Filming Tips :

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I had a good time in the church yesterday as we celebrated the birthday of a very good friend of mine in Atlanta Georgia, Pastor Kunle Aroniyo of CAC Power House.

I boarded a flight from Washington DC to Atlanta this Saturday, and I was greatly surprised when I saw a young lady of about 34 years. She is beautiful in her own way, maybe an African or black American I coundn't tell, many on the flight noticed her selfie addiction. I am not sure whether there can be anyone who is much more addicted than this lady, when it was time for light off, she put on the light on top of her own seat when her flash couldn't suffice. We were on the flight for about one and a half hours and she didn’t rest. As soon as we alighted, she continued, through to the domestic baggage claim spot, if you know that airport you will understand that distance, then I started thinking that this must be Afishe i.e. bewitched. Because she was not changing her dress or makeup and she kept doing it till a car came to pick her up.

I am not against selfie because research conducted in a university in United States shows that it helps self esteem of those who have low self esteem, then I concluded that the lady must be suffering from serious low self esteem, I hope I didn't offend anyone but too much of anything is not good. Enjoy your selfie, I know some very good friends of mine that love it, but just don't let it be too much, just my opinion.

About two weeks ago I broke down to a little extend how codec works, and the power of compression. During the research on that topic I got to know many things as well and that's one of the benefits of teaching. I have known about camera science for a while now but not fully and even till now, I do not have all the knowledge on camera science but those who have been following this post more than two years know what they have learnt from it though we are all growing, only the proud will get stuck.

Ben Ope Johnson just concluded his film training, I am sure the students must have learnt a lot. I know there are people who would have loved to be there but because of the pride in their heart, they would have decided not to go, but some are expecting those who had attended to come and tell them what they have learnt. This is quite funny.

May God help us.

After camera codec, the next one is editing codec. I will advice that whatever codec  you shot with, should be the same codec you edit with. If you don't understand what I am saying then see my first two post in this October.

However, if you shoot on raw mode, you may not be able to edit it in that mode. Adobe premiere pro latest version can edit raw, all you have to do is to edit it in proxies mode though you need more understanding of file management in premiere pro. If you are using davinci resolve then you can edit raw footages even if it is 8k. All you have to do is to do your project settings correctly. Optimize all your raw files, do your editing, balance your audio, do your graphics and colour grade it in Raw format for maximum flexibility.  Then go to the menu to delete the optimized files, check your export settings very well, chose your delivery codec and you are done. By next week I will talk more about delivery codec and editing codec. I promised to explain how I do my own color balancing. I used to use color in final cut pro 7 studio, that was what I used for Alfa Sule video titled Pride 2, I used Avid Media Composer for Sunset At Midday a mount zion ' s movie and I used DaVinci resolve for Time Bomb a Beatrice Funke Ogunmola movie. The point I am trying to make is that you can use any software to do colour balance so long as it has levels or curve with scope and a good monitor you are good to go. Colour balancing is to ensure that the Red, Green and Blue channel are level where necessary. If you shoot a vegetable garden, you should know that the green channel must be higher than the rest, if you then forced the green channel to be at thesame level with the rest then you have destroyed the picture.

We continue from here next week Monday. I will stop the post as soon as I get my websites ready, there, I will load all I have been posting for years .

Thanks for your time.

Feel free to share. If you have missed any of my past post please visit Christian film institute page and like our page or visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I had a busy one with my friend and prophet Kunle Aroniyo as we traveled to Harrisburg in Pennsylvania for one of our churches anniversary, I met with wonderful family of God.

I will like you my well wishers to help me appreciate those people who created the time to attend the movie preview of Prime Suspect last week Tuesday before I left the country. Post production wise the movie is not totally done yet, I am done with many things but there are more to be done, but I wanted some friends to watch it and criticize it for me in love, in order to fix the errors. You know your own work will always be the best in your own mind, this was the reason why I called this great people to come over. There are some people who will love to tell you what you love to hear and condemn you in your absence but there are some who will truly tell you their mind in love.

Abayomi Ojo is a good friend of mine and was also the production designer of the movie. He made mention of things that need fixing on the soundtrack and other things, he made serious observations which has been taken seriously.

