David (my business partner and I) went out on a whim to shoot for a day at this local horse farm. We did three interviews and I used two of them in the final product. This family is impossibly generous, and fun. It was fun getting to know them and being able to get some great footage. I mostly shot with a 7d and a Tameron 17-50. David shot with the 5DmII and traded between his 400mm and 70-200. In my opinion all great lenses. It was at this shoot I just fell in love with the 70-200. Such a filmic image. The lens does cost about as much as a body for a 7d, but it's the glass that makes these images sing. For the interviews I used 50mm on the 7d and the 70-200.
Of course we shot with a flat picture profile so the grading in post was just fun. I converted all of the footage using cineform's neoscene and all of the color work was done in AE using the methods found here.
Before & Afters:
Also the music was a track off a friend of mine's (Greg Wheaton) recent cd. Check him out here. He's an expert guitarist, who's music is just inspiring.
Anyway, you can see I did some simple effects in this film. There's the windmill (just shot against a blue sky and chroma'd out the blue) and of course the OCimage credit.
We did this video for the print side of OC, as a spot to show their customers the what's-what about Dimensional Letters. Thankfully, this was shot in much less time than our previous video.
So, I was recently hired (via handshake) with a local production company who shoots primarily with Dslrs (!).
One of the owners is a long time photographer who saw a niche and we've been working together to build this, er, division.
At this point we've shot about four videos. The first one was a vignette on a local artist, Steven Hill.
I was one of two camera operators (yes, I used my 7D) and Brian Barrow Shot with a 5d. We used a Zoom for external sound. It was a LONG day of shooting. We had no plan, but I think it came out pretty nice. Cudos to Brian for the brilliant editing, and Steven Himself for the music.
Recently, my wife had our first child (Lucas!) Anyway, he's about three months old and when he eats at night we usually get our Left 4 Dead on. Yes, my wife rules. So if I were to make Left 4 Dead the movie, I'd cast the following people:
Jada Pinkett Smith as 'Rochelle', Chi McBride as 'Coach' Dean Winters as 'Nick' Eric Ladin as 'Ellis'
This is before I went to IMDB and found out that Eric Ladin is already Ellis. And Rochelle Aytes, Hugh Dillon, and Chad Coleman would most likely all do great.
Until the Magic Lantern hack comes out for the 7D we don't have those convenient zebra stripes to show us when we're overexposing our images. I just wanted to mention this fact for those who don't have any photography experience-and that is until you get zebras (maybe even after) use the light meter!
We shot for eight hours yesterday (all outside locations) and for everyshot I used the light meter with the camera pointed at my subject and changed my aperture for a proper exposure. Unfortunately it was bright and, I didn't have any ND's to knock out light. Plus, I was running at 100 ISO and I wasn't about to change my shutter speed from 1/50 (although for a few shots I used 1/500-which is about as fast as a film cameras shutter angle can go.
Now, I'm sure I blew out the sky in some of the shots, and I tried to bring the exposure back to see both the sky and the subject. That being said, I'm not sure there was anything I could have done about that with what I own. But the point is - I used the light meter, like I would when I was taking still images. And most people that frequent this blog comes from a video background and I made this post because I haven't heard of anyone using the meter for video before. Probably because the people that know about it are like "Duh, why wouldn't I use that?"
This is an invitation if you aren't already at the party; use the light meter, it'll save your shots.
So I got my 7D on October 1st and haven't exactly gotten through the manual yet...that being said, I wasn't about to wait :)
Alright, bad news first: Friday night I went out to downtown Dubuque, IA at about 11pm with my sister Angelica Deming and we improvised a little ditty while I experimented with different ISO's. I found out afterwards that the changes ISO isn't a "liner progression". Link. (Thanks to hermmermferm from dvxuser for his chart.) There's some pretty noisy shots in this footage (at about 0:28 till 0:37) But, thanks to Michael Munkittrick's advise from the creativecow forum, it really helped cut down on the crazy noise. I think for those shots I was shooting at around 6400 ISO, but for the most part I was shooting between 1250 and 3200 ISO.
The only other thing (most likely user error) was during the editing I noticed some banding on a few clips. Now, I'm not sure if this was my fault (incorrect settings) or has something to do with the way the sensor writes the information.
Alright, that was the bad news. But for the most part, the ISO on this camera rocks. Coming from the land of HV20, it was such a great experience to have full manual controls. The image quality is outstanding, and I'm so proud of Canon for listening and giving us most of the goodies we asked for in one camera.
This was all shot with a shoulder rig and a Tameron 17mm to 50mm lens. I followed Stu's method of flattening the 5D for the 7D, which gave me a lot of wiggle room in post. I edited it in Adobe Premiere Pro (using Proxies) and then color corrected using the DV Rebel Tools in After Effects. All of the audio was in camera. Yes, I'm going to have to buy something to record audio separately-but I knew that going into it ;). Not sure if there's anything else to report. More later.
