Manchester in Spring

Just a quick video I made recently to test out a 16MM Black and white style colour treatment. 

Stages of CGI production 1

1080P 50FPS video

Download and play in windows Media player or VLC, wont play smooth in QT for some reason;

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5442008/50fps%20rotate.avi

Latest test footage from a project im working on.

4K Digital Cinema test

Ive been working on a tron style promo video for a Swedish record label for some time now. I recently tried some 4K digital cinema resolution test renders.



Make sure you click on the quality setting Original - to get full 4K resolution

Here is a still frame:

http://www.deviantart.com/download/193160630/promo_preview_2011_by_duophonix-d3703p2.jpg

Magic Lantern Part II

Since posting my previous results regarding the Qscale setting on the recording Bitrate of the video, it has been mentioned that a more active scene with more motion would bring out more of a difference. I filmed the rain splashing onto the ground and i used a smaller aperture to capture a crisper shot this time. At 100% crop there is still very little difference, however i think i have spotted a subtle difference in the bitrates.

Here are the 100% crop shots - shot at 24fps 1080p

Default setting - total bitrate 55Mpbs

-14 - total bitrate 62Mpbs

-15 - total bitrate 85Mbps (same as  -16 for some reason)

-16 - total bitrate 85Mbps

Ok so like before, very little difference if any between the settings. I decided to see if the bitrate would effect the areas more in shadow and so I increased the exposure 2 stops in post production and did an enlargement of the bottom right corner of the image.

Here are the results:

Default

-14

-16

It appears as though the fine detail is slightly more defined in the -16 setting, if you look at the size of the  Macroblocks, the appears to be smaller in the -16 setting. In motion it appears as though these areas have a subtle noise to them in the -16, whereas in the default setting they look to just be a blurry mess. Does this mean that the higher settings will give more flexibility in terms of colorizing and post production? Perhaps.

Magic Lantern!

As an owner of a Canon 550D/T2i/Kissx4, I have been looking forward to a bit of custom firmware from the Magic Lantern Group. If you own one and fancy some extra and very useful features for your camera, go here and enjoy! http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/550D Please be careful so that you do not kill your camera though!

One of the features that excited me the most was the ability to increase or decrease the encoding bitrate of the video. I decided to do some tests to compare the settings and to see how much of a difference there really is, so here are my frame grabs. They are 100% size video stills. Recording at 24fps 1080p to a class 6 8gb SD card. The frames were grabbed a few seconds into the video so that any kind of key framing or progressive improvement of quality would not effect the results.

Default Bit Rate - VBR 45Mbps

QScale -14 / VBR 66Mbps

QScale -15 / VBR 68Mbps

QScale -16 / VBR 76Mbps
(could only record for a few seconds on class6 card)

UPDATED - Noticed the frames were being resized so ive included 100% crops of the in focus regions

Film post: The Catch

Random Production shots for "The Catch"

Had to make a soviet montage film, kinda missed the mark a bit, but here are some production stills from the project, ill upload the film soon.

CGI shot of wine glass falling, wireframe view here

Me setting up a shot

A joke title card i mocked up, everyone here was the crew. 

A shot from the location scouting exercise

Setting up a shot for the kitchen scene

We used this as Cocaine 

Veggie soup for vomit! yum!

Filming the party scene

Coke snorting scene with one colour treatment

Coke snorting scene with the other colour treatment, ended up using the former.

Ordering pizza scene....

Compositing CGI and Filmed elements

Not necessarily how the pro's do it, but here is my work flow anyway for a deleted scene in my experimental film, ON

Experimental film documents

I recently made this 90 second experimental film:


So i thought it would be helpful to some people for me to post some production material.

Initially i was going to use some Chroma key for the film, in the end i just filmed some segments for real and  recreated the real switch in CG instead. 

Promotional Poster

Shot from a deleted scene

Trying to make the baby look realistic 

Project: MR PVC - (cgi based short film)

Early concept shots for scenes in the short film.

I usually work in Mental ray, but for some parts of this film i will be using Vray, these shots are all done using Vray and 3ds Max 2010.