Guest post by Jeremy…
Video stabilization is a great tool for tweaking and smoothing video that was shot with out (or even with) the use of some sort of rigging to keep the vibrations at a low rate. I use Final Cut Pro to edit my video, and have always been impressed with the results of the default Smoothcam filter/effect. I was asked by Alain to do a review on CoreMelt Lock and Load X and give my honest opinion.
I ran the video through 2 different tests, the first was a simple pan that was shot without the use of my tripod. The footage was about equal on both parties results. I was impressed with Lock & Loads X (LLX) speed. It took Final Cut Pro over 2 minutes to analyze the footage, while LLX analyzed it in under 15 seconds, with a render of about 20 more seconds. The final end product were about the same. I left everything on the default settings for this run and was impressed with the results.
For the second footage, I decided to test a moving object, an old spinning mill wheel at a local resort. FCP’s Smoothcam took over 5 minutes to analyze the footage, while LLX took only 45 seconds with a render time of 30 seconds after that. These results were not as cut and dry.
The Smoothcam render has a noticeable wave coming from the right side of the screen, at the base of the mill. If your looking at it, the footage seems like it is spinning. I know this is due to the fact of how Smoothcam processes the data.
LLX’s footage was a bit rough around the edges, I had to go in and play with the settings to get a decent shot. I actually ran the footage through two different ways, one in the “lockdown” stabilization mode, the other in the “smooth single shot” option. I was not as impressed with the footage. I did some tweaking on the “lockdown” mode to get it as smooth as possible. I admit, I could be doing something wrong, but compared to the “smooth single shot” the footage was better. The “smooth single shot” mode is the default setting when you start LLX to process the footage, and what I have noticed on the video I shot (along with the video on the demo real on Coremelt’s website) is that when using this method, the stabilized video becomes wavy, almost like your video was being projected onto a white screen blowing in the wind. With the hints of movement, it can make your audience feel seasick. I am going to continue using the trial and if I come across findings that alter my judgement, I will post them below.
Pros
It’s fast, and non intrusive to the editing process. The whole process is very easy and the support from CoreMelt’s website walks you through step by step with great explanations on the science that goes on behind the scenes. Coremelt’s plug ins have a reign of success because they are efficient at what they do. For panning shots, I encourage you to try the LLX plugin.
Cons
I was not impressed with the really shaky footage. The warping effect would deter me from using this plugin on anything more than panning shots. Any action shot I ran through the process was playing too many tricks on my eyes. Even though I got the same experience with the Smoothcam filter, I was more impressed with the footage for shots like this. Even on the footage they have on their website’s demo reel, the you can see there are issues with the periodic wave of pixels going in and out.
Result
As stated before, panning shots are awesome and LLX is a time saver. Is it worth the $150 price tag… not in my opinion. Even the time ratio equation doesn’t work for me. Since Smoothcam can work in the background, it isn’t so intrusive I would consider buying a program to help, I would invest it in better stabilizing gear to get the proper shot in the first place. I am not badmouthing CoreMelt’s programs, they have other great plugins you should try for yourself.
I just saw on CanonRumors the press release of the 60D.
Here is the executive summary:
- 18 MP APS-C CMOS sensor
- Advanced creative features with Basic +
- Vari-angle 7.7cm (3.0”) 3:2 ratio LCD
- Full HD movies with manual control (same settings as the 7D)
- DIGIC 4
- ISO 100-6400, H:12800
- 5.3fps shooting for up to 58 JPEGs
- 9-point cross type AF System
- iFCL metering with 63-zone Dual-layer Sensor
- Integrated Speedlite transmitter
- In-camera RAW processing
Priced at about 1100$, it is probably going to replace the 7D as the second camera for a lot of shooters (and main camera for a lot of people too!).
Other than its attractive price point, I really like the vari-angle LCD. Its usefulness is very context dependent but for shooting from a tripod or steadicam device, it is going to be a life saver. Actually, I think it is THE feature that will make this camera a must have for a lot of HDSLR shooters.
We will have to wait for official reviews before calling it a 7D killer, but lets say everything looks like it since they share so many features.
Note: Canon also released a bunch of pro lenses, we will talk about these very soon.
You can get it (reservation) here from BH Photo or from Amazon
. Hurry up, I think they will sell quite fast!
I dont post clips (from others) often (maybe I should?), but I think this one deserve some visibility for many reasons. First because free running (aka parkour) is cool, second, because it was shot with an HDSLR (Canon 7D) and, finally, because it was made by a visitor of the blog (who turned into a friend) who could use some exposure: Chad Bonanno.
When Chad contacted me a few months ago about how to balance a Glidecam 4000 with an HDSLR, I thought he was a wedding shooter then forgot about it until I saw the video he has been working on. Lets just say that I was wrong!
