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.