Equipment Breakdown

For the production of our music video, we have a wide range of equipment at our disposal to help produce the best possible final outcome. In this post I will break down each piece of kit used and explain it's uses.

*In the event of the images uploaded below becoming unavailable for whatever reason, the majority of them are available on my personal Instagram.

NIKON D5100 - Main camera as it is my own. I have access to it 24/7. I know it inside-out and feel confident pushing it to it's limits to get the best possible end result. I will be mainly using the 18-55 kit lens in the production. The Sigma 70-200 Telephoto lens and a YN-560-II Speedlight are pictured in the image.

Canon 600D - Secondary camera, used for 60fps recording capability. Useful for multi-cam shots to save time during recording. I am new to this camera but it is essentially the Canon clone to the D5100. I feel confident that I will have no issues using it. One potential worry is syncing the 60FPS data with the 24FPS data of my camera in POST.

Manfrotto Tripod - High end, professional tripod for most cameras. This tripod is one of the most useful tools we have available. It allows us to set up in essentially any location in any orientation thanks to it's free floating legs and vari-angle head design. I use it in conjunction with the 804-RC2 tripod head which has a good level of resistance, allowing for beautifully smooth tilts and pans.

Hama Tripod - We have a cheaper, lighter and more portable tripod that will aid us with getting steady shots during our multicam scenes. This tripod is also useful for holding lights or microphones.

Rotolight™ - This extremely useful tool provides us with a strong, portable lighting solution. It is extremely strong and bright for it's size and grants us enough light to film at ISO 400 anywhere, anytime. Absolutely essential.

iPhone 4S - We use our iPhones to record video blog footage to help us document things on location. It greatly aids with communication and is equipped with a very high resolution camera capable of recording 1080p video. We will be using these to give brief tours on location or to show equipment set-ups.

ATH-M50 - Studio monitor headphones, ideal for audio level monitoring. My DSLR is not sophisticated enough to feature an integrated visual audio level indicator while recording, but it does allow monitoring. This is useful for recording spot effects, allowing us to cut down on audio spikes but monitoring levels closely. It is also important for accurate audio mastering in POST.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 - Premiere Pro will be our main workhorse for the production of our video. I personally prefer it to using any other editing software as it is what I have been taught to use, and because it works seamlessly alongside After Effects, Lightroom, SpeedGrade, and Photoshop. This is something that 90% of other video editing programs cannot do without the user jumping through a bunch of hoops, slowing their workflow considerably.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 - Photoshop is an essential piece of software when it comes to dealing with destructive editing of images. Creating our digipak, poster and other artwork will require Photoshop  It grants the user access to all sorts of image manipulation techniques and processes, making it possible to produce still image adverts and promotional items.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 - Lightroom is in a way, a watered down Photoshop. Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, meaning that the changes you make are not directly applied to the image itself, they are stored in a catalogue index ready to be applied to the image upon export. Kind of like a mask that is applied when you export, it isn't permanent unless you make it so.

Twixtor 5 - Twixtor is a slow motion plugin for Adobe After Effects. I believe that it works by 'stretching' frames in order to increase the duration of each one. Longer durations of each frame means the footage will playback at half speed, effectively doubling the playback time of the section stretched. I don't know the literal process that Twixtor carries out, but it's something along those lines. I will learn it soon and create a test video. The embedded video from an unrelated YouTube user demonstrates exactly how powerful Twixtor is, even without 60FPS footage! (Disclaimer: This video is NOT my content.)

Initial Footage & Thoughts

We have completed our initial shoot and have begun editing it in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. This will be a very skeletal edit, with only a few barebone clips added in at this point in time. our video will acquire somewhat of a structure when we complete the main body of filming in the coming days and weeks.

Here is a screen capture of me previewing our initial clips and naming them. Clips I find unusable for whatever reason are red labelled and not deleted. It is essential that we keep all footage recorded in case we either forget an idea, need clips to fall back on, or want to assess what we did wrong and possibly re-soot the clip.

It is was essential that we completed an initial pre-shoot before tackling the main body of filming. Upon reflection, we have decided that my costume is not suitable for our video as the print is distracting. In future videos I will wear more discreet clothing, and I will also revise Billy's outfit before our next shoot.

