Just a quick reminder that I am running a 3D workshop at ProKit on January the 17th. This is a one day introduction to 3D production that will cover the general principles of shooting 3D with side by side cameras and mirror rigs as well as a look at how to budget for 3D and make money out of 3D.
Full details here: http://www.prokit.co.uk/index.php?view=events
With countries like China launching state wide 3D channels, 3D is a market that continues to grow. With glasses free TV’s expected to be a reality in the next few years can you afford not to know more about 3D and how to produce in 3D?
Every year I pick one product that I believe has changed the way I work in some positive way, or improved the quality of the productions I produce. Last year my product of the year was the Matrox MXO2 I/O device which brought low cost HD I/O to laptops and work stations at a very low cost.
This year there have been so many products to choose from. We’ve had cameras, viewfinders, recorders all kinds of gear, but it’s the cameras this year that have grabbed all the attention with a whole fleet of new, very capable camcorders with super 35mm sensors available for most budgets.
The first to market was the Panasonic AF101, followed by the Sony F3 and then the FS100. The new Canon C300 was not available to purchase in 2011, so does not qualify for my award.
The Panasonic AF101 never really excited me. It uses a DSLR sensor which is not ideal for a video camera. But, as anyone that reads my blog knows, I am a huge fan of the Sony F3, so much so that I own 2 of them so I can shoot 3D with them. The Sony PMW-F3 is my all time favourite camcorder. I really enjoy using it, it produces a great image and the workflow is straight forward and fast. Now if I was going to give my meaningless award to the F3, it would not go to the standard F3, but to the F3 with the S-Log option. You see the F3 with S-Log is a different camera again. The S-Log option takes the relatively inexpensive F3 into a whole new league, producing images that rival the Arri Alexa and in my opinion surpassing many cameras costing two or three times as much.
But, I’m not this year giving my award to the F3 or in fact any other piece of kit that I own. Instead my award for Product of the Year 2011 goes to the F3’s little brother, the NEX-FS100. Why? Well I think the FS100 is another great camera, so very close to the F3 in terms of performance, but at a price that makes it possible for many more people to own a tool that is quite capable of shooting a technically very good movie.
I’m lucky enough to be able to afford the F3, but many can’t, the FS100 is extremely affordable and that combination of amazing picture quality and affordability is why it gets my end of year award.
Other close contenders were the Convergent Design Gemini 444 and Atomos Samurai external recorders, both very capable devices, but suited to different applications. The Zacuto EVF and Cineroid Metal EVF also both deserve a mention as my eye’s are not as young as they used to be so a good viewfinder is something I need more and more these days. I can no longer use the LCD without having to resort to spectacles and in the middle of a severe storm or hurricane, glasses are a real pain. I use the Cineroid Metal EVF.
On the software front Apples FCP-X gets my turkey of the year award. Perhaps in the future it will get the full feature set that a “Pro” editing application needs, until then I’m going to be using Avid. The new Media Composer 6 is really nice and a major step forward for Avid as it much more open than it used to be allowing you to use pretty much any I/O card that you want.
So that’s it for another year. I can see that the 2012 shortlist will almost certainly include another camera, the C300 from Canon and a little birdie tells me that there is a very nice viewfinder coming around NAB time. I wonder what else is in store for 2012?
Happy New Year to all my readers. I hope 2012 brings you new and interesting challenges, exciting projects and may it be profitable and prosperous for you all.
First let me say that as yet I have not used C-Log in anger, only seen it at a couple of hands on demo events and in downloaded clips.
From what I’ve seen C-Log and S-Log are two quite different things. S-Log on the F3 is a true Log curve where each stop of exposure is recorded using roughly the same amount of data and the available dynamic range is about 13.5 stops. It is inevitable that when you use a true log curve like this and play it back on an uncorrected Rec-709 (standard HD gamma) monitor that it will look very flat and very washed out. This is a result of the extreme gamma miss-match across the entire recording range. If you had a monitor that could display 13.5 stops (most only manage 7) and the monitor had a built in Log curve then the pictures would look normal.
What has too be considered is that S-Log is designed to be used with 10 bit recording where each stop gets roughly 70 data bits ( this roughly means 70 shades of grey for each stop).
