Seven Minutes of Cinema - the Vg20 goes to Taiwan and Japan

[Craig Marshall]

Finally found time to upload a short 'music video' I shot with the VG20 last October in Taiwan and Japan. A tribute to Vangelis 1990 track 'Good To See You' this seven minute film was an exercise in learning my new X-keys Pro 86 key Jog/Shuttle controller, working in 10 bit ProRes 4444 and Exporting to an Image Sequence.

For full production details and links to the Youtube and Vimeo versions of the film, click here:
'Good To See You...' seven minutes of audio visual 'cinema'

[Noa Put]

Nice Craig, at some point I saw some footage where my first reaction was: "wow, that's sharp" only to realize it was a sequence of photo's :) That's the only thing I found too different from the vg20 footage, the problem with showing photo's in a row is that it quickly becomes a slideshow, you where at such a beautiful location, why did you mainly shoot people walking by? I would have expected that the scenery shown in the photo's should have been done with your vg20 is well, constantly seeing people walking by became too repetitive.

Converting 8 bit avchd 4:2:0 to a 10 bit ProRes 4444 codec makes it much easier to edit and gives you a tiny bit more playroom when grading, especially with colorgradients that cause banding in a 8 bit environments but not in 10bit (like I showed in another thread when you use Edius), the source however is still in a very limited 4:2:0 color space.

Wish I could shoot at such a location, probably never will get there but good to have people like you that can shoot for me instead. :)

[Craig Marshall]

Thanks for the compliments! I did shoot an enormous amount of 'movie' scenery with the Vg20 in Japan and Taiwan but those pictures did not suit this particular 'audio visual' style of music production that I wanted to make. To me, this Vangelis music track (also called 'Good to See You') has a slow, swaggering style of rhythm. I imagined attractive Asian women walking along, window shopping, talking with friends and on their mobile phones so these scenes I captured, especially the slo-mo sequences shot in Osaka Mall, perfectly match the rhythm (and perhaps even the monotony) of the music track at those points, especially where they drift in and out of focus and that is the style and feeling I wanted to convey.

For many years, I shot and produced multi projector 35mm 'slide' audio visuals set to music so perhaps this where the movie/stills influence comes from. Several of the still images are 'HD' Frame grabs (8 MB tiffs) and remember too, I bought my VG20 principally because it was a hybrid - stills and movie at the flip of a switch!

Here are a couple of frames from the Master exported from Lighworks as a Tiff Image Sequence. Some are 'movie' and some are 'stills'. The 50P AVCHD was transcoded to ProRes 4444 at 25P then exported direct to the Tiff Master before transcoding to MP4 with CliptoolZ' Convert'.