I picked up a Rode VideoMic a few months ago, and I tried using it on some shoots. However, I noticed a horrible amount of handling noise whenever I used it, which I attributed (mistakenly, it turns out) to the mic being very sensitive to my fingers on the camera controls. I even bought the expensive Rode VideoMic handle, to try it handheld, and that didn’t help. So I stopped using it, because I couldn’t get any clean audio whenever I used it. But today, I discovered that it’s NOT my ham-handed fingers: there’s a problem with the shock mount.
Here’s how I figured it out. Today I was testing my iPhone with a mic adapter, the KM-IPHONE-MIC from KVconnection.com, which makes it possible to use external, self-powered mics with the iPhone. Just for grins I thought I’d test it out with my idle Rode VideoMic. Guess what I discovered? I got the same horrible handling noise as before, only this time, I had the mic in a controlled environment.
So where is all the handling noise coming from? From the shock mount. All those tiny rubber bands emit audible creaks. And it’s bad. Worse than useless, in my opinion: the Rode VideoMic introduces unwanted noise that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
Listen for yourself:
Am I the only person in the DSLR universe who has this problem? Is it possible that my unit is defective? Does the rubber on the feet age quickly and need to be replaced? How’s your Rode VideoMic working out?
**Update: I ordered a set of new silicon bands for the shock mount, and after replacing them, the mic is blessedly quiet. But I’m still not crazy about the fact that they had to be replaced inside of a year of very light use. That feels like a design flaw to me. The VideoMic should come with the following disclaimer: note that you will need to replace the bands frequently.
Last week there were some spectacular sunsets around Puget Sound caused by smoke drifting south from forest fires in British Columbia. I seized the opportunity to try out some timelapse shots. I got out my Nikon 300mm f/4, put a 1.4 teleconverter, and with a fotodiox adapter, mounted it on my Canon T2i. Here’s the results from two subsequent days, following two different approaches:
The first shot was made at 1080p, 24p and speeded up 600 percent in Final Cut. The second was shot the following evening, when the smoke had mostly cleared (notice how much less red there is). For this one, I shot stills, at the rate of a frame every second, and later assembled them for editing with Quicktime following these instructions from Phillip Bloom, who is a real timelapse junkie.
The nice thing about the second approach is that the much higher resolution of the image allows you to crop in and increase the magnification without losing quality. Because there was a lot less filtration of the sun on the second day, the sun is much brighter, though, and that definitely detracts from the magic of the first day.
If you look very closely to the first shot, you can pick out two sunspots that are hardly larger than specks.
For doing timelapse with the Canon T2i, you need an electronic interval timer. The official Canon part for this is listed as “temporarily unavailable” at B&H, so I picked up a really inexpensive one on Ebay, the Aputure AP-TR1C, for about $40. It worked great, once I replaced the old hearing aid-type battery it ships with which died within 15 minutes of use.
Interesting to note: the photo was taken facing due west (of course), and if you look closely, you can see how far the sun is moving south in a single day. In the first photo, its trajectory takes it north of the big tree – in the second it’s path intersects the tree, setting enough further south that we lost we lost 3 minutes of daylight from the previous day.
This screamin’ deal I just learned about via Planet 5d: this weekend only you can purchase Lock and Load X for $79. That’s 47 percent off the $149 I paid for it. Next to Red Giant’s amazing suit of plugin’s, this one tops my list of most-useful plugins. I routinely apply this bad boy to get the jitters out of my handheld footage, and it works like magic most of the time. The controls are intuitive and it’s FAST. And speed is often the difference between using and not using a plugin.
Here’s an example of just how effective it can be:
Last weekend I was shooting a documentary about a band on tour, and they spent the night at an interstate hotel. We were returning to the hotel after eating fast food, so I wasn’t lugging my tripod – and I saw these great ambience shots. To film them, I just reached into my shoulder bag for my 35mm nikon 1.4 lens, and grabbed these available-light shots handheld on my Canon T2i (using Novoflex lens adapter to get the Nikon glass on the Canon). If I hadn’t known in advance just how well these shots would clean up because of Lock and Load X, I probably wouldn’t have even tried to shoot them handheld.
Notice the before and after difference. Especially note the lens flare on the hotel shot, which shows how jittery the shot really is. After Lock and Load X is applied, you still see the lens flare bouncing around – but the background is solid.
