L.A. Night - Available Light Test

starway2001@mac.com

starway2001@mac.com

Carbonite Member
In preparation for our rooftop sequences for THE TWENTY-THIRD LETTER shoot, we wanted to see what the new camera's low light sensitivity was. We didn't bring any lighting equipment with us. Our goal was to shoot wide-open, +6db, 1/48th shutter and see what we got.

The weekend's rain storm was just coming in behind us. We only had about 40 minutes up there before it started precipitating. So it was difficult to get the buildings to look razor sharp as we were shooting through a lot of atmosphere.

We're now convinced that once we have our foreground talent lit appropriately, our backgrounds of Los Angeles will look phenomenal for this film-noir thriller.

You can download some of the shots (h264) here:

http://starwaypictures.blogspot.com/
 
Very nice, Starway. Nice blog too.

I'm glad you're not going to shoot 1/24, even with the added noise of gain up. When you have a shot like that lit properly, it will be awesome. Oh, and that 1080p file was hyper-compressed h.264 at 8 mbs? People who say it's really noisy and compressed need to keep that in mind.

btw, is that you turning around to look at the camera in that shot?

Thanks for posting and please keep 'em comin!
 
Cool. The scene reminded me a little of Collateral and To Live and Die in L.A.

btw, did you have noise reduction on? If you didn't and you're going to do more tests, try NR at different strengths to see how much it will mitigate the 6db.
 
Thank you Shannon. I live and breathe this stuff. Filmmaking is my passion and love the gear that makes the dreams happen.

And I'm in love with this H1! I call it my F900-Jr.
 
Editing your footage in FCP

Editing your footage in FCP

WOW! That looks awesome! I was totally in the HVX 200 camp untill I saw this footage.

How are you getting the footage into FCP? I thought there were some problems with 24F and FCP. Do you transcode to another codec for editing? Whats battery life like?

Thanks,

Joseph
Ace Derringer vs. The Shadow Men Sci-Fi Short film
http://www.acederringer.com
 
Battery life is pretty good. I bought three of the big Canon batteries. The kind folks at Birns & Sawyer said that days of needing the big pro battery packs aren't necessary anymore.

I have a Decklink Pro HD card and I capture my footage using DVCProHD. I think use Cinema Tools to do an inverse telecine. You have to sometimes do it a couple different times to get the cadence right, but it works okay. FCP should have H1 support around NAB.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top