After playing around with it about a day now I am quite surprised how much fun it is to work with. Here is a snapshot I took of our lovely doggy, colorgraded in Aperture:

And here is a video I took with the Canon 5D Mk2 and the Lensbaby Composer of my sister playing piano, colorgraded in Apple Color:

Music is by “We are wolves“.

With my Canon HDSLRs (Canon 5D MK II and 7D) I am shooting in the standard picture profile with the contrast setting turned completely down which gives the image a little more dynamic range. To lift shadow areas and crush bright areas even further I use the free Shadow/Highlight Plugin from Lyric Image Control. You can download it here
Since I have a quite flat image right now I can reapply contrast. 3-Way Color Corrector works very well for this but I am using an old preset from Magic Bullet Editors (which isn’t available anymore) called “LS Max Contrast”. Magic Bullet Editors has been updated to Magic Bullet Looks which also has a preset called “Max Contrast” but in my opinion they aren’t the same.
Last thing to do is to color correct skin tones. With the process of killing contrast and reapplying it, in frequent cases skin tones come out bad. I fire up my vectorscope which has the wonderful feature of a reference line for skin tones built in. (See the white arrow in the screenshot here)

With the 3-Way Color Corrector limited to just the skin tones I can push the skincolor towards the skintone line in the vectorscope. In the example above I had to push a little bit towards yellow. The result at first sight might look a little bit yellowish, but thats just because you have been used to looking at reddish skintones. Hold your hand up to the image and you’ll see that the skintones are correct.
The skintone line in Vectorscope is your friend!

One quick tip when color correcting skintones: If you want to limit the vectorscope display to a specific part of the image, just use the crop tool in the motion tab of the clip to crop the image to just the area where skintone is visible. That way you can work specific on your skintones and when you’re done just remove the crop.

Halios LAN test: Setup for the drive test. I just ran the read/write tests.

I tested following drive configurations: Apple software striped RAID (configured in disk utility with 32k and 128k blocks) with two 1,5TB 7200rpm internal SATA drives, internal VelociRaptor SAS drive with 10,000rpm and 300GB, internal SATA drive with 7200rpm and 1,5 TB, external SATA drive with 7200rpm and 1,0TB connected via eSATA over the Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P and an external SATA drive with 7200rpm and 1,0TB connected via USB 2.0. Here are the results:

Conclusion: A striped RAID is fast! Even the disk utility-software-configured RAID is. And eSATA is fast too. So my workflow is as following: Use the VelociRaptor for system files, use the one internal SATA for stock footage and stuff, use the striped RAID for daily work, but backup frequently to external SATA drives via eSATA.

My travel-by-plane-gear. Click on the image to view in higher resolution.

Of course this kit doesn’t include a professional tripod, my slider, audio-equipment and lighting. But for quick jobs when you are bound to fly somewhere it is perfect in my opinion. When on set our setup looks like this:

Our set rig with the 5D, 7D, Zoom, NTG-3 boom, Miller tripod and two Kinoflo 4Banks.

I don’t have a picture to prove that I fit everything you see on the first picture into my backpack – including the Vocas mattebox and the D-Focus follow focus I got after taking this picture. Just believe me, it works!

~41 Mbit/s from the 5D + ~44 Mbit/s from the 7D + ~100 Mbit/s from Cineform + ~80 Mbit/s from ProRes LT = 265 Mbit/s or 33,125 MB/s or nearly 2 GB/min

I haven’t seen anyone blogging about his backup workflows, so here is mine: First thing to do when coming home after a shoot is copying the source footage off the CF cards to my local drives (see picture 1)

Picture 1: Downloading source footage off the CF cards.

I have the four drives on my MacPro configured as following: The drive in bay 1 is the system drive. This drive is reserved for the operating system and applications. I am using a fast VelociRaptor HD from Western Digital with 10,000 RPM and 300GB of storage for this.
Bay 2-4 are filled with generic 500GB 7200 RPM drives configured as a striped-RAID for maximum performance. I did the RAID configuration within Apple’s disk utility (see picture 2).

Picture 2: Apple's disk utility configuration of a striped RAID.

After the source footage was copied to the internal drives I start the conversion processes. First to Cineform, then to ProRes LT via MPEG Streamclip. I save all the data in separate directories inside a master directory named after the job. After conversion, editing, exporting, etc. I usually have loads of data to backup.

In the past when I was filming with HDV cameras I used to either burn the whole job directory to spanning DVDs which resulted in a massive amount of burnt DVDs, was time consuming and expensive, or I copied the job directory to external drives connected via Firewire. Due to changing models and types of external HD enclosures I was drowning in different power supplies for different drives – a disaster! Moreover I didn’t want to pay the extra money for HD enclosures (Firewire-enabled enclosures are particularly expensive) when all I needed was the bare storage space. I didn’t plan to take the drive on a voyage!

My perfect backup workflow I found works as following:
I bought a SATA connection dock from Sharkoon called SATA Quickport Duo. (see picture 3)

Picture 3: SATA Quickport Duo for bare SATA drives.

This allows me to plug-in two bare SATA drives at a time, without enclosure. The dock connects to the workstation either with USB 2.0 or with eSATA. With USB both drives share one connection, but with eSATA each drive bay has it’s own connector on the back of the dock. In addition to this, eSATA is about 7x faster than USB. Only problem is that no Mac to this time has eSATA connections built-in.

