Film-making is a magic trick.  We take bits and pieces of filmed media and reorganize and juxtapose them to create a story and emotion.  The reality is an 8 minute short like The Specimen is shot over the course of 2 days, and also included 2 additional pickup shoots.  So different images from this film were all shot hours, days, and even weeks apart.  Try as we might to be perfect there are always going to be differences from take to take or shot to shot.

During the initial shoot I had retained the services of Branwyne Smith who had done the excellent FX makeup on Mercy, to do our actors makeup and make them look their best.  However on the subsequent re-shoots, we didn’t have the time or budget to bring Branwyne back.  You don’t really realize how much a skilled makeup person brings to the table until you look at some footage of an actor without it.

When cutting the pickup shots of Brian Pope without makeup in next to the takes from the initial shoot of him with makeup there’s a stark contrast as you can see below:

Original shot of Brian with makeup (click to see full resolution)

Pickup Shot Without Makeup (click to see full resolution)

If you click on each image you can see it in full resolution and the differences and evenness of the skin tones are much more apparent.  With makeup Brian’s complexion is a little warmer and even.  Without makeup, his complexion shows more blemishes and is a bit more (sorry Brian) pasty.

Now having slight differences between shots is going to happen, and it’s why people color correct their films.  In color correction you compensate for differences in lighting, white balance, color to make all the shots match.  One way to correct between these shots would be to warm up Brian’s skin tone in the non-makeup shot to get the same warmth, and until the advent of new digital tools that would probably be all we could do, but now we can add some digital makeup to make this shot look even better.

Enter Red Giant Software’s Colorista II’s Pop tool.  Colorista is a powerful color correction plug-in for use with a variety of editing systems including Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.  It’s my go to color corrector for its speed and intuitiveness.  In version II of the software they introduced the “Pop” feature, which is a simple slider that increases and decrease local contrast in a unique way that adds or in this case removes details from a shot.

By using this feature, along with Colorista’s built-in keyer, you can isolate the skin tones and decrease the “pop” to  smooth it out, giving the effect of having used makeup.

Colorista's Keyer Quickly Isolates the Skin Tones

With Digital Makeup

While this isn’t a substitute for having a real makeup artist on set, it can do in a pinch.  If you’re interested in learning more, the inventor of Colorista, Stu Maschwitz has created a tutorial on this exact subject that you can watch here.

Since my site stats tell me the most searches and page views on this site are for “superflat” and my “Changes in latitudes“  post, I figured I owed it to everyone to take some time and check it out.  So last night I took a break from editing and downloaded the picture style and loaded it up on my 7D.   I was immediately blown away by the additional latitude this picture profile delivers over my previous settings of Neutral, Sharpness 0, Contrast -4, Saturation -2.  Others have done much more testing  and provided some great visuals with this.  So rather than recreating all that, I’m going to stand on the shoulders of others hard work and point you in their direction for more info.

• Vincent Laforet’s Cinestyle Post
• Cinestyle vs. Superflat, Marvels, and Neutral
• Cinestyle is a Must Use
• Planet5D
• Crooked Path Films

I’m going to shoot some tests with people to see how the skin tones come out, but it looks like this could be my new flat shooting profile.  I’ll report back when I’ve done those tests and add them to this post.

One note, with the profile you can also download a look up table (LUT).  This can be applied in your NLE using a free utility called LUT Buddy. This LUT simply adds an S-curve to the footage which makes it look natural for editing, instead of the flat  image.  It is NOT a color correction and should be removed before you apply any color correction.   I’ve seen a lot of misinformation about this.  Color correcting after the LUT is applied effectively takes away the dynamic range you achieved by shooting with this preset in the first place.  So please remove the LUT before you color correct.  For more info see this post by Jay Friesen.

Happy Shooting.

Is this the DSLR killer for indie film? Probably not as the DSLR price point is still much less than this camera.  Possibly an AF100 killer will it’s S35mm sized sensor,  it will certainly shake things up.   I know I want one…

Click here to view the embedded video.