Now lets consider the Canon C300. It has no 10 bit out, it’s only 8 bit. Assuming Canon’s sensor can handle 13.5 stops then using 8 bit would result in only 17 bits per stop and this really is not sufficient, especially for critical areas of the image like faces and skin tones. A standard gamma, without knee, like Rec-709 will typically have a 7 stop range, this is a deliberate design decision as this yields around 34 bits per stop. As we know already if you try to do a hard grade on 8 bit material you can run in to issues with banding, posterisation and stair stepping, so reducing the bits per stop still further (for example by cramming 13.5 stops into 8 bits) is not really desirable as while it can improve dynamic range, it will introduce a whole host of other issues.
Now for some years camera sensors have been able to exceed 7 stops of dynamic range. To get around the gamma limitation of 7 stops, most good quality cameras use something called the knee. The knee takes the top 15 to 20% of the recording range to record as much as 4 to 5 stops of highlights. So in the first 0 to 80% range you have 6 stops, plus another 4 to 5 stops in the last 20%, so the overall dynamic range of the camera will be 10 to 11 stops.
How can this work and still look natural? Well our own visual system is tuned to concentrate on the mid range, faces, foliage etc and to a large degree highlights are ignored. So recording in this way, compressing the highlights mimics they way we see the world, so doesn’t actually look terribly un-natural. OK, OK, I can hear you all screaming… yes it is un-natural, it looks like video! It looks like video because the knee is either on or off, the image is either compressed very heavily or not at all, there is no middle ground. It’s also hard to grade as mid tones and highlights have different amounts of squashing which can lead to some strange results.
So the knee is a step forward. It does work quite well for many applications as it preserves those 34 bits of data for the all important mid tones and as a result the pictures look normal, yet gives a reasonable amount of over exposure performance. Next came things like cine gammas and film style gammas.
These often share a very similar gamma curve to standard gammas for the first 60-70% of the recording range, so faces, skin, flora and fauna still have plenty of data allocated to them. Above 70% the image becomes compressed, but instead of the sudden onset of compression as with a knee, the compression starts very gently and gradually increases more and more until by the time you get close to 100% the compression is very strong indeed. This tends to look a lot more natural than gamma + knee, yet can still cope with a good over exposure range, but depending on the scene it can start to look a little flat as your overall captured range is biased towards highlights, so your captured image contains more bright range than low range so will possibly (but not always) look very slightly washed out. In my opinion, if shooting with cinegammas or similar you should really be grading your material for the best results.
Anyway, back to the Canon C300. From what I can tell, C-Log is an extension of the cinegamma type of gamma curve. It appears to have more in common with cinegammas than true S-log. It looks like the compression starts at around 60% and that there is a little more gain at the bottom of the curve to lift shadows a little. This earlier start to the compression will allow for a greater dynamic range but will mean fewer bits of data for skin tones etc. The raised lower end gain means you can afford to underexpose more if you need to. As the curve is not a full log curve it will look a lot more agreeable than S-Log on an uncorrected monitor, especially as the crucial mid tone area is largely unaffected by strong compression and thus a large gamma miss-match.
For the C300 this curve makes complete sense. It looks like a good match for the cameras 8 bit recording giving a decent dynamic range improvement, largely through highlight compression (spread over more recording range than a conventional knee or cinegamma), keeping mid tones reasonably intact and a little bit of shadow lift. Keeping the mid range fairly “normal” is a wise move that will still give good grading latitude without posterisation issues on mid range natural textures.
I’d just like to wish all my readers a very happy Christmas. Thanks for the support and kind words I received from many of you over the year.
Next year promises to be an exciting one, there will be new cameras to play with, firmware updates and gadgets galore. I will be running workshops across the world, starting straight after the Holidays in Korea and JeJu. Mid Jan I have a 3D workshop at ProKit in London, then it’s off to Norway for my Northern Lights expedition where I will hopefully stream near live Aurora images. Feb looks like a visit to the USA for more workshops and so it continues. I have most of May booked out next year for Tornado chasing assignments in the USA and a couple of interesting film projects on the cards.
I hope you all have interesting and exciting things to look forward to next year. I know time are tough for many right now, perhaps if your not so busy it’s a good time to learn some new skills or hone existing ones, after all it’s your skills that will make you stand out from the crowd, not the technology that you may or may not own.
So have a happy holiday season, I’ll have more stuff for you to read after a short break.
I’m off to Norway to shoot the Northern Lights in a months time. I will be trying to feed near real-time images of the Aurora via this web site. There will be a page dedicated to the project and weather and technology permitting you should be able to view snapshots of the Aurora as I capture them.
Once again I’m having server problems. My domains are being moved to a new more powerful server, cos you lot keep reading my stuff 😉
I apologise if when you come to look for something you find the site down. Hopefully this move will mean better performance and better up-time. Please rest assured that everything is backed up, so should a complete disaster occur during the move, I will be able to restore normal service asap.