So I bought a eSATA PCI-Express card from Sonnet, in particular the Tempo SATA E2P (see picture 4).

Picture 4: eSATA PCI-Express card for my MacPro.

When connected via eSATA, the copying performance of the SATA drives is outstanding. I get around 73 MB/s per drive. (see picture 5)

Picture 5: Copy performance of a eSATA connected drive.

So what I do now is after I finished working on a job, I copy the whole job directory including all the source and converted footage onto a fresh and bare SATA drive, catalog the drive’s content with CDFinder and store them encased and labeled in a protective plastic case in a drawer. (see picture 6)

Picture 6: Filled SATA drives, stored in a drawer.

When I need to put a finished project back online, I simply grab the corresponding SATA drive out of the drawer, and plug it in the dock. Voilá back online. It’s simple, it’s cheap (bare SATA drives are getting cheaper every day) and as long as I use this technique – about two years now – I never had a drive failure (knock on wood).

The UDMA cards are very expensive compared to “slow” ones – the Sandisk UDMA 8GB is around 50 Euros, a cheap Kingston 133x 8GB is around 18 Euros.
I wanted to test if the investment into UDMA is worth the price. Here are my results: These are movies I shot with my UDMA CF. Roll over the images to see the same image taken with a slow CF.

Image 1: Canon 7D, 70-200mm f/2.8, 1/1000, ISO 800.

Image 2: Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8, 1/1000, ISO 800.

Here are some screengrabs of the Quicktime inspector showing the bitrate of the original files off the compact flash. Interesting the 7D bitrate was improved slightly when using the UDMA, the 5D bitrate almost stayed the same and even decreased a bit.


Image 3: Bitrate comparison slow/fast CFs with the 7D footage.

Image 3: Bitrate comparison slow/fast CFs with the 7D footage.

Conclusion? In my opinion rolling shutter stayed the same, bitrate didn’t significantly change and color stayed the same. Only thing that is annoying with slower cards is that they need some time to buffer. So when you just inserted the card or started up the camera, push the record button to start buffering. After a few seconds the recording will stop due to buffering issues. After that the recording shouldn’t stop anymore because of that. I say shouldn’t because it happened to me once during an interview shoot. So to be on the safe side, use fast UDMA CF cards for critical shoots.

Overall I’m happy with the result for this price and in comparison to the super ridiculous looking, self-printed business cards, this is a leap ahead in my professional appearance.

So what I am doing now is set the camera to the built-in “neutral” profile and when done shooting import the native h264 files with Cineform’s NeoScene compressor. The Cineform codec interpolates the 4:2:0 h264 file to a 4:2:2 cineform file.

Chroma Interpolation: 4:2:0 → 4:2:2.
Background: Most HDV and AVCHD camcorders record chroma (color) in a format known as 4:2:0. Without boring you with details, 4:2:0 chroma is half the color resolution of more professional 4:2:2 formats. When Neo Scene detects 4:2:0 chroma it properly interpolates the source chroma to 4:2:2 for more accurate color processing during editing and effects work. And if you ever “key” your material, CineForm’s chroma interpolation will substantially improve your resulting visual fidelity.

In my tests I’ve found out that exporting ProRes files out of the Cineform application gives you an exact copy of the original h264 file – only converted to ProRes. You need to choose to export to a Cineform file. Editing Cineform files in FCP is possible but not as streamlined as editing ProRes (you need to render when applying color-correction filters) so I am converting the Cineform files to ProRes before editing. This is one more step to my workflow than I described some posts earlier but in my opinion this one pays.

Here is some before and after Cineform conversion with the corresponding waveforms. Please note that the images just have been downscaled. No adjustments have been made. Roll over the images with your mouse to see the original h264 images and waveforms.

Shot 1: Canon 7D with 70-200mm ƒ/2.8 IS USM and a polarizing filter. Note how the skin tones have been enhanced by Cineform.

Waveform for shot 1. The histogramm has been smoothed out.

Shot 2: Canon 7D with 70-200mm ƒ/2.8 IS USM and a polarizing filter. The dark areas have been significantly lifted without losing detail and micro-contrast.

Waveform for shot 2. See how the histogram has been compressed. This gives you more headroom for your post color-correction and grading.

Shot 2: Canon 7D with 17-55mm ƒ/2.8 IS USM. Highlights have been reduced and skintone has been enhanced.

Waveform for shot 3. Highlights have been reduced from the limit to a reasonable value. Of course you can reapply contrast to the image in post, but it’s good to have opportunities.

Since shooting with the Canon 7D and because of the lack of audio-controls on the 7D I was forced to find a solution for external audio recording. I ended up buying the Zoom H4n recording device. Now that I have an external audio recorder which doesn’t attach quite well to my 7D or to my XDCAM HD, for me it was clear that I have to delegate someone in my team to operate the Zoom H4n during shooting.

Since operating the H4n during a shoot drills down to just pushing the record and stop button from time to time, the newly designated sound-engineer was capable of doing more. So I decided to give the boom a go. I bought a boompole from Røde and the Røde NTG-3 shotgun mic, which I was told is the best mic for boom swinging.

The first shooting with the new equipment was done with my old setup (Sennheiser G2 attached to my XDCAM) supported by the stand alone setup NTG-3 on a boompole attached to the Zoom H4n.

Here is a side by side comparison of the soundquality. Please note that the audio was not processed in any way.