New music video shot with homemade hdv35

Olivier Vanaschen · April 10, 2005

Hello everybody,

we've just finished our first music video shot using our homemade mini35 adapter for the Sony HDR-FX1 (pal). It was a long but well prepared 2 and a half days shoot with a crew of only 4 with the help of some friends (catering,...). Basically, we did everything from pre-production to post. This music video is for a belgian singer and it's going to be aired on many music TV channels here like MCM,... maybe even on MTV France. Yeah, we know, the content is quite "commercial" but it was a great experience, low budget like always but it was a real fun.

We did buy the FX1 end of December and decided to go for it. Not enough time for advanced testing, we went directly to the shoot: two days indoor, then one half day exterior. We shot in a small bar, by small we mean it, it's an old european house in the center of Brussels. Actually, it was a good thing we were only 4 because there were a lot of people on the set, we had to move quickly so everyone ended up being director, dp, gaffer, grip,...

About lighting, we had a Lowel 1000w Tota, Lowel 650w Omni, Ianbeam 800w, our trusty el'cheapo 500w halogen lamps and few hand-painted colored light bulbs (40w and 150w). We did use some homemade reflectors, 2nd hand gels and diffusers,...

We did use 3 lenses, a Sigma 20mm 1.8, a Nikor AF-D 50mm 1.8 and a Nikor AF-D 85mm 1.8. We shot wide open all the time and did use some close-up diopters (+1 +2) to get some real shallow depth-of-field effects.

The asa rating of our camera setup was around 100-125 at a shutter of 1/50 0db gain so we needed a lot of light. It wasn't easy at all getting the right amount of light and a good control of the final aspect. We had to run cables everywhere because of the weak electric setup of the house,...it was fun..

The focusing was tricky too, all we had was some cheap 5.6'' LCD Car Monitor and a 14'' CRT Sony TV we had to place upside down to get the picture reversed. Please children, don't try this at home, you'll get mad asking if the person you are shooting is in focus or not ;-)

Then, we went for the exterior, wasn't much easier... sky was quite gray and we wanted to use some artificial lighting too. We're lucky to get three 2kw Fresnel Lights for free but it wasn't enough so we did use everything we had. We did warm up all the lights by at least a 1/2 CTO and used filters on the camera (ND gradient Cokin P filter).

We did capture the rushes using ConnectHD from Cineform. Then converted everything to DV (and flipped the picture). We edited in DV in Premiere Pro 1.5. Later on, we did import the premiere project in Adobe After Effects 6.5 and replaced the DV footage by the HDV footage. We did the color correction, effects,...in uncompressed HD and converted the final to uncompressed SD for final output to Digital Betacam.

Yeah, sure it wasn't perfect, we're still working a lot on the mini35, practice more cinematography,... but it was a hell lot of fun and a great human experience. Like we did for "Marla." (Just Facts: another guide to digital filmmaking), we're going to publish a new PDF guide based around the new mini35 and HDV workflow (from capturing to final output). It will be available on our website in the soon-to-be-online blog.

Our old team has split, new members are there, it's all new and fresh, we're called "the black sheep". Our goal is simply to make some movies and to share all we know and learn from it so we're really pleased to share our little experience here.

We hope you'll like it, if you have questions, just ask, we are here to answer ;-)

LINK:

http://www.originalversion.net/temp/larmiers.mov

http://www.theblacksheep.be/portfol...02/larmiers.mov

Camera setup:

http://www.originalversion.net/temp/tbshdv35.jpg

Making of pictures:

http://www.originalversion.net/temp/makingof

olivier vanaschen, olan bowland, quentin aksajef & adil nahjari

creative film video & photography

www.theblacksheep.be

info@theblacksheep.be

Stephen Williams · April 10, 2005

Yeah, sure it wasn't perfect, we're still working a lot on the mini35, practice more cinematography,... but it was a hell lot of fun and a great human experience. Like we did for "Marla." (Just Facts: another guide to digital filmmaking), we're going to publish a new PDF guide based around the new mini35 and HDV workflow (from capturing to final output). It will be available on our website in the soon-to-be-online blog.

www.theblacksheep.be

info@theblacksheep.be

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi,

The video looks Fantastic!

Hope your pdf includes info on building the mini 35! Did you spin or shake the ground glass ?

Stephen Williams DoP

Zurich

www.stephenw.com

drew_town · April 10, 2005

The video looks really good. I think it fits the song well. Great lighting for what you used. Kudos!

Were you impressed with the HDV format? If you'd comment a little on working with HDV, I'd appreciate it. I'll be shooting a ton of HDV in the near future. I'm curious as to the format's strengths and weaknesses. Was the mpeg2 compression apparent? Did the transfer to an uncompressed format make a remarkable difference?

Thanks.

Ed Nyankori · April 11, 2005

Inspiring work, it looks great.

Riku Naskali · April 11, 2005

Looked very nice, although I think you went a little bit crazy with the shallow dof and focus pulls ;)

Looking forward to hearing more about the adapter, I remember "Marla" looked really nice too.

