Uncompressed grabs from Intensity vs. film scans.

[lordtangent]

These are form my two most recent projects. I was DP on one (the one in the house) and Director on the the other (the one in the gray set). These are straight from the camera, no grading. They haven't been touched other than being converted to RGB PNG files.

I thought people might like to see what Uncompressed looks like.

Also, here is a clip with a chip chart so you can see some stuff in motion. (24p from UNCOMPRESSED in Lagarith to keep file size down) Most peoples machines wont be fast enough to actually play it at full speed but it will give you enough frames to play around with.


LT_ChipChart.avi

Here are some frame grabs in PNG format. (RGB but otherwise totally un-processed) The stuff in the gray room is all Cinemode. The stuff in the house is "TV" mode. We kept everything at 1/48th sec exposure and usually aimed to keep the aperture as wide open as possible. (between f2.4-1.8)

LT_And_I_Will_Call_You_Mini-Me.png
LT_button.png
LT_Calibration_Compete.png
LT_Eris_CU3.png
LT_Eris_CU5.png
LT_Eris_John_TS.png
LT_Eris_Mike_Full.png
LT_Eris_Mike_OTS.png
LT_Future_Stack.png
LT_Im_Down_Here.png
LT_Jazz_hands.png
LT_Obligations.png
LT_Refcube1.png
LT_Sit_Down.png
LT_Understand.png
LT_You_Gotta_Be_Kidding_Me.png

My work flow is:

1. Capture live "24p" UNCOMPRESSED with the Intensity over HDMI
2. Remove 3:2 pulldown with custom scripts staying in 4:2:2 YCC color space though out (no color space round-tripping), re-compressing to Lagarith or HUFFYUV. (I generate SD res proxies for off line editing at the same time, in HUFFYUV)

Then after that edit, color grade, etc.

The biggest down side with the Intensity is you need to operate tethered of course. But as it turns out that doesn't seem to be much of a problem when you are working on a set. You need SOME sort of "Video Assist" station anyway, and the capture station can really do double duty in that respect.

Considering I still use the "free-ware" method of removing 3:2 pulldown, shooting UNCOMPRESSED isn't much of a hassle since the system of 3:2 pulldown removal I use is similar and the resulting file sizes are the same. But I have the benefit of starting with 4:2:2 color and a better quality source.

We typically generate between 500 and 700 gigs of uncompressed video data a day shooting live uncompressed. Once I process it, removing the 3:2 pulldown and compressing it lossless with Lagarith it ends up being around 200-300 gigs of data.

Considering the cost of storage these days that seems quite a bargain. (Especially when you compare the price of hard drives to film or even high end tape like HDCAM-SR) Even HDCAM SR is not uncompressed and it's about 112 bucks for 64 minutes. Film? It depends on if you use new stock or re-cans. But just developing it would cost $350+ and that is without any kind of transfer to video. 200-300 gigs of data takes up maybe $50 bucks of storage. even with a back up for redundancy, you are still looking at a cost comparable or cheaper than "SR" tape (only UNCOMPRESSED!). It's definitely cheaper than film, even 16mm.

I'm not trying to say the HV20 makes pictures anywhere near what the equipment that would typically be used with SR tape came make. Or that it can honestly compare to film. Only that it's a very economical work flow. (the quality not being half bad either!)

But... If you want to see some film scans at 2k you can down load some here (look for "Output Samples (downloadable files)" About half way down the page:
http://www.lasergraphics.com/us/pages/director.htm

I'd say the stuff out of the HV20 seems "sharper" if not as clean in the final analysis since the S/N seems worse on the HV20. The "noise" or grain on the film scans is definitely more uniform in each color channel. But over all I would say the HV20 material hold up pretty well, wouldn't you?

I'm going to NAB next week and I hope that Cineform has more news regarding their HDMI DVR. That may free me from the tether.

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

>removing 3:2 pulldown, shooting UNCOMPRESSED

Why remove pulldown? I thought that when you capture via the HDMI port it's true 24p, without pulldown addition.

[lordtangent]

It's still 60 fields.

But a huge advantage with HDMI capture over HDV is that it is 4:2:2, which reduces the damage from the interlaced "wrapper" to zero. (Unlike the interlaced 4:2:0 of HDV, which is pretty damaging to the chroma of the wrapped progressive frames)

Like I said. It's a hassle, but not any more than working in 24p from HDV anyway. It's just the quality is much higher.

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

Yeah, it looks amazing. Your shots are really nice. How many lights did you use?
BTW, I did some color grading on two of your shots. They look very cinematic. I can upload them if you want to see them. I used, modified, the Magic Bullet "coolish" template.

