Epic mini-doc about Ultra Music Festival - NEX5n, Metabones Speedbooster

B

Brandon Li

Member

I recently went to the festival and chronicled my entire journey from a first-person, POV style.

Shot on two lenses: Nikon 50mm f/1.4 and 24mm f/2, adapted to EF and then Metabones Speedbooster. With this combo I was able to shoot by the light of a full moon. The camera literally saw more than my eyes could.
 
First of all, great job! It was well shot, well edited and it kept my full attention. I really enjoyed your video. I'd like to hear about your experience using the 5N and the speed booster. If you'd kindly answer some of these, I'd appreciate it since I have a 5N myself and I'd like to learn from the time you spent with it.

How difficult was it to focus in these day & night shots? Did you shoot in manual or one of the auto exposure modes? What picture profile settings did you use? Would you recommend a similar setup if you had to do it all over again? How was your experience editing all the footage? Generally speaking, what type of corrections or grades did you do in post? Any noise removal?

I realize there are a lot of questions here. I don't expect you to answer them all, but you're welcome to.
Once again, great job!

James
 
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While I typically don't watch those kind of things, this was great!
Well shot and edited, music was moving and fit well.
Watched all the way through and wanted more.
Awesome!
 
Awesome video! Very well done. 5:33 was pretty jaw dropping I gotta say. WOW! lmao. :P The low light with Speedbooster is pretty impressive as well.
 
Thanks, I don't check this account very often so I apologize for the late response. I shot mainly in aperture priority during the day, letting the shutter do what it had to keep exposure. Generally that meant stopping down to f/4 in bright sunlight to avoid over-exposing, even at 1/4000 shutter. I would have liked to go wider but didn't have an ND filter on the camera.

Focus was pretty tricky; the LCD sucks in daylight, and DOF is super-shallow wide open at night. I used focus peaking (yellow color, mid intensity) and just racked back and forth until I found the right focus point.

The whole thing was shot on Standard Profile. I've experimented with Sunset and Portrait but found that they really don't offer any smoother gradation or higher actual dynamic range than Std. And Sunset just sucks with white balance.

As for color grading, I did a lot of subtle stuff. A few examples: I desaturated highlights in the intro scene to neutralize the s*%tty color of the interior light; I desaturated everything except flesh tones (via FCP X's eyedropper tool in the color corrector) in the beach scene; I overlaid film burns on a few of the scenes to add either flashes of color and/or film-like flickering effects. The extreme low-light stuff was extremely poor to grade; it was basically just a bunch of noise. So I just subtly raised the highlights where I could (like the clouds surrounding the full moon). I also added green to the shadows of the streetlight stuff to add color contrast to the overwhelming warmth of the scene.

Overall it was a whole lot of fun to shoot with the 5n and Speedbooster, though the camera's lack of scene files and poor ergonomics really suck. Editing the footage was pretty easy, considering it was only 24 or 28mbps...hardly the beast that RAW on the BMCC would have been.

Color grading on these cameras is a nightmare, especially at high ISO's. Just try to get it right in-camera and you'll have a beautiful image.

Oh, and be sure to use Memory Stick cards, not SDHC, otherwise the camera will overheat much faster.
 
Hey skital, at 5.33 your statment made me expected something like super lowlight capbility or advantage of small camera. hehe
 
nomana said:
Hey skital, at 5.33 your statment made me expected something like super lowlight capbility or advantage of small camera. hehe
Click to expand...

Haha! Not quite. You're welcome though. :P Truly magnificent were they not? lol. :D Combined with that hypnotic music and slow-mo it was really epic or LEGEN.......wait for it........DARY! LEGENDARY....as Barney Stinson would say. lol. Artistic shot as well.
 
Haha...Before she agreed to get pushed in the pool she said "hold on, I don't want to ruin my bra" and took it off. True story, as Barney would say.
 
Awesome! And curse you for making me miss South FL all over again. :happy:
 
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Very cool!
* Loved the editing
* The moonlight shots in the empty beach are absolutely crazy; is that ISO 1600, or 3200 and then a ton of NR?
* I've got to use the 60p on my 5N more often. In particular, rolling shutter and all, the jumping shots at 6:40 are epic!
* Have you tried Portrait? I found it to give about one stop better DR than Standard, and skin tones are pretty nice also: http://www.similaar.com/foto/flaat-5n/index.html
 
The problem with portrait is that it boosts noise at high ISO, and playing with the gamma curve in post doesn't bring it back as cleanly as just shooting normal contrast to begin with. With the Sony cams, you really don't benefit anything by going flat unless you want a flat finished look. The image is very compressed, and the codec is pretty nasty, especially above ISO 800.

FYI the beach shots are all ISO 3200 with zero NR applied. It looks a little cleaner online than in the original file because h.264 compresses away a lot of the fine noise. There's basically no detail in the shot to salvage by using something like Neat Video, so you're best off just keeping the image as similar to what was shot as possible. I did use a couple gradient masks to make the color of the sky a little more blue, though. And I locally raised the highlight level of the clouds to give the image more contrast. I did this with the color corrector mask in FCP X.

So that's the trick to shooting with these cams: at low ISO, you can grade in post. At high ISO, just shoot standard at 0,0,-3 and grade minimally.
 
Ok, thanks for the comment
I'll keep shooting Portrait, but I'll change to Standard if I need to go to ISO 3200 (which is completely useless with Portrait!)
 
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