C200: New Series of Dance Tutorials for YouTube RED shot on the C200

[puredrifting]

Moved this discussion from the C200 finished project thread in case in case of further discussion.

I was DP on this dance tutorial series for the YouTube RED Series Step Up: High Water. We shot these last year during Hurricane Irma last September in Atlanta. Shot on the Canon C200, in .MP4. We shot around 8 hours of footage per day on two cameras so there was no way to shoot Cinema RAW Light but we were pleasantly surprised at how well the .MP4 codec held up. My big challenge was the stage was created in the dancers rehearsal room which was really too small for our needs so we felt a bit boxed in and the show's art department was intent on a white on white set while many of our dancers were dark skinned and wore costumes that were dark as well so a real challenge with contrast ratios. We ended up using two Arri S60 Skypanels through an 8x8 silk as my key and an Arri L10 through a 4x4 skinned with Opal as my fill source. We used Quasar Science tubes above the giant HW logo to light the back wall. A camera was on sticks, while B camera was on a Dana Dolly. Clients at YouTube and the studio were very happy with the results. If you don't want to sit through all of the dance instruction and just want to see the end result with music, just fast forward to about the last minute of each. C200 did well. I had nothing to do with post or the grade, it looks a bit cool for my taste but not bad and there were content reasons the client wanted it to look this way.

Glad to answer any questions about how the C200 performs in a real, high pressure, studio clients sitting in chairs type of scenario.

 

[puredrifting]

Great stuff PD. How did you mount the Quasar Tubes?

Were the skypanels part of the lighting package? If being used in the way shown, would you use them again over an HMI?

Also, in another thread your lighting set up description is different to this post ^^ (4x/6x, not 8x/4x). (I'm only trying to help clear things up for anyone else following!)

Hi Rob:

We mounted the Quasar tubes with monofilament line from the T-bar ceiling tile.

The Skypanels were made available to me at the last minute, I had actually ordered a full tungsten package, we showed up in Atlanta and the set was smaller than it looked from drawings. We realized that if we used tungsten in that size room, our dancers would probably pass out from the heat. Fortunately the show was just wrapping on the stages next door and my gaffer did some snooping around. The production manager offered the Arris to us so I took advantage of their generosity. I ended up sending most of the tungsten package back to the rental house. I would use Arri LEDs over HMI anyday, they make NO noise and HMIs, in a room this small, would have been an issue with the buzz they make, since we were shooting dialogue. My gaffer offered his Arri L10 as a fill source and I kind of fell in love with it, that is a really versatile, super nice instrument.

As far as the frame sizes, we experimented and ended up using the larger sizes, I wasn't sure we could fit them into the room with the low ceilings but my grip and gaffer were very good at making things work (we ended up using the 8x8 tilted) so I wanted the larger sources, of course, since we had to cover multiple dancers with all different skin tones and wardrobe colors and shades. The white on white set didn't help matters, I was hoping to shoot on the show's sets, which were beautiful and in much larger areas but that didn't work out for various logistical reasons, the studio was already dressing the stages for a Sony Superhero movie that was ramping up. I have to say, I keyed from camera right and it looked pretty good but my lead dancer in the shots with three dancers had a tendency to flag the dancer on camera left and I ran out of time to try to fix it. They were all moving so it wasn't too bad but there were some instances when I would have liked to have setup an additional frontal fill light for them but that would have flattened out the overall look too and I liked the edgy yet soft look we created. All of the dances you see above were shot in two days, we were flying as we needed to get at least 2-3 takes of each dance sequence. Keep in mind Hurricane Irma was pounding us just a few feet outside the glass windows behind us, the crew had all wrapped shooting the show and were sticking around for us to shoot these, many of them had planes out to NYC, LA and Chicago the same day we shot these. The Hurricane canceled two of our shoot days, then we rented a generator to continue so there were some questions about if the talent could stay in Atlanta for us as they were also delayed two days and many had other gigs in their home towns booked. It was a crazy, relatively stressful shoot, simply because of the Hurricane. Atlanta was without power for four days.

Overall, it was a fun experience, the dancers energy was infectious and my Atlanta crew were pretty great overall. I have not seen the show yet but there are a ton of trailers of YouTube, hopefully it will be successful and we will get called back to do some S2 tutorials. The show is very dance focused and the people who work on it are really talented. Great crew too, the show looks very nice, especially for an on-line show.

 

[puredrifting]

We switched back and forth from face detection to AF, depending on how large the talent was in the frame. I was quite impressed with both, tracking these dancers was no easy feat and it only messed up a couple of times in two days of shooting. Looking at it objectively, a good AC would have had a hard time here since we had little rehearsal and blocking, there were no marks to hit with timing. DPAF really saved my bacon here. I also tried to light to an F5.6 at ISO 800 to give us a sporting chance with DOF, that was one nice thing about the white on white BG, no worrying about or trying to get shallow DOF, you never would have been able to tell if it was shallow since all the camera would see would be a wash of white.

 

[dave12781]

Was the decision to leave the b-camera footage ungraded a stylistic choice? It's a little jarring with the sudden change in color, etc.

