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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •Post Production •Production •Visual Effects • Making “One Man, One Vote”Production and post for a seven-minute short.
Ten years ago a fellow named Marshall Spight posted a challenge on DV-L called “Throwing Down the DV Gauntlet”, in which he said, “everyone talks about shooting serious dramatic films with DV, but does anyone actually do it?” I responded, and we wound up making a 20-minute short called “The Beautiful Thing” using Sony DCR-VX1000s, the first 1/3” 3-CCD DV camcorders. It came out so well (it was for a time the top-rated dramatic film on iFilm.com, an early and long-defunct predecessor to YouTube) that we set about making a short political drama/comedy (?), “One Man, One Vote”. This one gave us a few more challenges.
The PlanWe were happy with the pictures from the VX1000s, but wanted to explore the brave new world of widescreen 16x9 video and a more filmic shallow depth of field. Marshall obtained a Sony DSR-500WSL, a 2/3” 3-CCD DVCAM camcorder with a 15x Canon lens. It shot 60i, as all NTSC video cameras did back then (the DVX100 was still three years in the future), but we didn’t see this as an issue; several times viewers of “The Beautiful Thing” asked us what film stock we used, so clearly 60i wasn’t stopping us from telling our stories. Most of “The Beautiful Thing” was shot with a Tiffen Black Pro-Mist #1 diffusion filter and we really liked the look. I wanted “One Man, One Vote” to have a warm, soft, dreamy, magic-hour look, “like a Cadillac commercial, or those GE bring-good-things-to-life ads”, so we ordered up a Pro-Mist #2 filter for a more noticeable diffusion ("The Beautiful Thing“‘s Black Pro-Mist was on the edge of being too subtle at times). We also ordered up a couple of brand-new wireless mics. I read up on the DSR-500 and practiced with it a bit; Marshall got permits for our shooting locations and found actors through a casting agency, and we were good to go. Or so we thought.
Stuff We Did WrongThe blind DoP, part 1: I wanted warm, magic-hour sunlight, and we actually got it—on one day only. The rest of the time we had overcast skies. I’m not good enough in color correction to make flat, overcast lighting look like a warm sunny day, but even worse, I didn’t see that the light was wrong. So the Pro-Mist stayed on and we kept on shooting… and we wound up with flat, soft images, not crisp, warm images with a dreamy glow. And by flat, I mean flat: lots of shot have blacks at 20% and peak whites at 70%, half the available brightness range (less if you allow for peak whites at 108%). We were shooting 8-bit DV25, so effectively we were getting 7-bit images. Oops.
A typical uncorrected image and its waveform.No Testing: The wireless mics and the Pro-Mist filter arrived just before the shoot was supposed to start, so we just threw them into production without running tests. One of the two wireless mics had input switching noise in its diversity receiver and was unusable, but we didn’t discover this until we were on location, with the the largest crowd of actors in the picture standing around waiting. We wound up putting the one working wireless lavalier on the side of the primary actor closest to the secondary actor, so it would pick up both people’s lines. Surprisingly, this worked. Fortunately, this only affected one shot (it’s the shot where Allan and Emilio walk away from the rally, discussing how they’re going to collect votes); everything else in the film was recorded using practical mics (when Driscoll is addressing the crowd), or my Sennheiser ME80 on a boom. I had noticed when shooting “The Beautiful Thing” that the effect of the Black Pro-Mist varied with focal length and ambient light level, but hadn’t really internalized that lesson. I also didn’t realize that a Pro-Mist #2 on a 2/3” camera wasn’t going to give twice the diffusion of a Pro-Mist #1 on a 1/3” camera: in fact, it was considerably softer. Indeed, the effect of a Pro-Mist depends on the entire optical system it’s attached to; the focal length of the lens; the ambient light hitting the filter; the existing scene contrast; maybe even the phase of the moon (though probably not during the daytime… much). In short, saying, “we’ll shoot this show with a Pro-Mist #2” was a dumb move: we should have said, “we’ll shoot this show with varying diffusion from not much to a whole lot, depending on the shot, so as to get a consistent, diffused look”. No worries, though; we wanted a soft, dreamy look, so with not much more than a peek through the viewfinder with and without the filter, we agreed that the Pro-Mist looked good. This decision would come back to haunt us later&mdashand by “us”, I mean “me”. The blind DoP, part 2: We had carefully and cleverly blocked the camera during Driscoll’s speech: it started off on his left, and circled in front of him though a series of cuts to wind up shooting the crowd from over his right shoulder. The Canon 15x lens on the