CLIP - FS100/Leica 90mm/Abel's Range setting & lovely actress in a doorway

plasticam

plasticam

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This is 90mm Leica 2.8 on the FS100 with Andy Shipside's "Range" setting. For the daylight stuff actress is drilled with a spotted down dedo, clean. In retrospect that was a little ruthless.

At night just the peanut and a flouro as low as the dimmer could take it. I did not gain up much cause I wanted to see the underexposure, it may have been at 6 db, maybe 9. Lens was 2.8 -4 in the day. 2.8 at night. This was 1.2 gigs full rez reduced to 182 mb before vimeo compression. Ungraded.
 
lovely rolled off highlights, loads of detail in the shadows in the night shot... would like to see the full rez on my gradeing screen!

d
 
sorry but that totally blown out look is not for me at all. doesn't look good IMHO. There are ways to blow out stuff and it looks good. This to me wasn't it . The Shot at 1.27 looks real nice though.
 
That creates a lovely feeling of warmth and light. The roll off looks really nice too, even though it's pretty harsh, a touch of post on the edge of the clipped highlights would make it perfect. On the full res stuff are you getting any green/magenta noise against the white from the edges of the lamp? This has been a situation that i would try to avoid because of that, although if the intent was to create that feeling then the intent overrides the tech any day!

cheers
paul
 
jambredz, I guess for me these days material that is exposed correctly, in 'the pocket' feels predictable. These things change over the course of your career. I used to like the cold Zeiss look. now I like the warm Angenieux feel. I used to like hard blacks - now I like an open gray scale. when I look at what I consider great cinema these days I am amazed with how the dps are using light at the extremes of the image. I think DRIVE was the last one that blew me away. As I say in the description to this clip, it's done for mood to make you feel a certain way. I agree with you tho that this could be so much better. To my eye, the white is oppressively harsh, it needs a softer quality to compliment Audrey's delicacy. I would like a blue sea scape back there which would still blow but I would then have adjusted to bring in a bit of it's color and texture in. You know how water blows to a light pastel? Or just some gauze hung in the doorway would have helped. It was just me and the actress tho and without a couple bodies the wind would have blown it into her. Overall i disagree with you tho. I think this is good looking stuff. Oh well-
 
Hey Paul, Thanks! Just checked full rez file and really no, nothing to speak of. There is the slightest hint of CA when defocused but not objectionable. This needs a grade for sure to soften the harsh- yes! I CAN grade but it's not my thing. Not until I get that new computer with the big fat screen. I'm just a laptop man!
 
plasticam said:
Hey Paul, Thanks! Just checked full rez file and really no, nothing to speak of. There is the slightest hint of CA when defocused but not objectionable. This needs a grade for sure to soften the harsh- yes! I CAN grade but it's not my thing. Not until I get that new computer with the big fat screen. I'm just a laptop man!
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Resolve works on my MBP :)

But needs a way way bigger screen really. I find it amazing that it runs at all though!

cheers
Paul
 
Dermot said:
lovely rolled off highlights, loads of detail in the shadows in the night shot... would like to see the full rez on my gradeing screen!

d
Click to expand...

What about 0019 (check the dress) - we see the worst highlights ever - IMO a reason to steer clear from any PP that doesn't have knee at 100+
 
Morgan,

I dont see what you mean. This is ungraded footage. I've graded quite a bit of film on a Spirit/daVinci and find this looks similar at hell and gone blow out levels. I'm intentionally putting this into a hot frying pan and just showing the results compressed. Picture breaks up when you lean on it. Are you saying Abels Range PP is inferior to your own because your knee settings? Would you care to elaborate?
 
Despite the blown out look (I think you could desat highs and soften it a bit, it would look grande), this is the second patch of FS100 footage that made me rethink my stance on it. It's resolving pretty well, and for some reason doesn't have the usual thin Sony feel to it.

Thanks for posting it, Caleb!

