35 replies to this topic

[RWBrooks]

Hi, had a few days forced upon me in the office so started to put together some recent footage and it kind of snowballed.
Not meant to be a show reel but I would still appreciate comments.

Cheers

Richard



[vimeohd]55246155[/vimeohd]

[Pete L]

Great work richard. The reefs look really healthy & the fish life is simply amazing!
Do you do much in the way of colour correction/contrast etc?
Cheers Pete.

[Ferg42]

Very nice. Stunning amount of life.

[Drew]

Richard
You got some amazing behavior in the clips, especially the commensal hunting in the first sequence. Great catch on the trevally in the 3rd scene as well. I'm guessing you were snorkeling with the salty, very prudent retreat! I especially love the carnage of those divers in the cave! LOL

My only comment is in the short scene of the shark and trevally. I think it's pretty important to maintain orientation for shots. With the trevally headed diagonally upwards, I sorta felt the need to tilt my head to appreciate the beauty of the shot. I totally understand how easy it is to tilt off axis while swimming, Grid guide lines are an awesome tool to help in that.

Also I think if you gave a colorist or DIT a crack, they'd be able to polish up the clips with consistent good color and saturation. The present look is very HDV, which there is nothing wrong on the CU and medium shots, but the wide shots had a bleached look.

[Pete L]

I'm no expert by any means but would a little contrast add a bit more depth to some of those clips?
Especially the schooling fish?
Love it either way.

[RWBrooks]

Thanks for the compliments and tips. My knowledge of post production and colour correction is pretty limited having never done much of it before. I need to look up what DIT is!
I agree though that it does look very HDV on some of the wider shots, doesn't get the deep blues that you get with higher end cameras. I've always shied away from too much work in post especially with stills before we had HDR as it can look desperate, but then that's where the skills of the DIT coupled with the cameraman's come into their own.
Now my main gripe is to get rid of that interlaced look.

Richard

[MikeVeitch]

Nicely done Richard, makes me miss those group hunts on blue corner with all of the predators chasing some fish into a coral head

Great viz on the German Channel dive too!

[Nick Hope]

Now my main gripe is to get rid of that interlaced look.

What NLE are you using?

(can't comment on your film as Vimeo has more or less stopped working here)

[Drew]

Now my main gripe is to get rid of that interlaced look.

I didn't notice too much interlace artifacting in the clip. But I guess that Sony high contrast and edgy sharpness keep my eyes away from artifacting.

[DeanB]

Contrast blah blah cyans blah blah interlaced blah blah ... All good points! but to be honest it was beautiful to watch and had some real Wows in it... I visited Palau in 2002 (too long ago) and this took me back.

You probably pinch yourself everyday living there mate

Dean

[RWBrooks]

Nick, I'm using FCP 7 but not to it's full capabilities I'm sure.
Dean, some days are incredible.... usually the ones when I'm in the office!
I'm a great marker like that.....:-D
Thanks for the compliments on what I did get tho!

Richard

[Nick Hope]

Nick, I'm using FCP 7 but not to it's full capabilities I'm sure.

I could help you with advanced deinterlacing on Windows but can't help you on a Mac I'm afraid. Maybe this?

[Nick Hope]

OK, I managed to get the clip to load (half an hour in a 2nd browser... Vimeo is ****ed here). Nice stuff but I agree that a lot of the clips would benefit from some CC/grading in post. Especially more depth in the shadows. If you do it yourself, really learn what the video scopes in your NLE are showing, and remember that videos served in a Flash or HTML5 player (i.e. Vimeo, YouTube etc.) will clip information below 16 and above 235, exactly the same as DVD/Blu-ray/broadcast.

I love the close up trevallies at 6:10.

Talking plainly (and hypocritically!), I think your "Lightning Strike Productions Proudly Presents" opening screen looks cheap. Poor choice of font, colour and font effect IMHO.

[RWBrooks]

Thanks Nick :-)

[errbrr]

I like your timelapses, especially the nudi. And the shark swimming overhead with the diver further overhead is cool.

[Drew]

Richard
I hope you don't mind but I was evaluating the latest version of Film Convert and didn't have any clips on the laptop drives and was too lazy to hook up the backup drives. So I downloaded your clip from Vimeo and played with it a bit in Film Convert. After a 10 second adjustment, I got this:



Now it's not the best tool for grading but I wanted to see how close it would get to what I wanted. I'd probably push the water column up a bit more. The artifacting is from your .mp4 file, not the program.
Just wanted to show you the potential of your clips. I hope you got the action of the Stegosomas mating!

[RWBrooks]

The Stegs mating was one of those moments when I was really caught between pursuing them and leaving them to it. As they swam up the reef here they drew so much attention and so many people started chasing after them that I didn't want to add to the pressure. I know it's one of those moments, like a holy grail, but then I would rather they actually got it on than I followed them with all the other people put them off and I only got a shot of the male loosing his grip and the female bolting. I was cursing the situation as I saw everyone chasing them.
Thank you for the example of CC. This is something I obviously need to learn. I'm downloading the plug in now, only 8 hours to go........

Thanks again

Richard

[Drew]

I would not download Film Convert for grading. It's a look efx program so not good for anything except to throw a film stock look in.

Re the Stegos, I suppose that's the price for being in a dive hotspot. You're never alone!

[Nick Hope]

So did the chasing crowd get their live show or not?

Does FCP 7 have native colour curves fx, 3-way colour wheels etc.? In Vegas I do 90% of my colour work with curves and 10% with it's Secondary Color Corrector (although I am looking to upgrade to a less fiddly workflow).

[RWBrooks]

FCP 7 does have 2 and 3 way CC so I'm experimenting with that as well as other effects, just trying to do small changes here and there so it doesn't look too worked upon. Seems a little does go a long way.
The last I saw of the randy stegos was as they beat a hasty retreat up the secondary NW channel at German, an area I have yet to explore.