$700US music video shot on HVX200

P

poe

Member
Hi guys

Just wanted to post a link and some stills from my latest music video. This is for an up and coming New Zealand hard rock band called SLIPPING TONGUE. The video is for their single called "My Kingdom Falls".

This one was shot for only $700US with a borrowed lighting truck and a rented HVX200 - no additional lenses, filters, matte-box, hell not even a follow-focus.

The footage incorporates a mixture of studio footage with live-action concert footage shot on a mixture of HVX200 and DVX footage.

The concert was much darker than you see on the footage and the HVX's chip, color interpolation and the final grade really brought out a lot of hidden detail and gave the live footage a very slick look.

However the DVX footage came out (understandably) grainy and had problems seeing stuff in the semi-dark environment compared to the HVX. There was also a very strong purple color-bias on the DVX footage that we were unable to entirely get rid of.

The finished footage was graded using the Nattress Plugins set on Final Cut Pro 2.

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Watch the music video here:


Low Resolution (YouTube):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs7YS-yHFF0

Medium Resolution (Facebook - a facebook account is required. It is free to join)
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10597785989

HD High Resolution (Veoh)
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v6318879GRBxPfkY?searchId=6735409317549715547&rank=2

HD High Resolution (Vimeo)
http://www.vimeo.com/747352



Any questions or comments about the production and post workflow, feel free to fire them on here!

I'd be happy to answer any questions and also keen to hear comments and criticisms on our low-budget production!

Thanks!
 
There's a really nice style and feeling to your piece here, but there's a major discord with the DVX footage. It just doesn't look very good at all. Highly grainy, desaturated and without the Mojo of your other footage. It looks kind of hacked compared to how sweet and vibrant and composed your HVX footage is. Just looks like two seperate pieces trying to find a common ground and it doesn't come over. Just my .02, might be nice to intentionally make the DVX footage look really bad.. Grain it up, add some flares some streaks and maybe a bit of black and white and overall make it look tough and mean and nasty. As it is it just kind of looks flat and lifeless. This certainly is an example of when people ask, what's the difference between the HVX and the DVX...


Really nicely put together piece though overall. Like the ending a lot with the candles and just got a great style. I just think that the DVX stuff is more distracting then complmentary...
 
Thanks for the feedback Justyn.

Yes I whole-heartedly agree that the DVX footage was less than satisfying. In fact we were saying some pretty unsavory things about the poor old DVX when we were watching down the rushes. As dark as it was in the bar where we shot the live footage, we threw the shutter wide open on the DVX and tried to suck out every pixel of color and shape we could, but in the end it was still a disgusting purplish sort of image (we were correctly white-balanced too).

At the end of the day I became a huge fan of the HVX200 and was pleasantly surprised by what we acquired on the studio shoot and the live shoot (though I am still wishing we had budget for an M2 35mm adapter, even if we had to shoot upside down images with it). As for the DVX, it's nifty, but its hard to go back to porridge when you've dined on truffles and souffle :)

We did attempt a scratchy, 70's, 8mm look to the DVX footage, but the band wasn't really that keen on it, so in the end we had to do our best by trying to get the two different camera's footage to meet up in the middle (clearly we failed, but the exercise was invaluable to our learning process).

The Nattress plugin set was also a big help to get the final polish going on - we used the basic Film Look Extra appliance and then went from there, a lot of the footage was graded VERY aggressively and some of it barely resembles the dailies. Having said that however, I still find the Natress Plugins only as useful as your acquisition format and the results in this particular project still felt very video-y and kinda cheap (but I guess that's what you get for a $700US video!).

It was a great experience in working on such a low-level shoot and we certainly learnt a lot from it, especially comparing to our experiences in shooting the same band's PREVIOUS video which was a four grand (US) video shot on the Panasonic VariCam.

