Some more color grading, some extreme, some not. Lighthouses was my subject tonight. I used mostly Magic Bullet, Bump Map, Color Corrector, Unsharpen Mask, and a variety of Pixelan’s Vegas plugins.

Before:

Picture by chjab, licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution” 2.0 license.
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Picture by clapon, licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution/Share-Alike” 2.0 license.
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Picture by Bocian & Tusia, licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution” 2.0 license.
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Picture by Jake Wellington, licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution” 2.0 license.
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Panasonic announced yesterday the FZ38, an 18x super-zoom camera (called FZ35 in US). Not really the brightest idea for a digicam purchase. However, this camera has other features that can prove very useful to people who need 24p with manual controls for cheap ($400).

See, this camera is the first consumer non-DSLR digicam that offers manual controls in video mode! It has both shutter speed and aperture controls! At this point, I can only assume that when in this manual video mode, the exposure will stop jumping left and right as it does currently with other Panasonic digicams.

Then, there’s the frame rate thing. According to DPReview, the camera can do 25p and 30p (depending which model used, European or US), at 17 mbps AVCHD-Lite. However, it saves the videos in a really bad way, and makes editors *think* that it has recorded in 50p and 60p, while in fact it just has duplicated the frames. On Sony Vegas you have to specifically tell it to use either 25 fps or 30 fps (depending if you used the European or the US model) in order to avoid the duplicated frames. Sample 25p/50p .mts file here (bottom of the page).

So in a scenario where you shot in 25p (with 1/50th shutter speed), you edit as such, and at the end you re-time the video to become 24p (if desired). This will produce a very filmic motion look, as close as it gets with a digicam. Yes, there are other cheap digicams that do 24p right out of the box, but they don’t offer manual shutter speed control, which is an important ingredient in the quest to get the filmic motion look.

Additionally, color/saturation/contrast/brightness controls are offered in video mode, as well as manual white balance. In conclusion:

Pros:
- Shutter speed manual control
- Aperture manual control
- 25p can easily be converted to 24p
- Color adjustments
- Manual white balance
- Manual focusing in addition to auto focusing
- By using a CCD sensor won’t produce wobbly videos

Cons:
- Small sensor (1/2.33″)
- Its doubling of frame rate is stupid and unnecessary
- Not a fast lens (meaning, less background blur than the HV20)
- To get the 25p recording you need to buy the European (FZ38) version.
- We are still not sure if exposure will continue jumping even when in manual control mode (there was no word about ISO/gain control you see)
- Its 17 mbps bitrate is much lower than Canon’s 24 mbps digicams in 720p

Before:

Picture by Alex Witherspoon, licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution” 2.0 license.

After:

Used Sony Vegas’ color corrector to fix the white balance, then used a modified “bleach bypass” Magic Bullet look, and a bit of unsharpen mask to give it a more filmic look.

This is the art of Fade from TN, USA. Fade uses the modest (but legendary) 3.1 MP Canon HV20 camcorder to shoot her amazingly artistic and beautiful pictures. I am a huge fan of her art and I had to write this blog post, as a shrine to her art. She’s yet one bright example showing us that you don’t need the best camera to shoot the best photograph or the best video. You just need to have the vision, and the skill. Enjoy.

Finally, a few more nice pictures shot by others with the HV20.

I had a shock tonight. I was watching the most popular YouTube videos for the day, and I stumbled on this and this video, promotional clips from the new movie “Funny People“. The clips felt very video-like, they had nothing from the $70 million look that the movie cost to produce. Which of course gives us hope that our consumer HD cameras can produce great-looking video if we knew how to post-process it. I tried to find which camera was used, but to no avail (it has a digital look though).

Later, I searched and found the trailer at Apple’s site to try to see more of the movie’s scenes. When I watched the trailer though, it was a completely different look. Obviously, the YouTube clips were ungraded!!! The actual trailer really did look like a Hollywood movie! I can’t believe how the colorists were able to make this originally terribly-looking movie to look so good. Check the before and after!

Of course, there’s always the chance that the Youtube clips were the ones that were graded to be super-contrasty for some reason, or that whoever exported these clips messed them up, but I don’t think so. It really feels like the youtube clips are the original ungraded clips, and the trailer was graded. Which shows us how important grading is. You could take any digital HD camera and make it look as fabulous (as long as you have access to RAW).

Update: I played with the HD YouTube clips and tried to reproduce the look. And while I was working with the useless (for color grading needs) 2 mbps YouTube clips, I was able to get pretty close to the trailer look (I would need the movie’s RAW files to be able to completely emulate it). Which means that the YouTube clips are *definitely* the original clips, as they came out of the camera, ungraded! If *I* was able to get so close with these useless 2 mbps files, the movie’s colorist could very easily get to that trailer look with his RAW 4k files. Which again, it shows us that if we know how to light, frame, shoot, and grade, we can get the “film look” even with a consumer HD camera (of course we would have to try a bit harder, but it’s possible). No need for 35mm adapters.

I used the freeware Aav6cc plugin (saturated greens and yellows, desaturated reds), Sony Vegas’ “Contrast” plugin (-16 value), and the “Color Corrector” plugin (low saturation, higher gamma, a bit of offset, mids+lows towards yellow). Piece of cake, huh!

Update 2: One more. Again, I would need the original RAW/4k files to do better than that.

3D is back as the next big thing (until holograms arrive, hah!) and many forces are heavily pushing for it on all fronts. Soon enough, we will be enjoying 3D without the need for annoying glasses too.

Since July 2009, YouTube supports 3D videos. It offers various viewing styles to fit all kinds of tastes and… glasses. So, here’s how to shoot, edit and export such 3D footage in stereoscopic mode (a mode that allows YouTube to offer more than one viewing style).

The shooting

1. Buy this and this. Here’s a cheaper twin-head model if you’re short on money.

2. Place two identical cameras on the twin-head tripod. If not identical, they should at least be similar models (e.g. the HF10 and the HF100). Leave less than an inch/2cm of space between the two cameras for zoom level 0. But if you zoom-in, let’s say 3x, make their space ~2-3 inches/4-6cm. Of course, you need to be super-precise about your zooming level each time (genlock the cameras if they have that feature).

3. Setup the cameras the exact same way: frame rate, resolution, zoom level, exposure compensation, shutter speed, etc etc.

4. Make sure the cameras are level with each other (you can enable the “Grey markers” feature on your camera to test if the horizon is tilted in one of the two cameras). Try to shoot an object in a non-static way, always making sure there’s some background visible, so we can fake “depth” in the image.

5. Press “Record” on both cameras (maybe even by using a remote control, if your cameras came with one). I suggest you record in plain 50i/60i because 3D requires more frames to look natural (although PF25/PF30/24p/25p are workable, PF24 can be very problematic depending on the pulldown removal algorithm used, so stick with the default frame rates).

6. Use the clapper board to clap. The sound it makes will be used later to line up the footage from the two cameras.

The editing

1. Load Vegas, and set up a 1920×540 project if your cameras were full HD, or a 1280×360 project if your cameras were 720p (notice how the vertical resolution is half of 1080p/720p). Make sure that the rest of the project properties are correct (e.g. frame rate, field order, aspect ratio). Select “Best” for quality, and “interpolation” for de-interlacing algorithm. Here’s how it would look like if you shot in NTSC 1080/60i HD:

2. Place the two nearly identical clips from the two cameras in the timeline (one clip on the video track on top of the other clip). Zoom-in in the timeline, and find the place where the clapper makes the clapping sound. Based on this, line-up the two videos. Cut off the edges of these clips.

3. Load the “Track Motion” dialog for the video track on top. Click “Lock Aspect Ratio” icon in its toolbar. Then, change under the “Position” section the following: X:-480 Y:0 Width:1,920 Height:540. It should look like this:

4. Load the “Track Motion” dialog for the video track on the bottom. Do the same as above, but for X use the 480 value (instead of -480). Close it down. Now, you should have something that looks like this in the (ultra-wide) preview screen:

5. That’s it. Your video is now stereoscopic. Save the project.

The exporting

1. Export like it’s described here, but with two modifications: first, ignore the “project properties” setup in step-1 (we already did that step above), and secondly, the resolution. If you are exporting at 720p, then the resolution you should export is 1280×360. Everything else is the same as in that exporting tutorial. If you are exporting at 1080p, export at 1920×540 and give it a bit more bitrate (e.g. 8-9 mbps).

