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Massively late but finally ready...:

I have been shooting for a provocative documentary in the German Wolfcenter. Title is "Tyttö ja sudet" - "The girl and the wolves". Subtitle "Mitä tapahtuu kun ihan tavallinen maalaistyttö heitetään susille?" - "What happens if a normal countryside girl is thrown to the wolves?".

I'm editing my fingers bloody at the moment, trying to get a good story together and fix some mistakes I made during shooting (that's my very first movie project)... Shot on a 6D with the EF 24-105mm L f/4 IS, mainly in h.264 All-I with Cinestyle profile and a Gopro Hero 3+ with ProTune. ML was vastly helpful with exposure judgement in the wolf-enclosure (vegetation!).
Before post, I avconv'd the whole footage to ProRes 422 HQ. Editing is exclusively done with KDEnLive on Linux.

Here's a trailer:

The doc itself still needs to be color corrected and subtitled. Might take another 3 weeks or so before it's ready.

I'm using KDEnLive for keying, specifically, the color select effect (not the bluescreen effect - that sucks).

I do manual white balance with a grey card before every shot (if the light has changed) as a matter of principle.

I think, I found the reason for the noises. My wall has a structured wallpaper which creates massive aliasing on the distance I shoot and pretty much the same goes for my backdrop. I get much better results when I have a huge distance to the backdrop and I shoot wide open, so the backdrop is totally blurred.

Also, the h.264 theory obviously has some merit. On closer view, I see compression artifacts on the contrast lines between skin tones and the backdrop. Unfortunately, I still didn't manage to get a working RAW workflow together on my machine (Ubuntu 14.04).

But after shooting my documentary in Germany, it's already pretty clear to me that I need another camera. The 6D makes great photos but for my style of film shooting it just doesn't work . I do "news", documentaries, interviews and such and a lot run'n'gun. I need MUCH better lowlight performance and autofocus would be useful. So - the whole decision process again - but this time without the requirement for stills. Maybe a C100 with a Ninja Blade? Is there a recommendable more general forum, English or German? I think, I'll probably a bit offtopic with that here .

I did get the basics pretty much right. I just skipped describing them because I thought, it's a camera thing . But the bitrate I didn't try yet. The noise I even get with ISO100 and lights - well... 4x125W fluorescent (equivalent 4x625W halogen) softboxes SHOULD be enough for a 2x3m screen... I'll try the bitrate.

Hi,

I'm starting to get gray hair over my attempts to greenscreen. No matter what I do and how I set the lighting, I always have mushy transitions between skin tones and the green screen, resulting in spill. I also tried different color profiles - Cinestyle giving the worst results. I also noticed a ton of noise in my image, although my scene is well lit on the border to being overexposed.
Is there something like high light noise? I'm currently shooting in 1080P high.

-S

Hi,

I noticed something odd. When I connect an external monitor via HDMI, I cannot switch off the cropmarks. Well - I can switch them off, but they don't disappear. On the other hand, the magic zoom doesn't work on an HDMI display. It just doesn't appear. When I pull the plug, it will appear on the internal monitor.

-S

That worked perfectly, thanks . Well, those "pixels" were pretty big... The pink one was more like 10x10 pixels or so... Funny also that they only appeared in video mode.
But - now they are gone .

http://youtu.be/HnAnA2ymeD0

Anybody else has something like that? What can it be? It seems to just have appeared - at least I didn't notice it before.

I don't think your workstation is the problem so much as Kdenlive is the problem.

I get the feeling also... But the choice of editing software on Linux is quite limited... And since Adobe changed to that renting model which basically requires the editing machine to have an internet connection, that's out of the question for me (besides the fact that it's out of my budget).

Subtitles can be created in any text editor. (Unless you want DVD subtitles, you have to convert them to that DVD image subtitle format).

I think, creating them in a text editor is fairly unintuitive. Aegisub (what I mentioned before) allows basically "on screen" WYSIWYG editing.

If he's only doing translations, then you'd want to pre-subtitle it in whatever language with timing, and then he can just translate that text.

Isn't that kinda double work? She does understand/speak German and English perfectly fluent, so my idea was basically, to tell her what software to set up on her PC and then send her a USB-SSD with the material to work on. She would then send the SSA/ASS/SRT/whatever file back to me.

