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Field Tested 5DMII Camera Settings

What we did you come up the way with the way in which we set up the camera, was we? We shot a variety of tests using different scenting use seventy settings on the cannon. Once one she start getting into the menu. It's a bit like you suddenly open the manual to a russian nuclear submarine that's written in russian. You know, you you get into family tree after family tree after family tree in about six leans down the chain. You can't even remember what you were it's. It really is tricky stuff, and it takes a very long time tio to remember it. You can, uh, there's so much stuff that you could just forget which is deadly. You can make just one tiny little setting mistake. So you really do need to have a checklist of the way she set up the camera. Otherwise, you will be in tears on dh steve again loss and explain this later, but way basically shot material in a whole bunch of different ways and basically took it to a post house on house, which is a wonderful place called the post group in ...

hollywood on dwi colored time of the blast isn't was keith your absolutely wonderful colorist? Most people don't have the kind of facilities that we have on house obviously you know this is you know you're working in a color sweetness cost five hundred dollars an hour with you know, one of hollywood's top calories and using a system called new coda where you can sort of just grab some of these faces slightly change the color of it and then automatically track it and you lose stuff like that which isn't really available and against the general principles of ivory film making anyway I just thought I'd mention that because it's kind of important in the way in which I work but there's so there's that way of working and then there's a whole other way of working what I meant to say was that way basically got him to look at all the ways that we record in footage on his scopes and to me a scope should just get like things with wiggly lines on and they look like something from wall street but but he could tell that wayward capturing maximum dynamic range for me arrived in this series of settings that we then adopted for shooting on hers and so I wanted to say that um I think this is probably the point at which we wanted to go into our you know thing way good for that is that this is how we you know what we ended up with and what's important in terms of shooting and obviously the menu settings in different places kevin did that just because it's obviously very humorous to them tio put the but use it in different places on every camera so it's just to start out I mean, we got a couple of people in our last workshop that, uh, kind of just hit the wal mart and bought, like, a three pack of cards, and they weren't you diem, and they were getting, like, incredible drop frames, so you always have to use the media in there, which stands for ultra direct memory access, which means nothing to pretty much anybody else, but it just basically means it can write faster, so and when you're recording video, that's definitely something you need, you know, because you're not just capturing one frame, capturing, you know, twenty four frames, one second, so and then also when you put your card in, he always wanted format it because you don't know where it's come from, like, for us because we use somebody cameras like, sometimes they're not our own, so we're just always having to, like, make sure there's nothing on it or else you're gonna have to go back through in a race one by one and that'll kind of take more time than it's needed, and then the camera always has to be a manual telling lock all the features like it did on if it's on actual priority or shutter priority or something, you're not going to get your full menu and then you want to go in and you want to clear all your custom functions just because someone might have said your camera goes off at two thirty in the morning and turns red and you don't want to do that so here's all the cool stuff, but I can actually switch to live you and kind of go through it all with you guys would do that to the first one is peripheral illumination correction, and what that does is some of the lenses that will start to barrel. It'll get really bride around it, and then it will try to compensate by that by doing vignettes and doing stuff like that and just basically you don't want to touch any your image you just wanted to be completely flat, so you always want to turn that off, get back! And I asked one thing how many people here are cannon uses and are you a nikon? Yeah, okay, I mean, does this stuff make sense? I'm not sure how different the menus are on them. A couple of these specific options are available, but some of the other settings that's on the previous slide definitely makes a lot of she's the pro ones, like the d three answer yes ok I don't really know that many for that one end of the fifty, one hundred in the joe I knew yours only jenny when they're pretty much the same thing in seventy five days away the menu things on the top there obviously access by the little wheel on the job as you probably know you can you can access them or you can access them by the joystick on the back there's a joystick that kind of just moves and you can kind of scroll through it just kind of been all in one or you can scroll through your menu with your patrol well so now and then some people say that doing adobe rg like will actually give you better skin tones but I haven't seen anything because it's a it's more of like a print profile so I've just never really noticed the difference but I mean if you're into that he can have can run it so on and then as far as the auto power off we always said it to fifteen minutes. Some people said it too often some people said it toe like one minute but fifteen minutes usually pretty good time so I mean if you walk away from your camera and it's off it's going to be on all day and you know it'll burn your sensor up and when the sensors get hot, you know they can contend to canada put more noise into the image and stuff like that and you might have toe kind of get it cleaned and repaired, so we always do fifteen minutes lcd brightness this thing will