 

[puredrifting]

As far as I know (I wasn't involved in the post), the studio clients wanted the b-camera to look very different than the A camera. The B-camera is actually a lot more graded than the A camera, they played with that look a lot. They tried B&W, various types of color grades, etc. It's a bit like a bleach bypass kind of contrasty look. I kind of dig how the B camera footage looks, a bit like grainy S16. I used to own an Arri SR2 and shot tons of stuff that looked like this. I think the concern was, the space was really too small for what we were trying to do, we really had to have the dancers shrink their movement compared to what they did in the show because we were losing them out of frame. They didn't want super CUs on either camera because these were dance tutorials so the concern was more about can the viewer follow the dance instruction than making it look super cool. So in the end, the frame I could get on the B camera, even though it was off to the side and on a dolly, didn't look that different than the A camera angle, other than it was moving and little tighter. Originally we were going to get a profile shot with B camera, which would have worked better, but we ran out of set, there was no way to get a profile shot without seeing off the edge of the set so we ended up locating the B camera only about 10' to the left of A camera.

As far as the look, I think that's just a taste thing, some will dig it, some won't. I have been told that the audience who watches the show and are fans of the dancers love these videos, the Jade Chenowyth clip has logged 60,000 views in six days so the audience seems happy with it.

 

[groveChuck]

Turned out well for the space constraints, Dan, and I get what they were going for in the B Cam- grade, grain and film scratches added.

Wondering what advantages do you see the C200 offering in this situation over the C300 or even C100, since it's 8 bit 420, and delivered in 1080?
They didn't do punch-ins, did they?

 

[Barry1908]

We switched back and forth from face detection to AF, depending on how large the talent was in the frame. I was quite impressed with both, tracking these dancers was no easy feat and it only messed up a couple of times in two days of shooting. .

Thankyou for taking the time to record the setup and provide stills, the lighting is so nice it looks very Arri like to me. When you say you switched b/w AF and face detection , do you mean the C100 continuous AF ‘click the remapped Magn button on the grip’ technique? Also was this both cameras or was the C200 set to 5.6 and use manual? I know that lens well and couldn’t see it changing focus much. Great work!

 

[puredrifting]

Turned out well for the space constraints, Dan, and I get what they were going for in the B Cam- grade, grain and film scratches added.

Wondering what advantages do you see the C200 offering in this situation over the C300 or even C100, since it's 8 bit 420, and delivered in 1080?
They didn't do punch-ins, did they?

Yes, they were going for the classic mixed media look, which I kind of like. It can look gimmicky but for dance and action, I thought it worked okay.

They actually did some re-framing, not a ton but some so shooting UHD did help, here and there. As I have written elsewhere, if I am honest, I find that I prefer the WDR colors I used to get from the C100/C300 over the WDR color I get from the C200. The CRL, graded looks leagues better than the C100/300, but the straight out of the camera, hand it off to a client for web or air situation, I think the C100/300 colors were more pleasing, the C200 colors seem muted and overall, it's a more subdued yet more detailed look. I think with some testing and experimentation, I can get the C200 WDR straight out of the box look to improve, there are so many parameters to play with but overall, I still think the C200 looks great, just different than the C100/300 and I am surprised how different it can look from the C300 MKII. I wish Abel Cine would release some C200 CPs, I have always liked their CPs as a base to develop my own rather than starting from scratch, I need to check with them again, perhaps they have some CPs now for the C200?

 

[puredrifting]

Thankyou for taking the time to record the setup and provide stills, the lighting is so nice it looks very Arri like to me. When you say you switched b/w AF and face detection , do you mean the C100 continuous AF ‘click the remapped Magn button on the grip’ technique? Also was this both cameras or was the C200 set to 5.6 and use manual? I know that lens well and couldn’t see it changing focus much. Great work!

Hey Barry,

We used two C200s, not the C100 for this one. Yes, we used the control on the grip and sometimes the touchscreen to move that AF target box around but using the large size, we didn't have to adjust it very often. We only went to manual when the camera lost the focus point and was hunting, which happened a few times on the B camera on the dolly, makes sense since we had a close to featureless white BG so if the AF box went outside of the dancers, it had no contrast to focus on. We used face detection though at least 50% of the time and it worked really well, especially when the dancers were doing the drops to the floor, that would have been a tough one for an AC to follow. Usually, if this was a music video or part of the Step Up show, they would hav rehearsal, block the shots and hit the edit points and of course, for the show, they often shoot single camera so they are doing multiple takes and moving the camera location all over the place. For us, we were lucky to get two full run throughs, there was no rehearsal and we had never even seen the moves so we had no choice to but to nail it asap. If I recall, we used the cheap 18-135 STM IS lens on the B-camera on the dolly and it worked pretty well, it does focus really smoothly and quickly, which was important on these fast moving subjects.

 

[Barry1908]

Thanks for the extra info

 

[puredrifting]

Thanks for the extra info

Anytime Barry. Just found out the second clip above, Odalie's Solo (Ep 8) with Jade Chenowyeth is going to break 100k views in a little over a week today, impressive for a dance tutorial although it's all due to Jade's star power, not the clip itself. She definitely had "it" when we worked with her, she could be a big star someday, beautiful, great dancer and super positive, charismatic personality