The professional DSLR community has collectively yawned at the recent release of Canon’s 24-70 f/4 zoom. “Too slow for me,” is the conventional wisdom. So far, this lens is getting ignored. And that’s a real shame. Because it has the killer app: hybrid stabilization. For video shooters like me, this turns out to be huge. Game changing, even.
I rented this lens from Lensrentals to test it out (it’s not available at my local rental house, Glazers). Yesterday I took this lens along on a picnic with my wife to Seattle’s Carkeek Park. I shot this video entirely handheld, with my 5dmkiii (in Magic Lantern raw). Check it out:
This lens is a miracle. Forget everything else anybody is saying about it being slow. With a 5dmkiii, just boost your ISO a stop and forget about it. Only one thing matters: you can actually shoot great looking video handheld with it. Let me repeat that: You can shoot handheld with it.
Over the past few years, I’ve learned to NEVER handhold a dslr while shooting video. This is true for almost anyone, but me in particular. My hands are shaky. I wouldn’t even THINK of trying a camera move like the last shot, a tilt up and pan left.
One of my favorite lenses is the 100mm macro L glass from Canon. I like it because the IS on it is amazing. I’ve been wondering ever since why Canon hasn’t built hybrid IS into more lenses. So I was excited to try this new zoom when it was announced, to see if it was able to bring the same formidable stabilization to a general purpose lens. They have, and it rocks.
Stable shooting in 3x. There are two clips in my video that reveal how truly incredible this IS is. Noticing the extreme close up shot at 11:05, and the train approaching at 15:08. These were both shot handheld in Magic Lantern’s crop-sensor mode, which triples the effective focal length of the lens. In the case of the train approaching, I was shoot at 70mm, so x3 = 210mm. Ever try to handhold a 200mm lens while shooting video?
Other nice things about this glass:
1. The size is perfect (small). It feels “just right” on my 5dmkiii.
2. It has a 77mm filter size. Works with all my expensive filters.
3. The image stabilizer is SILENT. I put my ear right up against it, and it just doesn’t make a sound. All of my other Canon IS glass makes too much noise for use with on-camera mic.
4. It has macro, so you can use it in a pinch to grab extreme close up detail shots without reaching for specialty glass.
5. You can shoot stills with it! Zippy autofocus makes grabbing snaps like this easy:
For shooting video, I’m blown away by what this makes possible. I won’t be abandoning my tripod or shoulder rig any time soon, but this lens gives me a whole ‘nother option, one I never imagined I would have with a dslr. I want this lens.
Our first day of shooting Beyond Naked dawned with great promise. On Dec. 21, 2010, the sun broke through a thin layer of clouds and climbed over Seattle’s Kite Hill, where I was waiting with my camera. I knew that in 6 months, on this spot, we would shoot the final climactic scene in the film. This morning, however, alone with the crows, I tilted my camera down into a puddle and captured a timelapse of reflected orange clouds that would eventually become the title shot in the film.
A few hours later, I shot another promising event. This one, however, would not make it into the film. In fact, no one would ever see it. That’s because, less than 24 hours into production, I had already begun to lose footage.
We had 3 shoots that day, which resulted in quite a few sd cards to keep track of. As I was offloading media, I probably mistook one of the full SD cards for an empty one. I didn’t even realize it was missing until weeks later, because we hadn’t created a “dailies” plan to review our footage as it was shot. If we had, we almost certainly could have recovered it. Even if we had formatted the cards, it would have been a simple matter to recover them before they were used again using inexpensive recovery software.
This was the first of many data wrangling lessons we learned while shooting what ended up to be 4 terabytes of media. In this mutli-part post, I’d like to share the relatively inexpensive but feature-film capable system we devised for storing, organizing, retrieving and editing our media. Our simple system took us all the way from initial import to finished film – without any more lost footage.
Securing the take. A secure workflow begins with securing your media. And organizing it. As a first step toward doing both, I purchased an SD card Pelican case designed to hold more cards than you’d likely ever use in a full day’s shooting. It resembles a book. On the left side, stored with labels facing up, I inserted formatted cards, ready for use. The right side started out empty. As the shoot progressed, I placed used media, label down, into the right side. This gave me a double safe way of keeping track of which cards contained footage awaiting import.
This system worked extremely well – except when I didn’t follow it. This is where I have to tell a brief, unflattering story about the one time I failed to use this system. While filming the most important scene in the film, the climax of the the parade, I was operating a steadicam in a sea of naked cyclists when my SD card ran out of space. I was so eager not to miss the action that I just popped open my media case, grabbed a fresh card, and shoved the full card into my left pocket. A little voice whispered “store it properly in the case.” I didn’t listen.
