My big chromakey project

I know everyone's nuts about your chromakey and FX work, but I'm knocked out by how good the regular footage at the end looks. It's really beautiful -- well lit, great movement, etc... Did you use something like Magic Bullet or just regular CC to desaturate (in-camera, possibly?).

I also love the costumes and the fact that the lead singer at the end appears to be singing into your shotgun mic --- or is that standard in Denmark?

What are your feelings about the HVX in general? And did you use any kind of 35mm adapter?

Anyway, great work.
 
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darwinandpaine said:
Did you use something like Magic Bullet or just regular CC to desaturate (in-camera, possibly?)..
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The key segments was standard F6, the performance standard F5.
All grade was done inside FCP.
The performance was graded using two plugins: 3-way CC and Nattress Vignette.

darwinandpaine said:
I also love the costumes...
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We had two great dress designers select the costumes and do the dressing on set.

darwinandpaine said:
What are your feelings about the HVX in general?
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It's a very versatile tool.
When you learn what it doesn't do well, you can really begin to trust it to deliver stunning footage.

For this project I shot everything in 1080p25. All key elements was captured live into FCP 5. The performance was shot onto my 2x8 GB P2 Cards. It was a very good workflow, very good quality and at a small datarate (14MB/s).
I think you can push this package very far, and by knowing the limitations, easily work around them. There is no doubt that I will do a lot of work using this camera, until I hopefully can afford the Red.

darwinandpaine said:
And did you use any kind of 35mm adapter?.
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No, just the stock lens wide open for the performance part.
For the chroma shots I tried to get them as sharp as possible by stopping down a bit, then later set the shallow DOF with the virtual camera inside AE.
 
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Thanks for the feedback. One more question --- what, in your mind, are the limitations of the camera; what doesn't it do well? (Okay, that was kinda two questions.)
 
Fantastic, bravo, (Scrappy is standing and clapping, and trying to whistle.) All of your talented work has left me curious as to what the message of the video was. (I'm sure I would have got it had I paid attention during danish language class. I assume it was anti-war.) either way excellent work.
 
darwinandpaine said:
Thanks for the feedback. One more question --- what, in your mind, are the limitations of the camera; what doesn't it do well? (Okay, that was kinda two questions.)
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Just a few of my personal observations:
1/3" imagers does have limitations with regards to low-light performance (Noise), 8-bit does band, 6:1 DCT compression does introduce visible artifacts, the LCD display is very bad, The OIS freaks out occasionally when you reach the limits of the variable optical element, the zoom speed cuts from 0% to 5% when using a zoom remote (like there is a threshold around the 0 setting).

Is it still better than any other camera on the market in the same formfactor/price segment? Hell yeah! :kali:
 
Holly f*#@ing molly. How good is that.

I agree with darwinandpaine, not only is all the AE composite work fantastic but the stuff of the band in the white room is great. How did you learn these skills for compositing in AE?
 
Wicked clip bro,
Was thinking of getting the dvx100b now i think i am sold on the hvx that white cyc footage is awesome. Just a quick question though how do you get your footage into FCP what version are you using and which shooting modes can you import. Are you using secret workarounds.
Thanks for sharing that clip with us
 
WOW, extremely professional mate ;) The colours in the performance part were amazing. Yer im interested as well how you work with the footage on a mac seeing that your in PAL land?
 
Anders, with the shots in the white room that you say you captured to the 8gig P2 cards wide open, what did you use for monitoring, was it hard to get focus, and what gamma settings did you have on the camera, or any settings for that matter?

PS: I went to your site http://andersholck.batcave.net/ but I couldn't connect on any of the what looked like links.

PPS: The guy with the blond hair on the right looks like the guy out of Shaun Of The Dead.
 
i really want to see this video.. but my modem doesnt like streaming much.. actually it cant handle it.. hehe, do u have a link for download? thanx
 
Nice work Anders- great job on the VFX- I'm sure that took a lot of work. The style reminded me of Monty Python (Not a bad thing, as I really like it.). I'm sure that I would have appreciated it more if I could have understood the language ....

Keep it up. :)
 
Fantastic work, Anders. This was a fascinating video that kept me watching till the end and then I wanted more. I really liked the song too.

It gave me a headache thinking how much work went into this. You should be proud of it, man.

Thanks for sharing.
 
peter orland said:
Anders, with the shots in the white room that you say you captured to the 8gig P2 cards wide open, what did you use for monitoring, was it hard to get focus, and what gamma settings did you have on the camera, or any settings for that matter?
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This gig was a two man show: Me and the director. So no gaffer, grip, AC etc.
We did the setup, lighting etc.
The Performance parts was done by pre-focusing on the LCD with the focusassist button, and then trying to keep the same distance when doing the steadicam movement. It's actually possible to cheat quite a bit, by hiding slight defocus behind motion blur. The wide tracking shot in the end with the small soldiers is only in focus in the end, it actually starts slightly out of focus, but the wide angle and the motion blur hides the soft look.

All monitoring was done on either my steadicam LCD, or the FCP capture window of the computer LCD.

The gamma setting for the performance was standard F5: Cinegamma V.
I tweaked the WB in the settings menu after setting it neutral on the white cyclic background.
The lighting for that part was:
6 cyclic backdrop lights for the background.
1 spacelight right above.
1 4k fresnell with a XXL chimera on a dimmer for general fill from front-left. (adding to the yellowish look)
 
tatsuo said:
Just a quick question though how do you get your footage into FCP what version are you using and which shooting modes can you import. Are you using secret workarounds.
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I used FCP 5.1.1.

It's only material in 720p50 that is a problem in FCP.
1080p25 works fine. The whole gig was shot in 1080p25.

I do have an old Win XP machine to convert 720p50 material into QT in photojpeg codec.
 
Hi Anders:
That was an incredible piece of work! You are a very talented person and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future...What did you use to get the kaleidoscopic images? That was an impressive showcase for the HVX too. Peace and Light to you, Norman
 
digitalnirvana9 said:
What did you use to get the kaleidoscopic images?
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The kaleidoscope images was done as a multilayer composite inside AE.
I first made the shape to become the dance floor of our "Commander in chief" of the middle section of the song. The director liked it and we then reused it in the performance part.

It's a medium shot masked off at the waist, then duplicated and rotated a few time to form a circle. This process was duplicated three times to form a flower like shipe of three levels. Each level was then rotated at different speeds.
In the kaleidoscope parts of the performance this "dancefloor" was precomposed and duplicated a few times as 3d layers. Then I animated the 3d camera.
The rendered file was taken into FCP and here I duplicated the layer, added the FCP motion blur at 100 to the bottom one and added a luma key to the upper one. This gave me that psychedelic delay effect.
 
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