HP "ripoff" project with EX1...

Jim Arthurs

Jim Arthurs

Well-known member
Hi all;

Recently finished this project for the RE/MAX International Convention held last week... thought there'd be some interest despite the specialized content because it has some green screen work and of course it's shot entirely with the EX1.

Directed and DOP'ed by the supervising producer and lead director for the CBS show NUMB3R's, camera work and all VFX by me.

http://ftp.datausa.com/imageshoppe/outgoing/HANDS_DOWN/REMAX_365_h264.mov

If you've seen the HP commercials, it's a dag-blamed rip-off... if you haven't, it's fresh and original... ha...

Regards,
 
Must have sucked to blow that tilt at the end!

How many takes?

Excellent work - nicely lit and great CG lighting.

Of course you know it's impossible to do 3D tracking on the EX1, and green screen.

And whatever you do, don't move the camera!
 
Thanks Matthew... "Last take delete" mapped to button 4 was my best friend.

I think we did twenty or so takes, as the talent hadn't had the chance to practice the moves before hand. I had done some previz earlier that week using myself as talent and it took about that many tries to get the gags into muscle memory.

Yes, no pressure to get that final tilt up right after a minute 40 second take done perfectly by the talent... no pressure at all... and I was on a crappy Bogen 501 head to boot...
 
Did you actually composite the head on the body at the end? The collar does not seem to react to the movement of the guy speaking.

Great work!
 
Jockomo said:
Did you actually composite the head on the body at the end? The collar does not seem to react to the movement of the guy speaking.

Great work!
Click to expand...

Yes, the founder of RE/MAX could only be with us for an hour total, so we set him up to read the copy against green screen in the same lighting setup as the body double. I then stabilized his head (which had some tracking marks) and tracked it to the body double's neck area.

Then the body double practiced his hand motions to a quick on set cut of the VO I did in Vegas. We were able to take the rest of the morning to finish off the shoot without bothering our main guy again. This all was shot 1080 30p, framed a bit wider than the final to allow some buffer when I do the tilt up to catch the tracking marks before they enter "final" framing, and to provide left and right pan room. The final was a 4:3 SD version, so I had plenty room to pan/scan.

Everyone was happy with the "slimming effect" at the neckline. Given more time it could have been pushed more with some subtle deformations, but for the money and the limited exposure of the public to a single SD 4:3 viewing, it was fine...
 
Jim, that was pure genius! Great work! Since I don't watch TV, I'm not familiar with all the commercials that are currently on, so maybe there's better effects out there, but to my eye, your work looked innovative, very creative and made a boring subject entertaining.
 
Sumfun said:
Looks great Jim.

Did you decide to hold off on getting a Red camera?
Click to expand...

Yes.

At the moment, the EX1 fits my individual needs better, at a fraction of the 35K plus cost my RED package was moving toward. I have easy access to a rental RED if needed, and I'm very happy with the key quality of the EX1.

I will re-visit that decision down the road when there are 3000+ RED's in the field, but right now I have zero regrets after a half-dozen projects with the fully paid off EX1.
 
Jim,

I have a Red reservation, but I'm thinking of doing the same thing. I had a chance to play with a Red One in person a few days ago, and I'm not sure it's the best tool for what I do, which is mostly run and gun. But I don't need a new camera right away, so I'll wait til NAB to what Panasonic (and others) have to offer.
 
The RED is an amazing camera, but it surely is not run-and-gun. :)

Man, I could not believe how hefty this thing was with the camera on rails with the battery, drive, and LCD attached. It weighed 25LBs.

I had a chance to check it out last week. It does take good looking footge. That's for sure.

The problem I see is the intense work flow. Also, you can only preview at 720. That surprised me.
 
Thanks everyone!

To answer some questions, I just recorded to SxS card, no HDSDI used, even for the greenscreen. I am thinking about putting a BlackMagic Intensity card in a small PC system for capturing HD-SDI to either PhotoJPG or Cineform down the road for super-critical key work, but that's the only reason I'd do that.

Yes, the RED is a great camera... but when it came time to make the final decision, I looked at the first handful of jobs I had booked and the RED wasn't the best choice for any of them. That was an eye opener...

...One project was a green screen "premiere night" arrival of a limo and tons of flashing strobes. No good for the RED, or the EX1. The next was a series of green screen talking head interviews in a distant city, and I only had the budget for myself and one soundguy/assistant. No good for the RED, plus the client didn't want to deal with the RED post-flow. And on and on.

Since the RED and the EX1 have the same basic "faults" in regards to rolling shutter, neither of them were appropriate for some of the projects... not good if you've got 35K invested in the system, but that's tolerable if you've only got 8K in an EX1.

I do look forward to revisiting the whole RED concept again down the road. In fact, if Adam Wilt doesn't do a direct RED/EX1 green screen shootout test, I'll do that in the next few weeks.

Regards
 
Jim Arthurs said:
Given more time it could have been pushed more with some subtle deformations, but for the money and the limited exposure of the public to a single SD 4:3 viewing, it was fine...
Click to expand...