These screenshots are a good comparison of what you get for the larger chipset and the DOF off the VariCam's HD lens:

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Overall, I'm impressed with the Panasonic range - regardless of their limitations. At a rental price point, particularly here in New Zealand where music videos rarely reach above $10,000US in budget, both the HVX200 and the Varicam provide great options and reasonable alternative to shooting 35mm and 16mm film stock.

If anyone has any suggestions (based on looking at the footage) as to workflow options or critique on our handling of the DVX, please feel free to let me know. We're always keen to learn new tricks on how to getting the maximum benefit out of the Panasonic range.

Oh and anyone keen to see the above video (shot on the VariCam), you can check it out here:

Medium Resolution (Facebook)
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10597040989

HD Resolution (Vimeo)
http://www.vimeo.com/747177

HD Resolution (Veoh)
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v6318519WKXpzDFp
 
Hey Poe,

What part of NZ you in ? I'm in inverz and we shoot with 2 202's and a 502,

Nice Vid too man, i had trouble with the bands performace intercut with the story, i think it should have been on a light background, but the grade over was pretty sweet man :)

what speed was the varicam set to for the second one
 
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Hey Phantom,

I'm up in Auckland! Hey what're the 502's like? Where would you place them compared to the 200's and the Varicam?

Thanks, I'm still a larval critter when it comes to music videos - I've only done three and the second video ("Bitter") was my first, so there was a lot I still had to learn. Thanks for the compliments on the grade, it's not the most fun part of my job but at least doing it ourselves saves us a bit of cash on the long run for low-end videos.

The Varicam only went up to 60fps, so the slow-mo stuff isn't exactly hot. Would've killed for something that would go to at least 100fps, but we made do with what we had.

We used extensive speed-ramping in our second video, which we did for Donald Reid. Shot the entire video in 60fps and then did speed-ramping from 15fps to 60fps and back continously through the video. Talk about a math-headache!

What kind of stuff do you shoot?
 
loved it

loved it

yeah you didn't need an m2, all the content was there, an m2 (might) have slowed you down,(if you have never used it before) and it might have taken away from this beautiful piece.

The most obvious of course is the graininess, and I totally agree with whoever said to make it look even nastier, destroy that footage even more.

You have got to be proud of this.

Quality looked great. Thanks for the screen grabs and the filters you used, i will take note. Best of luck over there in europe(if i read that right) and i think you all are paying way more than us for gas, off topic sorry.

Goodluck and I know in your head, this video is done, but I really feel it could be a stronger piece with a little bit more of adjustments.

It was a little dark, at first I was a little creeped.
 
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Thanks Joe,

Will definitely be in touch in the future about that 202 kit!

MDC - I totally hear what you're saying about the Red Rock, it's a pain in the butt in the best of circumstances. But I guess I just wasn't too happy about the performance of the glass that comes with the HVX - the DOF and lens distortion (or lack of) felt it took away some production value.

Glad to have pointed you towards the Nattress FX set, good value for money and very easy to use.

Oh and we're based in New Zealand ;) heheheheh.
 
Poe, Your attitude is just simply awesome. You take feedback well and gain from it, that's what we all should do. It shows how self-assured you are about the quality of your work, and that indeed your work is great. Too many people get uptight about such things when people are giving comments.


I too love the Natress plug-ins. I have the old film look ones and for a hundred bucks you can't go wrong. Also, as far as a 35mm adapter, have you checked out the Letus extreme? I think it's an easier set-up than the Redrock and it consumes a lot less light. You might want to check that baby out.


Can't wait to see your other stuff. That varicam shoot video is stunning. CHEERS
 
poe said:
Hey Phantom,

I'm up in Auckland! Hey what're the 502's like? Where would you place them compared to the 200's and the Varicam?

What kind of stuff do you shoot?
Click to expand...

Yeah the 502's are nice, not quite as noise free as a varicam, but much more sensitive than the 202 and the DOF you can compared is good too. I work for SIT (The polytech) down here, we make all the distance learning shows and some interest and community shows, most of which are lowbudget one man band style. Its not great but there are moments of brilliance. Been doing this adventure show all in 720/50p. We shot the national SIT ads in 720/ 25p, 27p, 30p with 250 base, but never done any ramping, it was awesome in your video.
 