An hour later, in a euphoric moment atop Kite Hill at the completion of the ride, my cast and crew surprised me by chanting for me to get naked. As a show of solidarity, I caved. I whipped my pants off and danced a brief celebratory jig. As I pulled them back on again moments later, the little voice said. “Check your left pocket.” I reached in and a chill shot down my spine: it was empty.
I lost it. I heard myself yelling at everyone to back up as I desperately scanned the ground around me for the bright blue chip. Nothing. I knew instantly that the card could have fallen out a hundred places as I had jogged down the parade route. What are the odds I would find it? A tiny glimmer of hope – that it had flown out when I pulled off my pants – faded as I searched the muddy, wet ground crowded with naked people.
One of the stars of the film, Molly Meggyesy, was nearby and asked me what was wrong.
“I think I just lost the most important footage of the entire film.”
“I’m going to find it,” she said.
She took one decisive step, leaned over, and came up with it. “Here you go,” she said. “Is it OK?”
Unbelievably, it was.
I suppose the lesson here is that it’s best to keep your pants on when shooting a film. But I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. And I’ll pick up next time with Part II of this article, selecting primary storage for documentary film.
I was recently invited by Noise Industries to review their FX Factory Pro suite of visual effects for Final Cut Pro X. It’s an easy yes for me, since I purchased the $399 library last year and have used them in some way on most of my projects since. Full disclosure: I received a review license prior to posting this review, but I had already purchased the suite, so I’m not in any way being compensated for sharing my experience.
First, some clarification: when you install FxFactory Pro, what you’re actually installing is two things: a tool kind of like Apple’s App Store, in which you have access to other developer’s plug-ins from within a single app, and a suite of plug-ins called by the same name, FxFactory Pro.
Installing FX Factory Pro is painless and fast. However, by default, not only the FxFactory Pro plug-in, but all third-party plugins, are installed – probably a lot more than you want or need. Having more effects than you need not only clutters the interface, but I believe it can slow down your machine.
Update: Niclas from Noise Industries contacted me with this clarification: “Having many effects active will not “slow down you machine” in general.
It will affect the time Final Cut Pro X takes to startup after the effects are first installed, as Final Cut Pro X needs to build the “list” and register everything that’s new. These results are then chached, so the next time you launch Final Cut Pro X it will again startup quickly.
It will affect the speed of browsing through effects, simply because there are more there, and manipulating a larger list is more taxing.
It will however not affect rendering speed, or the speed of Final Cut Pro X in general.
Luckily, the FX Factory app makes it easy to manage which effects are installed. At any time, you can open the app and select which plugins you want to have enabled. You can add trial versions of plugins that you may want to try, too.
To disable unwanted plugins, and more, open preferences for the FxFactory app:
When I got ready to create the credit roll for our recently completed doc, Beyond Naked, for example, I went looking for a plugin to help with formatting text. I started my search on Google, and ended it on my FxFactory app, already installed on my computer, where it was a snap to enable Rolling Credits, a SugarFX plug-in. I ended up purchasing it and it saved me a lot of time in creating the credits for the film, looks great, and provided tons of options for display. But it’s technically not part of FX Factory Pro, so I’ll save a review of Rolling Credits for another post.
Since FXFactory Pro comes with 176 filters, generators and transitions, you may find yourself scratching your head when it comes time to find the one you need. Or maybe you’re not even sure what you’re looking for. That’s part of the fun of having an effects library – you can browse until you find something that catches your eye. But I don’t have time or patience to do that for long. Here’s what you do:
Open the FxFactory app, and click the “info” window.
You’ll get a complete listing of each of the 176 items in the suite.
Slide your mouse over the one you’re interested in, and you’ll find a help link, and in some cases, a video tutorial that shows you exactly how to use the tool.
Clicking help brings up a comprehensive description of the effect, transition or generator:
Clicking “tutorial” opens a YouTube page with a tutorial:
FxFactory has done a killer job of showing you how to get the most of this suite. You just have to know where to look. And in my experience, knowing how is the difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. I give FxFactory Pro major props for helping users get the most from their suite.
Meanwhile, back in Final Cut Pro X, you’ll find that the FxFactory installer has done a good job organizing things into three categories: Transitions, Effects, and Generators. Let’s take a look at each more closely.
Transitions:
Transitions are easy to overdo. But there are times where a clever transition can bring your edit to life. I found myself looking for a special way to open a promo video I recently cut for Seattle Interactive Conference (see below).
I needed a way to get into the piece that was glitchy and electronic. This is, after all, a tech conference. Inside FxFactory Pro I found Channel Switch, and it was perfect.