Akin Alabi is a great creative guy, far beyond what I have known of him. This guy is really good, creative wise and technical wise, he pointed out those things that many wouldn't have noticed, constructively, he made a great contribution to the post production process. Watch out for this guy, he is bringing up something much more than what you know of him.

 Olaitan B Faranpojo is a genius. He was able to recieve the story, digest it, get all the points and told me things that can make the edit greater, tighter and stronger. I love this guy with his beautiful heart.

Ben Ope Johnson this is a great friend of mine who was there while I was writing the script. He encouraged me to write the story to become what it is today. He was the first to see the film, the film was much more than we thought so he gave the advice on how to go about the editing to reduce it for cinema purpose. He saw the version that has no soundtrack or effect.

Please help me to say big thank you to these great minds. Sorry if you think I should have invited you too, you are also special and important but if I invite all you my well wishers, then I will need to rent a stadium.

The overall comment of those who saw the preview was: "This movie has totally raised the standard of Christian film story and techniques". The premier will be coming up later maybe during Christmas because it is already late for festive season cinema, Olaitan Faranpojo will see to the Nigeria premier while I see to the premier here in United States during the festive season if God wills.

I am going to post the first official trailer soon. Feel free to share.

If you have missed any of my past post please visit Christian film institute page and like our page or visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Filming Tips :

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I had a very busy one as usual, trying to do some work and fix some things. Watch out for this guy in the picture. He is a great gospel singer, heavily talented and anointed to serve the Master with his talent. I have being busy with his works and some others.

For the past few weeks I have been concentrating on the prerequisites of colour grading. I tried to explain why we need to capture the best with the best camera you can afford in the best way you can, because this will determine the outcome of your colour job.

I shot a scene on the see, the colour of the costume the cast had was close to the colour of the flying boat, the colour of the water was also as close as it could get. Meaning, there is no sharp contrast between the cast and his environment. This is where a good preparation with a production designer has a big role to play. We often neglect the need for all these. Though there are shoots that are so impromptu. Like the one I told you I did, it was so impromptu. Please relax before you judge someone else's job, because you do not know the situation in which the job was done. I have shot a movie without microphone before, and without light. If you hear about it and condemn me with words of your mouth you are doing yourself harm because God will judge every idle word. I shot that movie some years back and some who have seen it said they didn't believe we did not use boom mic for the job because the audio was great. To do that is not ideal but some situations can make one do that which is wrong. Though it shouldn't be done deliberately because only the best is good for our God according to Evang Mike Bamiloye.

In davinci resolve, I tried to separate the water from the cast through colour picker but alas, the picker picked the cast and boat as well, that means I can't treat them separately. Though there is still a solution to that which is a little advance, those who are compositor will know about rotoscoping through which you can separate object without chroma, you can also key frame the nodes with power windows but all these could have been avoided had it been we have had the time to chose the costume and the boat.

The lesson I think we should pick here is to ensure we have sharp contrasts on set, this will help the overall outcome of the job from the colorist.

By next week by God's grace, I will explain how I do basic colour balancing.

If you have missed our past posts please go to Christian film institute page and like our page or visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Please feel free to share. Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Filming Tips :

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? I had a peaceful one after a long week in Ila village at ilesha, I worked with wonderful people and a very nice producer, thanks to all those who made my stay a blissful one.

For the past two weeks I have been talking about types of video that are strong enough for color job and why you have to take it easy with some over compressed files. I will like to expanciate further. When you shoot Raw on Blackmagic cinema camera you are shooting a job that contains no compression at all. If you shoot with red, the raw can not be compared with blackmagic in terms of little compression that you find in some cinema cameras like Red and some Sony cameras. Nonetheless, you can't compare the strength of any raw file with a really compressed file. Canon dslr cameras use h.264 codec, but the style of compression of Canon 5d mk3 is better than that of others like 60d and 7d. Remember I told you last week that codec stands for Compressor and Decompressor. 5d mk3 uses ALL-I which makes it stand out compared to the  smaller ones earlier mentioned.