I thought you did a stellar job on this. Super pro. Looks fantastic.

My subjective .02 would have been to seperate the conceptual and live footy a bit more. It feels at times like to much flip / flop of the visuals. Perhaps staying on the conceptual up until the chorus and then slamming into the live stuff would balance it out a bit ?

Purely my own spin

Nevertheless, awesome job !
 
Justyn - thanks heaps for the feedback and for the kind words. I don't come to this forum very much except to read up on technical help, so I thought it would be nice to share some of my work back now that I actually have HVX and DVX footage to speak of. The fact that people are giving me such honest and yet helpful feedback is really amazing and I'm happy to take both good and bad criticism in equal stride, because all of it helps for the future.

And yes the Nattress plugins are very useful. I'm currently editing and grading a television documentary series right now which the Nattress plugin set is being extensively used. We're rendering it out on an 8-core and the workflow is pretty up to scratch and we've only had one hiccup so far and that was with the vignette plugin (but we resolved it through some back-end fiddling). The show went to broadcast yesterday and the production company was flooded by historians asking where we got all of our old kinetoscope/8mm footage and we laughed and had to tell them it was handycam/DV footage we tarted up using our grading system to resemble historical footage from the 1910's and 20's.


Hey I thought it may be useful to people here to show some screencaps from the raw dailies to compare against the footage. Hope you guys don't mind, but this is what the footage looked like before we attacked it with Nattress.


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As you can see the range of effects we've applied varies greatly - in some shots there is only a subtle adjustment of chroma, luma and saturation/hue to match against other footage, but in other shots it's totally off-the-wall and quite different.

Also a reminder that all of the concert footage was basically on-the-fly, in the front of the crowd style shots. Nothing was rehearsed and it was a live gig, so all of the stills you see up are just random things caught whilst avoiding mad moshing/headbanging metalheads going apenuts on a club floor ;) Ahhh HVX, how I adore thee!!

As for the Letus Extreme, now I've not had the chance to check it out. A quick Google hasn't shown me any rental places in Auckland, New Zealand (where I live and work) that carry it. Everyone here seems to only stock the M2...but I will keep my eyes peeled and see if anyone coughs up a Letus35 anytime soon! Thanks for the heads up on that, it does look pretty good.




PhantomVideo - cheers for the headsup on the 502s! I'll have to definitely check it out!!! The lesson seems to be clear - don't shoot on DVX: the HVX is an ideal flat bottom standard for image acquisition for anything remotely professional! Awesome to hear from someone down at SIT, there's very little info about what you guys do up here.

Are you involved in SIT's Bachelor in Digital Film or the NCFT course? Or are you mostly working in the long-distance course production part of it?

Great to hear that you guys have such awesome gear down there - I have friends up in Massey and Auckland Uni who're shooting on Sony Z1-P's and I just don't know where to begin with helping them and their post-workflow and media management for Sony's HDV format. DVCPROHD all the way!!




J.R. Hudson - You totally nailed my biggest concern for the "My Kingdom Falls" video. Even to this day, the choppy intermixing of the studio and live footage just doesn't gel with me...it feels like it's all over the place.

To be fair, the budget and time we had didn't allow us to do really much else other than shoot, cut and do a single pass of a grade and then hand it over to the band, but I really would have liked to have been more organized or thought more about the studio footage to ensure that the footage cut against each other better than it does (ESPECIALLY since I had almost 2 months downtime between the live footage and the studio footage).

Ahh well, lesson learnt eh? I think I'll definitely not make that mistake again.
 
VariCam and Speed Ramping

VariCam and Speed Ramping

Justyn and PhantomVideo -

As you both expressed interest in the VariCam shoot (and PhantomVideo in the speed ramping), I thought you may be interested in seeing my only other music video that I've done which pretty much pushed the Panasonic Varicam to the limit in terms of footage-manipulation, speed-ramping and post-workflow mathematical headaches.