One limitation of Lock and Load X: it doesn’t work with footage in which you’ve changed the frame rate. So if you’ve shot something at 60p and used Cinema Tools to convert it into slow motion 24p, you’ll have to use Lock and Load (the non X version, which is included with your purchase) instead. It’s much slower than X, and has to be re-rendered whenever you make changes in the timeline, but it works great if you’re patient.
One of my Biznik buddies, Art Torelli, sent me an introduction to Seattle filmmaker Michael Maniglia recently, which resulted in us having coffee. Turns out we live less than 5 blocks from each other, we both shoot regularly with the Canon T2i, and we both need help on our various projects. Mike’s primary focus is on narrative film, while mine is on documentary, but I’m keenly interested in getting some narrative experience because I want to make films that blur the line between the two. So when he offered me an opportunity to operate camera on a short film he’s making, I jumped on it.
The shoot took place in an elevator, in a Seattle office building after work hours. Luckily, we found one elevator out of four that didn’t complain when we stuck a sandback in the door, to lock it open, which allowed us to shoot. In the shot above, sound engineer Kelsey Wood places a small HD camera into the elevator for a shot that mimics a security camera in the scene.
My biggest take-away from this experience is just how VERY different narrative work is from documentary. Narrative is all about careful planning ahead of time, having a great script, and then deadline-driven production. Since nobody was getting paid on this project, it was even MORE deadline-driven: you have a limited amount of patience from everyone involved.
I picked up a few tricks from Kelsey on how to get great audio: use one of those hidden wallets that strap around your waist to hold the wireless lav transmitter to hide the mic on people who are wearing t-shirts.
And a lighting tip as well: we were using LED lights, and you have to really watch out for the obvious reflection signature they leave on anything glass or metalic. Once we covered the light’s face with paper to diffuse things, the reflections softened and the lights were usable.
It was my first experience using a really nice fluid head, as well, and the difference between the Vinten Vision 10 head we used and my Manfrotto 503 fluid head is unbelievable. Expensive fluid heads like the Vinten really are worth the money you have to plunk down for them: they make panning and tilting dreamy smooth.
I’m slightly red-green color blind. Yet at this stage of my career, I have to do all my own color correction. Impossible? Well, maybe if I were REALLY color blind it would be. I can eyeball most colors just fine, but the ones I have a hard time with are flesh tones. That’s why I’m so excited about the latest update to Red Giant’s amazing Colorista cool. Because hidden within the interface is a secret weapon that Colorista II inherits from Magic Bullet Mojo called “show skin overlay.” When enabled, it literally lays a grid over your clip’s flesh tones, telling you when you’ve got it right. Here’s how it works.
I made this video for Seattle chef Tiberio Simone, who needed a short web video to help find a publisher for his book, La Figa: Visions of Food and Form. He and photographer Matt Freedman have been working on this incredible project for nearly 5 years, and the results are amazing. But what’s most amazing about this video, of course, is Tiberio himself. Who else could walk into Pike Place Market and within a half an hour, literally have tourists eating out of his hand? I like filming Tiberio so much that I’m planning a documentary film that will give me an opportunity to put him in front of my camera a lot.
The technical stuff:
Audio: I taped a Sennheiser EW wireless lav onto Tiberio’s chest before we arrived at the Market, and as you can probably notice, I forgot to turn it on in the first scene, so I had to fall back to the reference audio recorded on my Canon T2i. But I remembered for all the other scenes, which have vastly better audio that was recorded onto my Zoom H4N and synced in post with the latest version of the indispensable Pluraleyes.
Camera: I put my Canon T2i with kit zoom lens on my Merlin Steadicam, and had to carefully pre-focus every scene before I started rolling, since it’s impossible to refocus with that rig when you’re rolling. I love the cheapo Canon kit lens when I use the Merlin, because it’s very lightweight, has a decent zoom range of 18-55mm, has some added built-in image stabilization that’s quiet. And the fact that it doesn’t open wider than f 3.5 is fine, because I never want to shoot wide open with the Steadicam because of the aforementioned focus issue.
For shooting in the Market, I set the ISO of the camera to 800, with the aperture around f 5.6. Because there was so much mixing of daylight with tungsten and fluorescent lights, I set the camera’s white balance to automatic and I was very happy with the results. I’ve found that getting the white balance right is very important for these cameras – the file simply won’t hold up to too much color correction, so you gotta get it close to begin with if you want to see the great results the camera is capable of.