totally mess everything up if you don't turn it off because basically it's going to compensate for everything that's outside its reading, this sensor and if it's reading the light, so if you're outside it's gonna get really bright, you're gonna be like, oh, I got it and then you're gonna come inside and it's gonna get really dole and you're going to compensate on your exposure and, you know, you probably gonna be over two or three stops, so you always want to go in there, turn that off, and then you can either set it to four or five it's it's basically, just according to her, I I like to set mine it for because it looks a little bit under and like, I just know that mine, I always kind of exposed just slightly under just for my stuff because I can always kind of pull up in grading, but some people like five or six, but like we've found that like for is not to dole and, like five isn't too like milky and, like, washed out, so this is optimal settings that we found to be the best as far as being on the back but you know if you're going out marshall monitor and stuff like that this this doesn't apply turn yeah, I turn this on doing manual yeah just cause if it's on auto it's going to fluctuate because like it's like your cell phone you know you go outside it's gonna get really probably come in it's getting it but we don't so and then live your center so here's the whole live you grid mode so you want to go into the first one and then you want to go into stills plus movie and then you want to go into movie display so that one is kind of going it's going to give you a movie display through like the whole thing and it's going to give you a full like simulation of your exposure so instead of like if you were shifting if you did all the other ones like if you shifted it your, uh your lcb would stay the same. So like, if you were on faa and you went toe f eleven, nothing would change. So when you go to the stills and movie display it it's actually gonna change and show you that you're under exposer overexposed and then um twenty four p thirty p it just really depends on like what you're doing I mean he's going to give you more information I mean, if you're going to try to get the most that if you had to do some kind of like slow mo I guess thirty people be better than twenty four, but I mean, you wouldn't want to be maybe on a seventy at that point and then there's good old six forty by forty eighty, which I've never seen anybody she with so, you know, there's, nothing in there and now here's all the customs folks shins I don't you know, we don't usually mess with anything except for, like, the image and we disable all these, like the long exposure noise reduction it kind of just seems to give you this well, like, pattern noise, and it kind of kind of simulates and tries to take away stuff, and sometimes it takes away stuff it's vital and it got and gives you a little bit more artifact, so we always took those off on, uh, it's the same thing on highest the highlight tone priority. Basically, what it does is it tries to fit all of your compression and all your tones by like cutting and clipping your signal and smashing it down. So it's given you a false representation of what's really happening it's not giving your high and low, so when you're looking on your lcd, you're like, wow, this looks amazing hdr but it's not so when you when you get it out in post you're gonna be like, wow, I didn't know that was three stops over so it's compressing it for your lcd and that's that's another that's like a brother to it that's like its partner so they kind of thought a lot like optimizer it kind of just works in the same way so these all these all kind of like smasher tones down so they're viewable on the back of the lcd think that's pretty much it for actually setting the camera up on the thing aside from, you know, the white balance and then you always wanted you always wanted to your white balance and calvin so you can adjust it accordingly because you don't really want to go in there and just be like, ok, because I mean, maybe your lights air kind of slightly more so you kind of just thirty four, thirty seven or you can kind of match it to your scene to scene so you're not stuck and, you know, have something baked in, you know, it's not just like one color overall, I mean, because in photo shop that's just a simple white pounds, you know, but when you're doing video it's a different story man and after effects like you're like, oh, I got the tone out but then the skin tones of green so it's it's a nightmare and then that's where all the high end colored rating programs when you're putting windows on people's faces and opening people's highlights and stuff like that so it becomes a real hassle if you don't do it right from start and then um you know we have the kelvin's story that yeah is everybody does anybody know what tim where degrees kelvin came from what it what it what it represents go go through it briefly and it's it's a rather nice way off kind of understanding color temperature color temperature is inequality in color in line and basically it was them believe it or not degrees kelvin was invented by a guy called kelvin to know his first name but it's basically the act too in a vacuum eating up a block of black iron on dh when you get to thirty two hundred degrees replicates exactly on the same color thirty, two hundred degrees of studio lighting and it is done in a vacuum because otherwise the iron would just sit over start burning and oxidizing but on dh it's almost like when you stick a piece of iron or a blacksmith stick is a piece of iron and the fire first of all he goes red and then it gets they're blind the bellows and it gets white what they call you know yellow and then it goes orange and then he goes what actually goes our interest in that yellow, and then why they call it blew hot. And if you actually heat the iron up to fifty, six hundred ways in a vacuum, it has exactly the same color as daylight balanced color film, obviously it's around the nice way of thinking about it because you think of this piece of iron just getting hodgins, hodgins, hundred going cooler and cooler and cooler just think about that sort of line. It's a really nice way to think about how