[lordtangent]

Thanks! I'm still learning.

How many light I/we used depends on the shot.

All the way from zero lights (just the light from the window) to I think 4 lights is how many I used on one of the shots in the house.

In most of the shots by the window though, we are using at least one extra light as sort of a rim/fill on the shadow side. It's very subtle. (I had to keep asking my DP to "knock it down, keep it more subtle") Since I didn't want it to LOOK like a light source...it's totally not motivated. Too much and it would look fake. I'm not a huge fan of the "magic light" effect of old school Hollywood movies. You know, like lights that come from nowhere.

In the stuff shot (as DP) in the house though that's actually kind of s style I went with since the director wanted a sort of "Film-Noir, pulp fiction" feeling. So, very sourcey, hard light... dark back grounds...

The effect you get has more to do with what you DO with the lights you use rather than how many you use. More lights is actually usually worse (and I'm speaking from my perspective as a CG lighter also) since once you have more than a few lights they get really hard to control. They all contribute to the scene, so knowing which to modify to get the result you want gets tricky. Fewer lights = less variables = easier to control.

I'd be interested to see your color grade. Thanks for asking first though!

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

Here you are:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/images/lordtangent.jpg
All shots have unsharpen mask applied (with radius at twice the sharpening). I used the modified "coolish" template of Magic Bullet for most shots which gives that blue color that's in fashion in Hollywood lately, and a modified "Epic" template for the darker scenes.

[lordtangent]

Valid choices. Except for maybe some of the night stuff. It looks almost like day now.

Part of the idea with a night look is to leave a lot of black in frame to indicate darkness. Then lit areas should be almost normal level of illumination. (sometimes a lot darker than normal, it depends on taste.)

I'm not happy with the way I shot the girl looking out the door. What I WANTED was for the light in the house to be normal level or even over exposed, and the stuff outside to be like 2 stops under. Instead, everything is like 2 stops under. The interior lights are tungsten balanced and the exterior lights are 1/2 "CTB" (CTB is daylight correction color). It creates some color contrast, but it's not enough to really sell it.

Anyway, the "flatness" of it makes the shot a lot less dynamic. I wish it was more dynamic. What I'm probably going to do in the final grade (which the director has been kind enough to allow me to do) is window the area above her head and brighten it up a lot. I might boost her just a tad, but not much. Still waiting for the edit though!

[Ian-T]

For some reason my Vegas, Windows Media, and Virtual Dub are unable to open your AVI. I am able to open it in VLC player...strange.

By the way..nice shots. Are you sure that's the HV20..lol. That is way clean....c'mon Cineform....I hope that thing-a-ma-gig is ready.

EDIT: Do you use any external filters when filming? Especially when using TV mode. While in TV mode did you turn down all of the settings (sharpness, color, contrast etc.)?
In regads to your lights, what type (brand) and kelvin rating where they? (sorry for all the dumb questions).

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

>re-compressing to Lagarith or HUFFYUV.

I would suggest Lagarith, as it creates 15% smaller filesizes (when exported in YUY2). Lagarith on the other hand, is about 10% slower to encode, so it's up to you.

>(I generate SD res proxies for off line editing at the same time, in HUFFYUV)

Why not in mpeg2? SD proxies in mpeg2 are much faster/smaller to edit.

[divide]

Nice shots ! It would have been nice if you had recorded some of theses shots in HDV at the same time, so we could have an A/B RAW vs HDV.
Anyone made this test before on this board ?

Eugenia, the color grading looks sexy, but I was wondering, can't you achieve the same look without Magic Bullet ? From what I've seen on MB website, in Vegas it's roughly like playing with color curves and color corrector (secondary).

[Ian-T]

You can emulate much of what Magic Bullet does from within your NLE.

[lordtangent]

>re-compressing to Lagarith or HUFFYUV.

I would suggest Lagarith, as it creates 15% smaller filesizes (when exported in YUY2). Lagarith on the other hand, is about 10% slower to encode, so it's up to you.

>(I generate SD res proxies for off line editing at the same time, in HUFFYUV)

Why not in mpeg2? SD proxies in mpeg2 are much faster/smaller to edit.

I want my SD proxies to be high quality so I don't get thrown off when I'm grading them. I should test something more compact though.

My master 24p stuff is in Lagarith. Only the Proxies are in HUFFYUV for speed,and also so I can make MP4 from them for sending out as dailies.

There is like a million ways you can do things once you have it all automated. This is just the work flow I'm using for this project. I might try something a little more efficient next time.

[lordtangent]

For some reason my Vegas, Windows Media, and Virtual Dub are unable to open your AVI. I am able to open it in VLC player...strange.

