NOCTURNE Behind-The-Scenes

This and other screen-grabs from the upcoming behind-the-scenes video of Nocturne give you a sense of what the light was like at our location. Here we’re about to make a run on the GripTrix for the loading dock scene. Although the 5D Mark II can barely make us out, I ultimately wound up darkening the ID Mark IV’s shots for the final grade.

Read more on Vincent’s blog, and watch for his post with the behind the scenes video.

I will post something soon about our post workflow.

NOCTURNE and the Canon 1D Mark IV

See It Bigger on SmugMug (full 1080p!) HERE.

Two weeks ago Vincent Laforet emailed me with a cryptic request to join him in shooting a follow-up to his short film Reverie, the short that started the avalanche of excitement over DSLRs that oh-by-the-way happen to shoot video. I was flattered, but found myself thinking “Does the world need another Reverie?” What I didn’t know was that Vincent had just had his mind blown by a new prototype camera that Canon had sent him, and his mind was racing with ideas for how to put it to work.

I met up with him in LA and saw the camera. Yes, the world needed to see what thing thing could do.

The camera was, of course, the Canon 1D Mark IV. It’s the first of Canon’s professional 1D line to feature HD video recording. The Mark IV joins the I-get-tired-just-typing-the-numbers crazy-high ISO club, maxing out at a ridiculous 102,400. This insane low-light capability extends to video recording as well. The 1D Mark IV is an HD camera that can see more in low light than your eye can, recording usable video at up to ISO 6400.

On our Friday night location scout I took a break from giggling like a dork every time I pointed the camera down a dark street only to discover a supernova of illumination on the LCD, and asked the burning questions: Sensor? 1.3 crop. Aliasing? Still present. Autofocus? Not while recording.

So the Mark IV is an evolutionary step in the HDDSLR race. It doesn’t tick too many things off my wish list. Where it is revolutionary is in its low-light performance. And it has by far the least rolling-shutter shear of any DSLR I’ve ever held.

To hold it in your hand, you’d never know the 1D Mark IV has video. The body is exactly the same as that of its predecessor. After the 7D’s barrage of new buttons, including dedicated video start-stop, the Mark IV is a spare and spartan affair. My theory is that Canon doesn’t want to risk tripping up the muscle memory of its pro customers, many of whom still take this whole “photography” thing fairly seriously.

(For my part, owning a 5D Mark II and a 7D, operating the Mark IV pushed me into the schitzo zone. Now no matter which Canon HDDSLR I pick up I fumble with the controls and press the wrong thing.)

Two Nights, No Lights

Me hand-holding with a Zeiss prime (having donated my shoes to actor Mark Smith for the loading dock sequence), GripTrix driver Aaron Hummel, and Vincent with his ATM Gyro rig

Our mission was simple: We’d shoot for two nights in downtown LA, with whatever gear we could swing and no permits, and only with available light. We “lit” our scenes though careful location scouting and blocking. We shot in locations that were so dark that we could barely see. In fact, on our second night, a “real” film shoot moved in next to us under the 6th Street bridge, and they brought with them a massive truck with a crane-mounted stadium light array of nine HMIs to shoot the area we’d just left.

So let me say this clearly: This camera alleviates concerns over quantities of light. It’s still up to you to supply—or find—the quality of light.

Here are some random notes:

• It’s one thing to shoot a film in two nights, but its another thing entirely to post it in a week. Editor Benjamin Nussbaum at Pictures in a Row is a total rock star. He took our hectic collection of footage and made it sing. If you need your shit cut good, go to Pictures in a Row. Seriously.
• I was all WTF? about the 1.3 crop, But Vincent reminded me that in the pro line, the 1D model has always been APS-H and the 1Ds series is full-frame. Still, we wound up fiddling with prime lens choices more than we might with a more familiar sensor size.
• The reduced size of the sensor is considered in the stills world to be a worthwhile compromise in the name of faster frame rates. The equivalency in HD video might be sensor read-out times, because the rolling-shutter nastiness was so minimal that we did not shy away from Bourne-cam, whip-pans, and scrolling backgrounds.
• Speaking as someone who owns a 5D Mark II and a 7D, it’s that last point that makes me most envious of the Mark IV. Seeing in the dark is cool, but not worrying about Jello-cam is even better.
• Vincent and I collaborated with a third co-director, David Nelson. Sharing directing duties is hard, but if you put real effort into the collaboration it can be very rewarding.
• We did color correct and lightly denoise the shots. When Reverie first hit, it was important to see “what the camera can do,” but now I think we’ve all matured a bit and are interested in how a new camera fits into a reasonable post pipeline.
• You can color correct a three-minute short in one night using After Effects and Colorista. Sunrises are pretty.

The inevitable question: Should you buy the Mark IV? It’s gonna be expensive, and the APS-H sensor feels like a rest-stop on the way to a 1Ds Mark IV with full frame (and possiby a million other things we want, according to rather optimistic rumors). I’m happy with my 7D, and hold out hope for a firmware update for my 5D Mark II (UPDATE: Holy shit!). I’ll hold off on buying a Mark IV.

Until the next time I feel like making a movie in the dark.

Be sure to read Vincent’s post here. Like I have to tell you that.