For the last shot in the video, I carefully raised the Merlin up over my head as Tiberio walked away. Then the key part – I applied my favorite Lock and Load X filter to the footage in post, which drained the remaining wobblies away like magic. The results are pretty indistinguishable from a crane shot, don’t you think?
I made this video for a fantastic Seattle-based organization called Cultures Connecting. Their vision is to create a world based on principles of equity and justice for all. What’s not to love about that? Ilsa and Caprice, the two co-founders, were a lot of fun to work with, and I learned a lot during the project.
I shot the interviews with my JVC HM-100, using two tungsten lights: a single overhead softbox with baffles to focus the light, and a background light shaped to resemble a bridge, iconic of the work they do and part of the organization’s logo.
I shot the workshop on my Canon T2i dslr, and I was worried that the footage wouldn’t intercut with the JVC stuff. But I think it cuts fine, in part because the interviews are lit so well and is an altogether different looking situation from the workshop.
One thing I discovered in shooting this project is NOT to use the superflat Canon picture styles that are touted by some. The results, even after a significant amount of tweaking in post, are, well, super flat. Especially the skin tones, which I’m not happy with at all. I’ve since getting much better results following the advice of people like Shane Hurlbut, who advocates a simple recipe.
This is the first video I’ve cut in which I also produced the music myself. I recently finished reading Sound Editing in Final Cut Studio, by Jeff Sobel, which has an entire chapter devoted to teaching you how to compose custom music using the thousands of Apple loops included with the application. It’s actually quite miraculous how simple it is to compose simple music using Soundtrack Pro. The loops are designed to automatically match whatever tempo you’ve set, and it’s easy to line up the beats for seamless composing… even if you aren’t a musician.
I shot this 1-minute commercial video with my Canon T2i on a Redrockmicro EyeSpy with follow focus. I also used a Glidetrack, and mostly Nikon glass used with Fotodiox adapters. I also directed and edited the piece, which I made for a Seattle startup.
My favorite clip is the lengthy slow-motion clip of the girls twirling around on the twisty playground ride. For that, I shot at 60p, which I conformed to 24 in Cinema Tools, before importing into Final Cut. I mounted the camera to the ride using a Manfrotto Magic Arm, which was rock solid.
I’m starting another commercial project for University of Washington on Tuesday, in which I’ll putting my T2i to work to show how special-needs kids are finding friendship and community with “typically developing” kids in one of the school of education’s programs.
Earlier this week there was an excellent post from one of the clever guys at dslrhd.com, explaining a technique that can be used to disable automatic gain control (AGC) on a Canon 7d or T2i:
Only problem is, I followed the steps, and it didn’t work for me and my t2i. So I started tinkering. After a bunch of trips to Radio Shack, I figured out how to make it work, and if you got what I got, it’ll work for you too.
So, here’s what I got: a Rode VideoMic and a T2i. I’ve found the VideoMic to be almost useless, because of Canon’s AGC. In fact, the tiny built-in mic on the camera sounds better than the VideoMic, which is ridiculous. Anyway, when I hooked up the VideoMic to the splitter as outlined in the above tip, I got nothing but a lot of static and hiss on the line.
It turns out the problem is because the VideoMic outputs a stereo signal (which doesn’t make very much sense, because it’s a mono mic, but it does). Plugging a stereo jack into a mono jack doesn’t cut it. You need a 1/8″ stereo plug to 1/8″ mono jack adapter (part number 274-882 at Radio Shack). Plug the VideoMic into that, then plug that into the Y described in the video. Bingo, you’ve got audio. Note: for playing the tone from your iPod, you’ll need either a mono 1/8th cable OR another one of the aforementioned stereo to mono adapters plus stereo cable. In the picture above, I’m using a mono cable to connect to the iphone, but these only come in 6′ length at Radio Shack, so I’m going to switch to using a 12″ stereo cable with an adapter to make it more manageable.
The volume slider on my iPhone is what you use to control the sensitivity of your mic (that is, the amount of reduction of the AGC). I find that setting it at 1/3 volume works best for recording someone speaking at a distance of 3-5 feet directly in front of the camera. Sliding the volume up increases the tone and thus reduces the gain, and vice versa. Pretty slick. Using this setup, my Rode VideoMic is finally useful to me.