My main issue is: In case a TV station or production service wants the material - which format are they going to want the subs in and how to I create that format? DO they nowadays still use the EBU STL format?

In Mac? Plenty of them, Open Source and free!

Actually, Linux or Windows but if it's Open Source, chances are it's possible to get it to run and/or compile on Linux. Do you have recommendations for good software which creates files which could be accepted by "professionals"?

Hi,

I'm slowly getting settled with all the new stuff around my 6D and my new video workstation. One thing I was wondering about is that my shiny new workstation seems to have more problems with real time processing of h264 in KDEnLive than my shabby old Phenom2X3.

Anyways, for the moment, I settled on DNxHD as intermediate format and I knitted some bash scripts which will suck h264 (and hopefully MLV if I ever get it to work) from the card and convert it to DNxHD on the fly. Mid August comes my first project - travelling to Germany and shooting a short doc about the Wolfcenter.

Question:
What would be your recommendation for subtitles? I have a translation genius who lives 600km away from me. What we need is some kind of a visual sub editor, preferably open source, which produces a format which can either directly be exchanged with others on production quality level or be converted into a common production format.
At first glance, Aegisub looks really good as far as the workflow for the translator goes. But I'm not sure if I can actually do something with the "advanced substation alpha" subtitle format...

-Stefan

I use the default version from Ubuntu 14.04 which is dcraw 9.19. Is that sufficient?

As the title says...
I put the CR2, the resulting DNG and the program's output here: http://home.gofferje.net/ml/

Whops, I just checked just to be sure and it *was* activated. But that would mean that the +4 doesn't work properly then? Well, I'll test tomorrow...

There is an option to do a single-ISO picture every second shot. Are you sure it's not checked?

Pretty much, because it works perfectly with +4 and I change just that value, nothing else. I'll test more tomorrow.

No, I meant, dual ISO without AETTR. Setting it to e.g. +4EV and using camera ISO 100 works perfectly. Setting it to -4EV and using camera ISO 1600 produces a single-ISO picture every second shot.

You said you are on 6D, right?

So, wait until somebody will fix it (I'm going to break the nightly builds until then), and if it still won't work after that, prepare to do a proper bug report (for example, choose a static test scene and upload the first 4-5 test images until ETTR settles).

Right now, the exposure decision on 6D (and 600D, and maybe others) is completely wrong because of bad RAW offsets.

AAAAAAAHHHH!!!

Ok, I'm fairly experienced in software testing and bug reporting but not in photography. But if somebody gives me precise instructions on what they need, I'll be happy to do whatever testing necessary to help.

Is it possible that using negative EV offsets for dual ISO leading to single ISO pictures every 2nd shot is also a bug?

Tons of testing today in the kitchen in the afternoon - medium bright inside, very bright outside.
But I couldn't get consistent results. I originally set dual ISO to +4 again and again tried with Av but also in M mode. Out of about 60 shots I got a single image which was dual ISO and a little bit overexposed so I could do something with it in darktable. Most of the pictures were heavily underexposed. I also tried setting dual ISO to -4 but with that I didn't get a single usable picture.
Maybe I'm lacking some understanding of the underlying principle here...

Is there any tutorial on dual ISO which describes the use in practice rather than just explaining the technical details? What I did was setting it to +4 and main ISO to e.g. 100 and then aiming at the bright places in the picture (the windows) or - in manual - trying to get the bright places exposed right. As I understood the technical basics of dual ISO, the camera would create an image file with ISO 100 and ISO 1600. As I adjusted my parameters for the windows, I would expect that in the ISO 100 lines, the windows would be exposed right while the room is too dark and in ISO 1600, the room would be exposed right while the windows are blown out.

Together with AETTR, I would expect about the same, just that everything is just a tad brighter (overexposed).

I also tried without AETTR and the results were a bit better. However, with dual ISO set to -4 and the camera's main ISO set to 1600, every other picture was not dual ISO - it was totally flat, no lines at all, with the room correctly exposed and the windows blown out.

ETTR thinks you didn't need dual ISO for the particular scene and you probably didn't. Try on a scene with a large dynamic range (for example: indoors with some bright exterior windows)

The algorithm is that intelligent? So, basically, with AETTR, I don't need to worry about dual ISO - it will set the values as needed?
I'll experiment more!

