first real 550D shooting

Well i “just” got back from a one week shooting for a new corporate film project. My new “toy” just came in the right (last) minute to test this thing in a real shooting / work scenario.

We went to all different kind of locations and situations: daylight, lowlight, indoor, outdoor … you name it … only thing we didn’t shoot this time was any kind of interview or something …

Just big or small machines and people around them, landscapes, buildings … stuff like that.

Fist of all i have to admit i did not have any kind of DSLR rig, so that was a “big” problem in some situations … but a sachtler Video 20, a Manfrotto monopod and even a “magic arm” did it in the meantime … but “handheld-kinda”stuff was almost impossible to shoot without getting a rather shaky picture …

Anyway… the 550D was not our main cam, we used the XH-A1 most of the time.

550D just became our “atmospheric” DOF-film-like tool … for our beauty-shots, so to say.

I used the canon 50mm 1.8 most of the time, cuz all the photo zoom lenses had quit a problem with the “adjustable” aperture turing “zooming”. i did get some kind of short flicker. i don’t know if that kind of problem comes with all HD-DSLR’s or just with the 550D ?!.

right now i’m rushing through all the footage we shot on XH-A1 and 550D … after that i can say more about the usefulness for this project …

I will post some “examples” soon … even if i know i wont get full permission to post all the footage we shot.

here is our “gear-list” and some BTS snap-shots … to be continued

One word about the SD cards and Batteries …

Well, Batteries are empty quite fast … two of them are a must have … better of with 3 … if you can charge them at  / over night (if not, better get more) … charging take a few hours but that is ok.

About the SD cards: You cant’ have enough of them. If you are shooting a lot for B-Cam  2 or 3x 16 GB is ok … even class 4 is working good in normal situations… can’t say anything about 32GB SDHC-Cards … didn’t get one yet …

About my Data-Backup routine: Every night i took my SD-Cards and transferred the data to my external 250GB Hard-drive (on a MacBook) i made new folders for every day (named with the date) even sub folders called card one, two and so on  … i did a quick check on the footage, compared number of files in the  folder and folder-sizes and formated the SD-Card within the Cam. Thats it pretty much.

UPDATE:

Right now i’m in post (FCP) with this … first things first … i transcoded all footage with MPEG Streamclip to 1920×1080 ProResLT (HDV and h.264 footage).  Everything will end up in a HDTV1080i timeline … (yes interlaced – better for slowmo and stuff) … i will generate a “progressive” version in the end so the 550D footage will not “generate” any trouble (i hope) … right now i just can say: 550D footage looks really awesome … i will have to face some “smoothcam” work and even some “overexposed” trouble … but my goal is to make a beautiful film (literally) so a blown out sallow depth of field will help with that anyway

… stay tuned for more background info during my render times …

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GEAR LIST:

Canon XH-A1 (2x battery)

550D (2x battery, 2x 16 GB SDHC class 6 and 4, 1x 8GB SDHC, 1 ND 4 filter,

lenses: Canon 50mm 1.8, Canon EF-S 18-55mm 3.5 – 5.6 (kit lens), canon zoom EF 28-90mm 4-5.6

Sachtler Video 20 tripod

manfrotto Monopod

steady bag

6m jib (astro crane)

Zoom H4

Rode NTG1 & NTG3 (boom & stuff)

2x Arri 1.2 k HMI

3x 650W tungsten Kobold set

and more suff (Manfrotto 035 Super-Clamp & Magic Arm … things like that)

…
MacBook Intel Dual 1,83 GHz

ScanDisk ImageMate Multi-Card USB – SD-Card reader

XH-A1, 550D and some “lousy” coffee it the field

550D on a Manfrotto Magic Arm fixed with a Manfrotto 035 Super-Clamp on a simple microphone tripod

the ASTRO Crane Jib

 

550D with ND4 Filter
all about ND’s & Stuff on/at Nino’s Blog -
“…DEPTH OF FIELD and ND filters”
http://ninofilm.net/blog/2010/03/29/depth_of_field/

THE “BIG” INTERCUT (EX FC150, XH-A1, Canon 7D, RED ONE, DVX100)

A few day’s ago two things “happened”

fist: Scott from Rocked Rentals posted/shared a bunch of RED ONE (Mysterium X) low light test R3D’s over twitter … so we all could have a try … that’s one of the kinda things with this great twitter/film community. anyway, i tried build 99 of REDCINE-X … that was fun and nice to play with some RED ONE footage.