I was asked if I could come up with a Log style profile for the sony FS-100. Well here are the settings for a very flat almost log look. Grading will be essential:
AC-FS-Log
Gamma Cinematone 1
Black Level: -1
Black Gamma: High, +7
Knee: 85
Color Mode: Standard, -3
Color Level -4
Detail-4
Last night was a big deal. 12 PMW-F3’s shooting the legendary pop band Duran Duran. Back in the 80’s DD were one of the first bands to embrace the video age with ground breaking, big budget films to accompany their top 10 singles that were very different to anything done before. I have to admit I was and still am a big fan. Back in April, I had a discussion with my good friend Den Lennie about possibly shooting a Duran Duran concert with F3’s. That led to a trip to Berlin in May to shoot the band at a small concert, however, lead Singer Simon LeBon had vocal problems and the entire tour got postponed at the last minute.
F3 and Optimo 24-290 rigged in Berlin for the concert that never happened.
We were fully rigged at the venue, ready to go when we got the last minute call that it was off. This was very disappointing. Despite a second attempt to stage the show, it never went ahead and that was about the last I heard.
Being a Duran fan, I went to see them in concert at Birmingham about 2 weeks ago. It was a fantastic gig and the whole family had a great night out. As I watched the amazing light show, I thought to myself that it was a great shame that this was not being recorded.
Then almost out of the blue I get a phone call from Den Lennie and James Tonkin of Hangman Studios. The question was… Did I think we could shoot a Duran Duran concert with just 7 days to prepare? Of course I said yes and having seen the show, I recommended that we should try to make it happen. So James and Den got together with Director Gavin Elder who has been working with Duran Duran since 2003 and the magic started to happen. Just 48 hours latter I got a message from Den to say we were on! My task was to look after most of the technical aspects of the shoot, things like camera settings, picture profiles etc.
Now, I could tell you all about the tech issues that we discovered during the recce we did when we went to a gig at the O2 arena in London, but sadly you’ll have to wait. Den, James, Gavin and myself will be doing a full write up of how we made the choices we made and some of the many challenges that a concert shoot with super 35mm cameras throw up. I can tell you, it’s not as easy as a traditional OB, not in any way. But when you start pairing up Sony F3’s with 1000mm, yes 1m, lenses, beautiful Arri Alura 18-80mm and Optimo 24-290mm lenses, shooting an incredibly dynamic light show at a massive sell-out arena concert, I think you can see why this project was so exciting!
A pair of F3's with Optimo 24-290's and NanoFlashes on O'connor heads.
Everyone pulled out all the stops. Changes were made to the gig lighting and I created a picture profile to match. Audio was worked to perfection and the band put a massive amount of extra energy into the performance with the end result of an electrifying atmosphere and from what I’ve seen so far, jaw dropping images. This is one of those incredibly rewarding projects that I’ll remember for a long, long time.
Den and James did an incredible job organising kit lists, camera plans and crew lists. I’m sure they will tell their own story in due course.
James Tonkin checking out on of the 12 F3's.
It’s interesting to note that as DoP, Den’s main role was an organisational role and this is something often forgotten, a Director of Photography is not just a cinematographer, but also an organiser, arranger, overseer of the cinematography. I think the term DoP is often miss-used these days often simply being used as a fancy term for cinematographer or camera operator. A true DoP does not shoot, the camera operator does that. The DoP, directs the camera operators and directs the lighting crew to produce images to his or her satisfaction.
The final Duran Duran film is going to be distributed many ways, some of which I’m really excited about, but I can’t say more at this time. I hope you will all get a chance to see it. At this stage it is still to be edited, graded etc. James and Gavin will be working hard overseeing that stage of the production.
Me, at my camera just before the start of the set.
My role.. camera setup, creating a custom picture profile, helping on lens and kit choices, on site tech support and then operating one of the two PMW-F3’s using a B4 to s35mm adapter along with big ENG zooms. I used one of the MTF B4 to s35 adapters that I designed along with a Canon 10 to 400mm zoom. When you add the 2.5x magnification factor of the adapter system that equates to a 25mm to 1000mm zoom. My role was to shoot the close ups of lead singer Simon LeBon from the Front of House area, 160ft from the stage. With such a long lens the DoF was tiny and the shoot was hard work, but incredibly rewarding.
I promise that there will be a much more in depth write up in the future from Den, James and myself covering all aspects of the project as well as a full behind the scenes video (we had a crew shooting BTH footage). Watch this space!
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