Picture Styles & Grading

Came across these excellent videos from Adam Stevenson on Vimeo.com. I represent them here with his permission, cheers Adam!

Here you’ll learn some useful other potential picture styles, and in the comments you can find links to picture styles you can upload to your camera using EOS Utility (Canon only, sorry!). Just plug your camera in, set it to manual camera mode and then click ‘Register User Defined Style’ then upload the files Adam offers to your User Defined 1, 2 or 3.

Adam also shows in his video use of Magic Bullet Looks, an awesome suite of grading tools from Red Giant Software.

Canon 550D / T2i Picture Style Colour Settings

A quick video tutorial on how to set up User Defined Picture Style for video on the Canon 550D / T2i

A little something about Picture Styles

Rather than recording all the data captured by the sensor like cameras like the RED (a format loosely known as RAW) most DSLR’s when shooting video save data via a filter algorithm (known as a codec), in Canon’s case the widely used H.264 or MPEG-4.

It’s a simple flow of information from sensor through filter to card. This filter algorithm works out what information isn’t needed to be remembered for the video to still look okay. Its much like the way music is stripped of frequencies not audible to the human ear by the MP3 codec. It’s a simple case of space-saving for the card and buffer.

Now in most Canon cameras the filter algorithm is called the ‘picture style’. These are pre-set filters made by Canon, aiming to record the right information to make your video look its best, given you match what you’re shooting with what the picture style is called. So for example, if you’re shooting a landscape Canon think their ‘Landscape’ picture style would save the right mix of pixels to the card to make your video look just right.

Now these might be fine when you’re shooting photos in JPEG (they were originally designed to process photos not shot in RAW), but if you’re shooting video you’ll want to have control over what is saved to the card. Why? Well to properly colour correct your footage and get its looking its best you’ll need the right mix of properly exposed pixels to work with. So its really nice to know that Canon let you design and install on the camera some of your own picture styles. These can be designed in detail in the EOS utility and uploaded to the camera or quickly made in-camera by changing the Sharpness, Contrast, Colour Saturation and Colour Tone. You’ll also want to look at the White Balance Shift to take out any colour casts your lens or sensor may be making.

Now I know what you’re thinking, ‘Nick, what’s the best picture style for video?’ and the answer is it all depends on what you’re shooting, where you’re shooting and what you need to get out of the pictures. General consensus is that flatter and closer to a RAW photo the profile is, the more information is stored and can therefore be played with in post production. If you don’t want to put the time in messing with it in post you can always use a picture style that emulates your favourite film stock or effect. There’s loads of user defined styles out on the Internets so have a Google, load them up onto your camera and see what you like.

Personally I’d rather get a nice flat images so the camera records as much detail as possible in what will eventually be the highlights and shadows. This gives me more latitude to play with things in post and see where I want my image to sit in the grand scheme of detail and exposure. It’ll also give any colour correcting effects the maximum opportunity to keep detail in the picture.

Your brain, frame rates and why you should have a variable ND filter

This is going to be a bit of a long post, but stick with it okay?

Everything* in the visual arts can be traced back to the way the brain
processes the information given to it by the eyes and ears.

Roughly speaking the brain sees and decodes a continuous stream of information coming from the eyes. There is a point at which this decoded data can merge together. This can change given different lighting and motion conditions. Roughly speaking the point at which the brain cannot decode individual pictures and see them as distinct frames is about 25 individual shots per second (this is a massive subject area and would take hours of reading just to start to understand, so go with me on that, okay?).

Because of this, when television was developed it only needed to show a picture 25
times a second** to convince us simple humans that we’re seeing fluid
motion rather than a series of still images. Because of the way early televisions projected these
pictures they could only show half the frame at a time. So if you
slowed down a television picture enough you’ll see it only changes the top half and then bottom half of the frame at a time (progressive) or
alternately refreshes lots of horizontal lines (interlaced). The miss-matching
of these projection techniques is why computer monitors have that
scanning look when filmed. To make 25 full pictures a second the television actually shows 50 part-pictures.

Why is this important to us as DSLR filmmakers? Because these 50 part-
pictures dictate our shutter speeds. The choice of shutter speed should, for maximum
quality of picture, be a multiple of the frames-per-second you’re
shooting. So if you’re shooting 25fps you should have a shutterspeed
of 1/50, 50fps should have a shutterspeed of 1/100.

You should also take into account what you’re intending to do with the footage. If you’re going to slow the shot down in post production you should shoot at a multiple of the native shutter speed for your intended frame rate division. For example if you’re shooting at 50fps and intend to slow the shutter speed down by half to 25fps you should be shooting at double the native shutter speed, so 1/200.

So your shutterspeed is fixed, how are you going to control exposure? There’s two options, one is the aperture and the other is the ISO. One of the reasons for using a DSLR is to get that beautiful depth-of-field and aperture is your key to that,so you can’t really mess with it too much. Thats just ISO left and you can’t go down in ISO only up, which adds noise. What to do? What to do?

Well the best piece of kit to easily control exposure without having to mess with your shutterspeed, aperture or ISO is a variable neutral density filter, something that has been present inside of television cameras for sometime. This piece of glass attaches to the front of your lens like any other filter and rotates just like a polariser. Rotation of a variable ND produces reduction in light entering the lens and getting to the sensor leaving you clear to shoot side open and at your native shutterspeed. Its also infinity variable so when filming continuously from a bright to dark environment you can just rotate the variable ND as you go. They’re not cheap, and you need to make sure the one you buy doesn’t cast a colour across your picture or vignette your shot.

But if you’re serious about using your DSLR as a proper video camera you’ll be wanting this little bit of glass eventually.

*mostly, probably
**different frames per second are possible. These are all processed by
your brain slightly differently, making different cinematic effects.

www.MobyGratis.com

One of the most overlooked parts of post production is the audio.

Fact.

Fail to include incidental music and spot effects and your masterpiece is nothing but a shell of pretty pictures and (sometimes) shaky dialogue.

And thats where www.MobyGratis.com comes in to help. Its a free-to-register site that lets independent, non-profit film-makers and students download and use music from Moby in their projects. If you need to get a commercial licence then there’s a simple form to sort that out too.

MPEG Streamclip

Anyone making any kind of digital video will probably find this useful – MPEG Streamclip is a converting and transcoding tool which will let you work accross almost any video & audio format.

Already aware of VLC media player? This is the VLC of the conversion world. Even better, its totally free for both PC and Mac! Bravo to Squared5 the developers, big thanks for your work on this!

We have found through various tests that it is often better to take the native footage that comes from cameras such as Canon’s 7D and 550D and convert it from H.264 to a  less render intensive format such as XDCAM – this will allow you add certain effects in Final Cut Pro with minimal and in some cases no rendering time.

Hello there!

Welcome to ExposureHD. We are about to launch a full site all about our learning of film making with Digital SLR cameras. From the 500D through to the 1D from Canon, and the Nikon D90, we are very exciting about this new dawn of film making with simple, low cost equipment, empowering all manner of people previously with no access to such equipment.

We aren’t historic filmmakers, we are a group of photographers, developers and authors who are taking a new interest to the web. As such you’ll see us post all manner of stuff we’ve tried and tested, things we’ve seen online and in person and much more, hope you enjoy the site!