"Life at 8 FPS" - a mood piece from stills

[Jester2138]

Hello world, I'm a high school filmmaker. I attend two schools, an "normal" high school and an arts high school every day (it's bit of a complicated situation). I study media arts at the arts high school. One day while the rest of that school was celebrating the Saints going to the Superbowl, I walked around running my 7D at 8fps as an experiment. That night I edited this together. It's either a mood piece or an experimental piece, I suppose. I normally don't like experimental projects so I'm calling this a mood piece...

I ended up with over 6,000 .jpg's so I rendered them into HD MPEG-2 files to edit. They were extremely sharp to say the least... Editing that kind of footage is awesome because you never notice any image issues like aliasing, jello, or artifacts like you do with most footage.

This should be called a rough cut since there's just cutting up of clips going on, no color correction or anything.

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on what worked and what didn't.

http://vimeo.com/9258103

btw please educate me on how to do the vimeo links

[morgan_moore]

It looks nice - do you know what sort of shutter speeds you use

One thing - a DSLR shutter is rated for maybe 100,000 clicks

I dont know how much it is to repair

I did 13000 on my D3 pretty fast !

But Im well over 100k on that camera with no problems

S

[Jester2138]

Haha yes I don't plan on doing this very often... I've got about 8,000 on my 7D so far (6,000 of which is this video!). I believe Canon says it's rated for 150,000, though, so I've got a ways to go.

Shutter speeds... I think most of it was ISO 160 f/2.8 Av mode so I can't really say. It would be fast enough to freeze motion, whatever it was.

[ramdop]

i like it very much
can you explain to me what was your editing approach
with so many stills
i am very experienced cinematographer but not so much editor

[Jester2138]

My workflow in detail (I edit in Premiere CS4, but it should work pretty much the same way in any editor):

- Within my project folder I had three folders, one named "Project" in which I saved my project and backups, another named "Images" in which I saved all the original 6,000 .jpgs from the camera, and another named "Video clips" in I which saved the video clips.

- To get those video clips I imported all the jpg's into Premiere, set the default image duration to 1 frame, selected all the images in the browser, and dropped them into a 10 fps timeline. Then I exported an HD MPEG-2 movie file (also at 10fps) from that timeline into the "Video clips" folder.

- I then set up another timeline at 10 fps and imported the new movie files. They defaulted to 29.98 fps instead of the 10 fps that I wanted, so I right-clicked on the files in the browser, hit "Interpret footage," and set it to 10fps.

- Then I started editing to the music.

- When I was done, I set up another timeline, this time at 24p, and copied everything from the 10 fps timeline to this new one. I then turned off Frame Blending so Premiere wouldn't try blending the frames to make it look smoother (I wanted to keep the juddery 10fps look).

- Then I rendered it. All done.

[ramdop]

thank you
it's time to test

[jonE5]

Kinda cool but i really dont understand the point. Couldnt you just have shot at 24fps and edited down to 8fps at much less wear and tear on your camera? I guess your resolution on this way would be much higher, but not like most people have monitors that can display it anyway.

[Revsta]

That's really awesome and I really like the part where you find the girl's face in the crowd. A buddy of mine did this once documenting his night out and him dancing. Was very cool. Do you remember how big a card you used? Or did you use multiple cards?

[Jester2138]

Kinda cool but i really dont understand the point. Couldnt you just have shot at 24fps and edited down to 8fps at much less wear and tear on your camera? I guess your resolution on this way would be much higher, but not like most people have monitors that can display it anyway.

Yeah this started as an experiment, not a real "piece." So I didn't know what to expect. The file is remarkably sharp and clean (sharper and cleaner at 1080p than a movie from the camera that's for sure), since it's assembled from high-res stills, but that's not the reason I like this method. If you shoot in Av or Tv mode the camera will be exposing each frame individually, so you get exposure jumps that you simply can't get in a normal video. Maybe if you look at it again you'll see what I mean. The shots with the crowd of people dancing in the courtyard were on full manual, so that's not happening there (one reason why I don't much like those shots). On some of the indoor shots (like the one where I follow the guy running down the hallway) I even had it on auto white balance, and it kept picking different temperatures 8 times a second so there are these crazy color effects. I really like that shot, btw haha

[Jester2138]

That's really awesome and I really like the part where you find the girl's face in the crowd. A buddy of mine did this once documenting his night out and him dancing. Was very cool. Do you remember how big a card you used? Or did you use multiple cards?

Thanks! The card was a 16GB, but I didn't fill up quite the whole thing. Maybe 10GB's (probably due to the fact that I was shooting on the lowest resolution the 7D can, about 2500x1700 I think). I got some really weird looks due to the noise coming from my camera. CHIKACHIKACHIKACHIKACHIKA