Dublin's People

Two days ago I wrote of the Canon 7D that “there is no Reverie video to erase all doubts about its capabilities.” Philip Bloom has changed that with Dublin’s People.

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.

With the 7D You Might Just Be Forced to Use Your Filmmaking

In my announcement day post I made an argument in favor of the new Canon 7D, a camera I haven’t even seen or used, and for which there is no Reverie video to erase all doubts about its capabilities. For balance, here’s the real quick case against the 7D.

I said of the 5D Mark II that “Buttons and features and resolution charts just had their asses handed to them by sex appeal.” In other words, the video that comes out of the 5D Mark II can be so emotionally stimulating that we forgive its rather egregious shortcomings.

The 7D has many, but not all of the same shortcomings as the 5D Mark II. And while an APS-C sensor is lovely for filmmaking, in that it is so similar to a Super 35 film frame, another way of looking at the 7D sensor is that it is an adequate size for filmmaking, where the 5D’s is excessive.

The 5D Mark II’s excessive sensor size allows excessive sex appeal (in the form of shallow DOF). Enough, for some, to outweigh its downsides.

The 7D’s about-right sensor size means that its shortcomings, such as rolling shutter, poor resolution, excessive compression, and video-as-afterthought features and ergonomics, will stand out much more than they have with the 5D.

You can’t drench your 7D shots in sultry shallow DOF delight quite as easily as you can with the 5D.

So you might actually have to start doing some filmmaking.

The 5D has prompted a ton of “beauty reels,” but not many narrative films. I’m guilty of this too, calling my first 5D short a “camera test” to let myself off the hook for not telling a story. Maybe the 7D, with its more conservative sensor size, will make it less tempting to create another seven-minute boke-porn reel (bokake?), and remind people that audiences want to know what happens next, not what’s going to be marvelously out of focus in the background next.

The Foundry Un-Rolls Your Shutter

The Foundry have released a $500 plug-in for Nuke and After Effects that attempts to remove rolling shutter artifacting, AKA “Jell-o cam,” from CMOS footage (RED One, Canon HV40, Canon 5D Mark II, etc.). It’s based on a technology demo that they showed at NAB earlier this year.

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.

Update

on 2009-08-06 21:32 by Stu

Of course, there will always be some rolling-shutter artifacts that can never be fixed: