The bit that bites you in the butt!

The Teeth Of The Tiger – Part Two

Let me be transparent at this point about my motives. I’ve shot a lot of video for TV, Indie films, YouTube, etc. and I’m buying into the idea that you can make a great looking film with HD DSLR cameras.

I’m coming at this as a film guy who’s shot and worked around a lot of 35mm motion and stills and medium format – hyper SDoF and heavy grip trucks. I know it takes more than a camera and some fairy dust post tools to be a film, not just look like a film.

But, for those of you who came up shooting fast and easy video with fixed lens 1/3 chip cameras, there are probably a number of areas you have not considered. If you want the film look, the Colonel has a few secret herbs and spices you need before it goes from home grown to the big time. Here are the big ones.

1. Lenses

You can see for mile from here – if you forked over the dough for a good prime lens. The $100-200 ‘kit lens’ that came with the camera is entirely useless. As soon as I slapped on my shiny Canon 50mm 1.4 lens, I realized why I had paid nearly $900 for it. And no, the 50mm 1.8 won’t cut it either. Once a crew I know of threw their 1.8 to the ground, smashed it up and used it as a ‘Lens Baby’ alternative. This is appropriate behavior.

Canon make a 50mm 1.2 L lens. If I was dumb enough to put that on my camera, I would have to sell a kidney and buy that and forsake my 1.4. Why? Because you can REALLY see the difference in quality between the different levels of lens. And you can’t go back. And your audience can see it too. Even on the ‘interwebvimeotube’

Vincent Laforet has a large collection of L lenses, and it shows in Reverie. It’s part of the reason that video created such a stir.

You will need 5 prime lenses and 2 zooms. You will probably invest $5k-$10k depending on where in the world you live. I would suggest the 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, 100mm, 10-22mm and the EF 70-300mm.

The faster primes will get you a sharper image, better color rendition, SDoF and low light performance the zooms can’t touch.

The zooms will get you out of trouble time and again when the distance between the subject and the camera is fixed. Like the other day when shooting a waterfall. With only a 50mm prime, I was forced to ford the river and setup in the splash zone…

2. Sound

According to George Lucas,  the audio is at least 50% of the motion picture experience . And it is typically the most abused aspect of video production. Pfft, radio lapels are not God’s answer to every situation. Most DSLRs are poor sound recorders. It’s not just the inter-channel crosstalk that you get from a 3.5mm stereo jack (wha? It does what?). It’s also the lack of manual recording levels, the REALLY compressed sound quality, the lack of any other meaningful control, having to menu dive for whatever control there is…

Look, if we keep our 35mm film paradigm in mind, record the sound separately if you can. Buy a reasonable portable digital recorder (most things around $400 US and up) and stick it to your camera. They record and run all day on SDHC and a few AAs. Due in part to better design and a better recording format, it will sound better. Imagine that…

Oh, and trample those blinking iPod ear-buds and get some full cup headphones (closed back) like Sony’s MDR-7502 (sort of a standard, like Avid once was- more because everyone had one, not so much ’cause it’s the best).

Use this software: PluralEyes to re-sync picture and sound in post without the tedium.

If you treat sound separately, chances are you will get a sound recordists, or pay more attention yourself, resulting in better sound and therefore a better film.

Don’t ever use a built in mic (or on camera shotgun) if you can possibly avoid it. Get the right mic on or near what you need to hear. Think, people. Think. For the love of Pete, stop using the 20c mic built into your DSLR unless you need it to sound like it is under water in a submarine.
Oh, and stop editing and mixing on those Logitech computer speakers. Man (or woman), up and get some studio monitors! You don’t edit on a 1960′s portable tele – if sound is 50%, then spend the dosh on some real speakers.

3. External Monitor

I will tell you now (if you have not already discovered), that the screen on the back of your 550D is not as bright as you need in broad daylight. Even in subdued light, ambient light will make it hard to judge anything on what has to be the shiniest (and most nose-fog catching) screen made to date.

Zacuto leads the way with a strap on (ahem) viewfinder gadget…look, I’m a pretty normal human being, my head being attached by a short neck. If you pan the camera more tha 30 degrees in any direction you have to move your whole body to maintain a good seal on the eye cup. Turn 90 degrees, and you will consulting a contortionist for help or a chiropractor for salvation if you did it without thinking first.

Get a monitor on an external arm (I likeManfrotto magic arms, half the price, longer and versatile mouting options).

Get a Hoodman shade or whip something up out of black foam-core and gaffer tape. The DV Rebel should endeavour to home-brew at least 25% of his/her kit.

The 550D has a neat zoom in feature with pan and scan to see a 100% magnification and check focus – but you can only use it OUTSIDE of record mode.

4. MatteBox and Follow Focus

I listed them together because it’s silly not to buy them as a package deal – and if you have a mattebox, there is nowhere for your fingers (unless you look like ET) to fiddle about with the lens. Your arm and wrist will be on an unnatural angle all day if you try and rack focus on the lens body. It will annoy you at first, and hurt if you go all day.

And you need the mattebox for 2 reasons. The first is: it’ll look cool. Yep, I said it. You are going to have a Dickens of a time explaining to your client that you ditched your old AVCHD camcorder (that looks 4 times larger) to shoot on a teeny tiny 550D with a lens that WON’T EVEN ZOOM!

Slap on the mattebox, call it Digital Cinema (and unlike Panasonic, who coined the phrase) as you could really project this stuff at the movies (ask the boys at Zacuto). Rodney Charters,  a fellow Kiwi and DOP of 24, validated what we all suspected when he shot episodess on little video cameras and the only complaint was that without the mattebox the actors felt unsure – nothing about image quality.

