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.
When it rains it pours.
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.
Update on 2009-10-20 05:51 by Stu
Readers of this blog, y’all should pat yourselves on the back for this one. This is a great example of a big behemoth of a company hearing its users and responding. Well done.
So here’s the state of HDDSLRs: Amazon has the 5D Mark II in stock now for $2780, the 7D in stock for $1900 (short wait for $1700), and the 1D Mark IV available for pre-order for $5000.
And we’re only 10 days away from new announcments from RED.
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, 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 HDSLR 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.)
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.
Let me state 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 notes in the experience:
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 possibly 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.
John’s kind comment bellow reminded me of a point I wanted to make. He described the short as looking “gritty and filmic,” and I take that as a huge compliment. We achieved that in a number of ways, both creative and technical, but one simple technical rule helped in no small way: we limited ourselves to a 180 degree shutter. In other words, if we were shooting 24p, we used at least a 1/50 shutter—usually 1/60 to avoid flicker. When we shot 60p, we used a shutter of 1/125.
You may recall that my principal criticism of Reverie was that its wide-open shutter (impossible to override at the time) gave it the look of well-shot video.
Others have tried to use digital cinema cameras to capture the beauty of downtown Los Angeles at night, but they’ve always needed to open their electronic shutter past 180 virtual degrees, and the results are a dead giveaway of video origination. The 1D Mark IV gave us the low-light performance we needed to stick to our guns on the 180 degree maximum shutter rule.
Inexplicably, Canon has asked Vincent Laforet to remove Nocturne from his blog today. Vincent reminds us that “this happened last year [with Reverie] and all was fine a few days later.” So let’s hope that’s the case this time as well.
The SmugMug embed above worked for a while after the news but has finally died, it seems.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
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 it’s nearly usable by mortal humans.
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.
Update
on 2009-09-30 21:12 by Stu
I can’t believe I wrote all that without once linking to the official Adobe whitepaper on Color Managed workflows in Adobe After Effects CS4. It’s a great write-up, super detailed, and accurate in every way. Further proof that my work here is done.
