Finally done =) Musicvideo shot on DVCAM

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Yepp,

all done and ready. check out http://www.docuwild.com under the mainstream section.

Regards,
Henrik "HuBBa" Bengtsson

[John Locke]

Great job, HuBBa! That must have been a monster edit job.

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Thanx =) it took roughly a day and half to do the edit (using FCP's excellent offlineRT), Most of the effects is actually done in FCP (the flashcuts and blurs) i just had to go in afterwards and add some additional fx in AFX to hide some places where the DV artifacts became to obvious :) it made me wonder one thing though... if i do the effects in FCP.. doesn't that mean that they also automatically recalculate them in DV? ie. wiht additional degradation of the image. Maybe i would have been better off bringing the entire edit over to afx for all the final effects in uncompressed? Or can you edit in FCP with uncompressed video?

Which means i need to get something like automatic duck. =)

Regards,
Henrik

[Rob Lohman]

Your quality has been degraded if you have saved to DV. Unless
you choose UNCOMPRESSED (dunno if that is possible in FCP)
specifically. So it probably would have been better to do all
in after effects. But then if you edited it might be that FCP
recompressed that too (which it doesn't have to do). Not sure
thought. I haven't used FCP myself.

The clip looked really nice! Good work!

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Hi Rob,

I did choose Uncompressed when exporting. However, i found that you need to set uncompressed as your project "compression" aswell. As default FCP comes with 4 different settings, DV NTSC, DV PAL, NTSC Offline and NTSC PAL. If you make new ones which uses compression none, then all effects and transitions will be rendered in uncompressed. Of course, this makes playback nearly impossible on my system but thats not a real issue. I edit for temp and sync in offlineRT or DV and then recapture for the final render out.

Thanx for the feedback =)
/Henrik

[Adam Lawrence]

henrik, what did you shoot with ?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

The video was shot in a studio (the black & white backgrounds) and in a beautiful beech forest outside Borås in Sweden.

It was shot on a Sony PD100A on DVCAM tape, no special filters, using the standard wide adapter that comes with the camera. Exposure was checked with 75IRE to be well within the ranges so clipping did not occure (no clipping == more colour information to work with in post).

The footage was then brought into FCP3 using the OfflineRT compression. I was actually a bit lazy here and brought every tape in one piece. This let me browse through and select the clips i wanted a bit easier and worked like a charm.

After doing the editing, colour correction and some effects i made an Offline copy (through media manager) and re-captured only those parts i had in the timeline. I then rendered out a uncompressed full version of the video.

This uncompressed file was then brought into After FX for final tweaking and some additional effects. Lastly it was rendered out to the final master version (one DV and one Uncompressed for mastering to Digibeta)

And thats how the video came to be,
Henrik

[Rob Lohman]

Very cool Henrik. The fun thing was that I showed this to a woman
friend of mine and she is a huge fan of their music (which I didn't
know). So it was fun that I "know" the guy who made it.... Heh,
small word eh.

Again, nice work!

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Hehee.. very cool =) I'll relay that to the band. They are not "big" yet, but they have a pretty devote following around world. A lot based on their touring and internet presense.

Just got the confirmation that they want NTSC BetaSP copies too since they are going to broadcast it in the US and Canada.

Fun fun fun,
Henrik

[Rob Lohman]

Fun! thanks.

[Nori Wentworth]

Wow. That was an amazing job. Two thumbs up!
My question is this: How did you create the "white out" and "black out" backgrounds?
More specifically, how did you film it/light it, and what, if any, extras did you need to do in post to achieve that look?
Appreciate your reply.

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Thanx for all the nice comments =) This being my second video production total and the first where i got to do the entire thing from sale to delivery myself.

Some more info about the shoot.

We got to borrow a studio at a theater here in Borås for a full day free of charge (great thanx to Älvsborgsteatern), this included a few lights (IANIRO, Redhead 800W) run through a dimmer.

For the black background we borrowed a filt mat that laid rolled up in the studio and hung it over a waterpipe (and yes, we checked so it would hold first :) that ran through the middle of the studio.

I used one of the Ianiro's off to the left of the subjects to create a backlight effect and the second Ianiro forward -right of the subject for the face side-light.

In the camera i used a long zoom (ie. long focal length) to get as small DOF as possible. This to make sure that most of the dust on the background mat disappeared into the black. I then adjusted the exposure so i was withing 75 IRE on the whites and the black didn't disappear to much (high brightness on the LCD monitor and a 2nd external monitor for composition).

As i shot this in 4:3 and then cropped it in post to 2.35:1 aspect i used a mask on my external monitor showing me how the composition of the shot looked. Shooting in 4:3 also gave me a lot of options when editing to move the image around for different composition.

For the white background we got to borrow a white cloth which we hung over the black mat. I then lit it with one of the 800W shining directly on to burn it out as much as possible. I moved the subject about half a meter forward (so they didn't catch any lights from the 800W). The remaining light i used to do the same side light on the face.

Now the white cloth showed a huge ammount of creases so i made sure that i had it way out of focus (lower DOF, subject closer to camera) and that the exposre clipped the whites properly. Here i also wanted as much info in the face and hair as possible but didn't mind if the white background was clipped out.

In post i did colour correction in FCP to bring down the blacks way down on dark parts, and made sure i had a good contrast on the white sequences.

Ok. i think thats about it. Please ask more questions =) I'm happy to answer them (a bit to happy judging from the length of this post :)

/Henrik

[Rob Lohman]

Great info Henrik! Always nice to hear about other peoples
experience and such. Thanks for sharing.

[Jay Gladwell]

Good work, Henrik! A perfect example of "less is more"!

[Bryan Johannes Onel]

Tell me, while recording i assume you played the song and then record with your cam. How did you sync the audio on set to your real full quality song? Did you use timecode slates or did you just try to sync it in post manually?

Bryan