I was doing some cleanup of my video files and discovered that I never published a short video I put together last year.  Just one of those things that got lost in the shuffle.   I ran it through a new converter I’m testing out and published it to YouTube.  This is just a little montage of scenes from our backyard.

Related posts:

1. Waning Days of Summer on Lake Boon
2. Lightroom-enhanced time-lapse video
3. First cut of a nature video short

Betsy and I snuck out of town for a few days to catch our breath and meet up with some friends at Umbagog Lake in New Hampshire.

We had camped on the lake a last year and this time we decided we would try camping at one of the remote sites, in our case site 1 on the “Big Island” located about 2 miles from the main grounds.  Our son Jay joined us and he had arrived there a few hours beforehand.  Our friends were to arrive the next day and set up at site 7, which was about a half-mile around the island.

We arrived with good weather but do to timing and weight limits of our kayaks my camera equipment stayed in the car until I could retrieve it the next day – by which time the weather was beginning to play some games.  I’ve included a bit about the tradeoffs made for this trip in the technical section at the end of the article.

The island was nice — kind of a northern rainforest feel to it…

On Saturday our little flotilla paddled around the island with the goal of getting to the Androscoggin River inlet.  After a few hours paddling we stopped for lunch and, by then, I had decided to turn back as my tendonitis was sending some warning signs.  Because we were camping I was piloting our 16-foot tandem kayak which weighs quite a bit more than my normal boat.  Coupled with very little paddling this year, the miles were beginning to take a toll on the arms.   Sigh!

Shortly after we turned back it started to rain (lightly), so perhaps it all worked out well anyways.  The nice thing is that the light turned soft and we were getting a bit of saturation in the vegetation.   Forests always seem so peaceful, but I’m reminded that they are really battlegrounds for plants.  Conifers versus deciduous, leaf vs needle vs moss…

Umbagog is also home to a number of Loon families and at least one of them dwells near the island.  The calls at night are simply delightful.   We paddled fairly close to this mother/youngster pair.  It was this moment that I felt REALLY annoyed about leaving the 500mm f/4 in the car (logistics, once again, rearing its ugly head).

The fast-changing weather may have destroyed the opportunity for glorious sunrises and sunsets, but it did provide an opportunity for some soft light within the woods and the opportunity to record some time-lapse sequences.   I had one and a half tripods with me.  The Gitzo was set up to record the time-lapse movies while I padded around the woods with the Gorillapod.   Here’s the 40D rigged for the inevitable inclement weather.

Doing macro photography with a Gorillapod turned out to be somewhere between surprisingly good and quite challenging, but the wind was the real spoiler for getting good macro shots.   Faced with incessant winds I decided to make lemonade.  If I couldn’t get things to sit still then I’d take advantage of the movement.  I switched the 5D to video.

Here’s a little short that incorporates video captured with the 5D/Gorillapod (mostly) along with the time-lapse sequences.

The rain was getting a bit more persistent and this 30-second exposure turned out the be the last image for the trip.

Technical background:

First a bit about equipment choice.   We were camping on an island that was a 40 minute paddle from power and something solid over your head.  Whenever I travel into the unknown my camera bag of choice is the Lowepro DryZone.  I’ve had this bag for probably 9 years now and it only comes out when things might get hairy.  The DryZone bag is a regular camera bag that is surrounded with a reasonably watertight shell.  (And no, I haven’t tested it recently.)   If the kayak is swamped or our tent site is inundated by a thunderstorm (which, by the way, happened) I like to keep the sensitive electronic gizmos reasonably dry.  Much less stress when you don’t have to worry about that.

I packed the Canon 40D and the 5D Mark II cameras.  You might ask why I didn’t bring the 7D as it would be better than the 40D – and you would be correct.  The 7D stayed home nice and dry because I had a business filming assignment the day after I returned and, although I don’t use the 7D for video shoots it is my backup camera.  In heading out for a vacation I decided to only risk half of my revenue-generating equipment.  If the worst happened I had everything I needed to meet my obligations to my client when I returned.

