Shooting Tips & DSLR

If anyone needs remote monitoring and recording with iphone here is how to do it. You need:

1. a mac with wireless capability (I have not tried it with a PC)
2. EOS utility
3. iphone
4. VNC iphone app like iteleport or any VNC app that allows screen sharing.

Red Giant Software has just dropped a new tool into the family of Magic Bullet products and it might be of great interest to the DSLR shooter. Magic Bullet Grinder is a simple application tasked with transcoding your Canon 5D/7D/1D files out of their H.264 native state and into something a bit more usable. It also can create lower resolution offline versions of the same clips for editorial should you be in an offline to online position. While simple, Magic Bullet Grinder works quite well and has a few tricks up its sleeve.

"Help Me", the season 6 finale of "House", was shot with Canon 5D Mk II HDSLRs using off-the-shelf Canon still lenses. This past week, Director of Photography Gale Tattersal quashed a few rumors about how the show was shot, and commented on what he liked about using the Canons as cine cameras.

Hybrid DSLR video is a kludge - having to duct tape together all the parts necessary just to get the tool to do what it mostly should. Mainstream video cameras present a known quantity - they do what they do because they were designed to.

The H.264 compression just gums up the works! So, the footage needs to be converted into a more useable format and here are the Videoguys' recommendations based on the editing software you're going to use:

Klix Digital Picture Recovery. This $29 piece of software is worth every penny, and then some. After scanning my sd card, it built a list of all of the missing files. However, it did NOT include a preview - which at first led me to believe the files were not recoverable. But in fact, they were.

The way I discovered this was by trying the nuclear option - a company called Aero Quartet that has a sweet piece of software for Mac that you can download to diagnose your broken Quicktime files, called Treasured.

There's a lot of interesting talk about a new aesthetic for video journalism. New cameras, but more importantly, new ideas are breathing new life into video storytelling, and starting to break those rusty screws which so far have bolted video journalism to it's televisual parent.

A lot of people were concerned there was going to be a bias towards DSLRs and we were doing this to show that film is dead. Far from it. Every one of is, especially the ones like me who have never shot 35mm, respect and love film. After all I have been desperately trying to emulate that "film look" all my career on video. These Canon DSLRs have really been "game changers" for me. I love what they do, am totally aware of their limitations and simply work around them. Every single camera has limitations. The DSLRs are no exception.

"The Great Camera Shootout 2010: a three part web series where gunslinging HD DSLRs face-off against legendary 35mm Film." The webisodic series showcases the top performing hybrid HD-DSLR cameras: Canon: 5D MKII, 7D, 1D, 550D/T2i Rebel, Nikon D3s, Panasonic GH1 and compares the image quality of these cameras against the gold standard of 35mm film. In addition, the Canon 5D MKII test includes the new 24p firmware.

Making production life easier with your phone
Here are a few of the apps I have been using regularly on my iPhone 3Gs that has taken my phone from, "Nice" to "I can't live with out it."

The show itself was shot with 7 5Ds. 3 were stationary cameras capturing a wider shot of the stage. The other 4 were handheld: 2 in front of the stage and 2 on either side that could move behind as well. The handheld and focus questions were two that were answered early on. Being this was more of a rock n roll style show it was decided that handheld-type movement was something we could embrace. Add to that the shallow depth of field and rack focusing capabilities and you have a large part of the style of the show.

It's important to note that you have to have the proper folder structure of your CF card intact for the EOS Movie Plugin-E1 to read the media. You can't just point to a folder full of H.264 QuickTimes that you've backed up from a CF card and transcode them. You'll get the usual Log and Transfer error:

Enter the new EOS MOVIE Plugin-E1 for Final Cut Pro. You can download it from Canon's website my selecting Mac OS X from the Drivers / Software Selection on the website.

Such a plug-in eliminates the need to send a batch through Compressor (or another transcoding application) to make ProRes files from your H.264 originals. While there's still very valid reasons to use a Compressor-like workflow (speed, multicore or distributed rendering, transcoding on a different workstation) it makes good sense to be able to do this in Log and Transfer as well.

I am going to attempt to cover the majority of everything I've learned about the 7D since I started shooting with it.
The Canon 7D has limitations that have been well documented all over the web.What do I know about the Canon 7D that could be helpful?
Something simple yet one of the most important steps when shooting with the Canon 7D , Canon 5D MKII, and any other camera really, is flattening the color.

If you are shooting video with one of the hot new DSLRs, you are probably aware of the aliasing issues found in some of your footage. If not yet, you will at some point. Just keep shooting, it will show up. Fine detail aliasing has always been an issue for any camera system, but it's particularly prevalent in DSLRs as they lack an Optical Low Pass Filter (OLPF) that is specifically tuned for video. In the case of the 5D & 7D, engineers at Canon have also chosen to sample a limited number of lines from the image sensor to downsample to 1080p.

Funny side note...when written moire, it's pronounced "mwahr." Moiré with the French accent aigu mark is pronounced "mwahr-AY."

One of the things that I wanted to do right away was find a way to shoot longer master shots on a dolly to facilitate our schedule. This allowed us to combine a large amount of coverage into one long shot, and yet still be creative with the camera blocking. The following narrated behind-the-scenes video is a case study exploring the way we handled one such dolly shot. The goal here is to show just one of many possible approaches to the creative challenges we encountered on this shoot.

Teaching the craft of camera operating is extremely difficult to do well, so I'm going to do it half-assed and give you some random tips that may help you along in your career.

There's a lot more to being an operator than skill in moving the camera. It's a very political job as well. I'll address some of both aspects in this article.

LEARN THE GEARED HEAD, WHEN IN DOUBT, KEEP MOVING, ETC

Jepson's setup involves two Sound Devices 302 mixers linked together. Audio sources include a Schoeps CMC6 boom-mounted mic or a Neumann KMR82 mic and up to five channels of Lectrosonics wireless lavalier mics mixed to the second channel. The 302's stereo outs are sent to the camera via stereo wireless with IFB sent back the camera's return feed. From the mixer, Jepson occasionally sends a wireless feed of either the left or right signal out to a second camera on site and/or a wireless headphone mix to the director.