5D Crushing News

UPDATE: This article contains some out-of-date information. See follow-up here.

In my last post I wrote about the Canon 5D Mark II’s well-known tendency to crush black in-camera, and that “This is a separate issue from the one facing Final Cut Studio Users.” Oops. It’s not. And this is really good news—and really bad news too.

Reader urmel commented on that post:

if you recover the cliped whites and black in Apple’s color you don’t need any custom picture style. Camera Standard with Sat -1 and sharpness set to 2 works fine.

And I thought, no, that’s not true.

Then I tried it. Damn it, urmel is right. Well, except for the sharpening part. Definitely don’t turn sharpening up on the 5D when shooting video—the line-skipping used in video mode means the images are already too sharp in a very sizzly way, like scaling down an image in Photoshop using Nearest Neighbor sampling.

Sorry, got distracted. The point is that the clipping seen in Final Cut Pro is also seen in Quicktime, which means its also seen in After Effects. But Apple’s Color, that magnificent bastard, can recover it. The clipping is not in-camera after all!

Here’s a frame from my Stunt People shoot. This is how it looks in Quicktime, in Final Cut, and in After Effects:

Here you see it in Apple Color, with the Grade disabled. Note the values above 100 IRE and below zero. Those don’t always display, but with Disable Grading on (press Control + G [yes, Control, not Command—WTF Apple?]) you can usually see if there’s anything lurking there.

Turn off Disable Grading and lift Primary In Shadows up a bit to bring up the blacks, then lower Highlights to bring the brightest whites down to 100 IRE (as I mentioned, you may not see the out-of-range values in the waveform when doing this, but you’ll see them being brought into range). Here’s the result:

Wow. So there really was extra information lurking there all along. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this is the only way I’ve found to get at it (Final Cut Pro itself could read and rescue these values if it saw 5D clips as YUV, but it forces them to RGB instead).

David Newman of Cineform is blogging about this as well. That’s really good news. David is smart—so smart, in fact, that he’s the only one who understands Cineform’s confusing array of products.

The Canon 5D Mark II still doesn’t shoot 24p or have manual control. That’s the bad news.

Although we no longer seem to have as dire a need for contrast-reducing Picture Styles, it is still a valid and worthwhile thing to set up the 5D to shoot a flat, low-con image. Now that I’ve seen what Color can rescue from this footage, those settings I used in-camera (similar to urmel’s, but based on the Neutral preset with reduced contrast and saturation) seem like they might actually have been flat enough—but I still like the extra control offered by Picture Style Editor.

So in closing, while a custom Picture Style to flatten out and make more post-friendly the movies from the 5D is a good idea, it’s not a dire necesity. The harsh crushed blacks we associate with the 5D’s motion output are a decoding error, not baked into our footage.

5D Movies Aren't a Player, They Just Crush a Lot

UPDATE: This article contains some out-of-date information. See follow-ups here and here.

Here’s something I wish I had when I did my test shoot with the Canon 5D Mark II: advanced Picture Styles that help reduce the movie mode’s nasty crushed blacks.

The precipitous drop to detail-free (and therefore easy-to-compress) black that characterizes the 5D’s movies is one of the agonizing limitations of the camera that can actually be fixed now. As commenters on my previous post noted, Canon SLRs come with software called Picture Style Editor, and with it you can do even more than you can with the camera’s menus to create customized “Picture Styles,” which are color correction presets that affect JPEGs and, yes, movies created in the camera.

Ben Syverson, creator of DV Garage’s DV Matte and co-creator of Conduit, offered to share his presets with us. Ben describes the process of creating and using these Picture Styles:

The first image was shot with the default “Standard” picture style. All were shot with the same exposure settings.

I’ve attached three Picture Styles. They all feature a sort of secondary color correction to target the blacks and bring them up a little bit. The video mode seems to take the current picture style and then crush the blacks, so this is an attempt to compensate for that a little.

Flat +10

This style creates a slight reverse S-curve to bring down contrast. This should be good as a general purpose picture style.

Flat +20

This style creates a stronger reverse S-curve to combat higher contrast situations. Use with caution, because it can flatten out midtones too much.

