Juan Carlos Oganes' film-making and work blog.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Guerrilla shooting

I loved the results!
The HVX200 is awesome. I checked the video on the LCD widescreen at my editing bay and its looks sharp and clear. The only thing lacking is the so fought-after depth of field. Im almost clear that the 35mm adapter that I'm purchasing now is the Letus Extreme. I had worked with the other brands before (Redrock M2, Brevis) but the flipped image is the issue there. I find very annoying having to turn the image in post or turn the monitor upside-down while shooting.

Doesn't work for me that...but I'll cover that in another post.

I did another "test drive" a while back and now in a more "guerrilla" way, more "run-and-gun" scenario to see the 24p motion in action. This time I used the 720p resolution but on NATIVE mode to have more room in the 16GB P2 card that came with the camera.
Those little cards fill up fast! Im waiting for the market prices to drop on those (almost $900 the 16GB, $1500 the 32GB) as paying almost a grand for 17 minutes on 1080 resolution is way too little. Now with 720p in Native mode I get 40 minutes apart from being able to shoot slow-mo too. It's also a good thing that the camera has two P2 slots so one one fills up completly it automatically jumps to the other and continues recording without gaps or losing frames.



Too bad I cant do "speed ramping" like on film cams but...I dont want to be too exquisite. Im happy with what I got.
Here below is a video of quads in action. The shooting of this was so fun.
Loved the fast-paced results and I loved to see them so happy doing what they love. It was such a great day!


Monday, April 28, 2008

HVX200 test drive

Today I took the HVX200 out for a "test drive".
I have always been keen about film motion. The characteristic move of 24fps transfered to 30fps (or 60i) is very unique. When I was shopping around months back I happened to read all articles about the new 24p cameras out there....some were convincing and some weren't.


Like the film veteran Scott Billups said once in his book Digital Moviemaking 3.0, many of those articles are written by people who have little or no real world experience and who are simply "transcribing" or reformatting in their own words what the manufacturers give them in a press-release, and of course, much of that is just hype, commercially motivated fibbing. You only know the performance of something on the field, on a real project who's main finale is the big screen or prime time TV where all quality is tested. No question asked.

So, just for starters, I took the cam out and shot simple stuff around the neighborhood, streets, cars passing by, the sun thru the trees (to see how it manages high-contrast light) , slow motion in-camera and finally its time-lapse capability with a beautiful sunset.

The excuse to do it was to have a motive and chose to make video for my lovely girl that I wanted to make so bad since time ago.
And here is the result.

Solace of a Statue - a Video Poem






Saturday, April 12, 2008

SD to HD test

I was doing some tests of turning Standard Definition video to High Definition. There are many ways to do this thing but most of them aren't acurate and the video turns out looking pixelated or jagged.

For this one I used After Effects and also PhotoZoom Pro 2 (the professional one). There is another plug-in that works in After and I'm checking it right now. So far the results are awesome!

Used a short clip of me here warming up for a music videoclip I did last year.
I'm playing "My Melancholy Blues" by Queen.


SD to HD test from Juan Carlos Oganes on Vimeo.