can keep out of focus, the better they’ll do. The more that’s in sharp focus, the more potential for negative complications from aliasing.

They are not a magic bullet. They are not Red-killers. They’re not sharper than conventional video cameras. Keep that all in perspective, and use them for what they’re good for, and they can do astonishingly good things at an unprecedented low price point.

Nicely said Barry. All around.

For my part, I’ve focused on the positive aspects of the 5D Mark II and the 7D because I like where they are pushing things. But I do owe it to you guys to show you that I take this aliasing problem seriously. You need to understand it well to evaluate whether an HDSLR is right for you. And I would hate to give Canon the impression that we’re content with looking at the world through venetian blinds.

A friend of mine shot this with his 7D. Right after a hundred other friends of mine shot the exact same thing with theirs.

A friend was starting in on a project that he thought he might shoot on the RED One. Understandably, he shot some tests. He was concerned about shooting in low levels of tungsten-balanced light, which is understood to be a situation that does not play to the RED One’s advantages. He was going to test against some other digital cinema cameras, and invited me to come play.

I think he was rather surprised when I told him that I would rather not. I explained myself thusly:

“I’m glad people test cameras, in the same way I’m glad people test condoms. But a condom-testing event doesn’t sound fun to me at all. At some point, you just want to pick a condom that you have reason to believe will do it’s job satisfactorily, and get busy.”

Cinematographer Geoff Boyle just posted this dutiful comparison of three 50mm cinema primes; Cooke S4, Zeiss Master Prime, and RED. I highly recommend that you download the full-res DPX files and compare them at the pixel level, because it will cure you of ever wanting to do such a test on your own. The differences are so infinitesimal that they could be accounted for by light bouncing into the scene off the operator’s cargo shorts.

Are camera tests useless? Not at all. I’m grateful that so many people want to do them. It frees me up to grab a camera that I think is going to be pretty much right for the job, and get busy.

Since then I’ve gotten many replies and comments from people shooting with the far less-expensive Extreme III and 133x cards without incident.

Here’s one such response, from Will Backer, reprinted here with his permission:

Hey Stu,

First off, thanks so much for your continued support of the indie rebel community — I’m a big fan.

I wanted to just drop you a quick recommendation regarding the flash cards you use and recommend for shooting video on the 5Dmkii and the 7D.

I haven’t shot on the 7D, which I realize has a slightly higher data rate, but I have shot 8 commercials (about 20 hours of raw footage) on the 5D with the Kingston Elite Pro 32 GB 133x cards (about $75 each), and I have not had any issues whatsoever with speed or data security.

I see that you’re still recommending the 8GB Extreme IV’s, which are 1/4 the size and more expensive than the Kingston 133x 32GBs.  I know you moved to these faster cards after losing data on the Extreme IIIs — which makes sense, but it seems the word around the net is the the Extreme III just didn’t play well with the 5Dmkii, and it isn’t necessarily a speed issue.

I bought 2 of the Kingston’s because I found people on cinema 5d successfully using them and I needed to shoot a lot in the field.  I’ve since noticed that Phillip Bloom and others use and recommend these cards as well.

Obviously it’s better safe than sorry when it comes to quality media, but the price difference is so huge that you may wanna give slower cards a try.  At least these Kingstons seem to work perfectly and offer a four-fold gain in storage capacity for your dollar.

Cheers,

-Will

Thanks Will. I’m cautiously changing my recommended cards on the 7D Cine store page and I’ll let you know if I have any issues with the Kingston card I just ordered!

If you’re hanging out with a bunch of editors and you want to play a mean trick on a friend, just find the one guy in the room who uses Sony Vegas (there will be one guy, and only one) and tell that guy that your friend, yeah, the one over there at the bar, he’s super curious about Vegas and would love to hear all about it.

(ProLost, Inc. assumes no liability for what happens next.)

Vegas fans man. They love that Vegas. And they’ll get all up in your blog and be all like, “Dude, Vegas is so underapreciated, and you guys should make Mojo for it, because of all the ruling that Vegas does all the time.”

Well guys, now what happens in Vegas, has some Mojo.

Magic Bullet Mojo, now with support for Sony Vegas.

Now leave my friend alone, he’s not even an editor, he just came for the free drinks.

Vignetty and grainy image made possible by Lightroom 3 public beta. With just a little more work this photo made with a $2,700 camera and a $1,600 lens could look almost as good as one made with a $30 Holga.

I am late in mentioning that Adobe has released a public beta of Lightroom 3.

I love Lightroom. It makes me so happy.