The trusty 70-200mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8, 16-35mm f/2.8, and the 100mm f/2.8 macro rounded out the lens choices.  The 1.4x teleconverter came along for the ride along with a wide set of filters, Zacuto Z-Finder, spare batteries, plastic bags, clips, rubber bands, and CF cards.  A separate utility bag, which remained in the car, held the chargers and other non-critical items.  I also brought along the 500mm f/4 – but that doesn’t fit in the DryZone bag.  Sadly, considering the less than ideal weather along with the amount of cargo we had to ferry out to the site, I decided to not bring the 500mm to the island.  For the most part this was a good decision.  For stabilization I brought along the Gitzo tripod with the H38 video head and a Jobi Gorillapod.   I didn’t end up doing much in the way of tilt/pans with the video so the H38 head turned out to be a lot of weight and bulk I could have done without — but frankly that had more to do with the weather.

I’m beginning to wish I had purchased a Vari-ND filter.  My 5-stop setup just isn’t up to the task for really long exposures when light levels are even moderate.  This turned out to be a limiter on some creative ideas I wanted to explore (e.g., blurring the clouds).   The other reason for wanting more stops is that I was forced to use apertures like f/16 and higher for some of the images and the dust spots just come out of woodwork when you do that.   You can probably see a more than a few in the time-lapse sequences.

While the 40D was cranking out time-lapse sequences I screwed the Gorillapod to the base of the 5D and it did a pretty decent job.  I used a cable release to keep the vibration to a minimum — although as I noted the wind eventually got the best of the situation.  I will definitely try that again under different conditions — the Gorillapod works naturally near the ground — unlike my tripod.

The first two timelapse sequences were captured using S-Raw files, then processed by Lightroom for exposure/contrast/cropping.  I really like using S-RAW for time-lapses — the file format provides decent storage utilization while preserving the ability to fully tune the images in Lightroom prior to rendering it as a video file.  Due to card constraints the 3rd timelapse in the video was captured via JPEG.  This turned out to especially annoying because the sky lightened more than my 1-stop safety and blew out badly for the first 200 frames (of nearly 1000).  Rats.  If it had been S-RAW I might have been able to recover the sky a bit and extend the sequence a bit more.

All images (including time-lapse sequences) processed by Lightroom 3.  Techniques varied widely for the images so I won’t bother trying to spout off settings.

The 5D clips were converted to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip and the video was edited and graded with Final Cut Pro.  A shout out to my friend Duke Levine for granting me permission to use his great music on these personal video projects.  I thought the tone of the song matched the dreary weather just great.   But, as we all know, bad weather makes for great photographs — so I’m not complaining in the slightest!

Related posts:

1. One from Umbagog
2. Umbagog Morning Mist Timelapse
3. Sunapee Lake Region Panorama

A couple of months ago my friend and guitarist Ricky Berger introduced me to a band that rehearses here in town, The Museum Direktors.   TMD was a pretty big Boston band back in the 80′s until, well, it gets complicated.   It was a combination of that story plus their great musicianship led us to start a little documentary project on the band.   Progress is a bit slow right now, mostly due to the rehearsal loft hitting 100+ degrees and consequently not being terribly conducive to sitting down and having an interview where everyone isn’t dripping wet.  But they are in my sights…

We’re currently experimenting with shooting video in the rehearsal space.  I’m working through the dubious mechanics of doing a single-operator multi-camera shoot, but mostly I’m learning the music so I can anticipate shots (and yes, I may even script it a bit).   Despite shooting in a really dark room the real challenge is getting decent audio (as you’ll no doubt notice if you play the videos, there is plenty of room for improvement).

Here are a couple of videos we shot a few weeks ago that I finally got around to putting some title slates on and posting to the YouTubes.  They are definitely rough but I kinda like the edginess of them in contrast to where the music is — which is also “under construction”.   We’re hoping that Museum Direktor fans will enjoy this sneak peek into the creative process and we promise a lot more in the coming months.

