HZ-CA13U (COPLA) sample footage

[Tim Dashwood]

Here's a couple performance music videos I shot recently with the HZ-CA13U, the HD200, and my Russian-made Kinor Zoom with PL mount.

http://www.timdashwood.com/.Movies/E...lke-480P24.mov Right-Click and "Save-As"

http://www.timdashwood.com/arianagillis

The vignetting in the corners is the "trademark" of Russian optics and WAS NOT achieved in post. The adapter does not vignette that much... what you see is simply a result of the particular lens I used.
Elissa Mielke's video was shot at 720P60 and slowed to 720P24. I used pantyhose on the back of the PL lens in both cases. For those of you at the FCP User's Group Supermeet NAB2007, you may have caught my tutorial on the technique. Here's the link to the podcast on the technique. (track #7) Also, you can watch this tutorial on dvinfo.net.
I have another video of a test with various Zeiss primes and I will upload and post a link to that soon.

BTW, the HZ-CA13U is now officially the "Cine Optical PL Adapter" or COPLA for short. That's a little easier to remember.

[Hayes Roberts]

thanks for putting this up- look forward to more.
Any thoughts on the adapter with the Optar Illumina prime set?

[Tim Dashwood]

Originally Posted by Hayes Roberts

thanks for putting this up- look forward to more.
Any thoughts on the adapter with the Optar Illumina prime set?

I haven't used any Optar Illumina lenses, but I have used Cooke S4, Zeiss Ultra, Zeiss Super speeds, Zeiss standard speeds, Century 6mm, Clairmont anamorphics and my Kinor 16OPF12-1.

The adapter works as expected as if the lens was on a 16mm camera (centre cropped to 1.78:1)

[Sean Adair]

I really enjoyed these. I didn't have the vignetting jump out at me, since I was looking for the depth of field with the COPLA, but the cinematography distracted me from that, however it was really the video concept that struck me, until the music won me over, and I was wondering what happened to all those years now that I'm old enough to be the father of these gorgeous young things....
Great work with great material. Bravo!

[Daniel Patton]

Nice Tim,

Without anyone telling me, I could still find stuff shot with the JVC series camera. They carry a look to them that is very unique to the camera, unlike any other in my opinion.

Great stuff, thanks fior sharing.

[Stephan Ahonen]

The Ariana Gillis video... It's a great song and a great video, but it doesn't feel like they fit with each other. The video feels like it's trying to be a production for a hard rock band on MTV while the song is this quirky indie rock thing.

[Jaadgy Akanni]

I thought it was a little underexposed, which given the almost monochromatic forest background, made it look gloomy, in contradiction with the lyrics. She also should've worn something that would make her shine and stand out more, and not make her blend in with the forest to the point that she becomes visually less important. Her upper clothes in particular should have been brighter, like a nice red or aqua blue, perhaps. Just my personal artistic opinion.

[Stephan Ahonen]

In my experience things tend to look a little low on a computer monitor when they will look just fine on TV. Just a little bit different gamma between them. Makes it really hard for me to watch DVDs on my computer.

I'm amazed that she managed to lip-sync that fast for slo-mo and still make it look natural and relaxed.

[Douglas Toltzman]

I'd love to have a look at the first video, but when I click the link I'm asked if I want to save some .exe file. Has that page been hacked?

I watched the Ariana Gillis video. I found the setting, lighting, and cinemaphotography to be pleasing. The edits were paced about right for the tempo of the song, in my opinion. Nice work.

[Stephan Ahonen]

Originally Posted by Douglas Toltzman

I watched the Ariana Gillis video. I found the setting, lighting, and cinemaphotography to be pleasing. The edits were paced about right for the tempo of the song, in my opinion. Nice work.

Eh, maybe the tempo, but not the style IMHO. Lots of quick cuts and snap zooms. Suffers from the MTV information overload style of editing that maybe works for the kind of stuff that's on MTV, but this is a quirky stripped down alt-folk-rock band here. I would've started with the bell thing as the first shot, with the singer front and center like she is later in the video, done my first cut right after she sings "through down" in the first verse and kept that sort of pace in the editing throughout, using dolly moves and cuts to a storyline to keep it interesting. Of course shooting a story portion of a video would probably mean another day of shooting so maybe that wasn't in the budget.

It's also strange that the video barely features the rest of the band at all. It almost seems like you were told to give the band the absolute minimum amount of face time possible. You sometimes see a closeup their hands doing something on their instrument, but you barely get to see their faces, so you don't get the feeling like those hands or instruments really belong to anybody, they're just disembodied hands and instruments. If you're trying to maximize screen time for the lead singer by minimizing cutaways, go a bit wider on the cutaways so we at least get to see a face.

I was looking at the drummer in the wide shots and it looks like he's trying to make the smallest amount of noise possible. My advice for shooting drummers goes something like this: If he needs to hear the track to sync with it, bring a PA that will let him hear it over his normal volume of playing. Yeah, it's loud, but you get a much better performance out of your band when they feel like they can rock out more. Bring some earplugs.

