The Y4 Post tattoo Production is almost at an end (thank god)! There are a few minor graphic titles to be created and inserted and Mr Ben Robinson is still working hard on the music score and audio. I just wanted to get in a quick semi-Y4 post production wrap up up on dah blog.

As far as a tech summary, the Y4 trailer was shot on the Panasonic HVX-200 using a MOVIEtube mount. The mount is in fact a angle shaped piece of circular metal housing a prism. This mount allows the use of 35mm lenses which results in a more filmic look. We shot recording onto the P2 card which is a solid state flash card. This allowed us to shoot at 720 25PN. That means at a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and at 25 frames a second. The "N" in "PN" stands for native which means that it's true progressive and not a in camera interlace to progressive conversion which happens in some cameras (most notably the pro-sumer models that claim to shot 1080 25P). So you might wonder why am I boring you with all these specs? Well, cuz I have issues with the equipment used. First, I just want to make it known that I am very impressed with what was done with the very very small budget for this production, and in no way am I criticizing any of the amazing and talented people that worked so hard on everything :) What I am doing is what us post production people do best, and that is to lay it out with our acute 20/20 hindsight ;)

So here is the breakdown:

Regarding the MOVIEtube, I caution people who are considering using it to understand it's limits and possible pitfalls. I say possible because I am not 100 percent sure the problem we faced is the same across all the models, but... the one we used had a serious serious issue regarding the exposure and color accuracy. Below are two frames that were shot, one with the MOVIEtube and one without. As most of the environments we were shooting were meant to look dark, with our limited lighting kits, we found that we were most always stopped all the way up (lens open all the way to allow the most amount of light). Having your lens open all the way is a sure way to increase the amount of noise that registers in the blacks and mid tones of your picture. The HVX-200 is not known for it's low light capabilities and with the MOVIEtube attached, it was adding insult to injury in the way that the noise in some of the darker shots was almost a show stopper. Also the MOVIEtube tended to mute out the colors as well as is very apparent in the example below. The before and after shots are have pretty much identical lighting, the only difference is that we threw some blue gels on the screen lights to bring out the blue as the bluescreen we were using was actually kinda purple.

My second bit of beef is with the whole HDV and DVCPRO HD codecs. They both use rectangular pixels instead of the square pixels that we see in all true HD spec cameras and also with the RED cameras. What that means is the actual picture size being shot is 960 x 720 at true square pixels and then the video gets stretched so that the square pixels get elongated across the horizontal plane thus stretching the width of the screen size from 960 to 1280 making it 1280 x 720 (which is the smaller of the two standard HD specs). This little bit of rectangular pixel magic is one of the reasons they are able to get their files sizes so small. Yay for them! But what this also does is take the noise that is already in the shot and amplify it. See the example below. Basically noise is a bitch. Film has grain, but video has noise. Noise can look like grain at times but it is extremely annoying in dark shots because when you go to adjust the grade and do color correction, it in fact becomes more enhanced. The noise can span multiple color channels (rgb and beyond) so when you start messing with the color balance, you might be effecting individual channels of noise which could have an end result of a rainbow extravaganza of noise dancing all over the screen. Truly annoying and very upsetting for me.

So recap, MOVIEtube causing exposure to be close to two stops lower then what the light meter reads (BAD) and then HDV/DVCPRO HD codecs not being square pixels (BAD ON BAD) and then color grading to correct exposures and color problems from the already mentioned faulty gear really does equal BAD ON BAD WITH A SIDE ORDER OF MAJOR SUCK. Kay bitching done. On to the post end :)

I hit this project with the usual line up of software, Final Cut Pro, Color and After Effects. But this time around I was able to try out some new software called Monet and Mocha (thanks to Andy Stokes for putting me onto them). These are both made by Imagineer Systems and utilize something called planar tracking. I used these two apps to do motion tracking and to map textures to the motion tracks. The advantage (and what makes these apps so powerful) of Monet and Mocha is that by being planar trackers, they track planes instead of points. Point trackers, like what comes native with After Effects, really can spoil the show when there is lots of noise (BAD!) because the noise and/or grain can cause the tracker to jump all over the place destroying any attempt and having an accurate track.
 
Now for the show and tell! Here are some before and after color graded shots.

And finally I leave you with a quick little timelapse movie involving some of the post effects I was working on. Coming Soon... Y4 The Trailer!!!