One of the feature films shot on the D90 (and mentioned in this forum), "Desperata" (aka Desperate), is now finished. The film is kind of an homage to the so called Eurocrime genre, and the story focus on two bankrobbers on the run. The film was shot in Sweden, mainly on a Nikon D90, but also spiced up with flashback shots etc on 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film.
It's not a cinematographic masterpiece, but to keep it simple, the majority of the film was shot in available light. For example, many scenes take place in the getaway car, where the robbers have their conversations during the escape. We were able to keep mobile without using external lights by opening up the rooftop and bouncing natural light from outside, through the windows.
Common strategies to make the best of the D90 image were used, such as:
* Avoiding detailed wide shots as far as possible, and instead set the background out of focus, to avoid some of the known compression artefacts.
* Problems with rolling shutter artefacts were also avoided by keeping camera movements within the "safe zone". Using a shoulder rig, up to 100mm FX lenses were used without any jello.
* Lack of manual controls were worked around in different ways. By keeping the number of artificial light scenes low, flicker problems were minimized. To get 1/48 shutter outdoors, ND filters were used where appropriate, and light was measured with a light meter set to the corresponding ASA, and the aperture set accordingly to get the desired shutter time - if necessary combined with paning the camera around and using AE lock to get the exposure right. When using artificial light, ND's weren't used, usually the light levels were just enough with fully opened aperture. Paning around and using the AE lock at the right spot was sometimes necessary to avoid flicker. All-in-all, the lack of manual controls was of course not ideal, but on the other hand not too big of a problem on this particular shoot.
Regarding post production, I found the mjpeg footage easy to work with, since it's not very CPU demanding. I didn't use a very fast computer, but the raw footage was very convenient to edit and playback in the timeline in real-time. Rendering to mpeg-2 was relatively quick, 75 minutes of film took just a couple of hours to export. The only drawback for me in a PAL country was that the native 24 fps had to be sped up to 25 fps for final delivery. It still looks good with smooth movements, but the runtime went down 4%. And whereas high budget films commonly have problems to keep the runtime short enough, we had the opposite problem of reaching an acceptable length of the film ;-)
The delivery format of the film is SD (DVD), I felt this was the best choice since blu-ray discs are costly to produce here with licensing fees and such, and I prefer to down-res the D90 footage to SD rather than to up-res it to 1080p.
Trailer for the film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTYnxKhqAY
It's not a cinematographic masterpiece, but to keep it simple, the majority of the film was shot in available light. For example, many scenes take place in the getaway car, where the robbers have their conversations during the escape. We were able to keep mobile without using external lights by opening up the rooftop and bouncing natural light from outside, through the windows.
Common strategies to make the best of the D90 image were used, such as:
* Avoiding detailed wide shots as far as possible, and instead set the background out of focus, to avoid some of the known compression artefacts.
* Problems with rolling shutter artefacts were also avoided by keeping camera movements within the "safe zone". Using a shoulder rig, up to 100mm FX lenses were used without any jello.
* Lack of manual controls were worked around in different ways. By keeping the number of artificial light scenes low, flicker problems were minimized. To get 1/48 shutter outdoors, ND filters were used where appropriate, and light was measured with a light meter set to the corresponding ASA, and the aperture set accordingly to get the desired shutter time - if necessary combined with paning the camera around and using AE lock to get the exposure right. When using artificial light, ND's weren't used, usually the light levels were just enough with fully opened aperture. Paning around and using the AE lock at the right spot was sometimes necessary to avoid flicker. All-in-all, the lack of manual controls was of course not ideal, but on the other hand not too big of a problem on this particular shoot.
Regarding post production, I found the mjpeg footage easy to work with, since it's not very CPU demanding. I didn't use a very fast computer, but the raw footage was very convenient to edit and playback in the timeline in real-time. Rendering to mpeg-2 was relatively quick, 75 minutes of film took just a couple of hours to export. The only drawback for me in a PAL country was that the native 24 fps had to be sped up to 25 fps for final delivery. It still looks good with smooth movements, but the runtime went down 4%. And whereas high budget films commonly have problems to keep the runtime short enough, we had the opposite problem of reaching an acceptable length of the film ;-)
The delivery format of the film is SD (DVD), I felt this was the best choice since blu-ray discs are costly to produce here with licensing fees and such, and I prefer to down-res the D90 footage to SD rather than to up-res it to 1080p.
Trailer for the film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTYnxKhqAY
