the editman.com

This weekend I shot a corporate video featuring World Rally Championship in Sweden. A couple of years ago I shot a video for Porsche but this was a new experience. As with any sport it becomes interesting once you start to scratch on the surface. Rally is much more than just roaring in high speed.

The first night was at a horse race track and I opted to use my J17 lens on the AF101 since it has a nice reach. I've got used to shoot at ISO1000 and upwards without any noise problems. The trick is to use a scene file that gives you less noise. Just as easy as that.



Each job has it's challenging moments and to do a sit down interview in a restaurant with speakers playing music all over wont be good. I managed to find a hall way that had a low level of noise and that could fit the task. I used my LED312 kit to lit the person and they keep impressing me with good performance and ease of use. I made the face warmer because I like them that way.

The LCD display on the AF101 can be so difficult to judge exactly how it will look but after a year I know you can make it on the verge of ugly warm and then you will get a nice warm skin tone in the final image. To bad I have to use my experience instead of using a correct LCD display.



I used the Atomos Samurai to record it all and on the internal SDHC cards also. I found one quirk when recording overcrank footage. If the Samurai is set to HD-SDI timecode it wont record anything even if a trigger is sent from the camera to the Samurai. I see the logic in this because when when you do 50fps on the AF101 the timecode runs faster than realtime and the Samurai does not like that. If you set the Samurai to record run it does record so that you get in-camera 50fps and 25fps in the Samurai.

To get clips in the same edit friendly prores format I play back clips from the AF101 and the Samurai starts to record. This is a simple way to get overcrank into the Samurai in 1080p.

When you have 1080p50fps record inside the camera the only thing the Samurai does is to mark a clip after you've pressed stop. Maybe to indicate you have a overcrank shot? I don't know.



It was cold outside but other than the LCD display on the AF101 started to have a low refresh rate the camera itself worked fine. My feet froze but the camera and recorded was fine!

I managed to get close in the pit stop and just as the guys stressed to get the car on track I had little time to shoot it. But I had time to use my crane to get some nice crane shots and in the hurry two interviews with the camera mounted on the crane. Not my plan but the driver was about to go so this gave me some interesting angles.

I wish I had more time but sport is often fast moving and this was one of these occasions. No time for a second chance.



I used the SLRMagic Hyperprime for this interview and although I like tighter shots when doing interviews it worked much better than I would have imagine. Kinda nice to try something different this time.

When hauling around equipment it doesn't feel to good but when you're back home in the edit suit any angle you put some effort into getting to that place or bringing that crane pays off.

No matter how you fight the fact that the Panasonic AF101 is an 8-bit camera, it still is 8-bit, with the limitations it brings. This camera can be accused of having the lowest DR of all the large sensor cameras and that's probably true to some extent.

There are a couple of goals how I look upon achieving the greatest footage out of this camera. I look at; colour, noise, 8-bit artefacts, resolution, DR and compression artefacts. It's not an easy task to really know what happens when you dial the settings in camera and what happens when you start to grade or push the footage.

The usual thing to do is to shoot as flat as possible to safe as much as you can and afterwards grade the footage to your liking. Sounds really easy and sure enough you can set the AF101 to be very very flat. The problem is the minute you start to stretch that flat image to achieve some sort of contrast it starts to break up. I think it does this due to 8-bit and compression used when recording to the internal cards in AVCHD.

You can try to set this camera to a flat setting by using the Cineline D gamma and master pedal to +5. Also use the noisefree norm2 colour matrix and lower detail and you'll end up with a reasonable noisefree and utterly flat looking image. That can be a nice flat look that can work on it's own but the second you start to grade it it will break. In many scenes you might not notice it thou but looking at gradients show breaking early on when applying a s-curve.

But most of us do prefer a bit more contrast to the image.  You can try to use these settings for a very contrasty and punchy image; Cinelike V gamma, master pedal at -4, Norm2 gamma and turned down detail and chroma. The result is a picture with great contrast but reduced DR and might look to contrasty.

So is there no middle ground?

Well, there's one trick that works the opposite to shooting log/flat footage and that is to achieve a flatter look when grading. Thanks to many excellent tools like Magic Bullet you can shoot with the most contrasty setting and still end up with a just enough flat image.



The image above shows a frame grab from my "clean" settings. Settings are; Cinelike V gamma, norm2 matrix, master pedal -4, chroma -4, detail -4, v detail -4. I would say this scene file has the lowest degree of noise so check on noise. I put a white card in the frame that is clipped and there are details going into black and levels in between. Focus is set on the plastic bag and the printed text to show resolution.

One misunderstanding I see often is this camera is noisy even at ISO200 but it all comes down to the settings you use. The example images you see here are shot in ISO1000 and using my clean settings the footage is pretty much free of noise.

In itself it looks okay except for the clipped white card and if you check on the lower right corner there's chroma skew due to a couple of things. First it's the settings to have a high contrast image that introduced the chroma skew, then it's the norm2 matrix which boost colours. I think the Cinelike V gamma has a nice high roll-off and the white card is clipped but doesn't really look ugly, just clipped.
 


