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Author Topic: Advice please – File format details for animation video from 5Dii DSLR  (Read 4530 times)

Beamengine

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Hi everyone

I'm an experienced photographer who has been asked to shoot stills for a three-minute music video. While I'm happy enough with stills I know next to nothing about video or animation work, but am prepared to put in the hours playing with FCP to get the job done.

A few details: the video will be 1920 x 1080, 'shot' with stills from a 5dii or 1Dx. I'll probably aim for 30 FPS, since I can...

All images will be shot in RAW and batch processed in LR5.

Now, where I need help is advice on file format exporting from LR5 to then be imported into FCP. My initial thoughts are to set aspect ratio in LR to 16:9 and then export to tif, setting:

Compression: ZIP
Colour space: AdobeRGB (1998)
Bit depth: 8 bits

Resize to fit: long edge to 1920 pixels
Resolution: 72 DPI

This is just a guess; I'm pretty sure it will work, but I have no idea if these settings are optimal pr just naive guesses. I would like to produce the highest quality product I can for my friends, so I'm not too bothered about creating vast files providing they can be sensibly processed in FCP on my Mac Pro.

Last, but not least, would the settings change between a colour vs B&W video?
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Sareesh Sudhakaran

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CR2 cropped to DNG can be imported natively in FCP X. If you're grading before the edit, then uncompressed TIFF.
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bcooter

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I do a lot of this work for a cut frame look using a canon 1dx, Olympus omd and a panasonic gh3. and others.

There  might be easier ways to make this work, but I've never found them and I wrote a semi-white paper for you, threw it away, because there are so many variables.

But anyway back to the stills to video.

Are you shooting this for a cut frame look, or to produce smooth video, because if it's smooth it won't happen.  the mirror will give some form of flicker even at very high fps.  It looks cool, kind of retro, but it still will flicker and if the lighting is practicals they will also wave and flicker.

A word of caution.  Stills into video is tricky.  Compression for web can ruin it.  For some reasons there is a sweet spot on all of this and it really depends on how you shoot, how smooth you mount the camera, how fast the subject moves, the input functions, output functions, etc.

What looks amazing at full hd 1920x1080 with a high bitrate codec like prorezz will look awful at 1700kbs in web form and look like flies around the subject.   It takes a lot of experimentation, so do one session first, write down all of your settings,
process it out into different codec and see what works.

In reality if you want a smooth look use a video dv cam, if you want a cut frame look, use a video cam that goes to high iso, set the shutter at high speed, something like 2,000 and then play around with different codecs and fps in the NLE to get the look, because what your really talking about is a special effect and special effects are difficult.

These were cut frame looks, mostly from still  to motion, we shot and produced.

http://www.russellrutherford.com/magic/

http://www.russellrutherford.com/man/

IMO

BC
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fredjeang2

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Hi everyone

I'm an experienced photographer who has been asked to shoot stills for a three-minute music video. While I'm happy enough with stills I know next to nothing about video or animation work, but am prepared to put in the hours playing with FCP to get the job done.

A few details: the video will be 1920 x 1080, 'shot' with stills from a 5dii or 1Dx. I'll probably aim for 30 FPS, since I can...
Y
All images will be shot in RAW and batch processed in LR5.

Now, where I need help is advice on file format exporting from LR5 to then be imported into FCP. My initial thoughts are to set aspect ratio in LR to 16:9 and then export to tif, setting:

Compression: ZIP
Colour space: AdobeRGB (1998)
Bit depth: 8 bits

Resize to fit: long edge to 1920 pixels
Resolution: 72 DPI

This is just ] a guess; I'm pretty sure it will work, but I have no idea if these settings are optimal pr just naive guesses. I would like to produce the highest quality product I can for my friends, so I'm not too bothered about creating vast files providing they can be sensibly processed in FCP on my Mac Pro.

Last, but not least, would the settings change between a colour vs B&W video?