Gotcha alert: This splitter is just slightly too big to fit in the T2i’s mic jack socket, and as a result, tends to work itself slightly disconnected with normal handling during a shoot. And, since you can’t monitor the sound going into the camera, there’s no way to tell for sure whether it’s come lose, except to physically grab the thing and push it in every so often during shooting. It’s always something with these DSLRs, hey? But in a year or two, when all of these problems are solved in a $2,000 ergonomically-correct, fat-sensor proper video camera body, I got a feeling we’ll remember these days fondly.
To generate the tone: Fire up Final Cut Pro and an empty timeline. Use the Generator > Bars and Tone to generate 20 minutes of something like NTSC bars and tone. Export it. Open it in Quicktime 7. Export again, only this time uncheck video, and choose to save the audio only as an AIF file. Drop that into iTunes. Create a playlist called “film utilities.” Drop it in there, and you’re all set.
I recently completed a pair of 1-minute unscripted commercial videos for a Seattle startup. The company makes colorful friendship bracelets designed for pre-teen girls, with a unique twist: the jewelry is magnetized and snaps into place with a distinct “click.” Have a look:
While this video was shot documentary-style without a script, it was very much driven by a concept. In developing the concept for this piece, I was inspired by the positive feedback I got from my first commercial project, I Am Becoming, which promoted a school by focusing on teachers’ stories paired with visuals shot entirely from a student’s perspective. I knew the videos would be successful if I could get the teachers to say something true about teaching.
Similarly, my goal in this case was to say something true about friendship. In essence, my goal was to create a 1-minute celebration of friendship. Making people FEEL something is much more likely to make a positive impression than trying to TELL them anything about the product, no matter how interesting.
When I presented this video to the client, one of their employees was crying by the end of the video, so I knew I’d hit close to where I was aiming. I’ll post the second video later this week.
The music was composed by Nick Torretta, who was a real pleasure to work with.
Technical details: I worked with a sound recordist to help me with audio; he operated a boom pole during the interviews, freeing me to participate fully in the interviews, which were led by my client. For the shooting part, I used a single Canon T2i. It’s the first project I’ve shot using a DSLR, and I’m thrilled with the results. The shallow depth of field really is perfectly suited for this type of work.
Lenses: I used mainly Nikon glass, with Fotodiox adapters. Nikkor 50mm f/1.4, Nikon E series 75-150 f/3.5, Canon 17-55 f/2.8 EFS. Support: Redrock Micro EyeSpy with follow focus (rented from Glaziers Camera Rentals here in Seattle). Audio: Recorded with Audio-Technica AT875, and Octava MK-012, using Zoom H4N recorder on a Rode boom pole. I used a Rode VideoMic on the T2i during filmming, but did not end up using any of the sync audio. (The birds twittering is a sound effect that I purchased from istockphoto because I couldn’t get a clean recording of birds myself in Seattle due to all the background noise caused by cars and airplanes).
I used a two-step approach in producing these videos: the first step was recording audio of the girls talking during a single session that lasted just over an hour. Then, I scheduled a second session for the filmming. When reviewing the audio, I selected the bits that made me feel something, that sounded most authentic, and dropped it in to Final Cut (with regular round-tripping to Soundtrack Pro for cleaning up files), added music, and then added video as the final step.
The sessions were entirely unscripted. The interviews were conducted by the founder of the company and I, asking the girls questions about the things they liked to do together, with the goal of teasing out why they click.
The best visual moment in this first video came as a total surprise. When I showed up for the audio interview, I noticed the girls sitting together in a swing in the back yard. Because the T2i is so small, I carry it with me everywhere. So I had it with me, even though I wasn’t planning to do any shooting that day. I pulled out the camera, dropped to my knee, steadying the camera with my elbow on my knee, and started rolling as the girls blew on a dandelion together. Again, totally unscripted, totally unprompted – it just happened. And I got it. (The lens was Nikkor 50mm at 1.4 with Fader ND).
I asked them to do it again afterward, but they couldn’t find any more dandelions, so that was it! For it to be usable, I had to stabilize the footage in post, and for this I used the amazing Lock and Load X plugin, which I’ve come to rely on heavily. It’s very, very fast – about 10 times faster than the stabilizing plugin that ships with Final Cut. Because of this plug in, I’m able to get away with shooting handheld in more and more situations than I ever thought possible. Which makes me very happy.