Here are my three favorite features of the new public beta:

• Post-crop vignette no longer looks like a slightly-used dog’s breakfast. I posted a detailed rant about this issue after the feature was released in Lightroom 2. It’s so much better now. Not perfect, but better. There are many options to play with, including a choice of modes. Tom Hogarty implied in his blog post that Adobe would like to know which you tend to prefer. All I care about is that a post-crop vignette look as much like the real thing as possible.

• Grain. In a release focussed on image quality, Adobe goes and gives us a feature to make our images more noisy. And that is because the lead Lightroom engineers are photographers, and they know that grain, like horses, is pretty. What’s not pretty is sensor noise, which lives exponentially more in the shadows. Lightroom’s grain is more perceptualy uniform, making it look very film-like. Remove noise, add grain, rule world.

• And my third favorite feature is that there’s a public beta at all. With these kinds of applications, a dialog with the users is absolutely critical. As I’ve written in the past, Apple’s policy of black-box secrecy that works so well for iPods and iPhones is disaterous for software relied upon by the creative proffesionals who are traditionally supposed to be the biggest Mac fans. Kudos to Adobe for keeping the conversation open.

If you’ve ever wanted to try out Lightroom, now’s your chance to do it for free until at least April 30, 2010, which is when the current beta expires.

Come and listen to a story about a guy named John,
Likes shooting vids, set to buy a GH1.
The day it showed up he shot some 24p,
And played it back big on his plasma TV.

16:9 that is. Widescreen. High Definition.

Well, the first thing he sees is big nasty blocks,
Color smear and compression knocked off his socks,
Then he tried to edit that 24p,
But transcoding out the pulldown kept him too busy.

3:2 that is. Interlaced. Redundant frames.

John packaged up the GH1 and sent it out the door,
Never got that shallow depth of field, the lens was just f/4.
Couldn’t abide the compression, it was so nasty,
He’d have to look elsewhere for his pocket HD.

Camera that is. Maybe a 7D. Maybe a Scarlet.

Y’all come back Panasonic, y’hear?

Many people ask me which camera they should buy. It’s a question I duck and dodge like Steven Seagal.

People have also told me that they “eagerly await my review of the Canon 7D.” Which strikes me as odd, given that I’ve never reviewed a camera in my life.

I bought a 7D. I don’t buy things to try them out. I’m not a tech journalist or someone who gets review units of new cameras. I’m a self-unemployeed filmmaker who spent his own money on it, and I’m happy with my purchase. It’s cheap by the measure of the type of video cameras I like, and it uses the same lenses that I habitually collect for my still photography.

Does the announcement of the pending firmware update to the 5D Mark II sully that happiness at all? Maybe it would if Canon was releasing it now, but since it’s a ways off, it just reminds me that I should not have bought the 7D if I didn’t have an immediate need for it. It’s a nice kick in the pants to keep shooting.

So what should you buy? If you are interested in DSLRs and have an immediate need, my recommendation is the 7D. It’s affordable, will get you on the trail of some nice lenses, and you get a free flagship-of-the-line APS-C stills camera in every box. Handy for PR stills.

I’ve prepared a 2-page Canon 7D Cine Kit store page for your convenience. Shopping there puts you in the Stu-owes-you-a-beer queue.

You could buy a 5D Mark II and wait for the firmware, miserably shooting 30p in the meantime. That sounds pretty silly to me—unless stills are more important to you than video. To me, there’s nothing like a full-frame DSLR for shooting stills. I loved my original 5D and I’ve learned to love my 5D Mark II as much. But don’t buy a camera based on what it might someday become. Buy the camera that you needed yesterday. If you’re reading this blog you know that 24p, like pants, is not optional. So for the time being, the 5D is not a great choice.

Also remember that all indications are that the 5D will get 24 and 25p, but not the 720p 50 and 60 fps modes that the 7D and 1D Mark IV have.

UPDATE: Looks like that’s not true—Canon revealed that the 5D Mark II will get all of the 7D’s frame rates.

UPDATE UPDATE: And now it looks like that’s not the case.

Ah yes, the 1D Mark IV. Should you buy that? For $5,000? That sounds expensive, but it’s what I paid for my first DV camera (the Sony VX1000 baby), which had no 24p and was, if I recall correctly, powered by steam or possibly wood. Of course, it came with a lens. The Mark IV is most assuredly $5,000 worth of stills camera body, but it’s not $5,000 worth of video camera. It has amazing low-light performance and greatly reduced rolling shutter artifacting, but it still struggles to resolve detailed scenes without nasty aliasing and color fringing, and lacks professional audio inputs. It can’t auto-focus while recording video and makes manually focussing difficult. Just like the 5D and 7D.