By the way, the other footage I sawr was connected to an external recorder, night stuff. It was pretty impressive.
 
i dig the blown look. you're right. it does serve the purpose of relaying a certain "feel". however, i would try to shoot more within the goalposts and bring it up in post. you can push fs100 footage very far especially when shot at 0db. i think you could achieve this same look but with prettier rolloff.
 
Great hearing from both sides of this (I like it / I hate it) because it shows qualified voices disagreeing over what is pretty black and white- overexposure. If we can't agree on what looks bad in overexposed situations maybe there is still some art left in our dreary ass lives.
 
Hey so D is going to take this controversial clip to funky town in his Color de Ville suite. Cool! I sent him the full rez files to have at- do whatever he pleases with. Quick story.

I made my first trip to a Spirit grading room at Filmworkers Dallas in about 98. Had 2 reels of S16 I needed to build a look with and got a colorist reccomended from a good DP. we started the clock and he asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to make it pop, a little blown out and commercial. "How?" he asked, "this is all correctly exposed". "I can lift the whites and soften things up..." . I was amazed at how little he could do to that image in an 800/hr room with all the toys right off the neg resolution in 2K. He had 15% either direction before he hit a wall. a lot more room to move with secondaries but still the look you bring into post is more the look than what is created in there. it's called correction for a reason- not creation. If I want the blown out look I gotta blow it out in camera or I lose the organic natural look. If this actress is correctly exposed her key side (away from cam) is a hard line against the sky- you can't easily roll that hard line off into soft hi lite in post. Not and keep any look to it- let alone when she moves. I'm not saying it can't be done- but who would want to when you can do it right- a decision made by the DP.

I was excited to shoot this because I could do it wrong for the right reason which is a passable definition of narrative film making. indie fiction is my own background and I like interpretive photography best. A lot of us increasingly do broadcast and corporate work for a living. I do. And these folks do not reward, recognize or tolerate any risk at all. they want everything safe just like everybody else's. So many times I find something that looks cool and I show it to a producer and say "yeah"? and I look at their face. they don't even know *what it is* it's like a foreign creature crawled onto the monitor. Awkward silence. They just want it to look "right" which is right down the middle. And they are right. That's the sad fact. For conveying info - right is all you want. Don't distract. but it squeezes creativity out of what is inherently a creative endeavor and that is a loss to the shooter and the viewer. Viewer's want something different. Producers dont.

Ok so as my harrangue draws to it's stumbly ending I'm just trying to say that recording reality is easy. making an image is hard.
It's cool we disagree over this clip because a passable definition of an image may be 'a thing people disagree on'.
 
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Color correction has come a long way since '98. I have a proper suite running DaVinci and I grade as much as I shoot. Nowadays you can take a solid black plate and make it white. I'm kind of split down the middle on this one. The DP side of my brain says I too, love creating art on set and committing in camera. But my colorist side cringes when I say that. It would be different if I always had calibrated monitoring with controlled lighting on set but that never happens.

Still, sometimes I do find a look in cam and just go for it.
 
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plasticam said:
A lot of us increasingly do broadcast and corporate work for a living. I do. And these folks do not reward, recognize or tolerate any risk at all. they want everything safe just like everybody else's. So many times I find something that looks cool and I show it to a producer and say "yeah"? and I look at their face. they don't even know *what it is* it's like a foreign creature crawled onto the monitor. Awkward silence. They just want it to look "right" which is right down the middle.
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I find myself in this boat also so I don't get the chance to do anything "artsy" very often. As for your clip (even though it's more of a test) I think visually/technically the camera holds up well in a very trying situation. (for the price of the cam, maybe better than "well")
Artistically, I couldn't see shooting anything that way though. certain spots the girls lips, chin just disapear into the background. Very distracting and I think would ruin any "Mood" you would be trying to capture / express. Blow outs like that (of that intensity) only seem to work as prep to a cut for me.
 
Cheezweez,

Good thought there. I have not graded on a Davinci since 07. I mean sat with a grader- I'm only checked out on a mac laptop
which seems to me about like a davinci in 98! So I was thinking all CC was in a constant state ;) So thanks for taking the blinders off. It must be amazing what can be done now. Dermot may be about to weigh in on this angle too.
 
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