Peter Moretti

Ikiru, Rashomon, The Last Emperor, the Conformist. La Strada, The Eclipse.

I have a ton of comments. Here are some of them, in no particular order: I think the camera work in the exteriors is very nice. The interiors look more stained. The mic is used for the interiors sounds like a shotgun instead of some type of cardiod, which is making the room sound too reflective. I'm not sure about the vignetting added in post around the corners. The DOF is somewhat inconsistent for similar shots. The fight between the girl and the guy outside is blown out. Overall, I think it's a very good effort, but would benefit from a simplificatiion and a more unified style. HTH a little and THANKS for sharing.

I thought the footage looked very good. A few clips could have been lightened more to match w/ the rest of the material. From a stylistic point of view, I do feel it relied heavily on jump cuts, which I'm not a big fan of. It could have benefited from more of some kind of a story b/c the girls are hot and music nice, but there's not a lot progression going on. Perhaps the ending could have been set up more. That said it looked good. Oh, one other thing, I found the light pole behind the mansion distracting and would have probably tried to remove it in post. But thanks for sharing and all the best.

I do this fairly regularly, but I don't use NeoScene. I use TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0. It's an excellent program for transcoding, changing frame rates, removing a pulldown, capturing from DVD's and more. Probably the best $100 I've spent on editing. But it's main advantage over Cineform is that it will transcode HV-20 footage into a Quciktime file of any DNxHD format. This file can then be fast imported into Avid. You do need a program to capture the original HV-20 footage with. I use Sony Vegas b/c I have it on my computer. But there are many free capture programs out there. So the steps are: capture w/ another NLE or capture program, use TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 to transcode the HDV file into a 23.976 DNxHD .mov file, fast import file into Media Composer.

First, have you tried capturing the footage with another NLE or capture program? There is a chance the problem is being caused by your NLE barfing during ingest and has nothing to do w/ HDV. Second, most NLE's have effects that can blur and be tracked for motion, if need be. So it shouldn't be too much of a PITA to fix it in post if it's not a common occurrence. Third, you don't need an F900 to get better results, nor would you want to as the camera weighs a ton and you'd need an HDCAM deck to capture the footage. I've never seen this type of HDV error with Canon or JVC. They do HDV the best IMHO, esp. Canon. So I doubt an XH-A1s would exhibit such macro blocking, posterizing, artifacting (whatever you want to call it). And Sony's EX-1 is an amazing camera that will not have this problem and gives you better DOF control b/c it has 1/2" chips. HTH.

What you need is a good book on Avid. It is actually a very logical program and I think the easiest of all the NLE's to use once you get the hang of it. I got comfortable with Avid by reading "Editing with Avid Xpress Pro and Avid Xpress DV." It's about four years out of date, but still applies very well to even the most recent version of Media Composer. There are many tips and tutorials on the Avid website and loads of training DVD's for purchase. Also, Media Composer comes with a set of very good introductory tutorials. If you want to learn Avid, help IS out there. :). & please feel free to aks me any ?'s.

Thanks very much! Went and really liked it. It also got me wondering if negative flashing has a place in cinematography today? Or is it a practice that really has no benefit since postproduction effects have become so advanced and film stocks faster?

John, interlaced video is still being shot today. I have to think 4:2:2 is an advantage when shooting interlaced, as it's the same situation you are describing with analog compoent back in the day: a frame losing half its vertical resolution by being split into two temporally different fields. If the colorspace then takes away another half of vertical resolution and one half horiziontal resolution, isn't the result 1/4th vertical resolution and one 1/2 horizontal resolution? I understand your logic when it comes to progressive. I've always thought that 4:2:2 was better than 4:2:0, but invariably the 4:2:2 was always shot with a better codec or uncompressed and the 4:2:0 was mostly HDV. But I also think there should be an advantage to having the extra vertical resolution. I mean if you had to represent a natural shape using blocks, wouldn't blocks shaped x wide by 1/2x tall allow for greater detail than blocks shaped x wide by x tall?

Jean, it sounds like FCP is your weapon of choice (or necessity). If you have the option of using Avid, I'll gladly help research a solution for you. But if FCP is the platform you'll be using, then I don't think finding an Avid solution would be helpful.

I'm curious, why are you saying 4:2:0 is a better choice than 4:2:2? Because the space saved in the chroma can be used for more picture detail? As for the Red, it's 4:4:4, but the Bayer mask, as you know as well as anyone on the planet, is 4:2:0. So Red's red and blue samples were originally half horzontal and vertical resolution but subsequently interpolated to be full resolution 4K. The Red takes great images and is excellent for keying, so I'm not trying to denigrate the camera. But in its 4:4:4, the first four is greater than the other two, IMHO. That said, Red does a very good job of filling in the missing pieces.

I only wrote YUV b/c you did and didn't want to seem pedantic with YCbCr. :P

True, but as you know most video cameras record YUV because they chroma subsample. Since the 5DM2 records 4:2:0, it's not going to use RGB.

Jean, Avid has sorted out RGB to YUV HD/SD (and vice versa) issues very well. If you were editing on Avid I'm sure a solution could be tracked down. And I believe it's as simple as choosing the proper import settings. Just as a way of education, digital images are stored between the values of 0 and 255 (assuming 8-bit color). RGB images use this entire range. YUV does too, but the range between 0 and 15 is called super black and between 236 and 255 super white. So in YUV land, 16 is considered nominal black and 235 considered nominal white. Depending on your delivery, having values below below 16 or above 235 may or may not cause a problem. For broadcast, it's a big no-no. Most cameras that record YUV record super black and white info. But not all NLE's properly use this info. Some see YUV and just truncate everything below 16 to black and everything above 235 to white. Avid does not do this. Cineform has had problems with YUV footage with super blacks and whites. To accurately represent the values between 0 and 15 it sometimes resorts to using negative integers, as per a discussion with David Newman of Cineform. It supposed to work out in the wash, but does not always. It looks like from the stills you've posted that the camera is recording YUV from 0 to 255 but the import process truncated everything below 16 and above 235. That's why the darkest blacks have lost their detail. HTH.

