C100: AVCHD Grading - Let's See How Hard It Can Be Pushed + 12800 ISO results!

draculr

Well-known member
Recently I put up a thread discussing my experiences using the C100 to do a sydney wedding video. I had recorded most of the footage using C-Log onto a Ninja 2 with Prores HQ and so of course grading it was not problem at all.

We just put out a new pre-wedding video (which - side note - I think is our best work so far!) which we filmed in Sydney during the Vivid Lights Festival. This was filmed using the C.Weed_5 profile from this very forum onto the internal AVCHD codec, but we really pushed the grade hard to get the nice contrast and pop we wanted. Great profile though... really is.

It's an interesting result. Which brings me to a bit of a phenomenon which I'd like to discuss. Please note that this really only applies for videos intended to be streamed online via Vimeo etc.

A lot of the shots which we pushed saw the AVCHD break apart quite easily. I did manage to somewhat recover this by applying a really light bit of neat video (@5-20% as opposed to the default 60%). Yes, some detail is lost but it's nothing that anyone would notice when your target is Vimeo. However, this is where I think it gets interesting. What I found when using prores is that I was working blind. I wouldn't know when I'd get something to break until I rendered to h264 or sometimes worse, until I uploaded to Vimeo.

This was painful. Yes sure it looks amazing in premiere pro, but if I'm not outputting to bluray etc. then it's all lost. With AVCHD the result in premiere pro isn't far off what I get when I render and upload to Vimeo. Bad if I intend to use the video elsewhere but it is such an easy workflow when I know I wont be. Notice the codec break? Dial it back or apply some treatment to it right there in the NLE.

Well, here is a link to the video and accompanying blog post:

http://dreamsinmotion.com.au/blog/2013/6/13/beautiful-place-to-be

So.. what do you guys think? What are your experiences dealing with h264? Anyone jealous of how amazing Sydney looked during the Vivid Lights Festival? :)

+

As promised in the thread title, I took some footage recently using the C100 handheld with the Canon 35mm f2 IS for The Great Gatsby Extras Red Carpet Premiere in Sydney. After the premiere we hopped on over to the after party which really was lit by little more than candles. I didn't think twice. Cranked it up to 12,800 ISO and left the lens wide open. Check out the results (and again the accompanying blog post):

http://dreamsinmotion.com.au/blog/2013/6/12/a-little-gatsby-party

The after party footage is basically the last 45 seconds or so of the video - the entire thing is handheld.

Loving the camera but I have one complaint... I'll get into that in detail in a future post!
 
I think the footage looks great. I can't wait to get this camera. The colors are very nice, very vibrant and lifelike. Great job, especially handheld.
 
A couple of things:

Vimeo isn't the best re-compressor, and their HTML5 playback engine does nasty NASTY things to our videos. No matter what flavour of perfection you feed it, it will lower the peak white level and screw around with yellow-to-cyan. I think it's using a CCIR601 (digital Standard Definition) profile of luminance on high definition (Rec709) video.

The C100's AVCHD is one of the better ones out there. I've certainly had no complaints over it. Interestingly, I think there's some noise reduction on the internal codec (or is this just it's nature?) over the external 4:2:2 recording, where there's more pronounced - yet cleaner - noise. Therefore one needs to brew up a version of WDR or C-Log with a bit of extra noise reduction if you're using a Ninja and don't want to do repairs with Neat Video. Personally, I'm sticking with the latter.

Good grading on the more 'intense colour' shots - many cameras with their internal recording formats would have seen such shots disappear in a mush of bad 4:2:0 karma. That's where Custom Pictures can really help.

Mr Weed has nailed it with his profiles - there are many around designed for the C300 pre version 1.0.8 which do strange things to reds if you try and port then to the C100 too quickly. IMHO, there's the danger that C300 owners are making Custom Picture profiles that are correcting faults that the C100 never had.

For my work, still happy to record 90% on the internal codec, transcode only 10% via 5DtoRGB (folks, ALWAYS use the Rec709 matrix), and am very happy with the results. However, Slough is not Sydney. :Drogar-KnockedOut(D
 
Dude this stuff looks fantastic! Wow.. What lenses on the first video on the blog post? I can definitly see renting that 35mm f2 IS. If that was a 35mm f1.4 IS I would buy without even thinking haha. But a stabilized f2 35mm IS is VERY ideal for alot of run and gun shoots. Love it
 
Thanks all!

Dude this stuff looks fantastic! Wow.. What lenses on the first video on the blog post? I can definitly see renting that 35mm f2 IS. If that was a 35mm f1.4 IS I would buy without even thinking haha. But a stabilized f2 35mm IS is VERY ideal for alot of run and gun shoots. Love it

The video in the second link is entirely the 35mm f2 IS. The first video however is a mix of Zeiss 35mm f2, Zeiss 100mm f2 makro and Tokina 11-16mm. Love the Zeiss magic but wished the Tokina would've had some nicer lens flare!
 
The C100's AVCHD is one of the better ones out there. I've certainly had no complaints over it. Interestingly, I think there's some noise reduction on the internal codec (or is this just it's nature?) over the external 4:2:2 recording, where there's more pronounced - yet cleaner - noise. Therefore one needs to brew up a version of WDR or C-Log with a bit of extra noise reduction if you're using a Ninja and don't want to do repairs with Neat Video. Personally, I'm sticking with the latter.

I have noticed this also. More - but finer - noise when recording externally via prores (comparing c-log on both).

For my work, still happy to record 90% on the internal codec, transcode only 10% via 5DtoRGB (folks, ALWAYS use the Rec709 matrix), and am very happy with the results. However, Slough is not Sydney. :Drogar-KnockedOut(D

I had not even heard of 5DtoRGB. Are the results much different compared to Compressor or AME transcoding to prores?
 
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