This transition, like most included in this suite, offers lots of options for customizing the look, timing, and other variables in the Inspector window. There are also presets that can be accessed inside the Viewer:
You an also save your own presets for later retrieval.
I used another transition in the SIC video, called Slice. This one has a techy, pixelated vibe that matched my content nicely.
Effects:
Early into this video for SIC, I wanted to briefly pixelate the entire screen to emphasize the speaker’s pointed question. I found the perfect tool to accomplish this among the dozens of effects in the FxFactory Pro suite, called Pixelate.
It does what it says, providing the ability to keyframe the application of the effect. So it was a snap to make the pixels appear suddenly and fade back into the normal display.
The many effects included in FxFactory are organized in your Effects Browser into the following categories:
Blur
Color Correction
Distort
Glow
Halftones
Sharpen
Stylize
Tiling
Video
The reason I purchased FxFactory was for one killer effect: Light Rays. It adds beautiful streaks of light that spread from the light areas of your frame into the dark areas. It works best when you have an image such as this one, where you’ve got a light source in the background and a dark frame in the foreground that contrasts with the light rays:
Generators:
About the only two I’ve found reason to use are the Banding-free Gradient and Timecode.
The gradient is, as it’s advertised, banding free, well, almost. You’ll need to play with your export quality and add diffusion and reduce sharpness to dial it in. Timecode is an improvement over the generator included with FCPX, but in the end it does the same thing: overlays timecode so that you can, for example, have a conversation with another editor you’re working with and be able to instantly reference and find the spot you’re looking for.
Two other broad categories of generators are included: pdf animator and slideshows. I tried out the slideshow and it works fine if you simply want to drop it on a large number of stills quickly. It has a rather unusual quirk in how it works: you drop the generator into the timeline as if it were a clip, then use the onscreen controls to choose a folder of images. This breaks the FCPX convention of storing all media in the Event library, and while that may seem convenient, I think I’d rather go to the effort of importing my stills into the Event Library, so I don’t have to wonder whether I’ve got all my media when sending a copy to another editor. You can still use it this way, but it would be easy to end up with stills scattered all over your system and on various hard drives using this generator.
I think every editor will find that having a solid library of effects, though seldom used, is as indispensable has having a mouse to go with your keyboard. And FxFactory Pro, with it’s growing list of third-party party plugins and support resources, is a great place to start.
My partner Lisa and I have just emerged from a marathon two weeks of editing our feature-length documentary, Beyond Naked. Too much of that time, I am pained to say, was spent loading and unloading events and projects. Final Cut Pro X has issues after more than a dozen or so large events are loaded (our film drew on 2.5 terabytes of proxy media alone, so loading the entire film at once was completely out of the question).
Somehow we got through the incredibly tedious process of manually moving dozens of Event and Project folders back and forth each time we needed to work on a different sequence. Working this way gave me new respect for what it must have been like in the days when editors actually had to make physical cuts on real film, stored on countless reels.
As a quick aside to anyone snickering “I told you how much Final Cut Pro X sucks,” I will state that my confidence in FCPX remains unshaken. I have really only one other negative thing to say about FCPX in this entire project from start to finish, and I’ll save that for another post. But suffice it to say that I remain a huge fan of the creative power of FCPX. It gave wings to our imagination on this film.
We locked picture last week, and I headed to England, where I am now, for a family vacation, taking a proxy version of the film with me on a Lacie 2big Thunderbolt drive for audio mixing.
And here, without Lisa looking over my shoulder telling me which file I had loaded already and which one to load next, is where I finally threw up my hands and said “there’s got to be a better way.” I wish I had done this weeks ago. Because, as it turns out, there is a better way. It’s called Event Manager X, and it’s a magical $4.99 utility designed to do just one thing: load and unload events and projects for you.
Our film has 33 sequences (projects in FCPX terms) from opening sequence to credit roll. Each sequence has Events associated with it. Event Manager X allows me to create sets that associate Events with Projects. When I’m ready to work on a new project, I simply switch over to Event Manager X (EMX), select the project I want from a popup menu, then press the Move Events and Projects button. Without ever dragging a single folder, all the old events are put away, and the new ones are brought online, and FCPX is restarted so it can load them. I can’t overstate how beautiful this is.
Before we discovered EMX, we would have to have four windows open, and constantly drag events and projects back and forth between Final Cut Events and Final Cut Events – Parked, and between Final Cut Projects and Final Cut Projects – Parked. It’s amazing how many times we accidentally dropped files into the wrong place, occasionally even losing them. When you’re sleep deprived, and if you’ve ever completed a feature-length edit than you know what I’m talking about, you shouldn’t be expected to do that with 100 percent accuracy. In our experience, sometimes the difference between actually looking at a clip and not was thinking about how much work it would be to load it up. No longer.
Suddenly, instead of pushing folders of files around, I’m actually getting work done. Instead of juggling lists of event names in my head, I’m solving creative problems.
Someday soon, I hope that FCPX can automatically do this. Until then, there’s Event Manager X.
Bug behavior alert: There is a behavior in Event Manager X that causes the last item you’ve checked to become unchecked when you switch to another application while building sets. This is a problem if you are switching between FCPX and EMX to create sets. For example, if you start to create a set in EMX, than switch back to FCPX to see which events you need to add, the event you last selected becomes unselected when you switch back to EMX.
Workaround: Write down all the events you’ll need in the set in Text Edit, make sure the document fits on the screen beside your EMX window, then copy them all down at once without switching between the apps.
Update: Philip Hodgetts, the app’s creator, responds “this is planned behavior you’re falling foul of. In order to keep Event Manager X in “sync” with the Finder, it rescans the hard drives, and updates the interface, every time you switch back to Event Manger X.”
Bug alert 2: If for some reason your hard drive is disconnected while making a set (as happened to me when power unexpectedly went off at my brother-in-law’s place where I’m staying in the English countryside, where apparently this happens all the time), all projects and events managed by EMX will turn red and it won’t reconnect to the drive when it is plugged in later. Instead, it creates a new, empty set. This means you will lose all of the work you’ve done creating your sets (the popup menus will remain, but none of the events or projects they contain will be selected). I call this a major bug, because I had spent hours building my lists when it happened to me and I hard to start all over again.
Update: I discovered this bug is actually worse than I thought when power was cut for a second time to my hard drive AFTER I had rebuilt my lists. This time I fully expected that I would simply restart when power came back on, and everything would be jiggy. But no, no no. Oh no. Same thing as above: all my carefully built sets appeared in red, and nothing can reconnect them with the drive, even though it is now mounted. So here I am at 10:58pm rebuilding my EMX sets for a third time. Grrrr.
Further update: Gregory Clarke of Assisted Learning adds this (a bit of a kluge, but a way to save some of the retyping):
Basically the set you’ve made is keeping the file paths for the wrong volume now it’s been connected again. It occurs to me though that the Sets database is just a text file, so you could carefully find/replace the wrong volume name with the right one.
In your user’s Library/Application Support/Assisted Editing folder is a file called Event Manager Sets.yml. Open that in a text editor and you’ll see the contents. The item labelled “name:” is the set name, and “array:” is the baths to the Event or Project folders.
When I was shooting in Alaska a few weeks ago, I did a lot of long-lens shooting with a follow focus.
I took a critical piece of equipment with me, without which everything wobbles out of focus at the slightest touch. Here it is:
It’s a Shape Lens Support, and it does a brilliant job of holding long lenses steady while shooting and focusing. One thing I discovered: when using with long glass such as my Nikon 300mm f/4 and with a Canon 70-200 f/2.8 zoom, it’s essential to place the support at the every tip of the lens, rather than at midpoint. The follow focus has to be placed in the middle between the two points of contact – between the lens support at the lens mount. Otherwise it doesn’t work at all.
One thing that happens on documentary shoots where you’re dragging gear around all day is that anything that can come loose generally will. This Shape lens support looks well designed – solid metal. But it’s significant flaw is that if the black tightening knob the holds the vertical bar comes loose, there is nothing to prevent the whole thing from unwinding and falling apart. That’s what happened to mine when I was standing on grated deck. I heard the clank and watched the parts drop through the metal grid of the deck and disappear into the Cook Inlet. Bummer.
Luckily it happened toward the end of the shoot. When I got home, I sent an email to the folks at Shape asking if they could sell me the replacement parts. They did one better: they shipping me the part for free.
How’s that for classy?
I’m not a fan of this particular design, but I am a fan of Shape’s customer service. And I look forward to trying more of their gear in the future.
The package that arrived from Team Tilta wasn’t reassuring. Wrapped in mismatched hunks of foam and bubble wrap, the goods arrived looking more like a used ebay purchase than something fresh from the factory. But it turns out you can’t always judge a product by its package.
I purchased the Tilta Matte Box (private page – for access message your email to Team Tilta on Facebook) to take with me on an 8-day shoot in Alaska.
I knew the low angle of the sun at this time of year would made a matte box helpful. But I had to pack extremely light: everything had to be flown in by helicopter to the shoot, an offshore drilling platform in the Cook Inlet.
The conditions were extreme: tons of dangerous metal flying around on overhead cranes, noise, constant hurry-up rig/lens changes. And to complicate things, the cold.
If I’ve learned one thing about the Tilta, it’s that it’s solid. Nothing fell off, nothing rattled loose; it just worked. With a few quirks.