I feel that overall, the shoot was very successful, with a small percentage of unusable clips. I feel that for the majority of shots, the camera work was top tier, with a little revision for shooting order and composition needed. I think it will be beneficial for us to construct a detailed storyboard before our next shoot so we can quickly and effectively record our shots in the correct sequence in good time. We used a 'scattergun' approach to filming our initial clips and need to be more organised next time.

Critical Understanding - Camera Settings & Lenses

It is crucial that as directors, we must ensure we know our equipment inside-out to use it to the best of it's potential and achieve the best possible final outcome in our productions.

In this post, I will break down the camera settings used, explain why I am using them, and explain my choice of lenses, and what each lens is suitable for.

To begin with, we have two main cameras we will be using for the production. A Nikon D5100 and a Canon 600D (KISS x5) Both cameras have full 1080p and 720p recording capability at 24 or 30FPS. The 600D is capable of recording at 60FPS in 720p mode, making it ideal for slow motion shots as mentioned in my planning. We are going to use the 60FPS footage in conjunction with After Effects CS6 and Twixtor 5 in order to create extremely smooth extreme slow motion shots when played back at 24FPS (film standard). Our choice of using DSLR's over our college's camcorders allows us great flexibility in filming, as we can use a wide range of telephoto and landscape lenses opposed to the standard 17-55mm camcorder zoom. Both cameras feature flip out screens making them ideal for film work.

Our video will be shot in NTSC format at 720p, as there is no need to shoot in full 1080p HD and we would loose slow motion capability. 720p files are smaller and render faster, improving our workflow under the tight schedule imposed, as well as saving storage space on our SDHC cards, allowing for longer shoots and extended battery life while recording. The end footage will be exported at 24FPS as that is the film standard.

We will use polarising filters when filming in the day. This is extremely important as it will help maintain a low shutter speed in brightly lit areas. It is important that we keep our camera set to 1/60 shutter speed and a relatively low ISO below ISO 800 in order to maximise our video quality. The shutter speed must be double that of the frame rate in order to maintain smooth frame blending in the video. This is why polarisers are used as they help improve the colour depth and temperature as well as stopping down the exposure.

 

I find that it is necessary to keep the camera in M (manual) mode. This means that the camera will not try to automatically adjust it's settings to correct the exposure. This is especially important for us, as our project involves a lot of low level light work, so things like auto ISO and auto metering MUST be switched off in order for us to obtain good footage. nine times out of ten the camera will completely mess up your end result if it is left in any kind of automatic mode. I even use manual focus during video recording, to ensure the camera's AF motor does not activate mid-shoot and completely ruin the continuity of our film. I also always take out a white sheet of A4 paper and perform a manual white balance before each shot, just to ensure that our colours are correct so we have to spend less time grading in POST.

Lens Breakdown

I have a range of lenses available, all of them are good for different things. The 18-55mm is the only wide angle I have, so that will be used for about 80% of shots as it has good stabilizers and is very compact and light.The is primarily for the photography and will be used for the cover of our poster, images for the digipak and other photographic tasks. The 55-200 will probably not be used. its only benefit is that it is a compact zoom with the same range as the huge Sigma. The sigma is a f/2.8 lens at 200mm so it is extremely well suited to low light situations and would be suitable for very tight video shots such as extreme close ups or segments that needed to be filmed from a distance. See image below for reference.

Criticial Understanding – Image Downsampling

It is important to downsample images before using them for my blog, or any other website. This is because most websites will compress the images using very lossy compression, so on top of uploading images that are 8MB each, the images look worse, and take longer.

DSLR cameras capture images at extremely high resolution, in my case 4928x3264. I am going to downsample these images before uploading them to the blog. They will also make managing the PowerPoint presentation much easier as there is less wasted image data.

Here is the export dialogue and settings. notice how I have set the resizing to use the long edge of the image, and limited that to 1024 px. Sometimes 2048 px is neccesary but for most web purposes 1024 is the most suitable size. There is absolutely no reason to be uploading full size, uncompressed images to the web as it is badly optimized and some users will struggle to load the website.

The end result? my images have been compressed from 9MB to around 800KB. this is approx 9x smaller in file size, costing mobile users less data and helping users with slow internet speeds to access the content faster. This is good practice in all cases, especially in my visual storyboard. There is negligible loss of image quality if images are downsized correctly. If anything, the images look better. This is because the pixel density is being increased and the pixels are getting smaller, meaning less noise is visible in the image as a result of it's compression. Blurry areas are less apparent and the image appears sharper.