calories described in terms of the color quality off day line and there is enormous living if you go up into the mountains and you're shooting in them in a shadow of a snow lit valley and all you got above you is blues guy, I mean, you're you're kelvin would be right up to seven thousand almost or even higher. Amazing not sure, but it it could just be enormously blue and send the extent you can evaluate this by looking at your room, your sense of your rem lcd on the bank but it's also difficult because everything that you see is interpreted by the brave, and so you tend to compensate rather like if you've been wearing yellow sunglasses after a while, you get completely used to everything, and then suddenly you take them off. For a few minutes really looked blue on dh because your brain is working overtime to stop you from actually seeing what you're really seeing. Andi it's always constant interpreting and messing with your actual photograph a guy s o the more that you can be aware of, that you will be in terms ofthe being a cinematographer and having the ability to controlled color, which is very important. And you know where you can really see the doan ality of color on people's faces the difference from one side of their face and another, I mean, you people become completely in general, people are completely un observant about keller, you, you know, you do an interview with somebody standing in a park ninety nine point nine percent of people wouldn't notice that they just happened to be completely green under their children under their nose, because of the sunlight bouncing off the hook over the grass on so all of these things, you need to separate your brain from your eye and start to be aware of looking at an image, um, the way it actually is rather than the way you're telling you, it's fine, because we're so used to kind of looking at somebody else on a golf course or in a park that you don't see that stuff and then it's a very important and integral part of becoming a good photographer cinematographer is to be aware of light havina bean on shoots where I was commercial shoots where suddenly I noticed that the actor in front of the cameras have me should have gone really orange and then you just look to the right you're cameron you realize your your first assistant cameraman is put on a day glo orange goat people don't notice these things and it's incredibly aware to start two separate your eyes from your brain and start to look at an image for what it really is look at the shadows what's going on in this is look at the bands coming up off somebody's pings where they're all you know if somebody's like this and sudden night setting them if they're wearing a red rock inevitably all the shadow zones on the here will be read and you know this is all part ofthe being observant and sutton is over or so that's the the reason for wanting to set things on degrees kelvin because it gives you control if you leave it to the camera to automate any of these things you're no longer controlling the image that you're capturing that you wanted to be in complete control especially when you know a lot of these cameras or suffer from the same thing they suffer from extremely high compression so age to sixty war is really you know what it is but it's ten times compression or something it's huge the best web compression yeah, it looks amazing on the internet and that's why it was because it was developed for journalists so they could send it over the air we actually skipped over you can actually uh when you're shooting under like metal hollow and lights and like those nasty like courts lights there's actually a white male it shift in the camera that you can kind of go into it kind of mellow it out and then you can also take the saturation down a little bit because if you're baked in completely orange you're never going to get that back but if you're de saturated and you go into a color in your room you can bring that back up yeah that's them things like you know I mean everybody knows sodium mabel lights are very common you know how it sided very often on on a low budget film you might be you might find yourself shooting you're seen with, you know soniya mabel and so taking the color saturation down a couple of notches didn't give me actually over that apartment you know, we didn't uh with switched out in game we said let's let's just happened do you want to do that now or wait just get over that little section of the steve can I ask you a quick question um just to clarify are all the city showing right now the camera settings in the keynote pdf is that part of the downloads I mean yeah well there'll be a version that love no well yeah it will be available at the end because I kind of gotta like restructure it okay so if you purchase the course that you can totally you get all this all right appreciate it so so you go in here and then it's white balance shift and then you can actually see you've been actually twist it and go back and forth through all your whole your whole gamma so you can really go anywhere with it and then it helps huge when you're like shooting under those nasty lights and stuff I mean because I do a lot of color grading and like yo man orange just make it look good but and then compensating and just it turns into an absolute nightmare but you always wanted to use this hand in hand with your saturation too because if it's really bad just take your saturation down a couple of clicks and it just it's going to be so much better you always put it back you know it's much easier to add a little bit of saturation when you go into uh final couceiro premier yeah I mean even the basic you know color programs will do it you know and then final cuts attached to color color is a professional color grading sweet I mean, aside from the rendering it's still pretty efficient you know I mean it's not quite as nice is like a venture and new code or a cluster system but like I mean it definitely get the job done and it's well rounded for the five days and then I skipped over the sound too, so we need to go back to the sound and you these picture stiles um yeah, we're going to get into that one because, uh basically you go through the we're going to do the house settings and then like