Cinematography thread: No film vs. video talk, dammit

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Cinematography thread: No film vs. video talk, dammit

Spaceman Love: Jun 19, 2003; come on take a trip in my rocket ship

butterypancakes posted:

I use to edit a lot of XL2 footage, how much difference do those presets make?

Even if you don't have some sweet color grading skills couldn't you just replicate most of that with Magic Bullet?

The output of cameras like the XL2 is very heavily compressed, heavily subsampled, and only 8bit. That limits how far you can push your image around before it starts breaking up and looking awful. Not only that, but depending on how you have your color set in camera, you're throwing out a ton of additional data. Setting the color in-camera, however, does these color corrections to the raw image, after it comes off the CCD and before it hits the compression, so it's going to look way better and you'll be able to push it much farther. Obviously this limits you in that you need to know what it should look like before you shoot, and in that once you've shot it, the color is "baked in," and you have very little latitude to alter it. Still, this is pretty much the recommended way to deal with color with consumer and prosumer cameras (and still many professional ones).

# ¿ Oct 24, 2009 01:56

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 14:21

Spaceman Love: Jun 19, 2003; come on take a trip in my rocket ship

Yeah, that's a pretty standard way of doing things. You can just get a piece of bluish paper and it will do the same thing, or you can manually set the white balance to get the same effect.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2009 21:55

Spaceman Love: Jun 19, 2003; come on take a trip in my rocket ship

The Affair posted:

Any of yous guys been using third party plugins for slow-motion? I've gotten okay results out of Timewarp in AE, but I wonder if any of you have had good experiences with Twixtor.

I know The Foundry makes a plugin called FurnaceCore for FCP that looks like it's got a lot of features for time-remapping, and other things, but it's damned expensive, just like everything else.

Furnace is really good, but with any speed change solution, you're either going to get perfect results immediately (unlikely), or you'll need to do a lot of rotoscoping. Optical flow doesn't deal well with cross motion, so if your shot contains things moving at different speeds, or overlapping, you will need to separate them by hand so that the software understands it. There is really no way around this, other than just living with whatever results it gives you.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2009 05:09

Spaceman Love: Jun 19, 2003; come on take a trip in my rocket ship

mechaforce posted:

Honestly the new arri doesn't do much for me.

What I did with 1/10 the light, 1/10th the price:

http://vimeo.com/6862321

At some point I really hope you guys realize that you're doing yourself a serious disservice by attributing the quality of what you shoot to your equipment and software, rather than your skills, your experience, and your creativity. Doing so devalues your own work and the work of others.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2010 18:01

Spaceman Love: Jun 19, 2003; come on take a trip in my rocket ship

mechaforce posted:

Yes and no - - my main point was that you don't need to drop 60k to shoot in ultra low light and keep it looking good. The noise removal plugin we used actually retains 99% of the data since it uses sampling.

While I understand that Neat Video is pretty well-regarded and is probably near the top of the heap in terms of commercially available noise reduction software, you're kidding yourself if you think it retains anywhere near that much of your data. If you want to shoot like this- low light, high gain, high noise reduction- that's obviously your perogative, but it needs to be understood as a "look," in the same sense as Day-for-Night is a "look" that you use when you can't afford lights to shoot at night. It's not a trick to get you something for free, it's an algorithm that re-interprets all of your image data. It tends to leave images looking wierd and plasticky, which is evident even when highly compressed and at low resolution.

quote:

You're right, they should've shot Blade Runner on Hi8 - would've saved em millions too!

Filmmaking is a visual medium, and to ignore the quality of a shot is a disservice to the viewer.

Believe me, you're unlikely to find anyone who is a bigger proponent of the pursuit of image quality than myself. However, that's not my point. When I look at that vimeo link, what I see is "look at the image that was made by [camera] and [software]." There is no authorship of the image implied, and I think that this is a really big problem. Frankly, your video comes across more as an advertisement for other people's products than anything else. I'm not trying to call you out in particular for this; I see this basically every time I look at the indie world. I see lots of technology worship and people saying "wow, thank you for giving me the technology to make the film I want," as if their creativity is entirely dependent on the products that someone else has sold them.

I'll be the first to acknowledge that this technology is pretty drat cool, and that the quality you can get out of an incredibly cheap camera has never been higher. But I'm not trying to make a point about image quality or about technology. What I'm saying is that you need to take ownership of your work. If you credit your shots to Sony or to RED or whomever, what does that say about you, other than that you're a disposable person who knows how to press the buttons on a miracle machine and point it in the right direction until it yields the desired results? You're going to have a job precisely until some new technology comes out that some other kid knows how to press buttons on, and then that's the end of your career as a professional storyteller.

Visual Effects artists have been making this exact mistake for the past 20 years. "Look at what I made using [computer] and [software]!" gets understood by producers, studios, and the general public as "look at what [computer] and [software] can do! _{oh, and I pressed the buttons until it happened}" Now we're paying the price, because no one understands the importance of humans in the process. Everyone thinks that fancy computers do all of the work, and no one knows the vast amounts of knowledge, experience, critical thinking, and brute force labor that must be applied to wrangle a professional-looking result out of even the best technology. This hurts our reputations, it hurts our pay, and it hurts our status in the industry. And that's what's going to happen to professional Cinematographers if you are as careless as we were.

Claim authorship over your work. Claim it during all stages of production, and claim it when you show it to anyone else. If your image was authored by a Sony EX-1 and Neat Video, then what did you do, other than light candles, point the camera and hit record, and throw on some filters in After Effects? The world is full of people who would love to diminish your work. Don't pre-empt them by doing it yourself.

[again, not a criticism of you, or anyone in particular, this is just a trend I notice A LOT and it drives me up the wall because I think you're all hurting yourselves without knowing it]

# ¿ Apr 17, 2010 12:06

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Cinematography thread: No film vs. video talk, dammit