I wasn't thinking about cuts. I've always converted to 23.976 before editing. Actually, doing the conversion after rendering could cause problems with effects and fades as well, now that I think about it. It seems that all the clips should be converted to 23.976 and the entire project re-rendered. Sounds like a hassle, but I think it would be the best way to go.

I've used TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 to convert 60i to 24P with great success. Also DVFilm's DVFilmmaker does a very good job, FWIU. I also have to think that FCP has a decent converter. Now how that will effect matching your sound, I'm not sure. I imagine you should add the new sound mix before doing the frame rate conversion. MichaelB, BTW, does it matter if your given 23.976 or 24 fps QuickTimes?

They did, XH-A1. It's still arguably the best $3K camera out there, three years later. I don't blame Canon for not giving the 5DM2 24P off the bat. They need to protect different product lines. While it's infuriating for us, the company needs to remain profitable. I wish they gave full manual controls to the HV-40, but that would seriously hinder their XH line. I naively thought this NAB would usher in a round of challengers to the RED. I was wrong, RED was given another year to run the field. But making a prosumer competitor for the Red is no easy task. Look at how frequently Scarlet has been delayed. And coming up w/ a RED-like camera means tackling the compression issue. AVCHD is a pain to edit and needs to be transcoded. Cineform takes up too much on camera power, FWIU. DNxHD is only used by Avid and is limited to 1920 X 1080 resolution. Even .R3D can't be worked with and viewed at full res on most computers. And whatever format used needs to be stored somewhere that's big and fast. These problems have not sorted themselves out yet. So the fact that Canon hasn't offered up a serious challenger to RED really shouldn't surprise us.

Here's an article on the making of the movie. Talks about the arc-shaped rig Marcus mentioned. http://blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/bri...k-high-voltage/

I watched Knowing tonight. I sat very close to the screen and tried very hard to look for digital problems, as I did with Crank 2: High Voltage. It was everything that Crank 2 wasn't. I saw no noise and had a hard time looking for problems, b/c there weren't any obvious ones, so I found myself slipping into the story. The colors lacked richness and the latitude was limited--but I thought they worked around it well, esp. in the school scenes. The blacks lacked some detail, but they were clean. When the movie ended and I felt sad. I actually almost started to cry. It had to do with the symbolism of the end of a world. Seeing the Red logo at the end really hit home for me that the world of film is dying. It's been in a decline for awhile now, but this film just sounded the gong for me in a way that Apocalytpo, Collateral, Che 1 & 2 and others hadn't. I know one has to be pragmatic and even learn from the past and bring it to the present when appropriate, but I still felt sad. It's the end of an era, and no cheesy scene of two kids running under some tree of life is going to make me feel better tonight that I just watched a beloved world get blown apart.

I've never seen Avid crush blacks except when it's been told to do so (often times inadvertently). On import settings, there is a choice for 601 or RGB levels. If you choose 601, Avid assumes black is 16 and white is 235, if you choose RGB, Avid will assume black is 0 and white is 255. There are similar settings for export. And it will depend on what format you choose to export to. Because Avid is used extensively in broadcast, one thing it does very well is manage how super blacks and whites are handled. It may take some time to find the correct combination of settings, but it should be a relatively simple process.

Neil, don't all of Canon's EF lenses work full frame with the 5D Mark II? I know the Canons use an electronic aperture, but does that cause a problem with the 5DM2 when shooting video? I think they're talking about getting aperture control over the EF lens when mounting it on a non-Canon camera. (I thought there were workarounds for using Canon EF lenses on other cameras like the Red and Nikons, but perhaps aperture control is still kludgey.)

FWIU, the ZF's have these following advantages over Nikon lens: longer focus travel, hard stops (some Nikkors go round and round), color matched glass across the entire line, usually nicer bokeh, tack-like sharpness. Of course Nikon lenses are sharp and have nice bokeh, but the Zeiss's seem to surpass even Nikon's level.

Tom, I'm not sure what you're referring to. An indie filmmaker holding a Canon XL is almost a cliche by now. And the XH's are probably the best selling prosumer line out there.

Saul, Thanks for the info. Are you saying that they used Red Ones for the Game? BTW, I've read that they used a faster than usual shutter speed for the frame rate in Crank 2, which would account for the appearance of dropouts with fast motion. Does anyone know if they shot 60i or 24p? And I'm sure the filmmakers are talented and technically savvy. From the buzz I'd heard, I was expecting something shot on video but looked close to what we've come to expect from film. IMHO, it was video shot to look in many ways like video--which actually makes sense. I saw the Polish brothers speak at bookshop in Malibu. They said, choose a format for its imperfections as well as for what it can do well. "Some subjects just aren't super-35 worthy," IIRC.

Elliot, when you say "at the start of your shoot" how often should that ideally be done--w/o going overboard? Do you mean just at the beginning of the shoot and if you change film stocks? Or do you mean for each setup? And then what about reversals, master etc. for each scene? Thanks much :).

This is something I've been wondering about. During filming, the film itself adds grain to the picture. So even if a DI is made and projected digitally, film grain will show up. But if a print is made from the DI, isn't another level grain added by the film print? If so, how does this second introduction of grain to image interact with the grain already there from the orginal filming? Is this something to be aware or is it a non-issue? Thanks much and sorry for asking such a basic ?. Thanks again :).