Samuel H
Major Contributor
I shot this Star Wars The Force Awakens fan film with the very awesome cosplayers Nebulaluben and Thelema Therion. They are really good at making costumes, but they don't like acting so much. Still, I like the final result.
I used VideoCopilot Saber for the lightsabers, and lots of assets from both Video Copilot and Triune-FilmRiot. Color work was done with Magic Bullet Colorista and Looks.
The camera was a Sony RX100 IV with Flaat settings. It was on a Nebula 4000 gimbal, with Hoya ProND filters when needed.
I shot 4K at 24fps, with the internal XAVC-S 100 Mbps codec (so, 8-bit 420 H.264).
I'm super happy with how well the camera performed. Resolution is great (at least on my files; not so sure about the YouTube version), and DR was super nice. Shooting on the snow, I was always able to keep highlights from blowing up (and yes, we shot in the shade, and it may not look like it in the final video, but there were some areas that were really, really bright). There's even a super-difficult shot where you see talent up close, in deep shadows in a forest, and sunny mountains in the back; it doesn't look as good as other shots (I had to push up the shadows and mids by two stops and colors are not as good as they could be) but just the fact that the background is not blown out is amazing.
This was the first time I shot something at 4K, and I'm a believer now: tracking the lightsabers was a lot easier than it would have been with the already-pretty-good 1080p of my a7S, for example. It was painful to work with, though: on an i5-3470 with lots of RAM and a GTX970 graphics card, editing at 4K with these files on Premiere CC just doesn't work. I ended up creating proxies and doing the edit with those. I then went back to the original clips once the edit was locked and the color work was done (yes, I had to do the color work before the VFX, and this was a good idea because the stuff that I had to adjust after applying the VFX made me want to smash the PC at times). And I also don't see the point in exporting in 4K, it just doesn't look any better than the downsampled-to-1080p version. In any case, I uploaded the 4K version to YT because of "marketing" reasons: I guessed it might make it look "more pro" to potential viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRAdXXEt0bE
I used VideoCopilot Saber for the lightsabers, and lots of assets from both Video Copilot and Triune-FilmRiot. Color work was done with Magic Bullet Colorista and Looks.
The camera was a Sony RX100 IV with Flaat settings. It was on a Nebula 4000 gimbal, with Hoya ProND filters when needed.
I shot 4K at 24fps, with the internal XAVC-S 100 Mbps codec (so, 8-bit 420 H.264).
I'm super happy with how well the camera performed. Resolution is great (at least on my files; not so sure about the YouTube version), and DR was super nice. Shooting on the snow, I was always able to keep highlights from blowing up (and yes, we shot in the shade, and it may not look like it in the final video, but there were some areas that were really, really bright). There's even a super-difficult shot where you see talent up close, in deep shadows in a forest, and sunny mountains in the back; it doesn't look as good as other shots (I had to push up the shadows and mids by two stops and colors are not as good as they could be) but just the fact that the background is not blown out is amazing.
This was the first time I shot something at 4K, and I'm a believer now: tracking the lightsabers was a lot easier than it would have been with the already-pretty-good 1080p of my a7S, for example. It was painful to work with, though: on an i5-3470 with lots of RAM and a GTX970 graphics card, editing at 4K with these files on Premiere CC just doesn't work. I ended up creating proxies and doing the edit with those. I then went back to the original clips once the edit was locked and the color work was done (yes, I had to do the color work before the VFX, and this was a good idea because the stuff that I had to adjust after applying the VFX made me want to smash the PC at times). And I also don't see the point in exporting in 4K, it just doesn't look any better than the downsampled-to-1080p version. In any case, I uploaded the 4K version to YT because of "marketing" reasons: I guessed it might make it look "more pro" to potential viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRAdXXEt0bE