So unless you need to shoot in the dark and have money to spare (or are also a photojournalist who traffics in 1D bodies), I’d turn your attention back to the 7D. Convenient shopping page here. Beer owed.

Or, heck, you could go crazy and buy a “video camera.” Word on the street is that they’re damn good at shooting video. If rolling shutter really bums you out, check out the last great CCD camera, the Panasonic HMC150. It has all the same frame rates as the 7D, and get this: it’s designed to shoot video.

I’m sure someone will point out that you could wait and buy a Scarlet, or something else cool and unreleased. But this post isn’t called “What camera should I wait for, failing to do any filmmaking in the process.” I respect that RED is taking its time. We’ll talk about RED when there’s something to talk about.

So without further ado, here’s my long awaited review of the Canon 7D: Buy one, and be so busy using it that you don’t have time to talk about it. That’s my plan.

This and other screen-grabs from the upcoming behind-the-scenes video of Nocturne give you a sense of what the light was like at our location. Here we’re about to make a run on the GripTrix for the loading dock scene. Although the 5D Mark II can barely make us out, I ultimately wound up darkening the ID Mark IV’s shots for the final grade.

Read more on Vincent’s blog, and watch for his post with the behind the scenes video.

I will post something soon about our post workflow.

Mike Seymour just posted that Canon has announced a firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II that will support 24p and 25p at 1920x1080.

“We understand that EOS 5D Mark II users desire additional frame rates and we’re preparing a firmware update to allow the camera to shoot at both 24P and 25P,” said Chris Macleod, Brand Manager – EOS, Canon Australia.

Canon expects the firmware update to be available in the first half of 2010 and will release more details as they become available.

Whew.

Read the full story over at fxguide.

Two weeks ago Vincent Laforet emailed me with a cryptic request to join him in shooting a follow-up to his short film Reverie, the short that started the avalanche of excitement over DSLRs that oh-by-the-way happen to shoot video. I was flattered, but found myself thinking “Does the world need another Reverie?” What I didn’t know was that Vincent had just had his mind blown by a new prototype camera that Canon had sent him, and his mind was racing with ideas for how to put it to work.

I met up with him in LA and saw the camera. Yes, the world needed to see what thing thing could do.

The camera was, of course, the Canon 1D Mark IV. It’s the first of Canon’s professional 1D line to feature HD video recording. The Mark IV joins the I-get-tired-just-typing-the-numbers crazy-high ISO club, maxing out at a ridiculous 102,400. This insane low-light capability extends to video recording as well. The 1D Mark IV is an HD camera that can see more in low light than your eye can, recording usable video at up to ISO 6400.

On our Friday night location scout I took a break from giggling like a dork every time I pointed the camera down a dark street only to discover a supernova of illumination on the LCD, and asked the burning questions: Sensor? 1.3 crop. Aliasing? Still present. Autofocus? Not while recording.

So the Mark IV is an evolutionary step in the HDDSLR race. It doesn’t tick too many things off my wish list. Where it is revolutionary is in its low-light performance. And it has by far the least rolling-shutter shear of any DSLR I’ve ever held.

To hold it in your hand, you’d never know the 1D Mark IV has video. The body is exactly the same as that of its predecessor. After the 7D’s barrage of new buttons, including dedicated video start-stop, the Mark IV is a spare and spartan affair. My theory is that Canon doesn’t want to risk tripping up the muscle memory of its pro customers, many of whom still take this whole “photography” thing fairly seriously.

(For my part, owning a 5D Mark II and a 7D, operating the Mark IV pushed me into the schitzo zone. Now no matter which Canon HDDSLR I pick up I fumble with the controls and press the wrong thing.)

Two Nights, No Lights

Me hand-holding with a Zeiss prime (having donated my shoes to actor Mark Smith for the loading dock sequence), GripTrix driver Aaron Hummel, and Vincent with his ATM Gyro rig

Our mission was simple: We’d shoot for two nights in downtown LA, with whatever gear we could swing and no permits, and only with available light. We “lit” our scenes though careful location scouting and blocking. We shot in locations that were so dark that we could barely see. In fact, on our second night, a “real” film shoot moved in next to us under the 6th Street bridge, and they brought with them a massive truck with a crane-mounted stadium light array of nine HMIs to shoot the area we’d just left.

So let me say this clearly: This camera alleviates concerns over quantities of light. It’s still up to you to supply—or find—the quality of light.