DSR-500, like many 2/3” lenses, had a separate macro ring with a locking mechanism. Unlike previous Canon ENG lenses I’d used, this lens used a soft-touch button instead of a pull-up knob to lock the macro ring in its normal position. At some point during setting up the first of these shots (the pull-back from the ruined ceiling at the Palace of Fine Arts, with one of Driscoll’s aides testing the mics), I bumped the macro ring’s button and managed to turn the ring, not enough for it to be obviously in macro mode, but enough to throw back-focus off just a bit. As a result, I’d zoom in tight to focus, then pull out, and the image went soft— not soft enough to see in the finder, really, but soft enough to see in post! Most of the setups in our cleverly-blocked sequence were thus rendered unusable. Lack of Coverage: We had a detailed shot list, so we knew what we needed to shoot. By extension, we knew what we didn’t need to shoot, like a wide master for an entire scene. After all, if we’re starting wide for an establishing shot and then progressively cutting to tighter and tighter close-ups, why waste tape and time shooting the whole thing in a master? I’m an editor; I should have known better. When a scene cut together as planned, it wasn’t a problem, but when I needed a cutaway to cover an inconsistency or to change the rhythm of the scene? Oops. I was saved by pure dumb luck. We did enough different takes that I could usually pull an unrelated bit of video from another take and stuff it into a sequence to cover a hiccup. For example, when Allan meets Mr. Kern, we only had the opening two or three lines in a wide shot, but we had half a dozen takes. When later in the scene, I needed coverage for Kern coming back to the door with votes in hand, I had to resort to an alternate take of the opening shot, when Kern comes to the door the first time. For Driscoll’s speech, where most of the angles had to be tossed due to excessive softness, I was saved only by the fact that Driscoll had to run through his speech in its entirety on each take. Coverage by default, not by planning. The blind DoP, part 3: To avoid faffing around with white balance on location, we left the camera on preset WB and used the filter wheel to choose between tungsten and daylight imaging. Most of the scene with Mr. and Mrs. Stinson was shot with the camera balanced for tungsten (3200K) instead of daylight (5600K), even though the lighting was daytime exterior shade (thus, its color temperature was even higher than normal daylight). The DSR-500’s EVF used a monochrome CRT, and we had no external monitoring, so it wasn’t obvious, but even so: properly checking the camera’s settings before each shot would have caught this at the start, rather than very late in the game. D’oh! The purple pictures could be roughly corrected, but with the excessive image-flattening diffusion and the limits of 8-bit YUV-encoded video, it simply wasn’t possible to get all the colors in the scene back where they belonged. Also, getting skintones and white areas (like the door frame) back where they belonged meant that washed-out highlights and the sky turned bright yellow.
Before and after color correction: dig those crazy yellow skies!
Basic CuttingWe wound up with about 2.5 hours of DV25 footage, consolidated on one standard-sized (a.k.a. large) DVCAM cassette. I captured it into 15 different clips (due to timecode breaks) using Final Cut Pro 5.0.2 on a dual G5 in June of 2006; it only took up 33 GBytes of disk space. Captures started out in the usual FCP place: HD > Users > [username] > Documents > Final Cut Pro Documents > Capture Scratch > [projectname]. For simplicity of backup and portability, I created a 1m1v folder on the root of a new disk, and moved the Capture Scratch directory into it, relinking the clips the next time I opened up FCP. All collateral material—stills, sound effects, music tracks, intermediate renders, graphics elements, and the project files themselves—went into the /1m1v folder or subfolders, so all I had to do to migrate the project to another disk was to drag the /1m1v folder to the new disk. Eventually there were five copies of this folder structure (two on different internal disks in the G5; one on a FW800 portable drive, one on a FW800 RAID 0 array, and one on an eSATA RAID 1 array), and the drag’n’drop scheme kept things simple. For backup, I either dragged’n’dropped the entire folder, overwriting previous backups (this normally took tens of minutes to complete) or I used the command-line utility rsync to do incremental backups (normally taking under five seconds). Rsync is very powerful but the syntax can be daunting; if I weren’t such a lazy geek I’d have found or written a nice GUI wrapper for it (and may yet do so). I used FCP’s DV start/stop detection to break the clips into individual scenes, which I made into subclips, and then added scene numbers, take numbers, and logging comments. By sorting the bin by Scene, all the subclips were arranged in rough editing order.