I didn't quite get how ETTR works in Live View mode. Does it continuously analyze the picture or does it wait for a shot being taken? I.e., does it work for shooting video?

Tried in Av and M and now it looks like the second shot (autosnap) is a regular CR2 and no dual ISO...

Edit:
Not only the second shot - it looks like AETTR switches dual ISO off?

Edit2:
Confirmed! I just checked the ML settings after my last test shoots and dual ISO is set to 100/100 = effectively off.

My guess is that you are using GLUT rather than GLFW as the graphics toolkit. Unfortunately a few things don't work with GLUT - I think the MOV export is one of them.

Doubly unfortunately, MlRawViewer is using the latest version of glfw3 - 3.1 - which you will need to build for yourself from source from the git tree here: https://github.com/glfw/glfw.git

You will need cmake to build it. Make a "build" directory under the source tree, go in there and do "cmake ..". Then edit the generated CMakeCache.txt and change the line "BUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON" from OFF to ON.
Then build with "make", and copy the file "libglfw.so.3.1" into the mlrawviewer source directory with the name "libglfw.so.3"

After that your mov export should work.

Sorry for all the trouble. Hopefully in future, when GLFW3.1 is released and packaged by distros, this step will become as easy as "sudo apt-get install libglfw3".

Ok, I'll test but I have to check first if that messes up my system. A number of things are running on openGL. No worries about the "trouble" - it's none. I like to test stuff and with the price going half this summer, I'll likely get myself a BMPCC for that $500... So my 6D would be for photos only then .

AAH! Will test, thx!

You need a static binary build of ffmpeg in the same directory as the source. Get it from here: http://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/

Still doesn't work . Now it writes a 185bytes big MOV file and then idles.

Hi,

I'm currently trying to learn by doing and so I went out today to play with ETTR and dual ISO. I have tried dual ISO a few days ago and it worked pretty nicely although I didn't see huge advantages. Well, I'm no experienced digital photographer (yet) . With ETTR, however, I found some problems. After pushing all CR2s through cr2hdr as usual, I opened the DNGs in darktable and found all shots that were done by the ETTR module in autosnap mode way too dark. Some had a significant magenta or green tint.
I was shooting in "P", with ISO originally set to 100. Dual ISO was set to +4. Now I'm wondering if it was some operator's mistake or if there's an issue with the ETTR module on the 6D. As far as I understand, image done with ETTR shoudl appear too bright, i.e. overexposed, rather than too dark.
While shooting I noticed that ETTR was often doing multiple shots and it fairly often said "ETTR giving up" on the preview screen.

-Stefan

Can't export on kubuntu 14.04:

Code Select Expand

MOV export to /video/test/M23-0349_000001.MOV started
Opening MLV file /video/test/M23-0349.MLV
Black level: 2044 White level: 13000
FPS: 23.97 (23970/1000)
Audio frame count 0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/sgofferj/mlrawviewer/ExportQueue.py", line 423, in doExportMov
    self.processExportMov(jobindex,filename,movfile,wavfile,startFrame,endFrame,audioOffset,rgbl,tm,matrix,preprocess)
  File "/home/sgofferj/mlrawviewer/ExportQueue.py", line 482, in processExportMov
    self.encoderProcess = subprocess.Popen(args,**kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 710, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1327, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Export job failed:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/sgofferj/mlrawviewer/ExportQueue.py", line 182, in run
    self.nextJob(self.jobs[self.currentjob])
  File "/home/sgofferj/mlrawviewer/ExportQueue.py", line 205, in nextJob
    self.doExportMov(job[0],jobArgs)
  File "/home/sgofferj/mlrawviewer/ExportQueue.py", line 430, in doExportMov
    if self.encoderProcess:
AttributeError: 'ExportQueue' object has no attribute 'encoderProcess'


Edit:
Can't export to MOV. Export to DNG works...

Just to give an update - I have a 6D on order now. After quite some consideration I decided primarily because the 5DIII would be way out of my budget and there were a few things I saw in reviews, especially, regarding autofocus performance in low-light conditions which were better for me in the 6D. I'll see if I can deal with the artifacts and how it goes.