By the way..nice shots. Are you sure that's the HV20..lol. That is way clean....c'mon Cineform....I hope that thing-a-ma-gig is ready.

EDIT: Do you use any external filters when filming? Especially when using TV mode. While in TV mode did you turn down all of the settings (sharpness, color, contrast etc.)?
In regads to your lights, what type (brand) and kelvin rating where they? (sorry for all the dumb questions).

The AVI is in Lagarith. If you don't have the codec installed it doesn't matter what you try to open it with. It's a free open source codec. AVI is just a wrapper.

I have ND filters. But I haven't had the occasion to use them yet. (The HV20 being so slow and all)

For lighting I use all kinds of stuff. I don't own any branded lights except for one old Mole Richarson "Baby" Solar Spot I got from my bother-in-laws brother. I rebuilt it in to a cheap HMI light that I've only used a couple of times. Really, you can light with anything that makes light, provided the CRI is good enough. For some shots I use my home made Flo lights. Some of the other shots were lit with shop lights. Others with some movie Fresnels I borrowed.

One thing I've noticed consistently is that c-stands and flags are almost more valuable than actual lights a lot of the time. Also the barn-doors on movie lights are invaluable. I wish I could justify getting some movie lights though. The time isn't quite right for me. They are expensive and I don't think I'd use them enough to make it worth owning them.

As for color temp of the lights, the HV20 and most other single chip cameras seem to prefer daylight since they are kind of starved for blue (due to the Bayer filter) The white balance happens electronically so warmer light = more gain on the blue channel = more noise. As a result I chose to make my flo lights daylight balanced. GE makes a nice cheap flo tube that's high CRI and 5000k. Not exactly the same as the 5600k movie lights use as "daylight" but a pretty close match. And did I mention they are cheap? Like 3 bucks each. I just use shop lights with electronic ballasts to drive them. To hold them up I just sheet metal screwed a "baby plate" to the back of the shop light that I simply clamp into the head of a c-stand. I can't take credit for the idea. It's something I saw on another forum. But they work great. Another option are some of the large CFLs on the market. I have some I got on ebay, but the CRI isn't as good. (usually the higher output the bulb for it's size, the worse the CRI.)

I can post some pictures but I'll need to shoot some. I don't think I've ever shot a photo of them setup.


Now I'm thinking, by the time the Cineform DVR is out, the Scarlet might be out also. In which case I'd just get a Scarlet! Cineform better hurry up! There was no news at NAB about the DVR, (other than "we are still working on it!") which surprised me.

[Alsone]

Here you are:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/images/lordtangent.jpg
All shots have unsharpen mask applied (with radius at twice the sharpening). I used the modified "coolish" template of Magic Bullet for most shots which gives that blue color that's in fashion in Hollywood lately, and a modified "Epic" template for the darker scenes.

Those results look really nice Eugenia. The originals looked "muddied" compared to the aftershots.

[Ian-T]

Now I'm thinking, by the time the Cineform DVR is out, the Scarlet might be out also. In which case I'd just get a Scarlet! Cineform better hurry up! There was no news at NAB about the DVR, (other than "we are still working on it!") which surprised me.

That about sums it up for a lot of folks.. I always figured I would not need to buy anything outside of the HV20's price bracket due to what it can already do...and the fact that the Cineform capture device would be coming out soon. But Cineform better hurry up...heck....by the time it comes out...someone would probably already figure out how to capture RAW out HDMI. I can't afford to buy both the Scarlet and this contraption...so I'm with you on that.

[ForwardLooker]

Now I'm thinking, by the time the Cineform DVR is out, the Scarlet might be out also. In which case I'd just get a Scarlet! Cineform better hurry up! There was no news at NAB about the DVR, (other than "we are still working on it!") which surprised me.

I had the same thought the other day......

[redwave]

Great post! thank you.

Quality is outstanding.

I been waiting for INTENSITY examples
I was talking 2 days ago with Black Magic people on their booth for nearly 2 hours at NAB 2008 Las Vegas convention - mainly about 4:4:4 and future of 4K etc..
They have some new exciting products coming.
cheers.

[lordtangent]

Those results look really nice Eugenia. The originals looked "muddied" compared to the aftershots.

Dude, I said my images were ungraded! As a result they are a little flat. But Muddy? I'm having a hard time interpreting that considering how contrasty most of them actually are.

Actually, I'm trying not to take that as an insult... but...

If you can make images of equal quality right out of you HV20 I would like to see them.

I'm throwing down the gauntlet man.

[ForwardLooker]

lordtangent, your raw images are some if the best i've seen from the hv20. i'm dont see any mud, nice color grading too Eugenia.

[lordtangent]

Why, thank you.