Here are some random notes:

• It’s one thing to shoot a film in two nights, but its another thing entirely to post it in a week. Editor Benjamin Nussbaum at Pictures in a Row is a total rock star. He took our hectic collection of footage and made it sing. If you need your shit cut good, go to Pictures in a Row. Seriously.
• I was all WTF? about the 1.3 crop, But Vincent reminded me that in the pro line, the 1D model has always been APS-H and the 1Ds series is full-frame. Still, we wound up fiddling with prime lens choices more than we might with a more familiar sensor size.
• The reduced size of the sensor is considered in the stills world to be a worthwhile compromise in the name of faster frame rates. The equivalency in HD video might be sensor read-out times, because the rolling-shutter nastiness was so minimal that we did not shy away from Bourne-cam, whip-pans, and scrolling backgrounds.
• Speaking as someone who owns a 5D Mark II and a 7D, it’s that last point that makes me most envious of the Mark IV. Seeing in the dark is cool, but not worrying about Jello-cam is even better.
• Vincent and I collaborated with a third co-director, David Nelson. Sharing directing duties is hard, but if you put real effort into the collaboration it can be very rewarding.
• We did color correct and lightly denoise the shots. When Reverie first hit, it was important to see “what the camera can do,” but now I think we’ve all matured a bit and are interested in how a new camera fits into a reasonable post pipeline.
• You can color correct a three-minute short in one night using After Effects and Colorista. Sunrises are pretty.

The inevitable question: Should you buy the Mark IV? It’s gonna be expensive, and the APS-H sensor feels like a rest-stop on the way to a 1Ds Mark IV with full frame (and possiby a million other things we want, according to rather optimistic rumors). I’m happy with my 7D, and hold out hope for a firmware update for my 5D Mark II (UPDATE: Holy shit!). I’ll hold off on buying a Mark IV.

Until the next time I feel like making a movie in the dark.

Be sure to read Vincent’s post here. Like I have to tell you that.

Bold Films has picked up PSYOPS, an action thriller from Scott Stewart and Gus Krieger.

Stewart, who is directing the vampire action thriller Priest, came up with the initial story, then developed it with Krieger, who will write the script.

Stuart Maschwitz, who co-founded visual-effects company The Orphanage with Stewart, is attached to make his directorial debut.

PSYOPS revolves around a covert U.S. military unit of psychological operatives who specialize in exploiting their target’s deepest fears. When on a routine mission to the Amazon Basin, they discover something more terrifying than they could have imagined.

Read the full story here.

When he’s not producing my directorial debut, Scott Twitters his adventures from the director’s chair of Priest. Follow him at @robotproof.

There, I got that all typed up without using any exclamation points. How’s that for self-control?

I used to show you weird crap like this all the time

Back in the day I blogged a lot about how compositing and rendering computer graphics in “linear light.” a color space in which pixel values equate to light intensities, can produce more realistic results, cure some artifacts, and eliminate the need for clever hacks to emulate natural phenomena. Along with Brendan Bolles, who worked with me at The Orphanage at the time, I created eLin, a system of plug-ins that allowed linear-light compositing in Adobe After Effects 6 (at the mild expense of your sanity). I also created macros for using the eLin color model in Shake and Fusion. Along the way I evangelized an end to the use of the term linear to describe images with a baked-in gamma correction.

Then Adobe released After Effects 7.0, which for the first time featured a 32-bit floating point mode, along with the beginnings of ICC color management, which could be used to semi-automate a linear-light workflow. The process was not exactly self-explanatory though, so I wrote a series of articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on how one might go about it.

Then I rambled endlessly on fxguide about this, and in the processes managed to cast a geek spell on Mike Seymour and John Montgomery, who republished my articles on their fine site with my blessing.

This week Mike interviewed Håkan “MasterZap” Andersson of Mental Images about the state of linear workflows today on that same fxguide podcast.

Which is so very awesome, because I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

It’s just no fun going around telling people “Oh, so you put one layer over another in After Effects? Yeah, you’re doing it wrong.” Or “Oh, you launched your 3D application and rendered a teapot? Yeah, you’re totally doing it wrong.”

You are doing it wrong. And I spent a good few years trying to explain why. But now I don’t have to, because Mike and MasterZap had a great conversation about it, and nailed it, and despite the nice things they said about ProLost you should listen to their chat instead of reading my crusty old posts on the subject.

Because it has gotten much, much simpler since then.

For example, there’s Nuke. Nuke makes it hard to do anything but work in linear color space. Brings a tear to my eye.

And the color management stuff in After Effects has matured to the point that its nearly usable by mortal men.

