Coldpizza
Active member
Thought this might be interesting.
I shot a short experimental film using the HVX as the main camera and DVCPROHD 1080i as the main format. The resulting work flow ended up incorporating 5 different formats and 4 different NLE's. For this project I used a HVX200, a Bolex, a DX30 and a PD170. The DVCPROHD was cut on FCP 5.1.4 the film footage was telecined into DIGIBETA. The DIGIBETA footage was cut on an AVID adrenaline as was the BETACAM footage and the DVCAM was partially cut on Premier Pro 1.5 and partially on FCP. All edited segments of the film were then combined together in AE6.5. Here is a link to a web site with the film see if you can spot where the footage is not suppose to make sense...
http://www.archive.org/details/Ice_Smash_AUSTRALIA_2006
Since this was more of a work out how to do it as I go along kind of shoot, I ended up using if anything quite unique production methods. Firstly the idea was to film ice melting using a form of time laps and play it in revers to give the illusion of the ice growing out of water. I wanted to project an image of a man on to the ice in order to create the illusion that the man is trapped inside. The man was shot on a DX30 ye old BETACAM camera (how 80's...) seeing as the footage out of these cameras is good with warmer colors and usually compliments flesh toned hues. The man is actually touching and hitting a milk create at a few centimeters increment each time to give the illusion that he is touching something that is constantly growing in hight. The human parts were a green screen shoot out of which part of the blue channel was keyed out as well to give a degree of black grain over the bodies. The keying was done in Avid Adrenaline. The melting/growing ice though was an altogether different story. I placed the ice sculpture in the middle of a blacked out studio with a black background and lit it with a couple of Red Heads a Blonde and a Dedo. Had to experiment with various combinations until i was able to light each part of the sculpture to suite the exposure I needed. Since I had a rear projection on the ice it took several minutes before I found the correct angel to shoot the ice and have the projected image come across clearly through the ice. Several minute I didn't have seeing as the ice is melting (Blonde, Red Heads etc...). The projected image is footage of the man struggling this was shot on a green screen as well and keyed out on an Avid Adrenaline but once this footage was ready for use I had to render it to fit the shooting requirements of the ice. Since the ice was going to be shot melting and I wanted to give the illusion of it growing out of the water I had to play the ice melting in revers. From experiments I did on different kinds of ice I came to the conclusion that the best frame rate to shoot at was 0.1FPC. I also new that each shot of a different part of the ice sculpture would have it's own screen time so I calculated the approximate length of each shot and how many frames it would end up being. I then had to calculate the length of the projected footage inside the ice according to the number of frames the shoot would end up being and rendered the projected footage accordingly in revers as to get the “real” movement of the image inside the ice. So a shot of 5 sec screen time requires (PAL) 125 frames X 10 sec (0.1 = 1 frame every 10 seconds), 1250 seconds / 60 = 20.83 minutes so the shooting time of this 5 sec shot would be 20.83 minutes at 0.1FPC. Using the interval shooting function of the HVX I set it to 1 frame every 10 seconds at 1080i. To help me monitor when frames were going to be shot I played a click track of one 1KHZ beep every ten seconds with the projected image it was a good reference for when the I should stay clear of the lenses. Problem was that after 10 or so hours of this you still hear the clicks in your mind although the click track was stopped (it almost drove me mad). But at the end of it all I had to still “clean up” the footage by that I mean take out frames that had my hand in them cause I left it in front of the lenses when it took the single frame shot any how.
I also white balanced the HVX to a blueish surface and got a warm look to the surface of the ice for when the man is trapped with in the ice giving it a fleshy color. As appose to a warm white balance to give a bluer cooler looking surface to the ice before the man is in it. The pointy growing ice crystal that the man is “hitting” was composed of shots I took of a previous sculpture. The first sculpture was shot with the Bolex. Yes that means I sat there next to the camera and pressed the side release once every 10 seconds like a schmuck for 11 hours. But I over exposed most of the shots as I didn't measure the light of the projection through the ice and add the resulting extra F stops into my exposure calculations. But the blue growing ice crystal was shot well (no projection at that point) only thing was that blue is a very noisy color on film and this gave the growing crystal a haylo which in retrospect wasn't that bad. I ended up using 4 Adrenalines running of G5s to render all the projection images simultaneously seeing as each render took approx 13 hours then burnt them to DVD and played them back of a DVD player connected to a digital projector.
Once all the footage was in I edited each layer and sequence on their respective NLE and combined them all on AE. I ended up having 12 layers in my comp for different shots and rodascoping tools. Once all was keyed out and color corrected I rendered them out as a letter boxed SD QT move file a render that took each time (cause I used several different settings to see which works best) any where between 23 and 27 hours!!!
At the end of it all I got my 2 and a half minutes of experimental art.
Was it worth it you ask?