Tiff
Compression: none, nop, zero, nil, forbiden
Colorspace: srgb (unless you want to work in ps)
10 bits minimum

Ps: depending on the systems, you want to give
A look at OpenEXR (ps takes it), in the ILM website,
Wich is more storage efficient than Tiff and sprcially
Optimized for fx
You can also choose DPX.

Your master has to be rock solid as from it you'll create
Your families (archiving, web,broadcast, cine...)

A note: be carefull on the rezise before editing. You may
Want to use another composition on some takes and
Crop manually. If you do that before, then you are stucked
With the sequence already fitting the aspect ratio and reso
Wich will give you zero flexibility.
Personaly, i'll always keep the images 3 times your output
So it gives you room to make editorial decisions.

the general idea is not thinking final decisions at the
Beginning. It never works like that and you'll regret it.
For ex: you may think that you color correct your images
First and never look back. Bad calculation because there
Is a high probability that you will want to look back
At a different stage.
I will never get tired to repeat over and over again
The golden rules of editing:
1 STABILITY.  (no fancy compression-calculations. Don't
Stress the softwares with unproper material. )
2 FLEXIBILITY (never think final before the end)
« Last Edit: July 29, 2013, 04:56:09 am by fredjeang2 »
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JonRoemer

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Hi everyone

I'm an experienced photographer who has been asked to shoot stills for a three-minute music video. While I'm happy enough with stills I know next to nothing about video or animation work, but am prepared to put in the hours playing with FCP to get the job done.

A few details: the video will be 1920 x 1080, 'shot' with stills from a 5dii or 1Dx. I'll probably aim for 30 FPS, since I can...

All images will be shot in RAW and batch processed in LR5.

Now, where I need help is advice on file format exporting from LR5 to then be imported into FCP. My initial thoughts are to set aspect ratio in LR to 16:9 and then export to tif, setting:

Compression: ZIP
Colour space: AdobeRGB (1998)
Bit depth: 8 bits

Resize to fit: long edge to 1920 pixels
Resolution: 72 DPI

This is just a guess; I'm pretty sure it will work, but I have no idea if these settings are optimal pr just naive guesses. I would like to produce the highest quality product I can for my friends, so I'm not too bothered about creating vast files providing they can be sensibly processed in FCP on my Mac Pro.

Last, but not least, would the settings change between a colour vs B&W video?

If you are doing your grading within LR you could really export as a highest quality jpeg and be fine.  You won't be pushing/pulling the color & tone much further in the NLE if at all.  You can also export to sRGB.  AdobeRGB is not going to gain you anything.

This is a project shot with the 1DX.  The Light Inside.  Some background info is here -> The Movie Inside.  It was not shot shot initially to be a video but to result in a vertical print ad.  So, the challenge was in adapting that to video.  The footage was shot at 6 fps and was brought into to Quicktime at 6 fps and then into FCP X (24 fps timeline.)

In terms of shooting - if it is action based and you are relying on AF then go with the 1DX not the 5D.  For The Light Inside I shot as wide open as f/1.2 and AF was superb with the 1DX.  The 1DX also has vastly better low-light performance if that's a factor.

In terms of workflow - building a timelapse clip can be done in FCP X or Quicktime. It is easier to do it in Quicktime and then bring those series of clips into you NLE.  In my case, I was using Aperture, and since I had both vertical & horizontals, I exported highest quality 72 dpi sRGB jpegs to fit within 1920 x 2880 (w x h).  That way verticals could be cropped to 1920 x 1080 without any loss of quality.  You can also export to larger 72 dpi files if you want more options to crop in losslessly.

If you want motion blur similar to film/video footage then lock your shutter at 1/50 for 24 fps, 1/60 for 30 fps, etc.

Don't forget that if you are going to want dissolves and other transitions that you need extra footage for each clip before and after the main action.
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Beamengine

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Thanks everyone

Your help is much appreciated
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