Yea, I don't doubt it could have been tweaked, and really its plenty clean enough.

The only reason I even thought to look for it was because it looked like one take and the guy appeared to be CEOish, and honestly I could just hear it, "can you just paste the CEO's head on an actors body?"... Sure, I'll just paste it right on there.
 
Hey Jim
very nice work, and I am guessing your budget was a tad lower than HP's! Certainly several levels above the production values this sort of job usually has!

I don't wish to hijack your thread, but I have a slightly unrelated question. When you were keying the full-res footage, did you ever see anything that made you wish you were using a less compressed format, or did it satisfy your requirements completely? The reason I ask is that I am in the process of planning what is, for me, quite a large budget project. It involves slow motion footage of soccer players in front of greenscreen. As I have a part share in an EX1, I could just use that and collect a rental fee myself, or there should be the budget to hire pretty much any other camera, if it was going to give a noticeably better result. The advantage of the EX1 is that I understand it better than any other camera; I can just stick it in 720p, and record at 60fps - result nice crisp slow-mo footage, easy workflow, plus I don't need to drain the national grid to get enough light to light it in a big space. Ideally though I would like to capture at 1080p, so that I do the post at 720p and still scale the footage up a bit if I need to - it is always difficult to frame action footage tightly in camera, without losing bits. Given that in the UK, there are not yet a lot of Reds around (or experienced users) would you stick with the EX1, or go for something else (and if so, what?)
 
Thanks again everyone.

You need to experiment with channel or chroma blur with the EX1, but I've been quite happy with the results as recorded by the SxS media. It's no worse than any material I've used coming from HDCAM 3:1:1.

I've shared this before, but here's 8bit uncompressed 4:2:2 compared to the 35mb/sec XD codec side by side, this was a blue screen.

http://ftp.datausa.com/imageshoppe/outgoing/EX1/EX1_compressed_vrs_uncomp.mov

Having said that, no reason NOT to record better quality when in a controlled environment, so I intend on building some sort of 4:2:2 ingest station... on the mac, a macbook pro in combo with an AJA IO recording to ProRes is very workable, on the PC, perhaps a Blackmagic card in a small case PC recording to either photojpg or CineForm.

As to the 60fps 720p material, I've not yet experimented with keying it. In theory, 720p at 24fps on SxS should be the "least" compressed of all the SxS options, as all recorded formats share the 35mb/sec bandwidth, regardless of time-base or frame size. 720p 60fps should be on par with 1080p 30fps, but I'd wager the 1080p would still look better, as the size of the compression artifacts are smaller in relationship to the overall size of the frame.

Still, the EX1 720p is full raster 720p (1280 by 720) compared to the HVX's (960 by 720)or any DVCPRO 720p flavor... and I've been dissapointed with the key quality of DVCPRO 720p compared to the 1080 variant of DVCPRO... at least on the HVX due to some complicated reasons that have been disscussed on this forum somewhere in the past.

I'd say do a test at 60fps with your EX1 on native media and see how it goes...

Of course now the RED is up to 120fps in 2K...
 
Jim Arthurs said:
You need to experiment with channel or chroma blur with the EX1, but I've been quite happy with the results as recorded by the SxS media. It's no worse than any material I've used coming from HDCAM 3:1:1.
Click to expand...
Thats good to know

I've shared this before, but here's 8bit uncompressed 4:2:2 compared to the 35mb/sec XD codec side by side, this was a blue screen.
Click to expand...
Thanks - I will study this.

Having said that, no reason NOT to record better quality when in a controlled environment, so I intend on building some sort of 4:2:2 ingest station... on the mac, a macbook pro in combo with an AJA IO recording to ProRes is very workable, on the PC, perhaps a Blackmagic card in a small case PC recording to either photojpg or CineForm.
Click to expand...
I think that would limit us to 30 fps maximum?

As to the 60fps 720p material, I've not yet experimented with keying it. In theory, 720p at 24fps on SxS should be the "least" compressed of all the SxS options, as all recorded formats share the 35mb/sec bandwidth, regardless of time-base or frame size. 720p 60fps should be on par with 1080p 30fps, but I'd wager the 1080p would still look better, as the size of the compression artifacts are smaller in relationship to the overall size of the frame.
Click to expand...
If you record on a 720p24 timebase, and set S&Q to 60, don't you end up with full quality 24p footage (unlike recording on a 720p60 timebase, which crams 60 frames into the same 35 mbs stream)?
Still, the EX1 720p is full raster 720p (1280 by 720) compared to the HVX's (960 by 720)or any DVCPRO 720p flavor... and I've been dissapointed with the key quality of DVCPRO 720p compared to the 1080 variant of DVCPRO... at least on the HVX due to some complicated reasons that have been disscussed on this forum somewhere in the past.
I'd say do a test at 60fps with your EX1 on native media and see how it goes...
Of course now the RED is up to 120fps in 2K...
Click to expand...
Any UK based shooters with a RED?
 
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