About Dan
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I’ve lived here my whole life. I started up gymnastics when I was about 13. When I graduated I left gymnastics and started freerunning. Since then I have turned my passion into a career and a full time job. I am also currently pursuing my career in stunts an plan on making this a life long journey.
I had the idea to shoot a high production video for quite some time but I never had the behind-the-camera skills to do so. So for a long time it just stayed an idea. When I met Chad banana I realized that my idea could become real some day. So we sat down talked it out and got to work. We spent 5 weeks of filming trying to pump out as much as we could each day. This became tough once my body started to get tired of filming each week. But despite injuries and aches and bruises we pushed through to the end. After all the action was done the video was then given to Paul Darnell to cut and edit. Once that was done, the torch was then passed to Chad bonanno. He worked his magic on the video and gave her a little nip/tuck. Finally, after a ling process the monster had come to life. So far the video has gone way beyond what we had expected and we hope it continues to do so.
About Chad
My name is Chad Bonanno, I am a Art Director and Animator based in Los Angeles, and also do a lot of action and glamour photography on the side. I have taken a particular interest in the Canon 7D series, and that is my weapon of choice. I hooked up with Team Tempest in 2009 and started doing design and animation projects with them, but when the time came to give one of Team Tempest members Dan Mast a new Demo reel, I jumped at the opportunity. Using the Canon 7D , a Canon 16-35mm and Canon 10-22mm (also a Tameron 10-24) and a GlideCam 4000, we got to work. Shooting all over LA, in locations such as downtown LA, UCLA campus , Santa Monica , and Hollywood. The shoots are pretty fast paced, since the freerunning moves are very flowy and quick, you have to have your setup locked down before shooting. On the other hand, it is a run-and-gun situation because a lot of the locations we shoot prohibit parkour due to liability issues amongst other things. Victor Lopez assisted in many of the 5 days of shooting as a coordinator , Victor being a lead member of Team Tempest, guided day with creative direction while I worked out the camera moves and angles. I used 2 other B camera shooters, Dave Kim and Mark Williams.
Here are a few behind the scene shots I selected. I piked these because they show the scale of Dan jumps and also give an idea of the camera man job!
The overall result is excellent and we should expect more from Chad in the coming months in this domain.
A few technicalities
- The shooting was done in 5 days, spread over 5 weeks.
- Keeping the action in focus was done by shooting at f4-f5.6, measuring the distance to the subject and trying to keep up with him!
- Grading was done In After Effects
- Mostly desired item for the shoot would have been a quick release plate on the GlideCam to reduce the setup time
Gear used
Just a quick follow up on my post about the new Red Rock Micro Nano Rigs announcement. I receive an email from Brian, and he is not too happy about my comments on the announcement. Well, I would not be either if I was in the RRM gang.
I wont go into the details of the email exchange (dont worry, everything was very civilized and polite!) but I think it would be fair to RRM to state a few points.
First, these rigs were build around two restrictions: cost and weight. They receive a lot of requests for lighter rigs and wanted to have an offering for the market segment. Now they do, I just wished they put the rigs weight on the product page (!). Also, they should use lighter bodies for their product page too. Regarding the cost, well.. it is cheaper than Zacuto for sure and I doubt anyone is complaining on that front!
We also talked about the lowdown handle not positioned correctly: it should be pointing in front of the rig instead of at its back. Brian told me the handle direction can be configured to fit what ever the owner wants, so that is a good thing. Still, I think they should have shown it in at least one of the picture. He did not comment on the use of the hot shoe mount, which is a bad thing if you are using heavy lenses.
Also, I told him about a bad experience I had with a Captain Stubling where the knob of an handle got loose and made the rig tip over and fell off the table on a concrete floor (the lens survied by miracle!). It seems like they recently improved the knobs, which is a good thing:
and my guess is you were also probably using an earlier version of our handgrips, which we’ve really improved over the past few months including all-machined clamps and lift-and-lock knobs
Could anyone confirm this?
While this exchange did not change my mind about the usability of the Grippit and Low Down for users of heavy HDSLRs (7D, 5D, etc…) it provided more info on the products.
By the way, if you are in the Montreal area and plan to buy one of these rigs, I would love to steal it from you for a day to test it out.
I just saw on Planet5D a Red Rock Micro product announcement: the Nano rigs. Basically, these are small HDSLR rigs similar to the Zacuto Striker line but cheaper.
—Disclaimer—
I haven’t tested these rigs yet. Actually, knowning RRM order policy, it could take months before I do. They build everything in JIT mode (just in time) which basically means that once you place an order, it could take a while to get it. Here it is, directly from their web site:
Build to order
All products are product on a build-to-order process. You place your order and pay in advance, and we put your order into the production process and ship it to you when it is ready. This process allows us to minimize inventory costs, and helps us to provide the low prices to you without sacrificing quality.