Now look at the this image. It looks really flat right? I would say it's a bit on the wild side, but I made it this way to show you can do a reverse log/flat thing with the AF101 that doesn't introduce noise or 8-bit/compression artefacts.

If I had done it like one expects - to shoot as flat as possible in camera and graded to look like the contrasty image earlier, it would have gone broke by now. But doing it the reverse way works with the limits of this camera. Since 8-bit only has so many levels it just breaks when you stretch it but not when you make it flat.

You might notice the chroma skew is absent in the lower right corner. There's a little footage saver in Magic Bullet and it's the shoulder. Again I made it pretty extreme in this example to show how it can remedy chroma skew.



Probably you'll grade this image like the picture above. Less contrast but not as flat as the extreme example. My point is you might have to think in a new direction sometimes if you want to achieve something that can be difficult with an 8-bit camera like the Panasonic AF101. It's better to shoot with as few artefacts as possible to start with and flatten the image to you liking afterwards.

Again, if your goal is a really flat result you'd better use a flat scene file but if you're after something that will be graded it can be worth the time to try contrasty vs flat scene file.

One has to realize this is not an Alexa and you can not expect it to be one. But there are tweaks that can make it better.

One of the great things about Panasonic AF101 is you can use almost any lens. The lens that is hard to come by is a fast zoom lens made for shooting video. Non of the m4/3 lenses can do smooth zoom action. You have the choice of getting a very expensive cine zoom made for 35mm film cameras or go the B4-lens route just like I have.

Thanks to the low noise in this camera you can crank ISO way up and end up with a good looking image. The image above is from a shoot I did this week, Prores LT 4:2:2 ISO1000 and the lens at roughly F5.6.

Something that would have suited a 1/3-2/3 chip ENG camera but the AF101 with a B4 lens works really good as a substitute. The downside is you loose two stops of light when using the 2x extender but other than that it's a great combination.

I still hope for affordable lenses made for m4/3 that works as nice as these ENG lenses. I have a Canon J17ax7.7 and made a cable to power the zoom but it would be exciting to see something innovative in the future in lenses made for these type of large sensors cameras.

I really try to stay out of 5DmkII video shooting but sometimes a client have less money and can't afford a proper video camera like my AF101. This was one of these jobs and also the first one I got to use my new jib the multi-jib from Hague.

Everytime I use equipment for the first time there's something that doesn't work like I imagine it to work but this jib is sweet to use. The problems had more to do with my 5DmkII than with the actual jib. I used my Zacuto EVF to monitor and HDMI is something I really hate. It works fine on my AF101 because it have a full size HDMI connector but the flimsy mini HDMI is a joke. I had numerous occasions when the signal dropped out. When you use a jib you move the camera alot and that in combination with mini HDMI is not good at all.

I used the multi-jib in the standard length and had to put 10kg worth of weight on the back of the jib to have it in balance. When I moved the Zacuto EVF around, using a small and very versatile clamp, the weight shifted so I had to hang a 10m BNC cable over the weights to fine tune the balance. One thing I hate about a jib is to haul all the weights to and from a location. It's worth the effort when you have the jib up and running but man it's a back breaker to carry it around.

The multi-jib rests on a Manfrotto 528 tripod and Manfrotto 114 dolly. A great combination and I manage to roll the jib around even in tight spaces.

I had some issues with the jib I had before, the Hague K10, getting bouncy images if moving to fast but this jib is rock solid. It takes a bit longer to assemble but the more you do it the faster it becomes. I think I removed the jib part from the tripod four times during the day when moving the jib from floor to floor and it was fast to handle.

In most of the shots I used the pan bar on my Sachtler FSB8 head to move the camera and on a couple of shots I stood on the back. If you want the footage can look like steadycam footage and you can move the camera to locations that would be near to impossible on a steadycam. It certainly adds production value!

A jib is something you use more if you own it. A good investment in the long run indeed.

A key to good looking images is light. Without it you seldom get anything nice. There are many different sources to use and in different colour temperatures. A tungsten light is what you normally have at home in incandescent or halogen lights. You can also have fluorescent low wattage sources in tungsten or cooler temperature. A very commonly used light is a Kino Flow when you need a soft source of light. You can also use halogen sources and have the light go through a softbox.

Often a softbox uses a speedring to fit most fixtures but I never liked the time it takes to put one together. But there are ways to put something together that's both easy to use and inexpensive.

The softbox above works like an umbrella and folds easily and fast. In the middle there's an E27 socket to fit a bulb or like in in this case an 85W 5500K balanced fluorescent bulb. This has to be one of the simplest light sources to use and it doesn't cost much. Perfect for someone on a budget.

This softbox costs less than $30 including worldwide shipping and that bulb at about $15 each. It's strong enough to be used as a soft keylight and it's really fast to assembly. Compare that to any fluorescent panel light fixtures that costs way more even if it's a Chinese no-name brand.