The video is for a local pop artist named DONALD REID and the song is called "My Favourite Thought". The concept of the video was to create the illusion of a seamless shot down a tall building's stairwell, with a comical gag on each floor inside the elevator.

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The shoot's budget was around $5,000US and we shot on the Panasonic Varicam at 720p, at frame-rates ranging from 30, 50 and 60fps.

The entire, single-day, shoot was lensed on a steadicam on a single flight of stairs and a single landing containing a freight elevator. The camera was mounted with a single wide-angle HD lens, matte-box, follow-focus and a wireless TV monitoring system so I could monitor the shot from the flight of stairs above the set.

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Lighting was cunningly hidden around corners and suspended from landings and floors above the single flight of stairs we used. We also cropped the aspect ratio from 16:9 to 2.35:1 to help hide any gear or crew members that may have accidentally entered the shot.

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The post-workflow was a nightmare as we had three different sets of footage that was processed to DVCPROHD at 60fps. We laid it all down on a 60fps timeline in Final Cut Pro and then proceeded to do the math to get our singer's voice to lipsync properly (and you'll notice we slipped up numerous times!) and then also work out speed-ramps (to give the video some pace and energy), all the while ensuring that we don't fall out of sync nor do we run out of footage because we're speed-ramping too much!

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What saved the day for us was the fact that we shot as much of the video at 60fps, leaving us with plenty of spare frames to drop and play with to ensure semi-realistic speed-ramping. The results are good, but not fantastic and we think we will try a different workflow next time (but its good information to know even when shooting on an HVX system, which is very similar to the VariCam in terms of DVCPRO HD workflow).

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We used AfterFX and some 3D-spatial manipulation of the 2D footage to try and seamless connect all of the shots together. I won't tell you where the joins are, you guys can figure it out for yourselves I'm sure! :D

If you'd like to watch the video, you can take a look at it here:

Low Resolution (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucaAObMQYRs&feature=related


HD Resolution (Vimeo)
http://www.vimeo.com/747541

HD Resolution (Veoh)
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v6319159EMbQDPFX


As you can see it's a mixed bag video and a lot of things can and will be done better in the future I think, but the educational experience of tackling this kind of problem was absolutely invaluable!

Anyhoos I'm actually out of interesting things to say, you've seen everything I've done in the Panasonic/HD world. Sorry to flood this thread with all of my back catalogue stuff, but the critiques and suggestions that people have been making is amazing and I love to hear what people like and dislike about my work.

Would still love to hear more ideas, suggestions and comments! :)
 
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POE... You and your crew are highly talented.... That last video here is impecable. Simply awesome. I'd love to hear about your workflow on this.. HOw you figured out the ramping and where it would cut back to regarding the sycnhed lyrics. Did you just kind of wing it? Or was this figured out on location and performed accordingly.

I also liked the guy doing Tai Chi in the elevator.. Similar to what I do. LOL.


My only .o2 would be to not include how much you did stuff for. Not that it's not pro work and not because it's not worth it... BUT simply because your stuff looks a lot more expensive and I would say that you should have gotten more money. I've seen 50k or 100k videos presented on this site that don't look as good as what you've done for 5k. So I wouldn't tell people, or clients. I'd keep it at, under 500k or something like that. You're a pro and need to get paid accordinly. I think that last video you did should and wouldn't be surprising if it was 150K or such.

Keep it up bro and we all love seeing a new memeber bringing the funk.. and as John Hudson says, bringing the MOJO. When he likes your stuff you are on your way and I think it's great to have new blood showing us what's possible.

Personally I'd love to see you do this video again with the HVX or something to contrast the Varicam mojo. CHEERS.
 
