"Love Room" - Argentinian music video shot on the GH2

[Ernesto Mantaras]

Hi! Here's a music video I've recently shot for an Argentinian synthpop band called "Distant Project" (most of their lyrics are in English).
It was shot on my new GH2 that arrived only 3 days before the shoot! I used a Minolta MD 50mm f1.7, the Panny 20mm f1.7 and the 14-42mm kit lens, all of it in 720p50 (we tried 60p but the song was too fast for the guitar -when playing the solo- and the drums to follow properly!).

Distant Project - Love Room (Official Video) - YouTube

One thing to note: I used the Unified 88Mbit hack, but although the 1080p24 was beautiful, all of the 720p footage I shot was always between 11 and 30Mbps and showed a lot of compression artifacting. I didn't have time to test it, so it was a dissapointment to see how lower the quality was in comparison to 24p. After reading a lot I've come to learn that 720p is a different kind of beast to tame, but perhaps it's wrong to say that the Unified patch is all intra, or at least all 88Mbit? I love the 24p and would definitely keep it, but I do use 720p quite often and I've found Driftwood's Sedna or even Sanity to behave a lot better. Bummer.

[Jeff Harper]

Superb. So very well done.

[Ernesto Mantaras]

Thank you!

[Jeff Hinson]

Ernesto...
Great video!!!

Would you tell me your technique for syncing slow motion video to real time audio and how you accomplished the "falling photograph" effect at the end of the video.

Thanks for sharing, I really enjoyed the video and the song.

Jeff

[Patrick Janka]

The slowdown is done by recording a new audio track at a much faster rate, syncing your playing/singing/motions to it, then slowing the video back down to match the original tempo of the track. That way the instrumentation looks correct, but motions are more dreamlike. The pictures I'm guessing were done with After Effects.

[Jeff Hinson]

Hummm...
Id like to see the "behind the scenes" clips of the guys singing and playing to the fast audio. I bet they had a good time with that. ha

Thanks for the tip,
Jeff

[Ernesto Mantaras]

Thanks, Jeff! Just like Patrick said, I sped the song up using Audition and then we played that when shooting, so that when I conformed the 720p50 into 23,976p it would sync perfectly. Now, I made the calculations for that the very morning of the shoot, when I was pretty asleep, and made a mistake... So when I started editing the video I found out that it got desynchronized as the song played... But I have now made the right calculations, and there are quite long numbers.

Since the GH2 (and almost every camera really) records to 23.976p rather than 24p, the numbers become a bit messy on the NTSC side (they're always messy for PAL unless you shoot 25p). Here are the percentages to which you should stretch the song:

23.976p realtime song recorded at 50p: 208,541875208541875%
23.976p realtime song recorded at 60p: 250,25025025025025%
24p realtime song recorded at 50p: 208,333333333333333%
24p realtime song recorded at 60p: 250% (yeah, that's a rounded one)

I keep those numbers on a notepad file now. Come in handy.
BTW, recording in 60p would have yielded slower motion, but the guitar player couldn't follow the solo, it was too fast. And I was killing the drummer.

Oh, and the photograph animations were made in After Effects, just like Patrick also said.
I'm afraid I have no BTS footage, but I'll see if I can upload a few raw clips for you to see!

[Jeff Hinson]

Ernesto...

Thanks for the explanation and the data :>)
I may have to try that soon as I do a few simple music videos for local bands.

Enjoyed the video and thanks for sharing the details

Good luck,
Jeff

[Bruce Foreman]

Very good video and I enjoyed it. Just one thing.

I'd avoid overuse of that "orange flash" effect, I know we have a whole new generation or two of folks that haven't worked with film and have no idea how we used to get it. They think it's a cool effect that makes a video look like old film.

In motion picture cameras the film came on spools, on real productions film was carefully changed with the magazine in a light tight black bag, but consumer grade movie cameras mostly did not have detachable magazines and not a lot of folks carried a "changing bag" to put the camera in to safely change film in.

So the camera was opened out in light (hopefully not sunlight) and as long as one didn't "linger" getting the end taped and the film into the little black wrapper that should have been kept in the film can, only the first few layers of film got light struck. The transition from "protected" to totally light struck (totally clear when processed) is where we got the orange flashes. If we had footage affected we didn't consider it a "cool" effect.

The other way we got it was if some idiot opened the camera to load film and discovered a partially used roll already threaded.

I can guarantee you that we did NOT do it for "cool" effect.

So used once (maybe twice) in a short you were trying to make look like an old film would be OK, but throughout the whole thing...I wouldn't anymore.

[Jeff Harper]

For me, Bruce, in the context of a music video, I think the orange was used well, and in just the right places. I think it broke things up nicely. The color was just right, and the variety of angles and placement of it was great, to me.

[Ernesto Mantaras]

Hi, Bruce. I do know about how this effect (or rather, defect) happened when people used film. But here it was used more like a flash effect to characterize the chorus (something to do with the shine) rather than just being a "cool" effect. A bit of a resource to break things up a bit, like Jeff said. Even though its origin is the one you tell, we are now in a different era altogether, and even chromatic aberration can be used as an aesthetic choice to some extent. "Clean" isn't what everybody will be wanting for his final look. In fact, I also used some silmulated film grain to add some organic feel (as well as false resolution, since this was shot in 720p) to the final video.
Normal audiences don't relate those flashes with a mishandle of the video, but rather a rare aesthetic and "nice" flash. And most who do won't relate to that defect either, because of the way it appears in de music video, almost in the way of lens flares that are so popular today.

Like I said, I understand where you're coming from, but being quite aware of what you explained in so much detail, I still chose the effect because I think it fit the concept.