The second reason: lens flare. You can have the best (or 2nd best, in my case) lenses on your trusty tiger of a DSLR – but like every camera in the world, stray light off axis kicking back down the lens will wash out color and create uneven brightness or slow pulsing in the case of moving light sources.

Unless you are J.J. Abrams shooting on anamorphic lenses for sci fi, light kicking back down the lens is bad.

35mm guys have used matteboxes for decades because it improves the picture quality (not because it looks cool- that’s for people on the other side of the camera).

If you can handle the bulk, get one with actual matte inserts to match your lens collection. Get the side flags and french flags. Use them when you are on a tripod or shoulder rig. Derig for handhold in tight spaces – a french flag has a built in desire to lobotomise lead actors – this can be bad for the DV Rebel who is probably not paying talent and needs them to stay happy.

5. Filters

I list this separately so you will pay attention. Your video camera came with ND filters built in (if you didn’t buy it at Walmart). I hope you used them. SDoF is totally dependant on wide open lenses (large apertures of f1.2 and friends). If it’s bright outside, you are stuck with an exposure time of 1/50th and the lowest you can con the ISO is 100, you are going to have to stop down to f16 or so. Suddenly the whole world is in focus and you are not getting 2″ of focus you need to see the tears on her cheeks, but not the bus in the background…back to video – blehck. (Blehck – noun – the feeling in the pit of your stomach when things stop looking like film and start looking like it was shot on a 12 year old’s Flip Mino).

You will need Neutral Density filter (ND) and Graduated ND filters. And a few of them. Magic Bullet II does such a good job of color grads in post, I would hesitate to use a colored graduated filter on the camera unless I REALLY new what I was up to (i.e. I was Storarro incarnate).

UV filters are important in my neck of the woods – we have very little ozone layer in New Zealand – so lots of sunburn and UV mucking up the sharpness of colors.

A polarizer is a great investment, and if you have read this so far, you probably know what it does, otherwise wikipedia (it’s never wrong!?).

Filters, like lenses, are not cheap, and you get what you pay for. Get the glass ones for $50. If you get those gelatin / plastic ones, be sure to call me so I can make you an offer on those L lenses you will be wasting.

Remember, you will probably need a mattebox to hold them. Then you will look cool

6. Motion Artifacts

No really, there will be some. Keep the camera still, and let things move about the frame. If you move the camera about excessively (even less some times) you will get judder and false / soft edges that even YouTube won’t hide. Part of this is the (relatively) low speed at which the CMOS is read from top to bottom. This is what leads to Jello-cam – the earthquake effect of moving the camera to fast particularly in a horizontal direction.

Rodney Charters suggests this will lead away from throwing the camera about and getting a decent tripod and composing shots again. Finally, after 20 years of MTV / NYPD Blue (how old am I) camera-as-blind-man-with-flashlight-shooting, we might be allowed to used a tripod again. I blame Garret Brown for getting us used to the camera being far more mobile, but not giving us all a free Steadicam to do it right.

This is one issue that’s going to hamper us until Scarlet and similar cameras with higher data rates and faster chip read rates join the fray.

This is your wake up call to ditch the plastic tripod and get something in a nice carbon fiber with a real fluid head. It’s also a challenge to ‘video’ people to spend a little time thinking about holding the wide-shot longer instead of lunging for the mid-shot.

I am personally looking for a miniature geared head.

7. NLE Fun And Games

Being cheap, and not wanting to randomly fork over anywhere from $400-1000 every time a software company has the itch to make money and release an update, I am one of few, the proud, the Vegas Users who is still on version 8. Version 9 is when they discovered fire…I mean H.264 – that wondrous format that makes cheap video a reality for so many cameras and formats.

Vegas 8 on Windows7 (blast it, paid out again) is not great – h.264 support is kinda iffy in places. Trying to run footage from the 550D at 32bit into Magic Bullet Editors (yeah, another oldie, but I paid for it, you pirate scum!) at 1080P makes even my Quad Core sag and I get about 10fps playback before I add plug-ins. Sad.

This is mostly my fault, and I know I need to consider a MAJOR upgrade. CS5 is…well, it’s fast, but it’s still Premier (and adding the word ‘pro’ is marketing BS).

For those of you jumping to DSLR, upgrade or die. Hey, it’s not mini DV out there any longer, and you will have to update to the latest version of…well, probably everything.

And consider using an intermediate codec like CineformHD or ProRes if you are serious about release formats, color correction, etc. Just ’cause your NLE can play the file natively does NOT mean it’s safe to edit in that muck.

8. Lighting

Really want the “Film-Look”? – it ain’t just the 4 magic ingredients mentioned in part one of this ceaseless rant. And it ain’t celluloid with sprockets running through a heavily modded sewing machine with a bottle of Zeiss’ finest on the front.

Cinematography is about lighting, framing, motion, complimenting the story, motivation for lighting and movement…it’s all the stuff you learn at film school while you are waiting your turn to seize control of the class to produce your opus.

One of these that you can beg, borrow, steal or (gasp) purchase is lights.

Get some good ones you won’t have to make a joke about in your director’s commentary.

At least get a couple of Lowel Totas, some reflectors and a couple of Pro-Lights.

I would personally say get 3 Arri Fresnels of a matching size and couple of big ones – say 3×300 watt, 2x 650 watt and a 1k. Then you can light large areas with one light and get in close with the smaller instruments. Less moving around for your basic lighting, and easy finesse.

Fantasy over for some of us (’cause all my money is going on lenses and a new NLE), use some light / reflector / well placed flashlight with some diffusion. Go and read ‘Painting with Light’ if you really want it to look like a movie.

Video is fraught with washed out, flat, under/over exposed, just plain badly lit junk.

You finally have a camera that can see in the dark- great!  But you can improve on the floodlighting in the subway with just a small battery powered lighting kit.