Benjamin_Lussier · April 12, 2005

Very nice....

Tres bon ! lol

Jsuis pas un fan de la musique ou des paroles, mais l`eclairage est super !

Ahh the sweet advantages of being a proud montrealer... nor english nor french... just plain awkward :D

Good JOB !!

Cheerios

Ben

April 12, 2005

Looks nice.

Could you post some HiRes Frames? That would be really interesting.

-k

nchopp · April 12, 2005

Looks PHENOMONAL. I'm extremely impressed. (Which is a rarity)

Olivier Vanaschen · April 12, 2005

thank you so much everybody !! it just pushes us to work even harder now !

the ground glass used was static, homemade one (Sigma UV, aluminium oxide 1000). We're know thinking about using one from OptoSigma, which is finer and ready-to-use

We'll post full SD-res grabs and a small 30s cut in DV PAL real soon.

About HDV, it really is something different when used with a MINI35 because blurred backgrounds mean less information to compress into a MPEG2 stream so the compression is really less agressive on the "in-focus" parts of the images. We didn't have many camera movements but we didn't notice any compression bugs on any movements (we did shoot in 50i). We have to say that we did convert the MPEG2 streams during the capture to Cineform's HD codec (AVI codec) which works really really well and is nearly lossless. About dropouts, we got none at the shoot (we used those really expensive sony hdv tapes) but we got some at the capture because our hard-disk was a bit slow, nothing too stressful.

P+S technik (www.pstechnik.de) did publish a really nice PDF guide about their tests of HDV35, it explains the whole process very well.

Working with HDV is like working with any digital format: a lot happens in post. Sure, the whole look of the image is not going to change, if it's blue it's better stays blue but there's a whole difference in color-grading in an editing software or in a compositing software like we did. We went trough a lot of degraining, color-grading on two layers mixed together,... not the "usual" method at all.

The transfer to uncompressed just help avoid producing new compression artefacts during the color-grading process, so in a certain way, it did help. We'd and will shoot HDV again, at least for SD output it's way better than shooting DV. The extra resolution really helps. Now for HD output or even film, we haven't really tried yet, we're looking forward to test it in real life production.

olivier vanaschen, olan bowland, quentin aksajef & adil nahjari

creative film video & photography

www.theblacksheep.be

info@theblacksheep.be

Peter J DeCrescenzo · April 13, 2005

... About HDV, it really is something different when used with a MINI35 because blurred backgrounds mean less information to compress into a MPEG2 stream so the compression is really less agressive on the "in-focus" parts of the images. ...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Great job, Black Sheep folk!

It's indeed very refreshing to see a music video on the 'net in which every other word in the lyrics isn't some horrible thing the singer plans to do to the object of his "affection" ... 8|

But maybe in this case it's only because I don't understand a word of French? ;-)

In any event, your comment above about narrow depth of field's beneficial affect on video compression is a good one.

This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to the fullsize 2/3" JVC 3-sensor HDV camcorder they say will ship late this year or early next year. The bigger diameter sensor chips & lenses in this cam will enable the choice of much narrower DOF -- and thus fewer compression artifacts -- compared to what's typically possible using the 1/3" sensors & lenses in today's HDV cams.

In the meantime, using a homemade static groundglass & 35mm lens adapter, or the P+S Technik 35mm moving groundglass lens adapter, is a cool approach.

Again, congratulations on a job well done.

- Peter DeCrescenzo

Jan Doggen · April 14, 2005

We went trough a lot of degraining
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What do you mean by degraining? Do you mean getting rid of the groundglass-grain?

By the way, is that a Sigma lens on your adapter in the camera-setup photo?

grts

JD

Olivier Vanaschen · April 16, 2005

thanks a lot Peter !!

we did apply After Effects' remove grain filter (aka Grain Surgery 2) at HD res to get rid of some of the ground glass noise. It did really help getting a smoother finish on the video. As we did it at HD res we didn't loose that much resolution, the SD looks just cleaner.

the lens on the picture is a Sigma 20mm 1.8 Nikor mount. Excellent lens, we had a small budget but we wanted to be able to shoot as wide open as possible, that was the best choice, cheap, a bit soft but really solid.

Here's a link to full-res SD grabs: http://www.originalversion.net/temp/sdgrabs

They weren't edited in any way, they're straight out from the uncompressed SD master in After Effects. We just added the logo and exported in JPEG (quality: 10).

the black sheep

creative film video & photography

www.theblacksheep.be

Jan Doggen · April 21, 2005

the lens on the picture is a Sigma 20mm 1.8 Nikor mount. Excellent lens, we had a small budget but we wanted to be able to shoot as wide open as possible, that was the best choice, cheap, a bit soft but really solid.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Wasn't it hard to focus? I own a sigma 28/1.8 for my canon dslr and sometimes i find the focussing mechanism a little 'unsteady' if you see what I mean.

Something different... I thought there was quite some Chromatic Aberration-like color distortion on high-contrast edges in that video... maybe a problem a with your close-up lens (I assume you use a close-up lens to film the GG).

JD