Since I’ve seen a lot of recent traffic on those crusty old posts, here’s my linear-light swan song: a super brief update on how to do it in AE CS4:

In your Project Settings, select 32 bpc mode, choose sRGB as your color space, and check the Linearize Working Space option:


When importing video footage, use the Color Management tab in Interpret Footage > Main to assign a color profile of sRGB to your footage:


Composite your brains out (not pictured).

When rendering to a video-space file, use the Color Management tab in your Output Module Settings to convert to sRGB on render:

That’s the how. For the why, well, those crusty old articles could possibly help with that, especially this one on color correction in linear float, and this one on when not to use linear color space. Part 6 is still pretty much accurate in describing how to extract a linear HDR image from a single raw file using Adobe Camera Raw importer in After Effects, and this article covers the basics fairly well, although you should ignore all the specifics about the Cineon Emulation mode, which never should have existed. This little bit of evangelism is still a good read.

But the ultimate why answer is, and has been for a while now, within the pages of a book you should have anyway: Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques (deep breath). Brendan Bolles guest-authored a chapter on linear light workflow, and not only does he explain it well, he gives many visual examples. And unlike me, Mark keeps his book up-to-date, so Brendan’s evergreen concepts are linked directly to the recent innovations in After Effects’s color manglement.

OK, that’s it. Let us never speak of this again.

One of my fxphd shots with nothing more than Mojo applied

If you watched my tutorial on achieving the “Hollywood blockbuster look” using various color correction tools, you probably noticed the consistent theme among the very different example films I showed you how to match—the ubiquitous cool shadows, warm highlights look. Whether the film is bleached of all color (like Terminator Salvation) or super saturated (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), and whether it is overall warm or cool, modern films have zeroed in on a color correction style that tends to preserve skin tones and set them off against a cooler backdrop.

The same shot before Mojo

It’s more than possible to achieve this look with Colorista or Magic Bullet Looks (check out the Blockbuster preset—it’s been there since day one). But sometimes you just want to spruce up your footage quickly and easily, without a hundred presets to peruse or a powerful colorist’s interface to manipulate.

Sometimes you just want to take your footage that already looks pretty darn good, and give it a little bit of… Mojo.

Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software is the pocket-sized screwdriver to Magic Bullet Looks’s cordless driver drill. It does one thing, and does it quickly and easily. It gives you that Mojo thang with just a few simple sliders to adjust, and ships with presets for popular looks.

Unlike Looks and Colorista, Mojo is a bit of a one-trick pony. It’s simple and easy and priced to be an impulse-buy at $99 US. One license allows you to use it in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Avid, After Effects, and Apple Motion [UPDATE: Now Sony Vegas as well!]. Mojo is also now a part of the Magic Bullet Suite.

Mojo has some cool new features that you’ll recognize from the tutorial video. Since it’s all about skin tones, Mojo has simple sliders for emphasizing, cleaning up, and adjusting skin coloration. It even features a helpful overlay that gives you the same kind of skin-tone guidance for which expert colorists rely on their vectorscopes.

Here are some preemptive answers to questions you might have about Mojo:

Q: Isn’t this look just a cheap gimmick? Just a trend that could pass in a few days/weeks months?

A: Maybe, but in another way it’s an evolution of practices many years old in color correction suites around the world. Is it overused? Sure, but that’s because it works. Personally, I love the way it looks, when done tastefully. We provide the tools, you provide the taste. Try turning the Mojo slider down instead of up when you first apply it.

Q: I applied Mojo but my skin tones aren’t popping.

A: Your faces might be underexposed a bit. Try reducing Mojo Balance—it’s the control that determines what’s a shadow and what’s a highlight. Skin tones tend to fall right in between.

Q: I tried the demo and Mojo makes my footage look terrible.

A: Mojo is designed to work with footage that’s pretty solid to begin with. If what you need is color correction, then reach for Colorista. If you love the way your footage looks before Mojo, try the “Mojito” preset—it’s just a little bit of Mojo.

Q: Why do the sliders have more range in FCP than in After Effects?

A: Actually, they have the same ranges, but in After Effects we can have the slider min/max be different from the absolute min/max. I wish FCP would let us do that too, because the ranges we show in AE represent a “sweet spot,” and the values outside those ranges are kind of pushing things into the red a little.

Q: I already have Magic Bullet Looks, why do I need Mojo?

A: Because you don’t open a walnut with a jackhammer. In my own experience, Magic Bullet Looks is occasionally a bit to much overhead for a quick-turnaround project. Mojo is so quick and easy that I reach for it all the time, saving Looks for those occasions when I want to invest some time into my color grading.