UPDATE: REDCINE X Built 104 MAC Pre-Release is out now

Apple Color REDCODE plugin 4.0 beta is out now too

second thing: Tom Guilmette posted some test footage on his blog post about the new little Casio EX FC150 Camera which can shoot 120 fps and more in video-mode. so i played with this footage too … after a “few minutes” an lil intercut-test cam to my mind…

how good is this footage in a regular or typical project / workflow … which is 1080p or 720p HD footage for a SD DVD delivery?

so in the end i put a bunch of “flavors” in one timeline. in this first edition i used a 720p HQ (1280×720, 29,97fps) FCP preset.
in that timeline i dropped the original Casio AVI’s (no trancoding), some XH-A1 ( 50i, HDV 1440×1080 and ProResLT 1920×1080 transcoded), one 7D clip i got from Scott Simmons (editblog) ( i did an basic h264 to ProResLT – 1920×1080 transcode with MPEGStreamclip ) … and some RED ONE (Mysterium X) clips shared (R3D’s) by Scott. in this case i did some lil adjustments in REDCINE-X (nothing too fancy … you could do a lot more with RED footage … but that is not the point this time) so i did a basic 1920×1080 ProResHQ transcode / export and dropped these RED clips in my 720p timeline as well …)

UPDATE: NOW all clips 29,97fps conformed

Thanks to Genus Products on twitter. we discussed a few off many options to do this frame-rate conforming one is to do it with cinema tools: Genus Products: “Change the time base in Cinema tools. But only do on copies of files” but this doesn’t work for native HDV files (interframe issue ) so you have to transcode to PreRes (recommendation anyway)

another way – use compressor - Genus Products: ”While it won’t be fast use motion compensated settings in Compressor which make use of optical flow technology found in Shake.” (a nice link i’ve got – Genus Products:“While a little out of date read this article might be helpful: converting_frame_rates_compressor“)

i tested another solution: just a transcode in MPEGStreamclip to 29,97 fps… but i’ve had some flickering / quality issues in some details in the shots (in trees and so on)

satisfied ? … not yet ! PAL footage isn’t “faltering” as much as before but stillnot quite as good as in a PAL 25p/50i Timeline … working on that.

so i will try the slow compressor way… 20h + to render though for 4 clips …

 

so that’s it … i tried the “easy” way fist … so no advanced scaling and/or transcoding with all the footage … i just used it straight away

of course i had some trouble with all that 25p / 50i footage in a 29,97 timeline … but i’m more a PAL 25p kinda guy … so give me some time to do a better version in the next few days

so in the end (in my opinion) its stunning how good this DVX100 footage still is and you can see how much shaper the RED footage is … in relation to the “cloudy” HDV stuff … the 7D footage is as expected … quit good … but i will try (have to) some more of that flavor too. Casio EX FC150 is good too (at this pice point) but it’s not made for more than 720p and web usage … but still great to have a “cheap” SloMo-Cam at your service (if needed)

Ok that’s it so far … some more to come.

if the vimeo version is offline (for update reasons) the 1st edition is on exposureroom too:exposureroom.com

now some “BTS” pictures & facts:

RED ONE Footage in REDCINE-X in there you can to quit a lot color-grade stuff
it’s a nice free tool form RED

in addition to make this more fun to watch i did add some kind of sound design and music

i used LogicPro 9.1 (32 bit mode) and used my Euphonix MC Control & MC Mix to handle the 33 Tracks

for mastering the mix i used (my loved) Ozone3 PlugIn.