If you have taken more than a passing interest into the video capabilities of your DSLR camera then you will probably have thought about getting some sort of viewfinder for the LCD screen. With the DSLR cameras lacking the ergonomics of traditional video camera design, such viewfinders are probably the most useful accessory to aid video shooting. Not only do they permit easier manual focusing with a clear view of the screen, but they also add stability to hand held shooting with an extra point of contact to your body. Continue reading »
Adobe release Photoshop CS5 a couple of days ago and one of the most talked about features is the content aware fill tool. I recorded a quick demo of it this morning with a couple of potential uses. I don’t think its quite the “black magic” that it seemed to be when Adobe demonstrated it but it could be a time saver in some situations. Just using the tool on its own though rarely does the job, it still needs considerable touching up with the healing tool and brushes but at least it can get you in the ball park pretty quickly. If you want to try it out yourself head on over to the Adobe website and download a free 30 day trial. I didnt have a chance to play with many other features but there seemed to be a slight speed increase and I also really like the mini Bridge module.
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Almost exactly a year ago I posted some information about the RED Scarlet Camera. Since that time there have been a number of “announcements” from the company but most of them have said more or less the same thing. “ The cameras are delayed , but here is some more computer generated graphics of something that might possibly look like the camera when it finally arrives”. I would imagine that Jim Janard and his crew at RED have had to re-think a few elements of their designs in an attempt to combat the surprising success of Canons DSLRs in the video field. Continue reading »
When I decided I needed to get this video stuff dialed, I needed something to shoot. There’s no point trying to figure this all out unless you have a purpose and some footage to play with. Leigh Powis, a local skier from Whistler, told about his crazy plan to put a trampoline on top of a cliff to help him practice a few new tricks before the winter. This was the perfect chance to try filming some action AND some lifestyle.
So below is my very first ever video with the 5dMKII. We shot it on 3 different days for about 2 hours on each day. Please click through to the actual Vimeo page if you want to watch the video in HD. But come back to find out more about the video!!
Cliff Trampoline – Whistler from Dan Carr on Vimeo.
The lenses I used to shoot it were the 85mm1.8 , 17-40 f4, 24-105 f4, 70-200 f4,45mm 2.8 Tilt Shift, 15mm fisheye and the 50mm 1.8.
There are many people out there shooting videos with the 5dMKII right now. The new intro for Saturday Night Live was even shot with one last week! A lot of these video pros are attaching all sorts of accessories to the camera to make it easier to shoot video. External monitors, follow focus systems, matte boxes, shotgun mics and all manner of crazy rigs to hold them all together. This video though was shot with a 5dMKII on a tripod. Nothing else.
The tripod had a manfrotto 701HDV video head on it but that’s about the only difference to what I would usually carry for shooting photos. That’s not to say that all those potential accessories don’t make a difference, they undoubtedly do, but they are not a necessity if you want to travel light.
The whole video was shot in full manual mode so that I had total control over the aperture. In order to shoot at very wide apertures and keep the shutter speed down to something normal, I used a 2-stop neutral density filter on some of the lenses. Occasionally I also put a polarizing filter stacked on to the ND filter which has the effect of cutting down the light even more. This did produce some vignetting which you can see in a couple of the shots, but it actually looks like a nice effect! A 2 Stop ND is going to be the absolute minimum you need to get a nice looking DOF on a bright day though.
For a couple of shots I attached the camera to the end of a Manfrotto studio lighting boom arm. Not what it was intended for at all!! But it produced a dramatic angle. The panning shot right before the action starts at 2min08sec was shot like this. The camera fixed to the studio boom with a manfrotto magic arm and then panning on the mount on top of my regular Benro tripod. Again, a nice video boom would have been great, but I wanted to make this with just the gear I had access to. If you have read much about DSLR video before ,you will probably be aware of what “rolling shutter” is. You really have to be careful with your panning to avoid this. Slow and smooth is absolute necessity or you will get the jello effect. I also found that the visibility of this effect was somewhat dependent on what shutter speed I was shooting at. With a higher shutter speed it seemed to show up a lot easier.