Q: Will you tell my clients I’m using it?

A: No. It’ll be our little secret.

Yes, it’s a camera test more than a short. You could even call it Bokake. But it looks freaking great and should be enough to convince folks that you can have your DOF cake and eat it too with an APS-C sensor, as long as you’re willing to invest in fast glass.

Philip did everything right, including sticking to a 180 degree shutter (1/50 at 24p and 1/100 at 50p) and thinking of the frame rates other than 24 fps as opportunities to overcrank for 24p playback.

I took the Canon 7d, Zacuto Tactical rig, Z-Finder V2 and one lone lens, a Canon 35mm f1.4, which becomes more like a 50mm lens on the 7d…

Image wise, it’s very similar to the 5dmkII. Sure it isn’t as sexy image wise, but it is pretty close. It is a tad less sensitive than the 5dmkII but only just. This is as expected due to the smaller sensor. Also I would say it is a little bit noisier image wise than the 5dmk2. But not too much.

For me the thing i love most about the camera is the different frame rates. I can shoot full HD 24p, 25p and of course 30p BUT really excitingly I can shoot 720p 50p and 60p which although when played back at normal speed locks horrible and video like to me it means you can easily tell your editing system to play it back at 24p or 25p or 30p and get a lovely in camera slow motion. I have missed slow motion since using the 5dmk2 so much.

More here.

Log in to Vimeo and download the 1080p24 original and watch it big. The 7D is gonna do just fine, flaws and all.

After:

Coming soon.

I wonder if someday, maybe when I climb both Mount Fuji and Yellow Mountain in the same week, I will understand how Canon names their SLR bodies.

Today Canon announced the EOS 7D. The name makes it sound like the 5D, but it is decidedly unlike it. It is vastly superior in every way, except in pixel count, and by a very significant difference in sensor size. The 7D is an APS-C body, with a crop factor of 1.6.

The main reason you’re reading about the 7D here is that it records HD video. Canon has done with the 7D what they either could not or would not do with the 5D Mark II: they have included a plethora of useful frame rates (revised, see update below).

• At 1920x1080: 23.976, 24, 29.97, 30
• At 1280x720: 50 and 59.94 (often called 60p)

Check, check, and check. That’s pretty much awesome. I mean, we can dream of 50 and 60 fps at 1080p, but in all fairness those frame rates are usually only found at 720p even on very high-end HD cameras.

Combining that with the same manual control that came at long last to the 5D Mark II, and you have a camera that addresses some of the biggest shortcomings of DSLR cinematography.

Some, but not all. Does the 7D skip lines to create its HD images? Seems so. Is the compression still aggressive and unfriendly to post? Probably. Rolling shutter Jell-O? Likely. And there’s still no video-friendly autofocus such as we find in the Panasonic GH1.

(I know that we classy filmmaking pros are supposed to hate on autofocus, but as I wrote in the DV Rebel’s Guide, the truth is that, for the crew-of-few, it’s a nice option to have. Especially when it’s smart enough to track faces, even specific faces. Focus pulling is hard. Focus pulling while operating a clumsy camera with no focus aides of any kind and a VistaVision-sized chip has had me secretly longing for video autofocus on my 5D Mark II. Focus pulling while swinging your SLR around on a Steadicam Merlin is actually impossible. So please forgive my pining for fingertip on-off smart-as-heck autofocus on my big-chip digital cinema camera.)

What’s missing from the 7D?

• Autofocus (see above).
• Focus-assist while recording, in the form of an edge-detection display overlay.
• Gentle compression (although it seems the 7D’s video bitrate might be a little higher than the 5D’s).
• Funky frame rates. Even Jackie Chan shoots his fight scenes at 22 fps. After a big lunch, he might call for 21 or even 20fps.
• Decoupling shooting frame rate from playback. I’ll probably shoot a ton of stuff at 60p for slow-mo, adding more fun to the workflow puzzle posed by these cameras that crash the video party without a SMPTE invite.
• Video ergonomics. The 7D lacks a flip-out LCD. They call it that because if the 7D had included one, I would have seriously flipped out. I’d like to lose the double chin.
• Quality. The 7D still skips lines to make its HD images, resulting in aliasing and color artifacts. And it still has rolling shutter issues.
• Recordable HD HDMI output.
• Full-frame.

Yeah, let’s talk about that last one. Yesterday, when the 7D’s specs were “translated” from Chinese into English by some sort of cruel, sadistic computer, many people, presumably 5D fans, called its APS-C sensor a “deal breaker.”