My thanks to Paul, John, and Chris for inviting me into their working space and letting me document some great musicians at work.

Fans can check in on the group via the Museum Direktors Facebook page

Technical stuff:

The rehearsal room is dimly lit — a few bare bulbs around the perimeter plus maybe 1 or 2 100W floodlights illuminating the rehearsal space.  Audio is, well, besides being really loud, is just whatever they have for personal monitors plus a vocal feed.  It’s not rigged for performances.   I’m still hunting for a spot to set up a mike that isn’t dominated by one of the trio’s monitor vs. the other sound in the room.  It’s a bit of a battle right now because I really want to get better audio.

This is all experimental stuff so nothing is set in concrete:

Canon 7D with a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens either on a tripod or sitting on a chair.   You can see segments where I move this camera with one hand while holding the 5D with the other.   Not the quickest way to a quality end product.

Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L lens handheld or on a monopod.

Both are set wide open, ISO 3200 I believe.

I’ve done in-camera audio and via an Edirol R-09.  I was using a wireless mic, but that is too easily overloaded by the dynamics so I switched to a wired mic (AT825 stereo field mic).   I was so depressed with the audio track for “Unromantic” that I sent it through Soundtrack Pro just to toss a bit of compression and reverb in a vain attempt to give it some life (so yes, the original is even flatter…)

The stills on this page were taken on one of those “it’s gotta be f-ing 110 degrees in here” nights.  Canon 40D, 50mm f/1.4, manual focus. Various exposures.

Related posts:

1. Giant Kings at SMAC – Video #1
2. Lightroom-enhanced time-lapse video
3. Maine Media Workshop Video

Another week, another 50-year rain storm…

I’m partly joking, I don’t know the recurrence level of this current storm but it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Here’s the flow gauge of the river for the past 30 days.  We’re in for another fun few days with the current forecast having the river rise potentially 2 feet above where it is right now, but they said the last storm would reach 7 feet as well, and it didn’t quite hit that mark.

On the other hand we’re starting from a significantly higher point.

All this water means that I’ll have a chance to visit a few more of the local streams and capture some, um, “rigorous” flow conditions.

These two events back to back have me hankering to build a time-lapse movie of the river’s rise.   Today it rose rather dramatically and did so during the daylight hours.  The only problem is that it was pouring rain and we had non-trivial winds as well.  I think I’m going to poke around and see if I can build a watertight box with a plexiglas viewport, perhaps lockable so I can chain it to a tree or something if needed.  This would let me set it up for a 12 hour run and try to bring this dynamic event to life.

As evening drew near I decided the 5D needed a bath, so I headed out into the backyard to take a few images.  I nearly froze my hands off in 15 minutes — the rain must be at 33 degrees (F). Here’s a bit of video from this evening:

Technical:

Images and video captured with a well-soaked Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8L.  Image was at ISO 400, 1.6 seconds, f/5.6.  Video was at ISO 3200, 1/60, f/2.8.  Both were taken from Gitzo sticks and a Manfrotto fluid head.

Image processed with Lightroom, bit of fill and black point, moderate clarity.   Video was transcoded to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip, which was an unnecessary step because I then imported it into iMovie to trim, add the titles, and adjusted exposure +35%. Exported directly from iMovie to Quicktime H.264.

Related posts:

1. River Abstracts
2. The 23rd Annual Assabet River Cleanup
3. 21st Annual Assabet River Cleanup

Nature has given me a chance to do a bit of a personal workshop on the power of water.  In case you didn’t hear, we’ve had a bit of rain here in central Massachusetts the past few days (5 inches in 2 days and a bit more coming).

The Assabet River flows through my backyard and we live by the section which has the most intense rapids pretty much for the entire length of the river.  Normally the river is pretty tranquil, but it has been roaring the past 24 hours as it approaches what may be a crest that puts it in the top 10 for the past 50 years or so.

