Russian corporate movie shot on ML RAW (Canon 5d Mark III)

[nikitagetto]

Hello, guys!

This is a corporate movie shot for a russian company from Vladivostok. Actually the movie is about their travell to Cambodia, so most of it was shot outdoors during the journey.

All footage EXCEPT interviews was recorded in RAW, 23.976 fps. The interviews were recorded in H.264, 23.976 fps. I used three 32 GB TRANSCEND 1000x cards and one 64 GB KOMPUTER BAY 1000x card. All the cards could run stable 1792x1008 resolution. To be honest, TRANSCEND cards are more stable. Komputer bay is faster. it can run up to 1920x1080, but sometimes the recording stops unexpectedly. We shot about 6 hours of footage (without interviews), it took more than 2 TB on the HDD. No lost or skipped frames, no corrupted files at all.

I converted MLV files to CDNG 16bit maximized using raw2cdng.1.6.0, than I prepared proxy files (H.264) in Da Vinci Resolve 11 Lite, and the editor of the movie used proxies to edit in Adobe Premier Pro CS6. The footage was later color graded in Resolve, croped to cinema scope (1920x818) and rendered to final H.264. VisionColor ImpulZ LUTs were used for grading.

I really love the result although the working process is quite complicated. The main problem was the lack of the space. I had to shoot all day long and sometimes there was no possibility to copy the materials to clear flash cards. So I could not record continious long shotsand always had to choose what to shoot.

Great thanks to all the Magic Lantern team, you are real magicians, guys!

Any questions are welcome!

[Tumble]

Impressive,

What lenses did you use? And which of the ImpulZ LUTs did you use?

[nikitagetto]

Thank you!

I used: Canon EF 24-105 mm f/4 L IS USM, Canon EF 70-200 mm f/2.8 L USM, Canon EF 50 mm f/1.2 L USM

Most of the time it was 24-105.

As to the LUT, it was not from ImpulZ, it was from OSIRIS package by Vision Color. Sorry for the mistake. Actually it was M-31 LUT. I first corrected BMD Film gamma manually to get REC.709 and than I applied M-31 LUT with 50% - 60% opacity.

[arrinkiiii]

Very nice indeed 

[The Director]

Охуенно
На некоторых кадрах конечно шумы и горячие пиксели повыскакивали, но всё равно ОЧЕНЬ объемно

[DeafEyeJedi]

@nikitagetto:

Definitely remarkable and you did a great job overall with the handling of the 5D3 and the use of the lens was amazing. The natural lighting was just so natural!

Love how the contrast came out and the colors are beautiful... I think you made the right choice by decreasing the opacity of the M-31 LUT to 50-60% allowing the REC.709 to still be shown noticeable.

The the H.264 format from the interviews still came out great and almost unnoticeable in between with the RAW.

Most of all, I'm surprised how smooth and cinematic the panning/tilting came out especially shooting in 23.976 fps.

How often did you use the 50L? Were you able to use 3x crop mode during RAW... it is so much fun to do it that way for certain scenes!

Thanks for sharing.

[g3gg0]

first:
wow! absolutely impressive video. really good work!
would definitely call that a documentary in at least TV quality.

a)
the only thing that is not 100% perfect is the night shot where you can see ISO noise and dead pixels.
seeing the dead pixels, i assume you didnt use e.g. LR to reduce color/luminance noise for these shots.

b)
during the snake house scene with very warm colored sun, the orange teint was a bit too much for my personal taste.
you had two cameras for that scene?

c)
you drunk snake venom and fed chickens to aligators as team event?
interesting

[nikitagetto]

@The Director Спасибо!:) Самый шумный эпизод - где пьют яд, не оказалось под рукой полтинника, пришлось ISO задрать выше 6400. Ну да вроде глаз не режет:)

---

@DeafEyeJedi Thank you for your comment, I'm really pleased you liked my job! I used 50L just for a few times, when shooting at night, and a little bit in the conference episode. Usually I try to close up to 5.6 - 8 whenever it is possible, so 24-105 is more than enough most of the time.

The 3x crop mode really helped me to shoot the aircraft taking off for the beginning of the movie! We couldn't get very close to the runway, and 200mm was not enough, so I swiched to crop mode. I forgot to turn on FPS override, so the footage I got was 30fps. But when I interpreted it in Resolve as 23.976, it looked quite well.