The matte box itself is made of super lightweight carbon fiber. This does indeed make the whole thing substantially lighter than, for example, the Redrock micro matte box, which I rented recently. It weighs 3 pounds, 11 ounces. The Tilta matte box comes in at just 2.8 pounds.
In fairness it’s not quite as deep or large as the Redrock box, which really swallows a lens. But with the included top and side flags, I found it more than adequate.
Like the Redrock box, the Tilta includes a fourth flag rail on the bottom of the box, to which you can bottom-mount your french flag, to block light coming from below. An unlikely angle, but one I’m glad Tilta has covered.
All the business parts are machined or cast metal. The tagline of Tilta is “Tilta Armed Camera,” and indeed it feels like your handling a weapon.
Most elements of the Tilta are made so well made that the bits that aren’t seem like shocking oversights. For example, the donuts suck.
The donuts appear to have been complete afterthoughts, thin pieces of stiff foam that feel like they’ll rip rather than flex around your lens.
They are difficult to slide into place, tend to buckle rather than conform to the shape of your lens, and are just flimsy. I’m planning to make a fabric donut myself, for a long-term solution.
In the short term, I found it works better to simply trap the foam between the lens and the outside of the lens opening, which is about 120mm.
The Redrock Micro Mattebox also comes with foam donuts, but theirs are softer and more flexible, easier to tease into place. I’m convinced the better solution has got to be something with fabric that has an elastic garter. But I haven’t had a chance to try that yet.
All the knobs are made of solid cast metal. Not as good as the beefy stuff Zacuto makes for three times the money, but rock solid. Everything stays tight, and won’t spin free. Sweet.
I didn’t purchase this matte box for the filter stages, and you probably shouldn’t, either. That’s because they are made of plastic, don’t slide in and out easily, and the one rotating stage is sticky at best. Definitely not as smooth as the Redrock Micro Matte box.
It’s easy to push them in too far, because there isn’t any clear indication when sliding them in that they have clicked into place.
So you have to eyeball it. I don’t plan to use any 4×4 filters at this time, so it’s not such a big deal to me. If anything the fact that they are sticky and a bit difficult to slide on and off is a bonus for me because I won’t lose them that way.
The swing away arm is perfect. It allows instant access to your lens (where I prefer to change filters the old fashioned way – by screwing them on). It’s made of milled aluminum, and obviously very strong, and locks quietly automatically when the door is closed.
My biggest beef with this box is the height adjustment levers. Solid metal, like everything else, but poorly placed.
Check out the sequence above. When you loosen the levers to raise or lower the box to center it over the lens, the lever falls down and jams into a tight crack. It can’t be levered out by hand, requiring a screwdriver to pry free. If this were a piece of software, I would call it bad UI. In any case, it requires a workaround to make it work. It might even be a dealbreaker if you are changing cameras frequently. But in practice I wasn’t doing that, so it wasn’t a huge deal for me.
The side flags, which are included, align flush with the top flag only to a certain point, beyond which a gap appears. The Redrock unit I rented also suffered from this – perhaps all matte boxes do? Additionally, on mine, the right and left side flags don’t precisely line up, with one side very slightly lower than the other relative to the top flag. In practice, I generally used only one at a time anyway, with the light that I’m trying to cut coming from one primary side. However, I do wish the side flags were designed so that the top flag could stay flush at any point in the adjustment all the way down.
The most amazing thing about this matte box is that you can buy it for $580. Yep, it’s made in China. Yep, it’s about half what you’d pay for a comparable brand-name mattebox that includes swing-out arm, a french flag and side flags. But unlike many cheap knockoffs, Tilta includes basic support, and ships from a US address in New York.
In sum, the Tilta matte box is an extremely professional, solid and practical piece of gear. Oh, and did I mention it looks great? So for my purposes, and for my money, go Tilta!
Above: Tilta matte box packed into a Pelican case (not included) with the rock-solid Tilta Universal Handgrips. Good stuff.
When I bought my excellent SmallHD DP-6 field monitor last December, I have to admit I was thinking a lot more about the monitor than I was the arm that I purchased at the same time. But over the past year I’ve discovered that having the right arm is as important as having the right monitor. Maybe more important! I’ve gone through three different arms before finding one that truly gets the job done, so I thought I’d share what’s working the best for me.
The short story: You really do get what you pay for. The Zacuto Zonitor Kit is THE way to mount your monitor or evf for maximal grip in quick-changing shooting conditions. And it’s built to last without compromising its looks. Like a cross between a Porsche and a tank.
The long story.