While I think I do a pretty decent job conveying the river’s beauty when it is quiet, I’ve struggled with finding the right combination of exposure and angle when it is flowing briskly.  Translating this:

into a still image that conveys that power and intensity is difficult.

I only had a couple hours today to work out back, but I’ll have a good chunk of the afternoon tomorrow and most of Sunday to do some exhaustive studies on the river when it is close to bursting at the seams.  I’ll be sharing the results here and hope they will be of interest to folks in a similar situation.   I’m also going to be playing with video as well.

Above:

Canon 5D Mark 2, ISO 100, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 200mm, polarizing filter.

First exposure is 2 seconds at f/14.  Second exposure is 15 seconds at f/14 (additional 3-stop ND filter).

Video: Canon 5D Mark 2 (exposure unrecorded).  No post-processing (other than resizing for blog).

Processed with Lightroom: strong contrast, fair amount of clarity and vibrance.  Creative tweak: fill light and black point both around 45.  A rather cool effect.

Related posts:

1. Exploring the Power of Water will continue
2. Exploring the Power of Water 2
3. Exploring the Power of Water 3

Many years ago we purchased our first set of kayaks.  No moving parts, just a watertight shell.   But after that purchase came the realization that “you’re gonna need accessories”…  Paddles, PFDs, dry bags, gloves.  It took several years before we could walk into an REI without avoiding a stroll through the paddling section.

Photography is no different.  The camera purchase itself is, quite often, the tip of the iceberg.  (For many years I’d tell folks that I had spent far more on lenses than camera bodies, although that balance is beginning to erode as my lens set is stable now but there’s a slow but steady march to upgrade the camera bodies.)    Camera accessories can go in a number of directions: lighting, stabilization, filters, remote controls, etc.  Add video to the mix and you have more lighting, microphones, matte boxes, monitors, and a wide range of stabilization options.  There are thick catalogs full of wonderful ideas waiting to empty your bank account.

I recently decided that to be competitive in video production I would need the ability to have some additional  ”camera moves” (providing movement within the frame) beyond the tilts and pans my fluid head could provide.  Professional rigging equipment costs a lot of money.  This isn’t a complaint: manufacturing equipment that performs at a high level of precision and is rugged costs money, but I have a limited equipment budget so I looked into some DIY portable dolly systems.   One that popped out at me is affectionately known as the “Zazaslider” (after the creator who posted the instructions for building it in the DVXuser forum). I’m not what you would call particularly skilled at building things, but this looked within my abilities so I gave it a try.   I won’t go into the construction details, those are outlined very well elsewhere, but I thought it would be fun to show my modifications, my plans, and a bit about how it is used.  First the rig:

Here’s the slider with my current camera mount, a Manfrotto HDV701 fluid head. My slider weighs in at 6.4 lbs, and the HDV701 head (with a Arca-Swiss quick release plate on the Bogen quick release plate) is 2.4 lbs – so I’m expecting it to stay under 9 lbs even with anticipated additions.

This is the bare slider.  The metal part is the primary piece, purchased from IGUS (just over the border in Rhode Island).  The DryLin W rail is 1 meter long and features a lubrication-free guide that provides a smooth and low-friction platform.

I had to drill and tap a 3/8″ hole for the mounting bolt.

The rail comes with predrilled holes, so I could put a 3/8″ tap in the center one for a mount point.

The rail needs a few basic tweaks to be useful.  The first is some nylon bushings tapped into the end that keeps the carriage from running off the rails.  That would be an expensive problem with a camera attached.  I added a couple of lightweight feet that are easily removed if needed (I need to give them a coat of paint).  I recently added a nylon screw to one end to help secure the carriage during transport.

My original foot was just a block, but after my first trip into the field with the slider I realized that if you want to perch this on top of a log, you need something that isn’t flat along the base, so a quick trip to the bandsaw was in order.

I tapped a 3/8″ hole so that my Gitzo G1321 leveling base can “simply” screw into the rail.  This works OK but makes setup a bit slow.  I plan to put a sturdy quick Arca Swiss or Bogen release plate there so I can more easily attach it to a tripod head.

And finally the full rig attached to my tripod.  The leveling base makes for quick work in setting up the slider.  While this configuration is fairly stable, it still requires additional support when extending the camera the full 1 meter length.

There are two basic moves you can do with the slider: dolly zoom (forward/backwards) or dolly sideways (truck/tracking shot).  Here is an example of a dolly zoom:

And here are two examples of a tracking shots (one on the tripod and one with just the slider):

The slider requires quite a bit of practice to use effectively.  I’ve also noted that the rail system’s tolerances are very close so if condensation builds up on the aluminum rails (say, by bringing it indoors when it is cold outside) it can bind up a bit.  I’ve used it in the rain and noted similar performance anomalies.  (A dolly rig based on roller wheels likely doesn’t have this issue.)

I’ve used this for commercial shoots and nature videos.  It is quite portable and definitely gets the job done for a very reasonable outlay (so far it has cost less than $200 for the parts and tools).

As I noted earlier I plan to add a quick release plate to make setup and teardown a bit easier.  I may add a second setscrew towards the center as it is awkward to set up with the carriage at one end (or add a brake to the carriage).

I’m also interested in finding a variable speed stepping motor so I can use the rail system to provide movement in time-lapse photographic projects.  I’ll be sure write about that when those pieces come together.   (First I have to add a follow-focus unit.)

I hope you found this tour of the slider useful.  You can find the same Igus technology used in some commercial sliders, so while this is a pretty simple DIY project it shares the strengths of a number of rigs costing a lot more.

Related posts:

1. REALLY getting it right in the camera…
2. Why a new camera? Why this one?
3. More Lightroom 2 goodies: Camera Profiles

The first few days of January have brought us some wonderful video feasts of natural wonder, technical skill, and imagination.

The first comes from Tony Farley.  I’ve recommended Tony’s “Beautiful Places in HD” podcast in the past and he kicked off 2010 with a visit to Methuselah Grove – a beautifully barren landscape that holds the oldest living trees on the planet.  I highly recommend subscribing to Tony’s podcast on iTunes or your favorite subscription service.

Click here to visit Methuselah Grove with Tony Farley.

Tony Farley’s blog is also a great place to get news on his projects.

On the same day Tony’s video arrived on my Apple TV, so did the first 2010 episode from the Earth-Touch crew.   Earth-Touch is another HD podcast that provides absolutely some of the best wildlife videography around on a nearly continuous basis (they have a weekly podcast and other feeds that have more extended footage).  The first show was the highlights of 2009, including some amazing (and, I should warn you, graphic) footage of a pride of lions taking down a bull water buffalo.

Earth-Touch provides numerous ways of subscribing to their video feeds and I encourage you to find one that suits your needs.  You will not be disappointed.

Jewel #3 is a stunning and viral video by Alex Roman.

Alex’s vision is wonderfully realized and it is also an amazing technical achievement for a single person — the entire film is computer-generated imagery.  Just stunning.

The final New Year’s jewel arrived on PBS this evening.  The Jan 10th episode of Nature titled “Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air” was filmed using Phantom HD cameras and a number of special optics.  The Phantom is capable of shooting at very high frame rates and filmed the hummingbirds at 500 fps — doing what photography does best: making the unseen seen.  In this case, it allows us to see the acrobatics and grace of a bird that normally flits by in the blink of an eye.

If you miss it on your local PBS station, you can watch the full episode on the PBS web site.

I hope one of these amazing video projects peaks your interest.  Happy New Year!

Related posts:

1. Great talk on color and visual perception
2. Podcasts and blogs you might like
3. 40 Years Ago

Hidden in a corner of Hudson, MA is Danforth Brook, a tributary of the Assabet River.  A short walk from the road, the brook changes from a meandering stream in the woods to a series of small waterfalls working their way through large glacial boulders.  I rarely visit this spot without returning with some great photographs.

