OUR CANON 5D MARK 2 Method on Searching for Sonny

Posted by Andrew Disney in Articles, Technical Aug 1st, 2009 | one response

THE PASSWORD IS: basbas

So lots of people have been asking questions about how we did each thing. Here’s our full method. I’m sure there are TONS of typos. We tried to write it out so that anyone could understand.

We came to the camera with many hesitations. You read online how it’s a Pandora’s box. On one hand you get this great picture quality, on the other hand you have to figure out how to control aperture and light sensitivity. Canon made a great camera, but it seems like the video was an afterthought. In the end we found that the work arounds are totally worth it.

First to control aperture, we got a nikon adapter to put nikon lenses on the camera. This way, the camera can’t communicate with the lens, you have a fully controllable aperture, (which wasn’t the case with the test we did before the shoot http://vimeo.com/3711284) With the canon lens that came with our camera rental (we used lensrentals.com), the lens was fully automatic in LIVE MODE. This is a huge problem with many 5dm2 video users. If you can’t control the aperture, then you can’t control depth of field. The big thing everyone is looking for is that softness in the foreground and the background. That has always been the big differential between video and cinema. A few years back, 35mm adapters came out and changed everything. Finally an indie filmmaker could get that depth of field and use nice 35mm glass. So the big workaround with this problem is to use nikon lenses on the canon camera via a nikon adapeter. I bought one off ebay for $80.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Fotodiox-Nikon-Lens-Canon-EOS-Mount-Adapter-Pro-Series_W0QQitemZ220383167613QQcmdZViewItem

The next big workaround was the light sensitivity. For every shot, you want the the lowest ligh sensitivity so you’ll have the least amount of graininess and noise. The problem with shooting with the Canon 5d is that this is also automatic. The camera choices for you. The work around here is the exposure lock. It’s a button on the camera with an asterik. If you push this button, the exposure will lock. So we’d lock the exposure after we got our desired ISO (light sensitivity), then start recording with the camera, and lastly play with the aperture to get the desired look.

There was so much play with pointing the camera at lighter objects and darker objects. For the last shot in the teaser, you see the silohuettes. For this shot, we pointed the camera at the sky, locked the exposure, started recording, and then play with the aperture. In most of the other shots, we’d point the camera at the brightest object, then lock, shoot, and play with the stops. We almost always went one stop down after we’d lock the exposure. The beautiful thing about this camera is how it shoots blacks. The blacks are deeper, truer, fuller, than most any other camera I’ve shot on.

The next big challenge was to have a way to control the focus. We used a doorway dolly, because we wanted to do a ton of push ins and pull outs. But when shooting with a 50mm lens at a low f-stop, you need someone to constantly change the focus while the camera was moving. It was totally out of the question to have the camera operator/DP do it because we also needed someone to tilt. An actually hand pulling and racking the focus wouldn’t work because it would look to shaky, or crappy, or just plain bad.

Here was our workaround. The camera we usually use is the Panasonic HVX200 with a RedRock 35mm adapter. http://www.redrockmicro.com/lensadapter/index.html

We need the rod system seen in this photo to place a follow focus.

With the follow focus, the focus on the lens is controlled by gears. The gears are connected to a whip, and an assistant cameraman holds the whip which he would turn to get the desired focus. So we attached the rod system built for the HVX200 to the 5d. We had to change all the settings because the camera was too tall on the rod system. He had to add spacers to lift the follow focus up higher. Once we mounted the follow focus, we realized our rods were way too long. Since it was designed for the HVX200, which is a much longer camera, the rods i think were 15 inches. We needed them to be 5 inches. So I went to the furniture store where my girlfriend works because the owner had a steel cutter. He cut the rods and we used that on the camera (they were still a little long though.) You actually don’t need to do this. RedRock sells a DSLR rod system. http://www.redrockmicro.com/redrock_dslr.html

We just didn’t have the cash to buy that. So we DIYed it.

Next we put the camera on a doorway dolly we rented. http://hdgear.tv/details.php?catagory=Support&cat_num=20&sku=200210

We mounted the camera with the rod system onto a bogen tripod which retailed for about $800, and then stabilized it with sandbags. Another big thing about the camera is that it’ll show any little jiggle or movement. So we just had to rehearse every dolly pull and push over and over again. We were definitely worried about the “jelly effect.” This is one of the biggest problems with the DSLRs that shoot video. You can read all about it on prolost.com When the camera moves, quickly, you sometimes get this jelly effect where everything in the frame looks… welly jelly like. It caused by the rolling shutter in the camera (I don’t full understand it.) If you watch the teaser you can see it at the 26 second mark when the focus is pushed to the girl in the mirror.

Thankfully it didn’t show up on the dolly pushes. I think it only shows up when there is very very quick movement. Sometimes the camera would drop frames in the shot… We watched out for that and had to refilm shots. I think we did about ten takes for every shot. The full teaser has about 40 shots. We filmed it last weekend over three days. (March 19th, 20th, 21st.)

On the import for editing we converted all the footage to Apple Pro Res 422 HQ because editing with the native 5d format (h.264) doesn’t work so well. It’s too jittery and freezes alot.

After the edit was done. We did the coloring in Apple Color. Here was our coloring method

We mostly crushed the blacks, brought the shadows to a blueish hue, the highlights to a yellowish hue in the primary in.
Then we went to our secondaries and tried to preserve the skin tones with a saturation curve (sometimes a hue) and then play around some more with the other colors. I got my method from this post at prolost
http://prolost.com/blog/2008/3/23/save-our-skins.html

The I did the titling in After Effect. And then I uploaded to Vimeo. The vimeo version is in 24p beacsue vimeo converts everything to that framerate. The Canon 5d shoots in 30p. You can watch the 30p version on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ilOZldwH1Y

But i think all these methods and workarounds with the camera will be obsolete pretty soon. The Panasonic GH1 should hopefully fix it all… I think that’s what we’ll shoot the feature on.

here’s a flickr album with more pics from the shoot! http://www.flickr.com/photos/36854133@N05/sets/72157616088194214/

thanks so much for all your interest and support. We’re gonna make the best movie we can!

Full trailer comes out April 15th

- andrew disney