technicolor actually has their own profile for it and then there's a couple of things like marbles and stuff like that so we go into the sound real quick and then we'll go back to the picture stop way. So we always set our sound recording to manual just because like, I mean there's a couple times where people of shot a bunch of music videos and they thought they were going to be really clever like plural eyes but they shot from outside while the car was moving and all it was was I think plural eyes reads by the vectors in the wave history him and like when it's just flat bar it's not gonna work yoga's kind of on a monitor your peeking in your sound levels that way if you were can I try to line something up or you know, everything kind of affairs or if you're cheating with an age for end or something like that like you get actually line it back up and it would be pretty efficient and pearlized it works with aftereffects premiere final cat like I mean, I think they make a version for everyone I think it's like one hundred bucks to seventy has given us issue now with your leaders it's I mean it's pretty much not that big of a deal anyway, even with you monitoring it I mean it's it's like nothing I mean, you just plan for the worst that you're going to get aliens china when you're five you just hear all sorts of sandwiches because you hear your hands and then the knobs when you click like all that it just like kids so loud inside the camera picks up everything yeah, I mean, you can hear everything so yes, it's kind of it's kind of a nightmare, but hopefully that all we need is a thunderball connection s t I and xlr and four k and then, you know, maybe we say long live tv and maybe they'll catch it or something like that you just do that right now because they can I mean, they've already done enough right now we'll go backto picture styles, so picture style we said it on neutral this is this is where we start and then you actually have to go in and you have to click on invoke toe activate your picture style we set the sharpness all the way down to zero and way said the contrast all the way down to negative that obviously give you something that like resembles like a log ask her a lot easy to give you that kind of reverse s curve to give you that really flat image to get the most dynamic range that you could possibly get out of the five day so you can kind of just draw it back and then you can leave the saturation the same unless you were shooting, you know it's it's all to your right to until you shoot with the technicolor one than that one's pretty locked so but it's it's pretty much all of you and then the color tone I mean, I wouldn't shift that because it's I mean it's just is easily done in post and like, you don't want to have that baked in to be like, well, I really didn't like that and every time you got to read you that for your real or something, you have to correct for that so this is this is the most optimal settings that they found on house and then there's actually cinema are the technicolor profile can I ask you a question jeremy and chat room can you talk about why you dropped the sharpness again the sharpness yeah basically because you want your image to be kind of flat like a rock you know you wanted to come in with you know no adjustments to it just because you can always sharpen impose you can always color and post you can always add your contrast in post but like I say if it was not quite sharp enough because of the compression on the camera from the eighty sixth floor you're just going to get it it's just going to enhance the artifact in the banding and like all the problems that kind of come up in the shooting with the dea solares I think they've done it makes it look a little before cinematic it's a bit more organic looking and less digital you know I would say it's just having layers though I mean because maybe you don't want it like that sharp because like gail said he likes that more cinematic and some people like it really sharp so you can adjust skated in the masses by doing you know the most you can get out of the camera and then doing everything in post the other thing is that you know steve's right? I mean in the end you should end up these just guidelines I mean you should end up doing your own death in designing what you like for yourself based on what your workflow is on because you might you might like it to look to them very video like for a certain project you might what kind of a gritty get a video shop knows if you you know, especially if you were pretending I'm shooting a little movie that it was supposed to be shot from the b o b all the video kept running, it was tanking video camera maybe you love that this's just amazing that you said we used to doing that we can basically have maximum flexibility later to do anything we want maximum flexibility on age to sixty four isn't very much you don't have an awful lot of wiggle room it's all it's really baked in so you you can only slipping slide a little bit, you know, in terms of color and you know the various aspects of the way the pictures captured on dh comm brassed you know, this one this one gets really flat, they actually dropped their saturation down a little bit, so they just wanted to be like all the way and, like there's actually a demo that I actually did a shot on the corner of, like a full senate style and integrated city style and you can actually see how much diamond range you can actually get out of it but it's not really like a true test because like seattle's pretty much like a huge soft box and then I was like, I was trying to find like, bad stuff and I was like, wow, there's like shadow detail everywhere like it was just like perfect latitude through the whole thing, but in california it was just like harsh sunlight and just all the way through and you're just like it's either one or the other you're either exposing for the highlights of the mid tones of shadow detail so this one you can actually go online and pretty much read all about the technical or senate style profile and it'll go into like huge depth with you and and when you download it, they'll give you the l u t, which stands for lookup table it's a grating tour so when it actually go into your browser and do