F55: Recent kitchen/food commercial shoot

[starcentral]

Below are some frame grabs from a recent two camera project my production company was hired to shoot, I was the DP. We worked on a series of commercials spots over a very long day using pretty well the same lighting setup and overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, especially considering my small crew and low budget I had to work with for lighting, grip and camera.

I set both F55 camera's to CineEI mode using slog3/sgamut3.cine and purposely rated the cameras higher in ISO than their native setting which is considered somewhat unorthodox. I shot in HD XAVC 10-bit and the color temperature was set to 3200k. I used the camera's built-in 709(800) 3D LUT to feed two dedicated 17" Panasonic directors monitors for video village. The image even with the 709(800) LUT looked absolutely fantastic and the main client (Philips), their representing agency, and my client who is hired by the agency were all very pleased with the look we were able to achieve for this production. Always a main concern for me.

I used two zoom lenses for the entire shoot; a Canon PL cine zoom 30 - 105mm f2.8 and a Canon PL cine zoom 15.5 - 47mm f2.8 which made it possible for quick reframing without always having to move around too much. The A-cam was on a dolly so again the zoom was a saviour and my set of CP.2 Zeiss lenses stayed in their case the entire time and never made it out to the party.

The frames below are not from the final grade, just me tinkering in Catalyst Browse now that I'm allowed to post some actual frames from the shoot. I did not use any Sony or 3rd party LUTs at all. The ease of grading the images are testament to slog3/sgamut3.cine. Using Catalyst Browse I used nothing more than a bit of lift & gamma on the wheels, some curves to create contrast where I wanted it, and lastly a few small tweaks to temperature, temp and saturation. The last image (flame) was S&Q with the 709(800) LUT accidentally baked in and hasn't been altered too much at all. Here's the Catalyst Browse color settings exported into a loadable CB Preset incase anyone wants to give it a go on their slog3/sgamut3.cine footage, maybe it will make for a nice look: http://www.starcentral.ca/forums/cb/screen-shots-exports.ccolor.zip

 

[FrameFarmMedia]

Nice work Dennis the shots looks great.

 

[markfpv]

I agree w/ FF. Two quick questions - what large source did you use on the key side? (or is it a bounce that's giving the stainless fridge it's soft reflection?) And, did you rate higher than native simply because there seems to be very little darks in the shots & wanted to protect highlights?

 

[Grug]

Looking good Dennis, I'm sure you've noticed this already but there seems to be a bit of difference between the skintones on her arms versus her face, arms look noticeably pinker than the face and the face looks noticeably more yellow than the arms.

 

[morgan_moore]

Looking good. Full sat

Maybe a bit green? Also arms is a bit noisy - why the high ISO?

S

 

[starcentral]

Thanks guys, glad you dig it.

Markfpv - The lighting was a mixture of very large soft sources and hard lights. Her key and also the reflection seen in the stainless fridge is from a huge floor to ceiling half soft frost fabric. I rated the camera higher by 2/3 stops more for strategic purposes yes, mostly for some protection over blowing out any shots particularly because I couldn't always be in many places at once and I knew my amazing b-cam operator at some point would need to adjust his iris when racing through for a series of insert shots. Given this was more a type of high-key lighting scene without a lot of blacks like you suggest, I made the decision to underexpose slightly. It did not kill me to do that but I think against what most people might have done.

Grug - yes I have some kind of magenta/pink issue going on that seems to be more apparent on the on the B-cam equipped with the 30-105mm lens, in post I did notice some further color shifts with that lens when zoomed in more. To further compound things on that shot of her hands when the camera pans up to her face it is not the same color as her hands, so I'm assuming some difference may also be attributed to the makeup too.

 

[starcentral]

@Sam - yeah I agree too much green a bit resulting in a bit yellowy result. It was quick grade.

2/3 stop underexposed, so 2000 ISO on F55 in CineEI hence some noise. It was a two camera shoot which is very hard to light for without having some issues, and my B-cam op at times had to use his own judgement on exposure so again I wanted some safefy.