The 5D Mark II is the camera I want for shooting stills. How luxurious that it also shoots video, albeit with many limitations. I very publicly hoped Canon would shore up those shortcomings, and they did, some. It did occur to me though, when the Canon/Nikon DSLR arms race grew to encompass video, that my ideal stills rig may not always happen to be my perfect motion rig.

Ever since I treated myself to the original 5D, I’ve been hooked on full-frame. Or should I say re-hooked, as it was the 5D that made digital photography once again as rewarding as it had been with my 35mm Nikormat. I have no interest in a crop-sensor DSLR for shooting stills. But is APS-C an acceptable sensor-size for filmmaking? Ask any RED One owner. Or for that matter, any 35mm motion picture camera owner. APS-C is quite similar to the Super-35 imager size regarded as a holy grail in digital cinema.

APS-C is a perfectly awesome sensor size for filmmaking. The proof is… movies.

But it’s not that simple.

RED, Panavison, Arri, and others have optimized their cinema prime lens offerings for that Super 35 size. Canon’s range of big, expensive primes make sense on their big, expensive, full-frame cameras. Canon’s 24, 35, 50 primes become 38, 56, and 80 equivalencies, respectively. There’s a pricey 14mm that becomes a 22, but nothing between that and the 24(38)mm. To achieve a nice range of focal lengths for 7D filmmaking, you’ll have to use zooms. Since you have to work harder to achieve shallow depth of field, you’ll need expensive, fast-and-wide zooms. The optional kit lens will kill your DOF fetish faster than a $3500 1/4” JVC GY-HM100U. The 16–35mm f/2.8L will be a popular lens for filmmakers—it is to the 7D (roughly) what the beloved 24–70mm f/2.8L is to the 5D.

UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that the less-expensive, longer-ranged EF-S 17–55mm f/2.8 IS (27–88mm equivalent) might be an even better choice if you don’t care about compatability with a full-frame body. The 17–55 seems like a terrific lens, but I will stick to lenses that I can use for both video on the 7D and stills on my 5D Mark II.

The twice-as-vast area of the 5D Mark II’s sensor means more flexibility with more lenses, and more control over DOF. Yes, this includes the option to push it to a fetishistic extreme, but also the ability to achieve cinematic DOF with the slower stop of an affordable, flexible zoom lens. So Canon, if complaints about the 7D’s sensor size get annoying, you have no one to blame but yourself. It was you who hooked us on the glorious excess of affordable digital VistaVision filmmaking.

So now there’s a camera that, technically speaking, does everything better than my 5D Mark II. Better autofocus, more stills-per-second, better weather sealing, and better flash control.

But I don’t care. For stills, I’ll stick to my 5D Mark II. Eight-perf VistaVision, what stills folk think of as “full frame,” is the right sensor size for my kind of photography.

But APS-C, roughly the same as four-perf 35mm and what cinema folk consider full-frame, has been well-established as a wonderful size for filmmaking.

So you got me Canon. I’ll probably buy a 7D, and use it for nothing but video. I may have to switch up my lens shopping list, bumping up the 16–35 ahead of the 70–200. At least I can buy lenses that I can use with both my stills rig and my interchangeable lens, variable-frame-rate, Super 35(ish) sensor HD video camera.

That costs $1700.

And that’s the punch line: An interchangeable lens, variable-frame-rate, Super 35(ish) sensor HD video camera for $1700.

Canon, you’re gonna sell a bazillion of these. And you deserve to.

It’s tempting to project right past the 7D and imagine that maybe the rumored successor to the 1Ds line will capture all the new stills improvements of the 7D and combine them with a full-frame sensor. For a mere several thousand dollars you could have it all. Maybe. At some indeterminate time in the future.

Screw that. The 7D costs as much as a nice lens and it’s real.

If you can get your hands on one.

Do I still love my 5D Mark II? Absolutely.

Do I wish Canon would sprinkle it with magic 24p dust? Of course.

Is the 7D the perfect DV Rebel Camera? No. I still recommend a good, solid HD camcorder for filmmaking that doesn’t require fetishistic shallow depth of field. Which, FYI, is almost all filmmaking.

Has DSLR cinematography arrived?

Yes.

As of today (and barring any unforeseen surprises), the answer is yes.

Pre-order your 7D from Amazon now.

I sure did.

I’ve tried it, and it works—sometimes. The Foundry are well known for being leaders in the motion estimation field, and they have harnessed their unique experience in this area to attempt the impossible: a per-pixel reconstruction of every part of the frame, where it “would have been” if the shutter had been global open-close instead of read out a line at a time.