Technical

Filmed with a Canon 5D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8L and 24-70 f/2.8L lenses.  (And changing them in the rain is no fun at all…)

Camera moves were done with a home-made portable track  (similar to the Glidetrack).  I plan to write an article about this as I get more experience with it.

A big shout-out to danosongs for providing soundtrack music for these tiny projects for free.

Related posts:

1. Photowalk at Danforth Brook
2. Nashoba Brook
3. Signs of Autumn

The Canon 5D Mark 2 (and the 7D and a fair number of current video-capable DSLRs) record the footage using the H.264 codec.  I’ll leave it to others far more qualified than I as to the merits and lack thereof of this decision by the manufacturers.  For owners of the cameras wishing to use them for video it means you have some work to do after you shoot.

H.264 is often referred to as “distribution codec” — in other words it is optimized for end display rather than other purposes.  Of interest to the photographer this translates to “it is really lousy for editing”.

Because of the preponderance of its use in DSLR (and other) cameras I’ll predict that future editing suites will start to ingest H.264 footage directly, perhaps converting it quietly to some intermediate format — but until that time you’ll want to do this yourself before you edit your clips.

For about the past year, when I have a set of 5D clips for editing I’ve been transcoding them to Apple ProRes.  This is a high quality codec that works well with the editing tools.  It also eats up disk space like they have shares in Seagate.  I’ve heard of some folks using the XDCAM codec with a fair degree of success.  I’ve heard plenty of other people say “disk space is cheap” (which it is), but it isn’t free and it adds up quickly.

On Macintosh there are two tools that I have tried and used and I thought I’d share a few bits about them.  I edit using Apple’s Final Cut Pro Studio, which includes a transcoding swiss army knife called “Compressor”.    If you don’t have the budget for FCP Studio (and, as you will see, even if you do) you should look at “MPEG Streamclip” which has a number of great features including the ever popular price tag of free.  There are numerous excellent tutorials on each of these tools — just google around.

I’ve been using Compressor to transcode my 5D footage to Apple ProRes 422 pretty regularly because it has a really cool feature: droplets.  You can create droplets that correspond to specific Compressor settings and destinations, then either drag the input files to the droplet (or control-click to open the file(s) with the droplet.  As Emeril says.. “Bam!”

With the most recent release of Final Cut Studio (FCP 7) Apple introduced some additions to the ProRes codecs.  Originally there were two variations, the normal or standard quality (at 147 Mbps) and the high quality codec (at 220 Mbps).  For most of us this roughly translates into taking a lot of disk space and taking up an enormous amount of disk space.  Unless you are producing a high-end film with lots of compositing (or have specific technical issues with the footage around grading) the HQ version was overkill.  For most of us, producing videos for the web or DVD, even the standard quality ProRes was over the top.  Enter ProRes 422 LT and ProRes 422 Proxy.  The LT codec tries to find a balance between quality and space at 102 Mbps while the ProRes Proxy dives down to 45Mbps and is suited for editing on laptops.  (Note that even at 45Mbps that’s 9X what Vimeo and YouTube HD are accepting videos at.)

I have yet to play with the Proxy codec extensively, but the LT codec looked very appealing and I wanted to explore some issues I had with the MPEG Streamclip program so I ran a few tests.   MPEG Streamclip has the reputation of being very fast – and in a few tests I was running I never saw this.  The devil being in the details of course.   I also noted a gamma shift in MPEG Streamclip footage which bothered me.  Again, it was worth looking at a bit closer.

First the “gamma shift” problem.  Here is the output of the same video clip transcoded by Compressor (on the left) and MPEG Streamclip (on the right) as displayed by Quicktime Player:

It’s pretty obvious that the MPEG Streamclip footage is darker.  Apparently this is caused by a small difference in the Quicktime file metadata.  Compressor adds a “gamma” tag that MPEG Streamclip does not.  The result is that Quicktime Player displays them differently.   Here’s the fun part: Final Cut Pro doesn’t look at this gamma tag, or does it differently.  The result is that the footage looks the same.  Here is a short Quicktime video of the same clip alternating between Compressor and MPEG Streamclip:

Maybe a more well-trained eye can spot a difference, but I can’t.  So when it comes to editing it appears to me that the resulting clips are equivalent.  Whew!