I don’t know if things have changed, but I know some visitors contacted me last year telling me they had to wait weeks before getting their gear (many had to cancel their orders and moved to the Z store).
—End disclaimer—
So, let’s take a quick look at these rigs.
The LowDown
WTF? Do you really think I am going to trust a camera hot shoe to hold my HDSLR? Unless you are using one of the smallest HDSLRs, I would totally advice against this rig and even Canon says (somewhere that I can’t find for the sake of Google) that you should never hold your camera from the hot shoe! Have they tried it with a 5DMrkII + 16-35L?.
Also, from a usability point of view, I really wonder if they ever tested the rig outside of a studio photoshoot. The position of the handle is totally wrong! With the camera weight all in front of the handle, a lot of pressure is put on the wrist to keep the camera straight instead of pointing down. A few minute of this and your wrist is either tired or injured. Look at this model, does she look relaxed?
GripIt
The product description says:
The Grippit is a simple economical way to create added stability in a minimalist rig. A sturdy rubberized grip combined with the nano DSLR baseplate keeps hands off the camera and results in smoother video.
Do they test their products or what? How can handling your HDSLR in one hand increase stability? Don’t they know basic math: the further a point is from its center of rotation, the less stable it is. This rig put the axis of rotation about 6 inches off the camera. How could this be more stable than just holding the camera in your hand?
The only use I can find for this rig is for very small HDSLR that are actually lighter than the GripIt so it adds from weight to it.
Running Man
This one is actually ok. It looks like a simplified version of the Zacuto Striker with less adjustment knobs. I will have to wait until I get better pictures of the rig to comment.
Conclusion
You may think I don’t like RRM and you are right. My experience so far with their products has been very bad. The HDSLR revolution started two years ago and this product line does not offer anything new from a design perspective. To me, it looks more like a marketing push to increase sales than anything else. Come on! These are not real new products, these are just new packaging of already existing parts.
There is a reason why I don’t put RRM ads on my site, and I don’t think this article is going to help! If you see any bloggers excited about this announcement, you can bet they are building a relationship with RRM.
If you dont have a Z-finder or can’t even afford a LCDVF, here is a great opportunity for you to win one. Hangrip will be giving one away in a raffle at the end of the month. So far, the odds are very good, with only 44 participants at the time of writing but I have a feeling this number will go up very soon!
Just visit Hangrip!
This part 2 of Jon Lightroom 3 review. You can see the introduction in is first post and the second part here.
ACR 6.1
The newest incarnation of Lightroom uses the new Adobe Camera Raw 6.1 for it’s RAW conversion. Since this is a review of Lightroom and not ACR, I’m not going to get into the nuances of the newest ACR suffice to say that overall it appears to be an improvement over previous versions. One of the first things new users will notice is an exclamation point icon on the bottom of some images. This message is that LR wants to apply the new ACR default settings to the image. Upon allowing the update, you will notice a slight change in the handling of shadows, color rendition and a few other areas and overall, it looks good. If you’re someone who prefers the camera manufacturers software for RAW conversion, you’re probably still going to prefer those. The color rendition, quality of detail and overall fidelity provided in those programs (Canon Photo Professional, can’t speak for NX2) still has an edge over Adobe’s CR. This should be expected, given that ACR accommodates almost all types of RAW images and therefore isn’t quite as specialized as those from the Camera makers. That said, for those who do prefer ACR for it’s convenience and options will be very pleased with the new engine overall.
The only downside to the new engine is that you need to have ACR 6.1 running on your system, meaning you need to be running Photoshop CS5. If not, than you will need to render RAW images in LR before opening in Photoshop, which means an extra TIF (if that’s your selected preference for external editing) on your drive and more time spent waiting for an editable-image to be created before being re-opened. Of course, LR offers the option of “open anyway” rather then “render using Lightroom” but the results are inconsistent and frankly a bit unreliable for accurate rendition and conversion. So, if you’re not running CS5 be prepared for a little extra leg work to reap the full benefits of Lightroom3’s develop Module.
Noise Reduction Improvement
Adobe is pushing heavily the improved performance of Noise Reduction in LR3, which is no surprise since Noise Reduction is an item of large interest for photographers given the “Noise Wars” being waged between the camera manufacturers to push the high-iso-noise-performance envelop further and further. So the question is, how good is LR’s new noise reduction? The short answer is very good, in fact certainly better than previous versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. Luminance and color noise are handled nicely with details staying largely intact (compared to previous versions) and realistic. To get a sense of the improvement, I’ve set up the comparison below between LR3 and LR2, Aperture3 and noise Photoshop plugins Nik Dfine and Imageonic Noiseware. I’ll be posting the results soon.