A rip from Stu’s blog:

What I find interesting about this session is that it provides one answer to a common question: “Why doesn’t the video I shoot with my DSLR look as good as the stills?” Setting aside numerous technical issues, a big part of it is that stills shooters, as a rule, color correct their shots before letting the world see them.

The video is a screen capture of him working with his friend in real time to solve problems  and match stills taken with much more dynamic range.  Watch. Learn.  Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is no way to manually adjust the audio input of the 7D, as you can with Canon’s other HDSLR’s.  I have no idea why they won’t add this to the 7D when they’ve ported manual audio controls the the 5D, 60D, and T2i, but I digress.  The 7D can record audio from the internal mic or via a 1/8″ input, but it will only record audio with Automatic Gain Control (AGC).  AGC  has it’s uses, but typically introduces a lot of noise and hiss, and when mounting a production, low budget or not, you want to make your finished product sound professional, so AGC is non-starter.

In order to get clean audio when using the 7D I record dual system audio like a traditional film would shoot, using a Slate with a clapper and separate digital audio recorder.  We use the Tascam DR100, though the Zoom H4n is also a popular choice.  Since the audio and video files are recorded separately they will need to be synced together in post.  Film editors have been doing this for years, matching the moment the clapper sticks connect to the sound on the audio track.   This method works just fine, but it adds a step to the process for those used to working with audio already embedded in sync with the video files. That’s where DualEyes comes in.

DualEyes is a stand alone program that works outside of your NLE. It examines the wave forms of your audio  and video files and creates new synced video files with sound from your external recorder.   This then allows you to import your video files and edit as you normally would without having to manually re-sync the files in your NLE, potentially saving you hours of time depending on your project.  You can see a video demo here.

Sounds too good to be true right?  I thought so too, but as we were in a time crunch to finish the spots for the contest, and since Singular generously offers a fully functioning 30 day trial of the software, I figured what the hell and downloaded the latest beta.

It installed on my Windows machine without an issue and within minutes I was importing my 7D .mov’s and Tascam .wav files.  To put it through it’s paces I decided to go one scene at a time.  I imported all the Doritos Flavor Lab takes, hit the scissors button to start processing and went to get a cup of coffee.

After returning a couple minutes later it was already finished processing.  It performed admirably , though due to the repetition of multiple takes, it would sometimes sync multiple audio instances with a single video take.  Not the end of the world, you just have to be sure to double check the output, which is still faster than trying to manually re-sync each take in an NLE.

I continued to process the rest of the scenes with similar results, with the exception of the “Cool Rancher” scene.  This scene was shot outdoors on a horse ranch in Aqua Dulce in very windy conditions.  The 7D’s AGC couldn’t handle all the wind noise and so the scratch track was difficult to make out.  DualEyes was unable to process it, even when I set the option to “Try Really Hard.“  I don’t blame the software though, since in this environment I was asking a lot.

Overall I found this to be a very useful tool.  I like the fact that it’s stand alone so you can use it with any NLE.  I can batch process files, letting it run while I go do something else.  This also lets me pre-sync all of my files in advance of the edit.  Sure that means doubling up my hard drive space, but it’s worth it to have the freedom to just start cutting without having to worry about re-syncing each take on the timeline.

There are a few things I’d like to see improved.

1. After every sync it creates a .csv report you can view to see which files didn’t sync if you need to try again.  However, it overwrites this file on every retry, instead of auto incrementing.  It’d also be great if that report simply showed up in the GUI instead of having to open another program.
2. I’d like to see more options for naming the output files, and choosing were they should be saved.

These are minor quibbles though, for a product still in Version 1 beta.   If you are shooting dual system audio, DualEyes will save you a lot of time and is recommended.  Try it free for 30 days, and then pick up a copy for $149.  I am.