With quality out of the way, that leaves just space and time to consider.  I processed 16 5DMk2 H.264 clips totaling 7 minutes of footage and consuming 2GB of disk space.

Depending on the project I often try to save disk space by converting the footage from the native 1080p to 720p (times are min:sec):

To ProRes 422 LT 720p via Compressor: 12:44 and 2.3GB
To ProRes 422 LT 720p via MPEG Streamclip: 14:52 and 2.3GB

To ProRes 422 LT 1080p via Compressor: 17:17 and 4.5GB (2.2X original)
To ProRes 422 LT 1080p via MPEG Streamclip: 10:54 and 4.5GB

Kinda eye-popping counterintuitive results there.  If you want to save disk space by downsampling to 720p, use Compressor.  If you want fast conversions the use MPEG Streamclip with no resizing.

For disk space comparisons, the standard quality ProRes 422 at 1080p would take 6.9GB (3.5X original files, MPEG Streamclip transcoded them in 11:46) .

My test configuration was pretty mundane and this was not an attempt to get the best performance out of either tool, but rather to see how they performed “out of the box”.   Source and destination files were to the same drive (as you would on a laptop). Compressor has ways of using multiple systems to distribute the encoding and improve the performance.  MPEG Streamclip has the ability to run multiple transcodes at once.  If you have a lot of fast CPUs in your system, this can certainly help.  I have a quad-processor MacPro and neither program would drive the system to full CPU capacity.  By adding increasing the MPEG Streamclip to 2 simultaneous tasks I was able to trim some time off the transcoding and saw the system CPU utilization approach 80%.  Adding a 3rd task didn’t do anything to increase utilization.  Those of you with 8-CPU boxes would likely see a benefit from using these features to take advantage of parallelism in your system.

I mentioned ProRes 422 Proxy and I think I will dig into this a bit more.  It has a data rate of 45Mbps.  The Canon 5D Mark 2 with the current firmware clocks in around 38Mbps – but I don’t know if this is an apples to apples comparison.  MPEG Streamclip transcoded the test files to ProRes Proxy at 720p in about 14 minutes and the resulting files were just 1.1GB (half of the original) and the full 1080p transcode took about 10 minutes and the resulting files were 2.2GB (slightly larger than the originals).  I, quite honestly, didn’t see much of a difference between the full ProRes standard quality and the Proxy transcoded files with the 5D footage, so this deserves a bit more investigation to understand exactly what kinds of scenes are being compromised.  If the typical delivery is going to be 720p web video (or an SD DVD) and you are doing minimal grading and editing, using the ProRes Proxy format may turn out to be a perfect editing format and you can always reconnect to higher quality versions (standard or LT) if you need them.  Certainly something worth investigating further.

Related posts:

1. Assabet River Video – Canon 5D Mark II Test
2. First cut of a nature video short
3. Three Stone Mountain LIVE videos

Autumn’s is beginning to make itself known here in Massachusetts.   A little preview of the show yet to come.

Technical stuff:

Image: Canon 5D Mark 2, 70-200mm f/2.8 L + 1.4x TC, 240mm, 1/60 at f/5.0, ISO 200.  Minor post-processing in Lightroom (exposure, black point, some vibrance, clarity).

Video: Canon 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm f/2.8L, 70-200mm f/2.8L, 500mm f/4.0L, various ISOs, and f-stops.  Edited with Final Cut Pro.  Minor grading via FCP color correction tool.  The Vimeo compression seems to have taken some of the oomph out of the colors.   I may publish my own version here.

The music score is from Garageband (my arrangement).  Apologies for the frog — I couldn’t help myself.

Related posts:

1. A Rainy Autumn Afternoon at Danforth Brook
2. Exploring the Power of Water will continue
3. First cut of a nature video short