ALL-I is an intraframe compression scheme which, much like Motion JPEG, separately compresses each individual video frame. This yields higher quality video, but does so at the expense of a huge increase in file sizes. IPB compression, meanwhile, is an interframe scheme that compresses the video across multiple frames, inserting a key frame from which compression begins anew every 12 to 15 frames. In between these occasional keyframes are predicted frames, which require data from the previous keyframe and any intervening frames to reconstruct the final image.

Every cinematographer needs to always get the best he could from whatever tools he has, with this you will make the post production experts happy. Highest bit rate a 5d mk3 can capture is 8 bit which will give you 256 color info per pixel to work with, whereas a camera that shoots 12 bit will give you sixteen times more per pixel. I know that this is a little advance for a lay man to grab but I expect a cinematographer to understand his tools. We know in part and we prophecy in part, I am not trying to proof anything but I am just following and enjoying the grace given unto me, hope you are not offended?

I know you must have come across phones that shoots 4k resolution before even if you don't own one. When you see the picture captured by these phones on the device you will be amazed, but play it on an HDTV and you will see the extent of the compression. To edit a 12 bit video on an editing machine may not be easy.

I shot my movie The Prime Suspect in Raw, 12 bit depth, to edit it before I got my current iMac, I took it into resolve and created proxies, I took the proxy into Premier Pro and edited it. I generated xml files from the timelines and took xml back to resolve, I then linked back my original raw footages, as edited in premiere pro for color grading.

If you want to do colour grading, there are some prerequisites, there is a way by which you can manage your file in order not put yourself or the colorist into unnecessary trouble, we will start from there next week.

If you have missed any of my past post please visit Christian film institute page and like our page or visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Feel free to share. Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.

Filming Tips :

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? Happy birthday to our beloved country Nigeria. May God consume all your enemies with His fire, may you become a great nation in Jesus name. Amen.

Last week I made mention of the reason why you have to be careful when dealing with dslr footages in your colour softwares. I also said it is better to light well and shoot well without need for any colour work in post because of the limitations of the codec. This week,  I will like to go a little deeper in my explanations.

Codec stand for Compression and Decompression. Co is the act of compression while the Dec is the act of decompression. The media storage being used by dslr cameras are too small in size, the amount of data to be stored on it will need to be well compressed to make it fit into the media storage. This compression then leads to reduction in the strength of the footage compare to what the camera actually record. A filmmaker like Tunde Kelani often use external recorder that can record with a better codec like Avid DNXHD and Apple proress HQ. With this format, he will be able to have richer and stronger footages, you can now see why you may use thesame camera and come out with different results. You may now say, what if I convert the footage shot on h.264 codec to apple proress HQ, well, think about it logically, can you force a bag of salt into a small paint bucket, then try to put it back into the bag, can it fill it up again. The answer is no, what is lost is lost.

Bit Depth: The second thing that affect the footages, that can determine whether the footage is good enough for serious colour job is the bit depth. A camera that shoots with 8 bit depth can not be compared with those that shoots with 12 bit or more. With 8 bit you get 256 color per channel while with 12 bit you get 4,096 color per channel, though this will consume more space but you will have enough color information to work with.

Chroma Sub-Sampling is another way through which compression is also being effected. I shot my movie in Raw format on Blackmagic, so it doesn't have any form of compression at all. When I finished the color job of some scenes, I wanted to export it into the highest resolution possible since I can't export it out in Raw. I decided to export it in Ultra HD using Apple proress HQ but 444 chroma sub-sampling. The file was too heavy and bigger than I thought, I wondered why, until the research made me see that the closest codec to Raw is the one with the chroma sub-sample of 444.

There are cameras that shoot with 420, you can also shoot 422 and you can shoot 444 depends on your budget. 444 means out for pixels  (by the way, pixel stands for picture element) each of the pixel have their own color saved, this then means you have lots of your raw data stored up for use, then this will consume lots of space on your storage device. 422 means out of 4 pixels, 2 will store the color data while the other two will make use of what the first two has. The last option is 420 which means out of 4 pixels, 3 will disregard their own color and take the color data of only one. All these are efforts of compression and you can see that they all have advantages and disadvantages.  We will continue from here next week Monday.

Please feel free to share and ask your questions.

If you have missed any of my past post please visit Christian film institute page and like our page or visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God-given dreams alive and remain blessed.