4k anamorphic raw music video

[MonteNero]

Hi! Here is the no budget music video I shot for my sister. Even though it is no budget production it came out quite nice. She is very talented singer and music composer so check it out.
Regarding the production...The whole crew was me and my wife. She made a great makeup for the talents.
I used 5d mark III with 85mm 1.8 lens and compact  isco anamorphic adapter which gave me the true CinemaScope with all anamorphic aesthetics coming along.
The video was shot in two evenings on one lens. Due to no budget nature of the production there are many flaws that as the professional I would be ashamed of if I had necessary resources that I usually have when shooting TVCs. I used two 64gb SanDisk cards which can take 1920 4:3 ratio at 25 fps. I haven't had any lights so I shaped and manipulated natural light, that was a lot of pain...
The post production was flawless. I took the shot material at a studio I work, so I had all post production toys at my finger tips. Since it is not good to work on a personal projects during the work time I worked during late evenings and weekends.
MLV files were converted with custom in-house python app that at core uses ML's mlvdump. I wrote the app my self some time ago. The first draft version of the app can be found on this forum, it is available as a source code, since that time it consolidated quite a bit, but I haven't updated it on the forum.
The finishing was done in 4K in Resolve system on a professional cinema grade ref monitor. After unsqueezing the anamorphic material it naturally becomes 4k, and it doesn't loose any quality since all the range of details which was compressed horizontally now becomes normal. The unsqueezed 4k raw anamorphic video looked really amazing. Seen all kinds of footage from all kinds of pro digital film cameras on the reference monitor i can say that ML video holds up well. For the final output I sampled video to 1080p keeping the original CinemaScope style  ratio.
Comments and questions are welcome! If you like the music video please let Maydees know about it by putting the Like on Youtube.
So here is a final piece, I hope you'll  enjoy the song.

[MonteNero]

Some additional info, regarding anamorphic high frame reate shooting!
We all know that when shooting 60 fps ML vertically  squeezes the liveview. The thing is quite uncomfortable, it becomes hard to find a good framing, move object inside the shot etc.
But it can be easily fixed in liveview if true anamorphic lens is used. Since anamorphic lens squeezes the picture horizontally it will compensate the 60 fps ML's vertical squeeze. In other words, the 1.8x or 2x anamorhic lenses optically normalize the image when shooting high frame rates. That means no post processing scaling is needed, you get the final image right in camera which is kinda cool.

[DanHaag]

Nice work!  Can you share some information about your color grading workflow? Especially in terms of skin tones, those look pretty good. 

[MonteNero]

Thanks! When grading I tried to keep everything cool except the skin tones. If you shoot during the sunset you will get this effect automagically if color balance properly. Smooth lighting and good make up is a starting base for the good skintones. Moreover I tried to use soft warm bounce on the talents so they appear warmer then the background, with Reolve I pushed this effect even further.

[mothaibaphoto]

Really talented guys (and girls) tend to underestimate what they do. Because this it's hard to notice them in the crowd. By the way it's the best music video i've seen last week. Filmed, graded and performed just perfectly. Thank you.

[MonteNero]

Thanks, Mothaibaphoto. I appreciate it.

[DanHaag]

Thanks for your answer, I second that. White balance etc. shouldn't be an issue when shooting raw but a clean image with proper colors and lighting just makes it so much easier to start grading. Did you use any LUTs? Was the footage set to BDMFilm in Resolve? I'm interested in your workflow prior to the actual grading process. How did you prepare the ML raw footage within Resolve before doing your own corrections and grades?

[MonteNero]

I started with BMDfilm gamma. For some reason the original footage was heavily underexposed, even though on canon display it looked correct. I set the gamma to BMDfilm than I worked on the exposure and a temperature. The locations had very contrasty lighting and the difference between shadow and light was arround 5 to 6 stops, if I did not accedently underexpose prolly I would burn the highlights. I strongly believe that the raw 5d has us much latitude as red epic. If ML were more stable I would prefer 5d to our studio's Red Epic. I tried to use different luts that the studio used for film printing but they did not work as I expected so I developed the look my self. I found this tutorial which is  in my opinion is one of the best non technical tutorials about looks and coloring in resolve http://vimeo.com/65617394  While this tutorial only covers one particular mainstream look I tried to follow it when I was grading interier scenes.  But I have to worn you that the aprouch shown in the tutorial works only in certain locations and lighting conditions, that is why location scouting is very important. It took a lot of traveling before we found the  location that matched the intended color scheme. So the first and most important grading pass happened outside of Resolve actually... first it was a make up which set the skin tonality and brightness than it was finding the right location, the location had it's own color palette which strongly  effected the final image than it was the color and the quality of the light. Unlike the author of the tutorial above  I avoided using masks, key mattes and secondary corrections as I wanted to keep everything simple and fast. Hope it was useful.

[DanHaag]

Thank you so much, that posting helps a lot.  And again, really nice work, great video!

[extremelypoorfilmaker]

Great job montenero.. Just wondering.. are you italian?

[MonteNero]

Thanks!
I lived on Monte Nero street in Milano. Beautiful area The guy on the video is from Chiesa di Valmalenco.

[extremelypoorfilmaker]

I was only asking because your nick name suggested so. I am Italian, by the way!

[MonteNero]

Ciao! Non sono italiano, ma amo Italia non meno di italiani )
As I wrote in the first post I shot the music video for my sister. Her look implies that there is a probability that I'am not italian as well ))))

[extremelypoorfilmaker]

Probably, it's only a trick that my mind played on me!
anyway, great location for the shot. I like your work philosophy of getting the look right firstly modifiying the scene!

[MonteNero]

Hi, thank you again for kind words actually it is not my philosophy...it is how the every normal production works. There are also costume design and set dressing  which are very important aspects of the good image and storytellig. It is not all about camera and grading, those are very secondary things.

[rainless]

Hey... great video. Can you explain briefly the concept of anthropomorphic video and how it wound up uncompressing to 4k?

[MonteNero]

Hi, rainless. Thank you. If you read my first post carefully you'll find all the info about anamorphic workflow. There isn't much to add. Anamorphic shooting is the very old and cheap way to compress more information into the sensor or a film frame.

[extremelypoorfilmaker]

Montenero, your video and your workflow helped me prove to a "stubborn" friend of mine that adding ML to her canon 5D3 is a risk worth taking for the value for money. I would dare to add, i recently posted a short movie on the magic lantern forum, having your feedback would be greatly appreciated! I strive for criticism, so that i can grow professionally and become a better filmmaker for everyone to benefit