Speaking of shutter speed, I experimented with that a bit too. My preference was for the footage that was shot between 1/120 and 1/250 for the action stuff. Anything faster than that and it gives it a sort of weird digital jerky effect. For the lifestyle shots and interview shots I think I used it down at around 1/60 though. I basically set the shutter speed I wanted, then used the filters to get to the aperture I wanted and then dialed in the ISO speed to get the correct exposure. Incidentally, that is something that I found frustrating. Its VERY easy to miss your exposure by a 1/3 of a stop because the “blinking highlights” feature is only available in playback. Most times I would shoot a quick 2 second clip to check exposure before shooting the shot. It would be great if there were some zebra lines to show overexposure. They are available int he Magic Lantern firmware hack but I haven’t ventured that far yet….
One thing that I was pleasantly surprised about was how easily I managed to nail the focus in the shots even though it is fully manual. The screen on the 5dMKII really is great and considering I wasn’t using any type of screen shade or eye-piece, I found it quite easy to get the focus right first time. Pulling focus between 2 subjects takes a bit of practice to do smoothly, but its possible.
When I first got the 5dMKII last winter, the camera world was buzzing about the incredible HD video that it can shoot as well as the beautiful 21MP images. This will be great I thought, I can shoot some videos in between shooting photos. When it actually came down to it though, nice idea as it is, I didn’t have the time mid-winter to learn about shooting video and editing HD video or learn about all the weird idiosyncrasies that the 5d’s video has. I made a couple of short videos that never turned out how I expected and then pretty much gave up on it until I had some time to sit down and figure it all out.
Every year in the Autumn downtime before winter I sit down and try and teach myself a new skill. Up this year was naturally DSLR video shooting and editing with Final Cut Pro. There’s a few things you need to be aware of, and a couple of problems to solve when shooting with the 5d so i’d better write it all down so you guys can give it s shot too.
The 5dMKII generates 1080p video files at 30fps in h.264 codec. Only one out of these three things is actually a good thing. Video people will look at 30fps and assume that I mean the NTSC standard of 29.97fps because it’s often shortened to 30fps when talked about. Wrong. For some reason Canon decided to use an actual 30fps so that is something you need to bear in mind if you are shooting with any other cameras that shoot at 29.97 and intend to mix footage and audio together. For me though, right now that wasn’t a huge problem and 30fps is just fine for web content which was my initial goal.
What was a problem though was the h.264 format of the files. H.264 is typically used as a finishing format, it’s a codec used to compress movie files when you export them from an editing program like Final Cut or Avid (if you are on a PC). The codec is NOT designed to be edited with and Final Cut will not handle it very well if you try. Importing native h.264 files into FCP will have it breathing like its having a heart attack in no time. Nothing renders in real time and a few seconds of footage requires a 5 minute render every time you make the smallest of changes. This is what put me off the most when i first experimented with the video back in the winter.
First what you need to do is become familiar with some sort of transcoding program that will convert all of your h.264 video into a format that will Final Cut can handle at speed. If you have Final Cut then you should also have Apple Compressor and this is certainly one program that can handle the task. Another option though is a fantastic piece of freeware called MPEG Streamclip. You can download it from their website HERE.
For batch processing a large number of files, I actually preferred using MPEG Streamclip for the job and it’s not at all as daunting as it may sound. Which format you convert to will depend on your intended output for your project. Are you aiming to make production quality TV shows, DVDs or just simply some web content at a scaled down size? If you want to make the highest quality available to you, it is generally considered that converting to Apple ProRes 422 is the best option. You will need Final Cut 6 or later though to have access to this codec. Converting all the h.264 files is more or less a case of just dragging and dropping the files into Compressor or Streamclip and selecting the relevant setting from the menus. I wont go into detail about that as its fairly self explanatory once you have the program in front of you. Converting to ProRes format will roughly quadruple the size of your video files though, so if you go down that route, make sure you have some serious disc space available and a powerhouse of a computer to edit with…
If you are looking for a smaller file size then converting to AIC (Apple intermediate codec) is a great option. File size is roughly half that of ProRes, it is very very hard to tell the difference between the two and AIC files are handled very quickly in Final Cut. This is the option that I chose to work with for my project.
At this point i’m going to leave it here for now as this is getting quite long. I have just finished editing a quick 5 minute short that I shot while I was going through this learning process and I will upload that to the web shortly, along with some more information on things I discovered whilst learning to shoot video with the 5d.
I get asked this question every week so I have finally got round to making a tutorial video about it.
Photoshop Tutorial :: How to make a sequence from Dan Carr on Vimeo.