The StrongArm is as it’s name suggests – strong. It’s also short, at around 6″, and requires what feels like over-tightening to keep the monitor in place. The metal is surprisingly painful to tightening repeatedly, and actually made me more likely to live with the monitor in an awkward position rather than do battle with repositioning it. Unfortunately, if your monitor is screwed on in such a way that gravity is pulling it in the direction away from the screw threads, it can and frequently does work its way loose. This can result in sudden flopping of the monitor. It doesn’t fall off, but it flops loose and has to be retightened. I found I needed to use a pair of pliers to seat it tight enough to hold consistently through a shoot. Awkward.
The Manfrotto hydrostatic arm improves on the ergonomics of the StrongArm by adding an inch in length, and a rubber wheel that is MUCH easier to tighten and release. It also requires less twisting to get a lock. The lockdown wheel on the 1/4″ 20 side, which the monitor is mounted on, helps prevent the flopping problem mentioned above, at least when used with a monitor. But it still has to be tightened with pliers on the 3/8″ side. And when used with an EVF, I found that the lockdown wheel would quickly rotate loose from the pressure of my eye on the viewfinder. On a recent 8-day shoot in Alaska, I had way too many times where I was struggling to align and retighten the evf when I should have been rolling already.
So when I got home, I bit the bullet and did something I hate to do: I paid top dollar for something. Specifically, for Zacuto’s 12″ Zonitor arm kit. The kit arrived in a zip-lock bag, and you can tell immediately that this is serious stuff. Everything is mounted on big, beefy metal quick-release rods. The thing is heavy, in a reassuring way. When you twist the lever, it bites down hard and stays put. A simple twist of the quick-release, and the monitor is on or off your arm instantly. The 12″ (actually a bit longer in practice) is something that I don’t know how I ever lived without. You don’t know what you’re missing until you have it.
The Zacuto knobs are engineered to perfection.
What’s missing from this picture?
A rod clamp from shoulder rig made by MovCam. Why is it missing? Because it worked it’s way loose during a long shoot, and fell out.
I had an opportunity to compare their build quality literally side by side on my shoot in Alaska, where I was working in cold temperatures with gloves that made me want to fiddle as little as possible with anything fiddly.
For the sake of comparison, check out the knobs on this MovCam shoulder rig. I bought this rig less than a month ago, and one of the knobs has already fallen off and gotten lost. That is extremely unlikely to happen with Zacuto knobs. So if you’re depending on your rig to work when you need it most, you can bet that paying a few more bucks is worth it. Which makes us fortunate. We work in an industry where paying extra money pays off. Unlike those poor millionaires who got zip for everything they spent on Karl Rove’s super pac in the presidential election.
I have just one nitpick with how the Zicromount III works with my SmallHD DP-6. Because the monitor is beveled on the back side, the two grips that are designed to prevent the monitor from rotating can’t be secured properly when the Zicromount is mounted the only way it can be mounted to accommodate the HDMI cable.
Above: mounting the Zicromount III so that feet grip correctly prevents HDMI cable access. However, it’s easy to fix this – just mount it the other way around to the monitor. However, when mounted that way, the grips don’t set properly, and become useless. Here’s what I’m talking about:
The next obvious place to mount it would be on the top of the monitor, but I don’t have that option on mine, because I have attached a bubble level (pried from a string level and gaffed tapped to the monitor) which helps me find a quick level when I adjust the monitor. I find it really helps to have a level monitor when shooting, and without the level I have a hard time eyeballing it.
The good news is that the Zicromount III works fine even without the grips gripping – it just has to be screwed down tightly. Once in place, you can leave it there, making setting up your monitor a fast, painless process on location.
After my last post about audio syncing in FCPX, I thought I would give the new PluralEyes for FCPX a second look. When it first came out, I decided not to use it because it required creating project files to sync audio. I thought that meant you had to store files in projects, like in the bad old days on Final Cut Studio. But after further experimenting, I’ve discovered it’s possible to use PluralEyes to sync clips and keep them in the event library. But it involves some housekeeping. Here’s how it’s done.
1. Create an Event and import your video clips and the audio that you want to sync them with.
2. Create a temporary new project (I include the words “sound sync” so I can easily find it after and delete it) and place all of the video you want to sync into the timeline. Then, add all the audio files as connected clips. Creating this project is a temporary step – you will delete it as soon as the sync is complete.
3. Press Cmd-0 to view the project library. Select the project you just created, and from the File menu, choose “Export XML.” Save the file to your desktop.
4. Start PluralEyes. It’s a stand-alone application, not a plug-in, so you have to launch it separately. Once open, the interface presents like so:
5. Press “File” button and select the XML file you saved out in step 3.
6. Press “Change” button and review your options. I set mine as follows:
The options above are as follows:
Clips are in Chronological Order: This will speed up processing a bit if you place the audio and video clips into the timeline in order they were recorded.
