My wife and I took the dogs up to the park today. I took the T2i and a monopod and my lenses. Here are my thoughts after actually shooting with it in a run ‘n gun capacity with no support (except the monopod), no filters, no follow focus and no audio:

1. Focus – This will be impossible in a run ‘n gun capacity without viewfinder amplification (I ordered the Z-Finder)
2. Exposure – This will work without a histogram if you a) use the built-in light meter by b) practicing.
3. Support – You will not get a steady shot without some sort of support, I thought my monopod was awesome, not to mention cheap. I would like a single handle though.
4. Focus 2 – Trying to keep steady and focus will not happen if you don’t have some sort of follow focus assembly (still looking- traditional FF’s are just way to big and appendage-y for what I need.
5. Exposure 2 – Forget trying to do anything faster than F/2.8 if you’re a one-man band and moving- you simply WILL not be able to focus well- MAYBE F/2 but that’s pushing it. Static interviews will probably be okay though.

What I have noticed is that anything out of the HDLSR also has a hybrid “look” and by that I mean, it’s not quite your typical DV look but it has a crispness that lends itself to almost looking fake. The following shots are simply colored in First Light by adjusting lift, exposure, saturation, and contrast. I wanted to make the mailbox stuff look a little vintage but wanted to see how colorful I could make this piece in it’s “crispness.”

FYI: My T2i settings are pretty simple- I pulled every setting down to it’s maximum decrease

I am VERY pleased with what I can do with this H.264 stuff after I transcode to Cineform. VERY pleased. The results I get just frankly, blow me away and I’ve worked with about every codec out there now. I’m VERY happy and struggle to really find that I need anything more than this.

I have a whole bunch of real gear coming and a couple real gigs. In a change from what I usually do, I’m going to look at a workflow where I edit in Avid “offline” then do my final online in Premiere and After Effects. Avid just blows Premiere away in terms of easy use, and responsive editing.

Tags: avid, cineform, downtime, hdslr, tech, tools, video

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For the techies:
Shot on the Sony Z7U
Transcoded to Cineform Masters
Offlined in Avid (DNxHD)
Onlined in Premiere (Cineform)
Posted in After Effects, First Light, Nuendo, and Record

Tags: after effects, avid, bangladesh, cineform, dnxhd, documentary, firstlight, premiere, red futon films, unheralded, video

One last edit: You might ask, “why the hell would I want to do that?” Well, to go back and forth to After Effects via sequence import or Dynamic Link. You get the full power of AE and still able to tweak your edit if need be. It doesn’t have to be locked coming out of Avid (or FCP for that matter).

Last night, I was working on editing the first trailer for the new doc Unheralded. It’s been many weeks, indeed months since I worked out the bugs between my Avid to Premiere workflow. I’d forgotten and had to relearn what I did. So, since what I want to do isn’t really documented anywhere, here’s what you want to do:

FILE > EXPORT

Once your sequence is edited in Avid, go to FILE > EXPORT. You have a few different options. I select simply Link to Video and Audio. You can select a few options deeper down and/or deselect anything you don’t need. This will create your AAF for you.

FILE > IMPORT

In Premiere go to FILE > IMPORT select your Avid exported AAF. Premiere will ask for the link to your files. At this point, you can leave ‘em offline or link ‘em up right there to your online clips. Adobe actually recommends a slightly different route if you want to continue to use your DNxHD stuff (here). Then in Premiere, double click on the newly created sequence and you should have your all your edits neatly ready to go.

That’s Not My Name

If you ingest any footage into Avid, it will rename the new transcoded clips on your disk. There is a character limit as well. My .M2T clips are ridiculously long. Without renaming those, Avid overwrites the last several digits like this:

ORIGINAL: 01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T
AVID: 01_0045_2009_10-28_4B3C0996.mxf

If you’re relinking to different media such as an offline/online scenario, this isn’t as big of an issue as it seems and you don’t have to spend hours renaming things before you go into Avid because:

The clip names in the Premiere bins are the same as they were in Avid which is the same as they were originally:  01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T. So no matter how many times you go back and forth you always know the name of your original (in this case online) file when you’re inside the application (unless of course you renamed those for whatever reason).

Premiere, unlike Avid, allows  you to relink to any source file you choose. So while the dialogue screen when relinking says “Where is the file “01_0045_2009_10-28_4B3C0996.mxf?” You can relink that offline clip in the bin to “01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T” and Premiere won’t throw a fit.

*as an aside, make sure those new clips are in a different folder on your disk otherwise Pr. will default to your proxy media, so no orginal (or online) files in subfolders of your proxy media*

Adobe’s vid won’t embed so here’s the link

Tags: .m2ts, after effects, avid, premiere, video, workflow