Well me to.....
I shot a short experimental film using the HVX as the main camera and DVCPROHD 1080i as the main format. The resulting work flow ended up incorporating 5 different formats and 4 different NLE's. For this project I used a HVX200, a Bolex, a DX30 and a PD170. The DVCPROHD was cut on FCP 5.1.4 the film footage was telecined into DIGIBETA. The DIGIBETA footage was cut on an AVID adrenaline as was the BETACAM footage and the DVCAM was partially cut on Premier Pro 1.5 and partially on FCP. All edited segments of the film were then combined together in AE6.5. Here is a link to a web site with the film see if you can spot where the footage is not suppose to make sense...
http://www.archive.org/details/Ice_Smash_AUSTRALIA_2006
Since this was more of a work out how to do it as I go along kind of shoot, I ended up using if anything quite unique production methods. Firstly the idea was to film ice melting using a form of time laps and play it in revers to give the illusion of the ice growing out of water. I wanted to project an image of a man on to the ice in order to create the illusion that the man is trapped inside. The man was shot on a DX30 ye old BETACAM camera (how 80's...) seeing as the footage out of these cameras is good with warmer colors and usually compliments flesh toned hues. The man is actually touching and hitting a milk create at a few centimeters increment each time to give the illusion that he is touching something that is constantly growing in hight. The human parts were a green screen shoot out of which part of the blue channel was keyed out as well to give a degree of black grain over the bodies. The keying was done in Avid Adrenaline. The melting/growing ice though was an altogether different story. I placed the ice sculpture in the middle of a blacked out studio with a black background and lit it with a couple of Red Heads a Blonde and a Dedo. Had to experiment with various combinations until i was able to light each part of the sculpture to suite the exposure I needed. Since I had a rear projection on the ice it took several minutes before I found the correct angel to shoot the ice and have the projected image come across clearly through the ice. Several minute I didn't have seeing as the ice is melting (Blonde, Red Heads etc...). The projected image is footage of the man struggling this was shot on a green screen as well and keyed out on an Avid Adrenaline but once this footage was ready for use I had to render it to fit the shooting requirements of the ice. Since the ice was going to be shot melting and I wanted to give the illusion of it growing out of the water I had to play the ice melting in revers. From experiments I did on different kinds of ice I came to the conclusion that the best frame rate to shoot at was 0.1FPC. I also new that each shot of a different part of the ice sculpture would have it's own screen time so I calculated the approximate length of each shot and how many frames it would end up being. I then had to calculate the length of the projected footage inside the ice according to the number of frames the shoot would end up being and rendered the projected footage accordingly in revers as to get the “real” movement of the image inside the ice. So a shot of 5 sec screen time requires (PAL) 125 frames X 10 sec (0.1 = 1 frame every 10 seconds), 1250 seconds / 60 = 20.83 minutes so the shooting time of this 5 sec shot would be 20.83 minutes at 0.1FPC. Using the interval shooting function of the HVX I set it to 1 frame every 10 seconds at 1080i. To help me monitor when frames were going to be shot I played a click track of one 1KHZ beep every ten seconds with the projected image it was a good reference for when the I should stay clear of the lenses. Problem was that after 10 or so hours of this you still hear the clicks in your mind although the click track was stopped (it almost drove me mad). But at the end of it all I had to still “clean up” the footage by that I mean take out frames that had my hand in them cause I left it in front of the lenses when it took the single frame shot any how.
I also white balanced the HVX to a blueish surface and got a warm look to the surface of the ice for when the man is trapped with in the ice giving it a fleshy color. As appose to a warm white balance to give a bluer cooler looking surface to the ice before the man is in it. The pointy growing ice crystal that the man is “hitting” was composed of shots I took of a previous sculpture. The first sculpture was shot with the Bolex. Yes that means I sat there next to the camera and pressed the side release once every 10 seconds like a schmuck for 11 hours. But I over exposed most of the shots as I didn't measure the light of the projection through the ice and add the resulting extra F stops into my exposure calculations. But the blue growing ice crystal was shot well (no projection at that point) only thing was that blue is a very noisy color on film and this gave the growing crystal a haylo which in retrospect wasn't that bad. I ended up using 4 Adrenalines running of G5s to render all the projection images simultaneously seeing as each render took approx 13 hours then burnt them to DVD and played them back of a DVD player connected to a digital projector.
Once all the footage was in I edited each layer and sequence on their respective NLE and combined them all on AE. I ended up having 12 layers in my comp for different shots and rodascoping tools. Once all was keyed out and color corrected I rendered them out as a letter boxed SD QT move file a render that took each time (cause I used several different settings to see which works best) any where between 23 and 27 hours!!!
At the end of it all I got my 2 and a half minutes of experimental art.
Was it worth it you ask?
Well me to.....