The short story: 31-OCT, the day the Portuguese Budget for 2013 was approved. People gathered in front of the Parliament to say we're being governed by thieves. Not very original I know, but it's a great place to shoot video and take pictures (well at last until it degenerates into mayhem which is rare around this parts but not unheard of until very recently). This is how I worked it.

1) The extremely simple setup:

GH2, screen folded back as a monitor, Transcend 32GB class 10, Samyang 7.5mm fisheye (my favorite video lens), set and forget to hyperfocal, ISO 400 I believe, SS=1/25s. Flowmotion 2 was used as I never know before hand how much video I'm going to capture or how many photos I'll be shooting, so I need something that is very good quality but doesn't make me have to change cards when something very important is happening. If the card is pre-formatted (the extended, not the quick format) it has never failed me to span.

2) The capture:

This is all about getting there up front and trying not to shake the camera. The police until very recently (and only after a 1h stone shower) has been instructed not to charge, so it's an easy job, you just dodge the TV reporters and other amateurs like me. So, here's my first mistake: the aperture is fine, this lens is sharp as an axe, but should have upped the ISO and set a faster SS because in these situations you are always bound to get bumped and it shows in wobbles after software stabilization.

3) Defishing the Samyang:

Load the MTS into AE. Export as image sequence. Use a batch (http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/69869#Comment_69869) to defish the images and import the output again to AE now as image sequence. The defishing was done using the Panini projection. It's loads more natural on people than Rectilinear, it preserves a lot more corner resolution and still manages to keep a few lines straight. This was the first export and not reasonably quick because the synthesis part takes it's toll: ~2-3fps.

4) Stabilizing:

Throw AE's Warp Stabilizer on the footage. Set the "Smoothness" to 15-25% (it will require much less cropping later) set borders to "Stabilize, Synthesize Edges" (again a lot less cropping) but drop the "Synthesis Input Range" to 0,2s otherwise you'll bog AE. In this kind of footage there is usually little point in using a higher value. Skim the footage looking for black borders and try to resize and reframe it so that they don't become evident. Note: defishing after stabilizing should make more sense as you would have more image to work with (defishing crops it) but from a few rough tries, the AE stabilization isn't clearly as effective when working on fisheye footage. This was the second export and a very long one: below 1fps.

5) CC & Denoising:

Used some of ColorGHear's gears, notably GHrain killer to kill a bit of noise and blockiness, but the footage was already very clean from the start and little color correction was used, just a little bit of levels adjusment. This was the third export and I believe it was even longer than the third due to the noise reduction filters: below 0.5fps.

6) The "so long" part: video effects, tracking and subtitling:

Translations were pretty quick, the hard and long part (at least until I found out how to smooth it) was tracking. It was fastidious to track people's features, takes a long time and needs constant review and adjustment. In the end I found out a few tricks (like increasing the tracking area) and smoothing the tracking points. This eased the job a lot and gave much better results. In the end I had to do it sometimes up to 3x until I was satisfied with it. In the process I had to learn a lot about tracking, smoothing, 3D objects, texting, transitions and light sources. This was the forth, the quickest and last export, probably around 10fps.

7) Audio mixing.

This was the part I was more ignorant about, but turned out to be pretty simple. Even though it's pretty rough, the footage is little demanding with so much crowd noise. It was as simple as importing the last video export from AE into Premiere, importing the original sound, importing also "Le Tigre - Dike March 2001" cutting and pasting a few pieces of this track and adjusting the volume here and there to serve the original events while leaving the words of the protesters audible when needed and off I was to the final export.

The resulting video can be found here:

Here are a few pictures of the event.

Anything more you may want to know about any part of the process I'll be glad to detail it.

Premiere Pro's renderer isn't exactly swift: it'd take twenty hours to render 2 hours of HD video into standard def. Is there a program that can render down a low-res version of an AVHCD file fairly quickly?

I recently found someone to sell me the entire CS5.5 master collection for just under $100 (they are legitimate and it's not pirated). But.... I'm also a student and can get the CS6 production premium for around $450 (or so). The upgrade costs to CS5.5 to CS6 seem like they are almost as much as the CS6 student pricing.. so... I'm wondering if the new features (esecially in premiere cs6) are worth the extra money???

What is your personal view about cs6 vs cs5.5? :-)

I was wondering what is the optimal hack/settings for GH-2 if I have a slower pc? I just finished editing for a DepicT film festival and the Full HD playback was slow when i started to tweak the videos.

My pc specs: (general stuff) Amd phenom II 920 - 2.8 GHz 4 core 4870 radeon 8 GB ram DDR2

What should I do? Should I shoot in 720p from now on? Should I use a diffrent workflow (now I just threw .H264 video in adobe premiere)? Is there a way I could encode videos to a diffrent codec before I edit (I know I will be loosing quality...). Are there any other tricks and tips in post, if so let me know please :)

However, I'm kinda lost when it comes to color grading. Here's what I shot the other day to kill time:

Not terrible. I always try to shoot it as close to how I want it to look in Premiere. But, this time around, I experimented with some color grading. I can get into the details if need be. But, really, I'm just looking for opinions. Does this look bad? What would you change? Etc.