Level Audio: I avoid this because I prefer to do my own audio leveling using FCPX’s Limiter plugin.
Use Markers: I haven’t yet found a reason to sync to markers, so I leave it unchecked.
Try Really Hard: Of course you want it to do that!
Replace Audio: By checking this, PluralEyes will create a new Event that contains all of the synced clips, with their native audio deleted, and the good audio connected. On DualEyes I never check this, but on PluralEyes, I do. If you need the reference audio, you can still get it as we’ll see in a moment.
Enabled Multiprocessing: Yes.
7. Click “Sync.” This runs the sync.
8. When the sync is finished, FCPX automatically opens and you will see that several things have been created:
a). A new project called “(your name) synced.” You should see the good audio moved into place below the reference tracks, like so. If you notice that some files are out of place or missing, double check your settings and run sync again (a common problem is checking “files are in order” when they aren’t.)
b). A new event containing a multi-cam clip called “(your project) mc.” I don’t see much use for this. The only reason I can think of is if you want to use reference audio. PluralEyes includes the reference audio in this clip, so that’s where you’ll find it if you need it.
c). A new event called “(your project) synced.” This is the one you want. It contains all of your synced files, minus the reference audio. This saves you having to go in and turn off the reference audio, a real timesaver over my DualEyes workflow if you are syncing lots of files at once.
9. If everything synced successfully, it’s time for cleanup. PluralEyes has created a whole bunch of stuff we don’t need, and we need to get rid of that stuff to keep our files organized. Start by deleting the project you created in step 2. You don’t want to have project files hanging around after sync is complete – you want all your files to live in the Event Library. Next, delete the project created by PluralEyes in step 8A. Finally, if you don’t need reference audio, delete the mutlti-cam event that it created. That should leave you with your original event, and the new event with the “sync” suffix. As a final cleanup step, let’s merge them.
10. Merge events. Click on the “sync” event and drag it over the original event.
Final Cut will merge the two events by creating a new Event, which by default is named same thing as the event you’re merging with:
Now all your files are where they belong, in the Event Library. You’ve successfully batch-synced all the audio. As a final step, I recommend highlighting the reference audio clips and pressing the delete key to mark them as rejected clips. This way, you won’t run the risk of using the crappy audio when you should be using the good stuff.
My most recent commercial piece, which Lisa Cooper and I made for Seattle startup Decide.com, is a great example of how a powerful Final Cut Pro X plugin called Neat Video can improve murky DSLR footage. We shot this piece on two Canon 60Ds, which like virtually all DSLRs, produce heavily compressed files that can get noisy when you lift the exposure levels.
Let’s start by taking a look at the finished video, and I’ll work backward from there.
Two challenges on this shoot combined to produce the noisy footage: mixed light at low levels, and monochromatic backgrounds. Let’s talk about mixed light first.
This office interior, like many, was lit by overhead fluorescent fixtures. But there was also big daylight windows. So the color temperatures didn’t match. My solution was to turn off the overheads, and set my white balance to daylight at 5400K, which I did with the employee interviews I’ll talk about shortly. The drawback to turning off overheads is that now the overall ambience of the room is darker. But, not so dark that I couldn’t bring them up to where I wanted them in post. But that’s where the problem comes in: lifting the levels in post introduces noise. And noise can look really ugly.
The second problem was the even tonality of the interview background, which was a bare, colored wall, which I hit with a Lowel ProLight to give it some life. But because of their highly compressed 8-bit codec, DSLR footage doesn’t hold up very well in large areas with the same color value. There just isn’t enough data available to make the subtle transitions appear totally smooth, especially when you have a gradient or subtle variations in color (a totally clear blue sky is another area where this problem often shows up).
In the example below, take a look at the grey background behind the subject. It’s essentially a gradation from darker shades of grey to middle shades of grey (actually, it was light green on left and grey on right before grading – grey throughout after).
As-shot section of video screen grab:
Notice there isn’t too much noise, but the image needs to be lightened quite a bit.
Graded, before Neat Video:
The color-adjusting and grading has improved the image dramatically, but also introduced lots of noise in the background. To help you see the noise, here’s a portion of the image cropped to 100 percent, at which the noise is most visible:
After Neat Video (below):
The noise is almost completely eliminated. Sweet. (Click the image above to view at 100 percent)
Here’s how it works.
First, download and install the Neat Video plugin for Final Cut. You can get a free trial, but it overlays a watermark, so to do any useful work, you’ll need to cough up $99. It’s totally worth it if you’re getting paid for your work.
Under the effects browser (Cmd-5), search for “noise.” The filter is called simply “Reduce Noise.”
