C100: Musicvideo shot with Canon C100

martinhultgren

New member
Here is a musicvideo shot with the Canon C100 + Ninja 2 external recorder. I am really pleased with the footage from this camera. Looks amazing!

 
Hey, the video is very nice and the image out of that combo C100+ninja is stunning, specially considering the price. Now the (constructive) criticism:

Regarding the music, the snare is too loud and sounds like it's been implanted on top of the rest of the (very nice mixed) music. The vocals sound "a bit too indie", try to remix them again with a better compressor (that polishses more and smash the bck vocals to death) plus some other combination of reverb+subtle eventide detuning.

Regarding the video, I liked the framing and camera moves, and the edit was really good. I didn't like the lighting at the theater, specially the closer up shots, which looked very video-y unlike the rest of the short. I'd say try to diffuse the lights more when doing close ups. It's ok on wide shots, but on close ups you don't want light that harsh.

Another thing, I was already bored halfway to the video, and only watched till the end for technical reasons. Anybody else would have changed the channel before the first minute and never look back. This a a very common mistake when doing this type of work, people's attention spans are VERY short. I come from the advertising world and am very aware of this, as there we only have 20 seconds to tell a story and sell a product, AND make a compelling short people want ot see AGAIN and AGAIN.

Overall I liked it (but still, won't watch it again). Cheers.
 
If only people could leave out talking about themselves in critics, I think you did a pretty great job, I think stylistically you were making mature choices, but I think in the theater scene, the hollywooded warm fill light added texture but it reduced contrast significantly and warmed skintones a little to much giving off a dv feel. I feel like at 1:35-1:37, you can see what I mean. Exposing in the snow scenes was spot on. Lastly the make up was in the right direction, but needed to be a little more subtle for HD. Keep up the good work!
 
It is very well done and a great advert for the C100.

Convinces me that it will be my next camera in 3-4 months time.
 
Nice work and especially like the work you did on the exteriors. Care to share what profile and post settings you used for those exteriors?
 
i recently bought a C100 and this video re-inspires me as to what the C100 can do as i have not been completely convinced of my purchase. for me this is by far the best overall use of this camera i have seen to date. the "best all around visual package"! excellent tonal range, well controlled exposures and loved the color tone done in post. lots of diverse shooting...handheld, jib, motion in a lot of the shots. looked fantastic to me. also looks like a very competent shooter at the helm!

i also have to commend your video from an artistic POV. cool band, solid song and a video that i feel complemented both of those aspects. i see mostly pluses and cons didnt come to mind.

as far as the mix? i have to disagree very much with the above critique about the audio mix. i used to do a ton of band recordings in the 90's up to about 2005 and there are endless artistic interpretations on instrument placement. where the vox falls, snare, guitars, bass etc. i thought the mix was solid in a general sense. actually with the snare a bit more present in the mix it just made it feel a little more intimate. i understand that we all hear things different. to me much of the time there is not right or wrong only varied. sometimes varied feels wrong to some people. i try to look at it like as artistic choice of what the mixer wants to make you feel when you listen to it. proximity and intimacy with some of the sounds...for effect. there is no absolute formula for placement of instruments.

how much do you think the ninja2 contributed to the quality of this video? did you do test comparing internal codec vs the ninja before shooting this?

this made my night!
great job!

david
 
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Really fun to hear that a lot of people have been appreciating my work here.

I shot the whole thing on C-Log, some shots were shot on the C100 internally (for example the car interiors). You really can't notice a big difference between the internal shots and the one with the ninja but its really nice working in prores in post and the whole workflow becomes so mush easier while shooting on the ninja and of course it should give you more flexibility in post.
 
I shot the whole thing on C-Log

Did you have an exposure strategy using a grey card or similar or did you do it by eye?

Did you use the One Push auto exposure at all?

What I really want to know is: did you shoot the footage as dark as Canon suggests and lift it in post, or did you expose for a good looking, albeit flat, image directly to the camera?
 
I did it by eye. No actually not, even though I think its a quite nice feature I just didn't use it, maybe because I am not used to it I don't know. I did shot it pretty dark, but it varied a bit from shot to shot but I was always in the lower part of the histogram.

An really interesting note on the other hand was that all the scenes at the theatre was shot on 3000 ISO, this was pretty incredible to me. It looked amazing, very clean noise and easy to remove with for example neat video if you want to, gave me a lot of flexibility during the lighting setup.
 
Yes it really is a nice job....editing and cinematography were really good.

Curious as to why you bought the C100 over the C300 Martin?
I myself could see myself getting the C100 because of videos like yours which shows little difference between the two cameras in a lot of real world filiming situations.
Also like you said, the option of getting a Ninja 2 if needed.
I need a 2 same camera setup with my 5D3 as backup and unless NAB comes up with the rumoured new camera to sit between these two with 720/50p...then I could see myself going with a C100 for now and adding another shortly after.
 
I graded it using Adobe After Effects plugin Color Finesse.

I think the C300 is a bit overpriced, sure it has a better viewfinder and a better screen and it shoots on a great codec internally. But I have no problem working with an external recorder. Actually I prefer it because I am used with a prores workflow. And regarding the 720p situation, it really sucks and I am hoping that Canon will implement it through a firmware update. But however, you get very similiar results shooting 720p50 or shooting 1080i50 and then convert it to 1080p50 anyway, so if I want slowmotion I get similiar results as the C300. Off course C300 has more professional features as well. But I simply cant afford that camcorder.
 
I thought it looked good. Clearly you put a lot of work into it. I actually thought the stage shots (wide) looked the best. Some here are complaining about the "video" look of the CU on stage (hard light is a pet peeve of mine where it doesn't belong as well). I'm torn on that. The band IS on a lit stage, so it's not the end of the world. The light is certainly motivated by the stage lights. That said, it's a good point and one I'll even remind myself of in the future (setup different lighting for each pass).

As for the rest, my only critiques are the story portion dragged after a little while. It felt like the same snow stuff over and over though clearly it was meant to be progression. I was on a shoot recently that has 67 shots in one day, and each of them might be used for a few seconds at most. It's good to keep things moving quickly and have a ton of coverage for story segments... or keep them very basic and cut cut cut between them. People won't stay tuned in otherwise. Cut until it hurts I say (for a music video). Then it'll keep type A Facebookians tuned in better.

I saw a few shaky handheld shots in there, whereas 95% of the rest was rock solid. (Great use of jibs/cranes and such btw... loved that!). I would smooth those shots out. Either the whole thing is handheld, or a movement/scene is, but one or two shots stuck in with shake just look like mistakes.

As far as the video quality - YouTube mucks it all up. I know the original looks much better than what we see here. I own a C100 and C300 and with a Ninja 2 or similar recorder the C100 looks just as good as the C300. Overall you made it shine here. Most "DPs" couldn't have done half as good as a job. Thanks for sharing.
 
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