Hey Justyn

The workflow was created as thus:

1) All elevator gags were shot at 30fps (because we knew that we were not worried about having smooth speed ramping on the elevator shots)

2) The singer was shot at standard 30fps AND 50fps whenever he was singing to camera (he was, naturally, singing to sped up music and the song was unsingable at 60fps - or 200% speed).

3) Empty stairwells and the singer playing the guitar was shot at 60fps.

The general shoot philosophy was to do passes on the singer that would last for an entire verse or an entire chorus. This would give us a "library" of takes at 30fps and at 50fps of performances that would span the verses and choruses - with the singer in different positions and with the camera catching the majority of the "upper" and "lower" halves of each verse accordingly.

So in short we didn't know what we wanted or what to do, so we tried to get as much workable coverage as possible during the single-shoot day.

All of this footage was processed to DVCPROHD codec footage at 60fps (all non-60fps footage was interpolated) by a post-facility and delivered to us on hard drive.

The footage was then laid down onto a 60fps timeline on Final Cut Pro.

The first thing we did was to lay down all of the singer's vocal performances. In some circumstances we flagged a number of these shots which we thought we could "dump" if there was elevator gag footage that would have better suited that place in the song.

After that we went through and dumped all over the elevator gag footage on moments where we thought they best belonged.

What this gave us - effectively was a video that had purely singing shots and elevator shots (starting from the doors opening and ending when the camera pulls away) with loads and loads of black, empty spaces to be filled with "stairwell" shots (which include EMPTY stairwell shots, guitar playing shots as well as the lead-in and lead-outs of singing shots and elevator gags).

We did various passes at the edit until we were happy with the combination of singer shots and elevator gags (we were sad to ditch about 6-7 unusued elevator gags) and THEN we went through the task of filling all the blanks with "stairwell" shots (including the lead ins and outs of the singer and elevator gags). The timing, speed ramping and place of the "stairwell" shots were done on a case by case basis, often trying different speeds and seeing how much more footage we could squeeze into a space without the speed ramping suffering or looking too phony.

So essentially the speed and placings of the ramps were arbitrary and we were doing adjustments for over a week until we were happy with the pacing of everything. We were not entirely sure what the final product would look like, so it was a matter of experimentation to get a good look and feel to the whole thing.

Shooting everything at 60fps (or close to) was of course the key to getting nice looking speed-ramped footage in the post workflow :D



I totally hear what you're saying about talking about the budget for these videos and I certainly don't tell my future clients how much they cost unless they have similar budgets in mind (in which case we show them our videos and explain how we were able to produce cost-effective product).

But I do agree that there is a time and a place for talking about music video budgets and in the big leagues (and believe me there's very little "big league" video work in NZ) the budget isn't really an important selling factor for a major music label as is the quality of the work produced.

I will definitely keep that in mind and, in the future, refrain from talking about money unless people ask me specifically. I suppose its mostly safe in here, I don't think major record label producers surf through the HVX forums much :)

Thanks heaps again for your feedback!
 
Damn that's a pretty cool video, I'm totally impressed! And you have no idea how many times I was cursing (during the editing) that we didn't have Twixtor to use!! Think I'll talk to my boss about investing in a copy of that sucker!

NZ is very beautiful and does have amazing locations, but they do cost an arm and a leg these days in terms of location fees. Mind you, you don't know what you'll find when you start looking.

I shot this short film within 20 mins drive of my production office in downtown Auckland. Even the forest shots were located in the central business district of Auckland, surrounded by urban sprawl!

I can point you to a few other vids some of my friends have made that show our totally local locations too :)

(mind you, you live in Florida! Come on, what better place to shoot hot, steamy thrillers and action films?!)
 
Hey Poe,

Funny that you should post those screen grabs from DONALD REID video.

I must have seen you as i was working for another company in Eden Park that day but ended up helping out as a grip for a few of those steadicam shots, you may remember me.

I never did get round to go see ol' Andy Mcgrah and see how that music video turned out.

You guys did a great job, i might know where the cuts are but they are hard to see.

Joe
 
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