[Tim Dashwood]

Originally Posted by Stephan Ahonen

The Ariana Gillis video... It's a great song and a great video, but it doesn't feel like they fit with each other. The video feels like it's trying to be a production for a hard rock band on MTV while the song is this quirky indie rock thing.

The video isn't "trying" to be anything except a lens test. I needed something to show at NAB that wouldn't infringe on music label copyrights, so I contacted some local indie artists and offered to spend an hour or two at a location of their choice to shoot a performance video (no story elements) that they could use on their myspace if they wanted.
Exactly $0 was spent on either video, with no crew (just my tripod, manfrotto wheels, a 1K redhead, and another cameraman to shoot "behind the scenes" material for my DVD. I shot each video in under two hours (including setup and strike), loaded the files into my macbook pro, and cut a rough cut in about an hour with multicam in FCP. It is this rough cut that you are seeing...I only showed a very short portion at NAB.

Originally Posted by Jaadgy Akanni

I thought it was a little underexposed, which given the almost monochromatic forest background, made it look gloomy, in contradiction with the lyrics. She also should've worn something that would make her shine and stand out more, and not make her blend in with the forest to the point that she becomes visually less important. Her upper clothes in particular should have been brighter, like a nice red or aqua blue, perhaps. Just my personal artistic opinion.

The look is completely intentional - "gloomy" is exactly what we were going for, regardless of what the lyrics "seem" to suggest.
Once again, I simply met this girl at her house, quickly decided to shoot in the bush behind her house, asked her to throw on a long coat because it was cold, and walked out there to find a suitable location. I shot this as a demonstration of in-camera day-for-night technique as well overcrank lip-sync. (This is a lesson unit on my DVD.) What you see is straight out of the camera without any colour correction. I will probably bring the highlights down and desaturate some more to complete the day-for-night look. I shot this, quickly threw a rough cut together, then hopped on a plane for Vegas. I actually also shot a bunch of stuff in her house with a piano, but who knows if I'll ever get around to doing rough cut #2?

Originally Posted by Stephan Ahonen

Eh, maybe the tempo, but not the style IMHO. Lots of quick cuts and snap zooms. Suffers from the MTV information overload style of editing that maybe works for the kind of stuff that's on MTV, but this is a quirky stripped down alt-folk-rock band here. I would've started with the bell thing as the first shot, with the singer front and center like she is later in the video, done my first cut right after she sings "through down" in the first verse and kept that sort of pace in the editing throughout, using dolly moves and cuts to a storyline to keep it interesting.

I went with the flow of what the artist wanted to do. I didn't really care because I only needed about 30 seconds for lens evaluation and NAB demo. She's never done a music video before in her life and was a little stiff in the beginning. I was ready to pack up and leave after I had the "sitting down" location wrapped - no band. About that time she noticed the black electric hanging on the wall and told me she wanted to do some of the song standing up. That was the best thing we could have done because she opened her eyes and started getting into it - much like her natural stage performance. We brought her dad in to play guitar and another friend and his teenage son to play bass and drums. I then did the profile shot to tie in the band with the other performance stuff.
I think we had a total of 15 full song takes when I left. This was all recorded in native 720P24 to the DR-HD100 in quicktime and then essentially cut in real-time with multicam editing in FCP5.1.

Originally Posted by Stephan Ahonen

Of course shooting a story portion of a video would probably mean another day of shooting so maybe that wasn't in the budget.

Like I explained above, there was no budget at all. Literally $0. I simply bartered a performance video in exchange for an artist to appear in my lens test.

Originally Posted by Stephan Ahonen

It's also strange that the video barely features the rest of the band at all. It almost seems like you were told to give the band the absolute minimum amount of face time possible. You sometimes see a closeup their hands doing something on their instrument, but you barely get to see their faces, so you don't get the feeling like those hands or instruments really belong to anybody, they're just disembodied hands and instruments. If you're trying to maximize screen time for the lead singer by minimizing cutaways, go a bit wider on the cutaways so we at least get to see a face.

The edit doesn't feature the band's faces not for a lack of shooting them, but because it just didn't work. It is distracting and they weren't the most "comfortable" blokes on camera.

Originally Posted by Stephan Ahonen

I was looking at the drummer in the wide shots and it looks like he's trying to make the smallest amount of noise possible. My advice for shooting drummers goes something like this: If he needs to hear the track to sync with it, bring a PA that will let him hear it over his normal volume of playing. Yeah, it's loud, but you get a much better performance out of your band when they feel like they can rock out more. Bring some earplugs.

We had the volume cranked. I think he did a pretty good job for a 14 year old. He played on the track too.
The singer is 16. Her backup singing sister is 13. Bass and guitar provided by the dads.

