Three weeks ago – on the 23rd February – it was time for this years HALLia VENEZiA, the venetian carnival I already shot two years ago. This year I decided to go and shoot again but without having time for preparing and preplanning due to our short film we shot in the middle of February I just decided to take my 5D and go and shoot some raw impressions from my shoulder. So it was mostly for trying out documentary style 5D raw shooting.

And I made a huge mistake there. Too late, when I saw the material in the editing I realised I hadn’t switched the IS of my 70-200 of, which was active from the last times shooting photos. I mostly used the 70-200 so most shots are a bit screwed up.

The problem is that the stabiliser is optimised for photographing, where the image has to be really stable for parts of a second or so. On video you would want smoothed out camera motions instead, no image pinned on one point. And as you see in the video the images are sharp for a second or so and then there is a fast move to the new center on which the IS then stabilises. I knew this problem and now I learned the lesson to double check your IS setting … This showed me that I’ve not done enough video with my 5D which I bought nearly 8 or 9 months ago. Still not used to have a stabiliser in the lens. In the Sony universe the NEX don’t have stabilisation for Alpha lenses so I didn’t had to worry about it.

Here is the impression video anyway which at least shows how good the FullHD raw from the 5D is. As I’m busy working on some other stuff I also had only a few hours for cutting and color grading this piece. Next year I plan to do a bit more on this day with more preplanning.

I really love the quality of the 5D RAW but I hate to work with it. This is due to the bad screen which is the hell to focus even with the Magic Lantern helpers compared to the small screen with good focus assistant on the NEX 5N. I hope that with Firmware 1.2.3 and the upcoming Magic Lantern for it, it will get easier to get external monitoring to work right with good resolution output etc. Currently with 1.1.3 the output is no good FullHD as on the Sony which makes displaying much easier.

The other thing is, that you have to be aware of frame dropping issues with raw. I filmed in the moderate 24p mode with only 1920*1038 (1,85 DCI aspect ratio) but still had some drops on my Komputerbay 1050x 128GB cards. I ordered two more for this day which I sent back after experiencing many drops on nearly every clip. The old ones (also 1050x 128 GB) I got in August only had a few frame drops over the course of filling the whole card so worked better.

The aperture was at around 8 to make focusing easier, as long as I didn’t actually pushed the aperture control, shutter 1/50. Than I exposed with my Genus Eclipse Fader ND. I tried not to overexpose and used the histogram and it worked fine. Some images looked a bit dark in some parts but the raw offers everything I need. If I had exposed to bright, the often bright and reflective costumes would have overexposed.

Again this project showed me what cool material you can get from your shoulder but how inconvenient working with a DSLR on a not so full blown rig is. I hope that workflow and ergonomics are getting better also in the lower budget camera gear section…

In November I was approached by fellow student who searched a Director of Photography for a short crime film project. As someone who always loved well made crime movies I asked him to send me the script and was in after reading it. And I’m happy I decided to be part of the project.

We started planing the next steps and begun the casting and location search. In mid January, after the end of the winter term we then made a few weeks of hard work to finish preparation and were ready to shoot on the 10th of February, our first shooting day. After 7 shooting days we had great material in the can and are now in post production.

And finally yesterday our crowdfunding campaign was changed to the funding phase by Startnext, a German crowdfunding service. (They have some strange processes to get projects up and running which took some time …)

We invested some money because even No Budget Projects aren’t free. There is always little things that add up which we try to refund with the campaign. I’d be happy if you support us by becoming a supporter on Startnext or if you spread the word about the campaign!

Stay tuned for more about our project. In the next weeks I plan to write a bit about our workflow on set and in post. And to tell you one thing: It’s a RED workflow ;-)

Actus Reus on Startnext

This year I spontaniously decided to got to the IBC (International Broadcast Conference) in mid september after I already threw away this idea. But I’m happy I did cause it was great to visit Amsterdam (where the IBC is happening) and to go to the tradeshow and chat with many interesting people and network a bit there. And to see the cool new gear of course.

But besides all the interesting gear of course I also took some time to see a bit of Amsterdam. Unfortunatetly my visit was way to short and I ended up being at the show for three days and only having two days for Amsterdam itself. But on the first day in Amsterdam I took my camera bag and the tripod to play a bit with the 5D. I wanted to have some more material in raw to play with and to get more of a feeling for it. And it was really good I decided so, cause especially in the time around sunset the sky was nice and mostly clear.

All in all I ended up just shooting about 40 minutes of material while getting a feeling for the city. The video above is a short collection of some of the clips which I cut and graded in the Resolve 10 Beta.

With this project I discovered some shortcomings with shooting 5D raw. The biggest thing was: In post I discovered that all material regardless of the setting in camera seems to have a White Balance fixed at 5521 Kelvin. So I ended up setting the Camera RAW module in Resolve to cloudy, shade, sunny etc. depending on the shot to get a better starting point. Number two: the few cloudy shots at the beginning are a bit muddy and even after trying many stuff of the they don’t look nice. So I only left them there for demonstration purpose.