Update on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 1:13AM by Stu

John’s kind comment bellow remined me of a point I wanted to make. He described the short as looking “gritty and filmic,” and I take that as a huge compliment. We achived that in a number of ways, both creative and technical, but one simple technical rule helped in no small way: we limited ourselves to a 180 degree shutter. In other words, if we were shooting 24p, we used at least a 1/50 shutter—usually 1/60 to avoid flicker. When we shot 60p, we used a shutter of 1/125.

You may recall that my principal criticism of Reverie was that its wide-open shutter gave it the look of well-shot video.

Others have tried to use digital cinema cameras to capture the beauty of downtown Los Angeles at night, but they’ve always needed to open their elecronic shutter past 180 virtual degrees, and the results are a dead giveaway of video origination. The 1D Mark IV gave us the low-light performance we needed to stick to our guns on the 180 degree maximum shutter rule.

Update on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 9:32PM by Stu

Inexplicably, Canon has asked Vincent Laforet to remove Nocturne from his blog today. Vincent reminds us that “this happened last year [with Reverie] and all was fine a few days later.” So let’s hope that’s the case this time as well.

The SmugMug embed above worked for a while after the new but has finally died, it seems.

Flatten Your 5D

Readers of The DV Rebel’s Guide know that I like to set up my cameras to record as much dynamic range as possible, resulting in a low-contrast, low-saturation “digital negative” that allows more flexibility for grading in post. If you’ve seen any video I’ve shot with the Canon 5D Mark II lately, whether in the Red Giant TV tutorial or on fxphd, you may have wondered how I set up the camera to achieve this. The answer comes in the form of some in-camera Picture Style settings.

I posted a while back about using Canon’s PictureStyleEditor software to create these custom Picture Styles. Since then I have found that the controls in the camera are more than sufficient for creating a more post-friendly look for the 5D’s video files.

Starting with the “Neutral” setting, I make the following modifications:

• Sharpness all the way down
• Contrast all the way down
• Saturation two notches down

Save that as on of your User Defined Picture Styles. Then, optionally, hop over to the Custom Function menu, select C.Fn II: Image, and enable Highlight Tone Priority.

UPDATE: Or don’t. See Update 1 below.

Your settings should look like this:

This will remove the contrasty, video-like tone curve from your future recordings, and eek out a little more highlight detail. Here’s a shot made with the default settings:

Video frame made with Standard Picture Mode, Highlight Tone Priority offHere’s that same shot with the Stu settings:

Prolost Settings

You can see the reduced contrast, the increase in shadow and highlight detail. It’s closer to a raw image with a linear tone curve. Zoom in and you can see the difference in highlight handling on the reflections:

Default settings — harsh, clipped highlightsProlost settings — smooth rolloff in the highlights, increased detailYou can also see the difference in sharpening artifacts. My settings reduce, but do not eliminate, the moiré effect endemic to the 5D Mark II’s line-skipping:

Default settingsProlost settings

You’re going to put all that contrast and most of that sharpening back in post of course, but in your own way, and with more control, and after any shot-to-shot evening out or clever power windows. The ability to design a “zeroed out” or CINE_LIKE-esque Picture Style is one of the things that makes the 5D Mark II’s video dangerously close to usable.

I recommend assigning this setting to one of your Custom notches on the mode dial, so that you don’t inflict these settings on your stills. They don’t affect raw files of course (UPDATE: That’s not actually true, see Update below), but they do get baked into the JPEG previews that accompany those raw files. I have the above settings registered as C3 (along with manual control and a 1/60th shutter), so I can quickly pop into my ideal movie capture settings.

Update on Friday, August 21, 2009 at 9:11AM by Stu

If you do set up your 5D as described above, make sure to do the last step with the custom function so that these settings only affect your video shooting. You probably don’t want to have Highlight Tone Priority on for your stills, especially if you shoot raw. What it does is “push” (reduce) your ISO setting by one stop, causing you to capture a full stop of additional highlight information through no more sophisticated means than simply underexposing. For video and JPEGs, that additional highlight range is non-linearly mapped into the image, creating a very film-like “shoulder.” For raw, it simply passes metadata to your raw decoder that may or may not be honored.

Lightroom, for example, interprets HTP as a simple instruction to boost exposure by one stop. Fair enough, except that this won’t match what you saw on the camera LCD at all. Blacks will be too crushed and that extra highlight detail will be missing (until you futz with the Develop controls to bring it back). Trying to bring more detail back into the blacks will bring in nasty noise that was not visible in the JPEG preview.

Underexposing to capture extra highlight info can be a fine idea, but it’s best implemented case-by-case, and in a predictable way.

Highlight Tone Priority hides the underexposure from you and might cause you to think you’re capturing a more robust negative than you really are.

But for video mode, it creates a more film-like low-contrast, high dynamic range image, with just a touch more noise from the one-stop push.

I now roll with two custom function settings, one with HTP on, one with it off. For daylight exteriors with plenty of light, HTP: On. For lower-light situations, or more controlled lighting, HTP: Off.

Update on Monday, August 24, 2009 at 2:09PM by Stu

There’s an interesting discussion of the nuances of HTP and ISO performance over at cinema5D.com. Interpret tests results such as these with caution though — as the OP says, he’s trying to show off the noise, so it’s not so much a real-world test as it is an attempt to learn more about what’s happening in the camera. Turns out there are some surprizing variations in noise preformance at different ISO settings, possibly having to do with some ISO settings being “virtual,” i.e. metadata offsets of native settings.