Articles about "holiday"

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.

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.

Like I wrote before I visited Photokina now. I was in Cologne from Tuesday to Wednesday and met a friend, David Leuck. On Tuesday we made a photo tour to the historic city of Cologne. We ended with shooting the sunset at one of the photographers meeting points, at the Hohenzollern Bridge where you have a nice view to the Cologne Cathedral, the Rhine and the cityscape of the historic city. We were relatively early for the sunset so I spontaneously decided to timelapse it. This shot may be part of a timelapse collection I plan to cut soon.

On Wednesday we went to the Photokina itself. A big crowd was already in the queue at the entrance but in the big area of the exhibition grounds the crowd dispersed so it was relatively easy to see and test all we wanted without waiting or with only having to wait few minutes. The main problem I experienced is that one day isn’t enough to go to all the nice talks you want to hear at different booths. But I set my priorities before and saw all that was important for me. But to begin I got one of the best shots in my collection. In the outdoor area near the entrance hall of the south entrance there where some falconers with their animals where I got the great shot on the left.

Best things first: The talks I watched were great. The first one was somehow accidently. When I was at the Nikon booth I saw that there was a talk by Sandro Miller and Anthony Arendt about to happen. They talked about how Sandro was asked to make a short for the D800 release – Joy Ride – and how it was shot. After this I was at the Canon booth watching the funny Philip Bloom talking about the C300 and the Cinema EOS line. Later I saw Nino Leitner talking about tripods and Sebastian Wiegärtner talking about DSLRs and large chip camcorders in the movie park. All the talks where cool and I think next time I’ll plan some more time especially for the talks.

Gear-wise I was a bit disappointed from some stuff but happy about some other stuff. Here are some short comments about some stuff I tested:

• The Sony A99 has a better viewfinder than the A77 but it’s still way inferior compared to an OVF. And in contrast to the specifications on the Sony webpage and the brochure I didn’t find 24p and 60p on the A99. Focus magnification is also still not available in video mode. So expect of clean HDMI output and the audio stuff nothing new on the A99 which excited me.
• We were able to test the Nikon D600 at a photo dealer in Cologne so we had done this before but we saw a good thing on the D600. The D600 is capable of bracketing with 3 Frames ±2EV and ±3EV. This is good for HDR timelapsing and the point I’m really disappointed by the D800 which I liked expect of this.
  
  

  BMD camera

• The Cinema EOS line – especially the C300 and C500 – from Canon is really cool and nice to handle. I hope I can try them out on some shoot sometimes.
• At the Zeiss booth I saw the one camera I really hoped to be able to try out. Equiped with the nice CP.2 50mm/T1.5 there was the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera. Handling seems cool. And the footage coming throw the web seems to speak for itself.
• Being used to filming with foto zooms it was really nice to play with the Compact Prime and a Compat Zoom CZ.2 70-200 with an FS100. The wide focus range and fixed focus while Zooming are really nice.
• Trying out a Glidecam with a vest was nice but it also confirmed what I read online often before: You have to pratice if you want to be good with it.

More photos from Photokina and the Cologne trip in my 500px collection “Photokina 2012”.

To end this article here is a sneak peek from my holidays in Oberstdorf. Dislcaimer: Edited and graded in the rush on the last day there to have something to show to my grandparents the next day. I then decided to upload it with this disclaimer. The final pice will get some more attention in editing and grading.

Also coming soon: I developed a little script to help me smooth my timelapses which I will write about later this month.

September is here and I’m really happy that after many long months now a month of holiday is here. While writing this I’m in Oberstdorf in the German Alps where I’m staying until Saturday. I’m here to enjoy the nature and of course shoot some timelapses and video. It’s cool to be back here after two years since my last stay here. I have some cool material and hope to finish some edits shortly after coming back home.

At home I have two days until I’m leaving again for a short trip to Photokina in Cologne where I’ll be on the 19th September. There I’m planing to try out some coole gear and of course meet some cool people from the community like Nino Leitner, Sebastian Wiegärtner and Philip Bloom.