Technical Background of the Video «What is Happiness»

Here is some background about the recent video of mine «What is Happiness». The aim of the video were the presentation of the beautiful landscape of Fuerteventura. I’m deeply in love with the Canary Islands, and Fuerteventura in particular.

It was also a test for my new Canon 550D DSLR camera.

Video Recording

All footage was recorded with a Canon 550D (T2i) in full HD 1080p with 30 frames per second. I used a tweaked Standard picture style for shooting with contrast and saturation turned down. These settings help with color correction in post production. Especially for portraits, a low color saturation setting is useful to avoid strange looks (skin tones and lips get too red). Some people recommend an even flatter picture style, however I try to do as few postprocessing and color adjustments as possible to avoid introducing noise.

Working with the Canon 550D

Overall, the 550D is a great camera for HD video entry. What I like: Video quality is great. The large rear 3″ LCD is very nice. The camera is handy, leightweight (it’s plastic), and quite small. What I miss: There is no histogram in video live view mode to control exposure, and there is no manual audio level control. These last two points could be improved by a firmware upgrade.

Lenses and Filters

Lenses used for this video were old Nikon prime lenses. These included manual focus AI Nikkkors 1.4/50mm and 2.8/20mm. These lenses are very compact, and their build is heavy duty. Besides, I’ve used the AF 2.8/14-24mm zoom.

These lenses were attached with a simple lens adapter ring. The reason? I am using Nikon gear for still photography, so I do not own any Canon glass.

Filters used included a graduated neutral density (GND) filter, and a polarizer, and a variable neutral gray filter to slow down shutter speed in bright conditions.

Camera Support

For these kind of nature shots, a tripod is a must as it’s very hard to keep a DSLR steady. Especially in such windy conditions as in Fuerteventura, a stable tripod is needed. Handheld shotting might be an option for rougher kind of video.

The Glidetrack portable mini dolly provided smooth camera movements to add depth to the rather static landscape shots. Even though I only have the shortest 0.5m version of the Glidetrack for portability and weight reasons, I still find it very useful for this purpose. A fluid head allows for smooth panning.

Audio

Ambient audio was recorded with an external pocket sound recorder (the same I’ve used for audiovisual slideshows such as the stories from Cairo). I only used few of the audio recorded in camera as I wanted the music to stand out. However, for journalist work, an external microphone connected to the camera audio jack is needed – with a «dead cat» in windy conditions.

Postprocessing

For editing, the highly compressed original mp4 footage  was converted to Apple Intermediate Codec. There is a great app doing the conversion called MPEG Streamclip. Most people would recommend using Apple ProRes, which results in huge files, however.

Video Editing

The converted clips were then edited in Final Cut Express. Color correction was done exclusively with the built-in color correction tool. Generally, I’ve warmed up the colors and adjusted contrast. As stated above, I’ve used an adjusted standard picture style and I think for nature video, it doesn’t make too much sense to lower saturation and contrast too much if the video is carefully exposed. Video editing is considerably more time-consuming than still photography!

I don’t know if other people also do this: in cases where I didn’t use a graduated neutral density filter for shooting, I’ve tried to overlay a graded transparent png image on a separate layer/track which works well for me.

As Final Cut Express has no option to dynamically alter the frame rate of a clip (unlike it’s big brother Final Cut Pro), I used the great TimeRemap plugin for some clips to slow down frame rate.

Export

The final video was exported in 720p using the x264Encoder instead of Apple’s own H.264 encoder because of colour issues. I’ve applied a careful bit of sharpening because of the downscaling.

Encoding in h.264 results in colour changes with pale unsaturated colours and decreased contrast. Apparently the colour bug goes back to 2005 and was never fixed [in Quicktime].

Here is what works for me to get true colors after converting videos to h.264. In Final Cut, I export a Quicktime movie (unscaled). Then I use the above mentioned the x264Encoder in MPEG Streamclip for the conversion to h.264. If needed, downscaling can be specified. The settings are detailed in the screenshot.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 7:07. It is filed under Gear, Video & Multimedia and tagged with Canon 550D, Final Cut, Fuerteventura, Gitzo, Glidetrack, h.264 colour, h.264 conversion, Manfrotto fluid head, nature video, T2i. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.