2. When the video is exported, upload it on Youtube. Make sure you add the following TAGS in your video, otherwise YouTube won’t apply the 3D menu options: HD, 3D, yt3d:enable=true, yt3d:aspect=16:9 (eventually it will be possible to tell Youtube your videos are 3D, so the 3D tags won’t be needed, but for now, use them).

3. After a while, YouTube will have converted your video to HD (it transcodes the low-resolution versions first and HD becomes available a few hours later). Wear your glasses, select the right Youtube 3D menu option on your video page (depending on what kind of glasses you got), and enjoy!

Notes

1. The kind of export we did here is called stereoscopic (with its wide 2 clips next to each other). There’s a way to export directly an anaglyph red-cyan image, hard coded, but this is the old way of doing things, now YouTube can dynamically adapt the stereoscopic image to various methods and viewing styles, so the stereoscopic way in this very article should be the method you should choose.

2. You can edit & export at full HD rather than just 540 pixels height, but you will have to create a 3840×1080 project to do that (1920+1920×1080). Unfortunately, only Sony Vegas Pro 9+ supports such high project resolutions.

3. YouTube requires 2x the CPU speed to playback 3D videos. So an older PC that barely plays back smoothly an HD YouTube video, won’t be able to playback a 3D version of that HD video smoothly.

4. If you don’t have two cameras, you can “fake” it by using the exact same clip twice, but by offsetting it by 4-5 frames in its video track compared to the other clip. This is how I did it on my 3D test here, since I don’t have two HV20s (although I am seriously thinking of getting an HV30 now to use it in 3D mode). This hack of course doesn’t produce realistic 3D, but it’s good enough to test things around and learn the workflow.

A common problem users have is to know how to export to an intermediate format rather than on a delivery codec (read here for the difference between the two types of codecs and when to use one or the other). The following is two tutorials showing you how to do just that with AVI and Quicktime MOV intermediate codecs. The example codecs used are Lagarith for AVI, and Avid’s DNxHD for Quicktime. You export in a similar way for any other AVI or MOV intermediate format (e.g. for Cineform, Huffyuv etc).

First, you need to install these third party intermediate codecs. Download and install Lagarith from here, and Avid DNxHD from here (bottom of the page, the PC version). Then, start Vegas, and closely follow the tutorial links: Lagarith/AVI tutorial, DNxHD/MOV tutorial.

If you are not sure which one of the two tutorials to pick: use AVI if your destination is a PC, and MOV if your destination is a Mac or Quicktime Pro. Use the Huffyuv AVI codec if your destination is Linux.

An experimental piece, comprised by unused footage I had around from the Canon SX200 IS digicam. Download the HD version here. It’s not really that good, which is why I was contemplating adding it to my YouTube account which is used for my tests, rather than Vimeo’s. My idea originally was to use a talent (model), and have a small story about him/her trying to sleep, and when falling into REM, to start seeing these things and wake up in terror. Each time he/she would be falling further into their world. But I have no model, so I had to release it as is.

I wasn’t on drugs when I made that btw. But I definitely had a lot of sushi in my system.

A beautiful and cleverly-shot HV20 video by music/video artist Arman Bohn for his song “Combat”. Arman’s first album is called “Bits“, and it’s inspired by classic video games.

The album can probably be classified as “easy listening indie pop with some electronic beats”, and it’s comprised by 13 songs. Its best songs are “Kaboom!” and “Combat” (toe-tapping, addictive hooks), followed (somewhat distantly) by “Warlords”, “Atlantis”, “No Escape!”, “Night Driver” and “Demons to Diamonds”. The music has a feel-good aura that should satisfy most indie (as in genre) listeners. The marriage of electro+rock in serene melodies make for one good calming listening session.

The lyrics are stellar. Smart, clear, and often epic. It’s obvious from the lyrics that Arman is one sharp guy.

On some tracks the keyboard is the main instrument, while on others the electric guitar, however both are usually are blanketed away by the constant vocals: not much of instrument solos/hooks are going on, which at the end makes the album sound a bit flat and repetitive. Only few tracks, like “Demons to Diamonds” have the music taking a front-row role compared to the vocals. For some of the songs to sound less flat, the tempo should have been upgraded to indie rock (rather than “pop”) with guitars taking over, while the vocals should have been a bit more aggressive. In other words, the album needed a bit more “nerve” in some places. One of the reasons why “Kaboom!” is so damn good, is because it takes that approach in its chorus.

Rating: 4/5