High Gamma 5.0

I’m still playing with this one, but it’s an attempt to mimic the look and feel of overexposed color negative film. Compensate for its higher gamma by moving the exposure compensation to around -1.

You upload these to the camera via a sort of weird dance in Canon EOS Utility.

Thanks Ben! Remember, underexposing means capturing more dynamic range. Using a boosted gamma to allow some underexposure is a practice that dates back to the very first digital cinema discoveries.

Aaron also posted a link to some presets created by James Miller, who discusses them here on DVinfo.net. Here’s a frame from one of his sample clips shot with the default Picture Style, “Standard”:

And here’s the same scene using his Flat 1 preset:

By crushing less in camera you expand your dynamic range, capture more shadow detail, and give yourself much more room for color correction in post. When I shot my tests, I used the flattest Custom Picture Style I could create with the in-camera controls, but you have much more control with Canon’s desktop software.

This is a separate issue from the one facing Final Cut Studio users, who have noticed that Final Cut Pro treats the 5D’s H.264 movies as if they were 16–235 rather than 0–255 (a problem that actually affected the OG 5D short, Reverie). That means Final Cut is actually crushing your blacks and whites more than they already were! There’s a discussion about this on DVinfo as well, although the way I choose to deal with this is a) edit with proxies (there’s no advantage to cutting at 5D movies 1080p, only pain and slowness) and b) use Final Cut to create EDLs, not pixels (in other words, online in After Effects).

UPDATE: The above paragraph is 100% bollocks, see the following post.

And of course not one bit of this matters a bit until Canon comes through with a firmware update that allows manual exposure control and 24p recording. When they do, I’ll order my 5D Mark II and post some Picture Styles of my own.

Amazon has the 5D Mark II in stock for list price!

As I write this, Amazon has the Canon 5D Mark II body in stock for the list price of $2,700. Free shipping and Amazon Prime shipping apply. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to grab one, this may be it, especially if you believe the rumors of forthcoming firmware updates to shore up the video deficiencies.

Oh, you’re all here? Sorry, I was just having a conversation with myself.

UPDATE 1/17: And like that, it was gone.

I Shoot Stunt People

Folks following me on Twitter know that while I didn’t preorder a Canon 5D Mark II (actually in stock now on Amazon, both kit and body only), I got to borrow one for a couple of weeks. My generous benefactor was none other than Vincent Laforet, whom I met when he gave a presentation at Industrial Light & Magic a few weeks back. The camera is back in his hands now as he prepares for his surf film.

Rather than rush off to the nearest subway station (well, maybe in addition to running off to the nearest subway station), I decided to contact a local group of filmmakers and performers called The Stunt People. We collaborated on a one-day shoot that involved stunts, fight choreography, and a lot of fun despite the nasty weather.

The images in this post are stills from the shoot, featuring a hasty, “one-light” color correction using Magic Bullet Colorista.

The camera itself offered few surprises. The control is maddening, and the form-factor is annoying for handheld work. I tricked it out with a stripped-down configuration of the Redrock Micro DSLR kit, and the follow-focus was a lifesaver—don’t leave home without it. I did not encumber myself with an LCD monitor, instead relying on the camera’s built-in LCD. The live view zoom function is fine for checking focus before a roll, but not during, and the fixed position orientation of the screen is punishing for creative camera angles.

But the images are pretty—as long as not much moves. There is noticeable rolling shutter artifacting. The low-light capability is stunning (all the images you see here were shot with available light), although working in low light means that the damned 30 fps frame rate is compounded by a creamy 1/30 shutter. The result, as I’ve described before, is that the stutter and incompleteness of film’s cadence is missing, resulting in an motion characteristic that is all verisimilitude and no cinema.

With 24p and manual exposure control this camera would be of use. Without those adjustments, it’s a tantalizing but ultimately frustrating curiosity to the DV Rebel. The best thing about it is what it portends for the very near future.

When the short is cut, colored and mixed I’ll post it here, probably sometime in January. In the meantime check out some of the clips on the Stunt People site—they have some mad skills!