Johnny W. Ching

If music videos started being shot low contrast, with less saturation, will you start complaining about that. If you don't like music videos stop watching them. :) I just watched about 30 minutes of music videos and most of them didn't have blown out highlights, and most of them didn't share the same color scheme, as you mentioned. Actually most of them were really well shot, and edited. We must be watching different channels :)

Here's a still used for telecine reference on a recent music video. 2 1k Pars to simulate car headlights, and a 1k w/ chimera and 60degree eggcrate for a soft edge.

Look forward to the stories from your set. What's the post process for the show? DI?

You can see a bit of distortion on the actor's face, so a wider focal length was probably used along with the deep stop. I agree with Dominic, the background does look a bit softer in the end frame, so probably a small pull. The defocus is noticable along where the top of the mountain meets the sky.

That's why run it on a PC :)

Combustion also makes it easier to manage Look up tables (LUT), grain, grain removal, Selections (ie. power windows, selective defocus) and even use the keyer's suppresion tool as a make shift secondary correction tool. Also color correction settings can be exported, and brought into Flame/Infernal for onlines and conforms. Oh, and I don't work for discreet LOL

Arri 2C, Zeiss Standard Speeds, Zeiss 10mm, 85ND set, and a Pola. Like you put it, minimal :)

Oh that software is called Automatic Duck by the way.

Discreet Combustion has a really indepth color corrector, similar to the one found in their Flame, and Inferno systems. And I've just read about a new nifty software that allows you to bring a timeline from your editing software (ie. FCP, AVID, etc) directly to Combustion, or Aftereffects, so it makes color grading alot more efficent. Each cut is represented as a layer in your compositing software. So setting up a low budget DI workflow is very possible. Just try to get a low con xfer for more room for your color grading. And as David said try getting a calibrated monitor.

Don't forget that you get 6 primes for half the price...

xfer=film-tape transfer :)

Thanks for the comments. We had a really good makeup artist on the show. The tunnel performance was lite by a single 200w joker, through 2 layers of 216 diff. Bedroom was lite with a single 4'x4 bank kino through 216 with the 200w HMI as a backlight. Emulsion used on the show were Kodak 5248, and 5279. Dave Hussey at Company3 did out xfer, and he did an amazing job as always.

Thanks for the kind words Kevin. Check out the video, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts. -JC