---

@g3gg0 Glad to hear good words!:) Thank you!

a) I corrected all footage in the Lite version of Resolve, which doesn't have any denoiser. Anyway I don't find it too much disturbing in this particular documentary... Maybe next time I'll use some plugin or software for denoising.

b) I had only one camera all of the time. I agree with you about orange, in some episodes there's too much of it, really. But this was my first experience in grading such a long movie, so I still find some mistakes whatching it more and more times. I'll do my best in future:)

c) Sometimes it was "team building xtreme mode", thanks to the guys who organized the journey. But why not?

[jonseki]

Great work! Really loved the shot composition, clean audio, color grading and editing. How did you get those smooth walking shots and slider shots? Can't believe you did this without a crew.

[nikitagetto]

@jonseki Thanks a lot!

We were only two in the journey - me as a cameraman and my girlfriend as a director, she also edited the movie. I made the colorgrading myself, but sound editing and CG were done by other professional guys.

Here we are





I didn't use a slider at all in this movie, some shots which look like dolly-zoom-in shots were made with a tripod. I simly unscrew one of the "legs" so it allowed me to tilt the camera a little bit. Also I used the Glidecam HD 2000 for steady walking shots. Anyway some of the shots (about 10 or 12), especially in Angkor Wat episode, were additionally slightly stabilized in AE.

[arrinkiiii]

Very well done !!!

[Ali Oliya]

This just represents so much talents! Just beautiful! thank you for sharing the useful details of the project and worlflow. what lights did you use?

[nikitagetto]

@Ali Oliya Thanks a million!

We used no additional lights at all in this movie. Only the natural light and a reflector (light disk, for the interviews).

[theartofweb]

Do you move the glidecam closer/further to change the focus or you had some sort of follow focus?

I have just found out the beauty of working with offline h.264 proxy files. Mine are set to Keyframe every 1 frame and medium quality. How about yours?

I see this orange/teel look is still all the rage! Did you have a log input lut also?

Love how the contrast came out and the colors are beautiful... I think you made the right choice by decreasing the opacity of the M-31 LUT to 50-60% allowing the REC.709 to still be shown noticeable.

How can I low the opacity of a LUT?

Thanks

[nikitagetto]

@theartofweb No, I don't have any follow focus. When following a person or a moving object I try to maintain the distance between the camera and the object so that it doesn't fall out of the depth field. Of course I'm closing the lense to 5.6 - 8, or even more whenever its possible.

I render proxies as default H.264 quicktime files in Resolve (I guess every 12th frame is keyframe), but I decrease the bitrate to 8 000 kb/s. I can easilly edit those proxies even using a laptop, it's really convinient!

No log input, just BMD Film gamma, it is flat enough for me.

As to the lowering LUT opacity... I just applie LUT to a separate node and lower the opacity of the node.



Here is the node graph acceptable to most of the shots in the movie:



MAIN CORRECTION (COLOR BALANCE, EXPOSURE) -- LUT -- SHADOWS/HIGHLIGHTS DESATURATE -- SHARPEN

In some shots I had to add a node to correct skintones or/and whites separately.

[jonseki]

Nikitagetto you are awesome! I would have never thought you used your tripod for dolly shots and Glidecam for those smooth walking shots. Keep up the great work!

[DeafEyeJedi]

@nikitagetto:

What was the highest ISO used during this shoot?

Like the ones you shot inside the tunnel with people holding candles...

Blacks looks so nice!

[derpface]

Very nice look! What software did you use or what format/settings did you export/upload to Vimeo? It looks very good. I've been having trouble lately with really bad Vimeo compression on my 5D footage. Thanks!

[nikitagetto]

@jonseki Big pleasure to hear that! Thank you!

@DeafEyeJedi The highest ISO was 6400. I used it once in the scene, where the guys drink venom, because I did not have 50 mm 1.2 at hand that moment. In the tunnel the ISO was 3200.

@derpface Vimeo compression is always a problem. I noticed, that videos rendered at 1920x818 (2.35) resolution look a little bit better than those at 1920x1080. This time I rendered the final version in Resolve to Quicktime H.264. All settings were default for this format, the only thing I changed was the bitrate. I enabled restricting data rate to 25 000 kb/s. The file I got was 4,55 GB. Of course I upload it in 1920x818 resolution and switch vimeo to show it in 1080, not 720.

[Mehmet Kozal]

Serious shooting, editing and post production skills. Awesome.