Subclips sorted by scene.
I broke the show into seven “chapters” ranging from nine seconds to nearly two minutes in length:
These bite-sized pieces made it easier to work on the timelines, and also made experimentation easier: for example, I swapped chapters 4 and 5 to see what would happen (what happened was: it made the film worse). The chapters were nested into a “1m1v” sequence to make the whole show, and then that sequence of seven chapters was nested into a “ColorGrade” sequence, so that I could apply a single color-correction filter to impart a look to the show without having to cut-’n’-paste the same filter into multiple subsequences or individual clips. I then pulled the titles out of the 1m1v sequence itself, and put them in track 2 of the ColorGrade sequence, so that they weren’t affected by the ColorGrade “look”. For a quick-and-dirty 4x3 master needed for a festival, I nested ColorGrade into a 4x3 sequence in FCP. It worked, but it wasn’t elegant, because the interlaced material didn’t rescale very cleanly. When it came time to create progressive-scan web and iPod / Apple TV versions, I tried various exports through Compressor, but I wasn’t satisfied: the live action looked good with adaptive deinterlacing, but the edges of the text had a tendency to quiver and jump depending on how the underlying image affected the deinterlacing process. Also, the nice, crisp title text became less crisp for being put in an interlaced sequence, even without the variations caused by adaptive deinterlacing. I turned off the title track in the ColorGrade sequence, exported the title-free sequence to Compressor for adaptive deinterlacing (but otherwise leaving the format unchanged), re-imported the resulting progressive-scan clip, put the titles on top of it, and then sent that sequence into Compressor for rescaling and reformatting, both as 16x9 and as 4x3 letterboxed. This turned out to be the best of both worlds: Compressor did a great job of deinterlacing the video material, while the titles stayed in their full-resolution, progressive format to begin with.
The show started off in FCP 5.0.2 on OS X 10.3 with a DV25-native timeline, but migrated over time through FCP 5.0.3, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 6.0.3, and 6.0.4. In each case the “new” FCP was installed on a different partition and the project was loaded, rendered, and played to ensure that it would work in the “new” version, before the old partition was upgraded or erased. When I moved the edit to a MacBook Pro, I needed to upgrade my copy of Color Finesse to an Intel-compatible version. That upgrade worked flawlessly and all the existing Color Finesse tweaks worked as before. Overall there were no upgrade problems, and the project file now bounces between an Intel MacBook Pro and a PowerPC G5, both running OS X 10.4.11, without any glitches at all. (FWIW, the big, fire-breathing, liquid-cooled dual 2.5 GHz G5 machine takes slightly longer to render the show than the 2.3 GHz Core2 Duo MacBook Pro. Progress happens.) We switched to ProRes422 HQ native timelines and intermediate renders in the final stages of the project; the quality is noticeably higher for multigeneration work (VFX) and for titles, and the entire project folder (including FCP and Motion projects, Photoshop PSD and JPG files, even a couple of uncompressed 10-bit VFX clips) still takes only 56 Gbytes of disk space. Next: Fixing the Mistakes; VFX... (Page 1 of 2 pages for this article 1 2 >)  
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3DAudioBudgetingBusinessCamerasDistributionEditingHardwareInteractiveListsLightingMotion GraphicsNAB '08Pre-ProductionProductionPost ProductionTrainingVisual Effects
Sticky: Traveling with batteries, Pro Apps Updaters, etc.NAB 2009: no RED tentR.I.P, VHS DistributionDissenting from DepressoZacuto’s Great Camera Shootout ‘08SlashCAM’s Camcorder DatabaseCalibrated CodecsEvents: DCS & MFM discuss CineAlta; FCPUG SuperMeet; Broadcast Video ExpoThe 24 fps PrayerGreen/Magenta?RED ONE: Obsolete Already?Review: Hood-Pro Sock-loupeMaking “One Man, One Vote”moby gratis- film musicPMW-EX1 Firmware 1.11Advertisements |
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