All of the lights directed at the “stage” at Exit are covered with red filters. This poses an interesting challenge for photographs. I used a flash with a colored filter for these shots and played with a modified white balance to match the filter. The result was a bit less red in all the shots, but a lot more yellow and orange. Not surprising, just interesting.
One benefit to having all of the red filters is that the photos convert quite nicely to black and white, especially where skin tones are concerned. I’ll be playing with that concept in the coming week.
Click the image above to view the entire set from this show.
Had a fantastic session with Wham Bam Pam this evening. We were both swimming in the hot & humid summer air, but it was worth it. I have Maria May I lined up for tomorrow evening and more in the works.
Some people, like superheros, have dual identities. Such is the case for MsPixy. Her burlesque identity must remain separate from her “day job” identity. Therefore, she appears as a talking silhouette in her video.
As I continue my work on All That Glitters, I continue my research and learning of capturing and editing video.
This is a summary of the workflow that I’ve determined might just work for me when editing HD movies in Adobe Premiere Pro that were captured by the Canon 5D Mark II. I still have a lot to learn, but in the meantime I feel like my research and testing has resulted in some reliable conclusions.
Disclaimer: I am new to video editing and make no claims of being an expert on the topic. Like I said, I’m learning, and I learn by doing and making mistakes in the process. Comments and feedback are welcomed.
The Canon 5D Mark II camera can capture HD video (1920×1080) in Quicktime MOV format at 30 frames per second. From what I understand, the codec is H.264 (MPEG-4) video at a higher-than-usual bitrate with PCM sound. I’ve also learned that this is the HDV 1080p30 format as opposed to the HDV 1080i30 format (or the other 8 billion available formats – it’s all so very convoluted).
I say a higher-than-usual bitrate because this is where my first problem came up. When I load a movie clip into Premiere and add it to the timeline, I’m not able to play the footage back in the output preview. It’s choppy, really choppy, and after a couple of seconds it stops. This is apparently due to the high bitrate and even the fast computers can’t process all of that data fast enough for smooth playback.
While researching this issue I learned about off-line editing, a process in which you have both high-resolution and low-resolution footage to work with. You use the low-resolution footage during editing so that the editing system can play the footage back without any problem, and then you bring the high resolution footage back in when it’s time to render the final output.
I must admit I have yet to learn how to do this the “right way” in Premiere, but for the moment I’ve found a method that seems to be working just fine. I start off the project by importing the high-resolution clips, then (outside of Premiere) I move those clips into a sub-folder and move the low-resolution clips back into the working directory. As long as the filenames are the same, Premiere doesn’t really seem to care. I was experimenting for a bit with using MP4 files for the proxy files (the low-resolution, temporary files), but it gets a bit tedious having to tell Premiere where each file is when rotating the low & high clips. For now I’m generating low-resolution MOV files.
It was during this researching that I started seeing another common thread, something about “crushed blacks.” Ignorance is bliss, and not knowing what they were talking about, I figured it didn’t have anything to do with me since I hadn’t noticed any other issues. At least, that was the case until I rendered a sample clip from a test project and noticed the colors didn’t match the original footage.
In short, the way the Canon 5D Mark II handles color isn’t the way that most editing systems and video codecs handle color, so if you run the movie files through these codecs, you lose detail on the high and low end of the color spectrum. The blacks and dark greys all go black, and the bright whites get dulled down. It just looked bad.
Back to the research table (aka. Google). I found a solution, but of course, that solution costs money. We can’t just spend a lot of money on a new tool and not have to spend more money on tools to support that tool, right? Enter Cineform NeoScene, a video codec that will translate the Canon 5D’s files into a file that Adobe Premiere Pro will properly interpret, with all colors accounted for, so that the colors in the final output will match the colors of the original footage. (Note: One must assume in this scenario that no color correction, white balance, or other color-changing filters have been applied during editing. In this case, it should be obvious that the colors of the final output will not match the original footage.)
Two issues, and what appear to be two solutions:
Can’t play back footage during editing – Create proxy files (low-resolution temporary files) so that the computer can keep up with the footage
Colors in output don’t match original footage – Decode original files with Cineform NeoScene.
After all that, this is my process:
Capture footage on Canon 5D Mark II
Copy files from compactflash card to computer
Open files in Quicktime (the NeoScene application is currently only available for Windows, but the codec also works on Mac through Quicktime)
Export the files from Quicktime using the NeoScene codec
Note: The converted files are HUGE. I don’t comprehend why this is the case, but it’s significant). Because of this I’ll initially just create the proxy files, and possibly a mid-size file (1280×720) for standard-definition and web output. I will save the HD conversion and output for when editing is complete and I’m ready to create HD media.
Create a new Adobe Premiere Project
Import the proxy files into the new project
Perform editing tasks
Replace the proxy files with high-resolution files
Export the project to the desired format
From what I’ve read, Apple’s Final Cut Pro can handle the Canon 5D Mark II’s movie files without any decoding while providing good playback during editing and without crushing the blacks. Of course, I’ve already made a financial investment into the Adobe software package, so I’m doing the best I can with what I have.
I’ve posted this for my own reference as well as in the hopes that it helps someone else who picks up the Canon 5D Mark II with plans to edit the footage in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Here’s a snapshot of the pile of gear as I was packing up for yesterday’s shoot with MsPixy. My goal is to keep everything as compact and light as possible so that I can travel with ease. I’m still not as compact as I want to be, but I’ll get there.
The shoot went very well and was a continued learning experience for me. After all that work researching microphones I forgot to turn one of them on. Fortunately, it was just the reference mic so the main mic was on the whole time and captured the entire interview. I was able to line everything up in post-production just fine.
Scheduling will ramp up this week. I’m happy that there are already a handful of performers in the queue. The past week has been spent testing, researching and learning how to use the tools I’ll need to complete this project. I’m sure there will be plenty of that to come, but at least now I can focus a bit more on the shoots.