Lens Correction Tool
Another crucial addition to the develop module is the inclusion of the Lens Correction tool. The LC too is taken directly from Photoshop, with all of the same parameters with the exception of scale and edge transparency (I would not recommend using the LC tool for scaling anyway). In addition to the default Photoshop parameters, Lightroom has raised the bar by including it’s own camera/lens profiles- similar to DXO software. These profiles, when applied, automatically correct a the image based on the lens and camera preset detected by LR. This is an excellent feature, and works well for most images. I would, as a recommendation use the automatic profiles as a starting point, as different images shot in varying situations will certainly require different levels of correction. Another great feature is the ability to batch lens correct, as the lens correct option has been added to the list of options when syncing develop settings across a number of photographs. Overall, the LC tool is yet another vital work flow time saver especially when trying to stay solely in Lightroom for image editing.
As some of you may remember, a few weeks ago I discussed the backup strategy/workflow outlined by Chase Jarvis and promised a tutorial on how to use GIT to add versioning & multi computer sync to your workflow.
While I havent completed the GIT tutorial yet, I decided to git a shot to Dropbox to take care of the multi-syncing across computers and off site backup. So far, it is working very well.
As noted in the initial post, I am not using these versioning/backup solutions to store the RAW stills/original H.264 files but only to store the XML and project files which are much smaller.
While I find the GIT workflow more flexible and faster, Dropbox is a nice alternative to anyone who does not want to learn a new command line tool.
This time, Jemery is looking for a cheaper alternative to the ‘official’ Manfrotto tripod.
One misconception that rookies might have is thinking that their old tripod will work just fine for shooting videos with an HDSLR… please don’t make the same mistake I did. If you are going to get serious about shooting video, there are things you will have to purchase in addition to your camera. A follow focus is a must for video, along with a slider of some sort. I had been shooting with a very dependable Targus tripod, just a run of the mill light weight – take it anywhere system… it took only a few shoots to look like an fool thinking that I would be alright with what I had.
Being budget conscious I scoured local stores first, then Amazon for a tripod that would fit my budget (needed to stay under $200) and provide stability along with a fluid head. I purchased the Ravelli AVTP Professional 75mm Tripod
I give this tripod a solid 5 stars. It is an inexpensive alternative to a higher and more pricey system and will serve its purpose well. Even with the dolly you can get shots that work well.
Pros
Inexpensive, solid and sturdy. Allows for little vibrations while shooting. I don’t mid that it is heavy, it can hold 20 pounds of weight effortlessly and that is worth it’s bulkiness to me.
Cons
Stiff while panning. It takes a few tries to get the muscles in your body to remember the tension. There are screws that you can adjust to make panning easier, but if you mess up you can ruin the panning entirely. Not willing to take that chance – not yet at least.
Now the Admin take on this
As stated by Jeremy, there is a big difference between still and video tripods and trying to work with the wrong kind of support system is asking for troubles. I have shot with a vast array of tripods and while the Manfrotto 525MVB
A bowl allows you to setup the tripod first, then make it level with the ground instead of having to adjust each leg separately until the whole thing is level. This is a major time saver and well worth the extra money.
There are a few other things to look for but I will keep these for a later post.
Moral of the story? While heavy, the Ravelli is a very affordable entry level video tripod with some pro features. Of course, you can’t expect it to perform as its 1000$ Italian cousin, but at a fraction of the price, it is hard to go wrong with this tool.
This part 2 of Jon Lightroom 3 review. You can see the introduction in is first post.
Import Dialog
One of the first things you’ll notice about LR3 is the new import Dialog, which is largely different than previous versions. The simple dialog box of old is gone and replaced with a full screen window complete with a large preview area. The preview area is the most significant improvement- you can now preview images and video before importing and can un-check any you don’t want to ingest- a nice feature (and overdue!). However, in exchange for a more sophisticate import dialog we are also given a slightly more complex interface, with essential source and destination information on opposite sides of the screen. This can make a normally simple task of simply importing, renaming, and adding metadata, cataloging and backing up a little more tedious. It also doesn’t help that they’ve now included a few seemingly unimportant options for these tasks, for example the rename images by shoot in addition to custom name. In other words, LR3 will add the words “shoot_whateveryouwant-1”. It would be just as easy to do this with a custom name, and with this option they’ve just made the list unnecessarily longer. Another annoyance of the new import dialog is that you will get it when importing ANY new images, even simply updating a folder. This essentially creates an extra step in the workflow, i.e. importing tiffs or psd back into LR after they’ve been processed in Photoshop. For photogs who require speed and consistency and are used the efficiency of previous versions of Lightroom in this regard may be surprised when they find themselves being slowed up by these little nuances of the new import dialog.