Last but not least most of the shots seem to be very oversaturated leading to bring saturation down for most of the shots. (Note that I used the standard REC709 debayer in Resolve at a starting point knowing that all the color information is there in resolves color space even if I debayer with REC709.)

With the rest of the shots and the possibilities of raw I’m really pleased and happy that I choose the 5D when switching away from Sony. If Magic Lantern raw wasn’t there in June/July I’d most likely be a D800 owner now ;-)

Despite all cool new features of Resolve 10 featured everywhere definitely is that now compressed DNG is supported. I used the Adobe DNGConverter to reconvert the DNGs created by RAWMagic which with the right setting leads to lossless compressed files with about 55% of the original file size. Only some CinemaDNG metadata like the framerate seems to get lost in this process.

And last but not least: Stay tuned! The release of the first episode of a webseries I shot in August is planed to be released this weekend.

On August 24th, Feuerzauber, a competition between three firework artist, took place in the German city Karlsruhe. I was there to film a bit to show the show and give a feel for it. Here is a first teaser:

Unfortunately there were some problems in the workflow which lead to a much longer editing time then I planed. The material was shot on the 5D Mark III with compressed (ALL-I intraframe compression) shooting for the day shots and RAW for the nights shots. Due to the high contrast between the fire and fireworks and the dark surrounding I knew RAW could really help here. But the interaction between the editing software and the color grading software really slowed me down due to some problems. Soon I plan to cut more material about Feuerzauber directly using DaVinci Resolve 10 this time, which just got it editing functions and seems to have everything needed for most tasks.

I’m not only going to write some more about problems with Resolve and the 5D material conforming but also have some topics for upcoming posts. Some of it will be Behind the Scenes reports of some projects I worked on in my holidays, some may be more software/post workflow stuff and I also have some general thoughts of our film world I’ve started to write about.

To close this post I have another really short clip. This is just a four second excerpt of a clip I recorded in Amsterdam a week ago. I loved the colors and how it came out without any color grading and felt the need to share it before I find the time to edit my Amsterdam stuff. (Btw. this was processed with the fresh of the shelf Resolve 10 Beta. And be sure that there is much more detail in the RAW material then what you see in this clip. So enjoy this nice sunset clip:

Some days ago I started updating my website layout and improved some small things to get a better user experience. One of the main points that lead to my decision redesigning the layout slightly was my new notebook. On a retina MacBook some photos and layout-related graphics looked a bit boring.

The decision to not only change the images and graphics but to implement some changes I had in mind a while now was easy then. So I added a welcome page which will be extended soon, a working Lightbox which is now used in the photo and video gallery and some helpers for me as the admin user. And some experiences where real fun and helped me to gain some hope in the human race again.

For example when testing the layout in Internet Explorer 9, the current version of IE on Windows 7, I saw what I not expected to see. I saw no layout hickup like I was used to from previous web design tests in the pre IE8/9 era. Well done Microsoft. Now you got the standard. After seeing this I was shure I wouldn’t have to make IE specific layout hacks. Anyway if you’re using IE, especially an older one, I’d suggest you use a more modern, better supported browser like Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

Another thing added now is that I’ll be notified about every comment made to one of my blogposts. I missed some in the past especially on older posts and missed some spam in the past weeks. Sad that there are so much spammers but they’ll have no fun with me now.

If anything seems to not work properly or you have some feedback you want to give about the layout feel free to comment this post.

Finally here is another video I just finished after some long weeks of tweaking TimeSmoother, my Lightroom timelapse plugin, and rendering timelapses. “A fast look on Oberstdorf” is a collection of timelapse clips I shot while I was on holidays in Oberstdorf.

Next I’m going to create a Video containing some of these timelapses combined with some of the video clips I shot.

All shots are RAW DSLR stills, most of them shot on the Sony Alpha 850, some on the A77. I edited the images with Lightroom and TimeSmoother, my timelapse plugin for Lightroom, and then rendered them to 4K ProRes 4444 with AfterEffects. This video is cut in Premiere and slightly graded in SpeedGrade to finish. This project again showed me, how slow Premiere is and how bad the Workflow with SpeedGrade is. It’s no fun that Premiere exports all movies as DPX files when sending to SpeedGrade although SpeedGrade is ProRes compatible. I had about 160GB of DPX files for 3 minutes at 4K with 35MB per file.

I’ll soon publish some more information about TimeSmoother and offer an alpha version. With this I’ll present my improved workflow to give an usage example.

Short video of the 3rd model truck meeting of the RC model sport club Öhringen. My father ask me to shoot a bit of video. Due to my flu from which I hadn’t yet recovered properly, I only shot a little amount of footage but I think it came out quite ok.