F5: First 200fps experiments.

Grug

Grug

Veteran
Hi Guys,

Last weekend I had the opportunity to put the F5's 2k HFR through its paces for the first time on a little promo for a friend's upcoming play. And while I'm not entirely convinced by the quality of the HFR images above 60p, they seem to suffice for web delivery (though I do wonder what, if any, improvements would be made with the 2k OLPF?).

This was yet another situation where the F5's sensitivity was a life saver, given I only had a 3kw gennie for power; had to make do with just a 2k blonde, 650w dedolight and two Area48 softlights for my lighting; and managed to lock my keys in my car, which had my f/1.4 lenses inside, so was left shooting 200fps on T/2.1 lenses in a park, at night, with very little lighting.

I shot mostly with a 360 degree shutter to give me an extra stop of light, but I'm not a great fan of how it effects the appearance of motion. I'd have preferred to shoot at a regular 180 degree shutter.


Let me know what you think.
 
starcentral said:
looks real nice and dig the muted color palette. Impulz LUTs for final treatment, or graded by hand?
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Cheers Dennis, I tried a fair range of different options for this one. Settled on the Filmconvert Fuji Eterna 250 conversion, and then tweaked the luminance curves a little. My main regret is not relighting to be able to stop down and retain more highlight detail in the fireball shot, but time and resources were quite firmly against us on this shoot.
 
Sometimes filmconvert is easier plus you can make little tweaks. More and more I tend to stay away from LUTs, the exception are the default Kodak LUTs which I feel gives a good base to work with most of the time.

I've been trying to make friends with a fire eater / thrower for a while so I can shoot some super slo mo. Your video has given me inspiration to try harder :)
 
starcentral said:
Sometimes filmconvert is easier plus you can make little tweaks. More and more I tend to stay away from LUTs, the exception are the default Kodak LUTs which I feel gives a good base to work with most of the time.
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You're a braver man than I! I find I'm pretty happy with LC709A as a starting point for 'normal'/'real life' images, but for everything narrative that I do, I just don't like the Sony colours without a colour transform, so I tend to work my way through all of the Impulz LUT options, all of the Filmconvert options and Juan Melara's LUTs as well until I find the one that suits the scene most. Then I just fitness the colour balance and luminance curves until I'm happy.

I've been able to match Sony material to LUT'd material by hand in the past. But it literally requires multiple colour keys and hue adjustments - all of which are far more finicky than simply finding a LUT that does the colour transform well in the first place.
 
Grug said:
I do wonder what, if any, improvements would be made with the 2k OLPF?
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I have been filming 2K XAVC up to 180fps with a Tiffen Digital Diffusion FX 1/4 and have seen no aliasing. I prefer this method than having to mess around with OLPF. I like the Tiffen filter as it makes the image more organic but I wouldn't go above 1/4. Below is an example of it being used at 180fps with an 180 degree shutter. I think the OLPF would be softer than this, Matt Allard sharped his OLPF images in post.

blog waterfall 3_zpswo3te4ys.png


Grug said:
Let me know what you think.
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Beautiful and very interesting. It's amazing how much work goes in to 30 seconds. I love those camera moves and the editing. Did you use any filters? How are you finding 2K RAW? Is it so much better than SR?

These F5/55 cameras are amazing, go compare them to the CineAlta HDW-F900 which was used on Miami Vice (2006). I was watching Miami Vice last night and I couldn't believe how grainy and video like the images were in low light. We are really spoilt with these new CineAlta's :)
 
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JackCarter said:
Beautiful and very interesting. It's amazing how much work goes in to 30 seconds. I love those camera moves and the editing. Did you use any filters? How are you finding 2K RAW? Is it so much better than SR?
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Thanks for the kind words Jack. No filters on this one, with all of the backlight and flames, I didn't want to have to worry about filter reflections.

I'm not sure I could really call the 2K raw from the camera 'better' than SR444, it's just a different option with different attributes. The best thing (hands down) about 2K raw, is that it gives you complete access to everything the camera can do. All framerates, everything - and you don't have to stuff around with menus changing recording formats in order to access different framerates. It let's you use the crop mode and still be recording the same, consistent 2K raw file. That really simplifies things on set, and on set (to my mind at least) simple is best.

The 16-bit linear raw gives you a lot of room to push things around, which is nice. And the file size is basically equivalent to ProResHQ, which is great.

That said, SR444 (being downsampled from the 4k sensor) seems sharper and in theory should possess more colour information than the 2K raw. SR444 is a lovely format, but the inability to do any off-speed recording with it is a real pain.
 
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