Thanks in advance!

I do my color grading (color correction) in the same place where I do my montage - Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. The effects I use are Three-way Color Corrector (for color grading) and ProcAmp (for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation), in order to achieve more "cinematic" look. But I have noticed that the video that comes out looses sharpness and quality, when compared to the original footage. Has anyone noticed this with Premiere Pro?

Am I missing something? Is Premiere Pro a bad tool for color grading? If so, what would you recommend?

(I'm using GH13, usually shooting in NOSTALGIC (Contrast -2, Sharpness -2, Saturation +2, Noise Reduction -2) and sometimes in SMOOTH (Contrast -2, Sharpness -2, Saturation +-0, Noise Reduction -2).)

I wanted to share this film with you to get some real critics from you. I'm active on a Swedish forum already and usually put my films over there to get some feedback but I wanted to hear your opinions as well.

The film is a school project I had, and I wanted to make a short film where I could really show my color grading. So even though I directed, edited and made the vfx in this video, I did it almost only to show my grading skills to then have something to show post companies as a portfolio after my graduation, which was a few weeks ago.

What do you think is good, what can I've been doing better?

I was using GH2, Orion v4b, Nostalgic (-2-2-2-2). Lens was Samyang 35mm 1.4.

Software used was After Effects CS5.5, Premiere Pro CS5.5, Twixtor, DaVinci Resolve. Converted all my files to Cineform .MOV before editing.

Sony HDR Cx-100 60i & DV NSTC 29.95 fps

Is there a way someone can explain how I can sync them. I am only outputting 720x480 (web video) and it doesn't have to look totally pristine, but the cleaner the better. I am using Premiere Pro CS5.5 on a Mac Pro.

Thanks for any good advice.

I did see something about OpenCL as CUDA alternative.

Has anyone got any ideas?!

http://www.avid.com/us/products/Scriptsync

today I´ve tried some different codecs after I downloaded hdcinematics' DSLR Post Prep Utility and here are my findings among Cineform HD (which I normaly convert to), Avid DNxHD and just mts. I usually transcode to CF, because Premiere Pro has a hard time to decode avchd on the fly, when it´s getting serious (multiple streams...).

In Premiere Pro the response time to dragging the time indicator along the timeline was worlds better in both CFHD and DNxHD. Between the latter two I couldn´t really make out great differences here.

So I went into After Effects to check the same thing there. Here I got no mentionable timely difference in response time to my wild dragging of the current time indicator. Even the mts performed equally, compared to CFHD and Avid.

BUT: The adpative resolution came down to 1/4 on both CFHD and mts. On DNxHD it stayed on full and then eventually came down to 1/2 while maintaining a great response time. I didn´t expect that.

Tomorrow I will redo my rendering tests, my preliminary results just don´t make sense right now.

Wanted to share the video and, if you like it, please vote for me on the link below.

Vote Here

Filmed on my Canon 600D(1920x1080 @ 24fps) over two days. I only decided to enter the competition at the start of January and the deadline was the 20th so I didn't have as much time as I would've liked, fitting it around my day job(animator/3D generalist). Decided to spend 2 weeks planning and refining the idea and a week to put together an animatic and then assemble everything from there.

Location is in my flat, actress is my wife(who is an actress, handy!), I've still got a lot to learn about lighting so I'm not entirely happy with the look. Lamp lighting for the sofa and laptop close up shots and we have no plug sockets downstairs so just had to suffer the ceiling halogens :(

Used a bare bulb for the close up shots of the hands which I'm happier with(the typing one worked best I felt)

I used the Tamron 17-50 2.8 for all of it, I'm kicking myself for not using the 50mm 1.8(what was I thinking!?) mainly on a tripod and a shoulder rig for the final shot outside the door.

Edited in Premiere and graded in After Effects using Colorista II, once again I was short on time but was able to get a general warm hue on the live action shots and a green hue on the computer screens in fitting with the Amelie movie and the colour palettes used for her appartment and the outside world. Ended up being so tight on the deadline I didn't get to do a noise reduction and sharpening pass unfortunately.

I was going to just do the computer shots in after effects and apply a filter to get the screen look but after some tests it actually worked best just filming the monitor so I stuck with that, most of it is just me manipulating layers in photoshop in realtime(in the splitscreen email shot the cursor that appears is the move one if you look closely, couldn't find a workaround for that :) )

If there are any lighting/gaffers on here living in the London area that are looking for projects to get involved in I'd love to hear from you, it's definitely a weakness.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it. If you voted, thanks very much!

Comments and feedback welcome.