all the optimal settings because I don't know all you guys are probably still photographers so you know, when you profile something it's the same thing and video that's what in l u t is it's basically a profile for your editing system so it can you know, help you work on the most efficiently and then yeah, I think that's all in the city stuff yeah, that was the next one cool, so here's the isis so these are the native settings again these air what we found and you know, everybody else the world aside from you know, people haven't ever mess with it, but for some reason it always works in multiples of one sixty like you always get the least amount of grain in the multiple sometimes sixty so I mean one hundred is way more grainy and then one sixty and you can actually do these tests by just leaving your lens cap on and just shooting profit like raw pictures and just enhancing the grain and then you can actually see how much more there is. Twelve fifty's about the most you want to go and that's like the worst case scenario like I probably wouldn't shoot above like six forty unless you have some experience with after effects or, you know, any kind of like noise reduction or I have some other kind of cool tricks that I don't know about which there's a million people had to. So this is kind of ah reference of all of them it's really hard to see because we really need like a huge screen to do it the worst settings of the one twenty five to fifty, five hundred one thousand on you big up the massive amount of noise in the blacks and I'm not sure why dating lee why that happens and I didn't know why that was the reason why I was saying I you know, sort of asked cannon and begged we can and if I could possibly daughters somebody about getting and you know, sort of eighty forty, twenty in ten irs so so that I could, uh, shoot much wider open or next year is without having to use and these but of course you know the the sort of professional semiprofessional side ofthe vibe gamarra a well the seventy gamma is such a tiny part of the market you know, your your questions aren't necessarily of top priority, you know, so it's difficult and also you know, very large companies take quite awhile to respond, you know, which is the reason why so many of the accessories for to make the cameras user friendly in terms of shooting are made by other companies because just within a few weeks they've given make brackets and make this make that it doesn't have to get through committees and mammals and departments and all of those sorts of things too you know, I think this is a great test of them this this is the one sixty this is actually the senate style, so I mean, you can see it's pretty flat so that's the one sixty I don't know how good you're going to build to see the green so that's the three twenty didn't start to see it like the shadows, but the three twenty actually like it was saying earlier it actually looks the most cinematic it feels like ads like that that right amount of green just to kind of make it work so we're getting a lot and the noise to you and the from the six forty like you can just all it's all it just stands in your like shadow detail and yet it's like and then that's that's when it just prone to banding like you just get something that's really dark and it's just going to start doing the pattern and all sorts of stuff and they're gonna be like ho hey, that out and that's gonna be a nightmare a post and then yet the twelve fifty which is pretty much know is all the way across and then this is a thirty two hundred which is, uh just like a bunch of colored sand. So but it's pretty cool. So and then I think the next one is so this is the technicolor that I went back through so did a cool a little intro for it. And then this is that without grading, this is just your flat out technicolor. And then this is, uh it looks like when it's all beautiful, so I think we will on harris was that begin to adopt the technique? Others at least I'll because, you know, it's really difficult to actually prove that you you know what dynamic range is? You could do all the tests in the well, but in the end to certain things and it becomes it becomes you know you're in personal judgment because all the jobs in the world should have done really I mean, who shoots charged you know mean it's like him, you don't make movies judge make movies of people moving and things happening and stuff like that and I my instinct tells me that you do by using cineaste, I'll probably get about another to his house to one's top of dynamic range, which is worth having because I didn't know what I mean. In my humble estimation, I think dynamic range on them. The hd dslr cameras is a rent ten, ten and a half stops max just about on a film it's about fourteen and a half lose that you've lost juiced opposite both ends, you know, which is it's almost like going back to reversal ville, which is where reversal film used to be. So you've got to compress life a little bit more or trying to avoid and extremely gone grassy situations or on the other hand, embrace them because and I think you can do about it well, we got one spot where it's clip into its clipping right here, right? So I mean it's pretty fairly easy for the grade too I mean, I just put some color back in it true there's a window here because they got a little dark when I pulled the curve down and then there's a window in the sky, but it pretty much captured all the way through from shadow detail all the way into the sky, there's actually, some texture and the clouds, I mean, you could actually really critic on it and draw it back in, but we shouldn't have the time to kind of make it happen, so but you can do this with, you know, your profile. I mean, if you don't want to be a color greater just set on landscape, crank the color all the way up and then just edited and final time I mean, you don't have to use all these, like color, generous and color tools like it's your camera, you can kind of do whatever you want, you know, famous free, you get a free account so your own filmmaker patent something that's crazy and then someone will come for you for your looks like, would you? D'oh? You're like didn't just shoot on landscape and, you know, just hide all your setting.