[Douglas Toltzman]

I hesitate to apply some of the critique you do, Stephan, because I've done 3 music videos and on only one of them did I get creative license. The artist's ego would often trump what I felt was a good mix of content. I hate to criticize the shooter/editor, without knowing the contraints they were working under.

I'd argue that the cuts were too fast. I'm not a big fan of MTV style editing, but I've seen a lot worse than this, and I didn't have a hard time following the flow.

Of course, I'm not here to debate editing or shooting style. A story would have been nice, but we could run in circles for days. I am curious, however, about what sort of clarity, artifacts, DOF, etc. can be expected from the HZ-CA13U adaptor. I doubt I will be buying one anytime soon, but watching the Ariana Gillis video, I did not observe an appreciable decrease in DOF. I did notice that the video had a soft focus. The highlights looked like a ProMist filter, or something like it, had been used. ???

I do think the lighting on that video was very natural and pleasant. There are some "effects" about which I'd like to know more.

[Douglas Toltzman]

Thanks for the explanation, Tim. Also, thanks for posting the video(s), although I've only gotten to watch one of them. I don't care about the aesthetics of the video, although I still think you did a nice job ... but what do I know? I am only interested in the technical details, some of which you've provided. If there is anything you can add, I'd appreciate it, but you've already offered an appreciable amount.

I'm guessing that the HZ-CA13U does not change the DOF. Obviously it allows you to use a wider range of lenses, but are there any other advantages?

[Jack Walker]

Originally Posted by Tim Dashwood

I think we had a total of 15 full song takes when I left. This was all recorded in native 720P24 to the DR-HD100 in quicktime and then essentially cut in real-time with multicam editing in FCP5.1.

Is your DVD available?

I have to make a music video and have never done one.
If anyone has answers, here are my questions:
1. What do you playback the music on. A CD?
2. How do you synch the music with the music? Do you record the playback with the video?
3. In order to simplify editing, do you play the full song for each take?
4. How do you synch the takes for use in multicam? Do you synch the recorded playback music on each take?
5. How is synch normally between music and video on a high end production? a medium rung production? a low-cost production?
6. How do you prepare the music for slo-mo? Spead it up in Adobe Audition (or other sound editor) by 250% then put it on a CD. Use the CD for playback and tape at 60fps, then when that take is in the editor change the frame rate to 24fps?

Is there a book or a guide somewhere that covers all of this?

Thank you!

And I should say I like Tim's video very much. I worked for many years in a network art department, and what Tim outlines is a professional approach to a job: clearly know what your exact goal is, analyze your resources and understand exactly what you can do with the resources in the very specific amount of time alotted... and be finished by the deadline with a result that is at a professional level for the goals that were initially defined. It should be noted that very, very few people who can do this consistently.

[Douglas Toltzman]

I learned a lot on the first couple music videos I shot; especially the first one. I can answer a couple of your questions, or at least tell you how I do some of those things ...

For syncing, the music track is playing while we are shooting and the camera is recording through a microphone, or better through a direct connection with the CD-player on one channel, and microphone on the 2nd channel. The cleaner the waveform of the music you record in camera, the easier it is to sync it with the waveform of the studio track. I visually sync wave forms in the timeline with the sliding edit tool.

I worked out a way to use FCPs multicam edit feature, but eventually I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

When I start my main sequence, now that I've done it a few times, I first insert a slug on V1 and A1,A2 tracks that is the same length as the audio track. Then I repace A1 and A2 with the studio audio track and lock V1, A1 and A2. The reason I do this, is so I can add tracks, layer on special effects, titles, etc. without messing with my reference audio track. Once you do it, you'll see what I mean.

If you're using Final Cut, be sure to use Apple-X (cut) to delete items you decide you don't want, and never "Del". The delete key performs a ripple delete, which can and probably will screw up your audio sync on your other clips.

As far as shooting full runs through the song. It's generally easier to shoot the full song repeatedly. At least once for each camera angle, etc. However, the real key to success is planning, planning, and more planning. I decided (after trying to cheat), that a storyboard with the lyrics of the song broken down into phrases; one phrase, or subphrase per frame of the storyboard, with details about how the story elements and associated shots would be assembled in the final edit, is critical. If your music video is like most of the good ones, you'll have story elements aside from your sync/performance shots. If you have story element shots that require syncing, the lips must match the particular part of the song where that element will be inserted.

Aside from syncing, and timing, shooting a music video is pretty much like shooting anything else. Since you'll be discarding the audio, you only need to be sure you capture what you need for syncing. Otherwise, all the rules of good lighting, selective focus, lots of closeups, etc. all apply.

I know this is sort of general, but I hope it helps. I'll tell you how to sync your 15+ takes for a multi-angle track in Final Cut if you really want to know. I found the camera switching to be a great concept, but in practice it was buggy (I had to restart FCP every so often), difficult to manage so many "angles", and I had some trouble fine tuning the audio sync.