ML HDR video - work in progress

[KarelBata]

Just some test stills to show at the moment - there's a  LOT of post still to be done. What you see is just the starting point - HDR workflow ia real pig.

p.s It's all in 3D! 

My heartfelt hanks to the ML team for such a fantastic tool! 

[Tired2]

Excellent.

Can you elaborate on the settings/process used?  I assume 50 or 60p HDR video?

[Rehaan]

AWESOME! Really looking forward to seeing the video. Do post it here once you are done with it, as i have subscribed to the thread!

Cheers,
R

[KarelBata]

Sorry for late reply.

Yes Tired, 60fps HDR.

EVERY shot is a major production. Really hard to maintain quality between shots. Lots of re-shoots that are testing the patience of everyone involved (tip- always cast for patient actors!).

Another tip - if you're going to do this, import and interpret all footage as 60, then set the whole edit to 30. When you're finished extract the two 30fps streams, export as JPEGs and tone-map. Expect that part to take a very long time. A 5 minute film will create 18000 JPEGs. (that's about 100GB!) If Photomatix takes 10 seconds to batch process each frame, it will take... about 25 hours! And that's before you start tweaking things. Complete madness. 

Should look good though.

I'm using AE, Photomatix, some Red Giant tools, and may well finish in a Mistika.

Looking forward to the 3D tools available now in Speedgrade CS6 which I hope wil, uh, speed up the post. 

[Michael Zöller]

And in 3D? Wow! How do you sync your cams?

[3pointedit]

Doesn't the noise kill you with HDR turned on? I had not noticed until I started shooting more video recently.

It's a shame that you have to generate so many stills for the HDR process. I have been running HDR video through Blender's node compositor to combine the light/dark frames. I did not have perform seperateration and processing as a discreet steps. Rather I use Blender to split the frames and key them all in the same pass. I am getting about second per frame rendering time.

Bear in mind that Blender is completely free, and portable and mutiplatform (Mac OS, Linux, windows).

[KarelBata]

It depends on the effect you're after. At the moment the tools available don't really lend themselves to going for conventional high quality video - you're better off looking at your lenses, lighting, etc. Of course there are exceptions. But for the classic HDR look this will just about work. But it will mean a lot of work in post. And shooting on the London Underground didn't help me - it's very dark down there! So more noise to clean up. And you have to have a suitable script - just plonking this 'look' on to something that could just as easily be shot conventionally doesn't make a lot of sense.

Sync is an issue, so you have to shoot with minimal movement, particularly in the X axis. And no pans. No camera shake. That sounds restrictive. It is, but take a look at this 

Shot using two Canon 105s. There was a lead problem, so had to go non-sync. There appears to be a lot of movement, but nothing ever crosses the entire frame. It's all in the Z axis. You think carefully about what you're shooting.

[KarateBrot]

Since you're shooting a lot of HDR you should check out "Ginger HDR" if you haven't already.

[carloferri]

Come funziona l'HDR? Grazie

[John Hable]

What ISO are you using in the darker frames?

[v1de0]

You are completely crazy. hope it all works. the stills look amazing

[Canon eos m]

Just some test stills to show at the moment - there's a  LOT of post still to be done.

Hi Karel,

Could you share link of the final video pls. Would love to see the outcome of your 100's of hours of  :)work.