Apply the filter to the selected clip in your timeline by double clicking the filter. It will appear in the Inspector, like so:
Click “Select to open” twice (for some reason it won’t open the first click). This will bring up these controls:
The first thing you want to do is click in the area where the most noise is, an area that has just noise, and no details that you care about preserving. In my case, the decision was easy: click and drag the box in the area against the background:
Next, select Auto Profile, then Noise Filter Settings to preview the results:
Under Filter Settings, you have the option to play with Luminance, Chrominance and Sharpening. I’ve found that it doesn’t seem to improve anything by fiddling with the first two defaults, so I recommend leaving them alone. Sharping is a powerful tool, so if you want to apply sharpening, be careful not to overdo it. It’s in effect the same thing as a sharpening effect, only it’s included within this plugin.
When everything looks good, click Apply in the lower right. Now, take a look at your Inspector, where you have a couple more options that you should leave alone until this point:
Temporal radius refers to the number of frames that Neat Video analyzes when it’s determining how best to de-noise your clip. The higher the number, the more frames it looks at. Choosing a larger number than 1 will definitely improve your footage. BUT. It will SIGNIFICANTLY slow down your render times. And, at least on these clips, the footage looked plenty good enough at 2.
Temporal threshold should be lowered below 100 on footage that has a lot of motion, and raised above 100 if your footage is static. So, for my interviews, I chose 150 and it looked brilliant. Play with it until you see what looks best, or just accept the default.
Adaptive filtration should be checked only if the level of noise changes during your clip (ie if your camera was moving from a well-lit place to a dark place, for example). For an interview that is pretty static, leave it unchecked.
One final tip: Applying Neat Video to your clips should be the very last step in your editing process. Why? Because it slows your computer down big time. All of the complex calculations required to selectively remove the noise from your video will bring even a fast computer to a crawl. My iMac 2011 27″ i5 quad-core beast will let me work through just about anything, but not Neat Video. Plan to apply the clips and go for lunch. But when you come back, you’ll be thrilled with the results.
I’ve been using Magic Lantern on my Canon 60D for over a year, despite the fact that it would occasionally freeze my camera in the middle of a shoot. But it unlocked so many powerful controls such as ability to zoom in and check focus while rolling, that I was willing to tolerate the occasional hiccup. The solution was (and remains) simple: remove the battery from the camera, and restart.
Luckily, that era of instability appears to be behind us now, with the release of Magic Lantern 2.3. I’ve been beta testing this release for a few days, and so far it hasn’t shut down on me once.
For shoot next week, I’m renting a 5DMKIII. This will be the third shoot I’ve done with the camera, and one of my biggest frustrations with it is that I can’t run Magic Lantern on it. I’ve gotten so that I depend on the features that Magic Lantern provides. Here’s my favorites:
1. Waveform displayed on the monitor – allows me to visually check exposure levels.
2. Audio levels read out in monitor, so you can visually see whether your sound is at correct levels while rolling.
3. Spot meter in center of focus area reads out exposure values in percentage value. So I can see instantly whether a face is too hot, for example, but checking the percentage. This alone has changed the way I shoot. I feel naked without the spot meter reading, and I constantly move this around the frame to check my exposure values.
4. Time elapsed during a take OR space remaining in the card is displayed in the upper right corner of frame, which allows me to keep tabs on how much time is left in a take (important because of the approximately 11-minute clip limit of my DSLR).
5. Zerbras! This new version offers even faster zebras, and you can set the sensitivity. I generally set mine to clip anything above 95%, which it displays as solid blocks of red color.
6. Exposure override in movie mode: allows setting an extremely slow shutter speed and correspondingly slow frame rate of two frames per second. This is great for getting a timelapse effect – for example, mount it on car and drive through city streets at night to record streaks of light flying by.
Exciting new features that come with this release:
1. Vectorscope displayed on the monitor – allows checking color values and especially skin tones.
2. Blub ramping – allows flicker-free lowering of shutter speed as night falls, or increase of speed as sun rises. Haven’t tested this feature yet myself, but looks promising.
3. Stability. That’s the biggie for me.
The Magic Lantern project is completely open source and the developers creating it are volunteers. You can support the project by donating here (scroll to bottom of page). I have donated to them twice, because they are doing what Canon could easily have done, but chooses not to. Canon in recent times have chosen to unlock features such as these only in their high-end offerings priced in the neighborhood of $15,000. This is extremely disappointing, and it makes me very happy to support this project, which is giving extremely powerful pro tools to us for FREE.
Congratulations to the crew at Magic Lantern on this major release. Now, how soon can you have this running on a 5DMKIII?
Other nice things about this glass:
