Act Of Valor on Blu-Ray = Amazing

It looks good is because they used Dark Energy Professional to get rid of all that compression artifacts and noise, then added film simulation and sharpen/upscaling.
 
vision_filmz said:
Looks like they have a software version for AE coming out July 4th for $399, if you pre-order it's $299
http://darkenergyforadobe.com/buy-dark-energy/

Problem is I need to learn AE & then this software :(
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The full version costs $13000 and it requires special workstations with Quadro and Tesla cards. Features include denoise/regrain, film simulation, standard conversion etc. It processes footage up to 4K.

The After Effects version costs $299 with discount, maximum footage resolution is 1920x1080. it includes basic feature, denoise and regrain. (anti-matter, matter).
 
I shot a very small amount of Act of Valor, filling in for Shane when he was unavailable. Also operated Steadicam for him on some other scenes.

From what I was told, initially the plan was to shoot the ops on the 5D and the story parts of the film on 35mm. I couldn't be scientific but I think that works to about 50-50 in the final cut. However over time, Shane began shooting more of the dialogue scenes on the 5D, so the 70-30 number may well be accurate.

As was pointed out, this was the early days of the 5D and 24p had not yet been activated on the camera, plus it was all learning curve, all the time. Every time I joined Shane and his team, there was a new set of knowledge, gear and approach to the cameras. It was exhilarating and inspiring. I was also working with Vincent Laforet at the time and we were pushing boundaries in other ways. I don't know if there will ever be another period in my career quite like that!

As far as the focus thing--yes, I think we can all agree that the interrogating scene on the boat contains some of the more egregious focus issues in a major release. Understand that at that time, monitoring was limited to the screen on the back of the camera (no loupes yet) and the (very experienced and talented) AC's were working purely by intution on a massive sensor at a shallow stop. Being off by a couple of inches was all it took. There has not been a working situation that hairy since the Mitchell rackover days, i.e. no-one on the team could confirm focus visually.

My personal feeling is that the action scenes benefitted tremendously from the agility of the 5D's, and Shane and the directors came up with some amazing ideas and visuals that very simply had not been done before in a feature by practical means. The choice to shoot dialogue scenes with the 5D was probably not as successful overall--some are fine and others are problematic. As a grand experiment though, I think it was all worth it and it should be considered a milestone marking the emergence of the DSLR era.
 
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Charles, thank you for posting and giving us some behind-the-scenes info. I really appreciate hearing what went on.
 
CharlesPapert said:
I shot a very small amount of Act of Valor, filling in for Shane when he was unavailable. Also operated Steadicam for him on some other scenes.

From what I was told, initially the plan was to shoot the ops on the 5D and the story parts of the film on 35mm. I couldn't be scientific but I think that works to about 50-50 in the final cut. However over time, Shane began shooting more of the dialogue scenes on the 5D, so the 70-30 number may well be accurate.

As was pointed out, this was the early days of the 5D and 24p had not yet been activated on the camera, plus it was all learning curve, all the time. Every time I joined Shane and his team, there was a new set of knowledge, gear and approach to the cameras. It was exhilarating and inspiring. I was also working with Vincent Laforet at the time and we were pushing boundaries in other ways. I don't know if there will ever be another period in my career quite like that!

As far as the focus thing--yes, I think we can all agree that the interrogating scene on the boat contains some of the more egregious focus issues in a major release. Understand that at that time, monitoring was limited to the screen on the back of the camera (no loupes yet) and the (very experienced and talented) AC's were working purely by intution on a massive sensor at a shallow stop. Being off by a couple of inches was all it took. There has not been a working situation that hairy since the Mitchell rackover days, i.e. no-one on the team could confirm focus visually.

My personal feeling is that the action scenes benefitted tremendously from the agility of the 5D's, and Shane and the directors came up with some amazing ideas and visuals that very simply had not been done before in a feature by practical means. The choice to shoot dialogue scenes with the 5D was probably not as successful overall--some are fine and others are problematic. As a grand experiment though, I think it was all worth it and it should be considered a milestone marking the emergence of the DSLR era.
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I loved the movie and how it was shot, truly looked amazing and I did not care or worry about the out of focus as overall I thought it looked beautiful. Excellent job and thank you for sharing your story, truly inspirational!
 
I thought the film was great!!! I would be more then happy if my film quality turned out that way. Those of you think it looked like crap please post some of your footage for us to compare.

I do have to ask the water scene where the seals with their hats on slowly went under the water and the shot with the guy catching the guy falling into the water was that 5d? If so WOW that footage is great!!!! I don't care what anyone says!
 
I was pretty 'excited' about this film, and I unfortunately could not see it in theaters. But the Blueray is pretty good.

I've known about the film for several years. The SEAL liaison in San Diego had some early footage from the 5D's and showed them at a Final Cut Pro user's group. As I recall it was some of the shipboard shots, night beach firering scene before the SEALs go out on the mission, and some of the 'mounted on helmet' down ropes from the helicopter.

The liaison indicated their original intent was a 'recruiting' film, and the project got expanded. There was a discussion about the 5D vs. the 7D which had just come out, and the 5D won out because of the more familiarity with that camera... go with 'known problems' rather than 'new and different'... As I recall the 5D also had better low light response than the 7D.

Since I'm not in the Canon camp, the details of this or that Canon were not the major interest... it was the fact that people were committing to a 'major motion picture' using DSLRs for more than crash cam or throwaway shots.
(Here 'major' means with more funding than a collection of personal lines of credit on one's credit cards...).
 
Shane has access to amazing post production stuff. Just look at the first 5D add, no rolling shutter in sight... imo, one should not compare results with a high-end hollywood DP.
 
I can imagine it would look fine on blu-ray, but man, it looked off in the theatres. Some scenes were barely passable with the resolution of the 5d, and there were some pretty bad focus pulling blunders in there.
 
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