When it works, it’s brilliant. But the more motion you have in the frame, the more likely this plug-in, mighty though it may be, will get confused. Unfortunately, when this happens, parts of the image turn to scrambled eggs.

It’s a very similar problem to re-timing 30p footage to 24p actually—in fact, I wish The Foundry had added an option for frame rate conversion to this plug-in. Although, in fairness, I would only rarely use it.

Folks are always asking me about converting 30p to 24. I responded in a thread on the Rebel Café:

…The more motion you have, the more likely it is that any optical flow re-timing system is going to encounter problems.

Not even getting into the combat shots, here’s the Apple Compressor method referenced in Philip’s tutorial failing on one of the more sedate shots in After The Subway:

Now I’m not saying that you won’t occasionally see results from 30-to-24p conversions that look good. The technology is amazing. But while it can work often, it will fail often. And that’s not a workflow. It’s finger-crossing.

On a more subtle note, I don’t think it’s acceptable that every frame of a film should be a computer’s best guess as to what happened between captured frames. The magic of filmmaking comes in part from capturing and revealing a narrow, selective slice of something resonant that happened in front of the lens. When you do these motion-interpolated frame rate conversions, you invite a clever computer algorithm to replace your artfully crafted sliver of reality with a best-guess. I feel (and feel free to disagree, I won’t bother arguing) that this artificiality accumulates to create a feeling of unphotographic plasticness. Screw that. Didn’t you select the 5D because you wanted emotionally resonant imagery? You’d be better off with a true 24p video camera that works with you rather than against you, even if it doesn’t give you the convenient crutch of shallow DOF.

To be crystal clear, that’s Apple Compresser failing to properly estimate the motion in one particular frame when trying to convert from 30p to 24p. Nothing to do with The Foundry or their new plug-in, which actually tackled that same shot quite well.

The Foundry knows that they’ve made a tool to help us limp along while camera manufacturers sort out this CMOS issue. Like any crutch, I wouldn’t plan on leaning too hard on it—but kudos to The Foundry for attacking this problem head on, and making a product out of a technology demo in record time.

As I’ve twittered numerous times, Save the Cat! is my favorite screenwriting book of all time—and I’m the king of reading screenwriting books (sure beats writing!). It’s been on the front page of the ProLost Store since I first read it.

If you haven’t treated yourself to this book, now is a great time. I’ll donate this month’s Amazon Associates revenue from the above links to the charity of his family’s choice.

Thanks @ShadowMakerSdR for letting me know.

I posted a while back about using Canon’s PictureStyleEditor software to create these custom Picture Styles. Since then I have found that the controls in the camera are more than sufficient for creating a more post-friendly look for the 5D’s video files.

Starting with the “Neutral” setting, I make the following modifications:

• Sharpness all the way down
• Contrast all the way down
• Saturation two notches down

Save that as on of your User Defined Picture Styles. Then hop over to the Custom Function menu, select C.Fn II: Image, and enable Highlight Tone Priority.

UPDATE: Or don’t. See Update 1 below.

Your settings should look like this:

This will remove the contrasty, video-like tone curve from your future recordings, and eek out a little more highlight detail. Here’s a shot made with the default settings:

Video frame made with Standard Picture Mode, Highlight Tone Priority offHere’s that same shot with the Stu settings:

“Stu settings”

You can see the reduced contrast, the increase in shadow and highlight detail. It’s closer to a raw image with a linear tone curve. Zoom in and you can see the difference in highlight handling on the reflections:

Default settings — harsh, clipped highlightsStu settings — smooth rolloff in the highlights, increased detailYou can also see the difference in sharpening artifacts. My settings reduce, but do not eliminate, the moiré effect endemic to the 5D Mark II’s line-skipping:

Default settingsStu settings

You’re going to put all that contrast and most of that sharpening back in post of course, but in your own way, and with more control, and after any shot-to-shot evening out or clever power windows. The ability to design a “zeroed out” or CINE_LIKE-esque Picture Style is one of the things that makes the 5D Mark II’s video dangerously close to usable.

I recommend assigning this setting to one of your Custom notches on the mode dial, so that you don’t inflict these settings on your stills. They don’t affect raw files of course (UPDATE: That’s not actually true, see Update below), but they do get baked into the JPEG previews that accompany those raw files. I have the above settings registered as C3 (along with manual control and a 1/60th shutter), so I can quickly pop into my ideal movie capture settings.

(Plus also lots of great moments from the now-underway DSLR Cinematography course at fxphd)

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